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Jan 24th, 2022 at 09:12:40 - Nobody Saves the World (PC) |
This popped up on Game Pass last week and when I looked it up on a whim, saw that it is a new game from Drinkbox Studios, who developed the quirky Guacamelee! games, which I love. This is an action-RPG with a similarly colorful art style and silly humor. It's fun and has an engaging gameplay loop with quests, dungeons, and unlocks, but is very grindy by design!
In Nobody Saves the World, you play as Nobody, a "naked baby salamander" (as an early character describes you) with a wand that gives him the power to change forms. Your goal is to defeat the Calamity, which is infecting people and taking over the land with a gross fungus. You do this by grinding quests through dungeons for 15 or 20 hours to level up your forms and become a badass.
The forms are the magic design element and are really creative and fun to play with. You start off as Nobody and once you get the wand, you can turn into a rat with a basic chomp attack and a passive ability. The rat is also small and can traverse tight corridors (a throwback to Guacamelee!). You gain experience by completing quests. There is regular XP that levels up your stats and there is form XP, which levels up your forms from rank F to S and grants a few new abilities and ability slots along the way (think of games you've played with a class system--it's basically that, but you have all the classes). You gain form XP by completing quests using form abilities. So, it might say, "Chomp baddies with the rat 50 times," for example. Once you do that and rank up the rat, you'll get new form quests for new abilities.
Once the rat ranks up enough, you unlock new forms. The rat opens up the egg, the ranger, and the guard. As you rank up forms and unlock new ones, you'll eventually be able to mix-n-match form abilities. So you can play as the guard, but equip the rat's chomp, the ranger's arrow strike, and the zombie's life leech passive. There are ultimately 15 forms to unlock, each with three abilities that you can equip on other forms--that's 45 abilities in however many combinations--plus other passive abilities you can purchase (some of which are required to complete quests and dungeons).
Here is where I see more inspiration from Guacamelee!. All of the form attacks have an element associated with them (sharp, blunt, dark, light) and sometimes apply status effects (poison, slow, burn, etc.). Enemies don't have strengths or weaknesses per se (that I am aware of), but some dungeons do have modifiers. The main modifier type is to attach elemental wards on enemies. So, a dungeon might say "Level 40, sharp and blunt," which means that you need to make sure that your form has sharp and blunt attacks to break the wards on enemies before you can damage them. Or, you can have multiple forms at the ready, perhaps one to break sharp wards and one to break blunt wards. I just equipped all the elemental types I needed on one form though because switching forms is a little clunky and you are usually trying to rank up a given form anyway. Dungeons can have other modifiers too, such as increasing/decreasing enemy health or damage, prolonging status effects, being really dark, having enemies you can't knock back, and so on. The dungeon modifiers add some puzzle-like aspects to the game and require a little bit of strategy.
Guacamelee! 2 was heavy on difficult platforming puzzles; these puzzles are about strategizing to break wards and overcome dungeon modifiers, and generally pose no problem. But, there are two crazy dungeons that I never really figured out (though I'm sure grinding to unlock/upgrade abilities is the answer; grinding is always the answer in this game), such as one that multiplies all damage by 9999 (so one-hit kills) and one in which enemy wards quickly regenerate. For the x9999 damage one, the ghost has an ability to ignore all enemy damage, which is probably the trick. I was running out of mana while using it, but I bet if I leveled the ghost up to S rank and upgraded that ability, and equipped other upgraded mana regen abilities, that I could do it. For the ward breaking dungeon, you just need a character that can break those kinds of wards with passive abilities and/or non-mana-using form abilities, and that can stay alive. I'm sure I could have done that one with some more experimentation later on.
Anyway! The game requires that you complete most of the dungeons and overworld quests to complete it because the story ("legendary") dungeons require "stars" to enter. Lots of stars, which you get by...completing quests. So, you'll frolic around the overworld map, with its typical RPG towns and environments, and you'll delve into dungeons, and you'll watch numbers increase and unlock wacky new forms until you kill the final boss. I believe that the levels of dungeons and areas are set at some minimum threshold, and then scale to your level once you discover them, and then they become fixed. The map doesn't tell you what level a dungeon is until you discover it, and then it remains that level. The map also doesn't tell you what level an area is, but when you enter the area, it pops up on the screen. The area levels definitely increased (sometimes?), but I wish the map would tell you what level areas were because the only way to know is to go back to it.
