Finished Any Games Lately?

"It is the 41st Millennium. For more than a hundred centuries The Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the Warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor's will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods."

If you've ever played a Warhammer 40K game or read one of its books or rulebooks, you are familiar with the above paragraphs. But where did it come from? Apparently, it was from the original Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader rulebook.

So imagine my complete lack of surprise when I say I have never played a WH40K game that has so perfectly captured the lore and feel of the 40K universe than Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader.

If you are a fan of videogames (check), especially story-based turn-based RPGs (yup!), and anything 40K (ditto), this game is practically mandatory for you to play.

But that doesn't mean it is a perfect game.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed my time with this title. As the titular Rogue Trader, you are one of the very, very few people in the 40K universe whose life actually doesn't stink. You are essentially a merchant prince with your own city-sized starship, millions of individuals under your complete rule, riches untold, and you are the master of an entire sector of the galaxy including all of the star systems, planets, and people within your domain. All are there under your protection and solely to serve your will.

So why do I feel like I am struggling half the time with pointless tasks?

Gameplay wise, if you've played Baldurs Gate 1&2 or any Pathfinder game from Owlbear you know what the game mechanics are like with Rogue Trader. First, there's an extremely long campaign - I clocked in at 130 hours, and that included the need for me to backtrack a couple of times for about 10 hours or so (more on that later).

There's fully-realized characters where you can build deep relationships. A mountain of text and story. Lots of tasks to perform, many of which are often menial. There's a massive pile of inventory to juggle. Bottom line, if you decide to play and complete this game, you have a long-term investment on your hands. More on that word later.

If you're looking for something quick and easy like the awesome Warhammer 40K: Inquisitor (ie, Diablo 40K), this is not it. Here, you have methodical turn based combat, inventory juggling, a dictionary full of different spells (I mean abilities) to juggle, a very deep, flexible, and comprehensive character leveling process, and combat that is 100% strategy and not action based whatsoever.

Ah, the combat. There's a lot of it. A lot. They practically force feed it to you in this game. For the most part I liked it, but didn't love it. Look, I dig turn-based combat (how could I not? Baldur's Gate 3 and XCOM2 are a couple of my all time favorites), but there were so many powers to juggle. Also, the terms they use here are not the normal RPG vocabulary (wounds = hit points/health? Exploits? Toughness?). At times - 100 hours in mind you - I was just hitting abilities in combat with no idea how they'd impact the fight. I just knew when I stacked them all on one target my sniper would do double damage. Oh you can dive into the details but it just never felt intuitive. At least the combat balance was ridiculously underpowered. There were maybe only a handful of times across the dozens and dozens of encounters where I seriously felt like I wasn't playing easy mode (I wasn't). In Rogue Trader, it is quite common to create an overpowered build for you and your party members, even without trying. Part of this is due to the amazing gear that would drop.

Ah the gear. Do you like gear? Do you? Well here's a mountain of it. Oh you like lasguns? Have 500 lasguns! And a thousand chainswords! You get a chainsword! You get a chainsword! You get a chainsword!

Now to be fair, the excess of gear, weapons, items, and valuables in this is excessive for a reason. The game's loot system is focused on a unique goods-based economy from a cargo perspective. Think about it. You have at your disposal entire planetary economies, so a treasure chest of gold pieces isn't going to move the needle for you. Instead, the buy/sell economy is built entirely around your ship's cargo, and any loot that isn't useful can be turned into tradable goods. Trading these goods builds your reputation and profit factor, and this allows you to immediately pick up the items you do want from faction vendors.

For example: let's say you picked up 1000 chainswords. You can convert that into Melee Weapons cargo. You then trade that cargo with a pirate faction, increase your profit factor with that faction to, for example, Level 15, and now you can buy that armor you wanted that's available from the pirate faction vendor at PF15. It's a bit clunky, but once you get the basics you start to think more as a merchant and less as a hoarder like you do in most RPGs.

