Dungeon Souls, The Most Fun You'll Have Dying...Repeatedly

Nintendo started with Mario, Sega had Sonic, Sony burst onto the scene with Crash Bandicoot; each huge developer started with one game, one character that they would found empires with. Every young game developer starts with a single game; too many of them fall through the cracks or fail to get off the ground. Every developer started as an indie developer. Will Mike Studios, the creator of Dungeon Souls, soar to the heights of Nintendo or Sony? They just might. Is Dungeon Souls the game they will ride to such great heights? It’s a hell of a start.

I was pleasantly surprised with Dungeon Souls, brought to us by Mike Studios and Black Shell Media. It’s an 8-bit hack n slash dungeon crawler, with a premise that’s beyond simple; you control one of three fallen heroes searching for a mysterious orb that will revive them (and maybe a few buddies). Still following? Great, that’s it. The game gives you a choice from one of three tried and true character classes; the healthy and powerful Berserker, the accurate Archer who can pepper many targets, or the fast and backstabby Thief. You’re also able to unlock four other classes by defeating enemies, finding a certain item, or beating the bosses thrown your way…and collecting the fabled mysterious orb, of course.

Standing in your way to freedom is the Gate Keeper, who keeps the gates of the afterlife closed…most of the time. He throws up obstacles in each of the twelve floors; making you activate summoning circles that, you guessed it, summon beasties to destroy before moving on. Every three levels, you have to fight a boss hell bent on preventing your revival. Also worth noting is that the Gate Keeper shows up to suck the life (or whatever keeps you going) from your body if you hang around one stage too long.

Sounds easy enough, right? Wrong. Dead wrong (excuse the pun). The challenge in making great games, or anything really, is balancing difficulty with fun. This seemingly innocent little game is hard, brutally hard. It doesn’t look like it should be, but that isn’t stopping it from eviscerating me more often than I’d like to admit. You do level up your stats and skills and can collect any number of absurd items, and drink potions of questionable origin. Much like the Duck of Doom though, you really should know better than to pick things up in a dungeon…especially strangely colored potions. These are a few of the things that ‘should’ help you out in your quest back to the land of the living.

Dungeon Souls won’t revolutionize the face of gaming or end racial problems or stop world hunger, I’d love seeing a single entity that could do even one of those things, but this will give you a damn fun game to play. It’s one of the more fun half hours you’ll spend dying. It won’t take hours to dominate this game, but I bet even Lazarus would have liked some help on his trip back to life. The best part so far? The dev team; everyone over at Mike Studios actually listens to the Steam community and they work constantly to satisfy each of our fickle little desires, in relation to Dungeon Souls, at least.

I can’t wait to play the next game from Mike Studios and Black Shell Media.

Check it out. Yesterday.

The Binding of Isaac shows us just how fun a little light-hearted sacrilege can be

This is an adorably strange little game. It’s more than a little gross and more than a little sacrilegious and more than a little juvenile and more than very entertaining. The first one, The Binding of Isaac, came out in 2011 via Steam on PC. This one is not so much a sequel, as much as well, a rebirth. The plot hasn’t changed, nor has the gameplay, but neither of these things has really needed to change. They were great in the original, and just as entertaining in the Rebirth. There are a few more characters, controller support, plenty of new items in Rebirth, and they included controller support, all of which make the game more fun to play. The new one was also not created using the Flash engine, and has the ability to stop and save mid-game…which is nice.

The plot of the game is largely inspired by the biblical story of the same name. Isaac and his mother live a normal quiet life in suburbia; Isaac playing with toys and drawing pictures while his mother neglects him and instead chooses to watch Christian broadcasts on TV. Cue a disembodied ‘voice from above’. Isaac’s mother is told that her son has been corrupted with sin and needs saving. Clearly, this is a voice worth trusting, so she took all his toys and games away from him, and even give him a circumcision. The voice booms from above again saying that he must be cut off from all the evil of the world and confess his sins, so she locks him in his room. Finally the voice speaks once more to demand a sacrifice in order to prove her love for it. Isaac overhears this last message and frantically tries to hide, eventually finding a trap door in the floor. He hastily posts the picture he was drawing (the sinful little brat) onto his wall and jumps into the trapdoor, not knowing what he’s jumping into; just knowing that he has to escape his mother’s wrath. To forward thinking, intelligent some people, this sounds bat sh*t insane, and will lead to a game which is just that. This picture becomes the title screen. In the story Biblical version, God asks Abraham to kill is son, Isaac, to show his devotion.

