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Jul 8th, 2023 at 14:05:21 - Hi-Fi Rush (PC) |
I suppose I should write some entries for all the games I’ve been playing. I’ve just been trying to burn through Game Pass games while I can, before I have “crunch time” at work, then vacation, then the new semester. Last weekend, I house/dog-sat for Sasha’s mom and dedicated the days completely to sitting in air conditioning and playing games. Hi-Fi Rush is the first one I played. I think I had a smile plastered on my face the whole time through. It’s pure joy, fun, funny, action-packed. This is a rhythm action game. Imagine if you had to play Bayonetta or Devil May Cry to the beat. That’s Hi-Fi Rush. This is different than other rhythm games I’ve played because everything—every thing—moves to the beat. It’s not just that you have to attack to the beat, but enemies move and attack to the beat and everything in the environment pulses with the beat. Actually, I suppose in this way it’s like Crypt of the Necrodancer. And, since I recently completed Metal: Hellsinger, I couldn’t help compare it to that, though they are very different games. One thing they have in common is that both encourage you to keep a combo meter up (though Hi-Fi Rush doesn’t penalize you for not doing so).
It's one of those “easy to learn, difficult to master” things. The difficulty curve isn’t too high on normal, and I figured out about halfway through the game that you can button mash, and later on in the game that as long as you’re rotating your party’s attacks in your combos, you’ll pretty much kick the shit out of everything and get high scores. But you have tons of attacks, special attacks, party member attacks, dodge, parry, and everything both on the ground and in the air. There are dozens of button combinations to memorize, from the simple X X X X combo to something like X [rest] X Y [hold X] Y [now they’re airborne] X X [hold Y] Y [chain enemy] Y Y Y X [switch characters for the finisher]. Okay, I made the last one up, but you can pull off combos like that.
I don’t think I would have cared all that much about Hi-Fi Rush if the story, setting, characters, and art weren’t so great. The music was really one of my least favorite parts. I found the songs to be pretty boring rock music (compared to the much more exciting metal in Metal: Hellsinger!) that got lost in the background of everything going on on the screen anyway. But that art! Man, the attention to detail in the setting, the character animations, it’s great. Everything is colorful and vibrant. The setting is alive. One of my favorite things about the game were the other robot characters—the vacuuming robots that run around frantically when you attack, the stoner guy mechanics, the robots made to move boxes who are perpetually worried about losing their jobs, the jabs back and forth between the newer model worker robots and the older ones. They’ve all got funny one-liners, and they always say something if you try to attack them (e.g., the box-carrying robots plead for you to stop so they don’t lose their jobs). The main characters were great, the bosses were great. It was just so charming, and I was always eager to see what the next little NPC was talking about, who the next boss was (and how insane they were!).
Some of the boss fights were pretty creative, and didn’t always involve traditional fighting, though like I said, I did eventually realize that as long as you’re including your party in your combos, you can pretty much stand right next to them and button mash your way to victory. I felt cheap. This helped me beat the last two.
Definitely recommended.
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Jun 28th, 2023 at 19:57:03 - Citizen Sleeper (PC) |
This game has a wonderful, expertly written story that kept me in my chair long after the novelty and challenge of the gameplay wore off. Also, I'm...a slow reader. I have nearly the longest completion time for the game over on howlongtobeat.com. So, what is Citizen Sleeper? It's a narrative game with tabletop mechanics. You roll a number of dice corresponding to your character's health at the beginning of each cycle (day), and you have different outcomes for various actions depending on which dice you choose for which actions. It's an engaging loop of sleeping, getting your random dice rolls, exploring the space station, triggering events, speaking with characters, and sleeping again to get new dice rolls and do it again the next cycle. It adds a constant forward momentum to the game.
That forward momentum is consistently interesting in terms of narrative, but not in terms of gameplay, which is the same at hour 20 as hour 1. Except, once you start spending skill points (obtained through completing "drives" [aka quests]), the tension of poor dice rolls ("Oh no, I have to slot a 3 into this dangerous action! It's got a good chance for a negative outcome with nasty penalties!") dissipates ("Ah, that +2 modifier on every single skill means that anything 4 and above is perfect, and even 1s are only moderately risky! I'll just sink into my chair and read the story then.").
