Tag: mage

Gamer’s Thoughts: Let’s Roleplay With AI

AI is everywhere lately. I think it’s something that won’t blow over or will go away in our lives. In the past few months, I had a craving to write stories again. So, I downloaded one of those AI chatbot apps on my phone and at first, I was afraid that it would be something very niche or something that was a fad. Yet, I found value in these apps and I wanted to talk about them in this article. This article isn’t meant as a review of these apps, but more to open a general discussion of these apps. Since, I think these apps have their place in our lives and can help if they are used correctly. Yes, they also have their pitfalls and dangers. And that’s what I wanted to explore in this article. So, let’s dive right into the world of roleplay and story creation with AI.

What are these apps?

There are a lot of these apps. You have examples like Talkie, Character.AI and Moescape. The idea of these apps is that you create a character that replies to you. In a lot of cases, these characters fantasy characters to play out a story.

Some of the advertisements don’t do these apps any favors. By advertising them as apps where “you can create your own girlfriend” or “combat being lonely”. And it’s a darn shame, since the creativity that you can find on these platforms is amazing.

I personally feel that these apps are the strongest when you look at them what they really are. Apps to let you roleplay a story like old school text adventures. The biggest difference is that you can totally craft the world and have full control of the story line.

This does create a big risk that you fall in an echo chamber. I call it the “main character syndrome”. Where your character in these stories barely get any problem in their way, without it being solved in a few dialogues later. Then again, power fantasies are something that’s quite attractive to people. It’s fun to play a character that can overcome anything and is the best version of yourself. Or where you can say anything you want in an argument.

Some of these apps add additional features for you to play with. Things like a character speaking their dialogue, creating various AI generated images or even love songs. After trying various apps, I personally landed on Moescape. At the moment of writing, this app keeps things quite simple in the character department. Giving great replies and amazing in playing multiple characters.

Essentially, these apps are apps where you can write a story, but AI plays another character and tries to challenge you from time to time to be creative. This is really something where you have to create your own fun.

Limitations of AI

While ChatGPT turned two years old this week, AI isn’t still fully there yet. It still needs quite a lot of processing power and other things to run properly. It’s quite clear that the AI is also quite dependent on your reply.

I notice that the AI in the apps I tried is rarely to never negative towards the player. Which is a tricky thing, especially when you want to create character depth.

I tested this with playing a couple going through a rough patch. And I noticed that the AI always tried to get back together with you. Even when you give it the worst backstory, your mind can come up with. But that’s not the only problem. The AI story memory is quite limited. Sometimes you need to repeat certain parts, like where you are, or what your name is.

Thankfully, almost every app has a regenerate button. This regenerates the message in case you disliked the reply or if it didn’t fit the storyline you are making at all. Some apps even allow you to give feedback to the AI on the generated messages, so the AI knows how to craft more engaging messages for you.

What I personally love about Moescape AI is that you can tweak the settings of the AI quite a lot. You have various different models to play around with to get the best experience. I even tried to play the same 3 scenarios with one of my characters with different models and got very different and interesting results.

Now, how do you make apps like this profitable? I have seen apps that limit the amount of regeneration you can do or have other limitations. Some apps even offer a call feature where you can call your AI bot. Personally, I haven’t tried that yet, since I love playing stories where there are multiple characters involved. And since the calls only answer in one voice, it’s a difficult.

But most apps have ads or limit the more advanced features. I have tried some apps, but as soon as the “BUY PRO NOW” features became too aggressive, I stopped using them. I’m not here to buy the PRO version right away. Let me first try out the quality of your AI and if I like it, I’ll buy a PRO subscription.

There was one app where I almost bought the PRO membership, but it has one major issue that I notice in a lot of apps. The issue of multiple characters.

The perfect app

For me, the perfect AI chatbot app should be able to handle to play multiple characters. I dislike app where the AI only plays one character. It’s not the stories I like to write.

I like to write stories where you can play multiple characters and interact with multiple characters. Yet, with AI, this brings its own can of worms. Sometimes the AI ends their message with a question to a character they are playing. Why don’t they reply on it themselves?

Or better yet, I have a story where you are part of a friendgroup where almost, without fail… One character gets forgotten and barely gets any interactions. So, you are not only playing the story out to its conclusion, but you are also playing a moderator on how the AI is reacting.

At the moment of writing, the app that best fits my needs is Moescape AI. The reason why is quite simple. It has the best models that fit my writing style and the way how I want to go through the story. It allows quite fine control on the settings of the app and the bot. You can see earlier generations when you regenerate replies. You can create a wiki with trigger phrases for your bots to reply too. Like if you set up certain lore, you can use a trigger phrase you set up and the AI will keep it in mind.

But, I’ll keep a review on that platform for a later article. Since, I mainly wanted to focus on how these apps can be used for good. I personally use them to write out various stories I always wanted to write and see if certain arcs would work or if they would fall flat on their face. I find them a great outlet of my creativity.

Sometimes the strange replies, forgotten characters and other weird generation things can pull you out of the story… But, a good writer knows how to solve these things. Sadly, some of these apps can be money traps. So, before you spend any money on these apps, look into it. Test it out and see if it’s for you. Since, I have to admit, I’m somewhat addicted to my stories. I’m so glad I have these apps a chance and I found the app that best clicked with me. If you want to see the characters and stories I came up with, you can find my Moescape profile here: https://moescape.ai/@jonez

I’m curious what you all think about these apps. I totally understand that they seem “weird” but, I urge you to give them a chance and look at them with an open mind. Since, they hold value. Yet, I have talked about some traps in this article. So, keep those in mind as well.

With that said, I have said everything I wanted to say about these apps for now. I hope you enjoyed reading this article as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to welcome you in another one, but until then, have a great rest of your day and take care.

Gamer’s Thoughts: Let’s Find The Difference Extreme Edition

Today I wanted to talk about a totally new type of game that’s gaining a lot of popularity. In late 2018, a totally new type of game called I’m on Observation Duty got released on Steam. Recently, these type of games are exploding on Steam. A spin-off called The Exit 8 gave a totally new spin on the formula. The games are actually a scary spin on the spot the difference style of gameplay. But, what does attract players so much into this formula? Let’s talk about a few titles, and maybe we find an answer to that in this article. Now, feel free to leave a comment in the comment section down below with your thoughts and/or opinions on these games, similar games and/or the content of this article.

Two main gameplay styles

There are actually two major styles in this genre. A lot of streamers call, one style Observation Duty and the other style Exit 8. Both styles have the same core concept. You need to first look at a room and then notice if anything changes or anomalies appear. The way how you deal with these anomalies differs in both styles.

In Observation Duty style games, the idea is mostly always that you are a security guard watching camera’s. You have to flip through camera’s and report the anomalies before there are too much present in the area. In Exit 8 type games, you play through them while walking through the rooms themselves. You have to walk one direction when there is no difference and another direction when there is a difference. The difference is that you have to make a certain amount of correct judgements in a row. One wrong judgement and you are sent back to level 0.

The gameplay is tricky to explain in words and in an article. I wanted to write this article several times, but I was unable to describe it properly. The best way to describe it in my opinion is a non casual spot the difference game.

Ever since, “I am on Observation Duty” and “The Exit 8” hit the scene… A lot of horror game streamers played through them. They gained a lot more popularity. A lot of new titles came out in a rapid pace with different spins on the genre and interesting innovations. I think it will become more clear when I talk about the games I played through or watched my favorite streamers play through.

The Exit 8 – The Platform 8

During the summer of this year, Klamath and I streamed through these two titles. The Exit 8 is one of the earliest games to my knowledge in the 3D style.

The idea is that you are trapped in a looping metro hallway where you have to reach the 8th exit. Travelers are advised to continue walking when nothing out of the ordinary happens. But when suddenly a poster changed or something else changed, you need to turn back.

Like I said in the introduction, when you make one mistake, you start at level 0 again. The first passage through the hallway is always safe. After that, you have to do 8 correct answers in a row. Now, at least 8, since if your 8th run has an anomaly, you need to turn back. You can only win if you have a hallway that has no strange thing, and you are above the 8th hallway.

Something really nice that this game does is, it doesn’t repeat anomalies. When you defeat a certain anomaly, it won’t repeat until you see all of them or reset the game. This makes the game more unpredictable and replayable.

The anomalies in this game range from extremely obvious like suddenly the hallway flooding… But others are sneaky, like a camera that moved location to the other side of the hallway. So, it was a puzzle. Is this room really the same, or did something change. Since you couldn’t go back to check. And there were various details that added to the complexity of the game.

In May of this year, we got the follow-up to this game called The Platform 8. If you thought that was more of the same, think again. This time, you are in the actual metro, and you have to survive 8 carts. The big change is that you can’t fail with an anomaly this time around since the exit door is locked if you need to find the anomaly first.

It’s a change that didn’t sit well with me at first, but I totally understand why. This game is now turned into a more tense game where you have to survive the crazy things that the game throws at you. The game is shorter than The Exit 8, but I’ll say… This game had me spooked and jump several times.

That’s Not My Neighbor

At it’s core, this game is an Observation Duty game. But with a big twist. You are a security guard at the entrance of a building. There are imposters out there, trying to look like your neighbor, and you have to keep them out.

This game tests your reasoning skills and tests you if you can look at all the clues. The best I can describe this game is: a mixture between Papers Please, and I am on Observation Duty. The added layer of difficulty is that you have a lot to keep track of. Who did you let already inside? Who is on the list and for who do you better call their apartment first?

This game is getting frequent updates with more lore and more modes. Each time I see this game being played by the streamers I watch, the new update impresses me. And I totally understand why this game got so big.

There is this extremely catchy song by longestsoloever. The amount of times I played it on repeat is just getting silly. Give it a listen if you like electronic music, but I warn you. It’s an earworm.

Confabulation

Confabulation, noun. Confabulation is a memory error consisting of the production of fabricated, distorted, or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world.

This game does a very interesting take on the actual formula. Instead of explaining the differences and anomalies with unexplained events, in this game it’s caused by a mental illness.

The flow of each play trough of this game is the same. But, the puzzles, the changing objects amongst other things are randomized. It’s up to you to make sure that you avoid you going insane and finding the truth of what happened.

This is an Observation Duty style game, but you can walk around in the area instead of watching at camera feeds. There is an extra layer added with the puzzles that add more information and lore of what happened.

I could talk about it more, but I highly recommend you play this game as blind as possible. The story, scares and impact is that much stronger when you don’t know what’s coming and let yourself be surprised. Watch the candles since they give you amazing hints on where to look next.

ATTA -Spot the Oddities in the Strange Hotel-

What if you have to count the amount of differences in a hallway instead of deciding there is a difference or not? Well, then you describe “ATTA, -Spot the Oddities in the Strange Hotel-“.

This game is an Exit 8 type of game with multiple rooms, where you have to count all the errors in a hallway… While various strange things happen. Like a train suddenly appearing and you have to duck for cover.

The atmosphere this game has, where it leaves you with an open ending that raises more questions than it answers, is the cherry on the cake. It’s a more intense game than your usual games. It may be a short run, but it’s a wild and pleasant ride all the way through.

Hospital 666

The final game I want to talk about today is called Hospital 666. In this game, you try to escape a cursed hospital. The first level has you running down a looping hallway. The second level, has one side room open.

Now, an impressive option that the game gives you is that you can choose if you want anomalies in the hallway or not. So, if you are in the second level, you can choose if you want things in the hallway to change or only focus on the new room.

Something impressive that this game does as well, is when you make a mistake, you can go back to the hallway to see what the mistake was that you made. You still start from the lowest floor of that level, but being able to see what got you is amazing. Since this game has very crazy anomalies but also various very sneaky ones. Like one is that some smiles faces appear on the wall.

In between the levels, there is a boss fight/puzzle that separates the floors from each other. They can be a bit janky, but the developer has updated and optimized the game quite a lot, and it is a lot better. Now, he is currently creating a sequel taking place in a school. And as somebody who works in education, I can’t wait to play through that.

Final thoughts

These games are only a handful of games in the genre. I have given a quick rundown of the games mentioned in this article, but if you are interested, I’m willing to talk more in depth about these titles. My intention with this article is to promote these titles.

