The Stack

A Monster’s Expedition (Through Puzzling Exhibitions) is a new sort-of-Sokoban-like puzzle game from the creators of Cosmic Express, Sokobond, and, most particularly, A Good Snowman is Hard to Build, which it resembles in a number of ways, starting with the appearance of the player character. Where Snowman had you pushing around large snowballs in the chambers of a hedge maze, Expedition has you push logs around in a network of tiny islands. (The logs start off as trees, but turn into logs when you give them a shove.) The islands and the pushing of cylindrical objects remind me a fair bit of Stephen’s Sausage Roll (which I should get around to finishing sometime), as do the numerous informational plaques. But Expedition is infinitely gentler than SSR, both aesthetically and in terms of difficulty curve.

One of the key factors in this gentleness is that not every island is a puzzle. The islands all exist in a frankly enormous connected space, impressive when you pan around it in fast travel mode. And some of them are just connections between other islands, ways to control the flow. You get from island to island by pushing logs into the water to make bridges or, sometimes, rafts (about which more later). When you get to an island and all it has is a couple of trees in exactly the right positions to make bridges to other islands, it feels like a respite from puzzling, an easy task as a cushion between the hard tasks.

One thing I’m really liking about it is the elegance of the behaviors. Although the rules are complex enough to produce puzzles, they feel simple because they make sense, visually if not logically. Logs move one space if pushed lengthwise, but roll until they hit an obstacle if pushed from the side. You can stand on a stump and walk onto an adjacent log, but you can’t step onto a log directly unless it’s in the water. If a log is in the water, you can walk along it, but attempting to step off laterally just makes it spin in place. This stuff is very easy to internalize. Similarly, the goals are natural and implicit. You’re not trying to push things to demarcated destinations that arbitrarily make doors open. The way that logs bridge gaps to other islands follows naturally from their behavior.

There’s one moment in particular where I was in awe of the designer’s mastery of their craft. Mild spoilers for the game’s beginning follow.

When two logs fall into the same water space, they spontaneously turn into a raft. This is something you discover early on. You can walk on rafts like logs, but unlike logs, you can step off them in any direction, and this seems like the main thing distinguishing them. You reach an island that has a windmill on it — clearly an important landmark that you want to reach, but the way is blocked by a tree, and you can’t push the tree down because the spot you’d have to stand to push it from is water. With a little cleverness, however, you can use a couple of other trees to make a raft there! And so you stand on the raft, and you push the tree, expecting it to fall, but instead, the force of your push launches the raft, sending it drifting far away into unexplored waters, revealing a larger world. It’s at this point that the game displays the title, effectively telling you that you’ve left the prologue and entered the main part of the game, but more importantly reassuring you that what you just did was right. Even though you were tricked into guessing wrong about what was going to happen, the game isn’t going to punish you. Rather, it’s rewarding you with something better than you expected, because it wants you to keep trying things.

I’ve managed to find my way back to the windmill, but I haven’t finished the game yet. On the basis of precedent (particularly Snowman), I expect that eventually everything will feed into a semi-hidden metapuzzle that makes you re-solve old puzzles in new ways. The thing is, even this follows kind of naturally. Because the goals are implicit, they’re flexible. Sure, most islands are set up so that there’s only one useful thing you can do with the logs. But you inevitably consider other possibilities when you haven’t yet figured out what that one thing is.

I’ve been a little defensive about Clue Chronicles: Fatal Illusion, trying to see the best in it and focus on what it does right, so let me be completely clear: This is not a good game. Even starting from “It’s based on a board game IP”, I think it’s disappointing, because the story doesn’t involve all of the characters from the game in a satisfying way. By the end, the only ones that are at all relevant are Mr. Green and Miss Scarlet. I feel like what we have is a truncated version of a larger and more ambitious design with more murders in it.

But I can’t complain much about truncation, because it spares us more of the puzzles. I wound up seeking hints for three, and brute-forcing combinations on a fourth — that one being the game’s climactic puzzle, placing gems to match hieroglyphs. One placement, Miss Scarlet’s red gem to match “Nefer, the symbol of beauty”, seemed very clear, but who gets “Was – Sceptre, the symbol of power” and who gets “Bow – Junet, pedjet, used against the many enemies”? Also, I found that a lack of clarity in the graphics sometimes got in the way of proper solving. The game runs at 640×480, which would be easily enough to display the various symbols and diagrams in the game well if they were hand-drawn pixel art, but not with 1990s 3D models.

