Members of the Legendary Computer Bugs Tribunal, honored guests, if I may have your attention? I would, humbly, submit a new contender for your esteemed judgment. You may or may not find it novel, you may even deign to call it a “bug,” but I assure you, you will find it entertaining.
Consider NetHack. It is one of the all-time roguelike games, and I mean that in the more strict sense of that term. The content is procedurally generated, deaths are permanent, and the only thing you keep from game to game is your skill and knowledge. I do understand that the only thing two roguelike fans can agree on is how wrong the third roguelike fan is in their definition of roguelike, but, please, let us move on.
NetHack is great for machine learning…
Being a difficult game full of consequential choices and random challenges, as well as a “single-agent” game that can be generated and played at lightning speed on modern computers, NetHack is great for those working in machine learning—or imitation learning, actually, as detailed in Jens Tuyls’ paper on how compute scaling affects single-agent game learning. Using Tuyls’ model of expert NetHack behavior, Bartłomiej Cupiał and Maciej Wołczyk trained a neural network to play and improve itself using reinforcement learning.
By mid-May of this year, the two had their model consistently scoring 5,000 points by their own metrics. Then, on one run, the model suddenly got worse, on the order of 40 percent. It scored 3,000 points. Machine learning generally, gradually, goes in one direction with these types of problems. It didn’t make sense.
Cupiał and Wołczyk tried quite a few things: reverting their code, restoring their entire software stack from a Singularity backup, and rolling back their CUDA libraries. The result? 3,000 points. They rebuild everything from scratch, and it’s still 3,000 points.
detailed in Cupiał’s X (formerly Twitter) thread, this was several hours of confused trial and error by him and Wołczyk. “I am starting to feel like a madman. I can’t even watch a TV show constantly thinking about the bug,” Cupiał wrote. In desperation, he asks model author Tuyls if he knows what could be wrong. He wakes up in Kraków to an answer:
“Oh yes, it’s probably a full moon today.”
In NetHack, the game in which the DevTeam has thought of everything, if the game detects from your system clock that it should be a full moon, it will generate a message: “You are lucky! Full moon tonight.” A full moon imparts a few player benefits: a single point added to Luck, and werecreatures mostly kept to their animal forms.
It’s an easier game, all things considered, so why would the learning agent’s score be lower? It simply doesn’t have data about full moon variables in its training data, so a branching series of decisions likely leads to lesser outcomes, or just confusion. It was indeed a full moon in Kraków when the 3,000-ish scores started showing up. What a terrible night to have a learning model.
Of course, “score” is not a real metric for success in NetHack, as Cupiał himself noted. Ask a model to get the best score, and it will farm the heck out of low-level monsters because it never gets bored. “Finding items required for [ascension] or even [just] doing a quest is too much for pure RL agent,” Cupiał wrote. Another neural network, AutoAscend, does a better job of progressing through the game, but “even it can only solve sokoban and reach mines end,” Cupiał notes.
Is it a bug?
I submit to you that, although NetHack responded to the full moon in its intended way, this quirky, very hard-to-fathom stop on a machine-learning journey was indeed a bug and a worthy one in the pantheon. It’s not a Harvard moth, nor a 500-mile email, but what is?
Because the team used Singularity to back up and restore their stack, they inadvertently carried forward the machine time and resulting bug each time they tried to solve it. The machine’s resulting behavior was so bizarre, and seemingly based on unseen forces, that it drove a coder into fits. And the story has a beginning, a climactic middle, and a denouement that teaches us something, however obscure.
The NetHack Lunar Learning Bug is, I submit, quite worth memorializing. Thank you for your time.
In a deckbuilding game, you start out with a basic set of cards, then upgrade it over time, seeking synergies and compounding effects. Roguelikes are games where death happens quite often, but each randomized “run” unlocks options for the future. In both genres, and when they’re fused together, the key is staying lean, trimming your deck and refining your strategy so that every card and upgrade works toward unstoppable momentum.