Each game listed here is between 5 to €10 and is an amazing ride. These games are short little romps but are bursting to the seams with creativity. I always think, now, I have almost seen everything this genre has to offer. But, then I’m surprised with a new gameplay mechanic or a new setting that changes the atmosphere completely.

So, depending on how well this article does… I might write more of these. If you found amazing titles like this, feel free to send them my way or leave them in the comment section down below. But, for now, I’m going to leave you with my usual outro. Thank you so much for reading this article and I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to welcome you in another one, but until then, have a great rest of your day and take care.

First Impression: The Legend of Zelda – Echoes of Wisdom (Switch) ~ Renewing the Echo

Wikipedia – Nintendo Microsite

After the release of Tears of the Kingdom, I was afraid that we would never see a new game in the style of the 2D Zelda game. Yet, I have been proven wrong when this game was announced. To be very honest, I didn’t have very high hopes for this game. Especially since this game was announced this summer and released in late September. I felt that this game going to be a game to fill a gap while the developers are working on a much larger game. Now, the game is released, and I have played through a fair chunk of it. So, what is my opinion on this game? Well, that’s what I’m going to tell you in this first impressions article, while I all invite you to leave a comment of your thoughts and/or opinions in the comment section down below.

Renewing the Echoes

After a short introduction where you play as Link, the main story of this game is introduced. There are all consuming interdimensional rifts appearing all over Hyrule, and it’s eating various people in the kingdom.

Link gets eaten by one of those rifts while freeing Zelda and when Zelda tells her father, the king, about these rifts… A new rift appears and replaces the king with an evil clone of himself. Zelda gets thrown in the dungeon and there she meets a fairy named Tri. This fairy gives Zelda a special staff where she can summon objects into the world using echoes. With those echoes, she escapes the dungeon and sets out on an adventure to save Hyrule from doom before the land is fully consumed by the rifts.

Something I always love about the Zelda games is that there is a different core mechanic at the base of the game. In this game, we get two things. We got the rifts to another dark world, but we also got the magical staff, which we can use to summon various echoes into the world. These echoes mean you can tackle this game in various different ways. But I’ll talk more about that later in this article.

In terms of story, this game is hitting all the same beats as your typical Legend of Zelda game. It might be disappointing, to some, that in this game there is no voice acting anymore apart from the grunts and various emotional noises. Personally, I think it adds to the charm of this game. That’s because the characters in this game are way more expressive. While the story isn’t going to leave you at the edge of your seat of “what’s going to happen next”, it’s still well quite enjoyable, and the more expressive characters add quite a lot to the charm and atmosphere of the game.

Something I really like is how in this game, you are free to explore the world at your own peace. This game isn’t limiting you to go in a certain order. While this game isn’t fully open world like Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom, it’s somewhere in between. You can tackle parts in a different order. Like the first two major dungeons can be done out of order. Each area is its self-contained puzzle, and everything you need can be found in that general area.

In my introduction of this article, I said that I was afraid that was afraid that this game would be a short one where you were able to beat it in a few hours. That it was going to be a game that’s supposed to hold players over for the “next big 3D Zelda title”. To my surprise, this game is rather lengthy for a 2,5D Zelda game. It clocks in at 25 hours of casual playtime, which is, to my knowledge, one of the longest 2,5D Zelda games.

Climbing with beds

Something I find myself doing quite a lot while playing this game was climbing the area with beds. I summoned various beds stacked on top of each other to climb a wall. Since, I wanted to know if the developers hid a secret on that cliff face.

The exploration of this version of Hyrule is a blast to do. While you visit a lot of familiar places and meet your usual suspects like the Zora and the Gerudo, it’s a treat seeing them again. The only thing I missed a bit is showing the impact of the rifts. Something that this game only tells through dialogue was how things got impacted by the rifts. I wish it was shown a bit more visually. Like different animations of the characters before and after. But maybe, Tears of the Kingdom set the bar a bit too high for those expectations where each major area had a certain curse.

In terms of gameplay, this game really leans into the echoes mechanic. It also remembers that Zelda is a princess and didn’t really have combat training. So, you have to use summoned enemies to your advantage to let them fight for you. Now, you do have a sword, but you can only use it when your power meter has charge. I always reserved that for the dungeon bosses or when the situation got pretty dicey. Since recharging that meter is either done with potions or by defeating monsters from the rift world. These enemies aren’t exactly common in the overworld, and the energy bar drains fast.

In general, this game hits the same general gameplay beats as all other Zelda games. You go from dungeon to dungeon, learning a new technique or skill, defeating the boos and moving forward to another dungeon. There are also side quests in this game, that give you a nice reward. In this game, you also have a nice system to keep track of these side quests, like in Tears of the Kingdom. Something they also brought over from that game is the cooking system to a degree.

That’s something I personally feel mixed about. Maybe it’s me, but I feel the ingredients are quite rare to come by and there is no real way to farm certain ingredients like in Breath of the Wild. I have to admit that it adds a certain charm to this game, but I feel it’s a bit under implemented here. Like when you first meet the potion creators Deku shrubs, they talk about recipes… And I had a hard time finding any.

Like in Tears of the Kingdom, you can also eat most of the ingredients without cooking them. While I personally dislike the fact you have to do two clicks to consume an item, I do understand why they did it. To avoid you consuming them too much. Yet, this is a change from the two previous games and I honestly really feel it’s a set backwards. A fine solution would be to give the player an option to switch between both systems.

Grezzo playset

This game was co-developed by Grezzo. Their previous original Zelda game was Tri Force Heroes. But, this game looks very similar in graphical style to the remake of Link’s Awakening on the Nintendo Switch from late 2019.

This game looks like a plastic toy set and it looks amazing. While I was playing this game, I felt amazed at how expressive they were able to make everything without breaking the illusion that this is a toy set brought to live by our imagination. I don’t have a lot of complaints about the visuals and animations. And most of my complaints aren’t that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things.

Just like, I don’t have any complaints about the music and sound design of this game. If you take the music and sound design in a vacuum, you would say that it sounds just like very other Zelda game. It sounds like a remix of the familiar melodies we all know and love from the Zelda games. But, this isn’t a problem, since it sells the illusion that you are a child playing with a sort of Playmobil toy set of Hyrule and trying to recreate the sound effects and music of the game.

In terms of controls, this game plays like a dream. I rarely had problems with the controls and something I really like is the fact that with one press of a stick, you can see a view from on top when you feel the camera is blocking something. Now, there is one thing that I do have some things to criticize about. And that’s about the jumping.

It’s pretty difficult sometimes to judge how high Zelda can jump. I had moments in combat where I wasn’t aware I could jump on a higher ledge until I saw an enemy jumping backwards on that ledge. I also got tripped up several times with how far Zelda can jump. Her jump is shorter than I think, and the amount of times I jumped into a pit misjudging the jump is quite a lot. Something that would have helped is something a small landing shadow when Zelda was coming down. Then again, that must have been a nightmare to implement… So, maybe I should keep her shorter jump just better in mind.

Now, something else. Something I really like is how this game has two difficulty modes. I’m playing through this game on the normal difficulty setting and I have to say, I’m happy that I did. This game can lure you into a false sense of security. I wouldn’t say that this game is hard, but it isn’t a cakewalk either. You really need to keep your wits about you and think fast sometimes.

Being aware of what’s around you is also quite important since this game loves to hide things in little side area’s and using the map system is a must. I love how you can put pins and such on the map. Yet, I have to admit that I still keep notes in my phone like: “treasure in Gerudo dungeon, need to check later”.

The more I play through this game, the more I realize that the critiques I can make about this game are more on the minor side. Like how it feels like a waste of time when you are scrolling through a long list of echoes when you just want to find one. An easy solution would be to give the player an ability to favorite certain echoes. But then again, the sort function in the quick menu has “most used”, “recently learned” … So, it’s kinda that.

Now, you have two save slots in this game. So, you can play through this game and let a friend or a sibling play through a different slot. Now, this game also autosaves for you frequently, in case you forget to save. The game also keeps like several autosaves in case you want to return to an earlier point.

Something I really like is how this game also has a quick travel system. The system works similarly like an owl statue in Majora’s Mask or a water vane in Link Between Worlds. It makes it easy when you feel stumped by a puzzle and want to return later. The fast travel locations are very fairly placed all over the land.

While I went quite critical in this game, the more I played it, the more it won me over. This game is a new 2,5D Zelda adventure game I hope we were going to see again. The last new, non remake 2,5D Zelda game was released almost 11 years ago. And, I’m so happy to see a return to this style. I’d love to see a this style also making an appearance very so often since it’s clear there are still various unique ways to explore Hyrule and tell a story about the Hyrule legend without going fully 3D.

Apart from a few small complaints you read in this article, I honestly don’t have any major complaints about this game. This is a game I’m going to finish for sure, since I’m enjoying my time with this title quite a lot. If you are into the series, I highly recommend this title to you. If you enjoy exploration and playing with unique mechanics, I also think this game is for you. This game is totally worth it’s price tag and it pleasantly surprised me.

And with that said, I have said everything I wanted to say about this game for now. I hope you enjoyed reading this article as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to welcome you in another one, but until then, have a great rest of your day and take care.

Preview: Cave Hikers (PC) ~ Point and Drag

Trailer – Steam store page

Today, I want to talk about a new game that’s going to come out later this year. It’s called Cave Hikers. It’s being developed by Porcupine Parkour. This small Croatian based studio reached out to me to review their demo in July. I would have written an article about it before, but I have been suffering from a writing burnout. Thankfully, I’m slowly getting back in the groove. And I’m going to make it up to the developers by publishing an article on their game today. Let’s take a look at the demo together, shall we? And I have a small surprise in store later.

Demo review

In this demo, you get an introduction to the gameplay. If you ever played a game like My Brother Rabbit, you will feel right at home in this game. This is a point and click game where you go from screen to screen. Each screen has a small puzzle or hidden object moment for you to take part in.

This game feels like playing through a children book. The voice of the narrator sounds like a (grand)father telling a story to their children. It’s extremely charming, and the story book art style really helps to sell this story.

Overall, there is no real tutorial in this game. Yet, the gameplay is quite simple. You learn quite quickly that this game is controlled with only the mouse. The menu system exists out of icons that make the game a lot easier to localize.

The demo is rather short but gives a very good impression of the full game. This game looks like it’s something I’m going to play. It’s a charming point-and-click game with hidden objects that feels nostalgic. Since the demo is so short, I don’t have a lot to talk about in terms of feedback.

The art style, voice acting, animation is all pretty well done. I only have a few minor complaints. The first complaint is that clicking to unmute the music or sound effects can’t be done right away. It doesn’t always register right away. And the second complaint is the in some rare spots, like with the red crystal at the end of the demo, the hitbox of placing it in the crusher is too tiny.

So, the game describes itself as:

Cave Hikers is a relaxing and humorous 2D interactive cartoon mockumentary that follows three characters through a cavernous world, on a quest to find the mystical “cave with an infinite ceiling”.

And I think it fits the game pretty well. Like I have been saying, the humor and charm of this game is there, and it’s pretty clear that maybe from some very minor things, this game is going to be an extremely charming game.

Now, how interesting would it be if I asked some questions to the developers of this game? Well, I had a few interesting questions in mind, so I went and asked them. Here are their replies.

Interview with the developers

– What games inspired you take to make this one?

It was mostly HOPA style games, which are usually made by much larger companies with inexpensive artists and a pseudo-realistic and kitsch-y style. So we went more in line with our own kind of art style, with some inspiration from Amanita games.

– What’s your process in creating puzzles?

It’s a strange process. As we started making the game in our free time for fun between odd jobs and more “serious” projects, we made a number of locations, creatures and simple mechanics. First we take a look at what already exists on the screen, then we intertwine the narrative with some clicking and potential puzzle elements. Then we play around with it until we are happy with the amount of “work” the player needs to do before accomplishing the goal.

Sometimes it includes a bit of moon logic. First, we make it clearer through conversation clouds and drawings. Then, whatever is unclear or hard to find for testers, we explain further through the Narrator.

– What are the funniest bugs or whoopies that happened during development?

For a while, we had a splash screen that looked exactly like the main menu, which created a lot of confusion! That was because the engine was upgraded, and also we started working with a much better programmer, we consolidated it into a coherent menu.

As for actually funny bugs, at one point we had Valeriano’s secret twin showing up at the cutscene. It took a while to realize we accidentally put two Valerianos of which one was outside the camera view.

