Blogging the experience of gameplayhttps://www.gamelog.cl/gamers/GamerPage.php?idgamer=1https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7996The night before last I played some more and beat the gauntlet! I felt very chuffed about that...kept on going, got to another boss (Parn!) beat that, and immediately after was ANOTHER boss...I lost really quickly and got really mad. In my mind it was boss gauntlet + Parn + final boss...with no saves in between and the thought of doing it all over was too much. So, I put the game down pretty confident that I'd just have to watch the ending on Youtube or something. Last night I picked it up for a "last attempt" of sorts - before that though I scoured the map and found a few secret areas I had missed! And one area that was now accessible I had forgotten about. Good thing I did, I got a new weapon (the Chakram?) with great range, for a little less damage, but just the sort of thing I'd need for the final boss fight. I then stocked up on potions, swapped my spell to one I thought might work better, and went back in. And success! (I think I had to try twice) And in the end, was it all a dream. Sure. With some more to it...but still. The epilogue was nice, though it was weird to going back to level 1 with none of the additional movement unlocked - not that there was any challenge. It feels strange to beat a game like this. I usually bail a lot earlier due to my lack of interest in practicing enough to improve enough so I can clear certain challenges. This game hit the sweet spot for me - it wasn't trivial, and I felt like I improved and learned the game's systems over time.Tue, 22 Sep 2026 07:38:16 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7996&iddiary=13554https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6108It's weird for me to think/write that the most important "contribution" this game has had for me is how useful/intriguing it's been to show students in experimental games class. The game is strange and quirky and funny and genuinely interesting as a puzzle box style game, especially once you've peeled back a few of its layers and understand how the game's support to work. Over the years fewer students have heard of it, or played it, which is both good and bad. Good means there's more room for it to be genuinely surprising to them, bad means it's also increasingly more "strange" - I've found that students have a lot less to go on with this game since it is so exploratory in the beginning. Hmm. it would have also made a good addition to the "thinky games" cycle when we did the game design seminar... Now that I'm at a new place with a new group of students, I wonder how it would go with them? It's been a while since I've played it - and I don't recall which endings I got or anything like that, but it seems like I did make decent progress since I've only got 5 locked achievements. One if for every ending, the other for ending 25 without unnecesary buttons being pressed. 3 are hidden.Sun, 20 Sep 2026 13:12:20 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6108&iddiary=13553https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7996I'd been playing until I got stuck on a fight - it's a two-parter boss against a soldier guy. The second part is against a sort of zombie/ghoul version of this soldier guy who spews green venom and turns into toxic clouds. After scouring the map for missing things - found a few new upgrades (not interesting ones at this point) and filled in the map a bit more which was nice - I finally realized that I could buy more than one health potion (up to 10!) and I've come to better appreciate how the magic select menu works. So, I devised a new strategy for the boss fight. I'd get to the 2nd phase and swap out the spell with healing potions and try to use those to stay alive. And it worked! I was down to 3 or so...but still. Yay! I'm now in Stage 6. I think this might be the last chapter? So, I kept on moving through new areas...and went back to older areas too - found a few secret areas as well (null space on the map)...and then I hit what I hope does NOT become a new wall. Maybe this is the end/last battle? It's basically been - so far - a gauntlet of all the bosses (I think all?) in the game. And, while I don't think they've been scaled in difficulty (meaning some are way easier than when I fought them originally), it is quite tiring.. I did quite well until I got to the boss fight I'd just been stuck on earlier. My hands were cramping up and I just...couldn't. Thankfully after I forget which boss there are items between them to heal up and such...but still. I think I lost this one from nerves and cramps more than difficulty? Though, I dread to see what happens AFTER this one. Will there be another boss? Sigh. I hope not.Sun, 20 Sep 2026 12:41:02 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7996&iddiary=13552https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=8023As I was installing the game I wondered why I had picked it up in the first place. So, I flip the case over and read the back - nothing really stands out until I look down and see "Grasshopper Manufacture". Ah. Ok. Grasshopper's oeuvre is