There are two other glaringly absent features. First, in a game about customizing character builds, it is odd that you can't save any builds. This would be useful, especially in new game +, where there are more dungeons with more modifiers. Like, my favorite dark and blunt combo would be nice to save, or my favorite build for a particular farm, so I can quickly use them again. The other, which really was annoying, is that the radial menu, from which you can quick-select forms, only has 8 forms on it. And for some mind-boggling reason, you can't select which forms are on it and you can't select where forms are located on the menu. It just shows the most recently used 8 forms. There should be a way to customize this. Or, there should be a toggle to bring up a "page 2" of the radial menu with the other 7 forms. You switch forms a lot and you will often find that the one you're looking for isn't there because it isn't among the last 8 you used, so you have to go back into the menus to select it. And since it automatically removes the oldest one for the newest one, then something else was bumped off, and the locations of forms change on the radial menu, which is annoying when you're in a battle and trying to--in real-time--switch forms. These two features, and especially the latter, seem like obvious holes.
But, despite the holes where a couple features should be and the grind, this was still a fun game. There are certainly better action-RPGs, but I liked the art, the charm, and the ability to mix-n-match form abilities to tackle dungeons. It could definitely be made more difficult and could add more puzzle aspects!
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Jan 20th, 2022 at 10:20:22 - Superliminal (PC) |
Superliminal blew me away. This actually wasn't on my wishlist. I thought it looked pretentious (my fault for being judgy). But I'd been curious about the size/perspective-shifting mechanic and when it popped up on Game Pass, I figured I'd try it. Picture me with a smile plastered on my face (punctuated by occasional furrowed brow of confusion) the entire time.
Adjectives describing playing Superliminal that I said aloud include "ridiculously cool," "so fucking cool," "trippy/a trip," and "inspirational." Seriously, the end is like therapy. As soon as I completed it, I started it over with the developer's commentary (which I plan to finish later), and got some insight on how purposeful this therapeutic angle was from the beginning.
The game reminded me in style and tone of Portal and The Stanley Parable, though the gameplay for me was wholly unique. You're led through surreal surroundings and have to manipulate the sizes and positioning of objects to proceed. You can make objects bigger or smaller by shifting how you are looking at them relative to other stuff in the environment. It's not necessarily easy, which is a commentary (as the game points out later) on how difficult it is to change your perspective, especially as you get older, and see things in new ways. I'm pretty sure toward the end there is an area with "cigarettes" that is meant to make you think about breaking bad habits.
New aspects of the perspective-shifting mechanic are added over time, such as making it work with the addition of doors, changing your own size, manipulating objects that emit light, making objects "pop" out of the environment, and so on. The game is short (3.5 hours for me), so these new elements were pretty constant. You're never using the same trick for too long before it tosses a new one at you. These usually aren't explained (which led to a few cheats on YouTube), but when you figure it out (or look it up) you're like, "OH MY GOD!" and then you have learned a new trick!
Yeah, so I absolutely loved this. Highly recommend.
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Jan 19th, 2022 at 08:46:02 - The Pedestrian (PC) |
The Pedestrian has a unique style. You are a stick figure in 2d puzzles, the faces of which are on the surfaces of other objects (road signs, monitors, architectural blueprints, etc.). As you solve puzzles, you sort of move throughout 3d areas (a university campus, subway, apartment building, etc.). There is a huge twist at the end that opens up far more complex puzzles that I am sure will be featured in any potential Pedestrian 2.
The puzzles themselves are very clever and become very challenging. I definitely experienced my share of frustration, but when I finished a puzzle, I usually didn't feel like a genius. They are typically set up like this: Your stick person begins on one piece of a puzzle. That piece has doors on the top, bottom, left, and/or right. There are other pieces too. You have to connect the pieces of the puzzles together by drawing lines between doors, through which you move your stick person. You'll have to find and move boxes (to gain height), keys (to open doors), wires (to power elevators, lasers, and other things), and various batteries. Once you connect puzzle pieces, you can't change the lines between doors or else the whole puzzle resets. And the lines are 1:1. Each door can only be connected to one other door.
