Etherfields Final Thoughts

hey everybody final thoughts time for ether fields and i love this game just as much as i did when i covered the prototype two years ago this is such an amazing audacious ambitious game from a publisher that's known for audacious ambitious games awaken realms and honestly i think people could wibble and disagree but for my money this is their best game to date i i probably probably have to give us a nudge to this war of mine because of how important it is as an evolution of the art form but in terms of just fun you can't beat ether feels this game is a blast from start to finish uh it does so many things so well you know the core gameplay is really simple and clean and elegant because it's a deck builder and you build a deck over time and it's a deck full of multi-use cards that you use for their um you know their resources or for their special abilities and over the course of many many hours as i understand it the base game comes with easily at least 50 hours of gameplay if you make it all the way through the two chapters that are in that come with the base box and i mean if you take your time it'll be even longer than that and even with that 50 hours you could probably still go back and see stuff you did not see because there are so many things to explore and experience but um you know 50 hours of slowly building and crafting a deck of cards to make it a super awesome powerhouse and then i mean there's so many things you discovered throughout the game um and i don't want to spoil i mean there's so many things i mean in the run-through i mean i had to kind of give you an idea a sense for um you know all the different type of things you unlock over time as you get more wisdom and i've got another one i have only 20 or less than 20 hours in the game i've unlocked these i've still got all these other things to unlock as the world continues to build and grow and evolve um you know about literally represented by the world you travel around and you grow and evolve as well and all of it being driven by a deck building game uh that's very good very well considered because this is a deck building game where unlike most other games you want a fat deck you want a lot of cards in this deck because every time you empty it out and then have to reshuffle you're going to take damage and uh you do not want to die in this game um you know once you if you if you do start taking a lot of damage you're getting close and you're going through your deck so fast and you've made a really thin lean deck so you're super powerful like a deck builder but you're going through the deck so quickly you're about to die what you can start doing instead is oh once you reshuffle instead of taking the damage seal more cards and that's a fascinating thing too that a lot of the special powers you get from your cards require you to seal them or other cards and those get taken out of your deck and it's not until you find a way to unseal them that you'll get them back so your death is deck is morphing and evolving over the course of the game too you might have a really great combo that you really love but then the cornerstone card of that combo gets sealed and now you got to come up with new and interesting ways to solve problems that are different than the way you normally go about it and then on top of that this is a wonderful cooperative game too i've played it a fair bit solo but i also played a lot with my wife jen and i would always want to play it with her i think this is definitely a more the merrier game because it's interesting the rules describe a turn structure that i think is actively bad where um you know we keep doing going round after round each player taking one turn in a round until everybody passes and then it's the end of the of the of the players go and then the bad guys get to go that's fine that's kind of normal but the rules do suggest that if you want to you can obliterate that structure and let players do anything they want in any order they want it kind of starts to take on kind of a spirit island vibe then because so much of the interaction between players just grows and evolves naturally out of our decision making process instead of being tied to some regimented strict structure um you know i mean and and that's another thing too you could be playing this as a four-player game and it's still gonna go really quick because chances are if there's three or four players you're going to split up and yeah i'll be over here exploring this thing while jen's over there exploring that thing and then you can work your way over here and we can all be doing things simultaneously and saying oh crap um you know you you're the strong man you should really come over and do this now that i've revealed this okay i'm gonna walk away and you can get this next turn so the freedom of play you have in this like i said this game gets better with more players and unlike a lot of games it does not bog down if you play with the freeform mode where anybody can do anything out of there is no turn structure oh it's so great why don't more cooperative games do this um you know like a spirit island does it uh there's a game i'm covering for kickstarter pretty soon called soul raiders it's brilliant there too i want to see this more just because pandemic just because matt licock said oh you have to have a really tight regimented turn structure in a cooperative game and don't get me wrong that's great i mean pandemic is great and it creates really interesting puzzly stuff but the freedom to just do anything you want any time you want oh it just feels so good it helps pull you into the world more because you don't have those kinds of artificial restrictions that feel very very gamey i love it i love it i love it i know i love the art i