– What engine did you use and why?

It’s Construct 3. At first, we made this project for fun and the Animator wasn’t exactly a programmer, so he used a really simple engine. (Un)fortunately, the project got out of hand and got some funding. Now we have a real programmer, but he had to learn Construct with all its limitations, but it’s also a really simple engine so we can still make a lot of the game without much hassle.

– What are some things you learned during developing this game?

Something that we re-learned time and time again… a game is easier to build if you have the whole team and a proper plan. Because otherwise you leave a lot of work and frustration for “future you”. We also learned that Construct can be a lot stronger than we initially thought… but also that it can be really stubborn in some areas.

– How many people worked on this game?

It first started with Sven the illustrator and Zvonimir the animator. At first, we were building a completely wordless game. But some testers were a bit confused at what the characters are really doing. So we hired Tom Bennet as the narrator and also Lea Konjetić to compose original music for the game. In the last six months, Fabjan the programmer also joined the team and superpowered our development process. All in all, five people, excluding all the translators.

Final thoughts

I’m very happy that games like these are getting more attention. Hidden object games have a strange reputation of being “too casual” or “boring”. Yet, I dare to argue there is something to love in these games. Especially when a game is created with this much passion and love.

I want to apologize to the developers again for taking such a long time in creating and article about the demo. But, I’m happy I did today. Since, if you have any interest in playing this game after reading this article, go and play the demo. Or share this article with somebody you think will enjoy playing this game. The demo takes roughly 15 minutes to finish.

I wish the developers a lot of luck and success with their game and when it’s fully released, I’m going to play this game and most likely review it on my blog. And with that said, I have said everything I wanted to say about this game for now. Thank you so much for reading this article, and I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed making it. I hope to welcome you in another article, but until then, have a great rest of your day and take care.

Review: Shadow Gambit – The Cursed Crew (PC – Steam) ~ The Curse Of Gaming

Steam store – Official website – Wikipedia entry

Some game genres are so rare, it’s a miracle when a new game releases in that style. I personally call this genre: stealth tactics. The actual genre is Real-Time Tactics, but I find that name doesn’t really cover this (sub)genre. If you have ever played games like: Commando’s, Desperados, Robin Hood – The Legend of Sherwood or Shadow Tactics… You know what sort of game I’m talking about. A game features a rag tag group of heroes. Each hero has unique abilities. They must get through big groups of enemies. They do this one by one to progress the group’s goals. The game I want to talk about today is called Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew. This was the last game by the studio Mimimi. Is this game the swansong to close down this studio, or is it a game that’s better left forgotten? Before that, I invite you to leave a comment in the comment section down below. A comment with your thoughts and/or opinions on the game and/or the content of the article.

Promises of amazing treasure

In this game, you play as the crew of a special pirate ship named the Red Marley. Each main member of the crew has a black pearl in their chest, granting them unique supernatural abilities. These unique abilities come at a cost of being cursed to a sort of undead status.

The Red Marley’s captain fell in battle, and now the Inquisition is after the biggest treasure of the ship. Now, the Red Marley’s crew doesn’t want this to happen. So they do everything in their power to avoid this from happening.

The story in this game doesn’t take itself too seriously. The story is written like it’s a Saturday morning cartoon. A story arc can be contained in one or a handful of episodes, but always has an ending. While almost everything in the story ends well for the main cast, the story and writing never looses its charm. I felt like I was transported back into the time I woke up for the weekly Pokémon episode. I knew that the main problem of that week’s episode would resolve by the end. Still, I kept rooting for the heroes.

One of the biggest reasons I kept rooting for the main characters is because of the voice actors. Their performances are extremely well done. They bring a lot of personality and life to each character. They make the characters stand out like real, actual people. This script must have been immense, since the characters sometimes react on the actions you preform with other characters. There are 8 main characters, and more if you buy the DLC packs. If you start counting how many unique voice lines that bring to the table… And that’s the tip of the iceberg. The enemies for example, when they come together also have unique dialogue between them.

It’s possible to write an article by itself about the world building, story and voice acting in this game. I can also assure you that when I write this article, I’ll keep gushing about it all. A great example is how the save & load function fits into the story. It enhances the world of this game. Yes, you read that correctly. When you save, you store a memory in the Red Marley. When you load one of your saves, the Red Marley uses its powers to restore that memory. Your characters also respond to your saving and loading action and this brings even more charm to this game.

In these types of games, the replay value is quite high. Especially since you tackle all missions in various ways and each playthrough is going to be different. In this game, it’s taken even a step further. You can choose the order to revive your crew. You can also choose the order to finish the missions of that chapter. I can assure you that your playthrough will look nothing like mine.

The main quest is quite enjoyable to play through. I actually became really immersed in the world of this game. At the moment, I’m playing through the final missions of the game and the DLC missions. I’m having a blast. Thankfully, I can easily start a new playthrough of this game. Then I can experience it all of it over again and take a totally different route. And maybe I can do the little side quests and pirate tales as well. Since, that’s content, I haven’t gone into too much yet.

Your playthrough of this game will take you somewhere between 27 to 37 hours. That is, if you want to beat the main story and DLC’s. But, if you want to fully finish this game… Oh boy, then you’ll have a game that’s close to 80 hours on your hands. I already mentioned the crew tales. But there are also mini-challenges you can go for during the missions to earn badges. Let’s not forget the achievements you can earn. Well, most of the achievements are related to the main campaign.

Now, I have one complaint about the badges in this game. Earning some of these badges is extremely tricky. Sometimes, you don’t get all the information you expect to. For example, there is a badge on each map for using all the landing spots of that map. But guess what, there is no easy way to see if you already used a landing spot or not. It’s a shame that some badges work like that. Especially since some of these badges make you go out of your way to play in an unique way. A more challenging way to spice up your normal routine.

Apart from bragging trophies, these medals don’t really add up to much. But, I honestly don’t really mind that. Since, it’s fun to gather these medals and have some bonus challanges during my playthrough. It keeps me on my toes and it’s really enjoyable.

Mindblowing abilities

I’m still quite impressed at how balanced this game is. Each character has their own unique abilities. It’s best that you always have a character with an ability that can move guards from their position. If you don’t have that, the game will actually warn you. You are going to make it extremely challenging for yourself.

Personally, I’m playing through this game on the normal difficulty setting and your decisions actually matter. Before starting each mission, study the map well. Try to remember each map as well as you can. Since you are going to revisit each map at least once or twice. It’s extremely important to choose the correct landing position.

You would think that the game will be a bit boring if you always bring the same crew into missions. But, the game rewards you using different characters for missions. You gain more vigor if you play with certain crew members during certain missions. If you earned enough vigor, you can upgrade one of the unique abilities of your characters. This upgrade will give you more and better tools in your arsenal. Now, these upgrades can make the game much easier. You can always turn off the upgrades while on the Red Marley.

In the introduction paragraph of this article, I quickly explained how this game works. So, let me tell you the gist of it. In this game, you go from mission to mission, completing various goals in each one. These goals can range for example from rescuing an informant or stealing an artifact. In each mission, there are various enemies patrolling the area. Your goal is to find the weakspots in their patrols and dispose of the enemies without getting spotted.

Now, getting spotted isn’t the end of the world in this game. Depending on where you are spotted, it’s possible to escape and hide somewhere. You just have to avoid taking damage, since your health is limited, and you can’t heal during the mission. If you aren’t careful, it’s easy to get swamped or overwhelmed with guards. Especially when a guard with a bell spots you, the traces you leave behind or sees a dead body. When this happens, you have a limited amount of time to kill that guard before the bell is rung. When the bell is rung, more guards will emerge from nearby barracks and swarm to the location.

On top of that, there are also some unique enemy types outside your regular patrol goons. The first type I want to talk are the Kindred. These annoying buggers bring something quite unique to the table in this genre. Kindred are always connected with each other. If you don’t kill these all at the same time, they will revive each other. But, this is only the start of your troubles.

You also have Prognosticar. And let me tell you, these are even more challenging. To defeat these enemies, you need to have two units ready. One unit needs to be spotted or attack the Prognosticar. Since as soon as that happens, your unit gets trapped. This trap will go on and damage your unit until the unit either dies or is rescued. When the Prognosticar is using his trap, he can be attacked and killed. But do it quick. The trap is damaging your unit. You are also stuck in place. This situation is dangerous.

It also matters if the mission is taking place during day or night. The big difference is that in the daytime, the enemies have a bigger field of view. During the nighttime, some enemies will carry a torch on their patrol. This gives more light to other units. They can spot you sneaking by if you aren’t careful. There are also various torches dotted around the map, and you can put them out. The enemies can’t stand torches that are put out and will go out of their way to light them again.

It’s also important to know if an enemy stops in their patrol to talk to another enemy. Since if you kill one of them, the other enemy will start looking for them. They will start running around and if you weren’t careful, will find your tracks and spot you.

Learning those little mechanics is essential in this game. Never forget the tools you have in this game! This ranges from the abilities of each character to how for example view cones work. There is something called view cone surfing. If you want to dash to another place past some enemies… Understand that a full color in the view cone means they will spot you right away. Stripped sections of the view cone will cause you to be unseen if you crawl by. Also, it takes a few moments of you being spotted and the alarm being raised. You can run quickly enough past an enemy. Alternatively, you can run from view cone to view cone. It’s possible to get past unseen.

If you are afraid that you will get overwhelmed by all the information of all the little mechanics, don’t worry. The difficulty curve in this game is perfect. This game also has solid character tutorials. Each character tutorial guides you through 2–3 rooms, teaching you the abilities of each ability and their unique use cases. At the end of each character tutorial, you get a puzzle room. Putting to the test if you can use that character correctly. During the game, you can always open your logbook from the pause menu, where all tutorials can be watched again.

This brings me to the abilities of your characters in this game. If you have played similar games, you’ll recognize certain abilities and others will be quite new and unique. Now, some of these abilities will have a unique spin to it. For example, your sniper only has one shot. But, when you retrieve your sniper bolt… Your sniper can shoot again.

There are also extremely unique mechanics, like your Canoness has very fun abilities. She can pick up dead bodies in her canon to launch them at enemies to knock them out. But, you can also pick up allies. You can fling them over a group of enemies. This will give them a better hiding spot. Or your Ship Doctor, she can create one hiding spot out of thin air. Or your navigator, she can stop time for one enemy, allowing you to easy sneak by. And your ship cook can throw a special doll. This doll allows him to teleport to that location. He does this as soon as you click the button. Oh, and if you place that doll on an enemy, it sticks to that enemy.

You might be annoyed that I somewhat spoiled things in the above paragraph. But I have only told the tip of the iceberg here. I have left out several characters in that little summary and they have mindblowing abilities as well. Each map is created in such a way that it doesn’t really matter which characters you take into battle. Since you can finish it using any of your characters.

The Swansong of Mimimi

When Klamath and I started streaming Commandos, I wanted to play a similar game. One I haven’t played through. Since I first started playing through Desperados III again, and that was beaten in a few days. Since, I really enjoyed Desperados III, I bought the next game from the studio.

As somebody who enjoyed Desperados III quite a lot, I was happy to see things return in this game. I can’t tell you how much I love the speed up button. While I wish you can adjust the speed of it… The slow wait can be annoying. Sometimes, you have to get an enemy right where you want them. On top of that, you also have the showdown mode. With the press of a button, you can stop time and plan out your units their next move. Once you press the enter key, either still in showdown mode or not, the actions will be executed. It still feels amazing when you execute a well timed attack to take out difficult set of enemies.

Something that’s extremely useful is how you can rotate the camera in this game. Sometimes an enemy walks behind a building or some rocks… So, if you can’t rotate the camera, you wonder from where you are taking damage. Also, the ability of outlining the enemies, ladders and hiding spots help with that as well. As you can see from my screenshots, I always play with that feature enabled.

Sadly, there are a few ladders that don’t get an outline. Most likely since the developers forgot to put a certain tag on them. I remember one in Angler’s Grave, at the top right. It’s not too far from one of the mission objectives, the informant. Thankfully, these very minor oversights rarely happen. Overall, this game is extremely solid and blast to play through.

