 |
|
Jan 22nd, 2025 at 19:47:48 - Animal Well (PS5) |
This one grew on me. In my first longish session (a few hours), I was getting sort of bored and frustrated. I didn't know what to do. There's not much of a story in Animal Well (you're in a...well...with animals). Animal Well is a metroidvania with no combat. It's full of puzzles. I'd compare it to Tunic and The Witness. All are games where you are not given much guidance. You can go in whichever direction you want, and you can go in that direction until you don't have the item required to move further (Tunic, Animal Well) or until you come to a puzzle that stumps you (all three). Once I realized that this was by design, and that there wasn't going to be any story, and that the puzzles are devious and clever, and that the well is connected in such a cool, labyrinthine way, I got immersed and couldn't stop thinking about it. I wanted to see every corner of that well. This sense of puzzle challenge and discovery kept me glued to Tunic, which I loved, but didn't keep me engaged for too long with The Witness. However, I had reservations about all three. I think that I anticipate disliking these types of games, but usually get sucked in.
In Animal Well, you discover a variety of toys (a frisbee, a slinky, a thing that makes bubbles, a spinning top, etc.) that are necessary for navigation and puzzle solving. They all have multiple uses, and since the game doesn't tell you what they are for, you have to figure it out through experimentation. This led to a bunch of "oh awesome!" moments when you stumble upon a new use for a toy. These moments felt really, really surprising and satisfying. They reminded me of Tunic when I would decode a manual page or The Witness when I would figure out a new rule, or when I realized how much perspective played a part.
The art style is compelling, too. It's got a retro vibe, and it's dark in the well, but it's also got a "bioluminescent" aesthetic. The animals range from cute to scary. There are a lot of animals down there. Some are background scenery, some are obstacles, some are bosses, some help you out, etc. Most can be interacted with in various ways. For example, the moles follow your yo-yo and you can "walk the dog" with them. Dogs will eat you, but they like frisbees. Similarly, weasels are distracted by the spinning top. You'll have to figure this stuff out because manipulating animals is often crucial to solving puzzles or exploring the well.
One final thing that I initially disliked, but that grew on me, is the map. It's very low-res and initially was hard to read. But, you eventually get a stamp, with which you can mark locations, and a pencil, with which you can write notes. You also learn to read the map better. Every pixel is meaningful. See a white dot? That's a teleporter. See pink dots? Those are locks. See a black space, no matter how small? That's unexplored and there's probably a way to get there. I knew I was into the game when I started annotating the map. If I got stuck, I stamped a "?" and made a note. If there was something that looked like it might be useful later, I made a note. I marked bosses, items, chests I couldn't get to, places where I thought I would need to return to with as-yet-undiscovered items, and so on. For example, I kept seeing all these staircases with buttons on the bottom, and another button elsewhere in the room. It looked like I'd need to use an item to press one while I stood on the other. And it was always steps. Almost like a slinky would be required. I started writing "slinky" on the map in those areas. And do you know what I eventually found? A SLINKY! Then I methodically revisited everywhere I'd marked. I felt like a genius.
There are a TON of secrets in Animal Well. I rolled the credits, but there are eggs to find, squirrels to find, more items to find, all sorts of puzzles and statues and stuff that I don't know what they're for. You find a totally new location after the credits that raises a lot of questions. I read up on some of this and learned that there is an ARG and like 3 layers of puzzle, which reminds me of Inscryption. (And Animal Well does have a similar horror-adjacent vibe!). I won't go back and spend time trying to figure more stuff out, but definitely recommend if you like metroidvanias, puzzle games, and exploring dungeons. It seemed a bit uninspired at first, but this game is deep. Like a well. An animal well.
add a comment  - read this GameLog  |
|
Jan 17th, 2025 at 12:26:21 - Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (PS5) |
This is the nth Ratchet & Clank game and the third one I’ve played. I don’t really remember the other two, but they were like 10-15 years ago. I honestly don’t have a whole lot to say about it. It’s fun. It’s cartoony and arcadey. It’s pretty easy. It’s colorful and loud and has creative art. My favorite part is using all the different guns and trying to level them all up. There’s a mushroom bomb that spawns mushrooms that attack enemies, another bomb that spawns little robot dudes that attack enemies, a “topiary grenade” that spawns a sprinkler that turns enemies into shrubbery (funny), which freezes them in place and makes them vulnerable. There is a ricochet gun that you fire, then press R1 a bunch to bounce the bullet at the enemy. There’s a gun that freezes enemies in blocks of ice, which you can smash with your wrench. There are all the standard guns you expect (pistol, shotgun, rocket launcher, sniper, etc.). There is a gun that shoots dogs at your enemies. It's wild.