Speaking of 3D art, there are frequent problems with the animation, especially as it goes on. Movement animations frequently don’t match the still images; objects will disappear while you’re moving and reappear when you stop, and such. Sometimes you can see a still version of a character as part of the room image behind their animated self. There are a few animations that are swapped, so that pushing a lever right shows the animation of pushing it left and vice versa. Things like that. Things that clearly show that meeting a contractual deadline was top priority.

Every once in a while, someone at Hasbro decides that the reason people aren’t buying Clue as much as they used to is that it’s dated, and they try to modernize it. And it always seems like a mistake, because evoking the bygone era of Agatha Christie novels is part of the point. Clue Chronicles, to its merit, avoids this mistake, setting the whole thing shortly before the Second World War, and working that fact into some of the extra characters: one is rumored to be a German spy, another to be a Soviet spy. This is never expanded upon, and is irrelevant to the story. It’s all very well to have red herrings, but the international intrigue angle doesn’t even get enough attention to qualify as a distraction. It reminds me of certain tabletop role-playing campaigns I’ve been in, where people write backgrounds on their character sheets and then forget about them.

But it also supports the truncation theory. This really seems like a game whose initial design document far exceeded its budget. The initial concept was, after all, essentially budgetary: “We already have these character models built, so let’s use them again!” But then what do they do? Double the cast.

The boat chapter is followed by a short section where you have to get a cable car working to get up the mountain to Ian Masque’s castle. Once there, you’re cut off from the outside world, which would be ideal for additional murders, but there have been no additional murders yet. Instead, the story shunts off into a puzzle hunt. Each of the six standard Clue characters was, at some point in the past, given a riddle hinting at the location of a hidden gemstone. They’re all hopeless at riddles, though, and spend their time standing in one place instead of hunting through the castle, so it’s up to the player find all the gems for them.

The biggest obstacle to this is the navigation system. The movement model in this game is Myst-like, a set of fixed camera positions with hotspots to turn and move between them. And sometimes the obvious and direct way to get to somewhere isn’t supported. You’ll enter a room and see a character to your right as you enter, but they wind up off-camera. So you click to turn right, but it turns you too far, possibly 180 degrees. That character is only accessible if you’re standing on some other spot, and you just have to keep looking for movement hotspots until you chance upon it.

At any rate, the puzzle design in this chapter isn’t bad. You’ve got six simultaneous goals to pursue, with complications in many: one person can’t remember their riddle, another doesn’t trust you enough to share it, and so forth. The special abilities of the extra cast are useful here, as when you help Professor Plum recover his memories with the aid of a hypnotist. (Not that the hynotist can go to him personally — that would involve moving from one spot! — but she can at least teach hypnosis to you so you can do her job for her.) And once you solve a riddle and know where the gem is, there’s still some kind of self-contained adventure-game puzzle or minigame. My only real complaint is that one of the minigames is a Lights Out puzzle, which seems like filler.

Mr. Masque’s corpse, if it is in fact his, spends all this time stashed in a walk-in freezer. Meanwhile, another of the guests, a stage magician, is preparing to perform a trick called “Escape from Death”. You might think this would be in poor taste after their host dropped dead in front of everyone, but this is not the sort of story were people react to death in normal human ways. It wouldn’t take a lot to adjust the dialogue to make them more human — just make everyone acknowledge that the sudden presence of death is the reason no one’s in the mood for riddle-games! But that assumes priorities that aren’t in evidence for the designers or, most likely, the players.

The other day, some friends, who have been playing occasional board games online while unable to meet in person, decided to play Clue (aka Cluedo). I personally had never actually played Clue before, although I had seen the movie and was familiar with the characters and weapons. The computer adaptation we used is of course just the latest and most modern in a long line of adaptations, stretching back to a SNES release from 1992. The 1998 CD-ROM version for PC is of particular note for being the first game in the franchise to spawn a spin-off, Clue Chronicles: Fatal Illusion, a first-person adventure game that reuses its predecessor’s character models. Even though I had not yet played the board game when it came out, the idea of an adventure game based on a board game was novel enough to get me to purchase it probably a year or two after its release — although not enough to make me finish it.

Amazingly, it installs and runs without problems under Windows 10. As of this writing, I’ve played through the first chapter, which takes place on the boat taking the cast to a mysterious castle they’ve all been invited to. I think this is farther than I got on my first attempt, but that was about 20 years ago, so my memories are hazy.

