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Game Ramblings #39 – The Swapper

More Info from Facepalm Games

  • Genre: Puzzle/Platformer
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Windows/Mac/Linux PC (Steam, GOG), PS3, Vita, Wii U, Xbox One

TL;DR

  • Fantastically well crafted puzzle/metroidvania style game
  • Interesting sci-fi driven story presented with a light touch, invites players to connect a lot of dots on their own
  • Great visual style based on a unique clay-model construction

The Swapper at its core is a game that derives straight from its title.  You play a lost explorer that finds a tool allowing them to create and swap with exact clones of themselves.  This is wrapped in a set of pretty simple mechanics and a Metroidvania-esque traversal that expand out into a huge amount of puzzle depth.  This is combined with some good visuals, and a simple but effective audio backing to create a really fantastic game.

When dealing with a puzzle game, the obvious question is whether or not the mechanics work to create interesting puzzles, and in this case, the answer is a resounding yes.  The swapper tool that the player has can only spawn new clones (to a limit of player + 4 clones) and shoot a projectile to swap to a clone.  Clones then all follow the same inputs that the main player character is doing, moving as a largely controlled herd.  However, the lighting in the levels can disable these abilities; blue lights disable clone creation, red lights disable swap projectiles, and purple disables both.  On its own, these combine to slowly ease you into the gameplay, with some of the early puzzles being some clever mix, with the player creating and moving around to platforms that are out of reach of just plain jumping.

One of the first things I noticed when I got the tool is that when I was creating clones, the game would go into a super slo-mo state.  At first this didn’t make much sense to me, until the puzzles started requiring multiple swaps in mid-air, then it became another fantastically fun ability to use.  Later puzzles started introducing gravity manipulation and pressure pads, mixing all of them together into rooms where the control of your clone herd became the ultimate goal.  By the end of the game, the puzzles were becoming a devious mix of creating clones, warping between them, and finding ways to either recombine with or kill clones in order to keep up completion of the puzzles.

The puzzles are backed by a really strong visual style.  One of the things that brought this game so much acclaim was that they quite literally created clay models for their source art, and that’s very apparent while playing.  The lighting they used was typically extremely dark, allowing for a great use of a flashlight to lead the path in hallways, then the strong colored lighting for puzzle mechanics.  I’ve thrown just a few screenshots I took below to give an idea of what the game looked like, though it certainly looks even better in motion.

It’s also worth noting that this has one of the more hilariously fucked up story endings I’ve ever played.

Story Spoiler

Given the core gameplay concept, it’s not too big of a surprise that there’s the possibility of swapping with other people, and there were some hints throughout that it had already happened. The end of the game takes full advantage of that. After crash landing on the planet below, a rescue ship finally finds you, but cannot rescue you due to lack of quarantine facilities. The game presents you with two options, die on the planet alone, or swap with the rescuer without anyone knowing what happened. The second option then takes this a step further, and gives you control of the rescuer you swapped with, causing him to fall off of a cliff to his death. Because of the rescue ship’s lack of knowledge of the swapping device, they simply saw it as the player character jumping off a cliff as a suicide.

In the end, hilariously unexpected, and a pretty fantastic way to wrap up the core mystery behind how you were going to actually get home.

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In general, I was somewhat caught by surprise by how much I enjoyed this game.  I’m generally a fan of Metroidvania-style games anyway, but without combat I wasn’t sure where this would fall fgor me.  However, the game had a really smart difficulty curve, introducing one or two mechanics, then doing a series of puzzles to reinforce the new mechanics. Ultimately, there were probably 30 or so puzzles to complete, interspersed with general traversal where story elements were introduced, and it felt pretty appropriate in length.  As far as puzzle-based games go, I can’t think of another I’ve played lately that I’d recommend as much as this unless I go back to Box Boy 3, and I think that says all that I need to say about it.

