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Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments (PS4) by jp (Apr 21st, 2024 at 00:26:13) |
This game is way more interesting than I initially gave it credit for (and I might even play all the cases, I'm that curious!)
There's a bunch of cases, you're Sherlock and you gather clues, investigate locations, use your special "eyesight", interrogate suspects, and more. So far, this is what you'd expect.
Some clues become more important and they show up in your "brain" where you can pair it up with another clue (if it's the correct one) to deduce something. Once you have enough of those, you can reach a conclusion. ALSO, once you've reached a conclusion you can decide how to act on it (usually it's either call the cops or call Mycroft - i think...).
What's really wild is that in the brain-connecting clues interface, you can reach lots of different conclusions! (I think it's 4 per case, at least it has been that so far and I've completed two cases). OH! And, as far as I can tell, the you can get it wrong! And, you just move on...the game calls some of them moral choices - which I'm confused by. But the idea that you could arrive at an incorrect conclusion and the game just moves on to the next case is pretty wild. So far, I've gotten both right (because there's abutton you can press that even warns you - like "spoiler alert" and it shows my result in green - which I assume is that I got it right).
Anyways, that's super cool!
Oh, and the game haslots of little mini-games that you play once, and they're part of the story (e.g. taking sherlock's pulse, or arm-wrestling with a sailor)..
The 2nd case is pretty neat - it takes place in the UK, there's a missing train...and there are rich Chilean (and Mexican) businessmen involved! Whoah.
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Fights in Tight Spaces (PC) by jp (Apr 21st, 2024 at 00:19:38) |
This one's a bit weird and I'll confess I didn't play it that much (just played one mission - which is like 1/5 of a full run?). It looks like it wants to be SuperHot, but it isn't - that's ok. But, it has a "play the movie" of what you just did in a level that you would think would play fast and smooth and super action-y. But now, it's slow and it even pauses between card plays...so it looks rather boring, which is a real shame.
As for the game, there's interesting stuff going on, but I haven't fully understood everything:
a. There's a typical energy system for casting, but a secondary system (combo) that lets you play some cards with a combo cost. If you move in your turn you lose combo so it's sometimes tricky to get everything to pull off.
b. While playing I was disappointed (because it seemed unfair) that there are objectives (bonus ones) in each level - and I wasn't getting any because I didn't know what they were! Apparently they're actually shown on screen, but in a place I did not see or notice.
c. The game seemed a bit slow - I was just moving and getting out of the way as I waited to draw into a good hand of cards. This cuts the momentum for sure and also made it hard/impossible to accidentally hit the secret (not really secret) objectives. So, I'm curious to go back and try again with awareness of the objectives. They should help a lot - in that I'm more likely to try to "solve the puzzle" of each turn and hopefully get the bonus objectives.
d. It's strange that you have to pay to heal, but I thought it was neat that you can upgrade several cards (if you have the money) and that some cards are cheap to upgrade - there's different pricing for them!
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Hadean Tactics (PC) by jp (Apr 21st, 2024 at 00:11:34) |
Ok, I've now cleared the game (not unlocked everything, of course) and it really is quite fun and interesting. The 3rd character (which I was waiting on to try out because I wanted to clear the game with the 2nd one) is pretty neat as well though as I write this all I can really remember is that it has an orb mechanic similar to one of the characters in Slay the Spire.
The harder ending is basically another 3 levels, but they get shorter! The last one, if I remember correctly, is just the boss. I don't remember what deck I was running, but it was pretty good - in the sense that I had picked up some good combos..traps and all.
I'm going to stop playing, for now, mostly because the list of games too look at keeps on growing - one a week - because of the design seminar I'm teaching.
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Before Your Eyes (PC) by dkirschner (Apr 14th, 2024 at 13:51:13) |
I've been looking forward to playing this, especially after playing One Hand Clapping, which had a singing mechanic. That game activates your mic and you use your voice, raising and lowering pitch, to interact with the game. Before Your Eyes was similar in that the game activates your webcam and uses your eye blinks as input. Before Your Eyes works WAY better than One Hand Clapping, and it's the better game all around. I figure that detecting blinks (yes/no) is easier than detecting notes along the range of human vocal pitch, so kudos to One Hand Clapping for trying.
Blinking in Before Your Eyes doesn't do anything unless you do it over a prompt (mouse over the prompt, then blink to interact) or unless you do it when the metronome icon is visible, which progresses the story to the next scene. The rules are simple, and it became a game in and of itself for me to blink strategically. I imagined that at the end of A Clockwork Orange, Alex's eyes are forced open so that he could successfully complete this game. At times, I felt like holding my eyes open with my fingers. This is because your eyes will get tired/dry/itchy while playing and you will screw up and blink when you don't mean to, skipping dialogue or ending a scene early. That's frustrating enough. Make sure you do the blink calibration, but I think that no matter how well you do it, it will still occasionally register some non-blinks as blinks. This really didn't happen much for me; through calibration, I think I turned the sensitivity way down, and I wonder what effect wearing glasses had. But like I said, it works surprisingly well.
