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Feb 10th, 2023 at 09:38:08 - The Dark Pictures: Little Hope (PC) |
Forgot to update this. Patrick and I have been playing it an hour here and there on Tuesdays for a few months and finally finished last week. These Dark Pictures games are all given mediocre reviews, but I got one for free or $1 or something in a Humble Bundle and figured I'd give it a shot because I like horror games and it seemed like a fun couch co-op game. Sure enough, it provided some good entertainment for us after our long work days on Tuesdays. The games are an anthology, all connected (I assume) by this mysterious storyteller. I think he writes the episodes, which each explore a horror theme. There's something supernatural about it. I'd have to play more of the games to understand, but the storyteller guy was this posh English man in a library who eggs you on.
Little Hope (and I assume the rest of the games) have an interesting premise. You play as a group of characters, alternating one at a time as the story progresses. In this game, they were a college professor and four of his students. They were on a bus for a field trip and the bus crashes in the town of Little Hope (gloomy!) where a dense fog descended. In the fog are demons, a mysterious little girl, and a cranky resident. You explore the town, wind up being able to interact with the past, as the two timelines impact one another. The five of you uncover the mystery of the town through a story about witchcraft. It has a Salem witch trials vibe, and we found the story generally interesting, but confusing as well.
There seem to be two main thrusts of gameplay here. The first is the exploration/horror stuff and the second is managing social relationships between the characters through dialogue decisions. The first is straightforward. The game is linear. There are jump scares (effective!). There are some items to examine or read (boring, but give more context to the story). There are quick-time events (intense and fun, especially watching Patrick fail them). If you fail a series of quick-time events, the character you're controlling is probably going to die in a wonderfully gruesome way. These often happen when you're being chased by a demon. I think that any of the characters can die. We finished the game with two alive.
The fact that anyone can die affects that second thrust of the gameplay, the social relationships. The decisions you make affect the characters' personality traits, which will permanently change. I don't know if this affects subsequent dialogue options or possible interactions with other characters or what, but each of them has an elaborate profile, and when they die it'll tell you what their dominant traits were (maybe the traits influence their life chances?). It would require another play through to gain a better understanding of the personality traits. If we were to play it again, we said we'd try to role-play the characters (like make the professor arrogant, one of the students scared, another one combative, etc.). Instead of switching "attitudes" as the mood struck us, we'd make them stick with personality traits.
Since anyone can die, the writers had to create dialogue for any combination of characters at many points in the story, depending on who was still alive. The dialogue is not the game's strong suit, and by the end of the game it could get absurd. For example, we had three characters alive for a while toward the end, but it was like one of them should have died a while back. She wasn't in cut scenes, she barely said anything, anything she did say was generic that could have been said by anyone. She'd disappear off screen while the other two characters had conversations. It was weird. Then she did die. She had...little hope...of living (sorry).
We were let down by the ending, but realize that the ending may be impacted by the fact that this is an anthology and the stories might be connected. If I got another one of these for free, I'd play it co-op. I wouldn't seek it out alone; it'd be boring without another person to get scared and laugh with.
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Jan 28th, 2023 at 20:53:14 - Assassin's Creed Odyssey (PS4) |
Figure I'll do a little reflection on how this one's going. My last entry was at 40 hours. This one's at 80. Hopefully I finish it before 120. My earlier observation is correct. The game is ridiculously large, absurdly large. I'll say that there is no good reason it should be so large! Can we have like a 40-hour Assassin's Creed game?
I played most of the game so far exploring every single "?" on the map. Recently, I stopped doing that because I realized that the game's level scaling doesn't hit a ceiling. I thought that at some point I would start to out-level enemies. After level 50, not only does it keep scaling, but you level out of your skill trees and can start spending ability points on other bonuses, like + damage with daggers or whatever. I realized that there was no use for experience anymore. Although I was mostly exploring the "?s" out of curiosity, they definitely get same-y. Another huge fort, another bandit camp, another temple, another animal lair. After a long time, I decided these things were slowing me down too much to be worth the enjoyment of doing them.
Now, I am only doing quests, exploring wherever those happen to take me. This makes for a more focused experience, and I am still clearing many "?s". Some quests are quite long and require going all over the world map to complete. For example, a blind man wants you to synchronize 5 tall view points and describe what they are like. A huntress wants you to slay some legendary beasts. These, handily, are marked by golden "?s" on the map instead of regular white "?s". I've been able to clean up these quests by exploring enough to find the golden icons and focus on those. I've also completed the arena, competed in the Olympics, and killed several mythological creatures (Cyclops, the Minotaur, the Sphinx!).
I'm getting close to eliminating all the cultists, too. I might have 10 or so more, and have already killed a couple of the main ones. My last play session, I killed one through a story quest. He was a reigning champion fighter in the Olympics (of course you get to participate in the Olympics), but was a cheat! I found him on a bench later and one-shot him with a charged assassination. Then I killed another on accident. I was clearing a fort to complete a quest and got spotted, which caused most of the fort to rush me. I was slaughtering them all and suddenly I got a "confirm cultist kill" popup. There was a cultist in the fort? Okay...cool! Another one bites the dust, I guess.
