Some video games make us wish to clamber into the sport design like a mechanic and make some modifications. They’re video games we love, however all they want is the tiniest of tune-ups to make them immeasurably higher.
Oaken is considered one of these video games. It’s undoubtedly good – a technique board recreation dropped at life, a incredible setting, and an intricate, intelligent roguelike – nevertheless it’s lined in so many small brambles that true greatness is out of its attain. We’ve performed an identical recreation that gave us an identical response, just a few weeks in the past. Oaken and Darkish Quest 3 share a flawed method to bringing turn-based technique to the roguelike. We form of want they obtained collectively and solved the issue collectively, as they each get very various things fallacious.
Oaken’s world is beautiful. Gone are the loincloths and robes of the fantasy style. It’s a technique recreation with out tanks or troops. You play crops and fungi, combating over the forest. It provides Oaken a novel, fight-on-the-forest-floor really feel, and the artwork fashion leans into the bioluminescence, thorns and spores. The character designs make the most of the aesthetic, providing simply the correct quantity of humanity to make them identifiable.
With Oaken, there’s all the time a ‘however’. At a zoomed out view in an isometric grid, it’s genuinely laborious to inform which unit is what. They blur into the identical bulbous mass, and all that arduous work within the character design is barely undone. Solely the larger bosses actually handle to face out. All the items look good on the cardboard artwork, although.
The sample of play is similar each run. You select your hero, who comes with their inventory number of talents. Then you choose a sidekick: a unit which is all the time obtainable, whatever the playing cards in your hand. These are usually dearer, highly effective playing cards that you could depend on to show the tide of a battle. Then it’s time to start out the run.
The trail you comply with might be acquainted to any Slay the Spire fan. You’re given a vertical set of nodes (going downwards, so perhaps it is completely different from Slay the Spire), and you may select your path by means of them. There isn’t an enormous quantity of wiggle room there, as you’ll be able to solely transfer barely to the left and barely to the proper, however most of the time you might have two or three selections on your subsequent encounter.
It’s a formulation that has labored on numerous different video games. Oaken deviates just a little by permitting you to make upgrades to your items everytime you need, moderately than beeline to a store or blacksmith. That freedom is welcome, however the trade-off is that the places are all too comparable to one another. They’re variations on a theme: kill the whole lot, kill the whole lot however with an goal hooked up, or kill a boss. The one exception is Occasions, which supply some neat trade-offs of punishments towards rewards. However largely it’s fight, and that makes the selection just a little moot: the whole lot’s going to finish in some fisticuffs.
Preventing is straightforward however efficient. Your hero begins on the hex grid, and there might be enemies there too. These enemies have bases which pump out reinforcements, helpfully denoted by a personality icon. You’ve all the time obtained an inkling of the place they’ll land, as they will drop into one of some surrounding spots.
You received’t keep alone for lengthy. Every flip, you get a form of mana which is spent on spawning ‘spirits’ (the sport’s items), casting spells, or utilizing considered one of your hero’s talents, that are continually obtainable and refresh with every flip. Oaken has a deft limitation to spawning enemies, as they will solely be positioned inside your hero’s sphere of affect, i.e. fairly rattling shut. That creates a neat pressure that’s all the time there: the sport is over when your hero is lifeless, however you want your hero near the motion, in order that they will dump crops and fungi into your enemies’ path. It’s potted genius.
As soon as your unit is down, they’ve a form of summoning illness which suggests they will’t assault this flip (except they’ve Haste). However as soon as they’re up and operating, they will transfer as soon as per flip, and assault as soon as per flip. That assault should be of their ‘line of sight’, which is decided by the route that they’re going through. You possibly can see that route by three traces on the hex.
Line of sight and the orientation of every character is a ache within the arse, and regardless of how a lot we scratched, we couldn’t do away with it. It’s simply too unnecessarily fiddly to assault a creature that’s close to to you. If one is behind you, you need to pivot to face them, which makes use of up your motion. ‘Shooter’ items are uncovered to manner too many guidelines. They’ll solely hearth in keeping with line of sight; the enemy can’t be greater than three hexes away; and a unit can’t be subsequent to the unit, in any other case they interact in melee, which suggests your shooter will get counter-attacked. And perhaps it’s simply us, however we saved selecting an orientation, just for the analogue stick to maneuver a millimetre and alter it to a unique one.
However largely it’s a tremendous, strategic method to hex-based fight. You possibly can sneak round an enemy and hit them on the again for uncounterable injury. You possibly can shove enemies into one another, chaining up stacks of injury. And Oaken’s speciality is littering the playfield with crops and crystals, every of which have their very own impact. They could bounce you across the enviornment such as you’re in Pinball FX, or explode in a bathe of Lumi, the sport’s foreign money. When mixed with the shoving and area-of-effect expertise, there’s large potential for synergies.
Right here comes the ‘however’ once more. Oaken is an extremely laborious to learn recreation. That’s much less to do with the dimensions of fonts, and extra about fundamental legibility of what’s happening. Every enemy has its personal record of results, as do your items. The crops and mushrooms have results, and the hex terrain does too. That’s exacerbated by virtually each impact being a key phrase, however you’ll be able to’t – not less than so far as we’ve discovered – increase on any given one. What it is advisable to do is press begin, tab throughout to a glossary after which discover the related time period. Then you definately hop again into the sport.
This large, wobbly ball of cognitive load and complexity doesn’t get any smaller for ten or so hours. We nonetheless haven’t remembered each key phrase, and we nonetheless get in conditions the place – inexplicably – we do roughly injury than we anticipated, as a result of one thing mixed with one thing else. The designers have clearly obtained too near their recreation: as Harrison Ford as soon as famously mentioned to George Lucas, “you’ll be able to sort this s**t, however you positive as hell can’t say it”, and we had comparable emotions. What this implies is that there’s a lack of belief in what would possibly occur if you happen to do probably the most fundamental of issues, like attacking or shifting. An impact would possibly set off that we didn’t anticipate, and that lack of surety is an issue.
It’s an issue as a result of loss of life is so punitive. Die, and you’re again to the beginning of the run. When a run takes – we child you not – an excellent few hours, that sudden and unpredictable loss of life stings like a dagger to the intestine. There’s a ‘however’ right here, and it’s a constructive one this time. You CAN restart the battle as soon as, which is perhaps sufficient together with your newfound information, and also you CAN play on a mode that lets you play on previous deaths. However even that latter choice has its personal punitive issues: you restart at the start of the chapter, which suggests death-by-boss takes you again ten or so battles.
We may go on, but we’ve gone on too lengthy already. And that’s as a result of we’re obsessed with Oaken – we will see the sport that it ought to be. The artwork is beautiful, the concepts plentiful, and there’s a lot depth to the fight and upgrades that it boggles the thoughts.
You possibly can see the ‘however’ coming now: Oaken simply can’t capitalise on that good work. It’s too convoluted as a turn-based technique recreation, it takes an excessive amount of time to evaluate any given state of affairs, and restarting a run takes far too lengthy. The ivy crawls round Oaken and drags it down, when it must be taking pictures up into the sky.
