Category Archives: Impressions
Mistlands Complete
Just wanted to make a quick note here that I have completed the Mistlands in Valheim.
You know, for all the people complaining about the Mistlands, I found it surprisingly… fine.
As the name suggests, the entire region in shrouded in fog all the time. Your original access to the biome is soft-gated by your ability to craft an accessory that clears a 10m bubble around yourself to let you see where you’re going. After felling the first Yggdrasill sapling, you unlock a recipe for creating a sort of wisp-based standing torch that clears out a 20m bubble wherever it is dropped. Maybe this torch was buffed for the 1.0 release or something, but its existence – and my extensive experience playing Minecraft – meant the mists were simply a matter of spamming the torches everywhere. So, I did. And it was fine.
In fact, I would say it is more than fine: the Mistlands has been fantastic. It might even be my favorite biome thus far. You have obviously been able to see the giant roots of Yggdrarsill in the sky since Day 1 in the Meadows; in the Mistlands though, you can tap its very roots. You scavenge the petrified bones of ancient giants, cracking open their skulls to mine their Soft Tissue (i.e. brains) so you can feed it into a woodchipper-like machine to distill its essence to make magic gear. Their enormous helms and swords can be broken down for Copper and Iron too. The Gjall legit evoked a primal, Silent Hill-level of fear with its fog horn warning cry in the distance.
Look at those screenshots.
Anyway, I will say that the Queen fight was some outrageous bullshit. I have the death penalty set to the lowest level, which means I get to keep any equipped gear. Even then, it took like twelve deaths across five in-game days to make any meaningful progress. I can’t even imagine running around naked, chased by 30 bugs, trying to retrieve your corpse on the 3rd floor or whatever. Several times I got pushed into a corner with the spit attack, which then spawns a bunch of grubs, which prevented me from leaving said corner. Then I died. It is possible I should have been using the 2H hammer or whatever, but I literally had zero skill in the weapon, so I stuck with magic and 1H hammer + shield.
Anyway, I eventually won. And now onwards to the Ashlands.
Valheim 1.0 – It’s All Coming Back
In another distraction from Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, I started back up the new Valheim 1.0.
Although I had previously played for apparently 46.7 hours, it had been such a long time since then that I had forgotten everything there was about Valheim. Well, almost everything. I remembered that you can’t build a camp fire inside of your hut, but that was about it. Seriously, it was Day 3 before I built up the courage to kill a boar, as I had imagined them being some tough enemy for which I would need to defeat with a bow. As it turns out, they die in almost one hit, and drop the material you needed to craft a bow. I must have been thinking about all those blog posts about Windrose…
After defeating the first boss and heading into the Black Forest, antler-pickaxe in hand, I started to feel the familiar shape of outrageous bullshit. I was able to find Tin ore along the coastlines fairly quickly. Copper took a lot longer, as I had forgotten what it looked like (mossy boulder identical to other mossy boulders). Neither of the resources would do me any good though, without the red cubes inside the Burial Mounds. Which are in the Black Forest. Just not in any of your Black Forests.
I already linked them, but in my prior Valheim experience, I had to “explore” and essentially discard five Swamps and seven Mountains before finding those biome-specific resources. So, I guess hitting up seven different Black Forests in 1.0 is still par for the course. Fantastic. I suppose I should count myself lucky that any Burial Mounds spawned on my starting island at all; I have heard tale of people having to sail to new lands on the slow, beginning raft just to smelt ore.
It’s just ridiculously frustrating in what feels like a genuinely unique way. If I’m playing Terraria or Minecraft or ARK or whatever else, I’m not expecting Copper Nodes in the very first rock I crack open, or even the first place I look. In that respect, searching forever and then finding literally five Burial Mounds within 100 feet of each other is not a completely uncommon genre staple. The key difference with Valheim then is… well, the outrageous slog of it all. Playing Terraria is fun and engaging. Running/walking through environments, avoiding all combat because it’s pointless, is not.
And actually, I’m finding combat almost entirely unavoidable. Things might be different now that I have decked myself out in troll-skin armor (raises Sneakiness), but smaller mobs in Valheim don’t ever appear to leash or otherwise de-aggro. Found that out the hard way, several times, while spending in-game days looking for Burial Mounds. Nope, you need to stop what you are doing and defeat every trash mob you encounter and throw away its pointless loot, lest you get caught on some logs or stumble into a spawning nest.
