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Dec 16th, 2023 at 16:22:27 - Behind the Frame: The Finest Scenery (PC) |
Really captivating point-and-click narrative game with gorgeous artwork. This was another freebie on Amazon that looked intriguing. It'll take you around an hour to beat and is time well spent. I've never played anything quite like this. You are an artist, and you are trying to complete a painting to enter into a competition. As you paint, you are preoccupied with the old man in the apartment across the way, and his cat, and the game takes a turn toward telling a beautiful story about a couple. Simple gameplay, and thankfully you don't have to be accurate with your painting, but wow, really something.
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Dec 16th, 2023 at 14:32:03 - One Hand Clapping (PC) |
This one has a novel mechanic: using your voice. A freebie on Amazon one week, it looked too intriguing to pass up. It's a 2d platformer. Move your character with WASD, but solve puzzles by singing. It takes time to get used to, it takes some configuring to get your mic and speaker set up properly, and it is imperfect, but it is neat. I didn't quite finish--it kept losing my attention--but I was pretty close. It's okay if you suck at singing, like I do. You can't die, you aren't punished for failing, and it is somewhat forgiving.
Here's a basic example of how it works. You need to jump across a gap, but the gap is too wide. Hold a specific note to make a platform appear. Jump on the platform (keep holding the note) to the other side. Voila. If you go off key, the platform disappears. The rest of the game is basically a series of increasingly complicated variations on this one thing. Maybe there are three colors of platforms, and each color appears to the hum of a specific note. Maybe your voice moves the platforms back and forth. Etc., etc.
I said that the game is somewhat forgiving. True, you can make mistakes. But if you suck at singing (again, like I do), then you will make a lot of mistakes, and you will be retrying over and over and over. You aren't always told what you need to do, either, so you'll need to use your voice to experiment. See what different notes do. See how singing changes the environment. It can be frustrating. I was quite frustrated at the beginning, but this was partly because I hadn't taken the time to properly follow the games' audio calibration instructions. This is very important, and I didn't get it reliable enough to play until I pulled out my good quality external microphone, put in headphones, and made sure there wasn't background noise. There's no other way to play it!
The longer the game went on, the more creative it got, but also the more it was like, "there's more? really?" So yeah, neat game for sure, something different, but I did tire of it before the end. Now I need to go play Before Your Eyes and blink through a game.
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Dec 3rd, 2023 at 15:13:46 - The Textorcist: The Story of Ray Bibbia (PC) |
I cannot type anymore, my hand is so cramped. The Textorcist is such a great idea for a game. The story is silly, there are typos throughout the dialogue, the music loops in a strangely distracting way, the function of items and various UI elements is not transparent, but my goodness, I loved playing this. The most intense typing game. This was a freebie on Epic (and maybe Amazon, too), and sounded so strange, that I had to try.
You play as the titular Ray Bibbia, an exorcist trying to root out demons from the Vatican and save his daughter. Ray has a holy Bible from which he shoots "hollets" (holy bullets; the puns and portmanteaus are painful) at demons by reading. You, the player, type the text that Ray reads. It sounds simple enough, but takes some next-level dexterity. The first enemies (and every enemy is a boss fight) stand still and shoot at you. Then, the enemies start moving, slowly at first, then quickly, then one takes up half the screen, another teleports. Their bullet hell projectiles begin easy, one at a time, as you practice typing and moving. Then multiple projectiles, homing projectiles, projectiles shot at various speeds, exploding projectiles, giant projectiles, lasers, an entire screen of projectiles, and on and on.
You might be thinking, how can you dodge all these projectiles, move, and type at the same time? Good question. The default key binding is to move with the arrow keys, which means you are moving with one hand and typing with the other, or you are moving with your right hand, then quickly typing with both hands, then right hand back to the arrows to move again. This quickly becomes untenable. I changed the key bindings first to Shift + WASD to move, then because that's not home position, Shift + ESDF. That was the trick. So, to move, bring your pinky down on shift and use ESDF (same movements as WASD but one key to the right). If you need to use ESDF to type, lift your pinky and get the letter out, then put it back and keep dodging those projectiles. While you're moving with your left hand, you can type with your right hand.
