Blogging the experience of gameplayhttps://www.gamelog.cl/gamers/GamerPage.php?idgamer=1997https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6918Third play session of the game was basically just running around the starting zone after getting down to the planet’s surface. I spent probably 2 hours just looking at every possible corner for loot and another 20 minutes at least fishing once I found out that it was something that I could do. It was interesting to see enemy robots that would just stair into space as the game said that were passive and other bigger robots that were hostile on sight. I’m wondering if there’s more to be said about smaller robots losing their aggressiveness compared to the larger more intelligent robots. It was fun to finally get another weapon and exploring the dessert zone was very entertaining once I found out that there were seemingly secret areas like the cave system below the desert floor. I could’ve probably just kept looking around the buildings in the city or the desert area and never gotten anything done and still have been entertained, but I finished up the quest lines and two first sub quests. The leader of the resistance seemed to know the character of 2B or the 2 model of android for reasons that were kept secret from us. I feel now that this game is going to require many a playthrough to get all the different story elements of this seemingly very deep and complex narrative. So long as the combat remains as entertaining as it’s been, I look forward to playing more. However, I get the feeling that the game will get to the point where combat is seen as something that you might not want to do as a player for one emotional reason or another.Thu, 15 Nov 2018 16:11:09 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6918&iddiary=12352https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6918Second time playing the game after you die from killing the goliath unit, I finally got to save so I took a break. When I got back, I was highly impressed on how they handled the game menu and made it part of the in-game universe. Your immersion is rarely broken which is quite impressive. What really made me impressed and further solidified my idea of what this game will be like is when they have you go through your settings. The best part being when you are asked to set the self-destruct options for yourself. If you choose to keep them off 9S will actually comment on the choice and promise to keep it as a secret from command. I was floored by this feature in the game and chose then and there to see just what was possible in this game and decided to keep the self-destruct access turned off. I’m actually hoping that it will become a pivotal factor later in the game and affects me in some creative way. After which I went to talk with the commander who gave us a mission to meet up with the resistance forces on the ground. As I headed over to the hanger to get the flight gear, I found myself talking to many of the NPC’s in the space station to hear what they had to say. I found it interesting to hear how one of the combat units wished they had been assigned as an observer while another observer wished that she could go to the ground to see all the data she read about in person. But what really got my attention was how in the space station everything was without color for the most part unlike how things were down on the planet. I wasn’t sure if this was just a creative call on the developer’s part or something more deeply rooted in the games message and theme.Thu, 15 Nov 2018 16:10:54 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6918&iddiary=12351https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6918Nier Autanoma is a game where you play as 2B who is from my understanding a cyborg or android who follows missions set by the Operator. During my first play session I went through and played the mission where you have to beat the goliath. Ethically the first two things that really stuck with me was how calm she was in the beginning just loosing her entire team within the first 10 minutes of the game and is completely unphased. In addition to that the game doesn’t include the option to save the game in a normal way. Although the latter isn’t as easy to make the claim for the fact that the game tells you straight up as soon as you start that you can’t save makes for an interesting dynamic. It made me on constant edge while playing the game to make sure that I do well because I couldn’t save the game if I died. I thought of it as a somewhat grey ethical decision on the designer’s part to give that stress to players straight out of the gate, but also very clever if they were planning on having you feel tense in a way that B2 clearly doesn’t feel. Yet, after fighting the goliath unit 2B starts to show signs of emotions towards 9S which contradicts this earlier premises. In fact, she fully contradicts herself when she shows great deals of emotion when they sacrifice themselves to beat the other 3 goliath units. On top of that she shows reserved anger when finding out that 9S only had bandwidth to upload one of their memories and chose to upload her memories instead of his own. Not delving too deep into the moral dilemma of how easily they came to the decision of sacrificing themselves to defeat the enemy the game does an amazing job right off the bat of making sure that this game came across and a highly complex game.Thu, 15 Nov 2018 16:10:33 