Industria Review

Industria by developer Bleakmill and publisher Headup Games—Sony PlayStation 5 review written by Pierre-Yves with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes. 

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November 9, 1989 is known for a world changing event, the fall of the Berlin Wall. But what if history for two people went another route and they weren't there for it? What if a science experiment went wrong and they would never see this world again? Starting on the evening of November 9, 1989, life would change for Nora as she finds herself in a world not her own looking for her Walter.

Industria by Bleakmill and Headup Games is an adventure based first person "shooter" in a world similar to our own, yet more steampunk looking in its technology. Having seemingly lost control of ATLAS, a networked computer, Walter calls Nora, waking her up from her nap on the couch, and tells her to stay far enough away from their lab for her own safety. Obviously ignoring this warning as Walter is both her work and life partner, she rushes off and the adventure begins.

Finding yourself in this new world through the eyes of Nora, there's a reason I put shooter in quotations. Do you have access to guns? Yes, a pistol, submachine gun, rifle with a scope and a shotgun. Are they fundamentally important to the overall gameplay? Not really. They'll surely help along the adventure but your axe will do most of the talking as it can break down boards blocking your way as well as taking out the machines that are after you if you make enough noise.

Industria is really more about the adventure and the light puzzles that stand between Nora and her journey to find Walter in this parallel world. It's the journey of finding out a little more of what happened here once ATLAS, the same one(?) has apparently taken over. It’s about learning more from seemingly the only other human, a person named Brent, on the other side of a radio as Nora the first human he's talked to in who knows how long. Finally, it's a journey of not knowing if it'll have a happy ending or not as this world is quiet and empty short of the noise that the machines make once they realize there's a human present.

This was perhaps my biggest draw to Industria, the thickness of the silence and never knowing if you’re alone, or not. Designed in a “classic” sense, the world has detail but feels like an older style experience with the direction of the visuals. This isn’t a bad thing at all as it helps to bring all of the elements together such as the year that Industria is based in as well as the robot models that you’ll see over the course of the journey. From that perspective, it works rather well while trying to find Nora’s way forward through closed gates and blocked off passages.

To open up these passages there are some small events that’ll need to be handled like mixing up a rust remover, finding and throwing matches to light the flame of a furnace and finding wheels to open doors to move forward. Once again throwing the word shooter into quotations, most of these puzzles will be tackled at your own pace short of perhaps one or two. These others will require either a bit of running and gunning or just some creative moving around to not get swarmed and save your ammo for another rainy day. This would be the other element that I truly appreciated with Industria, it doesn’t fall into the trap of padding things out in order to make them last longer. It sets out to do what it's meant to and then closes the curtain with both questions answered, and questions left unsolved.

Where Nora’s adventure in Industria needed a bit of love and care though is in the control schemes. There are options available like being able to adjust the sensitivity, toggle your iron sights on or off and more such as toggling your crouching. This said, the default control scheme is tough to use and for me required a fair amount of tweaking to get it right. I switched things around like which button to use to run, which was your flashlight and which one was for crouching as for some reason, there’s no option to toggle your run. This could make things awkward when trying to press and hold L3 while reaching for shoulder buttons.

Finally, the only area of Industria that I would perhaps have a complaint in is within the checkpoints and the save points. Playing on normal will grant an autosave that is convenient to have especially if you missed a jump and are presented with the game over screen. There are also “newer” Resident Evil like typewriters kicking around to manually save your game which is the only way if you’re playing on the harder difficulty.

While these above elements work decently enough, the world that is restored is not the one you left, but the world in its default state meaning if you picked things up, you have to do it again. Managed to get one area clear of robots to take care of a switch and then died? You have to do both again. With how short the adventure is, it’s not the end of the world, but, when you don’t know that’s the case? You’re left wondering what you could possibly be missing.

Summary

Overall though, Bleakmill and Headup Games’ Industria is a decent adventure through a parallel world to our own. With a bit of discovery to find out what happened and quiet and atmospherically heavy locations to explore, while a short adventure it was one that I looked forward to going through a second time to find certain smaller elements that were missed the first time around while playing on a harder difficulty.

Score: 7.75 / 10

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Cardaclysm: Shards of the Four - XB1 Review

Cardaclysm: Shards of the Four by developer Elder Games and publisher Headup Games—Microsoft Xbox One review written by Nick Herber with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

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Cardaclysm: Shards of the Four is an interesting mixture of roguelike, deck builder and turn-based RPG. I am a huge fan of collectible card games, which this at its heart, but balance issues and a less-than-optimized transition to consoles hurts the overall package.

