16 August 2024

Hello! Welcome back to our regular post where we write a little about some of the games we’ve been playing over the last few days. This week we work up a sweat on a new fitness game called Quell; we reflect on how Dungeons & Dragons’ combat is both exciting and frustrating; and Ian digs through the boxes and revisits a classic.

What did you play?

Read previous editions of this column in our What We Played archive.

Source, PC

Yesterday – Thursday – I went into a third floor office in London and was sweating on the carpet. I mean, really sweating. I was dripping wet; they had to get me a towel. It was gross. Or maybe modest, I don’t know.

It was their fault. I tested out their new fitness hardware and platform called Quell – think Ring Fit, only more intense. There’s a belt you tie around your midsection and then two VR-like hand controllers you hold – clarification: it’s not VR – and then the controllers are attached to you with resistance bands. The resistance bands can be swapped out if you want to make your workout harder, you sadist.

Then, like Ring Fit, a level loads on the screen in front of you and you move your avatar through it, spending most of your time running and pausing to punch enemies. It’s an impactful game and at the moment it’s all about boxing, although you can do some magic too. And there are plans for more games and more experiences as the platform matures – it’s only been live for a couple of months.

I only spent about half an hour on it, but I’m happy to say it blew me away. I definitely got the workout I wanted. I also liked the roguelike structure of the game and the RPG elements in between. It felt more complex than Ring Fit.

I have reservations about this, which I will tell you about in a more detailed article I am currently writing, but there are many positive aspects as well.

-Bertie

The Legacy of Kain Collection, Evercade

Did you ever play the Legacy of Kain games back in the day? Because I didn’t. But now I can, because I received a review copy of the upcoming Legacy of Kain Collection for the Evercade!

For those of you who don’t know, Evercade is a collection of consoles that specialize in playing retro games from the early era of gaming. All games are released on compellingly collectible physical cartridges that come in numbered boxes with cute color manuals, so they really give the feeling of buying games in the pre-millennial era. It’s perfect for people like me who like to snoop through manuals and display a collection on a shelf with obsessive neatness (and in numbered order).

Recently, Blaze, the company behind Evercade, started releasing new “Giga Carts” that pack much larger games onto carts, and that’s where the Legacy of Kain Collection comes in. This cart includes both Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain and its sequel, Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver.

Despite only three years having passed between Blood Omen (1996) and Soul Reaver (1999), they play very differently, as I discovered while streaming the game. Blood Omen is a 2D game with a top-down view, a bit like an emo Link to the Past, while Soul Reaver has that instantly recognizable PS1 3D look that the Tomb Raider series and, er, Duke Nukem Land of the Babes adopted (both of which are also available on the Evercade, I might add).

So far, I’ve enjoyed Soul Reaver much more than Blood Omen, mainly because it feels more modern. Blood Omen also has a super gothic Castlevania vibe. The way you move between spectral planes to solve puzzles in Soul Reaver, combined with the cool “hack and slash and throw your vampiric enemies into dangers like water and sunlight” has me much more hooked.

The Evercade Legacy of Kain Collection doesn’t go on sale for another month or so, but it’s definitely worth keeping an eye out for. If you were a fan of the games when they first came out, then being able to own them both for around £23 – rather than spending around £100 on the PS1 – seems like a bargain. And then of course there are people like me who have heard a lot about the Legacy of Kain games but have never played them. I know exactly what I’ll be doing on my flight to Gamescom next week. Picture it: playing a PS1 game on a plane on a handheld device. The future is now – the future is retro!

-Ian

Dungeons & Dragons

I can never decide whether I like the combat in D&D or not, and that has to do with its form, or rather its formlessness. That’s because there are so many choices in the game that the moment the fight starts is like fireworks, and who knows what will happen next. The chances of a fight playing out the same way twice – even with the same people doing the same thing – are microscopic, and that’s without factoring in the element of random dice rolling. That’s part of the game’s appeal, but I often long for something more predictable.

I come from an MMORPG background, so I think this is understandable. I grew up with defined “holy trinities” in groups, meaning a core of healer, tank, and damage dealer. You know how it goes: the tank runs out and gets the monsters’ attention, the healers keep them alive, and then the damage dealers rush in and kill the thing. It sounds boring, but for me the excitement was always about keeping order in a chaotic situation, keeping a cool head, and following some sort of procedure to stay alive.

D&D does have the loose concept of the “Holy Trinity” – I suspect that’s actually where it comes from. You can certainly be a heavily armored fighter with a shield, running into battle while weaker wizards deal damage behind you. But that’s never really how it works – at least not in my experience. It means that one minute you can be whizzing through D&D feeling invincible, and the next minute you’re facing total party annihilation. That happened to me just recently with no warning: there was no crescendo, but suddenly we were facing the very real possibility of Game Over. It felt wrong, it felt broken.

On the other hand, we survived that moment because the DM – a real person, remember – did a U-turn and had me make a soul pact with a demon to save our party, which resulted in a unique piece of storytelling and made the game richer in terms of entertainment and drama. In fact, this whole scenario was one of the most exciting situations we’ve ever been in, not least because of the game’s unpredictability, so maybe it’s a good thing – you see my ambivalence.

Does anyone else feel this way?

-Bertie