Tag: report

First Impression: Cave Digger 2 (PC – Steam) ~ No Feedback

Steam store page

One of my favorite activities in Minecraft is going deep inside the caves and just exploring them. A few years ago, the developers behind Cave Digger reached out to me and asked me to review their game. Not too long after, the sequel got released and looked like it would be a VR exclusive. Until I noticed that it appeared on the Nintendo Switch eShop. So, I thought, maybe it also released on Steam, since after playing the Switch version, I felt like this game was better played with keyboard and mouse. Now, a non VR version is on Steam now… But is it worth it? Well, after playing the first sections of this game, I want to talk about it. The latest update was on May 28th, 2024 when writing this article. Now, before we dive right into it, I want to invite to you leave a comment in the comment section with your thoughts and/or opinions on this game and/or the content of this article.

Risk of Staleness

In this game, we play as an unnamed miner who is throwing into the deep end, when his digger broke. You arrive at a mysterious valley. In this valley, a hardy explorer once did his research. But why? Which secrets are in these valleys and the accompanying mines? That’s for our miner to figure out. Now, the story is being told by various comic book pages you can uncover and, according to the Steam store page, has multiple endings. I’m quite curious where it’s going to go.

So far, I haven’t gotten too deep into the story. But, from what I can read on the Steam store page, I think it has potential. I have my doubts on how the multiple endings will work. Since comic books mostly have one ending, right? Unless, it all depends on which page(s) you find or in which order or where. That’s something I’ll discover when I’m deeper into the game.

If this game is like the original game, the story overall will take a backseat for the gameplay. And after 5 hours in, that’s the case. The original game didn’t have a lot of story to begin with, but more story in a game like this can be interesting.

There is one voice actor in this game. He does a pretty fine job and brings some life to the atmosphere. I replayed a bit of the first game and I have to be honest, I appreciate the small voice lines during the exploration. Even when you quickly hear every different line, it’s a nice break since they aren’t spammed and don’t appear that often.

One of the biggest changes in this game is that the cave this time around is randomly generated each time you enter. So, this game becomes a rouge like to a degree. But, you can always exit via the lifts to safety. Since, dying in the caves means that at least half of your obtained loot is dropped. The atmosphere this time around is very cohesive. This game presents itself as a sci-fi western game, and it really feels like that. Something I really like in this game is that it doesn’t go overboard in the sci-fi genre and stays grounded. The technology could realistically exist today, apart from the unique enemies in the cave, that is.

With the story taking more of a backseat, it’s quite important that the gameplay loop is enjoyable. The gameplay loop is simple, you have to explore the caves with 4 chosen tools. The three slots above the entrance give you a hint on which tools you will need to bring to gather the most loot. You take the lift down and gather loot, while fighting enemies and avoiding pitfalls to survive. The goal is also to find the other elevator that takes you down to the next level to gather even more valuable ores to bring to the top. You have to fill in the ores you gathered into the grinder to buy upgrades to your tools and environment to progress.

The big risk with this kind of gameplay loop is that this is just a different numbers game. What I mean by that is that, apart from maybe the visuals changing, the core concept is always the same. This risks that the game becomes stale and repetitive. It’s possible that it is just a “me thing”, but I enjoy games like this more when there are some variations on the gameplay or some different puzzles. Thankfully, this game has that. There are a lot of things you can upgrade and improve to make each run feel rewarding, and each type of cave you can visit has different enemies types and unique lay-outs to keep you on your toes. In a way, I dare to compare the idea a bit to Cult of the Lamb in a degree.

The music in this game is also a blast. It fits the atmosphere of each area like a glove. My favorite track is the track that plays in the lake caves. It sounds like you image a typical track like that to sound. And it gets more intense while you are fighting enemies down there. Now, the silent moments when the music doesn’t play feel a bit long, but I always know that there is more music coming and that it fits the atmosphere perfectly and draws me more into the game. Sadly enough, this isn’t the only problem with this game, and I’d like to talk about them.

