Blogging the experience of gameplayhttps://www.gamelog.cl/gamers/GamerPage.php?idgamer=1269https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7905I never really got into this, despite getting most of the way through the campaign (about 4 out of 5 chapters). There is a lot more to manage than in the first game. In Frostpunk 2, you no longer have just one city around a generator, but also outposts to run and a big map to explore. There are more resources to manage. There are more systems to manage. There are multiple factions to manage. It's hard to keep track of everything! Despite the bigger scope, it's a really similar game. Build your city, keep the people warm, calm, and free of disease and squalor. The temperature goes up and down and you must adapt accordingly, reallocating heat to different districts such that citizens can continue working (ideally uninjured) and not get sick or die of cold. If the cold sets in, things break down fast. Threatening again are the "whiteouts," huge blizzards that last for weeks. You must prepare for them ahead of time, stockpiling food, coal and oil, materials, goods, and so on. There was a major whiteout in chapter 2 or 3 that I had prepared well for in terms of stockpiling, but I hadn't accounted for how unhappy all the factions would get because of the cold. All four factions hated me, my trust went to 0, and they were going to vote to depose me (which is a game over). I couldn't believe it and the only thing I can figure I could have done differently is overheat the generator. But I didn't do that because I was scared it would malfunction. Or perhaps you are supposed to come out of the whiteout hated by everyone and have to rebuild their trust. I funded factions' projects, reallocated heat to their homes, let them pass whatever laws they wanted, and promised them power, and just in the nick of time before the vote, I gained the amount of trust I needed. I rebuilt all that trust, continued exploring and expanding into chapter 4, where a new outpost required for progression became unmanageable due to mistakes I made. With this particular outpost, you can choose to settle it or salvage cores (valuable and rare resources) to power the generator of your main city to the max level. I chose to salvage, but there are toxic fumes in the outpost. These get worse as you break the ice and extract resources, and I just kept losing so many people from disease. I replenished them over and over, but couldn't keep track of that and funneling other resources to the outpost at the same time, as well as managing my main city and first outpost. The outpost's generator kept losing power, one faction was really pissed off and kept destroying housing districts, which meant my people kept becoming homeless and freezing to death. I finally researched and built a watchtower for security, but then the faction attacked my industrial zone that was automating extraction (so fewer workers died from toxic fumes). Through all this, the generator kept powering down, I think because I didn't have energy extraction set up there and I wasn't funneling efficiently from my main base. Looking back on it, I probably should have built housing in the hills above the toxic fumes so at least my workers wouldn't die at home. My favorite thing was trying to play all the factions. There's a system again where you pass laws, and each faction can gain and lose representatives in a chamber. They each have different ideologies too, and you might align with one over the other. But of course, doing something aligning with one or two factions might piss off another one, so you're always balancing. The game is transparent about how many votes laws need to pass, and if you need more votes, you can make promises to factions that were hesitant. This serves the dual purpose of getting your law passed and making a hesitant faction happy by fulfilling your promise. Anyway, managing all these different things was very stressful and felt like pushing a boulder up a hill. I appreciate the complexity of Frostpunk 2, and I still love the environment, story, and tough choices. But like the first game, it's not enough to make me love playing it. I saw, oddly enough, that these developers have another game that just came out on Game Pass, The Alters, which looks unique. I might give that a look in the next few weeks.Sat, 14 Jun 2025 13:35:10 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7905&iddiary=13405https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7910Epic epic epic! I had zero expectations for this, having never heard of it until sometime after it came out and seeing that it got really good reviews. If you like Uncharted, you have to play Indiana Jones. Or if you like Indiana Jones movies. It's very authentic. It's by MachineGames, who has been doing the (mostly) excellent Wolfenstein games. They're sticking with the Nazi antagonist theme. This has Wolfenstein DNA, it feels like Uncharted and Tomb Raider, and it also feels like (unexpectedly) an immersive sim like Dishonored or Thief or something. It's REALLY good. I’m going to rattle off a handful of things I liked and then note a few rough patches. (1) Story. Solid. I was invested. It’s a typical treasure hunt mystery “go to x places to get the x items” thing, but well done. The voice acting is top notch from all the leads, and even from side characters and random Nazis. The Harrison Ford likeness was cool to see. Characters were well written, good dialogue, good banter between Indy and Gina. An excellent bad guy, a Nazi archaeologist named Voss. He’s sufficiently patriotic and out of his mind for power, arrogant, cruel, and manipulative. (2) Environments and level design. Outstanding. There aren’t a ton of areas that you’ll visit, but there is a lot of variety. Some areas are like semi-open world maps, while others are more linear. The semi-open world maps are full of places to explore, secrets to find. Discovery is organic. You’ll be infiltrating a Nazi camp and come across a “mystery” (the game’s category of puzzles, often finding and deciphering codes to open safes or locate a tomb or something). You might start