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Man I got in late on this thread but yeah. Every other upgrade in this game had me saying "oh hell yes" out loud to myself in an empty living room but the hookshot and the jetpack elicited maximal figurative volume. I don't know what it is about grappling hooks in 2D action/platformers that's so viscerally satisfying or how this particular game manages to do such a good job of coupling every upgrade to an immediate and palpable sense of constantly opening possibility but man I get the sense that the devs of this one understand these things completely. Steamworld Dig 2 stands out - even among the other Steamworld games - for how perfectly attuned it is with itself, how well every aspect of it serves every other aspect, how tightly the whole package fits together. And always, always, it comes back to axing blocks and going down; the core mechanic serves the setting which serves the environments with serve the design which serves the mechanics. It's a game of humble aspirations which are fulfilled totally. My main observation of this LP is that I never expected someone to take such a cavalier approach to digging almost straight down in this game. It's amusing to see how frequently this habit produces difficulties getting at some of the deposits. It always seemed to me like the ore deposits generally represented this kind of low-level constantly unfolding platform puzzle in which the very specific limitations in place on your ability to break blocks (broadly, only ever in a cardinal direction from yourself, even when at range) necessitate you having to think a little about how to be able to reach them, complicated enormously by falling blocks you have to loosen (or avoid loosening), or enemies that will interfere by breaking important blocks for you, or occasionally just being an out and out puzzle. As soon as I twigged this in my playthrough I started pretty much always approaching each area methodically, sweeping from side to side and descending one block at a time like a space invader and turning every area into an open pit (save for some platforms to facilitate exit before getting the hookshot), because I must collect everything. I think Steamworld Dig 2's greatest triumph is that it doesn't turn this compulsion into torture - hell, it barely even slows you down, and yet it's still rewarding and engages with the puzzle parts of your brain. Please buy cogs.
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Nov 24, 2019 06:01
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The purple drank block eroding mechanic is one of those things that looks like a really straightforward concept but which I fear sits atop an underlying code nightmare. Or maybe it's actually really elegant and does something like spawn individual explosions with a given lifetime and causes impacted blocks to give themselves new explosions with less life. I also feel like these things could be used to craft some really nifty puzzles but weren't because even when this game gets puzzly it doesn't seem like it gets to the kind of cerebral level you'd need to be on to have puzzles where the solution is to blow up a hodgepod but tactically mine one block from next to it to stop a chain reaction in a certain direction. Maybe. (I feel like there exists a theoretical fascinating paper to be written on the subject of "exactly how clever does a game that's not primarily a puzzle game dare get with puzzles?".) (I feel like there exists, even more theoretically, a really good puzzle mod for Steamworld Dig 2)
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Nov 27, 2019 04:27
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Please attempt the postgame dungeon. Its such perfect, glorious bullshit. Some of it's got to be seen to be believed. I respect the absolute hell out of this game. It is, as I said before, a game with humble aspirations but which fulfils them totally. It's a small thing but it's assembled with care and love and mastery of craft and I'd rather play it ten more times than another game of a hundred times its length and a thousand times its budget that amazes and wows with every available art asset and somehow feels completely identical to everything else released that year. It's a game that understands itself, it's a game that respects the player's time, it's a game that knows how you'll engage with it and how to work with you rather than against you. I'm unsure of the exact makeup of my personal small pantheon of perfect video games but I'm confident Steamword Dig 2 has a place in it. I"m not sure why the game ranks your time taken (or death count). I'm honestly always a little uneasy when lines are drawn over whole game completion stats, because I don't think these considerations really work at that scope. But unless there are Trophies or whatever tied to it it's a purely incidental concern.
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Jan 4, 2020 04:23
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