SteamWorld Quest: Not Dealing From A Full Deck

Last month's free Amazon Prime games included a real gem, SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamesh. I started playing it almost immediately and just finished it today. It took me a little over twenty hours to complete, playing on the default difficulty level, "Soldier", described as "A suitable difficulty for most players".

The other two are "Squire" ("Battles are easier and you'll have an easier time overall.") and Legend" ("Battles are significantly harder. Recommended for players who like an extra challenge.") If that's not enough choice, when you beat the game for the first time you can choose "New Game +", which lets you begin all over again, only with all your progress and extra cards intact. New Game + also adds a fourth difficulty, "Legend Remix" ("Battles are even harder and most foes have brand new tricks up their sleeves. The ultimate challenge".)

I really enjoyed SWQ:HoG. I'd recommend it unreservedly to anyone who likes slow, steady, unhurried gameplay and simple, clear, uninflected narrative. The characters are endearing, the art is evocative, the music is tuneful and the aesthetic is well-realised. There's no real world-building to speak of, even though it's part of a well-established I.P., but there's a surprising amount that can be inferred if you pay attention. It's skilful work.

As a game, I found the default difficulty pitched almost perfectly for both my skill level and personal taste. I haven't really played many turn-based, tactical card games other than Wizard 101, if that even counts, so I have little direct experience to draw on but I do seem to have read an awful lot of blog posts abut them. My guess is that afficinados of the form would probably want to jump straight to the Legend difficulty because if I managed to complete the game in a single run without losing more than a couple of battles throughout, it would probably feel much too easy for more experienced players.

It's not just that I was able to beat the game, more the way I was able to do it. As far as I can tell, the whole point of games like this is that you work towards acquiring a very large range of options in terms of both cards and characters so as to allow you to build teams and decks appropriate for every situation. It's supposed to be as much a tactical challenge as anything.

Didn't really work that way for me.

My team, as they were after the final battle.

It did at the beginning. There was a time, close to the start of the game, where I had few options, some of the fights were quite challenging and I had to think my way to a win. One or two of my handful of lost battles happened around then, before I'd really gotten into the swing of things. Once I got the feel of the game, though, I pretty much played the same cards and the same characters all the time and then I didn't lose at all.

By about half way through, when I'd met all the characters I was going to meet and added to them to the roster, I spent a while playing around with different line-ups just out of curiosity. You can only have three on a team for a given battle and you end up with a choice of five but although various combinations seemed to work well together, fairly soon I came to the conclusion that the original three were the best.

I benched the two later additions and did the last several chapters, including most of the bigger set-piece fights, using the classic combo of Fighter/Healer/Mage. (The two I left out roughly align to the Bard and Rogue archetypes, although less closely than the original three cleave to theirs.)

Along the way I acquired a truly overwhelming number of cards. Eighty-six to be precise. Each character can only have eight cards in their deck and you can have multiple copies of the same card. For the bulk of the game, I ended up using not just the same three characters but the same twenty-one cards.

What's more, the great majority of those twenty-one cards were ones I acquired in the first half of the game and they were almost all low-value. Cards cost from zero to four cogs to use and my deck of choice consisted of eleven no-cog cards, six one-coggers, three twos and a three. Rather than add higher-value cards I just upgraded the low ones as far as they'd go, which seemed to give far more bang for the cog.

I did go through an experimental phase in the mid-game, where I tried using some heavy-hitting three and four cog cards but I hardly ever built up the cogs to use them. Those were the other couple of times I lost a battle. Later on, I found myself regularly amassing enough cogs to cast cards like that but by then I was used to the rhythm of the low-cost cards and didn't want to change.

A really nice touch is that once you finish the game you get access to a Gallery of sketches like this and a Jukebox with all the music.

I suspect the cadence of my combat would cause most players to crack and change the deck for something more dynamic. Some of the fights lasted a long, long time. Battles lasting twenty rounds were fairly common. Some of the boss fights took twice that. I was almost an hour beating one particularly stubborn group of baddies, all of whom seemed to prefer healing to fighting.

