#wthitg

So, after fighting past two penguins (it was boring so I have NO pictures) I end up finding a stack of three crates

You might be able to see that the right elevator goes up higher. If you go up there, you find a locked door and an open airshaft you can't get to. So, the solution is obvious: Push the pile of crates over and bring them up on the elevator. The problem is, if you try to push the bottom crate it gets pushed out from underneath the other crates

This is not how this would work at all

So, there's a puzzle here, and it's the absolute dumbest thing in the world. Here's what you have to do:

Position a crate above where the right elevator is, as seen above.

Position a second crate on top of the left elevator

Trigger the elevator, bringing the left box down to the ground floor, and moving the right elevator up underneath the right box.

Move the left box underneath the right box, and trigger the elevator. This will move the right elevator down onto the box. The box will phase through the bottom of the elevator and end up on top.

Trigger the elevator again, moving the bottom box up. It will phase through the floor and push up the upper box, resulting in the two boxes being stacked on top of each other.

Repeat for the third box to get a stack 3 high

You know what? I called this a puzzle, but it's not. It's a workaround to get around the fact that there's no real physics at work in this game, so pushing the bottom box won't cause the two other boxes to move at the same time like it should.

Seriously, that's a basic thing. Stack three random things you've got around you RIGHT NOW on top of each other, and push the item you put on the bottom. Assuming you made a stable tower, the result is all three objects moving (or none of them moving if they're obscenely heavy). This is a result of a force called friction, which prevents things from moving forever once a force is applied to them. The items have friction with each other, so if the bottom item has sufficient force applied, friction prevents the top objects from staying still while the bottom item moves beneath them.

Anyway, you use the stack of crates to get into the airshaft:

And follow said airshaft into an area crawling with penguins

(Ignore the talking penguin, he just complains for a while)

So, since I'm up here and the penguins don't see me (even if they could you can only shoot left or right with no angling in this game) the obvious choice is to take control of one and explore for a bit.

...But this exploration doesn't really get me anywhere (apparently I'm not supposed to be over here at all: Jumping down into the room just leads you back to the stacking puzzle room, and you have to take the elevator back up to the airshaft since you can't climb back into the one you got in here from) so I head in a different direction and end up

Accidentally triggering a collectible I didn't know about. I guess? I dunno. I ended up hitting all three flags and only got an achievement, so whatever.

Eventually I figure out what to do: You can use the airshaft to get through the locked door that was underneath the shaft that we first went into (apparently it opens from one side) and from there, you can push one of the crates in the stacking puzzle onto a different elevator, into an airshaft (don't ask how you push the crate through when you can only get through the crouching sections by rolling the whole way) and eventually...

Progress!

I actually got a little bit confused here. There's an elevator shaft on the other side here, but when you go to the top you can't jump high enough to make it to the next area:

I guess I need to get the crate over here? You can open that locked door and push it through here:

But you still can't get high enough. It's almost like you need... to stack up... multiple...

Oh fuck off.

YOU HAVE TO DO IT AGAIN I CAN'T FUCKING BELIEVE THIS

They don't even change the puzzle! It's the same shit, put boxes at the bottom of an elevator shaft and drop the elevator with boxes onto it so they stack, it just takes longer because they spread it over like 12 rooms instead of keeping it in just one!

This is the definition of padding. The puzzle isn't difficult, it's not hard to figure out what to do since this is literally 5 minutes or so after the first one (if even). It's just busywork to pad out the game.

At least I get some mildly amusing dialog for doing it (and an achievement for stacking all three of the boxes, since you apparently only needed to do two)

...Aaaaaaand it was about this point that my buzzer went off, signalling that I had played for an hour and could FINALLY stop playing the game.

Honestly, though? The game's not terrible. It's not great by any means, but it's an interesting if baffling premise that's done decently well all around and looks pretty alright. I've got some issues with some of the level design choices, but I didn't hate my time with Rocketbirds when I was done, which is more than I can say about Ravensword.

The game is about 10 bucks on Steam, and if you're interested in what you see you might get your ten bucks worth of entertainment out of this. If it's on sale for five bucks or less, I might even recommend it! I feel like I was pretty close to beating it, too. I almost want to keep playing to get to the end.

...Almost.

PART 4 END

Anyway, we do some rooftop stuff that's boring to get a box to get past more scaffolding (it REALLY bothers me that you can't climb them)

And as I walk past them I find some more budgies talking

The next bit is actually kind of interesting: The budgie starts heading towards the right, and gets attacked by penguins on the way. You need to protect them on their way, since if you try to get to the Budgie Headquarters (I think that's what the building is?), the guard won't let you in.