love the presentation i love all the stuff that comes with this game if you get the expansion which you certainly don't need to but i love all of these miniatures that look so great oh my gosh these are just so detailed and whatever this wash is this is the way they come oh let me interrupt just to set the record straight this is the way they come with the deluxe edition of the game the regular version of the game they don't have this sunspot wash they're still very very nice big cool detailed miniatures but uh if you want this really cool look you've got a pony up for the deluxe station right i didn't have to do anything and they just look this amazing right from the gate i know you know this is a luxury item you do not need because the game comes with proxy tokens that you can use and again you won't use these very often i mean maybe you'll have one interaction with that thing i just showed you once in 50 hours but it'll make that one interaction much more special that's for sure um so the oh and then the other thing that i i raved about this i think this is the main thing i really talked about a lot uh when i did the prototype a couple of years ago and i was kind of a disadvantage because i was just going on the promise of it but now that i've actually experienced firsthand the what the developers call the emotional intelligence element of the game which really is just a fancy way of saying you have to use your intuition you have to pay attention to this world you will often be given options in this game and if you play this game the way most people play most adventure most people play most adventure games such that oh yeah make sure you open every door make sure you unlock every lock make sure you stick your hand in every dark spooky hole you find because you've got to explore it all that's a way to fail in this game because now this might be a complaint for some people and i would i would totally think it's justified this game loves to throw red herrings at you that if you're not paying attention you're not look at me because these cards they always have tons of little text that's like why is this text here and if you just ignore it then you might find yourself getting hurt a lot when you didn't need to because you just tried to do every single thing if you push every single button in this game you'll regret it um you know and that it means you do have to pay attention you have to make smart decisions in the extended run-through i was given an option to do something and i i don't know if i'm right or wrong but it seemed to me i should not do that thing and i chose not to do it and i'll find out later if i made the right choice or not but i mean and and that's all that core idea is which is just omnipresent throughout the game would be problematic for some people because some people's like no i want to push every button and then i get frustrated when you know one out of every four buttons turns out to be something that bonks me on the head and my response to you is don't just push every button don't be on autopilot read the room pay attention um you know look at you know i mean there are hint cards on there listen to the dialogue when somebody talks to you so you have a better understanding of who are they what is the best way to interact with these and when you unlock some features especially oh what is it the deliverance feature map that one is so important um because that's where it truly comes to life uh and i mean you have to make really informed you have to you have to practice empathy in this game you have to understand right this is an entity i understand what they're going to do to me i understand the roadblock they represent i have five different ways i can address them and it'll be very expensive and if i guess a lot of people would say oh they look at that and say oh you just have to guess and you pay a lot and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't and this is all garbage and to which the person who would say that i say you're not listening you have to listen to these characters you have to understand who they are i have not been led wrong because if i pay attention they are and i use the empathy that i think all of us carry with us normally we apply it to people in the real life this game demands you apply it to characters in the world who might actively trying to kill you and that's actually a beautiful thing and i haven't seen it in a game before most adventure games push every button pull every lever check every door and make sure you don't miss anything in this game you want to miss something uh as often as not and that's an important element which i love on top of that there are i forget how many dreams i think there's like something like i'd have to look it up 40 30 40 some game or probably 30 or so i could look it up i think there's like 30 different dreams each dream takes on average about an hour maybe an hour and a half and um so yeah that's where kind of the 58 hours of gameplay does occasionally you will lose and i know some people get very frustrated by that because the the penalties for losing can be problematic and this is a complaint i hear a lot about this game uh this this overworld which is this only half the overworld i mean there's still a whole bunch more then a lot of people get very very frustrated because oh i come out and i have to start here and then i have to move around here and i have to do all these slumbers if you've ever played um i don't know if they still do this anymore but old school japanese rpg games like you know the original final fantasies and dragon warrior and stuff like that there's always this concept of the overworld map and as you're walking around the overworld map every once in a while just completely randomly you'll get attacked by