I think it might be interesting to compare and contrast this game, with both 20 Minutes Til Dawn and Vampire Survivors but I don't want to get too deep in the weeds so I'll generally talk about the ways this game is distinct then highlight some similarities. I also want to note though that I find this game far less egregious than VSurv on the whole, and that when I talk about all three I'm strictly talking about them as games and not secretly saying 'one is actually a slot casino' (in fact not needing to do so was the whole point of my write up there as marred as that thesis statement might have been) or w/ever so relax.
In contrast to those games. This one goes for a more 3D fixed arena combat approach swapping out the top down angle for instead a diagonal aerial view, such that you might be familiar with from Diablo or Torchlight. At first this may seem indistinguishable and unimportant, but its actually enormously so in terms of keeping a dynamic visual busyness. What I mean by this is that all three of these games bring catharsis to the player by melting all the enemies on the screen into collectable gems as much as possible, with 20 minutes electing more towards the feeling of being cramped and Soulstone here being as many unique enemy attack patterns and 6 auto attacks from the player character, meaning the screen is absolutely melted over with visual eye candy, my 3rd and final run I had built bomb skills and the result was that there were so many explosion effects on the screen I was going crosseyed. However it felt very coherent and dynamic due to this camera adjustment and 3D effect. To help make things intelligible the enemy attacks show the hit box which you can avoid with a dash. The results are an effective display of visual noise that you can easily sift through while still feeling fun and chaotic. The top down angle by design limits to a degree the chaos of the eye candy because with the character centered on the screen it makes clear how homogenous the movement and evasion is. One of the issues I have with VSurv, is honestly just how boring and static the movement of the character in particular is, I feel like hot molasses just trudging along and melting everything in my path, and the centering only makes the evasion in 20 Minutes feel about as well as it can. This is by far the nicest thing I have to say about Soulstone Survivors and why I would say it's probably an amusing enough toy for a few runs. Reminds me of when I was a kid an fantasized all my toys violently crowding and attacking each other in huge duels to the death, this is just a slightly automated adult satisfaction of that same pleasure.
However this is unfortunately not enough to overcome some of the game design issues, the enemies having a large variation in their attacks along with you having to aim your auto attack and dodge I think leads it above the mere base point of it being a simple skinnerbox. But the problem is that the way level ups choices happen (which are constant, I felt like I was leveling up every 30 seconds) make the decisions obvious. So similar to VSurv you choose between three options, with the attack variations of what skills you pick feeling really unique and enjoyable. With a row of 6 actives and then a bunch of passives, the issue is that the way they dole these to you is through random chance rarity modifiers, but each 'option' you pick from is induvidually randomized and there's a clear indication that epic options are almost always better than rares, which are almost always better than commons, etc. So outside of the occasional health buff, the decisions pretty much choose themselves, you almost always pick up the highest rarity one, you can typically do this without even worrying or considering it much, which means those constant level ups become a quick visual nuisance you scroll past. There are other choices that are similarly automatic, for example the experience upgrade is an auto pick in this game and VSurv early on in a run because of the scaling. It by design means that you are basically trading (and barely) 1 early game level up for 3 late game ones, which with the damage modifiers not making the game difficult until then makes the choice a no brainer. Basically this issue would be solved if they got rid of the XP Modifier and either locked an entire option pool to 1 rarity or switched out the rarity system entirely. I would prefer the later because 20 Minutes and VSurv already recognized that building towards synergies is generally more satisfying than the variance of random basic power up pools. Now when you kill bosses in either of those games you do get a high varience quality reward, and I take issue with this as well, especially in VSurvivors case where the chest animation makes me downright impatient but at least within that matrix its a design decision that already makes sense.
The Experience scaling as a level up in particular is a particularly stupid design decision across all 3 of these games though. I understand on the surface this may seem anal retentive, but the issue is that whenever there's a degree of genuine difficulty in these games, the degree to which you win or lose a run is decided that much more by the level of variance of getting the XP upgrade. You naturally have an option that is far and away stronger than every other earlier in the game than later on. Whereas most of the rest of the pool settles in a place of equal strength and depends generally on how you build synergies. In theory the lack of explicit synergies in Soulstone would actually mean that there is even more nuance in your upgrade decisions as it would make playstyle and builds infinite, but this is once again simply squandered by not locking the rarity pools.