It suited me very well. I can't abide long boss battles in mmorpgs but that's because you can't just get up and walk away when you want, to make a coffee for example or answer the door. In mmorpgs, with their real-time, always-on, live action gameplay, any individual fight that takes more than about five minutes is a bona fide pain in the backside. 

In a turn-based card battler, long fights are perfectly acceptable. The only problem with this particular game is that you can only actively save your progress at specific points, namely certain statues you have to click. The game itself saves your progress a lot more often than that but never in the middle of a fight. 

On the other hand, you can Retreat if you want, so you have a get-out clause. I only did that once and then only because I was losing. It was very near the beginning and it felt so wrong I never tried it again, even when things looked dire. And just as well, too, because I was almost always able to pull things out of the fire when it mattered.

Counter-intuitively, recovering from a bad situation got a lot easier toward the end of the game, when the fights got harder. I have an annoying disinclination in all games to use most kinds of potions or devices during combat. I carry the things around but I always feel they're there for emegencies and nothing ever feels quite emergent enough.

If I was going to play through the game again, especially on one of those harder difficulty settings (Something I have absolutely no intention of doing.) the one major change to my tactics I'd make would be to spend a lot more money on those potions, carry a lot more of them and use them a lot more freely. They are hugely overpowered and not that expensive, either.

The final few boss fights went much more easily than I expected. I put it down to two things: Blindness and Potions. 

The Blindside card, which I picked up very early on, is crazily powerful. It costs nothing to cast, is never resisted and has the effect of giving every attack made by a Blinded enemy a fifty per cent chance of missing completely. I put two Blindside cards in my Healer's deck and that meant most fights ended up feeling as if the opposing team were one or two players down almost from the start.

As for the potions, there are 25%, 50% and 100% heals and resurrections that bring a character back at 50% health. There aren't any limits on how many you can have or use other than how much money you want to spend and they aren't that expensive. 

In the event, it turned out I'd been wise to be cautious about using them. When it came to the final two bosses I ended up needing just about every one I had. With hindsight, though, what I should have done was save all the money I wasted on upgrades for the characters I never really played and spent it on a whole lot more potions instead.

All of which suggests to me that people who really enjoy the subtleties and strategies of these kind of games would probably find SteamQuest a bit babyish. Not to mention the true fact that even now I've finished the game there are still whole rafts of information about it I probably ought to know but still don't. An embarassing amount of detail flew straight over my head. 

Even though I was quite comfortable with the gameplay, I never really understood some of the mechanics. Most of the mechanics, if I'm honest. The first few chapters are a kind of tutorial and they go over the basics well enough but I ended up not knowing much more than those basics for the whole of the game and there are lot of things the Tutorial never even mentions, let alone explains.

 It really didn't seem to make much difference.

I never worked out exactly how the cogs built up, for example, or why some cards have no cog value , others a value of zero and still others a value of "X". At no point, though, did I ever feel I needed to go look it up. Not knowing seemed to have no impact on my performance at all.

I was three-quarters of the way through the game before I realised it actually shows you how many cards your opponents can play. As for the Bestiary, where you can look up to see which creatures use what cards, what resisitances they have and other similarly helpful information, I didn't even realise it existed until the game was over.

There are plenty of other things I missed. I won't elaborate. I've embarassed myself enough. Suffice it to say, I was able to play through the entire game, very enjoyably, with the equivalent of one arm tied behind my back, both knees tied together and a patch over one eye.

I offer that as a recommendation but you can take it as a warning if you want.

I'm Right Here...

Going to be a short post today because I actually went to work for once. Seems like a long time since I was last there and that's because it was. I'm not going to be putting anything coherent together this evening, that's for sure. Might as well have a pot luck post.

