#spiritfall

Spiritfall has just released out of Early Access! This was my first job in the games industry, I've worked super hard on it and it's been an incredible experience. I started with the Marketing and Community management, and I ended up doing a whole bunch of the writing for the game.

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It's that time of year again! I wasted far too much time playing videogames, but at least I can tell you which of those videogames were worth playing and which ones weren't. Again!

(2020, 2021, 2022, 2023)

The Roottrees are Dead

It's... the comparisons that leapt to mind immediately were "like Her Story, but also like Return of the Obra Dinn", which it turns out were the two direct inspirations so that makes total sense. Your job is to piece together a huge, sprawling family tree, identifying the names, faces, relationships, and occupations of everyone therein. How? You've got a search engine you can enter search terms into, and bring up various webpages and documents detailing the lives of the Roottrees. As you fill in the blanks and make guesses, the game will confirm them in batches, Obra Dinn-style.

This core gameplay is already really engrossing, but along the way you'll pick up hints of a mystery underlying the Roottree family history, and figure out a bonus objective on top of just filling out the whole tree. It's extremely cool and unique, and The Fluteknees are Bread.

Bounty of One

This one was recommended to me by my kid brother. It's... fairly brainless? It's a roguelike where you're in an infinite empty desert, enemies come in from the sides of the screen to try and kill you, and if you shoot them you get powerups and money for upgrades. The character auto-aims at the nearest enemy while not moving, so all you have to worry about is dodging and selecting upgrades.

It's pretty fun! Lots of different toys with synergies that let you snowball in a few different directions. I find it great for like, putting on to give my hands something to do while I'm watching a show or listening to a podcast or something. Not too much else to say about it.

Misericorde

There's been a murder in a convent in 1400s England. The abbey's anchoress, the only person with an alibi (due to having been locked in a room her entire life), is tasked with covertly investigating by the Mother Superior, who believes the rest of the nuns are keeping secrets from her and covering things up.

She doesn't know the half of it.

Misericorde, currently unfinished, is chapter 1 of an episodic mystery VN, which is the only reason it's not my game of the year. It's got several strengths:

A great sense of atmosphere, with an extensive D&B-infused soundtrack that really gets across the protagonist's unease without being unpleasant to listen to.

Exceptional character designs, which manage to be distinctive and full of personality despite being in black and white and having every character be a nun wearing the exact same outfit the exact same way.

A dedication to historical accuracy, not flinching away from the realities and attitudes that would be present in a medieval English convent. Hedwig, our protagonist, is the stuffiest and most pedantic theology nerd of them all, and is constantly astonished by the irreverent-to-downright-debauched behavior of her "peers", largely forced into this life by circumstance. A really unique, harrowing, and sometimes hilarious perspective.

Despite this, impressively gay.

Good writing. Like good writing good writing. Not just structurally but on the prose level. Very important for a game that's 90% reading.

I'm not entirely sure how well the mystery aspect of it will shake out, since it's still in the setup phase and the whole thing isn't out yet, but all that aside, it's a joy to read anyway. Also Darcy is in it.

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet DLC

Yeah, I know. I shouldn't be rewarding Game Freak for their shitty business model and half-baked games. And you know what? You shouldn't either. These were bad.

Gameplay-wise... total nothingburgers. You know how Paldea was this ugly empty wasteland of airbrushed textures with no rewards for exploration, sprinkled with random pokémon spawns and trainer battles? They did another one of those. Two of those, kinda. The second one's Blueberry Academy map had a little more visual variety but ultimately was exactly as empty and unrewarding to explore as before. Zero-effort design as always.

The base game of SV had, I think, the best story a mainline pokémon game has ever had. They broke out the "dramatic legendary stuff", "fight an evil Team", and "do a Pokémon League journey" components into their own parallel things, and managed to make all of them more compelling than they've ever been.

The DLC... uh, doesn't, really. There's a couple fun new characters- Carmine and Kieran are entertainingly fucked-up- but Carmine gets sidelined almost immediately, and Kieran is the only thing the game has going for it storywise through the whole DLC. His story's kind of effective, but it can't carry the whole thing, and all the stuff about Ogerpon and Terapagos is underbaked and disjointed and anticlimactic. You're not really missing anything if you skip it. So skip it.

Cluefinders series

Did anyone else play these edutainment point-and-click adventure games as a kid? Sort of... Indiana Jones by way of Scooby-Doo? These were my jam back in the day, and I went back to them to see how they held up. And the answer is... uh, there's a surprising range of quality!

I ended up having way more to say about these than I thought I would, so here's a separate post about them. Overall, I don't know that I'd recommend any of them, unless you're an actual elementary schooler who needs to learn math and stuff.

And if you are- hey! You should not be reading my blog! This is not a website for children! I say swear words on here! Kind of a lot of them, actually! Your mom's gonna be mad at me, and neither of us want that!

