HotPocketHPE
2017
I would recommend playing this game blind if possible, so before reading, know that I give it my highest recommendation, though I have tried to keep this light on spoilers.
---
Experiential games seem to have a troubled relationship with their mechanics. Most games I've played that aspire to convey deep emotions or truths primarily rely on techniques established in other mediums such as cinema and literature. While these are obviously powerful and effective, it bothers me that they aren't really leveraging their key distinguishing feature: their interactivity. Either the mechanics are clumsily grafted on to a tangentially related narrative experience, they only resonate along some dimensions, or they simply aren't engaging enough to hold attention. Even when a game does mostly succeed, it's hard not to see it as an incomplete realization of its own potential.
Rain World does not struggle with this.
Slugcat is simple to control on a basic level: movement stick, jump button, grab. But the influence of momentum, some intricate Mario 64 esque techniques, and a pinch of QWOP style soft body physics makes quickly maneuvering around uneven terrain tricky, especially with the heavy gravity. There's a real physicality here: you'll feel it when you scramble to clamber Slugcat's body over a ledge, or when your frantic hopping gets stopped stone-cold by a crack in the ground. Holding objects will weigh Slugcat down, which subtly changes the arc and height of jumps, and landing a spear throw on moving targets is easier said than done.
This is paired with a dynamic creature simulation that you'll need to constantly adapt to. A Lizard's bite is deadly, but their bulky bodies have even more trouble maneuvering than you do, and they'll switch focus if threatened by something else. Creatures eat and hunt and flee based on their needs and what information is available to them, something you can work around and exploit by pitting them against each other, or taking advantage of distractions. Death is common and can be punishing, but the yellow flower, which negates this penalty if you can return to where you died with it, rewards those who show caution and savvy.
This is simply to say that the mechanics in and of themselves are intrinsically engaging; there's a good reason this game has extensive modding and speedrunning scenes. But what makes Rain World truly special is its unflinching, all-encompassing commitment to its most central idea: inducing the experience of an animal within a natural world. Developer Joar Jakobsson repeatedly mentions in this interview that the game was conceived as a simulation foremost, with no special privileging of the player character within the game's systems. Every single mechanic exists precisely to push you to behave as an animal would: eating, fleeing, seeking shelter.
Bats flitter, lizards prowl, vultures swoop. Everything needs to eat, not be eaten, and hide from the inevitable rain; they roam within and between screens to these ends. Where a Slugcat fits in is simply a function of opportunity and happenstance. Almost all other games would make some sort of concession to "fairness", but not this one. Sometimes you'll wake up and find a lizard staking out your way forward; other times a usual hunting ground will be empty and silent. That's just how this world is: that's life.
Seeing animals wrap and squish around the terrain, pushed and pulled by their own muscles or outside forces through procedural animation, conveys a certain life-like feeling. There are fundamental physics in this world, even if they are different from our own, and everything must obey them. Struggling with the controls is reflective too: we are born unfamiliar with our own body, and grow into its capabilities with time and knowledge.
It's the game's tremendous success in immersion, only possible through holistic devotion to its goal, that allows it to meaningfully ask you questions about nature, and for you to feel those questions. Why is nature so beautiful? Why is nature so cruel? How much are we animal? What does it mean to be animal? What does it mean to be part of nature, and know that you are part of it? These are thoughts etched deep into our psyche across millennia, which have only recently been allowed to slip from our minds.
In some regions of this world there are colonies of tentacles that coat surfaces and feed by pulling in anything that comes near. Touch only a few, and you can easily rip free; touch too many, and you'll be swiftly sucked in. But touch a handful, and you'll be locked in a futile struggle: you're strong enough to resist their pull, but not strong enough to escape. For the game to immerse me so much that it's able to convey even an inkling of that real situation, of a doomed animal desperately trying not to die, is a monumental achievement.
The clarity of artistic vision in Rain World makes its predecessors look almost primitive by comparison. If there is any justice, this will be looked upon in time with the analysis and praise it deserves, among the highest echelons of the canon. For my own thoughts, it's simple: there is before Rain World, and there is after.
---
Experiential games seem to have a troubled relationship with their mechanics. Most games I've played that aspire to convey deep emotions or truths primarily rely on techniques established in other mediums such as cinema and literature. While these are obviously powerful and effective, it bothers me that they aren't really leveraging their key distinguishing feature: their interactivity. Either the mechanics are clumsily grafted on to a tangentially related narrative experience, they only resonate along some dimensions, or they simply aren't engaging enough to hold attention. Even when a game does mostly succeed, it's hard not to see it as an incomplete realization of its own potential.
Rain World does not struggle with this.
Slugcat is simple to control on a basic level: movement stick, jump button, grab. But the influence of momentum, some intricate Mario 64 esque techniques, and a pinch of QWOP style soft body physics makes quickly maneuvering around uneven terrain tricky, especially with the heavy gravity. There's a real physicality here: you'll feel it when you scramble to clamber Slugcat's body over a ledge, or when your frantic hopping gets stopped stone-cold by a crack in the ground. Holding objects will weigh Slugcat down, which subtly changes the arc and height of jumps, and landing a spear throw on moving targets is easier said than done.
This is paired with a dynamic creature simulation that you'll need to constantly adapt to. A Lizard's bite is deadly, but their bulky bodies have even more trouble maneuvering than you do, and they'll switch focus if threatened by something else. Creatures eat and hunt and flee based on their needs and what information is available to them, something you can work around and exploit by pitting them against each other, or taking advantage of distractions. Death is common and can be punishing, but the yellow flower, which negates this penalty if you can return to where you died with it, rewards those who show caution and savvy.
This is simply to say that the mechanics in and of themselves are intrinsically engaging; there's a good reason this game has extensive modding and speedrunning scenes. But what makes Rain World truly special is its unflinching, all-encompassing commitment to its most central idea: inducing the experience of an animal within a natural world. Developer Joar Jakobsson repeatedly mentions in this interview that the game was conceived as a simulation foremost, with no special privileging of the player character within the game's systems. Every single mechanic exists precisely to push you to behave as an animal would: eating, fleeing, seeking shelter.
Bats flitter, lizards prowl, vultures swoop. Everything needs to eat, not be eaten, and hide from the inevitable rain; they roam within and between screens to these ends. Where a Slugcat fits in is simply a function of opportunity and happenstance. Almost all other games would make some sort of concession to "fairness", but not this one. Sometimes you'll wake up and find a lizard staking out your way forward; other times a usual hunting ground will be empty and silent. That's just how this world is: that's life.
Seeing animals wrap and squish around the terrain, pushed and pulled by their own muscles or outside forces through procedural animation, conveys a certain life-like feeling. There are fundamental physics in this world, even if they are different from our own, and everything must obey them. Struggling with the controls is reflective too: we are born unfamiliar with our own body, and grow into its capabilities with time and knowledge.
It's the game's tremendous success in immersion, only possible through holistic devotion to its goal, that allows it to meaningfully ask you questions about nature, and for you to feel those questions. Why is nature so beautiful? Why is nature so cruel? How much are we animal? What does it mean to be animal? What does it mean to be part of nature, and know that you are part of it? These are thoughts etched deep into our psyche across millennia, which have only recently been allowed to slip from our minds.
In some regions of this world there are colonies of tentacles that coat surfaces and feed by pulling in anything that comes near. Touch only a few, and you can easily rip free; touch too many, and you'll be swiftly sucked in. But touch a handful, and you'll be locked in a futile struggle: you're strong enough to resist their pull, but not strong enough to escape. For the game to immerse me so much that it's able to convey even an inkling of that real situation, of a doomed animal desperately trying not to die, is a monumental achievement.
The clarity of artistic vision in Rain World makes its predecessors look almost primitive by comparison. If there is any justice, this will be looked upon in time with the analysis and praise it deserves, among the highest echelons of the canon. For my own thoughts, it's simple: there is before Rain World, and there is after.
Despite being one of the most popular and influential games of all time, somehow, Doom 2 is still severely underrated.
Someone who agrees is Danbo, fellow Doom lover and developer of the shmup Blue Revolver. In his old article (https://blog.danbo.vg/post/50094276897/the-most-misunderstood-game-of-all-time) he explains:
"While Doom was no doubt the product of a bunch of nerds doing what they love, the game offers a more intelligent gameplay palette than just about any other pure FPS in the world...Doom perfection is achieved where the visceral meets the intelligent."
Everyone knows the obvious: the timeless joy of the Super Shotgun, the surreal demonic aesthetic, the beloved metal MIDIs that rip off Metallica and Slayer, and so on. But there's an iceberg of elements below the surface that oft go overlooked by those uninitiated in deeper Dooming ways. To bring up just a few examples:
The famous BFG is a brilliant, quirky weapon that operates like some bizarre hybrid of a delayed-fire rocket launcher and shotgun. The ball does a good chunk of damage, but the real firepower is in the spread of 40 invisible tracers that shoot out from you a bit after the ball explodes, in the direction you initially fired. You can fire at packs of enemies to spread out the damage for crowd control, or get right up next to something to put all the tracers on it for massive destruction (both incredibly useful and incredibly dangerous against Cyberdemons). You can fire the BFG at long range, do other things (run around, switch weapons), then move into position for the tracers as the ball makes impact. You can hide behind cover, shoot the ball into a wall, then quickly peek outside cover to forgo the ball damage in favor of safety. You can even shoot, realize that you're in a bad position, and retreat, wasting ammo but possibly saving your life.
Switching weapons is both critical to success and surprisingly slow, especially if you compare with Doom's modern entries. But this adds commitment, that deep shard of the action game's soul, in a way that ties into the ever-present ammo system. Say you pump two Super Shotgun blasts into a Revenant, and are confident that it's a hair away from death. You can switch to the Chaingun to fire a quick burst, which is highly ammo-efficient, but takes time and leaves you vulnerable. You can stick with the Super Shotgun, which trades ammo for safety and speed. You can even use the Rocket Launcher to put heavy damage on another foe while killing the first with splash damage, but this opens the door for the classic-yet-catastrophic rocket to your own face. id could have easily made the weapon switch speed near-instant, but whether by intention or happenstance, they didn't, and the game is better for it.
I could go on and on about all the nuances that add to the game, but there are two critical elements that set Doom apart from every other FPS. The first is its emphasis on space control. Take the humble Pinky, for instance: low health and it's bites are easily dodged, so not much threat, right? Well, put Doomguy in a room with fifty of them (Doom 2 MAP08: Tricks and Traps for instance) and the assessment rapidly changes. If you're not careful, you'll be surrounded on all sides, and while killing a few may be easy, others will quickly rush into the gaps to further constrict you. Controlling territory with movement and smart (or copious) use of ammo is critical to survival. Now imagine how much the situation would evolve with just a single Archvile added to the mix!
The other aspect, almost completely unique to Doom as far as I know, is monster infighting and its importance. Baiting one monster type to attack another will cause it to switch aggro and retaliate. Purposefully leaving some monsters alive to tear each other apart can save you tons of ammo, but also presents a huge risk, as the resulting fight is more chaotic and dangerous.
A great example is the slime pit in Alien Vendetta's MAP14: Overwhelming Odds. The whole pit is filled with Pinkies, and the only way to exit the pit is a lift opposite the switch you need to hit. But hitting the switch releases two Cyberdemons, who can easily kill you if you get trapped, but can also easily dispatch the Pinkies and save you lots of ammo. How many Pinkies do you kill to get to the lift safely, vs. how many do you leave alive for the Cyberdemons? A little later, you need to return to the pit to activate another switch, which releases a massive cloud of Cacodemons. Do you kill the Cyberdemons before hitting the switch, while the field is nice and clear, but go it alone against the Cacos? Or do you leave the Cyberdemons to thin out the horde, then risk fighting them with random Cacos floating around? Or maybe you only kill one Cyberdemon to split the difference? I've tried all of these strategies, and each has its own strengths, weaknesses, and gameplay flow.
It's truly astonishing to me how much id managed to get right so early on. The fundamentals here are rock-solid, and the blend of fast paced action, using enemies against each other, heavy resource management, and a thick coating of atmosphere for good measure prefigures Resident Evil 4 by a decade. All the dynamic layers of decision-making I yearn for in action games are here, weaving into each other in wonderful interplay. Split-second decisions and execution are, as always, a matter of life and death, but also affect your health and ammo, which leaks into the next encounters. Making too hasty of a retreat at the wrong time can cost you precious territory and create openings for monsters to stake out unfavorable positions, the consequences of which might not be felt until later in the fight. The overall route you devise for tackling a map can vastly change how the onslaught plays out, both in terms of what gear you have access to and what mix of monsters are active.
It should be an obvious conclusion by now that the map has a massive impact on gameplay, especially if you are pistol starting. (sidenote: you should absolutely pistol start levels, lower the difficulty if you have to) Placement of monsters, weapons, resources, and geometry will make or break the experience. and the true mapping virtuoso has a commanding sense of how to arrange these elements to create gripping scenarios that challenge, terrify, surprise, and delight.
Danbo again:
"It’s not artificial intelligence you fight when you’re locked in a room full of Barons of Hell and Revenants and voicelessly asked to pick a side in the resulting infighting (It’ll take more ammo to finish off the barons, but revenants are more likely to give you a nasty right hook or slap you with a rocket in the process) - it’s human intelligence."
Doom 1 and 2's base maps, given the time and constraints id was working under, are an admirable work and good bit of fun, and have undoubtedly served as a crucial creative jumping-off point for the community. But they weren't able to reveal the true brilliance of the game's design: it would be the Casali brothers' Plutonia Experiment, distributed commercially in Final Doom by id a couple years after Doom 2, that began to show off how careful arrangement could bring out the best (and most deadly) in each monster.
As Doomworld's Not Jabba puts it, in their epic history Roots of Doom Mapping (https://www.doomworld.com/25years/the-roots-of-doom-mapping/):
"The Casali brothers laid so much groundwork that all combat-oriented mapping has been a series of footnotes to Plutonia."
