Christmas 2021
Need You Now by Plumb
Hi all. A slightly belated merry Christmas and a happy new year. :) As per usual, my family gathered together at my parents' place for Christmas. I was there Friday evening (we had a Christmas Eve service at church and family time afterward) and all of Saturday and Sunday. It was enjoyable in some ways, but also a bit exhausting for an introvert like myself, especially since the kids take a fair bit of watching. X) On Monday I hosted a game day at my own place and was joined by my brother, my sister and her husband, and our cousin. We of course played some video games, but most of us also went out in the afternoon for a couple hours to hunt geocaches near my place.
This month my work in Forgotten Gates has revolved around the equipment deterioration system I made last month. I mentioned in the previous progress post a laundry list of things that would need to be implemented: switching equipment mid-battle, reimplementing Shemri's Throw ability, preventing the player from buying too many equipment-type items from stores, and reworking DynWardrobe to play nicely with the equipment system. All those have been neatly tied up, although in the case of the Throw ability, I haven't fully implemented it, just set up the skill set which changes names according to the available equipment. There's one more area I'd forgotten to mention and which both caused me some trouble and gave me some fun: how to handle the player getting too much equipment through non-shop situations like enemy loot drops and treasure chests. I wound up bringing in the self-proclaimed "Great Witch Maple" from the Oracle games to chide the heroes for being hoarders and buy their excess equipment.
We had a short impromptu Ninja Burger session GM'd by my brother during our game day. We were commissioned by a local McDonald's to provide a hundred burger patties since they were experiencing a crunch. On our way there we were stopped by a cop who turned out to be fake and had to get around a traffic light specifically programmed to hold us up. Then we had to sneak our delivery past the Pirate's Pizza adjacent to the McDonald's. My brother was actually trying to make things go wrong at some point, but between lucky rolls and successful arguments to apply our characters' bonuses to various situations, it turned out pretty smooth.
Styx: Shards of Darkness:
This is the first game I downloaded from another Humble Bundle, this one being focused on stealth games. It's apparently the second in a sub-series that spun off from a single game called Of Orcs and Men, in which Styx was one of two playable characters and there was less focus on stealth. Styx is a goblin -- the only known member of his species intelligent enough to talk, for reasons that I assume are more fleshed out in the other games -- in a dark fantasy world. Styx is a thief and assassin, made the 'hero' of the adventure mainly because the people he opposes are worse and more powerful than him. He's also a fourth wall breaker, occasionally talking directly to the player and referencing bits of real-life pop culture. Aaaand he's a bit foul-mouthed, so definitely don't play this where kids might hear. e.e
The gameplay of Shards of Darkness is a decently solid blend of 3D stealth and platformer. There's an 'amber vision' mode you can activate to highlight threats and interactable objects, and it even shows a helpful beam coming from enemies' eyes so you know what direction they're looking (although not exactly how wide and long their cone of vision is). You can also purchase skill upgrades that add advantages like seeing footsteps through walls as little circles. It's not a perfect-information game where you can entirely avoid any possibility of getting spotted, but it gives you enough advantages to usually navigate around detection once you're accustomed to it. And it has a quick-save feature, so you can abuse that to experiment with the tricky parts and figure out solutions without having to repeat long sections. That said, the platforming can be a little iffy. Most of the time it's fine, but there were noticeable occasions when I missed a hand-hold or slipped around a landing spot for unclear reasons. e.ea
For story, I give this game a C+. The main problem was that it didn't really feel like there was an overall arc. It was like, 'Styx has a job to steal this, so go do it. Then he gets an offer to take part in some espionage, so let's spend a few missions on that. During this time Styx finds out there's weird mind-control stuff going on with the dark elves, but he doesn't really care and heads back home. Then this other thing happens to force him back into the plot,' etc. Everything follows logically enough, but Styx doesn't have a final goal to work toward, he just reacts to situations as they arise. And without spoiling too much, the ending is pretty abrupt and inconclusive, as though they're just setting things up for the next game.
Bottom line? Decent as a stealth game, rather poor as a story, and disappointingly crude, though not as bad as some other games in that regard. Get it if you really like stealth games, otherwise don't bother.