“Lean” does not describe the current scene for roguelike deckbuilder games, but they certainly have momentum. As of this writing, Steam has 2,599 titles tagged by users with “deckbuilding” and 861 with “roguelike deckbuilder” in all languages, more than enough to feed a recent Deckbuilders Fest. The glut has left some friends and co-workers grousing that every indie game these days seems to be either a cozy farming sim or a roguelike deckbuilder.
I, an absolute sucker for deckbuilders for nearly five years, wanted to know why this was happening.
In Slay the Spire, and most roguelike deckbuilders, you battle enemies by drawing cards and playing a limited number of them: attack, defend, buff, debuff, etc. Crucially, enemies show you what they are going to do next, so you can triage and strategize.
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Winning battles nets you random new card choices, which may or may not fit your strategy.
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You choose which path to take, full of battles, stores, random “encounters,” rest stops, and “Elite” battles that are more rewarding.
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Stores and encounters will often let you buy cards or artifacts, and sometimes remove them, too.
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Roguelike deckbuilder bosses are often designed to challenge build strategies and force adaptability.
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Or, as often happens, you just die and start over with more cards and upgrades unlocked for next time.
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What is so appealing to developers and players about single-player card games made for screens? How do developers differentiate their deckbuilders? And how do you promote a title in a niche but crowded field?
Seeking these answers, I spoke with a bunch of roguelike deckbuilder developers, and I read interviews and watched conference talks from others. Some common themes and trends revealed themselves. Like a well-honed deck, each element fed into and bolstered the others.
But let’s first go back to the beginning, to perhaps the most powerful single element of roguelike deckbuilders’ success: two college friends in their 20s, tired of working QA jobs.
Slay the Spire’s starting point
Slay the Spire marked what was arguably the start of modern, single-player roguelike deckbuilder video games. Some games may technically have combined combat-oriented deckbuilding with the procedural generation and die/improve/repeat nature of roguelikes, but the 2019 game was the first to crack the formula and build a big audience around it. Slay the Spire also broadly boosted enthusiasm for single-player card games on computers in general—games other than Windows’ Solitaire, at least.
In a video interview with Ars Technica, and at Game Developer Conference (GDC) talks in 2019 on marketing and balancing, developers Anthony Giovannetti and Casey Yano told the game’s story. Giovannetti and Yano had met in college and made some one-off games, then graduated and got jobs. Giovannetti was a card game and tabletop enthusiast, even briefly managing a game store. He was certainly familiar with deckbuilding pioneer Dominion, but his main game was Netrunner—he still maintains the community site StimHack. Yano worked at Amazon, where he said he picked up the company’s “customer obsession” mentality.
In mid-2015, the two reconnected and went all-in on making their genre-melding concept, initially named “Card Crawl.” Starting with stick-figure drawings, a procedurally generated progression scheme cribbed from FTL, and input from some advanced Netrunner playtesters, they worked until the game was ready for early access on Steam. Chief among their in-development discovery was broadcasting enemy intents to the player and simplifying visuals and indicators until they were readable at a glance, even in a foreign language.
Slay the Spire launched in Steam’s Early Access after more than two years of development in November 2017. It sold 200 copies on day one, 300 on day two, and 150 on day three, declining from then on. The developers had made trailers, sent more than 600 emails to press and other outlets, and in the critical first two weeks of release, they had only sold 2,000 copies.
Things looked grim, but eventually, some of the 200 keys they sent to streamers led to some live play. An influential Chinese streamer’s Slay session garnered more than 1 million views, which nudged the game up the top seller list, leading to further sales, which sparked more streams, and so on. Grateful for their second wind, the team released new patches every week and used statistical feedback from early sessions to further tune the game. They took care not to remove “overpowered” strategy discoveries because they understood the joy of “a well-powered Rube Goldberg machine.”
