Title: Lost Wing Developer: Box Frog Games Publisher: 2Awesome Studio Genre: arcade, action adventure, endless shooter Number of Players: 1 Platform: Nintendo Switch Release Date: July 31, 2020 Price: $7.99 Lost Wing is a bit weird to describe. It looks and kind of plays like a racing game, since you control a spaceship that moves forward through a meandering path filled with enemies and obstacles, but you don't compete with others. It is actually an endless shooter, and you have to avoid these obstacles and enemies or shoot them to clear the way. Quite simplistic gameplay. It even has no story to boast, the title coming from an aspect of the gameplay wherein it is possible for your spaceship to lose a wing or two if you get clipped from the side. You'll have the chance to get them back, of course, which is a good thing.
So, how does it game play? As mentioned, this looks like a racing game but you're just on your own, speeding through a level. At the start of the game, only the tutorial and the first level is available to you, with only the easy difficulty unlocked. Each unlockable additional levels, spaceships, and challenges are unlocked by reaching certain levels. You level up by accumulating points during a playthrough of a level. You gain points simply by continuously moving forward and also by destroying obstacles. Destroyed obstacles leave behind points that can also pick up for additional score. You have three lives for each playthrough, and it is game over when you lose them all. Higher difficulties makes you earn additional XP, which helps a bit in leveling up.
During a playthrough, you get to steadily speed up as you progress into a level, and you can go faster by pressing the right trigger, which also makes you gain charge. Charge is like the currency of the game, as this serves as your bullet to shoot at obstacles/enemies, and also used for slowing down, which is done by pressing the left trigger. Aside from speeding up, you can also gain charge by collecting orbs that are scattered throughout a level. Collecting them can be tricky, due to the obstacles that block your way. Those colored blue can be destroyed, while those in red cannot. To avoid them, you can move to the left or to the right, and you can even press B to make your ship jump. Aside from the orbs, you can also pick up power-ups such as a small drone that can assist you in shooting down obstacles, smartbombs that can clear obstacles en masse, and recovery wings that can make you regain your lost wing or two, as previously mentioned. There are slightly negative pickups: one that makes your ship larger (makes it more susceptible to getting clipped from either side), one that makes your ship smaller (makes it weaker), and one that turns the level upside down and reverses the controls for a short while.
Speaking of going upside down, there will be a time during a playthrough when an "anomaly" happens: the camera gradually goes upside down and back to normal and will almost always result to you ship crashing because the controls also get reversed. This is very disorienting and very annoying and I wish it was not in the game, but alas it's there and there is really no way to avoid it. But I guess if you spend enough time playing the game more, you'll get used to it.
A level is divided into three sections, with a boss fight at the end. These boss fights are quite interesting, and I wish there are more of them in the game. Beating the boss doesn't end the level, though. You get to contiue playing the level to get more and more points until you lose all of your lives. There is an online leaderboard, but unfortunately, no online multiplayer modes.
Overall, Lost Wing is pretty decent, and could be worth your time to play in short bursts, unless you have the tendency to keep on pushing your limits to overcome challenges, in which case, this game is recommended to you. It plays well handheld, so you can play it anywhere and anytime. I played it mostly docked, and I had a good time with it. It looks and sounds good and the performance is mostly stable, though I did encounter at least two crashes, and those are two crashes too many. So if you are a fan of this genre, go and give it a try and try not to lose any of your wings.
Replay Value: High
PROS
Good visuals, with vibrant neon aesthetics throughout
Cool electronic soundtrack (you can switch music tracks on the fly by pressing the shoulder buttons)
Good amount of challenge
The boss fights are cool and challenging
Procedurally-generated levels
Stable performance
Good price point
Ideal for handheld gaming
CONS
Very repetitive gameplay
Very grind-heavy
Only three worlds to play in
No story
No online multiplayer mode
Unlocked spaceships could be better if they offer enough difference from one another and could be customized further
The moment when the level goes upside down is very annoying and shouldn't have been added to the game
On the last day of the cold January Will from Extra Credits sat down to stream SOMA, and for the first few hours of the game he was joined by his friend and Frictional employee Ian Thomas. Ian worked on scripting, coding, and level design for SOMA, and is now the Story Lead on one of Frictional's two upcoming projects. During the stream he answered some questions from the viewers, ranging from what type of pizza he thinks Simon had in his fridge, to ways of minimising dissonance between the player and the character in a narrative game.
