On this special fourth episode of the Polyspice Game Recommendation Podcast; Thorbjorne, Robert, Gerardo, Daniel and Greyson discuss all of their favorite games that they played through in 2020, whether they were new this year or not! From cartoonish RPG games like Bug Fables and Ni No Kuni II, to intense management games like Surviving Mars, to controller breaking frustration-gauntlet platformers like Spelunky 2, we’ve got a little bit of everything and more!
If you have some thoughts you’d like to share on the Podcast or the games we talk about, please feel free to let us know about it on Twitter!
Ho Ho Ho, Merry Christmas from the Rabbit Observatory! We’re all pleased to announce that Christmas IS observed on Planet Rabbit! Though I have no rational explanation yet as to why, they decorate trees with lights and exchange gifts and sing just like many Humans do!
Naturally, these Holiday festivities have also spread to our brave Rabbit Colonists. So all of the Colony Habitats are now decorated with Lights and Presents!
In terms of the Game itself our Artist has made some refinements to the User Interface, Our Developers have made adjustments to make the collisions feel “Crunchier”, and our Sound Engineer has pumped out some new sounds and popping tunes!
(ProTip for GameDevs: We have learned that Sound Engineers possess great distaste for pain. Threaten yours with a taser if you’re on a tight budget and need to negotiate a discount. Don’t thank us, we’re just paying the favor forward. Come back next week for more tips on how to masterfully manipulate your employees!)
Darkest Dungeon is a rule breaker, a transgressive and volatile little game. It is dark and brooding and moody and violent. It will throw down the gauntlet and dare you to pick it back up. Video Games don’t behave in this way, and yet Darkest Dungeon does. I love it.
Make choices wisely, as you won’t get to take them back later. Characters that die stay dead, and develop physical and emotional scars as they wander through the dark. Darkest Dungeon is fundamentally a turn based RPG with heavy Roguelike elements. You’ll bring up to 4 heroes at a time into a dungeon to complete the Objective. Party Composition is important, you must cover vulnerabilities as best you can.
Resources
As with most Strategic RPG’s, knowledge of the interlocking systems is your greatest asset. When selecting supplies to bring with you into the Field, you should consider what it is you are likely to be doing there. For instance, how much Food to bring to sustain your Party. Or how many Bandages you are likely to require. Antidotes, Keys, Medicines, and in particular Torches. Torches are the means by which you minimize danger, the primary way in which you will be lighting your path through the many dungeons.
Here you will select what to bring with you. There are 16 slots, your biggest needs at first are Torches, Food Rations, and at least one Shovel.
Heroes
Your Roster of Heroes interact with the Dungeons, and each of their successes and failures will determine either their course of evolution or cause of death.
You must select a region to explore and send at least one Hero to attempt an available Mission there. Each has certain enemy types you should strategize against before embarking.
For instance, I have a Hero that survived a horrible boss battle. While begging the game to let me win, I said in passing that I would rename the Bounty Hunter to “Batman” if he managed to survive. He pulled a rabbit out of his hat and won, with him alone remaining. So now his name is “The Batman” and he seems to be my best Hero ever… But he too will die eventually.
I’m just going to be using him to raise all kinds of Hell until then. *After many brutal campaigns, The Batman fell at the hands of The Fanatic. RIP
Heroes will also develop certain Quirks. These Quirks are a large part of what gives each their unique personality. These come in Positive and Negative flavors, and will change depending on what happens to the Hero. Those that survive encounters with certain bosses will often develop unique Quirks that Heroes cannot otherwise develop.
My Bounty Hunter named Batman turned Courageous at the last moment, shortly before being killed by the Fanatic.
A generally less beneficial relative of Quirks is the Disease. Diseases are generally Negative, though some are less negative than others. Diseases may be Cured in the Sanitarium or in the Camp menu by Plague Doctors and Grave Robbers with certain Camp Skills.
Curios
These are what any and all Non Trap and Non Encounter items you interact with in the Dungeons are called. There are many types and they are generated Procedurally along with the Dungeons themselves. Your Supply Items can be used to interact with these, and the correct item will be spent and produce a beneficial interaction. Or in some cases will produce a unique and rather negative interaction. And in all other cases will consume the Supply Item and do nothing.
