Month: December 2024

Musical Mondays: “Bygone Days” (Porco Rosso), composed by Joe Hisaishi

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For Christmas, I’ve chosen another Joe Hisaishi piece, “Bygone Days” from Studio Ghibli’s Porco Rosso. This is a movie I appreciate ever more as the years go by.

Below, I’ve linked both:

  • The soundtrack version (the first Spotify link); and
  • The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra version (the second Spotify and Youtube link).

Enjoy, and may you have a Merry Christmas, a great holiday season, and a Happy New Year!

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A Legionary’s Life: an engaging depiction, one text-based battle at a time

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This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series A Legionary's Life

A Legionary’s Life is a text-based indie game that follows the career of a legionary during the rise of the Roman Republic, through the Second Punic War and the Second Macedonian War. Over this time, the player character goes from raw recruit to seasoned veteran — or dies trying.

This is another game that will not be for everybody. Besides the limited production values, players must have the patience to repeatedly die and start again! Those who persist will discover a satisfying combat system and sense of progression.

What do you do in the game? (Fight. A lot.)

A Legionary’s Life moves between two layers:

  • Camp — Here you work out, or practice with the javelin or the sword. Considerations include time and stress from over-exercise. This also includes a top-down foraging minigame.
  • Battles — The meat of the game. See below:
You’ll see a lot of the battle screen in A Legionary’s Life. I took this screenshot on the Steam Deck, which the game supports well.

The key pieces of information are:

  • The red dial — health. Going to zero is a game over.
    • In this case, I (Tigris) am near full health while the Gallic Mercenary is nearly dead.
  • The blue dial — stance. Being off balance incurs a penalty. This happens if you missed a blow and lost your balance, or because your opponent successfully feinted or shield-bashed you. The same is true in reverse.
    • Again, here I have the advantage: my stance is full while the Gallic Mercenary is slightly off-balance.
  • The green dial — fatigue. Tired fighters perform worse.
    • In this case, I am at the second level of fatigue (the small walking stick icon), while the Gallic Mercenary is a bit more than halfway through the first level.
  • The red / blue bar under the dials — you can toggle this to blue to get a bonus to defence and a penalty to offence, or vice-versa.
  • The combatants’ equipment.
    • I am fully armoured, albeit in light linen, while the Gallic Mercenary only has his sword and shield.

While this looks simple, there is a fair bit of strategy behind it. For example:

  • The relative ability of the combatants is crucial. You can get away with more risks against weaker enemies. Conversely, when outmatched, it’s probably better to play defensively and wait for opponents to stagger before counterattacking them, or just stay alive.
  • Similarly, armour makes a big difference. The torso is easiest to hit, so unarmoured light infantry are beatable by going for their chest. But against heavy infantry in good armour, it’s better to wear them down by going for their arms and legs.
  • Different battles have varying lengths and numbers of enemies:
    • In battles between two armies, enemies will spawn infinitely up to the turn limit, but staying alive counts as a victory.
    • On the other hand, smaller encounters such as duels have a finite number of enemies, but go until death.
    • Some battles also impose a time limit for story reasons — for example, when trying to save the life of a wounded comrade. This may call for a high-risk, high-reward strategy — going for the head or neck.

Going from zero to hero is half the fun

How does this play out?

  • In general, the further through the game I was and the more powerful my character, the more aggressively I played.
  • At one extreme, I beat an experienced, well-armoured Carthaginian nobleman in a duel by playing very, very defensively and waiting for him to tire out.
  • At the other extreme, being the first man over the walls during a siege required beating many individually weak militiamen, within a strict time limit. I had to take risks, fight aggressively, and put my faith in superior gear and skill to carry me through.

The flip side is that I die a lot in this game, especially early on. This is typical:

  • Starting characters in A Legionary’s Life have the skills — and survivability — of XCOM rookies.
  • New players don’t know the battle system and will probably take too many risks.

Death is permanent, but a good score will result in more points for character setup in future runs. The story progression is scripted — replayability comes from trying again, and aiming for a higher score or better ending.

It took me 10 tries before I successfully cleared the game on my 11th run. This was my proudest moment:

Earning a Civic Crown, as in this example, is a tough but cool set-piece.

That was a 5 vs 1 fight (fortunately the 5 enemies didn’t come all at once) to save the life of a wounded Roman. My character became a hero that day, earning a Civic Crown. He later became a centurion, survived the wars, and eventually became a Senator. Hurray!

Tigris got there in the end!

… Then I died on my next run. The fortunes of war are fickle.

Conclusions

A Legionary’s Life is a good example of a simple indie game with a limited scope that achieves its goal. It’s engaging, historically enlightening, and makes me try again after defeat (… once I overcome my frustration).

With a Steam sale on as I write this, there’s probably no better time to give it a look.

Further reading

A Bay 12 Games forum thread I found helpful when starting out.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle — first impressions

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This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a wonderfully atmospheric first-person game that impressed me nearly from the start. I am enjoying it much, more than I thought I would, thanks to its focus on exploration, its rich and vivid environments, and its attention to detail.

