18.06.17

I have begun.

I went ahead and tried two games today.

The first one was Owlboy. I initially described it as a "platformer-y adventure game" that looked nice, and I wasn't far off the mark. It really looks like a platformer, but since you're given the ability to fly with pretty much no restrictions, there's little point in even having the possibility to traverse terrain by running, jumping, and rolling, all of which you can do.

Is that a speck of irritation visible in my writing? Why, yes it is. I disliked this game, but the dumbed down movement wasn't my main issue. Neither was it that the other aspects of the game felt too simplified as well. Let me elaborate on that.

You had to carry your companion who couldn't fly, so you had to go to them, pick them up, then place them down when you needed to carry something else. In return, they'd act as your firearm, allowing you to shoot at things. Now, the problem with this was that that you could just toss them down a cliff or straight at the enemies - he was invincible. "But surely that's a bad idea, as you couldn't retrieve them from such a place." Ah, well, not really, as the game decided to give you a button to teleport your personal gun holder straight back to you, mid-flight too. And this just completely eliminates the need to even have a dangling person with no hitbox attached to you. Just give our owl character a gun and say he can't use it while he's carrying things. Much easier to make, play with, and much more logical. There were also useless obstacles and enemies that you just shot down in a split second since your gun had no perceivable fire rate limits. And with those things gone, there's not much content left in the game except for flying around.

And this finally leads me to my main issue. With 90% of the game being flying around the place, I'd expect that to be made at least half-decent. But I have no map, no indicator of where I'm supposed to go to, nor sometimes even a clue what the immediate thing is that the game wants me to do. It's pretty irritating when the game tells you to "go to the Lab", and you've never been there before. Heck, you've never even heard of it before. It could be anywhere on the map, but those four words are the only clue you have of what you're supposed to do. Out of the 90% of the game spent flying around, I dare say another similar percentage of it was aimless. You're hoping you're going in the right direction, or that maybe if you look through the area a third time, you finally find a clue that tells you what you're supposed to do. ...but hey, at least the game looks nice.

So in case it wasn't clear, I would not recommend this game. Don't even try it.

Now, something noticeably better was MidBoss. It was also of a completely different genre. It would be a pretty generic dungeon crawler were it not for the notable feature that allows you to possess the bodies of the foes you kill. Each of these characters could also be leveled up, unlocking more of their abilities, and then those abilities could be equipped on other characters you possessed, making for fancy hybrids. But sadly, that's where the gimmick ends. The equipment, items, stats, abilities and everything else really were terribly generic.

My first run almost got me through the entire game, and it was for the most part a grind. New enemies popped up frequently enough to keep it from getting boring, but I can't imagine going for a second run. So, yeah, I enjoyed it for the 4 hours it lasted, but there's not much replay value.

The various abilities gained from possessing monsters still faint in comparison to, say, the builds you can make in Dungeons of Dredmor. In fact, pretty much everything does. If you're looking for a dungeon crawler, go play that. If you've already played that a bunch, then I guess you can give MidBoss a try. It should be fun for the first playthrough, doubtful it will be for the second.