Hey! Welcome to this new thing I'm trying out where I talk about video games I've been playing recently. I have no idea how often I'll be doing this, or how many people will read this, but it's still fun to talk about! Anyways, I should cut the crap and actually start talking about video games.
hey! this is not meant to be an objective review, but more of my general thoughts on the game.
Kiro Talks Games
Dead Estate
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Dead Estate is a top-down isometric roguelike shooter created by the game dev studio Milkbar Lads in 2021, being the first of their games to recieve a commercial release on Steam following a fairly popular "classic" version released on Newgrounds and itch.io. The game follows a group of 9 playable characters as they must run and gun through a monster-infested mansion while amassing an arsenal of weapons and passive items, all the while being pursued by an unkillable rat-monster named Chunks. As of writing this blog post, the game is currently on version 1.4, having recently released the "Heaven & Hell" update.
Gameplay
The game's central gameplay loop is pretty similar to most of the typical indie roguelikes you see mentioned, like The Binding of Isaac and my beloved Enter the Gungeon. The game's itch.io page even directly states the game's inspiration from Vlambeer's Nuclear Throne, which I can definitely see given how the gunplay feels.
Speaking of gunplay, I actually like it a lot! Most of the weapons feel pretty fun to use, and every item and weapon is unlocked from the start, which is decently rare in an indie roguelike like this one. (Of course, the game does have unlockables, which I'll mention later.) Every gun feels like it has a decent impact when fired, and there's even minor screen shake whenever a gun is fired to really contribute to that.
The main aim of the game is for it to be fast-paced, and it succeeds at this goal fairly effectively. Movement is simple and fairly quick, and the enemy design encourages the player to never stay in one spot for too long. The game's primary incentive for moving quickly through floors however, is the aforementioned Chunks. Chunks is a pretty direct reference to Nemesis from Resident Evil 3, being a big hulking (usually) unkillable monster. At first, he's pretty scary! As he approaches, you can hear a loud roar or loud footsteps thumping nearby signifying his presence, and the music goes quiet for a second before being replaced by his chase theme as he appears from the door you entered the room from. He's a near constant threat, able to appear on nearly every floor in the game, barring a few exceptions. The pause screen even changes, demanding you to unpause the game and face the beast chasing you down. As the run continues, the time it takes for Chunks to appear grows shorter and shorter, on harder difficulties he can show up practically immediately upon entering a floor! The player's best options are to run away until he looses chase, or duck into one of the shops where he can't follow, or if you're feeling particularly brave, you can try and face him head on. This is where a problem emerges.
After the player becomes skilled enough at the game, Chunks is basically never a threat. He's slow, can only attack up close (although he does deal contact damage, and can jump to catch the player in mid-air) and frankly, pretty stupid! He can be fought when encountered, and although he can never be technically killed he can be incapacitated long enough for the threat of his appearance to become basically non-existant.At worst, he's kind of just annoying. To some extent, I think the devs recognize this? The player is pretty heavily encouraged to tackle Chunks like this, as he gives a massive payout in money when defeated, as well as giving the recently introduced cross-run "Chunks Medallions" currency upon defeating him for the first time in a run. I don't think his presence is too big of an issue (he can still catch me off-guard from time to time), but I feel like he's so quickly undermined as a threat that it comes off as a dissapointment.
There is an unkillable, mush faster version of Chunks that appears in the alternate "Old Set" floor that the player must encounter when they go for the game's true ending, and he's pretty scary! I don't think Chunks should be outright made unkillable, although making him generally less predictable could be a fun way to challenge the player. Maybe only lock it to harder difficulties?
Chunks aside, I think the game's isometric viewpoint also serves as one of its greatest weaknesses. Depth perception in this game can be a fucking NIGHTMARE to deal with, and sometimes you'll have your cursor directly over an enemy and shoot five million miles away from where they are because their hitbox is basically wherever their lil shadow is. This is what the devs generally recommend when people bring this up as a complaint. It kinda sucks though because certain furniture objects can block these shadows, making them impossible to see! I also pretty frequently find myself getting caught on furniture while jumping because it's pretty hard to gauge where you are in relation to the space around you by just looking at your sprite (which is what most players are doing).
UI
This is probably my biggest problem with the game. The UI is fucking terrible!! Any player that even thinks about looping is going to have some of the worst fucking menu clutter I've ever seen in a game.
