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May 21st, 2024 at 07:48:19 - Creaks (PC) |
I haven't played an Amanita Design game in a long time, and what a treat this was. I'd never heard of Creaks, but it was in some puzzle game bundle I purchased a while back. It’s got the exceptional art and music you expect from Amanita. The puzzles are creative and the concept is original. In Creaks, you are a guy who finds a hidden passage behind his bedroom wall. He turns on his flashlight and goes through the crawlspace. Turns out that below his room is a sprawling cavern with a massive tower, wherein live all manner of strange creatures. The anthropomorphic birds are the main ones, and they’ve got a problem. A giant monster is crawling around the outside of the tower, destroying everything. The birds are trying to figure out a way to stop the monster. You stealthily follow the birds down, down, down, watching what they are up to, solving puzzle rooms as you go. Eventually, they discover your presence and enlist you to help destroy the monster.
The puzzles in Creaks are great! Over time, you’ll be introduced to various mechanics, but they basically involve manipulating creatures and light sources, which when shining on a creature, change them into furniture. The first puzzle creatures you encounter are dogs. The dogs activate when you get close and bark at you. When you get too close, they chase you. If you jump off a ledge or go down a ladder, they’ll stand there barking for a minute, then trot back to where they were. So, for example, if you need to get around a dog, you might get it to chase you, climb down a ladder, and climb up a ladder now behind it while it stands barking at the ledge you dropped from. Or, if you lure it to a light source, then turn on the light, the dog will change into a chest of drawers, which (as long as it stays in the light!) you can move or climb on.
You’ll see jellyfish creatures, which have rules governing their constant movement; goat creatures, which run away from you if you go near, and which otherwise will move toward patches of grass to graze. Dogs will also chase goats. Then there are these weird plant (?) creatures. One type copies your movements and the other type does the opposite of your movements (e.g., you step left, it steps right). And so on. You are generally trying to position the creatures onto buttons or beneath light sources such that you can get past them and move to the next “scene.”
There are something like 50 scenes. Not only is the puzzle design excellent, but the larger environment design is cool too. As you’ll see, the scenes are all interconnected in the tower. The difficulty is just right. Some of the puzzles had me scratching my head and then feeling clever once I figured out the trick. I got really stuck only one time, but put the game down for a week, played Firework, came back, and with a fresh perspective solved the scene in 5 minutes.
Highly recommended for a creative, charming, chill puzzle game.
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May 21st, 2024 at 07:04:53 - Firework (PC) |
This is a point-and-click psychological horror game from a Chinese developer that one of my friends recommended. He's studying representations of traditional Chinese religious practices in games. This one has a sort of shaman woman, whom we never see, and spirits. The main character, a rookie police officer, can communicate with the dead, and he does so as he attempts to uncover the mystery behind a fire in a funeral home and the death of an entire family.
The story was the strongest part of the game. Although it could be confusing at times, I liked how the protagonist occasionally recapped what was going on as he talked about the case with the teacher of the child who died, who was also investigating for her own reasons. One reason that the story got confusing is because of what I don't know about Chinese folklore. I kept thinking, "A person from China would have all the cultural context and knowledge to understand this," whereas I lacked such background assumptions. This might have been why the humans or spirits were doing some of the things they were doing, various symbolism, the significance of the grandparents going to see the shaman woman, how she or those visits might have been viewed, and so on. In the end, the story is really, really sad!
The gameplay in this one is straightforward. There is nothing challenging about it. Puzzles are easy. The environments are tiny. You won't get lost or stumped. You generally navigate one or a few screens at a time, interact with a few interactable objects, perhaps pick up an item or two, perhaps solve a puzzle. All of the objects and puzzles affect something on the same or nearby screen, and it's very linear. In typical psychological horror game fashion, the environment changes (e.g., new object appears, color shifts, spirits appear, phone rings, etc.) in generally unnerving ways. There aren't many scares per se, but certainly the creepiness factor is present. The one novel mechanic was a camera that you can use to invert colors in certain places, which changes how the rooms look and reveals new areas or objects that you need to progress.
Overall, the game kept me engaged through the intriguing story. Gameplay was slow-paced and easy, and it's good that the story consistently moved forward through exploring the environments (mostly the deceased family's house) or else I would have gotten bored. Not essential, but neat game. Now, I've got to talk to my friend about it!
