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Jan 10th, 2025 at 11:08:48 - Bloons TD 6 (PC) |
Retiring this one. It's a cartoony tower defense game about monkeys and balloons. I gather that it's been around a long time, it's heavily monetized like a mobile game, and so there is tons of content. I played a handful of rounds, tried many of the different settings and challenges and whatnot. I'm not sure what I thought it would be like...less of a mobile game, I suppose. There are dozens and dozens of monkeys, heroes, upgrades, abilities, balloons, etc., etc. It's overwhelming, grindy, and not my cup of tea for tower defense.
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Jan 5th, 2025 at 09:13:12 - Cult of the Lamb (PS5) |
Cult of the Lamb makes being a demonic cult leader adorable. The game is a hybrid of a farming village sim and a roguelike (very much in the style of The Binding of Isaac, with Slay the Spire style paths to choose in dungeons [aka “crusades”]), and it works really well. Basically, upgrades from running your cult provide you with stronger weapons and better resources in crusades, and completing crusades provides you with resources for improving your cult. There are four crusade areas, each of which must be completed four times to get to the boss at the end. Defeat those bosses, and you will fight the game’s main boss. And your cult has a predefined area in which to expand and exist. Indoctrinate followers, keep them faithful, fed, and healthy. The combat in the crusades is fun, but nothing you haven’t seen before. There are a handful of weapon types, some weapon attributes (lifesteal, crit chance, etc.), you get a heavy attack, a magic curse attack (depending on what items you find), and like a special single-use relic. And you can find tarot cards, which give you buffs during your run. A handful of times, I got some “broke the game” style builds, such as a vampiric axe and huge boosts to attack speed and movement speed. Later on, you add the blunderbuss to your arsenal, which is basically an insta-win if you get one (bonus if it has useful stats). Crusades are not necessarily easy though; enemies tend to be fast and there’s a lot going on in the small play areas, especially when rocks and other junk gets in your way (step one of a busy screen is smash all the stuff that obscures your vision or impedes movement!). Boss battles are intense; one time I beat a boss with half a heart left. I didn’t get touched for the last half of the battle, and my knuckles were white from gripping the controller and focusing so hard. Other times, I unloaded on bosses and killed them in 30 seconds without taking damage.
The cult management part is the novel piece for me though. I don’t play sims much, don’t really enjoy them, but this is pretty light. Through spending “devotion” and a couple other currencies, you unlock buildings and rituals. You’ll need beds for everyone to sleep (or else they’ll be too tired to work and pray), an outhouse (so you don’t have to run around cleaning up poop), space for crops to grow food (lest your followers starve), buildings to help harvest wood and stone, a pillory, a morgue for the corpses that will pile up (followers die of disease and old age), and on and on and on. Why a pillory? Well, sometimes a follower will dissent and begin speaking ill of you; they’ll lose the faith and infect others with their lies. You can “re-educate” dissenters once per in-game day, which decreases their dissent level. But eventually, they’ll leave your cult, perhaps stealing some gold or persuading another follower to come with them. I figured out that if you jail them, they can’t preach heresy to others, re-education works better, and eventually they won’t be dissenters anymore and you can let them back out.
You’ll manage hunger, sleep, health, dissent, faith, and maybe one or two other things from time to time. Faith is a really important one. Your followers’ faith levels will decrease over time. You have to preach sermons and perform rituals to keep the flock in check. You can preach one sermon per day and perform rituals on cooldowns. Rituals might involve sacrificing followers, dancing around a bonfire late into the night, mass brainwashing, throwing a feast, and so on. Some rituals you have to choose among when you declare a “doctrine.” So for example, regarding the feast, you could have chose to learn the feasting ritual, which restores faith and hunger, or the fasting ritual, after which followers will not need to eat for three days. If you learn one, you cannot learn the other, and there are like 30 such doctrinal choices to make, which generally differentiate you being a “nice” cult leader or a “mean” cult leader.