No feedback

This game has an addictive gameplay loop, and I’m really curious how the multiplayer works. I haven’t tested the multiplayer in this game, but it looks like fun. Now, this game can be played solo perfectly fine.

Now, I don’t know if VRKiwi took the VR version as a base for the non VR version, since I have the impression, that is the case. I especially notice that with the controls in this game. It feels a bit floaty, like you aren’t really connected to the ground. It also feels a bit stiff, like you have to move your mouse like you would a VR headset. You really have to play with the settings until you hit that sweetspot that feels right for you. For me, I had to lower the sensitivity to 80, amongst other things. I highly recommend that you tweak the settings to your liking, since on the Nintendo Switch version, I had to lower the sensitivity to 40 before it felt right.

Still, the character control doesn’t feel right. At first, I thought it was because the controls felt floaty… But, after some testing, I think I found a few other problems with the character control that might cause it to not feel quite right. First, the jump in this game is just silly. You can’t really rely on it, since it doesn’t always trigger when you hit the spacebar, and it’s just a pathetic jump. You can’t even jump out of ankle high water sometimes.

Secondly, there are no sound effects for walking on most floors. You feel like you are floating, and it’s jarring when you suddenly hear a sound effect when you walk over a table or a railway. Thirdly, climbing on ropes amongst other things is just insanely picky. There is also no real feedback or sound to show you grabbed the rope. Fourthly, the scroll order between tools is extremely weird. You get numbers on the wheel counter clock wise. But you go down, right, left, up. Which still confuses me after 6 hours of playing this game.

And finally, some things are extremely picky. For example, there are safe riddles you can solve down in the caves. But to rotate the letter wheels to make pick the right letter is more difficult to do. All of these things give you a feeling that you aren’t always in control of your character and that you don’t get the feedback as a player on what’s happening. Making you unsure what’s happening and doubt if you are doing the right thing.

Prompts like “Use W/S to use the crank” should be “Hold W/S to use the crank”. Since, you need to hold the key instead of pressing it. Small things like that could also improve this game and it’s controls quite a lot. Overall, the controls are good, but they lack feedback to the player sometimes. Either with sound effects or with some visual effects. Like with the hammer, you barely have any sound effects when you use it, and it has some wind up animation, making you unsure if you are using it or not.

That is one of the biggest flaws in this game. The lack of feedback on your actions. Things like not knowing how many bullets are still left in your revolver or a sound effect when you hit an actual enemy. I think if there is one thing I’d use the built-in feedback tool is to report various cases/moments when I expect feedback from the game, like a sound effect or visual effect. Maybe they appear in the form of rumble effects… But, I’m not playing this game with a controller.

When you read this section of the article, I wouldn’t blame you if you think that this game isn’t good. Small bugs like the text of “Press R to reload” when your gun isn’t equipped or the bullets not leaving from the gun but from the player model don’t improve things either. Yet, I find myself looking past these problems since the core gameplay still works. I find myself getting used to the jank in this game and finding a very rough diamond. If the developers keep up with their promise of improving this game, I think that more action feedback will bring a lot to the game and maybe fixing the small bugs like in this paragraph as well.

Things like the animation of the shovel looking weird sometimes. The animation looks like the arms go through each other after a dig. Speaking of the shovel, the last dig is annoying since you have to move a pixel or two for it to count and give you your goodies. But the bug I’d love to see fixed most is the freeze for several seconds when you pick up something new or get a new codec entry. The game locks up like it’s about the crash, but it doesn’t.

What’s next for us?

Usually, I’m not really picky when it comes to the visuals of a game. As long as a game looks consistent, I’m quite happy. It needs to have a certain style so that you can quickly identify what’s what and enjoy the game.

Yet, for this game, I do have some things that I not really like in terms of the visuals. Firstly, the contrast of some ores and the floor isn’t clear enough. Sometimes I was passing up on ores since I wasn’t able to notice them on the ground.