Some other criticisms: if you're not careful you might miss out on a couple of side story beats and major characters, some of which might make you miss entire major plot points and quests. Oh you can finish the game without them - in fact you can technically remove all your party members and just play with generic NPC merc types to fill out your party - but there needed to be a more obvious path to recruitment for a couple of them. One of the characters required I replay an old save from an earlier chapter and required about 10 hours of backtracking. I'm glad I did because he was awesome; still, I wasn't a fan of the unnecessary repeated gameplay extension.

Speaking of characters, the romance stories are kind of hit or miss. They're generally well written and interesting, but the one NPC I had a particular interest in had such a difficult tightrope to walk to gain her favor, if you make one mistake it requires you to practically replay half the game. Sorry, not going to happen.

Finally the major story. The basics of it were great, but sometimes the lore and dialogue were so true to the universe that if you were anything less than a 40K fan with a basic understanding of the terms and concepts of the setting, it could be difficult to follow and would require multiple glossary checks. I'm looking at you, Adeptus Mechanicus. Overall though, the plot was solid. This problem unfortunately, was really with the length and the pacing, which is typical of Owlcat games and is reflected in their Pathfinder series. You will spend the first couple of acts getting absolutely blown away with the story's pacing and awesomeness, things eventually slow down, a bit later you'll get lost a couple of times figuring out what to do next, backtrack because some interesting side quests were cancelled out due to proceeding to the next chapter, and then you kind of drag yourself through the later part, but then it picks up quickly for the conclusion, with a comprehensive and interesting epilogue. If this game was edited down to 80% of its size, I think the pacing would have been spot on.

Ok enough complaining. I'm making it sound like a bad game. It's not. I simply had such extremely high expectations for this one and it turns out it was merely a great time. Woe is me. Now let me tell you why I enjoyed Rogue Trader.

This is the best Warhammer 40K role playing experience out there. Owlcat Games captured the lore perfectly. The look of every single minimap. All the dialogue, written or spoken. The feel of every weapon, the gothic music, the sound, the critical decisions that are needed to be made. The stakes of the plot make sense, and the power players (including you) impact the entire Koronus Expanse sector. Even the size and overwhelming scale of the entire lengthy experience matches up perfectly with the 40K universe.

I also loved the character development for every single party member and NPC of note in the game. This is where the length of the game is a big plus, in that it allows these individuals to organically grow and become more familiar to you (and your character) as the story progresses. Also...I felt invested in them. They never felt like cannon fodder or pack mules. I wanted them to succeed on their side quests and their advice and decisions (often conflicting with other party members) mattered to me. And they all fit perfectly into the 40K setting. Finally, as a former voiceover artist, the VO in this game is outstanding for every individual from the top down.

Finally the story. There's so much of it. At times it can feel bloated, but the gameplay length allows for its digestion. Also the journal does a serviceable job breaking down quest progression and why it matters to the story arcs and forks in the road. And man, those forks - those key decisions you have to make at times with major consequences, sometimes for a single character, sometimes for an entire star system. It's at those critical moments you feel the weight of your actions and the true power at your disposal.

In short, Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader is a tribute band for the Baldur's Gate saga. the game follows the BioWare epic quest formula, and although it doesn't hit the gameplay heights of the BG series, where they land is still a deep experience with a similar song. One person, a god like figure, fighting enemies with your memorable crew, making decisions with massive consequences for everyone. However, with that power comes a burden. Not just your consequences, but the actual gameplay burden needed to complete the game.

I enjoyed Rogue Trader a great deal; I am very satisfied with the time I invested in this title, and that's the key word here: investment. This is NOT a game you pick up light-heartedly that immediately rewards your time with quick, short term bursts of dopamine like HELLDIVERS 2. No, my friends, this is Warhammer 40K. The Emperor requires a good bit of suffering first, but his blessings of entertainment are rewarded to the patient.

Up next, well, WoW: The War Within is starting to kick off, but I definitely need something dramatically different both theme- and gameplay-wise, so let's kick this old boat off the dock and get some DREDGE going.

I'll probably like DREDGE. The title is in all-caps, like DAVE THE DIVER and HELLDIVERS 2. Maybe it's the diving.

I'll do the exact opposite to Budo's incredible reviews and briefly mention a few games I've finished over the past month:

Dredge. Very chill, very engaging fishing + exploration + Lovecraftian horror game.

