IGT - Cucumber Blues, Endless Fables: The Minotaur's Curse

Welcome to Indie Gaming Theater, where I buy a discounted, barely-reviewed indie game from Steam's stacks and take a close, honest look at it. For more details on what this feature aims to do, go here to check out my lengthy preamble. Otherwise, enjoy!

Cucumber Blues

Cucumber Blues has the dubious distinction of being the first game in this blog series I've returned due to sheer brokenness. It's something I vowed not to do in the preamble to this whole thing unless the game was significantly unplayable due to bugs or technical issues. Unfortunately, Cucumber Blues is riddled with them.

From the outside, Cucumber Blues looks like a silly shooting gallery. You're a walking cucumber out for revenge for the deaths of your family. That's a pretty great setup, but it's also unfortunately the last good thing about this game. From the very first minute, Cucumber Blues has problems, and not just with its mangled English in its introduction. The very first thing you're tasked to do is "go to a bar." Ostensibly that's an easy task, but when I got to the door, it wouldn't open. I pounded the E key, and then just about every other key on the keyboard to make sure I wasn't missing something, but nope. The door simply did not want to open.

At that point, I should have given up. But plucky me, I figure I'm gonna reboot and try it again, and this time, it actually does open. Damn it.

What follows next is a confused haze of problems and bad gameplay. You move your very tiny mouse cursor around the screen (which, by the way, hasn't been remade into a gun icon or anything - it's just the regular old Windows mouse arrow) and click on bad guys to shoot. Again... ostensibly. The cucumberado sometimes fires, sometimes doesn't. Is he reloading? Is he just staring at the walls dumbly like... well, like a cucumber? Is he contemplating his inevitable fate as a delicious cucumber sandwich (and how fuckin' good would a cucumber sandwich be right about now)? None of this is explained. He just throws a bullet or two in the general direction of the villains, and stands around being useless as anything but a lead magnet.

When I did manage to shoot the villains, they simply disappeared, leaving only a small puddle of what I guess to either be blood or Italian dressing behind. Okay. Sure. Fine. Not gamebreaking, but not great either. But what's really screwy is when the game asks you to continue forward in any direction, because almost invariably, there are navigational problems.

Take, for example, the time I'm tasked with simply going down stairs. There's visibly a boxy-type area I can go down, but the actual spot where the cucumber goes down the stairs is as narrow as a coin slot. There were also several times when I could avoid closed doors and narrow pathways altogether by simply walking as close to the game's camera as possible and then swooping around those obstacles.

I'd like to say there's one thing that could redeem BITSOFT's Cucumber Blues, but sadly, any afffection I might have had towards the game ended by the point when I was furiously clicking on bad guys in the second level and absolutely nothing was happening except my death. If this was someone's attempt at learning Unity, it's a valiant effort, but as an actual product people can buy, it's a dumpster fire if the dumpster was actually made of cardboard dipped in kerosene. It should be avoided at all costs.

Cucumber Blues is available on Steam. Even at its bargain basement price of $1.99, it's not worth even the time you've spent reading this blog. Sorry. I'm truly sorry.

Endless Fables: The Minotaur's Curse

Thankfully, when I refunded Cucumber Blues, I decided to pick up a second game for the week in Sunward Games' Endless Fables: The Minotaur's Curse, an actual not-terrible hidden item/puzzler. Don't get me wrong - this is a very vanilla game and in no way whatsoever worth the discount price I paid of $5.99 (let alone its regular price of $9.99), but it's also up there with MOAI as a game in this series that's not a bad example of its particular genre.

I'd never played a hidden object game (though you could probably argue the original Runaway was essentially a hidden item game disguised as a traditional adventure game). I didn't have high expectations of Endless Fables, but the environments in the Steam screenshots looked pleasant enough, and I like Greek mythology quite a bit, so what the hell, right? Turns out I was right about the environments - the art of the backgrounds is definitely the highest point of this game - and while the game tends to Diet Pepsi-fy mythology, what's presented here does a fine job of setting up the main character's powers by invoking the myth of Ariadne, the daughter of Minos and the woman who helped Theseus with the Minotaur. The basic setup of the game is that the player character is the heir of Ariadne and inherits her special abilities, mostly revolving around Ariadne's thread.

