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.

It’s been nearly a month since the Steam sale, so I think it’s about time to wrap up. But first, I want to revisit a couple of games I mentioned previously.

I had some harsh words for Loot Hunter. Well, it turns out that a recent Humble Bundle contained a strikingly similar game called Windward. That is, Windward doesn’t abstract ship-to-ship combat into a match-3 the way Loot Hunter does, but the rest of the game is fundamentally similar. In both games, you explore an age-of-sail world viewed at a large enough scale that your avatar is a ship rather than a person, and you attempt to make enough profit to upgrade your ship by trading goods between ports, doing quests, and fighting off pirates. But Windward does it all so much better. It’s designed more like a MMORPG. The quests are often elaborate multi-stage affairs, even if they are obviously procedurally-generated. The world is divided into zones geared towards different levels. If you’re too low-level for a zone, you’re allowed to go there, but none of the towns will trade with you, and that gives you a strong motivation to go back where you belong. This division lets the designers better control the pacing and keep multiple upgrade tracks running in parallel.

Now, I haven’t given all my sale purchases an honest try yet, but of those that I have, the one I’m most satisfied with is Creeper World. I played through the whole thing pretty quickly, including the bonus levels (which seem to be the part that differentiates the “Anniversary Edition” from the free online Flash version), and then was pleased to discover that it has a couple of sequels. I purchased the first sequel while the sale was still going, and now I’ve played through that as well.

Creeper World 2 pulls the same strange trick as the second Zelda game: it takes a game in a top-down view and turns it on its side. The battlefields this time are systems of caves and underground tunnels, exactly as wide as the screen but many times taller. It’s still basically a game about fighting a fluid called “creeper”, but instead of just spreading generally outward, it flows downward if it can, filling cavities. When completely enclosed, it can become pressurized, spurting out and expanding at an alarming rate when it finally dissolves a hole in the wall. The most effective way to combat this is to build up some pressure of your own to resist it. In other words, you can generate your own creeper this time around. Once you have this ability, it almost seems like an oversight that it wasn’t in the original game. Here it is, the game’s most distinctive feature, but wasn’t something that the player could do. Being able to create your own creeper gives the game a greater sense of completeness, in the mathematical sense.

For all these big changes, the tactics are fundamentally similar to the first game. It’s still primarily about finding the opportune places to cut off the enemy’s creeper flow so you can move in on the things generating it. One change that’s kind of mechanically trivial but makes a big difference to the feel of the game: In the first game, you couldn’t actually destroy the creeper generators. You could effectively disable them by clearing the vicinity of creeper and then parking a blaster near the generator, so that it would destroy any creeper the generator emitted the instant it appeared, but that’s as far as you could take it. (And even then, there was the risk of forgetting that you needed that blaster there, and moving it with disastrous results, as happened to me more times than I’d like to say.) In Creeper World 2, you have a new device that actually destroys the generators.

And it is this ability that made me think: This is a lot like fighting a Tar Mother in DROD. I mean, it’s not identical, sure — Tar Mothers make all the tar in the room expand, while these creeper generators are just point-sources of the stuff. But in both cases, I’m cutting my way through a mass of viscous blue stuff to kill a thing in the middle that makes it keep expanding. And with that said, I think it’s time to get back to DROD.