Back when Flask was announced, I was immediately drawn to its twisted art style and macabre premise. Now that I’ve just finished playing the new demo, I’m looking forward to it for other reasons.
Don’t get me wrong, Flask still looks fantastic. There’s a whole bunch of personality woven into every pixel, and overall, the presentation is really good thanks to the work of artist John Kenn Mortensen. In fact, from the art to the voice work, it’s all very tongue-in-cheek and quite silly, and because it’s playful, Chop Chop Games gets away with being really frickin’ gross.
My refreshed enthusiasm comes from playing around with the game’s various systems in the new demo, which dropped today over on Steam PC (Mac, Win). You can download it here, should you wish.
Flask is gross because the main economic resource in the game is green blood. That being so, the monsters you encounter aren’t obstacles to overcome on your journey, but rather the targets of your excursions and the victims of your scheming.
You’re playing as an alchemist, who, along with a gang of heavies/homunculi, is off in search of the monster blood needed to make their fortune. I mean, it’s not subtle allegory…
You move around the world map in a giant tower, rolling from destination to destination, and kind of like Monster Train’s tracks, the path takes you one way or t’other. These locations include shops where you can get new tonics for your units, or events where you can upgrade stuff in your inventory.
When it’s time to draw blood, you engage in automated battles. Each unit must be equipped with potions that then translate into attacks and blocks (and other, more nuanced moves), and the order they’re positioned is vital to the effectiveness of your units.
The battles versus the CPU are all well and good, but things get much more challenging when you’re up against other players. This combat is asynchronous, so you don’t need to worry about other people and their ping, but the human-made builds are much better than the CPU ones, so prepare for an added challenge every third battle.
You can take a loss, but once you’ve had three, it’s game over and back to the start. That actually gives you plenty of chances to explore the world map and level up your units/potions, and find some interesting synergies via the various tonics in your collection.
There is a lot going on in the demo, but it offers a good look at Flask and its systems as Chop Chop and Ghost Ship finish preparing it for release. I’m not sure exactly when that will be, but as soon as I know, so will you, Dear Reader!