The game starts off simply enough, with your wizard getting in way over his head and summoning a skeletal Wretched that is way more than he can handle. What follows is a series of procedurally generated dungeons where you battle monsters and pick up items to try and increase your ability to eventually stand your ground and deal with the Wretched.

There is a bit of a grind built into the need to get the cards you want, which is heavily based on luck and happenstance. There’s no experience point earning, no levels to be gained, no new skills for your character. He can acquire pieces of gear that might give certain types of creatures bonuses or in some cases, putting together sets of gear give even better perks to your creatures, but he doesn’t actually impact the combat himself.

The cards represent creatures and spells – pretty familiar territory for anyone who has played a collectible card game. When combat occurs, your opponent starts with creatures already in play, and you need to get yours down next. If a single creature ‘breaks through’ and hits your wizard – you die. Death is not terribly punitive, thankfully. You restart the level, sometimes with fewer cards in your library (but I never had them pulled from my active deck). As you play the stage, instead of getting one card from a victory, you now get two – a new card and one of yours back – until your library is restored. As far as roguelikes go, it’s not too rough.

Where I do find myself getting annoyed is how the cards have two sets of resources. There really should just be one. You have golden runes which are the ‘cost’ of spells and creatures, and really – that should have been the only resource. The other are spirit orbs, which after about seven hours of play and two of the four bosses later I only had nine of. Creature and spell cards come in three levels. You can merge duplicate cards to level them up. Top level cards have a higher cost in both golden runes and spell orbs. But when you have 120 golden runes versus eight or nine spell orbs, it forces you to use weaker creatures or spells, but spells don’t do much to protect your wizard and weaker level one creatures are easy fodder later in the game. So you may only get to cast three or four creatures who are higher level before your orbs are spent and you can’t do anything else to protect yourself. I got very frustrated with my inability to continue growing creatures because it was too cost prohibitive on the orb side and actually make me second guess leveling up my creatures.

The randomized nature of the levels makes things a bit dicey as well. You just never quite know what is going to drop, whether it’s gear or golden runes or enemy placement. Sometimes you can cruise right through a level. Sometimes there is a lot of weird backtracking. One of the more interesting aspects to how levels play out, is once you best all of the preset enemies on a stage, the Wretched (or after you beat him, one of the other Big Bads) will then chase you through the stage, forcing you to either face them down (not recommended until your deck has grown mightily) or grabbing the key that opens the door to the portal out of the stage.

Between stages, you have a pub where you can get quests, have some trades, things of that nature. It’s a solid if unspectacular little hub that also highlights one of my biggest issues with Cardaclysm: Shards of the Four: the controls. It is quite clear that this game was optimized for point-and-click interface. Every time a trade is proposed, it starts on ‘accept’. It really should start on decline, because while I get that these trades are randomized, they are usually absolutely terrible. No, I will not give you my max level dragon for a first level goblin. Oh wait, I just did, because it defaulted to accept and I thought I pressed over (I did) to select decline before hitting the button and the trade was accepted.

In general, these controls are just finicky. Clicking on enemies in the battlefield does not always work. The cursor sometimes just is hard to see / almost invisible. Sometimes playing the card you want from your hand doesn’t work. This wasn’t a thing that happened once or twice. Dozens of times I just had the starting hand of cards that triggered commands to get ‘stuck’. It would not let me play a creature – clicking the button (repeatedly) would only have the info box come up over the top of the card but it would not play it on the field. At least not until I played the spell card in my hand, whether I was planning to play it or not. It’s just not a clean interface and really hurts the momentum of gameplay. Even moving around the stage is a little awkward at times, given its isometric view. Most of the time, it’s fine as the only time there is a sense of urgency is when one of the bosses is in hot pursuit, but during these chase scenes? It’s rather annoying to get hung up on a piece of scenery. It’s still not as big of a concern as the lack of optimization during combat.

Another mild quibble I have with the game’s various combat modifiers (frostbite, poison, etc) is that things just ‘happen’. Maybe a text box to explain what is taking place in combat would have been too spammy, but there were definitely times (especially earlier in the game before I had found my footing) that combat was resolving a bunch of effects and I had no idea what had just transpired.

