Quick Review: Beltmatic

Imagine, if you will, every factory-building game ever, but reduced to the simplest expression.

Just one of many, many factories.

A creation of Notional Games released on March 29th, 2024, Beltmatic puts you in charge of a “factory” in which numbers are created. You see numbers scattered around the giant map, and a big delivery area in the circle. All the numbers you create must be directed to this delivery area using treadmills and extractors. Set an extractor onto a number, link it to the delivery area with treadmills. Collect enough of the number that’s requested, and you go up a level! Now you have a different number to collect, and you may have unlocked something new.

It takes so much work in the early game to get numbers
anywhere close to 10...

At first, all you have is 1s, but then you’ll unlock 2, 3, 4, 5, and so on – it doesn’t seem like much, but these add up. As you level up, your prime request is the number on the delivery space – and these numbers become harder to obtain. It’s not always a prime, but it usually is, or it’s just one or two operations away from a prime number. You unlock new tools over time; the first is a bridge allowing your treadmills to cross over each other, which quickly becomes necessary.

The mathematical buildings have different shapes and function differently from each other. Most involve an A and a B – yes, we’re getting algebraic in here –, the operation, and its result. First is the adder, A+B. Then it’s the multiplier, A*B. The subtractors and dividers are A-B and A÷B, so you must pay very close attention to which number is sent where. For division, you end up with both the proper result, and then the remainder (ex. 5÷2=2, with remainder of 1), so you can use these to obtain other numbers that you can redirect elsewhere if necessary. The final operation is the exponentiator, or A^B; you can get some big numbers out of that one. It takes a while to unlock every option but having them all available is a plus.

Your factory will get pretty damn big after a while.

The final unlock is a storage box, which you can put on the field to store one number into a single area, so that your buildings can keep producing numbers instead of letting them get stuck at the end of a treadmill. Storage squares can contain up to 10,000 of a number. In addition, you can create new treadmills leading out of a storage square and into more operations and buildings.

Alright, I've made the number I wanted, not to tie it all
back to the delivery area. That shouldn't take too long.

But you don’t have just one number to produce every time; you can level up your treadmills and buildings so that they’ll churn out operations faster, allowing for more numbers to get produced per minute and reduce clutter as numbers go through. This will subtract a lot of the time taken for numbers to get to your facility after going through many other buildings on the way. However, leveling up any building will be tough, as you need to collect a large amount of up to three different numbers beforehand. There is no other cost to upgrading a building or the treadmills; just the hard work of making the numbers through complex series of operations, and getting them home.

With all 6 buildings unlocked, that’s an extra 18 numbers to crunch. This multiplies the factories around your reception area – not to mention just how much it divides your attention. Good thing there’s a menu keeping track of all the numbers getting fed into your delivery dock, and which ones are no longer necessary – this can allow you to cut off the unnecessary branches and delete those factories.

Everything's moving into the delivery area, riiiiight there
at the left of this screenshot.

You can unlock all the achievements by reaching Level 30 and upgrading all the buildings to Level 8. I've done both, so I personally consider to have beaten this game. It’s a fun challenge to figure out how to reach all the numbers that are requested. Really, this game is all mathematics, so it’s going to appeal to nerds like me and other folks who like crunching numbers, but may not be for fans of more classic factory-building games. I suggest playing with the PC’s calculator open, and maybe the factors calculator in a window. One of the bigger issues is just how many of each number is needed to go up a level or upgrade a facility; it eventually turns into a waiting game when you can’t produce them faster and need to wait for those quantities to tick up. The other option is to repeat your factories wherever possible to produce more of one specific number per second. But overall, yeah, it's a fun one.

…Okay, I’ve made exponentially more math puns here than usual.

Beltmatic is currently available on Steam for 6.99$ USD.

Quick Review: Balatro

Oof, I’m in for some addictive gameplay. I better not lose myself into this one. …Too late.

Developed by LocalThunk, published by Playstack and released on February 20th, 2024 (I know, I’m a full year late to the party on this one), Balatro is a very unique deck-building roguelike based entirely around poker hands, Jokers, and a myriad of special cards.

Two pairs? That should do the trick for now...

A run is divided into Antes, themselves divided into three Blinds: One small, one big, and a Boss. The latter throws in an additional effect to disrupt your strategies. The score required at each blind increases. A run is "won" if you can beat the boss of Ante 8, which will usually require you to score 100,000 points. You can choose to skip a non-boss blind, which grants a small reward in return.

Before playing a hand, you can discard multiple times, up to 5 cards, and then draw as many. Judge which poker hand will give you the biggest score and try to gather all the pieces. Then, choose your cards – again, up to 5 – and play them. The system will only play the cards that count (ex. If you play 5 cards but only have two pairs, one card won’t be scored). Be careful, though; you have limited discards, and you must reach the score in chips in a limited number of hands.

Oh, I've got a good feeling about this one!

The hands go from the simplest High Card all the way to the Straight Flush or beyond. Hands all have a base score and multiplier (Mult), which you can level up using Planet Cards founnd in the Shop. This can add up, and may encourage players to focus on one hand type over another.

At the top of the screen are your equipped Jokers. Every Joker has an effect that radically changes gameplay; many of them add to your hand score (Chips) or Mult. Some rarer Jokers may even multiply your Mult. Jokers can come in different editions, which can impact the scoring or the base game (Foil, Holographic, Polychrome or Negative). You start with only five slots for Jokers, but can gain more (thanks to Negative Jokers).

