What we've been playing
A few of the games that have us hooked at the moment.
2nd June, 2023
Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've found ourselves playing over the last few days. This time: Die, gobble holes and cough syrup.
If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We've Been Playing, here's our archive.
DIE: The Roleplaying Game, um, Hardback
I'm breaking the rules slightly in that I haven't actually played this yet, but it is a game I want to play, and it is a game I've been reading - or rather a game-book I've been reading in the interests of playing it.
DIE is co-created and written by Kieron Gillen who, if you've been around Eurogamer long enough, you might remember writing for the site. He went on to co-found Rock, Paper, Shotgun, but left games journalism to pursue a career writing comics, and it turned out he was bloody good at it, earning him employment from companies like Marvel.
Fast-forward a few years and Gillen has co-created and launched a few original series of his own, including the brilliant The Wicked + The Divine, and, to get to the point, DIE. DIE is a series about a group of people who were sucked into a tabletop role-playing game as teenagers, before finding their way out only to be sucked back in, years later, all over again. Think Dungeons & Dragons meets Jumanji.
Gillen needed an in-comic game for it to all be based on, though, so he set about creating one all of his own. That's why you'll find, in the back pages of the comic, essays by him where he unpicks an experience like Dungeons & Dragons and rethinks what it could be. He then took all of this thinking and, with the help of tabletop RPG experts Rowan, Rook and Decard, made a proper TTRPG game out of it. Then, they Kickstarted it, and copies of the book are currently shipping to backers - backers like me.
This game, then, represents something of a new vision for a TTRPG experience, and I'm fascinated by the ideas in it. Get this, for example: you don't play as one character in the game, you play as two: as a Persona (the person playing the TTRPG) and as a Paragon (the character in the TTRPG). And this sets up all kinds of powerful role-playing opportunities. Say your Persona has wanted to be something in their 'real' life: their Paragon can be it.
This can obviously play on quite powerful potential themes, and it's those deeper questions, those deeper role-playing possibilities, I feel DIE is really trying to get at. To me it seems like the book is laying out a whole framework for mature, collaborative storytelling play, which I'm really excited by - complete with many safe-play suggestions to enable it, too.
It's even suggested that the person running the game chooses the classes - the Paragons - people play, because some of them come with powers like being able to convince someone to do anything, which can be problematic if wielded in an immature way.
Despite all that that implied heaviness, though, DIE seems really light in terms of getting it up and running to play. There's clearly a concerted effort for this to be the case, and to avoid some of the laborious preparation that goes into running D&D games. Given the first couple of sessions are pretty much supplied to you, there's even an argument that it's pick up and play.
I'll stop there because I could go on forever but suffice to say I'm very impressed.
Bertie
Special Delivery, PC
2023's "Edwin Wishes It Was Still 2010" browser game-a-thon continues apace with Special Delivery - an Itch.io freebie which, as the name implies, is about ferrying a package from one end of a warehouse to the other. Rather than controlling a worker, you punt the box from conveyor belt to conveyor belt by activating pistons, toggling robot claws, flipping flippers and - oh gosh, I've just realised this is a pinball machine!
Or more accurately, a pinbox machine - there's no rolling the package up ramps, though you do occasionally contrive to spin it over the floor on one corner. Special Delivery shouldn't last you longer than 15 minutes, unless you're militant about avoiding restarts and scooping all the floating envelope collectibles, and is one of the most straightforwardly pleasurable things I've played in a while. If it leaves you thirsting for the gobble holes (yes, this is a real pinball word), I recommend grimdark pixelart game Demon's Tilt as a paid follow-up.
Edwin
Super Smash Bros Ultimate, Switch
I recently reinstalled this after losing my save years ago, and have been enjoying unlocking all the characters afresh - I've just bagged Bowser over lunch. I have limited patience for unlocking these days, but Ultimate is an absurdly bountiful and engagingly self-contradictory confection, with its dozens upon dozens of mismatched fighters and stages from all across the Nintendo timeline. The opening cinematic speaks for itself. As a friend of mine used to say, usually in reference to my wardrobe, "this is some Kingdom Hearts bullshit right here".
Each fresh challenger warps the whole game around itself - with the exception of all those identikit Fire Emblem heroes, anyway. Expanding the roster is sort of like getting the Switch high on cough syrup. Drop your counter on Random at the character screen and marvel at the chaos. The characters are, of course, all built around the same broad categories of moves and abilities - it's fun to explore how peaceniks such as Animal Crossing's Isabelle have been reworked into pugilists capable of stamping Bayonetta's face in.
Edwin