Cogmind

I want to like this game; the game has clearly had heart and soul poured into it, but it falls short in so many annoying, little ways that ruin a lot of what I could enjoy about it. First off is the resolution and text size. Kids with dinky computers do not play games like this. Hardcore, old-timers play games like this. People with cash money who have fancy high-resolution monitors and zoomed-in web browser pages so they can read the damn text on their screens without squinting at the screen like a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mole rat. After how many years it's finally fixed. I play on a large PC monitor with a high resolution, and after being fobbed off with 'yeah well, that's just how the engine is, here's a dumb link to my website with a visual acuity test with DOS codepage symbols so you should've done that before bying' made me sit on the game for several years. Jesus; just fix the engine. Listen to your customers. And after a 6-7 years that finally happened. So it shows that the commercial headwinds of not doing what your customers really want can undo an awful lot of pigheadedness --- given a long enough wait. That dogged attitude plays into how the rest of the game is built as well and how many of its gameplay elements are implemented and how even slight criticisms are addressed. It's clearly a passion project and the author deserves credit for having a vision and pouring his heart and soul into something they then share with the world. Few do this; they do not know the personal toll that takes. But when you charge cash money for something you're going to have deal with the occasional dissatisfaction, and the developer to his credit does try to ah charitably deal with negative reviews. The primary issue with the game loop is not the complexity, for the game is not that complex. It has destructible environments, enemies, allies, loot galore and all the fare we've all seen a million times before. Most game concepts get bucketed into classic game tropes: things have resistances; stuff does damage; some things subtract numbers from this pile and this thing from that pile. Matter; core health; durability; power; whatever. Most people can figure this stuff out. But as always the question is *how*. How you learn and what you learn is more about the things the game does *not* teach you. This game is a meta-gamer's game; you have to know everything inside-out to derive a measure of enjoyment from it. But you can't really learn a lot of this stuff from the game itself. And finding out is... not always fun? Nethack is fun; you kick something you might regret that, but you'll come away wiser. Eat the wrong thing and you might die; eat the right thing and you just got immunity to something. Hey cool. Dumb and obscure? Yep. But it's bankable knowledge. Drink a cursed potion of level up? And you'll float up one level. It's a game that rewards you with knowledge that you can immediately apply to the next game you play. In this game there's very little 'fun' to be had because you can't really experiment, and your learnings do not really carry forward well to the next game because actions and consequences are often divorced. "Raised alert level" is a classic one; a fart in the wind can raise the alert level but karate-chopping walls so you can sneak around between rooms seemingly do not? Loud gunfire doesn't seem to either; but if you ask a terminal the wrong question and you'll have a robots galore coming after you. You see, the game, for all its talk of builds (Hack! Fly! Tank! Minions!) do not mean much at all. They play a little different, sure, but it's in the margins. Even if you do try, you'll find your papier-mache build ripped apart limb from limb and all of a sudden your grand plan unravels like a poorly-wrapped tortilla. There's millions of component you can slot in --- few of them matter, and chances are you'll never see most of them anyway. The game has built up an incredible arsenal of bad-ass weapons and cool animations and effects, but woe betide you if you reach out and touch someone with them. The game will quickly disabuse you of any notion you may have of playing a warrior. This is not that kind of game, and yet the dev touts new weapons and gadgets that do not matter one lick with every new patch. The game abhors warriors, but everything about the game is set up like a roguelike where you fight. Sure, you learn what you can and cannot fight, and most roguelikes can punish you if you overextend yourself. But this game does *not* want you to play a warrior. You just cannot play them unless you perfectly metagame. No, your job is to dry hump walls then kool-aid man your way through rooms and avoid large hallways (where enemies patrol) lest you draw too much aggro which will end your fun right away. Part of the fun in a roguelike is adapting to change. Random loot means random opportunity. Sometimes you get lucky and sometimes you don't. That could be the game's greatest strength, but it hides behind meta-concepts like using a wheel to move around (faster) and wearing treads to provide coverage because that, uh... is.. what.. treads apparently do. Would you ever work that out yourself? Perhaps, but probably not. Lots of fun loot is great, but that assumes you actually get to exercise the parts you get, but most of the time you are just a floating hobo ripping through garbage cans looking for scrap to fill out the gaps of your "build". Oh you got your hover things shot off? Sucks for you; put on a wheel and now you're a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ pedal bin. So much for your dreams of being a hacker. That's the game's allure; you find scrap and you adapt. But why bother? You're just hiding and you can never fight. Hacking is simplistic but well implemented in the game but good luck doing any of it. You need just the right component and for the stars to align as the chance of failure is punitive. Don't get me started on the secret manual commands you can type that is drip-fed to you if you end up in the magic special places where bots might vaguely hint at them. Yeah you need to learn of the magic command line commands to truly stand a chance here. And let's hope you never lose your hacking suite(s), assuming you even found some or know that you can kill that one particular type of enemy that always has one. You can learn about the lore in the game -- I'm sure there's a plot for anybody dumb enough to grind through hundreds of hours reading snoozy telegrams from Exposition Bot 1 to Exposition Bot 2 only to land at a generic story trope --- something something bad probably happened in the world, zzZzzz. But much of it is gated behind hacking. And what isn't means you have to interact with friendly/neutral bots, but the dev keeps adding all these factions that make it hard to keep track of who's who. And ultimately who cares? I mean really. It's a roguelike not Dostoevsky. And if you are curious you might be tempted to try to ask a terminal about the lore it knows about. But thanks to the game's inscrutable alert system that makes point scoring in tennis look rational, you'll just anger the whatever thingy that sics bots on you when you cross an alarm threshold. So good luck figuring that out. To wrap it up: the developer will wag his finger and remind you that you can just lower the difficulty. But I don't find the game difficult. Just poorly designed. It leans into mechanics that are just not that fun; mechanics that he could change and turn the game into something genuinely interesting. All the bones are there --- the gameplay loop just needs a rethink.

