Diablo (1997)

 I don't want to call this a failure, but... there is just no other way to explain my experience with Diablo.

But let's back up a bit. Diablo is one of my earliest and fondest memories of computer gaming, sitting behind my mom as she was playing it on our old Mac. So much so I even have a quote from the game as the tagline of my blog! I never really tried it myself but had a lot of fun with Diablo 2 and 3. 

I recall my mom struggling with Diablo, she had to cheese Butcher by shooting him through a grate and eventually managed to save-kill herself my accidentally saving a second before she got swarmed by mobs. Then she moved on to calmer things like The Dig and Myst.

But in the back of my head lingered the feeling of a special relationship with Diablo, one that I would one day go full circle and play it like my mom did back in the day. I soon realized that would only come too true.

So I start it up and roll a warrior. The choices in Diablo are few and simple. That is a welcome sight for an amateur like me that I don't have to know whether I need a half-orc mage-paladin and what stats are best for those, but everything is pretty much ready and set for me. And maybe a bold move for Blizzard at the time when so many were still leaning heavy into the D&D rules. Here all you've got is someone who hits hard, someone who shoots a bow and someone who casts spells. Not much else to think about when getting started. With old games like this I always go for the melee, figuring they are somehow the easy mode with less to keep track off.

The music in Diablo is the kind of music I think could even give people fake nostalgia at this point, but for someone who like me was there for real, with all the extra hipster points, it gives off goosebumps. I think there are few tunes as perfect at conveying the right message and atmosphere from the get-go as the Tristram theme, and it's fortunate it's such an epic tune because you will be hearing it a lot. Definitely up on my top 10 Tunes That Gives Me The Feels-list. Eerie and calm at the same time, few tunes can pull this off. The Save Room Theme from Resident Evil is another one.

The game presents you as a returning citizen of Tristram. The local populace tell you that much evil has happened since you left. The local church has been desecrated and is being used for devilish purposes. They ask you to check it out and maybe also get rid of the local bad boy, The Butcher. You quickly notice that the church is just the very tiny top of a very huge hell-hole iceberg. 

I felt pretty gung-ho about myself as I went down the first set of stairs and came out into a massive crypt. I immediately set out to bash and smash some skeletons and imps jumping around. The permeating soundscape made sure any visitors would know there was nothing good coming from strolling down here, but I was doing quite well. Eventually I leveled up and encountered my first surprise. 

As you level up you get a certain amount of points to set into your stats. Your stats will affect everything from health, mana and what kind of gear you can use. But what I didn't find anywhere was a skill tree. Did the game mean for me to have this one click slash attack for the entirety of the game? Surely not? Reading up on it I find that to learn new skills you have to find book drops throughout the game. So they aren't inherit to the class, but random drops from mobs in the game. I guess it technically means any class can eventually learn any skill, though they will use them with different proficiency, but it does mean that until you find the drops you want and need, you're stuck with what ends up being a pretty repetitive skill set. People might've had the time and patience for this back in the day, but I definitely didn't find it amusing.

The game is a dungeon crawler in every sense. You go further and further down, killing everything you see and hope you get the right drops. In this game I find it to be a huge drawback that the mobs don't respawn, meaning that there is a set amount of experience (and loot) to gain from each level. There is no saving yourself by grinding some extra levels here, and that is usually my go to.

As I ventured further down it didn't take me long to encounter The Butcher's lair. I remembered what it looked like from back in the day, so I didn't get shocked when "FRESH MEAT!" was screamed into my face. I remembered The Butcher being hard, but he absolutely smashed me. I realized I wouldn't stand a chance unless I leveled up quite a bit. In fact, I struggled a lot against some rare mob on the same level and had to kite it several laps before it succumbed. Only for me to receive some half-decent helmet.

See here is the issue I have with Diablo; You always feel like you are one step behind. I am constantly short on money, which means I am short on healing/mana potions and short on gear. Which means I struggle against enemies even in the early game and I never feel like I catch a break.

After hitting my head against skeletons and imps for a while (maybe that's not the way to do it?) I decide to see if I am playing the wrong class. After failing equally hard on the ranger and mage I decide to see if the Hellfire expansion changed some of the things I had trouble with. And it did, it made leveling a little bit easier. The levels seem to be larger, or maybe the enemies give more experience. Either way I was several levels higher than I had been on my "classic" run once I got to Butcher again. Didn't matter much though, I still didn't stand much chance against him.