It's fun to try and keep all these levels in balance. Time continues when you’re on a crusade, so you also have to consider faith, hunger, and cleanliness while you are crusading. You will sometimes want to leave early to deal with a problem. There are also other areas of the overworld map with other characters and activities, such as a place to go fishing (for a quest, and to dredge up fish to feed followers), a place to play a dice game (for coin), and some others. These are cute little diversions to indulge in, often if you’re waiting for daytime to deliver one more sermon to get your followers’ faith up before embarking on another crusade.
Cult of the Lamb does flirt with being repetitive, especially the crusades. The areas are gatekept by requiring you to have a certain number of followers. Having to clear each crusade area at least four times is a little annoying, but usually by the time you’re tired of crusading, you’re back doing cult management, and by the time you’re growing bored of doing cult management, you’re on another crusade. It’s a nice back and forth. I do gather that, by this point in the game’s life, the developers have released various updates, which have made the game more complex, such as adding “sin” as a resource, which I didn’t really bother with.
Overall, this was a fun, cute, chill, novel experience of a genre hybrid that I hadn’t played before.
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Jan 3rd, 2025 at 09:31:53 - God of War (2018) (PS5) |
This is a great reboot of the series, featuring Kratos and his son, Atreus. They took a little while to grow on me, but as the story gets going, I really enjoyed the contrast between the two of them. Kratos is Kratos—terse, no-nonsense, disciplined. Atreus is a kid. He starts off sort of mopey and whiney, but comes into his own as he becomes a capable warrior (though briefly becomes an immature jerk during his development). They also represent two kinds of gamer: Kratos wants to get straight to the point. Don’t help anyone, follow the objectives, let’s get this shit over with. Atreus wants to help everyone, explore, talk. I see gamer-David in both characters when they talk about what we should do next. Gamer Atreus-David does like to explore when the world is interesting, talk to everyone when the dialogue is good, and help everyone when the quests are fun and unique. Gamer Kratos-David likes to get to the point when these conditions aren’t met, but also feels the pressure to get to the point when he has signed up for a month of Playstation Plus and has six or seven games to get through. Luckily, this game has all those positive qualities and my Atreus side is more in charge. It was cool to see both characters grow. Kratos isn’t a rage-filled monster anymore, and by the end he’s down to explore and help other characters too, or at least supports those qualities in Atreus. There is another dyadic relationship in the game where two characters have strife, but then grow and resolve it. I didn’t expect the blue dwarven blacksmith in the beginning of the game to be an important character, but I ended up really liking him and his brother too.
There are a lot of things to talk about with God of War; it’s far bigger than I remember previous games being. It’s a bit open-world-ish. There are 9 realms, 6 of which are visitable, and one of which is the main “hub” that is explorable (the others are for story paths or optional with trials for gear). Midgard (the hub) is organized around a lake. You can paddle around the lake docking at beaches. I loved the anticipation of what I would find in each place. Sometimes there were rift tears (challenging battles with good rewards); other times there were devious puzzles where I had to put to use various abilities; or runes that Atreus could find and interpret; or a treasure map; or a mysterious locked mirror-door; or some construction of the gods, giants, or Valkyries; or a shipwreck with a vengeful ghost for a quest; or a canyon with a large area full of secrets on the other side; and so on. Going off the main story path was perhaps my favorite thing. The exploration is classic God of War, gated by progression items that you receive through the plot. You’ll dock on a beach early in the game and see chests covered in red vines, a green energy orb hanging from a rope, poison gas covering an area, and think, “What the hell is all this?!” Come back when you get the items that can get you past all that stuff. This exploration gating actually feels pretty natural. The example I gave is a rare one; you won’t go many places where you can’t explore anything or open any chests. Usually, you can do everything there, like, it doesn’t let you go there until you at least have most of the exploration items. There are two (?) points in the game where the water level of the lake lowers and reveals more beaches, which makes for some interesting semi-backtracking (row back around the lake, but there are new beaches, and you’ll have new items for old beaches).