Battle
Combat in Darkest Dungeon is tense. You’ll be praying to the Random Number Gods in most of the more intense encounters. There are 4 Positions on each side. The relative locations of Characters between each other are what determines their available attacks, at least for the Player’s Heroes.
Some attacks are more situationally useful than others, with the Front Positions 1-2 usually offering the best Offensive options while the Back Positions of 3-4 offer the best Control and Healing options. This all being said, the Class of a Hero will determine which Moveset they will have access to from each Position.
Status Effects are very important and will have their own sub section. The most important one for you as the Player to know about is “Death’s Door” and it’s dire impact on every Battle in the game. A Hero that has their HP reduced to 0 will not Die immediately. They will be in a state of Death’s Door. From this point, any further damage will kill them. Unless you can heal them to at least 1HP or higher first. There is a Stat called Death Resist, and this is the Hero’s likelihood of not dying should they be hit while at Death’s Door. It usually is a little over 60%, but you’ll not be wanting to play dice with Death in Darkest Dungeon.
Positions and Skills
Characters may only have up to 4 Skills Equipped at a time usable in Battle. These have required positions 1-4 with 1 being the Front and 4 being the Back. Most attacks require the Character to be in one of several Positions or even only in one particular Position. For example the Hellion has an attack called Iron Swan that can only be used from the Front/1 Position that can only strike an enemy in the Back/4 Position. The Iron Swan is very unusual because it’s very rare that a Front/1 Positioned Hero can strike an enemy in the Back/4 Position.
Note that there are 4 Positions on each side. These are important when selecting which Skills to Equip on your Heroes. (You can only change equipped Skills outside Battle.)
Status Effects
Bleed and Blight are the most prominent, being the major “Damage Over Time” effects of the game. How much damage they deal per turn varies depending on the level of the initiating attack, and it stacks. If I hit an enemy with 2 Bleed attacks each dealing 1 Damage per turn, then the enemy will start taking 2 Damage per turn. For how long also varies according to the Attack used. If an enemy is killed with Bleed or Blight, they will not leave a Corpse. This can be important for more detailed plans that you may need to employ later on.
Buff and Debuff are their own things, they change Stats Upwards or Downwards. These are situationally important, but become very important when relevant to an existing vulnerability or strength. For instance, Bleed Resistance being raised or lowered is harmless or devastating to the Player depending on how many Bleed attacks they have incoming. On the other hand, a Buff to more commonly used Stats like Damage % will almost always be good for the receiving Character and bad for their enemies.
In the bottom right is the Map. It’s pretty straightforward and self explanatory really.
Horror is a rarer Status Effect that acts like a Damage Over Time towards Sanity. This generally only applies to Heroes and not Enemies/Monsters.
Marked
Marked is an unusual Status Condition. A Hero either has it or they don’t, and it weights the Random Number Generator during combat towards attacking the Marked Hero. Enemies that are Marked are dealt extra damage by certain Hero attacks, sometimes by as much as 90% over normal. So Marking enemies can be very helpful if your Party is configured to capitalize on it.
Disease
Diseases work much like Quirks, but hold their own category and there is a Stat for Disease Resistance that may defend against a Hero picking up a Disease in the first place. They are generally Negative, sometimes devastatingly so. You’ll need to cure it either using somebody’s Camp Skill such as Leeches for the Plague Doctor or by sending the Hero to the Sanitarium and paying a fee.
Sanity
This is the core mechanic of Darkest Dungeon that gives it a famously lethal edge. Each Hero can only take a certain amount of Stress before they become Afflicted. You won’t like them when they are Afflicted, so don’t let their Stress meter fill up. Once Afflicted, the Stress meter can be filled a second time to trigger a Heart Attack. Heart Attacks are horrible things that immediately place a Hero on Death’s Door. And if your Hero suffers a Heart Attack while on Death’s Door, which will happen to you, it ignores Death Resist and is 100% Fatal. Bye Bye.
Certain MiniBosses like this dude can and will sneak up on you. This enormous sack of dicks is named the Collector. He will do some very bad things to you, but killing him may be worth it.
Trinkets
Accessories you’ll usually encounter as either Loot or as Rewards for successful Quests. These are very useful for customizing and tweaking your Heroes to accommodate their strengths and weaknesses. Two different Trinkets may be equipped at a time on a Hero. Cannot be identical Trinkets.