Despite critical raves, a 99 percent positive Steam review rating, and more than 1.5 million sales by September 2019, Yano told the GDC crowd that “we never really improved how to, like, sell the game. I would say it’s still really word-of-mouth. But it’s been doing well that way, so I think we’re gonna keep going that way.”
Multiple developers I spoke with cited Slay the Spire as inspiration; one had more than 1,000 hours in it. The game’s design and success have compounded a few times over, creating new starting points. Balatro‘s developer claimed to have not played deckbuilders before making his own, but he was fascinated by streams of Luck Be a Landlord. That slot machine roguelike was, per its developer’s blog, heavily influenced by Slay the Spire. Even if you don’t know it, you probably know it.
You might have seen the demo floating around for Tea for God for a few years now, however indie studio Void Room has finally released the full version of its VR roguelike adventure for Quest and SteamVR headsets.
Tea For God is a unique VR adventure that uses “impossible spaces”, allowing players infinite movement within their own room. While there is optional stick movement, the game’s true claim to fame is its ability to smartly guide you around your own room with your own two feet, which it does thanks to procedural generation.
Since the game dynamically scales to each user’s room, there are a few minimum space requirements. Void Room says users should have at least 1.8m x 1.2m (6ft x 4ft), although if you have less, the game will use horizontal scaling to make the world appear larger, bringing the minimum space down to 90cm x 60cm (3ft x 2ft).
You can choose to play three modes: a relaxing no-story mode, an intense arcade shooter with story, and a roguelite shooter-explorer.
There’s also an interesting narrative behind it all. Here’s how the studio describes it:
In the distant future, humankind has been united, ruled by God Emperor. Endowed with advanced technology we reached stars, colonised new worlds, went onto endless crusades against myriads of civilisations.
Personal tragedies tend to be meaningless against the time. But once in a while, one person may start a fire that can change the fate of the whole universe. A man who lost his family, who holds God Emperor accountable for their death, seeking answers and vengeance, embarks onto his last journey to the place no human has ever left alive, where God Emperor is believed to reside.
Joy Way, the studio behind STRIDE and AGAINST, revealed a new VR game which seems to combine the web-slinging action of Spider-Man with the demon-slaying melee carnage of DOOM.
Called Dead Hook, the studio calls the upcoming Quest title an “explosive mix of roguelike and shooter genre with brutal combat and captivating storytelling.”
Prior to Dead Hook, Joy Way released a game called Outlier on Steam Early Access for PC VR, which was then cancelled shortly thereafter. At the time, the studio cited “overestimated demand” as a reason for pulling the plug on the alien-centric roguelike. Joy Way says it has since reworked the mechanics, storyline, and overall gameplay of Outlier to create Dead Hook.
In Dead Hook, you take on the role of Adam Stone, a mercenary, smuggler, and thief. In it, you explore the elder planet Resaract, collect legendary weapons and customize your character with what the studio says is “100 buffs and permanent upgrades to make each run unique.”
Enemies include regular and elite elders, which try to stop you in the air and on the ground as they defend their tombs, the studio says. Joy Way also says there’s bosses too which have “multiple phases, making each encounter feel tense and exciting.”
The roguelike shooter is also set to have a story. In it, you’ll “uncover the secrets of Resaract and AI duality, facing tough choices and unexpected twists along the way,” the studio says.
The Light Brigade is a roguelike shooter that I would mostly describe as a spiritual successor to In Death: Unchained, the critically acclaimed bowshooter from Sólfar Studios and Superbright. While at times a little less visually polished than In Death, the game’s variety of upgrades and array of WWII-era weaponry gives it a definite Wolfenstein bend that fans of the shooter genre will instantly be able to click into.
