Karnage Chronicles -- Past the Caverns of Decay

I've been playing Karnage Chronicles on and off for almost three weeks now, and I've just today finished the awfully intimidating Caverns of Decay on normal difficulty. The Caverns of Decay is the second of three dungeons in this VR RPG. It was a wild rollercoaster of feelings for me, so I thought I'd take some time to think about how it went.

A typical view of the mushroom caverns in Karnage Chronicles

First of all, the setting is pretty great. Basically you're crawling through an endless winding tunnel system full of glowing mushrooms. Being in VR, there's a lot to like with being in this environment. I just have to continually hail back to how awesome it looks in this game. It FEELS like riding through a magical journey through a Disney ride if Disney happened to make a high fantasy exhibit that wanted to kill you. Of course, you're not riding, you're "bamfing" and nudging with locomotion controls in VR. That said, sometimes after clearing an area, it's pretty cool just to look around it and be in that environment.

Since the Caverns of Decay are all about the mushrooms, take a guess what the monsters are that you fight in it?  

Time to put an arrow in his cap!

Not to worry, you also get to fight poison barb spitting plants, infected goblin zombies, and harpies . . . and in typical Karnage Chronicles fashion, you get to fight them every two footsteps forward and sometimes every one footstep forward. It really does get a little aggravating how often this game uses this "spawn in" method as you cross certain thresholds while crawling through the dungeon.

The most annoying of the bunch are these little speedy mushroom men who rush you and explode upon impact.  They come in groups of three, and I'd say 4 out of 5 times they jump scared me and blew up in my face, causing me to eat some food to regain health. The other 1 out of 5 times, I was actually able to shoot them and blow them up before they got to me . . . or at least one of the three dive bombing mushrooms, which is why it was absolutely critical to keep your health up.

A scene from the one time I killed all three speedy mushrooms before they exploded on me

Oh sure, it's easy enough to resurrect at a waypoint, but here's one of the most annoying features of this level. If you die in a section of this dungeon and leave just one monster behind, the entire section of the dungeon repops and you have to do it all over again. It got to be absolutely infuriating when I would clear this large courtyard area of 9 harpies, 4 poison plants, 3 mushroom men, 4 zombie goblin archers, and then die to something only to have to have them all repop again. To make matters worse, for some reason the game was thinking I was bound all the way back at the beginning of the dungeon and made me bamf all the way back.  This happened three times, and I was ready to rage.

After letting the game sit for a week I was ready to try again though . . . the allure of the harpies was too great.  By the way, I gotta say this . . . those harpies . . . LOL. I couldn't even concentrate on their horrible faces and vicious talons. All I could look at were their perfectly nakey, perfectly boob job boobs. It was so distracting! As I sunk an arrow deep into the areola of a harpy, I couldn't think how I should get bonus points for that bullseye. I mean, the game has a rating, but I think they could have accomplished what they were going for without it. I digress.

This dungeon was good training for how this game was most likely meant to be played:

Step 1: you bamf forward a couple steps.

Step 2: You bamf backward several steps quickly.

Step 3: You shoot to kill. 

Step 4: You drink potions from your quick belt slots, sometimes during the heat of battle.

Step 5: Gather the loot.

Step 6: Go to step 1.

I guess the other option is to pull out your melee weapons and actually stab things when they get close, but melee just doesn't feel as good as bow shooting, so I'm not going to do that.

There were a few really great trap moments in the Caverns of Decay including the old classic from Indiana Jones. Yes indeed . . . the rolling stone trap.  It was an awesome moment.  I'd play through this dungeon again just for that moment! The other trap that was fun in this dungeon involved the old giant blades swinging across a hanging bridge and a puzzle room where if you got the answer wrong, you got stuck with a billion needles.

Speaking of that puzzle room. Wow!  This room is amazing with its magical universe machine.

It was a cool puzzle . . . picture doesn't look like much, but it was cool . . . trust me

The puzzle itself was a bit infuriating. Basically there were two ways to get the clues you needed to solve it. 1) Find all the pages with the symbol clues. 2) Find the symbol clues in 3 random locations around the dungeon. It took a lot of wandering around, but eventually I found them all.  The reward? A piece to a separate, different puzzle.  For that puzzle you have to find 3 broken tiles and put them together to open up a sarcophagus with a weapon upgrade inside.  The infuriating part of this puzzle was that one of the broken tile pieces was actually sold at the vendor all the way at the beginning of the dungeon. 