the mystery by reading a note. Or, you might come across a piece of information from a note or an NPC or something that starts “fieldwork” (the game’s term for side quests). Fieldwork can be involved and is the side content that is most worth doing. There is usually a story component, often new characters, good puzzles, a great trippy sequence after Indy touches a poisonous frog, and so on. You can take or leave all the side stuff though. Some of it is well hidden, and I imagine it would take a good long while to find all the secrets in this game. Side content gives rewards you with money, adventure points (experience), and items. I purchased every skill I had access to by the end of the game, had a ton of points left, and had plenty of side content left to do. So, you won't be starving for experience. Also, the pacing is on point. There is a good mix of puzzles, exploration, combat, and cut scenes. You’re always moving forward toward some goal or another, even if it’s self-directed goals like “I’m going to clear out this Nazi camp” or “I’m going to stop at all these islands and see what’s on them.” The platforming is fun too, which usually goes along with the puzzling. (3) Melee. Something that felt unique about this game is the melee focus. Indy famously punches Nazis, so that’s what he does in the game. There are melee weapons scattered all over the place, everyday items like pots and pans, guitars, pickaxes (lots of excavation equipment), clubs, hair brushes, brooms, etc. Near the end of the game I found a violin and bow and made sure to clobber enemies with them. You can block and throw a charged punch too, as well as parry and counter-attack. You can also employ your signature whip to disarm enemies. Especially as you go further in the game, enemies will have guns, which you are also welcome to pick up and use as clubs, or you can shoot them. Enemies tend to match your combat style though, so if you use your fists, they probably will too, or they’ll pick up a nearby weapon (and often will throw things at you). If you open fire though, if they have guns, they’ll shoot back. Plus, enemies from all over the place nearby will converge on your location. Shooting someone often meant death a minute later. Some things that felt broken: (1) Dogs. Patrol dogs are annoying. I couldn’t figure out how to stop them from attacking me. The game says that if you whip them, they flee, and that they’re also scared of gunshots. I would whip them and they would completely ignore it, latching onto my arm anyway. I would shoot them, and it seems that the game has a “no animal violence” thing because bullets simply don’t do anything to the dogs. The game also says that you can mash left and right click to get the dog off you, but it didn’t work. So, every time a dog saw me, there was nothing I could do but let it attack me! Then, once it attacked, a whip crack would keep it away. (2) Dropping items. You can drop items by pressing “Q” and you will drop whatever you’re holding if you press “tab” to open your bag or “2” to take out your camera or lighter. This was very annoying early on, though less so as you learn the rules by which Indy drops things. It was also less annoying as I realized that it was just being realistic. Indy has two hands. He can’t use a camera and steer a boat at the same time, can’t climb a ladder and hold a gun, can’t bandage himself and hold a map, etc. BUT, what didn’t get any less annoying is that way too often the dropped item will “disappear.” You can’t see it on the ground. Sometimes this was because you’d drop it and it would “bounce” away. Other times, it just resets to its original location. And one time, I couldn’t complete a mystery puzzle because I dropped an item in a pit, but I couldn’t get it back out of the pit because Indy can’t hold his whip with both hands and carry an item at the same time. Actually, thinking back to this now, I probably could have thrown the item up and out of the pit. At that time, I didn’t know I could throw things. This is because… (3) Not much explanation for UI. The game tells you surprisingly little in terms of how to play and what things mean. This was neat for “figuring it out,” but, like I said, I didn’t know how to throw items until later in the game! And I had to look up what the various bars meant (hint: the white bars are health, the blue ones you get by eating food are “bonus” health, and when you eat fruit, you get extra yellow bars which is like reserve stamina). There is an in-game manual that doesn’t have this stuff in it. It’s weird. The game also doesn’t explain how to go back to previous areas of the game until AFTER you do it. And there’s a scary “you will lose unsaved progress” when you click to go back to a previous area, so I didn’t do it at first, and eventually looked it up. I would play a sequel in an instant. Hopefully MachineGames is making another! Or they could make another Wolfenstein game. At this point, I'll play whatever they make, especially if it's about killing Nazis, which they seem to be the best at making games about. Thu, 12 Jun 2025 16:51:43 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7910&iddiary=13401https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7904Doom: The Dark Ages was a good time, but the franchise is starting to take itself too seriously. I remember enjoying the stories of Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal, but this one was an eye-roller. Of course, it's just an excuse to kill demons, which is fine, but I don't need the excuse. It provides the Slayer motivation too, but again, I don't need him to have a reason for what he's doing. I didn't care about any of the characters--not the king, not his daughter, not the various named lieutenants and soldiers whose names I never learned. The main bad guy was very evil and bad, as befitting a prince of Hell, but I don't know what his motivation was besides...power? Kill Sentinels? Why? The fat guy, Kreed Makyr, I liked better. He reminded me of Baron Harkonnen in Dune. So, story, overly serious and who cares. The running and gunning is as satisfying as ever. Whereas the previous two Doom