Let's make sure the planets help as much as possible.

    Too bad I seem to already have all my Jokers. Then again,
maybe I can get a better one up there.

After beating a blind, you earn the base money reward, extra cash for each remaining hand you didn't play, and even some interest. Then you access a shop screen with randomized Jokers, a voucher, and card packs. Vouchers cost 10 coins but will provide passive bonuses and changes to gameplay; the packs can include Planet cards, Tarot cards (which can modify cards from your deck), regular cards for your deck, more Jokers, or even the rare Spectral cards, which can heavily change your run.

2,900e13? Yikes.

Can you figure out the best combination of effects to beat Ante 8? Can you… go beyond? The further you go, the bigger the numbers become; by Ante 14, blind chip scores need to be expressed in scientific notation because the numbers are too damn big. The last time I saw scientific notation in a video game was in an idle clicker! And oh yeah – there are 15 different “Decks” to unlock or use, each with their own special effect, AND on top of that you can also unlock additional Stakes to make the game harder. Imagine winning Ante 8 with every Deck, at every stake. Ouch.

Ugh, how I dislike boss blinds with face-down cards...

Yeah, this is extremely addictive. This is very much a roguelike; you never know what you’ll land on at every turn, and you make do with what you find. Some runs will end prematurely, some will go far (but not far enough)... or maybe you’ll win. There’s so much content to find, and so many secondary challenges, that if you want to beat the game just once, you’ll need maybe 10 hours (at least for the time it should take to learn all the mechanics and how they can be changed through gameplay). I know I was hooked; by the time I wrote this paragraph, I had spent 20 hours in this alleged “quick” game, and I had only beaten it twice (at publication, I've now won 9 times). Be very careful; when you start playing this one, it’s hard to put down.

Balatro is available on Steam for 14.99$ USD.

Still addicted, send help

Quick Review: Agatha Christie - The ABC Murders

Starting strong with a literary classic adapted to video game! While I can’t call myself a huge reader of Agatha Christie’s works, I have read a few of her stories – but not today’s. Good! That means I’m not spoiled!

It's a Poirot story - it's always a murder. (And for those not
in the know, that's pronounced "pwah-row").

Developed by Artefacts Studio, published by Microids, and released on February 4th, 2016 for PC, PS4 and Xbox One (and on Switch in 2020), Agatha Christie – The ABC Murders is adapted from the Hercule Poirot novel of the same name. The quirky, mustachioed Belgian detective was hoping to enjoy retirement with just a few simple cases from now on. This peace is troubled when his London office receives a typewritten letter signed A.B.C., discussing an upcoming murder in the town of Andover. A challenge for the aging gentleman! The first victim’s initials are A.A., and she is found dead with an ABC (a dictionary-sized book of train departure times to all destinations in England) on her, left open at the A section. Aided by his friend Captain Arthur Hastings and Scotland Yard inspector James Japp, Hercule Poirot might be able to see beyond the mind games and find the culprit.

Poirot concludes that this woman is both sad and angry.
He's a better reader than I am.

Poirot can inspect people’s appearances to reach conclusions about their mental state, and then interrogate witnesses and suspects to get information. Most body observations stop at three details to spot on the person. Investigating scenes goes the same way – bring the cursor to an area, hover on it long enough, and a detail will be “noticed”. This is how you can find clues and information.

We've figured out the how, now to figure out the who and why.

Occasionally, Poirot will “put his little grey cells to work” and tie pieces of information together to reach logical conclusions. Some questions appear ahead of time, and you can try to solve them before the plot mandates it, though you may be missing the clues/observations needed for completion. There are no consequences for failing, so if a question has you stumped but you have all the clues, you can keep trying different combinations of clues until you catch the right one.

All this for a piece of paper? Can't I just pull it out?

The centerpieces are the puzzles, in which objects are tampered with to find new clues advancing the investigations. Some require information found in the current chapter (like a safe’s code), while others require keen observation to figure out how to take them apart. Most of them aren’t too difficult, but a few are tricky if you can’t spot the one detail you need to see to proceed. I did get stuck on one or two of these, but most weren’t so bad.

Careful, it's best to not piss off the suspects, just in case
they're volatile.

The biggest weakness of this game is that, while its story covers the entirety of The ABC Murders, it’s also very rigid about progress. Outside of moments where youmay not notice a clue or a way to move onwards, the game is otherwise easy, with most sequences being impossible to lose (and, in the case of the puzzles, the only failure is being unable to finish them). There are no repercussions for mishandling an interrogation. You gain some “experience” by behaving like Poirot, which means conducting everything to perfection and being gentle when asking questions (or showing narcissism by making him stare at himself in every mirror, I got a kick out of that), but it doesn’t offer advantages.

It's the kind of game where I love the story (or, at least, how it interprets the story it adapts to an interactive medium), but gameplay is very much a mixed bag. Observations of relevant characters are always too easy; observing relevant objects on various visited locations can be a tiny bit trickier, but you can just focus on what feels relevant and you’ll quickly get through them as well. Much of the game is just too easy – but if you’re just in it for a classic Hercule Poirot story, you’ll get exactly what you want.

Agatha Christie – The ABC Murders is available on Steam for 14.99$.