So, the game itself is narrative-heavy. It's an obvious play on the idea that a life can pass in the "blink of an eye." You're picked up by a ferryman of souls who asks you to tell the story of your life. Back in time you go to remember it: your childhood, your parents, your career, etc., blinking your way through each scene. I won't spoil the story, but there is a twist that I absolutely did not see coming (though I should have paid more attention to the mysterious dark scenes) that changes the narrative and the tone of the game. This is one you can spend time reflecting on.
Aesthetically, it's got a simple visual presentation, sort of painterly, with some really nice piano music. The voice acting is good, with the exception of the girl-next-door (who sounds the same at 10 as she does at 40). For some reason, they also used the same voice actor for your dad and her dad, which made the one scene with her dad calling her very confusing ("Why is my dad at her house?!"). But I liked the dad and mom's performances. I was wondering through the whole game if your character was mute and/or on the spectrum because he doesn't talk--only through a typewriter later in the game--and otherwise expresses himself through his prodigious musical and artistic talents. But I think he's just a silent main character, not actually mute.
Anyway, the game won a BAFTA for a reason. It didn't blow my mind, but it's a neat experience that's worth having. It's short too, doesn't waste your time. I'm considering incorporating it into a class.
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Stray (PC) by dkirschner (Apr 13th, 2024 at 12:00:39) |
Patrick and I have been playing this together this semester, and finished it a couple weeks ago. We were talking after beating it about despite how simple and straightforward of a game this is, it manages to be something new. Playing as a cat (and being able to do cat things like curl up and sleep, scratch things, knock objects off tables, etc., so cuuuute) was novel, and the setting and story were interesting. But really, playing as a cat. I smiled a whole lot throughout the game. The lil companion robot was cute too.
On the other hand, I was often tired and bored while playing, and literally fell asleep during several sessions. Patrick would be making dinner or something in the kitchen, and I'd snap awake, cat walking into a wall, and I'd pretend I had not fallen asleep, and that I was just watching the cat walk into the wall and thinking. Like how my dad always used to claim he was "resting his eyes" when he'd fall asleep on the couch.
I would not call the game exciting. It was a lot of wandering around the city and talking to robot NPCs, fetching things for them. The city is a really good-looking dystopia, and the robots are quirky, but I wish they had more dialogue. You don't get a sense that many of them have personalities besides whatever one-note thing they do. I mean, the lack of dialogue makes sense, and it's not really "dialogue" since the cat can't talk. The fact that you are a cat adds a whole layer of silly to the game. Like, why has this lil robot befriended a cat? Why are all these robots putting all their faith in a cat to save them? Cats don't understand what we're saying to them, and cats do whatever they want! Playing as a cat in a game where you're doing fetch quests (fetching is dog stuff!) and doing things to help people is very un-cat-like.
But, you know what? The ability to play as a cat and do cat things trumps how little sense it makes, and I would play as a cat in this dystopia again. Idea for next time: more cats. And what do you think? Were there cats at the end?! Optimistically, I think so.
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2157 registered gamers and 3105 games. 7607 GameLogs with 13096 journal entries. 5074 games are currently being played.
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Prey (2017) (PC) by dkirschner |
| Feels very Bioshock. Super neat. -------- Good, but underwhelming. Other immersive sims are better. |
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most recent entry: Monday 24 May, 2021
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Prey didn't live up to my expectations. Here's what I expected: shapeshifting, mind-bending and fast-paced FPS action, maybe some portals (re: the last Prey game). What Prey is: a slower-paced immersive sim with a ton of crap to pick up and a ton of audiologs/computers/emails/notes to find. It has cool pieces, but the whole was underwhelming.
Talos 1
The Talos 1 space station itself is huge. There are maybe 12 areas of the station, plus you can put on a spacesuit and explore its exterior. It's a neat, well realized environment. This is perhaps best exemplified by it feeling lived in. You can, in fact, find every single person aboard the space station, and that's, according to the internet, 268 people. Most of them are dead, but they leave their traces. Although I didn't find them all, and I don't know how many I did find, I did get an achievement (unexpectedly) for reading every single email and listening to every single audiolog. So I feel like I was close! Anyway, the fact that I found all the extra narrative stuff speaks volumes about how engaging Talos 1 is.
Search Everything for Neuromods
The downside of this is that they had to try and make 268 people and their lives compelling enough that players would want to explore everything. Most of the side stories are fine and, after a while, you realize that the main point of them is to get neuromods. Neuromods are central to the game's story, but the short of it is they are skill points. You start the game with few of these. They seem hard to come by. You think you'll never have enough to get the many useful sounding skills in the (initially) three skill trees. But eventually you gain access to recyclers and fabricators.
