Personal difficulties have been resolved, and so I’m catching up on writing about some of the vast backlog of games I’ve accrued over the past few months. I’ll never have time to write full reviews of all of these, so I’ll instead settle for a few paragraphs about each one.

Tacoma

An interesting one. Tacoma is the next game from Gone Home developers Fullbright, and while I liked Gone Home very much I didn’t get on with Tacoma quite so well despite the setting being very much My Jam: instead of wandering around a spooky abandoned house trying to piece together what happened prior to your arrival, you’re instead wandering around an abandoned space station trying to piece together what happened prior to your arrival, with some AI stuff thrown into the mix. It’s a more sedate game than Gone Home was because at no point does Tacoma really try and trick you or really throw you any curveballs; the focus is instead purely on unravelling the station’s immediate past, with very few twists concealed within that past. It’s also more overtly linear than Gone Home was; Gone Home’s mansion allowed it a little more artifice in how it camouflaged its plot rails, while Tacoma doesn’t even try to hide it — there are four areas of the station, you tackle them one after another, and you cannot move on to the next one until you’ve finished all the plot in the current one.

Still, Tacoma’s writing is nevertheless top-notch, and it gets a surprisingly long way on its AR conceit; this is essentially an upgrade of the standard audio logs concept where you also get to watch coloured 3D mannequins act out the scene in front of you, except that you can fast-forward/rewind to any point in the recording and also track the actors as they move throughout the various rooms and corridors inside the station. Most scenes are based around a big group conversation involving all six of the station staff, but after the main event the group splits up into smaller vignettes that take place in multiple locations simultaneously — to get the full picture of what’s going on you have to scrub forwards and backwards through the scene several times, following the actors around as they do a walk n’ talk, or have a private conversation in a service corridor. As it’s rather more interactive than audio logs this AR replay mechanic is effective at getting the player engaged with the story — enough so that Tacoma successfully papers over the yawning cracks in its structure. It’s not as touching or intimate as Gone Home, but it’s still very real and human, and that’s a surprisingly rare quality in games these days.

Steel Division

After an abortive and not particularly well-received fling with retro-RTS Act of Aggression, Wargame developers Eugen have returned to the wargame-lite genre they’ve pioneered so effectively over the last five years. Steel Division moves Wargame’s real-time macro strategy gameplay to 1944 Normandy and takes advantage of the shift in era and technology level to make a number of very important refinements. The list is very long, so I’ll just mention the two most important ones. First on the list is the headline territory control feature, which is sort of like the standard point-control game mode — where there’s a number of control points on the map and whoever has possession of a majority of them scores points over time — except there are no points to control in Steel Division. The game instead dynamically calculates the percentage of the entire map that your units control and awards points based on that. This drastically changes the feel of a typical match as every single square foot of ground that your side controls counts towards victory, and instead of conflict being concentrated around arbitrary control points a threatening attack can develop at any point along the always-visible front line. It also lets Eugen do more things with their morale system, as units that are suppressed by artillery or machine gun fire don’t project map control and are vulnerable to being cut off and captured by advancing enemy forces if they get caught behind a front-line that’s rapidly receding backwards.

Steel Division’s second improvement is more subtle, but almost as important: the bloated unit lists from Wargame have been cut down dramatically. Instead of picking your army list from an entire nation’s roster, you instead select a single division’s worth of men and machines. The units available to one division are necessarily more restricted and there’ll usually be at most 3 types of infantry and 4-5 different tank types to choose from, with nuances within unit categories mostly being provided by the number of tanks you get from a given unit card and their associated veterancy. That’s not to say Steel Division is any less grognard-y, as under the hood there’s still a very detailed statistics system that you could squeeze a little extra performance out of if you took the time to understand it, but it’s definitely less immediately overwhelming and doesn’t require an intimate understanding of the difference between a BMP-1 and a BMP-1P¹.

In practice, though, I feel that Steel Division doesn’t quite live up to its potential. The mechanics and overall structure are very well thought out, and there’s a bunch of big quality-of-life improvements such as the absolutely essential line-of-sight tool. It’s let down by its maps, however; these are based off of actual aerial reconaissance photos of the Normandy terrain prior to the invasion, and while Eugen’s dedication to historical verisimilitude is admirable it’s also had the unfortunate consequence of every single map being bocage hell. The dense woodland and hedgerows of the bocage famously made progress against the German defenders difficult, and the same is true of Steel Division’s maps; it feels like the advantage is definitely with the defender as a single dug-in AT gun in a clump of bushes with good sightlines will make surrounding ground impassable for armoured forces. There are solutions, sure – artillery or airstrikes will at least suppress the AT gun while you rush tanks forward — but your supply of these solutions will always be outnumbered by the array of potential problems presented by the bocage. Making headway through the terrain is murderous, and while it’s not a game-killing issue it does suck to always be having to pry an opponent’s grip from a natural strongpoint one finger at a time; all the matches I’ve played have ended up feeling more or less the same, while Wargame at least went to some lengths to provide contrast with its mix of hills, mountains, towns and woodland.