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6918&iddiary=12350https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6794I honestly don't have much more, if anything at all to review as far as gameplay goes. I've literally completed the entire game now. I guess it was almost worth the 15 dollars. So, what I want to talk about instead is the ethical issues that it tends to tango with about death. In my opinion this game does a really good job at making the topic of death and the topics that get brought up with it extremely easy to digest. In fact I really like how the game never really makes things feel dark or depressing. The game actually keeps a greatly cheery feeling/tone throughout the entire play through. Death is usually seen as a negative part of life, however this game changes the representation of death into a fact of life that we must respect and work with not against. It also brought up a lot of beliefs on how to make the death industry more environmentally friendly and also brings up emotions with small business vs large companies. Yet, despite the small tangent to that direction the game seems to spend most of it's time as a learning tool for people to use to teach them about being respectful to the deceased, their families, and a little about the industry as a whole. The game does an excellent job at making you feel attached to it's characters, which for a game that took me about 80 minutes to complete is fairly impressive. All in all a good game albeit a bit too short for my tastes.Thu, 27 Sep 2018 01:29:53 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6794&iddiary=12132https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6794Assuming that there was more to the game I decided to play the game again to get another possible understanding of the game. However, what I found was that there really isn't much in the game outside of the intended path for players to experience. So while I was playing I decided to look for every other possible action I could do in the game. What I managed to find out was that you can play Tales of the Crypt Keeper while checking your email on the fourth level. I tried playing the rip off mind sweeper clone for about ten to twenty minutes until I decided that the symbols on the game meant nothing in relation to the numbers in classic mind sweeper. So I went for the other achievement in the game which was to talk to everyone at every funeral. Which was actually pretty nice because each person had a little story to tell when read in the context of that particular funeral. It was interesting to see how different people were behaving in reaction to the lost of a loved one or family. Yet, other than that I didn't really find anything else to do in the game other than trying without any luck to beat rip of mind sweeper.Wed, 26 Sep 2018 01:54:01 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6794&iddiary=12099https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6794When I first heard of the game “A Morticians Tale” I was curious on what style of gameplay they chose to take with the premise. Although I wasn’t surprised with the gameplay outside of having you attend all of the funerals, which was actually pretty cool. What I found was interesting was the use of emails to create story elements within the game and how it was used as level progression. I was actually quite shocked to find just how short the game was. I didn’t realize it only had three achievements on steam or I might have predicted it was a shorter game. Nevertheless, it was new to see how a game with such good reviews was in fact only about an hour and half worth of gameplay. The story began working for a small mom and pop funeral home called Rose and Daughters. After about 5 levels the company is bought by big corporate thugs that take all the joy out of working with the characters that you’ve talked with so far. After about 2-3 frustrating, putting it kindly, levels working for big corporate funeral home you get a nice single level event where you find out you started up your own business by the name of Magnolia Forest. I’ve yet to talk to every single member of a funeral which I still want to do, but other than that the game was more of a linear story with elements of interactivity rather than an actual game. It did bring up a lot of good questions on death and what it means for those who play it though. I was especially intrigued by the option that it gave you to opt out of the level where you had to prepare the body of the boy who killed himself. It was cool to see that the game took peoples emotions on such a topic into account, but it was a little weird that with all the different death scenarios that it gave you that suicide was the only one that you had more than one option to engage with on the emails. In my personal opinion this game made me more interested in the love life and personality of Charlies, the MC’s, best friend that it was with the message that the game was clearly trying to portray about the current condition of the death industry in our society. As a funny little side note I found it hilarious to notice that the developers could have been British to some degree based off how they spelt honor as honour was anything to go by.Thu, 20 Sep 2018 22:48:10 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6794&iddiary=12040https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6754Picking back up from where I left off I found out that I was not in fact done with creepy long arm dude. Instead I had to run through