Demetrios: The Big Cynical Adventure: A Big Cynical Review

Having been an aficionado of adventure games over the years, I understand that they aren't without their difficulties. For every Monkey Island or Space Quest, there are four that take the route of Phantasmagoria* and about six different games featuring puzzles with solutions that read like poorly translated stereo instructions. While it's the easiest genre to design for (no combat algorithms or anything like that, clean narrative with a few branches) it's also one of the easiest to screw up. All it takes is one puzzle where processor speed determines difficulty, or pouring whiskey into the gas tank of a car to fuel up a spaceship, or an infuriating pixel hunt and instantly people will throw up their hands and uninstall in annoyance. 

Which is what I felt like doing multiple times with Demetrios: The Big Cynical Adventure. With its slow-moving plot, absolutely loathsome main character, constant pixel hunts, impenetrable logic, and poorly designed minigames, it feels less like an adventure game and more like someone assembled a collection of exactly what not to do in an adventure game, then decided to show it off in adventure game form. 

Demetrios starts with Bjorn Thonen receiving a phone call in the middle of the night, alerting him to grave danger. A few moments later, he's beaten over the head and his house is robbed, including a piece of a mysterious bird statue he has in his apartment. Bjorn immediately sets out to figure out who attacked him, and who is murdering antiques dealers over the bird statues. Of course, because Bjorn is, in adventure game tradition, an inept jackwagon, he spends his time annoying people and committing minor crimes in an effort to achieve his goals. Adding to this is a tremendous amount of gross-out "humor," everything from fart jokes to a puzzle involving vomit. 

The game itself takes place on static, hand-drawn screens, where clicking on various hotspots will reveal more about the area, or allow the player to interact with various things.  The puzzles are all fairly simple in construction, with a lot of it being "Take item to someone else," or "assemble a recipe" rather than the longer and more esoteric Rube Goldberg puzzles found elsewhere. This does not in any way, however, make them easy. Even with a handy menu to tell you what direction to go in, and reveal what you can interact with on the screen, some things are incredibly obscure. They assume that the player will visit every location, even ones they have no reason to go back to, just to get the next event flag to trigger. Sometimes you have to talk repeatedly to people with no indication that you haven't exhausted all the dialogue, and try every option repeatedly until they give up their information, which they don't always do. 

The hint system is just as obscure, relying on finding secret collectibles by dragging your cursor over every inch of the screen to find cookies, which Bjorn then eats while giving some hint about what to do next. Which means you not only have to spend your time looking for difficult to find collectibles that sometimes don't even show up on screen, and are then treated to gulping and smacking noises (you will hear a lot of gross eating noises on the soundtrack. If anyone gets an ASMR reaction from listening to people chew with their mouth open, have I got a game for you) while Bjorn complains about eating another cookie and then drops a hint that more often than not is about useful as the infamous "FIND DON. GIVE HIM WHAT HE NEEDS!" from the aforementioned Phantasmagoria. 

This would be forgivable if the game was at least the slightest bit funny or clever. There are plenty of games out there that have a similar sense of humor. Deponia has a fairly loathsome protagonist who sells people into slavery and screws over his friends for his own profit, but there's some charm, and the character is actively trying to better himself, even if he's a selfish jackass. The humor is also sharper than just trying to make gross-out versions of hoary old adventure cliches. But after the fifth time I had Bjorn eat something off the ground (seriously, with a single-click interface, it gets really annoying when this happens) accompanied by stomach-churning licking noises, or making some joke about how he pops a boner when his hot neighbor is around (so he better not have any sharp objects in his pocket) it just becomes tiresome and sad. Compounding things, the pacing is glacial, spending two chapters on the beginning of the game, when the plot doesn't even begin to get started until halfway through the second. 

As far as all of this goes, I feel at least the slightest bit bad about bashing a game which appears to be the first effort from French-based COWCAT Games. Judging by the art style, this is a bunch of people who just wanted to put a game together, and then went ahead and did so. But their game being a perfect storm of awful jokes, terrible puzzles, and just poor design decisions goes beyond just first-time jitters and the result is a borderline unplayable mess.

I'm going to have to say that this one's a miss. Unless you really like vomit jokes, gross noises, and obtuse, static adventure environments, in which case COWCAT has captured your exact target demographic. Hopefully COWCAT is just working out their birthing pains and will come up with something a little better. There's a good idea buried under all this refuse. I'll just be damned if I want to go looking for it. 

1/5

*I like Phantasmagoria, really, I do. I love the town of Mpawomsett and its inhabitants. But I'm not gonna defend it. 

