Hello, and welcome to side Quest. This is our weekly video game show
here at Geekbers, and you know what, it's just me dying here today
for a little lone journey. We had some mix ups in our scheduling our
calendar here and so said quest a little bit late this week as well,
as you're just getting a solo episode from me. But I'm just signing to
use this opportunity to just rave and rant to you all about my latest obsession,
which is Blatro And honestly, I would feel bad putting in Taylor,
Travis or Kirkland in this cast with me and just yelling at them for forty
five minutes about this game. We'll see how long it takes me to talk
about it. But just a couple of quick plugs before we get into it
here. One, you can wish list my game on Steam right now.
It's called Potion Problem. You can check out the trailer that's all in the
description if you want to go check that out. And then also a friend
of mine named Patrick over there at the super Switchheads podcast which I've appeared on.
He's also been making an indie game very much in the same kind of
parallel journey as me. Making mine, and he just released recently released his
a beta or I guess that rather a Steam demo for his game. I'll
put this in the description as well. It's called Monochrome Heights, and it's
really fun. The demo is pretty short. I've played the game previously,
I've helped him do some play testing and whatnot, and I can assure you
that the other content in the game is awesome. It's a really really fun
game, and the demo, you know, is short and sweet, gives
you like a half an hour or so to check it out. But it's
a really cool two D platform with an interesting phasing mechanic where you're jumping on
black and white platforms and you're switching your characters color between black and white,
and so you can only stand or be affected by black platforms and obstacles if
you're that color, and you're kind of switching back and forth. So it's
frantic, it's difficult, it's very intense. But if you're into that kind
of thing, like a meat Boy or Mega Man or Celeste, those kind
of more intense platformers, then I think it's a game you'll really enjoy.
So once again, Monochrome Heights is the name of that, and you can
check out the demo on Steam. I think with that we can get right
into the topic at hand. So Blotro is kind of the latest indie Darling
so to beat, the latest indie game that blew up. It came out
and I think late January, early February and took me a little bit to
get to it. I don't really know why, but what essentially pushed me
to go check it out over the weekend here was that the Great Tyler Briggs
was staying at my house, and Tyler Briggs is very into poker, and
this is the poker roguelike, so I thought it'd be a fun thing for
us to play together, and we did. We had a good time with
it, and then I just kept playing and have been frantically playing it.
Took a sick day for work yesterday, which because I was actually sick,
and just play for another like ten hours. So I don't know. I
think I have like fifteen or so hours into it already, just over the
course of the weekend here. So really really great game for anyone who doesn't
or didn't didn't hear about it, because it you know, it wasn't never
at any big showcases or anything like that. It really just kind of came
out of the blue. I think it was maybe part of the Steam Next
Fest demo things as well, So people are checking out there. But yeah,
it blew up. It's everywhere. But if you haven't seen it,
like I said, this is a poker roguelike where essentially your objective of the
game is to make it through eight anti's. In each anti there are three
rounds, so I guess twenty four levels if you look at it that way.
And yeah, it's a it's a you have a handful of cards,
eight or nine cards something like that, you're submitting five at a time,
making specific poker hands, or you can do discards as well, making different
poker hands. And maybe you're just playing one high card, or maybe you're
playing a full house or maybe a straight, all these different things building up
scores. And yeah, you're not. There isn't other opponents or other poker
players. It's just you submitting hands, trying to beat the round individual round
to score. And then like I said, it kind of progressively gets more
and more intense, and then every anti within those three rounds there is kind
of the boss blind is the third one, and that one has some sort
of d buff as well that will make the level even harder, more of
a boss level. So it's pretty basic in that way. But you know,
even before I get more into it, I just I kind of had
a couple of realizations in playing this one. One is that, goddamn I've
been playing a lot of card games recently, you know, Marvel Snap.
I've been on that grind for like a year and a half now, playing
that game almost every day, take a couple of months off here there,
But for the most part, I've been playing pretty hard on that, which
has been fun because they recently kind of rebuffed some characters in the Bounce archetype,
which I really enjoy playing. That's a whole side tangent. I won't
get into that. I've been consistently playing Inscription Cases Mod, which is the
roguelike mode for Inscription, which is is super fun, tons of unlocks and
additional stuff there. And then I talked about this recently on side Quest Solitaire
Conspiracy, which I'm still playing through. That's fun. Simple Blotcher's kind of
kicked it out of that rotation of playing recently in the last few days,
but still working my way through that. That's been a good time as well.
So yeah, I've been playing a lot of card games recently, and
this one's definitely like Shining Bright as like just some really great mechanics, a
lot of variety, and then I think that variety really does come from the
rogueli side of it, which you know, I've talked about this recently.
