The Stack

I’m currently a solid 20 levels into Gemcraft: Frostborn Wrath, which means I’m up to the point where I have to go back and grind previous levels at higher difficulty to get the XP I need to make progress. My main first impression is that it’s very similar in look and feel to Chasing Shadows. It’s got a higher resolution and faster framerate, which does change the feel of the thing viscerally, but it’s a lot more like its predecessor than any other game in the series. For example, in the first Gemcraft, the enemies moved by just gliding continuously; then in the next game they moved in strides, fast then slow; then their bodies deformed as they moved, stretching and squashing like inchworms; and finally in Chasing Shadows they had fully articulated legs to creep around on. Frostborn Wrath is the first game in the series that doesn’t make a change there. The reason that the game has higher resolution and faster framerate is that it’s the first game in the series to run natively under Windows, instead of through Flash. I’m guessing that the effort involved in just porting the whole thing to a new platform put limits on how much they could innovate.

And yet, it does change stuff, just in ways that aren’t obvious in the first ten minutes of play. Endurance mode works completely differently now. There are no Visions, but their special quality, that they’re bespoke scenarios where you don’t have your accumulated skills and have to make do with what the level gives you, is now simply the highest difficulty setting for every level — in effect, every field can be played as a Vision field. Bloodbound and Poolbound gems have been streamlined out; every gem has the equivalent of Bloodbound and Poolbound baked in. I’m pleased to report that the developers apparently agreed with some of my UI critique: the gem inventory is far less huge and empty now, and the process of making gems is much more like what you’d expect from a normal Windows program. Something about Flash always seemed to encourage people to get fancy and experimental with UI design — probably just the fact that it didn’t have much of a UI library built in.

Most significantly, though, the devs have rethought progression. I spent much of Chasing Shadows playing every new level I encountered at the highest difficulty setting, and then continuing in Endurance mode after winning, to max out my XP earnings in minimal time. Frostborn Wrath simply doesn’t let you do that. You have to beat every level in “Journey” mode first. And Endurance mode isn’t just an indefinite extension of a level. It starts out as a mere 30 waves, and every time you beat it, it extends the limit by 5 waves. In short, the whole thing is designed to slow you down. To keep you from gaining XP too quickly, like I certainly did in the previous game, and to keep the basics challenging longer. I spoke of the effectiveness of Chasing Shadows as a power fantasy, but it’s probably better this way. There’s a paradox that I’ve seen compared to “the paradox of tragedy” (that people will choose entertainment that provokes emotions they normally avoid): that players will choose games that they expect to be challenging, and then, when playing them, do everything they can to make them easier. Chasing Shadows perhaps didn’t fight this tendency enough. Frostborn Wrath may be doing better. But it’s early yet.

It seems to be a smaller game, though. At least, the overland map doesn’t extend as far, and that may let it keep things more controlled. Accordingly, it’s not a numbered chapter: it’s another “Lost Chapter”, like Gemcraft: Labyrith, and apparently occurs simultaneously with Chasing Shadows.

I finally broke down and got hints about the Grey Trees. I suspect that most of the 5.2% of players who have the Achievement on Steam did the same. I won’t spoil it here — you can find the answer plenty of other places online if you want it — but it turns out to be less a riddle than a gateway to learning about the game’s cheat code system. Getting the Grey Trees achievement consists of activating a mod that makes all the trees in the game grey. There are other mods.

So, that was anticlimactic, but really only because I had built it up so much in my mind. Anyway, at least I got the satisfying puzzle I wanted from the mysterious compasses. I still have two in-game Achievements left, but I’m not really inclined to go for them, at least not right away. It’s time to move on to Frostborn Wrath. Which means that, for once, you’re going to see me blog a Gemcraft game from the beginning.

I said that I had reached the ending of Gemcraft: Chasing Shadows a while ago now, but this isn’t a game with a clean and definitive ending. There’s a climactic confrontation, but there’s no roll of the credits or unlocking of New Game + mode, and although the antagonist stops interfering with you, she’s still at large afterward. And it’s clear that there’s still more to do.

I had thought that I’d stop playing once I beat all the fields, but the Vision fields proved tough. Then I thought I’d just go for all the Achievements, but not all of the Field Achievements were accessible, and it seemed like the remaining ones were locked behind Visions. But then I actually started winning more of the Visions. The winning tactic for most of them, it seems, is to eschew fancy plans and just pour as much mana as you can into building up a single very powerful gem — which is kind of disappointing, but it’s at least consistent with the rest of the game. Anyway, once I was down to two Visions and still hadn’t opened up any more fields, I started thinking maybe I was wrong.