games focused on the risk/reward of proximity, The Dark Ages edges away from melee. Although there are melee weapons, the star here is your new shield. You can use it to close in quickly and bash enemies, but I far more often used its thrown buzzsaw function, which stuns enemies and allows for various effects. For example, you can upgrade the regular machine gun to ricochet when shooting an enemy affected by the buzzsaw shield. Throw the shield, fire the machine gun, watch the bullets tear through nearby enemies. Very satisfying. The roster of guns is great and, as with Doom Eternal, most have their place for rock-paper-scissoring enemies in certain situations. The plasma rifle explodes enemies with plasma shields. The shotgun and the ball-hurling gun do more damage to armor, which you can then break by throwing your shield. The machine gun that does spread damage is great for clearing out hordes of fodder demons. The one that I used the least was the sniper rifle, which wasn't really a sniper rifle. You can't zoom and it more "lobs" the bullet (arcs and falls short) than shoots it straight. So, you can't actually snipe, which is fair enough; it just made the gun pretty pointless for me. All guns can be upgraded a few times, and I ended up playing almost exclusively with the alternate plasma rifle, which supercharges, doing tons of damage to an enemy and arcing electricity to nearby enemies, which then explode when you shoot them. In terms of the combat encounters, this was an evolution of Doom Eternal, which was nice. I liked the somewhat open maps where you'd stumble upon groups of enemies, rather than walk into a room, have the walls come up, and do one arena battle after another. Although walls would come up, creating arenas, they were usually much bigger, more varied, and felt more organic. By the end, you were dealing with numerous tough enemies at once, sprinting around, targeting armor, parrying, cycling your weapons, etc. And I have to mention parrying, another new combat focus. This was in Doom Eternal a little bit, but parrying is now a big part of combat. Enemies sometimes have a green animation with their attacks, or will shoot a green projectile at you. These can be parried. Parrying has various effects, such as stunning nearby enemies, spawning an auto-turret, and shooting out a fan of homing knives. You have to learn to telegraph enemy moves and parry in the midst of all the chaos on the screen. It was FAR more forgiving than something like Sekiro. I'm also currently playing Nine Sols, which has Sekiro-like parrying. Hopefully these games help me with Sekiro! There are also three different modes of combat. Mostly, you are the Slayer, on the ground, running and gunning. Sometimes, you pilot this giant mech to fight enemy titans. Other times, you fly a dragon and engage in some air combat. These segments were epic for sure, and they broke up the gameplay, but I much preferred the regular on-the-ground combat. It's so crunchy. Everything has weight to it, sounds great, looks awesome. Finally, there are secrets galore, so you can spend your time exporing the maps, poking around to find all the gold, upgrade materials, collectibles, and so on. I did not focus on this, and probably averaged like 60-70% completion on the maps. You use your shield a lot for platforming around, throwing it at switches and whatnot. I probably would have explored more, but, you know, Game Pass only lasts for a month and I've got a lot to get through! First Game Pass game of June, down. Definitely recommend Doom: The Dark Ages if you want a fast and frantic FPS.Sat, 07 Jun 2025 08:33:17 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7904&iddiary=13396https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7898This is a solid metroidvania, hits high marks in all aspects. It's not Hollow Knight and it's not Ori, but it's up there. It’s set in a dark medieval fantasy type world, has a beautiful soundtrack and great artwork. The story is presented in that cryptic souls-like fashion and told primarily through notes in the environment, usually written by characters that you defeat or White Priestesses. It tells of the Blight, a never-ending rain that falls, infecting people and driving them mad. Combat and movement are both tight and responsive. There are like 25 weapons. I think that the most unique design piece is that your weapons are not weapons at all, but are the spirits of (mini)bosses that you defeat. Your character is a frail priestess and the spirits fight at her command. You can equip six of them at once (in two sets of three), so you always have a variety of attacks to deploy. Some are “main” attacks and others are “subskills.” The difference, usually, is that main skills can be used an unlimited number of times, while subskills have a specific number of uses before they run out. When you stop at a respite (save point), you refill your skill uses and health potions. Some main skills do have limited uses though, and near the end of the game, I realized that you can equip multiple main skills in each set. I had assumed that you could have one main skill and two subskills per set of three. This seemed so obvious to me that I didn’t even try to equip multiple main skills and only did so by accident! I wonder if my play style would have changed had I discovered that earlier. Anyway, some skills are melee, some are ranged, some excel at hitting airborne enemies, there is a strong poison cloud that deals damage over time, a movement skill, a stun skill, fast weak attacks, slow strong attacks, skills that can charge attack, and so on. Since you can equip six, you’ll have something for every occasion, and can really tailor them for boss fights. One neat thing is that you can use multiple skills at the same time. Since “you” are not attacking, your spirits can do so simultaneously. All skills can be leveled up using a specific type of experience, basic stuff. The level design is pretty good, but the rooms do get kind of same-y and boring after a while. This sucks because you will backtrack a lot. The map doesn't help with this, since it doesn't give you much information. For