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Thank Goodness You're Here! (PS5) by dkirschner (Aug 14th, 2026 at 17:22:09) |
This is a quirky, surreal game with British humor. Certainly one of the funnier games I’ve ever played. I laughed and chuckled throughout. And that’s good, because the gameplay is minimal! You play as a little salesman who gets sent to this Northern English town to meet with the mayor. Turns out the mayor is in a meeting for a few hours, so off you go to explore the town. All the weird townspeople need help. There’s a guy with his arm stuck in a sewer grate because he reached in to try and grab some change. You help him by getting butter from a bakery. There’s a guy who needs you to cut some grass. While doing this, you’re treated to some flowers declaring their love for one another…and whom you promptly mow down. The tasks are often funny and surreal. One of my favorite later ones involved helping a sick, bedridden man get his breakfast. You follow his arm, which snakes out of the bedroom, out of his apartment, through the entire town, ultimately grabbing the food from the store. The more elaborate tasks, like this one, have multiple parts (e.g., doing other things to clear the way for the man’s arm) and span across time as the townspeople move around, do different activities, and the town changes. For example, the game keeps you on the right track in clever ways, by blocking your path with other characters. There’s a guy teaching his daughter how to drive and there is an ice cream truck. These two cars will be “stuck” in various places (alleyways, roads, etc.), blocking your path. There is another character in a garden (I think the same guy whose arm you liberate from the sewer grate) who is constantly being bullied by two mean kids. Sometimes, they have him against the bushes (preventing you from going that way); other times, against the hole in the fence (no fence path this time); other times they’re paddling him or trying to push him into the well (can’t go down the well now). This kept me from getting lost wandering through town, and did so in a way that makes narrative sense. It wasn’t just an invisible wall preventing me from going in a direction.
So that’s the game. I said that gameplay was minimal. True. You can jump and you can slap. Slapping things is your universal interaction. Want to talk to a character? Slap. Pick something up? Slap. Etc. You’re treated to funny dialogue, animations, and noises from the things you slap. Definitely would recommend. It’s short and sweet.
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Skate Story (PS5) by dkirschner (Aug 14th, 2026 at 17:18:17) |
The story, music, art, and general vibe were immediately cool as hell (ha…because the game takes place in hell). The story becomes less “cool” and more absurd and surreal over time, but I liked it. I read somewhere that Skate Story is mostly a vehicle for having an audiovisual experience. I agree with that. I typically don’t care for skateboarding games. They have to do something besides “just” skateboarding (or BMXing or snowboarding, etc.). More than just tricks and racking up combos.
And so here we have a skater (named “the Skater”) who is made of glass and pain, who signs a contract with the devil to get his soul back. To do so, the Skater must eat the moon. He does that, then finds out there are many moons leading through the depths of hell, whereupon reaching the bottom with a full stomach, the devil will prepare a banquet and discuss the terms of the contract. So, you progress through the game’s chapters as you eat one moon after another. Eating a moon involves waking up in a new part of hell, talking with your rabbit friend and meeting other strange characters, learning of the moon’s location, skating around an “open” part of the level, usually solving some little puzzles to open paths or move the story forward, doing some “portal” sections that are almost like races (sometimes timed), and then one or two “battles”, the final one usually against some moon guardian or area denizen.
My favorite of these activities at first were the portals because you get to skate fast, avoid obstacles, and sometimes race against the clock. As the tracks become more complex though, these became less fun. Since you are made of glass, you can imagine how many obstacles you can run into before you shatter. As the open parts of the levels became more creative and complex, though, they became more fun, so I ended up really enjoying skating around the levels, talking to characters, doing tricks on the environment, finding little things to do, solving the little puzzles, seeing the bizarre scenery, and so on.
The battles, though, are the shining stars. How do you fight in a skateboarding game? You build combos and then land a “finisher” to “hit” the enemy with your combo. This is cleverly handled by visualizing the enemy’s hitbox with light. For example, usually what happens is the enemy is floating/flying around. Beneath the enemy is a field of light. This is where you have to do a combo finisher to damage it. So, you can skate around racking up combo points, but you need to be near, or get near, the light before your combo expires or you crash or whatever (and lose your points) so that you can do a finisher in the light. This was challenging and fun.