Let's start with a few things I've been watching on tv. I just read Wilhelm's post on the same topic and it reminded me I meant to mention "The Woman in the House across the Street from the Girl in the Window", starring Kirstin Bell, although I'm not sure you can just "mention" something with a title like that. You have to take a run-up.

I really enjoyed it, even though it was very different from what I was expecting. It was clearly flagged as a comedy by Netflix when I first added it to my watchlist and the current page calls it "darkly comic" and "deadpan, absurd, offbeat", all of which are true but almost incidental. What it mostly is is a fully-fledged, properly plotted mystery-thriller. It just also happens to have some good jokes and some surreal set-ups.

Kirstin Bell is excellent throughout although I'm pretty sure if her character really drank the astonishing amount of wine she's supposed to have been putting herself outside of since her daughter got eaten by a serial killer on Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, she'd look a damn sight worse for wear than she does. Compelling though the lead character, Anna, is I was distracted for the longest while by her friend and agent, Sloane, who I was sure was played by the same person who played Shannon in Kim's Convenience. She's not. Two totally different actors. This is when I miss not watching television with a roomful of people in the years when you couldn't just look stuff up online. That argument could have fueled an entire drunken evening.

Sloane (aka Mary Holland) in blue, Shannon (aka Nicole Power) in black.
It's not just me, is it?

I'd say it has a really good twist at the end but I hate it when people even reveal there is a twist in things like this. Except of course there's a twist! The whole show is twists!

Did I see it coming? Yes. Long before it happened? No. I got it just in time to say I'd figured it out for myself but I'd have felt pretty dim if I hadn't.

The fight scene that ensues, though, that I did not see coming. I'm willing to bet no-one did and if they say different then they're lying. The whole thing rounds off with the world's heaviest "Second Season Coming" drop. I'm down for that.

Talking of second seasons, I've either just finished or am just about to finish three of them and I was minded to write a whole post about the trouble with sophomore seasons off the back of it but this is not that post. I'll just say the second season of Raising Dion is at one and the same time overblown and undercooked and the second season of Final Space rips most of the pathos from the wounded heart of the first. 

Despite their many, many flaws, I'm thoroughly enjoying both. That's always been the great thing about television. It really doesn't have to be good to be good to watch. Just as well, really.

Upload also wobbled crazily at times as its second season flashed past but then so it did during the first one. Despite huge chunks of the premise, let alone the plot, not making any sense at all if thought about for more than a moment, the character arcs and the throughline do all hang together, somehow. Things got so fractured I didn't think the writers were going to be able pull it all together but then they managed to hail mary all the hanging plotlines in the last five minutes of the final episode with such success that I can't wait to find out what happens in season three.

Unfortunately I will have to wait and quite a while, too, because apparently Upload takes longer both to write and make than most Netflix shows, which is why we only got a paltry seven episodes this time. I really hope things work out for Ingrid when the next season does finally get here. She's my favorite character and she deserves a break.

That'll do for a TV round-up. Not quite sure what I'm going to be watching next, either. I think the fourth season of Stranger Things is due soon and the second set of Russian Doll, too. And wasn't there some talk about another season for Umbrella Academy?  The one thing I could really do with is another long-running half-hour sitcom, something that maybe notched up seven to ten seasons but that I miraculously haven't yet seen. And that's on Netflix or Prime. Not been able to come up with any good candidates so I'm open to suggestions.

Games, then. Other than an awful lot of Guild Wars 2, about the only thing I've been playing is the awkwardly-titled Steamworld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech. It's a bit of a departure for me, being a card battler. It's not a genre I know much about let alone one I'm any good at and generally I find the idea of deck-building about as tedious and annoying as talent trees in mmorpgs but SQ:HoG also has a surprisingly strong, linear plot and that's mostly what's keeping me playing.

The characters are unusually distinctive for this sort of game, too. They aren't subtle but they have strong personalities. It feels a bit like an rpg in some ways. For all I know, that's what all these kinds of games are like. It's not like I've played many to get a feel for the genre. I've read a lot of blog posts where other people wrote about them, though, and I can't remember anyone even mentioning there were plots or characters, let alone whether they were any good or not.

