No Game New Year: From Dark Souls to... BattleBlock Theatre?

I was watching an episode of Let’s Drown Out, a show that Yahtzee does with his mate Gabriel. It’s somewhere between a Let’s Play and a Podcast, where they stick on a boring game and talk about things. One of the things they were saying was: About 39% of games that are on Steam are never played.

That got me thinking: There are a lot of games I have that I’ve never played. So I went back to that list I did ages ago, where I was not surprised at all to find that a similar proportion of my Xbox360 games have never been played. This is something that I felt the need to address.

Unfortunately there was something in the way of that, which is the game I’m currently playing – Dark Souls. As I’ve said in the two preceding blogs, Dark Souls is a game where it is perfectly possible to play for hours and get nowhere. If I can play this game for two hours and all I’ve achieved is levelling up my character ONCE, I’d consider it progress. And while I’m still enjoying the game – it has an old-school feel to it that I haven’t seen in games in a long time – it is taking time away from playing everything else I’ve got.

So I’m making the decision to put Dark Souls to bed. Not because I don’t like it – but in the spirit of No Game New Year, I think I need to be playing more games than just the one, if there’s no evidence that I’m getting anywhere in it. I will come back to it at some point, but not now.

I decided to check off the first un-played game on my list:

 

BattleBlock Theatre

And what a fantastic game this turned out to be! In essence, it is a puzzle-platformer. You have to take your player through a series of block-puzzle-style mazes and challenges in order to rescue your friends from a theatre run by cats for their own amusement.

It sounds mad – and it is – but that is part of the joy of the game. This kind of thing reminds us of why we got in to games. It’s bright, colourful, the gameplay is fantastic and above all else is actually FUN. There is a non-interactive tutorial if you want it, but the game mechanics are explained to you as you go along so you can spend more time in the game. The levels are well-designed and balanced; no enemy feels out of place and only a small number of challenges in the main game have been insurmountable for me.

A typical scene. Except I made my guys blue.
For Birmingham City.

If longevity makes a good game, this game is great. The idea is that you need to collect gems in order to open the exit clear the level. There are 6/7 gems per level, but you only need to collect three of them to clear it and if I was playing the game like homework, I probably would. But getting all the gems and a ball of yarn (to bribe the cats for new weapons!) raises your score and rating for the level, and I found myself replaying levels over and over just to find enough gems to give me an A. If you compete the level fast enough you also get an A++ with 2 more bonus gems, but I rarely get this as I am not that fast.

A special mention must also go to the soundtrack of the game. In these times, it is always a pleasure to hear a game that has background music! And much respect to Will Stamper, for the voice that narrates the game. In what I can only describe as a ‘fantasy Irish’ accent, he narrates in a naïve yet oddly sardonic way that fits the tone of the game perfectly. Sometimes he goes off on one and you’re so busy laughing you don’t even notice. And it’s worth getting to the secret level just to hear what… occurs… as he scat-sings over a 2-chord refrain.[1]

This will keep me going for a while – I haven’t even tried the other modes yet – so expect another blog on this at the end of the week!

---

[1] It’s worth a youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwZISypgA9M

No Game New Year - Grinding Dark Souls

I mentioned last week that Dark Souls is a very difficult game, but so far, that difficulty is not insurmountable. It is a plausible tactic to allow yourself to die a few times while learning the attack patterns of the monsters, and retreat from boss battles that aren’t going your way.

I had this very thing happen to me when I’d finally got far enough away from the Undead Burg to find another bonfire. I proceeded with the game from that point and found myself, after throwing myself at the Dark Garden for an hour, face to face with the Moonlight Butterfly. Incapable of inflicting much in the way of damage, I decided to backtrack for a while and grind some enemies to level up. In doing so, I discovered that I’d missed what I was supposed to be doing, which was ringing the bell at the top of the Undead Parish. I went through that particular level, which still took me a couple of hours, and actually made a lot more progress with the game than I would have done had I thrown myself into the path of the Moonlight Butterfly and her Golems many more times.

Contrast this with something like Dragon Age Origins – a good game, but as I’m absolutely useless at character builds, I’ve come very close to derailing the whole game on more than one occasion because I haven’t picked the right combination of feats etc to level up, finding myself in fights that I CANNOT avoid because of the ‘random battle’ system – and you see why I’m enjoying Dark Souls a little more. I’m not saying the same hasn’t got the potential to happen with Dark Souls, but so far I’m finding there’s more scope for dealing with it. If I’m finding one part too hard, I can look behind and do another part. Sometimes the enemies are too hard for me to kill, other times they need some concentration, and while it is a little hard to make the distinction sometimes, it does add to the challenge of the game.