Again, I’m not necessarily asking for a chicken in every pot. It would probably be a very short game if you found the dungeon at the entrance of the every new biome you walked into. But I am not exactly sure that the way Valheim handles exploration overall is especially fun. Specifically, the overland part. Sailing is it’s own thing, and I can see the fun in provisioning for adventure, setting up return portals, the tension between moving your entire base versus setting up outposts, etc. Running around by foot is just running around. That and the godawful trash mobs, which will only grow more annoying, I know.
We’ll see how it goes. This initial (re-)experience was very bad, but now that I have a Smelter and am (slowly) cranking out Bronze ingots? I having some… if not fun, at least some satisfaction. Copper/Tin/Bronze opened up so many recipes that I am slowly planning out my upgrades, testing new weapons, and spending some time improving my Viking crib. Which you wouldn’t necessarily notice just looking at it, but that’s because I’m giving it the old college try before following a base build video.
I recall the Swamp being a relatively miserable experience, and that’s what I have to look forward to after defeating the boss of the Black Forest. Then comes Mountains, which I believe was fine. Then… the Plains? Mosquitoland? Never actually quested in there after finishing the Mountains, so that will be all new. Assuming I make it. Which I probably will. Maybe.
Impressions: Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2
I have been playing Kingdom Come: Potion Delivery, er, Deliverance 2 (KCD2) pretty solidly since last weekend. In fact, Steam is showing 31 hours, so… basically like another full-time job. A job in which I almost exclusively spend time in a dimly-lit alchemical shack, destabilizing the Bohemian economy one potion at a time.
Nah, but seriously, my Alchemy is level 28 (of 30) and I’m not even out of the first Dragon Age: Inquisition-esque Hinterlands area. It’s a problem.
If you have never played the series, Kingdom Come: Deliverance is basically a medieval immersive sim. You control Henry, the peasant son of a village blacksmith, who is thrust into the middle of a war and political intrigue. In the first game, Henry had almost zero fighting capability, social graces, or ability to read. In this sequel, Henry has a more competent baseline, but circumstances in the tutorial area have reset Henry to almost-peasant. You can still read and are still associated with a lord, but the game proper leaves you practically naked in the middle of a village that isn’t too fond of your shenanigans.
Six years ago, I was not particularly enamored with the original game being so gleefully obtuse. Now? I’m kinda for it. Well, to a point. Combat is still largely nonsensical, presenting itself with four different attack zones and combo abilities (left-right-left, up-left-right, etc) nevertheless devolving into a one-click unbeatable counterstrike. I’ve heard that maybe the counterstrike can be counterstruck later on, in which case you presumably have to counterstrike that? We’ll see. I am also getting weary about how bandits are already starting to show up with half-plate gear while the story quests have me facing wolves. This probably has something to do with how many levels I’m gaining while putzing around.
In spite of that, I am enjoying myself thus far. One of the things I loved most about The Witcher 3 was how much certain backwater villages felt truly backwater, with the mud and muck everywhere. KCD2 truly takes those same emotions and dials them all the way up. The roads between villages meander over hills and streams, narrowing down to almost overgrown game trails. There were a couple of times I felt nervous riding a horse down a switchback path, despite intellectually knowing the game did not include a loose gravel and/or horse-breaking-its-leg mechanics. Puttering around in the small villages for a while and then rounding the bend, seeing a proper castle looming on the tallest hill in the distance? In these moments, I feel like a peasant. Or thereabouts.
We’ll have to see whether my time in KCD2 unravels as it did with the first game. It feels like Skyrim in that you have a lot of freedom to explore the map, talk to people, and do a lot of miscellaneous, unrelated things. Unlike Skyrim though, KCD2 (and the original) has a lot of very linear main quest plot between you and the credits. It’s very possible to explore yourself into full suits of the very best armor in the game, leaving you with several dozen hours of story quests to slog through with now-obsolete rewards. That’s how I got to 51 hours in the first game, feeling a bit done, and then finding out I was only halfway through the main quest.