I think even as recently as an episode a few weeks ago where I talked
about Hades for a bit and how I feel like back in the day,
I was like really into roguelikes, and it was like even before that genre
is a big known thing, I was really into those kinds of games,
and then over the years I've kind of faded off of them or they just
haven't really hit me in the same way, like, and it kind of
got to a realization like do do I even love the rogue like genre or
do I just love these specific games like Binding by Isaac, Splunky, and
Into the Breach Those would be kind of my big three, And I've played
games like you know, Dead Cells didn't really do it for me. Hades,
as I talked about, wasn't really for me. But then a game
like Blotro comes along and it's like, oh yeah, I do. I
do love a rogue, like when it hits just right for me, and
this one's definitely doing that. So it's been fun to have another rogue like
to get into. You know, there's different kinds of rogue, like some
that are really all about like crazy, build a variety and wild stuff's gonna
happen, like like Binding of Isaac, or maybe games like Into the Breach
or Splunky, which are a bit more contained and the kind of build of
right you're gonna get. But like just the core gameplay feels so good and
plays so well, and Blotcher's more on that Buying of Isaac scale of things,
But the game feel of it is great, and I think that's the
first thing I wanted to praise about it is just the general esthetic of this
game is excellent. I've been playing it kind of with my laptop but like
plugged into my TV, so it's been like playing it on the big screen.
That music that it has just it's weirdly like on settling a little bit,
but also like puts you in like this trance like state in a way
that really what works well for the kind of game you're playing. I guess
it's kind of emulating almost like casino music or something like that, but it
works really well. The visual style is great. It's kind of got that
CRT to filter on it this. The effects are really punchy, the sounds
are all really good, and then just like as you're seeing you're multiplying your
score balloon and get these huge numbers and laying on fire. It just it's
so satisfying that second to second game play, which is kind of weird to
say for a card game. I think they've gotten better at this over over
the years. Like Heartstone has that great feel to it. I think Marvel
Snap, you know, being a lot of the same team as Heartstone,
has nailed that as well. Inscription had great feel as well, really punchy
effects, and so I think it's cool to see just where card games are
nowadays compared to you know, where they used to be, or you know,
even making it feel better than playing an actual card game with physical cards
in your hand is something that's that's worth praising there. So just love the
vibe. It's just a you know, there's no story or characters or anything
like that, but it's just it's a place I just want to be and
hang out, which is a good, good feel for it. But yeah,
so, as I mentioned, you're playing these different poker hands, and
the way it goes is there's kind of different ways you're pre resting in that
roguelike sort of way to start off with a basic fifty two card deck with
what is it, thirteen cards of each suit, and it all kind of
makes sense there. You're doing your very basics and then the shop has all
these different upgrades you could get, or maybe you're just gonna save your money
for the next round. You can even skip certain rounds and that will give
you some sort of benefits, so you kind of weane it like, Okay,
I'm not gonna play this round. I'm not gonna earn him money,
but maybe the benefit that it's given me is worth the trade off there in
that kind of way. So it has that good kind of I guess risk
reward element to it as well, And so you know, I think the
part where it gets more wild is you're doing all sorts of things to affect
your deck in different ways. So maybe you're pulling out cards, maybe you're
trying to get rid of all the diamonds, so you can really focus on
the other stuff. Maybe you're adding just a bunch of aces in your deck.
I've had decks where I've been upwards of like ten to twelve thirteen of
just like a ten of hearts. Like you just get insane amounts of the
same card over and over again, which makes it obviously work really well for
four of a kinds or different flushes, full house, that kind of thing.
