Some video games make us need 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 certainly one of these video games. It’s undoubtedly good – a method board recreation dropped at life, a implausible setting, and an intricate, intelligent roguelike – but it surely’s lined in so many small brambles that true greatness is out of its attain. We’ve performed the same recreation that gave us the same response, just a few weeks in the past. Oaken and Darkish Quest 3 share a flawed strategy to bringing turn-based technique to the roguelike. We sort of want they obtained collectively and solved the issue collectively, as they each get very various things incorrect.
Oaken’s world is beautiful. Gone are the loincloths and robes of the fantasy style. It’s a method 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 model leans into the bioluminescence, thorns and spores. The character designs reap the benefits 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 arduous to inform which unit is what. They blur into the identical bulbous mass, and all that onerous 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 choice of skills. Then you choose a sidekick: a unit which is all the time out there, whatever the playing cards in your hand. These are typically costlier, 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 observe shall be acquainted to any Slay the Spire fan. You’re given a vertical set of nodes (going downwards, so perhaps it’s completely different from Slay the Spire), and you may select your path via them. There isn’t an enormous quantity of wiggle room there, as you may solely transfer barely to the left and barely to the precise, however most of the time you’ve two or three decisions on your subsequent encounter.
It’s a components that has labored on numerous different video games. Oaken deviates somewhat by permitting you to make upgrades to your items everytime you need, slightly than beeline to a store or blacksmith. That freedom is welcome, however the trade-off is that the areas are all too comparable to one another. They’re variations on a theme: kill all the things, kill all the things however with an goal hooked up, or kill a boss. The one exception is Occasions, which provide some neat trade-offs of punishments in opposition to rewards. However principally it’s fight, and that makes the selection somewhat moot: all the things’s going to finish in some fisticuffs.
Combating is straightforward however efficient. Your hero begins on the hex grid, and there shall 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’re going to land, as they will drop into one of some surrounding spots.
You received’t keep alone for lengthy. Every flip, you get a sort of mana which is spent on spawning ‘spirits’ (the sport’s items), casting spells, or utilizing certainly one of your hero’s skills, that are always out there 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 rigidity that’s all the time there: the sport is over when your hero is useless, 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 sort of summoning illness which implies they will’t assault this flip (except they’ve Haste). However as soon as they’re up and working, 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 course that they’re going through. You’ll be able to see that course 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 eliminate it. It’s simply too unnecessarily fiddly to assault a creature that’s close to to you. If one is behind you, it’s important to pivot to face them, which makes use of up your motion. ‘Shooter’ items are uncovered to approach too many guidelines. They’ll solely fireplace based on 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 implies your shooter will get counter-attacked. And perhaps it’s simply us, however we stored selecting an orientation, just for the analogue stick to maneuver a millimetre and alter it to a unique one.
However principally it’s a superb, strategic strategy to hex-based fight. You’ll be able to sneak round an enemy and hit them on the again for uncounterable harm. You’ll be able to 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 may bounce you across the area such as you’re in Pinball FX, or explode in a bathe of Lumi, the sport’s forex. When mixed with the shoving and area-of-effect abilities, there’s large potential for synergies.
Right here comes the ‘however’ once more. Oaken is an extremely arduous to learn recreation. That’s much less to do with the scale of fonts, and extra about primary legibility of what’s happening. Every enemy has its personal checklist of results, as do your items. The crops and mushrooms have results, and the hex terrain does too. That’s exacerbated by nearly each impact being a key phrase, however you may’t – no less than so far as we’ve discovered – develop on any given one. What it’s worthwhile to do is press begin, tab throughout to a glossary after which discover the related time period. You then 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 harm 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 may kind this s**t, however you certain 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 essentially the most primary of issues, like attacking or transferring. 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 – a great 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 could be sufficient together with your newfound information, and also you CAN play on a mode that permits you to play on previous deaths. However even that latter choice has its personal punitive issues: you restart at the start of the chapter, which implies death-by-boss takes you again ten or so battles.
We might go on, but we’ve gone on too lengthy already. And that’s as a result of we’re obsessed with Oaken – we are able to see the sport that it needs to be. The artwork is attractive, the concepts plentiful, and there’s a lot depth to the fight and upgrades that it boggles the thoughts.
You’ll be able to 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 scenario, and restarting a run takes far too lengthy. The ivy crawls round Oaken and drags it down, when it needs to be taking pictures up into the sky.