So, this means that there is a lot of trial and error, especially later in the game. For at least the first half of the game, the possible combinations of doors are few enough that I could play the whole puzzle out in my head, then do it and exit. Later, it became too complex for that, and I would inch toward a solution, moving my stick figure and making connections a little bit at a time, before either solving it or realizing there was an error and resetting it.
This was fine (it's a puzzle game, after all), but there was one mechanic that I hated so, so, so, so, so much. Occasionally, puzzles will have these pieces with windows. These allow you to layer puzzle pieces and like...toggle the foreground to fall through a window and into a different puzzle piece. This is usually either done to get somewhere with no doors or to avoid a trap. I had such a hard time figuring out how exactly these windows worked. One puzzle in particular had like 5 windows, and I was trying to layer them like 3 windows deep, switching in and out of puzzle mode (where you manipulate the connections and pieces) and platforming mode (where you control the stick person) trying to fall just right to avoid lasers.
That was the first thing I looked up on YouTube. I wound up looking up several solutions on YouTube because I was getting frustrated with the windows, and whenever I started a puzzle that had a lot of pieces (especially if any had windows), I'd tense up, turn off the game, sit there, think, "No, I can do it," load it back, try and fail a lot, get frustrated, turn it off again, turn it back on, stare at the screen, and finally go to YouTube. Props to the people who made videos about this.
And that's my experience with The Pedestrian. Overall novel puzzle platformer with puzzles that increase substantially in difficulty, a cool style, and an interesting narrative premise.
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Jan 18th, 2022 at 10:02:19 - The Forgotten City (PC) |
What an interesting concept. You awake on a riverbank, are led into old Roman ruins, and discover an ancient city with inhabitants through a portal. They live under "The Golden Rule," which I first discovered when doing what I ALWAYS do first in a first-person RPG like Skyrim. (You'll probably do the same thing and if you haven't read about the game, you'll be as intrigued as me!).
Thus you are plunged into the mystery of what exactly The Golden Rule is, who created it, and how to get out of the loop caused by someone breaking it. The game itself is pretty straightforward. You explore the city and talk to its inhabitants. You pick up and follow "leads" (quests) that unravel the mystery, until you get to one of four endings (you can and should see them all through; the last one is especially rewarding, if a bit tedious to get). The game guides you through the mystery and does a good job making sure you know what to do and where to go.
The game was originally a Skyrim mod, so it looks and plays familiarly. The facial animations are pretty bad (often funny-bad) and the voice acting can be slow, but I was nevertheless immersed in the city's environment. Some little holes or oversights are apparent. For example, right at the beginning, you meet a character who doesn't want to tell you her name. Fair enough, I said. But when I opened my journal, my character had recorded her name. And it turns out her name is a REALLY big clue as to her identity and a clue to other parts of the story, which I guessed part of really, really early on all because the journal told me her name when I shouldn't have known. That was a bad oversight!
You'll be listening to a lot of dialogue, all well written and often philosophical and thought-provoking. It's rare that a game makes me really think deeply about some moral or philosophical question, but this one did, namely, how do we know the difference between right and wrong. It doesn't necessarily present arguments between characters in the most believable way, but I can look past that for what it is aiming at. Later in the game, you get a bow, which opens up some light action and platforming parts. I wouldn't say that the game is in any way difficult. It felt like a well-paced exploration.
I have to compare this to Outer Worlds, which I recently played and didn't like all that much. The main reason I didn't like Outer Worlds is that the loop is forced on you. In The Forgotten City, you control when the loop happens and you usually trigger it on purpose. You start back at the same place, as in Outer Wilds, but it's quicker and easier to get back to what you were doing. In Outer Wilds, the loop doesn't change anything. It just resets you. It doesn't open new avenues for you, except that you have knowledge that you didn't have in the previous loop (but which you had gained anyway even if there were no loop). In The Forgotten City, the loop resets the city's inhabitants, so you can lead them down different conversation paths, intervene in their actions, and so on in order to change things. The interweaving and accumulation of these changes in their knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors is what drives the story forward. I just found this all so interesting to see unfold! It's not a perfect game, but I'd recommend it for a cool story told in a different way (especially if you like Roman/Greek/Egyptian mythology).
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