So it helps you get those things, and you know, I think
it's good too, like even if you don't understand poker know much about it,
which I don't really know a ton either. We recently did an afternoon
we replayed it with some of the patrons, but I had to have a
cheat sheet up of all the different hands because I don't know about stuff off
the top of my head. But this game makes it really easy to do
that, and then you can. As you're going through, you're building up
the value of those poker hands as well, so maybe now two pairs worth
way more than it normally is, so you're kind of building up these numbers,
getting huge multipliers, all that kind of thing, and I think that's
where it gets really fun and a bit wild. And even deviates from what
poker is because in the shop you're buying things like planet cards, and those
are the ones that are going to uprade the value of your different hands that
you're getting. And so that's like a card where you're getting like an Earth
card or Jupiter or Saturn, and that's just leveling up your deck. And
then you're getting things like tarot cards, you know, all those classic tarot
cards and like Binding of Isaac or so many games have them now, and
so all of those affect your deck in different ways. You're adding additional playing
cards into your deck, as I mentioned, and even some of those,
there's all sorts of upgrades like holographic you can get steal you can turn them
into like rocks, and then they just have like straight value, but they
take away like the actual value of the card that sort of stuff. And
then there's even like spectral upgrades as well, which are even crazier things that
I don't I don't really need to explain the details of that. So that
part of it's really great, really fun. And then you know where where
it takes all this stuff and multiplies the possibilities by a thousand is through the
joker cards. So the jokers are all all sorts of different things, and
these range from just basic things like okay, this gives you just plus four
multiplier each hand you play. Cool, pretty basic, but then we'll be
things like, oh, this powers up all the spades you play, so
every hand if it has a spade in there, that I'll just get a
bonus on top of it. There's different variations of that. There's other ones
when I really like it's called four finger where it makes it so that you
only need four cards in a row to play a straight or four cards to
do a flush, which makes those a lot easier as well. But then
it just gets really wild because it starts out as basic joker iconography that you'd
expect from a deck of cards, but then you get wild stuff like one
of them is just a driver's license. One of them is like a credit
card that puts you like twenty bucks in debt, and I don't even know
what the benefit of it yet. Is Like there's so many mysteries to some
of the cards, and some of them I've seen them, like I don't
even understand how you would ever make use of this. But then like three
or four or five runs later I'll bump into some other combination of like,
oh, I wonder if I had that joker now compared with these other two
new ones I've seen, and maybe that's where it would create some really crazy
strategies that I otherwise couldn't have expected. So in that way, it has
that kind of roguelike element too that's works really well. And so those jokers
by default, you can have five of them equipped at any given time,
and they're not in your deck like they're just kind of up at the top
of the screen. As these constant effects. You can even move them around
and they might multiply off each other in more efficient ways if you position them
correctly. And then you know, there's course ways you can get more jokers,
like I think the most I've had at times like nine nine at a
time, which gets really really complex in terms of kind of factor in all
the math of how it all works out. But thankfully you don't need to
worry too much about the specifics of that. And so I've managed to win
a few runs now, and I think that's maybe the best way I can
illustrate some of the variety is by talking about some of those. So you
know, the first win I got was a pretty basic deck, but was
once again it was kind of I had this multiplier that would give me bonuses,
bonus chips if I played exactly four cards, so instead of playing five
cards like you normally, can only playing four and you get a bonus.
So there's kind of a trade off there of you're playing one less card,
one less potential value. You're not going to be able to play like a
full house or things like that, but ideally you're getting more points off of
this joker card that are gonna turn in two more points at the end of
the day. And so I was just playing a bunch of two pairs and
having those four cards, and it just worked so well because I leveled up
my two pairs and insane number, I had that four card bone, and
it just worked out. I was able to beat the run pretty much just
having this very simple strategy of just playing two pairs, which is not the
hard to do, especially when you're modifying your deck, maybe taking out all
the fives, if you can, adding in more hates or queens, whatever
it may be, so you can really guarantee yourself to get more and more
of these pairs. So that was a really fun strategy I had. That
was the first win I got, and then we get into more wild ones.
So another one I had was kind of all based around just playing strictly
flushes a flush bean when you play five of the same suit, and so
I had a bonus on spades. So I started building my deck around that,
trying to clear out anything that wasn't a spade, get more and more
spades. But then eventually I got a card that another joker card that made
it so that all spades and clubs act as the same suit. So now
essentially half my deck was all spades, and so I was just deleting out
all the diamonds and hearts, focusing on now spades and clubs, getting like
bonuses on top of those. And then I even had on top of that
another bonus that if after I play a hand, if all the cards that
remained in my hand are also spade, then I get another bonus on top
of that. And so since my deck was really just thin down really just
that one or I guess two suits that were the same, I was just
getting insane multipliers on top of each other and it worked really well. Once
again, I had a similar sort of one with the heart flush deck.
So once again similar basic kind of strategy there, but this one was kind
of based around trying to play like face cards and flushes. So I'm just
trying to play just like a bunch of queens, Kings jacks, And once
again, I had so many of my deck by the end of the run,
and then I had various specific jokers positions where it would like the first
face card you play would activate twice. You'd get like double the value off
of it. And then I had so I'd play that as like a face
card so to get procked again. And then I had certain cards that had
this red seal you can put on them that makes them prock twice as well,
so I'd have like one card going like three or four times. All
these crazy multipliers. You can get this one joker that's just called a bloodstone,
which is that has and it just makes it gives you, like I
think it was like a one in three or one and four chance that a
heart card will just get some crazy multiplier on top of it. And I
was getting insane like multimillion dollar runs or plays all in one go. It
was super satisfying, really fun, but I also had to change it around
a couple of times because certain jokers I got, they were really strong initially,
but then they lose power over time, and a couple one of those
got a little bit weaker, so I kind of had to modify it as
I went on. One thing I really like too is after you complete a
run, you can go into endless mode or you just continue that run.