Other than that... nothing. I logged into EverQuest II, thought about making some spell upgrades to try and get past the tough boss in the Adventure Signature Quest, decided it was too much like hard work and logged out again. Haven't logged into Chimeraland since End of Dragons came out or Lost Ark since I got my egg pet. Blade and Soul is patched but I still haven't gone back. 

I'd blame ANet for making a good expansion although judging from what I read on the forum I might be the only one who thinks they did. As for the immediate future, we're in the middle of a spell of glorious early Spring weather that's set to last all week, so I might be outside a lot. I might not be doing all that much gaming until it starts raining again but I'm sure that won't be long.

Going to wind up this quick filler post with a tune, one that YouTube's happy little algorithm offered up while I was watching all those Glastonbury long-listers. I wanted to put it in the post last time but it was thematically inappropriate. And now it's not!

Motorbike - Gretel Hänlyn

There's nothing about this I don't love. The relentless bass riff, the deadpan vocals, the color keying, the way she reminds me of Paula Wilcox in Man About the House... I could write a list. Best of all, 1.30 when she yells "Hey! You're not being loud enough!" and someone turns up the volume. Not far enough for my money.

That's all I got. Peace out!

Chuchu! Egg Coming Through!

It took me a few months but I am now pretty much in the habit of checking my free games from Amazon Prime at the start of every month. As a result, I am starting to build up the kind of backlog everyone else is always complaining about. My days of being able to post smugly about how "I simply don't do backlogs, dahling!" are firmly in the past.

This month I even went so far as to play one of the games I'd claimed, the awkwardly-named SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech. It's one of those card-based battlers I keep reading about on various blogs. It has a peculiar hybrid steampunk/medieaval setting, charming graphics, likeable characters, a moderately amusing plot and at first it was fun for a short session at the end of the evening.

Unfortunately, it's fast becoming too tough for me on Normal difficulty, so its time as charming little divertissement may well be about to come to an end. I could reset the difficulty to Easy or I could go back and replay earlier chapters to overlevel the content but I'm not sure I'm sufficiently commited to do either.

Although I've been able to keep up with the flow of new, free games, I've done a much worse job with the trickle of free stuff for games I already play. Every month sees Amazon toss out a slew of freebies for dozens of titles like a befuddled old lady casting handfuls of grain to a clutch of club-footed street pigeons. Like that familiar scenario, it's not necessarily something you'd want to encourage but when it's games you play...

The thing that got me to pay attention this month was the unexpected appearance of Guild Wars 2 in the list. I can't recall the game ever having appeared in the hand-out line before but this month you can pick up a pack of five Heroic Boosters in honor of the release of End of Dragons. Boosters aren't the most exciting of gifts but I have to say they will come in very handy in my quest for the large amount of experience required to complete the numerous Masteries I'm working on.

I can't see the expiry date for the offer on my account any more but I think it runs until the end of the month. I imagine most of them do. I note with interest that the Amazon Games/GW2 page has two more "Coming Soon" panels currently greyed out. I look forward with interest to finding out what we're getting next month and the month after that.

There are giveaways for no fewer than forty-eight different games in the March offer. There are several mmos, among them RuneScape, World of Warships, Black Desert Mobile, Lineage II, and Warframe. I don't play any of those so I let them pass but as well as GW2 I spotted three mmorpgs I do play, as well as another for which the freebie seemed too desirable to ignore.

When I briefly dabbled with Roblox a few weeks ago, I mentioned how having nothing but the basic, default avatar made me feel more conspicuous than if I was togged up in fancy-dress. Now, next time some enterprising hyperpopstar chooses Roblox as the venue for their first, faltering step into the metaverse, I will at least be able to greet them wearing a ridiculous "Mardi Gras Steampunk Hat."

