#backlog roulette

If you like the new style of Pokemon games, that’s great. I’ve played both Sword and Scarlet and found them to be generally decent times. But I rarely think about them outside of their initial playthroughs, and for the first time in my life, I decided to skip the new mainline content with the release of Scarlet & Violet’s DLC. 

Look, you can't say I didn't give the new games a shot.

Instead, I’ve found myself thinking more and more about the Pokemon romhacking community. Pokemon romhacks primarily take place in the third generation of Pokemon games, those found on the Game Boy Advance (there are also quite a few hacks from the Game Boy’s Gens 1 and 2, and a handful from the DS era of Gens 4 and 5, but the GBA games appear to be the sweet spot for hackers). These romhacks experiment in all sorts of ways, from difficulty mods like the “Kaizo” games, to games with brand new stories, regions and Pokemon like Pokemon Vega. There are games that attempt to recreate the Pokemon anime or manga, and others that flip the concept of Pokemon on its head, like in one hack where you play as a member of Team Rocket and steal other people’s Pokemon. Many of these hacks incorporate more contemporary ideas from Game Freak’s work — Mega Evolution, new forms and types, Z-moves, etc. — but keep them within the general framework and design space of the Gen 3 games, which gives them all a strong foundation upon which to build (also, using the GBA games as a base means these romhacks play perfectly on my Analogue Pocket.)

Pokemon Emerald Rogue is probably the most extreme and interesting romhack I’ve played yet, totally upending the formula of Pokemon by converting the game into a roguelike similar to titles like Hades or Rogue Legacy. 

Emerald Rogue (I played Pokemon Emerald Rogue EX v1.3 in case any of what I’m about to say changes in future updates) spits you out in an empty hub area save for three buildings — a config house where you can change some settings, a lab where you can choose your first Pokemon and a building to the north where you can start a run. 

The three Pokemon you have to choose from are random. My choices were Omanyte, Squirtle and Clampearl. Knowing survivability and flexibility were probably the most important things for a roguelike, Omanayte and its dual typing of rock and water seemed to be the right choice. Then I went on my first run. 

A run in Emerald Rogue starts you in a weird-looking overworld. This is essentially a decision tree on where to go next, like in FTL or Slay the Spire. The choices in front of you have names like “average gloomy route” or “mighty wet route.” These names correspond to the challenge of that route and the general preponderance of Pokemon types that you’ll find there — a mighty sharp route for instance will have more trainer battles and feature more steel-type monsters. 

Once you choose a route, you’re put into a modified version of a route you’d see in a traditional  Pokemon game. There are grass patches, items strewn about and trainers looking for battles. You start with five pokeballs and the catch rates appear to be much higher than usual, making adding new team members relatively painless. Like in a typical Pokemon game, catching a Pokemon adds it to your party, but if you catch more Pokemon than your team of six can hold, you must immediately release one — there’s no PC box with which to hold extra creatures in runs. 

You’ll also notice that when you defeat wild Pokemon, you gain levels FAST, and the exp all item makes sure your whole team is leveling speedily as well. There’s very little grinding in Emerald Rogue. Instead, the game introduces level caps for each area, asking you to make quick decisions about your team’s movesets as they learn new abilities rapidly, then challenging you with trainer battles you can’t just overcome by outleveling them. And if in one of those battles, you happen to lose a Pokemon, it doesn’t just faint, it’s automatically removed from your team at the end of battle, losing any items and investment you put into that Pokemon, but leaving you with a slot open to add another ‘mon as you continue.

Once you complete a route by getting to the end, you advance on the overworld tree and pick another route. There are also various other stops along the way, such as healing stations, shops for pokeballs, TMs and battle items, a lab where you can find your previously defeated Pokemon (though picking them back up often leaves you with a burden, like having to pay 10% more on items at shops during that run), tough trainer battles where you can win special items and take one of their Pokemon if you win or dens where a rare Pokemon is available to be captured (either legendaries or Pokemon with hidden abilities, like a Heracross with Moxie — a passive ability that raises its attack after every Pokemon it defeats in a battle). 

At the end of an overworld tree is a gym battle, where you can quickly raise all your Pokemon to the level cap if you haven’t done so already, or heal up (free at first, but gets expensive quickly,) before facing off against a random Pokemon Emerald gym leader. These gym leaders keep their type affinities — Wattson still uses electric types, fire for Flannery, etc. — but their teams have been enhanced with competitive movesets and overhauled AI. These are tough battles, and while they’re not Kaizo-level difficult, they are meant to trip you up. Also, the battles are on “set” mode, so you don’t get the advantage of a free switch anytime you defeat an opposing Pokemon, furthering the strategic bend of these battles. 