And that's fine, The Butcher is supposed to be the first boss of the game and it makes sense you need to gear up and level up to beat him. But everything just takes a bit too long. Getting levels, getting skills, getting decent gear. It's too repetitive and not enough... fun.

I had to conclude that my try with Diablo was a bit of a fiasco.

I feel like they fixed a lot of these gripes I have with Diablo in Diablo 2, but maybe I am misremembering that one too? I haven't played it in ~15 years, so maybe it is time to try that one again, and hopefully have a better time.

Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris (PC, 2014)

There can be defining moments of your teenage years, and the movie The Mummy was definitely one of those for me. It hit me like a slap across the face and I woke up to the glorious mystery that was Ancient Egypt. I became a little bit obsessed, when other teenagers had posters of Legolas and Anakin on their walls (that's what people had in the early 2000's right?) I begged my mom to take me to Egypt to visit the pyramids. I decided to learn how to read hieroglyphs and... well long story short, a game themed around ancient Egypt sounded like it would be right up my alley, because even though the obsession has mostly died down by now, I still think ancient Egypt is rad has hell.

I have also always had the intention to play some sort of Lara Croft game, and by now there are many to choose from. Well, there you have it - two good reasons for me to check this game out.

I liked the isometric design of it, being a big fan of games like Fallout 1 & 2. Somewhere I also thought that the rest of Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris (LCTO) would be in that vein, but I was very wrong. Turns out LCTO is a multiplayer action-puzzler and I was immediately struck by two problems: 1. A game designed around multiplayer but no one to play it with and 2. An isometric game but only WASD to control it with.

Let's just establish that WASD is not the best way to control any game that is viewed at an angle (hilariously the control scheme is compared to a SpongeBob Squarepants game on Wikipedia). I couldn't get my usual trusty setup of PS2 controllers to work with this game though, so keyboard is what I've got. Just think about it, to move the direction the game considers straight, I have to press two buttons. During the platforming elements and heated moments of battle it was easy to get confused and this definitely got me killed more often than I liked.  On the flipside, I think aiming is probably a whole lot easier done with the mouse than a controller, though weirdly Lara can't shoot urns that are right next to her. It does mean however that I can't make any comment as to the qualities of the game as a multiplayer experience, I am sadly without friends... who play video games.

It is weird to play this game on your own though. The other people on your team - Horus, Isis and some schmoe named Carter Bell - constantly talk to you, yet are nowhere to be seen within the dungeons. It just emphasized that I was playing it alone, and even the game was confused about it like it was saying "wait, you really don't have friends?".

It's usually clear where you need to go and what you need to do, the game gives you plenty of hints. Enemies are thematically obvious being mostly mummies and scarabs of varying kinds but this is what I expect and want going into a game taking place in ruins from ancient Egypt. It is clear they've borrowed more than a few things from the aforementioned 1999 Mummy movie, I swear the music that plays occasionally is almost exactly the theme tune to the movie. The atmosphere is definitely ancient Egypt, albeit with cool and magical machinery around every corner.

The story is... well, barely worth mentioning. Osiris and Isis were tricked by their brother Set who kills Osiris (the game mentions that Osiris and Isis are married, but not that they're siblings) and now Set has machinations on the human world. To prevent this from happening you need to re-awaken Osiris by reassembling his body parts. Setting out from a hub world, you enter different crypts/dungeons and make your way through, solving puzzles and shooting up the place like any good grave robber would do.  Lara still does what she does best and I never got bored of hearing the noise of an urn breaking or bombing pillars. The reward at the end of each dungeon is a another part of Osiris. Just be careful how you decide to google that, "How to find body parts in the crypt" might put you on some register somewhere.

All over the dungeon you can pick up gems that allow you to open chests in the hub world. The chests contain gear of varying and random quality, the more gems you pay the better the gear piece. The balance between puzzling and shooting is overall good, but actually leans a lot heavier on the puzzling than I was expecting. There are collectables and upgrades to find on each stage and the puzzles are not difficult to figure out, even for me - a notoriously bad puzzler.

To execute them is a different matter though. If combat gets tricky with the WASD control system (though never hard), puzzling can get downright irritating. Especially when there are timed puzzles where you need to really get your button presses correctly and Lara. just. won't. do. what. I. tell. her. to. Of course she does exactly what I tell her to, there is nothing wrong with the controlling - just the counter intuitive nature of it. After a particularly frustrating puzzle segment about 3,5 hours into the game I decided it was time to quit. I really wonder how the games are designed to be solved in multi-player, if they're the same then they're just way easier to do with more people.

Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris is ok. If you love action-puzzlers or you're looking for a game to play with some friends then this has potential. Just make sure you play it with controllers.

Crying Suns (PC, 2019)

Some times I like to theorize a bit around the development process of a game I am playing. Did they have a good story and borrowed some good gameplay? Or did they enjoy the gameplay so much from another game they wanted to create a story for it?

It doesn't matter when the end result is as entertaining as Crying Suns, but it is clear that they were heavily inspired by another great game - Faster Than Light (FTL) - when creating this one.

I spent around 50+ hours dying in Faster Than Light back when it came out, probably the most fun I've had failing in any game in a long time. FTL is notorious for its difficulty, and even though it could be downright mean, the gameplay was so well designed the thought of "just another try" was never far away in your mind.

While this isn't a review on FTL, it's worth mentioning this since Crying Suns takes a lot of what makes it fun from that game. What it adds that gives it its own identity is a different kind of combat system and a story (the story in FTL was a bare bone reason to move your ship ahead). 

The story in Crying Suns has other good inspirations, the first that came to mind when playing it was the Empire- and Foundation-series by Isaac Asimov. The game starts out with you being reincarnated as Ellys Idaho, space admiral in the Imperial Fleet. Apparently the original Ellys Idaho died somewhere, and you are woken up as the spare (if you've followed the AppleTV+ series Foundation you get the idea). You meet your new BFF Kaliban who is an OMNI, a certain type of robot that you will soon learn helps humans around the galaxy with absolutely everything. It also seems Kaliban is the only working OMNI left in the galaxy, leaving the humans completely helpless and dying.

You set off together with a crew of characters that you will quite come to like through your run. Your task is to find out what has gone wrong and, if possible, fix it. You do this by traversing space in a huge battle ship and directing your armada in combat with a lot of different enemies. Everywhere you go you have a chance of encountering something; most often something that wants to kill you, but also people in need of help and objects to explore. Just like in FTL I find that the Universe is a harsh place, you're often tricked and trapped by people who pretend to be nice, and you're almost better off becoming the same asshat everyone else seems to be.

You will find yourself really struggling for resources quickly, especially the fuel that allows you to travel around, and turn every dime (or scrap as its called in this game) to make it just another jump, to hopefully better pastures. But the better pastures never come. Around every corner lurks evil and danger. 

It's a good thing evil and danger is so much fun to fight then. As mentioned Crying Suns employs a completely different battle style from FTL, in which you control space ships in real-time on a grid. The combat area can be affected by all sorts of additional hazards like turrets or meteor strikes, and the enemy ship of course has battle ships and weapons of its own.

There is a lot to tinker with and keep track off here, there are many different ship types, skills and weapons to keep you alive and the enemy dead. Fortunately you can always choose to pause combat to issue commands and overall the combat is well designed and very fun - I never grew tired of it. 

I did find that on normal mode I had to scrounge a bit too much for resources, which took away from the fun of exploring the story. In FTL this wasn't an issue since there wasn't any story worth exploring, just the challenge of getting to the end. But the story in Crying Suns is genuinely engaging. While there are encounters that are clearly randomly generated, I only came across duplicates two or three times on a full run, which is impressive. At the end of each zone you continue the story, and you also have a chance of encountering story parts within the zones.

Crying Suns succeeds with a lot of things; it has a story worthy of its own sci-fi series (if this gets printed I am interested!), while nothing spectacular and in certain areas cliché and predictable, it still explores a lot of themes that I personally find fun and interesting. It has a well designed and thought through gameplay, both when travelling through the zones and when battling through any of the very many battles you will encounter.

Visually every character is represented by a fairly rudimentary pixel creation, and space is littered with planets, space stations and battle ships that you visit in a framed style. It suits the game and works well for the gameplay and almost gives the game the feeling of a visual novel.

The world building and character exploration is just deep enough to fit the story and I would've loved to know more or be able to dig deeper. But that would've been another game. It's always a balance between game and story and overall I find Crying Suns has made smart choices. As mentioned however I could see this being further explored in a series of books that I wouldn't mind reading.

If I had to nitpick over anything its that you can't choose to engage in combat yourself, which left me  frustrated a handful of times. When I was tricked out of scrap by a space station I was flying past, I wanted to destroy it. But I just had to accept it and move on. Maybe Ellys Idaho has a stronger moral code than I do, luckily for the people on that space station. When I came across some pirates that chose to bribe me to let them be, I had to accept it (some times you can take the bribe and attack, but I came across an option where I couldn't). This is barely even an issue however.

