Video Game Thoughts Bonus Bag #7

Once again, a variety of odds and ends. A nice break from preparing the release of our next game in just three short weeks ...

Avernum 4: Greed And Glory Coming October 22!

We’re almost ready to fling another game into the thresher that is the indie games business in 2025. We have a release date for our next Avernum game!

Started in 1994, our cult classic Avernum series is one of the great video game sagas. On October 22, we return to our unique underworld nation with Avernum 4: Greed and Glory for Windows and Mac. The iPad version will come soon after.

You can see an Avernum 4 trailer, screenshots, and plenty of information on our web site or on our Steam page. If you are interested, please wishlist the game on Steam. It helps a lot!

Spiderweb Software In The Steam Sale

There’s a big Steam sale. This is when Steam is kind enough to give gamers permission to actually buy games. Anyway, all of our games are on sale for deep discounts. Geneforge 2: Infestation and Queen’s Wish 2: The Tormentor are unusually cheap.

Megabonk, An Indie Game That Managed To Make Money!

I’ve been joking that some indie dev will get rich by writing a good Vampire Survivors clone in 2035. But Megabonk is doing well far earlier. I’ve been playing it. It’s pretty good.

It’s like Vampire Survivors but balanced to be much more interesting. You run around and automatically shoot monsters near you. Then you get a choice of three random upgrades. You try to get picks that make you strong enough to survive the level, and you earn money that can be spent after you die to put better items in the random reward pool.

There are only a few monster types and only two levels, and the whole thing feels kind of thrown together. Yet the game is effective enough at generating dopamine hits to entrance a bunch of popular streamers and earn solid sales.

I think Vampire Survivors, while it earned all its money, suffers from being the breakthrough hit in the genre. There is a lot about its design that doesn’t work well in the long run. My problem with it was that you eventually buy your characters enough power that levels get kind of dull and samey. Its clones figured out ways for you to buy power that makes the general design more varied and suspenseful.

Progressing by permanently making your character stronger is dull and hard to balance. Progressing by unlocking more interesting and powerful drops in the game (but you still start weak) is a far more effective design. It also works this way in Brotato, easily my favorite game in the genre.

So I’m still playing it. It is addicting. However, it is way harder than Vampire Survivors, and farming currency for upgrades takes kind of forever. So I’ll have fun with it until I suddenly crash out and delete it in a huff.

I Haven’t Played Silksong

My daughter told me that she wants to watch me play Silksong by Team Cherry, when she is back home during a holiday break. So that spares me from jumping into that thresher before the most annoying elements have been nerfed a bit. Phew!

Silksong generated a brief, intense debate about game difficulty. This was amusing viewed from the outside. It soon became clear that, while Silksong is a tough game, difficulty wasn’t the actual problem. The problem was that they included some game elements (like long boss runbacks, eternal arena events and need to farm resources) that have been judged so annoying and outdated that even Fromsoft doesn’t use them anymore.

Team Cherry has been tucked safely away in a cocoon of wealth and comfort for years, chilling and following their dreams. They haven’t experienced real criticism in quite some time. I wonder how they’re coping, and I can’t wait to see what design choices they roll back.

Every game has flaws and room for improvement, even if you’re so rich that you’re never actually forced to change anything.

Split Fiction

My wife and I love playing couch co-op games together. One of the best games like this is It Takes Two by Hazelight Studios, which I enthused about at length in the past.

We were really looking forward to the very similar follow-up game by the same studio, Split Fiction. It’s taken me a long time to write about it because it took us a long time to finish it. Honestly, it was kind of a struggle to get through it.

What makes these games work is that they are a series of many short games. Every time you start getting used to what is happening, the game completely changes (platformer to puzzle to action RPG and so on). It is a game that consumes mountains of ideas and designs like fuel. But that requires a limitless fountain of good ideas/designs.

I think this is a really interesting title from a design/business perspective. It’s an example of a bunch of developers making games of a certain style who are kind of running out of gas. I felt like Split Fiction was struggling to come up with cool ideas. There were some great segments (e.g. pinball, two-headed worm), but a lot of it felt a little warmed over.

Part of me wants to really break down what happened here, but I don’t enjoy writing long, negative posts. It’s still a pretty fun game, so play it if you’ve already finished It Takes Two. I hope you have as much fun making fun of the annoying protagonists as we did.

Spiderweb Software creates turn-based, indie, old-school fantasy role-playing games. They are low-budget, but they’re full of good story and fun. We have announced our next game, Avernum 4: Greed and Glory. Wishlists are greatly appreciated.

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