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Sep 12th, 2022 at 09:29:41 - Subnautica (PC) |
This is the first survival game I’ve put time into and really enjoyed! I’m so happy I found an exemplar of the genre. Since I haven’t played many survival games (though I’ve played plenty with survival elements, including recently completed Metro Exodus), I can’t well compare this with others. But I can say why I liked this one.
The game begins with you hurtling through the atmosphere of a planet and crashing into its ocean. Chaos! Your ship has exploded, the crew who managed to eject in life pods are scattered in the surrounding ocean. You lose consciousness and wake up to an insistent life support system. Take care of that, exit the hatch of your life pod, and behold the open ocean, calm, beautiful. Except for the burning wreck of the Aurora, your ship, in the near distance, leaking radiation.
Subnautica immediately establishes that the water world around you is beautiful, intriguing, and deadly. Colorful, cute fish swim near the life pod. Vibrant corals and plants with long stalks and luminescent seeds sway in the current. You’ll quickly be given some tasks, though. Read the survival manual and listen to radio distress beacons to figure out that (a) you need food and water, (b) you need to establish a safe base, (c) you should try to reach other survivors, and (d) other instructions that I don’t remember.
This begins a constant progression that didn’t slow down for many hours of gameplay. The progression occurs in terms of narrative, construction, and exploration. Narratively, you uncover what happened to crew members, their life pods, and other ships. You also catalog flora and fauna and learn about the ocean planet. Eventually, distress beacons from crashed life pods are too deep for you to dive, or surrounded by dangerous predators, or may just be really, really far away. Sometimes narrative events are set to occur in the future, like when a nearby ship catches the Aurora’s distress signal and announces a time and location for rescue. I’ll give you one guess as to how that goes; the rescue scene filled me with dread.
You’ll need to construct tools, vehicles, and a better base to reach, explore, and survive in new places (ocean biomes, as the game calls them). There are tons of things to fabricate (craft). You’ll be swimming around collecting ores and blueprints to build a laser cutting tool (cut metal, useful for exploring wrecks), a Seamoth (your first vehicle that offers some protection from the outside), fins that let you swim faster, O2 tanks that let you dive deeper, rooms for your base that let you scan for resources or store more items or use fish to generate power, and so on.
This is actually one point of improvement I have for the UI. It is not easy to search items to fabricate or to inventory what you need to fabricate more complex items. It would be useful if there was a search box so that you don’t have to scroll through 100 items looking for the one you want. It would also be useful if more complex items listed all the individual components they need. For example, building the Seamoth requires 1 Titanium Ingot, 1 Power Cell, 2 Glass, and 1 Lubricant. Each of these things requires some combination of other things (such as 2 Batteries and 1 Silicon Rubber for a Power Cell). Sometimes those things require still another combination of things (such as 2 Acid Mushrooms and 1 Copper Ore for a Battery). Without a search function, or a more comprehensive list of components for complex items, it is a chore! I can’t imagine the hell in doing this with a controller. I would prefer that the Seamoth blueprint tell me what’s in a Titanium Ingot, what’s in a Power Cell, etc. right on its fabrication page. Honestly, the game would be a magnitude shorter without time spent going back and forth in fabrication menus.
But progression through fabrication is fun nonetheless because it leads you to new places for materials. Narrative, construction, and exploration are all tied together well, as you are led with a constant trail of breadcrumbs to the next thing. At some point, though, the trail slows, and this is when I lost interest in continuing. I had built the big daddy submarine, which is basically its own mobile base. At the depths the sub can go exist leviathan class creatures, huge sea serpents and things that will wreck your vehicles and eat you for breakfast. I began to lose patience as my survival became more precarious. The final straw was when my sub caught fire. I was like a mile away from my base and I had one fire extinguisher on board (I didn’t even know it could catch fire!). The fire extinguisher ran out and the sub still burned. Every time I died, it spawned me back on the burning sub. I’d leave the ship and get killed by a leviathan. Return to the ship and get killed by smoke inhalation. This was a reload-to-an-earlier-save situation, but I decided to call it and watch the rest on YouTube. I didn’t spoil the main mystery here, but there is something else going on (of course there is!) that you will be unraveling. It turns out I wasn’t that near the end of the game. I’d built a lot of the major equipment, but needed a lot of upgrades and access to materials I hadn’t yet discovered, which meant using the sub to enter deeper waters.
