Americansplaining: Democracy 3

Taking only one hour in a game before writing about it is a special torture. I don't have long to make decisions or poke around. I can't indulge the analysis paralysis that usually gets me. I just have to go. So here I go.

Democracy 3 puts me in a nation's driver's seat. Choose a nation, select policies, manage influence, and make a better world. Let's see how much trouble I get into.

The game gives me several options for which country to rule with an iron fist, but I take the first. I am going to command the strange, foreign land known as the UK.

I take as much time as I can afford with the tutorial, and maybe five minutes in, I get to institute my choice of new policy. The Space Program it is, then!

After that capricious choice, I notice that, excuse me, Britons, your country is labeled a technological backwater! What have you lot done with yourselves? This cannot stand! Up education! Up science spending!

One year into a four-year term, I find the statistics button. I've dropped crime by 23% and violent crime by 19%. Equality is up 10%. That sounds good. But GDP is down almost 10% That's probably bad.

I have a plan to help the GDP, but it'll have to wait until I've crushed creationism in schools, which I promptly do. I didn't realize that was a problem over there, I thought it was just in backwards places like Kentucky. You poor bastards.

Heading into year three, my credit rating has been downgraded to CC, but my polls are at 42%.

I admit, money is tight. But my policies are good! If I make it through the election, I promise I'll jack up income tax and balance the budget. I'll make the hard choices for our economy. I'll make a difference.

That's when the game freezes on me. Having a legislative body lock completely up is a pretty familiar feeling to me over here, so I am unperturbed. I ponder the lack of a CTRL-ALT-DLT option for Congress while rebooting the game. Happily, it autosaved.

A capitalist plot, the Battenburg group, forms to unseat me. That seems malicious.

I legalize pot in an effort to create more tax revenue.

With only one year left, I go all in. My space program is nearing completion, and our debt may be mounting, but an educated, tech-savvy populace is worth it.

With half a year to go, technological advantage replaces technological backwater. I've done it! In a frantic effort to curry favor with my enemies, I plummet taxes, but it's not enough. The popular vote dumps me from office, 38% to 28%.

In four years, I dropped crime by 48%, unemployment by 12%, CO2 emissions by 32%, and traffic congestion by 18%. I've raised technology by 21% and equality by 45%. But high salaries dropped by 25% and middle-class salaries dropped by 50%, with the GDP dropping 15%.

Ingrates. I'm going back to the colonies.

Keep Right: One Way Heroics

You know that dream where you're running, and everything behind you is disappearing into darkness and you just know that it's crumbling away into nothing and somewhere out there is a platypus? No? Just me, then? Okay. Well, One Way Heroics is the RPG-style version of that dream, minus the platypus. The darkness encroaches from the left, so you head forever to the right, fighting monsters, gaining levels, and finding better gear so that you can eventually best the demon lord and save the world.

While it looks like a lo-fi JRPG, it's really a puzzle game. Keep going right, manage your energy and hit points, and improve your gear through loot drops or buying from merchants. The hardest part is managing your inventory. You can only carry around 20 weight-units, and armor and weapons can weigh anywhere from 2 to 8. Fighting monsters consults the random number generator for hitting and damage, and most of the strategy is making sure the monsters come to you and knowing when to run.

And running to the right. Always go right, because if you tarry the darkness catches up with you and devours you.

As with a lot of games lately, One Way Heroics makes death a stepping stone. You earn points depending on how well you did, and you can spend them to keep items for your next life and unlock new classes and abilities. It also gives you the opportunity to express something about your death: Was that enemy too tough? Was your armor just not good enough? The game gives you a selection of last words. My favorite: "I curse youuuu!"

Those come more into play on the public games. I don't know exactly how it works, but you can join new-generated worlds (or return to old ones), or join existing worlds where others are playing. You can see when they get to new regions or when they die (and how they feel about that death).