None of the updates to New World since the rather good Winter Convergence festival have piqued my interest sufficiently to get me to log in but give me a free outfit and I'm there. The game has an annoying appearance system in that good-looking gear drops all the time but hardly any of it can be converted to a look you can keep.

Full outfits, however, the ones Amazon would like you to buy from the cash shop, are permanent and can be easily and conveniently applied from the paper doll - once you've navigated the arcane combination of mouse-clicks and menus required, that is.

They're not at all bad, either. When I logged her in, my character was
wearing the very cosy, fur-trimmed greatcoat from the winter event and most impressive it looked, too. Now she looks equally warm but considerably less formal in her free Cloaked Charlatan get-up, which from the front looks uncannily like an anorak I had when I was about nine years old.

From the back it looks rather different, with a knee-length, hooded green cloak that Robin Hood would have admired. The cloak moves curiously convincingly as she runs, occasionally folding into itself as though caught by a fierce gust of wind. It goes rather nicely with her shield, too.

For Lost Ark, another game whose pull I'd been managing to resist without too much trouble until I saw I could get free stuff, the lure is a pet. We'd all log in for a free pet, right? There's also five days of Crystaline Aura, the premium membership buff, and some Amethyst Shards, a currency you can spend at an NPC, always assuming you can find him.

I already had some Amethyst Shards. Apparently you get five hundred just for joining or forming a guild, something I did a while ago. I generally make a branch of the guild Mrs Bhagpuss and I created way back in EverQuest II over a decade ago in every game that will allow one person to be their own club. 

Lost Ark was happy for me to set up my shingle alone although the extremely restrictive naming rules meant I had to go with a severely truncated version of the name. Given how easy it was, not to mention that there's a tutorial quest that points you to it, I was very surprised to see that the Steam achievement I got says only just over a fifth of players have joined a guild at all.

The free pet turned out to be an egg on legs. Very small, spindly legs. I'm used to eggs following me around from EQII but they're not usually quite as creepy as these. They come in a choice of colors, each of which denotes a different buff or resistance. Since I had no clear idea what those did, I just went with the color I liked best, blue.

The eggs all have names - Bouncy, Chuchu and Bonbon. My pet blue egg is called Chuchu. I swear, sometimes I can't believe I'm typing this stuff. I got him (Her? Them? It?) out and ran around town for a while taking selfies then I put him away and got my trusty bunny back. The bunny, which as far as I know everyone gets as part of the tutorial, has all the same abilities as the egg but also a 10% crit bonus so the free gift is worth about what you paid for it, I guess.

The last Amazon freebie I claimed was for Blade and Soul. It looks to be the least interesting of them all, a collection of various upgrade materials used in some of the game's abstruse systems and I wouldn't have bothered if it wasn't that I've been itching to get back to B&S for a while, anyway. I don't know why but there it is. 

I'd include a picture of what I got there  only I haven't been able to get my hands on it yet. When I went to log in I realised there had been some big shift a while back, when the game converted to Unreal Engine 4. It's a 41GB download and it's been grumbling away behind the scenes the whole time I've been writing this post. So far it's managed just over 17GB so it's got a while to go yet.

What I take from this experience is that giving away free stuff is a very effective way to get people to look at your game again but not necessarily to get them to stick around. It took me longer to claim the freebies, patch the games and collect my gifts than I spent doing anything in the games themselves. In fact, all I did was take screenshots and I wouldn't even have done that if I hadn't been planning to blog about it.

I very much doubt if any of this is going to make me more likely to play any of the games. My overiding feeling on logging back in to both New World and Lost Ark was "I can't remember what I was doing last time and I really don't feel like trying." I think there's a better chance I'll play a bit of Blade and Soul because I already felt like going back to that one and yet it's the one game of the five for which I wouldn't have bothered to log in to get the free gifts at all.

It goes to show. You bribe people all you want and they'll happily let you - you just can't trust them to stay bribed.