Look at this! Every single item you pick up shows up on the bottom of your screen and takes up way too much fucking room, covering fucking everything downm there. If you pick up enough items, it gets to the point where you straight up cannot see new items because they get pushed off-screen. The items can also cover up the map when it's expanded, which is fucking terrible for navigation. The map itself isn't too great either, but I think there's an intentional level of obstruction there? (Certain difficulties can get rid of the map entirely, for example.) I think it would probably be a good idea to move these to the pause menu like most roguelikes of this nature. Especially since the pause menu isn't too hot either.
This is the entire pause screen right here, just white text on a purple background. I does what it needs to, sure, but it kinda sticks out to me. Where's the visual flair?? Couldn't even do a gradient or something? WTF Nintendo. I think maybe moving the menu options around and moving the item list to here would do a lot to help with the menu clutter the game has currently, because it's REALLY bad.
Visuals
Overall, one of Dead Estate's biggest strengths is visuals. All the characters have fun portraits on the selection screen, unique intros that play upon unlock telling you how they arrived to the titular mansion, every floor has unique art for the central shopkeeper, lots of fun details like that.
There's also a lot of minor details too which serve to flesh out the world and give the game its own unique flair, for example, a decent chunk of characters have unique dialogue when interacting with NPCs or when examining certain items of interest.
...Oh yeah, I should probably mention the shopkeep.
Shops
This is Cordelia, the main shopkeeper and one of the only NPCs you'll see regularly while playing. She's also a playable character! If you've seen anything from this game, it's probably her, and it's pretty obvious why! She's VERY popular, and has arguably the most presence of any character in the game, manning four different shops (well, one's a bank) and having unique art for each one. As mentioned before, she's also playable, which causes a fairly cute change in which her mom replaces her role in the shops she once manned. (She's also a lesbian who's dating one of the playable characters, neat!)
On her own, I think she's fine. A little blatant, sure, but the game has... a LOT of this. The few non-Cordelia shopkeepers are also big booby women in skimpy outfits (barring one who's the Toilet Hand guy from Zelda), again, I don't think there's anything WRONG with this (I'll be the first to admit I'm fond of the cultist shopkeeper, Cybil), like what you wanna like but... come on, man. (The key art for the Heaven & Hell update is probably the biggest offender of this for me.) If I AM bringing the other shops up, it wouldn't be a bad idea to talk about each of them.
The newest shops added to the game are the Heaven and Hell shops. The Hell Shop can only be encountered after looping a run, and is used to buy the new Curses. I already explained Curses, but I do find it a little frustrating that obtaining every character's individual curses can take a LONG time, since you need to buy all three of a character's curses WITH that respective character after looping. It's a pretty significant investment into a run imo.
The Heaven Shop can appear rarely at any time, and lets the player buy Blessings, which remove the negative effects of Curses, for 5-15 minutes. I really like Blessings as a concept! They allow the player to avoid, but not entirely negate, the inherent risk-reward nature of Curses. The Angel Shop ALSO allows the player to buy powerful, rare items that are usually pretty hard to find in a normal run. Both of these shops take the new Chunks Medallions, which are only obtained by killing Chunks for the first time in a run, as mentioned before, or a certain amount can be obtained by clearing a run (the amount can be increased with each loop + by playing on higher difficulties.)
Endings
Dead Estate has two major endings. The first of which being a standard, no frills run through all of the main stages, finishing off with a boss fight against Chunks to finally kill him and destroy the mansion in another pretty obvious reference to inconic setpieces from the Resident Evil games. This is the first ending any player will get, and I guess counts as the "bad" ending. The true ending, involves going through all 4 alternate floors that are unlocked after completing a run alongside the main ones. Doing so will let the players collect pieces of a key that can be used to obtain an antidote to turn Chunks back into a normal lab rat, and have him help you enter the game's final level, the Exit Realm, and fight the final boss (as well as rescuing Cordelia's missing father in the process). This is pretty fun, and Diavolo, the final boss, is cool and flashy (although she's another lady with big boobs in game filled with them).
My main problem is that outside of earning the medals for it, I never saw any point in going for the true ending, at least at the point of the game I'm at. Pretty much every medal that requires a completed run can be obtained by going through the game's normal ending, which is faster AND easier, since some of the alt floors can be really tough! I guess the justification here is that you can obtain more weapons, items, and money by going through these floors and the Exit Realm. I never really desired to go through and get the true ending. Although, to be fair, I can see that changing whenever I finish unlocking stuff and just start doing runs for the sake of doing them (I still regularly fight the Lich in Gungeon despite not really needing to, so...).