The coolest thing aside from the guns is the rifts. You find these purple crystals that will switch dimensions so that you can explore two versions of many areas. There are other rifts that you can use to traverse larger distances quickly, and others you can open to find secrets in hidden sections of the world. It’s neat to find areas within areas and to see the contrast between wherever you are and some ruined version of it. After not too long though I quit exploring these so that I could get on with the story. Whatever collectibles you find in the rifts (or anywhere else for that matter) aren’t that useful because, as I said, it’s an easy game. There are golden screws (no purpose as far as I can tell except to find them), armor pieces that do give stacking bonuses, spybots that are like encyclopedia entries for lore, and so on. The most useful thing you’ll find when poking around is definitely the crystals that let you upgrade weapons.
Those purple crystals and rifts are related to the story, which is good enough to drive the action along. The big bad guy is upset that his plans are always being ruined, so he travels to an alternate dimension where another version of him rules the galaxy (and then you follow him there and ruin both of their plans, of course). There are the Clank puzzles again, and they are neat, but simple, and reminded me of the game Humanity because he has to route clones of himself to an exit. There are also little action shooter areas for a new character (because Ratchet has an alternate dimension person too). So yeah, fun, but probably will not remember!
Oh yeah, the PS5 controller has a super cool feature (aside from tons of varied pulsing, vibrating, audio effects, etc.) where you can, depending on the context, pull a trigger halfway for an effect and pull it the whole way down for a different effect. For example, hold L2 to aim and hold R1 halfway to shoot a gun in its slow and accurate mode, or hold R2 all the way down to change to machine gun fire. Returnal was doing this too, but I haven’t played much of it. Ratchet & Clank used it all the time for a lot of guns. This controller is awesome!
add a comment - read this GameLog |
|
Jan 15th, 2025 at 14:06:52 - Monstrum (XBONE) |
Been playing this with Patrick, but we called it quits last night. I'd never heard of it when he pitched playing it. He likes to dig up old Xbox games. This one is from 2015 and is like a survival horror game. It's pretty basic and reminds me of several other games, but doesn't do any of its elements as good as they do.
The premise is that you're on a ship. Y'all have found something. Now the "something" y'all found (monsters, I guess) are killing everyone aboard. You need to escape. That is all. The story and setting reminded me of Still Wakes the Deep. There are three monsters, and you'll get one of them randomly each time you play. There seem to be a few randomized starting locations on the ship. So, you start, pick up a fuse and a flashlight (always in the first room), and head off wandering through the ship to find materials to get off board.
We found a life raft, a submarine, and a helicopter, but never got everything we needed to get any of them working. The monster always kills us before we get too far. All three monsters act the same, as far as we can tell. They regularly appear if you make noise (run, or a security camera spots you and sounds an alarm, slam doors). Usually you can hear them stomping around or breathing, but several times we turned a corner and there one was, quietly there to kill us.
The ship looks really dull, the environments are not interesting at all, I didn't find the gameplay to be much fun. The one thing that was fun was watching Patrick jump and scream when a monster would appear from nowhere and kill him. To Monstrum's credit, it produces some good jump scares and some tense moments before your inevitable death.
But these "hunter" monsters reminded me of the alien in Alien: Isolation. Not a fraction of the intelligence, so I never felt "stalked." I never felt that I could outwit the monsters. They are big dumb things that you avoid. And the "escape" goal reminded me of something like Friday the 13th, where you are trying to survive a rampaging Jason and find the keys and gasoline for a car so you can drive away. So, Monstrum is a hard pass, but it's got me wanting to revisit the games I've played that have some similar elements.
add a comment - read this GameLog |
|
Jan 15th, 2025 at 13:47:48 - Inscryption (PS5) |
Finished this on Saturday. I really liked most aspects of the game, but the story lost me by the end. I was reading online to gain a clearer understanding of the details surrounding the woman at the end, and saw all kinds of stuff about the CIA and nuclear weapons that I had no clue about. Apparently there was an ARG where devoted gaming sleuths were decoding hidden clues, editing game files, and so on to gain more information about Inscryption (the disk in the game). There is a surface-level story within Inscryption, and I followed that, and then there is the second layer with Luke and what he's up to outside of Inscryption, which I pretty much followed, and then there is the third layer which involves all the clues. I saw some of the clues while playing, and clocked them as potentially important, but in no universe would I have known what to do with them. There are crossovers between Inscryption and Pony Island and all sorts of stuff.
