I knew going in that Riven was a remake of an older game, but it took me a while before I remembered the full original title: Riven 2: The Sequel to Myst. The title might conjure up an older, more opaque era of gaming. That’s a great reason to remake a game. With a classic story and even more classic puzzles, the original Myst games should be a staple. Unfortunately, as we a lot of old games, it can be a pain to get working. Even then you have to contend with old interfaces and antiquated menu. That’s why game remakes have so much potential. So does the new Riven stand toe-to-toe with the classic?

The Remake of the Sequel

The first Myst came out in 1993. It was pretty unique then for being a peaceful, methodical puzzle game. That’s less rare today than it was then, but it’s still pretty remarkable. Myst wasn’t just a series of riddles and puzzle rooms. It was a whole exploration game in a bizarre fantasy world. The puzzles were often dependent of the player’s understanding of the setting. They were also famously intuitive but nevertheless, people loved that adrenaline rush of solving the puzzle and hopping into the next book (there’s a fair bit of magical book hopping).

Riven is, as the original title declared, the sequel to Myst. This remake is a full 3D environment, that you can navigate like any first person game. Mobility is still limited, which gets frustrating when you are searching for the door to get you to the platform 5 feet below you. Just jump! (You can’t.) Besides moving and observing, you can interact with some objects. You also carry a notebook stuffed with valuable information, including some scene setting from Myst, to catch you up on the major players. The world is well realized, but you still can only do so many verbs.

Timeless Art, but New

As for the 3D environments themselves, they rule. Riven is on a dusty Mediterranean-looking island filled with weird statues and magical devices. You’ll see a lot of pretty domes, and some alien looking palm trees. Riven always had incredible artwork, so seeing it realized with this level of fidelity is a treat, even if this is your first visit.

Is this Riven remake a good game? That’s kind of a tricky question to answer! Even when they were first released, these games were extremely niche. Some kids played Duck Hunt and some kids played Sonic the Hedgehog but the super nerds played Myst and Riven. There’s a lot of reading; there’s a lot of looking. This is a game that really feels like a book. Some people like to read books! Myst fans were passionate in the 90s, and I am sure there is a new generation of little dweebs who want to solve a fantasy mystery.

Rosetta Stone Puzzle

Is this the best version of Riven you can play? Almost definitely. I’m sure there are some people nostalgic for the low-res photo style of the original, or the clunky point and click controls. This Riven plays smoothly and is miles more accessible. Unless your interest is academic, even if you found yourself an old copy and somehow got it working, why would you subject yourself to 90s menus? The real core of Riven is the story, the setting, and the characters, and I think this easily is the best way to experience them.

Is Riven a masterpiece that modern games should be drawing from? Listen- game design has come a long way in the last 30 years. Since the indie boom of the early 2010s, an interesting new puzzle game drops practically every week. Some of them still blow me away. Papers Please. Return of the Obra Dinn. Shadows of Doubt. Paradise Killer. Case of the Golden Idol! All of these games owe a lot to Myst and Riven, and all of them have built off that foundation.

If I could only pick one puzzle game to bring to a desert island, I probably would not choose Riven. Fortunately, that is not the case. It’s fascinating to see this missing link of game design. It’s nice to dig into some genuinely excellent writing and art. The puzzles are as opaque as they ever were, which is what a lot of people like about them. I think we need more remakes like Riven, that capture as much as they can about how games felt back then. That’s how we move forward, that’s how games get even better.

***PC code provided by the publisher for preview***

The post Riven Review – A Great Update to Riven: The Sequel to Myst appeared first on COGconnected.

Wild Bastards declares itself to be the spiritual sequel to the stylish 2019 shooter Void Bastards. If you played that game, it probably made a lasting impression. It’s not the first shooter to employ a comic book style (would that be 2003’s XIII?) but where other games kind of look like generic cels, Void Bastards looked like the style of a particular artist. Studio Blue Manchu is fairly small, and you can feel the personal touch. Do you want to get locked in a particularly crazy graphic novel? Now is your chance.

Dreams in the Void

Though the original Void Bastards drew inspiration from games like System Shock, that wasn’t quite how it felt to play. Rather than an immersive world or a story, Void Bastards played out as a roguelite. In the game, you navigate through nodes on a map as you complete cyclical runs. Between missions you can adjust your character and loadout. You worry about resources that your character carries and also bigger resources that drive the meta-game.

Void Bastards was a really great setup for a game, but it quickly ran out of steam (no pun intended). The procedurally generated space station rooms can only arrange themselves in so many combos. Though I am sure there are squintillions of permutations, the different modifiers and enemy types weren’t enough to really hook. me. This is a good game, it just needs more to it.

High Noon on the Edge of the Galaxy

More is here. Wild Bastards is changing the Void Bastards formula in a couple of critical ways. First off are the characters. I don’t really remember the characters in Void bastards. I remember a blur of discontented barrel chested loudmoths. Wild Bastards flips the script by setting up a squad. It’s the kind of team that could really use those short videos Team Fortress 2 used to run. There are 13 different characters and they play reasonably differently. The ability trees are different for each character and they all fit into fun shooter archetypes.

A further divergence takes us down to a planet’s surface! Void Bastards felt dark and sterile. Wild Bastards has environments that are as colorful as its characters. There are snowy cliffs and verdant woods, and all of this does wonders for breaking up some of the sameyness of the shooting. This specificity shows great ambition. You are going to remember particular characters in particular fights on particular planets. You might even pick one as your main.

Ragtag, Infinite Potential

The best things Wild Bastards has going for it is the potential for diversity. Unfortunately, that kind of thing is hard to assess with the game still in development. The shooting mechanics feel good to play, though the busy graphics may be too much for some. Maybe I’m out of practice with FPS games, but I had to give my eyes a rest between levels. The content in the game already feels much tighter than the developer’s previous effort but how can you judge the quantity of a thing that is still being made?

That’s going to be the critical question: can Wild Bastards keep its high level of energy going in the long haul? I think signs are promising. I especially like the way the relationship system is shaping up. It proves that the developers understand that the characters are the real hook, and if people want to hang out with them, they will want to play the game. I think they are on to something. I thought the tone landed on the right side of the maniac LOL random humor that makes me roll my eyes in Borderlands. It’s clear that Blue Manchu knows this game needs to impress, and I will be very curious to track the development of Wild Bastards. Maybe, like a desperate team of specialists brought together, they just might bring this plan together.

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The post Wild Bastards Is About Some Very Particular Bastards appeared first on COGconnected.

There is a burgeoning genre of games that aren’t quite remakes of classic titles. You know what I mean: games with marvelously honed mechanics and retro graphics. Stardew Valley is the classic example. Go back and play the original Harvest Moon though, and you will find it to be clumsy next to a modern game. These spiritual sequels offer a great way to go back in time and remember how it felt to play those games back when they were first released. If you are someone who has logged hundreds (or thousands!) of hours in Morrowind, you are going to want to spend some time with Dread Delusion.

I’m a Joker, I’m a Smoker

Dread Delusion is a giant first-person RPG. You see the world from a perspective that normally means shotguns and grenades but instead, you’ll be swingin’ swords, slingin’ spells, and pickin’ locks. You know, fantasy stuff! You’ll explore the wilderness and a few big cities and dive into tombs to unearth treasure and slay evil monsters. To survive, you’ve got to keep an eye on your health, your magic, and your stamina. So far, pretty conventional.

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind was not conventional. It included all of the above elements, but then things get really strange. You aren’t in a green pastoral European countryside. The titular Morrowind is a blasted volcanic land full of big, glowing mushrooms. Other fantasy stories have their heroes ride horses. In Morrowind, people all shuffle onto an enormous yet graceful bug that functions as a big magical bus.

When Elder Scrolls IV and V were rolled out, convention returned. Cyrodil didn’t have much of a unique personality, and Skyrim left us with a decade of Viking fantasy. Dread Delusion is determined to take us back into an alternate timeline where these sorts of games just got weirder and more esoteric.

Dread’s Moving Castle

The world of Dread Delusion has been completely rewritten by magic. The ground is gone; only floating islands remain hovering above the void. Multiple factions vie for the fate of the land. The sky is a striking shade of… magenta? You start off the game fresh and new (as a prisoner, natch) and build your character, who will become more powerful and specialized throughout the story. There is a story and while it’s opaque, it definitely gives the game a solid structure to take you through its many pixelated sights.

Everything in Dread Delusion feels good to play, much better than the games that inspired it. At first I admired the nostalgic floaty controls. Your character is walking but you feel like you are gliding without friction over the grass. But then I got worried. Was this old fashioned game going to burn through all its good will? Fortunately, the answer is no. Combat and navigation are built around some of the “flaws” of the engine. I got pretty good at zipping across the low-friction landscapes, dodging the swipes of a clockwork skeleton.

The hills that box in the play area are just a little bit too steep to climb. That’s just how we did things back then. I could climb maddeningly high in old Elder Scrolls games. It was fun until you clip into a rock or somesuch. Dread Delusion keeps you from getting too far afield and then stuck. Far from making the game feel cramped, the rules of terrain navigation really make you feel the precariousness of the whole floating-island society.

The Final Pixel

I must admit, I am getting a little sick of retro-pixels. I see a blocky game on Steam that looks like a PS2 port and my eyes go right over it like they do with anime visual novels. There are just too many! So really take a look at Dread Delusion. Soak it all in. You are gonna be stuck with this style for a long long time. If the oppressive mud and rotted wood is going to get you down, Dread Delusion might stress you out.

After a while, I forgot I was sick of pixels. I look at Dread Delusion and I don’t see part of a trend. I see a game that set out to capture a particular tone and succeeded wildly. It’s not that playing Dread Delusion is like going back and playing those old games. Dread Delusion allows us to delude ourselves into remembering those games through magenta colored glasses.

***PC code provided by the publisher for preview***

The post Dread Delusion Will Take You Back To a Weirder Era of Gaming appeared first on COGconnected.

In the vast puzzle genre, a particularly welcome sub-genre is the spooky mansion. I suppose you could technically call it an evil residence, but I am not talking about games with zombies and guns. I am talking about games that are half ambiance, and half devious brain-twisters. These games are sometimes gorgeous to get lost in; sometimes they are low-fi and pixelated. The sure thing is that it will try to drop you into a totally immersive world. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a strange experience that may have all the makings of a new cult classic.

Hunting For Clues

Immersive puzzle games are usually peaceful. That’s not a hard and fast rule, but it’s been tradition going back as far as Myst, and carried forward into games like The Witness or The Tartarus Key. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes follows in this tradition and sticks you in a big spooky mysterious mansion. The surreal mystery is key to the tone in LatLE. You are meant to feel as if you are exploring a liminal space, like the island in Lost. Even the game’s own description feeds into the mystery, describing the setting as “an old baroque manor, perhaps a hotel or a museum, somewhere in central Europe.” Somewhere. Sure.

The big mansion is naturally full of locked doors. A lot of puzzles reward you with keys, or lead you to the other side of a barred door. Classic stuff. There are also funky retro sci-fi devices scattered about, which contain puzzles. I found the puzzles to be pretty tricky, but my controller was never under threat of a rage-smash. They are fairly solvable.

“Functional” clears the minimum standard. Are the puzzles actually good? Do solutions make you feel like a genius? Not really. A lot of the game is navigational, about finding ways to open the next blocked door (or finding a new secret one). A surprising number of riddles were mathematical in nature, which isn’t usually my idea of a good time, but I was never totally out of my basic-algebra depth. I suppose that could skew either way depending on your enthusiasm for word problems.

Somewhere, Somewhen

Atmosphere is so important to these sorts of games, and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes has that by the bucketful. The funky house you are exploring is occasionally timeless, sometimes anachronistic. The groovy décor weirdly reminded me of Deathloop, not because LatLE has such 70s vibes (which it does at times). Both games do a great job at making their worlds feel other. This is a familiar time, but not as you know it. That sort of surreal tone is perfect for building a sense of mystery.

More fundamentally, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes understands graphical design. Once indie games started embracing limitations and moving away from photographic fidelity, graphics became so much more interesting. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes accomplishes lots with color, and the lack of color. Red is important, and when something is out of place, it sticks out like a sore thumb. Other times you rely on the visual clues in the level design that propel you forward. The color motifs give a great justification to that annoying mechanic where your path is marked in yellow paint. Things aren’t just glowing because the game designers want you to see them, there is something deeper at play here.