So far, it's a fun puzzle. My deaths feel earned. When I don't run from the Phantom Knight, or when I get stuck in a maze and the darkness catches up, or when I forget to use one of my powers and die, it's my fault, not the whim of the game. And I like that. It makes me feel like I can learn from it, and makes me want to play again to demonstrate that.

If anything annoys me, it's that gear isn't identified when you first find it. It always makes me uncertain about whether I should use it, and since pack space is in such short supply, I usually don't. I'm not sure what game purpose it serves, requiring me to ID weapons before I know what type they are or how much durability they have left. But I need to swap eventually, as all gear eventually falls apart.

In summary, playing One Way Heroics is better than that nightmare with the platypus. It's available for $1.99 at Playsim and $3.49 on Steam, and apparently there's a Plus version available.

Burn, Don't Slash: Wildfire

I often have the secret, secret urge to use fire to punish my enemies and destroy the unworthy. Please don't tell anyone. Happily, I've backed a game on Kickstarter that lets me indulge my urges without becoming inventory in one of America's many corporate prisons. Wildfire is a stealth platformer where you have the power to grab fire from existing sources and throw it. Unlike most games where you hurl fire through the air, you can't set people alight and watch them slowly cook and crackle to death. You can only light the environment, such as the tall brush and bridges. Using this as distraction, visual cover, and a source of terror for those poor souls who didn't sign up for the fire-controlling electives at school (foolish, really, but art's an easy A), you navigate levels full of enemies looking to murder you for some reason.

The game's in a playable alpha state right now, which you can get off the site. Backers will get monthly alpha updates, and the game's estimated full release is March '16, which my experience suggests translates to June '17.

It's fun, simply fun, to evade soldiers by hiding in the grass, to terrorize them with fire, and to douse their lights with water (which you can also control) to sneak past them in the dark. The decision of when to use fire and when to use pure stealth is also interesting: you can hide in the grasses, or you can set them on fire for cover from smoke or to scare off some soldiers. When there's snow on the ground, if you bring fire too close, you'll melt all your cover. It's a good balancing act so far, even if it reigns in my instinct to burn them, burn them all.

I played through using a controller, and then again using keyboard and mouse. The second worked much more easily for me, mostly because the button-press combination for calling and throwing fire was unintuitive on the gamepad. The mouse was smooth. The entire thing felt a little like Gunpoint, another 2D platform puzzler that used very similar mechanics. I'm looking forward to the final product.

You too can fulfill your urge to burn things. Check out the Wildfire Kickstarter page, and it's also been greenlit on Steam.

Flailing: Exanima

Exanima is the early release of the kickstarted open-world game Sui Generis, by Bare Mettle Entertainment, a prologue designed to show the current state of the game. What it displays is a 3D world rendered with interactive collision physics and active lighting that moves around you, and people that stumble over furniture and flail about like little brothers shouting, "It's not my fault if you walk into my stick!" It's hard to evaluate the game on anything more than the combat right now, because that's most of what's there. Exanima includes two options, a mystery where you wake up in a dungeon, and an arena combat mode. Initial forays into the mysterious dungeon taught me that I needed to know how to fight, so I turned to the arena.

Combat is... complicated. Exanima makes a point of dealing damage not simply based on weapon, but based on its heft, sharpness, speed at time of contact, and what part of the weapon you hit with. In other words, the physics of the attack. Unfortunately, you can only attack in broad, sweeping flails, either side-to-side or over-the-head, and nothing is quick about your attacks.

At least your enemies are in the same boat. By intent, it becomes a timing game. You have to flail from the correct side at the right time, making sure you're in range for your strike and out of range for theirs, or at least that yours hits first. It's hard, I think also by intent. Exanima combat simultaneously feels like something I want to get better at and something that should not have taken this long to become good at. After a couple hours in the arena, I don't have any consistency with success. I feel like I'm still flailing as much as my character.

