Ikonei Island: Open Beta. Very First Impressions

Remember, back at the beginning of the pandemic, when everyone was playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons? I wanted to play, too but AC:NH is a Switch exclusive. You can't play it on PC. 

Well, you can, if you want to download an emulator and jump through a bunch of hoops, some of which look highly dubious to me. I don't think I'm even going to link to the site with the instructions. I'm sure you can all find it the same way I did if you're curious.

I considered buying a Switch just to play New Horizons but as far as I remember availability was poor. It would have been aberrant behavior for me anyway, buying a console just to play one game. It was 2020, just after the first lockdown and I was still on furlough so that may have had something to do with it

In the end, I found a much cheaper and more reasonable cure for my rare case of FOMO. I installed Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp on my Kindle Fire instead. As I'm sure everyone knows, AC:PC is considered a hugely inferior entry in the Animal Crossing canon but I liked it. I posted about a few times, played just about every day for several weeks and then sporadically for a few months more until I eventually, inevitably, drifted away. 

I occasionally think about playing Pocket Camp again but I'd forgotten all about New Horizons. Or I had forgotten about it until this morning, when I read this post at MassivelyOP. Describing a new game I'd never heard of, Ikonei Island, a quote from the developers namechecks both Animal Crossing and another game I've read a lot about over the years, Stardew Valley.

Srtardew Valley has never appealed to me, partly because of the graphics, which lean very heavily into a nostalgia for a period of gaming that means nothing to me, but also because farming games are boring as hell. Part of what appealed to me about New Horizons as I was reading about it was the way it didn't seem to revolve around planting and watering. 

GIven that level of disinterest, I'd probably have carried on by had it not been for the two embedded videos. Particularly the second.

Four and a quarter minutes of piratical hurdy-gurdying is a hard ask, for sure, although I'd totally rock a red velvet frock coat like Patty's. It says something about the game and its developers that they thought it would make an effective - or even appropriate - promotional tool. I guess they must have been on to something, though. I mean, it landed me.

I watched as much as I could take of the video, which was about a minute, then I took a look at the gameplay trailer. At just over ninety seconds it's a lot more approachable and it shows the game to good advantage - or it does if you can tune out the bilious voiceover. Cheese and ham, anyone?

It immediately reminded me not of the two mentioned games I haven't played but of another I have: Yonder the Cloud Catcher Chronicles. Yonder was one of the first games I bought on Steam. I played and posted about it several times, most recently in June 2020, when I picked it up again after a long layoff for precisely the same reason I've ended up writing about it today: I saw something that reminded me of it.

I have never finished Yonder. I haven't given it a fair crack, even. I realised that as I was reading Kluwes' commentary on his own time with the game. I'd always struggled to find the thread of the narrative when I played, ending up rambling inconsequentially through the gorgeous scenery, getting nowhere and not really minding. Kluwes made it seem a much more coherent, completable game than I'd ever felt it to be. He 100%ed the entire thing and made it sound easy.

I was seriously considering starting Yonder over from scratch but of course I haven't done anything so dramatic. Or decisive. Instead, I seem to have jumped on the first available train heading the other way. 

As soon as I'd watched the videos I opened Steam, found the Ikonei Island store page and registered for the open beta. Acceptance was immediate so I downloaded it and started playing.

It says "Beta" in the description but the version number (bottom left) says "Alpha". Feels more like an alpha build to me.

First impressions are excellent. There's a charmingly illustrated introduction in which an unnamed narrator tells the story of four orphans - two humans, who look like they might be brother and sister, a lizard and a ... pig? - all of whom narrowly escape being taken by slavers (Who are also pigs for some reason.). 

They speed away on a raft powered by a magical wind released from a flask tossed to them by the mysterious narrator and end up, wrecked in a storm, cast up on the beach of some desert isle. It's a great beginning and the gameplay that follows backs it up admirably.

I would go into detail but I've only managed to play for about three-quarters of an hour.. Yes, okay, I could easily spin those forty-five minutes into a five post series if I had the mind to but I don't think that would do the game any favors. I want to leave a good impression because for the short time I was able to play, I really enjoyed myself.

"Rain, rain go away..." Or actually don't. I quite like it.

I can fill in a few notes, at least. The characters, animations and models are delightful, albeit a little hard to see, what with them being so tiny. There's seemingly being no way to zoom in with the fixed camera. The island, what little I saw of it (Mostly the shore and some ruins near the river.) is beautifully rendered in lush blues and greens, all softened contours and rounded edges. 