On the Case

If there’s one area I struggled with Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, it was the controls. At first this was my fault: I had left a controller plugged in, which was making the keyboard controls weird. Once I got that sorted, I was constantly finding myself popping in and out of random menus. As I got more used to the controls, I realized that the movement and clipping felt a bit off to me. It’s a gameplay element I hope gets improved but in the meantime, it does evoke the clunky tank controls from classic Resident Evil. Plus, the game is still in development, and I anticipate the controls feel a bit better by time of release.

Your opinion on Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is mainly going to be determined by two things: the puzzles and the atmosphere. Some puzzle games totally blow my mind; this one didn’t rewrite the rules, but I certainly felt engaged. And if you love spooky trippy mysteries, I am sure you will like to immerse yourself in this strange world. Just remember to bring paper, pencil, and a calculator.

***PC code provided by the publisher for preview***

The post Lorelei and the Laser Eyes Will Have You Grooving With Riddles appeared first on COGconnected.

It’s become a new annual tradition to re-install snowy survival games every winter. I see the snow outside, I give thanks for being inside. Then I venture out into the great outdoors, from the comfort of my warm home. I have a few favorites I keep coming back to (such as The Long Dark), but I am always open to including more games in my chilly rotation. Does Winter Survival join the pantheon of great frozen survival games?

The Grey

Winter Survival comes to us from DRAGO Entertainment, best known (to me anyway) for Gas Station Simulator. Right off the bat, it’s clear the devs got their fundamentals down. The controls, level design, and atmosphere are solid. The rules of the genre are pretty clear- you’re going to need wood and rocks, and you’re gonna shove them together to make stuff. All of that helps you survive.

If Winter Survival has a main gimmick, it’s building. Uh oh! Building and crafting games have been on a tear lately, with multiple popular new titles debuting in the first few months of 2024. Fortunately, the building system is totally fine. You have some good options to start putting together a little cabin base. I liked what I came up with, but the game really suffers from coming out right after Enshrouded, which totally rewrote the rules on first-person base-building. I didn’t have trouble building my cabin or anything but after getting used to all the neat and easy-to-use snapping, construction was taking up an awful lot of time and effort.

Beyond the building, there are some very neat sanity mechanics. Neat on paper at least, at the moment they seem to fluctuate a little too dramatically. I found myself getting new negative sanity status conditions as quickly as I could lose them. This ultimately made me feel like I was stocking antidotes before exploring a poisoned area. With some fine tuning though, I can see a game where the sanity mechanics really guide the player’s decision-making.

Hat and Beard

As for the other survival systems, you probably have a good guess. You must manage hunger and thirst. This is a winter survival game so of course you also must track your cold to not freeze to death. There’s also a fairly involved sanity system, which has a lot of good ideas. At the moment though, the balance of those things feels way off. Needs like hunger and thirst build up fast, but it isn’t hard to satisfy them. This is exactly the wrong balance you want in a survival game. Instead of feeling desperate for resources, I felt nagged by notifications telling me to use my items.

A game such as this doesn’t even really need a story, but Winter Survival has got one. It’s rather simple, which is good, as there are a lot of mechanics and nuances to master. You play as a Beardy Guy trying to survive and look for his friends from this freak cold snap. This mode didn’t do it for me at all. I found Beardy Guy to be sort of annoying, his friends doubly so. It also removed that sense of isolation you get from so many survival games as they were constantly giving me instructions. Eventually, I switched to the more free-form mode, and that was a lot better.

Impaling Woodland Critters

I was also struck by the violence… which is a little weird because I have no compunctions about Doom or Half Life or Mortal Kombat. More so than any similar game, Winter Survival has robust combat mechanics. You mainly use them on the classic wintertime foes, bears, and wolves. There’s a cool timing-based move where you brace a spear and let the animal charge into their doom. You can wave around a torch and scare them off. But these fights happen a lot. It felt more like a combat game than a survival game. Using stealth to sneak past wolves through the tall grass also damages the feeling of isolation. I want to feel the crushing, uncaring weight of nature coming down on me. That’s tough when I am merking fools like Solid Snake.

I don’t want to give the impression that Winter Survival is incompetent. It’s very solidly designed, drawing from a lot of popular games. It’s actually crazy how common base-building mechanics have gotten. To be able to express yourself and problem solve creatively is always going to be fun in a video game. And I surely had some fun while playing Winter Survival.

Winter Survival is still in early access, so it’s a bit of a wait-and-see. Some mechanics, definitely need more time to cook. With tighter controls and better pacing, Winter Survival could evolve into a very solid game. Other aspects seem to be part of the design. I don’t know that I will ever click with fighting animals in this game. The story and the writing will largely remain the same. There are games in this genre that I would recommend first, but if you’re looking for something new and solid, Winter Survival might be on the road to becoming that game.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***

The post Winter Survival Will Make You a Wolf Mass Murderer appeared first on COGconnected.

Last year was a banner year for RPGs, so I wasn’t looking for another gameworld to lose myself in. Let’s face it: what made 2023 so unusual was how many good RPGs came out. Any given year you can dredge through the depths of Steam and find dozens of new, uninspired RPG titles. Such was my hesitance in starting The Thaumaturge. Worry not, for I am here to tell you: The Thaumatruge is sort of undeniable.

It’s In His Veins

The opening moments of The Thaumaturge are all vibes. There is a bit of table setting: it is the year 1905, and the Russian Tsar has conquered Poland. The political system is a powderkeg, and nobody seems to be taking those upstart Communists very seriously, but you know and I know that they are going to successfully overthrow the Tsar in twelve years. The first cutscene follows Wiktor Szulski, a very dapper Polish guy who looks a little worse for the wear.

My impatience quickly got the better of me. Cool character design is a good start, but I need something significant. I need a hook. Where’s the RPG meat to really stick your teeth into. Then I meet my first major NPC, and his name is Grigory Rasputin. Aaaaaaaaand… I’m back in.

Rasputin is, of course, a magician of some talent, though at this point in the story he hasn’t quite risen to power yet. But the familiar face helped anchor me to the reality of this world, which allowed me to appreciate just the high quality of the game’s writing.

Join the Revolution!

I find this era of history fascinating, but it’s also a time that gave rise to a lot of really bad people with dangerous ideas. We are just emerging from a century of violent European colonialism. The fascist movement is beginning to come together. Two world wars are just around the corner. This story has a lot of potential for brilliance, but also a lot of potential for disaster. Fortunately, The Thaumaturge is whip smart, really taking the time to understand the dynamics underneath all this tension. The world feels deep enough that it becomes really fascinating to empathize with characters on their path towards evil.

All of this feeds into the story’s themes. Wiktor starts the story proud of his Polish heritage, which is a dangerous idea if Russian soldiers around. But more than his national pride, he is a Thaumaturge and he is seeking to grow his magical powers. A thaumaturge has special senses, which are a major mechanic in how you explore the game. Not only does it act as an excuse for the video game interface, but you can also read echos on objects to get an idea of their history.

Combat, an important part of many RPGs, is present in The Thaumaturge, and though it doesn’t feel quite as deep as the exploration, it feels pretty good. When in combat, an action bar appears at the top of the screen. Various combat actions take different amounts of time, which is the main resource you manage in battles Most of the time, you can see what the enemy is planning to do and so the strategy lies in the classic dichotomy between Fast and Strong. Do you get in a bunch of small hits or is it worth taking a beating to give a bigger beating out yourself? I wouldn’t say the combat is perfunctory, but I was grateful that for the most part, fights are brief. They remain exciting and rarely overstay their welcome.

A Bit of a Theory

The Thaumaturge is published by 11 Bit Studios, famous for serious titles like Frostpunk and This War of Mine. The company is based out of Poland, a country that is no stranger to hit video games, such as The Witcher. That’s not irrelevant either. The Thaumaturge is developed by Fool’s Theory, the studio who is also going to be responsible for the upcoming The Witcher 1 remake. That’s a series best known for its phenomenal writing but if you’ve never played the first game, you know it’s not flawless (Geralt can collect cringe nudie postcards of all the women he can bone down with). Not only do I believe that Fool’s Theory can adapt the older gameplay, I think they have the judgment to find the excellent story hidden at the core of a flawed but interesting 2007 release.

The more time I spend with The Thaumaturge, the more I settle into it. When you spend more time with any game you are bound to notice the edges of things, the literal and figurative invisible walls. But The Thaumaturge was more like a pair of shoes. As I learned the restrictions of what you couldn’t do in the game, it focused me towards things I could do, and they were all awesome. If you have been craving a dark fantasy RPG where you get to play as a John Constantine type, I have good news, The Thaumaturge is it. Anyone looking for their next interesting and original RPG, this is it!

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***

The post The Thaumaturge Review – A Spark of True Magic appeared first on COGconnected.

There’s a burgeoning genre I like to call ‘strategy games that make you feel bad.’ Instead of simply getting you involved on the character level, these games usually zoom out to show you the larger conflict. This creates a paradox. How can you balance the deeper questions of morality with having fun? If a game isn’t fun, will people still want to play it? War Hospital arrives to the scene, confident in its approach. Is this the game that sets the new standard?

The Doctor Will See You Now

On paper, War Hospital has got everything figured out. It is the year 1918. You play as Henry Wells, a British medic in World War I. You’ve been put in charge of a hospital near the front lines, and you will have to keep things running smoothly. The conflict is, you do not have the resources to save everyone, so you will have to make impossible choices. The objective is clear. This experience will help you feel for the real decision makers of history.

The specifics are what make War Hospital creak to life. This is not a generic war, this is The War To End All Wars. You are an Englishman in Continental Europe. But the medical specifics are sadly lacking. Part of the excitement of the medical genre is how gross it can be. And diagnosis can something lead to an exciting mystery. Your patients arrive with an existing status effect that can (hopefully) be fixed with some combination of doctors, medicine, and time. Your lack of these resources means you are constantly choosing the best of some bad choices.

I’m not sure what the exact fix is. I don’t think the game would have benefited from say, an amputation minigame. But because relevant information is presented clearly, you never get a chance to make a meaningful escape. A game like Papers Please also asks you to make life-or-death choices, but that’s layered into a challenging puzzle. The challenge of War Hospital is whether or not you have enough time to make your patient better with the resources on hand. When I make a mistake, it seems predetermined.

Bedside Manner

Guilt is an emotion that a lot of games try to traffic in; often to mixed results. You will lose villagers in a game of Banished, but they are more anonymous than your citizens in Frostpunk. Lots of military shooters throw you into dramatic situations, but The Last of Us 2 is full of little touches that make you feel bad for playing the game. There’s something to be said for a piece of art that can reliably provoke a certain feeling. But a lot of criticism on those two games questions what those feelings are even for.

War Hospital does not quite achieve those levels of guilt. The randomly generated medical decisions are repetitive. You will start seeing the same animations repeat very fast. The scripted crises are definitely more interesting, but the writing doesn’t have the punch it needs to really make you feel it. As such, I often found myself interested while playing War Hospital, and I often found myself bored, but I never found myself emotionally shattered. I never felt myself getting deeply invested.

We Must Not Exhaust Our Supplies

Sometimes I like to play strategy games by just looking at the numbers. It’s easy to forget that one number is for people, and another number is for food, and another represents bandages. When you really look at the nuts and bolts of a strategy game, you can see if it has worthwhile ideas beneath the genre trappings. War Hospital is very functional, and intentionally balanced, but it doesn’t give you room for improvisation. You are not rewarded for creative problem solving.

There’s another way to look at War Hospital which is as some sort of RPG/visual novel. I think this change would actually benefit the themes of the story. There are already existing characters in the story. They are where the game comes closest to realizing its vision. The randomly generated patients by comparison, all feel like unimportant NPCs. War Hospital is all about taking on a role, but you express yourself through tactical decisions. If I spent less time choosing the mortal fates of random named guys, maybe I could have spent more time learning to be Major Henry Wells.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***

The post War Hospital Review – The Prognosis Remains Elusive appeared first on COGconnected.

It’s been a great couple of years for colony building games. Not only is there a huge number of new titles, but lots of them are truly unique. You’ll encounter commonalities, sure. Most of these games will have you chop trees and break rocks, but there needs to be something that sets your game apart. The Tribe Must Survive takes a back-to-basics approach, but what is it doing to stand out from the pack?