Summary

For me, Cardaclysm: Shards of the Four is a mixed bag with a ton of potential, but too many small issues that are impossible to completely overlook. I really liked the card evolution and deck building systems, I appreciated the quests, equipment and randomized nature of the stages, and the turn-based combat is generally satisfying. I just don’t like the difficulty spikes that are largely due to the uneven resource requirements and the rough control optimization. I have a feeling this would play better on PC with a mouse and a keyboard, but appreciate seeing games like this make their way to consoles, where I tend to play more. A bit of UI / control cleanup and better balance of resources would make Cardaclysm: Shards of the Four a much better overall title that is still worth a look – but be ready for a bit of frustration.

Score: 5.5 / 10

 

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Pumpkin Jack - PC Review

Pumpkin Jack by developer Nicolas Meyssonnier and publishers Headup, Beep Japan—PC (Steam) review written by Susan N with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

Pumpkin Jack is a Halloween inspired 3D platformer that amuses its players with hilarity and simplicity. This is no Spelunky in difficulty so don't expect it to be a rough experience. It also has a unique feature that I enjoyed, so let's jump into it!

Gameplay

At the beginning of the game we learn that the Devil is bored with peace and happiness, so he unleashes a curse on the lands. But the humans find a wizard to thwart the devils' plans. Jack is sent by the devil to get rid of the wizard. In the meantime, we get to cause all types of mayhem by destroying crates and corn husks which also drops healing orbs. In some cases, lanterns will cause a fire that we are not immune to!

We have a special ability that is similar to a magic missile from Dungeons & Dragons. It is useful for bringing down drawbridges and hitting ranged creatures. But the primary weapons are a shovel, a sword, and a scythe!

Players are introduced to characters that make me appreciate the writers of Pumpkin Jack. When you meet one of them, he says to you, "I'm a salesman." Jack retorts, "Well now I just want to kill you anyway." This interaction had me in hysterics because - well - evil!

There are many other brilliant moments throughout the game that contribute to its overall charm. After every death, the game keeps a counter! Twitch streamers can rejoice knowing that they don't have to set up a manual counter. *cackles*

Another unique feature of Pumpkin Jack is the ability to take off your head to participate in a couple of mini-games. I'm not even joking! The pumpkin head has plantlike legs to move around and it's hilarious. It adds a different element to the platforming genre and I can't tell you how entertaining it is. I loved every minute of this. Besides, how could you not love this head? (See below.)

Collectibles

There are two types of collectibles in the game.

Crow Skulls which are used to purchase 'skins'. I put that in quotes is that when players get skins, they are buying literal skins. Talk about keeping a creepy aesthetic!

Gramophones which shows a fun cutscene of Jack dancing! Considering the idea behind this game, it fits and I'm here for it. Trust me, this is worth playing!

Other Points

If there is anything to criticize about Pumpkin Jack, it's that water is continuously seen as bad in video games - especially in platformers - and I'm tired of it. Honestly. Water is not a bad thing and I rarely see them not being pools of death! But the real issue with it is that there were multiple times when I fell off a platform that landed me UNDER the water. Yet for some reason, I was still alive? I then jumped out of it so that I could continue the level but instead, I died because of the surface. Huh? This occurred a couple of times and I think that it needs to be fixed.

Graphics and UI

I have to say that part of the appeal of Pumpkin Jack is graphical aesthetics. I do enjoy the art style of the game which includes the hand-drawn pictures, level design, and atmospheric additions. The cornstalks and the cauldrons are nice touches. I also loved the evil wizard, a conniving witch, and a mummy wrapped skeleton as characters.

That said, I was elated when I discovered a few options included in Pumpkin Jack. For one thing, it has camera sensitivity options that help players like me who are finicky about such things.

Another element that I'm thankful for is the ability to choose which type of gamepad you are playing with! It is very uncommon to find a controller focused game that displays either the PlayStation buttons OR the Xbox buttons without defaulting to one type. As a person that grew up with computers, not consoles, I appreciate this feature.

In terms of the user experience, I found Pumpkin Jack to be quite well optimized. The camera was quite smooth and I didn't find any places where there were graphics glitches, which is good. There didn't appear to be any places to sneak off the map area either, which is a rarity.

Audio and Music

The music in Pumpkin Jack is something I want to focus on because I adore the compositions. During different sections like the horse racing or the trips on railway tracks, the music featured was a neat blend of synthesized sounds and classical music.

The official soundtrack was composed by Yohan Jager who lives in Montreal, Quebec. He combined the distinct sounds of church bells, synthesized drums, and deep tones in a few of the compositions to achieve the evil vibe of the game. In other pieces, he uses something that sounds like a dogs' squeaky toy. And if that doesn't explain it well, I don't know what does.