In this blog we've compiled the best questions and answers into an easily readable form. So go get a beverage of your choice and dive into the everyday life at Frictional, narrative game design and tips on networking in the industry! Or, if you're not the reading type, you can also watch the whole video on Twitch.
Have some other questions? Hit us up on Twitter and we will try to answer the best we can!
(Picture commentary from your favourite community manager/editor of this blog, Kira.)
Q: Does the Frictional team scare each other at the office?
We didn't have an office until recently, and even now most people are still remote, so not really!
The thing about being behind the scenes in horror is that it's very difficult to scare yourself, and each other, because you know what's going on. We do play each others' levels every other week, and it's always brilliant to get a decent scare out of a coworker.
Otherwise we don't hide in the office cupboards or anything like that… regularly.
Q: Is it true that developers don't actually play their games?
No - we play our games thousands of times, and most developers do!
It does depend on where you sit in the development chain. If you work for a very big company and only do something like facial models, you might rarely play the game until it's close to completion. But in a team the size of Frictional everyone plays the game all the time. That's how we get our primary feedback and develop our levels before the game goes anywhere near alpha testers.
Q: How about after they're released?
Probably not that often. For me personally there are two reasons, which both have to do with time. Firstly, I'm probably already working on a new thing. Secondly, during the short downtime after a release I'm trying to catch up on games I had to put aside during development. But it depends: for example, when I worked on LEGO games I would later play them with friends, because they're so much fun to sit down and co-op play.
For a couple of years after the release you might be fed up with your game and not want to see it, but then you might come back to it fresh. With SOMA I sometimes tune into livestreams, especially if I'm feeling down. That's one of the kicks you get out of this stuff – knowing which parts of the game people are going to react to, and getting to watch those reactions! That's the best payoff.
Q: Did the existential dread of SOMA ever get to the team?
It's a little different for the dev team, as the horror is a slow burn of months and months, whereas for the players it comes in a short burst. The philosophical questions affected people in different ways, but I don't think we broke anyone. As far as I know we're all fine, but given that a lot of us work remotely, it could well be that one of us is deep in Northern Sweden inscribing magical circles in his front room and we just don't know...
Q: Why did SOMA get a Safe Mode?
SOMA was originally released with monsters that could kill you, and that put off some people that were attracted to the themes, the sci-fi and the philosophy, because they saw the game as too scary or too difficult. Thomas and Jens had discussed a possible safe mode early on, but weren't sure it would work. However, after the game came out, someone in the community released the Wuss Mod that removed the monsters, and that and the general interest in the themes of the game made us rethink. So now we've released the official Safe Mode, where the monsters still attack you, but only if you provoke them – and even then they won't kill you.
You can now avoid one of these three death screens!
The concept of death in games is a strange one. All it really means is that you go back to a checkpoint, or reload, and all the tension that's built up goes away. The fact is that game death is pretty dull. It becomes much more interesting when it's a part of a mechanic or of the story. We at Frictional have talked about it internally for a while, but it's something we've never really gotten a satisfactory answer to.
So, all in all, even if you turn on Safe Mode, it's not that much different from playing the game normally.
Q: What type of pizza does Simon have in his fridge?
Meat lovers', definitely.
Schrödinger's pizza! And a Mexicana. Unless they mixed it up at the factory. In which case it's also a Schrödinger's pizza.
Q: What was the funniest or hardest bug to fix in SOMA?
There were so many! You can find some of the stuff in the supersecret.rar file that comes with the installation.