monsters and you can stop and fight them and if you do you'll get stronger and stronger and the game wants you to fight those because you need to get stronger to eventually take out the boss but you can always run away and while you're holding i remember i must have been a supernatural it was probably a super nintendo final fantasy 2. holding down both shoulder buttons turned all the way away and they just ran in place and they got hit in the back two or three times and eventually got away you could just run away over and over and over again but then you're not leveling up that's what this game has recreated do don't get frustrated that oh i have to do this slumber again i've done this slumber five times that slumber is an opportunity if you've done it five times you know how easy to how to solve it how to get through it these slumbers are little puzzles you have to solve and if you know how to do it you'll get any slumber i've not seen a slumber that once you've got once you've figured it out you can get them done in less than five minutes and they're they're not that dangerous um and they give you the opportunity to get progress cards in play to get more gems to get more items to get more ether so that when you actually get into the real dream and you've got the real problems it again it's the exact same formula that final fantasy used for years and um i see some people are very frustrated because i just don't have to keep finding that and you know what if you don't want to you can run away that's totally fine and then you will just i mean and it's interesting because if if you do run away you'll take a little bit of a beating you'll get a little bit weaker a little bit weaker you'll never take the opportunity to get all the stuff you want and then when you get to the dream you're like oh i'm kind of behind the eight ball because i took those small penalties and they're tiny penalties but they do add up and so that's the thing i i i don't find the slumbers tiresome at all if i'm in a hurry or if i think like i'm already in a really good position yeah i'll take a flaw card it's no big deal i'll get rid of that flaw card later or yeah i mean i've only ever seen one penalty that has really made me think twice and it's lose all your items that's painful i will but you know what that's not a particularly tough one to solve much better just to go in and beat that one or use deliverance and remove it from the game forever um you know because that's the thing these slumbers you can manipulate this deck again if you use your intuition you can get rid of the really problematic ones and just keep around the ones that you don't mind or that give you good opportunities i think it's a brilliant system i see why a lot of people don't and in fact credit where credit is due if you still are not convinced you're like ah i still hate them i refuse and i hate the um you know the death by a thousand cuts that if you run away from every single one of them you are hurting your long term chances the developers have released a continuous dream mode all you have to do is download and print out um you know a single card and what happens is every time you go to a slumber oh no it's the degenerates i hate the degenerates let me actually go get that card hold on okay here it is i printed out you don't have to i mean it's really simple you come along you're you're doing slumber ah the degenerates those are the one guys i hate and actually uh you know they're ones you can't actually run away from you can still solve them through deliverance but i just i just can't stand them i have no fun well that's why you've got the continued stream mode this just sits here and anytime you don't want to deal with one of those you can do this instead and uh what happens is if i recall correctly i i've hardly ever used it i just haven't felt the need to but it's here for people who don't like it um you do still get to go into the slumber so you can still use quarks and take advantage of them um and you still get you basically get one turn so you can play cards and start building yourself up you do take damage or seal cards so there's a little bit that kind of replicates having to deal with rabid dogs or or scary spooky ghosts or whatever it might be and um then after you're done you basically get a key you get another mystery path which is a really important secret thing that normally you have to do these slumbers to get the mystery paths but you can choose oh i'll get a key or i'll get a mystery path or i'll unseal a card if you already got your keys if you finish the mystery path you just hey i get to unseal a card you know two of the sealed cards i unseal one of them and then i can just keep on going so if you use this mode you never ever ever have to um you know do any slumber at all and you will get through the in between part you know it's like a cheat code if you played the original final fantasy or final fantasy 2 or final fantasy 3 with this cheat code that just says oh just instantly run away from everything but still every time you do it you get to level up a little bit that's what you can play with so they've made this available it's two side thing the other side is just saying you know how you set it up basically but it's a really simple thing and you've got that so for if you are have heard about this game and you've been thinking i just don't know i hear the slumbers are really obnoxious the developers have got you covered you will be missing a lot of cool things a lot of these slumbers are so neat and uh and you know and they and some of them have opportunities for really interesting emotional cathartic moments as well that i think is one of the strengths of the game but if you just don't want to deal with it look i'm just here for the dreams then