However, what I love about the music he created is that keen listeners can hear its classical influences. Notable inspirations are the William Tell Overture by Gioachino Rossini and Flight of the Bumblebee by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Listen to the creepy version of Willian Tell Overture here:

Check out Yohan Jagers Social Media here:

• Website: https://www.yohanjager.com

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/edgarlerouge

• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/60vevdDdMEBmpeONqaWBLs

• Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/edgarlerouge

• Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/ca/album/pumpkin-jack-original-game-soundtrack/1535200378?l=fr

Pumpkin Jack Thought

Pumpkin Jack is a fantastic experience for a few hours of gameplay. It's witty and caused me to laugh at multiple points. The game has brilliantly composed music and excellent audio quality. Its graphics are spectacular considering the game was developed by one person. This is especially important because I did not find any graphics glitches or ways to cheat my way into places.

No game is truly perfect, as is the case with Pumpkin Jack. At one point, I was platforming away and ended up missing a jump. I fell into the water and it didn't kill me. Imagine my surprise when I tried to hop up, to instantly die. This might have been a glitch but there were a couple of points where this happened during my playthrough.

Summary

Overall, Pumpkin Jack is a hilarious platforming experience that had me smiling from ear to ear. It absorbed a few hours of time and I loved taking my head off for a bit (literally). This is a game that will amuse fans of the genre. As such, I give Pumpkin Jack a 9 out of 10!

Score: 9 / 10

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Vambrace: Cold Soul - PC Review

Vambrace: Cold Soul is one of those titles that seems harmless enough until you've finished the tutorial. Easy to get into, it doesn't take long before the cold wintery fangs sink into your warm flesh draining you of your heat and of your life.

Even before getting my hands on an advanced enough copy, in which after some updates you'll never know the true horrors that we experienced unless the developers release a hard mode patch, there was a lot of comparison to Darkest Dungeon. You move from left to right. It's pretty dark. There's a ton of perma death. And your character abilities rely on your position from front to back. There's a lot that could compared and honestly it's a fair comparison as let's be honest that almost everything recently is compared to Dark Souls in one manner or another. Is it Darkest Dungeon in the northern reaches of the world however? No. It isn't.

Starting off with one of the best nods to Final Fantasy, you learn the ropes with Sarge, Biggs and Wedge. As these three cross a frozen settlement with corpses all around, you're told that because of the uselessness of one that you won't be seeing the ghosts coming your way because they forgot to pack the tool that measures their presence. Following along a path, you are taught to loot and to just generally hope that your party can handle a trap if it so happens to walk right over one as all encounters of this sort are handled automatically with your party's stats versus the difficulty of a trap. Finding your protagonist at the end of their little trip, they head back to their base with you in toe and then things start up for real.

Waking up and being thrown into interrogation, Lyric gives you the player a bit more context as to what she's doing up here while also getting a bit of detail of where she finds herself. Having followed instructions left to her in her father's last will and testament, Lyric traveled the world until she came to this wintery wasteland. After having crossed the snow plains and icy mountains, she must have collapsed which is where the Sarge and her two cohorts found her but one question remained. How?

Surrounded by an incy barrier, people can make it into the city along a very particular path, but there's no way out as any that would touch the barrier or any others put up will instantly die. Telling her interrogator that she simply touched one of outer walls and walked through, it's here where everything falls into place. Wearing a Vambrace that her father left her, she can pass through dangerous magics that allows her an edge against the souls of the dead that plague this place as she sets out with any brave enough to face the cold as you search for a way out.

Basically starting for real at this point, Lyric after setting up shop in the back of the pub can shop for items that will help along the journey, store items that she and the party have found while out and about or hire new party members to help out. While there's no real set rule to how you should set up your party, there should still be a bit of a balance struct if you want to be able to make it both through the various battles of both the living and the dead trying to kill you as well as the various traps and environmental hazards awaiting your party's crossing.

Here's about where things start to truly set the bar for what you can expect. While sharing huge intertwined maps with the likes of Darkest Dungeon in which you can go back and forth, you don't need to worry about things like torches to see or stave off insanity. Instead you need to worry about health and stamina in which if either of these falls to zero, you die. If it's a hired hand, they are dead and you've just lost whatever they were carrying. If it's Lyric however, you are instantly brought back to town with whoever was still alive and whatever items you held in your inventory. You can also if you know things are not going well simply travel back to town and the most that you will lose is your forward progress. There's no penalty for being careful and you'll probably want to take the more careful route more often than not.

