So, this is
what dying feels like, ey?
10000000 is
a match-three puzzle game.
10000000 is also an RPG of sorts.
10000000 is like Rogue Legacy meeting Puzzle Quest and ‘doing it’.
10000000 is better than both Rogue Legacy and Puzzle Quest.
10000000 is a bittersweet ode to life and the inevitable acceptance of our own mortality.
10000000 is also an RPG of sorts.
10000000 is like Rogue Legacy meeting Puzzle Quest and ‘doing it’.
10000000 is better than both Rogue Legacy and Puzzle Quest.
10000000 is a bittersweet ode to life and the inevitable acceptance of our own mortality.
You play
10000000 by sliding rows or columns of tiles around a grid. You do that to
create matches of three or more of these tiles so that they disappear and do
something. At the same time as sliding tiles you have a little chap running
through a linear dungeon above them. He’ll run and run and run until he
encounters an obstacle like a door, treasure chest or physically imposing
adversary. Once he does, it’s your job to match up a suitable response to his
current predicament. FOR EXAMPLE: if your lad is butting up against an angry
bear, it’s probably best to match up a few swords and chop the bugger’s arms,
legs and 'ead off. If he’s having difficulty walking past a chest (you MUST
open all chests: this man is a proper right kleptomaniac), stacking some keys
will open it. There are also a few ancillary tiles that don’t directly interact
with anything. You’ve got backpack tiles that sometimes give you items. Shields
that help you shrug off attacks. Then there’s wood and there’s stone (building
materials, like), both of which are used to upgrade the rooms you use to
upgrade your character. That’s the RPG bit, but we’ll get to that in a few
short lines.
The overall aim of 10000000 is to score more than the titular 10000000 points on a single trip to the dungeon. Until that point you’ll be trapped in a limbo-like loop of matching tiles and dying. The faster you overcome the aforementioned obstacles, the farther to the right of the screen your little man runs. The longer you fumble to find relevant matches the closer to the left of the screen he’s pushed. Once he’s arse-to-the-edge it’s game over, so what you really want to do is not let this happen. The longer you spend not dying the more time you have besting the little obstacles, and the more besting you do the more experience, gold, building materials and points you'll accrue. Once you do, inevitably, die, you'll be thrown out to the relative safety of the upgrade screen where you can (should) upgrade bits and bobs to help you get closer to your 10000000 points goal. Experience and gold are used to bolster your passive abilities and attack/defence stats respectively, while the building materials are used to unlock subsequent levels of these bolsterers. There's also a potion room that lets you turn on modifiers to exchange one thing for another, say, "take no ranged damage at all but all other attacks are thirty per cent stronger ". It's all pretty standard stuff, really.
The overall aim of 10000000 is to score more than the titular 10000000 points on a single trip to the dungeon. Until that point you’ll be trapped in a limbo-like loop of matching tiles and dying. The faster you overcome the aforementioned obstacles, the farther to the right of the screen your little man runs. The longer you fumble to find relevant matches the closer to the left of the screen he’s pushed. Once he’s arse-to-the-edge it’s game over, so what you really want to do is not let this happen. The longer you spend not dying the more time you have besting the little obstacles, and the more besting you do the more experience, gold, building materials and points you'll accrue. Once you do, inevitably, die, you'll be thrown out to the relative safety of the upgrade screen where you can (should) upgrade bits and bobs to help you get closer to your 10000000 points goal. Experience and gold are used to bolster your passive abilities and attack/defence stats respectively, while the building materials are used to unlock subsequent levels of these bolsterers. There's also a potion room that lets you turn on modifiers to exchange one thing for another, say, "take no ranged damage at all but all other attacks are thirty per cent stronger ". It's all pretty standard stuff, really.
But it's not,
is it?
'Cos if it were all normal stuff, overarching resource gathering would be a passive activity that was only marginally connected with the bulk-gameplay of matching up them tiles, wouldn't it? Here, though, in 10000000 it's thrown in the same bucket as fighting monster people and breaking down doors in a very orderly fashion. You'll often find yourself in the very peculiar position of having to actively discard really good matches because they're in the way of the match you momentarily find yourself in need of. There were LOADS of times where I had to throw away a whole sack-full of magic wands just to open a chest to get but a coffee mug, only to run into a big bloody dragon and have nothing to combat it with but lukewarm soya milk foam. (It blew it all over my face and then I died.) I don't think I've ever played a game that asked me to balance micro and macro resource management in such a frantic and challenging way.