It’s a slow-paced game, consisting of a lot of asking every character about every dialogue topic and certain amount of object puzzles, and as far as I’ve seen so far, not very concerned with detective work or deduction. There’s a very B-movie feel to it. Not just because of the dated-looking pre-rendered CGI, but because of the adventure-game unreality, the world of arbitrary illogic. Both contribute to a creeping sense of wrongness that actually fits the murder-house story pretty well. The game gives the usual Clue suspects backstories and relationships, but at the same time, none of them quite seem real. For the most part I’m choosing to let the strangeness just wash over me, Twin-Peaks-like, but it would be easy to choose to laugh at it instead. In fact, there was one moment that made me laugh out loud despite myself: in the intro cutscene, an unknown person opens a case to reveal all six canonical Clue weapons in molded insets. Yes, someone in this blatantly false world made a special carrying case for clearly improvised weapons like the wrench, candlestick, and lead pipe.

In addition to the various Professor Plums and Colonel Mustards and so forth, we get an assortment of early-20th-century magicians, occultists, and experts in the paranormal, all invited to a New Year’s Eve party by an eccentric antiquarian who gets killed before they even get off the boat. It seems likely that he won’t be the last victim, because what else are all these extra guests for? In fact, the obvious twist would be that he faked his death to escape blame when he starts slaughtering his guests. The biggest clue would be that his apparent death was caused by a booby-trapped puzzle box rather than by any of the six standard weapons in the case.

I’ve mentioned “field tokens” a few times, so let me explain what I mean. In every Gemcraft game except Labyrinth, battlefields are shown on the map as a sort of frame-like icon, usually in the same bulging triangle shape as a grade 1 gem. Gemcraft Chapter 0: Gem of Eternity, the second game, additionally used this frame to keep track of which play modes you had completed the field in, dividing it into segments and illuminating the ones completed. Chasing Shadows turned these indicators into glowing gems held within holes in the frame. But it also presented it as a literal token, a trinket that could be found in a locked chest or otherwise handed to you as part of your rewards on completing a level. How exactly a physical object grants you access to battlefields was left unexplained.

Chasing Shadows had four shapes of field tokens. You had your standard triangular ones with a circular gem slot at each corner, for normal fields. Vision fields had their special circular tokens with only one slot, shaped like flames. Then there were trangular ones with a sort of spiral pattern to the slots, indicating a field with a Tome Chamber that teaches a new skill, and square ones with stripes, for Wizard Towers where you have to unlock certain mechanisms before the last monster wave to win and unlock other benefits. (Usually adding more waves makes a field harder to beat, but in Wizard Tower fields, it buys you more time to destroy the locks.) I don’t think these meanings were ever explained explicitly, but it was an easy pattern to notice.

Frostborn Wrath, now. Frostborn Wrath uses the three token shapes from Chasing Shadows (excluding the one for Vision fields), as well as a couple entirely new ones. But it doesn’t have Tome Chambers or Wizard Towers. Their function as dispensers of unlockables is taken by locked chests, but locked chests aren’t indicated by the shape of the token; there are plenty of locked chests in fields with just the base token. What does the shape indicate, then? I have no idea. Maybe they’re just assigned haphazardly, but I’m not quite willing to believe that. Maybe even without Tome Chambers, there’s a token shape that indicates a field where you can obtain a new skill — but if so, the connection is a lot harder to notice than it was in CS, where skills were always linked to permanent environmental features. There’s probably a lesson in that.

Let’s talk bombs. Gem bombs have been around since the very first Gemcraft game, but I find myself using them a lot more in Frostborn Wrath.

Partly that’s because the slower advancement in power means I more often face the kind of odds where I need them. Gem bombs, as I use them, are mainly an emergency measure: when the monsters are about to close in on your Orb, usually bombs are the fastest and easiest remedy. Unlike towers, which take time to socket the gem and then fire shots that take time to hit their target, bombs are instant. The drawback is, of course, that they’re not reusable. Throwing a lot of bombs uses up your mana quickly.

Although not always! If a bomb kills multiple monsters, it can be a net profit. And this is something that happens more easily in FW than in previous games, due to an optional Battle Trait ¹An extra challenge that improves the XP and loot for the level that causes every single monster to spawn a pair of Spawnlings on death. With that turned on, the later sections of the path frequently become a sea of Spawnlings, easy for bombs to take out en masse. You still wind up with less mana than you’d have if you had killed them without bombs, of course, but not necessarily less than you had when you started bombing them.

On top of that, bombs have simply become more useful over the course of the series. Chasing Shadows introduced the concept of “gem wasps”: little specks or sparks that linger after an explosion, drifting about and darting to hurt any monster that gets close. Suddenly bombs were not just instant effects, but a somewhat lasting defense! Gem wasps are not powerful, but they can be a practical last line of defense, finishing off the almost-dead. And in FW, they’re even better. Gem wasps are now weakly attracted to the mouse pointer. So if one Swarmling wanders off course in an open area, and you bomb it, you can lead the wasps to somewhere more useful. It just takes a little patience.

