We All Make Mistakes

When you play without guides, wikis or walkthroughs you'll end up doing things wrong without even knowing it. It's a sign of a well-designed game that you can still find yourself having a thoroughly good time all the same. 

Maybe you don't know what to do next. Maybe you have no idea what it was you just did. What you do know is you're having fun and other than that you don't really care.

If that's true then I have to say Valheim must be a very well-designed game indeed. I'm having a great time and so far I've only had to go to Google once. I only did that because the game is in Early Access and it looked like I might have run into a bug. I wanted to check if it was a known issue or whether I was being an idiot.

Guess which it was?

In almost thirty hours I have yet to see a single glitch, let alone a full-blown bug. I haven't even managed to get myself stuck on scenery, something I do at least once a week in some games I could mention. Valheim has to be one of the least buggy games I've ever played. Not just in beta or early access. Period.

The problem I was having turned out to be entirely of my own making. Quite literally, in fact. I'd been so excited to get all the materials to finish my smelter I didn't even wait for daylight to place it. In my haste and in the darkness and the pouring rain I'd placed my brand-new smelter very badly indeed: back-to-front and jammed so tight up against the kiln I couldn't even see the opening where you shovel in the ore, far less get to it. My fault entirely.

How was I to know? Do I look like a blacksmith? Don't answer that.

 

Let's back up a few days. It all started when I found a Burial Chamber deep in the forest. I'd beaten Eikthyr and gone searching for the Black Forest because... well, I wasn't entirely sure. Hugin the raven had appeared and told me I'd find my next target there although he didn't really go into details.

As it happened, I'd stumbled across the Black Forest in my first few hours of play. It's not a specific location, more a general description. Every time you enter a new biome in Valheim you get a message telling you what it is. So far I've been in Meadows, Black Forest, The Ocean and Mountains. 

I've heard there are also Plains but so far I haven't happened on any. According to the Steam store page, that's all there are in the game right now, those five biomes. Well, there are five biomes with four more to come. It doesn't name them. I'm assuming it's those but who knows? Anyone who's read the wiki, I guess. So, not me.

After I killed the forest god I didn't have any other plans so off to look for Black Forest I went. I thought I remembered where I'd seen it but long before I got there I ran into an ominous structure deep in the woods beside a river. A pile of stone slabs that had "Tomb" written all over it. 

Not literally, although Valheim does have quite a few slabs of stone with glowing runes carved into them. Runic messages the game helpfully translates, most of which tell me things I already knew, like how to build a house or how dangerous the forest is. 

This tomb didn't need a sign, anyway. The three skeletons that came charging at me the moment I moved in close made the point more effectively. I despatched the restless dead and havered over whether to go in right away or secure a spawn spot nearby first for my inevitable demise. Because of course I was going in! There was never any question about that.

Not going to miss that in the dark.

In the end I went for the secure spawn option but I decided to build it from scratch right next to the tomb. I didn't feel confident of finding the place again if I went back to the nearest safe spot. I didn't know then that you can mark locations on the map (Thanks eeickythump!). I wasn't carrying anything too unreplaceable and if I died at least that would place a marker. I'd be able to find my grave. Which would be in the tomb. It made sense at the time. Not so much now.

Inside, the tomb was plain, atmospheric, claustrophobic. Simple but effective, like most things in Valheim, as I'm coming to appreciate. I'd prepared myself with a torch but I also set a campfire inside the first room, partly so as to have a place to rest and recover but mostly in the hope if I got lost down there in the tunnels I'd be able to make my way back to the light.

The next quarter of an hour felt extraordinarily similar to gaming sessions twenty or thirty years ago. A smoking torch, wooden doors, earthen floors, skeletons with swords, shields and bows, chests, mysterious markings... All it needed were a few traps and a secret door or two and I could have been playing Eye of the Beholder. 

I looted everything I could carry, naturally. I don't know whether vikings had any issues with desecrating tombs but gamers certainly don't. There were some questions raised by the things I found, too. I ended up pocketing rather a lot of gold coins, which suggests some kind of economy somewhere down the line. Unless I'm expected to smelt them for the metal.

There were also gems, amber and rubies, again hinting either at some form of trade or a jewelcrafting skill. Perhaps both. And there were glowing red things on stands: surtling cores. I had no idea what those were but I figured I'd found out. And I did.

Don't need to tell me twice!

 

I can't remember now whether the information appeared when I looted the first surtling core or whether it happened later but somehow or other I worked out I needed them to make a smelter and a kiln. I wanted to do that. I'd been wondering how the next stage of crafting might open up and now it looked like I knew.

Well, kind of. It took a lot of running through the forest before I really found out how it all works. I'm pretty sure if I'd wiki'd it I'd have saved myself a lot of time, trouble and terror in the night. But where would be the adventure in that, eh?

It was the middle of the night when I got home from my first and so far only successful mining trip in the Black Forest. I'd been travelling for days. I'd somehow managed to get lost. Really badly lost. So lost I ended up having to camp out by a river one night and sleep in a bee-infested shack the next. 

There was the night I killed a skeleton in some ruins and barricaded myself in until a Greydwarf Shaman squeezed through a gap and tried to poison me. Twice I had to hole up in delapidated buildings I'd partially refurbished just to have somewhere safe to sleep. Another time a twelve-foot tall troll waving half a tree-trunk chased me into a river and very nearly drowned me.

Before I could even get started I'd had to go back to the altar and summon Eikthyr to kill him a second time. The first go round I'd somehow come away without the shards of his antlers you need to make your first pickaxe. If it hadn't been for Wilhelm mentioning it I wouldn't even have known what I was missing. I'm not sure how or if I'd ever have muddled my way through that one.

Craft first, eat later.

 

I've not heard anyone mention farming the bosses for body parts but I can confirm you can if you want. I put another couple of deer heads on the altar, Eikthyr came charging out, lightning playing round his horns, and I killed him all over again. This time he dropped three pieces of antler and I made my pickaxe.

By then I already had enough surtling cores for one of the new crafting stations. I meant to make the smelter but I got confused and made the kiln by mistake. Oh, well. They work in tandem anyway. One's not much use without the other unless you plan on sitting by the fire for hours burning raw meat into coal. You can do that but I wouldn't recommend it.

I primed the kiln with wood so it would turn out coal while I was away (shades of My Time At Portia although the kiln is actually a thousand times quicker) then off I went to find another tomb, loot more surtling cores and maybe mine some ore if I happened to find any. I'd seen a few copper deposits when I didn't have the pick so I knew what they looked like.