The whole time you are fighting these bosses, there is blood-pumping electronic music playing. The soundtrack is excellent and fits the surreal visuals. So, when you’re fighting a giant centipede, the visuals are pulsing and neon and glass, the bass is thumping, it’s mesmerizing. The soundtrack picks up at other times, too, but the boss battles are where it really shines.
So, this was a nice surprise. I thought I would like it, but it was cooler than I thought, weirder than I thought, and it certainly was an audiovisual treat.
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SEASON: A letter to the future (PS5) by dkirschner (Aug 14th, 2026 at 17:12:26) |
I tried to get into this. You play as a teen girl going on a journey to document the world as the “season” is changing. “Season” doesn’t refer to fall, spring, etc., but to some sort of impending cataclysm. The game is about change and memory. It’s pretty for sure, melancholic. You start in your home town in the mountains and ride your bike down, down into a valley, where you explore another town (and try to figure out what happened to all the people) for most of the game. You’ll learn about their politics, their religion, and other aspects of their culture. You do this by cycling through various marked areas (the fruit farm, the cow farm, the dig site, etc.), reading signs and documents, taking pictures of things, and recording audio of things. The idea is that you’re documenting the world, preserving its beauty (for the future, as the title suggests). You have a notebook, in which you can organize pictures, text, and insights that the character has. All this is neat in theory. I liked the mystery and generally enjoyed exploring around learning about this other town and its culture. I did not, however, enjoy cycling (except for the open road), taking pictures and audio, and especially did not enjoy having to manually place items in the notebook. I see how players could like this, giving them control over building the notebook, over what they “remember”, but to me it was tedious and helped make the game feel dull.
The main thing I disliked about the bicycle is that it cannot go over many obstacles! This is unfortunate in a game where a bicycle is your means of transportation. I was constantly getting stopped by things in the environment (a rock, a low fence, a small curb), and when you stop, the character gets off the bike. Then you have to figure out what blocked you, go around, get back on the bike, start pedaling again. Then you’ll hit another rock and get off the bike. Walk it around the rock, get back on the bike, pedal. It’s annoying. Why can’t you just bunnyhop over low things? To demonstrate how common (and annoying) this is—and I am not making this up—one of the few menu options is “unstuck.” Yes, that is how often you get stuck on the environment—not just knocked off your bike, but actually stuck. So frequently that there is “new game, continue, settings, credits, UNSTUCK”. The game is certainly rough around the edges. The camera is also janky. I got bored and picked up something else.
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Deliver Us the Moon (PC) by dkirschner (Aug 14th, 2026 at 17:07:04) |
This was nice! It reminded me of Observation and other such space station mysteries. Perhaps the more recent The Invincible as well. I haven’t found a perfect example of such games. I liked those other two, but they had problems. This was similar. It’s an indie for sure and was rough around the edges. Notably, it refused to save my graphics settings. Every time I booted it, it cranked itself up to ultra and turned on ultra ray tracing. Like, please, my laptop is about 5 years old and has one of the earlier ray tracing video cards. It’s never been able to really use the feature; the fan cranks to the sound of a jet engine, the laptop heats to the temperature of the sun.
The puzzles were basic (started to get a little more interesting toward the end), it used your standard audio logs / video logs / read papers to convey the story, and it was totally predictable in its linearity. Go here. Oh no, things are broken. Fix them. Oh no, something else is broken. Fix it. Go there. Oh no, another thing is broken. Fix it. Luckily, I found the story compelling, the gameplay was smooth, the pacing was good, and it was able to inject some manufactured urgency into a handful of gameplay segments.
In the story, you play as [spoiler], who goes on a solo mission to the moon to find out what happened to the work colony that maintained the facilities that sent power back to the Earth, which was facing environmental catastrophe. With the work colony missing, the power was off, which was causing an obvious problem for Earth. So, you learn about the people there, what they were doing, why the facility went silent, and you have to get the power back on to save Earth. There’s some good human drama.
Some of my favorite parts were the manufactured urgency ones. The game does a really good job of having you juuuuuust make things in time. You juuuust make it to the airlock before you run out of air; you juuuust align the transmitters before the old, creaky one falls over; the QTE on the monorail activates juuuust as it’s about to go off the track; etc. A player who is slower to react might have to play these segments a few times because there is little room for error (you’re usually doing something in a straight line, but still, it’s possible to go too slow or try to explore at the wrong time, or whatever).
