Last Week's Games: Snakebird, Legions and Mordheim.

It's worth playing for the looks on their faces.

This week I did something I don’t do very often these days, and that is play a game within about a month of buying it! In this case it was Snakebird, a puzzle game involving moving a curious combination of a snake and a bird towards the level exit. It works on a grid-based movement system, and you move your snakes forward by one tile each time looking for the best way to get the exit, and eat all the fruit along the way if there is any. It’s bright, colourful, and sounds very twee and pleasant. This is just as well because the puzzles themselves are very frustrating! There aren’t really all that many options available to you and if you make a mistake it’s all over; either your snake will get trapped or fall on spikes or water. The puzzles where you have to move two or more snakes are even more difficult, because they rely on each other to proceed – you somehow have to find a way for them to climb on top of each other, and still have enough support to remain still once their partner has gone!

So, Snakebird is frustrating, but there is a certain amount of fun to be had in finally getting it right, even if the vast majority of the time it is more by luck than judgement.

It's good to be back...

I also came back to a game I hadn’t played in a while: The Horus Heresy: Legions. I stopped playing this for a bit when I was at the UK Games Expo, funnily enough. I found myself far too busy on the Saturday to play the game and when it transpired that I was happy enough not playing it, I didn’t go back to it for a long time. But last night I gave it another go and was pleasantly surprised to find my low-power Lucius deck was still as fierce as ever. I have been very busy with family and work commitments over the last few weeks, but I might start streaming and recording again soon if the time is right.

Finally, I got justifiably angry at one of my favourite games: Mordheim, City of the Damned. If you’ve been following my blog for any significant amount of time you’ll know I love this game; the warband development and winning the 20-60 minute battles give me no end of pleasure, and getting to know the warriors in your band gives them more character than any amount of design or voice acting could. But it was my intention to get through the campaign eventually so, having finally completed my Wyrdstone obligations, I entered into the third Mercenary mission in the Library. I took my Level 4 Ogre, knowing how useful it was going to be to have a warrior immune to fear and terror, and set about finding the grimoires.

The Daemonette did for Luther in the end. If it had
gone to plan it would have looked like this:

So, to complete this mission, you need to find three warding wands to disable the wards around the grimoires and pick them up. You also need to collect three other grimoires that are around and about, whilst dealing with the Curator, who is pretty fierce, and the Daemons, who are horrible because of the terror they inspire. They are few in number but are brutal, and few creatures will survive a 1-1 fight.

It was when I was picking up the second Grimoire that disaster struck – the game bugged out. It’s done this before where you pick up a quest item, and it is added to your inventory, but the game doesn’t register it as completing the objective. As in these missions there are only usually as many items as you need, (no extras,) it is impossible to complete the mission. The only thing you can do at that point, (and thank you to the Steam community or I wouldn’t have known this,) is to let the Dramatis Personae die – this is the only way you can end the mission without there being further consequences to your warband, as usually they take additional injuries if they abandon the battle. I did this, and thankfully most of my soldiers survived – but this bug has been going on for years! Why hasn’t it been patched?