Gameplay-wise Rebirth is a top-down 2D rogue-like dungeon crawler. You (as player) control Isaac or one of ten other unlockable characters navigating through the basement of your quiet suburban house into the dungeons below. Each floor is a randomly generated dungeon in which you must fight monsters ranging from spiders and flies to floating hearts and the Seven Deadly Sins (yup, those bastards) in each room before proceeding to the next. While playing, you can collect three different kinds of hearts to replenish your health, keys to unlock rooms or chests, pocket change to buy a vast array of goodies, and bombs to cause a little explosion that can open ‘secret’ rooms or hurt anyone close to them, including you. Each floor contains an absurd boss, who you must defeat and pillage the body of to continue to the next floor. The first time through, there are six levels which culminate in fighting Mom. The next few times through, you climb into her womb after defeating her and on level eight, you fight her heart. You’ll eventually be able to unlock level nine and fight Satan himself; there may also be something after Satan, who knows?

This game was welcomed with a warm reception almost everywhere, from Steam to Windows to PS4 and PS Vita. I say almost everywhere, because Nintendo was originally going to release it on the 3DS, but eventually backed out, citing ‘questionable religious content’. I’m going to note just how entertaining it is that Playstation saw no problem releasing this on both of its systems, while Nintendo drew backlash and outrage from numerous gaming websites, and led the creator, Edmund McMillen to praise Steam and the freedom it gave to publishers in regards to content.

You’ll also find or buy plenty of items and pills and tarot cards to aid Isaac (wigged or not) in his quest of escaping his murderous mother. ‘How does this newly circumcised, lonely, terrified child fight?’ you may be asking; aside from tossing bombs and using a few items, he cries. That’s right, he cries at scores and scores of his worst nightmares and denizens of hell using the cleansing, cathartic powers of an innocent child’s tears. Some of these items enhance or alter his tears, making them bloody, poisonous, bigger, fear-inducing, or any other number of upgrades. There are also a couple items that change his tears into spit or laser beams or ‘jets of brimstone’, as the game calls big lasers that have to be charged up. The pills and tarot cards are one-off items and can either do great or terrible or mundane things. The pills are a crapshoot, never giving you the name of them until after you use them and changing the color schemes with each run. The tarot cards on the other hand, do the same thing each time you get them and are usually helpful; teleporting you to a secret room or giving you hearts and other collectibles or allowing you to fly for a room, or turning you into a pretty, glowing unicorn who is invincible for a short time and assaults enemies with the power of being fabulous.

Now, the important stuff; is the game fun? What’s the soundtrack like? Will you tell me about replayability? What other games could this be compared to? How long a game is this? Why would you play such a sacrilegious game? Are you a terrorist?

You’re damn right the game is fun, I got into the first one and found it adorably disturbing. This one is all that and more, it’s easy to play and hard to master, it’ll make you laugh if you don’t take things too seriously. The soundtrack is overall pretty good. While I tend to have Netflix on in the background while playing (and it’s caused more than a few deaths), on the few times I have listened to the soundtrack, I’ve enjoyed it, and the sound effects do add quite a bit to the game. On occasion, mom’s hand drops down from above to snatch you from the room you’re in, making you restart that room. When that happens, she utters a scream a second before you see the hand, so you can GTFO if you try.

 By itself, one run of this game can take a half hour, tops. Part of the fun comes from replaying it as the newly unlocked wigs…err characters. This game also features a boss rush mode, where you have to fight each boss the game has to offer and survive. There is also a challenge mode where you’re up against the first six levels of the game under different conditions. ‘When Life Hands You Lemons’ is a challenge based solely on peeing on things; you’re given a Lemon Party pill, which drops bright yellow creep that damages enemies, a reusable item called Lemon Mishap, which allows you a much smaller version of the pill and can be used very often. This is also in reference to a joke website called lemonparty.org, but please do not go there. You will not like what you see. I promise you. I would play such a sacrilegious game because it’s really fun. It’s also more than a little satirical, and if you can’t laugh at things such as religion, what can you laugh at? I’m not a terrorist; I’m just a dude who appreciates a well-made indie game. Are you? 