It rains all the time, which is both a plot point and an aesthetic pleasure. Everything looks and feels like it's been drawn in pastels then gently smdged with a damp cloth. Frogs hop, crabs burrow and occasionally an aggressive plant detaches itself from the undergrowth and has to be soundly clouted with your "sword", a branch with the leaves still attached.

Hedda is the only charracter I've tried so far. I think you can play all four of them although I haven't figured out how to swap yet.

The UI is clear and attractive and I found the controls quite manageable, which may put me in a a very small minority indeed. The game opens with a warning that it's best played with a controller because the mouse and keyboard options aren't optimised and there's a thread on the game's Discussion page, in which the OP describes the beta keyboard controls as "unbearable" and everyone else agrees. I'd have to say I've seen a lot worse. Try playing Final Fantasy XI sometime...

That said, the controls do need some tweaking and the developers have already said it won't happen in the current beta, so even though I'd encourage anyone who likes the look of the screenshots or the gameplay in the video to give it a try, do be aware that it's not even Early Access yet. It's a proper beta. Or maybe an alpha...

Fear my mighty leaf. Sword! I mean sword!

It's so much a work in progress, in fact, that I ran into a proper, gamebreaking bug. When I got to the second area of the island and a new cut-scene played, the game registered a fatal error and shut down. The same has happened each time I've returned to that area, which is why I stopped and wrote this post instead. 

Otherwise I'd still be playing.

I Like This Place, It's (Not) A Zoo

I have Tobold to thank for this one.

A while back, when Animal Crossing: New Horizons was the only thing anyone wanted to talk about, he asked his readers whether they thought he ought to buy it. I hadn't played it myself so I dropped a link to a very interesting article on Gamesindustry, which I thought might help him decide.

Tobold bought New Horizons, played it for a week or two, didn't much enjoy it and stopped. Since then he's had an eye out for "a better game of the same genre" and now he thinks he's found one.

It's called My Time At Portia, which is, I think, an extremely curious title for a video game. Especially that choice of preposition. The first thing that came into my head when I saw the name was "Last Year in Marienbad", closely followed by "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" and "My Dinner with Andre".

There is something of a naming convention going on here, isn't there? Or maybe it's just me. Then again, this whole genre, the so-called Life Sim, seems redolent of a particular inflection of post-modern irony, one that curves so far back around it meets its own faux-naif self-reflection coming the other way. It's children's entertainment sub-texting Baudrillard.

It also happens to be kind of the corner on which I live. Or where I'd like to. I would if I could. I'm very envious of everyone who's playing New Horizons (although I notice most people have gone quite quiet about it lately. That always happens.). If I had a Switch, I'd be playing it.

Instead I'm playing Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, which is barely an Animal Crossing game at all by most AC fans' reckoning. And, yes, I am still playing it. Every day. And enjoying it, although it's so laggy some evenings about all I can manage is to craft a couple of things and send Pete around in his van to fob off all my animal friends with a few butterflies and fish. I'm surprised some of them can remember who I am.

It is the animal friends thing, isn't it? That's why Animal Crossing. This is what I was saying to Tobold. I realize that in video game industry terms AC:NH, Stardew Valley, MTAP and a whole bunch of others are part of a specific gaming genre but AC:NH broke out because of those animals, didn't it?

I know they're what does it for me. There's a koala bear, who reminds me of  Pump Up The Volume era Christian Slater, doing an Elvis impersonation in my cabin (My cabin? My Cabin!). I'm being quizzed about my sleep patterns by a superannuated extra from Animaniacs. It's orders of magnitude more compelling than having similar interactions with cartoon human beings.

You work with what you've got, though, and I don't got a Switch so I thought I'd give My Time At Portia a go. It's on sale on both Steam and the Epic Store right now. I very nearly bought it yesterday but then I noticed there was a demo so I downloaded that instead.

I love this map. Barnarock, the peninsula in the north-east, is where my character comes from. Portia, where she lives now, is around the coast to the south.

I played it today and now I'm a bit stuck. Not in the game, which is paramountly simple to understand. No, I'm stuck over whether to carry on playing the demo, which I'm very much enjoying or to stop and buy the game while it's on offer for cheap.

Here's the thing. Unlike most similar set-ups, progress in the demo is not transferrable to the game proper. Usually what happens with these things is you download the demo and play it and if you like it you pay some money and either it opens up the rest of the game or it allows you to transfer your save file when you start.