use the continuous dream mode and in instead of the whole um the you know the the whole campaign taking you 50 hours it'll take you you know uh 43 hours you'll you'll cut seven hours out of the 50 hours you're gonna play by basically just skipping them yeah you know and hey it's there for you and it's i think it's done really smartly because you won't miss out on the uh you know the mystery path you will still you'll have a different way to get keys i mean if you're getting keys this way i mean you really can get to your dreams very very quickly it means you won't care about trains anymore and some of the other cool stuff you can do but hey if all you care about is the dreams you just want to go from dream to dream to dream this will do it and you're set so that's available to you and while we're talking about it let's not forget uh for people who do not like to have to read through the big book and say oh okay this and i don't have to go to oh go no okay to go that one and like oh why why don't you use the other one ah where was it they've also got the nice little uh helper app you can go online i mentioned it in the run through that you know replaces the book and gives you more hints about how to set up and and all that kind of stuff as speaking of which that's interesting thing i've seen a lot of people complain this is the worst rule book they've ever seen i don't know what to tell you folks i read literally hundreds of game rule books every year i read dozens every month because of you know because my job because i'm always evaluating games see if i'm going to cover them or not and honestly i didn't have a hard time with this it's it's it's a quirky weird rule book it makes the cardinal mistake of um hey let me tell you about all of the functions of the game before i tell you because it's not until you get to where is it where is it uh it's it's the the actual turn order is kind of weird it's kind of hidden and that's oh yeah here it is it's just kind of mentioned over here and it's like well you know this is this is the whole game you know and the whole game is by the way this is the whole game right here and it's just there could have been a couple little smart things done there but for the most part everything's there i mean this has i think by far by far the most thorough index i have ever seen in any board game rule book um you know i i i saw one uh reviewer saying wow it really drove me nuts that i couldn't find anywhere in the rule book that this one feature and i really and i went and i just looked at it and i found it right here in alphabetical order it was so easy to find i think it's a pretty good rule book um but if you have a problem with it the developers have gone out at the same time they released this they also released hey look here's a a kind of an introductory walking you through the tutorial so that it's a much easier world to jump into i will admit it's a daunting rule book you really shouldn't trust me for whether it's a good or bad rule book because i often think rule books are perfectly fine that other people can't stand just because i read so many of them but um yeah so if i think the slumbers are fun i think they're important i think they create an interesting ebb and flow because that's another thing i want to say about this game because i i mean i've seen so many people complaining about things that i think are just misunderstandings this game actively encourages and incentivizes players to engage in kind of a healthy relationship with it um because there's interesting thing you know i finish this dream that i'm on and then i'm back out in the world and um what i see a lot of people doing is right i'll just leave it set up they leave this game set up for weeks at a time because the last thing they want to do is have to save their progress because when you save your progress you lose all your damage you get your deck back but any of your progress cards that you have bought they're lost any of your gems or your ether actually you get to keep one ether i believe but you don't get to keep any of your gems you don't keep any of your keys and for a lot of people like no you know the what's it called the sunk fallacy cost i've sunk all my time into getting these things no matter what i would rather have a miserable time and just stumble along yo as a broken shell of a player when all i have to do at any time is just awaken kind of awake from the dream and that just lets you reset yes you lose your progress cards and you'll have to reset them and you might lose a couple of gems but if you watch the run through they're not that hard to get they're easy to get in fact but players feel that once i've got this stuff at all costs i will have a miserable time playing rather than entertain the notion of just letting go of stuff because if you can let go of things and just let it go and put the game back in the box play again in a few days instead of ah i lost the now i gotta go and get more keys and i gotta run all around i gotta get the keys i'm gonna just take a chill just step back say okay well you know what i learned some of the stuff i now know what's a problem in that dream i know what to avoid let me just put it away you know what um and i'll come back at it in a few days and i'll be able to get to it really quick especially quick if you want to use this and um and i'll try again uh yo i mean we as gamers i mean not all of us a lot of us have this kind of obsessive compulsive must do everything with peak efficiency must never accept any losses sunk cost fallacy type stuff and this game says nah nah dude just just relax let it go and if you're willing to do it if you approach this game in a more laid back and focus less on min max and more on intuition and observation that's the way i think