Golem Creation Kit
Jun. 28th, 2020 10:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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playingstoryName: Golem Creation Kit
Status: Complete
Site: https://illuminated-games.itch.io/golem-creation-kit
Rating: G?
Pairing: Gen? Possibly M/F later on
Description: A clunky and finicky game that's sadistic on multiple levels
This was in the VN category on the site that lets you filter BLM bundle games, but it's not really a VN. It's some sort of interactive puzzlish game but made in RenPy. For each day a group of villagers come to pound down your door and what you have to do is drag elements of outside scenes like the trees, rivers, houses, and animals, into your inventory, go back to your tower, put it in a cauldron where each thing gives you a certain amount of elements, go back, and keep doing this until you have enough of one element to create a golem. Once you do that the golem comes out and as long as none of the villagers are immune to that element they all run away and you win for the day. In between this there's some narrative and a some dialogue choices, but the puzzles kind of overwhelm that as the primary aspect of gameplay.
Which is unfortunate because the mechanics behind the golem building is pretty bad. You have a time limit of 90 seconds, but there are so many ui roadblocks to efficiency you spend most of that time trying to rearrange the four messy item slots you get and going back and forth from the collection area to the cauldron area. I tried to play it that way a handful of times and then said fuck it and took advantage of the option to turn the time limit off. I've said this before, but if a game gives you the option to just remove an entire major mechanic from the game one wonders why that mechanic exists in the game to begin with. Even with all the time in the world trying to collect the right crap from three unchanging landscapes is not fun. It's not like an I spy game where part of the enjoyment is looking through the environment for new things. It's the same thing every round, and the only reason you can put the same shit in the cauldron every time is because of immunities and the fact that stuff you use regenerates slowly and can't be used twice in a row.
You are given magic words that you can use to change the effect of the cauldron but many of them are not helpful. For example, one lets you see what elements have synergies with the element that is highest in the cauldron at the time. If you have high elements together you get a special combo golem, which is important for when you have villagers with multiple immunities facing you down. But, even though the option to use the word shows up as a disposable for every round the effects persist so you never need to use it again. And the indicators that they produce don't actually make clear which elements are good or not. It highlights them in different colors, but I can't figure out which color is the good one or the bad one. So it's like... completely worthless without experimentation, and my poor memory prevented me from being able to remember the results, so I just started ignoring it.
Other magical effects are based on time, so if you stop time they're just permanent? Who knows.
If you put too much of an element you don't want in the effects are detrimental. So theoretically it's good that it requires you to think about what you're grabbing, but doing so is clunky and again the time pressure doesn't really add anything but encouragement to make bad choices. There are spells to mitigate this, but again, lots of finickiness to get ingredients right but no real reward for that work. When you're done with making the golem you send it out, and there's this bunch of cut scenes that are slow enough that the game lets you skip them, but if you skip them wrong, you aren't told whether or not you succeeded or lost. You just end up back in the next round phase, and you find out if you have to do the same round all over again when you hit start. I feel like the indication of whether I succeeded or failed should be decoupled from the fluff stall cutscenes.
The three landscapes where you drag random shit into your inventory to collect it are large but empty. That is, they don't fit on the screen. You need to move around clunkily to look all over the place, but there is a fuck ton of empty space and a lot of elements are super large, so if they just designed it better it would all fit on a screen. Having to move around looking for stuff is more BS that wastes time for no reason and adds no strategy or complexity to the problem. The devs clearly didn't know how to scale so that both large elements and small could be represented efficiently.
So I was getting more and more frustrated with this game, and not having a particular fun time with the mechanics. The narrative layer was just barely keeping me in it, as there was some sort of ominous suggestion that things might go bad or the concept might shift from what was otherwise a straight forward plot of an magician's apprentice fending off angry villagers. A subplot shows up with a talking mirror. Your master told you not to talk to it, but while he's away his crow familiar introduces you to it. You have the option the first two times to refuse to talk to it and basically obey your master but in the third scene the game seems to forget that and you're suddenly conversing with it.