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May 13th, 2024 at 12:38:28 - Portal Reloaded (PC) |
I played about an hour and it broke my brain. This is immediately harder than Portal Stories: Mel because of the time dimension. Reloaded adds a third portal. It is green and allows you to move between a "past" Aperture and a "future" Aperture. Various rules govern how time works. For example, you can move objects from the future to the past, which basically creates an extra object, but not vice versa. Manipulating an object in the past will change it in the future (but not vice versa). I struggled to understand how past and present objects affected one another, and didn't even make it to where you can shoot your own green portal; it was always placed for me. I watched some videos of later test chambers and there is no way in hell I would have figured them out. This was really like Mel-level difficulty plus a third portal and fourth dimension. Really neat, but nah, I'm not motivated to think about it that hard.
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May 5th, 2024 at 14:19:33 - Resident Evil 2 (2019) (PC) |
This one blew me away. Utterly engrossing and intense survival horror. I am sure I played RE2 way back in the day (I remember the police station), but this is the one I'll remember in the future. I was a little worried that the remake's excellent reviews were biased for nostalgia, but that's not the case. It's incredible in all respects.
One thing I was thinking about while playing was how effective it is at making me tense. Other good horror games do some of these things too, but this one ties all these tricks into one package. When you kill a zombie, it might not actually be dead. By "kill," I mean shoot it until it falls down and appears dead. I learned that these zombies will sometimes begin groaning again and get back up, sometimes as you walk past, and other times they'll be reanimated when you return to an area. If its head explodes (by shooting it in the head with a shotgun or occasionally with the pistol), then it's really dead, but if its head doesn't explode, I was always anxious that it would come back. And you can't just go around blowing up all the zombies' heads with the shotgun because, as a survival horror game, ammo is a scarce and valuable resource. Later in the game, there are these plant zombies that will always come back unless you kill them with a flamethrower.
Another thing that constantly had me nervous were the corpses. Enter a room, see a corpse, and you have no idea if it's one that will animate or not. You have to go about your business always watching and listening in case it gets up. This uncertainly about enemy states is really nerve-wracking! Another type of enemy, the "licker," is blind. If you make noise (run, slam open a door, fire a gun), it attacks you. If you are quiet, you can walk around it. But if you get too close, it will become alert, although it won't *know* that you're there. When it becomes alert, it will start moving around, which means it might run into you, since you're trying to quietly creep by. Those things were scary.
And THEN, as if I wasn't already holding my breath half the time, there is this hulking enemy called Tyrant (that you can't kill) who, at several points in the game, appears to stalk you through an area. Tyrant is attracted to noise. If you're running, slamming doors, you'll hear his footsteps getting closer and closer. When he finds you, he relentlessly pursues you until you can get far enough away from him so that he goes somewhere else. So, whenever Tyrant was around, I was being quiet. Being quiet for Tyrant and the lickers is hard given that there are zombies around, who may or may not reanimate!
And you're constantly under pressure to conserve ammo, manage your inventory, and navigate these labyrinthine areas with maps and various keys and puzzles. In the police station, you do a lot of backtracking and criss-crossing as you gain access to new areas. One room was a darkroom where you can develop rolls of film. Every time you find film, you want to go to the darkroom. But, getting back to the darkroom meant going back through this terrifying hallway where there was a licker lurking and a few zombies strolling about. So, just finding a roll of film made me scared in anticipation of what I was going to have to do!
Oh yeah, one other thing to note, which made me feel kind of dumb, is that you'll find gun upgrades in the earlier part of the game. I had three upgrade parts in my inventory for some named gun, and had assumed they were for a gun that I didn't have because I didn't notice that my gun had a name. Then I found a shotgun upgrade, and I had a shotgun, so I figured it was for that. Then I thought, "that's weird that they'd give me all these upgrades for guns I don't have and then give me a shotgun upgrade for a gun I do have. Did I miss a gun?! Is the pistol I've been using really weak?! Is this why I'm always out of ammo?!" Turns out that yes, yes my pistol was weaker and I was always out of ammo because it should have been upgraded three times already. Oops!
The RE2 remake is a 100% score for sure. I have RE 8 queued up to play at some point. Super excited.
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on May 5th, 2024 at 14:25:45.
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