More Pam from HR, less asinine side quests.

I love video games, I have for years. Unfortunately, sometimes they don’t make sense, even within themselves. I’ve noticed this phenomenon mostly with RPGs, and sometimes with open world shooters (I’m lookin at you Red Dead Redemption!), but mostly with RPGs. There are times that certain quests, or most quests, don’t make sense within the story arc you’re creating in the game. If I’m on an epic quest to save the world from some form of cataclysm, of course I want to find your lost chickens or murder a bunch of wolves who are just minding their business so you can make a new wolf pelt blanket. Let me put those lofty aspirations on hold, just for you, valued NPC. What’s that? Your friend in the next town wants to give me a ring, but only if I deliver these anthrax-laced letters for him. Sign me up, because you bet your ass I need that shiny finger accessory.

I recently finished Dragon Age: Inquisition (whose last boss was kind of a joke) and enjoyed the game as a whole. One part really took me out of the flow of the story, however. I was playing a female elf and pursuing a romance with Josephine, your liaison to high society. I know…you have comments about my decision to pick a female character or pursuing a lesbian romance, it’s 2015, get 

over it.

You can only make steps towards having sexy times with a character later in the story, where you’re already capable of murdering the bigger baddies in Thedas. One day, I stroll back to my lady love’s room in the castle after choking the life from a particularly brutal dragon only to find out that some dude wants to duel me for Josephine’s hand. I respond in the ‘ye olde fantasy time’ (technical term) version of ‘he ain’t shit, he ain’t never been shit, I’ll see to it that he’s never gonna be shit. I’ll choke the life from him too’. Instead of giving me her blessing to go body this fool, she starts getting all panicked about the chance I’m going to lose.  I just sit back and look at the TV in bafflement. Not only have I spent the last few hours murdering dragons, I single handedly made them extinct on this continent, and you’re worried I’m going to die at the hand of some rich brat who has no business polishing my blade? Come on son. There wasn’t an option for the olde fantasy time version of ‘Bitch, I murder dragons!’, so instead I go with the version of ‘don’t worry baby, I got this’. As it turned out, he’d heard of some of my impressive feats and backed down…you know, the way things such as this should go in video games.

Take Skyrim, another game where you can murder dragons; after you do something impressive, or reprehensible, everyone in every city knows about it. It’s like Skyrim has Pam from HR sending all of the memos on everything you do. That’s how open world games and RPGs should go, when you do something monumental, everyone in the world you’re screwing with should take notice. I’m not saying that you need to make every quest a matter of life or death, but something should change in the world because you found that lost brat or gave some lady a bunch of healing herbs. Living in the world of advanced game making that we do, with every game under the sun having influence meters or some arbitrary morality meter, one would think that if we save the brat, he’ll help us out with something later on or give you something valuable for altering the world  to keep him in it, or if we donate our hard earned (I know, you walk around hitting A, that’s not the point) herbs, that she’d offer us a free inn for the rest of the game, or the people she’d saved will become minions. Something that gives these tiny (in the scope of the game) side quests meaning to the universe you’re interacting with.

Are you ready for a ‘back in my day’ rant? Here one is, get excited! Growing up, I played a lot of RPGs, one of which was Shining Force 2, a great game by any standard. Early in the game, you wander around the grounds of a temple. If you wander to a certain spot, you’ll be treated to the Genesis version of a cutscene of truly awful bird-man parents tossing their fledgling into the air on the balcony of this temple. Sure enough, the little bastard falls and would be a baby bird-shaped splat on the ground were you not standing there with a soft, cushion-y head to fall on. Flash forward to later in the game, where an indeterminate (or determinate, I forget which) amount of time has passed as you’re traversing a mountain road, only to be accosted by a huge birdman wanting to join your army. As it would turn out, this is that little fledgling that you saved from being a bird-pancake so many game years ago. He’s all grown up and wants to thank you for saving him. Another instance of choices (or arbitrarily walking someplace) that make an impact on the world in the game, back before Sega was put on a ventilator.