Beating a gym leader permanently nets you an HM, which work a little differently here: You don’t have to teach these moves to a Pokemon to use them outside of battle (and even if you do, they can be deleted freely in favor of other moves, unlike traditional Pokemon games,) and they’re mostly used to access shortcuts or alternate paths in the routes. Then the Pokemon that survived the battle will get fully healed and you’ll be put on a new overworld tree to do it all again. Beating the game requires you to defeat all eight gym leaders, all four Elite Four members and two champions, meaning 14 loops total in a single run, and the difficulty ramps up with each loop.

If and when your team gets wiped out, you’ll be taken back to the hub area, and you’ll lose all the items, money and Pokemon you had on your run (save for the HMs you were able to unlock as well as your starter, though it’ll be back to its original level 5 state without any of the moves you taught it). Then you’re given money and items proportional to how far you got in your run. This is where the roguelike becomes less like a Spelunky and more like a Hades — anything you do with this money and these items in the hub is permanent. Shops that open in the hub will sell you TMs, so I could buy Ice Beam and equip it to Omanyte for use in all future runs (protip: don’t teach your TMs in the hub world. Instead, hold them until you start a run, and then teach it, so you have the option to teach it to something else later). They can also sell pokeballs, potions and battle items so you’re better stocked for any and all future runs.

There’s also a Safari Zone that eventually opens up, allowing you (for a price) to go in and permanently catch Pokemon that you’ve caught on your runs before (though legendaries won’t be added to that pool until you progress much further into a run). While you can only take one Pokemon with you into any one run, you do get a PC in the hub area, so you can keep all the Safari Zone Pokemon you catch and swap them out as you please (for my second run, I benched Omanyte and brought in Houndour instead). 

That is essentially what Emerald Rogue is all about. Now, you may have been thinking of a question during all of this, a question I asked myself many times as I played Emerald Rogue — isn’t this just basically a Nuzlocke, where you play a game of Pokemon that incorporates permadeath and other self-imposed rules? In many ways, yeah, that’s exactly what it is, a Nuzlocke where instead of imposing the rules on yourself, the game automatically accounts for and streamlines those rules for you.

Reductively put, The Last Guardian is the video game embodiment of “a boy and his dog.” You control a nameless boy, waking up in a prison of a cave. But you are not alone. There is a creature locked in here with you — a massive griffin-like animal. Chained, injured and afraid, it lashes out whenever you come near. This is Trico, and while you might not know it yet, this monster is going to become your best friend. 

Trico is the whole reason The Last Guardian works. His appearance may be fantastical, but his movements, his mannerisms, his stubbornness — they are familiar. You look at Trico, and you know he’s made up of polygons and AI "if/then" statements, but that artifice just melts away, expertly hidden by characteristics that are innately animalistic. Trico barks at things he doesn’t understand. He looks at you in confusion as you try to coax him to move. He paws at his food. He stretches his legs after escaping cramped quarters. He shakes the water off him when he comes out of water and then he preens his feathers. It’s magic. And the developers are able to keep up this trick throughout the entire 12-hour experience. 

How could you not love this goofball?

The game around it however, can leave something to be desired: An awkward camera that’s both rigid and yet has a mind of its own, scenarios that go back to the well a few too many times (I can’t tell you how often my character blacked out due to story reasons, only to be woken up in a new area by a rescuing Trico) and world design that, while undeniably beautiful, is often confusing and repetitive. 

But while those things can (and will) frustrate you, they can’t stop the emotion you feel for Trico. Never have I spoken so much to a TV during a playthrough, using the same tone as I would with my own pet. “That’s right, just a bit further. You can do it.” “No, not that way, Trico.” “Oh, you’re hungry now?” “There, there, the bad guys are gone. Nothing to be afraid of.” I caught myself saying these little phrases often, then laughing at how the game had fooled me yet again that Trico was a living, breathing thing.  

The Last Guardian definitely has its moments of intentional heartstring-pulling — big set pieces and scripted events with you or Trico put in a tight spot just to miraculously have the other save them at the most critical of times. And those moments do often land with their intended impact. But it’s the quiet moments that give Trico, and The Last Guardian by extension, its heartbeat. 

There’s another saying famous saying: “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.” Astria Ascending certainly looks like a great JRPG, its Vanillaware-like character design is striking, with a number of unique races from the beastly feline Arktans to the angular and serpent-esque Zeft. The art direction in general is often a sight to behold. The hub area especially has a real electricity about it, with many gorgeous structures. 

