Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery (PC) - Review

Swophisticated or Swo-Swo

It's unclear how the EP relates to the rest of the game.

One of the things I like best about indie-games is the feeling I get that a lot of them weren't made solely for the purpose of making money. Instead, I can almost believe that some were made because the creator believed in the story or experience it would give. I am sure they also hope that their game will make money, but I have so much respect for the integrity of standing behind your idea and not compromising details because you think they would work better for the mass market. I have nothing against money-grabbing triple-A titles as such, you either buy them or you don't, but I am glad there is a great variety nowadays - from the really peculiar to the extremely standard.

But in all of this I still have one rule - the game has to be fun (ok, I have some exceptions to this rule). Because if your game is mostly tedious to get through, it will probably affect the impact the story or experience has on me as well, and unlikely to the better.

And then we have a game like Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP. It's definitely interesting. It's cool. It's unique. It has great music and a very special art style. But is it fun though?

S:S&S is one of those games that are really more of an art project than just a game, and as such whether you're going to enjoy it or not probably comes down to how much patience you have for those kind of things. Just about everything about this game will either rub you the right way or the wrong way. Just look at the title, "sworcery". Is that a good idea, or a dumb one? EP, as in "extended play" as in a vinyl record? Cool? Or... lame? The game allows you to tweet your progress at pretty much every turn. Hip? Or annoying? This game managed to simultaneously make me think the creators knew exactly what they were doing and just tried to cram every idea they had in there.

There are people here, but they can be hard to find.

Released in 2011 for Iphone and Ipad, Wikipedia calls S:S&S an adventure game, but I thought of it more of a puzzle game. There is a story to follow, but it honestly makes no sense and my lasting feeling was rather of bumbling around trying to find the next place to interact with and to solve whatever I needed to solve there. Accompanying you is some pretty sweet music and a roster of odd characters. Sometimes something evil chases you. Something about moon phases. You can pick up mushrooms and eat them. I couldn't even try to explain what the game is really about more than that, because I can't say I understood more than that. And maybe that is just as well, as I suspect half the fun of this game is to discover it for yourself.

I first heard of S:S&S on a podcast (I can't remember which one unfortunately) and again an enthusiastic description won me over. But I was sceptical almost from the start. And I've played some odd games. The art style gets a lot of praise, but to me it was just a gloomy pixel style and really nothing special. The gameplay is probably the weakest part, but I wouldn't go all the way to saying it is bad. Walking around, talking to cryptic people with their cryptic and barely helpful dialogue, trying to decipher the world and what I am supposed to do, it was half-interesting at some times. It didn't help that the world feels pretty constricted. There aren't many things or screens to discover. For a game trying so hard to be deep it really lacked a lot of depth.

Who knows what people are trying to tell you.

The music has been praised as well, and it is very good. I even wish there would be more of it but the creators seem to be wanting to use it sparingly. I'm ok with that though because it makes it more impactful when you do get to hear it, unfortunately it has the drawback of adding to the somewhat empty feeling of the rest of the game. Jim Guthrie's soundtrack does immensely for adding atmosphere to the game however, I would say this is where the game nails whatever it is that it's trying to achieve and tell you (I don't know what it is, but it must be that). Either way you end up thinking about this game you should really give the game OST a listen.

As this game wants you to connect with social media, I thought it only suitable to seek out some other thoughts on this and went to check out some Youtube comments (always the best source of human greatness, slash end sarcasm). I was actually surprised to see how many people were saying a lot of the same things I was thinking regarding this game.

I couldn't finish this game. I got about half-way through before I got stuck and there was something about moon-phases and more cryptic information and I leant back in my chair and had to think about whether I thought continuing was worth my time. Did I really want to know what was going to happen next? Not really. Instead, I decided to enjoy the soundtrack on Youtube and move on in my game library.