The Doom 2 enemies in particular are some of the best ever made, and in Plutonia we can see that each contribute something unique. Hell Knights are balanced bruisers who eat space, health, and ammo in equal measure. Revenants are fragile, but their fast movespeed and homing missiles demand nimble footwork. Chaingunners fall over to stiff breezes, but call forth lead torrents within their sightlines. Mancubi and Arachnotrons lay down blankets of fire, but can be easily dodged close up and are especially prone to starting infights. Pain Elementals are harmless if you stop their Lost Souls from spawning, but sponge up piles of ammo if you let them roam free for too long. Archviles exert their tyrannical rule through long range, delayed-hitscan fire attacks, and they brutally punish inaction by resurrecting nearby fallen foes.
Since the release of Final Doom, Doom's almost 30-year-old community has been steadily building on this foundation, its continued vitality attributable to a complex mix of historical circumstance, id's openness to fan modifications (a stance I am immensely greatful for, and has been highly influential in PC gaming at large), and love of Doom. I confess that I have only begun to dip my toes into the vast world of custom maps, but the tremendous fun I've had so far, as well as the glowing reception for projects like Scythe 2, Valiant, Ancient Aliens, and Sunlust, has me eager to dive deeper. This is a community that most games would kill for, and the fact that it's gone largely overlooked, even by many fellow lovers of game mechanics, can only be described as utterly criminal.
An all-around great resource for learning more is MtPain27's Dean of Doom Youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/c/MtPain27), where he reviews both new and old WADs level-by-level. His love of Doom is infectious, and he gives a great sense for the age, breadth, and brilliance of the mapping scene. Skilled players like Decino (https://www.youtube.com/c/decino) can also help show off the deeper aspects of gameplay, as well as engine quirks to add to your knowledge repertoire.
There are certainly some problems with the game (random damage and berserk with the chainsaw come to mind) but these are negligible when juxtaposed with the whole. I am utterly awed and humbled by what has been created here, and I don't see anything comparable emerging again. This is the type of game you could spend your whole life exploring and mastering.
Simply put: One of the greatest games of all time.
Someone who agrees is Danbo, fellow Doom lover and developer of the shmup Blue Revolver. In his old article (https://blog.danbo.vg/post/50094276897/the-most-misunderstood-game-of-all-time) he explains:
"While Doom was no doubt the product of a bunch of nerds doing what they love, the game offers a more intelligent gameplay palette than just about any other pure FPS in the world...Doom perfection is achieved where the visceral meets the intelligent."
Everyone knows the obvious: the timeless joy of the Super Shotgun, the surreal demonic aesthetic, the beloved metal MIDIs that rip off Metallica and Slayer, and so on. But there's an iceberg of elements below the surface that oft go overlooked by those uninitiated in deeper Dooming ways. To bring up just a few examples:
The famous BFG is a brilliant, quirky weapon that operates like some bizarre hybrid of a delayed-fire rocket launcher and shotgun. The ball does a good chunk of damage, but the real firepower is in the spread of 40 invisible tracers that shoot out from you a bit after the ball explodes, in the direction you initially fired. You can fire at packs of enemies to spread out the damage for crowd control, or get right up next to something to put all the tracers on it for massive destruction (both incredibly useful and incredibly dangerous against Cyberdemons). You can fire the BFG at long range, do other things (run around, switch weapons), then move into position for the tracers as the ball makes impact. You can hide behind cover, shoot the ball into a wall, then quickly peek outside cover to forgo the ball damage in favor of safety. You can even shoot, realize that you're in a bad position, and retreat, wasting ammo but possibly saving your life.
Switching weapons is both critical to success and surprisingly slow, especially if you compare with Doom's modern entries. But this adds commitment, that deep shard of the action game's soul, in a way that ties into the ever-present ammo system. Say you pump two Super Shotgun blasts into a Revenant, and are confident that it's a hair away from death. You can switch to the Chaingun to fire a quick burst, which is highly ammo-efficient, but takes time and leaves you vulnerable. You can stick with the Super Shotgun, which trades ammo for safety and speed. You can even use the Rocket Launcher to put heavy damage on another foe while killing the first with splash damage, but this opens the door for the classic-yet-catastrophic rocket to your own face. id could have easily made the weapon switch speed near-instant, but whether by intention or happenstance, they didn't, and the game is better for it.
I could go on and on about all the nuances that add to the game, but there are two critical elements that set Doom apart from every other FPS. The first is its emphasis on space control. Take the humble Pinky, for instance: low health and it's bites are easily dodged, so not much threat, right? Well, put Doomguy in a room with fifty of them (Doom 2 MAP08: Tricks and Traps for instance) and the assessment rapidly changes. If you're not careful, you'll be surrounded on all sides, and while killing a few may be easy, others will quickly rush into the gaps to further constrict you. Controlling territory with movement and smart (or copious) use of ammo is critical to survival. Now imagine how much the situation would evolve with just a single Archvile added to the mix!
The other aspect, almost completely unique to Doom as far as I know, is monster infighting and its importance. Baiting one monster type to attack another will cause it to switch aggro and retaliate. Purposefully leaving some monsters alive to tear each other apart can save you tons of ammo, but also presents a huge risk, as the resulting fight is more chaotic and dangerous.
A great example is the slime pit in Alien Vendetta's MAP14: Overwhelming Odds. The whole pit is filled with Pinkies, and the only way to exit the pit is a lift opposite the switch you need to hit. But hitting the switch releases two Cyberdemons, who can easily kill you if you get trapped, but can also easily dispatch the Pinkies and save you lots of ammo. How many Pinkies do you kill to get to the lift safely, vs. how many do you leave alive for the Cyberdemons? A little later, you need to return to the pit to activate another switch, which releases a massive cloud of Cacodemons. Do you kill the Cyberdemons before hitting the switch, while the field is nice and clear, but go it alone against the Cacos? Or do you leave the Cyberdemons to thin out the horde, then risk fighting them with random Cacos floating around? Or maybe you only kill one Cyberdemon to split the difference? I've tried all of these strategies, and each has its own strengths, weaknesses, and gameplay flow.
It's truly astonishing to me how much id managed to get right so early on. The fundamentals here are rock-solid, and the blend of fast paced action, using enemies against each other, heavy resource management, and a thick coating of atmosphere for good measure prefigures Resident Evil 4 by a decade. All the dynamic layers of decision-making I yearn for in action games are here, weaving into each other in wonderful interplay. Split-second decisions and execution are, as always, a matter of life and death, but also affect your health and ammo, which leaks into the next encounters. Making too hasty of a retreat at the wrong time can cost you precious territory and create openings for monsters to stake out unfavorable positions, the consequences of which might not be felt until later in the fight. The overall route you devise for tackling a map can vastly change how the onslaught plays out, both in terms of what gear you have access to and what mix of monsters are active.
It should be an obvious conclusion by now that the map has a massive impact on gameplay, especially if you are pistol starting. (sidenote: you should absolutely pistol start levels, lower the difficulty if you have to) Placement of monsters, weapons, resources, and geometry will make or break the experience. and the true mapping virtuoso has a commanding sense of how to arrange these elements to create gripping scenarios that challenge, terrify, surprise, and delight.
Danbo again:
"It’s not artificial intelligence you fight when you’re locked in a room full of Barons of Hell and Revenants and voicelessly asked to pick a side in the resulting infighting (It’ll take more ammo to finish off the barons, but revenants are more likely to give you a nasty right hook or slap you with a rocket in the process) - it’s human intelligence."
Doom 1 and 2's base maps, given the time and constraints id was working under, are an admirable work and good bit of fun, and have undoubtedly served as a crucial creative jumping-off point for the community. But they weren't able to reveal the true brilliance of the game's design: it would be the Casali brothers' Plutonia Experiment, distributed commercially in Final Doom by id a couple years after Doom 2, that began to show off how careful arrangement could bring out the best (and most deadly) in each monster.
As Doomworld's Not Jabba puts it, in their epic history Roots of Doom Mapping (https://www.doomworld.com/25years/the-roots-of-doom-mapping/):
"The Casali brothers laid so much groundwork that all combat-oriented mapping has been a series of footnotes to Plutonia."
The Doom 2 enemies in particular are some of the best ever made, and in Plutonia we can see that each contribute something unique. Hell Knights are balanced bruisers who eat space, health, and ammo in equal measure. Revenants are fragile, but their fast movespeed and homing missiles demand nimble footwork. Chaingunners fall over to stiff breezes, but call forth lead torrents within their sightlines. Mancubi and Arachnotrons lay down blankets of fire, but can be easily dodged close up and are especially prone to starting infights. Pain Elementals are harmless if you stop their Lost Souls from spawning, but sponge up piles of ammo if you let them roam free for too long. Archviles exert their tyrannical rule through long range, delayed-hitscan fire attacks, and they brutally punish inaction by resurrecting nearby fallen foes.
Since the release of Final Doom, Doom's almost 30-year-old community has been steadily building on this foundation, its continued vitality attributable to a complex mix of historical circumstance, id's openness to fan modifications (a stance I am immensely greatful for, and has been highly influential in PC gaming at large), and love of Doom. I confess that I have only begun to dip my toes into the vast world of custom maps, but the tremendous fun I've had so far, as well as the glowing reception for projects like Scythe 2, Valiant, Ancient Aliens, and Sunlust, has me eager to dive deeper. This is a community that most games would kill for, and the fact that it's gone largely overlooked, even by many fellow lovers of game mechanics, can only be described as utterly criminal.
An all-around great resource for learning more is MtPain27's Dean of Doom Youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/c/MtPain27), where he reviews both new and old WADs level-by-level. His love of Doom is infectious, and he gives a great sense for the age, breadth, and brilliance of the mapping scene. Skilled players like Decino (https://www.youtube.com/c/decino) can also help show off the deeper aspects of gameplay, as well as engine quirks to add to your knowledge repertoire.
There are certainly some problems with the game (random damage and berserk with the chainsaw come to mind) but these are negligible when juxtaposed with the whole. I am utterly awed and humbled by what has been created here, and I don't see anything comparable emerging again. This is the type of game you could spend your whole life exploring and mastering.
Simply put: One of the greatest games of all time.
2007
Voivod is my favorite band ever. While their whole discography is awash with greatness, the run of 1987's Killing Technology, 1988's Dimension Hatross, and 1989's Nothingface is unreal. The band took its otherworldly cold-metal dystopian phantasmagoria vision, spearheaded by guitarist Piggy's signature bizarre dissonant riffs, and channeled it through 3 masterpiece albums that each feel distinct yet interconnected, breaking new ground with a deftness that makes it seem trodden a thousand times before.
When thinking about Hellsinker, I am struck with the same sense of awe. Hellsinker, impossibly, manages to be both wildly experimental and meticulously refined, bursting with new ideas yet grounded in strong fundamentals. Made by a single person over years of hard work, but that's the cost: something of this nature can only exist in a compact idea-space, and an individual's mind is the most compact of all.
I hesitate to talk about the mechanics too much, because the process of discovery is so core to the game's soul, but I'll mention a couple as both a cross-section and to entice you.
One of the game's main mechanics is the suppression field, a small aura that appears when you aren't using your main shot and slows down nearby bullets. In contrast to rounded bullets though, pointy-looking bullets are slowed down less, or not at all. And an interesting and deadly emergent property is how slowing bullets causes them to clump up together, suddenly denying you space and breaking a pattern's natural symmetry. Hellsinker takes these as an opportunity to construct frenetic patterns of push-and-pull between player offense, space control, and dodging, and flicks them on and off with whiplash pacing.
Like many shmups, some enemies will be blocked from firing if you are close enough. But unlike almost all other shmups, touching an enemy won't kill you, but instead bounce you away erratically. These two factors, combined with most characters having some sort of melee ability, make Hellsinker one of the most aggressive shmups I've ever played. Like when locking-on in Crimzon Clover, knowing when to get up in somebody's face vs. when to back off is a critical skill. But instead of the calculating sound of "click-click-click," it's a rusty knife rushdown, standing in stark contrast to the game's alien aesthetic and evoking the same electrifying chemical reaction between cold metal and fiery aggression that Voivod harnesses in their music.
Once again, music comes to mind. Music, especially instrument-driven music, is actually quite an abstract medium, since it doesn't rely on traditional storytelling/narrative. Instead, it excels at creating complex mixes and flows of feelings by interfacing with the subconscious. Much like the lyrics of many songs, the literal meaning of Hellsinker's story isn't important. The connotations and the delivery are the substance, mingling with the cold blues and lonely techno-religious environments. The synth trance is deliberately synced with the events of the stages, a la fellow doujin work Touhou. The crunch of quasi-gunfire-on-metal and gauges narrated by artificial voices calls to mind both shmup monolith Ikaruga and Cynic's tech-death classic Focus.
Hellsinker is notorious for being offputting to newcomers, as this review humorously illustrates, but in a certain sense that's simply another piece in the whole. The many esoteric mechanics, the dreamlike storytelling, even the bizarrely in-character manual, all of it loops back into each other and contributes to the complex feelings of alienation, exhilaration, melancholy, and awe that is Hellsinker. But don't take my word for it, take the dev's:
"I don’t really consider story, setting, characters, and music as something standing apart from “game design” per se. Even if one of those elements is excellent, it’s more about the holistic, overall vision I’m trying to present, and in that sense, all those elements are just one part of the whole (on the other hand, provided it doesn’t feel like something is lacking, not everything has to be “perfect” for me). Ultimately one is creating a single cohesive experience, and I think it should be conceived that way from the outset." - Tonnor in a 2019 interview
In a certain sense, I consider this to be the highest calling of the medium: aesthetics and mechanics unified as one, without sacrificing either. This describes many of the canonical classics of course, but works that flower like this from an alien core, such as Hellsinker and Voivod's albums, are often doomed to the fringes, for that's the only place they can be born. Yet their flames burn, silently but ferociously, waiting to entrance the next unsuspecting passerby who gazes too deeply inside.