Available On: SteamVR, PSVR 2 & PSVR, Quest 2 Release Date: February 22nd, 2023 Price: $25 Developer: Funktronic Labs Reviewed On: Quest 2 (native), Quest 2 via PC Link
Gameplay
There’s a definite story in The Light Brigade, although past the opening scene I really couldn’t remember what was actually at stake up until I completed my first full run. The game doesn’t chock too much story your way (or over tutorialize either), leaving you to just fight the bad guys while you save the culty good guys. Really, all you need to know is the demon-eyed, Nazi-adjacent baddies aren’t friendly, and the hellish fantasy-scape composed of discrete and sequentially connected levels must be cleared out and scoured methodically for loot.
It’s just pure action-adventure fun, as the meat of the game presents plenty of interesting upgrade paths which not only prolong your current run, but importantly give you enough reason to come back for more upon your inevitable death.
The Light Brigade feels forgiving enough to really keep you grinding for that next gun mod or class upgrade too, which gives you access to cooler-looking and more powerful versions of each weapon. Meanwhile, the game is busy serving up a good difficulty ramp that means your next run may not be necessarily easier despite progressively wider access to guns, magic, and upgrades.
That’s all well and good, but what about the guns? Thankfully, The Light Brigade really gets its WWII weaponry right, providing physics-based rifles and pistols which each come with their own immersive reloading mechanics. Loading and shooting the M3 submachine gun requires you to grab its stick-style magazine and chunk back the charging handle to chamber the first round, while shooting a K98 rifle is totally different, making you jam down stripper clips to feed the bolt-action rifle.
Practically speaking, sticking to a single class isn’t a terrible strategy as you get your grips with the game, as you’re probably looking to maximize your rank and unlock permanent upgrades since they don’t sync across classes.
In practice though, you’ll probably do a fair amount of class hopping once you progressively unlock the next available class, taking you from the starter Rifleman class with its semi-automatic Gewehr 43 rifle all the way through the other iconic WWII weapon-wielding classes the game has to offer, including the Sturmgewehr 44 submachine gun, the M3 submachine gun (aka ‘Grease Gun’), the powerful K98 battle rifle, and even a class that has dualie Colt 1911s for some John Wick-style madness.
As for enemies, the world’s baddies come in a pretty standard range, starting with your standard goons, which include shooters and archers. You’ll eventually come across shielded goons, tanks, and versions that fly, snipe, and lob bombs too. There always seems to be a new type added to the mix after each attempt though, so there may be more I don’t know about.
By this point, I’ve already made it through one full run, although that was after many (many) failed attempts spanning over about eight hours of gameplay—another thing that makes The Light Brigade a little more generous than In Death, which is probably there to keep it a little more of a fast-paced experience.
Levels are fairly linear, although there’s plenty of cover to hide behind as you make your forward march. That also means finding the remaining enemies can sometimes be tough, but thankfully prayer actually works in this universe, helping you to locate remaining loot and baddies. Enemies are revealed by showing you small red dots while chests are yellow.
And once you’ve finally cleared out the level’s baddies—you get a big ‘LEVEL CLEAR’ popup—then it’s time to scour for loot, oftentimes hidden in breakable vases and chests.
Here, you can find gold to buy consumables, weapon upgrades like scopes and magical trinkets, souls which increase your rank level, and the occasional key, which can open locked chests.
Mostly though, you’re looking for souls, the whispy white things that you’ll earn after killing enemies or finding soul containers. There’s also cards that give each run a unique set of possible upgrades. Choose one of three presented to you, and you might just significantly increase the damage you can deal, injecting a bit of luck into each run’s loot haul.
It’s not all WWII guns and demon Nazis though. The world is also magic-based, giving you upgradeable magic wands that can do things like provide shields, shoot fireballs, etc.
All of this effectively combines to offer a good selection of gameplay styles, letting you attack the world as you want.
Still, I have my gripes with The Light Brigade, the worst offender being its inventory holters attached to your belt. In practice, this makes reloading quickly and consistently an absolute pain. Instead of having a fixed area where you can reliably train muscle memory, shifting your body around physically or virtually with any of the artificial locomotion schemes has a funny way of shifting the belt holster around your waist in weird an unpredictable ways.