Something Wicked This Way Comes

The Tribe Must Survive is primarily about managing a whole mess of people in a hostile world. Your primary challenge is a curse of darkness which has seized the land. Creepy creatures crawl in the shadows and if given half a chance, will snatch up your people, never to be seen again. (At least, you hope to never see them again, you don’t want to see them come back to you Changed). Naturally, your best tool against the encroaching dark is fire, and wood fuels the fire.

This is the fulcrum of all your management skills. Rule number one is don’t let the lights go out, and have contingencies to keep going. You will inevitably fail, and subsequently, you’ll start again having earned some points towards unlocking your full kit of caveman production buildings. The idea of constantly warding off encroaching danger isn’t new to the genre, but The Tribe Must Survive has shadows that are so dark, you might feel a twinge of fear at the unknown. Sometimes those moments are frustrating but, there’s something to be said of the moment of panic when one of your guys vanishes, you don’t exactly know why, so the danger could still be lurking. It takes a game of some quality to make you break out into a cold sweat.

Cthulhu Cavemen

While the story is somewhat contrived, The Tribe Must Survive has a distinct aesthetic. This game knows what its about. The developers describe their world as a “gloomy Lovecraftian stone age,” and while those are all components I can point to in ten other games, I’ve never seen that combo before. Now that I’m racking my brain, I can’t think of a single story across any medium that crosses Lovecraft with the Flintstones. A world filled with unknown horrors is that much scarier when the characters barely know a thing. Everything is scary to them!

This is a game with a very distinct look. You can definitely see a Klei influence, specifically their hit co-op survivor game Don’t Starve. In fact, you could probably make a case for The Tribe Must Survive acting as a prequel to Don’t Starve. There’s a lot of shared DNA between both games from how they look to the spooky magic system. The key difference is that you play Don’t Starve as a singular character, but The Tribe Must Survive casts you as a protective overlord.

The Tribe Must Survive is still a work in progress, and it’s clear that there are more features to come. But the shape of the game is clear from the verbs- what you actually do in the game. You are playing from a top down perspective, and you do not directly control any of the characters. Instead you click on buildings and highlight resources, giving your tribe a set of priorities to tackle in their desperate fight for the titular survival.

The Longest Journey

Ultimately though, the game feels like it’s missing something. The unlock system is still cooking, but with the right pacing that could make the game very engaging. The aesthetic is strong, but there is not a lot of opportunity for player expression. You will drive Tribes like stolen cars, abandoning them at the end of each run. But while I like the look of the game and think it has a neat premise, it’s more of a distraction than an addiction. I’m sure that’s good news to some.

I keep coming back to the art style and the world building. The Tribe Must Survive is not a shaky effort; it’s a game made by people who want to see it become the best it can be. Diehards of the genre will find a lot to love and maybe with some steady development, The Tribe Will Survive can carve out its own niche in a booming genre.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***

The post The Tribe Must Survive Hides Secrets In the Shadows appeared first on COGconnected.

In a world of brave warriors and powerful mages, there is only one person who can manage everyone’s salary. That’s you. The Iron Oath is a tactical mercenary company management game. You command your mercs in battle, but you also choose which jobs to take and when to give your guys the week off. It’s a genre that has long been waiting for a new definitive entry. If you can get past its initial difficulty, you’ll find a deep game with a lot of surprises. The Iron Oath is my new go-to mercenary game.

Buying All the Sellswords

Mercenary games are where tactics meet tycoons. The most classic example is Jagged Alliance (which just got an excellent third entry into the series). If medieval warriors is more your thing, Battle Brothers has been the best game for a while. The Iron Oath is more explicitly fantastical than Battle Brothers, and has a very different aesthetic style. But each game gives you a lot to oversee.

The Iron Oath has a simple story that forms the spine of your journey. It’s one of betrayal and revenge. You’ll always play on the same map, which isn’t enormous but it makes up for its size with personality. Each region feels distinct from the others. You’ll spend a lot of your journey fighting demons and the undead. Occasionally, you’ll be killing other humans.

Tactical battles play out on a hex grid. Your guys belong to a series of fantasy RPG classes like hunter, valkyrie, bard, and thunder mage. One way the Iron Oath stands out is how big the fantasy elements are. There’s a huge evil dragon and you’ll find mages galore at each inn you visit. At first, I was uncertain about all the flashy magic. These games usually are concerned with the less glamorous details of a merc’s life. But I quickly came to respect the strategy that mages brought to combat.

Fighting In the Pixel Mud

You’ll be leveling up each of your mercenaries, and managing their equipment. There are customization elements, but the options are slim. Clearly you are intended to stick with the randomly generated guys, who have a lot of personality. They all have personality stats which determines how much morale they gain or lose from your choices as boss. Those personalities aren’t static, and can shift as the merc experiences the hardships of the road. But c’mon, we all know the way to play these games is to make mercs of all your friends so you can be gutted when they get gutted.

Once you start up the game, you’ll immediately run into the pixel graphical style. While I appreciate how pixel graphics can help get indie games out into the world, lately I’ve been feeling like we’re seeing too many of them. Eventually The Iron Oath won me over. I think it’s because the characters are so long and skinny, it didn’t feel like the same squat Super Nintendo graphics I’ve been staring at for ages.

Oath of Obsession

The sound design too, at first I didn’t know if I liked it. The Iron Oath sounds pretty similar on paper. The same clicks and beeps in the menu. The same clangs and screams of battle. The music could have been the soundtrack of any decent PS2 RPG. I was almost ready to try playing the game on mute, maybe put on a podcast. But then when I caught myself humming the battle theme in the shower, I knew that the audio design had me hooked.

You may be noticing a bit of a recurring theme. I scoffed, underestimating The Iron Oath at every turn. I tried playing an earlier version of the game, and bounced right off of it. I don’t know what precisely has changed. Maybe it’s the game balance. Campaigns are wicked hard, but every loss teaches me something new. Even at its weakest, The Iron Oath is never incompetent. And the longer I spend with it, the more I realize it might be me who’s incompetent. At least I feel like I’m always learning.

I plan to spend a lot more time with The Iron Oath. In fact, it gets a rare stamp of honor. Even fantastic games can grow old once you’ve played and reviewed it. With The Iron Oath, there’s still so much more for me to learn and see. In fact, I think it’s going to remain installed on my PC for a long while. I can’t foresee another game coming for the merc management throne for a long time.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***

The post The Iron Oath Review – Fulfilling Its Destiny appeared first on COGconnected.

Star Trek: Infinite sounds like it’s going to be a big game. “Infinite.” The final frontier is mind-meltingly vast. Across seven decades and almost a thousand episodes, no Star Trek show has ever run out of new worlds to discover, or civilizations to meet. Despite playing at endlessness, Star Trek: Infinite actually limits its scope. Perhaps there’s a game that could have it both ways; the best of both worlds.

Lens Flare By Starlight

Though published by superstudio Paradox, Star Trek: Infinite was developed by a team called Nimble Giant Entertainment. They’ve made a couple of games, but nothing as high profile as this one. And it’s a great looking game. The hand-drawn art of famous Trek characters matches evokes the game gear and board games of my 90s youth. Set nostalgia factor to mark 10.

Strangely, Star Trek: Infinite is sort of just Stellaris. There’s the passing resemblance sure, but under the hood they are fundamentally the same game. The gameplay loop of building ships and expanding your empire works identically. The resources sometimes are called ‘dilithium’ and ‘tritanium,’ but they all do the same stuff as in Stellaris. Which isn’t a bad thing; Stellaris rules! But it also already exists. Before Infinite was available publicly, I found that Stellaris tips also applied. When I needed to produce more unity or refresh myself on how invading planets worked, I could just pop over to a Stellaris guide and ten times out of ten, my question was answered.

I played quite a bit of Star Trek: Infinite right out of the gate. The game takes place shortly before The Next Generation. You can play as the Federation (obviously the coolest choice), but also as the Klingons, Romulans, or Cardassians. Borrowing from another Paradox game, each of the four factions has a unique mission tree to help shape their story. It looks exactly like the same mechanic in Hearts of Iron. There are a couple of critical moments like, will you support the insidious Section 31 or will you double down on your diplomatic corps?

Constellation Class

The thing is, there is already an excellent Star Trek game built on Stellaris. I refer to the total conversion mod, Star Trek New Horizons, which has been regularly updated since 2016. That game feels infinite. You can play as the above mentioned factions, but also literally anything else. You wanna be the Borg? The Dominion? The Bolians? Tamarians! The freaking Bynar!? You can play as pretty much anyone, big or small. New Horizons also has a much larger scope, covering the story from shortly before Star Trek: Enterprise and going all the way through Star Trek: Picard; almost 250 years of story.

So the question is, with such a deep mod, what makes Infinite unique. It certainly looks better. It also plays much better. Despite some annoying (but easily fixable) bugs, Star Trek: Infinite ran smoothly. New Horizons crashes on me all the time, it’s super annoying. And that’s definitely something! But the game feels strangely hollow in places where it should crackle.

Best of Both Worlds

As an example, let’s look at one of the most celebrated stories in Trek, “The Best of Both Worlds,” where Picard is captured and assimilated by the Borg. When I arrived at that episode, my heart skipped a beat. I was ready to face the strongest foe the Federation has ever encountered. But after the story kicked off it just sort of… ends. You get to make a few binary choices, and those change what resources you acquire, but that’s sort of it. I did not get to significantly participate. Across four Federation playthroughs, I found no way to change the outcome.

Let’s compare that to an event that takes place in New Horizons. In the early game, you are informed one of your captains has unexpectedly vanished. After an unfruitful search, your attention turns to other pressing matters but 50 years later, the Federation is attacked by a strange creature commanding a deadly nanoswarm (which can only be defeated by blasting the Beastie Boys). This is the story of Balthazar Edison, Idris Elba’s character in Star Trek Beyond. But you get to interact with it on the game’s terms. Every playthough, the event happens to a different Captain and it’s possible to not only change the story from the movie, but to flat out lose and be decimated by the nanites. Infinite holds your hand, making sure you more or less stay on the track.

Slice Up the Quadrants

In the recent Microsoft email leaks, the Xbox executives discuss the future of big budget game development. It has become so easy to distribute an indie game that the big studios are worried they won’t be able to compete with the clever, more nimble studios. What advantages does a big dev have? Time, money, personnel. The Star Trek New Horizons mod is janky, at times ugly, and prone to crash. But if you embrace infinity, you are bound to make a mess or two.

Star Trek: Infinite instead focuses on just a few quadrants and just a few decades. The game was clearly made by a bunch of Trekkie nerds, who packed it with lore and references and nostalgia. But even with the expensive-looking artwork, the gameplay always feels like a secondary concern. The recent Pharaoh: Total War is a masterclass in going deeper instead of wider. Star Trek: Infinite is not really interested in that kind of depth. The tried and true Stellaris rules fit well but, it feels more like a very pretty review of Trek history.

Having spent many hours on Infinite, I think I’ve seen all I need to see. Expansions and DLC might bring me back, but now we are talking about gating content behind another paywall. That sounds less enticing to me, especially when there is a more interesting mod available for free. Someone patiently waiting for new Star Trek games will definitely have some fun puzzling through Star Trek: Infinite, but I think I am probably going to go back over that New Horizon.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***

The post Star Trek: Infinite Review – The Finite Frontier appeared first on COGconnected.

The venerable Total War series was never one to rest on its laurels. At first, this meant bigger- bigger maps, more troops on the battlefield, more factions to play. Then the games tried to go smaller like with Thrones of Britannia and Troy. Total War even ventured into fantasy with a humongous Warhammer game. Against all those games, Total War: Pharaoh still might be a high mark for the series.

Behold, the Desert

As the Total War games grew, they also became less accessible. Pharaoh focuses on user experience. Information is not only available, it’s doled out in easy-to-read windows. It’s also art directed out the ears, even more so than other Egyptian strategy titles. All of that info is framed on crumbly stone tablets, sometimes even in hieroglyphics.

Part of me couldn’t help but feel that going so far back in time would limit the usual options in a Total War game. We’re talking about an era when bronze was the pinnacle of human invention. Iron, let alone steel, is centuries away from being used. And yes, Pharaoh has a much shorter list of units than Warhammer 3. But again, this tight focus makes the choices you make that much more significant.

The map stretches from modern-day Syria and Turkey in the north, following the Nile River down to modern Sudan. As Total War maps go, that feels teeny tiny, but there is so much variety in that space. The Nile is of course significant to many factions, and navigating it is crazy fun. It lets you access some pretty distant factions, but you’d best hope you move fast because big conditions are constantly changing the rules.