There are also a lot of objects to give more details to the cave, but you can barely interact with them. I’d love to see lilly pads in lakes to move a bit when you walk past them or something more than just being able to clip through them. As well, a sound effect when you hit a wall you can’t mine. You get shouted at when you use the wrong or a too weak tool on something, so when not for the rest?

I think the biggest mistake that the visuals make is that it has an identity crisis. What I mean by that is that it isn’t a cohesive style. There is a lot of shell shading going on, but there is also a lot of details that give off a more realistic vibe. Some textures aren’t detailed enough and strechted too wide giving wrong impression the rest of the visuals that look more modern. The floor textures sometimes suffer most from this issue.

Looking back at this article, I think I’m being very critical for this game. I have played a lot worse and broken games for 15€. But, in this game you even have customisation options for your character and thee developers are extremely open for feedback. This game has a lot going for it. Fun achievements to hunt for, bosses at the end of runs and an amazing auto save system.

Apart from improving the character controls and adding some feedback on actions, I think this game is pretty decent. Yes, there is some polish missing like not having a tooltip with the lever at the cave entrance on what that lever does. I personally feel less conflicted about this game compared to the original. The growth in this title is immense and brings me a lot of hope for either some amazing updates, DLC or a new entry in the series.

The basis of for an amazing title is here and if you look past it’s short comings, this game is a blast to play. Maybe it’s a bit too repetitive for some and can be more fun in short bursts. But, when this game sinks it’s hooks into you, it really clicks. There is some polishing left to do and for a rather new VR focused developer, this is amazing. It’s their second non VR game and it shows a lot of promise.

The game is a perfect relaxing game to wind down, since it isn’t too difficult. The game is rather forgiving. I wouldn’t be surprised that I play this game after work to wind down and try and finish it slowly. Then again, while I’m writing this, I have summer holidays and I wouldn’t be surprised that I finish most of this game during my summer break.

Like I said earlier, I feel less conflicted about this game compared to the previous title. This game has a lot more going for it compared to the original. It’s less repetitive and it has a lot more going for it. It has it’s problems, yes. But, if you enjoy games like Minecraft, Steamworld Dig or Cave Digger, give the demo of this game a chance. The demo gives a very good idea on what you can expect from this game and if you enjoy it, buy the game. I’m enjoying myself quite a lot with this game and I’m happy that I have chosen the PC version over the Switch version since I feel like it just plays better. But maybe, if I get used to the Switch controls, I might enjoy it on Switch as well.

With that said, I have said everything I wanted to say about this game for now. Maybe when I finish this game, I might write a full review with the final thoughts and opinions on this game. But for now, I think the best conclusion for this game is that it’s an amazing step up from the original and besides some unpolished things… It’s a great game and comes recommend from me.

So, it’s time to wrap up this article with my usual outro. 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.

First Impression: Paws Of Coal (PC – Steam) ~ Point-And-Dig

Steam store page

Remember a game I reviewed a while ago, called Speed Limit? Well, the developers behind that action game are back with a new title. It’s a point-and-click adventure called Paws of Coal. And it’s a sort of prequel-ish game to another game. A game I actually published the press kit off, when I still did that. Trip the Ark Fantastic. This game is actually a sort of demo for the gameplay for that bigger game, while it’s also a stand-alone short adventure. Oh, and there is also a demo for Trip the Ark Fantastic out, so if you want to give that a go… You can. Now, let’s get our hands dirty with coal and dive into this adventure. Since, GameChuck gave me a press code to review this game, but they always welcome my 100% honest and unfiltered opinion… So, here we go. It’s something I like as well. If you have any thoughts/opinions to share about this game and/or the content of this article, you are more than welcome to share them in the comment section down below.

Editorial note: this review is written when v1.3 was released. While writing, “Month 1” update got released.

