The Hungry Gamer's All's Well That Ends Mini Preview
Transcript
Ooh, that looks tasty.
Welcome folks to the Hungry Gamer is back with another mini preview and today we're talking about All's Well That Ends designed by Nick Fletcher from 1144 Games. The 44 is backwards so I don't actually know how to say that. So I'm going with it. Now, what this game is is this is an adventure dungeon crawl-ish style game though it makes use of map books. And and in this particular game there are four characters going on an adventure and the combat, which is at the core of this style game, is done by cards. And you have cards in your hand, you play out cards, and various things that you're going to be doing through the game will give you different modifiers. Every round you'll have what's called an impulse which might give you a boost, it might give you a a debuff, whatever. Lots of things going on as far as how your cards are going to work.
I'll talk about that a little bit later. And all the enemies are controlled by an AI though of note the AI in this has different statuses. As you wound the bad guys, they might become I forget what they're called but frightened or wounded or whatever and as they get those different statuses it changes how they act as far as the what the AI does every single turn. In addition, on every map you're going to have various things you can interact with which will take you to story and in between every game you will be going off on a little adventure exploration ala Seventh Continent. As you go out and explore different cards and move on to different cards and interact with the story and so on and so on. Now, but at its core it is another dungeon crawl adventure style game and so the question is is it doing enough that I think it's worth sinking your money into or not? So, let's jump ahead into what is to me the most exciting part of this game. And that is the card play. Each of the characters have their own deck of cards, but what's going to happen is you're going to pick a card and you're going to take two actions on that card. Sometimes, as you can see on the screen right now, there'll be little kind of bloodlines connecting two of the actions. And if you take those actions in that order, you're going to get a bonus. However, what makes this particularly cool is you can also, if you look at the screen now, you see the red line going all the way across the bottom. I could take all three of those
actions because it's all in a surge if you can line up those lines. And then you're going to draw back to your hand size at the end of your round, anyway. Really, really interesting and cool the way that works. It's very fun. It's very neat to try to decide, am I going to save cards to get a big surge, or do I just want to go with what I have and kind of chip away at the bad guys. Really, really, really like the way that works. Now, before I get to the rest of what I like, let's talk about one of my quibbles with the game. The first and the biggest one, I think, is the difficulty scaling from two characters to four characters. To me, it seems like the game is easier at four. And there's a thing that happens your your it's called your potency, which is how much damage you do and all those things. It goes down the more characters you have, but you don't have fewer things to interact with on the map. So, if you only have two characters, you might find yourself running all over the map just trying to see what these things are because the interactions are really interesting.
Speaking of the interactions, sometimes you just you get what you get and you don't throw a fit. You might interact with something and suddenly it's like, oh, do you want to set this thing on fire or not? You set it on fire, you get hurt, but something some benefit happens. But you didn't know going in that that's what was going to be there. And so, you take that for what you will. That might be very interesting you, or that might be something that bothers you. You just don't know what's going to happen. Next thing I'll say is, and this is a weird one for me, but I know a lot of gamers that have a very negative reaction to Seventh Continent style exploration. This game has it. You're going to move around, you're going to explore, you're going to flip over new cards, put new cards out. And, I want to talk about that again in a minute, but it's a big part of the game. And, so, if you're the player that didn't like that in other games, well, this is not going to make you suddenly like that.
Next thing I'll say is, one of the things that you do each round is you pick what impulse you have. It's kind of, well, it's an impulse your character has, and sometimes it's going to give you a benefit, sometimes it's going to do something bad to you. Well, there's bad ones in there. And, you're going to have to play some of the bad ones. And, so, you're giving yourself a self-debuff. Again, I think it's kind of interesting, but it might be something that bothers you, and I don't know if as you go through the game you're able to kind of call those out completely or not. Next thing I'll say is, there is a mechanic of you get trauma as you're going through, and at the end of each scenario, somebody's going to get some trauma. And, you know, and as you can imagine, trauma is not good. So, just like with the impulses that are negative, there's nothing that you're going to get saddled with some negative stuff at the end of some games, and it can also lead to a little bit of semi-coop action as players try to do the thing that they need to do to not get trauma. So, they get what's called a calling, I believe it's called. So, can be a little bit of a weird competition in there. Last thing I'll say is, there's a lot of icons. They have a pretty darn good iconography guide, but take a look. It's a lot of icons in the game.
Now, coming back around to the thing I think really works well, I think the character variety is fantastic. Just in the cards, the different cards, it's really good variety. Really cool combos you can make. I think each of the different characters has cool special abilities that they just start with. That makes them really interesting. The difference between playing the character I showed pictures from, which is like a dude with a big old axe, and the thief that's running around shooting things from a distance, and well, stealing stuff. Fantastic. Really, really good variety. And not only do they play differently, I think they're all interesting. I've enjoyed playing all four of them, so I think that's really, really cool. I think the story has good promise. I don't know where it's going, but it is enough that I'm interested in where this game is going. Next thing I'll say is the AI is easy to operate, I think for the bad guys, but particularly interesting the way that it works in the sense that as you wound them, they're going to do different things.
I love that. It's easy to track. It's easy to figure out what's going on. I just think that is spectacular. Along with that, I really like the way the initiative works. You start out, you flip them out kind of at random, but then you start moving them up and down based on the type of action that you took, and it's just clean, simple, and I think it works really, really well. And then the last thing I'll say is I actually enjoy that 7th Continent kind of exploration, the kind of moving around, what's going on, figuring that out. But I really like the way the tests work, cuz as you're going through, you're taking these tests, you have no how hard they're going to be. You're flipping out your cards, trying to get symbols, and you can even kind of go through and measure your good and bad interactions that you have as you're trying to get extra benefits. I think it's very clever. I think there's a lot of bite-size story bits. Each card has some interesting story on the back of each specific card. You're interacting with things that have that have these little bites of story on it as you're playing through the game. You're having little bites of story as things are changing and happening. I think it's a really clever game. And this is one that I did a demo of it, I don't know, 15 months ago. I was like, "Oh, this is really cool." And then I finally got it and I wasn't able to get to it to forever, but this is a game that I think has an incredible amount of promise.
What is going to be at the end? I don't know. But this is one of those games that I am really hyped to get a final copy of this and see where it goes. I think it could be one that just knocks it out of the park for me. So, I'm excited about it. I think it's doing some interesting stuff. And I think if you're a big dungeon crawl adventure game fan, then you should be checking this one out. I think it's doing some stuff that's interesting and unique in the space, and I am excited to play more of it. So, there you have it, folks. As always, if you found this video useful, please like, subscribe, share, maybe become a channel member. As always, thank you so much for watching. Have a wonderful, wonderful day.