Gods and Heroes

Modern Total War games have really gotten into following the story of a single hero, and Pharaoh is no exception. There are three larger kingdoms to choose between, the Egyptians, the Canaanites, and the Hittites. Then you will choose one of a handful of hero characters and what follows is essentially the life and career of that hero. There are quests pointing your way, but they are unobtrusive. In truth, you are probably doing dozens of quests at any time, and the interface makes your progress clear.

Taking place in the bronze age, there isn’t a ton of unit variety. But maybe that’s for the best. While there are some cool regional variants, this is a lean, mean, back-to-basics Total War tactical combat game. Without flexibility, you are forced to look to the tools you are given. I found myself planning ambushes way more than I had in previous Total War games, and playing around with formations. Removing the vast ocean of options did wonders for my choice paralysis.

Even when you are replaying characters, there is so much you can do to radically change your game. Perhaps the most significant are the historical paths you can take, walking in the footsteps of pharaohs and heroes from antiquity. One option focused on restoring one ancient city and its wonders. Another is all about merchant caravans. My favorite was the straight combat one, which lets you covertly sabotage your enemies, and raise partisan fighters to show up and assist you in the final battle for the territory.

Your Day in Court

I was less thrilled about the court system. Pharaohs and kings have royal courts and though I found a lot of success scheming and backstabbing, the consequences were too self-contained to stay exciting. Most options in the court are all about… getting in the court. And staying in the court. Sometimes, forcing rivals out of the court. But most of the time I wasn’t feeling the choices when I was building or fighting.

Of course, the wider diplomacy system sets a new gold standard for Total War games. Now there are a handful of search filters that let you list other factions along all sorts of criteria. Specifically, it lets you know who is most keen to trade what for what. But most miraculously is the computer characters. They offer deals now, but the deals consistently feel enticing. I have never ever EVER felt this way in a PC strategy game. It seems that the AI is aware of your resource production numbers so when they offer something, it is always fulfilling a specific need. Trading feels like more of a devil’s bargain- you certainly need what is being offered, but can you afford to help a potential rival building themselves up?

Rays of Ra’s Sunlight

Total War: Pharaoh is a gorgeous game; have I mentioned how pretty it is? I loaded up Warhammer Total War to compare and it’s not even close. Pharaoh uses every trendy graphical breakthrough, especially with lighting, particles, and character animations. Units in armies are startlingly diverse when you zoom right down to them. Most importantly, the lack of constant clutter makes the game so much more legible.

Total War games spent so much time trying to do more. There are countless clever strategy games out there, but this series always prided itself on having a massive scale. Pharaoh totally changes that formula as it scales down and rethinks the gameplay flow of the series. Everyone has their favorite Total War game (mine for the record is the original Rome Total War). I’m sure that someone out there will be quite unhappy with some of the Total War changes. But from where I sit as a long-time player, Pharaoh is a total blast, and has me more excited for the future of the series than ever before.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***

The post Total War: Pharaoh Review – Fight Like an Egyptian appeared first on COGconnected.

There are multiple factions in Dune: Spice Wars, but I serve one master, and his name is Shai-Hulud.

The sand worms are the true master of the planet Arrakis, colloquially called Dune. You might be familiar with the flow of spice from reading the Dune novels, or seeing the recent movie. There’s also the infamous 80s movie. Dune is well represented in games too. There was an influential tabletop game first released in 1979. But gamers know that Dune is largely responsible for the entire real time strategy genre, with the release of Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty in 1992. That’s the weight of the universe on the back of Dune: Spice Wars, and it would be hard not to stumble under all that legacy.

Strategic Melange

Spice Wars was developed by Shiro Games who you remember from their game Northgard. With slick presentation and some clever rules, Northgard really shot some life into the real-time strategy genre. While this isn’t just a reskin of Northgard, there’s definitely a close relationship; siblings not cousins. This means that the game is played on a big continuous board. Your goal is to take over a territory by bringing its main population center under your control. Spice Wars flips the script a little by giving you a number of different options for expansion. You know, the Harkonnens take what they want with guns, the Attreides have slower but more peaceful methods.

If that was all, Spice Wars would be a pretty alright game. Northgard is fun. Dune is rad. Put the two of them together, and you have a nice melange. But I was impressed with how deep into the sands this game was ready to dig. Take the factions for example. You’ve got to have Harkonnens and Attreides, that’s a given. There’s also a dedicated Fremen faction. There are the vaguely named Smugglers. But then you’ve got House Corrino, represented by His Majesty Shaddam Corrino IV (eighty-first and last of the Padishah Emperors). Rounding out the roster is House Ecaz, who I had to look up. They are the Emperor’s in-laws.

Treacherous Shifting Sands

Spice Wars is dedicated to Dune lore, and if that’s something you dig, I am sure you will walk away impressed. But how does it play, straight-up? It’s alright. Now out of early access, Spice Wars still feels a little wobbly. You will send armies into conflict in the desert, and then you’ll wait a while because all units feel like damage sponges. You can automate your scouts, but that doesn’t really free up much management space. Northgard felt impeccably balanced so, maybe Spice Wars will get there? Remove the coat of paint, and I would probably pick Northgard over Spice Wars, just in terms of how they each play. But Spice Wars does have that extra coat of paint, and wow, what a coat.

The most immediate influence on Spice Wars is the 2021 film, directed by Denis Villeneuve. You can see it in the design of the characters, who (mostly) resemble the actors who play them in the movie. The game is overall very concerned with getting all the little things right. The art style gives the game its own strong sense of identity, but Dune fans will marvel at the ornithopters, and the hissing buzz of the shield generators.

Fear Is the Mind Killer

There’s an impressive attention paid to details. This is particularly true regarding the music. Hans Zimmer’s score to the 2021 movie is his best work in years, and Spice Wars borrows a lot of instrumentation including Zimmer’s throbbing percussion (womp-womp-WOMP). I was really transported to Arrakis. Spend long enough with this game and you will be rushing to top off your glass of water.

I cannot lie, the world of Dune is one of my favorites, and any chance to visit Arrakis is a welcome one. Despite a its significance to gaming as a whole, there aren’t a lot of Dune games out there. Spice Wars is the kind of power struggle fantasy game that we’ve been seeing for decades, but its a winning formula. Sure Spice Wars might mostly be porting over a lot of the mechanics from Northgard and dressing them up with a new coat of paint, but it’s an incredible court of paint. If you were distraught to learn that the second Dune movie will be pushed back into next year, Spice Wars will probably hold you over until the big day for the big worms.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***

The post Dune: Spice Wars Review – Spice Up Your Life appeared first on COGconnected.

Astronaut: The Best is a game that knows exactly what it wants to be. That confidence is extremely fortunate, because there are times when I have no idea what Astronaut: The Best is even about. It is a game truly hard to categorize. Steam tags are settling on “Interactive Fiction,” which is undeniably right. So, let’s imagine that you’re a weird gamer looking for a weird game. Is Astronaut: The Best the right weird for you?

Mission Control

Steam tags aside, I would probably call Astronaut: The Best a management game. (But with an upward inflection: “a management game?) You play as the director of a space program on an alien planet. Your purview is a combination of all the support characters from The Martian. That means seeing to astronaut training, but it also means dealing with the press. Oh yeah, and you have to appease eccentric five high priests of your planet.

Each high priest has a specific portfolio and your choices will doubtlessly please some of them and anger the rest. That’s where the management comes in. You have to conduct your agency in a contradictory manner to keep each approval meter in the green. Every day you are greeted by a different high priest who gives you a different mission. At first, they come pretty slow. Later, you’ll be hit with more demands which makes it more likely that you’ll get your wires crossed.

Similarly, you also need to keep your astronauts in peak condition. You do this by scheduling training without exhausting them. Much like you the director, astronauts must balance their actual duties, but also public perception. Each of them had s handful of traits, stuff like ‘secret smoker’ or ‘likes weird sex stuff.’ The priests are all messy morons who have power over you. The astronauts are messy morons who you have power over, and thus you become their bully.

In Space, No One Can Hear You Laugh

Now, here’s the million dollar question. Is Astronaut: The Best a “comedy game?” It’s difficult to say. It’s definitely not serious. It seems to be aiming for Orwellian satire and stylistically, that idea comes across. But I don’t know that there was any writing in this mostly-taking game that made me laugh out loud. Perhaps it’s less ha-ha funny and more… irreverent. That’s the perfect word actually; the game is irreverent.

That tone might have worked better if the jokes were mostly about the characters. Instead, Astronaut: The Best puts its irreverence right into the gameplay. It’s baked right into the worldbuilding. But unfortunately, this makes the game sort of hard to commit to. The procedurally generated astronaut traits aren’t in a context where you can meaningfully manage them. Like, what do you do with an astronaut who likes “weird sex stuff?” The word ‘weird’ kind of implies deviance. But the whole world is so deliberately weird, maybe liking weird sex is the only normal way to be?

If the setting had one foot more in reality, I think Astronaut: The Best could better get its ideas across. The surveillance state that you serve is so alien, maybe they all like it? Producer propaganda in our world is sort of disturbing. But a Looney Tunes episode about Bugs Bunny distributing propaganda is funny, or in the very least, irreverent.

Space Age Design

Take a good look at the art style in Astronaut: The Best. The characters are all misshapen blob people. The furniture and the architecture bends at weird angles. Some items are in silhouette like a 70s underground comic book. It’s an art style that doesn’t care about your reality. It’s a perfect style to match the game. That’s why Astronaut: The Best feels so confident. The tone of the writing, the style of the graphics, the silliness of the setting, they all match to each other perfectly. So maybe Astronaut: The Best is a huge success?

It’s hard to find a point of comparison for Astronaut: The Best, but I will try. Learning about the world reminded me of Paradise Killer, a mystery game taking place in a totally gonzo tropical city. To solve the mystery, you will have to learn the rules of this weird place to understand how they were broken. It also brings to mind the Monster Prom series, which shares Astronaut: The Best’s irreverent sensibility. Astronaut: The Best lands weirdly in between them.

You have enough feedback through numbers and stats to keep the management game chugging along, so you never really have to internalize the rules of the world. And because your choices concern the greater good of an organization, you’ll never make a decision from pure emotion. I mean you can. But I doubt you’ll be so compelled by a particular astronaut’s weirdness that you’d choose to keep her around because you like her. If your astronaut’s numbers aren’t high enough to do what you want to do, fire them and hire a new rando with better numbers.

I am reminded of Sid Meier’s often repeated quote: “games are a series of interesting decisions.” I never really felt that my decisions were all that interesting in Astronaut: The Best. Either the course of action is fairly obvious, or it’s totally opaque. Click a button, find out what happens next. But then I keep looking at images from the game, which reminds me how consistent the whole experience is. I appreciate the wild swing, but ultimately, I don’t think Astronaut: The Best, is (the best.)

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***

The post Astronaut: The Best Review – Real Space Oddity appeared first on COGconnected.

It must be fiendishly difficult to design a puzzle game like Viewfinder. Sometimes, it is all I can do to wrap my head around it. It takes an inconceivably mad genius to come up with this game conceptually. Some of the challenges totally consumed me. Others were dealt with simply. While solving each I was struck with a question: In the face of sharp gameplay, does a puzzle game need an additional something? Perhaps not!

Picture Perfect

I have heard Viewfinder referred to as “that camera game.” This is only partly show. Viewfinder is a visually rich first-person puzzle game that plays with your sense of perspective. It’s in the lineage of some legendary games. A lot of people see it and think of The Witness. I couldn’t stop thinking about Portal. If you are a big fan of the genre, you’ve probably played Superliminal, of which Viewfinder is probably a cousin.

Going into Viewfinder, I thought it was going to be an immersive world to explore. I was expecting something like Myst. There is definitely a narrative in Viewfinder (more on that in a bit), but puzzles are discrete, not discovered. What I mean is, this is a game with levels. Every level you start on a new island and need to figure out how to navigate to a teleporter, which will take you to the next challenge. Between these puzzles are small hubs that tell you a bit about a character or the world.

Progress Snapshot

It’s a bit difficult to describe the puzzles in Viewfinder. An early example presents you with a gap, and a photograph of a bridge. Hold the photograph up and bam, you get a bridge you can cross. Then you find a photocopier. You’ll encounter standing cameras on tripods. Eventually, you can carry around your own camera. Sometimes, you’ll find things altogether stranger, like a comic book, which might help or distract you.