Finding tombs is a matter of pure luck unless someone knows otherwise (if so, don't keep it to yourself!). My method is to roam around the forest until a skeleton jumps out from behind a rock or I stumble over a pile of stone slabs. And be careful what holes you go down. I went in one very large, impressive cave and it turned out to be full of trolls. That was a fun corpse recovery, I don't mind telling you.

Gosh! I wonder who'd live in a hole like this?

All things told, I'd had some adventures getting those cores. I was damned if I was going to wait until morning to get the smelter up and running. When I finally got back to my old house it was pitch dark. All the torches I'd placed had gone out. I'd have put up some more but I made the mistake of picking up the coal from the kiln and now I was encumbered, which in Valheim is very inconvenient.

What with one thing and another I ended up placing the smelter in such a way I could barely use it even after I'd been to the wiki and found out what I'd done wrong. I thought about moving it but as far as I know the only way to move things you've placed is to destroy them and re-make them and I wasn't sure I'd get my cores back if I did. Barely-useable was just going to have to do.

And then guess what? I took my copper bars, made a forge and placed it where the only way to get close enough to use it is to jump. It's stuffed behind the smelter and the kiln and I can't get through the gap! 

Once again, it happened because I was I was too excited to see my forge up and running to stop and think first. That's another mark of a good game. You mess up because you just can't wait to see what comes next.

I guess some people don't enjoy that but I do. 

Until I don't. 

But that's not yet.

Is That All You Got?

As Wilhelm pointed out in yesterday's comments, you can futz about in Valheim playing house for as long as you like but if you have any ambitions beyond living in a cabin in the woods, eventually you're going to have to knuckle down and do what the raven tells you. And the first thing Hugin insists on is that you challenge and defeat Eikthyr, the horned forest god.

I'd been putting it off. I'm not a big fan of boss fights at the best of times and I was having far too much fun chopping down trees to relish a tough battle I might well have to repeat a few times. Reading Wilhelm's account of his struggles with darkness, adds and multiple deaths didn't exactly fill me with confidence, either. 

It seemed as though the acepted method was to attack with a spear and defend with a shield. The only problem was I didn't have either.

Combat in Valheim is exceptionally simple, at least at the start. Left mouse to attack, middle mouse for your weapon's special, right mouse to block. You can block with whatever you like but naturally a shield has the best bonuses.

So far I'd not found any reason to block or defend. Everything I'd fought seemed quite willing to die without doing me too much damage. Half the time I'd been sneaking up behind things, hitting middle mouse, leaping like a ninja and one-shotting them with my flint knife's massive backstab multiplier.

I doubted Eikthyr would stand still for that. Still, I wasn't convinced about the spear. It's not a weapon I favor in any game. I went to my workbench, pulled up the recipes and compared the stats. Without the backstab bonus it didn't seem likely the knife was going to do the job but there seemed precious little advantage in using the spear over the flint axe, which appeared to do at least as much damage.

Since I already had some skill in the axe I decided to stick with that. I thought I'd best learn to block all the same so I made myself a tower shield. It looked like a rusted sheet of corrugated iron. Or maybe a coal-shed door.

 

It also reduced my movement speed by a fifth. I stumped off through the woods to find some boars to train on but boars are never there when you need them. I found a few but although they did keep coming in to atack they spent more time backing off. 

After what seemed like far too long I'd only added three points to my block skill. I'd probably have given up if it wasn't for a run-in with a Greyling. They're everywhere and I'm so used to despatching them with a single hit I hadn't really paid attention to their behavior but it's almost robotic. 

If you don't fight back, a greyling comes at you three times, attacking. Then it dances back, does a quarter turn and comes again from a different direction. It keeps doing that until it's completed a full circle, making three attacks each time. There's a random chance it might reverse direction on any turn, so it doesn't always make the full rotation but mostly it does.

If you have your shield up it will hit it every time. It never varies. At first I was timing my block to meet the obvious wind-up but after a while I just held the right mouse button down, kept my shield up and gently rotated. 

 

That way I got my block up to twelve on the same Greyling. It got slower each time, of course, as the requirements for the skill points increased, but I could definitely have wrung a few more out of that one fight. I figured a dozen points in block would be enough, though, so I dropped my shield and clouted the Greyling with my axe. Not much of a reward for all his help.

It was getting past the point where I could prevaricate any longer. At the very least I needed to go give it a try just to see how bad it was going to be. If I needed to train some more, well, there's no shortage of willing Greyling volunteers.

Hugin reminds you to remember to eat before you start the fight and I'd already figured out you can eat three different types of food and get stacking buffs from all of them. Once I'd realized that my health pool had more than doubled. I packed a lunch of raspberries, mushrooms and cooked meat, picked up my stack of trophies to sacrifice on the altar and off I went. 

 

Thanks to Wilhelm I knew what to expect. Darkness, lightning and a bunch of Greylings joining in. Thanks to Ula's comment I knew there'd also be Norwegian death metal. That scared me more than all the rest put together so I turned the game music off.  

The altar was marked on my map but I'd also made a path between there and my house. The hoe has an option, strangely named "Pathen", that makes a very convincing footpath over most terrain. It's very handy since there's no means of adding map markers. The paths look good, too.

One thing I wasn't sure about was how many deer trophies it would take to get Eikthyr's attention. I had it in the back of my mind it could be as many as eight, which would have been a problem since I only had six, but I can't say I'd have been disappointed to be turned away because I didn't have the entrance fee.

 

In fact I just needed the one. And the head on the block turned out to be Eikthyr's, lightning-wreathed antlers and all.

What an anti-climax! It seems I'd over-prepped by a couple of orders of magnitude, at least. I'm not sure I saw Eikthyr hit me even once. I was watching my health and I never saw it move. In fact, you can see from the two shots here that between them I'd lost just one point of health, while Eikthyr went from just under half to dead.

Every time he reared up on his hind hooves I raised my shield and blocked him. He was as predictable as the Greyling and about as dangerous. The axe did an excellent job. I was glad I hadn't bothered with the spear. It took a while to kill him but only because he kept running away out of reach. Rather than chase him I just waited for him to come back. 

As for the Greyling adds that had swarmed Wilhelm, I didn't see any. I don't know if that's something to do with the way the fight went or whether it just depends on what happens to be passing through the woods at the time the fight begins.

 

When the darkness cleared I sat back and contemplated my success. I don't believe it had anything whatsoever to do with skill - at least not my skill. Something to do with the fact that by the time I called on Eikthyr my viking had been in Valheim for a month and a half, her time. I suspect the game intends you to get to this point long before that, not to wait until you've upgraded all your armor and weapons as far as they can go and pushed your skills into the twenties and even thirties (although that's only tree-chopping).