This is all novel dressing around a good card game. It's simple, not necessarily in terms of mechanics, but in terms of scope. The board, for example, is either 2x4 or 2x5 depending on where you are in the game. So you are only dealing with up to 5 cards on your side of the board at any given time. On the opponents' side, you can see cards that are going to come into play on their next turn, so not only is it like 2x5, but you can see a third row of cards that are coming. Your main deck is only 20 cards, and you'll have multiple copies of most cards. You also have a secondary deck full of identical 0-cost cards that you can either toss on the board to take a hit and die or sacrifice to play more powerful cards. You can only draw one card (total, not from each deck!) each round, so your hand is also usually tiny. Opponents seem to have even more limited decks (and ran out of cards earlier in the game). Number values are also small. I think the most damage any card ever did at once was like 7 (except cards with the Bifurcated Strike or Trifurcated Strike abilities, which do their damage multiple times). Each match ends when either player tips a scale that has 10 points. It starts in the middle (at 0), and you need to tip it to 5, while your opponent is trying to tip it to -5. This means that if it's in the middle and you deal 7 damage, you win and then some. The scale can swing wildly as new cards attack; it keeps you on your toes to have such a narrow window in which to win. You could have the scale at 3, but made a poor play, and the enemy hits you for 8 (which tips the scale to -5) and you lose. Matches can end really quickly.
A large part of the game is countering the cards that your observe your opponent about to play. "A good defense is the best offense" applies here. You will have many defensive type cards with 0 or low attack, but that may serve other purposes if they have certain abilities or synergies. In the last act of the game (it's split into 3 acts), you actually get to buff your basic defense cards and they become extremely valuable. They're not only defense cards; they're also sacrifices. Most cards cost some resource to play, and often the resource is "blood," which you get by sacrificing one of your own cards. So, you might play a 0 attack 2 hp card, let it take a hit (and prevent you from taking a direct attack), then sacrifice it to play a stronger card that costs 2 blood. There is a 7/7 card that costs 4 blood. Given that there are often 4 spaces on your row on the board, that means that you must sacrifice everything on the board (usually it's one blood per card) and go all in to play the 7/7. But since you attack immediately and you can see what cards are coming from the opponent, then you can always get 7 damage in if you directly attack the opponent with that card. There are a wide variety of abilities and resources that allow for different strategies and play styles. Some other of my favorite abilities were snipe (lets you target any card on the board instead of attacking the space in front of the card like normal), poison (kills any card it touches, pairs great with a 1-damage snipe, which just insta-kills anything), and sentry (which attacks any card that enters the space in front of it, and since many cards only have 1 or 2 hp, this will insta-kill or kill on the next turn a whole lot of cards). Since Inscryption is a roguelike card builder, and you build your deck as you go, you don't always know which cards are going to become your superstars or what strategies you will be able to employ. As you proceed (in act 1 through a sort of dungeon mastered roguelike scenario, in act 2 through an SNES-era JRPG style world, and in act 3 through a maze), you will get the chance to do all sorts of random-ish things to your cards: add stats, add abilities, sacrifice cards, merge cards, etc., etc.
I think that it was this sense of "I have no clue what my deck is going to look like" that may have been my favorite thing about the game. It was constantly surprising me with new mechanics, new resources, a new style, a new weird story beat, new cards, new ways to enhance my cards, new puzzles, and on and on. And the whole thing is tinged with a mysterious, borderline horror game, tone. Like, it is extremely compelling, and in a way that is unusual for a roguelike. Most roguelikes, for me, are "just one more run" kinds of games. Inscryption isn't typical in this sense, as it's only in the first act where you are doing standard "runs." Incidentally, I died the most in the first act and tried it a few times before beating it (and upon each death, you get some stronger cards and may be able to solve some additional puzzles or get additional items to help you out). But Inscryption kept me going because I never knew how things would shake out. The cards also have a lot of personality (not least because a few of them talk to you).
Anyway, I've talked to a few people about this since playing, and piqued the interest of someone who really likes Slay the Spire and Balatro. I wish the story was easier to make sense of, though I appreciate the effort that went into the complicated presentation and am glad this exists for people who like to dig into clues like that and discover something. It was a really intriguing experience to play this one, definitely will remember it!
add a comment - read this GameLog |