interesting in that it's always weird, and strange, and they somehow manage to stay in business which makes it also surprising to me. I think the last game of theirs that I played was "Sun Flower..something..something". A strange DS game that was strange and creepy and I don't think I ever finished. I won't open a separate tab to check my gamelog for that one...but whoever reads this might want to. Anyways. The game has a really striking visual style - and it's really "noisy" i the visual UI sense. Lots of text coming on, and pictures of the characters in different places on the screen (not always the same place), and words that sort of float around in the background...and little animated effects. It's all very busy, attention grabbing, and just - to me - visually noisy in a way that made me less interested. Apparently the version I have is a remaster of an older one, so I wonder if the low-res poly graphics (e.g. car driving down an embankment at night) and such are kept in smaller windows because it wouldn't look good today and all the rest of the decorative screen stuff is what's been updated? Anyways. There was lots of reading. Watching stuff, more reading and very little gameplay...and when the gameplay started it was "fine" (moving around a 3D environment in first-person view, but grid-based, like the old CRPGs Bard's Tale or the dungeons in Ultima and Wizardry). It didn't feel interesting - story least of all - so I finished the first chapter and called it quits. I just bounced off the writing, the story/context seemed strange but not intriguing...so, time to move on.Sun, 20 Sep 2026 12:26:42 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=8023&iddiary=13551https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7919Hmm, still "playing" though I would very often forget to "check in" when I first arrived in Rochester. So, for a hot minute, I though I might have been done with it. The other night I played the card game - demo at a store - and was surprised to learn that the card game is basically a super set of this game. I guess I didn't have a real conception of the difference between them - I thought that the cards were all the same, but they're not! This actually made me a bit less interested in this game, since it really is a watered down version of the regular card game. I do think it's an interesting approach that I don't know of other examples? Because it really does seem like a subset rather than a "new" or "different" or "variant" version. I wonder if someone's looked closely at them?Thu, 17 Sep 2026 20:24:16 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7919&iddiary=13550https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7940I feel bad that I didn't keep on playing this one. At this point all of my handwritten notes and reminders and things I'd figured out are long gone...and this doesn't seem like the kind of game you can just pop back into. I think there's too many things going on. So, I'm just going to call it my loss and close out the game log...Thu, 17 Sep 2026 20:19:59 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7940&iddiary=13549https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7996Still playing! I'm surprised myself, to be honest. I usually hit some sort of wall with these games - usually a boss fight - I try for a certain amount of time, eventually give up and move on. I'm currently on the 5th stage, right before another boss battle with one in the can already. The story is - I think pretty obviously - one of a character (Deedlit) in some sort of nightmare/dream hell...so I'm curious how this will end. Sadly, I don't remember how/when the anime ends, and I have no idea if this game is supposed to take place somewhere in the regular continuity? The fire an arrow at a gear puzzles are still a bit annoying - mostly because timing is a bit tricky for some of them, but I've been able to get past without too much trouble even if there's a bit of frustration at times. I also feel like I'm getting better - in general - at the boss fights. I've realized how maintaining distance is important, I'm also getting better at swapping between the yellow/blue modes because when you're at level 3 with one, you automatically heal, so if you take a hit, switching over is a way the heal up and it's saved me more than once. The map is really dense and convoluted in a way that's quite impressive. I guess I'd describe the overall map like a giant rectangle and it seems like it's all pretty much filled in! I wonder how much more there is to the game. The 4th stage felt rather short, and looking at the map it doesn't seem like there's many more places it could go (I guess an entirely new map would be the obvious?) Fingers crossed that I'm able to continue...Thu, 17 Sep 2026 20:18:03 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7996&iddiary=13548https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=8021Oh, the main reason I got bored is because, once the levels start to get a lot more complicated, I found myself in the situation of having to painstakingly "rebuild" bridges from scratch because my first attempt just just off by a little bit...and you can't