I love fantasy strategy games. I’ve played piles of them. That includes most of the Age of Wonders series, Master of Magic (the original and the new version), Warlock, Fallen Enchantress, Heroes of Might and Magic 1 through 5, and more. But Dominions outshines those games in multiple ways.
If you’re already someone who plays the Dominions games, you’ll have heard about Dominions 6 and you’ll (probably) already have it—or you’re waiting for the right moment to buy it. I’m more interested in those of you who haven’t played Dominions.
The last time I wrote at length about a Dominions game was a decade ago (damn), for Dominions 3. I said around then that I feared falling into the game, feared losing myself in its intricacies. That fear was appropriate. But I also wrote about the lure of a game that offered such stories—can my demon monkey kingdom raise enough hordes of undead and bleed the land dry fast enough to destroy the other would-be godly tyrants?—and I was right about that too. Dominions 6 isn’t accessible in the same way that I’d want if I were introducing novices to strategy games, but if you’re willing to dig into this game it will scratch itches that other games could never satisfy.
Check out a game that will let you turn your warriors’ skin to tree bark, throw fireballs, hunt the minds of enemy mages, accelerate time so that the whole world withers and dies, and steal the sun.
This is pulled from a conversation I had recently about optional rules.
Rules combine to make systems, and systems create flavor by shaping the permissible and supported space of a game. Any skillful or willful group of players (the storyteller is a player too) can play outside the rules of the game system they’re using—that’s normal!—but that play isn’t supported by the system, and it isn’t part of the flavor the system creates.
Vast is admirably ambitious. It’s designed for up to five interlocking, competing, asymmetrical roles that all fit together beautifully to make this boardgame a nail-biting, neck-and-neck race toward victory. With a few important caveats, each player has their own rules reference sheet for their role, encompassing everything they could need to know in order to play the game. And with another few important caveats, everything can flow smoothly as each player chases their own victory conditions, pushing the game onward towards a thrilling conclusion.
I’m shocked I haven’t raved about Heroes of Hammerwatch (HoH) on this blog before now. I thought I had. Sorry CrackShell, you deserved enthusiastic praise for your previous work. Apparently I only shared that with some friends.
Hammerwatch 2 is the high quality lo-fi alternative to Diablo 4 coming out August 15th, and there’s a free demo on Steam right now. I’ve been having a blast playing that demo: if you want a dungeon-delving ARPG hack-and-slash, try this. It’s a hell of a lot cheaper than $70.
What the hell is going on when playing feels like suffering?
Being bad at a game often feels bad to me. That’s most true when I think I *should* be competent, or when I’m playing with my close peers, people I feel competitive with. Being bad at a game feels terrible when I’m emotionally attached to a specific outcome, especially if I think I’m failing my team.
Yesterday I played my first match of Hobgoblin. It was a delight, and an epiphany.
I’ve wanted something like this for years. I was in middle school when I got a copy of the core rulebook for Warhammer Fantasy. I read through that book cover to cover, and then I read it again. I bought a faction’s army book (for the Skaven) with all their special rules and abilities, and read through that over and over too. I bought my first box of models. I yearned to play.
This might be true of art in general, but it’s video game graphics that keep reminding me of it. Chasing realism is an expensive luxury. Unless realism is a core part of whatever you’re trying to make, it’s probably not worth fixating on it. That’s because…
TUNIC is good. It’s great. It has a goofy, simple name that has encouraged Google to serve me both articles about the game and articles of women’s clothing, and it’s drawn me in magnetically over the past two weeks. There have been nights where I’ve had to peel myself away from the computer, and gone to sleep still puzzling over how to get past the latest obstacle I’ve found. It’s worth checking out.
This game has never had a name that, to my mind, properly acknowledged its potential. I first saw it teased at PAX East years ago, when it was still called Secret Legend. From what I can tell, the game has grown significantly since then.
And it’s good.
