Indie Game Logs Archives

Howdy, y’all, Joe Hills here, writing as I always do in Nashville, Tennessee!

Today my pal and project manager NJCoffeeJunkie celebrated her 5-year anniversary of streaming on Twitch with a charity stream benefitting the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society! I was invited to play as a guest during her Clank! and Phasmophobia segments.

Clank!

I was a bit frazzled from trying to set up Phasmophobia VR right before the stream, so I played two of the most embarrassing games of Clank in my life. During the first game, I wandered too far was only able to grab the seven point treasure before sprinting for the door. NJ got KO’d in the depths and I barely survived with for a win.

On the second game, NJ managed to grab a backpack and two treasures before I even made it to the depths, but I had loaded up on tattle cards that deal other players clank and kept drawing from the dungeon row to trigger dragon attacks. I grabbed a cheap treasure and got KO’d one room away from the exit, but NJ hadn’t quite escaped the depths when the dragon got her.

A screenshot of the video game version of Clank showing that Joe Hills won with 47 points and NJ lost with 0, but would have had 93 if she hadn't died in the depths. — NJ would have had 93 points and beaten me with twice my score if she’d been knocked out within recovery range.

Phasmophobia

VR Phasmophobia is way better than the last time I tried to play it, but still way worse than every other VR game in terms of motion sickness and weird stuttering glitches. I had a great time hunting ghosts with NJ, Mister Joker, and Queen Dark Lady, and got to show off all then VR motion control things I can do, like sipping from a tea cup, chugging from a tea kettle, and raving with glow sticks.

We managed to win both of our rounds with no deaths, and I earned four achievements!

The rest of the folks kept playing, but two rounds of Phasmophobia in VR was all my poor brain could handle.

Thanks so much to everyone who came out to support the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society! We raised over $200 during the segments I participated in! If you’d still like to help, NJ’s campaign fundraiser page will be open for a bit longer at: https://tiltify.com/@njcoffeejunkie/5th-annual-twitch-aversary.

Until next time, y’all, this is Joe Hills from Nashville, Tennessee.

Keep adventuring!

Howdy, y’all! Joe Hills here writing as I always do in Nashville, TN!

We’ve had a lot of extra expenses recently because of emergency dental work and the filing fee for the next step of Badger’s immigration process, the Green Card, so we decided to take time out of the last Saturday before Halloween to do a bonus stream of one or two spooky games (tips are welcome via https://paypal.me/joehills).

Ten Bells: Strongly Recommend.

It turned out, we only had time for Ten Bells today, but it was a lot of fun! If you don’t want any spoilers, I’ll just provide my review up front: strongly recommend for fans of spooky games. It took me about three hours to complete the normal mode, and there’s a nightmare mode that I haven’t gotten to yet, but probably would take me another few hours at least.

Are bells good or bad?

Badger and I both enjoy horror, but have never played a game from this emergent genre that I’ve been told is called “anomaly hunt” but which I believe should be called “aberration examination.” The player needs to explore the space of The Ten Bells pub and determine if anything has changed from the last walk-through. It’s harder, and spookier than it sounds.

Since we didn’t know how the game worked, it took us a while to figure out what counted as an aberration and what was merely an indicator of how progression was tracked. For example, the name of the pub above the bar changes from “The Bell” to “The Two Bells” to “The Three Bells” and that’s a progression tracker, not an aberration.

I’m the sort of person who loves deducing the rules of a game by playing it, so this was a lot of fun for Badger and I to puzzle out, but if you’re the sort of person who gets frustrated by things like that, it may be worthwhile to watch someone more experienced play a round or two before you jump in yourself.

Hitting a rhythm

Once we figured out that bells are good and that there were changes to the hallway near the restrooms that marked progress through the story, everything kind of clicked into place and the only person I could blame for not knowing if a carpet had always been there or not was me.

The core gameplay loop is simple and elegant, and the pacing make this a great choice for streaming. The predictable opportunities to breathe each time we finished a walk through the pub really helped make this a fun show, but also created a lot of tension every time I was about to turn the corner and walk through the door.

End-game bug

We only planned to stream for three hours, so once we hit our scheduled stop time Badger headed out of the studio to take a break. I was so immersed in trying to completely finish the last few scenarios, I decided to go into overtime and try to wrap up the entire normal mode.

Unfortunately, I made some sort of mistake by trying to walk back and look at the progress board after the bells rang and things went a bit sideways. I ended up in some sort of broken end-game state, and one of the devs, Acrylic Pixel showed up! Here’s how that bit went:

Thanks so much again for joining me for this log, but if you wanna catch a stream live, you can find my streaming schedule at https://joehills.net/soon/.

Until next time y’all, this is Joe Hills from Nashville, Tennessee!