Are other survival games like this? Are they this intense? This beautiful? Do they have better crafting UIs? Pros and cons of some others? Others to recommend?
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Sep 7th, 2022 at 15:53:21 - The First Tree (PC) |
I watched my girlfriend play most of this. She’s not beaten it yet, probably won’t, and neither will I. The game is story-focused, layering a story about a fox’s dead cubs over the story of the narrator’s dead father. It’s kind of an interesting premise but falls flat. The gameplay is barely there, which would be acceptable (see walking simulators) if the story (or stories) were compelling and if the walking were serviceable.
So here, you play as the mother fox, and you follow pinpoints of light to reach beacons and advance the story. If you deviate from the path, you’ll hit invisible walls. There is no exploration. But even when following the light, navigation is a chore. You’ll lose your way, turn around, and inevitably be unable to scale rocks that are too high to jump over. There is a double-jump mechanic, which involves collecting butterflies or something. I never really worked out why this was the case, or why there existed large rocks that required double-jumping in the first place. This is more irritating because the fox controls like a tank. You’d think the fox would be agile, but it jumps about as well as I do.
Anyway, you’ll occasionally reach beacons and other locations where you dig up audio snippets of the narrator talking about his upbringing and relationship with his father. I hate to talk badly about the execution because this was probably an intensely personal project, but the narration is aimless. Someone might feel like I do when people hate on That Dragon, Cancer for being clunky. The narrator’s stories are utterly mundane and delivered to a woman interlocutor (his girlfriend?) who comforts him and agrees with his words and insights. The story seems like it’s presented out of order for the player to piece together. It could have actually been that, or it could be poorly assembled, or I could have been paying more attention.
There are a hundred better games in this genre. Play A Short Hike, Gone Home, Dear Esther, What Remains of Edith Finch, etc., etc.
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Aug 13th, 2022 at 16:06:44 - Enter the Gungeon (PC) |
And then Enter the Gungeon. A game about gun puns. It was interesting comparing it to Nuclear Throne. There are several playable characters with different abilities. But Enter the Gungeon has way more stuff than Nuclear Throne. Tons more enemies, bosses, guns, passive abilities, secrets, and everything. For that reason alone, even though I'm retiring it and didn't play it that much, I think I like it better than Nuclear Throne. I *could see* myself spending more time with this to see more content. It also seems a bit easier than Nuclear Throne though. None of the bosses I got to gave me trouble like Lil Hunter. Gameplay is a little less hectic. A little easier to wrap my head around. There's a shop and secrets. I think you can unlock shortcuts to the different gungeon levels, which adds some persistence between runs. It also had more of a story, however silly, so was a little more intriguing for that reason too. But like I said, I didn't play much, just a few hours, and I know I'm not going to beat it, so I'd rather move on. I got the gist!
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Aug 13th, 2022 at 16:01:22 - Nuclear Throne (PC) |
Retired this. I was alternating playing this and Enter the Gungeon, two bullet hell twin-stick roguelikes. I played Nuclear Throne the most, and it's the simpler of the two. Deceptively simple, of course. Choose a character, each of which has a perk (e.g., my favorite, the robot, can "eat" weapons and gain ammo or life from them). Start with a crappy pistol, kill everything on each level to progress to the next level. Bosses come at specific points. How many did I fight...Bandit...Big Dog...Lil Hunter...There may only be four. I think after Lil Hunter is the Nuclear Throne. But I only killed Lil Hunter once, and didn't get far after that. Lil Hunter will mess you up. The other two bosses are easy and I could reliably kill them. Then if I made it to Lil Hunter, he'd wipe me every time. Start over.
Enemies drop "rads" (experience), ammo, and health. Whenever you gain a level, you choose one of three random perks to add. These are generally useful things like increase the amount of health and ammo pickups you find, decrease enemy health, your shotgun shells bounce farther, better aim, etc. You start having to strategize depending on what weapons you have and what perks are available to you. You might wind up going for a shotgun build, or a melee build, or trying to get every health perk, or whatever.
After a while, I found the runs began getting repetitive because there isn't a huge variety of weapons, enemies, or perks. I'd seen most everything and was just looping over and over and over. Die. Restart with boring pistol in the desert for the 100th time. Die. Etc. There's more to it, of course. Secrets, extra characters to unlock, and so on. It's a fun game for sure, but isn't keeping my interest long enough to beat it.
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