I spent a lot of time fixing David Munshi. His animation really didn't behave and he kept leaping around the place. He was so problematic, especially in this sequence where he was supposed to sit down in a chair and type away at the keyboard. We had so much trouble with that - what if the player had moved the chair? We couldn't lock it in place, because we want the player to be able to mess with these things. We went around trying to come up with an answer for ages.
And then someone on the team went: "Standing desk!". Problem solved! It's silly little things like this which tie up your time.
For all you thirsty Munshi lovers out there. You know who you are.
Another similar element was the Omnitool. It was a fairly major design thing that we came up with to connect the game characters, and to gate scenarios. We were struggling trying to tie these things together, and then it was just one of those days when someone came up with one single idea that solved so many problems. It was a massive design triumph – even if we realised later that the name was a bit Mass Effect!
Q: Why does using items and elements in Frictional's games mimic real movements?
This is one of Thomas's core design principles: making actions like opening doors and turning cranks feel like physical actions. It binds you more closely into the game and the character, on an unconscious level. We've spent an awful lot of time thinking about ways to collapse the player and the character into one and make the player feel like a part of the world. It's a subtle way of feedback that you don't really think about, but it makes you feel like you're "there".
There's an interesting difference between horror games and horror films in this sense. You would think that horror movies are scarier because you're dragged into the action that moves on rails and there's nothing you can do about it. But for me that kind of horror is actually less scary than the kind in games, where you have to be the person to push the stick forward.
We try to implement this feedback loop in other elements of the game too, like the sound design. When a character is scared it makes their heartbeat go up, which makes the player scared, which makes their heartbeat go up in turn, and so on.
Q: Why didn't SOMA reuse enemies?
It obviously would have been much cheaper to reuse the monsters. But in SOMA it was a clear design point, since each of the enemies in SOMA was trying to advance the plot, get across a particular point in the story, or raise a philosophical question. Thus, the enemies were appropriate to a particular space or a piece of plot and it didn't make sense to reuse them.
Q: Did SOMA start with a finished story, or did it change during development?
The story changed massively over the years. I came on to the game a couple of years into development, and at that time there were lots of fixed points and a general path, but still a lot changed around that. As the game developed, things got cut, they got reorganized, locations changed purpose, and some things just didn't work out.
Building a narrative game is an ever-changing process. With something like a platformer you can build one level, test the mechanics, then build a hundred more similar levels iterating on and expanding those core mechanics. Whereas in a game like this you might build one level in isolation, but that means you don't know what the character is feeling based on what they've previously experienced.
You don't really know if the story is going to work until you put several chapters together. That's why it's also very difficult to test until most of it is in place. Then it might suddenly not work, so you have to change, drop and add things. There's quite a lot of reworking in narrative games, just to make sure you get the feel right and that the story makes sense. You've probably heard the term "kill your darlings" – and that's exactly what we had to do.
A lot of the things were taken out before they were anywhere near complete – they were works in progress that were never polished. Thus these elements are not really "cut content", just rough concepts.
Q: The term "cut content" comes from film, and building a game is closer to architecture or sculpting. Would there be a better name for it?
A pile of leftover bricks in the corner!
Q: How do you construct narrative horror?
Thomas is constantly writing about how the player isn't playing the actual game, but a mental model they have constructed in their head. A lot of our work goes into trying to create that model in their head and not to break it.
A central idea in our storytelling is that there's more going on than the player is seeing. As a writer you need to leave gaps and leave out pieces, and let the player make their own mind up about what connects it all together.
You'll meet a tall, dark stranger...
From a horror point of view there's danger in over-specifying. Firstly having too many details makes the story too difficult to maintain. And secondly it makes the game lose a lot of its mystery. The more you show things like your monsters, the less scary they become. A classic example of this is the difference between Alien and Aliens. In Alien you just see flashes of the creatures and it freaks you out. In Aliens you see more of them, and it becomes less about fear and more about shooting. It's best to sketch things out and leave it up to the player's imagination to fill in the blanks – because the player's imagination is the best graphics card we have!