It swims like a great JRPG as well. Opening the menu reveals a wave of systems and mechanics. Each of the eight party members has their own starting class, equipment type, skill tree and abilities. Combat sees you use four of your party members at any one time, though you can swap out members mid-battle for strategic advantages. There are a suite of buffs and debuffs that can be applied to your team or to enemies. There’s a summon system. There’s even a Bravely Default-style system that lets you spend resources for more powerful attacks in a single turn. 

And hey, it even quacks like an RPG classic. The premise is undeniably cool: The world is protected by a faction of eight demigods, people from around the world who were drafted into service and given incredible power, but also given just a few short years to live. And the current group — your playable characters — are just three months away from a pretty permanent retirement as they work to protect the world fully knowing they won’t be around to see the fruits of their effort. The writing and voice acting (both in Japanese and English) are well done. And musically, composer Hitoshi Sakimoto, who has contributed to Final Fantasy Tactics, Final Fantasy XII and 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim does solid work here as well.

But unfortunately, looking, swimming and quacking like a great JRPG is not enough to make you one. And it’s in the details where Astria Ascending falls.

Ulan, seen here waving her arms like some kind of wacky inflatable tube man.

The game looks beautiful…in stills. Characters’ idle animations are so fast and so wild they become distracting. Walking and running animations are awkward too. There’s a real “Live 2D” look to everything going on here that just is devoid of personality. Battles don’t fare much better as animations and effects for spells and attacks are weak and flat. It’s such a bummer seeing cool characters move in such lifeless ways. 

Astria Ascending does have a wide array or systems though…too big of an array, in fact. You start the game with your full party of eight, which means you have eight classes, each with their own massive skill tree to attend to. And before you can unlock much of anything on one of these trees, you’re given additional access to a choice of three upgraded job classes per character that open up a second full skill tree. And later you’re given sub jobs and support jobs, which create even more headaches. I love tinkering with character builds, but this is just too much. Oh, and those upgraded job choices are permanent, so you better be happy with your picks. 

This skill tree is fine, but when every one of the eight characters has two of these each (and most of the things on it are flat stat buffs), it becomes both overwhelming and monotonous.

And all of this mechanics and systems just end up making the game’s many, many fights long and tedious, often with little reward. It got to the point where I turned the difficulty down to its lowest setting just to mercifully pick up the pace. 

When you’re not fighting, you’re walking around incredibly simple and bland Metroidvania-like environments. The structure feels a lot like Vanillaware’s Muramasa: The Demon Blade, where dungeons are made up of 2D side-scrolling rooms that can branch off in multiple directions. But each of Muramasa’s screens are visually distinct and built for dynamic platforming and action combat. Astria Ascending’s rooms all look the same and you mostly just hop around to solve the most basic of puzzles. 

Every dungeon ends up looking this spartan, with identical room connecting to identical room. It's easy to get lost.

And as for the quacking part, while the premise is cool, half the game is spent going back and forth among everyone’s hometowns, solving very similar problems before going back to the main hub to report in. It feels less like a grand adventure or unravelling a mystery and more like running errands with no payoff.

The music is also CONSTANT. There are no quiet moments. There is very little up or down. The tracks are fine, but they're implemented so poorly. They're just always there, sometimes drowning out the voice acting. And those voices, while nice performances, sound awfully similar (especially for the female English voices), and since the camera is almost always zoomed out, it can be quite difficult to know who’s talking.

The speech bubbles are also of little assistance when it comes to knowing who's speaking.

At this point, I suppose it’s clear that I didn’t like Astria Ascending, but I do find it to be an interesting case study for what makes a JRPG good or bad. Astria Ascending pretty strictly follows the formula of classic JRPG design, but while it hits the right notes and plays them in the right order, there’s just no soul to this music. Even if developer Artisan Studios addressed all of the issues I listed above, I’m still not sure the game would be good. Because it would still be missing a thousand little details that even I can’t so easily put my finger on. 

Astria Ascending is not a bad game, not in a technical sense anyway. It’s just one that lacks heart and passion. It’s a photocopy, an amalgamation of good things from other games without the understanding of what those good things mean or how they should interact.

So I made my two characters: Minami, an ice-cold sniper who prefers to keep to herself, but has a way with machines. And Liu, a grizzled veteran who picks locks, disarms traps and gets up close and personal with a submachine gun. 