Being in VR also naturally means that once in a blue moon you really have to search for a button to press around the world in a spot you wouldn't normally look. (Let's call it the VR-Button-Paradox.) This happened in that big harpy court area of this dungeon.  You have to push a button to reveal stepping stones out to a skeleton to give him an arm.  It took me forever to find that button . . . especially because I didn't know I was looking for it.  If they would have just put the button a little closer to the water's edge, it would have been easier to find. Just sayin'.

Past the harpy courtyard is the final boss, and it was a perfectly acceptable fight. Just make sure you're stocked with health potions on your quick belt and use 'em as you need 'em. Mostly you'll need them for when the boss is hitting you while a mushroom wizard is throwing things down on you from above.  Focus on the boss, then kill that pesky mushroom wizard!  Worked great for me.

Happy Dueling!

Playing Raji and Thinking about India

Yesterday I spent the day, strangely enough, really contemplating India. I thought about its massive population of 1.3 billion people compared to America's 329 million people, and then I just started comparing and contrasting all kinds of things between the two countries. I spent a lot of time thinking about the majority religion there and perhaps began to understand just ever so slightly a bit more?

I really don't know anything, of course. I look at America and all of our nuances that would be hard to explain to someone or even realize they were going on around you until you started a deep dive into the real-life social stratosphere of where we live. Who are you people and why are we like the way we are? Likewise, I'd love to spend some time really getting to know a new friend from India and their culture.

The closest I think I've come was when I was working outsourcing for WIMO and had the opportunity to work with a few professionals from India on a weekly basis. I would try to guide and direct design while monitoring milestone due dates as they made a game with us. I'd slip in a few things after the meetings to try and get to know them better. Questions like what foods do you eat when you celebrate Ganesh Chaturthi? Spoiler alert, it was nothing like what I had read online. I'd also entertain them by coming back each week with a little bit more memorized of how to count to 20 in Hindi. I'm a dumb American. They found it entertaining. The song Ek Do Teen helped a lot. I miss talking them them every week.

Yesterday I spent a lot of time flying over a few towns in India on Google Earth VR. I was surprised to see that major cities like Bengaluru and Hyderabad weren't even 3D modeled.  Of course, I could still go into street view and look around, so it's not all lost. Funny to think that Google Earth VR in a way has a caste system of its own . . . not based on any social structure mind you, but probably based on likely markets or what people typically search for? I'm not really trying to make a political statement here though.

The 2-D map overlayed the flat geography of Bengaluru, India

After that, I jumped on to Steam and downloaded and played the demo version of Raji and put the full game on my wishlist. It's an absolutely beautiful, isometric Action Adventure game filled with the mythology of India.

Raji and Shiva

For the most part the demo is just the tutorial, but it's also a lot of story set up, which is done through a kind of puppet show presentation and also through interactable murals as you're scaling the walls.

This has to be my favorite mural so far in Raji

The final boss was a little challenging and it took me a few tries to understand what I needed to do to defeat him, which is always a sign of a good game, right?  I don't want things to be too easy or it doesn't hook me.

Gulp. Here we go again!

Raji isn't without its social problems come to find out. I guess there's some cultural issues that I don't fully understand where mythology was re-written to glorify nationalism and conservativism? There's a Vice article that gets pretty angry about it. On the other hand, you get Steam store reviews like this, where you realize that there's a lot of under representation in a world steeped with mythology.

But they didn't like the combat ;)

At the end of the day my wife asked me to cook burgers out on the grill for the family, and it suddenly felt very American. As it turns out, my oldest returned home from work earlier than I expected, so the hamburger I had slated for myself went to them, which left me needing to make something for myself. I was almost tempted to spend 30 bucks on Indian food delivery from Grub Hub, but instead I turned to my spice cabinet. 

I ended up taking asparagus tips and broccoli and cooking them in a mixture of vegetable oil, curry, ginger, almond flour, ground mustard, salt, onion powder, chili powder, chili flakes, and monk fruit sugar. It filled the air with a really nice aroma, and I gave it a passing grade for my dinner. Throw in some chicken and I would have given the recipe a name of my own and shared it!

