Recent reviews by Camerus

A couple years ago now, nostalgia overwhelmed my better judgment and I bought some of the Gold Box Classics games on Steam. The engine, unsurprisingly and through no fault of its own, doesn't hold up, but this review isn't about games that came out when Ronald Reagan was still president. SKALD: Against the Black Priory feels the way I wanted launching Pool of Radiance after 30 years to feel, and I can offer no higher endorsement of the game and no deeper insight into the experience than that.

I think there's a fair amount of criticism of this game that boils down to, "this isn't the original," but Red Hook has a great deal of leeway with me, as I've been in love with Darkest Dungeon since early in the first game's development when I would play pre-release demos at PAX, so I went in with an open mind. The truth is, though, this game does suffer from the mere existence of its forebear; comparisons are both unavoidable and inevitable, and the sad truth is that Darkest Dungeon is simply a better game.

DD2 eschews most of the individual character progression from the first game - the thing that gave you any feeling of attachment to your party - in favor of a more rogue-like interstitial progression earned through repeated failure. This on its own might be fine, but freed from the consequence of most permanent loss, Red Hook has ratcheted up the difficulty rather substantially, replacing the careful balance between genuine fear of loss and risk/reward with a monotonous, frustrating grind that often relies on luck or buying enough inter-run upgrades to eventually carry you through.

And it's not as if interstitial progression is a new concept in Darkest Dungeon. In the original, the primary function of the treasure you brought home was to improve the town around you. In some sense, while you may have been attached to the many fascinating characters you sent delving into the depths, the town was the thing most representative of the actual player. It persisted and grew between runs and it got healthier and more vibrant (insofar as anything in Darkest Dungeon can be described as such). It was a brilliant way to model progression and, so, I'm at a loss to explain why Red Hook has thrown that all out the window in favor of exchanging a single abstract currency (candles) for a similarly abstracted set of upgrades. The thing that stands in for the player this time through is just a bunch of windows that show what you've unlocked. There's really nowhere to call home and in a world as aggressively bleak as Darkest Dungeon's, it feels like a big omission.

I also need to talk about how Red Hook has crippled some of the characters. It really feels like they got some criticism about how healing works, or X or Y class being too over-powered and they tried to address in the most ham-handed way possible. For the team that created Darkest Dungeon - a game which, in my opinion, felt fresh and innovative on almost every axis - to try to "fix" healing by simply disallowing it when a character's health is above a certain threshold, with no rationalization or narrative, is unrecognizable to me. I quickly found that some classes were unplayable if I wanted to succeed, regardless of the party configuration. Yes, Vestal, I'm looking at you.

It has the aesthetics. It has the narrator. It has the incredible one-liners. In every superficial way, DD2 feels like Darkest Dungeon. And I won't go so far as to say it's bad. There's a reason why there are so many Slay the Spire look-alikes out there right now. But I will say that, in my opinion, Red Hook threw out most of what made their first game special to trend chase a flavor of the week, and we got a game that just makes me want to go back and play the original, instead.

I think what they wanted to make was a Norse survival crafting game. What they actually made was a collaborative Norse house building simulator and I'm very here for it.

I'm going to recommend Star Renegades because I played it for over 50 hours and had a good time, and that's a more than reasonable value for the price I paid. However, as someone who hasn't historically attached to the rogue-like genre, I do struggle with it a bit. I think it falls prey to the same traps that most games in its genre do. For example, it's light on story... which is too bad, because the gorgeous world and characters beg for further exploration. More importantly, once you've beat the game once (which I did almost immediately just due to dumb luck), subsequent replays simply aren't rewarding enough.

That being said, I ground through the game at least a few dozen times, winning and losing, over the course of 50 hours before having the epiphany that just because a game imagines itself to be infinitely re-playable, doesn't mean it actually is. That usually happens much sooner when I pick up a rogue-like. So it is a fun game. As I mentioned earlier, the art is gorgeous. The character progression through each run is great. The interstitial progression is lacking, but I did enjoy unlocking all of the characters. If you're a fan of the rogue-like genre, I think you'll like this one.