An utter masterwork.
When thinking about Hellsinker, I am struck with the same sense of awe. Hellsinker, impossibly, manages to be both wildly experimental and meticulously refined, bursting with new ideas yet grounded in strong fundamentals. Made by a single person over years of hard work, but that's the cost: something of this nature can only exist in a compact idea-space, and an individual's mind is the most compact of all.
I hesitate to talk about the mechanics too much, because the process of discovery is so core to the game's soul, but I'll mention a couple as both a cross-section and to entice you.
One of the game's main mechanics is the suppression field, a small aura that appears when you aren't using your main shot and slows down nearby bullets. In contrast to rounded bullets though, pointy-looking bullets are slowed down less, or not at all. And an interesting and deadly emergent property is how slowing bullets causes them to clump up together, suddenly denying you space and breaking a pattern's natural symmetry. Hellsinker takes these as an opportunity to construct frenetic patterns of push-and-pull between player offense, space control, and dodging, and flicks them on and off with whiplash pacing.
Like many shmups, some enemies will be blocked from firing if you are close enough. But unlike almost all other shmups, touching an enemy won't kill you, but instead bounce you away erratically. These two factors, combined with most characters having some sort of melee ability, make Hellsinker one of the most aggressive shmups I've ever played. Like when locking-on in Crimzon Clover, knowing when to get up in somebody's face vs. when to back off is a critical skill. But instead of the calculating sound of "click-click-click," it's a rusty knife rushdown, standing in stark contrast to the game's alien aesthetic and evoking the same electrifying chemical reaction between cold metal and fiery aggression that Voivod harnesses in their music.
Once again, music comes to mind. Music, especially instrument-driven music, is actually quite an abstract medium, since it doesn't rely on traditional storytelling/narrative. Instead, it excels at creating complex mixes and flows of feelings by interfacing with the subconscious. Much like the lyrics of many songs, the literal meaning of Hellsinker's story isn't important. The connotations and the delivery are the substance, mingling with the cold blues and lonely techno-religious environments. The synth trance is deliberately synced with the events of the stages, a la fellow doujin work Touhou. The crunch of quasi-gunfire-on-metal and gauges narrated by artificial voices calls to mind both shmup monolith Ikaruga and Cynic's tech-death classic Focus.
Hellsinker is notorious for being offputting to newcomers, as this review humorously illustrates, but in a certain sense that's simply another piece in the whole. The many esoteric mechanics, the dreamlike storytelling, even the bizarrely in-character manual, all of it loops back into each other and contributes to the complex feelings of alienation, exhilaration, melancholy, and awe that is Hellsinker. But don't take my word for it, take the dev's:
"I don’t really consider story, setting, characters, and music as something standing apart from “game design” per se. Even if one of those elements is excellent, it’s more about the holistic, overall vision I’m trying to present, and in that sense, all those elements are just one part of the whole (on the other hand, provided it doesn’t feel like something is lacking, not everything has to be “perfect” for me). Ultimately one is creating a single cohesive experience, and I think it should be conceived that way from the outset." - Tonnor in a 2019 interview
In a certain sense, I consider this to be the highest calling of the medium: aesthetics and mechanics unified as one, without sacrificing either. This describes many of the canonical classics of course, but works that flower like this from an alien core, such as Hellsinker and Voivod's albums, are often doomed to the fringes, for that's the only place they can be born. Yet their flames burn, silently but ferociously, waiting to entrance the next unsuspecting passerby who gazes too deeply inside.
An utter masterwork.
1996
An experienced dev team's first foray into true 3D that, shockingly, gets it right all the way back in June 1996.
Absolutely rock-solid fundamentals which set the tone for the rest of the genre. Analog controls enable precise adjustment of angles which have huge downstream effects. A signature focus on momentum, combined with tricks both intentional and unintentional, birthed one of the most legendary and iconic speedrunning scenes of all time. Systems like this in a casual single player context, balanced to enhance rather than subvert challenges, are rare to find, and even the devs themselves never quite managed to recapture this particular flavor.
The level design here is emblematic of the early 3D era "golden age": enough detail and representation to evoke sense of place, but with the abstraction necessitated by the time's technology both facilitating dense layouts and imbuing the atmosphere with a surreal, dreamlike quality. No established formulas for success existed yet, so levels aren't overly concerned with providing the player a frictionless experience. Each expresses their own quirky character, something felt even more strongly than usual since gameplay is so contextualized by the precise placement of nearby geometry.
Shortcomings mainly occur in obtuse progression/secrets and a handful of stages (more concentrated in the latter half) that don't play to the game's strengths. Luckily, the huge modding scene has leveraged this fantastic foundation and learned from these mistakes to create a veritable cornucopia of visions, both vanilla-like and experimental, for you as a player to explore.
Yup, Quake is a pretty great game!
Absolutely rock-solid fundamentals which set the tone for the rest of the genre. Analog controls enable precise adjustment of angles which have huge downstream effects. A signature focus on momentum, combined with tricks both intentional and unintentional, birthed one of the most legendary and iconic speedrunning scenes of all time. Systems like this in a casual single player context, balanced to enhance rather than subvert challenges, are rare to find, and even the devs themselves never quite managed to recapture this particular flavor.
The level design here is emblematic of the early 3D era "golden age": enough detail and representation to evoke sense of place, but with the abstraction necessitated by the time's technology both facilitating dense layouts and imbuing the atmosphere with a surreal, dreamlike quality. No established formulas for success existed yet, so levels aren't overly concerned with providing the player a frictionless experience. Each expresses their own quirky character, something felt even more strongly than usual since gameplay is so contextualized by the precise placement of nearby geometry.
Shortcomings mainly occur in obtuse progression/secrets and a handful of stages (more concentrated in the latter half) that don't play to the game's strengths. Luckily, the huge modding scene has leveraged this fantastic foundation and learned from these mistakes to create a veritable cornucopia of visions, both vanilla-like and experimental, for you as a player to explore.
Yup, Quake is a pretty great game!
Tears of the Kingdom is radically and unintentionally about intrinsic motivation. All the building blocks are placed right in front of you, but you'll have to assemble them yourself. This is nothing new for pure sandbox games, but TOTK isn't supposed to be a pure sandbox game! In its best moments, it harnesses this: even mundane challenges are an opportunity to spark creativity. In its worst, it resents this, and will fight your agency tooth-and-nail.
Most of the time, the game lands in an awkward middle: not outright controlling you per se, but holding the guiding reins with shocking determination. Say you're on a floating island with a crystal you need to deliver to a nearby shrine. Almost certainly the game will place a wing and fan nearby, reducing the whole situation to a classic Zelda "nuzzle" where the solution is just handed to you directly. I understand tutorialization, but the game refuses to trust the player even after hours and hours and hours of this.
This also undermines any sort of efficiency-driven play, since the optimal solutions (that aren't obtuse speedrun-style tech) are simple and/or universal cheesy tactics (e.g. object + ascend + recall). There also seems to be some sort of aggressive speed cap that gives strong diminishing returns to multiple fans/rockets/etc. which hurts the parts management aspect.
But, with all this said, there's nothing stopping me from simply ignoring the game and coming up with my own wacky idea that's fun and interesting! What if I tried to launch the crystal directly with rockets? What if I dropped something to the surface from the shrine, brought the crystal, and recalled it back up? What if I put it on a really, really, really long stick?
Once I accidentally lifted up a large floating platform too high to grab with my Ultrahand. So I took out all my weapons, glued them in a straight line, and managed to reach up high enough to fuse it to the platform and yank the whole thing back down!
These are some of the most joyous experiences I've had in a game. I can't praise the building system enough (despite some minor control issues) in how deep, intuitive, and polished it is. Much of my time was spent messing around in some random location, seeing what I could build that used the items and landscape around me. It's the only true sequel to Super Metroid that Nintendo has ever made: the world is a kaleidoscope of problems to be both invented and solved.
But what's bizarre to me is how so much of the game either refuses to acknowledge this or even actively resists it! One of the greatest experiences I had with this game was making the climb up to the Water Temple on my own, without any prompting. Finding strange and inventive ways to hop between islands as I climb higher and higher in solitude, listening to the quiet ambience and seeing the imposing structure above creep closer and closer, then finally breaking in to hear the Water Temple's song play. This was by far the most powerful experiential moment I had in both open-world Zeldas, and in retrospect mirrors much of the strengths of Fumito Ueda's work.
And then, I was greeted with a loud "DA-DING" error message from the central console of the temple. So I dropped down, completed a menial fetch quest so Sidon would come up to the island chain, then returned to the console. "DA-DING." I went back, talked to him on a different island so the game would flip the proper flag, then returned again and was finally allowed to progress. It's baffling how the same game can have mechanics that encourage such freedom and a structure that so constricts it.
Mostly though, as with my first example, the game settles for mere apathy. Shrines vary from stiflingly simple lock-and-key tests of specific parts to open-ended challenges that you could feasibly solve without knowing the intended solution. (Sadly, the former are far more common than the latter.) The Fire Temple's skatepark design was my overwhelming favorite, and the Lightning Temple shows glimmers of greatness, but the Water and Wind Temple feel like Divine Beasts, and on the whole it's hard to not be disappointed in the missed potential here.
The Depths has parts lying around everywhere and treacherous terrain to use them on, but is homogenous and bloated. Sky Islands offer small shrine-esque challenges that can be fun, but fall far short of the potential illustrated by the tutorial area. Most of the side quests I tried were fetch quest adjacent, but there might be some really good ones out there! Which speaks to a larger point: there's too much content that's too much like BOTW that's spread across too large an area.
Combat mirrors the rest of the game, and its problems go back to BOTW. The sheer amount of options offered by fusing is breathtaking, and the breadth of interactions in BOTW's chemistry system has been made far more accessible. But the balance is all wrong! You can feel the potential during the combat shrines, where stripping your items away forces a more improvisational style. But the games it's (unconsciously) looking towards have key differences. Halo's two weapon limit prevents you from hoarding ammo in advance, whereas in TOTK (and BOTW for that matter) you will collect random resources without thinking. Traditional roguelikes are stingy with items to incentivize crafty use of each one, but BOTW and TOTK shower you with powerful consumables and fusion materials. Arkane's immersive sims also suffer from these problems to some degree, but in those games the level design is as much your foe as the enemies themselves, while level design is perhaps the single greatest failing of TOTK. All of the above games aspire to differentiate their tools, and TOTK has a lot of ways to produce interesting and unique effects, but the most common and powerful fusion materials are simple damage increases, which scale into the late game far better than the creative ones!
Despite all I've said above, I wouldn't quite call the combat "bad" per se. The swordplay is somewhat entertaining, throwing weapons is a great risk-reward mechanic, and having to scavenge around mid-fight adds a lot. But the most fun thing to do is to play with your food: try weird effects and interactions (of which the Bokoblins are fantastically suited for!) instead of playing efficiently all the time. Freeze things and blow them off cliffs! Bounce enemies around with a mushroom spear! Start Bokoblin-Zonai infighting!
For being so brilliantly realized yet simultaneously sloppily crafted, TOTK earns the title of most bizarre game I've ever played. It almost has a romhack quality to it: making visionary changes in some areas while uncritically accepting so much of its ill-fitting foundation. I had many moments of joy while playing it, but all throughout, the game looked on with a disinterested gaze. No score.
Most of the time, the game lands in an awkward middle: not outright controlling you per se, but holding the guiding reins with shocking determination. Say you're on a floating island with a crystal you need to deliver to a nearby shrine. Almost certainly the game will place a wing and fan nearby, reducing the whole situation to a classic Zelda "nuzzle" where the solution is just handed to you directly. I understand tutorialization, but the game refuses to trust the player even after hours and hours and hours of this.
This also undermines any sort of efficiency-driven play, since the optimal solutions (that aren't obtuse speedrun-style tech) are simple and/or universal cheesy tactics (e.g. object + ascend + recall). There also seems to be some sort of aggressive speed cap that gives strong diminishing returns to multiple fans/rockets/etc. which hurts the parts management aspect.
But, with all this said, there's nothing stopping me from simply ignoring the game and coming up with my own wacky idea that's fun and interesting! What if I tried to launch the crystal directly with rockets? What if I dropped something to the surface from the shrine, brought the crystal, and recalled it back up? What if I put it on a really, really, really long stick?
Once I accidentally lifted up a large floating platform too high to grab with my Ultrahand. So I took out all my weapons, glued them in a straight line, and managed to reach up high enough to fuse it to the platform and yank the whole thing back down!
These are some of the most joyous experiences I've had in a game. I can't praise the building system enough (despite some minor control issues) in how deep, intuitive, and polished it is. Much of my time was spent messing around in some random location, seeing what I could build that used the items and landscape around me. It's the only true sequel to Super Metroid that Nintendo has ever made: the world is a kaleidoscope of problems to be both invented and solved.
But what's bizarre to me is how so much of the game either refuses to acknowledge this or even actively resists it! One of the greatest experiences I had with this game was making the climb up to the Water Temple on my own, without any prompting. Finding strange and inventive ways to hop between islands as I climb higher and higher in solitude, listening to the quiet ambience and seeing the imposing structure above creep closer and closer, then finally breaking in to hear the Water Temple's song play. This was by far the most powerful experiential moment I had in both open-world Zeldas, and in retrospect mirrors much of the strengths of Fumito Ueda's work.
And then, I was greeted with a loud "DA-DING" error message from the central console of the temple. So I dropped down, completed a menial fetch quest so Sidon would come up to the island chain, then returned to the console. "DA-DING." I went back, talked to him on a different island so the game would flip the proper flag, then returned again and was finally allowed to progress. It's baffling how the same game can have mechanics that encourage such freedom and a structure that so constricts it.