At the end of the day, my thoughts turned to the millions of Hindu widows who by tradition can't remarry and take upon themselves social isolation and poverty. It's absolutely heartbreaking to read about, but it's again, something I understand little about with limited sources. There are, of course, several charities you can donate to if you so choose.

I didn't go as far to actually watch a Bollywood production. I just . . . can't really . . . get into those. Although I might cave to watch Mutamestri because of its Batman cameo. 

All in all it was a complex and interesting delve for me over Labor Day Weekend. One that I wouldn't mind repeating again. I'm fascinated with India lately, and I'm on the hunt for more information, games, and experiences. If you have insights, please share.

Happy Dueling! 

Thanks Blaugust! What's Timmy Wearing?

I saved you all a little cat treat for the last day of Blaugust. It's been a fun month, and I'm happy to have gone the distance. It's been great reading everyone's blogposts and joining in where I can.  The Blaugust Discord server is a fun bunch, and if you're interested in game blogging, you should jump in.

Blogging wasn't the only thing I was doing during August as it turns out. When my youngest would head out the door to school, it gave me a quick 15 minutes to dress up my cat and make a TikTok of him. 

You heard me right, I'm one of "them." 

So, without further ado, I give you my 9 episodes of "What's Timmy wearing?"

@friendlynecro #catsoftiktok ♬ original sound - Tom Purdue

@friendlynecro   #catsoftiktok ♬ original sound - Tom Purdue

@friendlynecro #catsoftiktok ♬ original sound - Tom Purdue

@friendlynecro #catsoftiktok ♬ original sound - Tom Purdue

@friendlynecro #catsoftiktok ♬ original sound - Tom Purdue

@friendlynecro #catsoftiktok ♬ original sound - Tom Purdue

@friendlynecro #catsoftiktok ♬ original sound - Tom Purdue

@friendlynecro  #catsoftiktok ♬ original sound - Tom Purdue

@friendlynecro #catsoftiktok ♬ original sound - Tom Purdue

Until next Blaugust!

Happy Dueling! 

Ding 27 -- Smuggled Lollipops in Tower of Fantasy

I played some ToF last night and progressed a bit with my story quest. As it turns out, there's trouble afoot in the Banges Tech Headquarters! It's THUGS! Crazy thugs with cool stylings!

THUGS gonna die!

As the story goes, after being introduced around the island by Hilda and getting to know a few important characters, you head to bed for the evening. It's a nice scene and you even light off a few fireworks. Ahh, happy days. 

In the morning things are much different. Banges Tech headquarters' shields are up and there's trouble, so Hilda leads you through a back door. When you get there, you find a lot of people in a kind of restraining field and start freeing them and taking down the aforementioned THUGS.

You head into the headquarters itself to see what's going on . . . and promptly get caught while trying to be sneaky.

It was a good try

That's ok, they throw you in a prison cell with a guy named Koh. Koh lets you know that everybody has been captured and put in jail cells, including President Kolador and his son Theo. GASP! 

It's ok. Not only is Koh President Kolador's right hand man, but he's also a thinker! He has a great plan to get the cell door open and have you throw on a guard uniform as a disguise! "Plan Koh" goes off without a hitch and before you know it, you're walking around Banges Tech headquarters in an Heirs of Aida guard uniform freeing people left and right.

Just act natural

I haven't looked up any spoilers about the Heirs of Aida, but I'm thinking that things may not be so black and white with the bad guys of the story. I mean, they could have outright killed President Kolador and Theo, but instead they just locked 'em up, right? 

Here's where the story goes a little kooky. Theo is a pretty sickly kid and looks to only have a couple months left to live. That's driven President Kolador crazy, and he decided to give him some kind of monster making syrum in hopes of saving his life.  However, you only discover this after running a couple of strange black market delivery jobs for a shady character named Hopkins while looking for Astrum. Side note: Keeping things light, Tower of Fantasy makes one of those delivery jobs giving some random kid some lollipops? *scratches head*

The best black market jobs are the ones you pull off for bratty kids

You see, this Astrum stuff we're hunting for is pretty rare and valuable since it's an energy source used to power Omnium machinery.  Yeah, I don't know what that is either. Look! It's all very complicated! 

Anyway, while hunting for Astrum, you then encounter a super frustrating puzzle mechanic that basically wants you to throw a laser box (ala the game Portal) onto a moving platform. Honestly it took me about a good 10 minutes to figure out how to put that cube on the platform.