In that pile of bodies were also like 5 mercenaries. I've figured out how these annoying enemies work more since my last entry. When someone sees you kill someone else or steal, your bounty goes up. Once your bounty reaches a certain point, a mercenary comes after you. Your bounty can keep increasing until up to 5 mercenaries are looking for you. And find you they will. I used to fight them, because there is some system whereby you kill increasingly difficult mercenaries to get rewards at blacksmiths and shops or something. After purposefully hunting mercenaries for a while though, it became clear that a better course of action is to avoid them and kill the person who placed the bounty on your head. After avoiding mercenaries for a while and killing people who placed bounties on my head, it became clear that an even better course of action is to just pay the bounty so the mercenaries will go away. This strategy is far simpler. As long as you aren't going around slaughtering townsfolk and stealing from the town square, you can easily afford to pay your bounty whenever it gets high enough to be annoying (which is to say, when mercenaries start interrupting whatever it is you are trying to do in the game). I really would miss nothing if the mercenary system didn't exist, though I understand how it ties to the story (your character is a mercenary and this is a thing; there are mercenaries everywhere).
Another thing I finally figured out, or rather finally took advantage of, is upgrading gear and equipping legendary sets. It's not too expensive to keep a set of legendary gear upgraded. By the time you are my level (57...?), you have a lot of legendary gear and don't need to spend time slogging through your inventory all the time assessing your 20 new shoulder pads. It's far more efficient to pick your best legendaries to keep upgraded, based on your play style. I like assassination abilities and using daggers and swords. So, I have been going with gear that provides bonuses to that stuff, as well as a gear bonus of +40% to poison efficacy, which is sick. My poison ability costs nothing, so I have perpetual poison daggers that do a ton of damage. I could re-spec and make poison an even stronger backbone of my offense.
I've still got several totally unexplored regions of the world map, and I can see a few cultists in those regions. Otherwise, most everywhere else is explored. I still can't say enough cool things about how beautiful ancient Greece is. I love just running, riding, or sailing around. It's easy to be aimless in this game. I know that, in addition to the remaining cultists (main quest) and side quests to clear up, there are DLCs. I've read that the Atlantis one is the best, so I'm looking forward to it. I'm not sure if I'll take a break from the game after beating the main story before tackling DLC, or if I'll burn straight through it. I'm not playing much, so I probably won't get tired if I go straight through. But yeah, this game is so long...so, so long...
Here's to continuing to chip away! At the rate I'm able to play, it'll take me the rest of the semester.
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Jan 28th, 2023 at 20:16:54 - Shadow of the Tomb Raider (PC) |
This was better than the last one, but I'm glad to be done. These games are bloated with items to pick up and needless optional tombs, crypts, side quests, and challenges. If you skip all that stuff, you'll cut your playtime in half. Unfortunately, my brain has a hard time ignoring map icons, so I squirrelled away items and explored most of the map for about 75% of the game before finally focusing on the story and finishing up. As such, the pacing was off for me. The skill tree is done a little bit differently and is a little more useful than the previous two games, but more or less the same. And the funniest thing, I complained hard during the previous game about "survival instincts " or whatever it's called when you click the right stick and it highlights interactable objects and enemies. It only lasted a couple seconds and I seriously spent the game clicking the right stick for most of the time. One of the very first skills you can unlock in this game increases the duration of survival instincts. They knew it was a horribly implemented feature! They knew everyone hated it! So they graced us with survival instincts that are not maddeningly short (for a skill point).
The best thing about Shadow of the Tomb Raider is the setting. They nailed it in the jungles of Peru with all the ancient civilizations that were there. Since this is the final game of the trilogy, the stakes are raised too. The bad guy is THE leader of Trinity. His story, while still leaning into a savior complex, was far more interesting than the guy with the face scar whose name I don't remember from Rise of the Tomb Raider. He's got a history with the people in the Peruvian jungles, is connected to the people and the setting in a way that the previous villain wasn't. The stakes are also raised for Lara. In the first 10 minutes, she accidentally sets in motion the end of the world (oops!).
Lara has to wrap up the drama surrounding her family and her own life too. You get more clarity on her childhood, what happened to her parents, and what she wants from life. At one point, angry and frustrated, she laments that she could have had a family and led a totally different life. I like Lara's development over the three games. There is this amazing moment in Shadow of the Tomb Raider that contrasts with one of the most memorable moments of the first game. In the first game--her first adventure--she kills her first enemy in self-defense. She's horrified at the killing. She comes to terms with it during that game (and kills hundreds of people over the trilogy). At one point in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the bad guy asks her how many people she's killed, how many lives she's ruined, and she's fairly dumbfounded and can't respond. But there's this scene--the most badass scene I've played in a game or watched in a show or movie in memory--in an oil refinery. An earthquake has hit, Trinity is flying helicopters around blowing up the refinery, the bad guy has just told Lara that he's killed her friend. She's furious. It's chaos. One of the series' trademark escape set pieces happens (these are breathtaking) and Lara jumps into the water at the end of the set piece. She emerges from the water, camera facing her, like a fucking sea banshee. Fire from the burning refinery lighting up the background, burning buildings and oil on water, Lara dark and wet in the foreground. An enemy grunt sees her and tentatively yells at her to stop as she stalks toward him. She says something like, "You don't want to mess with me," he attacks her, and she beats the shit out of him before taking his knife and stabbing him to death. It was really violent and emotional.