Full Disclosure: The reviewer received a copy of this game for the purposes of reviewing it

The Weaponographist Review

When I sat down to write this review, I found myself at a loss. With a game that fails this way on so many levels, what could one possibly address first?

It's pretty clear the game isn't good. There's not really a unifying theme, a lot of the mechanics are better implemented in other games, the weapons boil down to "mash attack as hard as you can," there's no real way to pick a loadout other than blind luck, and the near-constant waves of enemies are actually numbing at a certain point. I found my sensory input dissolving into generic music and bright colors as my fingers tapped the attack keys for reasons I could no longer understand. 

But, even with all of that, it's hard to pinpoint somewhere to start. Somewhere to point out where in the horrifying and sad mesh of monstrous machinery things begin to go wrong. 

But if it wasn't clear from the paragraphs above, I'd give The Weaponographist a wide berth. Despite the occasional good joke, there's really nothing to recommend the game when there is a glut of roguelikes that do it better and with more style than this one.
 

The game at its most distinctive

The Weaponographist stars Doug, a jerk of an adventurer who refuses to help the town of Hellside, and so is cursed to have all his weapons and gear disintegrate after repeated use. To save the town and weaken the curse, he must journey repeatedly into a dungeon full of strange monsters, clearing out each level with a variety of weapons he finds on the bodies of his foes, and the occasional chests that gallop across the screen. While death sends him back to the town above, Doug can weaken the curse and strengthen his abilities by giving the various denizens of the town "demon goo" in exchange for upgraded weapons, abilities, and chests. 

The game is a top-down arena shooter with elements of a roguelike. You charge into the dungeon, lay waste to as many monsters as you can with the weapons you can pick up, die, and then are resurrected in town to spend goop on upgrades and do it all over again. At the end of each "depth" of the dungeon, there's a big boss fight against a large enemy and a bunch of smaller ones, and then it's on to the next one. Lather, rinse, repeat. It's a formula many games use, and when you play a roguelike, it's half luck and half learning the systems through trial and error, then applying what you know to future delves into the dungeon.

But the game doesn't seem to be able to make up its mind. It gives you procedurally generated rooms, but limits them to the same three basic types per area, with little variation. It fills the dungeon up with monsters, but the enemy designs are kind of plain and have no real ties to any overall theme. The weapon degradation mechanic is interesting, but since not all enemies drop weapons, it's possible to face down an entire room of people armed only with the fists that serve as an ineffective default weapon. It feels like a lot of thought went into the idea of these systems, but not very much into the implementation of them.

Get used to this screen. You'll see a lot of it.

This is a problem that extends to the art, too. While the drawn art is well done with distinctive styles and ideas, from a top-down perspective, it looks like you're fighting clipart. Between the generic dungeon design and the painfully generic designs of ninjas and tommy gun-toting mobsters, The Weaponographist's visual style is best described as "boring cartoon fantasy". In fact...actually, I have the perfect way to describe this.

One of the better rooms, but still not great.

It looks like a lazy online game. It plays like a lazy online game. In fact, if this had shown up in some form or another on Kongregate or Newgrounds, I would have killed an hour or so playing it, then promptly forgotten about it entirely. It's not a particularly good arena shooter, as waves of the same four or five enemies careen around an empty room until you kill them all and a door opens to do it all over again and hope you're closer to the boss. It's not a particularly good roguelike, in that there's no strategy or skill or discovery. There's just persistent wave after wave of shooting. It gets frustrating after a while, because no matter how long you play, there's no appreciable difference in the gameplay. 

In case you're wondering, this is from Depth 2. Look how similar it is to Depth 1

To compare and contrast, I loaded up The Binding of Isaac recently. Isaac, a shooter/roguelike hybrid released in 2011, plays in some respects similar to Weaponographist: It's a dual-stick shooter with RPG elements where you go from dungeon to dungeon fighting monsters and bosses with a variety of weapons. But the difference is that Isaac is actually a lot of fun to play, combining a bizarre atmosphere with a vast weapon variety, distinct artwork, some interesting strategic quirks in gameplay, and haunting, discomforting music. Isaac feels like you're going somewhere even when you lose. The Weaponographist feels like you're going nowhere, and then slightly further into nowhere when you win.

In the end, I'd say I don't recommend The Weaponographist very much. The Binding of Isaac is currently on Steam for a little cheaper. If you want a better roguelike or a better arena shooter, both are in ample supply. I suggest playing any of those, and leaving this one alone. 

Score: 1 out of 5

Full Disclosure: The reviewer received a review copy of this game