A classic Indiana Jones moment.

What do you do in the game?

To steal a phrase, I could best describe Great Circle as an “Indy simulator”. It involves a mix of:

  • Narrative and cutscenes;
  • Stealth action — dodging or knocking out guards.
  • Navigating the environment and searching for a way to reach the next objective — for instance, across a rooftop or through a tunnel.
  • Solving puzzles, including one that required me to take out a pen and paper to solve a cypher (the cursive handwriting was the trickiest part);
  • Helping NPCs with quests;
  • Finding secrets and collectibles. These include landmarks that Indy can photograph, such as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Different areas and sequences, or different sub-locations within an area, focus on different parts of this mix. For example, the Vatican is the game’s first major hub and includes everything, whereas the preceding Castel Sant’Angelo is a pure stealth action area.

Indy disguised as a priest…
… and as a Blackshirt.
Disguises make it easier for Indy to move around.

My fear was that the game would be too combat-centric, but that hasn’t been the case at all. Playing on normal, and taking basic precautions such as sticking to cover in restricted areas and looking for improvised weapons in the environment, so far I can beat regular guards via stealth KOs or, if that fails, by mashing buttons. Optional challenges are harder — there is a boxing competition side quest where I can’t get past the second opponent. Perhaps I should come back later? (Hilariously, every time Indy is knocked out, the announcer says things such as “Defeat builds character!” and “At least you tried!” I wonder if he’s addressing Indy or the player?)

Stealth, action, and humour: how many games let you stealth KO guards by using musical instruments?

What do I like about it?

Great Circle is full of atmosphere, rewarding the player for discovery and exploration.

What made me fall in love with the game was Marshall College, the fictitious institution where Indy teaches. It feels like a warm, cosy place of learning, complete with a small museum (you can even read the placards if you look closely!), a student lounge, and flyers advertising a chess club.

That belongs in a — wait…

If Marshall College was the appetiser, the Vatican — where I currently am — is a main course. Its in-game visuals are sumptuous, from its architecture to the artwork on the walls, and prompted me to look up some of the real-life landmarks that appear in the game. On a more down-to-earth level, the little details are just as impressive: the boxing ring is crowded with cheering spectators, the intruding Blackshirts have a laundry tent (where I stole a disguise), and even the food — such as biscotti and cornetti — is lovingly detailed.

The voice acting and the dialogue also deserve praise. Again, the game wowed me as early as Marshall College, when Indy’s friendship with Marcus Brody shone through.

A final, related note is the humour.  Some of the NPC chatter has made me laugh aloud — and several cutscenes (Indy joining the boxing competition and being roped into hearing a confession) made me roar.

Conclusions

So far — I’m near the end of the Vatican  — Great Circle is excellent. Arguably, it fulfills the promise of Assassin’s Creed better than that series did — a lavish, AAA exploration of stylised historical settings.

If future areas live up to this standard, this will be Game of the Year material.

Further reading

Great Circle has excellent review scores — Metacritic 87, Opencritic 87.

Musical Monday: Hikari, the Warrior (Octopath Traveller II), composed by Yasunori Nishiki

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This week’s piece is “Hikari, the Warrior”, the theme of one of Octopath Traveller II’s heroes. It’s a lovely piece of music that I chose as a throwback to the early years of Musical Monday, when I tended to spotlight classic JRPG soundtracks. Enjoy!

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Revisiting Terra Invicta in late 2024

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This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Terra Invicta

I recently replayed Terra Invicta, a game I loved and covered extensively when it launched in Early Access in late 2022.

Two years on, it’s still recognisably the same game, and still does the same things well. What has changed are the AI’s competence (and the level of challenge), as well as the game’s quality of life and polish.

What do I like, two years on, and how did my game unfold?

Borrowing a concept from Jesse Schell, I like to characterise strategy games as either:

  • A “game” — a structured, rules-based challenge where the goal is to win (e.g. Civilization, Master of Orion II or Stars in Shadow, most real-time strategy games); or
  • A more aimless “toy” or “interactive narrative generator” (e.g. Crusader Kings, Stellaris).

The beauty of Terra Invicta is that it succeeds on both levels:

  • It’s a game with a defined objective — defeating an alien invasion — and a very high skill ceiling. Both times I’ve won, it took me until the 2050s. The best players do it in the 2030s!
  • And it’s also an simulator or narrative generator about the world responding to that invasion. On Earth, countries crash-industrialise, invest in science, and redraw their borders in response to the alien threat. In space, we go from recognisable near-future projects (returning to the Moon) to the furthest reaches of the solar system.

This playthrough became a test of how replayable the game is. I changed many things from my first run:

  • Chose a different faction (Project Exodus, which aims to build an interstellar colony ship, instead of the XCOM-like Resistance);
  • Increased the difficulty (from Normal to Veteran);
  • Played on the “Accelerated Campaign” mode, which significantly speeds up variables such as research speed (and almost certainly made the game harder, as the aliens benefit from the bonuses as well); and
  • Chose a different starting strategy (prioritising Asia ahead of Europe and North America).
The Pan-Asian Combine is a powerhouse in the medium to long term, but takes a lot of work to form. With hindsight, I should have prioritised North America.