I think there's one point in particular though that really just confounds me and to a degree gets on my nerves, and thats the statistical advantage out of game upgrade skill tree. This is something I noticed in the Mirror in Hades to, heres my functional problem with it: Doesn't a 3% damage boost upgrade just make all your future runs 3% easier? Doesn't that mean, until Ascensions come into play, that the hardest run of the game is your first run? To illustrate why this confuses me so much lets genre hop ever so slightly to how most roguelites do it. In Isaac or Slay the Spire what you unlock from completing a run is new items added to the pool, this does not nessecarily make the game easier or harder. It might make the game ever so slightly easier in isaac if you get brimstone added to the pool, but you still have to actually find it. If Isaac had an upgrade tree that made your tears do 30% more damage, it would be indistinguishable from an easy mode. But once you level up these skill trees in Soulstone or Hades its not exactly you can undo that unless you play the game with a wiped save, whereas having an extra item in a pool in a rouguelite game just feels natural and fun. I think what's so confusing about this progression system to me at least is typically when I want to play a game I want more challenging or interesting things to happen over the course of runs. I don't want to make the game easier for myself.
Now you could argue that the prestiege mode in Soulstone Survivors balances this out, and you would be right, but think about that for a moment: I'm making the game slightly easier to make the game 'harder' to make it easier again. It would only be after getting to the highest prestiege and all the max out on the progression tree that I would stabalize to the 'real' difficulty, but then if I went back and decided to play a no presteige run to relax, that run would not just be easier than the presteige difficulty it would be naturally easier than your initial run of the game. Here, you would instead have to guesstimate the initial game difficulty, is it prestiege level 3, 5? This is confusing and why I think fixed easy and hard modes from the outsdet is completely ok! The Progression system becomes a sort of Negative Prestiege, which seems to nullify the whole point of having one.
If I was to speculate why these games in this genre seem to do this anyway is that, it just leads better for a ratrace and feeling of growth and attainment over the system, but unlike in just adding more skills to the pool, the addition is completely artificial. Progression systems make sense when you're playing Diablo or other dungeoneering RPGs as your character is supposed to get stronger in order to keep up with the strength of the enemies but thats 1 continuous run. In a game like this, its the equivalent of taking anabolic steroids over adding a new workout routine that focuses on your cores. Yes you are theoretically getting stronger and in a mercurial sense its earned to the degree that you used the steroids and its your life to do so, but in the long run its the illusion of satisfaction, decision making, and personal growth rather than actually doing so (tho I realize this is a very strained analogy when considering gender euphoria of doing so like with transmascs, I would attribute that to more of a continuous upgrade system of self growth like in the dungeeoneering example. Anyway hopefully you get what I mean.). Not to mention this isn't like the progression system to make certain sections of dark souls easier by going out of your way to finding humanities and using them sparingly. You get bonuses to these progressions by simply playing the game for long enough, that's it.
On that note, it's pretty much exactly for this reason I take issue with Hades game design as well. It's honestly one of the go to design decisions that can immediately turn me off to a game. Just leaving aside the issue of whether these systems are intended to needlessly compel you to play more, the appreciation for it by other players and yearning for it has always confused me. My assumption is they just don't really notice it, which is why I spent so much time putting precision on it here.
I don't think any of this stuff makes the game egregious or awful to the degree VSurv is, I can understand what people are saying when they like this game even though I think improving or erasing these issues would really add a lot to the play experience. But all these factors do take what could be a great and entertaining game and sort of squander it a bit. This is also what I was trying to get across with VSurv itself being particularly a game design issue, theres game design issues here to for sure and for me at least that's a far bigger point of contention than simple moral remarks on the game itself. You can say basically the same in terms of hating monetization models etc by scaling out the problems like this I think.
Still I agree with Detchibe in hoping other designers take note more of the strengths of this iteration on the automated twin stick shooter genre. A great version of this game is very much possible!!