the vents while he was reaching for me through the cracks. Interestingly enough it was after this that you are put into your final confrontation with the long-armed monster where I was actually interested in the game play mechanics that were chosen here. The challenge for them being how to do you fight against something when you have made the game where your only controls are to move and grab things. So, I was quite impressed when they set up this encounter where your first idea would be to climb and run away, but then you can see that the bars of the cage bend and it may give you the idea, for me it took a while, to pull the cage bars and as logic would have it you basically disarm the long-armed monster. However, you’re not free as the next scene give you a glimpse of the next monster you have to face off against, which by the looks of him and the fact there are meat hooks going in his direction I can only assume is a cook. Of which I instantly predicted that I was going to see some humans either being stored away like raw meet in a freezer or I was going to literally see these people getting used as cooking ingredients. What I saw next though felt a bit like foreshadowing that you are getting more and more monstrous with how you get food for yourself, as this time when we get hungry we latterly kill a rat which was foreshadowed in the times that we got hungry the last time. As I got closer to the area that reminded me of a food cafeteria I was just waiting to see what your first encounter with the cook would be like. Following the blood on the floor to the kitchen I saw the big boy himself who isn’t as blind and easy to dodge as the blind one. He caught me very quickly and instantly went about cooking me up. After sneaking past the cook and climbing into the rafters I found out that now there were two cooks that I had to evade for the next part of this game. Which from an artistic standpoint it’s interesting how they chose to almost make them look like twins and make the connection even greater by making them look like two halves of the same monster. I continued to progress until I reached the point where you are tasked with creating a sausage link long enough to swing into the next area with. Which posed the question, was I going to have to put a body into the sausage grinder to get to the next level? Luckily, I didn’t have to do that, but as I got into the next area I got to do the same old song and dance with the monster’s brother. This one was actually grinding one of the human like things in a grinder, but at this point I was getting a little desensitized to the whole feel of the human meat processing plant vibe. My last run against the cooks was hoping onto the meat hooks to safety which was really fun actually cause of the horror elements of having no other options but to run away as fast as I possibly could. Once I was out and away I got the achievement for the kitchen level and I was out of there. For the Kitchen level I felt like a lot of the gameplay was the same for each cook. Honestly speaking, looking at what the game had been thus far just from mechanics alone it was a large amount of repetition without many new mechanics being added in per level. With the long arm guy it introduced the idea of distracting the monster with an item that made a noise, but not much of anything new for the cooks. The only thing that I could think was possibly added was having to go around the zone to find multiple items to solve the puzzle like with the sausage grinder, but with it only being used that one time I was questioning if it was just that one puzzle or an attempt at another mechanic.Fri, 31 Aug 2018 13:10:27 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6754&iddiary=12019https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6754Once I was back in the game I crossed the chasm and continued on until I reached the hangman’s noose. Once again only after a couple minutes of playing the game and there is another reference to suicide. At this point I was starting to wonder if the entire creepy factor of the game was going to be a huge reference where suicide was the topic of reflection. It made me think back to all the children in the beds and the cafeteria and think if they are all stuck there until only a few will grow into adulthood at which point the reality of whatever is happening to them causes them to kill themselves vs continuing their lives in this prison ship like thing. Funny enough after getting past this room to the stairs my question was answered at least in part by finding out that the area I came from was indeed a prison. I climbed the stairs until I got to the top and found a room where the wall had a swing out room where you needed a key. I flipped down the bed and was partially surprised, but at this point not greatly, to find that the bed included straps to hold whoever was sleeping down. I also noticed how much bigger everything was compared to me and I started to think that either I was like the little people running around or perhaps me and the creatures around me, were not entirely human. I kept playing for a while after this until I reached more pipes and found myself once again doubling over due to hunger pains. When I continued down the path that ended in the cage I knew it was a trap and that I was going to be taken away as soon as I ate that meat. It really put everything into perspective that I was going to be the mouse in this giant place where the monster was probably going