This is all complicated enough when you are typing complete sentences in English like "I cast you into darkness. Come to the divine light of Jesus Christ." or something. Then the game starts throwing Latin at you. "Et absinthium dissisitum obliteratis jesu sau aeternum quotaun vadis..." (I typed Latin-esque gibberish, and that's exactly what it feels like while playing!). The letter combinations and hand movements to make them are unfamiliar, which significantly increases the difficulty. And this is happening as the bosses are getting harder. THEN! Some of the bosses start messing with your bible. One scrambled Latin words. Come on! So not only are you grappling with typing "aeternium glorius facie suae diabolis," but now you have to wrap your head around "aetrmiut sirulgo icfai uesa bsaliido." Another boss changes some "I"s to "1"s and "O"s to "0"s. So then you're like, "aetern1um gl0r1us fac1e suae diab0l1s," and COME ON!
The game is nuts. I loved it. I died my fair share of times, but I'm a very fast and accurate typist, so I feel like I did well. One death on the last boss, for example, no deaths on the next-to-last boss, maybe three or four deaths on the third-from-the-last. I had to get up and take a break a few times during that trio because my hands were starting to cramp/shake and my nerves were so on edge. I was literally laughing during the last boss because of how absurdly difficult it was and how absurdly close I was to winning, but I COULD NOT get my fingers to type the letter C right before the final "Amen" that would have finished it, while moving through the most ridiculous bullet hell part of the game.
There is a DLC that I appear to have, but the game won't recognize it for some reason. Seems like it's a known issue. I would definitely play more of this, despite the irony of a typing game having loads of typos.
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Dec 3rd, 2023 at 08:58:07 - The Walking Dead: A New Frontier (XBX X/S) |
Looks like Patrick and I started this way back in March! I remember he downloaded it on a whim, and I was concerned that he made a poor choice for us to spend our precious co-op gaming time. I've played a bunch of other Telltale Walking Dead and other franchise games--the highly reviewed ones--and loved them. This spinoff had a mediocre Metacritic score and, turns out, is a mediocre game. To be fair, it took us eight or nine months to complete, and I'm sure we would have enjoyed it more had we been more consistent, but it's not terribly compelling.
A New Frontier introduces new characters with new relationships to explore, and features Clem, but felt like a mishmash of scenarios from previous games, choices that didn't matter all that much, and characters whose shoes it was hard to step into and who often acted illogically. By the end, we were just laughing at what the characters were doing. For example, there is a scene in Richmond with the main character, Javier, and his brother, David, hitting baseballs in a batting cage (you know, a typical zombie apocalypse activity). You see, Javier was formerly a baseball player, and you know this because he wears a baseball jersey in every scene throughout the game, including flashbacks, and people recognize him and remember him for playing baseball (including a young kid who asks him for an autograph, even though this game is set four years after the beginning of the apocalypse, so the kid would have been like four years old when it started, and why would a four-year-old have been so obsessed with a baseball player, unless we are to believe that Javier was like Babe Ruth level famous). Anyway, David, whose successes were obscured by Javier's fame, remains bitter, and becomes more and more irrationally angry in the batting cages as Javier hits baseballs and says things like, "And the crowd goes wild!" You can miss the balls on purpose, which presumably doesn't remind David that Javier overshadowed him, but David becoming irate at this was so absurdly funny. As the game goes on, there are more such absurd interactions.
And at the end of the game, when Telltale breaks down your choices and tells you what kind of relationships you had with other characters, I'm not sure their conclusions were accurate. I wish I remembered which one I am specifically thinking of, but there was one that was the opposite of what it certainly should have been. This isn't the scenario, but hypothetically, it was something like "You acted romantically toward Trish," after being mean to her in every interaction. Yeah, this was definitely a weak entry.
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