What we’ve been playing – fitness games, old classics, and Dungeons & Dragons

16th August 2024

Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we’ve been playing over the past few days. This week, we get sweaty in a new fitness game called Quell; we mull the ways in which Dungeons & Dragons combat is exciting but also frustrating; and Ian goes digging through the crates and revisits a classic.

What have you been playing?

Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We’ve Been Playing archive.

Quell, PC

Yesterday – Thursday – I went to a third floor London office and sweated all over their rug. Like, properly sweated. I was dripping; they had to get me a towel. It was gross. Or maybe I don’t know.

It was their fault. I’d been testing their new fitness hardware and platform called Quell – think Ring Fit but more intense. There’s a belt that you strap around your middle and then two VR-like hand controllers that you hold – clarification: it’s not VR – and then resistance bands tether the controllers to you. Resistance bands can be interchanged should you want to make your workout harder, you sadist.

Then like Ring Fit, a level loads on the screen in front of you and you move your avatar through it, running most of the way and pausing to beat up enemies. It’s high impact stuff and it’s all – at the moment – based around boxing, although there’s some magic you can cast too. And there are plans for more games and more experiences as the platform matures – it’s only been live for a few months.

I only spent around half an hour with it but I’m pleased to say it kicked my ass. I got the workout I wanted, for sure. I also liked the Roguelike structure of the game and the RPG trappings in between. It felt more involved than Ring Fit.

I have reservations about it, which I’ll tell you about in a fuller piece that I’m writing right now, but there are a lot of positives too.

-Bertie

The Legacy of Kain Collection, Evercade

Did you ever play the Legacy of Kain games back in the day? Because I didn’t. But I can now, because I received a review copy of the upcoming Legacy of Kain Collection for the Evercade!

For those of you who don’t know, the Evercade is a collection of consoles that specialize in playing retro games from across the early era of gaming. All the games are released on compellingly collectible physical carts, which come in numbered boxes with dinky color manuals so they really capture the feeling of buying games in pre-Millennium times. It’s perfect for people like me who enjoy sniffing manuals and displaying a collection with obsessive neatness (and in numbered order) on a shelf.

Recently, Blaze, the company behind the Evercade, has started releasing new ‘Giga Carts’, which squeeze much bigger games onto carts and this is where the Legacy of Kain Collection comes in. This cart contains both Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain and its sequel Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver.

Despite being released only three years apart, Blood Omen (1996) and Soul Reaver (1999) play very differently, as I discovered while streaming the game. Blood Omen is a top-down 2D game, a bit like an emo Link to the Past, while Soul Reaver has that instantly recognizable PS1 3D look that the Tomb Raider series and, um, Duke Nukem Land of the Babes adopted (both of which are also available on the Evercade, I might add).

So far I’ve been digging Soul Reaver much more than Blood Omen, mainly because it feels more modern. Blood Omen also has a super gothic, Castlevania vibe to it. The way you move between spectral planes in order to solve puzzles in Soul Reaver, combined with the cool ‘hack and slash and throw your vampiric enemies into hazards such as water and sunlight’ has captivated me way more.

The Evercade Legacy of Kain Collection doesn’t go on sale for another month or so, but it’s absolutely worth keeping an eye out for. If you were a fan of the games back when they first came out, then being able to own them both for around £23 – rather than shelling out around £100 for them on PS1 – seems like a bargain. Then of course there’s people like me who’ve heard a lot about the Legacy of Kain games but never played them. I know exactly what I’ll be doing on my flight to Gamescom next week. Imagine it: playing a PS1 game on a plane on a handheld device. The future is now – the future is retro!

-Ian

Dungeons & Dragons

I can never decide whether I like D&D’s combat or not, and it’s to do with the shape of it, or rather the shapelessness of it. It comes from there being so much choice in the game that the moment combat begins, it’s like a firework box going off and who knows what will happen next. The chances of one fight playing the same way twice – even with the same people doing the same things – are microscopically small, and that’s without factoring the random dice-rolling element in. This is part of the game’s allure, but I often find myself yearning for something more predictable.

I come from an MMORPG background so I think this is understandable. I grew up with defined ‘holy trinities’ in groups, which is to say a core of a healer, tank, and damage dealer. You know how it goes: the tank runs in and gets the monsters’ attention, the healers keep them alive, and then the damage-dealers pile on in and kill the thing. It sounds boring but the excitement for me always came from maintaining order in a chaotic situation, from keeping my head and following a sort of procedure to stay alive.

D&D does have the loose concept of ‘holy trinity’ – I expect it’s probably where it originated from, in fact. You can absolutely be a heavily armored fighter with a shield and run into a battle, while squishier spellcasters deal out damage behind you. But it never really plays out that way – at least in my experience it doesn’t. It means that one minute you can be breezing through D&D, feeling invincible, and then the next minute be facing a total party wipe. This happened to me very recently without warning: there was no crescendo but suddenly we were facing the very real possibility of Game Over. It felt wrong, it felt broken.

Then again, we survived that moment because the DM – a real person don’t forget – pivoted and had me make a soul-pact with a demon in order to save our party, which led to a unique piece of storytelling and made the game richer in terms of entertainment and drama. In fact, that whole scenario was one of the most exciting situations we’ve been in, in no small part because of the unpredictability of the game. Perhaps, then, it’s a good thing – you see my division.

Does anyone else feel the same way?

-Bertie