Point-And-Dig

In this game, you play as Charles. A hedgehog helping a good old friend. Your friend is a doctor in a mining town investigating a strange illness that’s making a lot of the mining rabbits quite ill in the town. The rabbits actually went on strike since they think the government isn’t doing enough to help them cure the illness. Since our good friend doctor Hopper isn’t able to leave the clinic to investigate… Since, yeah, somebody has to care for the patients… Charles got tapped.

There is no voice acting in this game, not even a bit of grunting. Yet, the writing isn’t affected by that at all. The writing quality is honestly top-notch. I was honestly afraid that the writing was going to be weak or cheesy because this game is essentially a side project, but I was quite surprised. Quite often, I got quite immersed, and the writing actually made me forget that there weren’t too many animations going on while the story is being told.

At one hand, I could start complaining on how it would be more fun with animations that acted out what was being told… But, that was before I realized the style they are going for. This game almost feels like a (grand)parent telling their (grand)children a bedtime story. One with pictures and text at the side. Yet, the content of the story might not always fit a children’s book… it felt somehow nostalgic while I haven’t heard the story before.

I also loved how realistic they made the writing for the story being in an animal kingdom. In sayings, things like skin is replaced with fur and the actual personality of the animals is worked into the writing as well. The only negative I have is that in some spots, it isn’t consistent on how dialogue is shown. Sometimes the text that’s being spoken is in the same style is the text used for descriptions. Apart from that, I barely found any faults. Here and there, a very minor mistake, but most of them were missing ending ” ” ” at spoken sentences.

This game plays like your typical point-and-click game. Yet, there is no real tutorial that explains to you the movement keys. Thankfully, they are listed in the menu behind a button. But is it a bad thing that this game doesn’t have a tutorial? Nah, I don’t think so. Overall, the game is easy to understand and learn. Especially when you have played other point-and-click games like Broken Sword for example. The big difference in this game is that this game is somewhat open-world. You don’t go from one screen/area to the next, you have the whole world open to you from the start, and it’s up to you to find the answers to its many puzzles.

It’s a side-game?

At various moments, I felt that this project didn’t have the main focus of GameChuck. The following paragraphs might look like I’m going to “destroy” this game, but it’s because this game and concept has a lot of potential… but it has some missing polish that’s making the game look bad and unfinished.

One of the best examples is the saving system. The game saves after each dialogue, automatically. Which is great! You do also have three save slots where you can manually save outside of dialogues, no problems there.

But if the save/load slots don’t give the information IF there is a save file in there and/or WHERE that save is… Then we are having issues. What if you are testing things with the different answers you are giving, and you want to see if the dialogue changes from other characters as well? You almost need to write down which save slot is what. Also, you don’t get a message if you want to save over an existing save slot. The current implementation works technically, but it leaves out a lot of information visually.

Something I feel quite conflicted about is the music and sound effects in this game. While this game has some nice orchestral music, it plays too few. There are too many moments of pure silence, even between the tracks repeating. Also, there aren’t enough tracks to play as background music, which means that you hear the same track over and over again. A bit more music tracks as background music would have been amazing.

All in all, the sound effects are great. But, at certain moments, I feel that there are sound effects missing. Especially when you do an action that doesn’t or won’t work. A perfect example of this is the first time you get the prompt to press the “J” key to open up your journal. When you are in dialogues, you can’t open your journal. I was mashing my “J” key, and I thought I encountered a bug. But no, it’s just that the journal doesn’t open during dialogues. In those cases, I’d either play a sound effect or show a little pop-up that communicates that with the player. That way, things don’t feel rough around the edges.

This is something I felt here and there. That this game has some very rough edges. The controls are another great example of that. Currently, there is support to play this game alone with the mouse. Yet, I don’t recommend you do that in the current version, since going in and out of doors doesn’t work currently. Also, there is a roll feature that lets you quickly roll from one place to another… Yet, good luck trying to do that with the mouse controls! It doesn’t work. I highly recommend that you play this game mostly with the keyboard controls. They work a lot better, are snappy and extremely responsive. Also, the tooltips shown on the screen relate to the keyboard controls anyway.