For now though, I’m doing whatever I want. Speaking of which, I just unlocked proper poisons, which likely means I’ll be able to effortlessly defeat every enemy in the game if only I spend another couple of days in the alchemical shack. I could also… not do that. But it’s there in the game, so… ¯\(ツ)/¯.
7 Days to Die – Undead Legacy
Undead Legacy is a complete overhaul mod for 7 Days to Die (7DTD) that got a massive update after about four years of radio silence. Much like with Darkness Falls or Rebirth, the goal of overhaul mods is to take the very solid (zombie) bones from the base game and actually do something worthwhile with them. In the case of Undead Legacy though… well, I’m not exactly certain what is worthwhile here.
If you have never heard of it, Undead Legacy’s schtick is greatly slowing down the rate of progression within the game. That’s… basically it. This is achieved in a number of ways, including the introduction of a lot of intermediate crafting steps and additional item pieces and so on. For example, it took me six in-game days before I was able to craft a wooden cube. This does add a layer of immersion, as you can’t immediately go from punching trees to scaling the sides of buildings with wood frames you hand-crafted out of raw wood in your backpack like in vanilla. Doors also needing hinges to craft, etc.
The problem is that this feeds into the overcorrection The Fun Pimps have been taking for years.
Once upon a time, 7 Days to Die is/was a survival crafting game. At some point though, the devs decided they wanted the game to be more of a looter shooter. This is why almost 100% of the Points of Interest (POIs) are no longer just buildings or houses, but micro-dungeons with defined paths and invisible triggers that spawn in zombies. In the past, you could be almost entirely self-sufficient in the forest somewhere, digging for Iron ore and building a castle out of cobblestones. Today, you have to find enough magazines from active looting to unlock any technology at all. It is technically possible to find a balance in the craft vs loot debate, but it is a fine line to walk.
Unfortunately, Undead Legacy’s principle design of “slowing progression” specifically pushes it even more into looter shooter territory. Making crafting the most basic wooden house a painful grind simply means you are encouraged to take over an existing POI instead. Is crafting anything beyond a Primitive Bow too difficult? Don’t worry, just randomly loot an AK-47 in any of the several dozen POIs you are raiding. Being able to repair these weapons may be a challenge, but you almost don’t care, because by spending 100% of your time looting, the crafting progression will almost passively take care of itself.
Was this the intention? Did the overhaul’s author really just have it out for players being able to turn cars into machetes instead of praying for RNG loot gods to smile upon them instead? There is indeed less cheese in the game, such as nerd-poling and throwing hatches in doorways to confuse the zombie AI. On the other hand, there is still plenty of cheese, like being able to pick up most every object, including cardboard boxes… that you can nerd-pole with instead.
Anyway, there are other changes Undead Legacy brings, but they are largely irrelevant. Level-ups let you select nodes in a Path of Exile-esque skill bush, but almost all of them are extremely boring +5% to whatever. “Learn by Doing is back!” If by “learn” you mean eventually unlocking +5% to whatever by using Polearms a bunch. Research looks like a tech tree now, but it just hides the fact that instead of reading magazines, you scrap them for Research Points that you spend – along with a bunch of other resources! – to individually unlock recipes.
Undead Legacy just feels like a giant drag. Which, I guess is what the author was going for?
Give it a whirl if you want, but this overhaul is a 0/10 for me. Play Darkness Falls or Rebirth instead.
Impressions: Palworld, 1.0
It’s been about 2.5 years since I last touched Palworld. With its 1.0 release, it felt finally time to go back.
TL;DR: I haven’t booted up Hearthstone or Guild Wars 2 a single time since, not even for weekly quests.
I am not going to spend a lot of time talking about changes, as I only played around eight hours back in like… v0.12 or whatever. What I can confirm, broadly speaking, is that the game pretty much plays like it did 2.5 years ago, minus the bugs. All of these impressions are coming from around ~30 hours of game time on default, Normal settings.