In contrast to those games. This one goes for a more 3D fixed arena combat approach swapping out the top down angle for instead a diagonal aerial view, such that you might be familiar with from Diablo or Torchlight. At first this may seem indistinguishable and unimportant, but its actually enormously so in terms of keeping a dynamic visual busyness. What I mean by this is that all three of these games bring catharsis to the player by melting all the enemies on the screen into collectable gems as much as possible, with 20 minutes electing more towards the feeling of being cramped and Soulstone here being as many unique enemy attack patterns and 6 auto attacks from the player character, meaning the screen is absolutely melted over with visual eye candy, my 3rd and final run I had built bomb skills and the result was that there were so many explosion effects on the screen I was going crosseyed. However it felt very coherent and dynamic due to this camera adjustment and 3D effect. To help make things intelligible the enemy attacks show the hit box which you can avoid with a dash. The results are an effective display of visual noise that you can easily sift through while still feeling fun and chaotic. The top down angle by design limits to a degree the chaos of the eye candy because with the character centered on the screen it makes clear how homogenous the movement and evasion is. One of the issues I have with VSurv, is honestly just how boring and static the movement of the character in particular is, I feel like hot molasses just trudging along and melting everything in my path, and the centering only makes the evasion in 20 Minutes feel about as well as it can. This is by far the nicest thing I have to say about Soulstone Survivors and why I would say it's probably an amusing enough toy for a few runs. Reminds me of when I was a kid an fantasized all my toys violently crowding and attacking each other in huge duels to the death, this is just a slightly automated adult satisfaction of that same pleasure.
However this is unfortunately not enough to overcome some of the game design issues, the enemies having a large variation in their attacks along with you having to aim your auto attack and dodge I think leads it above the mere base point of it being a simple skinnerbox. But the problem is that the way level ups choices happen (which are constant, I felt like I was leveling up every 30 seconds) make the decisions obvious. So similar to VSurv you choose between three options, with the attack variations of what skills you pick feeling really unique and enjoyable. With a row of 6 actives and then a bunch of passives, the issue is that the way they dole these to you is through random chance rarity modifiers, but each 'option' you pick from is induvidually randomized and there's a clear indication that epic options are almost always better than rares, which are almost always better than commons, etc. So outside of the occasional health buff, the decisions pretty much choose themselves, you almost always pick up the highest rarity one, you can typically do this without even worrying or considering it much, which means those constant level ups become a quick visual nuisance you scroll past. There are other choices that are similarly automatic, for example the experience upgrade is an auto pick in this game and VSurv early on in a run because of the scaling. It by design means that you are basically trading (and barely) 1 early game level up for 3 late game ones, which with the damage modifiers not making the game difficult until then makes the choice a no brainer. Basically this issue would be solved if they got rid of the XP Modifier and either locked an entire option pool to 1 rarity or switched out the rarity system entirely. I would prefer the later because 20 Minutes and VSurv already recognized that building towards synergies is generally more satisfying than the variance of random basic power up pools. Now when you kill bosses in either of those games you do get a high varience quality reward, and I take issue with this as well, especially in VSurvivors case where the chest animation makes me downright impatient but at least within that matrix its a design decision that already makes sense.
The Experience scaling as a level up in particular is a particularly stupid design decision across all 3 of these games though. I understand on the surface this may seem anal retentive, but the issue is that whenever there's a degree of genuine difficulty in these games, the degree to which you win or lose a run is decided that much more by the level of variance of getting the XP upgrade. You naturally have an option that is far and away stronger than every other earlier in the game than later on. Whereas most of the rest of the pool settles in a place of equal strength and depends generally on how you build synergies. In theory the lack of explicit synergies in Soulstone would actually mean that there is even more nuance in your upgrade decisions as it would make playstyle and builds infinite, but this is once again simply squandered by not locking the rarity pools.
I think there's one point in particular though that really just confounds me and to a degree gets on my nerves, and thats the statistical advantage out of game upgrade skill tree. This is something I noticed in the Mirror in Hades to, heres my functional problem with it: Doesn't a 3% damage boost upgrade just make all your future runs 3% easier? Doesn't that mean, until Ascensions come into play, that the hardest run of the game is your first run? To illustrate why this confuses me so much lets genre hop ever so slightly to how most roguelites do it. In Isaac or Slay the Spire what you unlock from completing a run is new items added to the pool, this does not nessecarily make the game easier or harder. It might make the game ever so slightly easier in isaac if you get brimstone added to the pool, but you still have to actually find it. If Isaac had an upgrade tree that made your tears do 30% more damage, it would be indistinguishable from an easy mode. But once you level up these skill trees in Soulstone or Hades its not exactly you can undo that unless you play the game with a wiped save, whereas having an extra item in a pool in a rouguelite game just feels natural and fun. I think what's so confusing about this progression system to me at least is typically when I want to play a game I want more challenging or interesting things to happen over the course of runs. I don't want to make the game easier for myself.
