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Sep 26th, 2022 at 11:41:02 - In Other Waters (PC) |
Didn't realize this never got an entry. This was a freebie on Amazon and one I'd heard of for its innovative UI. Indeed, and briefly, the UI is quite neat. You play as an AI, awoken in a dive suit by a researcher who is pursuing a colleague/ex-lover into the depths of the ocean on a mysterious alien planet. You navigate, scan things, use tools, and so on by clicking on the UI instead of traditionally controlling a character in the underwater environment. You can see the environment represented on your radar, and move by setting (pre-determined) waypoints. It's quite linear in this fashion. It was really weird not being able to "see" what is being described, what the human in the suit is looking at. A metal door barring the way is just a line on the map. Sea creatures are little moving dots. Points of interest are triangles.
The story is really what kept me going through the game. It's intriguing for sure. There is mounting dread as you go deeper into the ocean, encounter more mysteries, and eventually something sinister and tragic. It could get a bit boring because it's mostly reading and no action. There is a big focus on building a taxonomy of marine life, taking samples, learning about the alien flora and fauna. Having recently played Subnautica, I didn't really care to do all that again and mostly ignored the "biologist" part. But it's a short game and yeah, like I'd heard, has a neat UI. Do you like to use a novel UI to play a game? Do you like science fiction? Are you a marine biologist? Then this is for you.
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Sep 26th, 2022 at 11:28:32 - Gwent: The Witcher Card Game (PC) |
Since I've recently retired Legends of Runeterra (LoR), I can't help but compare it to Gwent. They're very different games. I've also been thinking a lot about Hearthstone lately, which I haven't played in years, but did spend a few years playing. (LoR is much more similar to Hearthstone). Here are reasons I'm enjoying Gwent more than LoR:
1. It's slower, less chaotic. I have more time to think in Gwent. Along with this, there are fewer card mechanics, and the numbers on cards are smaller (e.g., attack power doesn't skyrocket). This is generally good for me in handling so much information!
2. The relative difference between more and less powerful cards is smaller than in LoR. You're not going to play one card and insta-win. Your opponent is not going to buff a card to unmanageable heights in one round and annihilate you. For these reasons, the game feels more fair and balanced.
3. Gwent is more tactical and involves planning much farther ahead. This is in part due to its best-of-three structure. Hearthstone just went back and forth player-opponent in each round. LoR went back and forth but added attack and defend phases in each round. Gwent goes back and forth sort of like Hearthstone, but you play three "sets" (idk what to call them) in the game. It's best two-out-of-three. Cards in your hand after each set carry to the next. Between each set, you draw three more cards. This means that if you play all your cards in the first set, you'll only have three cards in the second set. This happens often. But, you can choose to "pass," which is useful if you are clearly ahead or behind. If you're behind, it saves you from wasting more cards in that set. If you're ahead, either your opponent will also pass (realizing that they're behind, or that it's not worth trying to come back from behind to win the set) or they will play cards to win the set, which puts them at a disadvantage later because if they play extra cards to win a set, then you'll have more cards than them in the following set. You can also strategically hold cards through a set. Often, I will try to save more powerful cards for later. Some cards grow in power if you hold them. Or, you may hope to draw better synergies after each set. But it's never guaranteed! Sometimes you hold a card the whole time and realize it would have been much better played in the first set. Other times, it wins you the game. There is also a lot of guessing what your opponent is up to. I've already learned that I can "trick" people into removing a threat that isn't really a threat, or playing a little bit of a strategy, but really moving into a different strategy, and the opponent counters the wrong thing. Overall, I feel I can be cleverer in Gwent!
4. Gwent is generous with rewards. It's much more free-to-play (although you can of course purchase card packs) and free-to-play players can actually compete in ranked modes. There are also far fewer types of rewards to earn, which simplifies things.
5. The "single-player" is more interesting than LoR. In LoR, single-player began great, but quickly devolved into playing the same AI decks on the same maps over and over ad infinitum, grinding away. In Gwent, there's no story mode per se, but there are stories. And as this is the Witcher universe and this is CD Projekt Red, the writing is fantastic. As you unlock "reward points," you can choose to progress through various maps with rewards to unlock. This is purely to get you cards and vanity items like avatars or game boards, but the games are online with humans, not against AI! Playing other people is more engaging than playing AI. It makes me wish that the Path of Champions in LoR could have been completed against humans. I have also figured out though that the game, Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales, is like a standalone single-player RPG of Gwent. It has some tie-ins (achievements, rewards), for playing through Thronebreaker. So, I'm actually stopping Gwent until Thronebreaker next goes on sale on Steam. Then I will play that, and continue Gwent later when I am probably better at it.