It turns out that most of the missing fields, as well as others I hadn’t anticipated and several more Vision fields, were locked behind compasses. I had been putting off doing anything with the compasses, because I suspected they were connected to the Grey Trees riddle, but I finally broke down and figured them out. I won’t go into details, but there’s a certain operation you can do with the mysterious compasses that gives you more field tokens, and you can perform this operation three times before it gives out. After the third pass, the compass icons disappear from the overworld map. The compasses are still present and clickable in the fields, but they no longer do anything but spin.

And that puts me in a bit of a quandary, because it now seems like the compasses aren’t connected to the Grey Trees riddle after all. They were my only promising lead. If it’s not them, what is it? I’ve been searching for grey trees in the fields I know, hoping they’ll be clickable, but the ones I remembered don’t really match the achievement icon: they’re grey because they’re bare of leaves, which the icon isn’t.

I now feel like I could get out from under this game if only I could solve the riddle. But who knows how I’ll feel once I do? I continue to make sallies at the remaining Visions, just in case I decide later that I want to finish them all.

While I’m grinding out the last few Vision levels, let’s critique the UI! The UI in Gemcraft: Chasing Shadows has a general look of rectangular slabs of lightly-mottled grey stone. One part of it is even identified as made of stone in the game’s fiction: the “wave stones” in an endlessly-rising column along the left side of the screen. These stones depict and describe upcoming waves, with a texture indicating whether it’s a reaver, swarmling, or giant wave, and icons for any special powers — with more specific stats and details available from a pop-up on rollover.

On the opposite side, you have your main control panel and gem inventory. You’ve got a grid of 12 rows and 3 columns to hold any gems not currently in play, and it’s nearly always empty or close to empty, because why would you create gems and not put them into play immediately? If I’m not going to use it right away, I’d rather have the uncommitted mana. I do like to keep one gem on hand, because there’s a hotkey for “duplicate the first gem in the inventory and use it as a gem bomb”, and that only works if there’s a gem in there. But I basically feel like this is one of those design decisions that doesn’t really mesh with the gameplay, like the desktop customization in Hypnospace Outlaw.

Creating gems is a little unintuitive: you select a color, then you click on the inventory, and the grade of gem you create is governed by the inventory row you clicked on. It’s a familiar system, going all the way back to the original Gemcraft, although you didn’t have any control over the created gem’s color there. But it still feels a little weird. There have been other weird-feeling experiments, such as the skill upgrade menu in Gemcraft: Labyrinth that had you select a number by dragging up and down without a visible slider. But such things don’t usually stick the way the gem creation UI has.

Along the top are buttons for casting spells. These also have hotkeys, as do most of the buttons in the UI, but I have to admit that, even after playing this game for longer than it probably deserves, I use hotkeys sparingly. It took me forever to even start using “W” to build walls, and that’s one of the few really useful ones, because when you build walls, you usually want to build a lot of them. Building mode puts a transparent overlay on the screen showing exactly where you can and can’t build, which unfortunately also does bad things to the framerate. Gem-bomb-dropping mode is even worse. I usually pause the game during such operations. Somehow it’s less painful that way.

It’s worth noting that all UI elements are demarcated with the traditional Windows-95-style beveled borders, just a little darkening of the mottled stone along two sides and lightening along the other two, giving things a raised or inset appearance. This is something that’s fallen out of fashion lately, which is a shame, because it’s such an elegant way to communicate a whole lot about how the UI functions. Someday UI designers will rediscover it, and it’ll be a revelation to the world.

I currently have all but six of the 418 in-game Achievements in Gemcraft: Chasing Shadows.

Steam recognizes a 419th, for beating the game in “Iron Wizard” mode. Obviously you can’t get that in a normal game, so it’s not part of the in-game list. And I don’t think I’ll be going for it, or at least not soon.

One of the six that I don’t have right now is the “Grey Trees” riddle achievement I described previously. I’ve made some progress on that, figured out how to use the compasses to unlock a secret level, but I’m holding off on taking things farther, because getting that achievement as the last thing I do in the game just feels like the right way to do it.