I played about a third of the game on normal before I decided to enjoy it on easy. Easy is almost too easy, but at least it allowed me to not stress and to have the resources to go out on a limb here and there which in the end I think was a more enjoyable experience. It took me just over 14 hours to complete my first run, and after that you have replay value in trying to beat the game with different battle ships and trying to find out more parts of the main story (or get a different ending, there seemed to be three).

If you enjoy rogue-likes, space battles, sci-fi or just loved FTL I can really recommend checking this game out.

Eye of the Beholder (PC, 1991)

 As gamers we're constantly crushed between the onslaught of new games being released, but also all the games that came before we were old enough to play them or at least enjoy them. I am always trying to balance my gaming of new and old games, to make sure I don't miss out on old classic like Thief, Deus Ex and Heroes of Might and Magic 3. But my quest to sift through the Good Old Games I often come across the ones that didn't age so well. And also the ones that try the old formula but don't quite hit the mark. 

Eye of the Beholder, a game that came out on MS-DOS (remember that thing?) back in 1991 falls somewhere in between. For a dungeon crawler it actually holds up really well and improves on a lot of features and gameplay to similar games like Might & Magic that came out in the mid 80's. But dungeon crawlers of this era still rely on the players immense patience and fortitude to get through, having some cruel design choices. Let's go explore.

You control a group of adventurers, based on basic D&D rules (with all the problems that entails, I'll get back to that). You've been tasked to investigate the sewers beneath a city to find out what is going on down there. As soon as you enter your only way out is blocked and your only option is to work your way further in and further down.

The controls, at least on my version, were with the number pad. This actually worked well since it allowed me to choose between turning and strafing, which would really come in handy when fighting certain enemies. It was also something that on occasion would get me lost, when I accidentally hit turn instead of strafe and suddenly found myself facing the wrong direction. Fortunately the game provides you with a compass, which is quite crucial to keep track off. Some parts of the dungeon will deliberately try to throw you off by turning you around, and some times the only way to spot it before you get lost if by keeping an eye on the compass.

You fight by clicking your weapons/spells. Your front characters can hit (and be hit) in melee range, so it is wise to put your ranged characters in the back row. You only have two spots in the front row however, and this is the first occasion you can smeg yourself over during the character creation screen.

Oh D&D rules. I have complained about them before. And I will probably complain about them many times more. Maybe I should just learn to steer clear of games who implement this system too rigidly? Then again, Eye of the Beholder is actually an example of a game where this system doesn't work too badly. You really have to know which classes are worth rolling in the beginning however, I implore you to throw your pride out the window and look up a walkthrough for at least a bit of guidance on this. If you, for instance, think you want a group of only mages, you are in for a hell ride from the beginning.

Some group compilations are simply the way to go, and when you roll your character stats it's also important to remember that you can't just wing it. Old-school D&D is very harsh and doesn't play kindly to experimenting or deviating. 

Once you've made your best group however, I found Eye of the Beholder didn't suffer so much from one of the worst D&D curses, the combat targeting. Anyone who has played old D&D knows that combat is mostly spent missing whatever you're trying to hit. I don't understand why anyone thought this would be any fun, because it really isn't. In Eye of the Beholder there will still be a lot of missing, but not to the point where it gets frustrating.

Monsters are fortunately not infinite nor random, a certain amount spawn on each level and once you've worked your way through them you are free to explore. Overall I found the difficulty well balanced, and as long as you have a cleric in your group you can heal up between fights. Some enemies have cruel features however which make them a pain to deal with. Spiders have a high chance of poisoning you (unless you were smart enough to roll a dwarf with high constitution!) and I had no way to remove it. You can just watch your characters slowly die when this happens (there is also no way to resurrect characters to my knowledge). If you're lucky you've found some Cure Poison potions at this point. You only other option is to reload the game. You can save whenever so I just made it a habit to save after every combat or every 15 minutes or so.

I called EotB a dungeon crawler, but it really is more of a maze crawler. The game doesn't provide you with any map or mapping system, instead you need to rely on good old pen and paper, or if you're lucky you've got the Clue Book. It is provided with the GoG version of the game. I love the Clue Book, it is absolutely amazing. And absolutely necessary if you don't want to go insane down in those sewers. They twist and turn and like I mentioned even actively try to confuse you. The Clue Book provides maps, with detailed information on the whereabout of enemies and items and I don't care if it's considered cheating - as a working mom I simply don't have the time nor the mind power to work these things out on my own.

