Recent reviews by Talist

Wildfrost is a great game. Cute artstyle, lots of deckbuilding combos to pull off, and getting combos that destroy groups of enemies is super satisfying. As of writing this, I have almost 100%'d the game. The only thing I have left to do is to beat a daily run. The game is hard, yes, but it's not impossible. In fact, I won my first ever run, but I did get very lucky. Expect to lose a lot of runs to mechanics you've never seen before, but that's part of being a roguelike. A few criticisms of the game however:

1: In most Slay the Spire (STS) esq rougelikes, you have a persistent HP pool. In STS, if you make a mistake or have a bad draw, you'll lose health, but you won't lose the run unless you were in a tight spot already. In Wildfrost, you lose as soon as your leader is KO'd once, and your leader doesn't have much HP. A lot of later enemies will one shot your leader if you make a mistake or don't get the right draw. Because of this, every run is always on a knife's edge, which is both a positive and negative. There is also one fight against enemies that hit hard, but pick targets randomly. This often means you have to roll the dice, hoping they don't hit and one shot your leader. It's never fun to lose a run to a 1 in 3 dice roll.
2: There are certain mechanics the game doesn't explain super well. The most important of which is moving your units around. You can move your units around as much as you want during your turn, even though the game somewhat implies you can only do it once per turn. This is crucial, and if you don't get that, you're likely to think the game is unfair. Another thing is companions' health. The game describes KO-ing an enemy as 'killing' them, so you think that if your companions get KO'd, they're gone for good. That's not the case. Instead, they get 'injured' and the game says "if they survive the next battle, they'll recover". This led me to believe, "okay, if they get KO'd while injured, then they're gone for good", but again, no. If they're KO'd while injured, they just stay injured. The game could certainly explain better what risks you can and can't take.

I'm sorry, but I don't want to put EAC on my system to continue playing this. I hope the devs reverse their decision.

The real treasure was the glue we ate along the way.

Note: I got this from the Jingle Jam 2021.

I'm a sucker for procedural storytelling in games, and this is hands down the absolute best example of it I know of. It starts a little bit rocky and generic, but once you start building up your characters' legacies and relationships, it becomes incredible.

For instance, in my first campaign, I had two characters, Kurt and Mournwick, who were lesbian lovers and ended up founding the Kurtwick family line, which had characters that would later appear in my future campaigns. Then later I realized some of the descendants were named Kertwick with an E and some were named Kurtwick with a U, so I imagined that there was a family schism and now the two houses were bitter rivals.

Or I had another character, Charmer, who was abandoned as a kid and joined a religious cult for a sense of purpose. After being saved from that, he had a brief adventuring career before getting struck down by a disease after he sacrificed the only cure to save another. I feel like he found some sense of purpose in his final years.

...

Then later he came back as a legacy hero in a different campaign, perhaps him reincarnated many years later, and quickly became an absolute powerhouse. He became a world class warrior, found love, turned into a furry, fought off hundreds of giant insects, helped kill a god, got a pet bird, got possessed by a demon, was saved from the demon by the power of love, and then finally made peace with his childhood. Good times all around.

I got this because I thought it would be like Papers Please. And, it sort of is. The gameplay itself is pretty good, especially when you add in a challenge or two. But, for a story heavy game, the narrative is dumb. It suffers heavily from tonal whiplash, often trying to jump from comedic to grim back to comedic in only a few minutes. And why does your choice of headline retroactively affect what has happened? And despite working in the news, why don't you know anything until two seconds before it's being broadcast live? They also refuse to name the country this is happening in despite making up other fake country names, which makes for awkward dialog with a lot of "this country" in it.

And for a political game, the story sounds it was written by people who studied political theory solely on r/politicalcompassmemes and think the USSR was a 'liberal' state. The game's rather progressive socially, but it has very little subtlety with other matters, and usually just has you pick binary "good guy or bad guy" choices. It has big bad 'Advance' throw out random policies that make little sense for an authoritarian government to run. For instance, Advance run extremely progressive taxes, and I constantly get the feeling that the writers *hate* progressive taxes. Despite Advance committing actual atrocities and war crimes, it feels like all anyone cares about in the resistance movement is "I used to be rich, and now I'm not, and that's bad". They talk vaguely about freedom sometimes, but usually only in the context of "being free to be rich". I knew going in that they'd have this taxation be a plot point, but I thought they'd be more nuanced about it, rather than parroting conservative, pro-big business talking points.

Advance feels like a hardcore libertarian's scaremongering tactic, warning about such evil government activities like funding the arts, allowing euthenasia, and taxing the rich. Those are Advance's three main policies, and the game portrays all of them as leading directly to fascism in a year or two. Now, to be fair, they satirize a lot of things in the game from around the political sphere, but...

1: Forced neutrality is not neutral. It's a form of media bias. Ironic, huh?
2: They aren't exactly being neutral when they paint one side as a literal dictatorial 'new world order' and the other as the only freedom fighters willing to stand up for what they believe in, and makes it a binary choice between them. The game paints this as freedom versus oppression, and pretty consistently spins financial equality as bad. It's like the game is saying to the player "supporting arts funding or taxation basically makes you a fascist".