Other people have already made this quip, but they’re on the right track: TUNIC is a Souls-like by way of Zelda nostalgia. But that’s not all. In many ways, TUNIC reminds me of a less bloodthirsty Hyper Light Drifter (HLD) with more puzzles and more Metroidvania-esque exploration. It’s softer aesthetically, with all its gentle shapes and bright colors, and less challenging in its basic fights. But it still rewards—and requires—mastering its combat-mechanics in order to progress. As is traditional, boss fights are designed with the expectation that you’ll die a number of times. You’ll gradually learn the bosses’ patterns and how they change over the course of the battle, and might find sneaky ways to use those patterns against them.
TUNIC starts you off slowly, a classic ”wild Link” waking on a sandy shore. It introduces its mechanics in a dribble, offering you new equipment and consumables in chests hidden throughout the game—some hidden better than others. It even gives you an in-game manual. But TUNIC requires you to collect every manual page you want to read, and (again like HLD) almost all of its in-game text is in an unfamiliar script.
Just enough of the manual is in English that I haven’t needed to translate the script in order to understand how to do things yet. But nearly the entire “Background Story” page is impossible for me to read, along with other big chunks of the manual. So making a translation is on my to-do list; there are enough pages mostly in TUNIC’s script, enough clues and explanations that I can’t read yet, that I think it is worth it.
Frustrating as this might be, it’s part of what sets TUNIC apart from other similar games for me. It has somehow doled out just enough information to keep me feeling hooked and encouraged, and I haven’t yet spent long enough mashing my head against a wall to despair. Better yet, while there are clues hinted at in the manual, there are also secrets the manual carefully doesn’t explain or mention, which only opens up the feelings of possibility even further.
Given what I heard about the game developers giving their early reviewers a Discord channel where they could share questions and hints about what they’d discovered so far, my hope is to find other people who are playing and compare notes with them. Maybe I’ll do that on the official Discord server; while I’d prefer to confer with friends, the community there looks like it’s doing a decent job of not spoiling things for the most part. And that’s good, because I don’t want spoilers! And I don’t want to spoil anything for another player. I might be willing to tell people that yes, there’s an item that will allow you to do something, or that yes, there’re hints pushing me to investigate in another direction… but I want to find the actual discovery for myself. The few hints I saw on the official server reassure me that I’ve barely scratched the game’s surface, even though I’d thought I was pretty far along.
I guess that makes sense. So far, I’ve just kept finding more things hidden around the world of TUNIC. And every time I discover a new tool or technique, I revisit all the old places I’ve already been and hunt for what I might have missed. So far, I’ve missed a lot! But I’ve also uncovered tremendously cool things, and it’s that feeling of discovery that I love so much. The satisfaction of puzzling out how to do something—how to open a door I’d struggled with or how to sneak my way past it—is what feels so rewarding. I don’t want to ruin that for anyone. And if that’s something you enjoy in a game, I have to recommend this to you.
If you’re able to play it, and if you like Zelda-ish games with many deeper puzzles, and don’t mind an occasional tricky boss battle… damn. Try TUNIC.
Hero’s Hour, which I wrote about before, is out now in a full release. The game still feels like the same casual-ish Heroes-lite offering I mentioned before. But with its stability improvements in the release build, I can finally play the game without multiple crashes in one sitting. It turns out that’s enough to change my feelings on the game.
The visuals haven’t changed. The maps still feel a little bland, but there’s significant variation in visual appeal between different biomes and it seems like I was mostly playing on the ugliest possible options last time. The units aren’t as detailed or lush as HoMM 3’s units, but their cute lo-fi pixel art design matches their slightly cartoony movement and attack or death animations. It all gels to match the aesthetic, for the most part, and does a decent job.