It's a neat impromptu escort mission, and I like that it's not explicit with the goal. And it's only 2 screens, so it's not long enough to be really annoying! After a couple of tries (the penguins will target the budgie over you, which makes it a tad more difficult), I manage to get the budgie to the building and we're both let in. The budgies have a conversation which is long and mostly boring but ends with-

Well, that was a bit loud, especially since there's a penguin right up in the upper left corner there. At least there's no one on the other side of the building, right? They'd have checked there, right?

Oh good we're all incompetent.

We continue on, grabbing a new machine gun-

-and continue further onto the rooftops and, eventually, into a

Oh for FUCKS sake, again!?

This was actually a bit of a shock. Bruno and Il Putzki show up to taunt you and throw five waves of enemies at you. Which I know because Bruno counts them out at you:

The waves are interesting, but kind of bullshit. The first couple waves are easy, but once they start throwing in the riot shield enemies it basically becomes a game of "Kill the guy with a gun before they can start shooting or the lack of invincibility will lead to you dying quickly". At least they give you a checkpoint between each wave.

Also, in case you were hoping for a confrontation with Bruno right now, sorry. That sparkly thing in front of him seems to be a Shield Of Plot Importance so it's impossible to kill him, and once you've beaten the last wave, he and Il Putzki bounce-

And a crate drops down for no reason, allowing you to progress since the stacks of boxes are, conveniently enough, too high for you to climb.

Continuing on, we end up heading down into the subway, which leads to-

Oooohhhh

Yeah, it was the grenade trick again. I'm annoyed at how long it took me to figure out.

I grab the blue keycard in the room and continue on. This leads me to a new (finally) part of the level:

I can't climb up the scaffolding (for some reason? I thought the reason scaffolds are built like that is to make them easy to climb), so I take control of the guy up top

And send him down and to the right where I can't get to, which leads to the beginning of the level

...so I can open up the door, which will allow me to double back with the crate I got towards the end of the LAST post. But first, I have to open up that door I was trapped behind using the guard I'm controlling right now.

...Which I only found out once I killed him, and the game decided not to respawn him, leaving me stuck where I was. Seems like something pretty easy to catch! In any case, I had to restart the game from the last checkpoint.

I reset to checkpoint, solve the puzzle correctly this time, and manage to get myself to a green keycard

I give you guys one guess what happens when you pick it up.

If you guessed "Bullshit ambush" then congrats! You know this game better than I do, because I actually didn't call it. Probably because on either side of this hallway there are DEAD ENDS THAT DEFINITELY COULDN'T HAVE HIDDEN DUDES but I guess I just gave the developers too much credit in the sense department.

I managed to defeat them, though, and took the keycard ALL THE WAY BACK TO THE BEGINNING OF THE LEVEL so I can open up what turns out to be a trapdoor.

Since you have to be on top of the door to open it, you end up dropping through into-

ANOTHER FRIKKEN AMBUSH COME ON

This one was especially annoying since it actually managed to kill me like, 4 times. And if you die, you know where you get sent back to?

You have to play this entire chunk all over again. Which means going through the door, killing the guy on the lower floor, taking control of the guy up top (and he walks around, so you have to time the grenade to make sure it hits him), use him to both open up the door that leads from the beginning of the level into the new area, AND to switch the door-trapdoor switch so you can actually get through the newly opened door, grab the keycard, kill the ambush waiting there, go back to the beginning of the level, and open up the trapdoor so you can fight the second ambush.

Again: This took me four tries. There's a reason I'm calling it at three hours.

Moving on, I encounter some protesting budgies. Yes really.

That hint is in regards to a new enemy, a penguin with a riot shield. You can't attack them head-on, but they only have a baton to hit you with, so as the budgie suggests, you roll past them and shoot them from behind while they're distracted.

This moves us into:

Bit of a short update tonight, but I figured It'd be better than nothing.

So, when we last left off I was absolutely stuck without a clue what to do, but as you can probably guess I figured it out. See, there was a crate on a ledge I couldn't reach with Hardboiled or a mind controlled guard. Typically you SHOOT these chests off, but I couldn't even get to a good vantage point to shoot the things off. What was I supposed to do!

Then I remembered I got grenades earlier.

Here's a Video Game Pro Tip: If you're stuck, take a break for a bit! There's a solid chance the answer will come to you. Also, in my defense, it's pretty rare for grenades to be used in this manner. I tip my hat to Rocketbirds for stumping me for a bit, I suppose.

I make my way up to the elevator in the upper right of those images, get to a new area, mind control a guard:

Who I get to send an elevator down for me.

Which means...

MORE BACKTRACKING! 

The guard presses a button for us, which allows Hardboiled to move to a new area and, eventually, make it to the roof, where...

I get murdered when two dudes jump me, as I desperately try to get into the right position to pick up the ammo and health in the middle of the screen. Pickups usually aren't too difficult, but when in a pressure situation, and after getting jumped (which, again, tends to kill you pretty quickly), getting into the right spot to pick them up is a pain in the tuckus.