Oh yeah, one funny design decision was how constantly the game reminds you of your objective. But it does so in the game world, not just through your “mission” menu. So, as you run around the facilities, there are always screens displaying that the power is off here, the bay doors are locked there, the generator is on here. You’ll never be at a loss as to what to do. It’s so unrealistic though, the amount of monitors displaying the statuses of things. They also added a few “slice of life” things around the facilities. One is a poster that you keep seeing for an upcoming movie night. The posters tell people to vote on the movie. Like the monitors, such posters are reused a hundred times. I noticed, at the end of the game, the climax, in the elevator to the reactor core, there is…a poster about voting on movie night. I laughed out loud. There are probably two engineers who ever ride that elevator, and if one knows about the movie night, then the other one does too. And who put that poster in there?
Overall, I certainly enjoyed this one. I’d give it a solid C+.
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Divinity: Original Sin II (PC) by dkirschner (Aug 14th, 2026 at 17:01:57) |
My god. 116.6 hours in and I cannot beat the last fights, which are absolutely nuts. I could load an old save approximately 6 hours back, complete some additional quests, purchase some better gear, and re-do that last 6 hours. I wouldn’t get enough experience to hit level 20. That would probably add another 10 hours to the game. But, I can’t.
Here is how the last fight went. I confronted Dallis and Vredeman in Lucian’s tomb. I fought them. When Dallis’s health is low enough, Vredeman taunts her and you can attempt a persuasion check with either the nearest character or the last character who attacked Dallis (unsure which). I re-did this fight a few times to be able to make the check (strength or intellect) with a character who could pass an intellect check. It was initially using my rogue, who has neither high strength nor intellect.
After successfully making the check, the fight proceeds to phase 2, where you fight Vredeman (who reveals himself to be Braccus Rex) and the kraken. The kraken vomits up three other special enemies, and will continue spawning tough enemies throughout the fight. The first few times I arrived at the fight this way, Dallis and Lucian were also enemies to me, but they would also sometimes attack Braccus et al. I thought it was weird that they would keep attacking me after Braccus betrayed them. Anyway, this fight was absolutely impossible. The kraken teleports around the map each turn, typically to wherever the biggest cluster of your characters is, vomits up a couple enemies and uses massive AoE spells, often straight up one-shotting some characters. Meanwhile, Braccus and the spawned enemies run around decapitating your crew. Seriously, impossible. What am I supposed to do when I have a dead character already coming into phase 2, and then the rest get basically one-shot before they can do anything?
So, I went back to the initial confrontation and chose to give up my source instead of initiate combat. Well, doing this takes you straight to phase 2 with all your characters at fully HP, AND all the enemies from phase 1 (except Braccus) are friends. Now we’re cooking! Braccus et al. are much stronger than you and your allies, especially as the kraken does its teleport-and-spawn-enemies thing. But your new friends tend to go straight for Braccus, Lucian especially, and they’ll bring him down. I figured out that you need to spread out and hide. When I finally beat it, three of my crew were dead and my rogue was cowering in a corner after drinking invisibility potions for most of the battle. When Lucian kills Braccus, the fight is over, so hiding in the corner until that happens is a good strategy.
Or not. Because, to my surprise, once I (or Lucian) killed Braccus, Lohse resurrected and the Doctor showed up. What? As far as I knew the Doctor was an optional boss related to Lohse’s quest. You can meet and kill him (or negotiate with him?) in Arx in Act 6, but he annihilated me when I fought him once (and I didn’t have the option to negotiate), so I just ignored the quest and moved on. Well, APPARENTLY, if you don’t kill him earlier, then he’s the final boss. Who knew?! He kills Lohse, and then you fight him with your remaining party members, who, unlike Lohse, did not resurrect. So, it was my half-health and no-longer-invisible rogue against the final boss of the game. The Doctor one-shotted my rogue. Game over.
How is one supposed to deal with this? I suppose I could distribute scrolls of invisibility to everyone and have them hide throughout phase 2 so that I will have 3v1 for the final battle against the Doctor. Though he kills Lohse, who is my healer and magic armor restorer, before the battle, which means I would be doing a boss battle with no healer. Probably not going to work. The other option is to reload an old save…before the point of no return…HOURS ago. Kill the Doctor, removing him from the end of the game. Except the Doctor fight was also nuts; one level ago when I attempted the fight, he basically one-shot my party. Need to do other quests to try and gain another level. Buy more unique and divine items. Strategize to kill the Doctor. Maybe sneak through his home killing nurses first. After that, re-do the entire final dungeon. That would take an entire day. Why. Why is this game doing this to me!?