It sets an interesting precedent. I hope the game continues to allow overgearing and prepping. I'd much rather hone my skills on the litle guys and then breeze through the boss fights than rush ahead and get my viking butt handed to me. 

Next god on the chopping block is... I have no idea. I went and hung my new trophy on the hook at the stone circle then I walked round reading the runes on the rest. I couldn't even work out what creatures most of them were meant to be, let alone what order they might have to go down. One is definitely a skeleton but other than that, I'm stumped.

 

Oh, wait, I do have one clue. After I'd done with god-slaying I went exploring and I found a couple of tombs. That was an adventure worth a post of its own and it might get one tomorrow if nothing else happens. 

While I was tomb-robbing I happened upon the grave marker for one Vegvisir the Elder. When I read the runes they gave me the option to add a marker to my map. I did and it looks very much like the one for Eikthyr. It's also waaaaay off to the east, much further than I've ever travelled. 

If Vegsivir's next it's going to be a long time before I get there. I'm in no hurry. Readiness is all.

Thirty Days

In a shocking development that's going to surprise absolutely no-one, having posted my highly skeptical first impressions of Valheim, in which I made it quite clear the game had failed to impress, much less hook me, I spent so long playing it yesterday I didn't have time to post my second impressions.

Steam tells me I've now spent 12.7 hours in the viking afterlife simulator and if it hadn't been for the lure of red envelopes in Guild Wars 2's lunar new year (four accounts takes a while) that could easily be fifteen. Or more.

It's not that I've decided Valheim is a good game, you understand. I have no idea whether it's good, bad or indifferent. I haven't seen enough of it to tell. What I have seen are a lot of trees. Many of which I have chopped down. Very many.

I cannot tell a lie.

 

At one point I spent three straight game days chopping down trees around the architect's nightmare I laughingly call my house. I didn't need the wood. I just can't stop chopping down trees. The way they fall. The way they bounce and roll. The damage they can do. It's compelling.

With the basic stone axe or the slightly better flint upgrade, the only trees around my homestead that I can fell are beeches. Birch and oak, the other two broadleafed varieties that make up the deciduous forest, return a message indicating they're "too hard". 

Maybe I can't cut them down. I can still knock them down.

Damn you, silver birch! I'll get you if it's the last thing I do!

 

Trees handily lose all their branches when they fall, leaving a neat cylindrical trunk. That in turn splits into two when chopped, before finally shattering into the generic "wood" pieces you can pick up and use. I discovered early on that you can roll these large logs around just by by pushing on them.

I had a plan to fill the pond next to my house with logs in the hope of rendering it uninhabitable for the annoying amphibian "necks". That didn't really work but while I was pushing logs down the slope I noticed anything they hit took damage. 

I say "damage". Large rocks took "0" damage. It registered but meant nothing. Birches, however, gave up actual numbers. I pushed the beech trunks back up the slope and let them roll back down. After four or five tries the birch snapped off at the base and fell into the lake.

That was immensely satisfying until I realised it left me with a stump I couldn't remove because it was, predictably, "too hard". Also not many birch trees are considerate enough to grow at the bottom of a convenient slope. 

If I can just roll another twenty or thirty of these in here...

 

This, by and large, is how I spent the day. I also played with the hoe for a long while. It can raise or lower the ground. That seemed straightforward enough. I cleared a lovely flat yard all around my house. It was only when I went inside I realized I'd buried half the floorboards in dirt.

I raised the land under a gap in the wooden barricade I'd built around the house only to find that now, when I open the gate, I fall into the pond. I took the roof on and off about half a dozen times. I built a tower and tore it down. I moved the fire to somewhere it wouldn't set me alight every time I used the back door, only then it was too far away from my bedroom and I couldn't get to sleep.

Things went on like that for a long time. I won't bore you with the details except to say that soon one house wasn't enough for me. I started refurbishing any structure I happened to pass. I was out searching for stones which seemed to be remarkably hard to find where I was living and I kept happening across ruins that looked like they could be made perfectly habitable with a little work. I mean, I couldn't just leave them, could I?

At one point Mrs. Bhagpuss came in to ask if I wanted a coffee. She looked over my shoulder and observed that I appeared to be playing some kind of hobo sim set in the Appalachian mountains. She asked if I was living in a pile of cardboard boxes. It did look like that way, I couldn't deny it.

I'd say "hobo" was a tad harsh. How about "outdoor type"?

She also opined that I had very noisy neighbors. This is true. At all times of day and night I can hear yelling and banging around my homestead. I've tried to find out what's causing it but so far it remains a mystery. Some of the noises sound like words, others like explosions. It sometimes feels more like living in an urban jungle than a forest.

As for the attacks and home invasions others have described, I've now seen one. Just the one. I was on the roof hammering some nails into the thatch (not really - construction in Valheim doesn't have that nit-picking level of detail, I'm happy to say) when a message came up across the screen. 

It was too quick and unexpected to catch the details but the gist seemed to be that I'd angered the forest god and he was rallying the animals to the attack. I waited. Nothing happened. 

Eventually I noticed two or three deer and couple of boars hanging out in the undergrowth beyond my perimeter pallisade. They didn't seem to be doing anything. After a while longer another message appeared, telling me the animals were calming down. Well, that was certainly... nothing.

Take a glance to your left, bird. What d'you think I've been doing all this time since you last popped your head out?

 

Hugin the Raven turned up then. I hadn't seen him for so long I'd forgotten he was part of the game. I went to speak to him and he told me I ought to build a strong defence to protect myself against incidents like this. Thanks for that, Hugin. Waaaaay ahead of you, pal.

"Excitement" over, I went back to my home improvements. This all might have gone on indefinitely only for some reason I got it into my head I ought to build a raft. 

I didn't have anywhere to go or any reason to go there but if you know you can build a raft, eventually you're going to build one. It's kind of a given. So I built my raft and got on. Across the bay I could see what looked like the spot where the giant tree that looms overhead might touch the ground. Good a destination as any.

The raft turned out to be one of the easier vessels to navigate that I've run across in gaming. I had it moving in a few seconds. There was some tool tip that said it was safest to sit down when you ride a raft so I sat. The waves were rolling, the simulation was impressive, I was enjoying the trip out to sea.

I think I'll name her the Surprisingly Seaworthy.

 

Then the sea turned into ocean. There was a message telling me so. The light got darker, the waves got bigger, the raft began to buck. I was soaked in seconds. Any sensible viking would have turned around and headed back to shallower waters.

I am not a sensible viking. Well, perhaps I am, a little bit. Before I set out I'd put most of my valuables (Hah! Valuables! That's a good one!) in chests in my house. I'd already decided I'd better only take what I could afford to lose because you leave all your stuff where you drop and if I died at sea I didn't foresee getting any of it back.