I hate that stupid cube

Inside the ruins where you're hunting for Astrum is President Kolador, and he's just about done turning his son into a soulless monster. It doesn't end well.  

Theo!  You monster!

In the end, the Heirs of Aida take care of Theo and leave you and Kolador behind. Kolador gives up the "now depleted" Astrum and bids you a final farewell by telling you that "Sean at 201" has what we need as he's left to wallow in the fact that he failed as both a husband and a father. (Dang, I could use some light-hearted lollipop smuggling right about now.)

Heading back to Franz and Hilda, they put 2 and 01 together for you and point you toward Shelter 201 on the east side of Banges Port.

. . . and that's where I decided to stop and do a few bounty missions and dailies and things. Whew. Intense, and I really liked the story there -- even the crazy part of delivering a mystery kid some smuggled lollipops. (especially the crazy part of delivering a mystery kid some smuggled lollipops!) It's all good times in Tower of Fantasy.

Happy Dueling!

Blaugust Journaling -- How about some Guild Wars 2 and Tower of Fantasy?

I got nothin this morning, so I'm just going to do a little quick journaling about a couple of games I played yesterday.

1- Guild Wars 2.

So Team Spode is playing Guild Wars 2 together . . . again . . . and I'm there for the ride! Except last night . . . I wasn't! Why? Because the mic on my headphone decided to not work and I spent way too long fighting it instead of just playing muted. After 40 minutes of troubleshooting and uninstalling Oculus thinking that there was a conflict between the Oculus headphone mic and my actual headphone mic, I organized my terribly messy desk and found the cable I needed to hook in my podcasting mic that I never use. At that point, I was like . . . I'm done, and didn't even log in.

I love going super necro in Guild Wars

That said, I got in a couple hours of play on Guild Wars 2 last night and this morning, so it's not like I feel like I'm "behind" or anything. Our buddies John and Clara have been playing tour guide to Team Spode in the Heart of Thorns expansion, and as it turns out, there's lots to do there . . . waypoints, points of interest, vistas, challenge points, etc.

Standing in a council of angels?

For me personally I've just been going through the story in Heart of Thorns and getting a bit road blocked by the need to grind enemies. Sounds like an MMO, doesn't it? It sure does!

2- Tower of Fantasy

I logged in a bit this morning and man . . . I don't want to like this game, but I'm really liking it. Every time I log in, something cool happens that's like, dang, this is really freaking good.  Case in point, there was a battle with this lady named Frigg and it was friggin' intense. She gave me an amazing butt kicking with a super cool cut scene.

About to get my butt kicked

My brain keeps telling me, please don't let me like a game with the name Tower of Fantasy, but there's this troll inside of me that's like . . . YES, YOU LIKE GAME! YOU PLAY GAME! TOWER! FANTASY! ALL THE THING YOU LIKE! PLAY GAME, DUMMY!

Me . . . it's me. I'm not a crybaby.

That's all I got time for this morning! Thanks for the quick read, and I'll catch you tomorrow.

Happy Dueling!

Some Lessons Learned Blaugust 2022

According to the Master Schedule over on Belghast's blog, this week is to be the Lessons Learned week after a solid month of blogging. So, hmmm, what did I learn? Lemme brainstorm that a bit:

• I learned that you can't view 360 photos hosted from the Momento360 website on your Quest 2. I even e-mailed their support about it. They pointed the finger at a change to how the Quest 2 works and said they wouldn't have a fix for at least a year.

Looking out over Lonely Lake Georgetown

• I learned that my old Runes of Magic guildmates probably aren't interested in reading my blog anymore now that I'm not writing about RoM and logging on daily. LOL! It's fine. I get it. Same thing happened with my old Project Gorgon guildmates.
  
  
• I learned that I can't hack doing Blaugust and Mutant Reviewers at the same time. I didn't get any movie reviews done this month. I suck.
  
  
• I learned that I think I'm finally getting my Sea Legs in VR. Vection sickness is no joke and there are games that handle it well, and there are games that handle it poorly, but over time, the more you play, the more you start to get an immunity built up to it.
  
  
• I learned that along with gaining an immunity to vection sickness, the more you play VR, the more the illusion of a fantasy world around you starts to crumble away. I'll never forget how I felt playing Astrobot for the first time and how marvelous that fantasy world was in the midst of an apocalyptic pandemic. I don't know if I get that deep into the illusion of a VR world anymore.

