Tales of PAX East: Delver's Drop

I went to PAX East a week ago, and came back with all sorts of games I want to write about, but also came back sick and tired. So dragging myself to and from work all week was about all I could manage, and I took this last weekend to recover. (And to beat Bioshock Infinite. You really, really need to play Bioshock Infinite.) Having gotten back to a place of feeling relatively human, there are some things I think you might enjoy, if your tastes run similar to mine.

The first of these, and the most exciting thing that I personally played on the show floor, is Delver's Drop.

The product of a Kickstarter project I was proud to help fund, Delver's Drop has been described by its creators (a small and ambitious team calling themselves Pixelscopic) as "a sexy HD Zelda roguelike", which is (1) just about the best 5-word pitch for a game I've ever heard, and (2) pretty much entirely accurate, based on my time with the game at PAX.

What does it mean? Well, in their own words,

Delver's Drop is a 2D Action RPG with fluid physics-based movement, snappy combat, shifting dungeons, and a rogue's gallery of individually leveled character classes. With an emphasis on mystery and dynamic gameplay experiences, the game features randomization for infinite replay, enigmatic puzzle permutations to unravel, multiple narrative paths, customizable character growth, and layers of secrets to unearth. 

I spent probably 30 - 40 minutes with the game over the course of three days (I kept going back, to the point where the team was pretty familiar with me by the end of the weekend), and as one of the many people who believe that The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is one of the finest games ever made, I'm happy to report that Pixelscopic clearly thinks so, too, and they've built a game that wears that opinion proudly on its sleeve.

Everything about Delver's Drop looks and feels like a validation of the assumptions we might have made about the future of gaming back in 1992, based on what we were playing on the SNES. The combat, the items, the puzzles, the movement and physics... they all feel deliciously familiar, but modernized and made incredibly pretty. Before I talk about what I played, just take a look at this thing in motion.

Look at the colored lighting bouncing off of every surface, and the shadows being tossed around by that lighting, and the parallax that's being used on the walls to give the illusion of depth as Link (he's not Link, but I'm just going to call him Link) moves around the room. Look at the sliding block puzzles, and the bombs being tossed and the arrows being fired, and the rupees (they're not rupees, but--) spilling out of crates and jars. Look at the sheer number of enemies being rendered and how smoothly it all moves. Look at the not-at-all-subtle Triforce reference in the logo! (That last part doesn't matter for the gameplay, but I'm not ashamed to say it made me happy.)

Different gameplay modes are promised, one a story-driven campaign and the other likely more of a "challenge mode" where players compete to dive as deep as they can into a (presumably) endless dungeon. Something like the latter was on display at PAX, with 60 randomized floors on offer. I managed to make it 21 rooms down, only two shy of the PAX East High Score of 23. The final game will have multiple character classes, a bevy of items and upgrades to find or purchase, and all sorts of other fancy stuff, but really, it all boils down to "Sexy HD Zelda Roguelike," and my answer to that is, "yes."

It's still in an early state, and of course things are being tweaked. The hit detection on some things is a little off, and the bottomless pits are a little too eager to suck Link into an instant, demoralizing death. The timing on bombs might be changed. Obviously they've got lots more content to build. But I didn't want to stop playing what they already have - navigating the environment and swinging the sword into enemies feels great, the level and enemy designs are fun and clever, the roguelike-inspired tension of permadeath is palpable, and the whole thing just looks stupendously attractive.

My hope is to get someone from Pixelscopic on Skype for an interview in the near future, and if that happens I'll certainly link it here. In the meantime, if you have any love for the Zelda series, action RPG's, roguelikes, 16-bit game design, or a combination of the preceding, keep your eyes peeled for Delver's Drop. It's slated to come out late this year for PC, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, and OUYA (vote for it on Greenlight right here so it'll end up on Steam), so you're pretty much guaranteed to have something that will play it. For my money, if re-imagining SNES classics in HD is going to be Pixelscopic's bag, a proper 2D Super Metroid-style game next sure wouldn't go amiss.

Wherein Zelda Saves Link For a Change

Thanks to Owen Good over at Kotaku for this one. While I've been a fan of the Legend of Zelda series almost my entire life, there's no question that most of the series has been very heavily focused on male power fantasy. Beat the evil guy, save the helpless girl. Zelda's gotten some good moments in the series proper, but never an unambiguously powerful role, and certainly never her own game. (For more on this, see the recent and very good Tropes vs Women in Video Games video series.)