In the end I can't bring myself to tell people not to play this game though. It's a divider, and it probably has to be experienced for you to really know if you think it goes down as an extremely memorable and eye-opening experience or not. It's a bit like the movie Donnie Darko that way. It's either cool-weird or just silly-weird. Neither of those options have to be good nor bad, it probably mostly comes down to your mood the day you decide to play this, because while a lot of the Youtube comments were like the ones above, there were plenty like this one as well.

The Witcher 2 - Thoughts and Review

There are most definitely spoilers ahead.

I finished The Witcher 2 the other day and I was shocked. I didn't expect it to end there, not like that! Ok, I had expected it to end with a showdown between Geralt and Letho but as the cutscene before the fight was playing out I even turned to my bf and said "well, I really thought Letho would be the final boss of the game but since I'm only half-way I guess I was wrong". The fact that you can choose to spare him further threw me off. Turns out I was wrong, the encounter with Letho is indeed the end of the game (unless it does a Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and only pretends to be done when it's actually at the half-way mark?). But it left me feeling like I hadn't actually accomplished anything yet, like all the plot threads were still hanging in the air waiting for me to get to their end. The Witcher 2 felt more like a prequel than a stand-alone game and I can only hope The Witcher 3 will give me the closure I so badly need now.

Otherwise The Witcher 2 improved on the first game in the series in many ways but also changed a couple of things that did grate on me quite a bit. So they made it so that you could craft potions anywhere and not just by a campfire as in The Witcher, also you didn't need to meditate to remove the toxic effect like in the first game. Finding herbs for said potions was also easier, although I didn't find any of the above a big issue in the first game. But a couple of Quality of Life changes worthy of a sequel, that's great. But who the heck decided that Geralt would only be able to scoff potions out of combat? This must be one of the most annoying gameplay decisions I've encountered in a post-2000 game since ever.

While you can't meditate everywhere, Geralt is surprisingly ok with sitting down in some weird stuff.

I can imagine the idea was probably to add a bit of challenge and maybe tactical thinking, and in reality potions weren't super-necessary in normal mode (except for the healing one) - but in practicality this turned out one of two ways; you're stingy and don't want to waste potions when you're just running around gathering herbs and not doing anything special... BAM! Surprise attack by five endregas that you weren't expecting and you're dead. Reload and now you know they're coming so you can prepare, yay! Or you're stingy with your time and don't like the trial and error attitude of the game because it's not 1989 anymore and decide to run around with the most essential potions active pretty much all the time. Add to the problem that potions only last around 10 minutes (you can add a couple of precious minutes with talents) and you spend a lot of time preparing for fights you're never going to have. Or dying in fights you never thought you were going to have. Either way, as you may understand from my rant, bad design choice.

Surprise mothafakka!

They also overhauled combat quite a lot, and since I didn't have any problem with it the first time around this took me some time both to get used to and to accept. I died a lot in the beginning before I realized I could take a page from Dark Souls and run in-stab-stab-dodge-stab-dodge-stun-stab-etc. Basically, don't get greedy and think you can go in like it's some hack-and-slash. It also feels like you fight a lot less types of enemies in this game compared to the first. The first introduced you to a lovely plethora of monsters, but here I found myself mostly fighting Rotfiends and Harpies (and of course, humanoids). Just as in the first game though, only two of the signs are useful - fire and stun. I did use the shield one for some fights so I guess that one is alright but I literally never touched the hex and trap sign. I didn't use traps at all in fact. Maybe they're more needed on the higher difficulties.

Gone are stances, which I actually missed, but at least they kept the fact that you need to use different swords for different enemies. I guess that one was too rooted in lore to remove entirely. Just as with The Witcher however, once you had gotten the hang of the combat I rarely found the game difficult. There was a boss guarding a chest that gave me a headache, and an ambush by a couple of dwarves and elves, other than that I found the game to be well balanced difficulty-wise.

