Roguelites: Blanksword (demo)
Disclaimer: I've backed the game on Kickstarter.
Blanksword was a game I had actually forgotten to mention in my post on Ark's Wonder Dungeon, but it's also an upcoming game in the slowly growing roguelite RPG genre and I thought it would be fair to take a dive into the demo and what sets it apart from other games as well as my current feelings on the game. I played it when it first came out last year and decided to replay it recently to solidify some of my feelings on the game.
As usual I try to avoid any sort of story spoilers or anything like that, focusing more strictly on gameplay mechanics. RPG roguelites nowadays tend to integrate mechanics and story fairly tightly though, so you can expect some incidental stuff here and there. If you want to play the demo for yourself, it's still up on Steam. And of course since it's a demo I don't expect these mechanics to be set in stone; things can change quite a bit from demo to release.
Exploring His Country
The game is divided into two separate gameplay halves, the level/world navigation portion and then the in-battle elements. JRPGs will often place variable importance on the actual navigational portion, some using it merely as a vessel for going from Point A to Point B and others being more involved, with Blanksword being in the more involved circle.
You have active 8-way movement, a dash button and then the ability to swing your sword. Other options open up later, but this is your primary way of interacting with the world. Enemies all appear on the overworld and can be ambushed by attacking them early, giving you an additional Action Berry in combat (more on those later).
Outside of foes, there are a good variety of different rooms and minigames within said rooms. Some will ask you to try and actively avoid alerting enemies, some will have shops or things chasing you or environmental hazards and so forth. It's nothing that's going to be super surprising (in the demo, at least) but it adds a good amount of variety between runs. Plenty of NPCs to pick their (or your) brains on too.
Each location starts and ends with a train station, letting you choose which location to head off to next.
(an example of environment choices, the demo is fairly linear but this is something that i fully expect to grow with the full release)
I don't have any issues with these mechanics; they're welcome diversions from the combat and make the game feel alive. There's a number of RPGs I can think of (looking at you, Bravely Default) where dungeons and navigation is so flavorless that you lose all sense of place. Dungeons become meaningless blobs of Corridors and Corridors Diet flavor. That's a rant for another day though, good job Blanksword at keeping things interesting.
Moves of the Trade
Along the way, you'll see your usual roguelite choose-3 style upgrades. I'm not the biggest fan of how standardized this has become, but it's not really a critique of this game specifically. Anyways, this comes in the form of move scrolls:
(a sample move scroll and a separate sample of moves from a scroll. the second is the starter scroll which includes two basic moves, but you get the idea)
Move scrolls are your primary way of upgrading Blank mid-run. They provide a variety of skills and passives, each with their own effects. Sometimes they can be found just lying around, other times in chests or bought using Possessions (the form of currency in the game). You can only hold a limited number of moves and passives, so you'll need to figure out the right setup for what you're attempting to do whether it's dot, shields or just raw beat down.
Thankfully the game has hover-over tooltips for the move icons since the game does like to blast you with a lot of iconography at a time:
(an example of hover-over on a buff)
Blank can also earn experience with an upgrade, which gives you the option to boost one of his four core stats, crit chance or hp/sp. I often improved crit chance during my runs, since stacking crit chance makes skills a lot more efficient and lets you push through fights where enemies frequently heal or shield up. I think choosing hp/sp seems like a bit of a gotcha option but in the full release there might be more synergy to make it worthwhile.
Other than that, you've got equipment which'll occasionally pop up (and you can only hold two) and consumable items. This encompasses the majority of Things you can find mid-run.
Remembering past runs
Metaprogression is here of course and in two separate forms: Things you can shove into your brain and then a metaprogression tree.
(an empty brain slowly being refilled)
The brainbits are the story-related progression items you'll find for the aptly-named Blank. Shoving them in his head will not only allow him to start remembering things again, but also grant access to new movesets, mechanics and more. There's a bunch here I did not see or unlock, but there's opportunity for a variety of ways to spice up your runs.