example, the rooms are all represented with variously sized squares or rectangles and no other defining features. The only icons on the map are respites (save points), white lines connecting rooms you have been to, and red dots for entrances/exits that you haven't been through yet. Rooms will also turn orange if you have collected all the items inside, which was handy. But there are no icons indicating other objects, obstacles, or enemies. Metroidvanias often mark bosses on the map, mark obstacles with some icon indicating what it is or what tool you might need to bypass it, and so on. Given the amount of backtracking to explore new areas after getting new traversal abilities, it became frustrating that the map didn’t tell me which obstacles were where. This meant that I had to try and remember what obstacle was blocking the constant number of 10-20 unexplored entrances, making my way back through sometimes maze-like rooms to check each obstacle to see if I could bypass it now. So, the map was a bit disappointing, but I guess props for giving me a feeling of achievement and discovery by making me work for exploration. Miniboss battles were easy, basically just buffed versions of regular enemies. I recall dying a few times on the first ones, but I think I one-shot like 15 of them. Boss battles were excellent and provided more of a challenge. Most bosses have three phases that predictably change at 66% and 33% HP. Most took less than a few tries, but I remember three that took a while, including the last boss, which I looked up how to beat because I just wanted to finish the game. I learned that a lot of weapon and relic combinations are (over)powerful. I had been dying for a good hour on the final boss, but after I looked it up and tried a suggested build, I killed it in two tries (and had full health, no health potions used!). There is a sequel out. It has overwhelmingly positive ratings on Steam but it looks really, really similar to Ender Lilies. It would be another solid metroidvania to play, but if it's just more of the same (though by all accounts polished in every way), then I'm not particularly interested, at least no time soon. I do have Nine Sols to play on Game Pass (soon?), so maybe I’ll get a pretty direct comparison to another recent highly rated metroidvania. Wed, 28 May 2025 07:51:46 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7898&iddiary=13395https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7895Next up is a retirement (ooh, ahh!). I bounced right off of Monster Hunter: World. Never played a Monster Hunter game before and am surprised that I don't like it. But after playing a while, at least I understand why. My expectations were a bit different than the reality. I know that the name of the game is what you do, but I assumed there would be more narrative or more traditional, tight, RPG or action RPG elements. But I would characterize the game as a massive grind. I know that this is how it is described (kill monsters to get materials to improve equipment to kill bigger monsters to get more materials to improve equipment, etc.), but I just thought there would be something else to it. And I'm sure that the hunts get more exciting, but I also know that the game is long, and I don't feel like grinding my way there to begin enjoying it after 50 hours or whatever. Some things that made me bounce off include: 1. A gazillion items to pick up. What is all this stuff? If you walk around in the field, you are prompted every 2 feet to harvest an herb or mine some ore or something. 2. Inventory management. Inventory was full very quickly, which prompted me to sit there trying to learn what all the stuff does. Short answer: crafting. 3. I usually don't enjoy crafting a lot of stuff in games, so this was not good for me. 4. Annoying cat puns. 5. The map is so busy, and the first area was super confusing to navigate. 6. Boring story and characters. 7. "Tracking" monsters was a matter of clicking on enough footprints to "level up" your knowledge of it or something. Then, you follow some glowing flies around until you see it. This did not make me feel clever, like I was hunting. I was following a green path of fireflies the whole time and pressing B when prompted to "study tracks." 8. The UI is really cluttered and could be improved in so many ways. 9. You have to play online (though you can set your game to 1 player). I didn't know there was such an online multiplayer focus. In the end, Monster Hunter: World feels like a single-player(ish) MMORPG. My days of World of Warcraft are far, far behind me, and this brought back all the memories of years of grinding in that game. I can't do it! And now I know that Monster Hunter isn't for me! Wed, 21 May 2025 11:13:31 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7895&iddiary=13392https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7863Been playing this with Patrick for most of the semester and we finally beat it last night. It's a mixed bag, but overall positive. It absolutely rides the coattails of Portal, and we read that it was directed by the lead designer on Portal, so no surprise at the similarities. I'll get the negative things out of the way first: 1. It tries to be funny, but it falls mostly flat. The funniest things were Ike (this little imp creature that makes silly faces at you) and the way that the paintings change when you use the abilities (often funny and surprising!). What was supposed to carry the game's humor--the narrator/uncle--didn't. He delivered his lines just fine, but they didn't land. Given that you play as a child, he can't be as sarcastic as GlaDOS in Portal. Given the more family-friendly aesthetic, the jokes were sillier. Given that he and the child actually don't seem to have much of a relationship, nor is it developed throughout the game, there's little relational history and context to draw from. And he usually only pipes up in between puzzles to make brief comments that don't add much. 2. The level of precision required for the first-person platforming was rough. Many puzzles require excellent timing and precision for jumping, throwing and catching objects, and