This is nothing an expansion or a sequel can’t fix, though; I’m a little surprised Eugen went for Normandy when the Eastern Front covered something like 10x the land area and would have provided so much more variety for the player. They’ve shown enormous willingness to adapt and refine with Wargame so I’m sure that Steel Division 2, if it comes, will rectify the comparative blandness of Normandy’s map selection. In the meantime Steel Division is at least a very promising evolution of the Wargame formula, and hopefully a more accessible and sustainable one too.

Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2

Oh dear. I was rather looking forward to CSD 2, as the original devoured a couple of dozen hours of my life back in 2012 with its compelling Diner Dash-style setup of having to prepare several meals simultaneously by entering complex combinations of key presses, all while the customer impatiently waits at the counter for their order to be ready. The sequel is ostensibly more of the same — in the most literal sense of the word, as there are 180 dishes to prepare (compared with 30 in the original game) and they’re all drawn to look as succulently tasty as possible. The problem is that while visually they’re all very different, in terms of cooking preparation they’re all basically the same. This might sound weird when the “cooking” in this game consists of pushing B, Up and R very quickly, but CSD 1 had some dishes/activities that matched button presses to the actual meal activity quite nicely, like dicing vegetables by pushing up exactly 10 times or washing dishes by alternately hitting left and right to mimic wiping them with a cloth. These have all but vanished from the sequel, so once you have the ingredient letters memorised it’s basically just one step removed from a weird touch-typing game.

The thing is, that would actually be fine. I like touch-typing games – I loved Typing of the Dead, for example, and I wouldn’t particularly hold it against Cook, Serve, Delicious! if it replaced shooting zombies with sushi preparation. CSD 2’s problem is that it’s now got so many dishes it can’t keep up consistent letter assignment for its ingredients, however; a simple piece of chicken can be Chicken, cHicken or even chicKen depending on what you’re preparing, and so instead of memorising a common language that can be applied to all dishes you essentially have to memorise all 180 individually. And that’s a big ask. Couple that with the fact that the persistent restaurant management has been jettisoned and the “campaign” has been reduced to a series of preset challenge levels, and Cook, Serve, Delicious! has rather unfortunately lost a lot of its charm. It’s still compelling enough to begin with and will sustain you for a few hours, but eventually the number of dishes to learn becomes too overwhelming for that anemic structure to support. I’d actually recommend the original over it.

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Yeah, I don’t think I like Shrouded Isle very much.

The monochrome art style it’s plumped for is certainly eye-catching enough, and the choice of a sickly green-yellow hue is fitting given the subject matter of preparing your island settlement for the awakening of a Cthulu-like elder god — albeit one carrying the significantly more generic and/or copyright-friendly moniker of Chernobog. You are the high priest of the cult controlling the island, and it’s your job to keep the populace on the Lovecraftian straight and narrow by stamping out heretic tendencies such as “being curious about the outside world”. Mostly you do this by sacrificing anyone found harbouring them to Chernobog. You get three years of seasonal “turns” – twelve in all — to boost your population’s Ignorance and Fervour levels above minimum required thresholds in the hope that Chernobog will be pleased with what he finds when his deep-sea alarm clock goes off and he finally wakes up.

As game concepts go this is not the worst I’ve ever heard. Unfortunately Shrouded Isle has a significant problem in terms of the mechanics through which that cultist concept is translated into an actual game, because once you peel away that ghastly facade what you find underneath is ridiculously prosaic: Shrouded Isle is actually a game about making numbers go up and/or down, and making sure some of them don’t go down too far. I’ve not encountered a game this slavish about having you balance the books since Football Manager, and it is a bad thing for Shrouded Isle when the closest comparison I can find is a game that’s not a million miles away from being Accountancy Simulator 2017.

Let me elucidate: in Shrouded Isle your population has five general attributes: Ignorance, Fervour, Discipline, Penitence and Obedience. Aside from the name, there is no in-game distinction between these attributes. Each of them is an arbitrary number between 0 and 100. Chernobog demands that you keep these numbers above a baseline of 25, and occasionally he’ll come up with a seasonal demand that you bump one of them up above 50. There are no in-game events that affect these attributes. The only thing that makes them go up or down are the actions of your council of advisers. You have five positions in your council, each responsible for maintaining one of the attributes, and each of which is filled by one of the ruling families on the island – so House Efferson is responsible for Penitence, while House Iosefka is responsible for Fervour, and so on. Each season you pick one of the eight members of each family to serve on your council, and they’re the ones who carry out your will in e.g. whipping all the villagers to make them more Penitent or whatever.