So somebody fixed it. Zelda Starring Zelda is a patch for the original NES Legend of Zelda that simply swaps the roles; you'll play as Zelda now, saving Link. It's a small thing, just a sprite swap and some modified text, but it was remarkable to me how much this video made me think, "Why the hell hasn't Nintendo done this by now?" See if you agree.

Says Kenna, the author of the patch:

Earlier this week, I read about that awesome dad who edited Donkey Kong to let his daughter play as the Princess. I wished I had someone who could have done that for me. Then I remembered. I'm an adult now. If he could work it out, I could too.

...For me, I played my first Zelda game when I was pretty young, and at the time, I thought the game did star Princess Zelda. I figured I'd get to play as a magical battle princess that saved her kingdom. The game was fun, but I was bummed out that I never got to play as Zelda. But like I said, I'm an adult now. There's no one to stop me from eating candy before bed and there's nothing standing in the way of me creating the games I want to play.

Hear, hear. She talks more about the technical details of making the patch in the post, and it's a good read.

In terms of playing the modified game, setting it up seems fairly trivial. It does require finding yourself a ROM of the original NES Legend of Zelda, which for copyright reasons I can't provide for you, but a little searching will help you out there if you want to try this out. Kenna links you to a good emulator, and the patch, and the instructions are simple.

It's about time.

This is really cool. I'm glad somebody did it, and I'm absolutely going to try it out. It's been awhile since I played the original Legend of Zelda and this is a great reason to go back.

Proteus is Painfully Lovely.

I wrote about Proteus about a year ago, back when you could only buy it as a beta product directly from its website, but haven't said anything about it since it got released as a finished game this January.

A lot of stuff has been added to the game since I wrote about it - it has a cycle of seasons now, and many more objects and creatures to interact with, and a definitive ending. I've played through it several times, and just finished another playthrough tonight, and felt compelled to post the following to Twitter.

"Proteus is such a special and unique experience. For me, it's always about finding the house."

"On every island, in every season, I have to find that house."

"And then I cling to it until the game takes me away."

That might not make sense to you if you didn't read my previous article and/or don't know what Proteus is (in which case, you know, go fix that), but that's pretty much how I feel about it as a final product. It's lovely, people should play it, and I'm really glad I have it on my laptop to make me feel this way whenever I want / need to.

But that's what it's come to be about for me. Maybe for you it'll be about something totally different. It's on Steam now, for $10, and it has my strong recommendation.

Friday Night Bytes: The Button Affair

It just so happens, it's Friday again, and I played another sweet free game that I think you should check out. Serendipitous! And so Friday Night Bytes returns.

I have a fascination with the "runner" genre. I've written about it before with games like Solipskier, how a game that allows me to feel fast and graceful almost always captures my imagination. Tonight's game doesn't nail quite everything about that, but it gets enough right that I still strongly recommend you check it out.

"The Button Affair is the story of Enzo Gabriel. His quest. To steal the priceless Button Jewel from the infinitely wealthy business tycoon Victor Meirelles." The product of The Button Experiment (4 fine folks you can read about right here, if you like), The Button Affair is an automatic runner in the style of Canabalt or Solipskier, in that you're stuck constantly moving one direction and the gameplay primarily consists of avoiding obstacles. It is not, however, "endless", comprised of three distinct and fairly short levels. BIT.TRIP Runner might be the better parallel, actually, though there's no rhythm component to the gameplay here.

Oh, those look bad for your health.

The game's strongest element is its style, without question. Lighthearted and self-aware, it hearkens to all sorts of pleasant influences from across entertainment media: James Bond, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Prince of Persia, Flashback, Mad Men. It's self-assured and playful, knowing just what it wants to be and communicating it to the player extremely well. Video is going to convey this better than I can in words:

So, yeah. It looks and sounds great, and you should download it for that reason alone.

Whether The Button Affair's gameplay holds up to its aesthetic is going to depend strongly on how well you tolerate trial and error. Controls are simple and tight - the arrow keys are all you need - so there's no problem there, and I rarely had any issues with the game being "unfair" in terms of not respecting my input. The level design, though, essentially boils down to pattern memorization. Jump, roll, roll, jump, jump, roll. The quicker you can do it, the higher your score will be, but you'll never see a Game Over screen here; failure leads to a death animation and a return to the most recent checkpoint, and you can repeat that as many times as you need to.