so on, and the game just didn't handle that well. The movement controls are oddly both too tight and too floaty at the same time (I'm sure I'm mischaracterizing this in my description, but this is what it felt like). We OFTEN fell off flying objects, jumped too far or not far enough, missed catching things because of the camera, and so on. Actually, it was irritating for the first half of the game, and it became funny to us as the levels became more complicated. Like last night, Patrick tried for 15 minutes to execute the moves on a puzzle before handing it to me to finish. It would take 1 minute to figure out what you need to do and 14 minutes to accomplish the task. I felt bad watching Patrick sometimes because he's not great at precision controls, so he would fail and fail and fail, hand me the controller, and I'd do on the first try what he'd tried 20 times (though I certainly failed my fair share of times because of the controls!). 3. The ending was uninspired and happened quickly. I'm not entirely sure why what happened happened and I don't care. It obviously set up a sequel that never came. That's it! Those are the negatives. The positive, though, is the puzzles. They are great, consistently fun and challenging. You're in your uncle's crazy science mansion, and there are four ways that you manipulate objects to solve puzzles by swapping to different "dimensions." First, you can make objects "heavy." Second, you can make objects "fluffy." Third, you can slow time. Fourth, you can reverse gravity. Only one dimension can be active at a time, but by choosing sequences of dimensions, you do some cool things. For example, one common object is a big safe. You normally can't pick up a safe (or other large objects), but activate the fluffy dimension and it becomes light as a feather. This way, you can move safes around to toss them through windows (throw and change to "heavy" before it hits the glass), depress buttons (place them them change to "heavy"), or fly through the air using a combination of dimensions. For example, carry the safe with fluffy, throw it and quickly slow time, jump on top of the safe you just threw, use reverse gravity to travel upward, and (voila!) you've used a safe to get to a ledge above you. Puzzles utilize various combinations of dimensions, and often you have to find these little capsules to trigger the dimensions in the first place. So task 1 will be acquiring the capsules for dimensions in a puzzle area, then you can start solving the harder puzzles in an area. It is totally linear though, so it's not like you'll be trying puzzles you can't complete. Unlike something like The Witness, you're always at a puzzle you can solve. So if you can't figure it out, then it's you. Like Portal, there are various obstacles and death traps, including deadly pools of "science juice" (like acid), lasers, robots that push you off ledges, and so on. I do recall getting bored and sleepy earlier on, but to be fair, we were always playing Quantum Conundrum at night after work, and I have learned that puzzle games are a genre not best suited to play while exhausted at night. Nevertheless, it held our attention, and by at least halfway through, we were thoroughly enjoying the puzzling. So, the short version is: Portal is better by far, but Quantum Conundrum scratches the itch. Wed, 21 May 2025 10:48:42 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7863&iddiary=13391https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7893Excellent narrative adventure/mystery game. You play as an archaeologist and basically-a-PhD-student named Aliya who gets sent by her professor / university head / potential Empress (my, don't we believe university administrators have a lot of power!) to find out what happened to a roboticist colleague who may have uncovered some troubling truths about the history of the Nebula. You have a robot companion named Six (so named because you've gotten all your previous numerically named robots destroyed, which is understandably alarming to Six) and a ship. The gist of the gameplay is that you "sail" between moons from site to site (some ancient, some modern), exploring them, finding artifacts, translating ancient inscribed text, as you piece together the long and complicated history of the rise and fall of the Nebula’s various ages and empires. Your choices have implications for the Nebula’s future and everyone's survival. The obvious comparisons here are to 80 Days (a previous non-linear narrative game from these devs) and Chants of Sennaar (which also involves deciphering ancient languages). The difference between this and Chants of Sennaar (and Tunic, now that I think about it) is that you don't have to correctly figure out the language. Like, it's helpful to understand the story, but you can progress fine by making total guesses at what symbols mean. This makes Heaven’s Vault an easy game, whereas Chants of Sennaar and Tunic were quite challenging. That’s fine because of the constant feeling of discovery, which motivated me to keep going. I loved finding new artifacts in the dirt, trying to puzzle out inscriptions, the satisfaction of confirming correct translations, discovering new moons and ancient sites, and going deeper into the history of this game world. The constant sense of discovery counterbalanced what may otherwise have felt like a slower game. There is no “run” button; you slowly walk everywhere. There is a lot of dialogue, especially optional context-specific dialogue (e.g., you can press “Q” or “R” when prompted to ask a question or reply outside of any formal scene, which supplies extra personality to Aliya and Six and supplies deeper insight into what’s going on). The “sailing” involves slowly watching your ship move along a path, with you occasionally having to check the map and guide it left or right and having to press the right mouse button for a burst of speed. The sailing is meant to be relaxing and contemplative. It’s pretty sailing through the Nebula, but that was absolutely my least favorite part of the game. The distances between moons can be large, and the sailing speed is slow. You can occasionally “rest” and have Six take over for you, but I found that sometimes Six would annoyingly divert me from my path, and Aliya would wake farther away from her destination than when she went to sleep. Minor gripes in the grand scheme of things. The writing is top-notch. I really enjoyed Aliya and Six; their banter is great, often funny. The art and sound are nice too. This gets two thumbs up from me. Sun, 18 May 2025 10:48:06 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7893&iddiary=13390https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7890Eliza is a commentary on Big Tech through the lens of a character, Evelyn, who created a “listening machine,” which became monetized as an AI therapist after she left the game’s tech company three years earlier. She has been rather aimless since leaving, and at the beginning of this game, takes a part-time job as a “proxy.” Proxies are people who mediate between Eliza (the AI therapist) and the clients. Proxies wear smart glasses, which run the Eliza program. Proxies are fed a script from Eliza to read to the client. As the client talks, Eliza analyzes the conversation and spits out prompts for the proxies to read, based on its algorithm. Proxies are only to read the script, never to deviate. The idea is that clients find speaking to an AI too impersonal, and so the proxy provides a façade of real human interaction such that the therapy can be successful. I’ve been talking with people for weeks about this game because AI always comes up. And I run a Human Services program with a Social Work concentration; half my students want to become social workers or therapists. It’s highly relevant. At the same time, the game is dated. Why? Because this was made in 2019, pre-generative AI. Eliza is algorithmic. It’s scripted. It essentially selects from dialogue options based on how the conversation is going. If the game were made just three years later after ChatGPT dropped, I don’t think that Eliza would require proxies. Most people now cannot tell the difference between speaking to a generative AI chatbot or a human online. Although, even in Eliza, the need for a proxy is questionable. Imagine sitting in front of a person who you know is just reading Eliza’s script. You know you’re really talking to a computer, even if there is a person sitting in front of you saying the words. You would have to delude yourself into thinking that the person made the interaction much different. And, in the game, most of the clients make comments like, “I know you’re just a computer, but…” So, despite the proxy, they are aware that they are talking with Eliza, an AI. Perhaps that’s part of the critique. Tech products promise a lot, but often fail to live up to their promises, despite the people who make the products feel alive. There are generative AI therapy chatbots today. Even the large commercial chatbots like ChatGPT can be used for this purpose. They are far more sophisticated than Eliza. I don’t think the main point of the game is the therapy chatbot, but the big tech ethics stuff. The chatbot is just an example to generate ethical questions. Do people need human interaction for effective therapy, or does just talking to something human-like help? Can AI chatbots do harm? Is it ethical to use a chatbot to monetize mental health services? What about the proxy: do they become alienated? What are the impacts on proxies when they cannot respond to the client, but must observe the client’s suffering and simply convey an algorithmic prompt? Do proxies have an ethical obligation to help if they can offer better advice than Eliza? What if such deviation from the script gets them fired? The game raises questions about surveillance and privacy (the tech company develops a new service where Eliza can provide more detailed evaluations if the client lets Eliza access their texts and emails), the effects of technology on emotions, the possibility of resistance to technological development, and so on. The game was thought-provoking for me, not necessarily in its self-contained story, but because I was able to connect it to so much else. The game itself is not terribly captivating. But that may be the point. Evelyn is something of a blank canvas. She has a history, of course, and there are other static characters. But the player gets to decide how Evelyn thinks about the big tech company, about Eliza, about experimental technologies, about ownership and control, about privacy and surveillance, and ultimately about her own purpose and goals. In the end, I had her abandon the tech world and leave the city to go find her father (where I hope she will find some meaning in understanding her family and herself, if not develop a good relationship with them). As one of Evelyn’s last lines of monologue says, “There is no message, no point, no overarching story here.” Wed, 07 May 2025 23:30:46 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7890&iddiary=13388https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7869I’ve been playing Sekiro on and off for most of this semester and have gone back and forth between liking it and disliking it. It’s a great game, really focused and tightly designed, no doubt about it, but it is so, so difficult, and I find myself questioning if I am having fun or if I am driven by the desire to not let the game beat me, to prove that I can beat another notoriously difficult game. FromSoftware context: I tried and quit Dark Souls years ago because I thought it was too hard and frustrating, though admittedly I didn’t give it a lot of time. Then I picked up Bloodborne, enjoyed it a lot, and ultimately beat it. Sekiro is my third FromSoftware game. My first impressions were positive. Sekiro’s atmosphere pulled me right in. It’s dark and gritty and violent, something I liked about both Dark Souls and Bloodborne. I explored around one of the first areas, the Ashina Outskirts, and discovered my first mini-boss (some general or another), though I didn’t know it at the time. Mini-bosses have two health bars instead of one. I got my ass handed to me a few times before thinking, “What the hell is this enemy?!” and changing direction. I found