As another example of 2, minor spoiler: Early on, there's an economist character who is actually quite reasonable and positive about the taxation. However, later, when everything has gone sour, you get a tape from the rebels that they want played on air. It's a video of the economist character saying, in no uncertain terms, that the only reason she was positive towards taxation policies that essentially ended homelessness overnight was because she was jealous of rich people, and that blinded her to the "freedoms" they took and how "regressive they really were." ... Yeah. Like the only possible reason you might want to increase taxes on the rich is because you're jealous of them, and doing so is a direct attack on freedom. Everyone knows in the US, back in the 1950s when we had a ~90% maximum income tax rate rather than today's ~37%, we were basically a dictatorship. And this is in the rebel's questline, so if you disagree with bombing civilians for fun, you need to play that tape. The economist could have said something along the lines of "Advance lured us in, but then showed their true colors", but no, it's portrayed as "I'm sorry I was wrong all along and blinded by envy". Watching that tape made me quit the game, because at that point, everyone was insufferable and I just didn't care anymore.

...

So, game's fun, has good representation of minorities, but the narrative has really gross and distracting undertones. Or maybe I'm just a dumb bleeding heart liberal. Take your pick.

Edit: Oh right, how could I forget probably the worst message in the game? Spoilers for midgame: There's a raving conspiracy theorist character who gets introduced early on. Later, he turns out to be the leader of the rebel movement. Now while he is much more reasonable as the rebel leader, the game's decision to cast him as the brave, selfless leader willing to stand up for what's right is tone deaf and in poor taste. It's just... disgusting. It's especially gross because the people he's based off, like Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones, have literally gotten people killed with their radicalization, lies, and Covid-19 misinformation. Portraying him as being right all along gives validation and support to those types of grifters whether you intend to or not, and a game about media spin should honestly know better than that. Plus, conspiracy theorists tend to side with authoritarianism, not against it.

An incredible VR game. Combat is a unique test of observation and multitasking.

How I feel about this game is... complicated. It's times like this that I hate the binary review system of Steam. Originally, I had watched the first two hours or so of game play on a Youtube channel, and the style of gameplay looked unique and cool. So, I bought it and played it for myself. I've enjoyed my time, but I'm still disappointed because I only enjoyed the game in retrospect. When I'm actually playing it, it's honestly quite dull and frustrating. I have beaten the game, but I don't feel fulfilled with it because there was just so much busywork and waiting. That's probably the greatest problem with it. I'll get into more problems, but let me start with that. Just a note, there will be some small mechanical spoilers in this review. So... be advised.

The game is a resource management type where your resources are cards that you have on a big table. You can slot cards into actions, wait, and then it spits other cards back at you. Many cards have time limits, where they vanish or transform after some amount of in game time. There are a few lose conditions, and they all boil down to having too many of a card type, or not enough of a card type. And here's where the horrible waiting comes in.

Most of the things you do to advice your cult, like exploring locations, can give you cards like Fascination or Notoriety, both of which can cause bad things to happen to you. Maybe I was just being too careful, but every time my people came back from a mission, I would have to wait five minutes for my Notoriety to expire. And that's just one of the things you have to wait for. You often have to wait for research, wait for funds, or wait to find the correct card type.

This wouldn't be so bad if you could just leave the computer for a bit and come back later, but the game forces you to do a bunch of menial tasks or else you might lose that way. Plus, if you want a certain lose condition card to expire, you have to babysit it because events will come up that try to take away the card from you and add to a counter that eventually punishes you. The only way to prevent that and let the card expire is to pick up the card and hold it (and you can only hold one card at a time). If this is supposed to be an intentional game feature, then they could certainly make it easier to use and much more clear by giving a 'locked card' slot where you can store a single card.

(Note: Once you've played for like, 5 hours or so and established your cult, you do unlock some ways of dealing with the various lose condition cards better. But this doesn't really help because A) you can, like me, go quite some time without finding these methods because the game doesn't tell you where they are, B) It doesn't make up for the waiting I've already done, and most of all, C) At around that point in the game, waiting for lose condition cards to expire just gets replaced with waiting for expeditions to come back, so really nothing changes.)

Through these systems, the game artificially pads its run time and forces you to slow down, gating you away from the interesting stuff. None of these systems add any real challenge though, as they are all (annoyingly) solved optimally by just waiting. This is probably the biggest thing that hampered my enjoyment. I can deal with all the other stuff, but forcing me to wait is just frustrating, and it's the problem that is most core to the game itself. Let's move on to some other problems, like the second biggest problem, the UI.

When you first look at it, the UI is quite beautiful and simplistic. It's pretty much just a big board, and you interact with everything by clicking and dragging. But later, like looking at a subtly eldritch painting, you start to notice things about it that just make it terrible and needlessly obnoxious. I feel like about half of the 'challenge' of this game would be solved if it had a more user friendly UI.

