Teleglitch: On the Nature of Rougelikes

The corridors are a maze that twist this way and that. The bombs you had spent a few minutes creating barely put a dent in the horde of aliens following you, and the pistol you’re carrying has only half a clip left in it. You skid to a stop and take a left, and another right. You have no idea where you are, and the swarm is relentless in its pursuit. Finally, you reach a dead end. Before you have time to react, you’re overwhelmed.  You hadn’t even finished the first level.

Such is the nature of Teleglitch, a top down rougelike shooter. If I had to sell it to you, I’d describe it as a mixture of Hotline Miami and Quake, with the atmosphere of System Shock peppered onto it for added flavor.

Death is a given, in Telelglitch, as with any other rougelike. And like with other rougelikes, each death will be a learning experience. What sets apart Teleglitch from its perma-death brethren is its frantic combat. Every battle is life or death, and could end in an instant, every bullet shakes the screen as if to punctuate its damage, as well as its scarcity, what with bullets being this game’s equivalent to gold. This is in contrast to more traditional rougelikes – where each step is measured and calculated in those games, meaning you can stop for a breather, Teleglitch requires machine-like concentration and coordination. Any misstep could send your progress back by 20 minutes, to 2 hours, depending on how well (and lucky), you’re doing.

If you find yourself nodding along to the words above, and perhaps even going over to other sites to get more info on Teleglitch, you’re probably familiar with the rougelike genre. To anyone else, this probably sounds, to put it lightly, incredibly un-fun. And honestly, if someone asked me why I liked games that punished me for failing so brutally, I’d probably stutter for a second.

Why do people like rougelikes? Before Teleglitch, I had a few other roguelikes under my sleeve – Spelunky, Rogue Legacy, Nethack, Receiver. All games that were excruciatingly hard and uncompromising. All of them I kept going back to until I had beaten them.

The question of why I enjoy rougelikes may be similar to asking why someone loves to gamble. Perhaps its the risk and reward of knowing that one more step could lead to a massive pile of loot, or a quick loss of life. The further you go, the higher the stakes go. It’s hard to back down from something like that.

Then there’s the fact that each playthrough is a learning experience. It’s dependent on your philosophical view: You can view a loss as a waste of time, or as a way to realize things like, “don’t use the nailbomb in such close quarters”, or, “the Archmage isn’t a good class to choose when going against this boss”, or even “okay, so spikes kill you instantly…shit.”

I’m a sucker for self-improvement, and that stays true both within and outside of the game world. The joy of finally getting to that safe-house, finally beating that boss, finally completing the game…it’s something you don’t forget.

And thus, I will keep on trucking through this Alien hell of mine. One death at a time.

I Played Mass Effect Again…And It Has Not Aged Well.

The Mass Effect series is well-known for powerful stories, along with compelling and deep characters. It is less known for its gameplay, and after replaying the original Mass Effect, I can see why.

While I enjoy the series as a whole, I’m honestly surprised at how much praise the first Mass Effect gets – especially after playing it again. The game is honestly a technological mess. Bugs and glitches run rampant, and load times are unbearable. I set the game to “easy” difficulty not because I didn’t enjoy the game’s challenge, but because the game took 30 seconds to load for every death.

Then there is the game’s User Interface. This was the first time I had played Mass Effect on a console, and the poor design decisions are made even more clear when playing with a controller. Navigating through different weapons and items felt like a waste of time, and I ended up skipping inventory management to upgrade my characters, simply because I didn’t feel bothered tangling with the jungle that was the Equipment menu.

All this being said, this post isn’t just a post for the sake of complaining. I think Mass Effect was deeply affected by the game’s poor technical presentation. When the game was released, it was almost unanimously praised. It was obvious that Bioware had put out a hit. But I think that the developers knew they could do better with the game’s gameplay aspects. However, rather than focus onimproving Mass Effect’s design, and streamlining the game’s more convoluted processes, the creators decided to remove them all-together.

Coming to this conclusion, it explains the drastic changes that come with Mass Effect 2, which I’ve started after completing the first game. ME2 all but completely takes away most of the RPG details that came with the first game. In fact, the sequel is much more “Shooter” than “RPG”. One could go through the entire game without changing a single piece of equipment, and not miss out at all.

I find this very interesting. I wonder, what could the Mass Effectseries have ended up like had it started off with a better RPG interface? I think the gameplay would be drastically different if this were the case. The series would be more inline with Bioware’s other series’, such as Knights of the Old Republic and Dragon Age, with a larger focus on strategy through item-management. Picking the right stuff to defeat your enemies.

I don’t think Mass Effect as a series is any better or any worse for having gone the direction it had after the first game is released. But I wonder how the series would have been accepted, had it continued down the path of the original.