Recyclers allow you to deposit all your junk (you know, from obsessively searching trash cans, beneath stair wells, and kitchen cabinets) to convert to raw materials. Place the raw materials in a fabricator to craft items ranging from guns to ammo to other useful items. Eventually, you get a recipe to fabricate neuromods, which is obviously awesome. And they turn out to be pretty cheap, requiring one rarer ingredient that you get from killing Typhon (the alien enemies). Well, if you pump points into the skills increasing yields of exotic material, and if you choose to fight Typhon around Talos 1 instead of avoiding them, then you'll wind up with tons of neuromods. Seriously, by the end of the game, I had about 50 unspent neuromods (average skill cost is probably 4 or 5).
Difficulty Curves
The thing is, you simply don't need all those neuromods. You'll search high and low and spend time managing your inventory, but the game becomes quite easy as it goes on. At first, wow, Prey gave me a challenge. Each new enemy type was dangerous and scary as I scanned them and learned their strengths and weaknesses. Ammo is scarce at first and you have no psi powers for a while. I relied on sneaking up with my wrench to melee enemies--saves ammo, but risky! But once you do learn all the enemies' strengths and weaknesses and you get some basic Typhon powers (these open up three more skill trees for a total of six), you will be more efficient with ammo and you'll have all the items you need to kill anything. Even the "Nightmare," the big scary alien who occasionally surfaces to hunt you (and you can kill it or hide from it for 3 minutes and it'll go away) becomes simple to take down.
A Dull Plateau
What all this culminates in is a dull plateau of gameplay that persists for at least half of the game, which is long if you bother doing all the side quests (which I did). You'll be a packrat searching for stuff to convert to neuromods, which you don't really need, completing side quests for characters who aren't really that interesting, that give you more neuromods and items that you already have enough of because you are a packrat. And you'll be able to hack anything, lift the heaviest objects, repair the most difficult electronics. In short, I could go anywhere. I wound up debating whether or not to just pursue the main objective or continue with side quests just to see if there were some really cool ones. It wound up feeling very MMORPGish: go here, click that, go there, retrieve that, bring it to the NPC, follow their next instruction to go back there, search that, get your reward.
By the time you are at this point in the game, you will be doing a lot of backtracking, whether you are doing side quests or not. You will have unlocked the exceedingly complex travel system within Talos 1 (consisting of an anti-gravity tunnel, a central elevator that doesn't work for a long time, airlocks to get to sections of the ship from outside) and you will be acutely aware of how you still have to take specific routes to get to specific places despite the myriad doors, hatches, and elevators you will have unlocked. I bet if I hadn't bothered with all those side quests, reading emails, and listening to audiologs, the game length would have been cut by 25-33% and if there was a fast travel system, it would have been cut by another 10-15%. I guess, by the end, it just felt bloated, and it went on for ever and ever. In fact, in the very last area of Talos 1 that I explored, the game tossed 4 or 5 new side quests at me. Like, I'm about to finish the game! More of these side quests!? Uuuugh!
Mimics
Okay, at the beginning, I said that I thought Prey would focus on shape-shifting. This is what I remember from the ads years ago, and promos always focused on this. There is an enemy called a Mimic and they can transform into ordinary items (coffee mugs, chairs, etc.). This is, again, central to the story, and I remember learning that the player-character could also transform into things. This sounded like great fun. In practice? Mimics (and Greater Mimics) are the first enemies you find and they are a complete gimmick! Yeah, you'll walk into a room and get jump scared by a coffee mug. It's cool, it's fun, you'll kill the Mimic in two swings of the wrench. Sometimes they'll run off and turn into something else, but whatever.
Eventually, yes, you can turn into coffee mugs too. This is not exciting. It allows you to be a little sneaky, evading enemies as they walk past the ordinary office printer you have become. I get it. It's an immersive sim and this is a clever way to take on the stealth element. But it's just so unnecessary. You can already sneak. Enemies are not hard to kill. Maybe you want a pacifist run or something? I thought this would be more central to the gameplay, but it isn't. No enemies hide except the Mimics, the first enemies you encounter. And there's nothing else you can do with it except turn into something and sit there.
Narrative
The main story is pretty interesting and kept me engaged throughout. The choices seem fairly binary. The ending (whichever ending you get) is not the ending though. I was underwhelmed at the ending, and had it predicted since I had gotten a "secret" earlier ending that spoils the actual ending. But after the credits, Prey redeemed its narrative. It made me feel bad for wondering if I could kill a friendly NPC because I really shouldn't have done that. I was judged accordingly. Oh well!
I'm going to try out Control next, which hopefully is not very similar to Prey. And hopefully it doesn't melt my laptop.
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