The controls are extremely solid. I had to get used to one thing. To execute certain actions, I had to hold the left mouse button instead of just clicking. This sometimes tripped me up but a quick reload fixed that problem. I only have one minor complaint about the controls. Depending on the camera angle, there were rare moments where your character refused to go to a location. I suspect it has to do with where you click. Your unit always wants to look for the shortest way to reach where you click. Sadly, this trips something up in the pathfinding and your unti refuses to go to their destination. Thankfully, a quick camera movement can fix these moments. And also, I’m glad that these moments are quite rare.

Something that’s even more rare are some minor visual bugs that can happen sometimes. Sometimes an UI-element refuses to dissapear. I had that happen twice, when I shot an enemy holding down an exit rift with the Canoness. The stars indicated that the enemy was dizzy. They hovered above the enemy’s head after the rift opened. Even after I killed the enemy, these stars remained visible. There are sometimes minor visual bugs happening like that. Thankfully, they are extremely rare and sometimes are quite funny. One time, one of my units was standing perpendicular on a ladder when I stopped it going up the ladder. The only annoying bug was that I couldn’t retrieve two bodies. They lay in a remote part of Angler’s Grave. It was almost impossible to get rid of two bodies. Maybe, it’s possible. I don’t know, I honestly gave up and earned the badge of hiding bodies on a later revist.

In such a big game it’s to be expected that sometimes things can go wrong. But it surprises me how little goes wrong and how polished the overall game is. Scrolling through the patch notes of this game, I noticed that the developers fixed many issues. They also added a lot of new content to the game. The last update to the game was even a modding tool for this game. These mods go from chaging your character models to adding new maps. I think I’ll play around with the mods after I have fully beaten the game. I’m extremely close, since I’m in the final missions of the game.

Now, earlier I talked about the UI. The UI is quite easy and helpful. There are several unique icons to inform you where certain things are. For example, where you left the paper doll when using the ship cook. There is only one thing in the UI I dislike. And that’s the list of save games. You get a little screenshot of the location of the save and a time stamp. And that’s it. You can’t give a special name or note to them. So if you are looking for a certain save… you either need to make notes OR just go through all them until you het it.

It’s the only real complaint I can give about this game. There is just a lot that this game does right. Like how you can scroll to zoom in or out. When you scroll again at the max zoom level, you see a live map. This map shows where all the enemies are. The only minor complaint I have about the map is that ammo chests aren’t marked on there. Also, quick note on the ammo chests… Almost every character has the same visual for their gun. Now, if another visual appears above the ammo chest, it doesn’t matter. The ammo chests are never character specific.

Visually, this game looks breathtaking. The attention to detail in this world gets a big thumbs up from me. The world really feels alive and somewhat real. The little animation details for example when an enemy stops at a prison cell to talk to inmates… This is just amazing. The immersion level is even higher with that.

The soundtrack is very catchy and a joy to listen to. It made certain moments in the game even more thrilling. The music has been created by Filippo Beck Peccoz, he also created the music for Desperados III. The soundtrack really fits the game like a glove. I’m so glad I bought the soundtrack DLC,. Now I can add the music to my music library to play while I’m at my dayjob.

This brings me to the sound design of this game. The sound design of this game is amazing. I’m playing this game with a good headset and I don’t think this game is playable without sound effects. A great example is, when you get spotted. You not only get a great visual hint of a yellow line turning red of the enemy spotting you… You also get some sound effects informing you that things are about to go down. On top of that, the sound effects add so much extra impact on taking down enemies. This makes it even more rewarding when you finally take down that one pesky enemy.

One thing I haven’t talked about yet is how flexible this game is. I have touched upon that by talking about how you can only choose three out of 8 characters per mission. And you are encouraged to experiment with different combinations. Now, when you open the options menu, you’ll be blown away. You can change almost everything. The controls like the shortcuts for abilities can be tweaked to your liking. You have quite a lot of control to tweak the volumes, the controls, the visuals… Even tweak certain game mechanics to your liking. Don’t like the save reminder? You can turn that off.

There is still another thing that boggles my mind that was added in this game. You can create a custom difficulty. The only complaint I have there is that the UI fails to explain the differences. I find it challenging to understand all the settings. You get a short explaination about the setting, and then you have a slider you can set. But, what’s the difference between 1 and 2 on the slider? That’s something the UI doesn’t really tell.

When I was writing this article, I kept looking at my notes and thought: “Oh, I forgot about that.”. There are just so many things in this game. The fact that in some missions, you must kill enemies in unique ways. In one mission, you have to lure enemies to a certain location. You need to do this 4 times. You do this instead of killing them. It’s a breath of fresh air. You’d think that having only a handful of maps would make this game boring and repetitive, but no. The maps are not only large but also used in extremely interesting ways. Revisits of a map make it easier to start, but each area is used in a mission. So, there is still a lot of challenge in the revisits.

Oh, there is one more thing. The question if you should buy the DLC’s or not. Let me just tell you this, I bought the game on sale with the DLC’s included. I’m so happy I did! Since the additional content in the DLC’s adds so much more to this game. They come highly recommended.

Now, I have left out a few things for you all to find while playing this game. This article is already getting quite long. I want to leave some things as a surprise for people interested in playing this game. I think it’s high time to wrap up this review and give my conclusion and final thoughts on this game.

Conclusion of this treasure hunt

The negatives:

-Unable to add notes to quick saves.
-Some minor (visual) glitches can happen. Thankfully, they are rare and rarely/never gamebreaking.
-The UI of custom difficulty could have been executed better.

The positives:

+ A masterclass in it’s genre in terms of gameplay.
+ Extremely flexible with options.
+ A modding tool.
+ A love-able cartoony story.
+ Amazing voice over work.
+ Superb soundtrack.
+ …

Final thoughts:

When I started playing Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, I had extremely high expectations. Mimimi blew me away with the amazing Desperados III. With this swansong of a game, they not only met my expectations, they blew them out of the water. This game showcases the achievements of passionate people. These individuals are dedicated to creating the game they love.

It didn’t take long before I fell in love with the cast of this game. The charm drew me into the world of this game. Apart from some minor things, it’s hard to find things to critique about this game. The only thing I can critique are small bugs that barely impact the gameplay of this game. This game really feels like a finished product and it’s a thrill ride from start to finish.

If you really want to find things this game does wrong… You’ll either need to be extremely nitpicky or just have the game not clicking with you. If you find this game too easy or too difficult, just tweak the setttings to your playstyle and voila.

If you enjoy games like Commandos or Desperados… You’d do yourself a disservice to not check out this game. Give the demo of this game a try, and see what you think. I wouldn’t be surprised that this game sinks it’s hook into you like it did with me.

It’s a shame to see that this game studio closes. Thank you to everybody who worked on this amazing title and I hope to meet your work in other games. This final game you all created together is a real piece of art. It’s a masterclass in game development and shows how well you know the community for games like this. I’m so happy that this game exists. Since it wouldn’t surprise me that I’ll play through this game several times now.

Before I ramble on and on about this game, I think it’s high time I wrap up this article. Otherwise, I’ll keep praising this game to high heavens and back. So, with that said, I have said close to everything I wanted to say about this game. I hope you enjoyed reading this article as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to welcome you in another article, but until then… Have a great rest of your day and take care!

Score: 100/100

Preview: Ama’s Lullaby (PC – Steam) ~ Hacking The Point-And-Click Genre

Itch.io – Steam

Back in 2017, a developer from France contacted me about their new point-and-click sci-fi game in the works called Ama’s Lullaby. But, it’s more than a point-and-click game, it’s also a hacking game. Now, this developer works on this game in his free time after his day job and with a small budget. Sometimes these passion projects die due to lack of time, money, motivation and/or just interest. But it looks like Ama’s Lullaby isn’t going to be one of those projects. Earlier this year, a demo of the game got released. Now, I asked the developer if he was interested in streaming this demo with us, and he did. Here is a link to part 1 & part 2. Sadly, due to overheating of Klamath’s computer, it had to be cut into two parts and the ending was quite abrupt. Now, this stream is almost a month ago, and I still wanted to write an article about this game. So, what do I think of the demo? Am I still as impressed when I saw it during the livestream, or is my opinion going to change when I’m not back seating and playing it myself? Let’s find out in this article.

Hacking The Point-And-Click Genre

The story of this demo is quite simple. Ama enters the police station and gets new tasks to aid the space colony she is in. Overall, the story is told more naturally compared to other games. Mostly, we get an opening where the main story of the game is teased, but not in this game. During interactions with the others, we get little glimpses into the world and story. Now, this is a tricky thing to pull off, since either you have to force the player to interact with everybody or risk that some players miss potentially important information. On the other hand, info dumping on the player isn’t always the best solution.

Now, in this space colony, there is an AI that makes a lot of decisions. It turns out that Ama and her dad have created that AI and the software to interact with it. She is one of the ambassadors of the human race. But it doesn’t take too long before strange things start to happen, and you notice that not everything is what you think it is.

The dialogues in this game appear above the character’s their head. When it’s cursive, you know it’s a thought. Not only that, you have simple sound effects that appear to put some additional power to the dialogues and to quickly differentiate between thoughts and spoken dialogues. Currently, there are plans to fully voice act this game, but if those plans fall through, I’d recommend to the developer to have different sound effects for the dialogues for different emotions.

Now, the game cold opens with an old school terminal as a main menu. This might be a bit jarring for new players who aren’t used to working with the command line. Personally, as somebody who knows how a command line works, I really love this touch. Since, this interface is also present in a lot of puzzles in the game. It fits the atmosphere and style of the game as a glove. To be honest, I think that with some minor polishing, it would be perfect.

There are a few things I would change. First, I’d get rid of the case-sensitive commands. The main reason is that a lot of people have the default keybinding for the Steam overlay with is… Shift+Tab. Since I love using autocomplete, it got pretty frustrating when I was holding my shift button and tabbed to autocomplete and my Steam overlay popped up.

A second thing I’d change is to allow the user to enlarge the font of terminal. The reason for that is because it doesn’t really scale pretty well with people who are using larger monitors.

Now, since this game is still in development and this is just the demo… I can totally excuse that there are features not present. Like pushing the up arrow to get the last command, or the help feature not always working correctly in all menus. For example, if you are in the options menu and use “QUALITY HELP”, you get information but if you first write “QUALITY” to see the options you can input and then “QUALITY HELP”… It bugs out and doesn’t give you help at all. Another small bug I noticed is that for some reason, the enter button on my numpad didn’t enter but always selected the whole text. But hey, during the stream the developer said that some of these things are on the list to get fixed for the full game.

Cyberpunk Sci-fi

I was impressed with the visuals of the game when we were playing this game on stream. While I haven’t played the Blade Runner games yet, I have seen a lot of people talk about it and know the visual style of the game. This game really mimics that style extremely well. You really feel like you are in a sci-fi world with some older technology than we have compared to our own technology.

Also, something I really love in this demo is that everything is one big space. You don’t really have “screens” in this game, like in a Broken Sword game for example. No, the camera swings and follows Ama as if she was in a movie. This sells the illusion of the area even more. While I’d have loved to see the details the developer put in every scene more up close sometimes, the more zoomed out look gives you a better overview on the scene. It almost feels like you are watching Ama through security camera’s or a drone camera in a way.

The biggest thing that I want to point out in terms of the visuals is Ama herself. The game goes for a more dark and dimly light environment and with a main character that’s wearing black clothes, it’s extremely easy to lose Ama in the scenery. It wouldn’t surprise me if they gave our main character in Blade Runner a brown coat for that reason, so you can more quickly see the main character without breaking the visual style of the game. But, overall, this is almost a nitpick. Since, it didn’t happen a lot that I lost Ama in the scene. It mostly happened when I was replaying parts of the demo while writing this article.

Now, I want to talk about the command line. The tutorial in this game on how a command line works is actually well done. I love how it doesn’t hold the players hands and tries to force them to input the right thing. It really lets you experiment with it and learn how it works. All the while, a small guide on how things work is displayed on the top of your screen.

This whole command line mechanic in this game is a breath of fresh air. It’s impressive how true to reality the whole command line is. While it uses some creative liberties here and there to make it fit into the game world, overall, it might be a real command line interface that’s open in the game.