Then you get into the game itself, which is an isometric RPG in the vein of classic Fallout and Baldur’s Gate-style games. It’s pretty good! Still a little glitchy, despite having come out over three years ago (I did lose about three hours of play due to a save error, as well as dealing with a couple of crashes and getting stuck in a door), but it’s fun. It’s got a sense of humor that is willing to be silly — at one point you can fight a giant animatronic Ronald Reagan, complete with laser eyes — but it never reaches Borderlands-levels of grating. And the RPG mechanics are always fun to tinker with as you discover skills, weapons and gear that make for a variety of surprisingly viable builds.

It shocked me how good Zhang, my melee bruiser, was in my team composition.

As you play Wasteland 3, you will eventually run into some named characters who will join your squad, as well as be given the opportunity to build even more characters from scratch (you can only carry six squad mates at a time though, the others can be swapped in back at base.) And this is where I found Wasteland 3 to get very interesting.

On one hand, these named characters are quite useful, not just for the unique weapons and items they come stock with (similar to the premade starting characters), but also because they are a real part of this game’s world. Darius Kwon, an early companion, is one of the Marshals in your hub area. He’s lived and worked here, and knows pretty much everybody. When you go and talk to the cranky landlady in the apartment building on the east side of town, he has dialogue with her that reveals this isn’t the first time he's had to make a house call here. He adds a lot of commentary and color as you meet more people in town, which helped me to better immerse myself into the world of Colorado. 

And yet, I resented every minute he was in my squad. Because Marshal Kwon was not my character. And I had decided this wasn’t his story, nor was it the shotgun-toting drunk, Scotchmo’s story, nor the young sharpshooter, Lucia Wesson’s, all recruitable named companions. Each of these characters were only getting in the way of the story I was building for myself. And while it made problems for me, I did find it to be an interesting needle developer inXile tried to thread. 

The way I see it, there are three kinds of character options when it comes to games. The first are the fully-fleshed out roles — Mario, Master Chief, Sonic the Hedgehog. These characters have pretty set abilities. Your only outlets for expression are the way you choose to execute those abilities, like whether to pick up the Needler or which route you take up the hill in Bob-omb Battlefield. It’s great for leading a player through a story, or giving them a specific experience, but it’s also quite rigid. This is Mario's story, you're just helping him through it.

I never owned a copy of Super Mario 64 growing up, but I played this stage so many times going over to my friend's house. It's on the backlog roulette wheel though, so maybe someday I'll see past this initial area.

Then there are games where you’re given near total freedom to inhabit the role or roles you want — XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Dragon Quest IX (the best DQ, by the way), World of Warcraft. You build your character(s) from the ground up: What they look like, what their specialties are, sometimes even what goals you want them to pursue. But that freedom comes at a cost. It’s hard to tell a compelling narrative or build interesting challenges as a developer if your player characters can look like or be anything. There’s just not much for them to grab onto, which can lead to something that feels altogether passive or disengaged. While the player might personally get attached to one of their characters in XCOM, the game itself cannot, as that character might get permanently ripped apart in the very next mission.

And then you’ve got games that do a little of both. This is where pretty much all Bioware or modern Fire Emblem games go. You get some choices about your main character, but they still need to fit into the right box or boxes the devs have made for them to work within this world. These are sometimes labeled as “self-inserts.” You get to make “you,” but everything else is predetermined. In Fire Emblem: Awakening, you can make Robin look however you want and put them in basically any class, but Chrom’s always going to be Chrom, and the story is going to be the story, even with your slight influence. Sometimes this balance works great, but other times you can feel too restricted by the game's options while also not getting as crafted a narrative as you'd like.

Wasteland 3 oddly tries to pull from column B and column C at the same time. You could eventually have a squad of six pre-built companions. Or you could create six custom characters. Or you can mix and match any combo of the two. I think that’s wild. Because while a self-insert-style character can make sense on its own, it really starts to shatter the illusion when you add a second one (or a third, or even more). 

This is the squad I found myself running for most of my game. Lucia and Kwon are premade companions. the other four are my own creation.

When you're a self-insert character, you understand that many times, you're out of your element, and these other characters in and out of your party have a reason to catch you as the player up to speed (through your self-inserted character) on the world and how things work. And when you've got a whole army of custom characters, you realize the onus is on you to build that story in your mind, attributing meaning to emergent game actions. You put your classmates into Oregon Trail, and then you get to imagine those real people getting dysentery (this is also true for more procedurally-generated games like Dwarf Fortress. Oftentimes, the player is left to find their own meaning out of these semi-random happenings.)