 

Here’s an experience I think will become familiar quite soon: After ringing the bell at the top of the Undead Parish and being rewarded with a weapon that there is no way I can use because I’m the sorcerer, I decided to have another crack at the ‘underground’ section. I tried it a number of times before deciding that I still wasn’t good enough to take on the Skeletons (horribly difficult) at the level I was, and went around the rest of the game to grind for some experience. I finished back in the Dark Garden, and though I had no intention of fighting the Moonlight Butterfly again, I did at least get to the clearing before – killing a Golem in the process, which I was pleased with. On my way back to the Firelink Shrine, somebody invaded my world close to the exit of the Dark Garden. Not quite realising what this feature is for, I did not make a move to attack the guy who was clearly a higher level than me. They then proceeded to take me out with one Pyromancy spell, and I lost the 4000 or something souls I’d been saving – I needed around 4500 for the next level up.

“You bastard,” I thought, and hurried back to the area to recover the souls, praying that this Player vs Player mechanic didn’t extend to pinching each other’s souls. It apparently doesn’t and I got them all back. THEN I noticed for the first time that there was a different way you could go out of the garden, and found myself in what the game was calling the Dark Basin. “Oh wow, a new place to explore,” said I. I went down into the basin, got ambushed by a Knight, rolled off a cliff and lost all my souls – and when I came back to collect them, I couldn’t reach them, rolled off the cliff AGAIN and made the last hour and a half of play count for nothing except a new area.

But I guess it’s one of those things I’m going to have to get used to!

No Game New Year: Dark Souls

It hasn't escaped my attention that my blogging has been somewhat inconsistent of late. Usually the reason for this is that I haven't had time to write a blog about what games I'm playing. So to counter this, all subsequent No Game New Year posts - or indeed anything I write on the subject of getting through video games - will be 700 words or thereabouts.

With that in mind...

Dark Souls

So for the past couple of days I’ve been playing Dark Souls, a game of some renown amongst the so-called “Hard Core.” For the rest of us, Yahtzee sums up the core of the game quite well: “[You] must best a series of castles, dungeons and bosses by doing the equivalent of firing yourself from a cannon at them an infinite number of times.”

It’s true; the game is very hard. Horribly unforgiving, it doesn’t suffer fools or their mistakes. This action/horror RPG is frustrating to play, depressing to experience and has probably by now caused several cases of advanced delusionary schizophrenia.

And do you know what? I love it.

 

I’ve played most of the RPGs for the Xbox360 and a significant number of them for the Xbox and other systems. The high-fantasy swords and sorcery basically-the-same-plot-each-time-but-with-slightly-different-controls are enjoyable enough for the first few hours but get a bit samey after a while, when you realise you’ve been playing for two hours and made absolutely no progress in the game.

Dark Souls is different. Its setting is of a dying world largely populated with undead, lending itself to its dark, oppressive atmosphere straight away. There are no elves, dwarves, orcs or equivalent: Here you’re a former human, now an undead soul, trying to battle your way for something remotely resembling a purpose. I say this because I know no better. There’s not much exposition that explains the plot, and such that there is comes from talking to the VERY small number of NPCs you happen across on your travels. It actually is your story.

It also does away with a lot more of the common RPG tropes, which is very refreshing. For a start, the Tutorial - such as it is - explains the game mechanics and that is it. No button prompts, no hand holding. It will take you up to the first boss, and then you’re on your own. There’s also no village you use as a home base. Sure, there are bonfires, which is about as good as it gets for the purposes, and there are NPCs and Merchants scattered around the gaff, but nowhere you would feel safe or even free from the imposing environments. There’s none of this tedious mucking about with crafting, no lore explained to you in 24-page long books you can’t be bothered to read, no ‘relationship’ mechanic. It does a good job of keeping the focus where it needs to be: On the aforementioned Castles, Dungeons and Bosses.

Yes, this caught me out first time...

On that subject, there’s plenty going for it here as well. A lot of the regular enemies are easy enough to kill but can still make very short work of you indeed if you are careless. Anything tougher than a regular hollow man (who makes up the majority of enemies in the earlier section of the game) really does need thinking about in order to come up with strategies for beating them. The fact that I’m playing The Sorcerer adds to this, since I’ve got to decide whether to use my very limited magical resources for an easy kill, or risk attacking up close with my melee weapons and taking more damage. Dying – which I do a lot – sends you back to your last bonfire without any souls (awarded after you kill enemies, and brilliantly used as both currency and experience points) and though you do have a chance to recover what you’ve lost if you manage to get to the same point on your next run-through, it does shut down anybody who thinks they can get through the game by scum-saving.

So while it is perfectly possible to play this game for two hours and not get anywhere, it’s not because the game is designed with faffing around in mind. If you die, it’s because you’re rubbish. Or you’re careless, which is the same thing. Or it could be because you haven’t analyzed the attack patterns of the enemies yet. Correct me if I’m wrong, but there’s something very old-school about this – and a welcome change of pace from the games I’ve been playing for the 360 this year!