The gameplay loop is the same with ARK: explore a defined map, grind resources, capture creatures, repeat. The big difference is that Pals are much more inherently useful in all aspects of the game. You can summon Pals to help you fight/tame other Pals. You can summon Pals and then ride on them over land, sea, and/or air. You can summon Pals and utilize them as living flamethrowers, grenade launchers, miniguns, or even as swords. Crucially, you can deploy Pals in your base to farm resources, craft ammo, plant/harvest crops, and otherwise keep you company. And because Pals can be useful for all of these different scenarios, you are encouraged to capture all of them in the off-chance they are better at a given task than what you have, rather than just the completionist “gotta catch them all” achievement.
The actual act of playing the game has been an interesting experience for me. Palworld very much feels like a AA game… which it is, with MSRP of $30. The title screen, the menus, some of the textures all kinda scream “stock Unreal assets.” More than that though, some red flags immediately raised to me when I discovered that the first resource after Wood was just “Ore.” Not Copper Ore, not Iron Ore, just… Ore. In the past I have railed on designers having excessively prescriptive design, e.g. Copper Sword, Iron Sword, Silver Sword, etc. Palworld does have other tiers of items, like Refined Ore and others, but having “Ore” the baseline was indicative of an overall balance towards volume than rarity. Which is indeed how it has played out thus far.
What I do appreciate (to a degree) is how many different activities are available in the game. There are faction bases that you can attack in the open world, which gives you some loot. There are instanced dungeons, which contain some Pals and resources that only spawn inside. There are open-world “bosses” that are effectively super-charged Pals. Base raids are a thing, unless you either pay the messenger for them to go away or turn them off in the menu. There is also Fishing, which can net you some nice rewards and high-level Pals. Respawning treasure chests are strewn about in the land. In short, there are plenty of distractions when exploring, such that you may end up not actually accomplishing the thing you set out to do, unless you are able to ignore everything else.
In short, Palworld is great! For now. I can imagine a scenario in which some of these activities get old after a while, in which case the loop collapses. I also find it difficult to imagine replaying the game later, since the map isn’t procedurally generated. I believe there is an option to randomize the Pal locations, but I’m not certain how much extra juice that will provide. Best-case scenario would be for there to be ongoing support, ARK-style, with perhaps new maps eventually, whether created by Pocket Pair themselves or dedicated modders.
Then again, there is something to be said for having an experience that is just over when you’re done.
Out of Breath (of the Wild)
I may have mentioned in passing that I am playing through Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (BotW). This was originally going to be supervised watching of Little Man playing, but the mechanics proved too punishing for him, and so he wants to watch me play. So I have been, for the last several weeks. I believe we are roughly halfway through the game, but it is hard to tell.
Broadly speaking, I don’t find BotW very fun at all. In fact, it feels like it’s designed to be un-fun.
I’m certainly not treading any new ground here, but for posterity, the biggest offender for un-fun is weapon durability. In BotW, every single weapon you pick up in the game (sans one) will eventually shatter. In some cases, it makes sense, like your tree branch or skeleton arm breaking or whatever. Other times, you have Royal weaponry that has presumably survived countless battles over dozens of years… and it’s gone after fighting three goblins. “Realism!” I guess? No blacksmiths anywhere, but we have ancient robot technology and teleportation and food that makes you immune to lightning.
I can see the design goal. It’s exciting starting out practically naked and eventually becoming a force of nature by scrappy adventuring. Defeating a powerful foe and claiming it’s deadly weapon for yourself feels good! There’s also no reasonable way to introduce more than a dozen different weapons into a Zelda title without having a mechanism to enforce you not just using the strongest one all the time.
That said, it just feels awful at every stage in the game and warps player behavior. I think this is the first game I have played where the stronger you get, the more you are actively punished for engaging in combat. In the early game, you use whatever you can get to just survive. Later on, defeating some strong enemies give you powerful weapons… which you then have to stow away while you flee from every low-level enemy encounter, lest you waste precious durability on trash. At some point, no combat is worth engaging in. And when you do engage in extended combat sequences, you get the fun experience of pausing combat multiple times as you toggle through menus, debating which weak-ass weapon you are OK with breaking just to be rewarded with vendor trash, at best.