People have clearly complained because there's a big warning on Steam telling you that's not going to happen. I'm glad I read it in time. I don't know how long the demo is or how far you can get but I do know it would be very annoying to have to do it all over again if you weren't expecting it.

Demos exist to show potential customers enough of whatever it is for them to make a purchasing decision. The MTAP demo does an excellent job of that. I already know enough about the game to make my choice. It's a very good demo. The problem is, I'm just not a very good customer.

I know I want this game. I like it. I like the colors, the animations, the conversations, the gameplay. I could already critique it from the couple of hours I've seen. I took a lot of screenshots in preparation for a first impressions post, which this isn't. It would have been a very favorable review.

I'm sure it's not perfect. For once it doesn't seem to be in Early Access so I think we have to treat it as feature-complete. Replying to Tobold, Redbeard noted some translation issues and those are quite apparent even in the demo.

Only I really like "translation issues". They both amuse me and make me think. And anyway, sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between text that's been mistranslated and an idiosyncratic prose style. When Oaks says "I'm kind of simple", is that poor use of idiom or is he expressing a political philosophy? I mean, he's walking around a technologically advanced city dressed in culottes and a bearskin cloak... it's hard to be sure.

So, there's no doubt in my mind that this is a game I'd enjoy. Except for one thing. It's single-player.

I have a problem that seems quite common among people who've played a lot of MMORPGs, which is that I find it very hard to commit time to games, even online games, that don't offer evidence of the presence of other players. It doesn't have to involve meaningful interaction; I just need to know they're there.

Take Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp for an example. I play it one hundred per cent solo. There isn't even any mechanism for communicating with other players as far as I can see. You can't group with them or talk to them. But they are there.

I see them standing about. Just one in each of the tiny zones. I can see their names. I can see their outfits change. I can trade with them and make friends with them (in the most abstract way). Their mere presence somehow validates all the time I spend there, even though clearly it does nothing of the kind.

My Time At Portia is very reminiscent of a game I bought a few years back and about which I posted a few times. That game was Yonder. I liked it a lot, but According to Steam I played for just six hours. The last time I logged in was July 2017, which was also the month it released and the month I bought it. I played it a few times and then I stopped because I was the only one there.

If I could carry progress over I'd just keep playing the demo until there was nothing left to do. Put off any decision that way. But I can't because, if I did decide to buy the game, I'd have to do it all again. Not a terrible hardship, I know, but still...

You're either on the bus...

Then, Yonder was quite an empty sort of game. Very beautiful but without a huge amount to do. By most accounts, MTAP does a far better job of keeping players entertained and motivated. The very gaminess of it as compared to the beingness of Animal Crossing seems to be what drew Tobold to prefer it in the first place.

It wouldn't draw me but I can't play Animal Crossing without I buy a Switch and there aren't any and even if there were I am not ready to pay that much just to hang out with my animal so-called friends.

Maybe, with plenty to do, I won't find Portia empty. And I'm better at playing single player games now than I was in 2017. And it's only £9.99...

Sod it! I'm going to buy it. There, that's that sorted out. Thanks for the advice, everyone! This is what blogs are for!

Like An Animal Crossing Or, If You Will, A Crossing For Animals

When I was a boy, if I did something stupid because all my friends were doing it, which was often because I was a boy and my friends were boys, or at least the ones who did stupid things were, my grandmother would ask me "If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?". It never seemed to me to be much of a reason not to keep doing whatever it was I'd been doing, especially when what I'd been doing, as it sometimes quite literally was, had been jumping off a bridge.

Actually, I don't know if my grandmother ever did ask me that. It's one of those things you read about grandmothers saying and after a while you remember your own grandmother saying, whether she said it or not. I know for certain she did tell me that if I swallowed gum it would wind round my heart and kill me and that if I cut myself between my thumb and index finger I'd get lockjaw and die.

Those seemed like good reasons not to pay attention to anything she told me or at least not if it was going to end in a fatality. Anyway, my grandmother sadly met her own end (not from gum) in the late 1970s, so she's not around to pass an opinion on whether I should jump off the latest bridge and start playing Animal Crossing.

The universal language of obsessive hoarding.

To be honest, it seemed like a bit of a moot point. Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the game that's sweeping not just the nation but the world right now is, as far as I can gather, a Switch exclusive. I don't own a Switch.

The last console I personally owned was an Atari 2600 and the last one I had access to was, I think, the NES - possibly the SNES. The kids had one when they were quite small. I played a Mario game on it a few times, as I recall.