One has the description “Kill a monster with shots blinking to the monster attacking your orb that would otherwise destroy your orb”. This seems like a very difficult Achievement to get, but I imagine you could set it up carefully if you know what you’re doing. Which I don’t; I don’t fully understand what “shots blinking to the monster attacking your orb” means, and without the text of this Achievement, I wouldn’t even have known that it’s something that happens. The “orb” is your base; when a monster reaches it, you automatically expend a certain amount of mana to “banish” it back to the start of its path, unless you don’t have enough mana, in which case it “destroys your orb” and you lose. So I’m guessing that “shots blinking to the monster” means shots targeting the monster at the moment it reaches the orb strike the monster instantly. But that’s just a guess. All I can easily observe is that the shots disappear in mid-flight.

The remaining four are all in the “Field” category, meaning that they require beating some specific level in a specific way, or with some particular constraint. And they’re all for fields that I can’t access and haven’t seen.

I assume they’re behind Visions.

Vision fields are the special ones I mentioned before where you don’t have your skill enhancements and thus actually have to work to beat. The overmap is divided into lettered regions, with (usually) seven numbered fields in each region, named with a letter-number combo: A5, J3, etc. The Vision fields are scattered throughout the regions, and all have the letter V instead of the letter of their region. As representations of visions of the past or future, they’re frequently repeats of maps from previous games in the series, although changes in the game mechanics mean that they don’t quite play the same, and sometimes they have other alterations besides. There’s one Vision that’s just the first level from Gemcraft: Labyrinth, but with the addition of a Shadow. Recall that a Shadow was the final boss in Labyrinth, and this is basically showing you what that game would have been like if the Forgotten didn’t secretly want you to win. It’s basically the only Shadow fight in the game that’s a real struggle.

Anyway, one of the possible rewards for beating a field is that one or more additional fields get added to the map. And although most Vision fields are leaves in the progress tree and don’t unlock new fields, some do. So my previous plan of “win all the normal fields, or at least enough of them to get all the Field Achievements, but leave the Visions alone” is not an option. I had been thinking of Visions as optional bonus challenges, but they’re as tied into the structure of the game as anything else. It makes me suspect that I really wasn’t supposed to have risen in power as quickly as I did. A more timid player might struggle with all the fields in a region equally as they’re discovered, Vision and normal alike.

I mentioned before that there’s a type of randomly-appearing monster in Gemcraft: Chasing Shadows called a Shadow, described as an “avatar of the Forgotten”. A bigger Shadow was also the final boss in the previous game, Gemcraft: Labyrinth; the smaller Shadows have fewer hit points but are otherwise basically unchanged from the original. (It reminds me a little of beating the Slayer at the end of DROD: Journey to Rooted Hold and then facing “Slayer trainees” in its sequel.) Shadows have by far the most complex behavior of any enemy type in the game. They drift around the battlefield, ignoring the path and all obstacles, constantly increasing their armor as they go, occasionally pausing to execute one of their various abilities: spawning spawnlings, firing projectiles at your base, buffing other monsters, healing, turning temporarily invulnerable — each power accompanied by morphing into a different shape. And it all seems a bit of a waste, because by the time you start encountering them, you can pretty much one-shot them. There’s a Vision level or two where you have to defeat Shadows without your skill upgrades, and that’s pretty much the only opportunity to have a real shadow fight.

There’s one particularly notable thing about shadows, though: they’re capable of moving while the game is paused. They’re greatly slowed down, but not immobile like most things. This is the sort of real-time game where you can keep on interacting with the UI while it’s paused, and I frequently do — most of the time, when I want to effect any change on the battlefield, I pause the game while doing it, so that the time spent just moving my mouse around won’t count against me. So it’s really fairly alarming to realize that it doesn’t quite work on everything.

I kind of suspect that this behavior was originally a bug. It’s the sort of thing that would happen if, say, they keep Shadows from colliding with things by putting them on the UI layer, and then can’t completely stop the UI layer and still have it interactive, so instead they just give it a very small but positive time scale. I have no idea if that explanation is at all close to how it happened, but it’s the general sort of thing I expect. Regardless, even if it was a bug at some point, the designers definitely embraced it, as reflecting the sort-of-fourth-wall-breaking nature of the Forgotten, whose avatar the Shadows are. This is an important part of game design: When things don’t behave the way you want, a good designer asks “Is this better or worse than the intended behavior?”