And oh god, the menus. Defeated enemies don’t drop hearts; you must consume food to regain life, or otherwise get back to civilization. There are dozens of different ingredients, all of which you have to – painfully slowly – experiment with to determine if the resulting meal is worth your time. 99% of the time, it was not. In fact, the vast majority of the food is functionally useless considering it might restore 8 hearts, despite you only have like 5 at the time. The only ingredients worth a goddamn are ones marked “Hearty X,” which when cooked (at a lit cookpot), result in a full refresh of all hearts plus some extra temporary hearts. So, you cook them, 1 at a time, because while you can technically combine up to five ingredients to stack the temp HP, it is much more functional to refresh all hearts plus get 4 temp ones X times than one refresh with 20 temp hearts once.
Meanwhile, your adventuring is entirely spent scouring the countryside looking for hidden shrines. Completing one shrine gets you one Spirit Orb. Turning four Spirit Orbs in lets you get one extra heart container, or one-quarter of an extra stamina meter. Where I’m at right now, I believe I have eight total hearts (started with 3) and a full second stamina meter, so… 28 shrines completed? I’m supposed to get to 13 hearts for reasons, so that’s another 12-20ish shrines depending on a few factors. Sigh.
It’s dumb, guys. When there’s actual quests going on, things are decent, but I was once awarded an heirloom weapon of a dead friend and even Little Man said “No, we can’t use it, because it’ll break!” Was that the vision? The developer intention? “Nothing lasts forever, kid. Get used to it.”
You know, maybe there was a zeitgeist I missed when Breath of the Wild first came out. Being able to climb literally everything was undoubtedly novel at the time. My first experience with that came from Craftopia, which unabashedly stole it and several other things from BotW, and so did every single open-world gacha game that came out since then, so experiencing it here in 2026 was no big deal. I’ve also heard all the stories about peoples’ minds being blown when they realized the first plateau was just the tutorial and how big the world was. Yeah, okay. I got that back in 2008 with Fallout 3, but I guess some players weren’t even born yet. Something has to be someone’s first.
But, seriously, I feel like I’m taking crazy pills or something. BotW is a big, beautiful… empty, sterile world that drains you of resources for interacting with it. In Fallout, I relish every opportunity to scour empty buildings of Aluminum cans or rolls of duct tape. Ghouls or Raiders appear? Fantastic! More loot, more XP, more character progression. Even if a particular ruin is a bust for any of those things, there are often environmental vignettes that can be poignant.
That doesn’t exist in BotW. There is zero reason to ever clear a goblin camp. The only reason to explore is to find either another Shrine (puzzle) or a Korak Seed (puzzle), to incrementally gain more HP/Stamina or more items slots, respectively. Every heart of damage you take or damage you deal is paid with busywork later. Sloooooooowly cooking up food, collecting up arsenals of garbage weapons, or enduring loading screens teleporting around to “farming spots” where you can more easily gather the best versions of either. That’s not exactly the power fantasy I’m expecting from a Zelda game.
That said, my opinion is clearly wrong: Breath of the Wild enjoys a ~97 Metacritic rating, and has sold 35 million copies. The game indeed embraces nonlinearity, encourages exploration (for the first few hours), has minimal onscreen UI for an open-world game, and has challenges that can be overcome in a number of (occasionally physics-based) ways. What more could the average gamer ask for?
Not being punished for interacting with said world, for starters, I would say. Apparently, that’s just me.
Impressions: Metaphor: ReFantazio
I will not be finishing Metaphor: ReFantazio. Primarily because it leaves GamePass in like four days.
Aside from that, there are a couple other things working against ReFantazio. The biggest of which is the fact that I literally finished Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 a week or so prior. In many ways, Expedition 33 felt like a repudiation (or perhaps more charitably, a “reimagining”) of the classical JRPG formula. I disliked the dodge/parry mechanics in Expedition 33… but will admit it has been a bit more challenging than expected going back to a fully turn-base system. Watching enemies just sorta attack me and being unable to do anything but take the hits feels bad now.
Exacerbating things, ReFantazio has a sort of rock-paper-scissures punishing design. Instead of everyone getting a single turn apiece, there are turn “orbs” that only get half used if a given attack/spell happens to trigger the target’s weakness. For example, if you cast a Fire attack against an enemy weak to Fire, your next character can use the remaining “half-turn” to pile on the damage. So, theoretically, if you were facing a boss with a weakness to Fire and all your characters had Fire attacks, you could get six turns in a row.