In this demo, you have a few tasks to complete. Most of these tasks involve fixing various things. One task is highly dependent on the command line. This was quite easy for me since, like I said, I know how to use a command line. Visually, it’s a bit tricky during the tutorials in the network view since it’s not really clear/easy on how you can scroll up or down while in the network view. Using the mouse mostly scrolls around the network map. I think an easier way to scroll up and down in the terminal could be useful there. Also, when you have to input a command that’s longer than the terminal screen, I’d start a second line. Since, that’s how real life works. Or move the whole thing, and not let the username stay.

Final thoughts and future wishes

Overall, the demo is quite short. If you don’t know what you are doing and exploring everything, it will take you mostly two hours to complete. But if you know what to do, you can finish this in 10 minutes. Yet, the impression I got from the stream hasn’t changed. This game has quite a lot of potential but it needs some polish here and there.

There are some minor things like some objects not being solid and Ama being able to run through them, but there are also more major issues. The elevator bug the developer Marc mentioned during the stream, happened to me. Ama didn’t go up with the elevator and she was stuck. I think it was related to another bug I encountered where the head of IT got stuck in an animation loop. Somehow it was like Ama was near him while Ama was walking in other parts of the station. I don’t know what exactly triggered that, and I have replayed the demo trice to try and get it back into that bugged state, but I was unable to find the cause and I was unable to replicate it.

Currently, there is one way to save the game. There are several terminals in this demo where you can save your game. You only have one save slot. There is also no manual saving of the game. So, remember that. You can also only load from the main menu.

Reviewing a demo is always tricky to do. Especially if the game is still in development, since you never know for sure how the final game is going to look like. Yet, this demo is extremely promising. The puzzles where a lot of fun and after playing the demo, I had the same feeling that Klamath had at the end of the stream. I want to play more or similar games like this.

I could start talking about how the sound effects are amazing but there isn’t enough music yet. But, at one hand, the lack of music really sells the atmosphere of the game a lot more but on the other hand, the music during the terminal sections is really enjoyable. But, I’m sure that in the full game we shall see more music.

Just like I’m convinced that when the full game releases and the players find bugs, they will get fixed. While I was talking with Marc during the stream, I really felt the passion for creating this game and how he wants to make it the best experience it can be for his players. So, if you are interested in this game after reading this article in any way shape or form, I highly recommend that you give this game a chance, play the demo for yourself and give the developer feedback via his Discord or any other of his official channels.

I can’t wait to see and play the final game. Various things got revealed and talked about during the stream and I have to say, it was an amazing experience and conversation. I was already interested in seeing this game when it was on KickStarter but now that I have played the demo, I think we are on a winner here. This game will put an interesting twist on the point-and-click genre and will be interesting to anyone who enjoys adventure games with a sci-fi influence or just enjoy more unique puzzle games.

I want to thank Marc for reaching out to me and talking about his unique project. You can be sure that when the full version releases… me and Klamath will play through it and most likely stream it. And I’ll write a more in-depth article on the final product. Since, I might have not talked quite in-depth in this article but I want to hold off my final opinions when the game is fully released.

If you have read my article, played the demo and/or watched our stream, I’m curious, what did you think about this game? Feel free to talk about it in the comments. Am I overhyping the game or overlooking flaws? Or is there something you’d love to see in the full game?

And with that said, I have said everything about the game I want to say for now. I want to thank you for reading this article and I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to welcome you in another article but until then, have a great rest of your day and take care.

Review: Hypnospace Outlaw (PC – Steam) ~ Dreaming Up Nostalgic Investigations

Steam store page – Wikipedia – Official website

So, when I’m writing this, it is 2024. I turned 31 years old back in February. I still love playing video games and surfing the internet since I was a young lad. Besides that, I also have a fascination for anything that has to do with dreams and their meanings. And then a game called Hypnospace Outlaw turns up on my radar. A game that promises to bring back the early years of the internet that I remember. Not only that, we are going to have to moderate the internet with a new technology that allows people to surf the internet while they are dreaming. We have to play as an unnamed enforcer to keep the internet safe and on top of that, we can create our own pages and mod this game easily. But before we start spending time on that, let’s find out if the base game is actually good and if it’s worth to start playing this game or if it’s something we should skip. Also, feel free to leave your thoughts and/or opinions on this article and/or the game in the comment section down below. Besides, dear enforcer and MerchantSoft, this isn’t harassment, this is a fair review/critique of the game. Removing this from HypnoOS isn’t the solution.

Dreaming Up Nostalgic Investigations

In this game, you play as an unnamed enforcer for MerchantSoft. A company that developed a headband that allows users to surf the web in their dreams. Your goal is to clean up the HypnoSpace for everybody. You start in late 1999, where your first case is assigned. When your first case is assigned, you are left to your own devices, and you can explore the internet by yourself. And let me tell you, there is a lot of internet to explore.

The story of this game is fascinating. You get to dive and explore through various pages on the internet about various things. A long time before social media was a thing and everybody had a website for their own creations. The HypnoSpace has several zones, with each their own theme. If you remember AOL, you will know what I’m talking about.

If you want to get the most out of this game, I highly advise you to take your time with this game. Don’t rush it at all. This game is sadly rather short if you only follow the main story of the game. It’s only 6 hours long and shorter if you know what you are doing. I mean, the speedruns are only around 11 minutes. The strength of this game is the depth it has. This game has three main chapters, and there are clear triggers that separate the chapters.

The deeper you dig and the more you read up, the more interesting lore gets revealed. I actually started a second playthrough to try and find the things I missed. And honestly, this game is one that gets ruined by playing it with a guide in any sort or form. Do not play this game with a guide. It’s a lot less rewarding if you play it with a guide in your first or second playthrough. The wonder of getting lost in all of these pages is just so nostalgic.

Now, while I was playing, I was wondering if it would appeal to the younger players out there. I’m somewhat on the fence about that. While it tackles a lot of subjects that are still somewhat relevant, I honestly think that it’ll mostly click with those who grew up with the internet of the ’90 to early ’00. With that said, I think that it still might click with the younger people, but know that the internet was very different back then.

Point-And-Click Detective

This game is a point-and-click adventure game in any sense of the word. You get a case, and you have to explore the internet to see if anyone broke the rules or not.

Each infraction you find, will reward you with HypnoCoin. You can use these coins to buy various things in the Hypnospace. This can go from stickers, wallpapers, themes, applications to so much more. But be careful, it’s quite possible that some of these downloads are infected with malware. And back then, malware was a lot more visual and less aimed at serving you a lot of ads or stealing your information.

The controls of this game are quite easy. You mostly click with your mouse and input things sometimes in the search bar. If you know how to do basic things with a computer, you’ll very quickly find your way around with this game as well. While I sometimes struggled with opening apps, I didn’t have too much trouble with the controls. Thankfully, there are some options to tweak the controls to your liking, like disabling that double-clicking opens apps. But, I’m a Windows user and the double click to open apps is just hardwired in my brain.

Visually, this game really looks like you are playing with the old internet. When I noticed that there was a mod that changed the OS into Windows 95, oh boy, I was sold. There are various themes for the OS in this game, and they go from amazing to silly. There is even a fast food theme. Now, if you read that this game is mostly created by a team of 5 people, it’s even more impressive. Not only that, one of the main designers of Dropsy is part of the team.

The creativity of this game never ceased to amaze me. Let me continue on the trend of the visuals and say that the little details on how the webpages look is just so realistic. The little typo’s here and there, the rabbit holes you can jump down, the crazy visuals on various pages… Even the “help me, I can’t remove this” and “Test 1 2 3″… I made me crack up and remember my early days when I used to write webpages in plain HTML with barely any coding knowledge as a young teen.

While I knew that wiggling the mouse sped up the loading of the webpages, I just never really did. I just enjoyed the webpages loading slowly and having that experience again when I was a teenager before Facebook or any other big social media started to take over. Yes, even before MySpace. While I only experienced the late “pre-social media internet”, I do have amazing memories of it.

On top of that, you have the amazing wallpapers and sticker packs you can buy and play around with. With this, you can really make your desktop your own. But, something that really triggered memories for me were the viruses you can encounter. Back as a young teen, I was a lot less careful in what I downloaded and seeing the visual mess some viruses can create in this game, it triggered some nasty memories.

Memories like how one time, I got a very nasty variant of the SASSER worm and each time I installed something new, my computer would lock up and crash. Yes, even when you tried to re-install Windows, it locked up and crashed the installer. After a lot of digging, I found that it was caused by a program starting with boot and I had to screw out my hard drive, connect it with somebody’s computer and then remove the start-up file from there. I also had a piece of malware that looked like the ButtsDisease virus in this game. Where it started to change all the text on a webpage to another word. Oh man, those were the days.

So, during your investigations you can encounter various things. Things like people breaking the rules, and you have to report those. You mostly need to focus on one of 5 categories. Copyright infringement, harassment, illegal downloads/malware, extra illegal commerce and illegal activity. Each law gets several infractions, and you do have to look for them. At one moment, I really that to take notes. I really have to say, taking notes for this game is really helpful, you even have the notes’ app in HypnoOS.

Sticking in your brain

Now, something I have to commend the developers for in this game is that they also took accessibility into account. Something I have to commend the developers for as well is the amount of content in this game, even when the main story is extremely short. I already talked about the visuals and how much I love them, but the music in this game is something else.

Some of the music tracks are really stuck in my mind and I wouldn’t be surprised that if I ever write another article in my favorite game music series, some of them will pop up in that. Some tracks are real earworms and got stuck in my brain. The music for some of the parody products in this game is so good, that I wish they were real.

The music in this game is a mixture of various styles, and I find some of them more catchy than the others, but it’s really impressive at how many styles there are in this game. If you know that this game has over 4 hours of music in it, that’s an amazing feat.

There is even a whole suite where you can create your own pages, music and mods released by one of the main developers of this game. It works only on Windows and you can read more about it on the itch.io page of Jay Tolen here. There were even various community events where your stuff could appear as an Easter egg in the main game. Yet, these tools are now part of the main game and are in your installation folder.

Speaking about this, modding this game is extremely easy. There is even a build in mod browser, and it’s a piece of cake to install and downloads mods. If you use the in-game mod menu, you don’t have to reboot the game for most mods to take effect. Just go to the main menu, choose the mods button and install the mods you want. Now, there are a lot more mods out there then just what you can find in the in-game mod browser, so check them out here.

The game has an autosave, it doesn’t really show when the game gets saved. There are three save slots, so if you want to replay the game, you can pick another save slot. Now, if there is one mod I highly advise is he expanded endgame cases mod. This mod expands the game quite naturally and is a lot of fun and additional challenge. But don’t read the description when you haven’t finished the game, since it contains quite a lot of spoilers.

This game can be quite tricky. Sometimes the solution isn’t the easiest to find. It’s even possible you don’t find the solution to every puzzle out there. Now, there is a built in hint system for this game. It’s somewhat hidden to avoid immersion breaking, but for a small HypnoCoin fee, you can get a hint to progress. I really love this system, since I rather have you getting a crowbar to get yourself unstuck than you getting a guide where it’s very easy to other things and spoil the whole experience. Since the fun of this genre depends highly on solving the puzzles with what’s given to you. If you want to get a hint, just search hint.

Overall I have been extremely positive about this game, and I have to say that overall this game is extremely well-made. I rarely found any moments where I thought, this isn’t right. But does that mean that this game doesn’t have any negatives? Well, sadly enough there are a few things I didn’t like about my experience and that I want to talk about.

First of all, I wish the default text-to-speech voice wasn’t the default language of your system if you aren’t English. I’m from Belgium and my text-to-speech voice reads English extremely weird. Thankfully, I had the English soundpack installed on my computer so after I went into the BIOS settings, I was able to quickly change it to the English one and it sounds a lot more natural and better.

Secondly, this is an issue in general with point-and-click games but the replay value just isn’t here. Once you explored everything, you have seen everything. There are various mini-games, but those are quickly beaten. While I personally don’t really see this is a negative, since not every game needs high replay value and sometimes playing it once and having the whole experience engulf you is the idea… I want to mention it, if somebody is looking for replayable games.

Third, you can find more infractions than what’s required to close the case. While I can understand that the game doesn’t tell you how many other things there are out there for immersion reasons, as somebody who wanted to experience everything, I was sometimes a bit annoyed that I couldn’t make sure I found everything. If only there was an option you could toggle to see completion percentage or something of that nature. Since, because of this, it’s possible to lock yourself out of achievements or content in this game.