There are a lot of references that the superfans have been able to put together. But there are one or two questions that even we as a team don't necessarily know the answers to.
Q: How do you keep track of all the story elements?
During the production of SOMA there was an awful lot of timeline stuff going on. Here we have to thank our Mikael Hedberg, Mike, who was the main writer. He was the one to make sure that all of the pieces of content were held together and consistent across the game. A lot of the things got rewritten because major historical timelines changed too, but Mike kept it together.
During the development we had this weird narrative element we call the double apocalypse. At one point in writing most of the Earth was dead already because of a nuclear war, and then an asteroid hit and destroyed what was left. We went back and forth on that and it became clear that a double apocalypse would be way over the top and coincidental. So we edited the script to what it is now, but this has resulted in the internal term 'that sounds like a double apocalypse', which is when our scripts have become just a bit too unbelievable or coincidental.
Q: How do you convey backstories, lore, and world-building?
Obviously there are clichés like audio logs and walls of text, but there is a trend to do something different with them, or explaining the universe in a different way. But the fundamental problem is relaying a bunch of information to the player, and the further the world is from your everyday 21st century setting, the more you have to explain and the harder it is. So it's understandable that a lot of games do it in the obvious way. The best way I've seen exposition done is by working it into the environment and art, making it part of the world so that the player can discover it rather than shoving it into the player's face.
Q: How do you hook someone who disagrees with the character?
It's hard to get the character to say and feel the same things as what the player is feeling. If you do it wrong it breaks the connection between the player and the character, and makes it far less intense. Ideally, if the player is thinking something, you want the character to be able to echo it. We spend a lot of time taking lines out so the character doesn't say something out of place or contrary to what the player feels.
With philosophical questions there are fixed messages you can make and things you can say about the world, but that will put off a part of the audience. The big thing when setting moral questions or decisions is that you should ask the question instead of giving the answer. If you offer the players a grey area to explore, they might even change their minds about the issue at hand.
To murder or not to murder, that is the question.
Q: How do you write for people who are not scared of a particular monster or setting?
In my experience the trick is to pack as many different types of fear in the game as you can, and picking the phobias that will affect the most people. If there's only one type of horror, it's not going to catch a wide enough audience. Also, if you only put in, say, snakes, anyone who isn't afraid of snakes is going to find it dull.
We probably peaked in our first game. What's worse than spiders? (Not representative of the company's opinion.)
Q: What's the main thing you want to get across in games?
The key thing is that the players have something they will remember when they walk away from the game, or when they talk about it with other people. It's different for different games, and as a developer you decide on the effect and how you want to deliver it. In games like Left 4 Dead delivery might be more about the mechanical design. In other games it's a particular story moment or question.
In SOMA the goal was not to just scare the players as they're looking at the screen, it was about the horror that they would think about after they put the mouse or controller down and were laid in bed thinking about what they'd seen. It was about hitting deeper themes. Sure, we wrapped it in horror, but the real horror was, in a way, outside the game.
Q: What does SOMA stand for?
It has many interpretations, but I think the one Thomas and Mike were going for was the Greek word for body. The game is all about the physicality of the body and its interaction with what could be called the spirit, mind, or soul – the embodiment of you.
The funniest coincidence was when we went to GDC to show the game off to journalists before the official announcement. We hadn't realised there is a district in San Francisco called Soma, so we were sitting in a bar called Soma, in the Soma district, about to announce Soma!
As to why it's spelled in all caps – it happened to look better when David designed the logo!
Q: Does this broken glass look like a monster face on purpose?
I'm pretty sure it's not on purpose – it's just because humans are programmed to see faces all over the place, like socket plugs. It's called pareidolia. But it's something you can exploit - you can trick people into thinking they've seen a monster!
This window is out to get you!
Q: What is the best way to network with the industry people?
Go to industry events, and the bar hangouts afterwards!
