Club Afterglow - Rik Schaffer (From the Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines Soundtrack)
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(the cool soundtrack for this game isn't available anywhere on the internet but im still using the music player because i think its fun)
I don't really have a tonne to say about this because its only a deck-builder but it's really good!! Q-Up is a faux-competitive-multiplayer coin-flipping deck builder made for little freaks who like to watch their number go up really really high. When you Q-up (LOL!) a match it's a 4v4 where each team gets assigned a side of a coin. It's then flipped until it lands on one side 3 times, and then that team wins. It actually sounds really fucking stupid now im writing it down but you have to believe me its really addicting!! Inbetween matches you're brought back to the lobby where you can do a bunch of stuff; the main thing is the 'skills' screen which is a spreadsheet of movable nodes that do a wide variety of things. Your overall goal is to position these nodes in way that they start activating eachother and syngergising and making your score go to 10 trillion.
There's six characters you can choose from and I think that they might have the most gameplay variation in anything i've ever played. The simple concept makes the systems surrounding it so malleable that you and whoever you're Q-ing Up with (ok that doesnt work as well) are playing entirely different games. I originally started out playing as The Medic. Her skills are centered around building really high scores whenever you lose a flip, but it got so complicated towards the end that I ended up switching to a different character, The Pro. His nodes are focused around accumulating a really high Q-score (like points) based on if you were able to accurately predict who's on the enemy team before a match. This becomes trivial pretty quickly because literally everyone plays The Medic or The Gambler but it was still really fun to experiment with different node setups. It's cool how the gameplay difficulty scales upwards based on the player's abilities. You keep unlocking more and more nodes as you progress and your build becomes so complicated that it's an unknowable furious beast by the time you reach like level 20.
The over-complication of the node screen can become a little bit of an issue at times, though. There's no way to actually test a build other than to Q it Up (...) so you won't know if it sucks hard until you go through an entire match (they're like 3 minutes long but still). It makes tinkering with things pretty tedious. Sometimes you'll unlock a node that's an absolute game-changer and pretty much forces you to rebuild your entire setup, and then it's even worse because you've forgotten all the syngergies you had setup before. Another problem with the node screen is the fact that it's pretty rigid. The characters have alot of variation, but I suspect the builds produced by most players who make it to the end will probably look pretty similar. This became a real problem when I was playing as The Medic, because I didn't notice that pretty much any high-score build is built solely on the shoulders of one inconspicous node. It's pretty antithetical for a deck-builder to operate like this but it's not a problem that I encountered too often so I don't mind.
The visual design of Q-Up is clearly parodying a modern free-to-play hero shooter, but it's so well-done that it loops back around to being really good. The character designs are all really varied and unique, I like The Troll and The Whale especially. The dopamine you get from activating all of your nodes in 3.3 milliseconds and getting 40 billion points scratches the right part of my brain too. On top of that, the music is amazing!! I was really bummed that I couldn't find the soundtrack on YouTube or anything because I couldn't put it on the music player for this page. put it on spotify please!! The tracks that play during matches are the best ones
There's a vague narrative thread that runs through the game as you level up. It's conveyed through e-mails but if im being honest I started skimming them pretty quickly. Most of them are written in a very universal paperclips hyper-intellectual prose that I can't comprehend. It's cool that it's in there though! I like narratives that unfold without any character prescence (you can read my dissertation if you want to read more about that!! haha!! ha!).
Q-Up is the perfect game for you if you are like top 500 lamest losers on the planet and you want to spend 10 hours watching a coin flip and moving nodes around on a spreadsheet. Luckily I like that exact thing so this is like top 5 games released this year for me. It's a little restrictive which was unfortunate but I still had a blast playing it! I even beat it twice! I'll probably continue to Q it Up (LOL!) in the future. It probably won't happen but it would be really cool to see the devs go all-in on the live service aspect and continue to add new characters. one more coin flip and then im going to bed i promise