The puzzles in Viewfinder are the main attraction, so it is fortunate that they are a blast. A lot of them may feel familiar- there were at least a couple of challenges that were pretty much the same as some of the Riddler trophies in the Arkham games. But the specifics are always well thought out. Sometimes, they are even delightful. You’ll play with gravity, and image quality, all sorts of simulated systems. Often the order with which you complete tasks is the key to activating the next teleporter.

All of this takes place in a blindingly vibrant sci-fy/fantasy world. The genre blend is sort of key, because the realm you are exploring in Viewfinder is full of Weird Science and you are encountering audiologs of the Weird Scientists who built this place. There’s also a story stapled on top, where you and your unseen handler are trying to comb the depths of this freaky dimension to maybe solve climate change.

For Film

This story never really grabbed me. I love the presentation! Exploring different art styles is one of the best video game experiences I’ve had all year; they rule. But the characters never really grabbed me. They were coherent enough to give a motif to a collection of levels- this guy loved guitars, this person had a complex relationship with their family- but I found myself tuning out and skipping the harder to reach audiologs. I dunno. Maybe there’s a disconnect for me between art, photography, and magical climate change solutions? The game is interested in this tension. If you are a schoolteacher, this game is an argument for including the A in STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics). But ultimately I enjoyed Viewfinder most as an excuse for some groovy brain teasers.

There’s a cat in Viewfinder. It’s a sort of talking robot/alien/Cheshire thing. It appears from time to time to drop some exposition. You can pet the cat. I mention all of this, because they do a good job at conveying the tone of Viewfinder. This is a game that’s touching upon a lot of popular themes right now. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it in a collection of cozy games and hopeful environmental sci-fi is hot. But I didn’t walk out of Viewfinder with a new perspective on the future.

I did however have the best time solving its puzzles, which I’d hate to spoil here. But man, when you turn a photo upside-down and then stuff falls out of it? That moment got me to gasp. And the gravity physics were fun enough to have me playing with them until I made myself a little seasick. Viewfinder doesn’t have the tonal mastery of an exploration game like Myst, but it’s puzzles are second to none in the genre. You should definitely challenge yourself with Viewfinder, the most beguiling puzzle game of the year.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***

The post Viewfinder Review – A Positive Time with Photo Negatives appeared first on COGconnected.

Jagged Alliance 3 deployed on high ground; it is a game in a unique position. It’s not the first time we’ve gotten a sequel to a video game after a multi-decade wait, but that list of titles is small. With breakthroughs in graphics, interface, story presentation, and physics simulation, what would a new Jagged Alliance game even look like? It turns out, quite a bit like the originals. Jagged Alliance 3 is a true sequel, filled with all the stupid awesome musclehead action of the 90s, and everything that entails.

Anything But Expendable

We talked gameplay in our Jagged Alliance preview, but there are some things worth focusing in on. The one thing Jagged Alliance does better than any other turn-based game out there is cinematic gunfights. These aren’t the brutal, balletic sort of fights you’d see in a John Wick movie. These are the sort of engagements you’d expect to see Schwarzenegger or Stallone tangled up in. Actually, pick any of the Expendables and you are on the right track. The original game had a very arch sense of humor and its genre, and this new game bears a similar smirk.

You will command your mercs in asymmetrical firefights, positioning them behind cover each turn, and trying to claw for any advantage. You will also manage the company which involves salaries, ammo, and some light RPG elements. There’s also a surprisingly large world map, and you will take territory square by square.

Made To Order

Each of those squares represents a map (sometimes two, if there’s a secret basement). There isn’t procedural level generation in Jagged Alliance 3. Instead the whole war-torn nation features bespoke level generation. This mostly rules. The level design is one of Jagged Alliance’s strongest elements. Planning an ambush on a bridge, or a desperate firefight in an abandoned mansion are both highlights. There will be a few high traffic maps that you will probably grow sick of, but there’s also day one Steam Workshop support (not to mention a patch or two), so I’m confident there will be fresh content someday.

Looking at the Steam Workshop page, I noticed something interesting. One of the most controversial features in Jagged Alliance 3 is the lack of an aim percentage. You eyeball your shots (sometimes spending AP to increase your accuracy) and then there is a true ballistics simulation. Shots can go wide and hit allies, or pierce one enemy to kill the guy behind him. There is ricochet to watch out for, and interesting tricks you can play with line of sight.

But on day one, there’s already a mod adding in a shot calculator- with a note from the devs! They passionately argue for their original vision and balance, and so far after playing a good many hours, I am inclined to agree with them. It’s different from a total information strategy game. This is something altogether more chaotic. And there’s a real place for that. If XCOM is the Street Fighter of turn-based tactics, Jagged Alliance is the Super Smash Bros.

Diamonds Are Forever

I was curious how the story and setting Jagged Alliance would be updated to fit a modern era. It isn’t. This game is set in the late 90s with some fun retro email clients and big ‘ol cell phones. It also follows the formula of the previous two games almost identically. Again you are in a war-torn nation in Earth’s southern hemisphere killing ill-equipped scavengers who prowl through the rust and mud.

As you play through the Jagged Alliance 3 story, you will learn a bit more about Grand Chien. It’s an African former French colony making money through the foreign diamond trade. Most levels are in the sort of aluminum-siding slums you’ve seen a zillion times in this sort of action adventure. You’re not supposed to take much of it seriously; there isn’t a lot of nuance in the way you capture diamond mines from the locals to pay your merc salaries. There’s a character named Greasy Basil. But the arch tone never really rises to the level of being funny. It’s mostly lazy stereotypes with a smug sense of remove. And that’s to say nothing of the unit barks, which get real real old, real real fast.

After beating the story in Jagged Alliance 3, I still really wanted to play more. I want to try out every merc on the roster, and learn how to use each of their unique abilities. There are fights that I want to play again, this time with a new approach. Fans of turned based action will find Jagged Alliance 3 to be a genre-best game. But I’m probably going to play those gunfights with the volume turned way down. After all, I’m not in Grand Chien for the atmosphere and the company. I just want to find new ways to blow stuff up.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***

The post Jagged Alliance 3 Review – Command Pure Chaos appeared first on COGconnected.

Somewhere in the multiverse, is a reality where your favorite game was made by a completely different developer. The changes might be subtle or dramatic, but this game took a different path to release. It feels different, plays different. Would you welcome the opportunity or is your favorite perfect as it is? Xenonauts 2 lets you live in that parallel world, and it’s not a bad place to land!

A History of Invasions

XCOM 2 came out in 2016. It’s closer to its 10^th birthday than its first. And the XCOM 2 you have sitting in your Steam library is a sequel to the XCOM reboot, which came out in 2012. That reboot retooled and streamlined X-COM: UFO Defense, which first saw release in 1994. I played quite a bit of original X-COM. I’m not ready to declare the original better than the very playable reboot, but it has a certain complexity that’s been lost in modern gaming.

Enter: Xenonauts 2. Which is of course a sequel to Xenonauts, which came out in 2014. The point of Xenonauts was to recapture the parts of X-COM that were cut in the reboot. That means more base-building, equipment management, and fighter jet dogfights. The first Xenonauts rescued all that cut content, but there was one way it could not compete with reboot XCOM: the interface. The UI in the first Xenonauts is (marginally) better than what we were cooking up in 1994, but that’s a pretty tough sell.

Overhauled In Drydock

So how does the sequel stack up? Beautifully! (At least, in this regard). Xenonauts 2 is easy to play. Hell, it’s easy to get lost in, making sure your soldier have just the right robot support and weapons loadouts. This isn’t accomplished with graphical horsepower and gorgeous information. Xenonauts 2 has a crisp clean look that’s easy to parse, easy to play.

Here is an example of a subtle yet game changing feature: you can preview your shots. XCOM 2 will give you a percentage number, but if you say, position yourself against a wall at a lower elevation, your soldier may not have line of sight. Xenonauts 2 lets you hold shift, plot your soldier’s route step by step, and look at a shot preview in their ending spot. Every obstacle, including your other soldiers, are highlighted. Little icons explain each object and how they are effecting your aim. The same goes for weapon range- the target line turns from green to red as it gets farther out from its target.

Could you imagine anything so simple? It makes a huge difference. Less guesswork means more fun, and also more guilt when one of your beloved guys is perma-killed. Of course, it’s hard to get as invested in your Xenonauts soldiers as you do with XCOM. I have over a hundred mods installed, lots of them cosmetic, giving me options to design little outfits for every one of my soldiers. I give them all names. In a campaign in XCOM 2, I acutely feel each and every death.

The Usual Goon Squad

Xenonauts 2 lets you rename your soldiers. But you cannot change what they look like. You can’t change their country of origin, or their voice. I didn’t anticipate missing those customization options, but the personal touch does wonders for player investment.

On the flip side, Xenonauts 2 has destructible environments. Sure you could blow a hole in a wall. But you can also order your guys to fire blindly at a wall, hoping to catch a bad guy on the other end. Even if you miss, you can now use the bullet holes to peep what may be lurking in the next room. Or you can blow up enough load-bearing terrain to bring your foes crashing down. The destructible environment is definitely the coolest and most modern-feeling feature.

The Truth Is Out There

But then, you’ll be blowing up the same maps over and over again. There are minor changes, but you will basically be doing the same missions in the same towns and office buildings and military facilities. If you plan to play the campaign over and over, you’ll even have the enemy placement memorized. In a procedural generated story like this, the repeated elements can feel like a grind.

Even coming short of perfection, you nerds are going to love Xenonauts 2. It lacks the bombast and superpowers of reboot-era XCOM, but it more than compensates with logistical complexity. It may not be sexy, but Xenonauts 2 is a well-designed strategy game, thoughtfully made by a team who knows the genre. And if you are a youngster who missed the 90s? Here’s an approachable piece of video game history given form. Figuring out how to run an old DOS game is a headache. Xenonauts 2 in out and ready for your orders commander.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***

The post Xenonauts 2 Review – UFO Defense Rebooted appeared first on COGconnected.

Star Trek: Resurgence is the first new narrative Star Trek game in a long time. We quite liked it, and wanted a chance to take apart its warp core and look under the hood. Dan Martin, lead writer for Dramatic Labs pinged us on his combadge to tell us about the game’s development.

COGconnected: Dramatic Labs is made up by former Telltale Games talent. How is the Dramatic Labs development process different from Telltale?

DM: Hi and thanks for chatting with us about Resurgence. A few differences jump to mind. The first being that, very early on, we knew that we were going to release Star Trek: Resurgence as one single game, not episodes. That allowed us to complete the whole script, and revise the game at every stage of development, which makes for a more refined and compelling story and experience. Another difference is that we are a very small team, not a large studio. The production was put together specifically to make this one game, and in a lot of ways, this game is a labor of love. Our Star Trek fandom runs deep and we wear it on our sleeves.

How did a Star Trek game come about? Did Dramatic Labs approach the Star Trek team or was it the other way around?

DM: A few of us had already been working on a project that Kevin put together prior to Resurgence. He was also in discussions with Paramount to license Star Trek and produce a new game. We have all been long time fans of Star Trek, and given our collective track record of adapting other IP into our types of games, we hoped Paramount could feel comfortable that we would handle their franchise with care. Once we had the core pieces in place, we put together what would eventually became “Dramatic Labs”.

But even more important was the great fit of franchise and format. Star Trek is all about character and big, dramatic choices that could go either way. To that point, on many projects – well before we knew there might be a Star Trek game – we would talk about Kirk, Spock, and McCoy as a great model for constructing tough choices that are balanced by the push and pull of Spock and McCoy on Kirk. So you could say it was a long time coming!

Of all the many eras of Star Trek, why tell a story in the time shortly after the Dominion War? Did you ever consider a story set around the Captain Pike era or far off in the 31st century?

DM: Well, part of it is that neither Discovery season 3, nor Strange New Worlds had aired when we developed the story. But more than that, it was driven by our own fandom. Speaking for myself, The Next Generation is the show that made me a Star Trek fan and still has some extra gravity. It also felt like the time shortly after the Dominion War was still somewhat “current” as the present day of Star Trek in the minds of fans. It has a look and feel of Trek that people are hungry for. And setting it right after the Dominion War gave us some uncharted territory to tell our own story before running into the Romulan Supernova event that would send Spock back in time in the J.J. Abrams 2009 reboot, and featured heavily in Picard season 1.

I certainly didn’t expect the main character to be a Kobliad! In fact, I had to look them up. What was the inspiration for Jara Rydeck and why experience the story from that perspective?