(Funny story. I'd died in the water once already so I knew what I was getting into. I was hunting deer along the shore and after I wounded one it ran into the sea and I foolishly swam after it to finish it off. It seems even badly-wounded deer have more stamina than vikings because I ran out of energy and drowned before I could catch it. My corpse was in the shallows but only just barely in swimming range. If there hadn't been an underwater rock I was able to climb on to get my breath back I'd never have gotten my stuf back at all. So you can see what my prospects of a corpse recovery in the deep ocean were likely to be).

Oh, no. This can't be good.

 

Despite the wallowing and inundation, I kept on going. I could see a shore not that far away. If the raft didn't founder I thought I could make it still. And then the serpent appeared.

I actually said, out loud, "You have got to be kidding me!". It wasn't a big sea serpent. Maybe twelve, fifteen feet long. And purple. With the classic ridged back. It swam around me in circles, occasionally lunging forward to take a bite out of the raft. Really. I saw it do it.

The raft sank lower and lower in the water until finally it broke up. I got out my knife and prepared to go down fighting. Then I drowned. Or it ate me. One or the other. I was dead, either way.

Just make it quick, okay?

 

I woke up back in bed, in my underwear. I'd put a lot of stuff in the chests but I only had one tunic and one pair of pants and now they were at the bottom of the ocean. And staying there.

Priority number one became getting some new clothes. That meant getting some leather scraps and/or some deer hide and that meant hunting boars or deer or both. Didn't seem like it was going to be too much of a problem. There were always animals around and about and while deer were hard to catch, boars were easy.

Only there's never a boar around when you want one, is there? I mean, the entire genre runs on them and yet if you need them, where are they? Not in my part of the forest, that's for sure. Not this time. 

Okay, now we're getting those Scandi feels.

 

That's how I ended up a long way from home in a part of the map I hadn't visited, which became the moment I realized I'd barely been anywhere, seen anything, done anything. Valheim has one of those fog of war maps that opens up as you travel. Mine was almost completely fogged over still and I'd been playing for almost a month, game time.

It occurred to me that I was letting down the archetype I frequently claim to represent. Dr. Bartle will be asking for my Explorer card back if this goes on. And just about then the scenery began to change. Instead of dense forests studded with lakes and meadows the ground became rockier, more uneven. I very nearly fell down a ravine.

Looking up to the skyline along the ridge above me I saw evergreens. Firs, to be precise. Ahead of me, above a steep bank over a river, stood a deserted house, weathered but with all of the roof and most of the walls intact. It was getting late. It was a long run back. 

Raspberries: Blessing or Curse? Discuss. (Hint: depends if you plant them in a doorway or not).

 

Okay, so I own a second home. Don't hate. I spent a couple of days fixing up the new place. It was a lot less chaotic than my old home or at least it was until I got at it. 

There were some raspberry bushes in the doorway and in trying to move them I somehow raised the floor so high I couldn't get in, so I had to replace the door with a bigger one. Then I had a run-in with two Grey Dwarves in amongst the firs so I thought I'd better get some defences up and in doing that I managed to destroy three workbenches. Seems if the land shifts beneath them they implode or something. Still figuring out how that goes.

Eventually it got to being really late. I'd already passed on posting, only my second missed day this year. I had plenty to write about (here's some of it) but I didn't want to stop just to talk about what I'd been doing. I wanted to go on doing it.

That's not happened in a while. I'm  not surprised, though. This is Landmark all over again. I've written before about how building stuff can get to me and also about how undecided I am about whether I like it or not. It has all the harmarks of a bad habit if not an addiction. I'm very wary of indulging.

Here's a tip. If you put a section of roof on slightly crooked, it keeps the rain from putting your fire out while still venting the smoke. Cosy!

 

At the moment it's not like there's a whole lot else I have to do, though, so if I'm going to blow a week or several hacking down imaginary trees to build imaginary backwoods shacks I guess this is as good a time as any. Better.

What I definitely can't say yet is whether any of this makes Valheim a good game. I'd go so far as to say it's a good toy. I'm certainly having a lot of fun playing with it. But whether there's more than that I'm still waiting to find out.

One thing I really am impressed by is how little the designers seem to be botherd by what I think about their game. When I logged out last night I was on Day 30. Hugin has all but given up on me. The deer god doesn't seem to care any more. Other games would be badgering me to get on with the plot by now, sending me passive-aggressive reminders of my duties and responsibilites. 

Okay, Maslow, that's Physiological and Safety done. What's next? Belongingness and Love? Hmm. Can I get those with a flint axe?

 

In Valheim, I get the impression I could just set up home in the forest and live there forever, doing my own thing and that would be just fine with everyone. And right now that's pretty much what I plan on doing.

So if you'll excuse me, I'll get right back to it. Those trees aren't going to fell themselves.

Why Am I Doing This? : First Impressions Of Valheim

 

After considerable thought, and bearing in mind what Wilhelm said in the comments yesterday, this afternoon I bought Valheim. I'm fairly sure it's going to be a five-minute wonder but it's not like it's the first bandwagon I've jumped. May as well get onboard while it's still rolling. I doubt anyone's going to care much a month from now.

If that sounds lukewarm... well, it is. I played for three and a half hours this afternoon and it was exactly what I expected. Since I've never played Minecraft I won't be making the same comparisons as everybody else. Instead I'll say to me it felt like a cross between New World and Landmark. 

It looks like a very much uglier New World and it plays like a very much less buggy Landmark. In fact, as many people have noted, Valheim doesn't seem to have any bugs at all. I certainly didn't run into even a single, minor glitch in my first session. There were some awkward moments when I couldn't get building pieces to fit where I wanted them but tools not doing what you wish they would isn't the same as them not doing what they're supposed to do.

Is that a mushroom cloud?

 

If don't have any complaints about the build quality I certainly do about the graphics. It's one of those games that looks a lot better in screenshots than it does in game - and as you can see, it doesn't look great in screenshots. 

The environmental art has its moments. The forest can be atmospheric and the lakes and ponds look quite charming in the early morning sunshine. I've only seen one biome (I think) so there may be more joys and splendors ahead.

The character art, though. About that, nothing good can be said. It's one thing to have very limited customization options. It's another altogether for your character to look like a melted waxwork. I saw today that Valheim has sold over a million copies in its first week of release. I sincerely hope some of that windfall goes towards hiring some artists.

The UI needs some work, too. It's clunky, awkward and unintuitive. Fortunately the controls are configurable because some of the defaults are strange. I would make a point about having the secondary attack on the middle mouse button if I'd ever needed to use a secondary attack but I haven't done much fighting yet.