Yes, this game has achievements and some of them are extremely tricky to get. It took me a lot of researching and exploring in HypnoSpace to find all the material. Thankfully, taking notes really helped me to find it all.

And the final thing is that the final chapters of this game feel a bit rushed and undercooked. One of the final cases is a breeze to solve if you have written notes during your playthrough and it feels like there is content cut out of the game. The ending comes a bit out of nowhere and if you didn’t explore everything or didn’t register certain things, the ending won’t make sense to you and it will loose it’s impact. Thankfully, the mod I shared earlier resolves this to a degree.

That’s all the negative I could say about this game, in my honest opinion. When this game clicks with you, it clicks really well and doesn’t let go at all. But, I’ll leave my final thoughts after the summary of this review. So, I think it’s high time for that since I have touch upon everything I wanted to in this review.

Summary

The bad:

-Text-to-speech should use English by default

-It’s possible to miss content or lock yourself out of it.

-The game is rather short.

-Rushed ending.

The good:

+ Amazing nostalgic trip

+ Amazing music

+ Fantastic writing

+ Easy to use mod tools

+ Great puzzles

+ Great controls

+ …

Final thoughts:

Hypnospace Outlaw is an amazing nostalgic point-and-click adventure trip through the late ’90’s internet. This game might not be for everyone, but when it clicks… Oh boy does it really click. Now, this is also a game you shouldn’t rush. The charm of this game is in all the little details and references that are hidden in the pages and the world building of this game.

While the game is rather at the shortside for point-and-click games, I don’t see it as a big problem to be honest. The journey that this game took me on was a lot more worth it to me than having a long game. Since, I think it would have lost it’s charm if this game kept going and going.

While I personally have more memories with the internet time period that came right after it, the developers are already working on the sequel to this game called Dreamsettler. I honestly can’t wait to play that one, since the quality that this game has is just top notch. The music is catchy, the visuals are amazing and it alls comes together in an amazing nostalgic trip that makes you want to play more.

There are some minor blemishes on this game, but you can work with them. Like I said before, when this game clicks, it really does click extremely well. I’d compare my experience with games like There Is No Game or SuperLiminal. Amazing small titles that leave a lasting impact on those who play it. All of these games are passion projects that turned out amazing and get a recommendation from me.

If you enjoy playing unique point-and-click games and/or if you have nostalgia for the old ’90’s internet, I highly recommend that you give this game a try. While this game is on multiple platforms, I highly recommend that you play the PC version since it has mod support that gives you even more toys to play with and expands the game even more.

I had a blast with this game and it’s a breath of fresh air for me. I’m angry at myself that I rushed my playthrough, but now I have installed several mods and I’m so going to replay this game after I have published this article. I also want to earn every achievement in this game, since I really want to see everything. I’m also extremely hyped for the sequel to this game and I can’t wait to start playing that, since that is going to be an even bigger nostalgic trip for me than this game. And with the amazing set of developers behind this game, I think we get another gem in our hands.

And with that said, I think it’s high time to wrap this article up. I want to thank you so much for reading and I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to welcome you in another article, but until then, have a great rest of your day and take care.

Score: 100/100

First Impression: Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands (PC – Steam) ~ Role playing With Guns

Official microsite – Steam page – Wikipedia

Something that is on my bucket list for a while now, is playing a round of Dungeons and Dragons. Currently, I haven’t made the time to actually do it. But, when I saw that there was a shooter with a lot of dungeon and dragons elements, I got quite interested. I mean, I love unique shooters, so I gave it a shot. I didn’t know that this game was a spin-off of the Borderlands series, another series that is on my bucket list but… you guessed it, I haven’t played yet. But, is this game any good? I mean, I placed it on the 9th spot of best game I played in 2023, so you would think it’s good. But perhaps it’s a “me thing” and if I look with a critical eye, this game might be full of flaws. There is only one way to find that out, and that’s taking a good look at it, while I invite you to leave a comment in the comment section with your thoughts and/or opinions on the game and/or the content of the article in the comment section down below.

Role playing with guns

In this game, we play as a new character joining a group of D&D players who are about to wrap up a game. At the start of the game, you can customize your character. The amount of customization options you get are quite overwhelming. The amount of control you have in this game to fine tune your character is possibly a game in itself. Now, it’s a shame you don’t see your character yourself outside the pause menu or some cutscenes.

The pacing of this game fully depends on if you do any side quests or just want to explore the world. Overall, the writing of this game is charming. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, and you really feel that the main characters are a group of friends who welcome a new player into their world. During the game, the personalities of the characters really shine through in the world building and through the voice acting.

We get quite the diverse cast of voice actors lending their voice to this game. I have to say, they did an amazing job bringing this world to life. The personality and the emotions of the characters really shine through, giving this game even more of a Saturday morning cartoon vibe. While the story is predictable and silly sometimes, it’s written in such a way that you always want to know what’s going to happen next or how they are going to resolve the current crisis.

The silly puns of the enemies, the charming world, the over the top writing… It’s like I said earlier, this game’s story feels like you are watching a Saturday morning cartoon. There are also various different builds you make, so I think that the replay value of this game is going to be quite high. It wouldn’t surprise me that all the different builds play quite different from each other.

Now there is a whole multiplayer section to this game. Personally, I don’t play a lot of multiplayers. So, I’m not going to talk about it in this article. But, it sounds interesting. I wonder how they balanced this game, since overall this game feels a bit easy to me. Maybe I got quite used to keep moving and prioritizing enemies after playing games like Metal: HellSigner and Doom Eternal. But, if you balance your weapons and equipment to your playstyle, this game isn’t too much of a problem on normal difficulty.

On the fly polish

Visually, this game goes for the Borderlands style. This game uses a lot of shell shading and comic book style to present their world. It has quite realistic environments, but I do have some complaints.

The first complaint is that after fast traveling or traveling between zones, the game took quite some time to load in the high resolution textures. If I compare my computer specs to the recommended specs for this game, I shouldn’t have any problem. Thankfully, this is something that quickly fixes itself. After max 5 seconds in an area, the whole area loads.

The second complaint I have about the visuals is that in some houses, their front door is open. Yet, it’s a complete black hole with an invisible wall. You can’t even enter the houses. I can totally understand that modeling a lot of houses and balancing the loot and such inside of them is a lot of work, but this is just bad. It feels unfinished. You would think that there is only one of these houses like this, but oh no. There are several. Even some side quests have an NPC exit a house and, behind the front door, it goes completely black. Why?

But my biggest complaint is how quest markers aren’t visible enough on the mini map. In the screenshot I placed a bit higher, you can see that small blue marker above my ammo count in the right corner. Guess what, that’s a main quest marker. Now, you also notice that same marker on the mini map on the top right. But, if the area isn’t on your mini map, you don’t see it. You don’t get a hint in which direction you should go. So, we start playing a game where we have to open the pause menu to look at the map.

Overall, this game looks and runs amazingly fine. Just like the options to create your character, there are a lot of options you can tweak to your liking. There is even in a built-in benchmarking feature. I raised every setting to the highest it can go, and let me tell you, the game looks amazing. The vibrant colors and the smooth animations of this game are really great. Apart from the complaints I talked about above this paragraph, I don’t have anything really that I didn’t like about the visual presentation.

Now, let’s talk about the gameplay. In this game, you go from area to arena to finish battle arena’s. Honestly, I call it Doom in a Medieval fantasy setting. That’s one of the core gameplay loops in this game. Now, this loop has one negative, the risk of the game becoming repetitive. Let me tell you, this game can be quite repetitive. Outside the battles, there isn’t a lot to do in this game, and the fact that the enemies respawn in certain area’s for you to grind isn’t doing the game any favors.

Now, you also have the overworld sections of this game. This is nothing more than a fancy level select. Now, you do have these wild Pokémon encounters… Well, I call them Pokémon encounters because they spawn randomly, and you go into a small arena to battle for weapons amongst other things. The biggest difference is that you can’t really run from these battles and don’t really have a clear indication on how many enemies are left in the encounter. Apart from that, you have some minor environment puzzles where you have to go through a dungeon to get a key to open a gate, or a cheese chip. Yeah, a cheese chip.

Overwhelming

Now, there is a lot that this game does right. The amusing story, the amount of depth are just two examples. Visually, this game is also quite good.

Now, something I don’t really like is how many stats there are in this game. It didn’t take very long before my inventory was filled with various items like weapons and armor that I didn’t know what to do with. Also, the amount of ammo creates in the area is just too much. I rarely ran out of ammo. To a point that I that the ammo that the enemies dropped fill the floor.

You also have a helpful dragon that attacks enemies for you on the battlefield and saved my skin several times. You have a whole tree to upgrade your companion. And on top of that, you also have a melee attack you can preform. But, that melee attack is quite risky, since the animation takes quite some time… more than enough time for the enemies to gang up on you and do some serious damage.

The game feels a bit overwhelming sometimes. Especially for loot goblins like myself, who don’t throw any loot away and think that we can use them to craft or upgrade them for stronger ones. And this game is also hell for somebody who wants to open all chests in this game, since your inventory is anything but big enough to hold all that loot.

You’ll need to make decisions and adapt to the environment. Thankfully, we can run around the environment with responsive and easy to learn controls. I only have two complaints about the controls. The first one is that in certain menu’s like the blacksmith menu, the way to move left/right/up and down isn’t changed with the controls in the options’ menu. That menu uses WSAD to move, and I use an AZERTY keyboard here in Belgium… So, I have to set my fingers quite unnatural to move in that menu.

The other complaint I have about the controls is that you need to hold some keys to preform an action. In general, this isn’t a bad thing, since now we don’t have to deal with silly “are you sure” boxes. But, if your inventory is full, and you are fighting, and you are standing on top of some junk… the pickup key turns into an equip key. Sadly, the communication to the player that your inventory is full isn’t strong enough and I equipped weaker weapons and armor so many times. Just pay attention to that.

This brings me to the music and sound effects for this game. The sound effects in this game are overall very impactful. You really feel the impact of the guns you shoot and projectiles hitting you. I don’t have any complaints about that part, apart from sometimes not having a clear enough sound effect when you pick up health or when your inventory is full. I mostly had this problem in hectic battle situations. Thankfully, the visual effects sometimes helped to solve this.

The music in this game is amazing. I didn’t hesitate to buy the soundtrack of this game to add to my playlist. It’s very bombastic and orchestral. It’s loud and proud. Furthermore, it fits the game writing like a glove. I tried to play this game without music and the impact of some scenes really was lost. The battles also became a bit boring.

While, I’m currently midway into the main campaign and I haven’t touched any of the DLC’s yet… I’m quite enjoying myself with this game. This game isn’t perfect, it has some flaws. But, the positives far outweigh the negatives in my opinion. I actually had a hard time finishing this article because I kept playing this game while taking notes to finish this article. While I said that the gameplay loop might be somewhat repetitive earlier in this article, I still enjoy it. I also enjoy that you can get a second chance in a battle and revive yourself. The frequent saving in this game and the fact you can have multiple characters in this game is another cherry on this cake.

Personally, I recommend this game to everybody who enjoys playing shooter games and don’t mind having a bit of fantasy in their shooters. It’s an unique RPG where your main weapon isn’t a sword but it’s a gun. It’s a great game and if this is what the Borderlands series is about, I’m quite interested to give the whole series a chance. If I would give this game a score, I would give it a 70/100 for now. But, I haven’t finished the game, so I’ll leave my final score up for when I write a review of this game or fully finished it.

And with that said, I have said everything I wanted to say about this game for now. I want to thank you for reading this article. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to welcome you in another one, but until then have a great rest of your day and take care.

Speedrunning Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine GBC – Level 5 – Shambala Sanctuary

Level 3+4 speedrun article

While my focus has shifted away a bit from speedrunning, I still sometimes try to beat the records for the Game Boy Color version of Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine. Now, since we got a new game announced, called Indiana Jones and the Great Circle… I honestly think it’s a great moment to continue that series on my blog, where I explain the starts and fastest ways according to me to beat the game. I want to say as a disclaimer that I’m talking about the current level speedrun records. The_Kovic made an awesome TAS of this game, I mainly want to talk about the current human speedrun. So, let’s dive right into it. Feel free to leave your questions, comments and/or thoughts on this article in the comment section down below.