Graphically it's a massive improvement to the first game, but it's an unfair comparison because pretty much anything would've been an improvement. While the Witcher 2 still reuses some character models it comes nowhere near the level of the first game, and I played the enhanced edition for that so apparently it's even worse in its original make up. That being said though, I somehow still found the first game to be more immersive and inviting than the sequel. There was something about the sequel and the places I visited (I only did one of supposedly two different ways of playing it through) that didn't make them seem as open and "real" as they were in the first game. This probably added to the feeling of the game ending at the half-way point, I was always expecting to get to that one big area to run around in but was mostly cramped up in cities.

It aint pretty.

While the story in The Witcher 2 takes a turn for the very political and talkative, I overall enjoyed it more than I thought I would. Personally, yet again, I preferred the first game where Geralt was more of a free spirit and less entangled in the machinations of kings and sorceresses (or rather, the way that game made you believe you were less entangled). The Witcher 2 puts you smack in the middle, for better or worse, and I think I would've enjoyed it more for Geralt to be the joker, out-of-nowhere-player that he was in the first game. I also felt that this game had a lot less of the extremely well-designed choices that the first game had, where I genuinely wracked my brain about which way to go and often just had to choose what felt like the lesser evil. This game gave me a couple of choices but they rarely felt anywhere near as difficult. Do I save Triss or Philippa? Well considering Triss is my long-time friend (and lover) and Philippa just betrayed me...

I thought we were friends!

Though I enjoyed most of the characters, I also felt they got less build-up than in the first game. Zoltan Chivay makes a return but the game assumes you know everything about him from the first game (which you probably do, but still) because this game adds practically nothing to his character. Same thing with Triss, who spends most of the game being kidnapped anyway. Gone are the way side-characters got a lot more love like in the first game, like Shani, Thaler, Raymond and Vincent to name a few. We get an option to befriend either Iorveth or Roche. I chose Iorveth to make up for my sins of siding with Siegfried in the first game (while I really liked Siegfried, I didn't like the way they killed a lot of non-humans). Iorveth is one of the few characters that is well realized, even the main antagonist Letho feels too anonymous when you finally fight him in the end.

Overall I really liked The Witcher 2, although it might sound like I was just annoyed it wasn't as good as the first one. While I do think the first one was more fun, there were a couple of things the second did that I felt moved the series forward rather than making it feel like a step backwards. Most importantly, it made Geralt feel more personal and real and not just like a really cool game protagonist but like a really cool person that I want to know more about and experience more of. He has a lot of the sassy, gritty persona showing through already in the first game but through all the political intrigues and dialogues of The Witcher 2, you get an even better idea of what kind of person he is and in the end it is definitely someone I'm happy I spent all that time with. Also it is pretty telling when I think a game is too short, rather than thinking it's a blessing it finally ended. If you enjoyed the first game I would still definitely recommend this, with the caveat that you shouldn't expect them to be much alike.

Man Up or Manual - Comparing Diablo-clones

As I've been on a streak of playing Diablo-clones, purely coincidentally as I often install games on random, I've also come to think of the subtle differences that make or break a game. What makes a good game? It's a question almost as difficult to answer as the big one about the meaning of life, especially since it often comes down to subjective ideas of fun. It just really popped into my head when playing these Diablo-clones specifically because they're somehow so comparable. Often the core mechanics are pretty much the same and the differences are too subtle to explain in a good way.

I never played Diablo or Diablo 2 much when they were released, but once I got around to it I loved them. I never beat Diablo, but went through Diablo 2 a couple of times. I was quite thrilled when Diablo 3 was announced but got bored with it after some months, I gave it another chance a while after but never could get into it. I've filed it under the list of "unsuccessful Diablo-clones" (although technically not a Diablo-clone), along with a whole bunch of others. Din's Curse (2010), Torchlight (2009) and FATE: The Cursed King (2011) joined that list pretty quickly. Eventhough I had fun with all of those games initially, since I am quite a fan of the core mechanic, I ended up losing interest fairly quickly. I even bought Torchlight 2, having heard it was better than the first one, over two years ago. I still haven't played it.