Do I have to climb that tower? It might make me seasick.

• I learned the impact that Breath of the Wild and Genshin Impact had on the gaming world. I feel like I missed out on riding a really important cultural gaming phenomenon by not exploring those games more (although my kids played the heck out of it). Tower of Fantasy . . . I'm looking at you!

Feeling the Impact of Genshin Impact

• I learned that looking back on your game portfolio can get a little tedious and dredge up some old buried feelings. I mean, it'll help me if I ever need to start looking for a new job somewhere, but probably not the best material for a Blaugust.
  
  
• I learned that if you happened to make it through that whole list and read to this point, that I appreciate you. Not a lot of people are willing to read a long list like this and invest time in what you have to write, especially when you're a niche game blogger. Thank you!

I'm sure there's more I learned, but I've gotta get ready for the day. So many things to explore and never enough time.

Happy Dueling!

Chronicling the Karnage!

I picked up Karnage Chronicles the other day as a part of a VR Bundle sale (Incidentally it's also 60% off in the Steam store at the moment), and it's really good! It feels a lot like Vanishing Realms (which I've talked about in passing before), but with what feels like a bigger budget of a game studio behind it instead of a solo dev company. In fact after a quick peep at their LinkedIn Page, Nordic Trolls, seems to be a small 2-10 person team located out of Beijing.

Immediately what grabs you in Karnage Chronicles is the art style and the embodied choices for game selection. To choose one of the two classes, Warrior or Archer, you simply walk through a doorway.  To choose a difficulty (easy, normal, hard, or impossible), you, again, simply walk through a doorway. That's great. Nobody wants clunky, ugly UI elements in a VR space . . . unless you're in Roblox. I jest. Even in Roblox it sucks.

Goblin Archers . . . the worst!

Being in this world feels like being inside a fantasy amusement park ride. Everywhere you look at a rock wall, there's also some kind of bioluminescence that gives the world a fanciful Underdark kind of charm. Just like in an amusement ride, there's pockets of decoration off to the side for you to look at. The puddles on the ground reflect this bioluminescent glowing as well. Around every corner is some kind of urn or bottle to break with a bow or even pick up to throw. It's just a fun world to be in. They've done really well making the cave system wind and turn and open up into natural rooms.  

Timing my run through a trapped corridor

The inventory system feels like a complete rip off of Vanishing Realms, but they've made some improvements to it. You can stack similar items! It's easy to drop and sell!  But at the end of the day, it's exactly like the inventory in Vanishing Realms, which is good!  I'd love to see someone innovate beyond this system, but as far as VR RPGs go, this is as good as it gets.

To be honest, live action melee combat is really hard to pull off in VR. It's super easy to get inside the middle of an enemy and slice around in a strange haphazard fashion that doesn't necessarily feel cool. Karnage Chronicles suffers from this. Archery in VR, on the other hand, always feels cool. In Death Unchained is still one of my favorite games in VR. I've raved about it before. Likewise, I love shooting arrows at things in Karnage Chronicles.

Sticking the End Boss of Wyvernscale with several of my deadly arrows

So far I've been exploring Wyvernscale, which appears to be the first of three areas. In fact, as of writing this blog post, I believe I've just entered the second area Caves of Decay. Little hint if you play this game, there is nothing more valuable than the scroll of Town Portal. Every time you go to town, be sure to buy a new one because you won't stumble on a replacement while out adventuring. I can't tell you how many times I've been bogged down with a full inventory. Meh, inventory, the bane of all RPGs. Am I right?

At the beginning of the Caves of Decay, you run into an orcish innkeeper, a full size NPC, that is absolutely amazing. They really handled him well as a character. All in all, I'm really impressed with the art and sound in this game. It's just done extremely well. The way the sound echoes around the tunnels is amazing in a 3D space and completely unnerving in a good way. Immersion is the name of the game, and they pulled it off extremely well in this game.

Love this guy . . . feels like an Australian Orc

Best part of this game of course, is that you can play it with friends. I'm pretty sure a group of us at work is going to jump into this game and play it together over lunch breaks. It seems to integrate really well with your Steam friend list. Because of that, I'm sure I'll have plenty more to write about Karnage Chronicles in the future.  It's one of the great ones! 

Happy Dueling!