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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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Apr 26th, 2024 at 17:11:51 - Portal Stories: Mel (PC) |
I had some Portal 2 mod sitting in my Steam library and then saw some other one released recently that was highly, highly reviewed. I thought, "I wonder what are some other fully self-contained Portal story mods with great reviews," and Portal Stories: Mel jumped out. Downloaded it, played it. It's ridiculously impressive, basically a full prequel to Portal 2. But man, is it challenging! I made it most of the way through without using a walkthrough, but eventually caved in and then relied on it to solve four or five levels. Initially, I had luck putting the game down and coming back to it later, seeing the puzzles fresh, but after a while that quit working.
It's hard in part because it begins where the difficulty in Portal 2 ended. It's a full game, but not in terms of introducing mechanics. That is to say, it doesn't introduce mechanics. It assumes you know everything and are a portal genius. That's fine as a mod. So its puzzles are difficult, and they are really clever. You have to learn new tricks, not used in previous Portal games, that it doesn't teach you. You just have to figure out, for example, that "destroying a cube" is occasionally what you need to do to solve a puzzle. It never would have crossed my mind that I would need to purposefully destroy a cube for any reason, but it pulls that trick a few times. Other times, you need to move a cube from afar using an excursion funnel. In the second level I caved in for the walkthrough, you combine these tricks, using an excursion funnel to destroy a cube, so that you can get a new cube in a different spot.
In the third level I used a walkthrough for, there is actually a decoy button and panel that you don’t need at all. I spent a lot of time messing with that button and panel! That level honestly felt mean! There is also some guesswork involved in some levels in shooting a portal where you can’t see, which was also kind of a mean trick. One trick (that I figured out, go me!) that I saw a lot of people stuck on involved sliding a cube down a slope to break the paths of a series of lasers, which opened up a series of red laser grids so that you could get to the next area. That one took a while because, annoyingly, you have to slide the cube down the slope and get it to land in a portal. You have to open the other portal after you pass the red laser grids and get the cube. But getting the cube to slide into a good spot to be able to pick it up was a pain. All these super hard levels made me feel brilliant when I solved them (typical Portal!), and like an idiot when I saw the solution online ("Ah, of course!" Or actually in this game's case sometimes, "What the hell?!?").
The story and production values are great. You play as another test subject, there is another maintenance core, and there is another AI trying to kill you. It's a direct prequel to Portal 2, which you learn after the credits. Very cool. If you're a Portal fan, it's worth playing, but just know that it'll really test you!
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Apr 26th, 2024 at 16:46:54 - Wandersong (PC) |
This was a freebie from somewhere or another, and it is totally worth playing. I picked it up because it looked like it had an interesting "singing" mechanic. You use the right stick to navigate an action wheel, where each of eight directions is represented by a color and produces a note. Your character is a bard, so you're basically singing with the right stick. It's pretty simple, but it is implemented in a variety of ways throughout the game. For example, you don't select dialogue options like in most games. You use the right stick to choose the option on the action wheel and the bard "sings" the dialogue option, one click on the wheel per syllable. So, "I'm a singing bard" would be like right, right, left, up, down-right. For dialogue, it doesn't matter which notes you sing, just sing the syllables. Other times, you'll have to match colors like in a typical rhythm game, or during some very cool boss fights sing notes according to colors of projectiles and environmental cues. Like I said, it's not terribly difficult, but it is such a different take on how a character interacts with the game world, and it's done in such a playful way, that it's consistently fun. I smiled through most of the game.
The entire game has a playful tone, not just the singing mechanic. The story itself plays with the typical RPG hero narrative. You aren't a hero; you're an overly positive little bard who thinks he can sing a song to save the world. There is a hero with a giant sword who calls lightning from the sky, and constantly foils your adventure, saving the world in the traditional way by killing all the bosses, but she's a jerk. The game is all about "believing in yourself" and "friendship" and "being positive" and etc. In most RPGs, you learn special moves, gain equipment to better kill enemies, get money (the bard never has any money), and so on. What does the bard find hidden throughout his adventures? A man in a mask who teaches him dances. Very silly dances. What purpose do the dances serve? None whatsoever, except to entertain you. You can dance-walk (instead of regular walk) at any time, and it is pretty funny.
The writing is also consistently funny, and there are many characters to meet. The game is broken up into seven acts, some of which are more interesting than others. They generally have a "talk to all the people" phase, then a "complete the area (side)quests" phase, then a "puzzle platform" phase, then an encounter of some sort with a fairy or a boss or the hero or someone. Admittedly, there is a lot of dialogue, and yes, I read all of it because it's good. But the characters are talkative. And admittedly the quests are not always that exciting. And admittedly the puzzle platforming leaves something to be desired in terms of how well the bard controls and in terms of length (they almost always feel too long). But damn if the whole package isn't a 9 out of 10!
It's definitely a little rough around the edges, which only added to its charm for me. The bard sometimes glitched into the terrain, so I'd have to exit and re-enter a screen. The pirate ship occasionally just refused to move in one act. Also, for some reason, when the camera was zoomed out, the dialogue could become unreadable. I assumed this had to do with the fact that the game ran in a low resolution on a TV, but it was the same on my laptop. I've watched videos where it looks fine for other people. I mean, it was like 1% of scenes that were unreadable. Most were fine, and at worst, some scenes were like looking at one of those "did u kno u can raed tihs senentce bceause the frist and lsat ltetrs are the smae??" things, which was...honestly kind of fun, like word puzzles. Obviously not ideal, but it didn't detract from how much I liked the game.
So, a big hit for me that I never would have heard of had it not been offered for free. Definitely recommend for those who like RPGs and quirky indie games.
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Apr 14th, 2024 at 13:51:13 - Before Your Eyes (PC) |
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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