Problem is, this also works the other way around. Enemy hits your entire squad with an AoE attack and any of your characters happen to be weak against the damage type? Bam, extra attack, which could very well be another AoE one. Later on, if one of your attacks gets Absorbed or Reflected or whatever, you actively lose extra turns, because fuck you, apparently.
This sort of design is interesting… on paper. One of the principle conceits of the game is that any of your teammates can channel any of the Archetypes (read: jobs) you have unlocked. Recruit a knight-looking dude that literally starts out with the Knight Archetype? Make him a Mage. Make your whole team a Mage! Characters can also “inherit” skills from other Archetypes as well to really get some combos going. The problem is that all of this revolves around either looking things up ahead of time, or getting unpleasantly surprised by getting smacked around. There is even an in-game feature that shows you what the most-used composition was across all players for the dungeon you are about to enter, pseudo-Dark Souls style. Which… thanks, I guess?
The real nail in the coffin for me though are the time limits.
I have railed for years against plots premised on fake time-sensitivity – “rescue Ciri before it’s too late! Or take a few weeks questing, whatever” – so you would be forgiven for assuming I want actual deadlines. I do not. At least, not in long-form games like RPGs. So imagine my dismay when in the first post-tutorial section of ReFantazio I get notice that I must clear the dungeon within 10 days or else I lose the game. Also, each day is divided into two parts, so you can talk to one person in the morning, another in the evening, then time passes. Dungeon delving takes a full day though.
Is it a serious, tight deadline which you must relentlessly optimize? Probably not. But it was enough of a mental friction point that I wanted to look up what happened if you beat the dungeon early, which inevitably led to spoiling elements of the dungeon, and at a certain point the game unraveled, reductio ad absurdum style to the paint-by-numbers that it was. Stack Mages at this part, then switch to Brawlers, farm infinitely respawning enemies at this next bit because the final mobs are level 20, etc, etc, etc. I was already primed to grind levels considering the timer otherwise makes it more difficult to do so later, but seeing the solutions already laid out ahead of me flipped a switch into the off position.
Overall, it is probably my own loss. The plot looked interesting, I loved the frequent anime interludes, the UI is pleasingly hyper-stylized. It has a 94 Metacritic score, for god’s sake. Which, is somehow 2 points higher than Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, by the way.
But I’m really, really not in the mood for another lengthy game that is a chore to actually play, and certainly not when it’s leaving Game Pass in a few days. Metaphor: ReFantazio will either come back, get in a cheap bundle, or I’ll catch it on Youtube.
More Impressions: Slay the Spire 2, pt 2
My original Impressions post for Slay the Spire 2 was about a month ago. At the time, I was merely whelmed with the experience. Since then, my time /played has reached 80 hours and I now have all five characters up to Ascension 10 (the highest) while playing on the beta branch. Suffice it to say, my overall impression on the game has improved quite a bit.
Incidentally, many people apparently agree. There are reports that Slay the Spire 2 has sold over 5 million copies while still posting some respectable concurrent Steam numbers:
So, what changed from my perspective? Well… my perspective.
There is the obvious point that this is an early access release of a game in which even minor balance changes can make or break the experience. Some things were indeed over-tuned and have since been nerfed and the gameplay feels better for it. But the real change for me was internal: I needed to “unlearn” habits and inclinations from the first game. Many of the cards and characters were seemingly ported over wholesale from the original, but that did not mean they could/should be played the same. Once I let go of the baggage and muscle memory, I was free to enjoy all the nuances that this series such a genre titan.
Ironically, one of the biggest personal shifts came about from Reddit memes. Meet Snakebite.
Explaining a meme kinda takes all the fun out of it, but the short-ish version is that everyone was absolutely clowning on Snakebite as a F-tier card. I also felt it was absolutely terrible, especially considering Deadly Poison is a card that costs 1 less and almost grants the same amount. Then, one of the most famous Slay the Spire streamers, Jorbs, started posting videos about how Snakebite is actually a good card. The memes intensified. At some point during a random Silent run, I was offered Snakebite as a card reward and I was like “fuck it, let’s see how bad it is.” And, well… it wasn’t, actually.