A couple of clever variations are scattered throughout - each checkpoint has a quick code entry minigame that determines whether or not the checkpoint will "register", for instance, and one late section introduces a start/stop mechanic in short bursts. But on the whole, we're talking about a very one-note game. It'll probably take you 20 minutes to finish your first time through, and I imagine you can do it in half that once you've practiced, if you want to try for a higer score.

For being as short as it is, though, the game contained a little more frustration than I expected. Obstacles sometimes seem to come out of nowhere, to the point where failure is the only way to learn, and even on repeat trials I found some sections to be maddeningly difficult. Not "cheap", necessarily, but sometimes you can hear the designer laughing at your failure. If that bothers you, be forewarned.

Still, for a free game made by a team of four, I think The Button Affair is pretty great. It's slick and polished, challenging without restricting your progress, and while it doesn't have a lot of tricks up its sleeve, it doesn't overstay its welcome either. So get in there. Get that diamond. Or don't. I'm not giving away the ending.

The Button Affair is a free download for PC and Mac. If you like it, the team asks that you donate to a charity for disabled gamers. That's a pretty stand up thing, in my opinion. Bravo.

Friday Night Bytes: Binary Boy

I don't know if this'll be a regular thing, so maybe I shouldn't kick it off with a column title, but it's a Friday, it's nighttime, and I played a short free game that I want to tell you about. So, Friday Night Bytes. Okay? Okay. Here we go.

I got an e-mail yesterday from Jared Johnson of Data-Fidelity, asking me to check out his new game Binary Boy. I'm glad that I did! It's short, it's fun, and it's got a solid concept with a lot of room for future expansion. Let's start with a trailer.

Jared cites VVVVVV and Proun as his influences, and you might remember that I liked both of those games a lot, so I was excited to dig into Binary Boy and see what he'd taken from them.

The answer is, a surprising amount for such a small game. Like VVVVVV, Binary Boy is a two-state platformer (I think I just made up a term), in that your character controls his horizontal movement and his vertical orientation, but nothing else. You're either pointing up, or you're pointing down. Unlike VVVVVV (but exactly like Proun), you are anchored to a line that traverses the level, along which obstacles attempt to thwart your forward progression. There's no fail state; hitting any obstacle or being pushed off the line bounces you back to a checkpoint, which are placed very generously. Your goal (again, like Proun) is to complete the levels as quickly and gracefully as possible. Jared claims his best time is around six and a half minutes; I managed to do it in something closer to twelve minutes. Regardless, we're not talking about a big time commitment.

Things that impressed me:

• The aesthetic is nice and clean, with some great touches for being an intentionally low-fi project. Little animations abound, and add a lot of character to the world.
• Though resolutely 2D in gameplay (and, I think, technically), it mimics depth nicely, with objects swinging into the foreground and receding into the background.
• Each level feels distinct, with a new trick to learn in each area (with the exception of the final level, which offers a visual change but not a gameplay one).
• I didn't expect the game to have boss battles, but it does, and they're not bad given the limited mechanics at play.
• The generous checkpointing means that failure (almost) never costs you more than a few seconds of gameplay, which makes the trial-and-error nature of some of the sections much more palatable.

Things that made me go "hrm":

• The hit detection seems... off, sometimes. It's not bad, but for a game where essentially the only challenge is "don't get hit by things," it could use some tightening.
• Because the checkpoints re-set you, but not the state of the world, the timing of the puzzle you're about to face doesn't stay static from one attempt to the next. I hit one frustrating section that I was trying to do some fancy flipping to get through, and eventually the timing worked out such that I just walked through it without flipping at all. Maybe that's deliberate, but I doubt it.
• I hit one nasty bug (which I e-mailed Jared about, and to his credit he says he has fixed) where pausing the game removed the boss I was fighting from the game world, rendering the game unbeatable. Short game, so not a deal breaker, but it did happen.
• The very last section of the game (by which I mean literally the last 60 seconds of gameplay, if that) feels frustrating and arbitrary. I e-mailed Jared about that too, and he said he'll take my feedback into account. I should mention here that Jared is very responsive to feedback.

On the whole, I'd like to see a little more done with this concept than is presented here - the levels are so short that just as soon as you've had a chance to say "oh, neat!" it's over and you're on to the next thing. Stuff like working an "attack" into your flip ability and using a rising / falling water level to provide platforming puzzles are really good ideas, but could be built out a lot more. The inspirations here are clear, but the experience is so short that it never quite hits the "oh WOW" moments of VVVVVV.

But this is a free game, and also an early effort from a young and promising designer. If you've got some time and you like trying out new takes on the platforming genre as much as I do, I strongly recommend giving it a look.