And so, really, that's what Citizen Sleeper becomes: reading a good story. I would have liked the whole thing to be half as long, and the three free DLC added a chunk of story too. But man, I really enjoyed the tale. Basically, you are a "sleeper," which is (and I'm simplifying) a human consciousness semi-transplanted into an android. You wake up on The Eye, a space station with a few factions and a history rooted in corporate expansion and exploitation. You eke out survival with other people, meet them, learn their stories, solve their problems, learn the history of The Eye, become embroiled in its underbelly. But you're special. You're being hunted. By whom? Why? Do you even want to stay here? You can try to leave, you can stay. There are a variety of endings (I think I read 8), plus a couple endings in the DLC, which brings a larger threat to The Eye.
This was a good one, AND, I found out was made by the same person who created In Other Waters (the interface has a similar feeling), which was quite interesting, too (and, I realize, also places you in the role of a newly awoken AI). Citizen Sleeper 2 has been announced, and I hope the quality surpasses this one. Shorter, though, I hope. I'd rather read a good 20-hour book than have 5 hours of good story and gameplay, but then followed by 15 hours of good story and mundane gameplay. Or maybe I should learn to read faster.
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Jun 25th, 2023 at 14:10:06 - Road 96 (PC) |
Really neat narrative adventure game. It's like a road trip simulator and reminded me of something like a hybrid between 80 Days and a Telltale adventure, except in a pretty unique setting. I say "pretty unique" because the game is set in an authoritarian country with an upcoming contentious election, and it's clearly meant to evoke the current conservative/liberal polarization. The incumbent, a conservative white man, President "Tyrak" (who cannot think of "tyrant" here?), whose campaign color is red (Republican) vs. the liberal, Hispanic (I'm assuming--Florres) woman whose campaign color is blue (Democrat). The police and the media are all pro-Tyrak. Police are caricatured as violent assholes, except the one we get to see with some depth. Tyrak has established a border wall, has a state media outlet, is drilling everywhere for oil, and sends runaway teens who try to cross the border to work in the iron mines. Less is known about Florres' policies, just that character insist she'll make things better. There is a resistance movement, who is not necessarily associated with Florres, especially the more violent wing of it, but it can be assumed that this is the case. The backdrop certainly serves to villify conservatives as authoritarian and cruel and paints liberals as democratic, kind, and oppressed, while taking care to draw a line between "regular" liberals and "extreme" liberals who might be terrorists. It doesn't give such treatment to conservatives, who of course may also be moderate or extreme.
Anyway, you play as a series of nameless teenagers who are trying to cross the border. One by one, you guide them north by car, bus, and foot. You have to manage their energy and money; if you don't you'll be too broke to pay when you need to and you can actually die by exhaustion/starvation. Along the way, you'll meet a series of story NPCs with each teen and uncover their complicated backstories and web of relationships. Without giving anything away, there is the aforementioned "good cop," a trucker, another runaway, a hacker, a cab driver, a pair of robbers, and a news broadcaster (my favorite).
I was intrigued by both the narrative uncertainty of what would come next, of who I was going to meet and what I would learn about them, as well as the gameplay uncertainty of whether I would find food, be able to afford what I needed, and ultimately, whether I'd be able to make it to the border. And if a teen makes it to the border, crossing the border is another story. Not all your teens will make it across. In fact, I made it on my first try (before I understood what the game was doing) and thought, "Wow, I beat this game in an hour? Weird." I proceeded to get arrested or die on nearly every other attempt!