I get it: you should be covering and assessing your ammo situation at all times so you don’t run dry during critical moments, but having to crane your neck down every few seconds to make sure your hand is actually hovering over the right area is decidedly a dull spot on an otherwise shining example of great VR gaming.
I’m still working on getting the last remaining achievements and consistently beating the first boss as I attempt my successive runs. Considering the array of gun upgrades and magical weapons to explore, it’s safe to say I’m nowhere personally finished with this well-crafted roguelike. I won’t talk too much about bosses, although they are hard, and offer up unique bossy ways of dealing out damage—pretty much what’d you expect from a fantasy shooter, i.e., they can shield, do magic, and surprise you throughout the encounter, so they aren’t just glorified bullet sponges.
Immersion
I get it: The Light Brigade is all about bringing light back to a dark and corrupted world, but it is very dark. At times, I felt it offered less visual contrast than Quest 2’s LCD displays can rightly handle, making some levels appear more muddy and generally more difficult to resolve visually.
Road to VR has a PSVR 2 in hand, although I don’t personally. I have had a chance to preview the headset though, and its OLED displays with HDR will undoubtedly be more capable of serving up better visual contrast. Still, if you’re playing on Quest 2 natively, or any number of PC VR headset running the Steam version, you may find later bits of the game very difficult to resolve visually.
Image courtesy Funktronic Labs
Were it not for the beady red eyes that shine in the darkness, enemies would be maybe too difficult to make out in the ever-present fog of war. Still, it’s a fairly muddy palette any way you slice it; level design and variety as you move forward are always interesting at least.
The star of the show though is inevitably the game’s weapons, which provide subtle articulations that really make it feel more of a realistic experience. For example, you can cycle a magazine’s worth of cartridges just because you mechanically can. You don’t need to, but the fact that The Light Brigade’s guns functionally work like real guns means the player should be able to if they want to. See my magazine empty as I eject unfired bullets:
Another immersive touch is the gun’s physical weight, which affects how you hold and steady it. A pistol requires a steadier hand because it’s lighter and easier to swing around, while a rifle is more forgiving with movement since the game registers as it being substantially heavier in the player’s hand. Suitably, some guns let you steady with your non-dominant hand, providing discrete attach points to do so.
I was hoping for some amount of melee, although there’s none present to speak of, meaning if your gun runs dry, you better find cover and reload, or pull out your trusty sidearm.
A note one positional audio: enemies provide good spatial audio cues for their relative locations—something important once levels start getting more claustrophobic, like in the sewers.
Comfort
The Light Brigade has a good swath of standard comfort options which, include optional smooth or snap-turn, and smooth locomotion or teleport.
Playing seated is possible, and the game comes with a seated mode, although it’s not advisable since your belt holster may be awkwardly positioned at any time, making standing play the least encumbering way to interface.
The Light Brigade’ Comfort Settings – February 15th, 2023
Turning
Artificial turning
✔
Snap-turn
✔
Quick-turn
✖
Smooth-turn
✔
Movement
Artificial movement
✔
Teleport-move
✔
Dash-move
✖
Smooth-move
✔
Blinders
✔
Head-based
✔
Controller-based
✔
Swappable movement hand
✖
Posture
Standing mode
✔
Seated mode
✔
Artificial crouch
✖
Real crouch
✔
Accessibility
Subtitles
✔
Languages
English, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, German, French, Russian, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional) , Korean, Japanese
Slated to arrive on all major VR headsets later this month, The Light Brigade is well positioned to make a name among the top VR roguelikes, as it follows most visibly in the footsteps of bowshooter In Death (2018) in all the right ways. In our hands-on, we got to see just how Light Brigade is setting itself apart though with a strong focus on an array of realistic WWII-era weapons and magical upgrades galore.
