Recent reviews by Pete, King of the Detectives

The tricky thing about puzzle games is that the interesting part is usually figuring out the solution to a puzzle, after that you have to actually execute the solution which is generally less interesting. For example, if a game gives me a coded note and I decode it and it says "Go to X room, jump twice, and do a 360", the decoding was the interesting part and now going to the room and doing the ♥♥♥♥ it told me to do (executing the solution) is a matter of me remembering which button makes my character jump. Sure, I'm interested in seeing what happens after I execute the solution, but the longer the time between figuring out the solution and executing it, the more my interest turns into annoyance. So, a smart dev should probably try to minimize the time between these two steps of the puzzle solving process.

Blue Prince spits in the face of this convention by wasting the player's time at every possible turn. Things start out fine, the focus of the game is the roguelike and you have to learn drafting strategy while also figuring out how to enter Room 46. You'll also notice a lot of strange things that you think are worth investigating. Continuing these investigations often requires you to find specific combinations of rooms or items, which requires some amount of luck. For example, some puzzles require you to light candles. In order to light candles, you need to find two specific items in a single run. If you don't find those two items and the room that allows you to combine items, you can't light candles. This is annoying. However, because there are so many different things to investigate, you can just kind of take things as they come and continue investigations based on the rooms that appear on a given day. However, you'll eventually reach a point where you don't have very many things left to investigate, so you enter a hell of knowing what you have to do but not being able to do it simply because you have bad luck.

Here's an example: I've spent about 20 hours trying to open safety deposit boxes in a particular room. In order to open a safety deposit box, you need to find a key for one of the boxes. These keys appear randomly throughout the house and as far as I've been able to tell there's no way to guarantee one appears. Finding the key isn't enough, though, because you also need the room with safety deposit boxes to appear during a run. If that room doesn't appear and you're holding a key, you either need to find a Coat Check or end the day and lose the key. I don't even remember the last time the room appeared for me. I've had a key waiting in the Coat Check for maybe the last 5 hours I've played, but the room I need has never shown up. And you need to do this multiple times, I've unlocked three safety deposit boxes but haven't gotten the item that I know is in one of the boxes and need to solve a large meta puzzle. So, I know the solution to the puzzle (an item I need is in a safety deposit box), I knew this 20 hours ago, but I haven't actually been able to get the item because I have bad luck. Every person who plays this game will have at least one problem like this, maybe the Boiler Room refuses to connect to other rooms, maybe the Pump Room won't appear, maybe you can't get a Workshop. Like I said it's excusable at first, but as the hours pass and you're still trying to find a certain room you're just gonna get pissed off.

This ties into the game's other large issue, which is that even when you've moved on to the game's larger meta puzzles you're still forced to deal with all the roguelike ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ that you've already shown a mastery of. This, again, feels like a massive waste of the player's time. I've played 45 hours of this game but I think at least half of that involved doing time-wasting ♥♥♥♥ like Parlor puzzles, searching for sledgehammers, and holding W while watching my character move at a snail's pace. It's possible to change the rarity of rooms, but there are very specific conditions for doing so and even then the rooms that you can actually change the rarity of are randomly selected, so if the room you've spent the last 5 hours looking for never shows up as an option whoops too bad! There are permanent upgrades that make the roguelike section easier, but they only somewhat cut down on the time spent on trivial ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Why do I still have to solve these box and darts puzzles when I've already gotten a trophy for doing them 40 times each? Why can't I pick the rooms to adjust the rarity of? Why can't the Coat Check hold more than one item? Why does the game have to tell me what every item does after I've picked it up for the hundredth time? Oh, you're telling me the magnifying glass allows me to magnify text, that's completely new to me, thanks for letting me know! By this point in the game I don't care about the roguelike part at all, I'm trying to solve bigger puzzles, so why is the game still dragging me down with it? I can't answer that question, either the devs were too busy huffing their farts to consider wasting less of the player's time or they just don't see the inherent problems that come when you introduce RNG into a puzzle game.

I imagine most people playing this game will have a honeymoon phase where they think it's like the coolest puzzle game ever but eventually things will gradually sour until they finally tap out. You, the one person who read this entire review, how long will you last before you tap out? Do you think you'll make it all the way to the very end? I thought I could and I have both roguelike AND puzzle autism, but I've reached the point where I'm ready to waste my time on another game. Wasn't Meet n' ♥♥♥♥ Kingdom supposed to be on Steam? What happened to that?

Taster's score: C-

I didn't think it was possible to improve on perfection but I've been proven wrong!!!

D&DG is a pretty interesting game but it’s one that I think would only appeal to a very specific type of person. The most obvious game to compare it to is Balatro because Balatro came out half a year ago, was really popular, and is also based around a casino game (poker). So, I imagine a lot of people that liked Balatro will look at this and be interested. The problem is that D&DG is almost nothing like Balatro. Balatro is a fast and simple game that’s pretty carefully balanced. None of the cards do anything too crazy, at the end of the day you’re usually just getting more points. No matter what, you’re always playing something that resembles poker, even if it’s a lobotomized version of poker where you just need a pair to win.