There is a catch, however. Well, more three catches. Number one, you only have three months’ worth of actions to do in a given season. Each month you can pick between one and three advisers to carry out an action; if you pick a single adviser their action will have a big positive effect of around +15 to the attribute they’re responsible for (there’s some RNG involved in exactly how much an attribute increases by), and if you spread your actions out amongst three people it’ll have a smaller effect of around +5. Number two is that each of your advisers has a single Vice and a single Virtue, both of which are unknown when the game starts, and both of which will impact attributes unrelated to the attribute to which they have been assigned. For example, if Lazlo Blackborn is assigned to improve Obedience then he’ll increase it by anywhere between 5 and 15 from his primary action, but his Narcissist Vice means that picking him to do an action will decrease Penitence by -20. His Virtue of being rather Dull means that he’ll also increase Ignorance by +10, but it would be a bad idea to pick Lazlo to do anything if your Penitence attribute was critically low.

Picking which advisers will carry out actions in a given season is therefore a matter of balancing the positive effects of their primary action and their Virtue against the negative effects of their Vice. This is complicated further by the final catch, which is that each ruling House has its own independent approval rating of your performance as High Priest.  Selecting an adviser to act on your behalf raises the approval of that adviser’s house to a greater or lesser degree depending on how many advisers are doing actions this month, in a similar fashion to the action effects themselves. Not picking an advisor causes their house’s approval rating to go down by a flat -5. Allowing a noble house’s approval of you to drop too low will incur the risk of a rebellion.

This makes it tricky when the end of the season rolls around and you have to pick somebody to sacrifice to Chernobog, because the sacrifice has to be one of your five council members. No matter who you choose to tie to the bloodstained altar you’re going to take a big approval hit from their house for doing so, although if you’ve managed to discover that they have a Major Vice such as Embezzlement the approval penalty is reduced slightly from -30 to -20. Vices and Virtues are uncovered by choosing advisors to carry out actions during a season; pick an advisor enough times and you’ll eventually find these out, although you also get a limited number of free Inquiries that do the same thing if your approval with a noble house is high enough.

That was an incredibly dry set of mechanics to describe, and it can’t have been much fun to read about either. And yet that’s the experience of actually playing Shrouded Isle; it’s reduced the promising theme of cult management to a pure and (very) simple numbers game, and it’s not even a particularly interesting one either because I figured out the optimal approach within the first half hour of playing it:

• Picking a single advisor to carry out an action is only a good idea if one of your approval or attribute ratings is perilously low and you need to give it a big boost.
• Otherwise it’s always preferable to pick the maximum three advisors per season, for two reasons.
• One, you’ll uncover Virtues and Vices faster.
• Two, it spreads out the attribute and approval increases and decreases in such a way that you don’t tank any one number to a non-recoverable level — if you pick a single advisor then the attribute penalty from their Vice will be amplified along with the bonus from their action and their Virtue, and the Vice penalty is always higher than the bonus. By spreading out your actions it ensures that this penalty will at least be mitigated by somebody else’s positive action.

There’s some minor thought required in selection of advisors as you’ll need a set that’s good at whatever you want to increase that season (or at least not actively detrimental to it) as well as a patsy for the sacrifice — but even this is usually a no-brainer once you have a sufficient number of Vices/Virtues uncovered. No, what challenge Shrouded Isle has lies in obfuscating its mechanics, since I had to figure out all of the above through trial and error. Once I knew how everything worked it was childishly easy to keep everything at a healthy level and I never even came close to failing, and ninety minutes after clicking Start Game for the first time I was looking at the “Chernobog Awakens” cinematic; not coincidentally this marked the point where I was done with Shrouded Isle because it has zero replay value. What would I replay it for? The thrilling clicking-on-things-to-keep-numbers-high gameplay? The paper-thin concept that, art style aside, it doesn’t even try to play to beyond the odd random event? There are apparently five other endings for fucking up on each of the attributes, but intentionally losing a game of Shrouded Isle would be even easier than winning it; there’s nothing interesting there when I can probably just go and look at the endings on Youtube by now.

Even though at £7 Shrouded Isle does not exactly break the bank and it’s wrong to expect anything particularly ambitious out of it as a small indie title, it still feels ridiculously anaemic both as a game and as a cultist simulator, and I was expecting it to at least come close to nailing the latter quality. Instead it’s a good idea that’s completely wasted on Shrouded Isle, and that’s something I’d feel sad about if we weren’t living in an age where the stars have come right and you can’t move three paces without tripping over some kind of Lovecraft-themed IP. As it is, though, I’m perfectly happy to pick up the sacrificial knife myself to consign Shrouded Isle to oblivion.

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