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Aug 11th, 2019 at 17:10:55 - Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (PC) |
I'm 22 hours into Mankind Divided and I've done four story missions. Yesterday I got to the gun mod tutorial. Am I playing incredibly slow?
What I HAVE done: explore nearly every nook and cranny of Prague. At least the first two parts of it (are there more??). I've got a ton of money and more praxis points than I know what to do with. I can break in anywhere and steal anything.
The pacing and open world are throwing me off. Am I far? Am I not far? 22 hours is a long time and I have no sense for my progression through the story. It feels like I'm doing things out of order. Example: I spent two entire play sessions just sneaking around and stealing everything I could from the Palisade Bank, a gargantuan building with guards and security systems densely populating it. No quest or anything. I just found myself inside and started doing my stealth thief thing.
The exploration, stealth, and thievery are clearly mesmerizing to me. Combat? I'm not quite sure. I've mostly knocked people out, and shot a few with tranquilizer darts. Story? Not enough data yet. The world-building though is excellent. I've read a hundred emails in hacked computers, e-books, personal data files, and more. There are a lot of little stories that weave together to give a sense of a world on edge after the Aug incident at the end of Human Revolution. I'm looking forward to doing more story missions soon.
I have noticed some odd gripes. The TVs and radios in the game. I hate them. These people in future Prague have so many TVs, and they are all tuned to the same news station that loops the same broadcast. Similarly, the radios are all tuned to an Alex Jones type angry man. I turn them all off whenever I can, but I've really come to loathe them because their noise pierces through all other sounds in the game. There are some bugs. After the gun tutorial, the game crashes. I re-did it three times. So I technically never completed the gun tutorial. Sometimes guards will become hostile to me because I am in a friendly space that used to be forbidden. The guards still think such spaces are forbidden sometimes. I don't know if this is a bug, but often vendors (like NPCs marked as such! In stores!) will not show me anything for sale and make comments suggesting that I have no money (and that that is why they aren't showing me their inventories).
It seems weird to write about Mankind Divided having played so long yet so little. How many more areas are there? How many places will I have to revisit? How many story missions are there? I know it ends on an awful cliffhanger, and I think I know that it only takes place in Prague. Its scope is illusory.
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Jul 18th, 2019 at 13:17:10 - Wuppo (PC) |
Yet another free game that I'd never heard of before from...from where...probably Humble Bundle since it was in my Steam library. The number of great free stuff from Humble Bundle (or $1, okay), Twitch Prime (free with Amazon Prime), Epic Games, and etc. is getting wild. It's like I don't have to buy games anymore. I bought two cheap things from the Steam summer sale (because it felt weird not to!), and I may not have bought anything over the winter one. And I've still got a massive backlog.
Anyway, Wuppo. Odd name, odd game. What a hidden gem this was. It's like a narrative puzzle-platformer RPG hybrid thingy. It is cute and charming and funny and really well made. You play as a "wum," which is a little creature that reminded me of Strongbad's head on 4 legs. You're chilling in the "Wumhouse," where a lot of wums live, and the manager gets pissed at you for dripping ice cream all over the floors, so he kicks you out. But not before you meet a bunch of the quirky residents, take a lot of baths, play a quiz game to get a disguise to get to the 5th floor so that you can clean it, fight a giant dust monster, fight a giant ice cream monster, steal a train ticket, take over operation of the bell tower, help a wum paint a picture of fireworks, and more. Thus begins your adventure as you leave Wumhouse and look for a new place to live.
During the game, you learn about the history of the world and its "races," largely through collectible film strips that you bring to wise wums (and one wise fnakker), who help you interpret the films. You'll encounter a wide variety of creature types (like the mud-loving fnakkers, the peaceful zen-like blussers, and the capitalistic splenhakkers). For example, you quickly learn that there was a big war between the wums and the fnakkers, and the wums cast the fnakkers into a giant sinkhole. Are the fnakkers really dead and gone, or are they still alive down there in that sinkhole??
Gameplay in Wuppo generally involves talking to NPCs and completing missions that move the story forward, opening up new areas to explore. You'll acquire a variety of items (and lots of hats) that you can equip one at a time. Most items serve some useful purpose. For example, you get a "popo" hat that can pull levers and doors, various items that let you see in the dark, a "workman's hat" that lets you blend in with wums in Popo City and gives you a mustache, and on and on. You do use a gun to fight, but it looks like it shoots paint, and you can modify it in a few different ways. There are a lot of boss fights (about 20 total, I believe, and a handful are optional), and these are really fun. I didn't have any real problem with any until the final boss, but I eventually got him after 5 or 6 tries. The focus of the game is not on combat, even though you have to fight to progress, and I really like that. It didn't feel violent or combative, which is a nice change of pace. The antagonisms are sillier. A related thing is that you don't have HP, you have "happiness." You can increase your happiness by doing nice things for NPCs. This was a cool way to incorporate HP in the game.