*Edit* - A few days after writing this, I mustered the motivation to re-load an old save—not quite as old as I thought I’d have to do, but still a couple hours old. I learned (117 hours into the game) that you can access waypoints via the minimap, which I had to do to escape the Death Room that I had saved in (and had thought—wrongly—that I was stuck in). Wow. It was about 60 hours into the game when I realized you could click on waypoints from the main map instead of physically going to a waypoint to teleport to other waypoints (which is what I had been doing). Some things are not explained well! Anyway, I went back to the Doctor to give that fight the old college try. Impossible! He freaking mind controls (“demonic possession,” permanent debuff) Lohse after three turns, which is barely enough time to get through his (magic) armor, let alone his health. At that point, it is this uber-boss, his four demonic minions, like 8 nurses who come running from throughout his clinic, and demonically possessed Lohse (again, this is my healer and magic restorer, who of course just starts buffing the shit out of all the enemies!) vs. my other three characters. Oh, also, when Lohse is possessed, the Doctor is invulnerable. So, that means that on turn 3 after he possesses Lohse, you need to then focus fire her down to kill her (maybe then you can resurrect her and she won’t be possessed?), and do that while surviving the onslaught of all those other enemies, turn the tide of battle, and kill the Doctor. How? HOW?! I half-assedly looked into completing the few other remaining quests first, but, again, I wouldn’t have gained a level, and two of those had given me tons of trouble earlier, too.
So, I have a horrible taste in my mouth upon reaching the end of Divinity: Original Sin 2. I love so many things about the game. I love that there are challenging battles. I love the magic system, the elements, the dialogue, the characters. It’s phenomenal. But there are some atrocious things about it as well. The insane difficulty spike and surprise bosses and “mandatory” side quests at the end, for one. The biggest thing though is the inventory micromanaging. I disliked the inventory system SO much. It is no exaggeration to say that at least 10% of my play time…easily 15% or 20% if you include looting...was inventory management. Moving items between characters, keeping track of what I’d picked up recently, trying to find specific items amid the clutter, ensuring that wares were on Lohse (who had the “bargaining” trait, so things in her inventory sold for more), dealing with encumbrance, searching random barrels and desks, and so on. The game has THOUSANDS of items. Hundreds of crafting recipes. Ingredients out the ass. Vendors everywhere. Items littering every building and out in the wilds and the dungeons. I was compelled to pick things up, sell them, turn a profit, buy better items. That required the inventory micromanagement. If I knew how it would be, I 100% would have made a warrior character with high strength (carry more weight) and given him the bargaining skill. Instead, it was Lohse, a mage with no strength, who had the bargaining skill. Indeed, none of my characters had strength because I didn’t choose any warriors. Which moves me on to my next point…
I probably struggled more than I needed to throughout the game because of my party composition. I had three mages and a rogue. My party was squishy and lacked mobility. One mage was a summoner/necromancer. Another used fire, geo, and poison magic. The third used air and water magic. I thought that given the game’s focus on battlefield elements, this would be fun. It totally was, but often my battlefields look like rainbows, with red fire here, green poison there, blue ice there, etc. The lack of mobility and constant need for line of sight often meant that my three casters were grouped up—easy targets for enemy AoE abilities. I also just realized way too many useful tips and tricks way too late in the game. Like, there are some amazing talents, like the one that restores you to full health when you are resurrected (instead of like 10% health) or the one that lets you cheat death. Used in conjunction with the full health restoration talent, that means that when you get killed, you cheat death (one more turn to kick ass!). Then, if you do die, someone resurrects you, and you go back to full health, and the cheat death talent refreshes every time you are resurrected. Like, I should have given both of those to every character, but either they didn’t become available until higher levels, or I was thinking about other strategies. Also, apparently I built my rogue wrong. I was dumping points into Dual-wield, which gave some damage bonus, but turns out I was supposed to be dumping points into Warfare, which added like a bigger damage bonus to ALL physical damage. I couldn’t discern that from the tooltips. So my rogue was weak.