First off, manipulating cards is far harder than it has any right to be. For instance, left clicking on a stack of cards only drags one off the stack. In order to drag the whole stack, you have to click on the tiny number circle in the bottom right. It's almost like the game was designed for a phone. It would be so much easier just to have right click drag a stack of cards, or better yet, have right click define a selection box. Another issue is in putting cards into events. When you click on an event box, it opens a box where you slot in cards, and many of these require more than one card. I have found no way to do this other than manually dragging each card, one by one, which is quite tedious when you get to having about 100 cards all scattered across the board. (Plus, Cthulhu help you if you accidentally click off the opened event box, which closes it and spews all the cards you already put in wherever it feels like). It would be much easier if you could double click a card and it automatically inserts itself into whatever action box you have open.

Second, the game doesn't let you stack cards unless they are *exact* duplicates of one another. This means that you often have 5, 10, or even 15 copies of a card, but the cards decay over time, so you can't stack them and they just take up way too much space and time to manage. The game should let these stack and sort them by time left. It would take up so much less space. There are also problems with cards that are similar to one another, but not exactly the same. For example, throughout the game, you recruit cultists, and they each have a different 'aspect' they are affiliated with. But, none of the cultists stack with eachother, so you have to put them in a big pile and pick through them for the right person every time you need to send one on a mission. Instead, they could all stack into one pile, and when you click on it, it spreads them out, nicely sorted, for you to pick one from. (Side rant: My Azathoth, why aren't cultists color coordinated? Why does Tristan, my forge specialist, have a blue background? Basically every other forge related card, from lore to tools, has an orange background, so why not Tristan? Instead, he shares a blue background with Neville, my knock specialist. It's *really* frustrating. The unnamed cultists are color coordinated, but not the named (aka: important) ones. There isn't even a blue colored lore!)

(Note: To people who say the UI is part of the challenge, I agree. But it's not a very fun or interesting challenge. It's just meaningless busywork that forces you to spend time sorting you cards rather than working out how to do something interesting, like summoning a spoopy monster.)

That's all the UI stuff I'll mention. The last complaint I'll lodge here is that expeditions are terrible, which is a real shame, considering you spend half the game just waiting for expeditions to complete. Once you figure out how expeditions work, they're extremely simple. Plus, they prove that your cultists are too stupid to live. I once sent out three of my best guys to explore an old manor, and they all DIED one by one because of some unstable flooring. I did not have the proper aspects to counter it, and they just kept throwing themselves at it until they all died. As far as I know, there is no way to call an expedition back. You just need to hope they run out of money before getting themselves killed. (And cultists are a limited resource, by the way).

There are more issues, but I'm hitting the review letter cap. So in conclusion... ugh. That's what I can say about this game. It has a cool artstyle, and you could write hundreds of theories about the lore. But by Yog-Sothoth, is this game dull once you learn how it works. My experience with it was pretty much just: spend 3-4 hours learning how it works, then spend 15 hours waiting for stuff to happen and sometimes looking up guides to see what crucial item you missed. I really wish this game played better, because I could see myself replaying it. Maybe future updates will fix that.

I just beat the game, taking 9 hours almost on the dot when I was actively backtracking to collect things. First off, this game both looks and sounds beautiful. Although, everyone else has already said that, so I'll try and focus on something else instead. I love the progression. I started off feeling pretty pathetic, and I was. But each new ability I got was unique (well, except for one that feels more like just an upgrade to an existing ability) and opens new areas. Once I got all the upgrades, I was bouncing off the walls, enemies, projectiles, scenery, and feeling like a general god of everything agility related. The ability I liked the best is one you get about half way through called Bash, which essentially allows you to dash through an enemy or projectile and launch them. It feels great to use and has considerable force behind it. People are saying that its better to use a controller, but I went through the entire game using keyboard and mouse just fine. Maybe its just me though.

Also, you are going to die. A lot. Even if you memorized the entire game, I still don't think that immortal achievement is remotely possible. I died 220 times, or about once every 2 minutes and 30 seconds. Although, a lot of that might have been me jumping into brambles, poisonous water, or flames trying to get that +100 XP orb slightly before I was supposed to be able to get it. But hey, it worked. Like... twice.

Although, I do have a couple minor problems with it. First, there is no fast travel. Or at least if there is, its very well hidden. Midway through, I bought an upgrade that told me the general locations of life cells on the world map, which increase your maximum health. So in order to get some of them, I had to run all the way across the map. The game has these springs that give full heals, so giving the ability to fast travel between them seems logical. However, this isn't that big of a problem because the map isn't too big and there's usually stuff to find along the way.

Second, the threats are somewhat inconsistant. Early in the game, touching brambles takes off 1 bubble of health. However, later on there are brambles that look the same, but they take off 2 or 3 of your life bubbles. Then there's one patch that instantly murders you.

Lastly, once I beat the game it doesn't seem to let me back in, which is a shame because I wanted to find some more hidden loot. You do get a vauge warning that you "may never be able to return" right before you go into the final dungeon, but I thought that meant I just wouldn't be able to leave midway through. So if you do get this game, make sure you have all the loot and achievements you want from the overworld before going into the fire dungeon.

Despite these three problems, I still loved the game. I would go on and on about the art style and that sort of thing, but other people have already said anything that I could.