But I feel like with some roguelegs you just build is so overpowered that endless
mode is just that, like it'll just go on forever because you're you've essentially
beat the game. But in this they ratch up the difficulty so much that
even if you're in endless mode and you have a really really strong deck,
the most I've ever gotten is like one or two more anties at the most
pass that final round, because it just gets to like you need ten million
chips or something, which is just an insane number considering the first hand is
always to be or the first round rather there's always gonna be three hundred,
Like just the amount that it increases over time is absolutely wild. And then
another one I had that was it was really fun. It was a deck
based around essentially having this multiplier that would build up anytime I didn't play my
most played poker hand, so meaning that like let's say pair, you can
see like how many times you've played a pair in a certain run. So
lets say I've played a pair seven anytime I seven times, anytime I didn't
pay anything except for a pair, it would like build up this multiplier.
And so it got to a point early on the run. You know,
it was kind of hard to keep track of that because I had only played
a handful of hands, so it was very hard to keep that going.
But it got to a point where I played like ten flushes or something like
that, and that kind of became the number that I was like, Okay,
I think I can try and play other hands now, And so it
became this thing of like, okay, I'm gonna play a bunch of two
pairs. Eventually two pairs got up to also ten plays, so then I
switched over to the three three of a kind or four of a kind or
full house, and over the the run just getting like almost all of the
available poker hands except for like straight flush because that's so hard to get.
It was up to like that ten number, and so my multiplier was absolutely
insane, but I had to play like really specific limited hands, and it
was just really fun to try and balance that back and forth without trying to
lose that multiplier on top of that too, I think my favorite joker,
I think so far as one. It's just a walkie talkie and it's called
ten four and so you just get multipliers on tens and fours, and so
that that whole build, that whole run. Rather I was just going all
around deleting anything out, duplicating any tens and fours I had, and that's
where I think I had like upwards of like twelve or thirteen tens in there,
and like seven or eight fours as well, and all of them were
like multiplied enhanced versions as well. So that was a really really fun one
that took. Like that one felt like it took a lot more skill and
reallyd to pay attention each hand, but it had like a huge reward to
it as well. And that one I think took me a couple antis passed
the h past the final round as well, So just all sorts of crazy
stuff like this. And once again, I've seen so many jokers in there
that I've like never even purchased because I don't have a run that particularly makes
use of them, but there's so many that you're getting that all do all
these crazy things. They're very weird and funny too with the icronography on them
and their names. So I just I can't. I can't foresee me running
out of fun things to do in this game for a very very long time.
On top of that, as you're playing through it, you're unlocking tons
of new things as well. You're unlocking new decks. I give you different
starting positions, new cards, new jokers, you're unlucky like challenge runs,
so it's give you very specific goals as well. And then for each deck
you have higher difficulties, and I think there's like six or seven of them
too, and I've only ever beaten the Tier one difficulty of like, I
think I have like five or six wins now at this point. But yeah,
so much more to do. And I even just saw today that the
first like major patch for the game is coming, which is going to add
even more stuff on top of that, as well as rebalancing a bunch of
things as well. So I'm very excited to see see that and it finally
comes out but yeah, this game is fantastic. You know. I've got
a lot of praise back when it came out, and I just I guess
I'm happy to hop on the bandwagon there, even if I'm a couple months
late, and just kind of confirm that, Man, this game really is
great and knows what makes a good roguelike and knows what makes a good card
game, and I don't. I haven't really played many like poker video games
before, so I'm sure it's studied those as well, but I don't really
have that background. But at least in terms of having playing tons of roguelikes,
playing a bunch of card games currently in my life, I can say
that this game definitely nails it in terms of the variety there in terms of
the game feel, So yeah, I don't think I have much more to
add on top of that. I think this is just a game that's absolutely
worth playing, and it gets like twenty bucks. It's available I believe on
Steam and maybe Android now or Android iPhone, one of those two things,
and I think it would probably work pretty well on mobile as well, because
it's pretty low key sort of game, pretty simple visuals for the most part.
But once again, I'm like playing on a big screen, so I
think it's cool that it goes all the way there from like being a good
phone game all the way to the main thing on the TV there. It
works well for that, so uh yeah, hopefully this wasn't too rambly,
wasn't too confusing, but I think, you know, hopefully it shows up
my enthusiasm, my excitement for this game. And it's like, man,
any more time I spend in this podcast is less time for me to play
the lotro, so I just want to get back to it. But yeah,
I'm sure I'll keep updating my thoughts on this game as I play more,
get more crazy runs in there, so yeah, I'll share that journey
as I continue to play more here on side Quest. Thank you everyone for
listening to know this is a short episode this week and not kind of what
you expect, but next week we'll be back with the kind of standard side
Quest episode that you know and love and uh yeah, so thank you everyone
for listening, and I'll see you next time. But by Pat