DM: A non-human character seems to be an intrinsic element of any Star Trek crew. They are often mirrors held up to the human crew as a point of comparison –  but they also serve as outsiders in the story, struggling to fit in. In the same way that Jara is coming onto the ship as a new first officer who hasn’t been through the calamities that cemented the crew together before her arrival, making her a Kobliad gives her something additional to work against. In both cases, people question her fitness to serve, and she has to prove herself. And it’s a very playable dynamic for the person with the controller in their hand. Lastly, for those who really know their Star Trek, there is an unspoken parallel between our primary threat and a plot element of “The Passenger” – the Deep Space Nine episode in which the Kobliad were introduced.

Was the story always going to explore the differences between Upper Decks and Lower Decks on a Starship?

DM: That was one of the earliest choices we made about the story we were going to tell. On the one hand, we wanted to give a broad Star Trek experience to the fans, and we thought that by putting our playable characters on opposite sides of the chain of command would give us that breadth. But also, the TNG episode “The Lower Decks” (before the show of the same name) was an inspiration for seeing another side of life on a starship. And come on, Miles O’Brien couldn’t have been the only enlisted member of Starfleet, right?

My favorite character in Resurgence is Commander Urmott, a Bolian and chief of ops. How do you go about imagining up such a dramatic and dynamic bridge crew?

DM: I love hearing that about Urmott! As for putting together a bridge crew, first and foremost, just have fun. This has been a dream project for so many of us, and picking a ship off the line and collecting our crew was a damn good time. Then put all of that aside and get to work, because it’s a tough a needle to thread. Conflict is at the heart of drama, but we want our Starfleet crew to be a group of dedicated professionals who may disagree with each other but ultimately have good motivations. That’s where this balancing act of personalities, backstories, and pecking order come into play.

How challenging was it to include characters from existing Trek canon, such as Ambassador Spock?

DM: It’s a big responsibility to write for these characters we love and respect. And, while part of the appeal of writing for a franchise like Star Trek is getting to include these fantastic characters, we didn’t want to feel like we were shoehorning Spock, or the others into our story. These legacy characters had to have an organic place, and the TNG episode from which we spun out a major part of our story gave us that natural connection to some old favorites.

This game features some unique action scenes (such as using a phaser to disrupt electrical currents, or piloting a shuttle without guidance). How difficult is it to plan those scenes in a mostly dialogue-driven adventure? Did you have any ideas for action set pieces that got left on the cutting room floor?

DM: There are always things that you dream up and want to include, but for whatever reason – pacing, production realities, etc. – don’t make it into the final product. And a lot of times, that reason is a good one. It slowed down the experience. It would have taken resources away from something else that is actually more important. That said, I wouldn’t want to tip my hand on the specifics of what was cut because… maybe these setpieces will have a place in another story.

The real kernel for these action sequences starts with our ethos that we wanted to put that broad Star Trek experience in the players hands. Rather than make a game that is ALL shooting, or ALL fleet maneuvers, we were going to give a bit of science, a bit of technobabble, a bit of action, and of course a lot of dialogue-driven drama. We often would ask ourselves, how would the show confront this moment? And what tools do we have in our game-design toolbox? That often led us down the path to what ended up on the controller.

I’d love to hear about your Star Trek influences. Does the team have a few collective favorite episodes or characters or storylines? Which parts of the Trek canon was Dramatic Labs’ guiding star?

DM: For me, it starts with TNG. It was my first appointment viewing: Channel 56 at 7pm in the Boston TV market. Running concurrently, of course, were the final films of the original cast. I also watched Voyager in its first run after TNG concluded. But we drew influences from all eras of Star Trek, with references to The Original Series (one of our characters can choose to say “Risk is our business!”) through The Motion Picture, all the way up through the 2009 reboot and the look of modern Trek. (Yes, we have a bridge window. Let’s debate it.) First Contact is one of the primary touchstones, both in terms of production design, and as the peak representation of a big budget Hollywood treatment of the TNG era – not to mention it features those great uniforms our crew sports as well.

I’m sure there are a lot of people who would love to write a branching narrative game like this. What advice would you give someone trying to plan out a story like that? What are some pitfalls to avoid?

DM: There is a lot of art and science that goes into it, but one pithy aphorism that applies is “more is not always better.” When looking at creating a branch, you first need to assess if the choice is compelling in the moment… but you’re not done there. You also need to figure out if the downstream effects are also compelling enough to make it worth building out all of those consequences. Because writing those alternate paths is hard enough, to say nothing of the production efforts it takes to get them on screen and in players’ hands.

Similarly, people often want to know how many endings there are in one of these branching narratives – but they should really be asking how many good endings there are. There’s a screenwriting saying that “third act problems are really first act problems” and there are only so many threads you can set up at the start of a branching narrative that will come to a satisfying conclusion at the end.

What new creative ideas did Dramatic Labs try out that never would have happened at Telltale Games?

DM: We knew what our strengths were, but we gave a look at just about every aspect of these games. We asked ourselves, “What do we keep, what do we toss, and what do we evolve?” As mentioned before, telling the story in one complete release is definitely a new approach that runs against the way things were done before. We also pushed the scale of our explorable spaces and action sequences.

Even some of the smaller evolutions likely would have hit resistance, such as getting rid of the silent option (which hardly anyone ever actually chose) and in turn changing the way choices would progress – or not – when the timer runs out. But we’re not done yet! We always want to innovate and improve on what we’ve built. We find new ways to put players at the center of great stories, and we’re sure there are more adventures ahead of us.

The post Star Trek: Resurgence – Interview With Lead Writer Dan Martin appeared first on COGconnected.

I don’t remember exactly how we got here, but it’s starting to feel like we are hitting critical mass with survival/crafting games. It’s a genre that has games by developers big and small. Survival mechanics have just about found their way into most modern games. It’s going to take a lot to make one of these familiar titles stand out from the rest. Forever Skies has a great gimmick, and it gets one half of the survival/crafting genre very right.

Rusting Hulks

There’s a story and setting in Forever Skies, but I had more fun just ignoring those parts (weirdly, that’s going to be a theme here). You are on an unrecognizable post-apocalyptic Earth. Your home is a blimp with a little room hanging off of it. As you dive down into ruined skyscrapers and windmills, you’ll scavenge the bits you need to make your flying home really, really cool.

Forever Skies is going for stark beauty, and it really gets there. The crumbling buildings creak ominously, as plastic tumbleweeds blow through the sky. Between all of this are clouds of glowing, possibly irradiated moths. As you’d find in a lot of craft games, it’s sort of a lonely experience. But sometimes that’s exactly what you’re looking for!

You start with a tiny airship. It can’t do much. At first, you’re limited to a tiny cockpit which doesn’t even work. But then you set up your research table, your 3D printer thing, and some engines and you are on your way. The basic gameplay loop involves landing your craft and searching for resources in the ruins. Then you take those resources back and build a better airship.

Clicking Into Place

The building mechanics is Forever Skies at its best. Parts lock together with a satisfying snap. It could not be easier to turn your single room into a floating fortress. One of your primary methods of collecting resources is to hang out the side of your ship in a gunner seat and laser those weird tumbleweeds right out of the sky. The laser-collector also feels great, with a crunchy control scheme and a satisfying zap.

Building while thousands of feet in the air is a little scary. If you put your engine in a hard to reach place and your run out of fuel, taking a dangerous journey on the surface of your craft is a white-knuckle mission. Eventually, you’ll master catwalks and railings, which will allow you to build farther and farther out from safety. But the threat of falling a zillion feet to your death (or you know, your respawn) adds just the right amount of tension to an otherwise peaceful activity.

Crafting is just one half of Forever Skies. There are also survival mechanics. Unfortunately, this half of the game isn’t nearly as strong as the building. Yet. You have to track hunger, thirst, fatigue, you know the basics. And sure, you can find tainted food and water in the rubble and then clean it on your ship, but desperately searching for a melon as your vision fades to black is frantic in a bad way. The survival meters just give you a ticking clock that distracts from building thoughtfully.

There is also a unique disease mechanic. Eating or drinking unclean food and water can trigger all manor of sci-fi diseases or at least, that’s the idea. In practice, I kept getting the same disease over and over again. I don’t know if it was me or the RNG gods, but I kept contracting a virus that damaged me whenever I looked at the sun. Honestly, I liked that! It provided such a weird restriction that I would angle my ship so I could build with the sun at my back.

Air Traffic Control

Fortunately, as with many such games, Forever Skies includes an easier difficulty that drastically tones down the survival mechanics. Usually, I appreciate a challenge in games like The Long Dark or Sons of the Forest. I imagine the similar mechanics in Forever Skies might feel better after a good deal of balance changes. And this is a game still in early access, so the balance is changing all the time.

In the time since I started writing this preview, Forever Skies announced their roadmap (or rather their “flightmap” as they are calling it. Big items or their list of features to add include co-op, more stuff to build, aerial combat, and farming. That list is reassuring. If Forever Skies launches at full access with major improvements to those four areas, it has the potential to become a genre classic. In the meantime, check your favorite gaming site to keep track of the Forever Skies development process. One day you’ll wake up in an unrecognizable world, but maybe you’ll have a game that will let you take refuge in a skybound home.

***Forever Skies provided by the publisher***

The post Forever Skies: Your Dream House is a Blimp appeared first on COGconnected.

Video games sometimes feel like they are in an arms race for the most realistic graphics. That’s why I’m relieved whenever a game like Jumplight Odyssey comes along. Not only does it look like a very specific retro anime style, but it is also a game deeply committed to its aesthetic. With a strong sense of identity and some fun gameplay, Jumplight Odyssey has the potential to be a cult hit but, there’s a way to go before the gameplay can equal its style.

The Bridge Is Yours

What I played of Jumplight Odyssey felt more like a proof of concept than a full game- which wasn’t a surprise, a message from the devs says as much when you load the game up. Battleship Yamato seems to be the guiding aesthetic light. The colors are bold, the curving lines are gentle, and you can juuuuust barely maybe see an old degraded VHS filter. You’ll see elements of Voltron and Gundam Wing in there too, it’s great.

What you are doing, is managing an enormous spaceship. You are the captain/princess of a people sent into exile when their planet was destroyed by the evil Admiral Voltan. The objective is to get the princess and her people to the Forever Star, a mythical place where they will be safe. But the journey won’t be an easy one, etc. Wow, there are shades of Battlestar Galactica in there too.

The spaceship, where most of the game takes place, is big. Not just big, it feels friggin’ enormous. Every function of the ship is there for you to see, and you need to make repairs and oversee operations to get the ship functioning in peak condition. One of the decks has been totally annihilated and it’s there you’ll have the most freedom to build something imaginative. The building and management mechanics remind me strongly of the Evil Genius games. They both make you consider how close to the action you should position your bunk beds.

Battlestar Yamato

Jumplight Odyssey is trying to put a unique spin on that genre. There’s also an entire procedurally generated space opera mechanic. Every member of your crew is a simulated character, and all of them have relationship drama with each other. Plus you’ll run into space anomalies, or you’ll have to send some crew members on an away mission. That mix is the perfect recipe for a good season of Star Trek (which is also making a major comeback in gaming). It sounds deeply replayable.

Unfortunately, a lot of that promise is still being worked on. You can see that the building mechanics and interface are totally fine. But something with the AI and balance feels off. I tried building a console in my engine room and watched as dozens of crew members came down to take a peak at the work in progress. Then went off wandering off through the halls. I misplaced a door, but no one ever obeyed my command to demolish it. The hydroponics room just continued to have weirdly identical parallel doors.

More Fraternization Than the Normandy

I do not feel able to judge the part of Jumplight Odyssey that sounds most exciting to me, the relationship system. It’s in there- click on any crew member and see how they feel about everyone else. But right now it’s a random soup of nonsense. Relationships don’t consistently go two ways, and I found some alarming news. Clicking on a random engineer I saw that they had a troubling relationship with the one non-human member of the crew, a pig mascot. This human saw the pig as their lover. But navigate over to the pig, and it felt like it was just in a casual relationship! What? Don’t get me wrong, that sounds like a wild story. But I have the feeling it wasn’t an intentional one.

On top of that, there were regular clipping errors and pathfinding problems, the kinds of things you’ll find in a lot of early-access games. I caught the pig (that pig again!) trying to use human animations, and in doing so contorted into a shape that belonged to neither man nor beast. I have seen things Man Was Not Meant to Know in Jumplight Odyssey.