Which means when I return to the dungeon, my best bet is to avoid combat. So I run away when I can, and fight when I must. There's some realism to that, and realism is obviously a goal for the designers. But I need to feel myself ascending the skill curve to enjoy a game, and I don't know if that's going to come soon enough. I also need some understanding of why things happen, and the people wandering the dungeon seem to attack me or ignore me based on some algorithm that is completely opaque to me.

I'll go back to the arena. The game is different enough from anything else I've played that I'm going to keep flailing at it for a while. I don't know for how long. Long enough to wish the designers had provided a retry option rather than kicking you out to the main menu every time you die in the arena, at least. It feels a bit like they're flailing at game design, but I somewhat think they know exactly what they're doing, even if it might not be for me in the long run.

You can get Exanima on Steam for $14.99, or at the developer's store.

Basic Mysteries of Life: Eldritch

Eldritch is a terrific little game. Drawing from the Lovecraft mythos, it gives you procedurally-generated levels full of increasingly-terrifying monsters to sneak, fight, and explore your way through. It doesn't bother with story: You wake up in a mysterious, infinite library with a handful of glowing books. Opening one transports you to a world where you must survive the strange to return to the library with one of the souls of the gods of that place. Return all three, and you unlock a mysterious door in the library.

Monsters are fish-people who glub and robed wizards who grunt. They react to sounds, which means they can chase down your gunshots or run toward that rock you just threw. Mix in the Minecraft aesthetic and destructible terrain (mostly through dynamite at first), and later indestructible monsters, and you have a strong recipe for delicious gaming.

It grew after its initial offering, too. Originally with three worlds, the creator added a Halloween world and a mysterious ice-world staffed with invincible penguins, among other monsters. Pickaxes, tripwire guns, hatchets, and more gear also appeared in the expansions.

There's a lot to explore, and while I admit I don't have the patience to start another game after dying this close to beating the third world and having to start over, it's a game I'll return to from time to time.

You can buy Eldritch on Steam or on its own site for $14.99.

Full-Contact Gardening: Lili: Child of Geos

Imagine you're a university student finishing up your degree on magical plants. Not that much of a stretch, right? As part of your final thesis, possibly your dissertation, you travel to the far-off island of Geos and discover it to be inhabited by a society of animated, wooden constructs and the spirits who created and oppress them. (Plus one Information Fish who provides occasional exposition when not insulting you.)

The game looks and feels like a Gamecube-era adventure game, like something out of the Zelda franchise. It has that feel as you run around the colorful town, talking to people with their bubbles of repeating text, and bursting into people's homes and opening their treasure right in front of them.

I hesitated to do that last one. Lots of the game's many treasure chests are in out-of-the-way places, tucked into homes closed off by order of the mayor, but one early chest is in the home of one of the constructs. And he's home, watching you. After a half-hour's play determined that the game expects you to open every chest, I went back and stole all his goods before his eyes, to no consequence other than becoming marginally richer.

Besides currency, each chest contains unique items, each an homage to some other video game. The collection features a "plumber's hat," a "hero's shield," and a ninja sword suspiciously stained with fruit juice. Nearly all of them are extraneous, but the game surprised me when two wound up having a use in the game's explore-until-you-find-a-solution puzzles.

As you play, you learn that besides being oppressive, the spirits are plain jerks. They steal the flowers that you pick for your thesis, and thus begins your quest to acquire magical flowers by stealing them from where they grow on spirits' heads. This is the main gameplay skill to learn: you ride the spirit like a rodeo bull, yanking flowers off its head while avoiding thorns that make it harder to hold on. Get enough before the spirit throws you and you can pick its red spirit flower, defeating that spirit. The construct resistance requires that you return with yea-many red flowers before they'll help you to the next stage of the game.

The minigame feels like it was designed for a touchscreen, and a bit of research reveals that Child of Geos was first published for the iPad. And while I call it a minigame, it's really the main part of the game. There's no other skill curve to ascend; the rest of the game is exploration and talking to enough people in the right order that you unlock the next batch of spirits to wrangle.