Mostly though, as with my first example, the game settles for mere apathy. Shrines vary from stiflingly simple lock-and-key tests of specific parts to open-ended challenges that you could feasibly solve without knowing the intended solution. (Sadly, the former are far more common than the latter.) The Fire Temple's skatepark design was my overwhelming favorite, and the Lightning Temple shows glimmers of greatness, but the Water and Wind Temple feel like Divine Beasts, and on the whole it's hard to not be disappointed in the missed potential here.
The Depths has parts lying around everywhere and treacherous terrain to use them on, but is homogenous and bloated. Sky Islands offer small shrine-esque challenges that can be fun, but fall far short of the potential illustrated by the tutorial area. Most of the side quests I tried were fetch quest adjacent, but there might be some really good ones out there! Which speaks to a larger point: there's too much content that's too much like BOTW that's spread across too large an area.
Combat mirrors the rest of the game, and its problems go back to BOTW. The sheer amount of options offered by fusing is breathtaking, and the breadth of interactions in BOTW's chemistry system has been made far more accessible. But the balance is all wrong! You can feel the potential during the combat shrines, where stripping your items away forces a more improvisational style. But the games it's (unconsciously) looking towards have key differences. Halo's two weapon limit prevents you from hoarding ammo in advance, whereas in TOTK (and BOTW for that matter) you will collect random resources without thinking. Traditional roguelikes are stingy with items to incentivize crafty use of each one, but BOTW and TOTK shower you with powerful consumables and fusion materials. Arkane's immersive sims also suffer from these problems to some degree, but in those games the level design is as much your foe as the enemies themselves, while level design is perhaps the single greatest failing of TOTK. All of the above games aspire to differentiate their tools, and TOTK has a lot of ways to produce interesting and unique effects, but the most common and powerful fusion materials are simple damage increases, which scale into the late game far better than the creative ones!
Despite all I've said above, I wouldn't quite call the combat "bad" per se. The swordplay is somewhat entertaining, throwing weapons is a great risk-reward mechanic, and having to scavenge around mid-fight adds a lot. But the most fun thing to do is to play with your food: try weird effects and interactions (of which the Bokoblins are fantastically suited for!) instead of playing efficiently all the time. Freeze things and blow them off cliffs! Bounce enemies around with a mushroom spear! Start Bokoblin-Zonai infighting!
For being so brilliantly realized yet simultaneously sloppily crafted, TOTK earns the title of most bizarre game I've ever played. It almost has a romhack quality to it: making visionary changes in some areas while uncritically accepting so much of its ill-fitting foundation. I had many moments of joy while playing it, but all throughout, the game looked on with a disinterested gaze. No score.
2020
(Played on Nightmare, mods used: Original TAG1, AI Restoration, Fixed Immora)
Doom Eternal feels like it should be the greatest single-player FPS ever for me, and I really admire its ideas and ambitions, but instead it's just a pretty good game. Why?
My main problem is that most of the encounters have a "soupy consistency": they feel similar despite me ostensibly making different decisions in the moment. I am still not sure what precisely is causing this, but I think most of the complaints about this game aren't getting at the core issues, so I'm just gonna throw out a bunch of things that I think are primarily contributing.
Movement in Doom Eternal is just ridiculous. For comparison: Quake allows for building momentum and doing crazy jumps, but this is very geometry dependent and difficult to execute while in combat. Doom's movement is more straightforwardly fast, but enemies have large hitboxes which easily bodyblock you, and the vertical axis is off-limits. Halo (and many other FPS) simply have slow movespeed that forces you to commit to positioning. DE has fast immediate movement + easy height and momentum boosting with meathook and ballista + 2 dash charges that cancel momentum and can go any direction. Faced with this kit, enemies have an extremely difficult time contesting you, especially in the air, and it's more likely that you'll get clipped by some random projectile than from misjudging a situation per se.
The level design is exacerbating this problem! Almost all the arenas you fight in are huge spaces filled with monkey bars/jump pads/ledges/etc which allow you to easily run in big circles, flee when threatened, and glide over enemies' heads. Cooldowns incentivize this too! TAG1 and the Master Levels try to combat this somewhat by using more environmental hazards, shrinking arena sizes, and placing major encounters in the comparatively cramped areas between arenas.
In the former context, the enemy roster generally struggles to pressure you. This is a real shame, because in many basic ways they are quite well-designed and differentiated (some writeups here, here). The Marauder has strong (and annoying) defense that demands you hold specific spacing, but even then it's not all that hard to just run away and ignore him. Most everyone else will let you flit around whatever range you want to be at and fire away, as opposed to the melee-oriented action games that Doom Eternal is drawing on, which require spacing and attack commitment.
There are a few exceptions. Carcasses subvert the issue by hiding and spawning energy shields at a distance which can abruptly block your path, i.e. actually contest your offense. Blood Makyrs reuse the annoying traffic light mechanic to prevent you from bursting them, but shoot massive, fast, movespeed-reducing projectiles that are dangerous and predictable enough to warrant playing proactively around. Cyber-Mancubi at least incentivize closing into melee range, where they can easily deal damage to you (unless you use the very silly chaingun shield).
The Spirit, in fittingly maximalist fashion, brute-forces the issue by just cranking up the health and speed of possessed enemies. Suddenly ranged enemies are difficult to dodge without cover, and melee enemies become relentless harassers that can actually keep up with you. On top of that, you need to make sure that you have ammo + time + space to kill the ghost itself, or let it possess something else. I wouldn't say it totally fixes the aforementioned problems, but it helps.
I say this about almost all fast FPS but this game really needed an enemy similar to Doom 2's Archvile or Quake's Shambler, something that can control space without the player just reactively dodging. Obvious, persistent homing missiles like Doom 2's Revenant or Quake's Vore might have helped complicate movement too, and the Glory Kill iframes couild even be used to avoid these big attacks (see: Ninja Gaiden incendiary shurikens).
Watching high-level play of DE is kind of weird, because of how ridiculously powerful weapon switching is. Nonstop swapping between ballista/rocket/precision bolt/SSG dilutes their individual characteristics as tools and turns them into one giant DPS hose. Almost all enemies can be bursted down near-instantly, especially with the various swap glitches that have been discovered over time, and meathook + ballista boosting to create sightlines quickly. Most players of course won't reach this level, but even for me I could feel the echoes of this playstyle when tackling the hardest content.
This game has a weird relationship with difficulty in general. Not being able to scale intensity isn't a critical flaw IMO (arguably original RE4 is like this). But I don't generally find Doom Eternal most compelling when the fights are easy, for reasons mentioned above, and trying to make the game extremely difficult presents issues. Because enemies move and fire so erratically:
* Initial placement is generally unimportant, and cannot be used as a design lever
* Single enemies struggle to exert pressure, but if the mapper places too many enemies at once, it becomes difficult to discern order from the chaos, and generic "just keep moving" strategies will dominate
Environmental hazards and AOE spam can work, but don't always feel like they change your decisionmaking that much, and feel vaguely annoying for many people, including myself at times. Limiting access to your tools, as seen in the Classic Mode for Master Levels, certainly does, but this is rarely used so far, and certainly not to the level of e.g. Doom maps.
Sometimes though I think that everything I wrote above actually doesn't matter that much, and the real problem is some difficult to pin down game feel issue. The game feels vaguely "floaty," in a way that makes it less satisfying to move around and fight. Sadly I can't identify exactly why this is, but it really does matter, even for a game near-exclusively focused on combat depth. For example, even after putting thousands of hours into Monster Hunter, the way the classic games control still feels viscerally enjoyable to me, and hurts my experience with the new games in comparison.
I found this game very difficult to analyze, so forgive any shortcomings. Check out Durandal's writeups here and here to hopefully fill in some of the gaps. Hopefully this team's next game can somehow overcome these issues and fulfill the potential of this style of design.
Doom Eternal feels like it should be the greatest single-player FPS ever for me, and I really admire its ideas and ambitions, but instead it's just a pretty good game. Why?
My main problem is that most of the encounters have a "soupy consistency": they feel similar despite me ostensibly making different decisions in the moment. I am still not sure what precisely is causing this, but I think most of the complaints about this game aren't getting at the core issues, so I'm just gonna throw out a bunch of things that I think are primarily contributing.
Movement in Doom Eternal is just ridiculous. For comparison: Quake allows for building momentum and doing crazy jumps, but this is very geometry dependent and difficult to execute while in combat. Doom's movement is more straightforwardly fast, but enemies have large hitboxes which easily bodyblock you, and the vertical axis is off-limits. Halo (and many other FPS) simply have slow movespeed that forces you to commit to positioning. DE has fast immediate movement + easy height and momentum boosting with meathook and ballista + 2 dash charges that cancel momentum and can go any direction. Faced with this kit, enemies have an extremely difficult time contesting you, especially in the air, and it's more likely that you'll get clipped by some random projectile than from misjudging a situation per se.
The level design is exacerbating this problem! Almost all the arenas you fight in are huge spaces filled with monkey bars/jump pads/ledges/etc which allow you to easily run in big circles, flee when threatened, and glide over enemies' heads. Cooldowns incentivize this too! TAG1 and the Master Levels try to combat this somewhat by using more environmental hazards, shrinking arena sizes, and placing major encounters in the comparatively cramped areas between arenas.
In the former context, the enemy roster generally struggles to pressure you. This is a real shame, because in many basic ways they are quite well-designed and differentiated (some writeups here, here). The Marauder has strong (and annoying) defense that demands you hold specific spacing, but even then it's not all that hard to just run away and ignore him. Most everyone else will let you flit around whatever range you want to be at and fire away, as opposed to the melee-oriented action games that Doom Eternal is drawing on, which require spacing and attack commitment.
There are a few exceptions. Carcasses subvert the issue by hiding and spawning energy shields at a distance which can abruptly block your path, i.e. actually contest your offense. Blood Makyrs reuse the annoying traffic light mechanic to prevent you from bursting them, but shoot massive, fast, movespeed-reducing projectiles that are dangerous and predictable enough to warrant playing proactively around. Cyber-Mancubi at least incentivize closing into melee range, where they can easily deal damage to you (unless you use the very silly chaingun shield).
The Spirit, in fittingly maximalist fashion, brute-forces the issue by just cranking up the health and speed of possessed enemies. Suddenly ranged enemies are difficult to dodge without cover, and melee enemies become relentless harassers that can actually keep up with you. On top of that, you need to make sure that you have ammo + time + space to kill the ghost itself, or let it possess something else. I wouldn't say it totally fixes the aforementioned problems, but it helps.
I say this about almost all fast FPS but this game really needed an enemy similar to Doom 2's Archvile or Quake's Shambler, something that can control space without the player just reactively dodging. Obvious, persistent homing missiles like Doom 2's Revenant or Quake's Vore might have helped complicate movement too, and the Glory Kill iframes couild even be used to avoid these big attacks (see: Ninja Gaiden incendiary shurikens).
Watching high-level play of DE is kind of weird, because of how ridiculously powerful weapon switching is. Nonstop swapping between ballista/rocket/precision bolt/SSG dilutes their individual characteristics as tools and turns them into one giant DPS hose. Almost all enemies can be bursted down near-instantly, especially with the various swap glitches that have been discovered over time, and meathook + ballista boosting to create sightlines quickly. Most players of course won't reach this level, but even for me I could feel the echoes of this playstyle when tackling the hardest content.
This game has a weird relationship with difficulty in general. Not being able to scale intensity isn't a critical flaw IMO (arguably original RE4 is like this). But I don't generally find Doom Eternal most compelling when the fights are easy, for reasons mentioned above, and trying to make the game extremely difficult presents issues. Because enemies move and fire so erratically:
* Initial placement is generally unimportant, and cannot be used as a design lever
* Single enemies struggle to exert pressure, but if the mapper places too many enemies at once, it becomes difficult to discern order from the chaos, and generic "just keep moving" strategies will dominate
Environmental hazards and AOE spam can work, but don't always feel like they change your decisionmaking that much, and feel vaguely annoying for many people, including myself at times. Limiting access to your tools, as seen in the Classic Mode for Master Levels, certainly does, but this is rarely used so far, and certainly not to the level of e.g. Doom maps.
Sometimes though I think that everything I wrote above actually doesn't matter that much, and the real problem is some difficult to pin down game feel issue. The game feels vaguely "floaty," in a way that makes it less satisfying to move around and fight. Sadly I can't identify exactly why this is, but it really does matter, even for a game near-exclusively focused on combat depth. For example, even after putting thousands of hours into Monster Hunter, the way the classic games control still feels viscerally enjoyable to me, and hurts my experience with the new games in comparison.
I found this game very difficult to analyze, so forgive any shortcomings. Check out Durandal's writeups here and here to hopefully fill in some of the gaps. Hopefully this team's next game can somehow overcome these issues and fulfill the potential of this style of design.
2018
Replayed on Cero Miedo (equivalent to Ultra-Violence in Doom), Intruder Mode (aka pistol start from Doom), no mid-level saves. This will be a quick one, not as analytical as my usual fare.
Mechanically, SimonDedalus's review is pretty much on the money. Elements from classic FPS (movement from Quake, infighting from Doom, secrets from Build Engine, prop shenanigans from Half Life) are haphazardly smashed together without any real sense of a cohesive, balanced end product. Movement is fun to hop around with but utterly dominates open-air encounters. Map design is serviceable I guess? Nothing awe-inspiring but I haven't played Quake custom maps so I have no idea what the bar is here.
Enemies are mostly Doom 1 clones, weapons are mostly Quake clones except for the crossbow which is kinda neat. Infighting is a lot more circle-strafy than Doom (which could already get circle-strafy on some maps) and less strategic since enemies of the same type can fight each other. The props are borderline overpowered, but throwing barrels over and over is kinda boring and error-prone so whatever I guess? Ammo is usually everywhere even if you don't find the secrets, but health and armor get gobbled up quick. Enemies do huge damage on Cero Miedo, probably because the dev realized that the only way you can die with this combat and movement system is to get clipped by stray pseudo-hitscan projectiles like 5 times over the course of the whole level. Play a good Doom map and you'll understand what I mean here when I say the balancing and structure is pretty bad for protracted combat encounters.
