Episode 41: Someone Please Teach Me How to Play The Bazaar

Transcript

do you ever feel like you're just doing it wrong like like whatever whatever the thing is that
you're doing it seems way more difficult than it's supposed to and it seems like everybody else
is clued into something that you're just missing and this can't be a completely uncommon experience
this is how i have felt about playing uh this new game or relatively new game the bizarre
so i'm just gonna give a quick rundown because for whatever reason i have followed the
build like the develop design development like build trajectory and community around this game
that's that's not a thing i typically do what makes it more bizarre is that the guy this guy uh
reynad i believe his name is i am not even sure i'm pronouncing it right uh r r-e-y-n-a-d reynad
he so he was a streamer from what i have put together of this he was a streamer
he primarily played i believe he came up through match at the gathering and which i never saw him
uh play i don't think made his way into things like hearth's hearthstone and some other you know
uh other online games i i never once watched this guy stream anything i i don't know almost anything
about him however for whatever reason i i bumped into him somewhere around not physically but like
i bumped into his content somewhere around the time that he was beginning to he was making his way to
wanting to launch a game of his own i'm gonna say this was
uh 2017 ish something like that 16 17 i don't know so i started bumping into this this guy's some
of this guy's content he was gonna make this game he gets on to indiegogo which is sort of like a
sort of like a competitor to kickstarter he gets funded puts out a few videos about what it is he's
trying to build he wants to make this game called the bizarre uh that that you know bizarre being like
the market kind of bizarre not like bizarre things but the the marketplace kind of idea and he wants to
build this game it's around you know you you're you're in a marketplace and there's a bunch of
interesting characters and there's a game in there somewhere right that was sort of the pitch
i was and and then there was like nothing for a long time and i was certain that this thing was
just vaporware that it was just never going to actually occur um again i i have no particular tie
to this individual but but i kept just checking in on this thing for whatever reason i i wish
i wish i could more specifically remember why it is that i just every every i don't know
five six months i would just check in like oh there was that bizarre thing i wonder what's going on with
that i would love to learn some lessons from from how this guy somehow hooked me to bother checking in
on a game from a person i don't know about gameplay i never saw for over the course of and here's a
spoiler alert this game ended up taking like six or seven or maybe eight years to build it just came
out so this thing just launched to the public this calendar year in 2025 so i you know got an account
and i got in there and started playing it i i do i am enjoying this game at least to some extent
it has a they nailed the flavor i think there is you are clearly in some sort of fantasy slash sci-fi
slash steampunk-esque type of environment you're at a marketplace you buy stuff and then it makes you
better and then there's this auto battler part of things if you don't know what auto battlers are
battlers are go take a look at that i really like auto battlers when they're done well like i've been
an auto chess player for many many years now so it's got some really cool elements there's clearly a big
focus on synergy within the gameplay so that the general game loop uh you kind of you go you buy some
items you fight some computer enemies you buy some more items you kind of upgrade your stuff as you
go you become stronger and then you fight against other players it's it's a well put together game
loop and it's asynchronous yet still competitive which is a pretty cool mix i like that mix so you
don't need to necessarily be matched up directly the other player they i think it's just storing what
that player had that time in the game and you get to play against them so it's got some neat design
elements to it i would say and the flavor is great and the art is great and i like how they've given
the npcs like personality a lot of good stuff here's the thing i cannot win a game i am terrible
at this game every game i play i get in there and i'm like oh this is gonna be great i've got these
synergies i bought some good stuff i've created a thing and i just lose and i just lose and lose
and occasionally i win like a round but i never i never win the full sweep of it it's like a i think
like a 10 day cycle so you kind of go through 10 total rounds kind of thing throughout the course
of the game cannot win and i feel like i've got to be doing something wrong here this game can't be
this difficult right i just came in i have no ranking i'm not presumably playing against anyone of
particular uh skill level i've got the the beginner character and you know whatever the
beginner and the other thing is when i then i don't i also don't understand how you get new stuff i don't
really understand that either so i think that the actual interface while it looks really pretty has
some like functionality stuff to to work on it it feels like i imagine i'm supposed to be opening
some sort of chest loot box things that presumably i'm supposed to get through the course of winning
rounds of a game i think and then i assume that inside of there there's like new items i can find
that then will show up in shops or something like but i don't i don't i don't really know i i don't
really understand how how the actual it's weird i i don't know i understand how the gameplay works
i have no idea how the actual like building of your collection and stuff like that works
but also in the game even though i i feel like i understand what it's doing
i still can't win and i'm terrible at it all this is kind of a roundabout way to say a few things
first of all whatever this guy did to build a community swirl around the development of this game
seems to be very successful i don't think it was just me this this game every time i checked in
on it seemed to have an ever-growing community of people sitting around waiting for this thing to
happen so that was pretty cool uh the other thing is i would recommend checking this game out like if
you're looking for a game that to kind of just it's not terribly long to play it's pretty fun
you know good gameplay loop something a bit different i'd say than a lot of other stuff
that's out there check it out see see how you like it uh the visuals are really nice the game
play is pretty fun there's a lot of choices you feel like a lot of agency in some ways i think at
certain points there might actually be too much agency where it almost starts to border on randomness
but it's still it give it a whirl if you haven't if you have no idea what i'm talking about go look
it up it's called the bizarre the other thing is if somebody knows how to play this thing
let me know because i'm terrible at it and i'd like to get a little bit better