Vanquish Remastered. The opposite of chill, but fairly engaging if you want to shoot robots. Just don't quiz me on the story, because I have no idea what was going on.

Bubble Bobble 4 Friends. The original Bubble Bobble is one of my favorite games of all time, so these new levels with updated graphics delighted me to no end.

Celebrities Hacked. It's like Qix, but with sexy anime girls. Game of the Year.

Finished Spider-Man 2. The long, long, long final boss fight lowered my impression of the game quite a bit.
It.fet like a by the book way to "defeat" the baddie

Finished Lorelei and the Laser Eyes and it's definitely going to be in my top 5 for the year. Terrific puzzle game with a super compelling story and vibe. I could have done without a couple of the horror elements but that's just my own preference because I really do not enjoy horror. A funny thing was that there was just one jump scare in the whole game, and afterwards I realized that there was something in the room telling me exactly what was going to scare me and I did not notice it. You don't have to be a math whiz to enjoy the puzzles but I feel like this one is especially fit for people who did puzzles on pen and paper because you definitely need to play the game with a notebook by the side (and it's a terrific game to use the notepad embedded in the Steam overlay).

As an enjoyer of puzzles and horror this is going on my list. I’m purely on console so you think a controller would be an issue?

Excellent I have wish-listed it.

On my Kirby series playthrough, I just finished up Kirby's Adventure for the NES. As the first introduction of the "copy" mechanic for the series, this game obviously stands out as a major progression from the first Gameboy game. The copy mechanic added a lot of variety but only in a “designed” way, as in “we put this enemy in front of you so that you can engage with later enemies specifically using it”. I hope that the series gives more freedom of selection in these abilities than just when an enemy of that type is present. It would open up a little more creativity in the gameplay for the gamer.

Another thing I hope they change in upcoming games (no spoilers, don’t tell me) is to get rid of the float mechanic. I just found some sections annoying enough to float over them, avoiding the challenge completely. It also got in the way when I was just wanting to jump and attack without floating, but apparently I pushed ever so slightly upward and it was registered as a float. We’ll see how it progresses into the next platformer with …

Kirby’s Pinball Land for the Gameboy? Oh, okay. That’s good too.

Tinykin is such a delight!

I have a PhD in Molecular Biology. (Not a flex, I've forgotten like 80% of it even though I still work in the pharma industry). I loved the classes and the experiments during my education and training. Except for one.

Organic Chemistry lab.

Org Chem is basically the class that determines how far you want to go in science or medicine. I loved the lectures - they were basically problem solving puzzles. I hated the labs. Just hours of manipulating equipment stands, glass bottles and tubes of various shapes and sizes, a constant flame, and grinding chemicals of questionable safety into fine powders just to make a single person - the lab professor - happy.

So imagine my joy and dread when I loaded up Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator.

This game puts you in the role of the new alchemist in town, and the entire game plays over 5 screens: Your bedroom, your garden where you pick herbs daily, the storefront where folks come with their various requests or to sell you ingredients, the basement where you do the real crazy experiments, and the workshop, where you spend most of your time crafting daily potions. That's it, and the entire game is set in this gorgeous medieval painting art style, similar in some ways to Pentiment.

The workshop is where you will spend 90% of your time, and you have four tools only. A mortar & pestle, your cauldron & wooden spoon that's under a cookfire, a bellows to heat your potion and complete it, and a ladle with water to dilute your concoction and fix any mixture errors.

Oh and of course, the potion map. This is where the game really shines.

Think of how the potion map works in this way: Every potion you are able to make in the game is set on this giant map that looks roughly like a Buddhist mandala, with potion checkpoints set in various areas on the map. You start with just a clear container of water in the very middle, and you have to add ingredients to move your mixture to destination sites on the map where your desired potions are. The simplest potions to make (healing, poison, sleep, etc) are near the center. The more complicated potions (invisibility, berserker, explosions, hallucinations) are farther away. And there are no straight lines to travel to these more complicated concoctions.