'Cos if it were all normal stuff, overarching resource gathering would be a passive activity that was only marginally connected with the bulk-gameplay of matching up them tiles, wouldn't it? Here, though, in 10000000 it's thrown in the same bucket as fighting monster people and breaking down doors in a very orderly fashion. You'll often find yourself in the very peculiar position of having to actively discard really good matches because they're in the way of the match you momentarily find yourself in need of. There were LOADS of times where I had to throw away a whole sack-full of magic wands just to open a chest to get but a coffee mug, only to run into a big bloody dragon and have nothing to combat it with but lukewarm soya milk foam. (It blew it all over my face and then I died.) I don't think I've ever played a game that asked me to balance micro and macro resource management in such a frantic and challenging way.
To begin with you're fucking all over the place, grabbing everything you can and gobbling it up. Wood and stone are scoffed down like pills and booze: you just can’t get enough. You’re spunking money like there was no tomorrow; upgrading your sword, then your armour, then your stave, anything really as long as you have the ‘dollar’ to spare, upgrading until you skint yourself and are forced to hit the doldrumsome dungeon again. You’re living for the weekend, my friend. It’s a blur of consumption:
Run.
Upgrade.
Run.
Upgrade.
Drink a beer.
Run.
Run.
Run.
Sleep.
Upgrade.
Run.
Until at some point you’ve had enough. Not in the bad, stung out, fat old hippy way; the way that tells everyone around you that you have, indeed, seen your share of parties. It’s more of a latter-day Scorsese way: where everyone succeeds and stays svelte despite their numerous substance addictions. At some point you’ve guzzled up enough wood and stone to the point where you don’t need them anymore for upgrades. You’ve reached the nadir of your conspicuous consumption and need to move to the suburbs, as it were. You hit up the potion room and exchange all future acquisitions for cold, beautiful, cash, knowing that now you’re in the business of prospecting and nothing, not a door, chest, limbless/headless bear, dragon or living-tree will keep you from ‘that green’.
You’re back
into the dungeon, but this time you’re there with a renewed, laser-pointed
purpose: gold. (And experience points.) You run and run and run, hoovering up
your plundered bounties like so much ‘I’ve just made the biggest deal of my
career’ cocaine. You’re not spasming around the sticky dance floor of indecisive
childhood anymore: you are the embodiment of corporate success, feathering your
nest and building your biceps in the most disgustingly chauvinistic way possible.
You bathe in gold (and experience points) until you approach your own untimely
death, only to be rescued by the comforting arms of natural physical slowdown.
You’re done again. You’ve drunk your bucket and it’s all empty. Time to slow it
down. There’s nowhere to go from here.
Except back
to the dungeon for a couple more runs.
Your last hurrah.
Once you’re approaching the end of the game a bittersweet stillness descends. Since you began playing you’ve been presented with an omnipresent finality that was so intangible it didn’t seem real. 10000000 is a pretty big number. So big, in fact, that while you were busying yourself with the constant drive for personal progression, that endpoint was getting increasingly closer to you. When the final available upgrade has been purchased there’s nothing left to hide this anymore. You’re nearly done. You’ve achieved everything you set out to achieve, barring that one, terrifying accomplishment. All your accounts are in order, everything has been finalised and, whether you like it or not, this is the end.
Your last hurrah.
Once you’re approaching the end of the game a bittersweet stillness descends. Since you began playing you’ve been presented with an omnipresent finality that was so intangible it didn’t seem real. 10000000 is a pretty big number. So big, in fact, that while you were busying yourself with the constant drive for personal progression, that endpoint was getting increasingly closer to you. When the final available upgrade has been purchased there’s nothing left to hide this anymore. You’re nearly done. You’ve achieved everything you set out to achieve, barring that one, terrifying accomplishment. All your accounts are in order, everything has been finalised and, whether you like it or not, this is the end.
So you run,
‘cos that’s the only thing left for you to do. It probably was all along.
If you don’t want ME to die just yet,
maybe consider reading the rest of this paragraph. I’ve set up one of them
Patreon pages wot a lot of other writers have got themselves these days. If you
like my thought process and fancy helping me legitimise my type of video game
criticism to a terribly unsupportive girlfriend and the wider world, then
please consider a small donation to my peerlessly altruistic cause. It resides
here: patreon.com/ashouses. Chrz.