It's a fixer-upper, what can I tell you?

 

That's definitely one of the strong points. The game gives you all the time you need to get comfortable. Or as comfortable as you can be, squatting in a ruined hovel in soaking wet rags. 

In nearly four hours I died three times. The first was in the opening few minutes, when I was heading to the shoreline in the dark to see what was there. Something jumped out of the undergrowth and one-shotted me. I never saw what it was.

The second time three trees fell on me. I was aware of the danger. I'd been careful to stand up-slope of every tree I'd chopped down until then. This time the first tree fell against a second and then the two of them lodged against a couple more. I tried to figure out the dynamics but when the last tree fell the whole lot went every which way, bouncing off each other in all directions. I was caught in the middle and crushed like a bug.

The third time I was killed by bees. I saw a nice hut, raised off the ground, in decent condition. I thought it might make a useful storehouse so I clambered inside to take a look. I didn't see the hive hanging in the rafters until I walked into it and that was that.

Swimming's in. I saw some fish so I guess fishing is, too.

 

Other than those self-inflicted restarts nothing gave me any trouble at all. The most aggressive creatures I met were greylings, who look like little goblins wearing backpacks. I have no idea what they carry in them because every single greyling without exception dropped one glob of resin and nothing at all else. In the end I decided they must be some kind of small, fast treant. 

They seem to be attracted to structures or maybe to fire. There was often one darting about as I was building, feinting in close then jumping back. At first I stopped to kill them but after a while I found it better to carry on as if they weren't there.

I was hoping I could get one trapped inside my shelter so I could get a closer look at it but although they'd come right to the door I couldn't get one to go inside. If I really wanted to catch a specimen, I'm pretty sure I could build a wall around one before it realized what I was up to. They seem dim enough to stand still for it.

There are quite a few boars in the woods. When you approach they back off although a couple of times one atacked me before I saw it coming, then ran away. They have a rubric that tells you they're frightened but they're not so frightened they don't have a go, even though they always lose. 

That's not a visual bug. There really is a giant tree up there. It gets mentioned.

 

Deer are scarcer, at least in my part of the forest. They don't fight back at all, or don't I think they do, although I only managed to catch one. It's not really a meaningful sample.

The last living creature I've seen is some small amphibian going by the unlikely name of a "neck". They look a bit like tadpoles and they're highly aggressive. Also feeble. 

Everything so far has been feeble except for the single skeleton I ran into and those bees. The skeleton was about as tough as your average newbie zone undead and the bees I don't think you can attack at all. They're more of an environmental hazard.

There are a few weather-related dangers but once again they seem very low-key. If you get wet it's some kind of debuff. If you get cold, the same. 

I set myself on fire multiple times after I foolishly placed my campfire between my bed and the door, meaning I had to hop over it every time I wanted to go in or out. There were flames and some warnings but nothing very bad seemed to happen. 

Is it raining or is that a helicopter gunship up there?

 

Smoke inhalation looked like it was going to be more of a problem. I neglected to leave a gap in the roof to let the fumes out and things looked dicey for a moment but then I opened a vent in the ceiling with a quick click of the middle mouse button (it doubles as an eraser for building materials) and that was the end of that.

I did think something bad might happen when I got caught in quite the most spectacular thunderstorm I have ever seen in a video game. It was apocalyptic. More like an orbital bombardment with accompanying laser attack than weather. But all that happened was I got wet.

You can't starve to death, either. You can get hungry but the game makes sure to remind you to eat something and since you can apparently survive quite happily on a diet of raspberries and mushrooms, both of which grow abundantly throughout the forest, there's no real risk of getting the hunger debuff.

All of this is very much to the good in my opinion. I'd far rather have the survival risks trivialized while I'm learning the ropes than suffer a string of frustrating deaths before I've even worked out what's killing me. On the other hand, it does raise the question of why bother with penalties at all? It's almost as if the developers feel these sort of games always have them so theirs should too, even though they couldn't really tell you why.

A very bright, non-directional light source directly in front of you is not helpful.

 

I found more than enough to challenge and frustrate me without difficult death penalties. It gets very dark at night and having a flaming torch makes it harder to see where you're going, not easier, just as it would in real life. 

To begin with, I dreaded the coming of darkness. Not because of the danger; because of the tedium. I spent the first night aimlessly wandering through the woods until I got killed by the unseen horror. After that I just waited at spawn until it got light.

By the second night I had a shelter, a ruin I'd found and partially repaired. I'd even made a bed but I couldn't lie in it because you can't sleep without a fire near you and I was two stones short of a fireplace. I foolishly went out into the night to search for some and got lost. It was so dark I couldn't see my house. Once again I had to give up, stand still and wait for dawn. Gallingly, when the sun rose I realized I was about fifty feet from my front door.

On the third night I had a bed and a fire and I made sure I was inside when night fell. At this point darkness went from being an irritating nuisance to a loading screen. Click bed, select sleep, read a couple of lines of text about your dreams, wake up. New day ahead.

In that sleep, what dreams may come?

 

Once again, I have to wonder what the point is. If you can switch night off, why have it at all, other than for the look of the thing? And making it so you have to spend the first couple of nights just twiddling your thumbs seems to be adding insult to injury.

I suppose the idea is that it forces you to make a safe place to return to for fear of being caught out in the dangeous darkness. Doesn't really work if the darkness is just boring, not dangerous, though, does it?

All of this makes it sound like I wasn't very impressed and probably didn't enjoy myself much. Which is kinda, sorta true and yet kinda, sorta not at the same time. It's  a kinda, sorta game on first impressions. 

I do have a pre-existing issue with survival games in that I don't quite get the point of them. What exactly am I surviving for? Of all the genres I've played I don't think I get such a strong sensation that I'm wasting time that could be better spent elsewhere in anything else. 

I can spend literally months of my life doing utterly pointless tasks in mmorpgs without once feeling the slightest compunction to find something more useful to do with my life but half an hour building a hut to spend the night in is enough to make me look at the clock and think about the dailies I could be doing instead.

Thanks Ulf! I was wondering what I was doing wrong.

Valheim clearly addresses all that with a progression path that requires the gathering of various sacrifices to summon a series of boss monsters. It also seems to have some kind of narrative or storyline lurking in the background. I strongly suspect there's a much more structured game in there somewhere than the first few hours suggest.

Whether I'll stick at it for long enough to find out what it is looks iffy right now. It certainly hasn't sunk any claws into me so far. Both New World and Landmark felt positively velcro-like at the same early stage; Valheim is hanging by a thread.