A special shout-out to the puzzles in God of War. They are so good, often relying on perspective and a clever use of multiple abilities to solve. I can’t tell you how many times I walked through an area three or four times and noticed a new item or chest or lock every time I walked through. Or how many times I thought that I couldn’t solve a puzzle yet, only to end up 15 minutes later having figured it out. I remember one island with a chest locked by three runes (those chests have health and rage upgrades, which are very useful). In this case, you had to throw your axe at all three runes in quick succession, but one of them was behind a gate. I could open the gate, but only from the other side, which meant I couldn’t throw my axe at all the runes. I couldn’t figure it out. Elsewhere on the island was a gear covered in vines, and I didn’t know what that gear did or how to get the vines off. Usually, there will be a red crystal that you can explode, but I didn’t see one. So, like 30 minutes later, I’m on a nearby island, and I happen to look across the lake and see a red crystal shining on the side of a cliff amidst some vines. I hadn’t noticed the crystal earlier, even though I’d run by that cliff on the beach several times. So, I went back to the island and exploded the crystal, which removed the vines from the gear. I turned the gear, which cranked a water wheel at the back of the island. The water wheel had some rungs missing. Ah! There was a second beach at the back of the island and I didn’t know why they put that there because it didn’t lead anywhere different than the other beach I’d docked at. Turn the water wheel so that the broken rungs are level with the lake. Paddle your canoe through the water wheel (previously blocked before turning the gear just right), land your boat at the back beach, and then you can manipulate the gate from the correct side and shoot all three runes to get the chest. Yeah, the exploration and puzzles were absolutely my favorite part of the game.
It’s God of War, so there’s violent combat too. I have less to say about this. It was fun, fast, kind of button-mashy in a Devil May Cry way, but more precise than that. You have an axe that you can use as a melee and thrown weapon. There are entire move sets for both. Later, you get Kratos’s signature chains, and there’s a whole move set for those. Then you have Atreus, who uses a bow, and you can give him commands to shoot arrows, which can impart status effects on enemies and distract them. You can also use runic abilities. I really liked the axe and the strategy involved in using it in multiple ways. When you throw it, you actually have to recall it, which is its own skill. If you’ve thrown the axe, then you fight with your shield and bare hands. Recalling the axe can hit enemies and lead into combos. It’s all very smooth. My only gripe is that sometimes there could be too much going on on the screen, enemies on all sides of Kratos, and it could be hard to see, maneuver, and respond to what was going on. Combat is nice and challenging though, and there are a lot of optional hard fights, especially with the Valkyries. I killed three of them, and probably sunk 20 or 30 minutes into learning each one. I don’t know what my favorite fight of the whole game was. Probably the dragon, Hraezlyr. That was badass.
Toward the end of the game, I was very powerful. I’d acquired every skill, upgraded most of my gear to max (though I didn’t have all the best optional gear), and had a ton of extra experience and hacksilver (money). There are some optional realms you can unlock and visit for even better gear, though I’m not sure what you need it for. I imagine there are some even harder Valkyries or something (maybe I killed the easier ones?). Anyway, I stumbled on this awesome combo that could devastate most tough enemies. I could drain a Valkyrie to half HP before the fight even started. Step 1: use the runic ability that is like a sustained laser. Step 1.5: use Atreus’s summon crow ability, and from here on out have him fire shock arrows on cooldown. Step 2: Trigger Spartan Rage and, if you time it just right, you can hurl four giant boulders. Step 3: Use the item that freezes time. Step 4: Use the runic ability that imbues your axe with tons of extra frost damage. Step 5: Go to town on the enemy while time is stopped. At this point, they will get away from you, if they haven’t already, but the laser and Atreus’s summon are probably just about off cooldown again, so you can use those real soon. This combo absolutely wrecks enemies. I loved figuring it out.
I’m really looking forward to playing Ragnarok. Now that I have a PS5 (God of War was my first game on the PS5!! Technically a PS4 game played with backwards compatibility but still counts), I can purchase new games that my laptop won’t run well. I can play Ragnarok, Black Myth Wukong and whatever other AAA games have come out in the past couple years. God of War looked amazing on the PS5. I cannot wait to see how great real PS5 games look.