Project Killdance

This was a... kind of cool tactics/action game? It's kind of Superhot but a deckbuilder, and that's... not really to its benefit. Copy-pasting my review from itch.io:

This is really polished and has some super cool moments, but I'm kind of hung up on... the core mechanic of it being at odds with the rest of the design. The tense action where you have to decide moment-by-moment how to not die that turn is great, and the action economy is a good abstraction for it... but ultimately, success or failure hinges almost entirely on Did You Have Enough Basic Moves In Hand. The overriding concern is always "is a bullet about to hit me?", and the answer is almost always "yes", and the solution is always "play a move"- which means, if you don't have one, all the rest of your planning doesn't matter, and you're dead.  Other deckbuilders have this core problem, of course, but they usually smooth over it with a health system that gives you a certain tolerance for failure. When it's an iterative system, building your deck properly you can lower the chance of being forced to take hits on your turn, and the outer game loop is about managing that risk. But... in a game like this, where a single failure means death, any significant random failure rate is a feel-bad. And the failure rate varies with the level design: the less cover, the more movement you need to be doing, but the incremental deckbuilder thing locks you into a certain proportion of offense to defense, forcing you to mulligan over and over to find viable hands. I do like the action economy aspect- keeping an eye on your AP and moves-in-hand to ensure you don't get stuck taking a breath at the wrong time is a good tactical challenge. The question is how to preserve that core challenge- making the most of limited and unpredictable options- without creating as many situations where all roads lead to dead. Maybe... separate decks for moves and attacks? Or the ability to slash enemy projectiles out of the air? More cover options in the level design? I'm not sure exactly what the right solution is, but I think you want something to cut down on "a big guy with a machine gun is immediately firing at you turn one and your opening hand doesn't let you move, RIP" moments. (Also- is there any significance to those Corrupted cards that sometimes show up in longer levels? I thought maybe relying on them gave you a bad ending, but I played through twice without using Corrupted cards the second time, and got the same outcome. Just a catchup mechanic for if you find yourself in a stalemate, or is there something else going on there?)

It's very short and manageable (and free), though- I think this is like, a prototype of something larger they're working on? Its length mean its flaws don't really get too annoying, and it's very stylish and fun when it works.

Pokémon Infinite Fusion

This was fantastic. This is the best Pokémon game, I think. The concept: You can take any two pokémon, and fuse them. Into one of two new fused pokémon, depending on which is the base and which is the head. It gets extremely wild extremely fast.

But more importantly, the game is very good. It's got so many QoL features! They've got HMs, but every HM in the game has a sidequest associated with it that earns you an item that substitutes for the HM- so you get the sort of teambuilding and moveset tradeoffs, but they're temporary, encouraging you to try out new stuff instead of locking you into the stuff that runs the HMs you need. And there's a proper speedup function, and there's these sidequests with really nice rewards in every town...

It's also hard to overstate how many custom fusion sprites there are. There's a huge community filling out a dex of the things, and more often than not there'll be a custom graphic for whichever unholy combo you come up with. The odds have presumably only risen over time, as the game's been continually updating since I played it. The stuff you can make is crazy cool.

My favorite is Honchvire. He is going to kill you to death.

Spiritfall

It's sort of... Hades meets Super Smash Bros. It's hard to come up with anything more to say than that, mechanically- that's exactly what it is. The combat system is a Smash-style platform fighter, but it's a roguelike where you acquire synergistic boons from different gods over the course of the run, and unlock different weapons with different movesets (and slight upgrades to said weapons) through the metaprogression.

And it works! If that concept sounds fun to you, then hey: it is! It's gorgeously animated, well-balanced, and has lots of optional challenges. It didn't really need to innovate- it smashed two known formulas for success together, executed with care and polish, and bam, the result is successful. Fun Video Game.

(Story's kinda nothing- a few months later, I literally can't remember if it had one. Some vague thing about souls and a sealed blight and you have to save the world or something? Didn't seem to be trying too hard, and didn't really need to.)

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I got, um... 23 more games on this list, so I'll talk about the rest later.

NANO 2021 Project: SPIRITFALL

- cyberpunk fantasy

- LGBTQ+

- draft #1

- dual timelines

Synopsis

When Cameron Bohl, an unknown bio-mechanic, witnesses the abduction of her apprentice, she learns there is far more to her amnesia-ridden past than she ever thought there could be. Joining forces with Qeti, the prickly Siadin quartermaster of the ship Sunli, and her crew, Cam storms her way through the galaxy on a vengeful rampage - and uncovering universal truths she never thought possible along the way.

Multiple millennia later, Jinie A'Maris grew up on legends of a ragtag-pirate-crew-turned-deities. Now, at age twenty-two and an experienced cartographer in their own right, Jin just wants to return to their friends aboard a way station in Androda's Solclyde system only to have their plans crash and burn in the form of a hijacking. Jin sacrifices themself to the violent crew of the pieced-together antique attached to their former workplace after overhearing several discuss a possible location for the deities' ship, soon learning the captain may not have the best intentions.

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by  Sergio Cosmai

Banger daily deal for the first game I ever worked on (and helped write!)