The Crimson Curse
Including the Crimson Curse DLC into your run of Darkest Dungeon is entirely optional. But I of course enabled it to give myself the maximum possible amount of challenge. Because I am a masochistic bastard. The catch is, this DLC has a way of invading the main game in a very literal sense.
To lift the Crimson Curse, you will need to go after certain bosses fought at the end of “Epic” quests. These are very long, and a bit tedious, but the Crimson Curse will proliferate until you beat them.
Personal Thoughts
Darkest Dungeon is about making the best of a bad situation. Much as the text says that precedes the start of every game. This is very true. Surviving your mistakes is the defining feature of this game, and it can be harrowing. Darkest Dungeon can stomp on your toe and spit in your eye even when you’ve Won. This potentially Pyrrhic Victory is a concept players may never have witnessed in a game before playing Darkest Dungeon. It’s when you “Win” but at an immense cost. On the other hand, when you Lose in Darkest Dungeon, it takes everything you put at stake. All 4 Heroes, all the money ventured, all their Trinkets.
And then it asks you to try again. I always do. And I love it. Darkest Dungeon demands Players calculate risks and gamble wisely in order to win. Find your fortune by plumbing the depths of the Darkest Dungeon today!
I am Robert Kelly Ball, you’ll see me come back to update this Recommendation to HOPEFULLY create a better resource for Darkest Dungeon Players while I continue playing it.
I’m 30 years old today and a parent of one delightful seven year old. I love just about everything about videogames, and am thrilled that I can write about them. Advocating for the poor is my other hobby, and I will gladly offer whatever aid I can if approached.
There are many ways to make a good video game; and there are many ways for a game to be good. Some games are great because they tell amazing stories unique to the medium. Some games are great because they present truly unique and innovative gameplay mechanics. Then there are games like Disc Room; which is great because it does just one thing, and it does it incredibly well.
Gameplay and Premise
Disc Room shares its strengths with games like Super Meat Boy, Devil Daggers, and to a certain extent SUPERHOT; In that, they all take a simple concept that’s easy to understand, and build on it with deep gameplay and a high skill ceiling.
The core concept of Disc Room couldn’t be much simpler to understand and that’s exactly what makes it great. The premise is simple; you are a scientist that’s part of a team exploring a mysterious disc floating in space, and you must make your way through a series of rooms and survive dodging a never-ending onslaught of different spinning blades, or “discs”. You may think you’ve figured this game out at first glance. But trust me, this game is probably smarter than you.
At first, you start off just dodging some run-of-the-sawmill spinning discs. But it does not take long for things to get substantially more difficult, and for the discs themselves to begin adapting. There are dozens of different discs that you’ll end up facing throughout the game, and as soon as the second room you will be thrown for a loop.
I’m not joking, some of these levels will eat you alive! (literally)
Let’s not mince words, Disc Room is a very hard game. It’s perfectly doable if you’re just aiming to beat the game itself. But you’re likely to die dozens of not hundreds of times. Most levels have a goal along the line of surviving for a certain amount of time. But many others have unique objectives that force you to switch up your tactics and approach the level completely differently.
Every room is a veritable Bullet-Hell worthy amount of deadly discs flying through the air at different speeds; all of different sizes and shapes, and you have to remain on your toes constantly in order to figure out what each room wants from you and how best to tackle each objective.
The Art of Balanced Difficulty
But even after many, many deaths Disc Room never reaches the point where’s it’s completely unfair or obnoxiously hard because of several key things that it does very well. Firstly, the game controls very well, with subtle movements being easy to pull off in tight spaces which you’ll often have to do, and your running speed usually being just fast enough to dance through the danger, but not so fast that you can’t keep track of your character or overshoot a gap between hazards.
Secondly, you die in one hit from any hazard, can start over very quickly with no penalty. The levels themselves rarely last much longer than 30 seconds to a minute in terms of what they expect you to do. In short, any failure is just a brief slap on the wrist; and you can try a level over and over again without sinking an unreasonable amount of time into it. On top of that; every level has a sort of par time achieved by the developers, and this essentially acts as a secondary goal for each level. They can be very challenging to reach. There are tiers of completion to strive for without making it overly difficult for the average player just trying to make it to the end; which adds even greater depth and replayability to the experience.