Aragami:
Next up in the stealth bundle is this indie offering. You play as a vengeful shadow spirit called into being by a white-haired woman named Yamiko. A projection of Yamiko's spirit explains that she has been captured by the murderous Brotherhood of Light and is being used to contain the powerful Shadow Empress. The Aragami's purpose is to gather several talismans that were used in the containment spell and bring them to Yamiko so that the spell can be broken. These talismans turn out to be objects of emotional importance for Yamiko, like her childhood doll, and when he touches them, the Aragami gets flashbacks of memories that include her...although from the perspective of someone else. Well, everything will become clear when the spell is broken, right? Riiiiight? ;)
Gameplay-wise, Aragami is basically about being a supernatural ninja. As with most stealth games, you move around using cover to avoid the vision cones of enemies, use (or avoid) noise to manipulate their movements, and pick apart their defenses with sneak attacks little by little -- or just try to slip through like a ghost. There are achievements on each stage for completing it with zero kills or ALL enemies killed, so if you want to go for 100% completion you're going to need to replay at least once. Normally I go for the mercy route when playing stealth games, but this time I decided, what the hey, let's play along with the 'vengeful spirit' role and leave no survivors. X) This turned out to be at least as challenging as getting past without killing anybody; while you don't have to deal with as many moving pieces once you've made a kill, you do have a lot of objectives to complete before finishing an area, and each kill is a risky proposition that requires isolating a target and taking them out without anybody else seeing, and probably disposing of the body so that an alarm isn't raised when another soldier wanders across it later. And unlike Styx, there's no quicksave feature to abuse here -- the game saves automatically at checkpoints, with sometimes more than a dozen enemy soldiers to take out in between.
So what's supernatural about this ninja? Mainly the fact that he can teleport to any strong shadow within a certain radius. I actually came up with a similar ability for my Triforce MUCK character Daray years ago, just as a little aside. In addition to the distance restriction, the Aragami has a shadow power limitation (basically MP) which restricts him to 2, maybe 3 teleports before needing to recharge by lingering in a shadow, and being in bright light will actually drain this power even without him using it. You can also purchase special skills and upgrades to those skills by finding scrolls scattered around the stages, things like throwing a kunai to take out a target at a distance, laying a trap that sucks in enemies within a radius, and turning invisible briefly. These abilities cost individual skill points to use, with only 2 points per skill, and they're recharged by single-use shrines, so they're much more precious than the teleportation ability...although you can eventually unlock a shadow kill ability that allows you to restore 1 point at a time through sneak attacks that are a little noisier and slower than usual (on the plus side, they automatically dispose of the body).
Bottom line? An enjoyably challenging stealth game with fairly simple mechanics, well worth the $20 price tag (although as it happens it's on deep 80% discount on Steam right now). Get it if you'd like to play ninja.
Click to viewHi all. A slightly belated merry Christmas and a happy new year. :) As per usual, my family gathered together at my parents' place for Christmas. I was there Friday evening (we had a Christmas Eve service at church and family time afterward) and all of Saturday and Sunday. It was enjoyable in some ways, but also a bit exhausting for an introvert like myself, especially since the kids take a fair bit of watching. X) On Monday I hosted a game day at my own place and was joined by my brother, my sister and her husband, and our cousin. We of course played some video games, but most of us also went out in the afternoon for a couple hours to hunt geocaches near my place.
This month my work in Forgotten Gates has revolved around the equipment deterioration system I made last month. I mentioned in the previous progress post a laundry list of things that would need to be implemented: switching equipment mid-battle, reimplementing Shemri's Throw ability, preventing the player from buying too many equipment-type items from stores, and reworking DynWardrobe to play nicely with the equipment system. All those have been neatly tied up, although in the case of the Throw ability, I haven't fully implemented it, just set up the skill set which changes names according to the available equipment. There's one more area I'd forgotten to mention and which both caused me some trouble and gave me some fun: how to handle the player getting too much equipment through non-shop situations like enemy loot drops and treasure chests. I wound up bringing in the self-proclaimed "Great Witch Maple" from the Oracle games to chide the heroes for being hoarders and buy their excess equipment.
We had a short impromptu Ninja Burger session GM'd by my brother during our game day. We were commissioned by a local McDonald's to provide a hundred burger patties since they were experiencing a crunch. On our way there we were stopped by a cop who turned out to be fake and had to get around a traffic light specifically programmed to hold us up. Then we had to sneak our delivery past the Pirate's Pizza adjacent to the McDonald's. My brother was actually trying to make things go wrong at some point, but between lucky rolls and successful arguments to apply our characters' bonuses to various situations, it turned out pretty smooth.