The atmosphere, sense of pacing, and general presentation save the game. There's a sense of constant forward momentum, going towards something, though you're never quite sure what. Maps alternate between combat-heavy arenas and claustrophobic crawls, which elevates both beyond their standalone level of quality. Low-poly blends great with backwoods and industrial horror, think those PS1-style short horror games. Sound design is generally solid. I love the dual shotguns, satisfying to use. The powerups are fun and stacking them is pretty neat. And the ending is genuinely good, which is bizarrely rare in other classic FPS.
I definitely don't hate this game, it has the good sense to keep its runtime short and it was made when classic FPS design was only just coming back into vogue. If you haven't played the classics you'll probably like this a lot. Moral of the story is go play Doom and Blood.
Mechanically, SimonDedalus's review is pretty much on the money. Elements from classic FPS (movement from Quake, infighting from Doom, secrets from Build Engine, prop shenanigans from Half Life) are haphazardly smashed together without any real sense of a cohesive, balanced end product. Movement is fun to hop around with but utterly dominates open-air encounters. Map design is serviceable I guess? Nothing awe-inspiring but I haven't played Quake custom maps so I have no idea what the bar is here.
Enemies are mostly Doom 1 clones, weapons are mostly Quake clones except for the crossbow which is kinda neat. Infighting is a lot more circle-strafy than Doom (which could already get circle-strafy on some maps) and less strategic since enemies of the same type can fight each other. The props are borderline overpowered, but throwing barrels over and over is kinda boring and error-prone so whatever I guess? Ammo is usually everywhere even if you don't find the secrets, but health and armor get gobbled up quick. Enemies do huge damage on Cero Miedo, probably because the dev realized that the only way you can die with this combat and movement system is to get clipped by stray pseudo-hitscan projectiles like 5 times over the course of the whole level. Play a good Doom map and you'll understand what I mean here when I say the balancing and structure is pretty bad for protracted combat encounters.
The atmosphere, sense of pacing, and general presentation save the game. There's a sense of constant forward momentum, going towards something, though you're never quite sure what. Maps alternate between combat-heavy arenas and claustrophobic crawls, which elevates both beyond their standalone level of quality. Low-poly blends great with backwoods and industrial horror, think those PS1-style short horror games. Sound design is generally solid. I love the dual shotguns, satisfying to use. The powerups are fun and stacking them is pretty neat. And the ending is genuinely good, which is bizarrely rare in other classic FPS.
I definitely don't hate this game, it has the good sense to keep its runtime short and it was made when classic FPS design was only just coming back into vogue. If you haven't played the classics you'll probably like this a lot. Moral of the story is go play Doom and Blood.
2023
I highly recommend reading House of Leaves. It's a very unique novel that's surprisingly quite funny at times. You will love it, or at least hate it in an interesting way. This WAD is fine, but it pales in comparison to the work it's imitating.
Edit 10/26/23: Changed to unscored. Feel uncomfortable with the work itself as unfiction, and its impact on the Doom community it draws on (from?) seems negative to me. Very unsure of my thoughts though.
Edit 10/26/23: Changed to unscored. Feel uncomfortable with the work itself as unfiction, and its impact on the Doom community it draws on (from?) seems negative to me. Very unsure of my thoughts though.
2022
Joseph Anderson made an excellent video on this game, so for the sake of brevity I'll just refer you to it, while adding some short comments of my own below. Video here
The first 20-30 hours really are magical, and the force of that experience can't be denied. Seeing fantastic new areas and enemies, taking in the massive scope of the world, getting lost somewhere unfamiliar, spotting some distant location on the horizon and realizing you can actually go there, if you can figure out a path. It evokes Dark Souls 1's best moments, and I wouldn't begrudge anyone for loving the game from this alone.
The legacy dungeon design is characteristically impressive but still feels like a regression in some aspects. The sheer size and complexity of many dungeons is breathtaking, the ambition really shines through here. Jumping lets you traverse the environment in lots of creative and organic ways, and interacts well with the aforementioned complexity. Unfortunately however, nothing here really comes close to DS1 classics like Sen's Fortress in terms of considered design. The Stake of Marika is a fantastic addition, but its potential is largely wasted, as instead of leaning into it to make bonfires more scarce and important, bonfires appear at the same or higher frequency than previous games. For some reason fast travel is allowed within legacy dungeons, which kills a lot of the tension of exploration and the risk of losing souls. Shortcuts feel less important and traps feel less deadly.
It's also far too easy to run past everything in the open world with the horse, with only a few exceptions. A hostile landscape with enemies and hazards at every turn should not feel like a walk in the park to traverse. It was only after making a second character that I realized how badly this murders the replayability. Fast travel serves as yet another bandaid fix here, reprising its usual modern FromSoft role.
For all the game's virtues, the feeling I'm left with at the end is bitterness, which is probably why this is still on my mind. I'm bitter that I can sense an awareness of the typical open world pitfalls but somehow the game still falls into them. I'm bitter that I can't trust FromSoft to learn from its mistakes here, especially in the combat. I'm bitter that the enjoyable level design almost feels squandered by the other elements. I'm bitter that the daring spirit of Demon's Souls, the willingness to wildly experiment and defy expectations, has floated away like a soul leaving a corpse. But most of all I'm bitter that the game really does reach the lofty heights of Dark Souls 1 at times. It climbs the mountain, ascending higher than even the old mentor, until, with a confidence bordering on absentmindedness, it loses its grip and plummets down, down, down into the abyss.
"…But even so, one day the flames will fade, and only Dark will remain. And even a legend such as thineself can do nothing to stop that." - Hawkeye Gough
The first 20-30 hours really are magical, and the force of that experience can't be denied. Seeing fantastic new areas and enemies, taking in the massive scope of the world, getting lost somewhere unfamiliar, spotting some distant location on the horizon and realizing you can actually go there, if you can figure out a path. It evokes Dark Souls 1's best moments, and I wouldn't begrudge anyone for loving the game from this alone.
The legacy dungeon design is characteristically impressive but still feels like a regression in some aspects. The sheer size and complexity of many dungeons is breathtaking, the ambition really shines through here. Jumping lets you traverse the environment in lots of creative and organic ways, and interacts well with the aforementioned complexity. Unfortunately however, nothing here really comes close to DS1 classics like Sen's Fortress in terms of considered design. The Stake of Marika is a fantastic addition, but its potential is largely wasted, as instead of leaning into it to make bonfires more scarce and important, bonfires appear at the same or higher frequency than previous games. For some reason fast travel is allowed within legacy dungeons, which kills a lot of the tension of exploration and the risk of losing souls. Shortcuts feel less important and traps feel less deadly.
It's also far too easy to run past everything in the open world with the horse, with only a few exceptions. A hostile landscape with enemies and hazards at every turn should not feel like a walk in the park to traverse. It was only after making a second character that I realized how badly this murders the replayability. Fast travel serves as yet another bandaid fix here, reprising its usual modern FromSoft role.
For all the game's virtues, the feeling I'm left with at the end is bitterness, which is probably why this is still on my mind. I'm bitter that I can sense an awareness of the typical open world pitfalls but somehow the game still falls into them. I'm bitter that I can't trust FromSoft to learn from its mistakes here, especially in the combat. I'm bitter that the enjoyable level design almost feels squandered by the other elements. I'm bitter that the daring spirit of Demon's Souls, the willingness to wildly experiment and defy expectations, has floated away like a soul leaving a corpse. But most of all I'm bitter that the game really does reach the lofty heights of Dark Souls 1 at times. It climbs the mountain, ascending higher than even the old mentor, until, with a confidence bordering on absentmindedness, it loses its grip and plummets down, down, down into the abyss.
"…But even so, one day the flames will fade, and only Dark will remain. And even a legend such as thineself can do nothing to stop that." - Hawkeye Gough
1997
Reminds me of Monster Hunter 1: lots of messiness and annoyances, but nails a shocking amount of fundamentals from the get-go.
The heart and soul of this game, and probably its strongest aspect, are the controls. This might be the best game I've ever played in capturing the electric dynamic of graceful movement flowing through rigid restrictions. Boosting fast, but turning slow: that's fucking tank controls right there. Dodging another AC's missiles while struggling to keep them within your lock-on field? Boosting yourself through the air and letting momentum carry you while your energy recharges? Dancing in and out of melee range without losing control? Good shit.
This is also a game that actually justifies having stats and builds, because everything has some impact on how your AC handles. There's walk speed, turn speed, flight speed, durability, energy capacity and recharge speed, lock-on distance and shape, mobility with heavy weaponry, and probably more. Also an area map, please buy a part with an area map and don't make the same mistake I did. The balance isn't exactly pristine, especially if you find the secret weapons, but it didn't get in the way too much for me.
This being a corporate dystopia hellhole and you being a mercenary, the main thing you'll be worrying about for a while, especially as a new player, is money. Buying new parts takes cash (though you can sell them back for the same price!), but so do ammo and repairs, and if you lose the mission then enjoy the pure minus on your balance sheet. And by the way, don't break stuff the client wants to keep unexploded: you'll be footing the bill there too. If you decide not to save-scum and roll with the punches, there's a great survival-horror-ish dynamic to trying to stay above water while the stakes keep getting raised.
The main pitfall is the mission design. I actually think the dungeon-crawler style they went with could have worked; "Kill Struggle Leader" is laced with traps and gave me that pleasant singed old-school taste. But sadly, most of the mazes just amount to a long series of hallways with a few weak enemies placed like breadcrumbs, which makes even zipping your tin can around feel tiring before long. Basic AI adds to the monotony since almost all these fights will be 1v1 or close to it.
A few solid missions in the mix though too, especially when the game has you fight other ACs or painfully shares its love of unexpected halfway twists. And the ending has some excellent "game design as humor" that gave me a smile.
Solid first attempt with obvious room for improvement. Man, it would be cool if this studio still made games...
Murakumo or Chrome? Who cares? I'm a Raven, fuck you, pay me.
The heart and soul of this game, and probably its strongest aspect, are the controls. This might be the best game I've ever played in capturing the electric dynamic of graceful movement flowing through rigid restrictions. Boosting fast, but turning slow: that's fucking tank controls right there. Dodging another AC's missiles while struggling to keep them within your lock-on field? Boosting yourself through the air and letting momentum carry you while your energy recharges? Dancing in and out of melee range without losing control? Good shit.
This is also a game that actually justifies having stats and builds, because everything has some impact on how your AC handles. There's walk speed, turn speed, flight speed, durability, energy capacity and recharge speed, lock-on distance and shape, mobility with heavy weaponry, and probably more. Also an area map, please buy a part with an area map and don't make the same mistake I did. The balance isn't exactly pristine, especially if you find the secret weapons, but it didn't get in the way too much for me.
This being a corporate dystopia hellhole and you being a mercenary, the main thing you'll be worrying about for a while, especially as a new player, is money. Buying new parts takes cash (though you can sell them back for the same price!), but so do ammo and repairs, and if you lose the mission then enjoy the pure minus on your balance sheet. And by the way, don't break stuff the client wants to keep unexploded: you'll be footing the bill there too. If you decide not to save-scum and roll with the punches, there's a great survival-horror-ish dynamic to trying to stay above water while the stakes keep getting raised.
The main pitfall is the mission design. I actually think the dungeon-crawler style they went with could have worked; "Kill Struggle Leader" is laced with traps and gave me that pleasant singed old-school taste. But sadly, most of the mazes just amount to a long series of hallways with a few weak enemies placed like breadcrumbs, which makes even zipping your tin can around feel tiring before long. Basic AI adds to the monotony since almost all these fights will be 1v1 or close to it.
A few solid missions in the mix though too, especially when the game has you fight other ACs or painfully shares its love of unexpected halfway twists. And the ending has some excellent "game design as humor" that gave me a smile.
Solid first attempt with obvious room for improvement. Man, it would be cool if this studio still made games...
Murakumo or Chrome? Who cares? I'm a Raven, fuck you, pay me.
2023
Edit 3/29/24: Reduced to 7. Too formulaic, especially in level design. Souls stuff continues to sour on me.
---
Probably the funniest game this year. A ridiculous dark fantasy Pinocchio setting is played completely straight and infused so deeply with all the modern Fromsoft trappings that it almost comes across to my bitter heart as parody. Everything from general game structure, to the level up lady in the hub zone you warp to, down to even individual animation cadences, is lifted wholesale.
If that's the setup, then the punchline is that Lies of P is better mechanically than everything it's ripping off. For a more exhaustive overview, check out this writeup, but let me throw some out myself:
* You can restore lost HP by attacking, like in Bloodborne, but only the chip damage from blocking
* The mana used for weapon arts from DS3/ER is gained by hitting enemies
* If you are out of Estus flasks, you can gain another by hitting enemies
* Enemies can be "posture-broken" through perfect guards and damage, but to actually trigger the downed status you must land a charged heavy attack
* Parrying and dedicated ranged weapons have been completely removed (these systems have always been broken and/or cheesy in Souls)
* Red attacks cannot be iframed or blocked, and must be perfect guarded or outpositioned
The general flow of the game is: perfect guard on predictable attacks that are easily timed, block or dodge when you are unsure, and try to outposition and attack when possible to restore guard chip and land charged heavies. Red attacks are a somewhat natural extension to this dynamic, in that they encourage you to anticipate them and get out of the way, which is really what you should be doing for a lot of attacks. There's no need to play this like a parry simulator, and the fun of the game is in trying not to!
The best examples of this are the large bosses, who generally offer a lot of options for getting in hits during strings. My favorite is the Green Monster, whose AI can be somewhat predicted based on spacing and whose attacks have a lot of different arcs and blind spots to consider, almost like a weird Souls-ified Valstrax from Monster Hunter.