really do things like select a whole construction and, say, move it to the left a little bit...you just have to built it again from scratch, which got a bit tiresome - felt more busywork. That being said, because the physics simulation isn't quite 100% predictable - there are moments of genuine surprise and laughter. Each level has essentially two goals - get one cart across and get a convoy (multiple, that come out at a regular rate) of carts across. The convoy part was definitely more fun because your bridge might work for one cart, but oscillate a bit such that the next cart barely missed, and then there's a whole pileup with carts flipping and getting stuck or the entire bridge swinging out of control.Sat, 12 Sep 2026 16:02:23 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=8021&iddiary=13547https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=8021I played 40 plus levels, it was fun, didn't take too long but began to get a bit tiresome (which is why I've bailed and moved on). This game is a portal-themed bridge-constructing game in which carts move automatically and you have to build structures that will sustain/hold them on their way to a pre-determined exit. It's physics based, and having taken static mechanics as an undergraduate I appreciated the load-balancing/bearing principles behind a lot of the gameplay. However, the game's gameplay is portal-themed and not portal-based. In the main Portal games (1 and 2), the cognitive challenge comes from figuring out where to place portals and how to navigate yourself (your character, in first-person view if I recall) around an area such that you can reach the exit. In this game, the portals (and later gels for speedy and bouncy effects) are already placed - you just need to build bridges. This is fair to the game's title - just an observation not a complaint. In fact, the existence of portals arguably makes the puzzles themselves more interesting because it affords larger areas withing a single screen/area. If a level in this context is a large rectangular "diorama" - there are only certain ways to navigate from, say, the top left corner down to the bottom right. Portals allows the game's designers to create different navigational paths that violate the regular rules you'd have to follow in a normal space - Portaling around is basically teleporting (going from A to B without traversing anything in between) - so you can have more "interesting" routes you need to build bridges in. I haven't played the other games in the series, which I assume have their own interesting mechanics and level-things to avoid/make use of, and I wonder if "teleporters" were used in their earlier games? If so, then this game is a lot less interesting - after all it limits itself to portal themed things (switches, sentry guns, the gels, etc.) while the other games could presumably have all that and much more. Still, as a theming exercise, it's really well done - GladOs and more...and fun little interstitials every 10 levels (or was it 20?).Sat, 12 Sep 2026 15:58:36 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=8021&iddiary=13546https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7997I kept on playing the main story - it did become a bit of a drag mostly because I did not care about the story or characters - in the vain hope that this might unlock an additional table to play on. Alas, this was not the case. It did not help that I kept unlocking different cosmetic items and virtual things that threw me off - there was one whose icon was a small pinball table. It took me a while to figure out what they referred to and, sadly, it was not a new table. That being said, I thought the game's table goal design was interesting and how it triggers a broader goal you reach and then move on. Another way to describe it is that the game's main mode of play (the story mode) is one in which the pinball table is NOT played "until you lose", rather it is play until you complete it's goals - and then it forcibly ends you get another story sequence. There is, of course, an "endless" mode which I would call "regular pinball". LOL. As I write this I continue to wonder why they decided NOT to go with a vertical orientation for play but alas. The different camera angles helped some, but I still felt like the game was harder to play than it should have been (it wasn't hard to play, just made harder) because of the aspect-ratio limiting how much you could see on screen or how small/big it would be. I found better success changing the pinball to different colored/textured ones I unlocked because they had better contrast with the background table... Oh, also the tables often got stuck in an "infinite" situation that I had to nudge out of to continue playing, which is why the endless mode and score chasing are kind of pointless. BUT, it was an interesting game. Creepy in many ways, but true to the series theme (which is, I guess, creepy/pervy already?). The table goal design were interesting, even if I found it hard to follow them (look at the right-side of the screen while playing)...Sat, 12 Sep 2026 15:48:09 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7997&iddiary=13545