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Shelved It #5 – Akiba’s Beat

More information from XSEED/Acquire

  • Genre: ARPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Vita
  • Main Reason for Shelving: No reward grind

TL;DR

  • Lots of unnecessary re-traversal of dungeons for no reward
  • Gameplay is a lot different than previous title; Akiba’s Trip
    • Despite differences, solid ARPG gameplay reminiscent of the Tales of series.
  • Simple, but solid visual style with distinct dungeon designs

As the first RPG that Acquire has made, Akiba’s Beat is pulling ideas from other series in an attempt to provide some familiar gameplay, but in doing so it stumbled in the thing that can determine the quality of a lot of ARPGs and JRPGs; the grind between main story points.  While this one shows a lot of potential for the studio to continue doing RPGs in the future, it just didn’t provide enough incentive to continue through to the end with so many other quality RPGs available.

For anyone that has played Akiba’s Trip, the most obvious difference here is the gameplay.  Rather than being an action-heavy game reminiscent of a light-hearted Musou game, this is now very much a Tales of style ARPG.  The battle system is solid, but definitely not doing anything original.  Battles take place in a flat plane where the player moves side to side toward a targeted enemy, activating physical attack combos and skill attacks.  They can dodge in any direction, and unlock movement from the side to side movement to reposition in 3D space.  Yep, it’s pretty much a 1:1 copy of the battle system used in games like Tales of Vesperia, rather than the more free form systems in newer titles.  It even brings in the AI tactics system to set the skill type, resource usage, and target priority of the Tails games.  The fortunate thing is that this battle system still is extremely fun to play, and while fighting level appropriate monsters, is easily the high point of the game.

The 1:1 copy syndrome also extends to the story.  The core story revolves around Akihabara being stuck in an endless Sunday loop (hello Groundhog Day) in which people’s delusions manifest in Akiba, causing shenanigans to occur (hello Persona 5).  The main problem is that the story and characters just aren’t as good as Persona 5.  The core cast are basically rigid anime tropes, covering things like overly happy idols, brooding NEETS, the always positive athletic girl, etc.  The plot twists are telegraphed too hard, and the consequences of the cast’s actions are sort of brushed aside out of necessity.  In general, the story works, but it’s not going to blow anyone away, particularly when it’s to some extent copying a phenomenally good game that literally just came out.

The unfortunate thing is that the story ended up being the main drag factor on progression.  I put no reward grind as the shelving reason, but I don’t mean that in the typical JRPG fashion.  I wasn’t grinding to get levels, because typically I was around a pretty appropriate level for the things I was fighting.  As the story progressed, they forced you to retraverse the past dungeons repeatedly, typically all the way to the end room.  However, XP gained scales significantly down as the level gap between the monsters and cast increased, so retraversing the dungeons ended up being more of an exercise of how many battles I could avoid, rather than continuing to push the entertaining battle system.  This could have been fixed in any number of ways, whether allowing quick travel to story points, or even scaling up enemies to give players incentive to continue to fight in the dungeons they’ve already been in.  In the end, the story forcing retraversal was the game’s downfall, as it provided a lot of slow down and no reward.

That said, the dungeon visual designs were another high point in the game.  Like Persona 5, they took the concept of a person’s delusions quite literally, heavily theming the dungeon visuals around the person’s personality.  They were always visually pleasing, and really hit a high mark for playing with bright colors and strong designs.  Just for a quick couple of examples:

When the owner of the delusion was a cafe maid, the entire delusion was a twisted interpretation of what a maid cafe would look like.

For the audio hardware guy’s delusion, we got speakers, vacuum tubes, and visual equalizer’s in the skybox to fit the theme.

In general, Akiba’s Beat is a game that doesn’t necessarily do a lot of things that wrong, and isn’t that far from being a highly enjoyable game.  The things it does right, visually and gameplay-wise, it really hits high marks for.  Unfortunately, this is still an RPG, and the story failings immediately bring it down to the status of not worth finishing.  Given Acquire’s past experience with action games (Tenchu, Way of the Samurai, Akiba’s Trip), the change to a more formal RPG structure definitely seems to have tripped them up a bit, but if they take the right lessons from what went wrong here, they may be on to something with the genre change in the future.