It's critical, though, not to treat it as "networking". Let's just call it talking to people, in a room full of people who like the same stuff as you. It's not about throwing your business cards at each other, it's about talking to them and finding common interests. Then maybe a year or two down the line, if you got on, they might remember you and your special skills or interests and contact you. Me being on Will's stream started with us just chatting. And conversations I had in bars five years ago have turned into projects this year.
You have to be good at what you do, but like in most industries, it's really about the people you know. I'm a bit of an introvert myself, so I know it's scary. But once you realise that everybody in the room is probably as scared as you, and that you're all geeks who like the same stuff, it gets easier. Another good way to make connections is attending game jams. If you haven't taken part in one, go find the nearest one! Go out, help your team, and if you're any good at what you do, people will be working with you soon.
Q: Can you give us some fun facts?
Sure!
- You can blame the "Massive Recoil" DVD in Simon's room on our artist, David. A lot of the things in Simon's apartment are actually real things David has.
- We try to be authentic with our games, but out Finnish sound guy Tapio Liukkonen takes it really far. We have sequences of him diving into a frozen lake with a computer keyboard to get authentic underwater keyboard noises. It's ridiculous.
- Explaining SOMA to the voice actors was challenging – especially to this 65-year-old British thespian, clearly a theatre guy. Watching Mike explain the story to him made me think that the whole situation was silly and the guy wasn't getting the story at all. And then he went into the studio and completely nailed the role.
- There's a lot of game development in Scandinavia, particularly in Sweden and Norway, because it's dark and cold all the time so people just stay indoors and make games. Just kidding… or am I?
In my previous article, I gave you guys the rundown for how I go about building army lists. I always start with the Commander first and then try to take units that best take advantage of their tactics cards. Well, I decided to get the party started with my favorite character from GoT: Tywin Lannister. Lannisters, in general, have a ton of control elements and I think Tywin just adds to the flavor in a big way. He is a battlefield commander so that means you put him with your frontline troops in any one of the units that he can be taken in. Since he's considered an infantry character, you have to put him in one of your infantry units. I decided to put Tywin inside a unit of Mountain Men because they have a pretty respectable save of 4+. Besides, having two chances to apply Panic-based damage is great. More on this later.
For now, let's take a look at Tywin himself and his Tactics cards to see what he offers us:
Just look at this badass.
From the get-go, you can see that Tywin is all about making your opponents' units Weakened and then exploiting those tokens and effects to your advantage. Immediately, you can see that Tywin's Commander card has built-in Lannister Supremacy and Fear of the Lion. Fear of the Lion combos really nicely with Tywin's tactics cards because it allows him to place a free Weaken token on any enemy unit within Long Range of his unit when he activates. I put him with Mountain Men because MMs already have built-in Vicious so on the offense, they can make opponents take Panic Tests with a -2 modifier. When they attack back, Tywin's Lannister Supremacy makes it so if I roll a 7+ on my Panic test, my opponent has to take another test at -2 again. This is some pretty silly free damage if my opponent rolls poorly and can also be a form of damage negation because the more models they lose to Panic checks, the less damage they will do because of the ranks lost. Throw Weaken on top of this from Tywin and it becomes a force multiplier.
The Lion doesn't mess around.
The Tactics cards themselves are very nasty. Exploit Weakness is a perfect example of a card that kicks your opponent when they're down. If you spend the Weaken token, you can force your opponent re-roll all of their successful hits and any 1s to pop up will deal automatic wounds to their unit on top of whiffing on their attacks. This is extremely effective at taking down heavy cavalry because it essentially turns that units attack into wounds that bypass saves. The Lion's Wrath is a great card because it affects ALL enemy units on the board that has Weaken on them and it lasts until the end of the round. You will hear me say this a lot, but anything that lasts an entire round is super good. Players take alternating turns activating their units, but rounds last after all player turns are finished. This means that for the duration of the round, anything Weakened on the battlefield will be moving -1 movement AND suffering Disorderly Charge on a roll of 1-2. First, this card auto-applies a Weaken effect anywhere on the board, but Disorderly Charge is super frustrating when it happens. Another example of Lannisters kicking you while you're down, but Disorderly Charge robs you from your ability to re-roll hits on a Charge AND essentially silences you for the rest of that unit's turn. Players cannot play Tactics cards for the remainder of that unit's action, and if you miss the actual charge itself, that unit has to take a Panic test. Lastly, we have Lannister Intimidation. This is pretty much a hard silence on the enemy unit and all of its attachments until the end of the round. Again, end of the round here folks, Tywin doesn't F around. Almost everything he does is centered around making your opponents' units weaker while giving slightly leveraging your battlefield position.
