Lets Play: Hack 'n' Slash - Episode 8 - The End

With this episode we reach the end of the game. The Wizard is defeated and there were no reality destabilizing deletions that took place. Leaving us free to help the princess and go and explore the world.

There are a few more puzzles to solve, ones that were skipped during the journey through the game, I could certainly go back and do them, but I am pretty content to leave things here unless people would really like to see it.

As for my thoughts on the game, I have kind of been sharing them throughout this series but I guess the summary would be this:

Hack 'n' Slash is a fun hacking based puzzle game. It has a good sense of humour and rolls out new mechanics and abilities at a nice pace; unfortunately the puzzle difficulty can be pretty spiky and I am not sure it really provides enough support for someone unfamiliar with programming to have a great time.

As the game progresses the level of abstraction increases and so there is a growing disconnect between your actions and the puzzles themselves. The end result is a puzzle solving process that is both more complicated and confusing, which means you really need to enjoy the process of experimenting in those machine states to continue to have fun.

If you enjoy programming and puzzle games I definitely recommend it otherwise I suspect there are better uses for your money.

Anyway, something new on Friday and I think I have an idea for a daily thing for a while too.

Lets Play: Hack 'n' Slash - Episode 7 - Dueling Codeslingers

Now the epic final confrontation with Christo. Like many games Hack 'n' Slash has an obligatory boss fight. It is however a puzzle boss, you cannot beat him through force, he has infinite health and does infinite damage. Taking him down requires a little bit of hacking using the tools at your disposal.

This game never really explores the implications of what it is doing however, if the entire world is code and sprites, what does that mean? Is there really a world outside of what we see in this game? Who set everything up and why are there only two factions, good or evil?

The set up here reminds me a lot of Off to be the Wizard by Scott Meyer especially in that you could use the ability to manipulate the simulation to set yourself up as a wizard much as Christo evidently has done but Off to be the Wizard does spend a little time on what this really means, though not too much as I suspect that the main characters don't really want to think about it too hard.

Lets Play: Hack 'n' Slash - Episode 6 - Exploring the Library

After a fairly frustrating time with the bomb trigger room we make it into the library. This is the final tool the game gives us, our taste of real ultimate power as it were. From here we can access every game file and tinker with every lua script.

With sufficient foreknowledge you can break the rest of the game and while you could have gained access to it from Room 1 of the castle, you actually have to use it to get past room 2.

I do appreciate that we have evidence that Christo also has used the library, clearly he has better tools access than we do since he can add arbitrary code and we can only change around existing stuff. But it isn't perfect, you would think that he would have some books checked out but he doesn't, not even his own...

I am sure this will in no way be relevant down the track.

Lets Play: Hack 'n' Slash Episode 5

We are in the final area, on our way to take down the Wizard and restore things to some semblance of normalcy. For the most part it is really just about beating Christo for me, there just aren't really any other named characters that you spend much time interacting with. While Doublefine didn't really succeed in making me care about the world they did succeed in making me enjoy taunting Christo and I definitely think things will be better without him in power.

However, I should also mention this episode could be frustrating at points, I get through a grand total of one and a half rooms during it and some of the slowdown is caused by me just not seeing key information.

It also doesn't help that a form of the LoadBool function is pretty much uneditable for me, which I suspect is a bug, possible a self inflicted one from much earlier in the series given I cannot find anyone else online with this problem. It is hard to know what is genuinely a bug and what is a flow on effect from things I did earlier in the game.

Lets Play: Hack 'n' Slash - Episode 4

With the Bombs Hack 'n' Slash really opens up, you can make permanent lasting changes to the world in a way you really couldn't before.

There are limitations, mostly through it being really confusing and leaning heavily on out of game understanding of code. There is a disconnect between actions and effects which makes it much harder to know what you are doing. This is compounded by the lack of meaningful variable names variable names so sometimes I really have no idea why the change I made had the effect it did.

This also marks the first time I have used Youtube's editing tools, they are better than the nothing I would otherwise have, but they are pretty slow, took a few hours for it to save the removal of 13 seconds from the front of this video.

Lets Play: Hack 'n' Slash - Episode 3

This episode is double length because I kind of lost track of time. We finish the dungeon escape and start getting to get even deeper into the programming based systems.

This is where I can definitely see the game start to come undone for some players because I am not sure that it really teaches you quite enough about what is going on in the algorithm rooms and it is really easy to kind of miss that Bob and Alice are capable of discussing and explaining what some of the machines do. In fact I think that I don't actually use those prompts until next episode, well after the advice would have been useful.

That said, this is also where you start being able to do some more interesting things, especially with the tools we get at the very end, so I guess I will go into that in a little more detail next time.

Lets Play: Hack 'n' Slash - Episode 2

Continuing where I left of last time, been captured and left in a cell with no doors, being the hero of the story of course we promptly escaped and got a magic hat and get a new area to explore and a bunch of new mechanics.

The most interesting one is probably the hardest to explore. The key puzzle to the dungeon is to change your name, and this is done through breaking the in-game cypher and gathering a couple of treasure. One will find memory locations for you, the other will let you change the value at that address. The problem is that other than your own name, it is pretty difficult to actually find a use for these items. I am sure that some people have really put them to interesting uses, but not really sure how they started playing with it in the first place.

Lets Play: Hack 'n' Slash - Episode 1

I have been experimenting a bit with recording my gaming sessions so that I can share them with friends and I think I have most of the major obstacles dealt with now, and I thought it would be interesting to try sharing them a bit further.

So here is the first episode of Let's Play: Hack 'n' Slash.

Hack 'n' Slash is a fantasy action adventure themed puzzle game that was pitched during Doublefine's Amnesia fortnight 2012. The key concept is that it is a game that looks and feels like the old Zelda titles, but the items and puzzles you are gain allow you to tinker with the back end engine of the game. The first item you get is a USB ended sword, which when used on appropriate objects and enemies lets you alter their variables, you can not longer reduce their health, but you can change their faction, attack pattern and damage.

I was pretty keen on it, despite not actually getting very far through the prototype and picked it up during its early access debut, where most of the game was available save for the final act. But now it is out of early access and is currently available on Steam at a promotional $13.37 price.

I have to admit I am pretty nervous about showing this, but I would really like feedback on what people like and what I could do better.