And the tree isn't quite as interesting, but it's a demo and etc etc. I'm not going to critique this too deeply because metaprog is always the hardest to judge in a demo. You've got your basics like hp/sp and a few more interesting upgrades along the way.
(an example of metaprogression)
Blank vs 30-50 Feral Hogs
Combat in Blanksword is perhaps unfortunately the weakest part of the game. There's a couple systemic reasons why I personally think so and I hope the devs will be careful about how they balance out the game for the full release.
When you start up a fight (by either an enemy running into you or you slashing them), you move to the battle scene and start with 2 Action Berries; 3 with the initiative and stacking to 5. Action Berries serve as the primary action resource of the game, moves in combat will take a combination of Action Berries and SP to perform. Some moves might take no berries and only SP, some might only take berries, you get the idea. You can also pass the turn (if you want to save up berries) or use consumables, and each turn you regenerate two berries. Once you successfully pummel your foes, enemies will drop some Possessions to weigh down your soul until you get to a shop. Did I mention that too many of them will harm you? It's simple but effective way to get you to stop hoarding currency.
(an example combat scene).
The issue of combat in Blanksword is, well, Blank himself. Or rather the lack of anyone other than Blank. The ability to take multiple actions per-turn certainly helps, but Blank being alone exposes a lot of the flaws of these kinds of turn-based RPGs. Enemies will freely stack buffs, self-heal to full, slam you with debuffs until the left side of your screen is filled with a variety of complex maluses and quickly turn combat into a stat check where stats are hidden behind multiple layers of things.
This isn't exclusive to Blanksword mind you, it was an issue I brought up in Ark's Wonder Dungeon as well. However, the nature of single-member combat makes these things remarkably more effective and harder to deal with. Games like Splintered (a Dragon Quest-style roguelite) and NO-SKIN run into similar issues where the actual decision matrix of actions you can perform per-turn is quite low, but for different base reasons.
During my first run of Blanksword a while ago, I ran into an enemy lock situation. I was fighting a foe where I could not deal enough damage to kill it because it could heal to full, and it could not deal enough damage to kill me. The end result was that I would either need to pass actions and let it kill me or simply close the game.
Even moreso than other RPGs: this makes damage His stat. The more damage you can do, the less of a problem enemies become because killing one foe in a group of 3 drops their effectiveness drastically. Damage over time effects and scaling become riskier choices and trying to be self-sufficient can result in grindier fights simply chipping you out. Especially when and if enemies start tossing debilitating status effects on you that result in skipping turns or reducing your action economy.
I don't really have a good solution for this. A simple patchwork fix might be to increase the total number of moves Blank can hold at one time so that you have more decisions to make and less chance to result in the above situations. Another could be to make pseudo-party members out of Blank himself; think adding hp/debuffs/buffs to berries themselves which enemies can attack. That's just me spit-balling here and making the game's combat crunchier can and will certainly turn away folks.
The above combined has me concerned that the gameplay will collapse when it comes to harder encounters in the game. I've seen a few RPGs where things unravel in the late game because the gradual increase in difficulty and complexity of encounters becomes too much for the base mechanics to really handle, and nothing is more painful to me than having a final boss that ends up being either unsatisfying or frustrating.
Future Memories
I might seem overly harsh on the combat mechanics, but it's what I'm focusing on in this series. Either a game has strong story/writing and I can push past the combat, or the game has great combat and I can tune out the story. Games rarely have both and Blanksword so far is leaning in the story/writing department which I can never be too upset about; I just really hope they land the combat portion of it. I believe a game is at it's best when it achieves that special synthesis. When the combat is firing on all cylinders reinforcing the story as it races towards the final act. Blanksword certainly has the juice everywhere else, I just hope they don't trip along the way.
If you're at all interested, as said above there's a perfectly good demo on Steam and every wishlist helps them out. The only way we'll get more games in this genre is by supporting the ones that catch our eyes. Who knows, maybe you won't be as pertinacious as I am.