the game is intended to be played and now to be fair there's nothing about the game that gives you any indication of that this is just kind of how what i have stumbled across to make it fun for me um and in fact i mean i i do kind of think they they they could have done a better job you know i mean if in the same way that where is it you know that if you are going to log out for the day you get one of these um ether cards so that you know i mean first of all if you log out for the day you can you get one last opportunity shop you don't have to make it to a mall you don't have to have shopping you get to shop and if you can't spend all your money your remaining money can be turned into this so you do have you can carry your money over why isn't there an equivalent like that for keys and gems i think if that were the case i think people would be much more comfortable with the idea of just okay i'm done with the game let me put it back in the box put it back on the shelf i'll be back in a few days as opposed to what i see so many people doing leaving it out on the table for days or weeks at a time and just after they make it through a dream and they're really hurt oh what can i do i dare not lose any because i've got four progress cards and i got all this it's locked in place and i don't want to lose that extra key i've got and now i must struggle and strive to pull my way back up so that i'm ready to take on the next dream or it turns out i can't beat the next dream because i'm still so weak and all i had to do at any time was just wake up just to wake up and reset all your stuff but people don't want to do that and i think you should be prepared to do it you should embrace it embrace change let go of the stuff because here's the interesting thing once i've got all of you know i've got my super suped out character and all of my progress cards are in and this one's then i got to get this one back and blah blah blah you know my characters kind of remember i was talking earlier about how cool it is that the game is all about you know the world changing right in front of you and you having to change because the way you seal if you keep all this stuff permanently locked in chances are you have different progress cards and maybe it would be nice every once in a while to wipe the slate clean say goodbye to them so you can have a different combination than normal that is what i have found and i appreciate the game has kind of forced me to um you know reckon with my own min maxing you know hyper efficient game style but if you're somebody if you think you can't you can't come to terms with that you might find yourself frustrated this certainly helps a lot though this um just you know anything that might be rough patches for players i think this takes care of it does mean a lot of the game is gone um but you know what hey if it was a part of the game you didn't like no harm no foul just enjoy because oh my gosh the dreams i have done i think seven dreams now every single one of them is radically different they are all interesting puzzles it's like every single dream is its own little exit the game escape room in a box type environment because they make you do things you know the way the dreams like rearrange themselves or you're looking for stu i i am so impressed by this game um let's see other problems i know one problem my wife has it makes it hard for her to go on and i can certainly see this being a problem for some people is the fact that we are amnesiatic or we're we're suffering from anesthesia we have no idea who we are what we're doing where we're going the number of times that jenna said why are we here what are we doing i just don't understand i need something and what the game does is it slowly drip feeds you little snippets of what your history was and i imagine we'll eventually find out why we're here but again i'm almost 20 hours in and i don't know yet and that was a problem for jen she needed as a player one she also had a hard time with oh i don't want to reset everything we'll just try to figure it out and we'll grind everybody complains about the grind this game has no grind at all if you don't want it it's only if you self-impose the grind that it will be here but anyway um so my wife she she wanted more direction she wanted i know this is a dream this is a surreal landscape weird funky things happen it's very mysterious what's going on it's hard to get your fingers on anything that feels solid and concrete because it's all ephemeral it's all ether um and so i know that was an issue for jen she would have liked to say no i know exactly who i am i know why i'm here i think what that means is she probably needs to start with chapter three and she wants to skip chapter one and two which are the stumbling around in the dark trying to figure out who we even are what we're trying to do so that was an issue i imagine it's perfectly reasonable i love my wife she's a very smart player she's better than me and it was an issue for her so it'd be an issue for other people too what else that's it folks i think that's all i got to say i am super super duper impressed by this game this game demands kind of a rewiring of your brain and if you're willing to do it if you're willing to accept it on its terms and you like deck building and you like multi-use cards and you like really rich atmospheric storytelling you might want to check out ether fields and that was the run through folks thanks so much for watching have a very nice day talk to you soon bye bye

Channel: Rahdo

Views: 6,425

Keywords: board games, boardgames, radho, baord game, baordgames, rahdo, baord games, baordgame, boardgame, board game, game, rhado

Id: ZMvYGGOJWRg

Length: 25min 14sec (1514 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 15 2021