An Adventure of Sorts
My promise of not working on anything today lasted until 10:30 in the morning, but once I'd made a couple of changes to improve the speed of the Flash game I put up last night, I went on to Steam and started playing an action game where you're cast as a little man in a hooded robe and can gradually acquire spells to unlock new abilities... wait a minute.
This is Magicka, which I actually found when an Italian review of Crystal Towers 2 mentioned it. It's set in a Norse fantasy world, which like all Norse fantasy worlds is called Midgård, where you adventure through the countryside as one of a society of the Keepers of the Seven Keys fighting monsters by mixing and casting spells from a bank of elements.
It's quite difficult to convey a decent impression of how it plays, because you'll already be expecting it to be an RPG, and it isn't. Despite the visual similarity to something like Diablo, you don't have an inventory, currency or quest log to speak of - your objective is simply to get from one end of the map to the other through the various fights, in a sort of mouse-controlled equivalent of the old beat-em-up games like Streets of Rage. The mood of it might best be demonstrated through this video by someone calling himself The Cynical Brit. It starts off normally enough, then he gradually gets more psychotic throughout the video as he realizes just how much the magic system can do, eschewing both the actual objective and any practicality in favour of setting everyone around him on fire and firing lightning bolts everywhere, like Jeremy Clarkson finding that a car has an "afterburners" button.
It really is a tremendous amount of fun to play about with the magic system, though - you can queue up to five items up in what almost feels like a Die Siedler von Catan fashion by tap-dancing over the left side of the keyboard with your hand, and then cast that combination with a wide variety of effects depending on the number of elements you had "in hand". Fire on its own gives you a flamethrower effect, which varies in size and intensity depending on how many of the fire elements you put in. Earth conjures up huge boulders - so combine the two different elements in one spell and you can launch fireballs. Or use a beam element like Arcane instead, and you get a screen-long flaming laser attack. You can protect yourself from elemental magic by using that element along with the Shield spell - and when you begin to realize that you can create new elements by combining existing ones (like Water and Fire to make Steam), it really starts to get interesting.
The story follows an almost Phoenix Wrightish humour of making as many popular culture references as it can possibly fit into the dialogue without collapsing in on itself in a black hole, but importantly it doesn't act smug about it - it never tries too hard to point them out, they'd pass by without notice if you didn't understand them, and it crams so many of them in that it delivers plenty of hybridized laugh-groans when you get the slightly less obvious ones. Even the very first thing you're told in the game is to "Stay a while and listen". Later on, you're directed to go and see someone called Gram who owns the village Workshop, and who says that "in the far North, there is only war". Then some goblins arrive and he tells you to "Run to the hills, run for your lives" and you can pick up a Warhammer from him for defeating them.
And it's got a great sense of silliness otherwise, as well - early on, you can find Excalibur, the sword in the stone, at the end of a field slightly off the main path. I was expecting to have to come back to it later, but instead the game allows you to pick it up right away... complete with the stone still attached, that is, so that you use it as a huge bludgeoning weapon.
I still favour the one that it gave me at the start of the game, though. When I picked the Reservoir Robes character for its smart jacket and tie look, I hadn't realized that thanks to this game's way of thinking, it would also give me the advantage of a Beretta.