Adding further variety to the core gameplay are the abilities that you unlock over the course of your playthrough; such as slow-motion and a short range dash. You can have one equipped at a time, and they can seriously change the way you approach each individual level; which creates additional layers of potential strategy.
Dodging the discs is one thing, but doing so while stepping on every white tile is a whole other thing entirely.
Presentation
Presentation was honestly the last thing on my mind while playing Disc Room because of just how intense and attention-demanding it. Though the graphics and sound are nothing to sneeze at. The hand drawn style is bright and clean looking; with a nice variety of colorful backgrounds as well as countless different incarnations of discs; whether they be small, large, sharp, or extra sharp. There’s even what is essentially a bestiary in-game that catalogues all the different types of discs with descriptions and stats of how many times you’ve encountered each; which is a really nice addition.
The story may not be the main focus of the game, but I found myself at full attention whenever a new hand-drawn cutscene comic would appear, due to just how quality they were.
A variety of in-game options allow you to additionally customize a lot of minor elements of the game to better suit your own experience. There’s a button dedicated to simply speeding up the gameplay. Which you can do if you want to add even more challenge for yourself; as this makes maneuvering the discs and making subtle movements at least twice as hard. Which I had a lot of fun using whenever I wanted a little more out of a specific room. There’s also an optional speedrun timer, multiple opportunities to change the color of certain graphics. In general lots of small choices that allow you to play the game your own way without compromising. It’s design or gameplay to any significant degree, which is just how I like it to be.
Conclusion
If you’re looking for a challenging, replayable, and refreshingly fun game then I can absolutely recommend Disc Room. Honestly, I could see this game as an easy platform to just slot more levels into over time; just like Super Meat Boy did. As it’s practically built to be expanded on with such a strong and already well-explored central theme and core gameplay mechanics.
Disc Room is the kind of quality game that I can pretty much recommend to everyone. The only thing I could see deterring people from wanting to try it out is how hard it can be. But the game is far from unfair. There’s a lot of satisfaction to be found in besting the challenges it presents.
As it stands, Disc Room is one of the best games Devolver has published in recent memory; as well as simply one of the best games of 2020. It’s a beautifully executed and engrossing gameplay experience that gives me the kind of satisfaction that few other games can. It is absolutely worth it’s asking price of $15.
Disc Room is available now for Nintendo Switch and PC.
This could be you, if you’d only buy Disc Room!
Greyson is an aspiring author and YouTuber with dozens of consoles and hundreds of gaming hours under his belt. He’s always looking for something new to play, and is always happy to share it with other people. He also likes the Shantae games, like, a lot.
Robert here, Have you ever decorated a tree for Christmas? Most folk have, what with the popularity of the Holiday. But a bit fewer (I hope) have done so immediately after becoming too obese for their last pair of Pants. Thank the Void for Elasticity eh?
I hope some of the folk reading can sympathize. And for those that can’t, I shall pray to Nyarlathotep that you awaken tomorrow morning as a morbidly obese FrogFish. Disproportionate? Maybe. But then again so is my BMI. No Apologies here.
Darkest Dungeon
Spiteful petitions to Outer Gods aside, I’m nearing completion of my Game Recommendation Article covering the Gothic/Eldtrich Horror masterpiece that is Darkest Dungeon! In preparation for the Article, I have been reading Lovecraft’s books and particularly enjoyed the Shadow Over Innsmouth. While the game is inspired by Lovecraft, you don’t actually need to be familiar with his Mythos to enjoy Darkest Dungeon. In any case I hope my article convinces some folk to get their (Potentially webbed) fingers on the game for themselves!
On this month’s episode of the Polyspice Game Recommendation Podcast; Thorbjorne, Robert, Gerardo, Daniel and Greyson discuss the experimental, art-house style 2D Platformer Mibibli’s Quest!Brought into the world by the hands of Resni, a unique and outspoken indie developer also responsible for games like Peen Peen and Salad Fields, Mibibli’s Quest turned out to be quite the intriguing experience for the crew to talk about. Join us on for our third episode of the podcast to see if this game was just too strange to recommend, or maybe just strange enough.
Mibibli’s Quest is available for PC through Steam and itch.io. If you have some thoughts you’d like to share on the game or the podcast, feel free to let us know on Twitter!