Current records

One term I’ll explain is something I talked about in the introduction, I talked about “TAS of this game”. TAS stands for Tool Assisted Speedrun. This means that it’s created using tools like save states, slowdown amongst various others. Also, in these runs we can control the input to the frame. Basically, this means that we get a look if the run is perfected.

Now, comparing the route of the TAS through the game and the route of the current record, we basically don’t see a lot of differences. The biggest difference is that the movement is a lot cleaner and a lot of extremely risky jumps and tricks are preformed. From watching the video, the current TAS is, give or take 7 minutes 5 seconds.

Currently, the record for Shambala is 7 minutes 51 seconds, set by myself on December 10th 2023. I know it can go lower since I have already done it. But, due to me messing up my OBS settings, the video is anything but watchable. I decided to not upload the video, but I know it’s possible. Currently, my personal best is 7 minutes 40 seconds. I’ll explain how to save time in this article, since I even think it’s humanly possible to go even below that by a tiny bit.

On January 22nd, 2022 I also set the current record for all treasures in this level. The current record is 8 minutes and 57 seconds. Now, this run doesn’t use all the most optimal jumps and tricks. This is something that can go lower. In the guide, everything that’s in cursive is additional information for the all treasures route.

The route

The level starts with a little dialogue box that Indy needs to hurry up because the Soviets aren’t too far behind. In the PC version, the Soviets only turn up after you pick up a certain key. In the Game Boy Color version, they are already there. If you want to run this level, I highly advise you to learn where the 5 guards are in this level.

I had several runs where I lost time due to bad guard movement RNG. The first guard is when you move up. Just run past this guard to go to the next screen. Yet, if you are doing all treasures, the first treasure is to the left here. So, pick that up first. Usually, I pick up that red gem while at the right most edge of the texture and already turned to the right to run back to run up.

Keep running up towards the building, which is actually Shambala. It doesn’t really matter where Indy stands to open the door, since the game forces you in the middle of the entrance when you enter it. When you enter, you’ll notice a block to the left. Don’t make the same mistake I quite often make. It’s faster to go to the right block and move that one to the side first. So, move the block to the side and press the button that gets revealed. Do it for the right and left side, in that order.

After that, move upwards on the left side of this room towards two doors. Something I do that’s different to the TAS is I press the third button before I enter the next room. The TAS presses the button when we exit from the other room. Personally, I think it doesn’t make a lot of difference timewise, maybe 2-3 seconds. The reason I directly go for the switch is that I don’t want to forget to press it. The guard is usually now facing away from Indy and walking towards the other door. The TAS route is riskier, since there is a high chance that the guard is facing towards you when exiting the other room and can get a few shots off. And those can be quite dangerous, since the TAS even finishes this level with one health point left. Anyway, for the next room, you need to take the left door.

Now, the next room has three parts to it. It also has three bricks to move, well, depending on the route you are taking. But be careful here. There are two guards roaming around in this room. RNG can really screw you over here depending on how these guards move. Now, if you take the all treasures route, you have three bricks to move. The one for the treasure is at the far left in this room. If you are confident in your jumping, it’s possible to stand on the left most edge of this block and jump up towards the green gem. If you aren’t, move it once right and then jump up towards the green gem.

Now, we take the middle section. This is a little bit to the right when you enter from the left door. You’ll see two gears moving on the wall. Move the block over once to the left. If you stand on the right most edge and face right, you’ll be able to land on the higher platform with the gear. Feel free to move it closer if you don’t feel comfortable with those edge jumps.

After you picked up the gear, move towards the right most section. Now, we do the same block pulling thing here as well. If you can, try to jump up towards the ladder. The less climbing you do, the more time you save. Climbing is really slow in this game. When you reach the top of the ladder, we see the first Ice Monster of this level. Usually, moving to the top row of tiles and jumping over it towards the door avoids damage.

Now, in the following room, we have a hallway and two higher sections. Go towards the section on the right and move the block on the top left of the platform once down and once to the left. Here I lost 4 seconds in my record because of some horrible movement. The following trick might be in my head since the TAS doesn’t do it, but I usually do it. The reason why is that it’s the most consistent way I have to make 100% the cutscene of opening the room on the left triggers without you having to move another block. And that’s not pulling the top block towards the other square but pushing it. Don’t forget that on the top right of this section there is a gold bar treasure, after pushing the block is the perfect moment to go grab it. After you push over that block, go to the bottom right of this section and pull the block towards the bottom square. The reason you need to pull is that it saves time to not have to go around the block after the cutscene. Also, practice the jump of landing in the middle of the hallway or beyond that. You’ll need that later. Now, move to the newly opened section and move towards the other top corner. There you’ll need to pick up a rod. And, if you jump a bit higher, on the next tile a set of coins. After that, leave the building. Be careful to dodge the guards and the ice enemy on your way back. If you feel extremely risky, you can save time by jumping towards the ladder in the ice enemy room to save time, but if you don’t grab the bottom pixels of the ladder it’s game over.

Now outside… we move to the right of the building. Now, the fastest way to arrange the boxes is moving the two stack once to the right and the one stack once towards the left. Doing this jump without loosing time is extremely tricky but would save a lot of time over pulling the blocks into the easiest configuration. It’s a lot of edge jumps here, but I have done it and it’s possible. So, jump up and towards the platform to pick up the blue gem. After that…

… we go left of the building. Here I lose 2-3 seconds of time in my record because of some bad movement and not grabbing the two stack box right away. The easiest and fastest way to progress is pulling the two stack box one towards the top of the screen. After that, jump on the one stack and diagonal to the right to enter the next room. After entering the room, pick up the treasure at the left. Do it now, otherwise the guard RNG will be hell. Now, we need to go in the door next to the climbable wall.

From now on, the easy part of the run is over. Now come a bunch of sections that can potentially make you lose a lot of time or just end your run outright. There is a treasure at the bottom right of this room. Pick it up first. Now, jump over the gap and move towards the broken tile at the top right of the room at the gears. While facing the gears, open your inventory and pick the ratchet. You’ll need to move to the left 4 times in your inventory and press A. This is meant to block the bell from falling back down.

Now comes one of the first sections that can cost you a lot of time. I highly advise you to practice this next section. Just take a look at the stream Klamath and I did. The idea is that you jump back and forth between the two broken tiles. The timing is extremely strict. You’ll hear a sound effect when you hit the tile in time. When you hit the tile and don’t hear the sound effect, the bell is going to fall down and you have to start over. So, try and try this bit until you are good at it. After 7, yes 7, jumps back and forth, the bell reached the correct point. Now, the camera will pull up to show the location of the bell. Whilst it’s moving down, move towards the door at the bottom left of the room. It’s possible to exit the room before the camera reaching the bottom. Since I missed this once during my record, I lost 12 seconds.

After exiting the room, a guard suddenly shows up. The fewer hits this guard does on you, the better. Yet, the space is quite tight and it’s difficult to avoid him. Now, we need to climb up the wall. Jump towards the climbable wall that’s closest towards the door we just entered the room from and climb up. Now, we do something that’s unique to the Game Boy Color. Whilst climbing up, you will have to drop towards another ladder. For the first drop, it’s fine if you move over to the left. For the second drop, climb towards the top and let yourself drop towards the right and hold up. It’s scary to do, but hold up during the fall. Otherwise it’s game over for sure. After you climbed up, go to the left and exit this room at the top left door.

Now comes to the next trick, depending on how well you execute it, you’ll save more time. The idea is that, when you enter the room… you move towards the right edge of the room. Run down and jump down give or take a tile before the edge. Let yourself fall but hold up at the right time. The idea is that we grab the long ladder a bit down there. Failing this trick is a run ender. It’s no short ladder so be careful of dropping off this ladder. Now, after you are off the ladder, move to the bottom left of this room and climb down. Or be even more risky after this ladder snipe and snipe the ladder at the bottom left like the TAS.

Now, in the next room, don’t climb the ladder down. Midway the ladder, drop down towards the gears. You’ll notice that there is a peg sticking out of the wall. Stand in front of that one and open your inventory to go trice to the right to select the gear. Now, stay on the raised platform and move towards the other side of the room. Drop down to take the silver bar and jump up towards the raised platform. Those ice guardians are quite painful and hurt a lot. The more damage you take, the higher the risk you’ll loose your run. Now, jump towards the ladder from a little bit before the last tile to save the most climbing time.

Now, the clock starts moving. Move as quick as you can towards the button and here comes something I’m still unsure about the fastest way to go forward is. I know you can totally skip the cutscene of the camera moving up to show the statue turning like the_Kovic does in the TAS. Yet, in order to do this, you’ll need to preform some tricky jumps perfectly. It does save a lot of time, yet almost five minutes into an any % run and after preforming various edge corner jumps, that annoying bell part… I find the TAS strategy at the moment of writing too risky. I linked to the TAS a bit higher if you want to see how the TAS does it, but I’ll explain how I do it. It costs 10-15 seconds, but it’s a way safer strategy in my honest opinion. Sadly, using the glitch that Indy can move after the button press for a little while isn’t possible, so that costs us an additional second.

So, press the button twice and watch the cutscene of the camera moving up to show the statue moving. While the camera is moving down, we regain control of Indy. Depending on how confident you are with your jumps and your nerves at this point… Press the button between 7 to 9 times. I personally prefer 9 times. It gives you some room for error. The red brick-thing will be either at 9, 10 or 11.

Now, comes the annoying part. We need to go back up. Go towards the raised platform you notice at the middle top of your screen and jump up and enter the door. You’ll notice we exit at the platform at the bottom of the ladder we sniped earlier. Climb up to the top of it. Now, if you want to be extremely risky, you can do what’s known as a corner jump.

It’s an extremely risky jump that can save you a lot of time and is essential when you pressed the button at the bottom 6 or 7 times. The idea is that you jump from where the X is after you climbed up the ladder and hold left up in the air to land where the other x is. Now, missing this jump means a game over. So, you risk it all here. I was around 5 minutes 18 seconds in my record run and as you can see from the screenshot, I walked into the door after the ladder. Now, we need to do a corner jump to the raised platform at the left here. It’s quite the precise jump so that’s why I was only able to do it after my third attempt in my run. Enter the door and jump towards the ladder after exiting the door. Be careful to not miss that ladder, since if you don’t land on that raised platform, it’s an instant game over.

Now, after climbing up that ladder, go towards the button at the top right of this room. As soon as the statue starts spinning, press it. You’ll watch a lengthy cutscene of the statue going on the rails towards the bell. You will see something drop down from the bell and see the door you entered this room from close. This will take +/- 30 seconds.

Let me also tell you, if you don’t have a spinning statue in a few seconds, you best reset your run. Since now the clock needs to reach the red peg and that’s too big of a time waste.

But we are in the final strech of the level. Now, don’t loose focus in these 30 seconds since we are not done quite yet. Run towards the left and jump towards the ladder to save up on some climbing time.

When you reach the top of the ladder, and grab the 9th treasure at the top left of this room, we need to dance around the ice guardian to reach the climbable wall that’s just outside of the shadow part of this section. Now, when you enter the next screen, drop down at the right from the climbable wall.

Now comes the final life or die trick of this run. We need to drop down somewhere along the purple titles. The best way is where I have drawn a red line. Hold up to grab the climbable wall, but not too soon to not grab it at the top. Since climbing is slow in this game and there is still that pesky guard at the bottom. The idea is to grab the climbable wall as low as possible so you can drop down without loosing too much health and not loose too much health to the guard having some free shots at you. You’ll need to face that guard twice, since you need to enter that annoying jumping room to pick up the seed that dropped down. Now, you can save a little bit of time since the hitbox of the seed is bigger then you think. If you stand on the edge of the tile, you can pick it up.

Exit the room and make your way to the building. If you have health enough, drop down from the ledge outside. Once inside the building, move towards the blue flower tile and standing in front of the water… open your inventory and move three times to the right to pick the seed. Now, it’ll turn into a flower. Now, go up towards the right side of the room to enter the right door. After that, go to the right section and climb up the ladder. Here some luck will be involved to avoid the guard. When you climbed up the ladder, dodge the ice guardian again and now you have the run in the bag. If you don’t make stupid movement mistakes… you’ll be able to finish the run in just a few seconds.