Here are a couple things I'm missing in Gwent:
1. When your opponent plays a card, you get a few seconds to look at it before it goes on the board or disappears. If it goes on the board, that's fine because you can continue looking. But if it's a spell and disappears, it's confusing because I can't always understand it quickly enough to know what it did! And there is no "previous move" list to refer to, as in LoR and Hearthstone.
2. I wish there was an auto deck-builder. You get a starting deck for each faction, but otherwise have to build your own. This is fun of course, but I remember when Hearthstone added an auto deck-builder to help quickly try new decks and strategies. It was awesome. You could tweak it later. Since each faction comes with like 8 special abilities (once-per-game powers), it would be neat if Gwent had basic decks for each ability. It was funny, I was trying an ability with Skellige that said something like, "Spend one charge to do one damage to any ally on the board. Once you spend all five charges, summon [some big bear card]." I misread the ability as doing damage to enemies, so the first time I played with the ability, I of course lost because I didn't build my deck around doing damage to myself. I haven't tried to make that one again yet, but instead have been playing a Skellige deck with pirates and ships. I forget exactly what the ability does, but there are some cool synergies.
Anyway, I've been playing only Skellige to learn the game. They're a fun faction with a few different playstyles. One is heavy use of Bloodthirst, which triggers an action if x number of enemies are damaged. So like Bloodthirst 3: Deal 4 damage to an enemy, means that if 3 enemies are damaged, then that card can deal 4 damage to an enemy. The base Skellige deck uses Bloodthirst a lot, so you've got to constantly be trying to keep enemies damaged (but not necessarily dead!) to maximize your own cards. Then there's the ship-and-pirate one, another that focuses on healing and "alchemy" cards (of which I have few), another (as my failed run in the previous paragraph suggests) that focuses on damaging yourself and going berserk, and others.
I've barely scratched the surface. Really looking forward to Thronebreaker, probably in the Steam winter sale! Maybe I'll knock out another card game (there are so many...) in the meantime.
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Sep 19th, 2022 at 14:17:30 - Legends of Runeterra (PC) |
Officially retiring this. I started a long time ago and never really got into it until recently. However, I've discovered it's a massive grind. A fun CCG, but also a massive grind. I've stayed in the single-player area, which involves a map with various regions. Each region has a handful of adventures that are rated at different "star" levels (1-star, 1.5-stars, etc.). Your goal is to unlock and level up the game's champions to tackle harder and harder adventures.
There are so many champions! I unlocked four (of maybe 20? 30?), leveled one up to level 12 (out of 30), another to 8, another to 5, and had managed to win all the available adventures through 2 stars. I don't know how much time this took. Early runs at 1 or 1.5 stars could take 15-30 minutes. The 2-star runs were taking about 75 minutes. Runs involve a series of battles. You choose your champion and your adventure, and get the champion's premade deck. Cards in the deck have various special items equipped, which boost their abilities, depending on your champion level. So with any given champion, you begin with the same cards, although they are modified for your champion's level. Once in the adventure, you choose nodes along a winding and branching path. Nodes contain battles, item shops, chests, healers, or other types of encounters. There is a lot of strategy and planning. Your battles will be against different NPCs with different decks who have different relics equipped. You can see some of this information ahead of time, and generally can see a node ahead of you, although there's usually not much you can do given the information. You could choose the battle with the relic that seems easier to handle, choose to get healed instead of buy items if you have no gold, etc. So there is a healthy amount of crossing your fingers, although over time I did start to learn the types of decks I was facing.
Anyway. That sounds so complicated writing it out. And there's so much more. There are TONS of card mechanics to deal with. Even playing as long as I did, sometimes the games would get so complicated with so much shit going on and abilities and equipment stacked, that I would get very lost. In fact, the last game that I did lose was like that, against some magic fairy wizard character who kept summoning these 5/4 (power/health) cards and getting Spellshield (blocks spell effects targeting the card) and Overwhelm (excess damage against an enemy card hits the nexus, which as in League of Legends, is your health pool) on them. Then the adventure mod gave enemies +2 power every time they attacked, so these protected 5/4 cards grew until I couldn't block them anymore. She was also slinging 0- and 1-cost spells around like there was no tomorrow. It was brutal!
Before this loss, I had been realizing that the single-player mode is just playing these same adventures over and over and over, grinding the 25-some-odd champions, grinding your "legend level" (which is a meta-level that awards bonuses across champions in all adventures), and grinding quests to get cards, shards, and the zillion things you need to unlock characters, level up characters, craft cards, and so on. Plus--oooh, Riot you are so mean!--you constantly get experience for quests and rewards that can only be obtained if you pay real money. It shows you progress on these quests alongside the others so you see how much other stuff you could be getting. There is no end in sight!
