The Stack

Speaking of titles that I played obsessively for a time, 2024 also saw the release of a new Creeper World game! But it occurs to me that I never posted about Creeper World IV here, so let’s talk a little about that first. Creeper World IV was the franchise’s foray into 3D, and it was fine. If you’re a fan of Creeper World, and you’ve wondered what it would be like with 3D models, it’s worth a look. But it’s nothing to write home about, especially after Creeper World 3: Arc Eternal, which is, to my mind, still the ultimate and definitive Creeper World experience. Being 3D adds the possibility of a first-person mode, and, while this wasn’t used in any of the campaign mission, it’s telling that basically all of the top-rated player-made levels use it. It’s like the fanbase decided it was more fun to use the engine to play a different game.

Now, the new one: Creeper World Ixe. (Or, according to some of the title graphics, Ixe Creeper World. “Ixe” is the name of an alien race in the game’s backstory, which I will not be describing any more than that.) This game abandons the 3D and in fact brings us back to the vertical 2D view that we haven’t seen since Creeper World 2, based on cave systems that constrain and pressurize your fluid enemy. But the game isn’t just Creeper World 2 brought up to modern standards. It’s Creeper World 2 hybridized with Noita.

This might seem strange. The Creeper World games are real-time strategy games in a sci-fi milieu, and Noita is a fantasy Roguelike. But they both have a lot to do with simulating fluids, and the main thing Ixe gets from Noita is its pixel-level simulation. CW2, in contrast, was fundamentally tile-based. The world was a grid where everything you could build occupied one square and the Creeper was essentially a cellular automaton. The pixelation of Ixe is notably coarse, but not tile-level coarse.

And the pixelation doesn’t just affect fluids. As in Particle Fleet by the same developers, your own ships take damage by having pixels eaten away. This isn’t the only thing it takes from Particle Fleet, either: some levels feature a similar particulate enemy, and, as in PF, the number of ships of any type you can have at a time is limited, making for smaller-scale battles. The very fact that I refer to your units as “ships” is a symptom of how Particle-Fleet-ish it is; Creeper World is usually about land battles. But the pixel-level simulation is stronger and weirder here: when you move your ships, they move by physically breaking apart into the pixels they were built from, which form a sort of snake-like chain, slithering its way around walls to reach its destination and reform.

But back to the fluids. In addition to Creeper and Anti-Creeper, there are several other fluids found in the environment, as well as substances with “sand physics”, pixels that form heaps when they fall. And some of them are useful: oil, sulfur, pixellium, etc. These can be sucked up and combined into other useful substances, like explosives or acid. And, as in Noita, you combine them by throwing them into a pit together. This is the single thing that makes me certain that Noita was a direct influence, rather than just something that hit on similar ideas independently. The system of alchemy here isn’t nearly as complex as Noita‘s, but I’ve seen player-made levels that extend it with secret combinations and new substances.

In the campaign’s final level, it makes a final turn towards Noita by stopping being a RTS and instead becoming a 2D metroidvania, with a single player character running around a complex, shooting at Creeper, picking up keycards, and mixing chemicals in vats. I feel like this might be a reaction to all the first-person levels made for CW4, a way to get ahead of the inevitable genre shift among the fans, to make it planned and deliberate. But I haven’t seen any player-made levels like it yet.

I’ll say it again: Creeper World 3 is the definitive Creeper World. This game isn’t even trying to be the Next Big Development of the series. It’s the quirky offshoot of the series, an experiment in what else you can do with the basic idea. And I kind of love it for that.

When I started this blog, I posted about every game I played. That hasn’t been the case for a long time, and some games that have eaten large portions of my life have gone completely unremarked on. I did make a solitary post about Train Valley 2 a few years back, but this does not even begin to cover my experiences with it.

To recap a little: In contrast to the original Train Valley, which is a scramble to meet unpredictable demands (a bit like Mini Metro, but with completely different mechanics), Train Valley 2 is about making a plan and then executing that plan. It’s essentially a crafting game, where the crafting is mediated by trains: a city might need, say, dozen Copper Ingots, which are made at that factory over there out of Copper Ore and Coal, each of which is produced at a mine somewhere else on the map using Workers. (Workers are, like everything else, a consumable resource.) You have multiple demands to meet within a time limit ¹That is, there isn’t a time limit per se. You can exceed the par time and still meet all your other goals. But only if you’re willing to settle for fewer than five stars, and thus have to prioritize, sending your trains where they’re most needed.

I think I found this structure most appealing at times when I felt blocked in other areas of my life. If I can’t make progress in my real plans, at least I can make a plan and execute it in Train Valley. The fact that it really does involve making a plan is important, I think. So many modern games tell you outright what you need to do at every moment, but TV2 just delivers a bunch of requirements and constraints and lets you figure out what needs to be done. The result is something that I found it extremely compelling, to a perhaps unhealthy degree, downloading and playing user-made levels well past the point of enjoyment. I’ve uninstalled it several times, but then they’d come out with a new DLC pack²One of the DLC packs adds back the random passenger trains from the original Train Valley, letting levels mix together the two play styles in a single level. My reaction to this is usually annoyance and a desire to get through the random stuff as quickly as possible so it stops interfering with the execution of my plans. and I’d begin the cycle anew.

Last year, an ad on the TV2 main menu announced the release of a third Train Valley game, Train Valley World. Despite a title containing a word suggestive of MMOs, this game turns out to still be essentially about levels playable by a single player. It does add multiplayer modes, but this is of not much use to me, as I don’t know anyone else interested in these games. It changes up the presentation and feel once more, basically going for something more like Civilization VI: levels are larger still than TV2, the graphics are finer and typically viewed at a greater distance, and, as in Civ, the cities all have names this time, these names being the names of real cities, even though the geography they’re placed in is nothing like reality. The tracks follow the same tile system as always, but the larger scale makes this fade in relevance. Instead of placing a route by dragging over every tile you want it to go through, you usually just click on a series of waypoints.

But the largest change to the feel of the thing is in how you give orders to trains. In the previous games, you send trains on single missions. You’d select a source of freight and a destination to bring it to, and a train would do that once, and then it would be done. If you wanted to send four trainloads of lumber to a mill, you’d give that order four times, perhaps using all of your trains in a convoy to send your tire factory all the rubber it will ever need at once. In TVW, you program a route into a train, potentially including multiple stops where it drops off one freight and picks up another, and then that train repeats that route until given new orders. Or attempts to, anyway; sometimes it can’t, like if a source of freight is empty, or a destination is full and can’t take any more. The overall gameplay, then, becomes less dominated by goals. It still has goals similar to TV2, with cities having specific demands, but you reach those goals by creating stable, balanced systems than can keep running indefinitely without your attention.

And for whatever reason, I find this a great deal less compelling than the get-it-done-and-then-stop approach of TV2. Perhaps it’s because it suggests endless labor, even if I’m not the one performing that labor. I’ve played through the TVW campaign, but I don’t feel drawn back to it. I’m hoping this breaks my Train Valley habit for good.