How far she came from the scared, vulnerable, novice adventurer she was at the beginning of the first game.
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Jan 18th, 2023 at 08:51:02 - Slay the Spire (PC) |
Since my last entry, I have beaten Act 4 with the Silent and the Defect. The Silent took me a long time, but the Defect was more like the Ironclad, just a few tries. Then, I went back to the dreaded Watcher! I finally beat Act 3 with her, though it didn't "count" (didn't get the achievement) because I obtained the keys to Act 4 and died there. But let's call it a victory. And, after many, many attempts, I have yet to beat Act 4. Hell, I may not have even reached it but like twice. The Watcher is hard to play!
Since I have played with the Watcher so much, I've developed many strategies that seem to be good, but that haven't scored an Act 4 win. She has some cool card mechanics. In my last run, I tried to build a Scry deck. Scry lets you look at the next x cards in your draw pile and discard up to that many. So the card, Cut the Thread, does 7 damage, scries 3, and draws 1. That card is great because not only can you look at the next 3 cards in your draw pile (and discard those that you don't want this or next turn), but you get to draw one right then. There is another card that costs 0 and does 4 damage. Every time you scry, you return that card to your hand. So, in the deck I built, I had like 5 or 6 scry cards and 2 of the 0-cost "return to hand" cards. After I played the 0-cost cards once, I would get on a roll! Every time I scried, I'd get a free 8 damage (actually 12 damage because they were upgraded). And I would try to play this combo when in Wrath (deal 2x damage) to nail enemies for an extra 24 damage every time I scried. And I'd always try to scry for a scry card. When it worked, it WORKED.
All those little damage cards also synched with two other cards I had. One did a little damage to an enemy and then gave 3 block every time you attack that enemy. The other one (when upgraded) applied 2 weak (-25% damage) to all enemies every time you gained block in a turn. You can imagine how much block you could gain and how much weak you could stack if you manage to pull off a scry combo with these two cards in play! Passive block and applying weak go really far for the Watcher because you want to do what you can to stay in Wrath. If you can offset the 100% damage you take while in Wrath with passive block, weakening the enemy, and so on, then you can kill them quickly and not take as much damage yourself.
Another strategy is to acquire as many cards with Mantra as possible. Mantra stacks until you get 10, then you enter Divinity stance, in which you immediately gain 3 energy and deal 3x damage for the rest of the turn. This allows for ridiculous bursts of damage. I think somehow I need to get both scry cards and mantra cards so that I can scry FOR the mantra cards. But as always with the Watcher, you are always playing this precarious balance between stances. If you trigger Divinity without having attack cards in your hand, or without being able to draw, or without having energy, then its potential is wasted and you have to build up mantra again. You definitely don't want to stay in Wrath long because you take double damage. The trick to this is mitigating it with tons of block or weak debuffs, having healing in your deck or relics to compensate for taking extra damage, or timing entering Wrath when enemies are not about to attack. The consideration to enter Wrath is always, "Will I be able to exit Wrath if I need to?" For example, the enemy might not be attacking this turn and you can enter Wrath and dish a lot of damage. But what are they going to do next turn? Maybe use a huge attack that will one-shot you at double damage. What's the likelihood of drawing a card to exit your stance or enter Calm? Do you have one retained (meaning it stays in hand until played)? Can you scry for a Calm card? Or will you take your chances? I've died plenty of times by being in Wrath at the wrong time.
The crazy thing about this game, as much as it frustrates me to lose over and over and over with the Watcher, is that I keep seeing new cards, relics, and finding new synergies. Like, part of me wants to mark the game as complete and move on, but the other part of me is like, "wait, this is still fun and exciting!" The feeling of "just one more" is strong. Two quick examples, then I'm out. In one recent run, I moved to a ? on the map and it was the Good Face/Bad Face event, where the Face Trader swaps faces with you. You have a 50% chance to get a Bad Face, which I had previously gotten every time. It's a relic that gives you 1 weak (-25% damage) on your first turn, which makes for a terrible opening. But I finally got Good Face! (I just read that there are two possible Bad Faces and two Good Faces). The Good Face I got gives you +1 max HP after every combat. And I got it in like the 3rd room on Act 1, like immediately. That's HUGE. I was going to fight fight fight and get like +30HP for the final boss, tons of cards, build a crazy attack deck. Then I got a relic that raises max HP by 14 and another that raises it by 7. Then...I attempted an elite with a key and got some terrible luck and was killed in Act 1, after being set up to have more HP than I've ever had. Crushed.
So, I dunno. Should I keep trying with the Watcher? Maybe I'll play the other characters more and finish unlocking everything. I think they all have just one or two more tiers of stuff. Maybe the new relics will help with my Watcher quest. Or should I just stop and move on to Monster Train?
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