It’s not an earth-shattering revelation that the community sometimes gets it wrong. It is also not uncommon for specific cards/abilities in games to be overlooked or work better in specific situations or with certain combos. In Snakebite’s case though, I legitimately felt dumb for how wrong I was about the card. To be clear, I’m not like excited to see a Snakebite being offered. But now I have a better understanding on why some cards are built the way that they are, and the niches that they occupy.
[Edit]: Briefly, what makes Snakebite much better than it appears is the “Retain” keyword. Retain means it stays in your hand instead of being discarded at the end of each turn. So, at a basic level, Snakebite helps improve the consistency of your turns by being available any time you happen to draw mostly defensive cards when the enemy isn’t attacking. Would two Strikes dealing 12 damage right away be better? Okay, play those Strikes then. Snakebite is for when you only draw one Strike, or the enemy has Thorns, or if you can leverage the full value of Poison (28 damage over 7 turns).
In any case, if you like deck-building roguelikes at all, Slay the Spire 2 is your endgame, even in Early Access. It will only get better from here.
Impressions: Slay the Spire 2
For something that only happened due to a coin flip, I’d say the folks at Mega Crit have scored another, ahem, mega crit with Slay the Spire 2. And this is with it being Early Access!
As a veteran of slain spires myself though – 235 hours in Steam, likely 4x on mobile, A20 clears on all characters – my first impressions over eight hours in the sequel has been… weird. Strange, even.
Perhaps I should say: whelmed. I am very, very whelmed.
For starters, three of the original classes have made a return, along with the majority of their original cards. On the one hand, this is good. Why mess with success, especially when the theming and power fantasies were such a hit the first time around? On the other hand, as an OG fan, a lot of the novelty is already pre-digested. There are certainly new cards, and some of the original cards have been tweaked in different ways. But things don’t quite hit the same walking into your first Silent run knowing that you’re going to see Shivs, Poison, and Discard as primary synergies.
The other off-putting things at the moment is balance. Now, this is literally the first few days of an Early Access launch, and there will likely be (bi)weekly balance passes for the next year or longer before StS2 hits 1.0. My concern at this stage though, is that things certainly feel tuned to the level of infinite and/or bomb combos. It was always fun to stumbled into good combos in the original game, but it never felt completely necessary outside of an A20 Heart run; you could still feel reasonably confident heading into most encounters with merely a pile of mostly-good cards. Here in the sequel though, the average (non-Ascension!) encounter will be ready to deal like 35 damage to you right off the bat.
Again, we can imagine a world in which the devs tone down the overall enemy damage and player damage in tandem. But are they going to leave in the bombs? Look at Thrash+ in the picture above. By default, it will deal 6 + 6 damage, and then exhausts an Attack in hand. If that Attack was a standard Strike, not only is it doing you a favor by (temporarily) removing a bad card from your deck, the next time you draw Thrash+ you will be dealing 12 + 12 damage. Imagine instead it removed one that normally dealt 32 damage. How do you tone that down? Make Thrash deal 1 + 1 damage by default? Only add half the attack’s damage? It’s still a run-defining card.
…and maybe that’s OK? Getting the ole Corruption + Dead Branch was a (hilariously fun) run-defining combo in the original as well. All I’m saying is that I’ve scrubbed out on the first boss – and sometimes before then! – on some characters at zero Ascension by virtue of not seeing any bombs/combos. I’m just hoping that once things are tuned appropriately, the game doesn’t still feel so swingy.
Aside from all that, the rest of the game looks very impressive. Some of the card art, in particular, is amazing. Unlocks are governed by an “Epoch” system which are basically achievements plus some worldbuilding elements. Speaking of worldbuilding… well… yeah. Less is more, and more is less. Some elements felt cool to read about (Silent taking back a piece of the Heart) and other bits kind of made the world feel less cool. I didn’t need to know the world is named Preon and is “that which tells stories,” for example. This could be placeholder text too, who knows.
Anyway, I suppose a lot has changed in the last eight years. Would Slay the Spire 2 have blown me away in 2018? Of course. Is it blowing me away right now? Ehh. I’ll do a few more runs with the characters that haven’t beaten Act 3 yet, and give the devs some more time to cook.