But having my squad of four meticulously-crafted death dealers constantly be spoken for by two people I had zero attachment to, but were to be seen as equals? I just couldn't square that circle, and it continued to bug me during my entire playthrough. It felt wrong to kick those characters out and miss out on their potential world building, dialogue or voice acting, but at the same time, they just didn't belong in this idea I had created for myself.

Listen, I really enjoyed my time with Wasteland 3 (it’s hard not to have a blast when you craft a revolver with incendiary rounds that makes enemies explode when you kill them), and I absolutely recommend you check it out. You may not have the same hangups I do when it comes to the characters. Or you may not worry about missing a little bit of insight into the world by having a full custom squad.

Anticipation is a funny thing. It can warp perceptions, exaggerating the littlest details (both good and bad) until your expectations could not possibly be met. I remember loading up Mother 3 and not grasping the rhythm-based combat to the point of putting the game down, despite having been enthralled by its world and characters for the longest time. Finally getting to play Final Fantasy VII having never owned a PS1, I was stunned by how much I hated the Active Time Battle System, which left a terrible taste in my mouth as I slogged through combat to get to the parts of that game I did love. I was really worried about similar possibilities going into Gunpoint. Here’s this indie, solo dev game that’s got a 3.5 hour measurement on HowLongToBeat.com. And yet, I’ve let the ideas of what this game could be simmer and brew in my mind for 10 whole years! 

So I sit down, open up Steam and brace myself for what comes next. And what comes next is…a really good game. 

It’s as simple as that. Gunpoint rules. The physics of holding your left click to power up your jump, the way you can break through plate glass windows with the right amount of force (an amount that’s not explicitly stated, yet intuitively felt), the stringent stealth requirements paired with the multiple options for quick resets: It all connects together like a dream. 

The only thing that didn’t click with me were the controls, but that is certainly more in part to my lack of experience gaming with a mouse and keyboard rather than the developer’s layout choices. And as Gunpoint more often leans toward methodical pre-planning over twitchy action, even my weak WASD skills were able to pass muster. 

But what stands out for me most is Gunpoint’s sharp writing. I suppose that shouldn’t come as a surprise be written by a guy who was already writing professionally, but the text in Gunpoint is funny and kinetic and smart. Your character, the detective Conway, sends and receives messages with multiple clients, some of whom treat him as a hero and friend whereas others are cold and rude. And you’re given some flavorful options of how to respond. I role-played my Conway as a capable doofus, a kind of Sterling Archer minus the crassness. While the amount of dialogue is a fraction of what you’ find in a Mass Effect game, for my money, Gunpoint has it beat in terms of quality. 

Gunpoint’s final trick is my favorite though. It’s a bit of a spoiler, so this is your warning to check out now and go play the game yourself. It’s never more than $10, and often much cheaper. I think it’s totally worth playing. 

Once you complete the final mission in the game, Conway starts to publish a blog. And just like with the dialogue, you get the option to, uh, smooth over some of the details to put you in a better light. Or you can be completely honest. However you choose to complete the post, when you hit publish, the game instantly closes itself out, and opens up a page in your browser, showing you the finalized blog. On one hand, the game is just taking your stats and and choices and generating a custom little webpage with them. It’s nothing that technical. But it’s a moment of immersion I found intensely cool, bringing the game outside the bounds I had anticipated for it. 

And therein lies my problem with Mutant Year Zero: my cunning just can’t make up for the amount of ways the game demands to fuck you over. One of the big selling points of MYZ is how you can explore areas in free roam until you or an enemy locks eyes and starts combat. This gives you an opportunity to pick up resources scattered around the environments or listen to your characters talk about the current events of the plot (which mostly involves Dux asking “isn’t this all kinda weird?” and Bormin saying “yeah, but shut the fuck up anyway,") but most importantly, it allows you to scout and position your units to ambush enemies for the next skirmish. 

A snipe like this is the coolest the game gets, but it's nothing you haven't done a million times before in XCOM.

There’s something satisfyingly cool about posting my sniper up in an elevated position, then getting my tanky boar behind some cover down low to rush in and finish the job so that the enemies never know what hit them. This isn’t perfunctory either, as MYZ rewards you for being patient, doing a stealthy sweep of the area and even picking off a handful of stragglers with silenced weapons before it’s time to go loud and mop up whoever’s left. It’s a great system…when it works. But too often, engaging with these mechanics is a tedious or even impossible pain in the ass. 