Going for more

Listen, according to this tweet… This game is the first part of the Ark Fantastic universe. Honestly, this gets me quite excited. Since, if we are going to see more games with this high level of world building, writing and visual presentation, we are going to be in for a treat.

Yes, the visual presentation of this game is amazing. Like I said earlier in this article, this game looks like a children’s book you are reading at night to your children. It’s colorful, well detailed, and the atmosphere makes the art almost come to life.

The game also has a handy “TO DO” list for when you are unsure what to do next. You can also put your current theory in your journal to try and find the actual reason and cure for the illness going around in the Burrows. It’s a great detective/point-and-click game that makes you think about what characters are saying and really take notes. I even had several notes on the mystery sprinkled in between my notes for this article.

You can investigate so much, it’s insane. The comments you get on various things, helps to build the world quite a lot. Like, you can also inspect almost every art work to learn more about the world. There are also sometimes more ways than one to get the information you need. You can either go research it via books, or you can research it by going around and talking to the other characters. I especially love the moments where things click and when I finally have a new lead to hunt down next.

This game might be rather short, but it also manages to have multiple endings, so it also has replay value for a point-and-click game, even. I have to be honest, I have been playing this game for 3 – 4 hours, research it quite extensively, and I haven’t solved the mystery just yet. I feel like I’m close, but I haven’t beaten it yet. That’s why I’m only writing a first impression.

But, this game also gave me an amazing first impression at the future of this game, and its universe. Yes, it has some things to polish and work out, like at one place in the game, you can see the ending of the map. Thankfully, we have a developer that updates this game with various quality of life improvements and since the release on May 2nd, we got 4 small updates to the game. Here is one they can fix in the next update, since the “month 1 update” removes the version number… It might be great to also remove that toggle to show it or not from the option menu, don’t you agree?

Speaking about those toggles, this game has some interesting settings. It also has a setting that gives you somewhat of a behind the scenes look at how the game works and was created behind the scenes. It doesn’t contain too many spoilers, if any, I think. You can also make this game harder on yourself by hiding tooltips, so you have to find out what you can interact with and how. But if you want to play this game, I highly recommend that you enable tooltips to not get lost.

To avoid me rambling too long about this game and maybe going into spoiler town… I’m going to wrap up my article here with the following conclusion. This game might have some rough edges in terms of UI, sound effects and music… But, all in all, this game works and it works good. I think that this game has something for every adventure/point-and-click game lover. Knowing the studio behind this and how they take feedback to heart, I’m quite sure that this game and the next games in this universe will grow and become even better.

Don’t misunderstand me when I say that this game has some rough edges, they are anything but game breaking. I have played this game on and off during this month and I haven’t gotten any crash and a very stable framerate. I was excited to see what this interesting point-and-click game “Trip the Ark Fantastic” was going to be and now that I got my first taste of it, I’m hooked. If the next game also polishes the save/load UI and has more music and uses more sound effects to communicate things with the player… I may be in trouble as a reviewer since I may not have too many things to critique anymore.

Give this game a chance when it sounds at all interesting to you. It’s a great experience and I’m conviced that with our feedback the developers can bring us amazing games in this interesting and rich universe. Now, I have to write my usual ending paragraphs and publish this article so I can go back to solving the mystery of the illness. Maybe we should discuss theories in the comment section? I’ll repeat it for the last time, yes this game has rough edges but the positive outweigh the negative by a lot here. Besides, a lot of the rough edges can and may be patched in the future… So yeah.

With that said, I want to thank you so much 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!

PSA: See stolen content from content creators? Content theft!

Today, I had an unpleasant surprise this morning on the train to work. I found out that two websites actually stole my content! This was such a let down since the amount of content that was stolen from me is more than just one article. It’s almost all my articles from December. While I was working on contacting other sites and blogs that got content stolen, a good blogging friend of mine Drakulus wrote this article. And it’s actually a great lesson to learn. 