D&DG has a blackjack theme, sure, but if you’re playing the game correctly you aren’t going to be playing blackjack past the first few enemy encounters. There also isn’t even a semblance of balance in the game, with the focus in most cases being on flavor instead. The best cards are those that have a low value and disrupt the enemy in some way, for a few reasons. First, if your deck is all low-value cards you can play a bunch of cards in a round without worrying about busting. Second, if you stand before your opponent does (because your deck has a lot of high-value cards) they can play a disruptive card and force you to bust or lower your score. Third and most importantly, late game enemies can almost always hit a 20 or 21, so if you just try to play basic strategy against them without disruption you can easily end up in an endless war of attrition where busting once knocks out a fifth of your health. In most cases your goal should be to force the enemy to bust since that drops their defense to 0. Cards like Geraldo, Yellow Card, Break Limits, and 4 Mana 7/7 are absurdly strong, then, because they either remove important cards from your opponent’s deck, force them to bust, or clog their deck with trash. On the flipside, basically every card with a random element to it or a value higher than around 5 or 6 isn’t worth taking because boosting your own score should always be ancillary to trying to disrupt your opponent. What this means, in technical terms, is that like 80% of the cards in the game suck.

I imagine a lot of people would look at the number of bad cards in the game and go “Wow, there sure are a lot of bad cards in this game, they really need to balance them!” Again, however, the focus of the game clearly is on flavor more than balance. A 21 of diamonds is a funny card and there isn’t really a way to make it less useless without ruining the joke. All the cards that are king, queen, and jack puns don’t work if they aren’t kings, queens, or jacks. The design philosophy in many cases seems like the devs said “Wouldn’t it be funny if…” and then added a card without really caring if it was balanced or not. As a result, there are a lot of amusing references to other card games or just types of cards in general (like a “Get well soon” card or a credit card) and they don’t feel forced because they fit with the game’s theme.

So, I suppose you need a certain type of mindset to enjoy this game. You shouldn’t expect things to be balanced and you shouldn’t expect to play blackjack. There is a lot of RNG at certain points depending on the starting deck you pick (the Birthday "deck" can literally lose to the first enemy encounter without you being able to do anything), but in a way I feel like this is more of an experiential game in the vein of something like Inscryption. Sure, all of my wins have come from abusing the same pool of 5 or 6 cards and I’ll probably get bored of that soon, but I appreciate the game for what it tries to do. Maybe you won’t, maybe you’ll hate it and refund it. So, I’m basically trying to prevent that from happening by writing this review. If this game doesn’t sound appealing to you don’t buy it, because you might hate it so much you’ll send a bomb threat to the devs and get sent to prison, then in prison you might get sodomized by a big black bull named Tyrone, or maybe a guy covered in Nazi tattoos named Ralph. You’d basically be ruining your life all over a video game. So think carefully, okay?

YIIKADEE

Probably the best fighting game released in 2023

Hey gamers, it’s everyone’s favorite indie card game reviewer Pete here, ready to give it to you straight. I’m not one of the idiots you see in the reviews who hasn’t been able to beat the game once in 10+ hours, I’ve actually beaten the real final boss so you can’t just comment “git gud” and think you’ve owned me. I CAN’T be owned.

The art style of this game isn’t half bad, I can definitely see myself yanking it to a few of the female characters. The elf girl in the hot spring is a definite highlight, and before every run I check in there just to say hi to her. The cat girl in the companion hut is a bit of an odd case. She’s definitely got me feeling something strange and I don’t know if I like it. Personally I wouldn’t mind if there was a patch that made her a little less cat and a little more girl.

Wildfrost looks like it’s a deckbuilder that took a lot of inspiration from Monster Train, which was a very good game. However, in its current state the deckbuilding elements don’t really shine through that much. Maybe that’s intentional, maybe it’s not. The problem is that you don’t get many opportunities to add cards to your deck, so even against the final boss you’ll probably still be relying on some of the cards you’ve had with you since the start of the run. This means that most runs with a particular faction play out very similarly. Monster Train had a very good mechanic where your starting deck got partially randomized every run, which helped ease the issue these kinds of game tend to have with repetitive starts. Another problem is that when you have the opportunity to add a card to your deck, you can’t skip it. So, if you get three/four bad options, well, too bad! The end result is that treasure nodes are by far the worst you can encounter, and the best strategy is probably just to actively avoid hitting them so you aren’t forced to add bad cards to your deck. Why not give the option to skip them for a small amount of gold?

Leader generation is also a bit suspect. You get three presented to you before each run, one from each faction. If they die, you lose. The leaders all seem to be randomly generated to some extent, and more often than not most of them look awful and you don’t feel excited about picking any of them. I would honestly just rather have preset heroes, maybe three per faction. I don’t want to see another hero without any keywords, or just barrage or other non-faction keyword. Some kind of mix and match deal could also maybe work. Like, you pick from one of three basic heroes, then pick one of two or three bonus effects/charms to add to them.