Coming February 22nd, The Light Brigade is the latest VR title from Funktronic Labs, the team behind Fujii (2019) and Cosmic Trip (2017). With a few hours of Quest 2 gameplay under my belt, I can say that The Light Brigade is certainly something to watch out for when it lands on PSVR 2, PSVR, Quest 2, and SteamVR headsets in the next two weeks.
Although The Light Brigade isn’t related to the award-winning roguelike bowshooter—In Death was developed by Sólfar Studios and Superbright—there are more than a few comparisons here to make. The Light Brigade similarly features a high degree of visual polish, well-realized enemy classes, and a fun array of weapons that make you really second guess stepping out from behind cover.
It’s also culty as all hell, as you battle it out as an acolyte warrior of light on a quest to pry the world from the grasps of the (totally not Nazi-inspired) Obsidian Forces.
What the hell does that all mean? I can’t say just yet, but it all ends up feeling like a cool mix of World War-inspired trench warfare mixed in with a heaping dose of medieval-style religious quackery and magic.
The Light Brigade tosses a smorgasbord of realistic weapons your way, all of which require a deft hand at manually reloading in the middle of a firefight. You’ll get your hands on rifles and pistols, all of which are upgradeable. Besides the Mauser C96 (aka ‘Broomhandle Mauser’), most everything is what you’d consider WWII standard stuff, including Gewehr 43, Sturmgewehr 44, Colt 1911, M3 submachine gun (aka ‘grease gun’), and Nambu Pistol Model 14. Guns have a virtual weight to them too, so you won’t be waggling around a 10-pound rifle or running too fast either when you’re supporting the gun with your non-dominant hand.
Each gun has three upgradeable power levels, which also let you tack on things like red dot scopes and powerful trinkets that allow you to charge and execute special shots. There are also so mini potato masher-style grenades, health kits, and interesting tools like deployable decoys which draw enemy fire away from you.
You’ll have to grind it out to level up each gun, which usually means sticking with the corresponding class long enough to generate points to sink into upgrades. The game’s actual difficulty seems to scale relative to your weapon’s current upgrade level, giving you more and different baddies to encounter as you head back in after your inevitable death—although that’s a bit of speculation on my side. There are two user-selectable difficulty levels though should things get too tough, ‘Arcade’ and ‘Realistic’.
Levels start out fairly small in size, although all of them encourage exploration thanks to the important items that can be found around every corner, such as the game’s tarot card upgrades that you’ll find in glittering chests. These buffs stay in effect for your entire run, and are automatically applied when you choose one of the three presented to you from each chest.
Image courtesy Funktronic Labs
My typical level run goes more or less like this: kill every enemy in the level, comb the entire level again for lootable chests and other goodies, and then summarily step into a trap, like the sort of couter-weighted log traps Arnold Schwarzenegger tangoed with in the original Predator (1987), or even a simple bear trap.
Once I’ve dusted off my stupidity, it’s time to head to the level gate, which requires you to bring your hands together in prayer to activate—a really cool and immersive touch. There are level bosses, although I only ever made it to the first, which I won’t spoil for your here.
Image courtesy Funktronic Labs
Meanwhile, I’ll be playing a lot more of The Light Brigade’s and reserving my thoughts on game mechanics and immersion for the full review later this month. Still, it’s safe to say I really enjoyed the entire vibe.
One thing to note is that Funktronic Labs included a good number of comfort modes, including smooth turn, variable snap-turn, smooth locomotion, and teleportation. Currently, the game’s inventory system includes a hip-mounted holster, which can be difficult to access whilst seated, making standing gameplay recommended at the time of this writing. We’ll have more info in our deep dive review when the game launches on February 22nd.
In the meantime, you can wishlist the game on Steam (PC VR), pre-order on PSVR 2 and PSVR, and pre-order on Quest 2—priced at $25. Also, in case you missed out on the announce trailer, take a gander below:
