October Analysis: Crypt of the NecroDancer

          What happens when you combine the elements of a rogue-like and a rhythm game? You get Crypt of the NecroDancer. It’s this unusual, but interesting game where the player must move in time with the tempo of the music. Failure to do so will result in being stuck and vulnerable to attack. The game requires the player to not only move to the beat, but to plan their attacks around traps, walls, and monsters. It’s a difficult game which will require lots of practice to master. But how does it accomplish its dynamics?

           First, the game asks for one rule to be followed: don’t move out of rhythm. If you keep up with the timing, you’ll do fine. The monsters keep in time as well. They also have animations that show when they will move to another space. But there’s more to the game than simply moving around monsters and striking them during the opportune moment; you need to find the exit of the level. Each level acts as a floor of the dungeon. When you find the exit door and beat the Miniboss, the door opens and you can continue. If the song ends before you find the door, you continue anyway. You can also reach lower floors earlier if you find a trapdoor, but they always put you in a room with several monsters that must be slain first. If you’re well equipped, this shouldn’t be an issue. Otherwise, play it safe and find the floor’s exit.

          The game keeps things interesting with its random pickups. Most useful are weapons that offer unique effects such as being able to strike from two panels away instead of one, slicing across tiles adjacent to yours, and the ability to throw the weapon across the room until it hits a wall. The player can also acquire Spells to aid them, Armor to reduce damage, Food to recover Health, and several other items. Most of these objects are found in chests, but can also be acquired from the Merchant. He’s always found in a small room surrounded by gold bricks. He also sings along with the song playing in the level which makes it easier to find him if you get lost.

          As customary to the rogue-like genre, rooms are random. Every floor the layout changes, the monsters spawn in different locations, different items are found, and traps are repositioned. The neat thing about the rooms is the dirt walls that separate areas. The player has a spade that can dig through those walls and potentially lead them to a shortcut. Most of the time I just dig through walls to go to other rooms that have less monsters in them. 

          What the game does differently than other rogue-likes is how they handle perma-death. Players who die are sent back to the beginning, but they keep any permanent upgrades such as Health. If they clear a Zone (the collection of all floors plus the Boss), a new Zone is unlocked and left open permanently. Progress is not saved with individual floors. Dying resets you back to floor 1-1 or 2-1 (for Zone 1 and Zone 2 respectively).

           Progressing through the game unlocks additional characters, all of whom have their own playstyles. The default character Cadence has to move in time with the music. Bard, the other character unlocked at the start, can move whenever he wants, but monsters move right when he moves. It can be fun to mess around with each and discover a playstyle you like.

          The most crucial things one can learn studying this game is how rhythm and music play into a game. Observe how the soundtrack makes you feel at specific moments and how the gameplay gets faster and more intense the further down you go. It’s also a good idea to study the animations. They move slow at first, but as the tempo increases, the monsters move faster. The frames never increase or decrease, but the framerate changes based on how fast or slow the music is playing. And finally, look at what the you the player have to do in order to survive. You have to keep moving to retain your coin multiplier so you can earn lots of Gold to spend at the Merchant. You have to keep in time with the music or risk being immobile briefly. You also have to manage items, slay monsters for Gold, purchase the right items, avoid getting hit, AND find the exit door. It becomes necessary to plan a strategy not around maps, but around what you have, what you can get, and how you get make the best of what you’ve got. It will take lots of practice to get good at something like this.

          That’s all the games I’m analyzing for October. Hopefully you’ll try them out, if possible, and have a Happy Halloween!

October Game Analysis: Momodora: Reverie Under The Moonlight

          Iteration. Inspiration. Polish. I choose these words to describe this game’s history as part of a series. Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight is the fourth entry in a series of games inspired by Cave Story. It’s a great 2D combat platformer that has you fighting enemies with a leaf. A leaf!? I know it sounds asinine, but the main character Kaho fights incredibly well with just a leaf. She’s also got a bow and arrow, but it feels so much more badass to strike your foes down with the edge of a red maple leaf. How does a seemingly fragile object deliver such impact? It may have something to do with the sprite animation or the sound effects, but whatever it is it works fantastically! For this week’s October analysis, I want to look at Momodora 4 (same game, just shorter to type).

          Playing Momodora 4 I immediately felt a sense of nostalgia. I don’t think it was the pixel graphics alone that did this. It was the wonderful feeling of playing something crafted perfectly. How did this game come to be? Through iterative design. The developer built a few games before this one and refined the mechanics with each entry. Over time the games improved until they hit this high point. Could they go any further? Or would it be a reskin of the same old thing? In this case, the series likely will not need another entry. You should not have to make a sequel or a prequel when the previous game does a good job. If you’re making another entry, make it different and unique. More importantly, improve on what worked for the game and get rid of what held it back.

          As I mentioned earlier, Momodora 4 plays like Cave Story, at least in most aspects. There’s no experience bar to power up your weapons, but the artstyle definitely looks like Cave Story and the combat mechanics are very similar. It’s as if the developer played Cave Story, then had some ideas on how to make it better. This is an example of inspiration at work. Anytime you play a game or watch a film or even read a book, you can generate ideas from those works and formulate something out of all of them. 

          This is a well-polished game. Notice the animations: not only are they fluid and smooth, but they also convey personality. Whenever the character Kaho stands still for an extended amount of time, she does an idle animation that shows her yawning. She seems bored that nothing is happening. Another example is when she jumps, tiny leaves fall beneath where she was positioned. It’s the little things that help sell a game on how enjoyable it is. Even the music is memorable. It conveys the perfect mood for every situation. When you enter Karst, it’s very silent and empty to match the loneliness of the abandoned city. However, playing music at the wrong time can ruin a mood. Always know if a soundtrack is needed for a specific scene and what mood it should convey to the player.