I initially compared this to Hearthstone, but it seems much more complex of a game, which is cool. However, I played Hearthstone from the time it started, so I watched it become more complex as it evolved. I jumped into Legends of Runeterra after it had been around for years. I can't imagine what it would be like to jump into Hearthstone after half a decade. Just thinking about this makes me nervous for the other card games in my backlog, like Gwent or Slay the Spire, that have been around a minute. I did enjoy my time with this, and perhaps I'll load it up again in the future, but the time would be better spent on the backlog!
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Sep 19th, 2022 at 06:57:15 - In Sound Mind (PC) |
I had zero expectations for this. Never heard of it before seeing it free on Epic. It seemed like a nontraditional horror/FPS with some trippy visuals. What did I get? A story-heavy game about a psychologist unraveling the mystery of his patients’ deaths, a government conspiracy, and his own psychosis. It's a VERY clever premise as presented. About 3/4 of the way through, I had a sad feeling that it was moving toward a more generic central plot and that the setup wouldn't deliver, but it mostly does. I even teared up at the end. It was so SWEET and I love cats.
You wake up in the basement of a three-story building. Eventually, you (the player) start to realize who you (the character) are. You find your office, your home (there’s a portal to it, don’t ask), a talking cat, and lots of mysterious purple substance that looks like radioactive waste. Most areas in the building are blocked off. The game is divided into "tapes," which you find through a series of other portals into your patients’ homes. Like a metroidvania, new parts of the building open up as you gain new items in each tape (e.g., a piece of glass to cut through police tape or smash boards, a radio device to jam electric boxes, etc.). The tapes are your recorded sessions with patients and the game proceeds as you play through each tape, transported into some hellish version of the patients’ realities. In each of their tapes, you trace their descent into madness, fight them in truly epic boss battles that span most of the tape, and bring some closure to their part of the story. But it only deepens the overall mystery and their connection to one another.
In Sound Mind shines in numerous areas, but I'll highlight the epic boss battles. Since the tapes are the patients' realities, you might imagine that the patients are omnipresent in each level. Good guess! Sometimes the entire tape feels like a boss battle. Not only are the tapes set where the patients finally lost it (a ravaged supermarket; a lighthouse and surrounding beaches; a state park; industrial mining operation), but the patients are there, manifested in horrific versions of themselves. It's hard to choose which one to talk about. The first one might have been my overall favorite tape. The second one presented me with the most tense moments of the game. The third one had the longest and most epic boss battle. The fourth one was probably the least impressive. And the final boss battle was whatever (he pesters you throughout the game and looks like a doddering Freddy Krueger).
The first tape is for a patient who can't handle other people looking at her. You (her psychologist) try exposure therapy and have her go out to a familiar local supermarket. She can do that, feels comfortable there. But then it closes, pushed out of business by the game's version of Wal-Mart. She goes there and, long story short, smashes it up and kills herself with broken glass. You get a piece of said glass, which is a creative tool for the rest of the game. Not only does it cut police tape and smash boards, but if you hold it up, it highlights objects (key progression objects, upgrades, electrical grids) behind you. They remain highlighted for like 10 seconds after you put the mirror down. So in this way, you can find hidden keys, health upgrades, figure out how to open electronically locked doors, see hidden paths, and so on. It's pretty neat!
In the third boss battle, you fight a man who is very angry over losing his job, transformed into a bull-head-shaped truck engine that zooms around the map trying to kill you. You basically lure it from place to place as you develop a way to pacify it. This involves a big puzzle synthesizing a drug, navigating a conveyor belt maze, completing a puzzle with fuses to lift an elevator and navigate a power grid, avoiding the bull in a train yard, and more. One of my favorite parts was in the second boss battle where you are fighting "the darkness." You have one fuse and have to get through dark areas by sprinting from fuse box to fuse box trying to create lit areas so the darkness wouldn't get you. Scary!
Sometimes, the levels can feel a bit long though. This is due to the game's main weakness: its combat (not good for an FPS!). Shooting is very basic and enemies dart around too much for the guns to handle. It is the least fun part of the game. There is basically one enemy type, besides the bosses. It does have a couple variations, but they both jerk around and are hard to shoot in the head. Stealth is also totally broken. I may have snuck by one enemy once. There's a whole stealth stat! You will never need this, rarely be encouraged to try it, enemies will see you anyway, and you'll always have enough ammo to kill them.
To sum, In Sound Mind was surprisingly good. Most of the time, I thought it was great. The story, bosses, and puzzles are highlights. Combat with normal enemies becomes a slog. Actually in the final boss battle, I quit killing them and learned I could just run past them. I'd definitely recommend this for something a little different. Oh, also, the soundtrack is excellent. I have to look up the band that did the music, The Living Tombstone. Their songs fit/set the tone of the game perfectly.
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