Space Hulk Ascension Impressions

Unfortunately the last three weeks have been very busy and I have not been able to sit down and play Space Hulk: Ascension at all yet. I have my regular play session day coming up later this week so I'll just do double duty playing Ascension as well as the next game on my list.

I'll edit this post to write my experiences, I just want to get it published so I don't break my post order. Thank you for your understanding.

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Ugh. Half an hour in, I've failed the third tutorial mission, and it's clear to me that I will not like this game.

Space Hulk Ascension is a turn-based strategy game set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe where you play as a squad of Space Marines infiltrating a Space Hulk--a giant mass of derelict starships, asteroids, and other debris--in order to cleanse it of Tyranid Genestealers. It is based off of the tabletop board game Space Hulk originally released in 1989 which in turn was influenced by the movies Alien, and Aliens.

It's the "influenced by Alien and Aliens" part that I really don't like, though turn-based strategy has never appealed to me outside of Age of Empires and some weird obsession I had for playing StarCraft through to the end shortly after it was published, might have been Sarah Kerrigan's story.

Anyway, the game is incredibly claustrophobic with most corridors being one unit wide and the maps having mostly right angle intersections which means that your squad members have to split up in order for one guy to down a specific hallway. It doesn't help that there are Genestealer entry points dotted around the map and there seems to be just one more than you have squad members so you can't block them all at once, forcing you to leave one side of your group vulnerable.

That forced vulnerability is incredibly frustrating. Like, in the tutorial mission I just failed I'm supposed to guide a squad of five members including one heavy equipped with a flame thrower to a room on the map for the heavy to "cleanse" i.e. roast to a crisp. One of the victory conditions is that the heavy cannot die, because of course if they're dead the room cannot be cleansed, so I have only four other members to block the Genestealer spawn points. Of course there are five spawn points and of course the farthest one has a shortcut to the main hallway that only the Genestealers can use. So I tried my best to cover all the spawn points in a way that protected the heavy while he made his way to the room for cleansing. Alas I did not get to the spawn point closest to the cleansing room and half of my squad in addition to the heavy died.

Apparently the game works on chess logic where the attacking piece just wins during its turn. There's a Space Marine skill that you can activate at the end of each unit's movement called "Overwatch" where they will attack anything that comes into their line of sight, but that requires 2 action points which have to be left over after movement and rotation so there's a lot of thinking ahead required that I just don't have the practice or the patience to do well.

Unless you're a tactical turn-based strategy nut, or a 40k completionist I don't believe I can recommend this game. For being nearly 3 years old it's still got a base price of $30 with each of the four DLC chapters sold for $8 on top of that. The "Ultimate Pack" has the base game and all of the DLC for $45, which is better than $62 for everything a la carte. It's gone on sale during the last few Steam Holiday and Summer sales, though no consistent discount, 60%. 80%, then 75%. If you can find it on sale and it sounds at all interesting then there are worse things you can do with your money. I personally found reading about the various Space Hulks in the 40k universe far more engrossing than trying to plod through one.

Playthrough 015: Space Hulk Ascension

The next game I will play is Space Hulk: Ascension.

Originally released on November 12, 2014 Space Hulk Ascension currently holds a rating of "Mostly Positive" with 73% of the 528 reviews giving it a positive recommendation.

I bought Space Hulk Ascension as part of the Humble Intergalactic Bundle on April 18th of this year. I'm not a huge fan of turn-based strategy, but I've been interested in the Warhammer 40k universe for a long time. We'll see how this goes, the environments look very cramped and claustrophobic instead of the grand, epic-scale battles that lots of other strategy games try to give you.

The Interactive Adventures of Dog Mendonça and Pizza Boy Impressions

It's as I suspected, a point-and-click adventure game that strives to recreate the feel of the latter-day LucasArts Adventure Games and unfortunately comes up a little short.

I was able to find a copy of the first issue of "The Incredible Adventures of Dog Mendonça & Pizzaboy" and read it in between play sessions of "The Interactive Adventures of Dog Mendonça & Pizzaboy". I could not find the second or third issues, which is too bad because I would like to see how these characters were developed further before the game, and possibly what else may have informed the game's writing. "The Incredible Adventures..." is a 2010 Portuguese comic book written by Filipe Melo and drawn by Juan Cavia telling the story of hapless pizza delivery boy Eurico as he gets drawn into the world of the supernatural in Lisbon, Portugal as he tries to recover his scooter after it's stolen by some gargoyles. "Dog" Mendonça is a private detective who is also a werewolf and has established a "code" that he expects all the supernatural residents of Lisbon to follow in order to not interfere with the regular humans.

As an aside; Cavia's art style seems heavily inspired by Carlos Meglia, who drew the 1992-99 comic series Cybersix, even down to close-cropped hair or arm hair drawn as small dark rectangles on the skin. I only know this because I tried to start a podcast discussing cartoons from the '80s and '90s and Cybersix was one of the first series we watched and talked about.

