Category Archives: Impressions
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.
Impressions: Mewgenics
TL;DR: I bought Mewgenics on February 14th, and have 30 hours played after four days.
Mewgenics is a tactical roguelite and cat breeding sim from Edmund McMillen, of Binding of Isaac and Super Meat Boy fame. While it does not play like Binding of Isaac, it is absolutely the same kind of brand experience: crude humor, goofy visuals, banging soundtrack, absolutely broken skill/item combos, and a deeply compelling gameplay loop. Well… for the most part.
The game is divided in two parts: house and adventure. During the house parts, you are performing the “eugenics” part of the title. At the end of each game day, compatible cats will squirt out 1-2 kittens with some mix of the parents’ stats (and sometimes abilities/mutations), and the kittens themselves will grow into adults an additional day later. There is a lot of RNG involved in breeding into the best stats, but you can mix and match furniture to weigh the odds more in your favor. Or, honestly, you can mostly ignore it and just rely on the daily stray cats that wander onto your property.
When you are ready to adventure, you place up to four cats in a box, give them a class “collar,” and then equip them with any spare items you got from prior runs. After that, you progress through a linear series of nodes that includes battles, events, treasures, mid-bosses, shops, and final bosses.
Hobbes would accurately describe Mewgenic’s combat as “nasty, brutish, and short.” Fights take place in an intimately-sized, randomized board with you generally being way outnumbered. I would classify combat as Fair* with the asterisk emphasized. There is a turn-order ribbon, right-clicking will show you have far a unit can move and subsequently attack, and abilities work as described.
However, no punches are pulled, no mistakes unpunished. There is no move rewind if you didn’t move 1 square far enough, you can absolutely waste attacks by mis-clicking on the ground, and there is built-in punishment for save-scumming battles. Additionally, there are some mechanics that work differently than you may be used to in other games. For example, Tall Grass is terrain that gives the unit a 50% evasion chance… but this also applies to friendly heals and buffs sent your way. Having a Tank character with Thorns or other “on attack” debuffs are great… until an enemy uses a knockback ability and sends your cat bumping into said Tank, dealing massive friendly fire.
It’s also worth noting that if a cat hits zero HP, it goes into a downed state and gets a permanent reduction to one of its stats. If a downed cat takes much more damage though – or gets targeted by a corpse-destroying ability – it dies permanently. While you can occasionally get a mid-run replacement, that new cat won’t have a class and starts at level 1, so it’s barely a warm body.
The upshot to this harsh, rules-as-written gameplay is allowing for truly broken shenanigans. Some things are RNG-dependent, such as which items drop and what starting class abilities each cat gets. That said, each level up grants a cat a choice between four options, which can sometimes lead you into interesting directions. In one run, my Tank had a cheap, stackable bodyguard-like ability that automatically caused him to swap places with any other team member that got targeted with anything (attack, spell, etc). He also had a starting ability to give himself Thorns at the cost of not moving during his turn. Not much of a problem since he could protect the team from anywhere. He later got an ability to automatically Block any attack coming from the front. Considering the Bodyguard ability always places the Tank facing the attack… yeah, suddenly my whole team was effectively immune to the first 5-6 attack of every turn.
The balance to all this comes from the fact that cats who survive adventures are “retired” when they come back to the house. They can still stick around a breed and such, but you are going to need an entirely new set of four cats to go on further adventures. Plus, you know, RNG is RNG and you may never receive that same set of skills/items again. Plus plus, the game escalates in difficulty pretty wildly by the end of Act 1, let alone the start of Act 2 where I am. Let’s just say that broken combos can go both ways, if you aren’t careful.
Having said all that, Mewgenics also feels kinda bad sometimes. The house portion of the game feels good, but it keeps getting interrupted by the need to go adventuring, which can often take more than an hour depending on how deep you go. Adventuring by itself usually feels good, but there’s a conflicting desire to play sub-optimally to farm more resources for the house phase rather than do what’s best to ensure success of the run itself. Then there are the house progression unlocks, which are done by “donating” cats to NPCs. One of them wants retired cats, for example, so it’s sometimes tempting to just go on a bunch of first-zone-only runs and try and brute-force the rewards. If you don’t, you’ll be making due with cramped quarters for dozens and dozens of hours.
Also, right now Events in the adventure phase feel half-baked. Random cat is selected, given a small selection of Skill checks, and it’s not entirely clear whether the outcome was due to failing or even succeeding the roll (or what the odds even were). What’s worse, sometimes the best reward is tied to a particular Skill check, not just succeeding on any of them. For example, when given a choice between Eat/Loot/Examine, you might have three different positive outcomes possible, where “positive” might be “just flavor text” or “game-breaking item.” Binding of Isaac was filled with randomness too, sure, but it somehow feels worse in Mewgenics.