Distant Constellations

With such a bright, appealing style, I am committed to playing a good version of Jumplight Odyssey. The game feels like it was bespoke and crafted for me. I’m on in on management games, and managing a big ‘ol spaceship is the dream. The rogue-lite mechanics mean that this is a story you can replay again and again. Everyone knows the best episodes of Farscape are the ones where the crew breathes in some alien gas and is overcome with trippy horniness. That seems to be the goal of Jumplight Odyssey. That sounds like a game I want to play.

It’s not right to damn a game based on a work in progress, so I want to make it clear that is not my goal here. If you were attracted to Jumplight Odyssey because you saw that art style and needed to learn more… hold on tight. In this state, the game doesn’t feel like the best version of itself. It’s not anywhere close to being all that it can be. But the devs are saying all the right things. They’ve already shepherded a weird stylish game into the world: Armello. Based on past success and future promise, Jumplight Odyssey is a game you should keep locked into your RADAR, or um, DRADIS.

***Jumplight Odyssey provided by the publisher***

The post Coordinates Are Still Being Calculated in Jumplight Odyssey appeared first on COGconnected.

Space. The final frontier. These are the games of the franchise: Star Trek. Does Star Trek: Resurgence go where no Star Trek game has gone before? The debut game from Dramatic Labs is a singular adventure story, and a refreshing return to Starfleet.

A Trek In Every Quadrant

I have been immersed in all sorts of Star Trek lately. Episodes of Enterprise, Picard, and Deep Space Nine have been on my TV, and the Stellaris: Star Trek mod on my computer. I have been enjoying the movies, and the soundtracks to those movies. And through all of it I’ve been struck by this thought: it’s weird that for a franchise famous for talking, there are precious few games where you get to her conversations.

Dramatic Labs is a new studio, but it’s made up of game dev veterans. That’s because while there is still a company called Telltale Games, a lot of the important people on the Telltale team 10 years ago formed this new studio. Resurgence is in many ways, a “Telltale” game. In their heyday, Telltale games were themselves throwbacks to the point and click adventure games of the early 90s. They’re not very “systems” oriented- which is to say, there’s not a lot of strategy or messing with stats. Telltale-style games are simply walking from conversation to conversation, and choosing what your character says within a small window of time. Also there are quick time events (ah, the dreaded quick time event).

Where Is the Ambassador?

Star Trek: Resurgence doesn’t shake up that formula. In fact, it’s almost shocking how similar it feels to Telltale Batman and Game of Thrones. There aren’t any gameplay innovations to speak of. If you liked those previous titles, you’re in luck. I’d rank Resurgence with the best of Telltale’s previous titles, games like Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, Batman, and Tales of the Borderlands. That last one is especially relevant, seeing as it just got a poorly received sequel made by a different dev team. The Wolf Among Us has a sequel in the works too. But Resurgence just has that Telltale magic.

That’s probably because Star Trek already fits to telltale vibe extremely well. I like the writing in Telltale games, but they are earnest to the point of goofiness. But see, so is Star Trek. It’s actually kind of nice that you aren’t usually offered noxious dialogue choices. There’s no ‘good’ choice or ‘bad’ choice. But there are still important choices to make. In fact, they have some of the nuance that more binary games lack. It’s nice to play as a team of dedicated, passionate professionals trying to do a difficult job together.

That Ship is One Handsome Lady

The old Telltale games had a very particular look, stylized and cartoony. That is not what Resurgence is going for. This is a more realistic Unreal-engine powered game. But the graphics aren’t going to make you gasp. In fact, they feel like they are from a few console generations ago; maybe PS3? But that’s OK, because the design makes the most out of its capabilities. It’s hard to deny how cool it feels to walk across a Starfleet bridge, and to sit in The Chair. It’s cool to actually be under an alien sky and communicating with beings almost twice your height. You ever wish you could live in Star Trek? Resurgence will take you there.

Maybe you’re a Trekkie and you want to know the score. Here’s where Resurgence fits into the story: it is the year 2380. The Dominion War was recently fought. The USS Voyager is still missing. The Romulan sun has not yet gone supernova, and thus Ambassador Spock is not yet in the JJ Abrams movies. You play as two members of the crew of the USS Resolute, a ship that’s seen some action. Everyone on board is still wearing their gray Dominion War uniforms.

Captain on the Bridge

This is an upper decks/lower decks story. You play as the new first officer, a stoic Kobliad with a strong sense of right and wrong. You also play as Carter Diaz, an optimistic petty officer and engineer in the model of Samanthan Rutherford. The story seamlessly hops between the two of them, often giving you choices with one character that later effects the other. With Rydek, you’ll determine the fate of the entire crew and get to facilitate some alien diplomacy. With Diaz you will keep the ship from falling apart, and you will get involved in a cute love triangle.

Of all the possible stories to tell in the wide universe of Star Trek, Resurgence picks a good one. It takes place in the “present” of the story, and while it has some fun with cameos, it doesn’t overdo them. It presents a galaxy in a time of uneasy peace, and a diverse Federation crew. I would certainly recommend Resurgence to anyone who loves Star Trek. If you’re a curious non-Trekkie well, how much can you tolerate quick time events? Because by the ancients there are a lot of them. But this reviewer didn’t mind one bit.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***

The post Star Trek: Resurgence Review – Continuing Mission Success appeared first on COGconnected.

I’ve never really gotten into an auto-battler before. I mean, there was a month when I played Loop Hero nonstop but aside from that, I’m a relative newcomer to the genre. So if you are a die-hard looking to see if Mechabellum is similar to your favorite… I’m probably not the person who can answer that question. But maybe that doesn’t describe you at all. Maybe you are like me, new to this sort of thing. In that respect, Mechabellum is a good-looking and sensible introduction to automatic murder machines.

Oh Heck, It’s Mech Tech

It’s a strong union between gameplay and genre. In an auto-battler, you drop little guys on a map and watch them single-mindedly pursue their primary function. That’s true whether or not the guys you are placing are actual automatons. In Mechabellum, as you may have surmised, you are placing mechs. And anyone with some Battletech or even Front Mission experience can get what happens next.

There are many different types of robot in the rock-paper-scissors of Mechabellum. They have different weapon ranges, different defensive abilities. They also can vary in speed and function. In those other games, you’d be the one taking the shots, but being an auto-battler, you just drop them and then take your hands off. You probably won’t walk away- you need to see if your guys make it. But if you’re confident, you can place your guys, trust they will do what they are supposed to, and move on to the next hot zone. That’s only if you are confident though.

Goliath Online

There is a substantial tutorial in Mechabellum, covering everything from the different mechs, correct timing and placement, and how to level your guys up. That’s right, these mechs can go custom. Though you can play Mechabellum against the computer, this was made to be a multiplayer PVP game. This gives you a Warhammer feeling. This is your army, there are more like it, but this one is yours. And you go up against other player armies, just as carefully positioned as your own. Tactics on the battlefield are the most important thing, but maybe with enough planning you can assure victory before ever fielding your machines for battle.

I think I would probably prefer if Mechabellum had a dedicated single player campaign. That’s mostly a compliment- this is a great looking game. Made by a relatively new dev team, the look and sound and feel of Mechabellum beats games a lot bigger than itself. The fantastic animations are critical. I’ve always felt like the mechs in Battletech ran around weightlessly. But not only do these mechs properly lumber, you can feel the powerful difference between a light fighter and a gargantuan metal behemoth.

Mechwarrior King

I actually think quality graphics go a much farther way than one might assume. Since gameplay is limited to building guys, placing guys, and watching guys, the player needs good feedback to immerse them in the game. If things make a turn for the worse, that only means something if the game can make you feel it, and watching your favorite ‘bot fall to pieces is wrenching. I found myself so tense, so absorbed, that I barely remembered to move on to my next area of conflict.

On the other hand, maybe this would all feel better if it was built on some sort of story. Mechabellum has enough to give you some context but there aren’t characters, or an arc. That’s not the kind of game that it is. It’s not good criticism to make up an imaginary game to compare it to, but considering the rest of the quality presentation, I couldn’t help but dream. I’m normally PVP shy, but the system is strong enough to protect you from truly noxious online BS. But I’m single player for life, and even in a good game, primary-PVP is a tough sell.

Mechabellum is published by Paradox Arc, an indie spotlighting branch of the massive games company. They have been associated with games like Surviving The Abyss, Stardeus, and Across the Obelisk. None of those games are the pinnacle of their respective genre. They’re all weird experiments that have a killer hook or a flawed by absolutely unique idea. Mechabellum feels of a type with those other games. It has a surprisingly strong sense of identity and it’s surprisingly well-polished, especially once you acknowledge it’s still an early access title. Building and fighting mechs is one of the most obviously appealing ideas in gaming. Mechabellum isn’t about to explode into the most popular mech game in the heap, but it’s ready to become an underground sensation that makes your cool gamer friends rave.

***Mechabellum PC preview key provided by the publisher***

The post Automate Your Automatons in Mechabellum appeared first on COGconnected.

The current murder mystery boom is the best video game trend in years. From high concept experiments like Shadows of Doubt to hyper specific stories like Case of the Golden Idol, it seems game developers are willing to take big risks to leave their definitive mark on the genre. In Unheard – Voices of Crime, gives you a very specific tool of investigation. Can you prove guilt or innocence using only your ears? Through good puzzle design, you just might.

Believe What You Hear

Unheard – Voices of Crime has a setup that may be familiar to some: you are an investigator testing out a new tool of the trade. This tool projects you into closed locations where a crime has taken place. You listen to a short audio play, you fill in a Mad Libs card, plugging specific details into a narrative summary. Hooray, you found the perpetrator!

This is represented through a strange interface. When I say you are projected right into the crime scene, I mean that literally. You have a little avatar that looks the same as the other human characters in the story. But you are not in the story. You are a ghost. This feels like a stylistic betrayal. If the whole game is about listening for clues in the echoes of crimes, why do you need to go to the crimes at all? I would have rather you explored the areas formlessly, or you know, maybe something more thematic like a big floating ear.

Scenes grow more complicated, but they clock in around the ten minute mark. You can scan through the video with common playback tools like fast forward and rewind. The big gimmick occurs when you start ghosting from room to room. There are always multiple scenes playing out, sometimes intersecting with each other, or showing two sides of a phone call. Putting together the dialogue from disconnected scenes is always crucial to finding the truth at the core of the mystery.

Crisp Levels

Happily for a game so concerned with sound, Unheard has excellent audio design; second to none. When you turn your digital avatar around (curious though it may be) the audio pans from left to right, to best simulate the ear you are hearing it with. The acoustics simulation is also impressive. From the sound clips, you can tell whether someone is speaking inside or outside, in a big room or small, wood-paneled or marble-carved. The sound team at NEXT studios know what they are about, and if I were building a game studio from scratch, they’d be on my must-hire list.

The rest of the production design is more serviceable than inspiring. The visual novel sequences between cases are traditionally presented. I liked the art style well enough, and some of the trippy effects worked well, but it seems like a perfunctory framing narrative on top of a strong but unrelated idea. While the settings are all easy enough to navigate, they sort of break away from the strengths of the game, the sound.

The Usual Suspects

In a game like this, writing is of paramount importance, and quality acting is just as crucial. This is the element that usually kills my interest on Sam Barlow games. Telling Lies had a top notch cast of favorite actors, none of whom are doing their best work. The acting in Unheard seems almost amateurish next to that, but weirdly it’s more effective?

This makes me think about how the game regards itself in its marketing materials. One point they keep coming back to is how the game belongs to the legacy of immersive theater. That’s exactly what it feels like. While characters are well voiced, the performances don’t do a lot to help you get lost in the spaces. They don’t sound realistic or naturalistic. And they’re not supposed to. These are little murder mysteries, played to the cheap seats. The actors need to emphasize certain hints or emotions. As such, you don’t really feel like a fly on the wall, you feel like you are reading an Agatha Christie and every word might be a clue.

Name That Tune

When I first booted up Unheard – Voices of Crime (and wow, what a title that is) I was reminded by another recent game, Cyberpunk 2077. That game had a mechanic that was exactly like the main gimmick in this. You would float around echoes of crime scenes, using mostly audio clues to piece together a mystery. Those scenes felt bloated and all over the place. Sometimes you had to scan temperatures for some reason. Unheard focuses down on what’s crucial- the writing and what it sounds like- and delivers much more compelling mysteries. Cyberpunk was trying to feel like episodes in a prestige TV show. Unheard is offering you up little puzzles.