Styx: Shards of Darkness:
This is the first game I downloaded from another Humble Bundle, this one being focused on stealth games. It's apparently the second in a sub-series that spun off from a single game called Of Orcs and Men, in which Styx was one of two playable characters and there was less focus on stealth. Styx is a goblin -- the only known member of his species intelligent enough to talk, for reasons that I assume are more fleshed out in the other games -- in a dark fantasy world. Styx is a thief and assassin, made the 'hero' of the adventure mainly because the people he opposes are worse and more powerful than him. He's also a fourth wall breaker, occasionally talking directly to the player and referencing bits of real-life pop culture. Aaaand he's a bit foul-mouthed, so definitely don't play this where kids might hear. e.e
The gameplay of Shards of Darkness is a decently solid blend of 3D stealth and platformer. There's an 'amber vision' mode you can activate to highlight threats and interactable objects, and it even shows a helpful beam coming from enemies' eyes so you know what direction they're looking (although not exactly how wide and long their cone of vision is). You can also purchase skill upgrades that add advantages like seeing footsteps through walls as little circles. It's not a perfect-information game where you can entirely avoid any possibility of getting spotted, but it gives you enough advantages to usually navigate around detection once you're accustomed to it. And it has a quick-save feature, so you can abuse that to experiment with the tricky parts and figure out solutions without having to repeat long sections. That said, the platforming can be a little iffy. Most of the time it's fine, but there were noticeable occasions when I missed a hand-hold or slipped around a landing spot for unclear reasons. e.ea
For story, I give this game a C+. The main problem was that it didn't really feel like there was an overall arc. It was like, 'Styx has a job to steal this, so go do it. Then he gets an offer to take part in some espionage, so let's spend a few missions on that. During this time Styx finds out there's weird mind-control stuff going on with the dark elves, but he doesn't really care and heads back home. Then this other thing happens to force him back into the plot,' etc. Everything follows logically enough, but Styx doesn't have a final goal to work toward, he just reacts to situations as they arise. And without spoiling too much, the ending is pretty abrupt and inconclusive, as though they're just setting things up for the next game.
Bottom line? Decent as a stealth game, rather poor as a story, and disappointingly crude, though not as bad as some other games in that regard. Get it if you really like stealth games, otherwise don't bother.
Aragami:
Next up in the stealth bundle is this indie offering. You play as a vengeful shadow spirit called into being by a white-haired woman named Yamiko. A projection of Yamiko's spirit explains that she has been captured by the murderous Brotherhood of Light and is being used to contain the powerful Shadow Empress. The Aragami's purpose is to gather several talismans that were used in the containment spell and bring them to Yamiko so that the spell can be broken. These talismans turn out to be objects of emotional importance for Yamiko, like her childhood doll, and when he touches them, the Aragami gets flashbacks of memories that include her...although from the perspective of someone else. Well, everything will become clear when the spell is broken, right? Riiiiight? ;)
Gameplay-wise, Aragami is basically about being a supernatural ninja. As with most stealth games, you move around using cover to avoid the vision cones of enemies, use (or avoid) noise to manipulate their movements, and pick apart their defenses with sneak attacks little by little -- or just try to slip through like a ghost. There are achievements on each stage for completing it with zero kills or ALL enemies killed, so if you want to go for 100% completion you're going to need to replay at least once. Normally I go for the mercy route when playing stealth games, but this time I decided, what the hey, let's play along with the 'vengeful spirit' role and leave no survivors. X) This turned out to be at least as challenging as getting past without killing anybody; while you don't have to deal with as many moving pieces once you've made a kill, you do have a lot of objectives to complete before finishing an area, and each kill is a risky proposition that requires isolating a target and taking them out without anybody else seeing, and probably disposing of the body so that an alarm isn't raised when another soldier wanders across it later. And unlike Styx, there's no quicksave feature to abuse here -- the game saves automatically at checkpoints, with sometimes more than a dozen enemy soldiers to take out in between.
So what's supernatural about this ninja? Mainly the fact that he can teleport to any strong shadow within a certain radius. I actually came up with a similar ability for my Triforce MUCK character Daray years ago, just as a little aside. In addition to the distance restriction, the Aragami has a shadow power limitation (basically MP) which restricts him to 2, maybe 3 teleports before needing to recharge by lingering in a shadow, and being in bright light will actually drain this power even without him using it. You can also purchase special skills and upgrades to those skills by finding scrolls scattered around the stages, things like throwing a kunai to take out a target at a distance, laying a trap that sucks in enemies within a radius, and turning invisible briefly. These abilities cost individual skill points to use, with only 2 points per skill, and they're recharged by single-use shrines, so they're much more precious than the teleportation ability...although you can eventually unlock a shadow kill ability that allows you to restore 1 point at a time through sneak attacks that are a little noisier and slower than usual (on the plus side, they automatically dispose of the body).
Bottom line? An enjoyably challenging stealth game with fairly simple mechanics, well worth the $20 price tag (although as it happens it's on deep 80% discount on Steam right now). Get it if you'd like to play ninja.