another area, Hirata Estate, where I stayed for many hours of gameplay. This is where I learned about how death works system works. When you die, you lose half of your accumulated experience (at the level you are on; you can’t lose a level) and money. This means you can grind experience for skills by redoing areas over and over (and not dying!). Well, I was dying, and so I reasoned that more skills could help, so I grinded, redoing the same area numerous times, reaching the next experience level before flirting with the next mini-boss, the Shinobi Hunter, who attacks with a huge spear. I may have found another mini-boss in that area too (or just a hard enemy), but I pretty much explored everywhere I could until I determined that I had to pass the Shinobi Hunter to move forward. You can’t beat the Shinobi Hunter until you learn how to counter thrust attacks and sweep attacks. In Sekiro, success in combat is heavily dependent on your ability to parry, dodge, and counter thrust and sweep attacks. If you can’t read enemies and respond very quickly and precisely to their moves, you’re going to die. To counter a thrust attack (indicated by a red symbol), you press circle (dodge) just before it lands, and you’ll stomp on their weapon, causing a lot of posture damage. Posture damage is something like stamina. When you block attacks, you take posture damage. When your posture damage reaches max, then you can’t block anymore. The same is true for enemies. Dealing posture damage opens them up to health damage. Countering thrusts and sweeps is good because it’s a way to hammer their posture. To counter sweep attacks (indicated by the same red symbol), you jump as they sweep, then press x (jump) again in the air and you’ll kick the enemy in the head. The timing on these has to be impeccable, or else you’ll get nailed, and it only takes a couple hits to kill you in this game. Since thrust and sweep attacks are indicated by the same red symbol, you have to learn what the attack animations look like for each enemy. Usually, it’s pretty obvious, but occasionally something that looks like a thrust is actually a sweep. After many hours of learning the basics, grinding, and not feeling like I was accomplishing much of anything, I finally beat the Shinobi Hunter. I slowly bested a couple other mini-bosses over the next few weeks. Then one day, I sat down to play a long session, and I got in the deepest groove. Everything was clicking. I must have killed like 6 or 7 mini-bosses and one of the actual bosses, Gyoubo (the guy on horseback). I even one- or two-shot a couple. I was optimistic, like “Yeah, I can beat Sekiro!” But of course that was premature and naďve! I think that day I ended up stopping after getting killed about 20 times by Lady Butterfly, another main boss. I abandoned her and went elsewhere, eventually getting to a mini-boss called the Lone Shadow Longswordsman. I didn’t fight him so much as fight the camera. He (like Lady Butterfly) was fast, but unlike Lady Butterfly’s fight, his took place in a tiny, enclosed space. The camera constantly got stuck, I couldn’t see him, I’d lose him, I couldn’t see where I was going, etc. He killed me over and over, and I was getting irritated. Finally, I complained to Google and found that this fight is notorious for the bad camera, and learned how to cheese it a bit. There is a way to cheese a lot of the mini-bosses for some reason. I guess it’s strategy, like if you can figure out that there is a ledge you can jump from to impale the mini-boss and take off a chunk of his health bar, then more power to you. Anyway, I learned how to start the fight with him at 50% health, and ironically I missed the surprise attack one time and beat him normally. Fast forward to today, where I started in the Ashina Depths, stuck from last time on the Shichimen Warrior miniboss. This guy induces “terror” by shooting you with purple spirits. When your terror meter fills up, you die. So, you have to avoid the spirits and try to close in to attack the Warrior. This is hard because he’s constantly summoning and firing off spirits, and when he’s not doing that, he’s shooting flames from his staff. If you get close, he tends to teleport elsewhere, where he proceeds to summon and shoot more spirits. I abandoned him and pressed onward into the Depths until I got to another mini-boss called Snake Eyes. Snake Eyes carries a rifle that does tons of damage, sometimes one-shotting me. I did immediately figure out how to get behind him for a stealth attack that lopped off half his health. But I could never take him down. I tended to get myself backed into a corner, where the camera again killed me as much as he did. There are other enemies in the combat area, except if you attack them, then usually Snake Eyes triggers and shoots you dead from across the room. Eventually, I figured out how to kill some of the extras, then stealth attack Snake Eyes, but I could still never get his second health bar down. I haven’t figured out how to counter his thrust/sweep (not sure which it is, but I haven’t timed it right for whichever it might be, and if it hits me, I’m dead). So anyway, I was again getting irritated by the camera and just was not in the mood to consider spending my day dying to Snake Eyes, so I looked up how to beat him. I learned that you can cheese him too. There are pools of poisonous liquid in the combat area, and apparently you can kite him into a poison pool, then grapple out of his reach, and he’ll stand there shooting at you (which you dodge) taking poison damage until he dies. I tried it a few times with partial success. The last time, he was stuck behind a rock shooting into the rock, his life slowly ticking away. I went to brush my teeth, came back, and he was dead. Just kidding. I was dead. I guess he got unstuck and killed me. I sighed and turned it off. I am feeling very frustrated with Sekiro. Today’s session was not fun. Grinding was not fun. Dying 20 times each to Lady Butterfly or the Shichimen Warrior or the Blazing Bull or whoever was not fun. Dying itself is fine, but one expects to learn something, to do better next time, to make some incremental