Now, I said before that the shadow demon known as “the Forgotten” appears at random once you’ve made sufficient progress in Chasing Shadows. But I just noticed that it’s been a while since I last saw her. Which makes sense! Once you’ve reached the end of the game’s story, she no longer has any reason to bother you. Her monsters still attack, but we can take that as more or less automatic. It just means she didn’t bother turning off the monster spigot when she moved on to the sequel.

But wait. That means that the post-game here is diegetic. It’s not just the player revisiting earlier parts of the story, it’s the player character, the wizard seeking to contain the Forgotten, continuing to wander the battlefields after he has nothing more to gain. The player has motivations: achievements, completion, finding all the game’s secrets, particularly the secret of the grey trees. I suppose that uncovering secrets is a suitable motivation for a wizard as well. But the rest?

The main thing that the PC gets out of it all is power, in the form of XP from defeating monsters. This has lore implications if we take it seriously. Is all your magic fueled by death? Moreover, the PC isn’t just killing monsters out of necessity in this case. You’re deliberately goading them to attack, setting battle traits to attract more waves, using gems to enrage the waves so there will be more of them to kill. The PC is the aggressor, the instigator of completely unnecessary violence.

And in a lot of games, I’d make comments about ludonarrative dissonance here. But in Gemcraft, it fits the story pretty well! This is a dark fantasy, set in a bleak wasteland, long abandoned by humans. The sole great task of the wizards is to deal with the consequences of a terrible mistake they made long ago — not even to correct that mistake, but just to limit it, keep it from causing any more harm than it already has. And that’s a battle they’re losing. And if the story as a whole is one of punishment for hubris, pushing the PC into morally questionable activities in the pursuit of power is hardly out of place.

I said before that I like to keep a tower dedicated to demolishing Beacons as they appear. One nice powerful yellow gem with its targeting priority set to Structures, positioned where it can hit most of the screen — I’d say all of the screen, but it’ll hit creeps when there are no structures to target, and you really want to give the mana-leeching gems first crack at them. However, some levels have elements that try to convince you not to do this.

Basically, there are structures that can be harmful to hit, and which gems will only target if they’re set to prioritize structures. One is inherited from the previous game in the series: sealed tombs, which, when cracked open, emit dense clouds of monsters, palette-swapped to pure black to reinforce the impression that they’re not so much individual creatures as a contiguous mass. These are really not so bad for the high-level player, though. Each tomb holds a finite set of monsters, and once you’e wiped them out, the tomb holds nothing more to fear.

This is not the case for the spawnling hives. Spawnlings are basically the same as swarmlings, just outside of the normal enemy waves. One of the random special powers sometimes assigned to a wave of giants is “spawns 3 spawnlings on death”, which isn’t that big a deal as long as you have multiple killing points along the path. These hives, though, are something else. They emit spawnlings when attacked, and the more they’re attacked, the tougher the spawnlings get. Understand that a high-grade gem can fire over a hundred shots per second. If you set such a gem to prioritize structures and put it in range of a hive, you can wind up with ultra-powerful spawnlings, ones that you don’t have a prayer of killing, before you realize what you’ve done and correct your mistake.

Then there’s the corrupted mana shards. Mana shards are environmental features that are basically like mines in an RTS: firing at them with gems gives you extra mana until the supply runs out. Very often there’s also a crust you have to break through before you can start harvesting them productively. Corrupted mana shards are similar, except for two things: they never run out of mana, and they eat away at any gem that fires on them, making it do less damage and, consequently, harvest less mana. As far as I can tell, the result is that harvesting a corrupted shard just isn’t worth it. The amount of mana that a gem can get out of it before it’s rendered useless is always going to be less than the cost of the gem. They’re not as disastrous as a spawnling hive, but still best avoided.

Accommodating these things is a nice little extra puzzle in the few levels where they appear. You want to cover as much ground as you can without accidentally hitting them, and that means placing towers where their circles of effect will leave just the right gaps. I wish the levels did more of this sort of thing.

I’m still playing Gemcraft: Chasing Shadows. Because the game isn’t strictly ordered, there are still multiple levels I haven’t beat — in particular, the “Vision” levels, optional strategy-puzzle challenges where you don’t have access to the skills and XP you’ve accumulated. Without the option of just bludgeoning a level to submission with superior force, the game can actually be pretty challenging.