Back to discussing "The Interactive Adventures..." the game starts in medias res with Dog, Eurico, Dog's partner Pazuul, and the decapitated head of the gargoyle thief in Dog's car chasing a bunch of other gargoyles who have now stolen a truck. You take the role of Eurico as Dog and co. are pulled into a wholly new investigation starting with a young woman seeking to hire Dog to help her break a gypsy curse, maybe. The controls are your standard LucasArts fare, any interactable object brings up three options, Eye, Hand, and Mouth as context-sensitive commands of Look, Interact/Pick up, and Talk/Eat. Your inventory is in Eurico's jacket, you can click and drag items onto one another in order to combine them or drag them out of his jacket to interact with the environment.

The game's story, as I mentioned, begins with a young woman coming in to Dog's office asking for his assistance. This is where you the player are introduced to the game's dialogue system and the first discussion-based puzzle. Unfortunately, I think the writing falls short in this puzzle because I don't like the options; you as Eurico are tasked with interrogating the young woman, who may or may not be the victim of a curse, to try and get her to provide more information. She makes three vague statements and you have to choose one of three options in order to get her to elaborate. The options you are given are Empathize, Confront, and Tease with no indication of what Eurico will say and one of those actions is the right follow-up to each vague statement. I got irritated because when I tried to Empathize with the woman's first two statements she accused me of being patronizing and Dog made fun of me. Thankfully we're in an Adventure game so no matter how annoyed she got she stuck around until I made all the correct choices.

After that in the game's first environment Dog is trapped in a cage and then kidnapped leaving Eurico on his own to continue the investigation. That's about as far as I've gotten in the game, I've only had about an hour to play over the last week.

So far I don't know that I would recommend this game. The art is neat, as I mentioned earlier it's very reminiscent of Cybersix so if you like that I think you'll appreciate this. The puzzles so far don't feel that intuitive, I guess? One was solved just by clicking around a room, another was the interrogation puzzle I talked about. Maybe if I get farther in the game the story will open up more. It's $15 at regular price now and has been discounted down to $3.75 each time it's been on sale, so if you're looking for a new Point-and-Click game that's not a Telltale one this might be a good value for you.

Playthrough 014: The Interactive Adventures of Dog Mendonça and Pizza Boy

The next game I'm playing is The Interactive Adventures of Dog Mendonça & Pizzaboy. Originally released on March 3rd, 2016 it currently has a review score of "Mostly Positive" with 75% of the 35 reviews giving it a positive recommendation.

I never heard of this game before I got it in the Humble Jumbo Bundle 8 second-week bonus games in March of this year.

It looks like a point-and-click adventure game, and from the Steam page is based on a graphic novel from Dark Horse Comics. I hope that it's more like Sam & Max or other LucasArts adventure games rather than Sierra adventure games like Phantasmagoria or Gabriel Knight.

August Game Purchases

Here are the games I bought in August:

Steam Store

• Secret Files 2: Puritas Cordis
• Secret Files 3
• Secret Files - Sam Peters
• Lost Horizon 2

Humble microJumbo Bundle

• Geometry Dash
• Oh... Sir! The Insult Simulator
• Space Pilgrim Episode 1: Alpha Centauri
• Space Pilgrim Episode 2: Epsilon Indi
• Space Pilgrim Episode 3: Delta Pavonis
• Space Pilgrim Episode 4: Sol
• Who's Your Daddy
• Town of Salem
• hack_me
• hack_me 2
• Oh... Sir! The Hollywood Roast

Humble Spooky Games Bundle

• Dead Age
• DreadOut
• Lakeview Cabin Collection
• Layers of Fear: Masterpiece Edition
• Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location
• Alien: Isolation

Humble Jumbo Bundle 9

• The Flame in the Flood
• Infested Planet
• Human: Fall Flat
• Samorost 3
• Verdun
• American Truck Simulator

Free Games

• Vickinachi - IndieGala Promo
• Jack's Gang - IndieGala Promo

Last month's Humble Saints Row Bundle's second-week additions included the first Secret Files and Lost Horizon games, both of which I used to own on disc in a bundle of non-LucasArts adventure games. I played a bit of Secret Files several years ago and thought it was interesting, if a little flat, much like Syberia. Anyway, when these additions were announced the Steam Store had a week-long sale on all the Animation Arts games, including a "complete your collection" bundle that included Secret Files and Lost Horizon so I was able to get the rest of the games at just a little more of a discount than buying the bundle first.

I honestly don't know why I got the Humble microJumbo Bundle. It was a lot of games for very little--I paid $3 for it--but outside of Who's Your Daddy I am entirely unfamiliar with any of the games in the bundle. I guess it was seeing a comment in the r/GameDeals thread on Reddit saying that Town of Salem is very good that convinced me to grab the bundle, we'll see if that's true whenever it comes up on the list.