I've never been more enamored by a game in my life

I originally got into this game from a DoshDoshington Video. I have only ever made it to factory once I think, I love the fact that 80% of the time, if something breaks I can just find another one on the corpse of the robot that shot it off.

I really want to like Cogmind, and I've been trying to for years but the first hour or two of a run just don't have much to offer. I know it has some complex branching paths and story, but that intrigue is completely absent in the early game. you have so little choice in equipment and no matter what you choose, that equipment will break after a few fights. +1 to a weapon isn't very impactful when I'm sure ill lose that weapon soon. even the better gear feels weak against the enemies on the same floor. I'm so desperate for this game to get good, but it's way too stingy. in terms of traditional roguelikes, I prefer Caves of Qud. maybe thats not a fair comparison, but I want to have fun at the beginning of a roguelike too. i believe that the beginning is the most important part of making a roguelike so fun to play and replay. playing cogmind after feels like playing with a straight jacket. This game reminds me of Noita, where the beginning of a run is really boring, but you can beat noita in an hour. I'm sure theres a world of complexity, somewhere, maybe, but I don't want to play this long opening a dozen times for all the endings, and hundreds more more for all the failed attempts. I want to like this game so so badly, but sadly i don't.

Cogmind is probably the best roguelike that I've ever played, although I've only seen a fraction of the content so far and haven't won a run yet. But I don't know if/when I'll finish it because the more I play the bigger the game seems to be, so I'll just give some highlights of the parts that I've played so far: As I said the game is big, much bigger than I thought at first. For a while it felt like Cogmind was just made up of several levels filled with increasingly difficult robots that must be destroyed. But it wasn't until about 40 hours in when I started exploring branches more intently that I discovered where all of the content was. The branch levels themselves add a ton of variety to runs, but my favorite parts of them are the hidden joinable factions that have settled in some of them. The factions all have really interesting lore and have a unique place in the history and current events of the facility. But they also all have important gameplay implications. While your primary goal in Cogmind is just to escape the facility, these factions have more ambitious goals, hence the many different endings, and hence why some runs you'll find online last longer than 8 hours. The difficulty is also a big highlight for me. Unlike most games that are considered difficult, but get easy after some time, Cogmind is always difficult. Some other roguelikes/lites that I like are Caves of Qud and Slay the Spire, but the only problem with those is that it feels like the goal of each run is to create a build that is so broken that the run becomes trivial. Cogmind's systems have not been built to be exploited, but to be understood thoroughly enough that the player can design a robot just barely capable of navigating the deadly facility. The last thing that I want to highlight would be the build variety, which isn't necessarily much better than other roguelikes, but is much better than I initially thought. I initially thought that there were essentially just two builds, gun robots and hacking robots. But after observing the massive variety of enemy robots in the game, I've realized that the possibilities are pretty much endless. Every enemy robot in Cogmind is made of the same parts that are available to the player, so builds similar to any of them can conceivably be made. From "Slayer" class robots who snipe from far away using targeting computers, "Slicers" who use thrusters to quickly close gaps and disable other robots with buzz saws, or "Programmers" who try to disable robots with EM weapons. And the builds feel very different to play as well. A heavy combat build will probably use tank treads to carry all of the weight of its build and the loot it picks up, and move at a snails pace because of it, while a hacker flies through the facility with at least 10 times faster movement speed because all it has to carry is weightless pieces of software to allow it to hack. And both are viable strategies for overcoming Cogmind. I definitely reccomend buying Cogmind if this difficulty and depth appeals to you, although keep in mind that it will take many hours until you actually grasp this game, and you may drop it before then. There are a lot of negative reviews of this game from people 10 or 20 hours in because they inevitably haven't discovered everything that the game has to offer yet. Like one saying that the early game isn't interesting because the branches/story are only accessible later into a run, while there are multiple interesting branches on the first floor, if you know how to find them. So all I can say is to stick with it and do as much exploration as possible.

DO NOT JUDGE THIS BOOK BY ITS COVER. IT DOESNT MATTER IF U THINK U WONT LIKE IT. U WILL.

This game is remarkable for being both the most true to it's Rogue roots of any modern game, and at the same time the most innovative and groundbreaking.

I'm generally not a fan of roguelikes, but Cogmind is one of the few exceptions. Along with Caves of Qud, it's one of those games that just clicks with me. With every failed run you learn something new, and eventually you start finding things you never expected to be there in the first place. I won't spoil any of it, because discovering those moments on your own is one of the best parts of the game. I kept starting "one more run" not because I thought I'd finally win, but because I wanted to see what else the game was hiding.

One of the two long and tense games I enjoy (the other one being XCOM2012 LWR): Cogmind acknowledges that players will optimize the fun out of the games, and implements ways to make those boring play patterns unoptimal. Those countermeasures are well aligned with the in-game world, which keeps up the already excellent immersion. The downside of Cogmind is that it is heavy and long, so it's hard to pick up again after a busy week. Other things of note: - Works well in Linux with WINE, but only attaches to the primary display. - DRM free version available, but not through Stream