And while the flow of the game remained the same, the details unfolded differently. The results were humbling. The normal progression of a Terra Invicta game looks like this:

  • The first order of business is winning support from countries on Earth, then using their space programs to establish early outposts on the Moon and Mars.
  • Over time, scientific research and the resources from those early mines provide the springboard to expand throughout the solar system: Mercury, the asteroid belt, and the moons of Jupiter.
  • Eventually, players have the resources and technology to build a fleet that can challenge the aliens.
  • Good players can establish a commanding lead at the start, get into space early, aggressively challenge the aliens and deny them access to the Belt’s resources, and then snowball from there. The best players can even beat the aliens to Jupiter.

So how did I do?

  • I was too slow on Earth (and hence to the Moon and Mars), got blasted out of Mercury orbit (twice!) before finally managing to secure it, and never succeeded in seizing the initiative. The furthest I made it was Io, the Jovian moon.
  • Left mostly to their devices, the aliens amassed large, powerful fleets and repeatedly sent them against the inner planets.
  • To win the game, I had to farm a stupendous quantity of resources by destroying alien fleets, which I mostly did on the defensive. This always felt slightly touch and go — even though my late game spacecraft were powerful and could win against several times their number, I never had the resources to build as many as I wanted, and they certainly weren’t expendable. Committing my fleets always felt like a risk.

This points to one more thing the game does well — encouraging players to be resilient. Strategy games tend to impose an “up and to the right” mindset — partly because setbacks, such as losing veteran soldiers in XCOM, can be so devastating, and partly because losing progress is often frustrating rather than fun. Here, perseverance pays off.

A late-game fleet battle in Terra Invicta. As of the current version (0.4.41), the aliens will typically leave their capital spacecraft in formation (upper right) while their small, nimble skirmishers break off and try to go around the flanks. Incoming barrages of Brilliant Sky advanced missiles were no joke.

Tougher…

After I won my first game, I suggested several possible changes that might keep the game challenging, such as a better AI and new late-game alien tools. Nearly every item on my wish list is now in the game:

  • The aliens stay in formation, use much heavier armour, and are less prone to squandering resources on bombarding well-defended targets, negating several of their weaknesses at launch. (In that last example, the pendulum might have swung too far — now they’re probably too cautious about bombardment.)
  • They mass their forces into terrifyingly large doom stacks instead of allowing themselves to be defeated in detail. At first, having to fight alien fleets of 80-100 ships was daunting. When I beat the 100-ship fleets, the aliens combined their forces into 200-ship fleets. After I beat a 200-ship fleet, I saw a 300-ship fleet. At that point, instead of fighting the 300-ship fleet, I just sent up unmanned decoys to distract it…
  • On top of their better AI, the aliens now field more advanced weapons over time. At launch, it was trivial for a late-game fleet to shoot down a barrage of incoming alien missiles. Not any more!
  • Even the AI for the other terrestrial factions seems to have improved. They are more aggressive and, on rare occasions, could defeat small alien fleets.

Those changes worked. Right to the end of my latest game, I never felt I was running away with things. While I brought Earth mostly back under control, the aliens remained a lethal threat in space.

While there is still room to improve, particularly for the other human factions, the game has already come a long way.

Alien doom stack growth over the course of the game. In the midgame (late 2030s, left) the aliens only had a single fleet of 100+ spacecraft. By the late game (2050s, right) their largest fleet was 400+, plus two more in the 100-200 range. That doesn’t include all the fleets I destroyed along the way.

… but still fair

Despite its high skill ceiling and learning curve, Terra Invicta is also surprisingly forgiving, or at least more forgiving than it looks:

  • I was massively overconfident in my ability to jump back in at a higher difficulty level, despite not having played in around 18 months.
  • I horrifically botched the early game, exacerbated by not doing what worked the first time.
  • I compounded my mistakes by angering the aliens and their sympathisers well before I was ready. Instead, I should probably have played to my faction’s strength, the ability to stay fairly neutral early on.
  • And yet, I still won.

Quality of life is improving

The game’s interface and user-friendliness have also improved since launch. For example, players can now:

  • Automate characters on Earth;
  • Set characters’ orders to repeat;
  • Sort bases by their resource income — also useful when looking for targets to grab;
  • Rally newly built fleets; and
  • Batch move armies.

These add up to a better, less painful experience, although again, there is still room to improve. For instance, I’d love to be able to automatically set characters to hide when detected by enemies. The upcoming patch is set to address another weakness, the clunky tech tree interface.

Conclusions

Terra Invicta has come a long way from launch. Back then, I said that it “may become one of the all-time strategy greats”. Two years on, it’s well on its way towards that goal, thanks to a more competent AI, more challenging late game, and better QoL.

More improvements — and new game mechanics — are on their way in the upcoming 0.4.42 patch, which the developers have been working on for some months.

If Terra Invicta continues on this trajectory, I think it can fulfil its promise by the time version 1.0 rolls around.