So how do you move your vessel to make the potions you need? You add ingredients, which basically serve as movement commands. This herb allows you to move southeast in an S-pattern. This root goes very far south but then hooks sharply to the west. This nut goes in circles heading northeast. It ends up looking like a pirate treasure map, and this is where the game really shines. You truly feel like some wizened apothecary or a town witch throwing flowers and herbs in a pot, grinding mushrooms into a powder, and eventually handing that merchant a potion that will make his love life better or help a warrior have stronger muscles in battle.

It's great for the first 10 hours, but after that, I hit a wall, and had to stop playing.

What happened? Well, first of all, there's the mechanics of the potion crafting process. You have to grind the ingredients with the mortar and pestle every, single, time. You have to physically drop them in the cauldron, you have to stir them in the pot. Blow the bellows to stoke the flames. It is a lot of busy work that while fun and first, it just gets so repetitive so quickly. Now to be fair, you have a recipe book where you can store your favorite mixes, and then if you have the ingredients you can just click a button to make the potion as a much appreciated shortcut, but there are still so many other new potions where that approach doesn't work, and you have to explore the mandala potion map and remove the fog of war (ignorance?) to discover new potions.

Ah, the discovery of new potions. You truly feel like an explorer on this map, sometimes just throwing things in a pot like my mother in law does when she's cooking dinner to see what happens. But if you don't have the right ingredients, all that grinding (literal and figurative) and stirring you did could amount to nothing. It's usually fun, but at times, it felt like I was navigating my car using medieval Ways or Ye Olde Google Maps to go up and down side streets and U-turns just so the estranged husband could have a charm potion to win his wife back.

Now I can live with all of this, even the physical repetition. But here's where the game lost me - there are times where you have to make strong versions of potions. Every potion in the game has 3 levels of strength: weak, normal, and strong (I, II, and III). How strong your potion is has nothing to do with the ingredients used, other than the fact they get you to that destination on the potion map. No, good sirs and sisters, you have to move your creation to land exactly on the destination potion site, and this is much, much harder than I'm describing it. You have to make sure the number of times you stir is perfect and just slow enough. One quarter turn too many, and all your effort is wasted. Or you have to keep throwing in more and more ingredients to turn the potion around. It's like trying to land a Stealth Bomber on an aircraft carrier on the hardest difficulty on a flight simulator. Or trying to park a semi in European Truck Simulator. I just don't have the patience for any of these tasks.

There are times where my gameplay sounded like: "Ok this wizard needs a potion of mana and explosion and swiftness. In one bottle? Ok, I have a shortcut to mana, let me start with that. Great, now I have to move the bottle to...why didn't I buy witchweed? It's fine, it's fine, if I go north instead of northwest, I can use mageberry and only grind it a bit to avoid the turn, but then I'll have to use poopshroom to head south onto the road to avoid my potion crashing into the barrier and ruining the mix. Great now just have to add some thornstick to land on the swiftness bottle and...oh crap I didn't buy thornstick when the herb merchant was in town. WHY DIDN"T I BUY THORNSTICK??"

And then there's the alchemy equipment in your basement. This is where the real crazy items are made. Essentially it looks like my org chem labs. You just keep adding glass bottles and contraptions to this Rube Goldberg contraption that must violate several medieval health codes, and the goal of all of this is to add multiple strong combo potions (remember how I hard I said those were to make) to create an uber-powerful ingredient. The endgame of this apparently is to create The Philosopher's Stone.

Long story short, I decided, just like when I took organic chemistry lab, that Biology was more my speed.

Look, I enjoyed this game a lot. It was a welcome break after playing a hundred hours of Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader to just run a humble potion shop. But as an increasingly older gamer, I have become quite stingy with my time. Nowadays, I simply try to avoid games that demand too much of me and don't hit that sweet, sweet pain-to-joy golden ratio (this is why I avoid all those Souls games like the plague). I am grateful for my time dispensing medicines and poisons to my fellow townsfolk, but at some point I think it's best to be thankful for the experience I had and then both literally and figuratively close up shop.

In short: Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator is the Medieval Organic Chemistry Class I needed in my life. At some point, however, my life needs to move on to games that feel less like work and more like, well, fun. Maybe I can move on to a Medieval Barber: Theodoric of York. After all, who doesn't need a good leeching? #kidsaskyourparents

Up next, finishing up DREDGE, which has been another enjoyable diversion before diving into another massive time sink. Also WoW: The War Within, which totally isn't a massive time sink.