Pycelle is an auto-include with Tywin.
As for unit selection, there are quite a few things you can do and I think Tywin is one of the more flexible commanders for how you want to build the list. To make things a little easier, let me first start off by saying that you should probably take Pycelle as your first NCU. Pycelle is incredible with Tywin because he puts Weaken tokens on your opponents when he claims a zone. This is exactly what Tywin needs when playing his Tactics cards and Pycelle on the Tactics zone after The Lion's Wrath will see 3 enemy units Weakend on a single turn. Now, Varys is pretty much one of the best NCUs in the game IMO. His ability is incredibly good even if you only have a limited amount of Order tokens. The ability to stop a crucial game-altering tactics board play or NCU ability from triggering when claiming a zone can be huge. Since Lannisters is a control-heavy faction in general, you will see me playing Varys a lot in my lists.
Alright, enough talk, here's the list:
Faction: House Lannister Commander: Tywin Lannister – Lord of Casterly Rock Points: 40 (4 Neutral)
Combat Units: • Lannister Guardsmen (5) with Assault Veteran (1) • House Clegane Mountain Men (6) with Tywin Lannister – Lord of Casterly Rock (0) • House Clegane Mountain Men (6) with Assault Veteran (1) • Lannister Crossbowmen (6) • Knights of Casterly Rock (8)
Non-Combat Units: • Pycelle – Grand Maester (3) • Lord Varys – The Spider (4)
As you can see, I have quite a bit of diversity in there with 7 total activations (5 combat and 2 NCUs). Combat activations matter for deployment, but total activations matter for how much control you have over the board state. That will be its own article at another time, but this isn't the first time I've played a minis game where activation and unit activation order matters a lot. Anyways, let's take a look at the rest of the list I have here: You will see Guardsman with Assault Vet, Tywin in MM and another unit of MM because they're a rock-solid unit. Assault Veterans because I love the aggression and they are great with Tywin because Weaken basically ensures that there will be a second round of combat and your guys will attrition quite well. For the Guardsman, you can also choose to bring along a Guard Captain to auto-pass Panic and therefore guarantees Lannister Supremacy every time.
When it comes to rounding out the rest of the army, Crossbowmen are there so they can pick off enemy units from range. From here, you can generally branch into any direction you want to bring for the meta. You can take another unit of Lannister Guards, another unit of MM, but for diversity and the ability to harass objectives, I decided to go with Xbows. If you think about it, if you're running a pretty aggressive infantry army, having 7 shots of Sundering from Long Range that hits on 3s is no joke. On top of that, I've decided to go wih a unit of Knights of Casterly Rock because they're a pretty decent unit to have for the points. Some people don't like them because you need to play them well and they're not push and win like the Flayed Men, but if you get them on the flank of a combat you need to win, you will like them a lot. They're designed to win on the charge so if you're not destroying units on the charge, think about saving them until you do or else you'll have to waste turns (or Manuever on the Tactics Board) to set them up again.
Stay tuned for my next article where I cover one of my favorite Stark lists to play right now!
Some shots for this past weekend. We ended up with 18 guys from across the northeast. Karl surprised everyone (including himself) by going 3-0 with AMTL and winning the Epic trophy (first place), Frank claimed the Dice of Dave (last place) yet again. I won Best Crit for crashing my Cobra into a tree while trying to avoid Jon's pin-point attacks. And I believe Jimmy took home "Best Painted" for his not completely painted Imperial Fists. Enjoy!