There are elements of Unheard that still befuddle me. Why did there have to be a framing narrative around testing a sci-fi sound machine? Why couldn’t this just be a series of devious chapters, full of double identities and swapped masterpieces? Ultimately, I don’t think some of the eccentric flourishes hurt the game. Unheard – Voices of Crime focuses on doing a few things well. The game rises to that very specific set of standards.

***PC code provided by the publisher***

The post Unheard: Voices of Crime Review – Sounds Good! appeared first on COGconnected.

Crusader Kings sometimes feels like it came together by accident. You can feel this acutely in Crusader Kings 2, which started as a complex grand strategy game but grew to be a strange sort of RPG. Crusader Kings 3 on the other hand, was trying to be an RPG from day one. And now with the arrival of the Tours and Tournaments expansion, another layer of strategy abstraction gives way to something a little more personal.

Monarchs World Tour

Much like the Royal Court expansion, Crusader Kings 3: Tours and Tournaments shifts the physical space where the game takes place. The core features are new mechanics that simulate your ruler traveling across the map and attending events. In the base game, you could go on a hunt or throw a feast with the click of a button, which would lead to a box filled with dialogue options. Now, each event happens in stages. Before you attend your liege’s feast or what have you, you need to plan a route and get your character (and their entourage) to their destination safely.

While planning a route, you need to assess how safe the journey will be, and longer journeys are more expensive. If you need to cross terrain that your character is unfamiliar with, you better bring a guide. And if you’re playing as a bookish curmudgeon, you may want to hire mercenary bodyguards too. Then you’re treated to a little animation of a pawn (representing your character and their crew) crossing the map just like an army would.

This completely changes the feel of the entire game. Before when you wanted to attend an activity, you would choose to do it and then be teleported right there. The character seemed to occupy a similar space to the player, existing as an abstract entity looking down at a map, but not inhabiting that map. Tours and Tournaments separates the player from the character in a substantial way. For the better. Now you think about how personality, politics, and geography all contribute to the story of your dynasty.

Lost At Sea

New mechanics naturally lead to new emergent narratives. I remember a time for example when I was playing the king of Ireland and a neighboring ruler invited me to a feast. Of course I accepted. The benefits far outweigh the costs of attending another lord’s event. But everything is different now, and what I found was disaster. I had to play out my king’s laborious journey. I brought all the wrong guys so when we hit bad weather, not everyone made it. And where does this other lord live again? Iceland!? Uh-oh.

We never made it to the feast. We eventually got to Iceland, but by the time we were arriving, the feast was long over. Would this little anecdote make for a good movie? Probably not. But the chaos of the simulation can lead to all sorts of insane stories. Bridging the gap in your imagination and making sense of the game is where the major storytelling happens. It’s what makes Crusader Kings 3 such a unique game.

The Taxman Cometh

There are also the titular tours. I love these. They remind me of that one episode in the first season of Outlander. You plan your route to go check out every corner of your kingdom. And you get to pick your attitude and the purpose of the trip. Are you here to collect taxes? Maybe you’re on the prowl for lecherous vices. Or maybe you simply want to be seen by your vassals to remind them you’re the boss and they should watch out. Or perhaps you just want to play all your lords in a chess tournament. You really get to feel the full size and diversity of your kingdom.

And then there are the titular tournaments! These take place on the ground, and your character will explore a little discrete instance of tournament space. These events are just as wide-ranging as the tours. You can participate or spectate or officiate. You can choose a melee, an archery contest, a joust, or play an episode of Medieval The Voice. And you can go shopping, spy, murder, and do all the great Crusader Kings verbs, only now you’re in a real place again.

Rolling With Your Crew

On top of the major stuff, Tours and Tournaments brings about a whole slew of minor changes. I keep encountering new events, at the new activities but also just randomly occurring. There also seem to be a lot more avenues to making friends or rivals. Little animations grace all the new mechanics and they do a lot of heavy lifting. I like seeing everyone’s expression on a hunting trip to figure out who is bloodthirsty and who is here out of obligation. The drunken wedding expressions are pretty priceless too.

I don’t know how I feel overall about the release schedule and pricing of Paradox expansion packs. Maybe it’s a lot, or maybe it’s a fair price. What I do know is that these big expansions look to change the feel of the game in significant ways. Measured against that standard, Tours and Tournaments is another huge step forward for Crusader Kings, the best emergent narrative RPG/strategy game around!

***PC code provided by the publisher***

The post Crusader Kings 3: Tours and Tournaments Review – Made of Win appeared first on COGconnected.

I was watching the movie Bullet Train, and I thought to myself, “This would make for an awesome video game.” And then I remembered that there was a video game that captured all the things I liked about that movie. The problem was that the last real entry in the Jagged Alliance series came out in the previous millennium. The intervening years have given us spin-offs but a proper sequel is nearly here. Jagged Alliance 3 is desperate to party like it’s 1999.

Mission Control

To the gamers who were perhaps born after Jagged Alliance came out, the hook is simple. You command a small squadron of international mercenaries, navigating a coup is a small country. Though the game has a lot of hallmarks of a strategy game- you move your characters on a world map, you manage money, injuries, and morale- Jagged Alliance is actually more of an RPG. There’s dialogue, and a plot, and everything. This sequel also occupies that strange genre space.

The setting may have changed, but a lot’s stayed the same, right down to the cast of Mercs. Many of the characters are returning from earlier games. Mercs have a specialty, like marksmanship, medicine, or making stuff blow up. They also have a cute nickname, like Ice, and Steroid, and Fox, and Barry. (Barry’s cool, be nice to Barry). And they also have a unique ability, to serve the squad in turn-based tactical encounters.

The characters are the real draw here. Much like the original Jagged Alliance games (and the movie Bullet Train) the Mercs all have opinions on each other, but guns for hire don’t get to pick their comrades. A pair of best friends may talk about what they’ve been reading lately, or a pair of rivals may celebrate their foe’s demise. In dialogue scenes (which are more or less linear from playthrough to playthrough) the different Mercs offer different lines depending on who is around. Assembling the perfect squad is fun. Trying to make an imperfect squad functional is even better.

Old, But Not Forgotten

For better and for worse, a lot about Jagged Alliance 3 really feels like an old PC game. That’s a good thing when it comes to the overall design. This is a game from an alternate timeline where XCOM was never rebooted. That explains why so many features that have become standard in this genre are missing, or completely rethought. Most of the time, I found that very freeing. Despite having a linear story, you can approach battles in Jagged Alliance 3 in just about any order. Fights are not procedural demonstrated, but consistent on bespoke maps. And yet, they never play out the same way twice.

That’s because Jagged Alliance is full of hidden dice rolls. This is a game asking you to pray at the altar of RNG. Which makes sense. Fights are trying to simulate the chaos of bullets flying in a Stallone movie. Shots have got to miss; for the drama! But Jagged Alliance has strange habits to information sharing. You can see how many AP a move will take (and you can spend more to make the shot more accurate). You can pick a body part to shoot at. You even know the critical hit percentage. What you don’t know is how likely you are to make the shot: Jagged Alliance 3 glazes right over that one. But you get a meter indicating the gun’s range. How do you come up with that?

Decisions like the lack of aiming percentages sort of carry a fuck around and find out attitude, and as I said, that’s got benefits and drawbacks. I certainly played for aggressively in Jagged Alliance than I would have in an XCOM clone. And often it ended in disaster. But sometimes the experiment pays off, and I direct a thrilling action scene.

X-Treme Pixel Hunting

This jankiness also carries over into the presentation. The graphics ain’t straining my GPU. The sound design… is very 90s. The repetitive barks have a lot of personality, but you can only listen to them so many times before you reach for the mute button. And sometimes the jankiness is actually bad. Stealth is a mess, especially because Jagged Alliance is sensitive about where you click. Sneaking across the hall is a big problem when you miss the pixel and you Merc closes the door and stands in the corridor like a chump. That feels not great.

It may be a lot of things, but one thing this game definitely is is a Jagged Alliance. I was thrilled to get reacquainted with my favorite snarky murderers, and I delight in fine tuning my squad to get everything just right. Jagged Alliance is wicked hard, but it’s the kind of difficulty that makes me want to try again and again, until I achieve mastery. At the end of the day, isn’t that all we ask from our video games?

***PC code provided by the publisher***

The post Party Like It’s 1999 in Jagged Alliance 3 appeared first on COGconnected.

I dig horror games, but I dig them more when you can play with friends. Playing by yourself can be scarier, which is fun. But when you are being frightened together, it can still be totally scary, while also being funny. You get both feelings at once, which is the best. Barotrauma is a 2D co-op submarine game, where you are trying to keep your crew safe from the alien horrors of the deep. The game captures dread and fellowship. Isn’t that what you want from your 2D submarine games?

If You Are Not a Moon Dork

The setup to Barotrauma is a little more complicated than first appears. It’s the (“not too distant”) future and Earth is covered in toxic fire. I assume. The environment collapsed, so humans skedaddled to the body in our solar system that has the best chance at supporting life- Europa. We of course, found more than we were looking for.

If you are not a moon dork, Europa is the smallest of Jupiter’s main four moons (out of 92 total!). It’s a shade smaller than Earth’s moon, and a substantiated hypothesis posits that’s because what we are seeing is the radioactive icy surface of a moon-covering sea. That’s why everyone in Barotrauma lives basically full-time in submarines. That’s also maybe why they didn’t know about the horrifyingly nasty gigantic mollusks that lurk in the depths. And this is a video game so, dive deeper, you can definitely find worse.

Fear With Friends

The gimmick that sets Barotrauma apart is its co-op gameplay. Your submarine can get pretty big, and you can crew it with up to 16 other players (or bots if you have no friends) (or bots if you play the game in pre-release and the servers are a little bare). Different rooms in your craft are used for different necessities, and players can develop their characters across six specialized classes. The classes, whether you’re the Captain, Engineer, Mechanic, security officer and whatnot.

Driving the thing feels gritty and granular. I’ve been on a submarine once; I never touched a button. I’m sure that submarine operation is akin to rocket science. And I could wrap my head around the various tasks in Barotrauma. But damn, even the most basic stuff takes a lot of effort. Which is good!

Any Color of Submarine

Where the complexity starts to make me sweat is in the building mechanics. Which is a bummer, because the building mechanics are the biggest selling point of the game. You have a robust sense of options, and I can see how creative you can get with your setup. Where’s the ideal place to put a medbay? Should weapon controls be near where you steer? The game’s marketing invokes FTL: Faster Than Light, Rimworld, aand Dwarf Fortress. But I found this part closer to another game where I am constantly losing everyone to a calamitous cascade of oxygen deprivation and pee: Oxygen Not Included.

I can also see where the co-op could be not just good, but great. I don’t think I have 16 friends who game (certainly not all in the same time zone), but I can see a sub being manageable with maybe 6 players, with the rest of the crew filled in by bots. The bots ain’t that smart though, so managing them is gonna be a full job. But where the day-to-day can be exciting, Barotrauma comes to life when you are imminently about to die.

When a beast boards your ship, it’s terrifying. The beasts are somehow made more scary by the chunky, retro graphics. Those things appear so suddenly they must be crawling in through an exhaust port of something. And when a huge crab claw pierces your hull, it’s literally all hands on deck as you try to bail the water and plug the hole. The moments right before the cascade are dreadful, but your final moments alive will be some of the most thrilling game you play in 2023.

Captain on the Bridge

I think the ideal game is mostly pretty calming, with moments of sheer terror. I, like a lot of you, enjoy playing the occasional Minecraft. You set your own goals, and achieve them in your own time. But When you can laying the foundation for your latest pixel palace, you hear the hiss of a creeper, and that moment of fear runs deeper than any horror game. It’s the understanding that, if you deal with the problem successfully and immediately, you’re good. But mess something up and you lose some progress. Barotrauma copies that formula. Most things you’ll do are pretty boring, but that just makes the scary stuff more delicious.

I probably admire Barotrauma more than I enjoyed it. I like the setting. The gameplay is very clever, even if it isn’t always exciting. I didn’t get a chance to get deep into co-op, but I can’t wait to try. It’s crazy to me that cooperative spaceship games aren’t an entire genre now, with dozens of indie games to compare. At the moment, Barotrauma may be one of the best trailblazers, giving inspirations for the developers of the future.

***PC code provided by the publisher***

The post Barotrauma Review – From Beneath You It Devours appeared first on COGconnected.