Tactical games all hinge on information. When you have information available to you, you can make smarter, more strategic decisions that let you take down bigger or stronger enemies. For example, in Into The Breach, you are given perfect information about exactly what each enemy is going to do on their turn even before their turn has started. So it’s up to you to find the best way of mitigating or redirecting their damage to protect your units and the city. Fire Emblem lets you turn on enemy range indicators so you can bait out some enemy attacks one at a time while avoiding the wrath of a full army. XCOM does hide enemies in a fog of war that are too far away, keeping you from getting the full picture of a battle, but it’s easy to scan around the field and position your units to make the best of what you have. Mutant Year Zero however routinely makes it difficult to know what you’re up against until it's much too late.

The first area you're in is a dense, dark forest. Then you get to this snowy area with so much crap on the ground that you can't really see anything effectively. And the zoomed out camera isn't doing you any favors.

The environments are incredibly dark, with plenty of debris to further block your view. Enemies have vision rings around them, but they don’t appear until you’re very close to them, making it nigh impossible to know if picking off this close enemy is going to provoke and enemy much further away. And there’s no map (mini or otherwise) to help you get a lay of the land. You do get a compass at the top of the screen that tells you where your objective’s destination is, as well as the direction of nearby enemies, but enemies also move around, and there’s no way to tag them to better keep track of where they go. But the worst of the issue of the bunch is an oppressively locked isometric camera that doesn’t ever seem to give you good sight lines of where you're going or what's out there. You can’t plan around what you can’t see, which often leads to your attempted ambushes getting ambushed themselves as more enemies you couldn’t detect come out of the woodwork to oppose you.

To make matters worse, even if you are able to fully scout out an area, there aren’t many opportunities to clear out those stragglers before the big firefight, even though that is kind of the game’s central thesis. Even when you do find them (which takes a significant amount of time, both with the game’s glacial walk speed, and waiting forever for enemies to get into the right position on their patrol path), the enemies in these situations can often take more than one round of combat from your stealth weapons, leaving them in a position to call in backup and/or retaliate with an attack of their own. But more often than not, enemies will be found in stubbornly stationary pairs, which further complicates your goal of a silent execution to remove a threat from the board. Why would they make a core tenet of their game so difficult to achieve? I don’t have a good answer for you, but it leads to a lot of standing around waiting for a plan to fail, only so you can reload and wait even longer for it to fail in a slightly different way.

Be ready to see this screen a lot.

Once the bullets do start flying, you’ll find yourself at a disadvantage almost immediately. Your attack ranges are painfully short, while the enemy seems to be able to take shots at baffling distances. Even when you do have a shot, good luck hitting anything. While MYZ certainly has some XCOM: Enemy Unknown influences — especially in its UI which will feel instantly familiar — one of the ways it tries to simplify is in its hit percentages. MYZ only deals in percentages of 100, 75, 50, 25 or 0. It all makes for a lot of missing, especially on your overwatch shots, leading to many wasted turns of missing, followed by more wasted turns of reloading your weapons. Meanwhile, a Pyro enemy is tossing molotovs at you like they were going out of style, and you’ll find yourself loading up your last save time and time again, leading to further frustration. I knocked the difficulty down to its easiest setting, and still routinely found myself in impossible, or brutally attrition-filled situations, and this is a style of game I feel pretty comfortable with!

It’s not quite all negative. The characters have pretty enjoyable personalities, both in their aesthetics and their mechanics, each with a unique skilltree of mutant abilities you’ll unlock over time (Bormin’s knockdown tackle is a personal favorite since it gave me another crucial stealth damaging tool, incapacitating a target long enough to follow up with two or more shots from my other characters, stealthily finishing the job.) And while the quantity of weapons in the game is low, the variety within that small set is very nice, with a number of distinct firearms with added abilities like knockdown or incendiary rounds. You can also find armor out in the world, which will cosmetically be displayed on your characters during play (I gave a top hat to Dux, not just for the increased damage buff it gives him while on elevated terrain, but also just because it looked dapper.)

It's a good hat! But also, this is a 75% shot? From my sniper character? Give me a break.

But those niceties don’t make up for the molasses walk speed, poor autosaves, murky environments and painfully inaccurate weapons, which all combine to make for an experience that is equal parts exhausting and annoying, even in a game that’s as short as 10-15 hours. The Bearded Ladies new game, Miasma Chronicles looks like a big improvement to many of my MYZ complaints: The environments are cleaner, better lit and easier to both navigate and survey, which could make a huge difference in my enjoyment if I play it.