I guess we can look forward either to dozens of posts, where I eat my words and bang on about the game to the point of delirium or to never hearing me mention it, ever again. It's going to be one of the two, I bet. I just can't tell which, yet.

Better Later

Today I almost bought Valheim. It's the game everyone's buying. Supposedly. 

Truth be told, so far the only people talking about it in this corner of the blogosphere seem to be Belghast and Wilhelm, although since Wilhelm heard about it from Ula I imagine we might see a post over at Ulalu in due course. Whether the next few days will see a light dusting of first impressions or a full-on blizzard remains to be seen. 

There's always a tendency for these things to snowball, of course. There's the infamous fear of missing out but also enthusiasm is often contagious. And, boy, are Valheim's boosters enthusiastic!

By comparison with many of the reviews on Steam, Wilhelm and Bel are positively restrained in their warm praise for the game. As I write, Valheim has an "Overwhelmingly Positive" rating from just under 17,000 reviews. That's seventeen thousand reviews for a game that's only been on Steam for a week.

I nearly wrote "only launched on Steam a week ago" but Valheim hasn't launched, not yet. It's still in Early Access, which makes all of this overwhelming positivity even more extraordinary. Early Access games have a poor reputation, both in general and on Steam, specifically. The EA tag is widely seen as a caveat emptor at best, more commonly a red flag.

Several of the reviews I read went out of their way to stress that Valheim is not your typical Early Access title: "If you're intimidated by "early access" don't be (in this case). This game puts AAA studios to shame, seriously". Others chose to comment on the price point: "Its worth FAR MORE THAN $20." And almost everyone agreed on one thing: "This game has no business being this F****** GOOD!"

When I read Wilhelm's observations and impressions I was mildly interested. Valheim seemed like the kind of thing I'd enjoy messing about with for a while. It sounded as if it might scratch that Landmark itch I was talking about a while back, probably more so than Jeromai's suggestion, Boundless, which I put on my wishlist but probably won't ever buy.

For one thing, Valheim has a northern European fantasy setting, some kind of loose re-working of Norse myth. It's not my favorite trope but it's certainly one that feels familiar and comfortable. For another, even though review after review compares it to Minecraft, Valheim appears to be blessedly free of blocks.

From the screenshots I've seen, it looks like any regular fantasy game, even if the graphics are its acknowledged weak point, perhaps the only one I've seen mentioned several times. Unusually, even the reviewers who draw unfavorable attention to the way it looks tend to forgive the game's aesthetic shortcomings with surprising generosity. 

That's partly because of the Early Access tag but mostly because the game has an astonishingly small footprint. The download's just a single gigabyte, although several reviews record a mere 500MB, possibly referring to some previous beta build.

Whatever the exact size, it's small. It's also cheap. Twenty dollars or, to me, £15.49. And it's been fantastically well-reviewed, with two bloggers whose opinions I trust reporting they've tried it and liked what they've seen so far. 

So why haven't I bought it? And more pertinently, why did I say I almost had?

Allergies. That's why.

Mrs. Bhagpuss and I went for a delightful walk in the woods this morning. The U.K.'s  in the middle of a very cold snap but the part where we live remains mercifully free of snow. The sun's been out for most of the day and the threatened bitter easterly winds have not materialized. It was a beautiful day for a walk so we took a long one.

And I came back sneezing my head off. I don't know what it was but something in the winter woods got right up my nose, literally. For most of the day I've barely been able to see a screen let alone play anything on one. It's about as much as I can do to type.

That's why I spent an hour squinting through streaming eyes at Steam's soothing blue-on-blue text instead of playing games. And by the time I'd finished I was starting to feel I'd be crazy to wait a moment longer.

It was pushing at a half-open door, anyway.  I was already minded to buy Valheim after seeing how much fun Bel and Wilhelm seemed to be having. My main concern was whether I'd be able to find enough time to play to make it worth the purchase. I seem to have picked up rather a lot of gaming commitments lately and I'm enjoying all of them. I'm not sure I have room to expand much further but there's nothing I want to drop to make space. In fact I already have a waitlist.

Then there's the memory of Atlas in the back of my mind. That's a not-dissimilar game I bought on a whim. I enjoyed it for a while and I would have said I'd gotten my money's worth but Steam informs me I only played for six hours in total and I haven't logged in for two years. 

Atlas was always a gamble. I bought it mainly to get a few blog posts out of it, which I did. There was a chance it could have turned into something spectacular and since the developers are adamant they're still working out exactly what it's going to be, I guess there still is. Even so, do I need to do that again?

Valheim looks a lot more solid than Atlas. Not only does it have the huge approval of almost everyone who's tried it but it has a premise that I find a lot more suited to my tastes than piracy on the high seas. I've always liked the idea of Minecraft. It's the look of the thing I can't take. If Valheim ends up being Minecraft without the blocky visuals that might be enough for me.

So I put it on my wishlist. Then I looked at it sitting there and thought "why wait?". It's not going to get any cheaper. In fact, the FAQ suggests the price will go up: 

"Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access?

“No definitive plans here yet, but it is likely that the price will be increased over the course of the Early Access period.”"

Might as well buy it now, then, I guess. I moved it to my basket. 

And then I sneezed and kept on sneezing. When I'd finished I thought about it. It hardly seems fair to the game to make it compete with my near-total inability to concentrate, see or think. Maybe I should wait and see how I feel tomorrow.

These sudden allergic reactions don't often last more than a day or so. Fingers crossed, tomorrow I might be able to go more than five minutes without needing to blow my nose. If so, I'll buy Valheim then. Probably.

Another day isn't going to make any difference. Is it?

And look! I got another post out of not buying a game! That's two days in a row! 

I might be on to something here...

Cast A Long Shadow

Mmorpgs, they're the gaming equivalent of slasher movie villains, aren't they? Exceedingly hard to kill. Even when they're down and seemingly out for good it never does to turn your back. They have a habit of hauling themselves back up, somehow, for one last stab at your heart. Or your wallet. 

One of the stranger news items I read yesterday involved the re-animation of a game that closed down over a decade ago: Shadowbane. It triggered some vague recollection; the dessicated corpse of the original source code, disinterred from its digital coffin, traded away across the seas to a land far away. I just never imagined it would come sailing back, a ghost ship pulling into Steam's safe harbor, a specter at the feast.

Yes, yes, alright. Enough of all that melodramatic twaddle. Let's examine the facts.

I never played Shadowbane but I remember it well enough. It was a very long time ago that I first heard of it. I imagine I would have been playing EverQuest at the time. Those were the days when news of any new mmorpg was pored over and examined like holy writ. We had no inkling of the glut to come.

