Another trip back into some more slightly-less-retro games that I've been playing outside of our regular programming. This time it's the multiplayer roguelike Slipstream: Rogue Space, the puzzler with RPG elements PictoQuest, and the classic game mashup that is SnOut 2. Slipstream: Rogue Space was also discussed all the way back in Lite Switch: April 5, 2024.
Slipstream: Rogue Space
The first game is Slipstream: Rogue Space, a free game available on Steam as well as both the Apple and Android stores. The game released earlier this year and has been gradually adding some additional features since then. The game is heavily designed around the framework of a Twitch streamer captaining a spaceship at constant war with slugs and then viewers can play as the crew under their command, so the game does work best when the captain has the full lines of communication open. When I first played this, it was because one of our guests, RiRi, had been playing this on her stream (@RiRiYells) and so I had jumped in to some of her playthroughs. It's a lightweight game, so when I did decide to join in, it was real quick to download, log in through Twitch, and hop on board.
The first choice in the game is what sort of character build to pick, represented by the different animals your character can be (at the time I'm writing this, there's 6 animals to choose from with a 7th releasing shortly). Each animal has strengths and weaknesses, but the main skills that matter are close quarters combat, gunnery stations, shields, and repairing damage. You don't begin with them all available, so it is a fairly important choice which to pick as it will influence playstyle until you can unlock more characters.
RiRi runs a fairly active ship, so I started with the octopus, which is fairly slow and not much of an attacker but is quite good at repairs. So a maintenance role like that on a populated ship was pretty easy to jump into as I was learning the game since there's a lot of damage. The biggest hindrance, though (and I think this applies a lot) is that speed is a HUGE factor in this game and so I feel like the first few levels are always just trying to level up how fast the character moves because when you're slow and on a ship with a lot of players, it's hard to get to anything in time to do it. It's a spot where I wish speed wasn't quite as big of a factor, because it does feel like a penalty for being new (maybe something like a bit of a XP boost on your first character would help get around this).
Once I got the hang of the game, I added two other characters into the mix. A bear, which again starts off slow but is very good at on-ship combat, was my next pick. It can be fairly useful on smaller crews where there's a need to clear out invaders quickly. And then most recently, I've started trying to build up a turtle, which is quite good at powering up shields on the ship (and can also accelerate other players getting their shields up as well, so it always helps to know where the turtles are). There's 3 other characters I haven't bothered with, the cats, alligators, and hamsters. The game's also just about to add a new class that'll be a koala that, I think, will function as mobile medics. It'll be interesting to see how that plays out when they're actually in the game.
These character types are also the main revenue for the game, as you can get earn some cosmetics for them, but others do require money. You can also speed up unlocking more characters, but to my knowledge there's no way for money to go to something like leveling up faster or making your characters stronger, so I don't begrudge them using those sorts of monetization techniques, particularly because the game works better when there's no barrier to entry and people can just start playing as soon as they download the game.
Slipstream is a roguelike, and the main loop for that is that the ship is on a voyage across one or multiple sectors, location to location as decided by the captain. Fuel is the resource that feels the most important, but of course keeping the ship intact is a big deal. So the captain role involves a lot more strategy in charting a course and upgrading the ship which the crew doesn't have to worry about.
Each point along the map is going to be something, but there's a range of possibilities. Some are fairly scripted events, some are interactions with enemies, some are stores, and then there's things like riddles, puzzles, and trivia. The captain can (Twitch delays allowing) get input from the crew from these things, but they are one of the areas that I'd really like to see a bit of improvement on the game. Those interactions only show up on the captain's screen, so the crew only sees what comes over Twitch and the font used is not always legible there. The difference something like a 6 or an 8 is not always clear but for the number puzzles that's a super important difference, and a lot of this would be fixed if the developers made it so that players could also see those interactions that the captains are seeing. Having said that, I think I even misidentified numbers on my own screen once or twice, so I do feel like numbers in particular could be a bit easier to read.
The main part of the game, especially for the crew, are the battles. I think they all fall into the same format of engaging with an enemy ship which is maneuvering around the ship you're on, so different parts of the ship are engaged in battle at different times, and much of the information of that comes from the captain, which they need to then share with the crew. Part of why a good captain matters.