We move on and find...

...Is that the jetpack?

Another blimp section?

Nailed it

Hardboiled Chicken Teaches Counting, a Learning Company Production

I wish I could say this was a big, huge, cool departure from the FIRST blimp section, but it's really not. You fly around the blimp killing enemies:

You enter the blimp, and kill a bunch of enemies, initiate a self destruct sequence:

Aaaaaaaand get out of the blimp conveniently just in time for it to explode!

The only real interesting bit is in the second blimp, where instead of the typical 30 seconds (which is a laughably long amount of time to escape; both previous exits have been two rooms away from the self destruct terminal), you get 1 minute and 45 seconds, and have to make your way through a silhouetted section of the blimp, which is actually sort of neat from a visual perspective:

It's actually shows off how surprisingly strong the character design is, at least for what you'd expect. An important part of being able to tell characters apart is how different their silhouettes are: The more different the shape of the characters is, the easier it'll be to tell them apart.

It's why all of the characters in, say, Wreck It Ralph are super easy to tell apart; In Wreck It Ralph, everyone had very different shapes to their bodies: Ralph was top-heavy and broad, Felix was tiny and had a big head, Calhoun was fairly realistically proportioned, etc. Everyone's shape is different, so it's easy to tell who someone is at a glance.

A similar thing is shown off in this section, although to a lesser degree:

Here, you can see that Hardboiled is fairly stocky, and doesn't have much neck, whereas the penguins are slightly skinnier and have very long, noticeable necks. Hardboiled also has a telltale tuft at the back of his head which is notably absent from the helmeted penguins. It's nowhere near as well done as in Wreck It Ralph, but I would hesitate to call it poorly done. There are certainly games that have done worse.

Also, side note: That penguin is pretty calm considering he's gonna die in a minute and thirty seconds (TOPS) and also his friend is being air juggled above him. It was a weird part of this section: Everyone was super willing to just... hang out while the blimp exploded around them.

Some of the other jetpack troops manage to get out behind us, but they're easily dealt with as we move on to...

I enter the penguin museum, where you can see some obvious propaganda poorly disguised as historical exhibits:

I try to be sneaky, but fail almost immediately because I didn't realize I can't jump to either of the platforms on either side of this middle thing I'm on (the camera angle causes some hard-to-read platforming bits)

I move through the museum, taking in some of the obviously legitimate historical exhibits littered throughout:

Aaaaaaaand get stuck again. I figure out that I need to control a guard to get that box in the upper left corner down:

But once I get to the higher area, I can't figure out what to do. Well, I know what I need to do:

Drop down through that shaft in the middle to get to the next area. Thing is, the only way to open that shaft is by pressing the button on the other side of the door, which ends up shutting the door behind me so I can't get through to the now-open shaft!

I even tried the grenade thing again!

No dice!

Again, I'll try again next weekend and see if I can figure it out. I'll give this game it's fair shake, but right now it's looking like I'm gonna be going 2 for 2 on playing games to my 3 hour limit, then quitting.

PART 3 END

I'm glad a consistent tone was important for the developers.

So, when we last left off, we got a peak into Hardboiled's childhood of brainwash and forced conscription shortly after escaping prison, finding weapons they just LEFT LYING AROUND in the process.

This next section is pretty combat-heavy, and it highlights a problem this game has:with its fights. See, the game wants to do the thing where medpacks are uncommon and enemies hit you for a lot of damage. Thing is, that doesn't really work when the fights are as unfair as they are in this game. For instance:

THIS admittedly-sort-of-neat silhouetted section took me three tries to beat. Not because it was difficult, not because the enemies mixed up their tactics in any meaningful way, but because the first two tries let me find out how the battle goes. Enemies will just show up off the sides of the screen, with no real way to avoid their attacks. So, I've got to fight off one group of enemies (often coming from both sides of the screens, so that when I turn to attack one group the other shoots me in the back), find out there's another, get killed because I wasn't prepared, then reload with that future knowledge in tow so I can beat the section. 

Earlier sections of the game were actually MUCH better than this, giving areas you could duck into for cover while you waited for the penguins to stop shooting you. However, the penguins were also able to duck into cover, which made it an interesting back-and-forth, or at least more interesting than this part of the game, where I just go in with my preferred weapon and hope for the best.

I also discovered that if I back a guy into a corner, I can punch them into the air and juggle them. AND, since melee attacks can't kill enemies, only knock them back, you can just juggle them indefinitely.

Anyway, we continue further into the prison yard until eventually we move down into the sewer. I couldn't actually tell it was a sewer myself, though. Luckily:

And we move forward until we find...

*RIMSHOT*

This is the cardinal we were told to find, who will lead us to the resistance hideout! Awesome, a moment of peace, perhaps, in the insanity of this game, giving us a short time to reflect on-

oh, wait, no, cutscene time.