I really enjoyed The Life And Suffering of Sir Brante, so it's no surprise I also really enjoyed Suzerain (or Postwar Turkey Simulator 24).

(I'm mildly joking with the parenthesis, but I'm also not, this is the most thinly-veiled fictional version of Turkish history in the 50s and 60's i've ever seen.)

That said, if you enjoy a good, well-researched political drama and visual novels, I cannot recommend this enough. Your first playthrough will probably take around 20 hours and it's just fun to struggle with balancing the politician I'd like to be versus the realities of the broken country I'm running.

It's very wordy, and can really be slow in some places, but I found it a thoroughly enjoyable experience. First playthrough should take you 15-20 hours or so, although I got through it in two nights.

Shadow of the Erdtree (Elden Ring DLC)

Much of my gaming over the summer has been taken up with Elden Ring. Using the Seamless Co-Op mod, I have played through the base game in its entirety again with my son, and then we jumped straight into the DLC when it was released. I am generally more lukewarm on the DLC than I was on the base game

To start with the positives: the legacy dungeons here are very good, and I was especially impressed with Shadow Keep. Over the years, I have often pondered why I find myself so drawn to Fromsoft titles, given that I dislike action games in general, and especially "difficult" games. I’ve decided that a huge part of it comes down to the level design - the way the intricate pathways twist and turn and double back on themselves, with enemy placement and density carefully calibrated to offer just the right amount of challenge. You feel as though you are progressing carefully, inch by inch, using your brain as much as your hands. Top drawer stuff.

I also really liked the upgrade system that was unique to the DLC. This was an elegant way to sidestep the problem of leveling, as well as giving the player an incentive to explore the open world in search of fragments and ashes...

...Unfortunately, though, I felt as though I needed an incentive to explore. The open world was way less impressive here than in the base game. Beautiful, yes. But so empty - a whole lot of nothing, except for a bunch of useless low-level upgrade materials. Oh, and bird enemies. So many bird enemies. Plus, even figuring out how to get to certain areas was frustrating and had me checking a wiki too many times.

As for the difficulty, which is something that a lot of players have commented on… There’s not much I can say about it, since I played the whole thing in co-op. Even though the mod gives enemies various boosts to compensate for two humans working together, it is pretty straightforward to steamroll 95% of the content together. The one exception – and this is my final complaint - was the last boss. In the end, I had to modify the file to take away his extra health, since I couldn’t see any way we’d be able to beat him otherwise. Even then, our "tactic" was simply having my son maintain aggro and try to stay alive while I frantically spammed Stars of Ruin so fast that I’m surprised I didn’t break my controller.

Obviously, From have spent years leaning into their identity as a developer that makes hard games, but the final boss of the DLC may well represent the moment when they disappeared completely up their own arses. Such BS - the gaming equivalent of a restaurant meal that is so spicy you can’t taste anything except the heat. Or an IPA so hoppy that the hops obscure all the flavor.

So yeah, a mixed bag. Not an expansion I would have bought to play solo, but we did have fun in co-op, despite those frustrations.

I saw credits roll on Carrion. What a fun little game. The janky of the controls got to be a bit much for me by the end of it, but it was certainly fun.

I finished Crime Scene Cleaner. If you're looking for something in the vein of Powerwash Simulator and don't mind dealing with dead bodies and truly comical amounts of blood, then this is highly recommended.

It doesn't quite have the same soothing zen-like quality of Powerwash Simulator, as it's a lot more 'gamey'. There are multiple different cleaning modes, like picking up trash, removing evidence and bagging bodies, alongside the more familiar stain removal. It also has more of a story with cutscenes and voice overs.

It's still a lot of fun and gives that same satisfying feeling of completion when you see that trashed pizza parlour returned to its tidy state, with all the tables and chairs reset, broken furniture removed and dozens of dead mafiosos stacked neatly in your truck trailer.

Looks brilliant! Wishlisted immediately, thanks!