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Game Ramblings #38 – Ray Gigant

More Info from Wikipedia

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS TV / Vita
  • Also Available On: Windows (Steam)

TL;DR

  • Decent battle system, a few changes not typical of the genre w/ move cost and HP regen made battles feel a lot more impactful
  • Battle animation was a clear focus for the visual needs of the game
  • Outside of the battle system, the game is significantly more average
  • Story works, but not much to write home about

Ray Gigant is for the most part a pretty standard first-person dungeon crawler JRPG.  It’s got a normal mapping system that generates as you wander around the dungeons.  The battles are for the most part a standard turn-based affair.  The visual-novel styled story hits a lot of points that are by and large not unusual for a sort of post-apocalyptic games out of Japan.  However, there are a few things that it does that are at least of note, even if they don’t really elevate this to anything more than average for the genre.

The biggest problem that I really had with this game is that it didn’t really do much with the dungeon crawling aspect.   The environments that I was walking through had occasional puzzles (forced teleports, one way entrances, etc), but they were never that challenging.  The art and enemies used for each story arc was the same the entire time, so once you did the first run for an arc, you knew what you were seeing.  The lack of being able to draw on the map was also a deterrent compared to 3DS games like the Etrian Odyssey series, where I could directly put traps and notes on the map as I progressed.  In general it was pretty clear that for as simple as the first-person dungeon crawling was, it was also the area that received the least amount of love, so by the end of a story arc, I was typically doing what I could just to rush through dungeons to get to the good parts.

Since this is a JRPG, the core of the gameplay is in its battle system.  This is where they really do some of the things that are less standard for the genre.  There’s a pretty basic elemental system, as well as differentiation between ground, air, and undead enemies, giving a nice amount of flexibility in how you take advantage of each character’s move set to get through the battles as quick as possible.  This is backed up by everything being based on an Attack Point value, rather than a more typical mana cost.  The AP regenerates by either waiting a turn with a character, or by taking damage, so the harder battles had an interesting play between preserving AP, using heals to keep the party going, then going all out in an attack pattern to get your bulk damage in at once.  The system also resets all HP in between fights, so each fight feels more impactful, rather than becoming more of a resource-management slog that a lot of dungeon crawlers fall into.

The visual treatment of the battles is also worth noting.  All the characters have pretty decent idle animations, both the player and non-player characters.  While it doesn’t extend to the basic attack animations, it adds a nice flourish to the battle while you’re setting up your turn.

This also extends into the Slash Beat system used for a generally boss-only massive special attack.  For reasons known only to the development team, the game turns into a rhythm game at this point, but it works out shockingly well as a distraction in the middle of larger fights.

The core leveling system also takes a bit of an unexpected turn.  There’s no XP to be had at all in the game, and tied to that there are also no distinct item drops.  All fights drop one of three types of core resources, ones used for upgrading gear, ones used for purchasing skills, and ones used for purchasing character levels.  Since these drop from any fight, there’s a really quick feedback loop between the fights you’re engaging in, and the upgrades the characters receive.  It also ends up allowing for highly flexible team builds.  Taking too much damage and need defense? Spend resources into the character’s shield upgrades and get better gear, or use the skill purchase resources to get damage mitigation.  Need more attack damage? Spend resources into the character’s weapons or purchase character levels in physical damage.  Rather than being on the fairly preset path typical of most JRPGs, this feels a lot closer in style to more western RPGs, where gear builds are typically more fine grained.

However, the little details start to show where the game lacks the polish of larger budget titles.  Aside from the environment art repetition mentioned above, the story itself leaves a lot to be desired.  It pretty much follows most character tropes (broody male that doesn’t want to interact with people, airhead girl that doesn’t pay attention to things around her, obviously evil older mustached guy, etc) without going into any interesting territory.  Although there are three distinct story arcs, each one is over within a few hours, so the characters don’t have the time to grow, even if they had been written to do so.  There’s also a subsystem in battles called Parasitism that activates periodically, changing attack cost from AP to character HP.  In general it activates at inopportune times during boss battles, but can be immediately cleared with a Slash Beat attack.  It seems to serve no purpose other than linking into the story and being annoying.

Overall this was fairly average, but a nice distraction from what I’ve been playing recently.  It definitely doesn’t do anything out of the ordinary, and there are far better dungeon crawlers out there for people being introduced to the genre.  However, it scratched the itch for me without getting heavily in the way, and at least had a few nice surprises for me along the way.