2003. It launched in March 2003. I just looked it up. I can remember following its development so I most likely became aware of it the year before.

I never played it. That's surprising. I played just about ever mmorpg I could get my hands on back then, all the AAA releases, Anarchy Online, Dark Age of Camelot, Horizons...

There'd have been a couple of reasons. The subscription. Just about every online game came with a monthly rental fee in those days. It wasn't feasible to play multiple mmorpgs without feeling your money was being wasted, not least because playing mmorpgs in the first few years of the millennium wasn't all that far off being a full-time job. If you already had a for-real full-time job you definitely didn't have time for more than one mmo on top. Even students and the unemployed probably couldn't stretch to more than a couple.

 

That wouldn't have stopped me trying it, though. I bought quite a few mmorpgs, knowing I'd probably never play past the free month that came with the box. Some I bought even after I'd played the beta and knew I wasn't going to enjoy the finished game. It was nice just to have the case on the shelf. 

Still is. I'm looking at them a few feet away as I write this. All the games I've mentioned so far and more. But not Shadowbane.

The reason I didn't buy it was, of course, the same reason it's still remembered so fondly by some, when so many other games of its time are long forgotten. The same reason a game almost twenty years old, dumped onto Steam virtually unchanged since the day its sun set in 2009, has the kind of glowing reviews you might expect of the latest seven day wonder.

"The best at the time, and possible still is "

"This game is perfect"

"Highly recommend!"

"WTF? OMG. YES!"

The reason is free-for-all PvP.

The way the concept has dominated the conversation for two decades might suggest otherwise but there really haven't been that many ffa pvp mmorpgs. The last really big one was probably Darkfall, another game I never played, for much the same reasons, but my understanding is that even Darkfall ameliorated and watered down its hardcore offer over time.

Shadowbane supposedly didn't. I mean, don't ask me. I never played. But that's its reputation. And the description on Steam has "unlimited free PVP" in the very first line, right after "MMORPG".

Not everyone agrees. One of the few negative reviews complains "The game is not "Unlimited free PVP" as advertised" although when you read on to find out what he's complaining about it turns out the reviewer thinks "free" refers to the cost not the gameplay.

No, the Steam version of Shadowbane is not free as in "free to play". It costs £8.29 (odd price) but you can get it right now for twenty per cent off, so £6.63 (even odder). 

Shadowbane's "free" PvP means players are free to kill you whenever and wherever they find you. And take your stuff. In theory, you can do the same to them, although that would require you to be better at it than they are, something I'm unlikely to experience first-hand. That's why I never bought it, or even tried it when it actually did go F2P in March 2006. 

At that time I would still have been quite nervous about PvP. I'd dabbled on EQ's various PvP servers but you could hardly say I'd PvP'd.  I'd been killed a few times but I'd never managed to kill anyone back. 

I'd done better in Dark Age of Camelot but there I'd always been in a gang. An army, really. And more often than not my computer had been struggling so badly under the weight of all those bodies it'd been about as much as I could do to bash on a door with my axe. Again, I don't believe I ever killed anyone in a straight fight.

Over the years I got a little better and lot less nervous as the games reformed themselves to suit the more casual killer. I found I liked instanced battlegrounds quite a bit and spent a lot of time there in several games, DAOC, Warhammer, WoW, Rift...

I also discovered I didn't mind PvPvE so much that I needed to avoid it. I never joined the camp that claimed killing goblins was more fun if you knew at any moment some player might roll up and put an arrow in your back but neither did the possibility put me off, or not unduly. So long as it didn't happen repeatedly I was quite willing to treat it as an environmental hazard like falling in lava or being stomped on by a giant.

It wasn't until a few years ago that I found in Guild Wars 2's World vs World the kind of PvP I really, thoroughly enjoy: territorial siege warfare. I was about a decade late. I could have learned that about myself in Dark Age of Camelot. Only my PC wouldn't let me. It's amazing how much more fun a castle siege is when you can actually move.

Shadowbane has territorial siege warfare although it hardly seems to be the focus of the game. Almost none of the reviewers refer to it and it doesn't even get a mention in the publisher's blurb, although that might be down to translation issues. The new owners and publishers are ChangYou Games from Hong Kong and they describe Shadowbane like this:

MMORPG, unlimited free PVP. 12 races, 22 occupations, 48 affiliated occupations, more than 200 attribute points, more than 500 skill points. Open battlefield that can be arbitrarily harvested in the game. Its freedom and cruelty are its characteristics, and it is also a fair competition for power.

Some of that does sound interesting. A lot of races and classes. Maybe now I'm more weathered in imaginary battle I'd be willing to give it a run? 

Nope. But not for the same reason, not this time around. The FFA PVP may not attract me but it doesn't put me off. Provided I can get off spawn and into the game for long enough to get a few screenshots and have a bit of a run around it would be worth the pittance of an entry fee just for the blog posts I'd get out of it.

The barrier to entry this time is something that would absolutely not have been any kind of issue back when Shadowbane released. It's what it looks like. I have a huge tolerance for outdated graphics in games for which I feel some nostalgic affection but it doesn't extend to games I never played back in the day. It's not fair but that's just how it is.

Never say never, though. I'm not disposed right now to fork over a few quid for the privelige of messing around in character create and checking out the newbie island but I'm not saying the mood might not come over me another day. And if the game ever does go F2P again, I guess I'd probably feel duty-bound to download it and log in at least once.

For now, though, I'm happy to see it back for the small but happy band of free for all warriors who've mourned it all these years. Let's leave them to their slaughter. May heads roll and bags fill until the next sunset. 

Just don't imagine it'll be the last.

Happy, As A Clam!

 

When I anounced my intention to steer this blog away from its unwritten mission statement - "all mmorpgs, all the time" - I never meant to replace the online with the offline, the massively multiple with the single-player or the rpg with point-and-click. Nor did I imagine I'd find myself running a showcase for every micro-game, demo and introductory prologue available for free on Steam. 

That's what seems to have happened, though. Oh, well. 

It doesn't help that Steam is one of those annoying 21st century cliches, the dumb AI. It sits there humming to itself, noticing everything but understanding nothing. The more of these fragments I download, the more it suggests. It doesn't seem to pay attention to whether I spend any time playing them or whether I uninstall them as fast as I can. Steam believes in love at first sight. If you clicked, you must have clicked.

Of course, I'm not helping myself. Or Steam. The AI keeps asking me what I think of things and I keep refusing to answer. If it'd only give me a "None of your damn business" button I'd click that all the time.