There are Achievements in both FW and CS for beating a level entirely with bombs and wasps rather than towers. This feels a bit like an Achievement for using only melee weapons in a FPS. It’s not the most straightforward approach, and certainly not the way that the game encourages normally, but it is demonstrably doable. I’d like to think that there are some Gemcraft fans somewhere who really like bombs and never do things any other way.

I’m basically finding Gemcraft: Frostborn Wrath to be an improvement over its predecessor in every way, but one of the improvements that I find particularly pleasing is in “Trial Mode”. This is the equivalent of the “Vision” fields in Chasing Shadows, in that it makes you pass a level without your XP or skills, instead giving you a pre-set selection of abilities. The chief difference is that Vision fields were special ones, set apart and not playable the normal way, whereas Trial Mode can be applied to every single battlefield. But on top of that, I’m finding that FW is more willing to use Trial Mode to create bespoke puzzles with specific solutions.

I just hit a particularly good example of this: field T4. In Trial Mode, your starting condition is: You have a single grade 6 red-yellow gem. This is an unusually good thing to start with, capable of holding off an army all by itself if placed well. However, you have only 30 mana. This is not enough to create a tower to put the gem in. You gradually gain mana over time even if you don’t kill anything, so if you could wait long enough, you’d have enough to build a tower. You cannot wait that long. The monsters will destroy your base first.

At this point you might think “I’ll just cash in the gem!” — you can destroy gems to recover 70% of their value, and a grade 6 gem has a base value of over 9000 mana — easily enough to buy a tower and a slightly less overpowering gem to put in it. Except you can’t do that. Every battlefield has a subset of the gem colors you can create from scratch. In field T4 in Trial Mode, that subset is: none of them. The only way to make a new gem would be to spend 9000 mana to duplicate the one you have.

So at this point, I was wondering if it was a bug. It seemed absolutely impossible. But it wasn’t! I won’t give the solution here, but there was a clever application of the rules that let me win rather easily. This is a much better experience than the Visions, where, as I noted before, the winning approach was usually brute force, just sinking as much mana as possible into making a single hero gem.

Now, most of the Trial Mode fields are not like this. Most of them are fairly sedate and fall to familiar tactics. But even there, I think the experience is enhanced by knowing that they could turn out to be special.

I said before that Gemcraft: Frostborn Wrath seemed shorter than Chasing Shadows, because I had already reached the extents of the world map, but this didn’t really jibe with other observations, like the greater number of Achievements. It turns out I was simply mistaken. I had reached the left, right, and top edges of the map, as indicated by a decorative border, but, unlike CS, the map here is taller than it is wide. It’s like a scroll of unknown length. This makes progress feel more linear: where my explorations in CS spread out in all directions, in FW they mostly just go downward, with minor branching. The original Gemcraft did something similar, but scrolled horizontally.

The map in CS was made of hexagonal tiles that you unlock over the course of play, each tile being a grouping of several levels, which also have to be unlocked individually. FW is similar, but its map tiles are shaped like 60-degree diamonds in a hexagonal tiling pattern, thematically resembling snowflakes when six come together at a point. In both cases, the tiles seem a bit superfluous, giving the player nothing but an extra layer of stuff to unlock on the way to unlocking new fields. Still, completing a level and seeing a new tile appear gives a sense of progress, and dividing the levels into subsections this way gives you permission to feel a small sense of accomplishment whenever an entire tile is completed.

Still, I have to say that my favorite world map in the whole series is that of Gemcraft: Labyrinth, which didn’t use tiles at all. Instead, it put all the battlefields on a 13×13 grid, and identified each field with grid coordinates. The key thing here is that the fields were connected. Every monster path coming in from the edge of a field matched up with a similar path on the neighboring field on that side. Hence “labyrinth”: the whole game was a single connected maze. (Well, apart from four secret levels in the corners, inaccessible by normal means.) It was a compelling conceit, and made the whole game feel more like a real space, rather than just a collection of isolated levels selectable from a map-shaped menu. And I just love that sort of thing, when disparate pieces gel into something cohesive.

As a so-called “lost chapter”, Gemcraft: Frostborn Wrath is a side-story in the Gemcraft setting, with a different protagonist: a wizard who has been frozen in ice for years, possibly centuries, and who is awakened at the story’s start by a mysterious thaw. This nameless wizard has a different perspective than our familiar nameless wizard. He remembers the Forgotten. He remembers the time before, when the wizards were engaging in increasingly daring and dangerous rites to bind demons to their will. And he warned them. He warned them all, and they didn’t listen. He explores the aftermath not just as the ruins of a bygone age, but as the desolation of his own world.