Anyway, man, I’m so beaten down by the end. I want to persevere, but I think I need to cut my losses and just say I enjoyed the time I had with the game. I’m so close to beating it, but I would have to replay the entire ending after reloading an old save, completing more extremely difficult quests, doing a ton more micromanaging with potions and scrolls and spells, finding better gear to buy, and so on. It’s going to take forever. I should just look forward to Baldur’s Gate 3, which will have, admittedly, a more familiar set of rules.
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Returnal (PS5) by dkirschner |
| Feels very sci-fi. Neat to see a Housemarque bullet hell game translated into a 3d roguelike. |
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most recent entry: Tuesday 28 October, 2025
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I started this about a year ago on a PS Plus subscription and dove back into it for a while on this current subscription. If I recall, it was about 6 hours last time and another 12 or so this time, so I had some really in-depth sessions last week. My initial notes last time just read "hard, grindy, neat vibe." I can say after another 12 hours that these three descriptors are still accurate!
Returnal is a third-person shooter / roguelite / bullet-hell game made by Housemarque, who is known (to me) for shoot-em-up / bullet hell type games like Outland, Resogun, and Nex Machina. The move to a AAA third-person shooter somehow works and retains the insanity of a typical 2d bullet hell. You play as an astronaut named Selene who crash lands on an alien planet after following a mysterious signal, and then finds herself stuck in a time loop. There's the set-up for a roguelite then. When you die, you restart at the crash site, slightly better off than the time before thanks to a slow-and-steady drip of persistent unlocks and upgrades.
Selene explores various biomes, following objective markers. The biomes are pretty big and have randomly generated layouts, so every run is a bit different (though after 18 hours, biome 1 was getting really fucking repetitive). Layouts are also branching: there are main and optional paths. Following the main path will eventually get you to whatever objective marker you're following, the boss, and the way out. Optional paths feature all manner of special rooms, which can have everything between great loot to deadly minibosses. The randomness in the design makes runs ridiculously intense. You constantly have to make decisions where one outcome could help (from slightly better than neutral to overpowered boon) or hurt (from a slight annoyance to dooming the run). Such decisions can involve whether to open a chest, use an item, go into a room or not, switch weapons, acquire a parasite, pick up a health kit now or later, spend more time in the current biome or leave it for the next, and so on.
Here is the anatomy of my 18 hours so far:
0-6 - Learn the basics in biome 1, die die die. Not sure if I ever even made it to the boss.
6-12 - Re-learn the basics in biome 1 after not playing the game for the better part of a year, and feel like I'm starting to get a good grasp on mechanics, enemies, strategies. Make it to Phrike, the biome 1 boss, a few times.
12-16 - Have a godly run where I finally kill Phrike, and then proceed to one-shot biome 2 and nearly one-shot biome 3. I would have one-shot biome 3 except that I FORGOT TO USE A HEALTH KIT during the battle! Uggggggggh! The boss and I were both almost dead. Like 3 more seconds and I would have killed it. I was so engrossed in the battle that I forgot I had purchased a major health kit that would have restored me to full life. I cannot believe I did this. /cry
16-18 - Demoralization makes me suck at the game. Never make it back to biome 3. Cry some more over the unused health kit.
I learned that when you beat biome 3, then you forever after can start your run in biome 4. Since I failed to use a health kit, and therefore did not beat biome 3, I had to start back in biome 1 AGAIN. This was really demoralizing and after playing a couple more hours, I decided to start another game instead of beat my head against this one. Although, I know that I can best Returnal! I just need more time. The run where I did so well (and every run before that), I meticulously explored the maps, killing lots of enemies (and therefore leveling up my weapon proficiency, which makes you find stronger weapons), getting lots of good parasites and artifacts, and boosting my max HP. After the run where I forgot to use a health potion, I was just zipping to the next biome as soon as I found the teleporter, but as a consequence, my weapon proficiency was lower, my max health was lower, and I didn't have many good parasites or artifacts, which meant that everything was relatively harder. Although my skill had increased, it didn't make up for having like 25% less proficiency, health, etc. So, I need to (a) continue getting better at the game and/or (b) continue moving slowly and completely exploring biomes as I go so that I will be strong enough to tackle the challenges that the game springs on me. Since I'm on a PS Plus subscription, I have other games I want to play, so I don't want to spend too much on this one, as it could potentially take quite a long time to beat. If I have time left after finishing the others I want to play, then I'll come back. Or I might just buy this next time I see it on sale, or perhaps I'll just wait for its spiritual successor to come out next year.
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