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Dec 27th, 2024 at 08:29:15 - Death Stranding (PC) |
I should have been writing entries for this as I was playing (same with Disco Elysium…) so that I could chronicle the weird journey. I got this for free on Epic a couple years ago, but was waiting to play it until after I’d played Metal Gear V, which preceded Death Stranding in Hideo Kojima’s gameography. I wondered if there would be some noticeable evolution in game design or anything, but although similar in some respects, they are very different games. In fact, I’ve never played anything quite like Death Stranding.
I will not even attempt to explain the story. There is a good synopsis here: https://www.reddit.com/r/DeathStranding/comments/vdj26q/the_story_of_death_stranding_explained_in_a/. If you’ve played Metal Gear games, then you’ll know what to expect in terms of “wtf is going on.” Suffice it to say that you are a courier. You deliver packages. The setting is a post-apocalyptic North America. As you move westward across the continent, you connect cities to a network. You’re essentially rebuilding the United States of America by putting cities online. Your work is, of course, complicated! Mostly, it’s complicated by the fact that there is another “reality” of sorts that is bleeding into ours. This reality is related to something called a “beach,” which is something like a bridge between the real world and death. Other beings come from the death-reality and from the beach and wreak havoc, there is something called “timefall,” which is precipitation that accelerates time for whatever it touches, there are terrorists, there’s World War II, there are couriers who are obsessed with getting “likes,” and so on. And, of course, you’re carrying a fetus (a “BB”) for reasons. There are twists and turns, and a good portion of the plot that will help everything make more sense is delivered after the credits, as the game keeps rolling for like two more hours.
So, there’s a lot going on…but you’re delivering packages. Mostly on foot. Gameplay largely consists of piling up packages on your back, then running from Point A to Point B, pressing “RT” and “LT” to steady yourself as you traverse fields, slopes, rocks, rivers, mountains, snow, and so on. It sounds boring, but it’s oddly engaging. If you aren’t careful delivering packages, they will get damaged, which can ruin the item and negatively affect your rating (positive ratings = more gameplay bonuses). Sometimes you have to stealth through sections where BTs are (hostile things from the beach) or avoid the rogue couriers. There is combat, especially later on, with a host of grenades and guns, and there are plenty of items to craft (a la Metal Gear). I actually barely touched crafting and minimally engaged in combat, only really enjoying it during the spectacular boss fights (which were easy, but visually stunning). The hardest parts of the game are dealing with delivering packages through BT-infested areas, and it’s less hard than annoying, because you have to slow down, and if they catch you, then tar bubbles up from the ground, BTs try to drag you under, packages fall from your pack and get damaged, and you’ll lose a vehicle if you’re traveling with one. Going around BT areas is more trouble than it’s worth, though.
There are so, so, so many mechanics that I didn’t touch. Death Stranding has this online feature whereby other players affect your game. And you’re encouraged to do things that will help other players. You can put ladders down to help people cross a river, put signposts that encourage players and refill some of their stamina, put signposts that alert players to BTs, leave equipment, build roads, and so on. I do not pretend to understand how all of this works. But it was neat whenever I was able to use something that someone else left, or when I was notified that someone gave me “likes” for something that I did that benefited them. This gels with the theme of the game of connecting people.
Trying to write one coherent summary of my experience after beating the game is challenging because there was so much going on. This hodgepodge of elements mostly works well together. You can (as I did) safely ignore what feels like the majority of stuff. For example, I rarely delivered “extra” packages, didn’t bother about my rating, rarely fought, didn’t craft hardly anything, didn’t engage in any of the extra social layers of the game, and so on. I went straight through the main mission. And it was quite the journey. If Death Stranding 2 is much like this one, I’ll probably skip it. Sasha asked me if I liked Death Stranding, and I said “most of the time.” I liked the “dull” moments traversing the landscape with packages the best (especially the ambiance when the soft music starts playing). And the boss fights were cool. The story is confusing, the combat is fine, and a lot of the game is avoidable. It’s wildly creative and something different for sure, though, which is why even though I only liked it “most of the time,” I’m glad I played it.
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