to chase me down and kill me. Of which I was totally correct as I was lifted away by the long-armed dude. So, when I got out of the cage and found the monster this was the point where the ethically questionable stuff really started to show itself. I saw the monster wrapping up kids and attaching them to meat hooks like he was on an assembly line. Running away from the monster I then found the room where it was just filled with children’s shoes and the first thought that I had is that whatever is going on here, my guess was a children food farm or something, was on scale with the holocaust or some other mass killing. It was very grim to keep showing very nightmarish images and to raise some questions for myself on just how dark this game was going to get. The rest of the time that I played the game was getting away from mr long arms until I got past the part of the level where you distract him with the TV. Throughout the entire ordeal though it gave me time to think about the gameplay instead of the many little nightmares I was seeing, see what I did there, and I was fairly impressed with the fact that it doesn’t teach you outright that standing on the carpet doesn’t make noise while standing on the wood will. I was impressed on this very subtle yet effective way to teach a game mechanic. After I cleared the T.V puzzle I put the game down now that I was away from the long armed blind monstrosity.Wed, 29 Aug 2018 23:00:33 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6754&iddiary=11959https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6754Little Nightmares is a game set in a mysterious unknown ship or otherwise dark area with no information given about the player, objective, or purpose really. Gameplay is very simple being a “walk right to progress” style game with basic levels of interaction such as moving objects and climbing onto things. My first thoughts while playing the game was initially why the hell was I seemingly birthed out of a carry-on case, but that was quickly overruled by the desire to progress in the game and find out who the masked figure in the opening scene was. Based off of the first images of the main protagonist I assume and yourself the game has a very dark feeling like you’re going against a monster in disguise as a human kind of vibe going on. The first reactions that I had on learning that you could open up a little lighter was that this game was going to shut you into many tight dark rooms and expect you to feel your way through which I wasn’t too hyped about honestly. I enjoy games that I can figure out with some time where I need to go and walking around in pitch blackness tends to get on my nerves. So, at this point I wasn’t all too excited about that possible game mechanics, which made sense to me because it was a horror game to my understanding. What made me happy though was all the little short people with hats running around the rooms that gave the game a bit of a chipper note that at least I wasn’t alone against what ever horrors the game would pit me against. What I was totally not expecting though was to run into the man who had hung himself. This was the first point in the game that I understood why people recommended this game as a topic of discussion. At first, I thought it was someone who had left clothes to dry or something, but as soon as I saw the chair I realized my mistake. It was also at this point that I thought it was really dark of the designers to use this kind of visual key as the element to highlight the fact that you need to use the chair to reach the switch. Ethically I was curious on the moral implications of using suicide as a means to draw the players attention to a point in the room. But, more pressing than that I was interested in whether the game was going to have this ethical grey area on the kind of horror this game would have in it. Was I about to walk into a mess of people who were driven made upon this ship that was taken over by the masked lady, was it going to be a twist where the masked lady was something other than a villain; I was confused, but curious all the same. What more or less answered my question after this event was the long armed, huge headed, monster that I encountered shortly after. Once I saw that creeper with the long arms I had a good idea that this game was going to be running away from abomination horrors and that the masked lady was probably going to be the most twisted of them all. But, to add flavor to the game I was probably going to see a bunch of ethically questionable imagery along with all these creepy monsters as well. Of which I was somewhat correct. Not completely as the next questionable thing I saw was the monster walking through a room filled with sleeping children, but it did make me more curious as to what kind of happenings where going on here and how these children were being used and for what they were being used for was. After about 30 minutes of gameplay I was just about to clime into the next area after riding the moving chain across the room and to add to the rest of my curiosity I was trying to decide if the cages were for the little hood people, the kids, or something else entirely. The first half hour of this game left me with waaaay more questions than answers, of which there were none, and left me waiting for the next time playing the game to hopefully get some answers to all these questions I had.Tue, 28 Aug 2018 23:08:37 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6754&iddiary=11928