Children of Morta combines the best elements of rogue-likes and ARPGs with some exceptional story telling and stunning visuals. The result is an incredible game that transcends the sum of its parts.

The mindless slog of repetition endemic to the rogue-like genre is beautifully offset by touching, between-play vignettes about the family whose members you play as throughout the game. You'll see the Bergsons grow and learn, you'll experience genuine feels as family comes and goes, and I promise that, by the end, you'll be deeply invested in their well-being... even as you take them into dungeons to die over and over again.

It could also have easily fallen into the trap of Souls-like games by trading on fun in favor of artificial longevity and exclusivity (fight me). Instead, in addition to offering two difficulty modes, Children of Morta rewards each dungeon run - successful or otherwise - with character-specific ability upgrades and currency with which to improve the entire family. By gaining more than just knowledge of the dungeon's mechanics on each attempt, I found that I was more likely to hop right back in to test out my new upgrades.

I beat the game in about fourteen hours playing on Normal difficulty. There's a lot more I could go do and I'm sure the higher difficulty would extend the length of the game but, for my part, I'm pretty thrilled to have been able to pick up a game, experience an emotionally satisfying story and be done. That's not something that happens a lot in my life these days and I'm grateful for it.

Oh, in case it's not clear, I recommend this game. Unless you think accessibility to a broader audience cheapens your success, in which case, you can go play Dark Souls for the hundredth time.

I'm deeply conflicted about the Lord of the Rings Adventure Card Game. On the one hand, we have a digital version of a game whose theme and mechanics I love, without any of the arduous and time consuming setup and tear down of the physical version. What's more, the UI has all the love and polish of Hearthstone or Magic the Gathering Arena and some much needed improvements have been made to the deck building component of the game without fundamentally changing the underlying mechanics. Brilliant and clever.

Unfortunately, some entirely unnecessary changes have been made to the game, presumably for the sake of simplicity, that do it a disservice. Threat is now just a counter until the next bad thing that happens to you, culminating in your loss. Gone is any concept of optional engagement or avoiding certain enemies by keeping your threat low. Questing, a rich and thematic mechanic by which you placed progress tokens (with little footsteps on them) onto location cards has been abstracted behind a meaningless "fate" value that robs the game of much of its flavor.

All of this could be forgiven, I think, if the attempt to create a more accessible, streamlined experience came with friendlier encounter design but, alas, it is not so. In my opinion, the designers of the Lord of the Rings Adventure Card Game have become so desensitized to their most hardcore fan base constantly complaining about the game being too easy, that they simply lack any perspective about what the experience is like for a new or casual player. As someone who engaged casually both with the physical game and the digital, I can tell you that every brief moment of triumphant success is almost always immediately crushed by a new stage or phase or enemy, often appearing without warning. It's soul crushing, it's not fun, and to add insult to injury, the "narrative" setting does little to alleviate the difficulty, leaving you feeling bad about being unable to play the game on a mode that is a thinly veiled euphemism for "easy".

And so we are left with a game that has the polish and accessibility of a Blizzard offering but the unforgiving depth and complexity of whatever fun-adjacent game Valve has most recently published. Its unnecessary simplifications to the game mechanics will drive away the hardcore players and the encounter design will have casual players putting the game down forever after their third or fourth consecutive loss. It's a game with heaps of potential but, sadly, is right for no one.

This is a rich, medieval sandbox that is actually two games: a strategy layer that consists of managing an army, controlling territory and building relationships with feudal lords and a tactical layer that consists of big 50v50(ish) real time battles between opposing armies. It's old but it holds up well and there's really nothing else like it out there. As an added bonus, it has an active modding community that has created whole worlds of new content and expanded brilliantly on the core game play. If I have one nitpick, it's that the combat represents far too large a part of the game for what it is. The hundredth time you steamroll an opponent, you're going to wish there was an auto resolve feature that didn't result in half your army dying against a handful of shirtless bandits.