FATE is pretty much Torchlight - amazon.com

Then I started playing Darkstone (released 1999) and something changed. The interesting thing was that all of the abovementioned boring games were simple to get the hang of. They either had tutorials that explained what you needed to know, or game mechanics easy enough to figure out on the run. But they lacked something that made it fun to stick around in the world. To me, Din's Curse, FATE and Torchlight all suffered from the same feeling of meaninglessness, the way all that killing never felt like it was leading anywhere or at least nowhere I wanted to go. Diablo 3 had the same problem of repetitiveness and sense that I was bashing my head against a wall even when I was making progress. But I had so much trouble figuring out how it differed from Diablo 2. What made the one fun and the other one not?

Torchlight - gamespot.com

Darkstone did things differently than the other games. It has a tutorial, if you can call it that - a dude tells you where the vendors are and you get to test some different weapons and that's it. Quests are given to you by random people walking up and telling you "good luck finding the Holy Shield! You're going to need it!". I am paraphrasing, but that is literally all the information you get. Not a word about where the item is, which seems like pretty essential information. It took me 2 hours to figure out how to make my companion use spells. Or how to lock spells into my spellbar. Or what the different skills you can buy actually do. All thanks to me digging up the actual manual of the game. Apparently you have to hold in shift while clicking a spell to make it stick to your spellbar. Apparently you have to tell your companion how much mana they can use by marking their mana bar before they start using skills. Apparently the Language skill is completely useless in single player.

Needless to say I was frustrated as hell the first couple of hours of playing, which wasn't the case with the other Diablo-clones. Diablo was released several years before this game so I was desperately trying to find the key that would show me all the loot at my feet, but alas. You have to use your eyes and try to see that tiny ass pixelated ring somewhere among all the cracked urn pieces. Trying to open a chest I often end up circling it because targeting is wonky as hell. There is no pet to conveniently run off and vendor your things. Eventhough you're a team your characters control as two different people, which means if you want to sell or buy stuff from the vendor you have to do it individually. Swapping between characters is also unintuitive (especially since there is no key for it) so I've already died a couple of times from freaking out when in the wrong character, using the wrong skills. But somehow, rather than making me angry, it made me all the happier when I got it right.

Closer to the style of Diablo - megagames.com

But it was fun. I kept trying, I kept playing - eventhough all the game mechanics told me I should've given up long ago. I kept thinking "what the hell is wrong with this game" but I didn't close it down. When I finally ended up reading the manual to be able to actually do simple stuff, I even got a bit sentimental. I can't explain it. I don't think it's a bad thing at all that games nowadays come with tooltips and explain basic game mechanics from the start. There are even old games that do this without it feeling like the game is holding your hand, like Geneforge or Planescape: Torment. And I don't think it's the handholding alone that makes a game more or less fun, Darkstone also has a more interesting world and manages to make dungeon crawling feel like an adventure and not a chore, just like the original Diablo did. I passed a lake and a fairy in it told me to "blow the reeds from the smallest to the biggest". "What reeds?" I thought. There were no reeds anywhere and she didn't tell me where to find them or why (to play the song of snakes, whatever that was good for). After some clicking around I decided to just leave it. Venturing into the next dungeon, I happen to find some reeds in various locations. Now I am curious.

Worst graphics, best game? - gamersinfinite.com

There was just something about the ruthlessness of getting thrown in at the deep end, the feeling of the game developers thinking "they'll get this, they're not stupid" (although clearly I was) that felt refreshing. If done right, and that's obviously easier said than done, saying "we don't need to tell you, you'll figure it out" really adds to the sense of achievement. You need a lot of faith in your game to think people will stick around for it. A lot of upcoming games will add this as an optional feature (like the new Hitman, and I believe the new Thief had this as well) where you can choose to get more or less information. I think that is a brilliant idea. If the popularity of Dark Souls is anything to go by, people enjoy good trial & error. And for the rest of us, there is always the manual.