Ashlands and the North
Oct 20
Posted by Azuriel
Still playing Valheim. I fully completed the Ashlands, and am on the final stages of the, er, final stage: Deep North. My original plan was to just simply wait until I finished the game before making this post, but I have been struggling to find the motivation to do either of those things.
The Ashlands, as the Mistlands before it, was not nearly as bad as everything I heard about it. Which is because they subsequently nerfed it. Back in 2018 I wrote a post called The Internet is Forever… Wrong, and that remains relevant today. Whenever I go out and search for Valheim information on whether X weapon or Y staff is worth creating, nearly every search result or Youtube video is from 2 years ago and referring to stats or functions that have changed half a dozen times in the interim. There are filtering options available, yeah, but precious few search results afterwards.
That said, the Ashlands is definitely still hostile territory. The seas are boiling, all wildlife is hostile, stuff will catch fire randomly. And then there is the lava. Good lord, the lava. I actually appreciated the challenge of the lava at first. You can clearly see buildings suspended in the lava, so I tried to build pillars made of the same material. Nope, they crumble instantly. Then I tried to terraform the ground up. Nope, now there is a raised pillar of lava. It would have been rather silly if you could defeat the Ashlands with a hoe, but you never know with survival games.
By the next session though, the Ashlands was basically over. Trying to get the Flametal Ore from the spires in the center of lava fields is an engineering challenge. And it used to be harder, with the spires sinking after a few minutes! Just stealing entire chests full of the ore from forts with big green beacons highlighting their position? Much easier. Then it was just a matter of defeating the next iteration of the devs’ latest attempt to get you to quit the game from their bullshit boss design: Fader.
Fader is an exercise in deep boredom and frustration. Every 30 seconds, the boss creates multiple 11m zones of fire under your feet. If you are in melee range, the fire prevents from hitting the boss anymore, so you have to move out. Every 25 seconds, meteors rain down from the sky. Every 45 seconds, the boss calls adds, some of which are ranged bow users. There are more abilities, but those three themselves often meant the following loop:
I eventually figured out that if I just kept running around at range, I could bait the fire to drop at range, and then maybe possibly get 3-4 melee hits in before some other bullshit happened. Bullshit being getting staggered by meteors, adds I didn’t kill, random other Ashland mobs who wandered into the boss area, getting launched into the lava by an Askvin, etc.
And props to the devs for making corpse retrieval as painful as physically (and emotionally) possible, even on the “easiest” difficulty. I’m not just talking about getting your corpse from the lava right next to a boss fight. I’m talking about how all these attacks create a lot of rock debris, which your character automatically picks up. So, when you run back to your corpse and try to hit “collect all”… you can’t do it. Or when it does work, you are overburdened and are desperately chucking things out of your inventory while under literal fire so you can move at normal speeds.
In any case, once my inventory and outside adds were taken care of, Fader eventually dies like the boring boss it is. Onward to the North!
…in which I am fighting Greydwarves and skeletons again? The upgraded troll is indeed upgraded, but nothing there is remotely at the same level as what I just got through. Which is kinda weird, right?
Thinking about it though, I started to realize something that had been bothering me since Mistlands. Specifically, how disjointed the newer biomes have felt in comparison with the originals. The Mistlands felt like a feature-rich biome, with more things than average: new enemies, new ways to get older resources, an entirely new item type (Eiter-fueled), the Grappling Hook, neutral NPCs, and so on. Ashlands? Not so much. The Deep North is similar, with recycled enemies, and random schematic grinding for some reason. Want to get the Vanguard set? Buckle up and kill certain Jotun for your 3% chance of a random one dropping!
I dunno. Maybe it is just me being done with the game way before the game is done. I have one more McGuffin to grab before I can summon the final boss, and then however long that takes to defeat. I’ve crafted like two items from this final tier, being in no particular hurry to make more as the enemies are dying just fine. In the Plains and Mistlands, I was fighting for my life for every upgrade. Not so much in Ashlands and Deep North.
Onwards and upwards, I guess.
Posted in Commentary, Impressions
Leave a comment
Tags: Ashlands, Deep North, Done Before It's Over, Emotional Damage, Valheim