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Nov 11th, 2019 at 19:21:08 - A Hat in Time (PC) |
Wow, this was a surprise hit. 3D platformers generally aren't my thing, but I adore A Hat in Time. This is the best of this genre I've played since the two Super Mario Galaxy games. The game has very positive reviews, but I still had it pegged as "too kiddie" or "meh 3D platformer not as good as Super Mario Galaxy so who cares." Neither of these is true! It might have a cartoony art style, but it's function is more cuteness and humor.
This gist of the story is as follows: You, Hat Kid, are flying home in your spaceship when you have an accident and all of your time pieces (like fuel) fall to the surface of the planet below, scattering to the different places there. You need to go recover you time pieces so you can get home. Not easy! There's another kid, Mustache Girl, who wants to get rid of all the bad guys. When you don't immediately help her, she vows to crush you. You proceed to go world by world collecting your time pieces, leading toward a final confrontation.
The worlds are really creative! The first one is Mafia world, which is populated entirely by big, stupid mafia men. They like to punch things and keep it simple. Sets the tone for the game. The next world is Dead Bird Studio, where two birds (a wild-west owl and a disco penguin) compete to make the best movie and win a film award. Naturally, you star in both of their films and uncover a sinister plot while doing so. Then, probably my favorite, was the graveyard level because of the boss. You sign your soul away to this Oogie Boogie type character, who makes you do tasks for you and eventually tricks you! He was definitely my favorite character. The fourth world was a strange one. In every other world, there are "acts" that you complete in order, but in the fourth world, Alpine something something, you get to free roam. There are a handful of time pieces, but you explore the world without much structure to find them all. I appreciated this change of pace, but the conclusion was unsatisfying. The characters in the world didn't have as much personality as previous worlds, which made the exploration less exciting. The final world is...well, you'll have to play to see that one.
The main mechanic of the game involves equipping different hats with different abilities. The basic hat points you toward your objective. There's one that lets you sprint, another that lets you toss bombs, another that lets you see previously invisible platforms, and so on. Then you pin "badges" onto your hats, which give you still more abilities, such as the ability to shoot a grappling hook. That one is absolutely necessary, while others are optional. Some of the hats are like this too. There's a final hat that I never crafted that (probably) lets you stop or rewind time. There are also other (useless?) badges you can buy. You can switch between hats on the fly and easily equip different badges to suit the situation.
My one gripe with the game is, as with most 3D platformers, the platforming. That has to be tight! The controls here were definitely good, just not great. Hat Girl especially has this annoying habit of hopping when you land from a jump, which makes it unnecessarily tricky to jump multiple times in succession. This made avoiding moving obstacles difficult at times. I was able to abuse her getting stuck on walls to get higher, and then other times it's difficult to judge distance for jumping. Platforming could be mildly frustrating.
Anyway, I'm definitely surprised by how excellent the game is. If you like 3D platformers at all, you need to play it. It's a relatively short one (took me ~12 hours), and you could easily sink some more in to collect every time piece. I finished with 26/40, which is the minimum required!
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Nov 11th, 2019 at 08:50:32 - What Remains of Edith Finch (PC) |
If I could insert a little emoji with hearts for eyes here, I would. What Remains of Edith Finch is a fascinating exploration of a family's history, misfortunes, and quirky (possibly cursed) house. You play as the titular Edith Finch, who has returned to her family's home to do some combination of uncovering truths and getting some closure. All of her family is dead and/or gone. Most of them died tragically. You'll explore the house, finding secret passageways, poking around dead peoples' preserved bedrooms, and reading very sad, shocking, and surreal diary entries, letters, and other "remains." You'll also wonder how one family can have the same copy of so many of the same books in their house, especially cookbooks (my favorite: A Viking's Belly).
I played this with my girlfriend (the first game we've ever completed together?!). She likes story-driven games and classic JRPGs, so I've set some aside to play together, or to at least play in her company. I've been playing Earthbound on and off at her house for half a year, and just wishlisted Chrono Trigger. I never owned an SNES as a kid, OKAY?! This was better than the last game I tried to play with her, Pony Island, which had way more puzzles and demanded more precision than I remembered. She thought the story was neat at least. Anyway, we were both enthralled by the vignettes in the Finch home, understanding the family tree, and piecing together what happened to each of the characters! The family tree is difficult to wrap your head around at first and it took us half the game to get a good grasp of who was married to who, of what the "leaves" were, and so on. Paying attention to who Edith is talking about when she calls someone "grandpa," for example, will really help.
Some of the vignettes were really creative, such as the "Tales from the Crypt" comic inspired home invasion murder of Barbara. Others let you play with toys (the bathtub scene, the kite scene). These vignettes often begin innocently enough, then take a dark turn. Eventually, as you realize what is about to happen, they can become very distressing. My favorite vignettes in order were:
- (King) Lewis. Good lord, the twist on this one...
- Molly. This is the first you encounter, and although the controls for the cat were a pain, the monster totally makes up for it. Very surreal.
- Gregory. Bath time. Play with a toy frog.
- Calvin. The dread from knowing what's going to happen here was awful. And who hasn't wanted to swing all the way around?! Very relatable death.