Charms end up being the main way that you assemble a win condition because they allow you to add extra properties to cards without adding junk to your deck. The problem is that the node that gives charms gives you a random charm, and charm effects range from game-breaking to completely useless except in very specific situations. Sometimes you’ll get the charm that allows you to play a card without ending your turn – yay! – and sometimes you’ll get the charm that makes a card do two less damage – boo! Apparently there’s also some sort of vendor that sells charms, but I haven’t unlocked that yet. Considering how important charms are, I think that should be unlocked from the start, or the charm gacha should at least give you a choice from, like, two charms. A lot of the time it just feels like you’re holding out until you finally manage to get a usable charm, and then you’re finally allowed to play the game.

When you’re actually playing the game I think it works fine, but I think it would feel a lot better if the deckbuilding aspects were leaned into more. Usually your run’s going to go like this: pray for a usable leader, pray for at least two Buddies that have some sort of synergy, pick up defensive cards, attempt to survive until the game gives you one to two good scaling cards and one good charm, then abuse your one synergistic interaction to win the game. It ultimately doesn’t really feel like you’re playing with a deck of cards, more that you’re playing the one or two good cards you have and then hitting the redraw button so you can play them again. I know you’re also moving your deployed units around and recalling them and all that ♥♥♥♥, but that part of the game basically plays itself. The deckbuilding elements are generally what give these games their depth, and in Wildfrost’s case I think those elements are just lacking. At the end of the day, at least elf girl is there for me.

Taster’s score: C-

Just like Among Us

One thumb down for each time I was rejected for bottom surgery because my doctor said my wiener was too big and removing it might kill me. Screw you, Dr. Pinjeet!

Inspired by the developer’s own experiences with women, Fight Knight is a wife beating simulator that’s inexplicably a dungeon crawler. Considering that I don’t really have a positive view of women I can forgive the behind-the-scenes stuff, but what I can’t forgive is how tedious the end result of all those scrapes and bruises is.

Like I said, the game is basically a dungeon crawler, except combat is what I could best describe as first-person Punch-Out. The dungeon crawling is really boring, movement feels kind of sluggish and there isn’t much reason to explore. The puzzles aren’t engaging at all, they just feel like busywork. The block puzzles on the third floor are really bad in that regard.

The combat is also tedious and boring. You basically just mash your attack button and then dodge or parry when an enemy glows red. The enemies in Punch-Out were a lot more interesting and had patterns you needed to learn, while the enemies in Fight Night usually just do the same move over and over again. That helps make it feel even more tedious when you’ve fought the same enemy five times already and you’re being forced to fight it again. Since there’s essentially no reward for beating enemies, there’s no motivation to fight them. Too bad, though, because the game uses a random encounter system. So, you have no choice but to fight the same enemies over and over and over. If the combat system was more fun, maybe you could argue that fighting is its own reward, but like I said it isn’t.

There are some other, smaller issues too. Skipping through dialogue feels really sluggish because your character physically punches people to talk to them, so it seems like there’s a slight delay before your input registers. The writing isn’t quite Undertale levels of horrid, but it isn’t very interesting, which is why eventually I just started skipping through it when possible. Everything about the game just adds to the tedium and makes you want to pull your hair out or punch someone in the face. From that perspective, I guess it becomes a lot easier to understand the drama surrounding this game.

Taster’s score: C-

Inscryption is another ARG creepypasta fake OS indie game from a developer that’s only able to make ARG creepypasta fake OS indie games. That’s fine with me, if you’re content with being known as a one-trick pony for your entire career more power to you, it’ll be good for me too since I’ll know to avoid all your games.

Inscryption’s problem is that it actually almost has good gameplay. If the dev wasn’t so hung up on the “Ooo, the game is haunted!” BS he would have taken the time to refine the gameplay and, I don’t know, ended up with something fun. Every single section of the game is trivial to the point that you can easily beat everything on your first try. The game gives you ample opportunity to break it but puts up zero resistance in return. Why? Again, it’s all because the game needs to be a creepypasta. There are a lot of cool mechanics, I thought every section had some interesting stuff going on (the third one did kind of drag, though), but it all just gets pushed to the side. If somebody literally copied the gameplay from the first section and actually tried to balance it, I would probably buy that game.

But hey, if the actual story is good maybe that makes up for the near total disregard for gameplay? Unfortunately, it isn’t. I won’t spoil anything but the ending is essentially just a wet fart after a decent attempt at setup. The dev obviously hid the full ending behind some dumb ARG but as soon as those three letters get brought up my eyes glaze over. Great, now I’ll never learn the fate of The Lucky Carder, one of the most complex and interesting characters in gaming history!

Taster’s score: C-