That being said, this is still a Sekiro-brained game at its core; you've gotta be buying what they're selling, even if this is a far better implementation than its inspiration. Occasionally the devs will fully succumb to the evil whisperings of the Sekiro demon on their shoulder, and use heavy tracking and obtuse timings to force brute memorization. A few red attacks in particular (Black Rabbit eldest, Laxasia) earned disapproving glares from me for this.
I was going to comment on weapon systems, level design, etc. but honestly you should just read that writeup from before.
Let me make a general point about the Souls series. The selling point for me is their holistic quality: they do a bunch of things passably and a few things well, but combine them into a greater cohesive whole. Dark Souls 1 is an insanely flawed game, more than most would admit, but the way the world design, level design, resource management, and themes wrap into each other makes me willing to overlook a lot of issues. Later Fromsoft Souls-type games are frustrating to me because they place an emphasis on combat that the mechanics aren't strong enough to support, while either failing to improve the persistent shortcomings of other elements or outright regressing in them.
Lies of P is nice because it improves the combat enough to justify a Dark Souls 3/Sekiro balance to me, while everything else is at least good enough. Bosses in Souls type games are pale shadows of Monster Hunter fights, and player toolkits and expressivity are pale shadows of Nioh 2; I would even say those games are "better," because I value their excellence in those single areas enough to overlook their flaws. But Lies of P is a solid, respectable, enjoyable overall package that actually iterates on its inspirations. It's fun!
---
Probably the funniest game this year. A ridiculous dark fantasy Pinocchio setting is played completely straight and infused so deeply with all the modern Fromsoft trappings that it almost comes across to my bitter heart as parody. Everything from general game structure, to the level up lady in the hub zone you warp to, down to even individual animation cadences, is lifted wholesale.
If that's the setup, then the punchline is that Lies of P is better mechanically than everything it's ripping off. For a more exhaustive overview, check out this writeup, but let me throw some out myself:
* You can restore lost HP by attacking, like in Bloodborne, but only the chip damage from blocking
* The mana used for weapon arts from DS3/ER is gained by hitting enemies
* If you are out of Estus flasks, you can gain another by hitting enemies
* Enemies can be "posture-broken" through perfect guards and damage, but to actually trigger the downed status you must land a charged heavy attack
* Parrying and dedicated ranged weapons have been completely removed (these systems have always been broken and/or cheesy in Souls)
* Red attacks cannot be iframed or blocked, and must be perfect guarded or outpositioned
The general flow of the game is: perfect guard on predictable attacks that are easily timed, block or dodge when you are unsure, and try to outposition and attack when possible to restore guard chip and land charged heavies. Red attacks are a somewhat natural extension to this dynamic, in that they encourage you to anticipate them and get out of the way, which is really what you should be doing for a lot of attacks. There's no need to play this like a parry simulator, and the fun of the game is in trying not to!
The best examples of this are the large bosses, who generally offer a lot of options for getting in hits during strings. My favorite is the Green Monster, whose AI can be somewhat predicted based on spacing and whose attacks have a lot of different arcs and blind spots to consider, almost like a weird Souls-ified Valstrax from Monster Hunter.
That being said, this is still a Sekiro-brained game at its core; you've gotta be buying what they're selling, even if this is a far better implementation than its inspiration. Occasionally the devs will fully succumb to the evil whisperings of the Sekiro demon on their shoulder, and use heavy tracking and obtuse timings to force brute memorization. A few red attacks in particular (Black Rabbit eldest, Laxasia) earned disapproving glares from me for this.
I was going to comment on weapon systems, level design, etc. but honestly you should just read that writeup from before.
Let me make a general point about the Souls series. The selling point for me is their holistic quality: they do a bunch of things passably and a few things well, but combine them into a greater cohesive whole. Dark Souls 1 is an insanely flawed game, more than most would admit, but the way the world design, level design, resource management, and themes wrap into each other makes me willing to overlook a lot of issues. Later Fromsoft Souls-type games are frustrating to me because they place an emphasis on combat that the mechanics aren't strong enough to support, while either failing to improve the persistent shortcomings of other elements or outright regressing in them.
Lies of P is nice because it improves the combat enough to justify a Dark Souls 3/Sekiro balance to me, while everything else is at least good enough. Bosses in Souls type games are pale shadows of Monster Hunter fights, and player toolkits and expressivity are pale shadows of Nioh 2; I would even say those games are "better," because I value their excellence in those single areas enough to overlook their flaws. But Lies of P is a solid, respectable, enjoyable overall package that actually iterates on its inspirations. It's fun!
2001
My previous classic Doom review here.
Meditations on Doom
=== Mechanics ===
Bangai-O Spirits, Treasure's 2008 DS masterpiece, is superficially quite like Doom in structure. All the levels can be created and changed with the included editor, and players can (jankily) share levels online. However, a distinct trait of the game is that Treasure's mastery of mechanics-as-such is remarkably tolerant of sloppy level design. Many of the included levels are borderline shitposts, and fittingly, one of the best is just a pixel-art portrait of the player character with lots of enemies thrown in. Treasure has done most of the work for you: all you need to do is place some stuff in the editor and let it rip.
In contrast, Doom levels need to be constructed with intentionality - certainly the enemies' AI pull some weight on their own but smart placement vastly amplifies their effectiveness. Huy Pham, creator of Deus Vult II, cites Alien Vendetta as a major inspiration and draws explicit comparisons to chess in the included text file:
"Map20 of DVII is a strong example of the Chess influence with the natural, non-teleport monster traps that simply springs from the map's sneaky layout. The Berserk trap on the uppermost level of Map20 is a reflection of a forced combination, with low health, the player is compelled to pick up the stimpack, entering the trap full of imps, grabbing the berserk as a counterattack, and then confronting the counter-counterattacking hell knight. In the yellow key complex, the two barons of hell were placed like two rooks on open files, firing down the corridor and putting pressure on the player's position and inducing him to make a mistake. The final archvile after taking the blue armor was placed in a way that parallels the black fianchettoed bishop in the Sicilian Dragon Yugoslav Attack opening, firing down the most crucial control point in the room."
The concept here is territory control. Chess is an apt comparison, but what's really interesting is to notice the similarities to shmups, that other game genre so focused on real-time territory control. The heavy emphasis on projectiles in Doom's combat means many common shmup techniques/concepts, such as streaming, moving with projectiles, misdirecting, safe spots, dodging within vs. outside of patterns, holding ground closer to enemies to keep control of space behind you, etc. directly translate.
In a structural sense, a tough section in a shmup demands a unity of macro-level routing, micro-level decisionmaking, and instinctual execution. Take Dodonpachi Daioujou's "hive" from stage 5. Clearing this demands the player work out a viable path that kills key enemies quickly while leaving movement paths open, have the requisite ability to precisely control their ship, and be able to quickly adapt to the slight unpredictability of bullet trajectories. Alien Vendetta's Map 32: No Guts No Glory (while being far less intense) uses those same core elements of macro-level routing through the map, micro-level decisionmaking via unpredictability of monster AI, and instinctual execution.
Like most shmups, and many older arcade-style games in general, there's also an intense focus on the fundamentals of movement and positioning. In this dev diary, Matthewmatosis talks about how compared to classic 2D games like Ghosts 'n Goblins, defensive decisionmaking in many 3D action games has been simplified by powerful get-out-of-jail-free cards such as rolls and parries:
"Imagine you were tasked with creating an AI which could complete these games without taking damage. You have access to all the relevant variables like enemy position and status, in other words you know when an attack is one frame away from hitting the player character. Despite being one of the most recent releases on the list, Devil May Cry 5 is one of the easiest to solve, especially if we’re talking about Bloody Palace. Simply attack until you’re in danger, then instantly activate Royalguard to negate damage. Others like Revengeance and Sekiro will require slightly more awareness about which attack type is coming but will ultimately be solved by pressing a certain button in response to the enemy...this isn’t some irrelevant curiosity, these defensive algorithms are running in your brain as you play...think about how clever Arthur’s [GnG player character] AI would need to be by comparison. If a grim reaper is running at him, it’s not enough to jump or throw a dagger on the last possible frame. You need to be able to think ahead and position yourself in the safest way to advance."
Doom is decidedly part of this old-school tradition, where avoiding sticky situations is contingent on many higher-level decisions that can't be easily reversed on a whim. High-level player David Assad has a great video on how survival in many tough fights demands creating space, which demands tactical play. Youtuber SoBad explains how the conventional advice about monster prioritization is in practice highly dependent on enemy positioning and composition (and he doesn't even mention infighting!). And in a nonlinear map, routing can recontextualize all of this.
My favorite map in Alien Vendetta is probably Anders Johnsen's Dark Dome. What's really cool about this map is how nearly the entire level is open to you from the start. This is because the entire level is shooting at you from the start. The opening minutes are a frenzied scramble to carve out a foothold somewhere as you dart around while constantly under fire. Clearing out one area opens up angles to attack new ones, which do the same in turn; this style of mapping has been called "zone-of-influence". And one of the great things that flows from this structure is how many viable ways there are to route the map. I used an invincibility to clear out a Archvile-guarded Revenant bonepile, but you might opt to assault from the window overlook instead and save it for one of the close-range Cyberdemon tangoes.
The "hot starts" in maps like Dark Dome also illuminates a truth: running away is deep! Trying to squeeze past a mob of chittering Revenants can be just as engaging as filling them with buckshot, and meaningfully deciding between the two is a joy rarely afforded in modern games. And those living Revenants won't just disappear: maybe later they'll pop back up at an inopportune time, or join the fray of another brawl. Mancubus battalions meet Cacodemon migrations; Cyberdemons rage at far-flung Revenant missiles; caged Archviles catch quick glimpses of their foe across twisted geometry; the boundaries between encounters, so rigid in most games, loosen, and their contents ooze together.
Certainly the door problem is a foremost cause of this rigidity, and some lock-ins here and there (like the BFG survival-horror blue key room) are far from unwelcome, but we can give up a bit of ground. Let the player play lame if they really want, you're not their babysitter. It's worth it when what's gained is a unique structure and flow that I haven't seen in any other game.
Even in 2022, especially in 2022, Doom has a wealth of ideas to offer. Don't think the iceberg stops at surface-level elements like fast movespeed or no reloading. Dig deeper and you'll find something timeless yet shockingly ahead of its time, a medium for mappers to explore yet grounded by solid and versatile fundamentals. Universally known, widely loved, rarely appreciated, never replicated.
=== History ===
"By the turn of the millennium, many players and mappers had moved on from Doom to Quake and other more modern games. Some of the greatest early mappers, including Iikka Keranen, Matthias Worch, and Dario Casali, had graduated to careers in commercial game design. Many of the major post-Requiem mappers—Anders Johnsen, Anthony Soto, Brad Spencer, Lee Szymanski, Kim Andre Malde, and others—had gotten together to create a team megawad out of Johnsen’s struggling one-man project, after which most of them would drift away from Doom. The twilight of the game’s odd little mapping community had always seemed like it would inevitably arrive sooner or later, and with the coming of the new millennium and the biggest of the “Doom killer” games themselves becoming obsolete, it must have felt more imminent than ever.
In other words, it was about time for somebody to create the most influential PWAD of all time."
- The Roots of Doom Mapping on Alien Vendetta
As you can probably tell if you've read any of my other writings, I'm mostly a "mechanics person". That's not to disparage other aspects of games, it's merely what I enjoy analyzing. But even for someone like myself, when playing Alien Vendetta it's impossible not to get sucked into the sheer history of it all.
Playing Misri Halek, listed as the most memorable map in history by Doomworld, might not have been a particularly great experience for me in an immediate gameplay sense. But imagine someone in 2001 experiencing something with this scale and architecture in a virtual world for the first time: how breathtaking and inspiring it must have been! (Luckily most of the maps have good gameplay too.)
Authorship is a large part of this meta-appreciation. After you beat a level, the stats screen lists the map creator(s) right under the title. Just spent hours banging your head against Dark Dome? You have Anders Johnsen to thank for that. And in a collaborative project, much like the original Doom games, each author has a distinct style. See Brad Spencer's name? Expect a fangs-bared techbase. Kim Andre Malde? Thick atmosphere and striking architecture. Anders Johnsen? Anything from a brisk romp to an all-out siege assault, depending on what the larger progression demands.
This is a pleasure that sadly seems to be limited to small indie teams and modding scenes. Devil May Cry 3's first level is one of the most fun to play in the series, but I have no clue who to credit for it. Itsuno the game director? One of the 10+ programmers listed in the credits? Someone else? Sometimes names emerge from the mist, but it's rare. In this sense, Doom is far more akin to a music genre or art scene: webs of influence can be traced, styles explored.
The larger narrative is equally captivating. It might be easy to forget, but Doom has really been "indie" from the beginning. id Software was just a handful of guys working out of a random building, and the community has always been just a bunch of fans making stuff as a hobby for the game they love. Certainly Doom was massively popular and influential, but there was no guarantee that the scene behind it would last.
Alien Vendetta is a line in the sand. A vindication of the past: 7 years on and the Doom 2 fundamentals aren't even close to being exhausted. A gift to the present: here's our last hurrah. A signpost to the future: mappers, look at what we did, what you can do. Surely you can do better, hmmm?
Playing with the custom MIDI pack feels fitting. Alien Vendetta was a gift to the community; now the community gives back. It's hard not to sense the emotion in Anders Johnsen's reaction to this WAD, 20 years later, still getting love from Doom players new and old.
For that matter, it's hard to imagine anyone at the time foreseeing what the classic Doom scene has become. Alien Vendetta's synthesis of aesthetics and challenge has been driven into new territory, most uniquely with Sunder and its slaughter progeny. Thanks to Doom's engine code being released, sourceports provide a modern experience while preserving all the idiosyncracies of the original, if you so desire. While level design has seemingly stagnated or even regressed in gaming at large, what's on offer in custom Doom maps, through three decades of knowledge, has risen to the best in the medium bar none.