The youngest is now married and expecting a baby in May so it's been a while since there was a games console in this house. I certainly don't plan on buying a Switch just so I can find out what I'm missing.

No, I thought I'd just ride this one out, like I have almost every other gaming craze of the last few years, from Minecraft to Pokemon Go to Fortnite. It's a bit like grandmother lore - I end up reading so much about these things it feels like I played them anyway.

And then I read this post at The Book of Jen, where Jen says "I don’t have a Switch, so I’m playing Animal Crossing Pocket Camp instead. It works on my phone." Hmm. A phone is another thing I don't have. Well, not true... I do have a phone and it is a smartphone but for months all I see when I power it up is static. Works fine as a phone so I've done nothing about it and most likely won't.

But I do have a Kindle Fire. And you can play Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp on that. So last night when I got into bed, instead of going straight to Virgin Prime to watch the last couple of episodes of the excellent Doom Patrol, I downloaded AC:PC.

Here's something no-one tells you about Animal Crossing. It has the most annoying character voices in the history of gaming. Why does no-one ever mention that? Is there some kind of pact of silence? If so, God knows, I wish the bloody characters would sign it!

Apparently not everyone finds the high-pitched, glitchy yelping as intensely irritating as I do. In this excellent and highly informative video essay from Polygon the (unnamed) presenter describes it as "warm and familiar", "adorable baby talk" and "cute".

Yeah, no. Or at least not on my Kindle. It may be that this is a particular issue with AC:PC. In the course of researching this post I listened to a few clips of various versions of Animal Crossing on YouTube and I have to say that none of them is as teeth-grindingly horrible as what I'm hearing.

The upshot of all this is that as yet I don't have too much to offer on Animal Crossing because I spent the first half hour googling ways to turn the sound off. Not all the sound. Obviously I could just turn the sound down on the Kindle if that's all I wanted.

The trouble is, I like the music. It's pretty good. And the ambient sound is fine. It's just those screeching, squalling voices. I want to mute them and leave the rest but that doesn't seem to be an option.

Oh, wait... Yes it is! I just found it when I was taking screenshots for the post. It's not ideal, because it also mutes the ambient sound but it does leave the music on. I can work with that.

Freya's a fox, which means I have to invite her to my campsite. Going to be playing until that happens at least, I guess.

Visually, things seem much better, even if the camp itself is a surprisngly awkward and cluttered starting point. I couldn't figure out how to move around it, either. I just seemed to be standing outside peering in over the non-existent fence.

Moving around the world outside the camp is slick as butter, though and the gameplay feels natural and intuitive. I ran through the tutorial last night. Shook some trees, picked up some fruit, traded with Apollo (I think he's an eagle?), got him to check out my camp. Isabelle seemed nice, if a little organizing. She kept telling me I was in charge and then she'd tell me what to do. I was glad when she went off to do her own job somewhere else. Perhaps I can get on with mine now.

I can already see how the game could be relaxing. It has that vibe about it. I'd guess that, being a mobile app, AC:PC is probably faster-moving and more goal-oriented than the console versions. Gotta drive those microtransaction sales after all. Even so, it feels pretty laid back.

Psssst! Wanna buy a butterfly?

Chances are I won't play much. Not because of the annoying voices. I was already beginning to become desensitized by the end of the first session and anyway now I know how to switch them off. It's just that if I have my Kindle in hand I'm far more likely to start playing music or video than games.

But at least now I can say I've played an Animal Crossing game. Even if it was only for about an hour.

Aaaaand.... In the course of taking screenshots for this post I ended up going to the beach and learning how to fish. And picking some pears and collecting some shells. And basically playing for about twenty minutes. And levelling up and getting a fox called Freya added to my contacts list. So maybe I will be playing some more after all.

I do like fishing in MMORPGs. Which raises the question of whether AC:PC is an MMO, let alone an MMORPG. I didn't for a think it was either until I clicked on a girl standing by the jetty and she turned out to be a player. I bought a butterfly from her just so it would look like I'd known that all the time. I'm sure someone I meet will want a butterfly...

If there are players in the world that I can communicate with and they're people from around the world who I've never met and there are, potentially, many of them, does that mean it's an MMO? If not, why not? Discuss.

So here we are. Or here I am. Playing an Animal Crossing game. It's kinda looking like my sort of thing, too, just a bit. If it wasn't on mobile this might be a runner. Maybe I should re-install Nox, which I appear to have uninstalled without meanming to when I removed it from start-up.

Aaaand... I'm just rambling now. Bye!