There is all sorts of stuff to do in the game that isn't related to the main story. You can fish for items, you can go to a theme park and ride rides. There is an entire island chain that has nothing to do with your main mission, but you can go explore it anyway, talk to characters there, swim out far and see what's out in the ocean. I took a train one time and it stopped at a cafe that I never went in (because I had no money to spend at the time, but I'm sure there were other neat things there to do). The game is so creative and so well done. The art looks like MS Paint. The characters are really expressive. The characters and dialogue are always funny. The audio fits the game like a glove.
Definitely worth just getting lost in the game's charm for the duration. It's never too hard, though there are some challenging puzzles and areas (such as Redav Kned's guest house) that will make you feel great for completing them. Took me near 11 hours. Minus a few points for some bugs (screen size was stuck small sometimes, first time I tried to play I couldn't get the sound working and nothing would fix it) and the time I crashed the game by worming my way off screen. I was worried that I would start and then not be able to finish because the audio wouldn't work or the screen size would lock small, but it was okay! How do people not know about this game?! It probably just got lost in the crowd in Steam. Play it and tell other people to play it!
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Jul 16th, 2019 at 09:06:23 - THOTH (PC) |
Fantastic little twin stick shooter from the person who did 140, which was a really neat music platformer. In Thoth, you control a little orb and you shoot other shapes until they die. The shapes chase you. When you kill a shape, it turns into a black ghost version of itself and chases you faster. Each level is a set piece, and like any good game, Thoth adds tweaks and challenges bit by bit to keep you on your toes. So, there are squares that, when killed, fire a smaller square straight at you, which continues to bounce around the level. Some levels have deadly rows of lights running through them. When you kill an enemy, the lights flip on. Kill another enemy and the lights flip off, allowing you to pass. Another enemy type is a circle that expands indefinitely until you shoot it, whereupon it retracts. If you kill it, then its ghost version will engulf everything within about 10 seconds. If you don't kill it, it will continue to expand normally again until you shoot it back down to size, and so on. Key to each level is knowing where the enemy shapes are moving, killing them so that you can move around the level safely (e.g., taking into account rows of lights, expanding circles, and other obstacles), and knowing when to be patiently methodical and when to be aggressive. The later levels had some cool new mechanics like shapes that, instead of shooting squares at you when they die, release pulsing circles. When one of these circles is on screen, the next enemy you kill transports you into the circle. In this way, you can teleport around the level, out of (or into!) harm's way.
Thoth is a short game, challenging but beatable, though there are extra levels after the main set that are probably really hard! I played through some of the procedurally generated ones, and then there are inverted levels (color swap?), a two-player mode, and one of the most difficult sounding achievements I've ever seen. For a brutal challenge, you can beat the game in two-player mode without the second player ever moving or shooting. When the second player dies, they become a ghost and chase you too. So basically this achievement means completing the game with another ghost circle chasing you around the entirety of every level. Veeeery few people on Steam have that achievement!
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Jul 15th, 2019 at 14:22:11 - Scanner Sombre (PC) |
Well THAT was cool. I wish I had a VR set. Scanner Sombre is a "cave exploration" game by Introversion of Prison Architect fame (or for me, Darwinia). They also did Defcon and Uplink. I've played everything they've ever made. It's always supremely creative. Scanner Sombre looks like nothing they've done before though. You wake up in a tent deep in a cave, find this radar type gun and a VR headset that scans the environment, pixelating and coloring it. Basically, you fire the radar gun everywhere to light your way and explore the cave. Along the way, you get upgrades to the gun that allow you to see more clearly. I won't say anything about the story, but I really enjoyed it, especially when I realized that where I thought I had started and where I thought I was going was not at all where I had actually started or where I was actually going. Scanner Sombre also has a little bit of horror in it with some hideous sounding creatures and oppressive sound design. The boat segment was one of my favorite parts and the most beautiful. The only thing that detracted from the experience was that sometimes navigating through the cave could get frustrating because everything is the same few colors. If you get turned around or can't find a little exit from an area, you can spend some time wandering. Not much though, as the entire game is less than 2 hours long. It's short and sweet and something different.
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