The game says that "every road trip is unique" and talks about procedurally generated routes, so I gather that you'll encounter the NPCs in various orders and scenarios. However, there is an overarching series of events that unfolds regardless of the procedural generation. Your dialogue choices affect outcomes of scenarios, when and how story NPCs will encounter one another, as well as the ending of the game itself, though it wasn't clear to me that my choices were affecting anything outside of immediate scenarios as I was playing. After each of your teens dies, is arrested, or makes it across the border, you'll see a news report mentioning something that happened on your journey and a current political poll. The entire time, the poll was roughly 2/3 Tyrak and 1/3 Florres (along with like 20-30% "abstaining," which totals to like 125% of the vote, and I have no idea if the developers overlooked the math here, or if it's a joke or what exactly...you can't have 65% Tyrak, 35% Florres, and 25% abstain...).
Because I wasn't really sure what the impact of my actions was, especially in the beginning before I understood much about the NPCs and their relationships, and before I suspected how I might be influencing things, I initially didn't play in an ideologically consistent way. You can generally choose important dialogue choices that signal you as a revolutionary (burn it down and rebuild!), a pro-democracy person (vote for change!), or an opportunist (as long as I get out, I don't care what happens!). Though it makes sense not to be ideologically consistent between trips because you are playing as different teenagers. But you, the player, probably have a perspective, and it does make sense to influence the story how you want; therefore, you might play all the teens in the same way. I ended up trying to play a hybrid of the revolutionary and pro-democracy person, and actually wound up with the "good" ending, which is the democratic one.
There is a new game+ feature, which carries over how much of each NPC's story you have completed (I was about 85% complete on average) and your abilities (each NPC can gift you an ability like lockpicking or new dialogue options for speaking to police; I got four of six). I started new game+, which opened with a new scenario for one of the NPCs, and I was thinking, "Oh, neat, I can just play until I 100% all the NPCs' stories!" But then the next scenario was one I had played in my first run, and I realized that it must repeat scenarios from game to game, even in new game+. I might watch the rest of their stories on YouTube, because they are fun and interesting.
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Jun 24th, 2023 at 14:01:00 - Amnesia: The Bunker (PC) |
I did not like this at all. It pales compared to the best Amnesia games and to Alien: Isolation, from which it takes clear inspiration. You are a French soldier trapped in a bunker in WWI. Pretty much everything else is dead down there. Oh, except for a hulking monster that murdered everyone and relentlessly stalks you. It sounds cool! In practice, I found most everything that was supposed to be scary about the game irritating instead. Once you get out of the "tutorial" area of the map, you can head in one of four directions, exploring the bunker and collecting what you need, and solving required puzzles in order to escape. After the tutorial, the monster activates, and boy does it. Everything seemingly triggers it to come looking for you and it looks for a long time. I spent a lot of my partial playthrough sitting in the dark waiting for it to go away. It moves through the walls, emerges from holes, and can break down doors. It feels like it teleports to wherever you are after you perform basic actions like running or cranking your flashlight.
This is all kind of fine though, right? It's a survival horror game. The monster is supposed to stalk you. Of course it's attracted to noise. Well, yeah, but it's so ever-present that the cat-and-mouse game feels less like any battle of wits (you can't "outsmart" the monster), but rather a waiting game. Cat-and-hide-in-a-corner-for-5-minutes. And chances are, after 5 minutes of hiding, the monster will magically detect you in the corner, break down the door you carefully locked, and kill you anyway. Then it's back to the Administration Room when you last saved.
You will HAVE to crank your flashlight; making noise is unavoidable. Typically, though, you want to fill the generator with gasoline so the lights in the bunker come on. The generator guzzles the gas, and you have a handy pocketwatch that you can sync to tell you how much time is left till the gas runs out. But you'll still need to crank that flashlight to illuminate where lights don't shine. And when the generator runs out, the only light you've got is the flashlight, which only lasts like 30 seconds on a crank. So, as with Amnesia: Rebirth, much of The Bunker is spent squinting in the darkness trying to open doors. The Bunker to me was less about avoiding a scary monster and more about navigating a maze of locked doors with a stupid flashlight that I have to crank every 30 seconds. It just so happens that the monster slows my progress through the maze to a snail's pace, what with all the stopping and waiting under tables.
The monster, the darkness, they're not scary! They don't build tension. They're annoying!
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