progress. I rarely feel that with Sekiro. On that day when I had a hot streak, I don’t know what I’d eaten for breakfast, but I was certainly enjoying watching the enemies fall like dominoes. It clicked on that day. But that was only one afternoon of gameplay out of many over the course of the last few months. Can it click again? Can I derive pleasure from trying and failing so many times, only to finally notice an attack pattern I hadn’t noticed before, or to try an item I hadn’t tried before? Probably. It’s weird thinking about quitting Sekiro because I do like it. It’s good. I’m just not having much fun. But the potential is there to have fun. Though even when I do beat a boss, it’s just like, “sigh, okay, here is the next one, who is probably going to be agonizing to learn and overcome.” That’s the thing. It’s definitely not a “come home from work and play” kind of game because it’s so brutal. On the other hand, I often don’t want to play it during my limited free time because I’d rather do something more rewarding. So, what’s its niche? Maybe when I have more time over the summer. I don’t want to give up quite yet. Maybe if I put it down and come back in a couple months, I’ll feel refreshed. Maybe if I try some other games with parry mechanics inspired by Sekiro, I’ll get some practice with this type of combat. Or maybe I’ll try Elden Ring! (And if I never make another Sekiro post, then I probably picked it up for another hour months from now and said “nope!”). Wed, 07 May 2025 15:28:13 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7869&iddiary=13387https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7874This is a roguelite deckbuilder that’s neat in that you have two different decks and there is some interesting worldbuilding, with probably like 100 characters you can meet. It’s also narrative heavy. You play runs with one of three characters, each of whom has their own story. Unfortunately though, it never really clicked with me; I was always sort of bored. I played two runs with the first character, Sal, dying near the end of my first attempt. On my second attempt, I noticed “story difficulty,” set it to that, and steamrolled the second run. I left it on story difficulty and steamrolled the game with the second character, Rook, too. When I started the third character, I was sort of dreading learning his mechanics, the tedium of leveling up another set of cards (you can level up each card once by using it a specific number of times), the endless filler-feeling dialogue, and the tons and tons of negotiations and battles I would have to wade through to get to the end of another story that I didn’t care about. So, I played part of the first day for him to get a sense of the character and any new mechanics, then called it quits. Here's how the two types of decks/combat work. The first is “battle” and needs no explanation. This is normal deckbuilder stuff. Do lots of damage and kill stuff. Some mechanics include “prepare” (a card is “prepared” when it is in the leftmost spot in your hand and can activate special abilities), “gamble” (one character has a coin that he flips, and some of his cards do different things depending on heads or tails), “burn” (deals damage over time), and so on. Each character has a few unique mechanics. When you battle enemies, you can spare them or kill them. If you spare them, they might hate you (all the various characters you encounter can either hate, dislike, like, or love you). If you kill them, their friends might hate you. If you kill them in an isolated place, well, you got away with murder. It can be tempting to kill enemies because they drop items, and sometimes quite good ones, or maybe because they were real jerks and deserved it. But, when someone hates you, you get a debuff (e.g., status cards cost one extra action), which does go away if you kill that person later. When someone loves you, you get a buff (e.g., gain 4 defense and 2 power at the beginning of every battle). It’s obviously good to have a lot of people love you and few people hate you. I definitely had some hate debuffs that were pretty annoying to deal with. The second thing you can do is “negotiation,” and this one is different. It’s the same basic idea as battle, except think of it as the passive option. This second deck is full of cards that are meant to manipulate, persuade, and intimidate others. In a negotiation, you have “arguments.” Characters all have a “core argument.” Then, they can make other arguments that do various things. All arguments have “resolve” (HP). When an argument’s resolve reaches 0, it is defeated. No big deal for a regular argument; these come and go during a negotiation. If your core argument loses its resolve, then you lose the negotiation. So, there are generally two ways out of a situation: battle or negotiate. Sometimes, negotiations make subsequent battles easier. As you think about building your decks, remember that if you lose a negotiation, you might still be able to battle, but if you lose a battle, you can’t then negotiate…because you’re dead. That means that, for me at least, negotiation was far more useful, and I chose that option far more. On the other hand, there are more mandatory battles than mandatory negotiations, and bosses are typically trying to kill you, not argue with you. So, you can’t rely on only one deck; you must figure out how to balance them. There are some other things to consider, such as the battle and negotiation grafts (like skills or perks you acquire each run), and then the various roguelite meta upgrades. You can unlock permanent upgrades for each character, perks that can be used on any character, as well as new cards that will appear in your runs. In the end, it feels strange to say, but I wish I had just stopped after the first run. I feel like I wasted my time with this one hoping that it would click. There are certainly things I enjoyed (like the negotiations and trying to get a ton of characters to love me), but like I said earlier, I just found Griftlands tedious and boring. Tue, 29 Apr 2025 15:53:58 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7874&iddiary=13386