I'm actually gonna spare you guys the blow-by-blow on this one, just because it's really, ludicrously violent. Like, dudes heads get blown of and comical amounts of blood gush out of the stump. Even for this game, it's a preposterous amount of violence.

Not to mention it'll save me some time in writing this recap.

Long story short, it's another flashback of Hardboiled working with the commie penguins to take over various nations, but eventually he's snapped out of his brainwashing when he sees a young chicken boy about to be shot and saves him. The young chicken boy gives him a headband to cover up the black star on his forehead, and Hardboiled starts a life of fighting against the Penguin Man.

I can believe I just typed that sentence.

Anyway, the next chapter picks up outside of the resistance base.

The penguins super find this place, don't they

So, there are two possibilities going into this chapter: Either it's a rest-and-relaxation chapter a la the Black Mesa East chapter in Half Life 2, which will allow us to rest for a moment from the action in what came prior, let us learn a bit more about this world, and perhaps interact with the characters a tad. Or...

Yeah, I figured. The "top secret" base is IMMEDIATELY attacked by the penguins, in MASSIVE numbers. Like, numbers so huge they must have been planning this attack since LONG before Hardboiled was locked up in prison, let alone busted out and taken here.

To help with the invasion, we're sent to go get some ACTUAL grenades

After which I... well, to be honest, I have no idea what I'm supposed to do. The elevator I took to get up to the area where the grenades were IMMEDIATELY breaks, leaving me unable to return to where the fighting is going on, and after 15 minutes of looking around I made little progress. I haven't even really gotten a chance to use the grenades.

I'll keep trying to get past this point, and I'll look at a walkthrough if I'm REALLY stuck. I mean, the last time I got stuck I just didn't know a certain command, so maybe I'm just really dumb. 

I must be to keep playing these games. HEYOOOOOOOO

PART 2 END

are we not gonna talk about that egg thing, because... okay, cool

So, yeah, we're in prison, and for SOME REASON we've been put in a cell with a cardinal. This cardinal also has GRENADES THAT LET YOU MIND CONTROL DUDES

How fucking well behaved do you have to be to get a boxful of THOSE?

In any case, you have to use these things (I honestly forget what they're called) to escape by taking control of a penguin.

Once you've successfully hit the penguin (harder than it sounds, we'll get to that) You're now controlling that guard, who can move around, jump, crouch, roll, and shoot just like Hardboiled can... but can't pick up keycards. Probably because there's no programming in the game to allow for a keycard swap between controlled guard and Hardboiled, because that would make too much sense I guess.

Oh yeah, I should probably put the title card up.

So, you run around as this penguin, get a box-

...and use that to boost yourself up and open up the cell that Hardboiled and Bud are in, and at this point you go back to controlling Hardboiled. But how do you stop controlling the guard? Is there a button press? Do you just switch back to Hardboiled? NOPE

YOU MAKE THE PENGUIN SHOOT THEMSELF IN THE HEAD.

I'm sorry, but this is kind of fucking disgusting. I get that this game is trying to be ironically edgy, or something, but it is SUPER goddamn weird for the game to be like "Yeah, this guy's useless, make him commit suicide!"

And, sure, you can point out that I've been mowing these dudes down by the truckload and I don't really seem to have an issue with it, but making someone take their own life crosses the line somehow. Like... at least the dudes I was shooting at could fight back. They saw it coming, they shot back at me, they could defend themselves. I dunno, it's just fucked up in a weird way.

ESPECIALLY SINCE THE GAME KEEPS GIVING THEM DIALOG AND SHIT

Anyway, we go back to Hardboiled and go through this facility, which as you can expect from this game is a really blatant torture facility. I mean, look at this shit!

Subtlety is not something you can accuse this developer of. There's a frikken CHAINSAW in the back, for goodness sake!

We continue on our merry way and encounter another cardinal behind a locked door.

I head back the way I came to search for the keycard I need, and eventually find myself in another area of jail cells.

You can bust these cardinals out, and they'll move out towards the next area where enemies are. They can't wipe them out, since the enemies are constantly respawning and they don't bother opening some doors until I approach anyway, which seems like the opposite of what you'd want.

After a couple of tries, since Hardboiled has no way to defend himself right now (can't even melee, which is weird since you melee automatically when you have a gun), I manage to get past these guys and into the room with the keycard. And a really weird, out of place reference to Animal Farm.

And after clearing the room, double back.

Or should I say... double BACKTRACK

Stop to grab the uzi quick

DO YOU SEE WHAT I MEAN ABOUT THE BACKTRACKING

Anyway, the cardinal opens up the floor (why doesn't he just escape himself?) and I move on to the next area.

Before you hit the next area, though, you get another cutscene! And this one is... another doozy.

SO. YEAH. THAT'S A THING.

Bit of a jarring ending as well. This game is...

Yeah, break time.