Now you could argue that the prestiege mode in Soulstone Survivors balances this out, and you would be right, but think about that for a moment: I'm making the game slightly easier to make the game 'harder' to make it easier again. It would only be after getting to the highest prestiege and all the max out on the progression tree that I would stabalize to the 'real' difficulty, but then if I went back and decided to play a no presteige run to relax, that run would not just be easier than the presteige difficulty it would be naturally easier than your initial run of the game. Here, you would instead have to guesstimate the initial game difficulty, is it prestiege level 3, 5? This is confusing and why I think fixed easy and hard modes from the outsdet is completely ok! The Progression system becomes a sort of Negative Prestiege, which seems to nullify the whole point of having one.
If I was to speculate why these games in this genre seem to do this anyway is that, it just leads better for a ratrace and feeling of growth and attainment over the system, but unlike in just adding more skills to the pool, the addition is completely artificial. Progression systems make sense when you're playing Diablo or other dungeoneering RPGs as your character is supposed to get stronger in order to keep up with the strength of the enemies but thats 1 continuous run. In a game like this, its the equivalent of taking anabolic steroids over adding a new workout routine that focuses on your cores. Yes you are theoretically getting stronger and in a mercurial sense its earned to the degree that you used the steroids and its your life to do so, but in the long run its the illusion of satisfaction, decision making, and personal growth rather than actually doing so (tho I realize this is a very strained analogy when considering gender euphoria of doing so like with transmascs, I would attribute that to more of a continuous upgrade system of self growth like in the dungeeoneering example. Anyway hopefully you get what I mean.). Not to mention this isn't like the progression system to make certain sections of dark souls easier by going out of your way to finding humanities and using them sparingly. You get bonuses to these progressions by simply playing the game for long enough, that's it.
On that note, it's pretty much exactly for this reason I take issue with Hades game design as well. It's honestly one of the go to design decisions that can immediately turn me off to a game. Just leaving aside the issue of whether these systems are intended to needlessly compel you to play more, the appreciation for it by other players and yearning for it has always confused me. My assumption is they just don't really notice it, which is why I spent so much time putting precision on it here.
I don't think any of this stuff makes the game egregious or awful to the degree VSurv is, I can understand what people are saying when they like this game even though I think improving or erasing these issues would really add a lot to the play experience. But all these factors do take what could be a great and entertaining game and sort of squander it a bit. This is also what I was trying to get across with VSurv itself being particularly a game design issue, theres game design issues here to for sure and for me at least that's a far bigger point of contention than simple moral remarks on the game itself. You can say basically the same in terms of hating monetization models etc by scaling out the problems like this I think.
Still I agree with Detchibe in hoping other designers take note more of the strengths of this iteration on the automated twin stick shooter genre. A great version of this game is very much possible!!
6 Comments
Concur w/ perma-upgrade systems in roguelites, the ones I like generally avoid it.
Kind of an aside but in general with roguelites, I feel like you need to justify why you even have random items in the game. It seems like often the "build choices" just come down to either pick the "rarest" item like you mention here, or enter an archetype then pick stuff in it. (And then the dev makes some average arcade-style gameplay to go with that). Slay the Spire is my favorite of the roguelites that I've played for that reason, it's focused hard on balancing short and long term gain with the HP system, skipping cards, specialized bosses, etc.
Kind of an aside but in general with roguelites, I feel like you need to justify why you even have random items in the game. It seems like often the "build choices" just come down to either pick the "rarest" item like you mention here, or enter an archetype then pick stuff in it. (And then the dev makes some average arcade-style gameplay to go with that). Slay the Spire is my favorite of the roguelites that I've played for that reason, it's focused hard on balancing short and long term gain with the HP system, skipping cards, specialized bosses, etc.
@HotPocketHPE Thanks so much for taking the time to read and respond with your own thoughts I appreciate that a lot ^-^
I'll probably just refer to it as a 'perma upgrade system' going forward. That was the exact definitive wording I was stumbling for.