So often, it feels like this medium has a capricious taste and a forgetful memory. Like so many others, Doom should have been confined to the history books, an unmoving artifact, a museum piece that gets gestured to when people talk about the FPS genre, then locked back up in its case. Maybe a few would see the deeper possibilities, feel intrigue and sadness, then get dragged along with the tide like all the others. Everyone moves on.
Not this time.
The fire still burns!
Meditations on Doom
=== Mechanics ===
Bangai-O Spirits, Treasure's 2008 DS masterpiece, is superficially quite like Doom in structure. All the levels can be created and changed with the included editor, and players can (jankily) share levels online. However, a distinct trait of the game is that Treasure's mastery of mechanics-as-such is remarkably tolerant of sloppy level design. Many of the included levels are borderline shitposts, and fittingly, one of the best is just a pixel-art portrait of the player character with lots of enemies thrown in. Treasure has done most of the work for you: all you need to do is place some stuff in the editor and let it rip.
In contrast, Doom levels need to be constructed with intentionality - certainly the enemies' AI pull some weight on their own but smart placement vastly amplifies their effectiveness. Huy Pham, creator of Deus Vult II, cites Alien Vendetta as a major inspiration and draws explicit comparisons to chess in the included text file:
"Map20 of DVII is a strong example of the Chess influence with the natural, non-teleport monster traps that simply springs from the map's sneaky layout. The Berserk trap on the uppermost level of Map20 is a reflection of a forced combination, with low health, the player is compelled to pick up the stimpack, entering the trap full of imps, grabbing the berserk as a counterattack, and then confronting the counter-counterattacking hell knight. In the yellow key complex, the two barons of hell were placed like two rooks on open files, firing down the corridor and putting pressure on the player's position and inducing him to make a mistake. The final archvile after taking the blue armor was placed in a way that parallels the black fianchettoed bishop in the Sicilian Dragon Yugoslav Attack opening, firing down the most crucial control point in the room."
The concept here is territory control. Chess is an apt comparison, but what's really interesting is to notice the similarities to shmups, that other game genre so focused on real-time territory control. The heavy emphasis on projectiles in Doom's combat means many common shmup techniques/concepts, such as streaming, moving with projectiles, misdirecting, safe spots, dodging within vs. outside of patterns, holding ground closer to enemies to keep control of space behind you, etc. directly translate.
In a structural sense, a tough section in a shmup demands a unity of macro-level routing, micro-level decisionmaking, and instinctual execution. Take Dodonpachi Daioujou's "hive" from stage 5. Clearing this demands the player work out a viable path that kills key enemies quickly while leaving movement paths open, have the requisite ability to precisely control their ship, and be able to quickly adapt to the slight unpredictability of bullet trajectories. Alien Vendetta's Map 32: No Guts No Glory (while being far less intense) uses those same core elements of macro-level routing through the map, micro-level decisionmaking via unpredictability of monster AI, and instinctual execution.
Like most shmups, and many older arcade-style games in general, there's also an intense focus on the fundamentals of movement and positioning. In this dev diary, Matthewmatosis talks about how compared to classic 2D games like Ghosts 'n Goblins, defensive decisionmaking in many 3D action games has been simplified by powerful get-out-of-jail-free cards such as rolls and parries:
"Imagine you were tasked with creating an AI which could complete these games without taking damage. You have access to all the relevant variables like enemy position and status, in other words you know when an attack is one frame away from hitting the player character. Despite being one of the most recent releases on the list, Devil May Cry 5 is one of the easiest to solve, especially if we’re talking about Bloody Palace. Simply attack until you’re in danger, then instantly activate Royalguard to negate damage. Others like Revengeance and Sekiro will require slightly more awareness about which attack type is coming but will ultimately be solved by pressing a certain button in response to the enemy...this isn’t some irrelevant curiosity, these defensive algorithms are running in your brain as you play...think about how clever Arthur’s [GnG player character] AI would need to be by comparison. If a grim reaper is running at him, it’s not enough to jump or throw a dagger on the last possible frame. You need to be able to think ahead and position yourself in the safest way to advance."
Doom is decidedly part of this old-school tradition, where avoiding sticky situations is contingent on many higher-level decisions that can't be easily reversed on a whim. High-level player David Assad has a great video on how survival in many tough fights demands creating space, which demands tactical play. Youtuber SoBad explains how the conventional advice about monster prioritization is in practice highly dependent on enemy positioning and composition (and he doesn't even mention infighting!). And in a nonlinear map, routing can recontextualize all of this.
My favorite map in Alien Vendetta is probably Anders Johnsen's Dark Dome. What's really cool about this map is how nearly the entire level is open to you from the start. This is because the entire level is shooting at you from the start. The opening minutes are a frenzied scramble to carve out a foothold somewhere as you dart around while constantly under fire. Clearing out one area opens up angles to attack new ones, which do the same in turn; this style of mapping has been called "zone-of-influence". And one of the great things that flows from this structure is how many viable ways there are to route the map. I used an invincibility to clear out a Archvile-guarded Revenant bonepile, but you might opt to assault from the window overlook instead and save it for one of the close-range Cyberdemon tangoes.
The "hot starts" in maps like Dark Dome also illuminates a truth: running away is deep! Trying to squeeze past a mob of chittering Revenants can be just as engaging as filling them with buckshot, and meaningfully deciding between the two is a joy rarely afforded in modern games. And those living Revenants won't just disappear: maybe later they'll pop back up at an inopportune time, or join the fray of another brawl. Mancubus battalions meet Cacodemon migrations; Cyberdemons rage at far-flung Revenant missiles; caged Archviles catch quick glimpses of their foe across twisted geometry; the boundaries between encounters, so rigid in most games, loosen, and their contents ooze together.
Certainly the door problem is a foremost cause of this rigidity, and some lock-ins here and there (like the BFG survival-horror blue key room) are far from unwelcome, but we can give up a bit of ground. Let the player play lame if they really want, you're not their babysitter. It's worth it when what's gained is a unique structure and flow that I haven't seen in any other game.
Even in 2022, especially in 2022, Doom has a wealth of ideas to offer. Don't think the iceberg stops at surface-level elements like fast movespeed or no reloading. Dig deeper and you'll find something timeless yet shockingly ahead of its time, a medium for mappers to explore yet grounded by solid and versatile fundamentals. Universally known, widely loved, rarely appreciated, never replicated.
=== History ===
"By the turn of the millennium, many players and mappers had moved on from Doom to Quake and other more modern games. Some of the greatest early mappers, including Iikka Keranen, Matthias Worch, and Dario Casali, had graduated to careers in commercial game design. Many of the major post-Requiem mappers—Anders Johnsen, Anthony Soto, Brad Spencer, Lee Szymanski, Kim Andre Malde, and others—had gotten together to create a team megawad out of Johnsen’s struggling one-man project, after which most of them would drift away from Doom. The twilight of the game’s odd little mapping community had always seemed like it would inevitably arrive sooner or later, and with the coming of the new millennium and the biggest of the “Doom killer” games themselves becoming obsolete, it must have felt more imminent than ever.
In other words, it was about time for somebody to create the most influential PWAD of all time."
- The Roots of Doom Mapping on Alien Vendetta
As you can probably tell if you've read any of my other writings, I'm mostly a "mechanics person". That's not to disparage other aspects of games, it's merely what I enjoy analyzing. But even for someone like myself, when playing Alien Vendetta it's impossible not to get sucked into the sheer history of it all.
Playing Misri Halek, listed as the most memorable map in history by Doomworld, might not have been a particularly great experience for me in an immediate gameplay sense. But imagine someone in 2001 experiencing something with this scale and architecture in a virtual world for the first time: how breathtaking and inspiring it must have been! (Luckily most of the maps have good gameplay too.)
Authorship is a large part of this meta-appreciation. After you beat a level, the stats screen lists the map creator(s) right under the title. Just spent hours banging your head against Dark Dome? You have Anders Johnsen to thank for that. And in a collaborative project, much like the original Doom games, each author has a distinct style. See Brad Spencer's name? Expect a fangs-bared techbase. Kim Andre Malde? Thick atmosphere and striking architecture. Anders Johnsen? Anything from a brisk romp to an all-out siege assault, depending on what the larger progression demands.
This is a pleasure that sadly seems to be limited to small indie teams and modding scenes. Devil May Cry 3's first level is one of the most fun to play in the series, but I have no clue who to credit for it. Itsuno the game director? One of the 10+ programmers listed in the credits? Someone else? Sometimes names emerge from the mist, but it's rare. In this sense, Doom is far more akin to a music genre or art scene: webs of influence can be traced, styles explored.
The larger narrative is equally captivating. It might be easy to forget, but Doom has really been "indie" from the beginning. id Software was just a handful of guys working out of a random building, and the community has always been just a bunch of fans making stuff as a hobby for the game they love. Certainly Doom was massively popular and influential, but there was no guarantee that the scene behind it would last.
Alien Vendetta is a line in the sand. A vindication of the past: 7 years on and the Doom 2 fundamentals aren't even close to being exhausted. A gift to the present: here's our last hurrah. A signpost to the future: mappers, look at what we did, what you can do. Surely you can do better, hmmm?
Playing with the custom MIDI pack feels fitting. Alien Vendetta was a gift to the community; now the community gives back. It's hard not to sense the emotion in Anders Johnsen's reaction to this WAD, 20 years later, still getting love from Doom players new and old.
For that matter, it's hard to imagine anyone at the time foreseeing what the classic Doom scene has become. Alien Vendetta's synthesis of aesthetics and challenge has been driven into new territory, most uniquely with Sunder and its slaughter progeny. Thanks to Doom's engine code being released, sourceports provide a modern experience while preserving all the idiosyncracies of the original, if you so desire. While level design has seemingly stagnated or even regressed in gaming at large, what's on offer in custom Doom maps, through three decades of knowledge, has risen to the best in the medium bar none.
So often, it feels like this medium has a capricious taste and a forgetful memory. Like so many others, Doom should have been confined to the history books, an unmoving artifact, a museum piece that gets gestured to when people talk about the FPS genre, then locked back up in its case. Maybe a few would see the deeper possibilities, feel intrigue and sadness, then get dragged along with the tide like all the others. Everyone moves on.
Not this time.
The fire still burns!
2001
(Replayed on MCC on PC with gamepad, Legendary, skipped The Library)
Honestly a lot better than I remember. I think the common praise and complaints about this game are mostly correct in kind if not always magnitude, so let me discuss some interesting specifics.
The Library is awful and you should skip it if possible. The campaign's pacing is significantly improved without it, it emphasizes everything bad about the game while downplaying everything good, Bungie devs have stated multiple times that it shouldn't have been shipped, etc. Everyone knows it's trash and I'm going to pretend like it doesn't exist now, moving on.
Weapon balancing here is my favorite in the series. Everything feels powerful and situationally useful. The pistol, shotgun, and power weapons are obviously good, but the plasma pistol has great accuracy and damage even with the primary fire, the plasma rifle stuns enemies who take sustained hits, and the needler is a great Elite killer if you have the positioning for it. Even the assault rifle occasionally comes in handy against Grunts or Flood.
A huge issue with this game is the difficulty balancing. Heroic is hilariously easy for some reason, with even high-rank Elites quickly melting to plasma pistol fire. Legendary has a lot of nice changes to health (Elites don't die instantly), enemy encounters (more enemies with higher ranks), and AI (dodges grenades and fire more often), but you also take tons of damage, especially on your shield. This makes it easy to get stuck on one health pip for long periods, which makes the game into more of a cover shooter, encourages the linear playstyles like plasma pistol overcharge sniping, etc. This could have been fixed by simply placing more health packs (occasionally this does happen, why does Keyes have so many?) or perhaps raising the minimum health value like Reach did. All that being said, if you are good at single-player FPS I would still recommend Legendary, or maybe Heroic with some specific skull combination.
Enemy design and AI (of the Covenant) is stellar. This is well-known and discussed, see here and here for some other people's writeups.
Flood, not so much. A melee-focused swarming faction is an okay idea on paper, but they don't have anything close to the Covenant's differentiation, AI behaviors, or health/shield tradeoff. Fighting them isn't horrible, but I'd be lying if I said I ever looked forward to it. Special dishonorable mention to the infection forms, which block checkpoints and are constantly a chore to clean up. Thankfully, many of your encounters with the Flood are in infighting scenarios where they can be toyed with or ignored.
The level design isn't as bad as most suggest IMO. It's less that they reuse environments, and more that a bunch of the missions are too long. Assault on the Control Room has you fight in the same room + bridge geometry 3 times, but they try to mix it up with different enemy compositions (especially notable: the bridge with Elites blocking your path while Hunters on the other bridge shell you across the gap). But there aren't enough unique ideas to totally sustain the momentum, and I suspect they would have had difficulty adding more.
Let me elaborate. There are broadly two styles of FPS enemy design. On one end is Doom, whose enemies are simple but highly differentiated, and form interesting situations with how they are placed and combined by the mapper. On the other is Half-Life and FEAR, whose enemies are complex but similar, and present new situations via the dynamism of their AI. Halo is great because its AI belongs to the latter school, but its enemy designs bring in much of the former's differentiation.
A side effect of this though is that the levels in general don't feel as distinct from each other as e.g. Doom maps might, since the enemies and weapon economy are less sensitive to small tweaks in placements and terrain. Halo 3 gets around this by using tons of setpieces, though this has the tradeoff of needing more budget and potentially feeling gimmickier (and 3 has the unforced error of worse fundamentals than 1). Perhaps they could have made more arena geometries, but I suspect the lowest hanging fruit was all picked, so the game should have just been a bit shorter.
After this playthrough, I'm comfortable calling Halo my favorite of the "dynamic AI driven FPS", (with classic Doom the king of the opposing style) and Halo 1 tied with 3 for my favorite entry in the series. Great stuff!