That Ariadne's thread is also the modern definition of solving puzzles with logic isn't exactly subtle, but hey, it works. And in that regard, Endless Fables sets up a generically pleasant little backdrop for the game. The dialogue itself is hammy and a bit on the silly side, but it's all so short and meant to push you towards puzzles that it doesn't really matter.

The puzzles themselves are fairly diverse, though all tend to revolve around moving objects until you've solved it and get a new shiny bauble to help with a different section of puzzles. Maybe it's just because I don't play a lot of straight-up puzzle games, but these felt a bit different than the usual adventure-type puzzles, though at one point I did have to do a sliding block Tetris style puzzle that bored me to tears. Thankfully, all of these can be skipped after a short period of time with no real cost to the player, something I took liberal advantage of thanks to my shit eyesight.

As for the hidden object aspects of this game, well... it's bad, but thankfully, the developers saw fit to include an "easy" mode that makes objects in the environment sparkle, or you can get a full-blown hint that shows you with a blast of what looks like Walter White's finest. It loops around the object or place you're supposed to go and then points you towards what that object should be used on. Pretty nifty little hint system and again one I made use of plenty of times because I largely didn't much want to spend the bulk of my time with this game pixel hunting.

The whole thing left me pleasantly numb. This is precisely the sort of thing I'd probably download on my iPad if it was stupidly cheap and I needed to kill some time waiting for a bus or something. It's not terrible, but nothing particularly stands out, either. I think the asking price is ridiculous, but apart from that, there's nothing here that should really stop you from playing it if you like this sort of thing. I'd love to see what the artists and programmers could do with a genuine adventure game, preferably with someone on board who could iron out the mildly stiff dialogue.

Endless Fables is a staggering $9.99 on Steam, but appears to be available free on the Amazon app store and elsewhere for mobile devices. I imagine that would mean there are in-app purchases for hints and such.

The Rest

Along with my continued playthrough of Persona 5, I've actually been playing something relatively modern and relevant this week in the excellent Shadow Warrior 2. I'm one of those crazy people that wasn't blown away by 2016's Doom - the levels felt too much like they were made from samey building blocks and the gameplay just didn't do much for me. But oddly enough, Shadow Warrior 2 is really grabbing me, probably because of the loot, but also just because it's a damn fun game.

Part of that stems from the idea that this is now basically a shoot and loot, which has become far and away my favorite genre since the relative death of the JRPG. Games like Dead Island, Dying Light, Fallout 4, and Borderlands grab me in ways that nothing else really does. And yes, I'm including Fallout 4 in that bunch because the loot system inherently makes it a kissing cousin to the genre, so back off, Judgy McJudgernaut.

Shadow Warrior 2 doesn't really go hard enough into the loot system to put it up there with the rest of those, but I do love the idea of random jewels dropping that can be slotted to the stock weapons. It's a good nod towards Diablo 2, and makes for a great reason to take on more of the enemy hordes than I normally would. It really doesn't hurt matters much that the sword play is still a lot of fun. Chopping up enemies into little bits and smashing things is just as satisfying as it was in the first game.

I'd have liked to have seen things go just a bit further on all fronts - the game could use more weapon types if they're going for a diverse loot feel, as well as more abilities both passive and active. But overall, it's a riot. Looking forward to putting more time in it in the weeks to come.

As for Persona 5, I just finished the third dungeon and it's not bad so far. I like the basic JRPG gameplay and actually find myself more drawn to dungeon crawling than I was with Persona 3 and 4. Having the party banter largely restricted to the Memento stuff was a smart move, as it breaks up the monotony really well. It's also become my podcast/book on tape game of the year, almost hands down. I can dungeon crawl for hours, listen to a John Sandford novel, and come out the other end with a stupid amount of money, ready to take on the next round of dungeons.

That said, outside the phenomenal first dungeon setup, it's all sort of dull. The characters feel like flatter versions of the Persona 4 archetypes, and there's a general lack of heart to an otherwise charming game. That said, it's the best JRPG since Ni no Kuni, which isn't saying a lot, but it's still a damn fine game on a technical level and will draw me in through a new game +, I'm sure.

And that's it! Hope you all have a good week.