As the enemy ship moves and does damage to your own ship, the big things are repairing stations that are taking damage, using the shield stations (blue) to build up shields for themselves and the stations around them, and using the gunnery stations (red) to fire at the enemy ship. Complicating all this is that often the ship will also send slugs onto your ship, with each slug attacking a single station. So the more combat oriented crew are vital in clearing out those slugs so that stations can be repaired and put to use as the battle ends immediately when the enemy ship is destroyed.
One extra plus to combat is that all you're having to do is move your character to a station, and then they'll automatically do what is necessary, be it use the station, repel slugs, or repair a damaged station. That makes it a bit easier to have your character busy doing something while you're looking for the next spot to have the most impact. The more you do during these battles, the more XP you get (and sometimes the keys necessary to unlock other characters) and so you gradually are able to level up your character.
This month, I decided to try out captaining a ship for the first time (the maiden voyage of the Chu'unthor), largely because they've added some new features to the game including roles for crew. That meant I was able to delegate out some jobs to have a little bit of support and it wasn't all hinging on me, including bringing in RiRi as my first mate to help out while I tried to get the hang of things. To the game's credit, I didn't need as much help as I thought I was going to need (but I still benefitted from a great crew). Captaining still does feel a bit overwhelming... part of that is that some component of captaining is basically just the job of streaming, since you're the only one getting many of the notifications and so a lot is just relaying things out to the crew. My own self-consciousness knowing that everyone else is waiting on me also makes me a bit nervous, so there's a temptation to rush and a conscious push I was making to feel like I was engaging with the crew.
It is also a bit weird captaining as at times, there's the question of if one should leave the helm, as you have to stay there in order to see the alerts and notifications, but then you're not contributing to the battle. So sometimes if there was fighting on the bridge, I'd briefly leave to clear out a few slugs and then head back into the captain's view again. I think I probably will try captaining again, though, even if I think I'd much rather be a crewmember, all things considered.
Slipstream: Rogue Space does feel really effective at its goal, though, which is to create a fun game that really works in a streaming environment. I've really enjoyed being able to play this with friends, but even the couple times that we've raided out at the end of a stream and ended up on the ship of another Slipstream captain, it's been a lot of fun. Much of that is to the credit of the other captains out there also being welcoming and engaging and having a good idea of what they're doing. As the devs keep working on this game, I hope this does see the number of ships and crew out there grow, because it's designed in such a way that it is really easy to just drop in, play for a bit, and leave if that's all you have time for. And the increasing functionality is still just enriching the gameplay so hopefully that means the game will have a solid future ahead of it. It's fun, has a good aesthetic, and I like that the gameplay (at least for crew) is at a really nice casual level that I don't find too stressful.
PictoQuest
When I stumbled upon PictoQuest on Steam, a game that takes nonograms and tries to add some other game components to it, I was certainly curious as to what it would be like. I'm a sucker for a lot of different kinds of puzzles, and that includes logic puzzles. Nonograms are grid-based puzzles where the challenge is to figure out which squares should be filled in based on numerical clues for each row and column, where the numbers indicate how many consecutive squares are to be filled in. So, for example, 1,2 would indicate that there's a single square filled in, then a gap of at least one square before there's another two squares in a row that need to be filled in. Generally there's also an image that is revealed as you fill in the squares.
I feel like nonograms, also called picross, are not as well-known as other grid-based puzzles like crosswords or Sudoku, but they are a game format that I tend to devour when I have them. So long before finding PictoQuest I had already 100%ed Paint it Back, PictoPix, InfiniPicross, and InfiniPicross 2.0, and am just shy of 100% on Depixtion (I really need to fix that now that I realized that's the case - the puzzles have all been solved though). For me, this was really going to be heavily driven by the puzzle component, and it took me just over 10 hours to 100%.
What PictoQuest adds is that the puzzles are generally one of two things.... a chest you're trying to open or a battle against enemies. The chests are pretty straight forward (the main thing being you get something from them), but the battles will have one or more enemies, and they charge up to attack you unless you can temporarily stun them by correctly placing a spot on the grid. It's an interesting approach, but what does bother me about it is that I don't like what this does to the puzzle's pacing. Since you're using placing pixels in the grid as a stun attack, placing multiple pixels in quick succession is less useful than pacing them out. And that's just not fun to me. I'd much rather see the stun sort of capabilities accumulate so that one can move quickly when you can see part of the solution rather than try to internally remember what you figured out for strategic reasons.