Standing on a bipod of exploration and full-contact flower-picking, both legs need to stand strong. The spirit rodeo was not engaging, and the exploration... varies. The writing is irregular and seems almost divided at times. Much of the text, such as the spirit profiles you see after defeating them, relies on tired, stereotypical jokes: this one is female and doesn't want to give its weight, or another lists her age as 16 on some days and 21 on others. This one is male and likes to watch.

In contrast, some of the dialogue is clever, self-aware, and mature (as opposed to juvenile). When you rescue a construct from a building you unlocked ages ago, you point out that she could have left any time. Her reply? It feels so good to be the hero, and she didn't want to take that from you. The flying mailbox-slash-mailman visits at first to bring letters, but then because it's worrying about Lili, and it helps Lili figure out what she really wants.

In the end, the core gameplay is unexciting, and the inventive, interesting dialogue is at least matched by the derivative or outright insulting bits.

Lili: Child of Geos is available on Steam for $3.99, or apparently on the iPad.

Mine's Bigger: Massive Chalice

This article was supposed to be some kind of dick joke, but instead, I'm too amazed: Why didn't anyone tell me that Massive Chalice is basically X-Com Fantasy Edition? I would've played it rather than let it sit in my Steam library for months. I'm not sure that knowing earlier would've led to me finishing the game, though. I've made it halfway to... well, I'm getting ahead of myself. The title says nothing about the game, and strikes me as something of a joke. Someone a Double Fine thought embodying the game's joint narrators in a giant cup was funny, and they named the game after it. At least that's my guess. And I'm not saying the people in my imagination are wrong, just that it's one reason the game sat, within reach but ignored, like a cup of tea that's spent too long cooling.

Massive Chalice is the story of a small nation besieged by monsters. Gameplay takes place in two arenas: the national stage, where you manage bloodlines to breed better heroes; and the battlefield, where you command your latest batch of heroes in fighting the monsters.

They execute the tactical combat well. You have three main classes, or hybrids thereof, and take advantage of their stealth, range, toughness, and burst attacks to destroy your enemies. Use line-of-sight and each hero's two actions wisely to find and eliminate the threat. It works well, and is basically identical to X-Com except with less of a cover system.

Between battles, you manage your kingdom, trying to keep it alive for three hundred years so the massive, talking chalice that advises you can gather enough power to destroy all the monsters everywhere. You assign heroes to marry and raise the next generation of heroes; your choices determine the next generation's heroic classes, hereditary traits, and learned traits. The choices are difficult, because assigning a hero to breed removes him or her from the fighting pool. You must weigh the benefit between keeping your good heroes in the field or letting them pass that experience on to a new generation.

You also select research projects to improve your heroes' armor, weapons, available items, and so on. As if the combat wasn't enough, I think this pushed me over into the game feeling just like X-Com.

So, at this point I've elected not to finish the game. I'm a bit more than halfway through the three-century chalice-charging process, and I feel trapped. My bloodlines produce nothing but the alchemist and alchemist-hybrid classes, which limits my combat options significantly. I just hit the point where I felt like I could manage the monsters well with foresight, cleverness, and a bit of luck, and the game upped all the monster difficulties on me. I recognize the need to keep a game challenging, but I feel like they just pulled the rug out from under my advancement.

The other reason is that the story just isn't there. X-Com had a series of plot-driven missions, taking aliens captive or capturing new technology. I could also interact with the engineer and scientist for some personality. Here, there's only the next mission and the long-term, unchanged story goal of reaching the three-hundred-year goal. Part of me wants to see it through to the end, but the rest of me knows I'll be more frustrated than happy doing so. And I can watch the ending on YouTube.

Massive Chalice is available in early access from Steam for $29.99. Note that since the game is still in development, just like this article's dick joke. I played the late February, 2015 build.