Honestly a lot better than I remember. I think the common praise and complaints about this game are mostly correct in kind if not always magnitude, so let me discuss some interesting specifics.
The Library is awful and you should skip it if possible. The campaign's pacing is significantly improved without it, it emphasizes everything bad about the game while downplaying everything good, Bungie devs have stated multiple times that it shouldn't have been shipped, etc. Everyone knows it's trash and I'm going to pretend like it doesn't exist now, moving on.
Weapon balancing here is my favorite in the series. Everything feels powerful and situationally useful. The pistol, shotgun, and power weapons are obviously good, but the plasma pistol has great accuracy and damage even with the primary fire, the plasma rifle stuns enemies who take sustained hits, and the needler is a great Elite killer if you have the positioning for it. Even the assault rifle occasionally comes in handy against Grunts or Flood.
A huge issue with this game is the difficulty balancing. Heroic is hilariously easy for some reason, with even high-rank Elites quickly melting to plasma pistol fire. Legendary has a lot of nice changes to health (Elites don't die instantly), enemy encounters (more enemies with higher ranks), and AI (dodges grenades and fire more often), but you also take tons of damage, especially on your shield. This makes it easy to get stuck on one health pip for long periods, which makes the game into more of a cover shooter, encourages the linear playstyles like plasma pistol overcharge sniping, etc. This could have been fixed by simply placing more health packs (occasionally this does happen, why does Keyes have so many?) or perhaps raising the minimum health value like Reach did. All that being said, if you are good at single-player FPS I would still recommend Legendary, or maybe Heroic with some specific skull combination.
Enemy design and AI (of the Covenant) is stellar. This is well-known and discussed, see here and here for some other people's writeups.
Flood, not so much. A melee-focused swarming faction is an okay idea on paper, but they don't have anything close to the Covenant's differentiation, AI behaviors, or health/shield tradeoff. Fighting them isn't horrible, but I'd be lying if I said I ever looked forward to it. Special dishonorable mention to the infection forms, which block checkpoints and are constantly a chore to clean up. Thankfully, many of your encounters with the Flood are in infighting scenarios where they can be toyed with or ignored.
The level design isn't as bad as most suggest IMO. It's less that they reuse environments, and more that a bunch of the missions are too long. Assault on the Control Room has you fight in the same room + bridge geometry 3 times, but they try to mix it up with different enemy compositions (especially notable: the bridge with Elites blocking your path while Hunters on the other bridge shell you across the gap). But there aren't enough unique ideas to totally sustain the momentum, and I suspect they would have had difficulty adding more.
Let me elaborate. There are broadly two styles of FPS enemy design. On one end is Doom, whose enemies are simple but highly differentiated, and form interesting situations with how they are placed and combined by the mapper. On the other is Half-Life and FEAR, whose enemies are complex but similar, and present new situations via the dynamism of their AI. Halo is great because its AI belongs to the latter school, but its enemy designs bring in much of the former's differentiation.
A side effect of this though is that the levels in general don't feel as distinct from each other as e.g. Doom maps might, since the enemies and weapon economy are less sensitive to small tweaks in placements and terrain. Halo 3 gets around this by using tons of setpieces, though this has the tradeoff of needing more budget and potentially feeling gimmickier (and 3 has the unforced error of worse fundamentals than 1). Perhaps they could have made more arena geometries, but I suspect the lowest hanging fruit was all picked, so the game should have just been a bit shorter.
After this playthrough, I'm comfortable calling Halo my favorite of the "dynamic AI driven FPS", (with classic Doom the king of the opposing style) and Halo 1 tied with 3 for my favorite entry in the series. Great stuff!
2022
My best score is 146.441 as of writing, run here. Another short review, wrote this one pretty quickly.
Ninja Gaiden essence: the game. If you've played NG that should immediately give you an idea of the type of interactions at play here, but if you haven't Yeahlookiehere has a good review, I won't bother repeating it all. I would just add that the official replay website is simple to use, and the spider and fish enemies are very well-designed. The core design is pretty damn solid, the devs are clearly on the right track and know what to go for.
However, there are some notable issues that started getting under my skin after a bunch of runs. It's clear that the devs have made giving the player lots of information a priority, but nonetheless readability can be an issue. Certainly the aesthetic is unique and striking, but the spherical projection combined with only having one main color for enemies makes things blend into a black-and-gold soup at times. The spider re-emerging is especially prone to get lost in this, which can be quite deadly. For some reason enemies will disappear from view if they go into the darkness, a very odd decision. Usually this isn't too bad, but for the skulls and especially the centipede it gets very obnoxious.
The centipede in general doesn't fit this game well IMO, apparently it's a carryover from Devil Daggers. It doesn't really interact with the essence system at all, and the only reliable way to deal with it seems to be to stand under it and shoot, but then it becomes difficult to see because it's so large and can curl in on itself. Laser ricochet feels a bit awkward to use, it's difficult to tell what (if anything) it will go for in many situations and big shots have a tendency to wet-noodle and not do much. Grab and laser being bound to the same key is a major design flaw, you will naturally be wanting to aim your laser at the big gems so it's very easy to accidentally mouse over and grab them instead. Stomp has a similar issue, and not having access to it out of normal jumps feels counterintuitive, especially in the heat of the moment.
Despite my issues, the game is lots of fun overall. Any fan of fast-paced arcadey action or Ultrakill's Cyber Grind should add it to their list, it's well worth a spin.
Edit: The final boss sucks ass
Ninja Gaiden essence: the game. If you've played NG that should immediately give you an idea of the type of interactions at play here, but if you haven't Yeahlookiehere has a good review, I won't bother repeating it all. I would just add that the official replay website is simple to use, and the spider and fish enemies are very well-designed. The core design is pretty damn solid, the devs are clearly on the right track and know what to go for.
However, there are some notable issues that started getting under my skin after a bunch of runs. It's clear that the devs have made giving the player lots of information a priority, but nonetheless readability can be an issue. Certainly the aesthetic is unique and striking, but the spherical projection combined with only having one main color for enemies makes things blend into a black-and-gold soup at times. The spider re-emerging is especially prone to get lost in this, which can be quite deadly. For some reason enemies will disappear from view if they go into the darkness, a very odd decision. Usually this isn't too bad, but for the skulls and especially the centipede it gets very obnoxious.
The centipede in general doesn't fit this game well IMO, apparently it's a carryover from Devil Daggers. It doesn't really interact with the essence system at all, and the only reliable way to deal with it seems to be to stand under it and shoot, but then it becomes difficult to see because it's so large and can curl in on itself. Laser ricochet feels a bit awkward to use, it's difficult to tell what (if anything) it will go for in many situations and big shots have a tendency to wet-noodle and not do much. Grab and laser being bound to the same key is a major design flaw, you will naturally be wanting to aim your laser at the big gems so it's very easy to accidentally mouse over and grab them instead. Stomp has a similar issue, and not having access to it out of normal jumps feels counterintuitive, especially in the heat of the moment.
Despite my issues, the game is lots of fun overall. Any fan of fast-paced arcadey action or Ultrakill's Cyber Grind should add it to their list, it's well worth a spin.
Edit: The final boss sucks ass
2004
(Completed debt, game dropped afterwards)
Frustrating. Despite this being my least favorite Pikmin by far, I actually do see the gameplay vision, and the aesthetic is very charming! But this is simply not a game playing to its strengths, and filled with too many frustrations to list.
The most obvious change is that this game has no time limit. Pikmin 1's time limit was a non-issue if you were decently good, but its removal signals a shift away from time efficiency being the major driver. Okay, so what is the driver then? Well, the combat... kinda.
On paper, and to some degree in practice, this is actually a fine idea. Swarming controls strike a balance between immediacy and indirectness that makes positioning engaging, especially amidst the chaos that erupts while trying to aim thrown Pikmin, call stray ones back, and dodge attacks. Some improvements to the controls from Pikmin 1, especially around selecting thrown Pikmin, support this without hampering tactility too much, and the Pikmin 2 enemy roster is far more creative, challenging, and dynamic than 1's.
The problem is that the level design is consistently terrible at actually inducing these types of scenarios. Overworld stages are downgraded remixes of Pikmin 1 levels, especially embarrassing compared to Pikmin 3's Mission Mode. But the real meat of the game, the caves, is somehow even worse. This is some of the most dry, sterile procgen I've ever seen, almost deliberately placing obstacles to encourage slow, grindy, safe clears. Everything is mostly cordoned off into their own "handmade" rooms, so that you tackle enemies and hazards sequentially instead of simultaneously. Many "lock-and-key" effects like fire traps, poison traps, electric beetles, etc. are actually more flexible than they seem, but the player is given no impetus to ever use a non-matching Pikmin type save for rare, forced scenarios like Submerged Castle.
Speaking of Submerged Castle, shoutouts to the Water Wraith for being a fantastic (albeit very undercooked) addition, by reintroducing efficiency concerns in a natural and dynamic way that fits the style of the game and leaves lots of room for counterplay. Of course, this is Pikmin 2, so it's limited to this cave and never used again.
I have many more complaints, so I will phrase things a different way. The great version of this game as I envision it would do the following:
- Either revamp the overworld to justify its existence, or further minimize/remove it
- Generate caves that place varying threats in close proximity to each other, and everything in generally more dense and interconnected layouts
- Rebalance the game to avoid reloading floors and instead emphasize continuous resource management
- Allow most enemies to wander much further from their initial location
- Introduce a mechanic that incentivizes some efficiency, which will complicate treasure gathering and grindy playstyles
- Instead of creating sudden difficulty spikes through random events like bomb rock drops, use procgen, such as grouped difficult enemies, constricting terrain, high hazard density, etc.
- Vastly speed up the pacing of the game. Given the current quality level, half of the caves can be cut
If you put all this together, it almost sounds like a traditional roguelike or dungeon crawler! But this style of dense, systemically driven design is not something that Nintendo seems willing or able to make; BOTW/TOTK is the closest, and those games exist in spite of balance and structural issues.
What's shocking though, is how much the Colossal Caverns romhack resembles this, simply by squishing everything in the game into one giant, dense cave. Combat is more chaotic! Routing is more freeform! Resource management is more natural! It still falls short structurally due to its romhack status, but it's a testament to how much of the raw material is already present.
Ultimately, a disappointment. This could have served as a great example of seizing on the latent potential in a set of mechanics, almost like how classic Doom's combat was explored and developed, but Pikmin 2 is just too unfocused and inconsistent to make it there. Check out Colossal Caverns with a self-imposed time limit, it's fun!
Frustrating. Despite this being my least favorite Pikmin by far, I actually do see the gameplay vision, and the aesthetic is very charming! But this is simply not a game playing to its strengths, and filled with too many frustrations to list.
The most obvious change is that this game has no time limit. Pikmin 1's time limit was a non-issue if you were decently good, but its removal signals a shift away from time efficiency being the major driver. Okay, so what is the driver then? Well, the combat... kinda.
On paper, and to some degree in practice, this is actually a fine idea. Swarming controls strike a balance between immediacy and indirectness that makes positioning engaging, especially amidst the chaos that erupts while trying to aim thrown Pikmin, call stray ones back, and dodge attacks. Some improvements to the controls from Pikmin 1, especially around selecting thrown Pikmin, support this without hampering tactility too much, and the Pikmin 2 enemy roster is far more creative, challenging, and dynamic than 1's.
The problem is that the level design is consistently terrible at actually inducing these types of scenarios. Overworld stages are downgraded remixes of Pikmin 1 levels, especially embarrassing compared to Pikmin 3's Mission Mode. But the real meat of the game, the caves, is somehow even worse. This is some of the most dry, sterile procgen I've ever seen, almost deliberately placing obstacles to encourage slow, grindy, safe clears. Everything is mostly cordoned off into their own "handmade" rooms, so that you tackle enemies and hazards sequentially instead of simultaneously. Many "lock-and-key" effects like fire traps, poison traps, electric beetles, etc. are actually more flexible than they seem, but the player is given no impetus to ever use a non-matching Pikmin type save for rare, forced scenarios like Submerged Castle.
Speaking of Submerged Castle, shoutouts to the Water Wraith for being a fantastic (albeit very undercooked) addition, by reintroducing efficiency concerns in a natural and dynamic way that fits the style of the game and leaves lots of room for counterplay. Of course, this is Pikmin 2, so it's limited to this cave and never used again.
I have many more complaints, so I will phrase things a different way. The great version of this game as I envision it would do the following:
- Either revamp the overworld to justify its existence, or further minimize/remove it
- Generate caves that place varying threats in close proximity to each other, and everything in generally more dense and interconnected layouts
- Rebalance the game to avoid reloading floors and instead emphasize continuous resource management
- Allow most enemies to wander much further from their initial location
- Introduce a mechanic that incentivizes some efficiency, which will complicate treasure gathering and grindy playstyles
- Instead of creating sudden difficulty spikes through random events like bomb rock drops, use procgen, such as grouped difficult enemies, constricting terrain, high hazard density, etc.
- Vastly speed up the pacing of the game. Given the current quality level, half of the caves can be cut
If you put all this together, it almost sounds like a traditional roguelike or dungeon crawler! But this style of dense, systemically driven design is not something that Nintendo seems willing or able to make; BOTW/TOTK is the closest, and those games exist in spite of balance and structural issues.
What's shocking though, is how much the Colossal Caverns romhack resembles this, simply by squishing everything in the game into one giant, dense cave. Combat is more chaotic! Routing is more freeform! Resource management is more natural! It still falls short structurally due to its romhack status, but it's a testament to how much of the raw material is already present.
Ultimately, a disappointment. This could have served as a great example of seizing on the latent potential in a set of mechanics, almost like how classic Doom's combat was explored and developed, but Pikmin 2 is just too unfocused and inconsistent to make it there. Check out Colossal Caverns with a self-imposed time limit, it's fun!