Errors will result in you taking damage, as well as being slow enough that the enemy gets an attack off, but then the items one can have feel a bit too limited. There's just 4 item slots, and I'm not always thrilled with those options... I do think you should be able to accumulate more, even if you're not using them immediately. I guess the push to use things faster turned the items to feel less like a bonus to the game and more into a hassle I just stopped paying attention to. Particularly because of the time issues that were also a factor here. So just across the board, I don't think the RPG elements interacted well with the puzzle elements. In retrospect, maybe I shouldn't have been surprised that the idea of powering yourself up in some capacity doesn't really work that well with something that is centered so heavily on logic. Outside of powering up the hearts, I just didn't find much motivation to spend gold (tangentially, there's something annoying about an achievement for having a certain amount of gold at one time vs having collected that much gold cumulatively - especially since the puzzles don't change so grinding isn't seeing new puzzles or anything like that and it just feels like it wastes time).
Perhaps the most interesting element this tried... or at least, the element that came close enough to working for me, was the way this uses a map to represent progression to again capture the RPG feel as then you're traveling across the map and there's characters to briefly interact with along the way that will give you unique challenges for additional rewards. But even those didn't feel too engaging.
Ultimately, PictoQuest feels like it was an ambitious attempt to combine two very different gaming elements, and the result was that the RPG elements just distract from (and in some ways, constrain) the picross elements that are supposed to be the driving gameplay loop. It just doesn't work well together. I could see someone finding the style and aesthetics of this game cute and that that is a nice addition to the puzzles, but I'm not that someone.
SnOut 2
Whether or not two different games combine well is quite relevant to the last game, SnOut 2. The premise is, at its core, so simple that I legitimately think I pitched something not too different from this in a story I wrote in like first grade and just thought you could say a couple games should be combined and that would be a functional idea. Of course, when I wrote that I used the 1991 Windows 3.x game Rattle Race as that's the game I had, but the whole genre is known as Snake. That whole game, though, was surrounded by another classic game, Breakout (one of my favorite games on the Atari 2600, and a great example of the paddle as a home console controller).
To combine the two games, you start on a field that is mostly full of blocks except for an empty cavity in the center. As in the snake genre, you control a snake, which is constantly moving and gradually gets longer so long as you don't die by having your head hit a block, yourself, or a bouncing ball. The ball is the Breakout component of this, as when the ball hits certain blocks, it will destroy them. The more times the ball hits your body without hitting a block, the more powerful it will charge up so that it'll do more damage when it finally hits a block.
As a player, the resulting combination is something that I'm finding quite difficult, at least in part because it is so unforgiving. There's no lives or health or continues.... one mistake and you start back over. But the gameplay loop here is so simple and so rooted in games that I like that I keep coming back to this. It's a really simple game to drop into, see how long I can last, and then go do something else. I'm still trying to unlock the other modes, as one requires a combo of 40 body hits to the ball before being interrupted by hitting a block, and I've only gotten it into the 30s once, and another requires clearing at least 80% of the board and the best I've managed is around 35%. but I do feel hooked and keep returning. It really distilled this down into the most simplified combination of those two classic game types.
Recap
Slipstream: Rogue Space is a game that I appreciate as easy to pick up (as crew), and I think it's a lot of fun and I appreciate all the hard work that small dev team is putting into it. It's real easy to get started by checking out www.playslipstream.com and following the links there to Steam or to the Apple and Android stores, though I can't see myself playing it on something other than a computer, personally. It also feels like it's got a very friendly and very supportive community surrounding it, so I hope to see that continue to grow (and I know a fair number of people who have gotten some of the cosmetics not just because they like them, but because they've had enough fun with the game that they want to support the devs further). It's also pretty easy to just see who's streaming it and drop in so there's really very little stopping you from checking it out.
PictoQuest has a visual look that'd set it apart from a lot of similar picross games, but for me there just isn't much coming from the RPG elements and since the look really isn't a selling point, the clutter around the games is more of a negative than a positive. Personally, there's a lot more games in this genre, without the RPG overlay, that are better. Though if PictoQuest looks interesting, not only is it on Steam, it's also available from the Nintendo Store for the Switch.
SnOut 2 feels like a niche sort of game, in that I don't see it having broad appeal as it feels hard, but as someone who likes both Snake and Breakout style games, I'm hooked. SnOut 2 is available on Steam.
Of the three, Slipstream is definitely my favorite, so maybe you'll see me aboard a spaceship sometime soon, fighting slugs together. Game on, everyone.