None of this has any real effect on the gameplay. You’re still doing the same things, working your way through a branching series of battlefields, setting up gem-powered defenses to slaughter waves of incoming monsters before they can destroy your “Orb of Presence”. But the expository text keeps reminding us of his perspective. When he starts encountering Apparitions, and we’re told that they’re the ghosts of wizards slain by the Forgotten, there’s an unstated “These were my brothers. That could have been me up there, drifting aimlessly over the world, awaiting release.”

But of course he was awaiting release, just in a more literal sense. And that makes me wonder about him. The Gemcraft series loves ironic endings where all your efforts throughout the game turn out to be either wasted or actively harmful.

Apparitions aren’t the only ghosts. I’ve talked about the Shadows before, although I haven’t encountered any in this game. There are also also Spectres, explained here as wizards who remember enough to know that gems are important, and who thus try to steal them from your towers. And new to this game are Wraiths, described and depicted as ghosts that are somehow made of flesh. They circle the battlefield like vultures, increasing the damage resistance of all monsters until you shoot them down.

Maybe the ironic twist is that the player character actually didn’t survive the apocalypse. That he’s undead and doesn’t know it. A ghost from the ice. Frostborn wraith.

I’m making slow progress through the levels of Gemcraft: Frostborn Wrath, but I’m racking up Achievements at a pretty good clip. I’ve even somehow gotten the “Kill a monster with shots blinking to the monster attacking your orb that would otherwise destroy your orb” Achievement that eluded me in Chasing Shadows, and done it without trying. That’s how I’ve gotten most of my Achievements so far: without trying. CS was like this in the beginning too, but I think FW is moreso. It has 636 Achievements to CS‘s 418, and where something like half of them in CS were “Field” Achievements, obtainable only on specific levels, FW doesn’t seem to have any Field achievements at all. So it has a great many things that you have the opportunity to stumble upon in any level.

Also, I’ve gotten far enough in to unlock some genuinely new stuff that wasn’t in the previous games. In addition to Towers and Traps, there are now Lanterns, area-of-effect towers which apply their socketed gem’s effects to everything within a radius. Then there are Pylons, which don’t have gem sockets at all. Pylons are basically shot batteries. You charge them up by having gems in towers fire at them, and then they produce very powerful shots of their own. In the process, you completely lose the special powers of the shots used to power up the pylon. I talked before about how all the gem types in Gemcraft fire in the same way and are distinguished only in their effects, but with these new buildings, FW gets the same sort of variety as a more typical tower defense.

In a way, it reminds me of Portal 2. Portal 2 introduced a bunch of new puzzle elements — laser bridges, excursion funnels, gels of various sorts — and apparently there was talk among the designers of basing the game entirely around these things and leaving the portal gun out. But in the end, they decided that the portal gun was essential to the series identity, and so instead of having the new mechanics supplant it, they made the new tech use it, rely on it. The portal gun became the means by which you interacted with everything else. Similarly, FW gives you new toys, but to maintain the brand, everything has to rely on gems in some way.

One thing that I thought for a while was an exception: Shrines. Shrines are mechanisms for dishing out lots of damage to lots of monsters at long intervals, and they’ve been around since the second game. The details beyond that have varied, but until FW, shrines were operated by sacrificing gems. The more expensive the sacrifice, the more powerful the result. In FW, there is no sacrifice. You just click on the shrine when it’s ready and it does its thing. This was the source of some panicked confusion when I first tried to drop a gem on a Shrine and nothing happened! Nonetheless, Shrines are still linked to gems: their power is determined by all the gems you have in play. This removes some of the tension. You’re no longer choosing whether to use a gem in a shrine or a tower if putting it in a tower is what empowers the shrine.

Similarly, “enraging” monsters no longer involves sacrificing gems. Instead, there’s a slot where you can place a gem to enrage all incoming waves, but you can just remove the gem from that slot whenever you want. I suppose the devs noticed that people didn’t like giving up gems and were reluctant to use powers that made them do it. Just one way of wasting gems remains: dropping them on the battlefield as bombs. This is something I usually only do as an emergency measure, bombing the creeps that managed to sneak past my last tower when I don’t have time to erect a more permanent defense. It’s sometimes necessary as a compensation for not quite being able to stretch your resources as far as you want, but at the same time, it consumes resources inefficiently, and that makes it tactically interesting.