But also, if I finish all those, there are still the Achievements. There’s a lot of them. Do I want to achieve them all? I don’t know. Maybe. It depends on how many are left after I’ve completed all the levels. But there’s one particular achievement that I definitely want to try for, and that’s because it’s a riddle. Its name is “Grey Trees” and its description, where most of the game’s Achievements give you explicit instructions on how to get it, is simply “11331791”.

Some possible leads: I’ve seen some grey trees in a level or two; there was one level in particular where all the trees were grey. The in-game Achievements page can be filtered by various keywords, such as “Gem” or “Enhancement spell” or “Destroy”, and the only keyword for Grey Trees is “Click”. Most levels display gameplay tips while they’re loading; a few instead show a row of gem shapes. Since the shape of a gem indicates its “grade”, this is a way of representing a sequence of numbers. And every one of the levels with the gem shapes also contains a mysterious compass embedded in the ground, which rotates to point in a new direction every time you click on it. The direction of the compass has no obvious effect, but the game considers them important enough that compass levels are marked with a special icon on the map screen.

I’m assuming that I’ll have to turn the compasses to some particular direction, but what? I’ll have to do some experiments, find out if the gem shapes vary from level to level and if changing the compass direction changes them. And once I get everything into the right orientation, what then? Is that the only step needed? Will it open up some extra-secret level? I don’t know.

It all reminds me of the special post-Mastery levels in the later DROD games. But DROD was already a puzzle game; adding in additional secret puzzles was far from unexpected. But then, neither is it incongruous here. It may not match the gameplay, but it fits right in with the fiction, a story of wizards facing uncertainty, fighting a shadowy foe who outsmarts them at every turn.

The Gemcraft series is pretty minimalist about its creeps. It uses just three archetypes: normal enemies called “reavers”, weak but fast and numerous “swarmlings”, and tough but slow “giants”. Any wave will consist of just one enemy type, with their appearance randomized from wave to wave, probably to help justify their increasing stats. Sometimes a wave will have randomly-assigned special powers. And that’s it, for regular enemies.

But there are also special monsters. Gemcraft: Labyrinth, the third game, had various special bosses like Arcane Guardians on key levels: you’d think you’re done because the last numbered wave is over, but then something large and glowing and very hard to kill would start making its way very slowly down the path. The final level was protected by a Shadow, a creature made of particle effects that moves outside the paths and has a fairly complicated repertoire of behavior. Also floating free from the paths were the ghostly Apparitions, which are kind of like the saucers in Space Invaders: they don’t attack at all, but you can shoot them down for a bonus. Apparitions aren’t bosses. They just appear at random from time to time.

And it’s these random appearances that Chasing Shadows adopted as the basis for all of its special monsters! There are no bosses per se here: special challenge levels are instead done by giving you special tasks, like destroying locks or activating ancient devices. But we get random appearances from boss-like creatures. In particular, the Shadow from Labyrinth, toned down a bit, becomes just another thing that happens once in a while.

The most interesting randomly-appearing boss-like enemy is the Forgotten. A demon that manifests sometimes as a tentacle monster and sometimes as a woman with skeletal arms, the Forgotten is the main antagonist of the series, but doesn’t appear in the game levels until about halfway through Chasing Shadows. In fact, she arguably doesn’t appear in the game levels even then. She appears to be in some way outside of the game, like the player. When she appears, you just see her silhouette on the screen, as if she’s passing in front of a movie projector, which would place her in the player’s physical space.

Because the Forgotten isn’t inside the scene where your gems and spells have their effects, she cannot be fought. When she shows up, she just takes a semi-fourth-wall-breaking action and leaves. Sometimes she enrages some of the upcoming waves, making them tougher to beat, which frankly never seemed all that bad to me — as I noted previously, I was enraging most waves myself by the end, so when the Forgotten does it for me, all she’s really doing is sparing me a little effort and expense. Ah, but the other thing she can do is fearsome: sometimes she takes control away from the player. For about the duration of a single wave, all the controls are simply removed from the screen and all you can do is sit and watch events unfold. Which you normally spend a lot of time doing anyway, but you usually at least have the ability to spring into action if there’s a sudden need, and she temporarily takes that away.

All special monsters, including the Forgotten, are heralded at least a wave in advance by glitches and flickers, as if their eldritch presence is interfering with the magic you’re using to view the scene. So you at least get some warning when the Forgotten is about to show up and mess with your plans, a trick that the game uses to make you blame yourself for the outcome.