I can see the fun in trying to do it the old pen and paper way, it plays a bit like an escape room with added monsters. The dungeon is full of buttons to press, levers to pull, messages on walls and secret walls to walk through. Everything just takes so much time. I wish I had that time, I really do. These game designs reflect a zeitgeist that is gone, those times when that one game was the only new one you had, for months. Eye of the Beholder represents one of the better products of its time in this aspect.

After having struggled through four levels, the first two without guide and the subsequent two with one, I decided that my nerves couldn't handle more. And if I am going to play the game entirely by guide I might as well watch a let's play, right? Maybe I do mind cheating after all.

Eye of the Beholder deserves better than me. It is not a bad game, or at least it wasn't, but time has outrun it. There is not much to complain about, it's got atmosphere and fun gameplay. But also endless running down corridors feeling lost and the stress of being chased by a spider knowing its bite will be the death of you. 

So four levels down I decided it was the enough for me. Looking in the Clue Book I knew that was about a third of the game, but also that much worse (and fun) was waiting for me further down. I will regret not finishing Eye of the Beholder, or maybe I regret not being able to play it back when it was released. I am sure it would've been a great experience.

EXIT: The Game Kids - Jungle of Riddles - Review

The EXIT: The Game series are board games centered around the currently very popular "Escape Room" genre. I haven't tried Escaping any rooms anywhere (unless The Room counts) so when my brother presented me with one of the EXIT games I was intrigued to see how they worked. As this is not a review of the adult version of the series I will just shortly say that the premise is that the players work together to try to solve the puzzles in the game. The design is often clever and some time even fiendish - I don't want to spoil anything by giving too many examples, so just suffice to say you will probably be surprised when you play your first EXIT game.

EXIT: The Game for Kids is just what the name implies, an attempt at translating the experience for the younger audience. 

Now it is worth mentioning that the adult game is playable with younger kids, I had my 6 yo and 10 yo taking part when I tried it and they absolutely loved it. And while most of the puzzles are too hard for them to solve (they're almost too hard for an adult of average intelligence to solve), the team effort and experience is not lost on them. The fact that my kids enjoyed the adult version so much was a big reason I wanted to check out the kids version. The adult version is an intense, one-time (per game) experience but the Kids version promises replayability.

EXIT Kids is similar to the adult version in that the players must co-operate in solving puzzles. The solutions are fed into a code wheel that will allow the players to move on to the next task or in this case, finish the game. In EXIT Kids the game isn't linear, as one solution isn't necessary to try to solve another puzzle. All puzzles are available to be solved from the get go.

The players get six different puzzle cards to try to solve, in the Jungle of Riddles the theme is animals. The replayability comes from the puzzles coming in six different variants, so each new game you shuffle the cards and get a new set of challenges. I found that the variety of puzzles was quite inventive and clever, and ranged from very easy to requiring some time to think for my kids (as mentioned, 6 and 10 yo). You can't play this game too many times in a row, as you will remember the solutions, but if you play it every now and then the replayability is definitely there. A big plus to the game is that once you've explained what the goal of each puzzle is, the game is simple enough to set up that kids can actually play it without an adult participating. 

Always bring HP Sauce to my board gaming.

The game is recommended from age 5+ and I find that appropriate. Both in the sense that the game components are somewhat thin and fragile and will easily break in a rough 3 yo hands. But also in the level of challenge. My 6 yo found some of the puzzles a bit tricky, but my 10 yo was probably right at the upper age that would still find this game fun to play, the puzzles were easy for him to solve. This means that EXIT Kids feels like it has an upper age limit, and as an adult you'd do best to just watch your kids have fun.

The game only takes about 15 minutes to complete and I guess it speak to the games strengths that my kids immediately wanted to play it another time. I agree with the game recommendation of 1-4 players. There are "only" six different puzzles to solve - it's hard to have 4 kids co-operating around the same material, and it is hard to have kids sit around and wait while other kids solve puzzles. You can have them solve different puzzles simultaneously but there is only one code-wheel to share.

Overall EXIT Kids has the benefit of being simple enough in execution that it is almost like a toy, and something my kids enjoyed bringing out and play around with even on their own (similar to the Mouse Trap game, if you remember that, or a book of Where's Waldo?) The drawback is that the design doesn't really allow for adult participation, besides cheering from the sidelines. This is truly a game made only for kids.