Not having a penalty to call it quits and head back was nice but at the same time it made me wonder why at first. You head back to town, you have all of the items that you've accumulated, minus the ones that you've used of course, and then you can make a killing on profits and buy new items for your team to equip. The team itself costs you nothing so where's the catch? What's the downside? There honestly really isn't any, but, and you knew the but was coming, Lyric and others don't level up. You don't get experience for heading out into the wasteland. You simply get more resources that can be used to craft new items or be sold for cash.

There is a maximum load that be carried however, so from that end of things you need to pay a bit of attention as you don't want to have to leave precious loot behind, but at the same time, you want to keep enough on you as there are items or equipment that can only be acquired outside of the town hub for the “right price” which is sometimes a load of materials that you literally just deposited back in your home base's storage. So what do you keep? How much do you keep? It's all up to you depending upon what your actual purpose is when you head out.

Honestly starting off I was more cautious than I ever should have been. Carefully checking space for what I could find, figuring out which route made it easier to pass from one room to the other, and seeing what could be gained from staying often at campfires brought more misery and woe that I can attest to. While staying at a campfire can allow you to explore and check out the various surrounding environments what they hold and keep you warm, it also puts some fairly huge ticks into the “ghost counter” that once passed the threshold will have you battling infinite undead beings often several times per map depending upon how far you had to travel within it. It doesn't stop at the map segment either, it lasts until you leave the area so I hope you're up to the task if you take your time because healing isn't cheap, healers are not the most effective, and healing items add ticks onto the ghost counter when used at a camp.

Battling is done in a turned based fashion in which I swear I never, ever, EVER, went first. So basically after your party took a few hits, you are then free to start hitting back or using abilities in order to impede your enemy. Shouting at them to cause them to freeze in their steps, using fire ammo or hitting a few at a time, each is available as long as your character has the gauge filled for it. Otherwise, standard attacks or defending is as easily done as running away from the battle if a character is way too close to death.

Starting from the front of your group which always goes from left to right, you have your first two melee and then your two ranged characters. Each character type that you can take along for the ride have their own abilities and weapons making them unique additions to your team. The rogue have daggers and flashbangs for distractions, the knight has a shout along with a sword and shield for defense while the dwarf is good with traps and mechanical elements while also sporting a flintlock rifle and incendiary ammo. Side to the more martial classes you have the blood mage who can attack with her draining ability or boost any of your own allies at the cost of their health while the healer can heal very minimal damage to two of your party members or launch a longer over several turns spell.

Now as I mentioned, you don't get any character experience while facing off against your normal random encounters or the spectral horde that will chase you once the gauge reaches its threshold. You, the player, will get plenty as you learn the dos and donts against the various enemies that you encounter as you move forward. Some are seriously not worth the effort and running from battle isn't something to even be ashamed about in this case as let's be honest, you get “nothing” out of it. What your party does get out of it however are items and material for crafting or trading that you won't really be finding within your environment so if the plan is to move forward, battle the least amount as possible in order to keep your party healthy. If you plan on mowing down enemies after enemies in order to accumulate resources? Get the ghost meter to full as fast as possible and then head back to town. Rinse and repeat as many times as necessary until you feel ready to truly push forward.

Now this may sound a bit silly, but something that I truly appreciated is that if you walk left or right, you see the left or the right or your character. You don't just see the same visual but on the other side. If a character has a shield walking one way, then you see it on their other side when walking in the opposing direction. The same is with Lyric in which the Vambrace is quite noticeable when walking in one direction but not the other. So many artists simply “swap” the asset but there are loads of tiny details like these ones that just improve upon the experience as it feels much more natural to look at.

Overall, whether playing on a keyboard or with a controller from the couch, Vambrace: Cold Soul is an adventure worth having. While not being an RPG in the traditional leveling up sense, there's plenty here to enjoy and the experience itself while being dark and snowy is still a very pretty one to look at with its choice of color palette.

Game Information

Platform:
PC
Developer(s):
Devespresso Games
Publisher(s):
Headup
Genre(s):
Adventure
Roguelike
Mode(s):
Single Player
Other Platform(s):
Sony PlayStation 4
Nintendo Switch

Source:
Provided by Publisher

Article by Pierre-Yves

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Meridian: New World - PC Review

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