So, yeah, that’s the game. If Isaac is any indication (or the 1 million already copies sold), Mewgenics will receive years of support, hopefully addressing things like the Events (etc). Plus, it’s $30 MSRP.
The era of the indie is now.
First Impressions: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
My first play session with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 lasted about two hours, and I got through the tutorial and far enough to see the first few real battles. And then I didn’t boot the game back up for almost three weeks.
By the end of the second session… yeah, I can start to see why this is winning all of the awards.
First, the game is trippy and evocative as fuck. The principle bad guy is a goliath-esque woman named The Paintress, which is apt as every environment looks like it sprung directly from some artwork in the Louvre and/or a fever dream. The protagonists live on some kind of island protected by shields or something – with the world itself seeming to have been shattered by some older cataclysm – but the Paintress controls a countdown timer that nevertheless kills everyone older than a specific number. At game start it was 34, and now it’s the eponymous 33. It seems to increment on a yearly basis, but I’m not sure if that was specified (or matters). In any case, every year a small number of adventurers next in line to be erased gets together and attempts to bring the fight to the Paintress. Enter you.
Second, I do want to highly praise the motion-capture and general dialog thus far. It’s passionate, awkward, and deeply human in ways very few other games have been able to reproduce. Nearly 14 years ago, I was blown away by Mass Effect’s wink, and here in Expedition 33 I just witnessed a character search another’s eyes to see if they truly meant what they said. You know, her face close, the silence, her eyes going back and forth with purpose, debriding the layers of your soul. I don’t know how, but they captured it. The bar has been raised again.
We will have to see how it works out for me over the long haul, but my first impression of Expedition 33’s combat system… is that it’s not fun. Basically, it feels like a turn-based Soulslike. Everything more complex than a basic attack will have a Quick-Time Event sequence in order to juice the skill further. On the enemy’s turn, you are essentially required to either Dodge or Parry their attacks; Dodging has a more forgiving window than Parry, but successfully Parrying every attack will allow the party member to unleash a devastating counter-attack. I say Dodging/Parrying is “required” because the amount of damage you end up taking is significant, and your ability to heal is limited and only refreshed when you arrive at checkpoint flags, e.g. campfires. And yeah, enemies respawn when you rest.
What results is a truly conflicting game thus far. I encountered some enemies in the opening areas that were clearly higher-level than my ability to meaningfully tackle. “The designers just wanted to teach me that not every enemy needs fought, and/or that I may want to revisit places once I gained more levels.” OK, great, very Soulslike of you. Buuuuut, technically, if you just Parry all their attacks, you will defeat them eventually. Which then gets you thinking about why bother putting points in Defense or Vitality, when both are irrelevant if you don’t get hit in the first place. Is that the intentional design? Stack Defense if you aren’t good at the timing, and everyone else go glass cannon?
Again, this is all very early on, so perhaps things will improve. Somehow. Or perhaps the combat system is just something you put up with for the environments, dialog, and plot. That is a very old-school RPG sentiment for 2026, but I’m going to roll with it for now.
Impressions: The Outer Worlds 2
When it comes to The Outer Worlds 2 (TOW2), when compared to the original game, there have been some marked improvements in some areas, and some continued nonsense in others. What follows are my initial impressions after about 12 hours of gameplay, still on the first planet.
One of my gripes from the first game came from what I considered stunted exploration:
Outside of combat, things are so formulaic that I don’t even know why Obsidian bothered with exploration elements at all. There are three ammo types for all guns (light, heavy, energy); there are multiple damage types (physical, corrosive, etc) but they map 1:1 in a cookie-cutter resistance way; 99% of everything you find is either currency, unnecessary food, and more copies of generic guns/armor to break down for generic parts to repair the guns you chosen to use; mods for guns/armor sound important but are again generic nonsense (your melee weapon deals plasma damage now!) that just ticks the customization 101 box. Even the Perks are boring.
I am pleased to report there are now 10 (!) ammunition types! But seriously, there is a much bigger emphasis picking up random pieces of junk to break down into useful materials and then crafting them into other items. I cannot exactly recall if the prior game already had a similar system or not beyond repairing/upgrading, but it certainly feels much better in TOW2. Additionally, there have been several unique “playing cards” sprinkled about that grant permanent buffs when picked up. Overall, it is not on the same level as Fallout whereby you shout in excitement at discovering an Aluminum can amongst a bunch of Tin ones, but it does make general exploration more worth it, with a knock-on effect of making navigating the game world more engaging. The Avowed-style vaulting certainly helps too.