Hey! You know what this is? It's a bit for my stand-up routine. Or it could be. I could have used it in the Steam freebie I played today, a game called Clam Man 2: Open Mic, "a stand-up comedy RPG adventure" or, if you will, "...a combatless, narrative RPG". Not a promising premise, perhaps, but let's find out. Maybe it won't be toe-curlingly embarassing after all.

I saw it on the list of free games Steam's AI likes to show me now it's realized how cheap I am. Mostly I mouseover and move on but the curious title was enough to get me to click through. 

On the store page I noted the "Very Positive" rating so I scrolled down to check out the reviews. I was already halfway minded to give the thing a try anyway. After all, as the shill said, "Give the game a shot! It's free! You've got nothing to lose!". 

What swung the decision was the way the reviews kept comparing Clam Man 2 to Disco Elysium. 

"I liked Disco Elysium for a lot of reasons and I think this game took inspiration from it."

"Oh, how I wish that more games would be inspired by Disco Elysium! Clam Man 2 does a splendid job of using that type of RPG gameplay formula."

"It's like Disco Elysium meets Kingdom of Loathing."

"Glad to see games in the style of Disco Elysium."

"It reminds me of a light hearted, fishy Disco Elysium."

"Bikini Elysium basically."

Wait, what? Bikini Elysium?

There are over two hundred and fifty reviews and it seems like half of them make the same comparison. And honestly, having played it, I'm surprised it's not more. It may not look much like Disco Elysium but it sure as heck plays like it.

Which is odd. Because Disco Elysium is bleak, alienating and disturbing while Clam Man 2 is warm, funny and relatable. 

Which is odder still. Because Clam Man really is a clam, man, and all the characters are fish. Or shellfish. Or arthropods. And the whole game takes place underwater

That's why one of your four stats is Aquamobility. The other three are Improv, Self-Awareness and Detection. Having played Disco Elysium I knew what was up with the stats as soon as the combined tutorial and character creation section got going but I'm pleased to say Clam Man 2 does a much better job of introducing and explaining its core concepts and mechanics than Disco does. It doesn't just leave you to flounder. (Don't forget to tip your waitress. I'll be here all week).

One very significant way in which CM2 differs from DE is that those four starting stats are all you get. There aren't any secondary stats introduced during gameplay and you don't have gear slots to kit yourself out with clothes and accessories that boost your skills. 

At least, not in this free Prologue, you don't. I'd hope that might change in the full version of the game because being able to tweak your build by wearing different insane costume combos or learning abstruse and surreal life-lessons was a big part of what made Disco Elysium such fun to play.

To counter that absence, Clam Man 2 (I have to keep adding the numeral for clarity. Apparently there really is a Clam Man 1. Or just Clam Man, I guess) comes with a visual trick that I found almost ridiculously effective and affecting. A red D20.

That's an actual 3D model of a die in a purely two-dimensional game. Two-and-half. Whatever. When there's a significant roll the big red die clunks down and bounces across the screen in an entirely convincing fashion. 

The suspense as it teeters on edge before toppling one way or the other is excruciating. I've always loved dice rolls in RPGs. I enjoyed the way Disco Elysium displayed them but this takes it to a whole 'nother level.

The underlying premise of what I'm guessing we're now calling Disco games is an open acknowledgment, a celebration even, of their rpg heritage. Instead of burying the randomization in the deep background they bring it into the spotlight. Clam Man 2 goes that step further and makes it the star of the show.

Oh, wait, no. That's you! You're the star of the show. Or you will be if you can just come up with three jokes ("Bits. We call them bits") that work. The plot takes you from your mundane job behind a desk at Snacky Bay Prime Mayonnaise ("What is it you do there?") to fame and fortune on stage. 

Yeah, not really. More like open mic night at the comedy club that just opened in the basement of your office building. The one no-one even knows is there yet. So before you even get to perform, how's about going out and doing some unpaid promo? And while you're at it, see if you can come up with some material. It's not like you know any jokes, now, is it?

That's the plot. It's also the gameplay. Except, just like in Disco Elysium, one thing tends to lead to another to the point where it's hard to remember what the point even was. 

My favorite part was running letters between a five-year old child and her estranged father. I found him hiding in a mailbox. Got a good bit out of that one. Then there was the Awkwardness Scale. Some recognition laughs there. The food war in my fridge was spectacular but I ended up not using it. I can try it out next time. I'm going to need new material.

The demo, prologue, free chapter, call it what you will, took me about two hours to finish. It has a start, a middle and an end. It works as a short standalone but in it you can also see the shape of the game to come.

Even though I finished what I set out to do there seemed to be a lot of loose ends left untied. You only need three jokes to get up on stage. I had four and I could have had several more. I still had unfinished quests left over (yes, they do call them quests) and most quests seem to reward ideas for jokes. I'm guessing there were several side-stories I didn't get to see so there's some replayability.

I'd want to see them, too. The writing is good. I wouldn't call it great but then I think I'm picky. I wouldn't call Disco Elysium's writing "great" either. Another thing the two games share is a predeliction for academic theorizing. I like it but I can see how it wouldn't be to everyone's taste.

The only time I thought the writing fell down was with the on-stage routine routines themselves. My bits went over with the audience but they sure wouldn't have made me laugh. I appreciate comedy is a matter of taste, something the game goes out of its way to emphasize, but I couldn't see why anyone would find some of Clam Man's observational asides amusing. At times, I thought he sounded more like a sociology professor than a stand-up comedian.

The visuals are strong. Maybe too strong. It took me quite a while to warm to them. I did in the end but I have to say that anthropomorphized crustaceans are always going to be something of a hard shell. I mean sell. 

While the world and the characters look nothing whatsoever like anything in Disco Elysium, the UI, specifically the communication interface, is incredibly reminiscent. It's hard to say just why text works but this really does. It's a positive joy to read and interact with.

As for the music, what there is of it is good, but someone really needs to write more. Two hours listening to what amounts to a pastiche of a few bars of the guitar figure from Pale Blue Eyes is a little much, even for a Velvets nut like me.

Minor quibbles aside, Clam Man 2: Open Mic is good. Possibly very good although I'd reserve judgment on just how stressful it might be. I did find some of the dice rolls nerve-wracking and the final on-stage performance, which the full game will have you repeating night after night with an entirely new routine each time, could end up being nightmare fuel.

If you can hack the pressure, I'd strongly recommend anyone who played and enjoyed Disco Elysium to check it out and it would be ideal for anyone who considered trying DE but wasn't sure they wanted to pay the entrance fee. Also anyone who likes fish and jokes, although not jokes about fish, of which there are mercifully few.

If you want those, you're going to have to go some plaice else. 

Yeah, that doesn't work. 

Edna? Wanna come workshop it with me?