Now, move down the hallway we all know to well into the final room. Pick up the final treasure at the bottom right of this room before you do the final “puzzle”. Now, when you stand in front of the fire… stand as close to the middle as possible. I have lost so much time when standing on the edges, it’s insane. In my record run, I lost close to 10 seconds because of this. Now, while facing the fire, open your inventory and move 3x to the right to select the flower. This will open the chest. Move towards the chest and face up and open it. After that, Indy will say that he found Urgon’s Part and the level ends.

Conclusion

Shambala is quite the insane run and after the first four shorter levels, this level is the first of a set of three quite lengthy levels with a lot of tricky jumps and avoiding enemies. Now, currently the world record is 7 minutes and 51 seconds. I have pointed out where I lost time in this article and if you count that all together, you have roughly 30 seconds.

I honestly think that 7 minutes 30 seconds is humanly possible for this level. Maybe even 7 minutes 20. But, that means there is barely any room for error and you need to take a lot of risks and be very lucky with the guards movements.

Usually, when I’m doing attempts for a new full game any % run, I usually know after Shambala if this is going to be a good or bad attempt. Another level is the Volcano, but the reason why I call it my run killer will be explained when I talk about that level.

Currently, when I’m doing speedrun pratice, I’m trying to perfect Shambala. I want a clean recording of my personal best and I want to see how much lower I can take that all treasures record. Now, my first record for the any % of this level was 8 minutes 55 seconds and for all treasures it was 9 minutes 46 seconds. I have saved a minute for each category for this level, and I can go lower. So, keep your eye out on the leaderboards, since as soon as I preform a run that beats my current record run, I’ll post it.

And with that said, I have said everything about this level for now. If you have any questions about this guide, feel free to ask them in the comments. Also, I wish everybody a happy new year, since this is the first article I’m going to publish in 2024. I also want to thank you for reading this article and I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to weclome you in the next article and until then have a great rest of your day and take care.

It’s time for the upcoming 10 of 2024

Only a few days left before we enter the new year. I already talked about my 10 favorite games of the past year, but what am I looking forward too in the upcoming year? This list is quite tricky to put together for me. Especially since I don’t always play the latest modern hyped title and to be quite honest, the pool of upcoming titles of 2024 didn’t have a lot of games that interested me. Yet, here are ten games I’m looking forward to play and/or will keep an eye on to add to my collection. Tell me, which games are you looking forward too in the new year? Feel free to leave a comment down below about that, or one if you just want to talk about my choices, that’s a fine comment too.

Editorial note: the release dates are the ones that were known at the time of writing.

#10 – ServiceIT: You can do IT (Q1 – PC)

When I was looking at the upcoming games lists at various websites and saw this one, I raised an eyebrow. As somebody who works in tech, I was interested to see how a tycoon/simulation game about my job is going to work.

While this game isn’t exactly a simulation about my job, since it more than maintaining a school infrastructure… It gets quite close. I’m mostly interested in this game to see how well they simulate my work life and how you are going to make an enjoyable game out of it.

I just hope that they stick to the reality of IT and not go overboard and with fake IP-addresses, silly terminal commands like “repair” or “fix” and sometimes really throw you for a loop. Furthermore, I’m also crossing my fingers that this game isn’t going to be a sort of PC Builder Simulator clone or that it focuses too much on hardware. Since, IT is so much more than building/repairing computers. It’s also about maintaining infrastructure, finding the right documentation, following the latest trends, developing software/websites/tools… I can go on for hours. But, when I read what I just wrote here, I think I’m going to set my bar so unrealistically high… But we shall see. I’ll have to play the game to find out how good it actually is.

#9 – Death Trick: Double Blind (Q1 – PC, Switch)

If there is one way to get me interested in your game, you make a mystery game with some unique mechanics or a unique way to play it.

Usually in detective games like Ghost Trick or Ace Attorney, you follow every lead until its end. No stone is going to be left unturned. Yet, in this game that is thrown out of the window, and you only have a limited amount of time to investigate and follow up on your clues. But, wait! There is more, since you play as two characters with their own stakes in the mystery.

Couple that with a gorgeous art style and make it non-linear, and you have something that gets me quite excited, even with the limited things shown in the Nintendo Switch announcement trailer. Not only that, this game is being developed by a very small team that are giving it their all for this game. I looked at the press materials and I think this is going to be a great game. Hopefully, it doesn’t fly under the radar and gets the attention it deserves.

#8 – Ubel (Q1 – PC, Nintendo Switch)

When the demo of Ubel released, the developers contacted me. They asked if I would be interested in writing a review about this game.

This game is extremely similar in terms of setup to the Nonary games. I always wanted to play another mystery game with that setup.

Now, the reason I haven’t written about the game is because the demo was a bit too short for to me to write about. I gave some general feedback to the developers, and I have been lurking on their Discord and following their social media channels quite close. I was praying that this game wasn’t going to be one of those games where I take a look at the demo and then just disappears into development hell or just never gets finished.

Thankfully, we got regular updates and even an alpha version was released to testers. This game is a passion project and I can’t wait to get my hands on it. It’ll also release on the Nintendo Switch and I can’t even decide on which platform I’ll play it.

So, if you are a big fan of the Danganronpa, Zero Escape, World’s End Club, Death Come True amongst other death game mystery games… This is going to be one you will have to keep your eyes peeled on.

#7 – Princess Peach: Showtime (March 22nd – Switch)

Like I said in the introduction of this article, I had a very hard time putting this list together. While I could easily fill this list with a lot of remakes of games that I want to finish and be done with it, I felt that wouldn’t be a quality article.

With that said, there are a few games that are going to release in 2024 that are really getting me excited. One of them is the new Princess Peach game. For those who don’t know, I’m also a hobbyist actor in a folk theater group in my hometown. I also love to go to theater to see plays and comedians preform.

Now, give it to Nintendo to develop a whole game around stage plays (again). The unique charm that this game gives off through the trailers and the promotion material makes me quite excited to dive into the world of theater again in a whole different way. I just hope we don’t get a game with a lot of gimmicks, but we get a game that’s fun to play and gives the player the feeling that they are an actor on stage, entertaining the crowd. It’s not too long now before we can take center stage with Princess Peach and how a big showtime!

#6 – Decapolice (TBD – PlayStation, Switch)

Almost each year, there is a game like this. A noir styled detective game that’s building up a huge mystery. This year, it was Master Detective Archives: Rain Code. Next year, that will be Decapolice.

This time, it’s “breaking from the mold of the Professor Layton series”. And when you hear that, you know right away that this game is going to be from Level5.

While we have to wait for the new Professor Layton game until 2025, we are going to get another mystery game from Level5 in 2024. And that has the possibilities of it being one of my favorite games of the year. Since, as I told earlier in this article, I adore games with unique spins. And this one has a battle system. Is it taking cues of Danganronpa? Looking at the battle system, it reminds me a bit of Master Detective Archives in a way. I just looked at parts of the trailer and skimmed through the teaser website, and I’m sold. To avoid any more spoilers, I’m going to avoid looking through all the materials, since I love when I can go in these games as blind as possible.

#5 – Another Code: Recollection (January 19th, Switch)

Another Code or Trace Memory was one of those series on the Nintendo DS / Wii that I truly loved. It was such a shame when Cing, the developers, went bankrupt back in 2010.

They made some amazing titles outside of them, like Hotel Dusk: Room 215. Seeing that their games aren’t forgotten and remade for the Nintendo Switch brings me a lot of hope.

These stories deserve to be told and experienced. Especially since the sequel on the Nintendo Wii will be released for the first time in America. Now, I won’t have any excuse to replay the Wii game to finally finish it after all those years. I’m ready!

#4 – Spirit Hunter – Death Mark II (February 15th – Switch/PlayStation/PC)

Since its reveal, this game has been on my list of games I want to play. I have even placed it on my list for this year.

Sadly, we got a delay this year. But, I’m not too sad about that one. This means we might get an even better game.

I’m beyond hyped for this game. Even more after Klamath and I streamed this game. They were such fun streams. I can’t wait to play this game, especially since it throws the whole gameplay loop of this game on its head. And because the successful crowdfunding campaign, we are going to get more than we are used too from the developers. So, February is going to be quite packed for me. But I’m ready to hunt those ghosts.

#3 – Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution (Q1-2 2024 – Gameboy Advance/PlayStation/PC/Switch)

No, that’s no typo in the title for this game. This game is really going to come out as well on the Gameboy Advance. Now, let me tell you the story of this game.

Back in 2002, this game started development but after two years of development, WayForward cancelled the game because they couldn’t find a publisher. Now, surprisingly and out of nowhere… In November 2023, Limited Games and WayForward showed in the Nintendo Indies Showcase that the game has been finished.

That’s the story of this game in short. I’ll link to the fandom page here if you want more information how this came to be. I’m so happy to see developers take on lost media like this. On top of that, I’m quite happy to see it also coming to the original platform. Shantae is such a fun platformer game that deserves more recognition. There is so much charm in this game. The world WayForward created with this game is just beyond amazing and as somebody who grew up with the Gameboy Color, I’m so proud to see this cult classic grow into the amazing series it deserves.

#2 – Broken Sword – Parzival’s Stone (TBA – PC/PlayStation/XBOX)

Ever since I played the directors cut of the first Broken Sword on my DS, I fell in love with the series. While the last Broken Sword game is currently 10 years old, I always knew we were going to get a 6th entry in the series.

And not only that, we are going to get a total remake of the first Broken Sword game as well. So, we are going to get spoiled as Broken Sword fans in 2024.

The new adventure is going to take place in Germany and France. I’m so crossing my fingers that one of these games we are finally visiting Belgium as well. Since, there are so many historical towns like Antwerp, Brussels and Bruges here were stories like those in Broken Sword can be told. But, besides that… I’m just hyped to finally see where George and Nico go next on their adventures.

#1 – Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time (Summer – Switch)

While we were promised this game in 2023, it got delayed until the summer of 2024. The exact release date is a secret for “strategic reasons”.

Now, why do I place this game at my number 1 spot? Well, because Fantasy Life was a game on the 3DS that took me by surprise, it became one of my favorite 3DS games.

The open freedom you get with this game is just insane. While parts of the game are quite repetitive, the gameplay loop is still extremely enjoyable. I expect a lot of things from this sequel. My biggest wish is that there is a bit more diversity between the paths you can take. On top of that, I want a more in depth story. They proved they can do it by the amazingly well written DLC story.

They just need to build upon the basis of the amazing core they had in Fantasy Life on the 3DS and we will get an amazing title that is for sure going to be the game I’m going to play during my whole summer. And it’s going to be the perfect game to relax and enjoy Fantasy Life all over again with a new story and new mechanics. Summer 2024, here I come!

Closing thoughts

When I look at my list this year, I’m quite afraid for my wallet at the start of the year. I think this is going to be a trend in the future. Where we only know about the new games being released in the first part of the year and during April-May, we get a list of games for the end of the year.

There are a lot of games without a real release date like Control 2, the new Indiana Jones game, Persona 6, the next mainline (non remake) Tomb Raider game and the new Bioshock game that’s in development are some examples. Now, truth to be told is that about some of these games we barely know anything. We don’t even know if they are still in development or not.

In any case, I’m just glad that this hobby of mine is still strong and not going anywhere. The upcoming year will bring some amazing titles and experiences that we can’t predict. I could write a generic message here about what my plans are for 2024, but I don’t want to do that.

I just want to enjoy life and how it comes. I know that I’m going to work on my blog and improve it and write more articles about the games I have played. I can also reveal that there are a lot of interesting streams planned with my friend Klamath. Outside of writing and streaming, there are a lot of things in my personal life I’m looking forward too as well.

Next year will be the 14th year I have been writing. Now, truth to be told… I have totally forgotten that this year was my 10th year writing on this blog. I mean, 10 years is quite a lot of time. I have talked about so many games and enjoyed it so much that I didn’t even notice it go by. I only just realized while writing this ending section. So, I have a few things in mind for 2024 and 2025. But, I’ll keep them a secret. Especially for 2025, since then I can celebrate my 15 years of blogging.

So, thank you everybody for the support and enjoyment that 2023 brought. I hope I was able to entertain, inform you, or maybe both. I’m looking forward to 2024, and I hope we can do it together. Have an amazing end of the year celebration and I hope to welcome you in another article and until then, have a great rest of your day and take care.