          A lot of work went into making this possible. It wasn’t done all at once, not everything fell into place, and it likely wasn’t fully formed when first concepted. Lots of ideas start out small and insignificant. But holding those ideas and looking back on them later can spark a new way to utilize them. Maybe you’ve got a game idea in your head, but you can’t make a game out of it yet. That idea could become a short story to start off with if it’s narratively focused. Perhaps it would make for a decent board game. Play with your ideas and see where they get you. You might stumble upon something you could never have imagined before. That’s how I see Momodora 4, something unexpected and almost impossible to conjure.

October Games Analysis: Fran Bow

          I have to admit something: I DO NOT fare well with horror games. I think it’s the mounting tension of being in a scary place awaiting the creepy monster guy who goes “ah-bloogy woogy woo.” You can just feel it building up so much that your neck hurts, and the anticipation far exceeds the horror itself. But I think the biggest reason I don’t enjoy horror games so much is that most of them rely heavily on jumpscares. Now there are tried and tested ways of executing a jump scare, but overdoing it turns the monsters from terrifying to obnoxious. The worst part is the volume on the sound effects they make tend to be louder than everything else! It’s like watching a movie in the theaters where the dialogue is spoken in near whispers so the audience has to listen closely, then a door explodes or something and somebody yells “WE”RE GETTING’ SHOT AT!” then your ears start to fall off and you have to pick them up off the floor. But enough about what horror games have done wrong; I want to look at what Fran Bow did right.

          Fran Bow is the only point-and-click game I’ve played in the horror genre. In Fran Bow, you play as the ten-year-old titular character as she sits in a bed in a mental hospital for children. She’s been diagnosed with psychosis, likely caused by seeing her parents brutally maimed before her. Fran doesn’t know what is happening and neither do you. All you find out is she needs to find her cat Midnight and her Aunt Grace. To do that, she needs to escape the hospital. This is where the game introduces the point-and-click mechanics. You find out that you can click on things to get items, you can use items on the environment, and you can ever combine items to make new things. Common mechanics for this kind of game, but then you obtain some pills (Duotine) that were locked away in a drawer. You can only get them after you master the basics and once you click the pill bottle icon, you transition into the alternate reality. The first time is always horrifying as the drastic change in scenery strikes you with fear. What the hell are these pills? They’re supposed to make you better, but they just give you hallucinations! But that’s not the weirdest part; the story strays far from reality.

          At the beginning of the game, you’re given information that Fran is quite possibly insane. At first, I believed them. Sure, she did see a spooky demon outside her window the night of her parents’ deaths, but that could have been her imagination. The medicine she’s taking is clearly giving her hallucinations. Yet, some parts of the game are accessible only whilst using the pills. Otherwise, you can’t progress. It convinces the player that maybe she does literally enter another reality when consuming the medicine. Over time, it becomes more easy to buy in to the fact that Fran can see a different world other than the one she inhabits. At one point, she enters a peaceful world that has magical creatures based on nature and insects. Seasons can change at the turn of a clock, everyone is exceptionally well-mannered, and virtually nothing goes wrong. To remind the player that they still aren’t safe, occasionally something dark happens such as seeing some of the demons and listening to their enticing words inviting Fran to take the easy way out and commit suicide. At the end of the game, the player is left with an ambiguous ending. Was Fran truly insane and everything that happened was part of her imagination? Did the events of her imagination then affect the real world and have real world consequences? Or was it all real and all the bad things went away suddenly and inexplicably? I would like to believe everything turned out fine, but the main themes of the game lead me to think otherwise.

          Fran Bow covers themes such as human psychology, mental health (specifically in children), love and loss, suicide, and the duality of mankind. They cover so much that I could not possibly write it all here. It’s some dark and heavy stuff to look at, let alone experience. And yet, we also have positive themes show up such as curiosity, enlightenment, hope, and acceptance. I would say duality is the most prominent theme as it plays out through the entire game. Towards the beginning, Fran’s skeptical of her surroundings, is more likely to do mischievous things, and has no problem being rude to everyone around her. As the game goes on, she becomes more polite and grateful. She learns to be more open to ideas and concepts. Towards the end, she goes back into a negative state of mind being filled with agony and hate. Then at the end of the game, she’s back to being happy.

          This game was amazing to play through. It made me think about things I normally wouldn’t such as how is the healthcare in mental hospitals? Are all patients treated this badly? What happens to someone who’s stuck in a sort of psychotic limbo where everything is real, and yet nothing is real? How would a child react to such vividly disgusting imagery? Fran takes it pretty well. She’s calm and collected seconds after seeing something disturbing like a skeleton with an umbilical cord hanging from its abdomen with the fetus still attached to the other end. Maybe she’s surprisingly strong willed… or maybe she thinks it’s not real.

          There’s just too many questions to ask and far too much to cover at once. The biggest point I wish to make with this analysis is this: horror games should be more like Fran Bow. Not necessarily a point-and-click, but something that prompts you to ask yourself what you should be afraid of. Something that doesn’t rely on jumpscares, but is subtle in how it presents its horror. Something that leaves the player with doubt on what just happened. Was any of that real? Were any of the characters real? Is the hero insane or gifted? I suppose not all monsters can be fought. And if they can, the fight will never truly end.