Sadly, one of the things making the world considerably less engaging is the Skill/Perk system.
Not sure if this qualifies as a hot take, but I despise Skills checks in games. “It encourages roleplaying and specialization.” No, it does not. There is nothing more nakedly mechanical and abstract than a Skill check. What is the difference between Speech 3 and Speech 5, from a “roleplaying” perspective?
To me, roleplaying is all about choices you make. When you defeat the bandits, do you forgive them or do you execute them? Do you accept the quest from the shady merchant, or do you turn them in? Or do you complete the quest, keep the item, then kill the merchant yourself while pinning the death on an innocent bystander? Those are meaningful roleplaying choices. Imagine not even having the option to turn the merchant over to the authorities because you put one too many points into Lockpicking last time you leveled up.
To Obsidian’s credit, TOW2 is not entirely binary in the Skills checks thus far. A stuck door can be opened with Engineering 3 or the Brawny Trait. Special medicine can be synthesized via Medical 4 or just winging it via the Lucky Trait. Sometimes just finding incriminating evidence is enough to trigger additional dialog choices. But there are absolutely single Skill checks in quests or conversations and you either have the number, or you have the deficiency rubbed in your face. Which means if you want to roleplay “someone in an RPG who can talk to people,” you need to hyperfocus on maxing out Speech. That’s 20 points, accrued at two points per level. Since there is a level cap of 30, that means you can max out just 3 total skills (out of 12) with everything else being zero, or perhaps max two with some scattered levels in other things for flavor.
To state the obvious, this is not a fun way to play the game. “Yay, level up and… another 2 points into Speech.” Or, in actuality, just leveling up and not choosing any Skills at all because I don’t feel that I have enough information to even make a meaningful choice. Is Speech 4 good enough for this area of the game? Can I afford to raise Sneak to 2 in order to get past this skill check and break into the building in front of me? Or am I going to immediately regret it the next time an NPC starts talking to me?
This is a real scenario I encountered: exploring the map, find a befuddled man in front of a locked house. Don’t have Medical 2, so I fruitlessly exhaust the dialog choices with him. I can see items in the house through the window, but there is no way inside as none of the doors are powered. Up the road is a power sub-station that is malfunctioning, presumably the cause of the locked house. The sub-station repair kit is inside a locked building, and you need Sneak 2 or the Nimble trait to squeeze through the vent. On the roof of the building is the malfunctioning panel, which requires Engineering 3 or the Innovative trait or the repair kit mentioned earlier. If you don’t have any of those… fuck you, I guess.
So, anyway, I’m still running around with 2 loose skill points and about to level up again for a total of 4. Could I put two points in Sneak and solve the area? Sure. How many more Sneak checks will I encounter though? This was literally the first one. Conversely, Engineering has come up quite a lot, so I’m more inclined to put points there instead. But I also have to acknowledge that since I know there will be Speech 20 checks in the game, I only get one other max skill (because I put a point into Guns and Observation), and that was originally going to be Hacking and/or Lockpicking.
This is all very fun, I’m having so much fun, can you tell? So much fun I’m seriously considering deleting 10 hours of progress so I can pick different traits – why did I think Witty was going to be useful if I’m not trying to kill everyone I meet? – and bypass some of these dilemmas. Unless, of course, there will be some future dilemmas with different Skills rendering everything moot.
By the way, I understand that there are indeed real people out there who either don’t care about being locked out of content, or who appreciate the “enforced roleplaying” aspect. I want you to know that I see you… and I don’t understand you. In fact, I may actively hate you. For one thing, the “enforcement” mechanism of discrete Skill checks could have stayed inside your roleplaying mind; you can still commit to your Chaotic Neutral space pirate fantasy without Speech 10 checks sprinkled about. Just, you know, pick those dialog choices, shoot empire guards on sight, or whatever. Hell, I’m more fine with a morality bar governing choices, because at least that is based on prior actions made inside the game world rather than the UI. Where is the fun picking answers before you even get to the questions?
Ultimately, if you have designed your game such that players would rather run around with unspent Skill/Perk points lest they miss out, you have failed IMO. Either by not making them exciting enough to want to pick straight away, or by gating too much content behind them.
Other than, well, all that? The Outer Worlds 2 is pretty good thus far. Time will tell how annoying it will continue getting with Skill checks as we get further into the game. My guess is “loads more annoying.”
In An Age 