I didn't dislike any vignettes, though Gus's (punk rock 13-year-old) was silly and a little confusing. The game did leave me with questions:
1. Is the Finch house really cursed? Or is the family cursed? If either is true, then WHY is it cursed? This will require some deep thought about the story and characters...
2. Where is Milton?! I think he died crawling through secret passageways in the house...
3. Can we visit Edie in the old folks' home? Is she still alive there?
4. Assuming Edie and Milton are dead, then Kay is the only person alive (maybe). What happened to her after the divorce?
5. Did Edith's kid make the same journey through the house as she did, reading her diary along the way?
I would LOVE another game just like this. Also, I need to acquire a PS4 and play The Unfinished Swan, these devs' first game.
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Oct 30th, 2019 at 21:22:00 - Risk of Rain (PC) |
I caved and looked up how to unlock more characters and watched some Let's Play of the whole game. That gave me an idea: play it on easy mode to just beat the thing, then bump the difficulty back up once I have the satisfaction of seeing credits roll. Well, I played a few rounds on easy, died surprisingly often, but did make it to level 4! Or 5...? Either way, there were multiple bosses and it was very scary. I unlocked another character for beating level 3 and another for finding some hidden container, which I probably wouldn't have investigated if I hadn't seen the Let's Play where the streamer talked about hidden characters in a few levels.
All in all, Risk of Rain was a really enjoyable game for the 4 hours I spent playing around. It was starting to get a little repetitive, as roguelikes do, since there were just three abilities to use and there wasn't much variation between levels except difficulty increases. I hear Risk of Rain 2 is in early access and it's in 3D. I'll have to check it out!
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Oct 29th, 2019 at 22:58:46 - Risk of Rain (PC) |
A friend showed me this unique roguelike a few years ago and I was smitten with the time-based difficulty mechanic. The longer you play, the harder the game becomes. You have as much time as you want in any given level to collect and buy items, gain experience, and so on, but the more time you spend doing that, the more likely you are to die. Oooh, the tension that balancing act produces!
At some point, you will need to activate a teleporter to leave to the next level. When you do, a boss comes, a ton of enemies spawn, and you have to stay alive until a 90-second timer runs out. I initially thought that once the timer ran out, you could teleport, but no! You have to kill everything. The function of the countdown seems to be to let you know how much longer until enemies stop spawning, and maybe you get some rewards for killing all remaining enemies before the timer runs out (?).
Risk of Rain is an engrossing roguelike. There’s a large pool of random items that really modify your character. You get all sorts of attack bonuses, health bonuses, and movement bonuses. Each character (you start with one, the Commando, and I've unlocked one more) has four abilities and can equip one reusable item. The Commando shoots a gun at long range, has a knockback shot, a dodge roll, and a machine gun burst for a lot of damage. I didn’t unlock any new characters for beating level one, and I don't remember where I got the second character (the Enforcer), but there are about 10 more.
The Enforcer really changes your playstyle. Whereas the Commando is a fast run-n-gun kind of person, the Enforcer is slow and armored. They fire a close-range shotgun blast that penetrates enemies and their special abilities are a knockback, a huge AoE blast, and a crouching stance that increases your rate of fire. Playing the Enforcer is all about lining up enemies, crouching down, and blasting away at them, whereas the Commando is all about rolling around enemies, popping up on the other side of them and firing before moving again.
One brief criticism is about the items. You can collect a lot and their buffs all stack. But there are no tooltips for them except a brief description that floats away as you pick it up. But unless you know what the item is or does by what it looks like, then you don't really know what all your buffs are or what any of the items you can choose from will do. There's a row of pixelated icons (a green blob, a couple guns, some round thing...) on the bottom of the screen, impenetrable as night. It would be nice if you could hit ESC and have a list of buffs or items that you have. Some of them play well with certain characters, and I imagine I'll learn more of these "combos" as I play. For example, the Enforcer benefits a lot from items that activate when you're standing still. Since the Enforcer is supposed to stand still in a crouch and shoot things, these items are natural fits. But I don't always know if I've got the item because I can't tell what the pixelated objects are supposed to be half the time! I'm sure I'll learn to recognize more and more of them, but it's fairly annoying for now.
In my second play session I did better than the first, getting to the third level. I didn't unlock any more characters and have no clue how to do so, but I did unlock a ton of new items that now have a chance to drop. Achievements in Risk of Rain are tied to item unlocks. I like achievements that have value within the game. It's more motivating than just achievements for achievements' sake. Anyway, I wind up being absolutely crushed by the third level. I think I've realized that the trick is finding the teleporters as fast as possible, activating them, killing the boss, killing the extra enemies, and getting out of there to the next level. I think the faster you can do this, the easier the game will be. I'm sure there are difficulty modifiers applied to different levels, but it's probably got nothing on the difficulty increases as the timer goes up. It even tells you that it's "easy" or "hard" or "impossible" or whatever. Your character does become pretty badass with like 20 items, but I always become totally outmatched at some point. Sometimes you find teleporters right away; other times it takes 5 minutes. So there's a huge window within which to get screwed over. Fun game, looking forward to trying to press a little further and hopefully see a few more characters.
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