Saturday Casual Gaming 236: Scrap Quest

Scrap Quest - an idle management RPG by localhero

Sorry about the sleepy nature of yesterday's blog, but I was wiped. I'm still pretty sleepy today, so an idle RPG where I just send adventurer's to their doom is an excellent place to start.

Scrap Quest is one of those games where you're basically playing the Questgiver NPC in any RPG - you select a hero to go on an adventure, you outfit them, you upgrade their town, and then you send them on their merry way to die horribly in the swamp. As far as menu-based RPGs go, this one is exceptionally pretty, with some sweet 8-bit style graphics and a streamlined look.

It's a pretty in-depth game, too. This is just the screen for equipment...

You end up with a lot of upgrades to buy, and while I'm told in-game that there's a prestige system... I don't know how it works or how to activate it. All I know is that I like having purple backgrounds on my items, sometimes characters come with items, and the more scrap I get in the smithing screen, the more upgrades I can buy. That's all on me, though, I wasn't paying enough attention to the text as it popped up on screen.

Behold the tavern, a lovely place to hire adventurers. This Castout Chemist Pyro came with a free sword!
Bargain!

Your goal, in the end, is to buy all of the upgrades and unlock and clear all of the areas in  the Battle area. You recruit your adventurers from the Tavern (which is located under the Town button, or, conveniently, you can just click on the Talents button and it will take you to your choice of three different adventurers), pick their Talents, Equip them with weapons and items you've already found (if any), and then send them to die in Battle. There are no survivors.

Items are sent back from the field to be examined by you. If you like the item, you can equip it to the next fool you send to die. If it's a garbage item made of garbage (indicated by red markings on the item portrait), you can scrap it in the Town. Scrapping items earns you Scrap (among other things), which can then be used on upgrades.

But you need to be sure you want to destroy something. There are no take-backsies once it's in the chute.

More upgrades mean less difficulty challenging the different zones in the Battle tab. Here, your adventurers wander about, whacking baddies and, eventually, dropping dead, all while sending you their spoils. How nice of them! Now, obviously you're going to lose a lot of guys here. Don't feel guilty about that. I'm pretty sure they all know what they're signing up for.

And it's a fun little warzone, too.
Very simple. Very streamlined.
Wow.

So that's Scrap Quest in a nutshell - you kill tons of adventurers for fun and profit. Everyone wins.

Definitely give this little Kongregate game a go - and encourage Localhero to make more games, because this one's pretty darn fun!

Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 228: Incremental Popping 2

I'll be honest, I've never played the first Incremental Popping game from Diamonax on Kongregate, but since I have played other chain reaction games, I basically got to just breeze through the opening.

If you couldn't tell, this is a very, very simple game.
Simple, here, is not a bad thing!

This is a chain reaction based single-button game. That means that you only need one button - your right mouse button, to play this game, and every move makes other things happen.

Colorful, pretty things.

In this case, you lay a starting circle/charge by clicking on a point on the screen. There are colorful balls bouncing around the screen like in a Breakout-style game, and if they bump against the circle, they'll expand into another circle, possibly giving you higher scores. Higher scores give you more money, and if you "pop" all of the balls, the screen refreshes and gives you more balls to pop, leveling you up, somewhat.

The money is useful. I think...

Now, generally, when you are playing one of these incremental games, the gains you make are slight, but noticeable. I... don't really notice much improvement when I'm playing this game. I've leveled up, I've popped lots of balls, and I've paid for a lot of upgrades, but... I'm still not 100% sure what use the Boost function is? I think it speeds up the balls on the screen if you click and hold anywhere after laying your initial charge. Still, it's kinda fun, and I can't bring myself to badmouth a game this neat.

And, of course, there are Achievements!

I haven't played this game too long, so I'm not surprised that I only have one of the Achievements so far, but... no balls at all? That's gonna be hard.

There's also a Statistics screen!

I love knowing what I've done and how much I've done, so I love screens like this. I also like games that forgive you if you botch things early on and allow you to wipe your game data. It allows me to try a game and, if I enjoy playing it, start over fresh so that I can take notes on it while I play start-to-finish for the blog!

Now, you can see that the graphics are ultra-simple. 2D balls bouncing around a 2D plane with a very, very faint grid in the background, plus some text here and there. Mechanically, too, this game is extremely simple - click, wait, maybe click-and-hold for a little extra speed.

The music is where this game shines.

It has a lovely, jazzy score that I enjoyed listening to the entire time I played. I usually mute games because I have a low threshold for music and sound effects, but since this game is 100% lacking in sound effects, the music was able to really shine. I dig it!

You can find this game here on Kongregate, and I strongly recommend giving it a play.

Go Enjoy Something!
FC