So as you collect ingredients sometimes special shit shows up in the landscape which seems to have something to do with the plot. There's diary entries which are the usual "something terrible's about to happen" stuff, and you get a ring too. When you talk to the mirror after getting the ring it's like, thanks for doing what I asked, and if you say you didn't ask me anything after ignoring it the first few times it's like, ha ha very fun thanks again. So there seems to be a meta reason for some of the BS going on, but I don't care for reasons I will explain in a second.
Eventually you end up in a situation where you can ask the mirror some questions. If you ask a certain one the game goes full jump scare on you. What was until then a game of primary colors gets horror mode, the mirror cracks, the girl's face on it goes Ringu, you know the deal. And it babbles stuff about not asking that question. Ok, I thought. Plot hook. That's fine. I play that round and lose because this stupid element collection is unfun and the objectives remain too opaque. The game reloads at the scene where you have to ask questions of the mirror. I try a couple others and then lose again and am starting to really hate the game. I end up back having a chat with the mirror, and decide ask the same question with the jump scare.
Which is when the fucking thing decides it's Undertale and changes the jump scare to "I WARNED YOU," throws a fake error, and then erases my save. Like, it actually erased my fucking save.
Now, clearly it's trying for meta bullshit here. Maybe if I start a new game something will be different. But I don't give a fuck. The core of the gameplay is tedious, opaque, and uninteresting, and I'm not into it, so this game is going in the trash. There's no way in hell I'm starting from the beginning again.
And that's why there's no screenshots. I usually go back and capture a few things to provide a general idea of what to expect after I've done a playthrough, but since the game deleted my save that's not going to happen. And I'm usually not this down on tiny indy games but this one felt malicious, so fuck it.
Oh, and do not play this with headphones. The sound design is such that I felt like the "fire" sound was going to give me tinnitus.
Edit: I did some digging and as I suspected my save wasn't entirely "deleted." There was a recovery option hidden in the game somewhere, but IDGAF, I deleted the whole thing off my computer already. If I had liked the game enough I would have pushed through that but the "deletion" gave me an excuse to cut my losses.
Status: Complete
Site: https://illuminated-games.itch.io/golem-creation-kit
Rating: G?
Pairing: Gen? Possibly M/F later on
Description: A clunky and finicky game that's sadistic on multiple levels
This was in the VN category on the site that lets you filter BLM bundle games, but it's not really a VN. It's some sort of interactive puzzlish game but made in RenPy. For each day a group of villagers come to pound down your door and what you have to do is drag elements of outside scenes like the trees, rivers, houses, and animals, into your inventory, go back to your tower, put it in a cauldron where each thing gives you a certain amount of elements, go back, and keep doing this until you have enough of one element to create a golem. Once you do that the golem comes out and as long as none of the villagers are immune to that element they all run away and you win for the day. In between this there's some narrative and a some dialogue choices, but the puzzles kind of overwhelm that as the primary aspect of gameplay.
Which is unfortunate because the mechanics behind the golem building is pretty bad. You have a time limit of 90 seconds, but there are so many ui roadblocks to efficiency you spend most of that time trying to rearrange the four messy item slots you get and going back and forth from the collection area to the cauldron area. I tried to play it that way a handful of times and then said fuck it and took advantage of the option to turn the time limit off. I've said this before, but if a game gives you the option to just remove an entire major mechanic from the game one wonders why that mechanic exists in the game to begin with. Even with all the time in the world trying to collect the right crap from three unchanging landscapes is not fun. It's not like an I spy game where part of the enjoyment is looking through the environment for new things. It's the same thing every round, and the only reason you can put the same shit in the cauldron every time is because of immunities and the fact that stuff you use regenerates slowly and can't be used twice in a row.
You are given magic words that you can use to change the effect of the cauldron but many of them are not helpful. For example, one lets you see what elements have synergies with the element that is highest in the cauldron at the time. If you have high elements together you get a special combo golem, which is important for when you have villagers with multiple immunities facing you down. But, even though the option to use the word shows up as a disposable for every round the effects persist so you never need to use it again. And the indicators that they produce don't actually make clear which elements are good or not. It highlights them in different colors, but I can't figure out which color is the good one or the bad one. So it's like... completely worthless without experimentation, and my poor memory prevented me from being able to remember the results, so I just started ignoring it.