What do you if you come across stolen content? Do you ignore it? Or do you do something about it? What if the stolen content you come across is yours? 

WordPress is a great place to publish content of all sorts. Some people like to use it as a diary. While others, like myself, us it to express their love for gaming by reviewing games, writing excellent opinion pieces, and being active within the WordPress community. Some people, however, don’t use WordPress for any of those things. They use WordPress to steal other people’s work and post it as their own. They use it to make money by leaving half links to the creator’s blog to avoid suspicion and they use it to attract followers that would have no idea that the content that they’re reading and enjoying belongs to someone else. That’s what we’re here to talk about today. 

A fellow blogger has had a good chunk of his content stolen by two different blogs. The blogger is NekoJonez and he and I decided to write a piece on how to prevent something like this from happening in the future. The blogs in question are wponlinetutorials and proxly. Now I know I can’t accuse someone of theft without proof. How’s this for proof? (original article, written by me)

That post was taken from NekoJonez without his permission and posted on that site. He wasn’t asked by the owner of the blog if it was okay. They just took it and posted it as their own piece of work. That’s not cool and something needs to be done about it and that brings me to the point of this post today. 

NekoJonez note, if you want more proof, just look at the dates of my article about Nintendo Pocket Soccer Club. I published mine on the 10th of December and this ripoff blog published it on the 17th December. Yeah. 

If you want to do something about this to prevent this from happening again we need to look out for each other. We need to report these people that are doing this crap so they’ll know we’re serious about defending our hard work. I don’t know about you, but it takes me a few hours to write a single article sometimes. And if I knew someone was profiting from my work I would be pissed too and that’s why I’m doing this. I went through both blogs and noticed a lot of stolen content. Most of it is from NekoJonez, but other blogs were stolen from too. 

We’re bringing this issue to light and you can too by opposing this. Stealing is bad and shouldn’t be tolerated. Help us take these guys down by reporting them to WordPress. Click here to file a complaint. If enough people come forward and do this WordPress is going to have to force this person to remove all their stolen content or remove their blog completely. 

Let’s stand together and defend our work from thieves that are looking to profit from it.

NekoJonez here again. So if you notice other blogs or websites just copy and pasting somebody else’s content without using it in a good context, notify the content creator as quickly as you can. Personally, I wouldn’t mind people quoting me or using excerpts from my article to talk about their points, but if you copy the whole article, that’s another story. The content creator always needs to give permission before you use it, it’s just etiquette. 

I really want to thank everybody who already helped me file complaints about this so we can resolve this issue as soon as we can. I’m really thankful to all other bloggers who actually reported the stolen content as well so this will be resolved.

If you notice my content ever being stolen from another blog, use my contact page/DM me on Twitter or any other social media platform.

If you notice other blogger’s content that gets stolen, like I said before, contact the blogger in question before you take action. If the content owner wants you to report it as well, he or she will ask.

Also, try to not make a big fuss about it at first. Why am I saying this? The reasons are simple, don’t wake sleeping dogs AND don’t give a website unneeded traffic. Who knows, they might have a system with links set up, that every time they get clicked they earn money.

I think I can speak for all of us content creators here, we are always thankful that our audience reports stolen content to us. This way we can avoid people abusing our content and avoiding creators giving up on following their passion!

It’s never fun to see your content stolen since you put your time and effort into it. Having to deal with researching, contacting hosts and WordPress and other blogs who got content stolen is so time-consuming and you lose time spent elsewhere in your life. On the other hand, you could argue that we shouldn’t care, but what’s the point then of writing content again?

Thank you for reading this PSA written by me and Drakulus. Thanks for all the support and help! Feel free to tweet this article out, share it on Facebook or on any social media platform so we can raise awareness of this issue and start fighting it.

(PS: How ironic would it be if this article gets stolen from NekoJonez’s Gaming Blog and posted on one of those bot/stealing websites)