Agree that using an items system isn't qualitative of 'balanced' game design nor in a long term sense even desirable game design. One thing I forgot to mention though is I don't think every decision needs to be made in line for balance. For me I think having new tools to play around with in the existing system feels very fun and playful, it doesn't have to nessecarily imbue pure balance like Isaac is great on just having so much weird crap in it that the OP weapons feel like landing on a gold mine. Recently they rebalanced the game and now the joke is basically that there's no damage upgrades in the game. I think it can be fun to have new tools to mess around with. This is also why the rarity pool in Soulstone is so lacking though, I cant even remotely predict or pursue for a new toy if they switched the system around to giving you those new tools because of how the RNG currently functions. At least in Slay the Spire I can quarantine off a rare card pool after a boss and in a few other instances forcing my chances of getting that new toy significantly.
I also acknowledge that its not as simple as switching from a perma upgrade system to an item system, since the latter takes a lot more foresight and knowledge which is why I'm in favor of just doing away with permas. It's not like its nessecary in a game like this since playing as the different characters would in of itself provide more than enough novelty for people who like the game.
I'll probably just refer to it as a 'perma upgrade system' going forward. That was the exact definitive wording I was stumbling for.
Agree that using an items system isn't qualitative of 'balanced' game design nor in a long term sense even desirable game design. One thing I forgot to mention though is I don't think every decision needs to be made in line for balance. For me I think having new tools to play around with in the existing system feels very fun and playful, it doesn't have to nessecarily imbue pure balance like Isaac is great on just having so much weird crap in it that the OP weapons feel like landing on a gold mine. Recently they rebalanced the game and now the joke is basically that there's no damage upgrades in the game. I think it can be fun to have new tools to mess around with. This is also why the rarity pool in Soulstone is so lacking though, I cant even remotely predict or pursue for a new toy if they switched the system around to giving you those new tools because of how the RNG currently functions. At least in Slay the Spire I can quarantine off a rare card pool after a boss and in a few other instances forcing my chances of getting that new toy significantly.
I also acknowledge that its not as simple as switching from a perma upgrade system to an item system, since the latter takes a lot more foresight and knowledge which is why I'm in favor of just doing away with permas. It's not like its nessecary in a game like this since playing as the different characters would in of itself provide more than enough novelty for people who like the game.
NP, good review.
Yeah when there's a shitton of wacky items like Isaac then I kinda get it, the breadth and unpredictability is the appeal. In my experience though most actiony roguelites are not like that, you have a handful of cool items and then the bog-standard stuff. Then you're in a bad spot of having to compete with arcade-style games which are usually much more tightly designed. E.g. playing Gungeon just made me want to play a good shmup like Dodonpachi, where I could pick a different ship if I want a new playstyle. Or DMC/Bayo/NG/etc where if you want to screw around with a weapon you just pick it from the loadout screen. That's where I'm coming from
Ehh, IDK though, I still haven't played some big names like Spelunky so my opinion isn't fully formed yet.
Yeah when there's a shitton of wacky items like Isaac then I kinda get it, the breadth and unpredictability is the appeal. In my experience though most actiony roguelites are not like that, you have a handful of cool items and then the bog-standard stuff. Then you're in a bad spot of having to compete with arcade-style games which are usually much more tightly designed. E.g. playing Gungeon just made me want to play a good shmup like Dodonpachi, where I could pick a different ship if I want a new playstyle. Or DMC/Bayo/NG/etc where if you want to screw around with a weapon you just pick it from the loadout screen. That's where I'm coming from
Ehh, IDK though, I still haven't played some big names like Spelunky so my opinion isn't fully formed yet.
Extremely fair. You might like Into The Breach if you haven't tried it. It's a turn based RPG game similar to maybe Fire Emblem. You can pick from a wide range of starting loadouts of several different mech teams, without them being violently changed mid run. That game has no real randomness to the encounters you can pretty much predict what enemies will do every move of the game. It's one of the best games of its type out there and nothing like FTL (made by the same team).
I learned to really enjoy Gungeon but the first 2 floors definitely feel like molasses and the reason I spent so much time with it is probably because I don't play as many SHMUPs as I'd like to.
I recommend checking out Spelunky Classic when you get around to it.
I learned to really enjoy Gungeon but the first 2 floors definitely feel like molasses and the reason I spent so much time with it is probably because I don't play as many SHMUPs as I'd like to.
I recommend checking out Spelunky Classic when you get around to it.
Both those are on my radar for sure.
Erato_Heti
1 year ago