Other magical effects are based on time, so if you stop time they're just permanent? Who knows.
If you put too much of an element you don't want in the effects are detrimental. So theoretically it's good that it requires you to think about what you're grabbing, but doing so is clunky and again the time pressure doesn't really add anything but encouragement to make bad choices. There are spells to mitigate this, but again, lots of finickiness to get ingredients right but no real reward for that work. When you're done with making the golem you send it out, and there's this bunch of cut scenes that are slow enough that the game lets you skip them, but if you skip them wrong, you aren't told whether or not you succeeded or lost. You just end up back in the next round phase, and you find out if you have to do the same round all over again when you hit start. I feel like the indication of whether I succeeded or failed should be decoupled from the fluff stall cutscenes.
The three landscapes where you drag random shit into your inventory to collect it are large but empty. That is, they don't fit on the screen. You need to move around clunkily to look all over the place, but there is a fuck ton of empty space and a lot of elements are super large, so if they just designed it better it would all fit on a screen. Having to move around looking for stuff is more BS that wastes time for no reason and adds no strategy or complexity to the problem. The devs clearly didn't know how to scale so that both large elements and small could be represented efficiently.
So I was getting more and more frustrated with this game, and not having a particular fun time with the mechanics. The narrative layer was just barely keeping me in it, as there was some sort of ominous suggestion that things might go bad or the concept might shift from what was otherwise a straight forward plot of an magician's apprentice fending off angry villagers. A subplot shows up with a talking mirror. Your master told you not to talk to it, but while he's away his crow familiar introduces you to it. You have the option the first two times to refuse to talk to it and basically obey your master but in the third scene the game seems to forget that and you're suddenly conversing with it.
So as you collect ingredients sometimes special shit shows up in the landscape which seems to have something to do with the plot. There's diary entries which are the usual "something terrible's about to happen" stuff, and you get a ring too. When you talk to the mirror after getting the ring it's like, thanks for doing what I asked, and if you say you didn't ask me anything after ignoring it the first few times it's like, ha ha very fun thanks again. So there seems to be a meta reason for some of the BS going on, but I don't care for reasons I will explain in a second.
Eventually you end up in a situation where you can ask the mirror some questions. If you ask a certain one the game goes full jump scare on you. What was until then a game of primary colors gets horror mode, the mirror cracks, the girl's face on it goes Ringu, you know the deal. And it babbles stuff about not asking that question. Ok, I thought. Plot hook. That's fine. I play that round and lose because this stupid element collection is unfun and the objectives remain too opaque. The game reloads at the scene where you have to ask questions of the mirror. I try a couple others and then lose again and am starting to really hate the game. I end up back having a chat with the mirror, and decide ask the same question with the jump scare.
Which is when the fucking thing decides it's Undertale and changes the jump scare to "I WARNED YOU," throws a fake error, and then erases my save. Like, it actually erased my fucking save.
Now, clearly it's trying for meta bullshit here. Maybe if I start a new game something will be different. But I don't give a fuck. The core of the gameplay is tedious, opaque, and uninteresting, and I'm not into it, so this game is going in the trash. There's no way in hell I'm starting from the beginning again.
And that's why there's no screenshots. I usually go back and capture a few things to provide a general idea of what to expect after I've done a playthrough, but since the game deleted my save that's not going to happen. And I'm usually not this down on tiny indy games but this one felt malicious, so fuck it.
Oh, and do not play this with headphones. The sound design is such that I felt like the "fire" sound was going to give me tinnitus.
Edit: I did some digging and as I suspected my save wasn't entirely "deleted." There was a recovery option hidden in the game somewhere, but IDGAF, I deleted the whole thing off my computer already. If I had liked the game enough I would have pushed through that but the "deletion" gave me an excuse to cut my losses.