The map generation and layout also doesn’t seem to have changed. But as one might expect from procedural generation, its quality varies: sometimes the spacing I complained about previously is an issue, sometimes it isn’t, and mostly it feels right enough. However, I admit that the variation is something I never saw HoMM 3 manage well, and it does help keep things interesting. Hero’s Hour deserves credit for that. It also helps, no doubt, that I’ve changed strategies and picked up an early extra hero or two to cover more ground and to augment and reinforce my main army faster (old HoMM strategies I’d nearly forgotten).
Also, I think I’ve found the ‘deeper strategy’ I’d glimpsed before. It’s not what I’d expected. Hero’s Hour gives every faction unique mechanics, and every hero a unique arrangement of common skills, without (apparently) trying to balance any of them. I generally like games where every faction can do weird cool stuff, and I’m okay with that imbalance. But this means the most reliable path to victory (vs the AI) is to find and exploit combos of skills and faction units, and then hammer that combo relentlessly. Changes in strategy are rarely necessary when facing the AI. Some heroes seem strictly worse than others, whether through weaker or slower-starting combos, but counter-combos are also available sometimes. This creates a messier-than rock-paper-scissors dynamic, which I think could shine in a multiplayer setting. Sadly the game only currently offers multiplayer via hotseat—classic HoMM—and the dev apparently isn’t certain how to implement other multiplayer options.
What’s my final take?
In context, this game is extremely impressive. It’s predominantly one person’s project, with help from a few other contractors. Now that it’s more stable, I’m able to enjoy the HoMM-esque feel without interruption. As I said above, it turns out that’s enough to let me enjoy the HoMM homage without fixating on the minor shortcomings. I can just relax and have fun.
And your mileage may vary! Some folks like the game’s aesthetic more than I do, including the map’s visuals. Plus, there are enough weird interactions between different units and their abilities that the game can totally surprise me; that’s both good and bad, but it leaves enough intriguing wrinkles to draw and hold my interest for a bit. And at least in Hero’s Hour I can puzzle through why what was supposedly an easy fight was actually hard. This game does a far better job explaining unit and hero abilities than HoMM 3 did, where most unit abilities were opaque and the path to victory was generally predictable.
I’ve seen precious few games recreate the HoMM experience any time recently (though I’m still watching Songs of Conquest) and if you want to experience HoMM again, this is one of the few options that can deliver that. Playing Hero’s Hour is fun. The game knows what it’s doing. Plus, there’s a free demo, which is a big plus.
No review for the moment, just an update. I’ve got Sal & Gabi Break the Universe right now, and am looking forward to getting my hands on In The Red soon (which for some reason wasn’t available as an ebook through Libby). My recent book-sprint has slowed down again, just waiting for it to pick back up again. Might have something to do with watching more shows than I usually allow myself to, or giving myself permission to watch them less attentively than I usually try to.
Meanwhile, I’ve been reading Murderbot to my partner and they’ve been loving it. I love rereading it too, though I’d forgotten how difficult some of it is for reading aloud. It turns out that while I think Martha Wells was right to bury some conversations in paragraphs the way that she did, simply because that’s how they fit in Murderbot’s stream of consciousness, it’s a lot harder to read those buried lines aloud without breaking up my reading to clarify what Murderbot says versus what it thinks. This could be easier, if I had thought to come up with a distinct voice for Murderbot’s speech as opposed to its thoughts, but alas I did not.
Besides, that would be odd, right? It’s all Murderbot. It should sound more similar than different.
It’s not all bad though. I did luck into some hilariously good voices by accident, especially while reading ART’s lines.
I’m not sure what next week is going to look like, or whether I’ll be able to post much; I’ve been selected for jury duty, and might be otherwise occupied.
Oh, and on the video game front, following up the Hero’s Hourpost from two weeks back… there’s another game that also obviously wants to follow the path of the old Heroes of Might and Magic games: Songs of Conquest. It’s not available yet, though early access is supposed to start in March. From the little I’ve seen so far, it looks like they’ve focused a larger team with more resources on making fewer factions in a game with more visual polish and greater similarity to HoMM’s old combat mechanics. Hopefully it is also more stable.
Fistful of Wits 