Midsection

We play a lot of games here at Pixel Die. Most of them don’t get a full review. This lack of attention can be due to a variety of reasons: not finishing it, insufficient perspective to form an opinion, lack of anything interesting to say, the works. But the worst reason of all is when a game is just…mid. Those are reliably the most difficult games to write about, the ones that leave us with little more feedback than a shrug, the games that we forget we even played until we check our notes at the end of the year. The games featured here are, undeniably, five of the games of all time.

Kyle: Take the look and feel of Condemned: Criminal Origins and make it a low-poly fanfiction in the deep-seeded underbelly of Hell City, USA.  A rabid outbreak of a new drug infestation labeled “Pig” is swarming the poverty stricken and homeless masses within the city and it’s up to FBI Crime Scene Photographer Thomas Greene to find the clues to the outbreak and find the origins of the serial killer, “Der Kannibale.”

The washed-out low poly aesthetic of the world does make for an enjoyable look of the city and its inhabitants, but the combat is weightless and unrewarding, the audio is flat with steadily obnoxious pulsating background music, and the storyline is about 30 minutes long if you’re generous with your step count.  It’s a neat project that would’ve really done better if it leaned more into the storyline and the crime scene investigations, but with the weak combat taking up the majority of your time, the road traveled is not gonna be a super enjoyable one.

***Review copy provided by developer.

Demetri: It’s 2019. I pick up a copy of Godsforge and am impressed by its singular art style. I introduce it to my friends. We find it underwhelming. I write it up.

It’s 2024. I receive a copy of Godsforge and am impressed by its singular art style. I introduce it to my friends. We find it underwhelming. I write it up.

To be fair to Atlas Games, it takes an enviable amount of confidence to send a review copy with expansions to a writer that called the prior edition of their game mediocre. I respect that gumption immensely, and wish I could say that that confidence feels fully warranted, but despite introducing it to (mostly) different folks with no preconceptions it still failed to hit home with anyone.

The core system is the cause. It’s just too slight to carry its own weight, with triggers and timings and text aplenty but so little for actual choices. Your roll will almost always be able to do exactly what you want, if not very close, so it just comes down to which cards you’ve managed to draw and whether they have any synergy with your priors. It’s the same “what if Yahtzee rolls, but more” approach that we’ve seen so many times, and like many of those games (King of New York, Fantahzee, and especially Dice Throne) it dilutes the excitement of dice chucking by flattening the payoffs without adding enough spice elsewhere to compensate.

To their credit, the new expansions do make notable improvements. Both decks are playable without including the core cards and you absolutely should, though this is mainly because their new mechanics would be diluted by the core’s duller additions. These give you more to do with veilstones, a resource that’s otherwise underutilized in the base, as well as a neat set of initial power cards that start your game off with a unique ability. They aren’t mindblowing, but they are helpful. Unfortunately they still don’t do much to diminish the reliance on drawing from the common deck and praying for compatibility.

My recommendation? Play Atlas’ excellent Dice Miner instead. We’ve been slamming games of that out for the last several months at our kitchen table, game night, and wherever else we can fit the lil mountain stand. It understands how to present a dice game that’s a bit more than just a dice game, meanwhile Godsforge’s flame is comparatively dim.

***Review copy provided by publisher.

Kyle: I don’t like that I have to write this, but ever since we talked about Ravenswatch last May each update has made the game progressively worse.  Increased crashes, ho-hum new characters, and the weird enigma of adding content but lacking replayability has doomed us to only trying a new run once a character comes out, with no motivation to get continuous runs in like when we initially started.  There’s still time for the game to make a turnaround and make us believers again when Ravenswatch 1.0’s in Q3 2024, but it’ll need a lot of help to get there.

Demetri: Of all the games featured here, this one stings the most. I want to believe, really I do, but I cannot recommend this in its current state despite it being so damn promising when it first dropped. Technical issues aside, it’s almost as if every gameplay change was made for the hardest of hardcore players only, and as a result it’s choked the life (and build variety) out of the game. At least Geppetto is fun?

Demetri: Let me be transparent with y’all: I could not finish my helping of Knuckle Sandwich. Not because it was challenging, or uncomfortable, or anything like that. I stopped for two reasons: it gave up on its own premise, and its new premise was putting me to sleep.

Spoilers? I guess? Don’t read the next paragraph if you’re curious about this one unless you want a reason to not be.

So the demo for KS sees your character moving to a town and failing to get any kind of job. You eventually stumble into a shitty burger joint, take the trash out, and in a sudden self-defense situation you end up stabbing a man to death. Your boss insists on covering for you by turning the body into burgers, which are so delicious his soul nearly leaves his body. He craves more man meat. Bam! End of demo. It’s an incredible premise and I could not wait until this came out so I could see where it was going.

Turns out it goes nowhere. It legitimately felt like some kind of bait and switch, as if the writer totally lost interest in the concept and decided to just make an Earthbound tribute from that point forward despite, you know, the murders and the cannibalism. You quickly end up on a typical dungeon tour with a cast of buddies and combat that resembles a cross between Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga and Undertale. The battle system starts out promising, but fights take absolutely ages and get incredibly monotonous. To the game’s credit you can turn the fights off, but…what? Why? Why is it like this? Why is this game so damn boring, both to play and to read? Combine that with semi-frequent crashes and I just couldn’t take it anymore.

I dropped the game after 7 hours, but had to know A) how far I’d gotten and B) if it ever did anything with its plot that tied back to the initial hook the game was sold on. The answers to those questions were about ⅔, and hahaha fuck no. I do not regret my decision one bit.

Kyle: Now that the dust has settled and millions upon millions of people have thrown money at the supposed Pokemon killer: it’s safe to call Palworld mid, right?  Because it was.  When you have a game that’s whole shtick are these new pals and the guns that were prominently displayed in every trailer and come to find out when you launch the game that Palworld is just a softer more user friendly rendition of the “Early Access-Open World-Survival-Crafting-etc” template that plagues the PC world.  You don’t get to enjoy proper weaponry within the game until some 20-25hrs into it and by then you’ve seen all the game is gonna offer you as your only task is to MIN-MAX how to get XP as fast as possible to unlock the things you saw in the trailer and by then I was already burnt out on the experience.

Also, why…are we here in this world?  Where’s the plot?  Who are these dungeon bosses?  Why are we fighting them?  This is the give and take of Early Access but man I absolutely did play 31 hours of this game to only learn that making ammo takes forever and Pal combat is butt.  I’ll be back when it’s 1.0 I guess.

Demetri: Yeeeeeeeeeah, look. I liked Palworld more than expected, especially considering my general distaste for anything with survival or crafting in its Steam tags, but above average is only that. My enjoyment of the Pals and their ridiculous behavioral problems doesn’t make the empty world any more lively and the constant resource treadmill is as much a drag here as it is in every other game like this. I love Dumud more than is reasonable, but the game itself doesn’t have so much going for it that you can’t wait for more updates to iron out its creases.