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May 21st, 2025 at 10:48:42 - Quantum Conundrum (XBONE) |
Been playing this with Patrick for most of the semester and we finally beat it last night. It's a mixed bag, but overall positive. It absolutely rides the coattails of Portal, and we read that it was directed by the lead designer on Portal, so no surprise at the similarities. I'll get the negative things out of the way first:
1. It tries to be funny, but it falls mostly flat. The funniest things were Ike (this little imp creature that makes silly faces at you) and the way that the paintings change when you use the abilities (often funny and surprising!). What was supposed to carry the game's humor--the narrator/uncle--didn't. He delivered his lines just fine, but they didn't land. Given that you play as a child, he can't be as sarcastic as GlaDOS in Portal. Given the more family-friendly aesthetic, the jokes were sillier. Given that he and the child actually don't seem to have much of a relationship, nor is it developed throughout the game, there's little relational history and context to draw from. And he usually only pipes up in between puzzles to make brief comments that don't add much.
2. The level of precision required for the first-person platforming was rough. Many puzzles require excellent timing and precision for jumping, throwing and catching objects, and so on, and the game just didn't handle that well. The movement controls are oddly both too tight and too floaty at the same time (I'm sure I'm mischaracterizing this in my description, but this is what it felt like). We OFTEN fell off flying objects, jumped too far or not far enough, missed catching things because of the camera, and so on. Actually, it was irritating for the first half of the game, and it became funny to us as the levels became more complicated. Like last night, Patrick tried for 15 minutes to execute the moves on a puzzle before handing it to me to finish. It would take 1 minute to figure out what you need to do and 14 minutes to accomplish the task. I felt bad watching Patrick sometimes because he's not great at precision controls, so he would fail and fail and fail, hand me the controller, and I'd do on the first try what he'd tried 20 times (though I certainly failed my fair share of times because of the controls!).
3. The ending was uninspired and happened quickly. I'm not entirely sure why what happened happened and I don't care. It obviously set up a sequel that never came.
That's it! Those are the negatives. The positive, though, is the puzzles. They are great, consistently fun and challenging. You're in your uncle's crazy science mansion, and there are four ways that you manipulate objects to solve puzzles by swapping to different "dimensions." First, you can make objects "heavy." Second, you can make objects "fluffy." Third, you can slow time. Fourth, you can reverse gravity. Only one dimension can be active at a time, but by choosing sequences of dimensions, you do some cool things. For example, one common object is a big safe. You normally can't pick up a safe (or other large objects), but activate the fluffy dimension and it becomes light as a feather. This way, you can move safes around to toss them through windows (throw and change to "heavy" before it hits the glass), depress buttons (place them them change to "heavy"), or fly through the air using a combination of dimensions. For example, carry the safe with fluffy, throw it and quickly slow time, jump on top of the safe you just threw, use reverse gravity to travel upward, and (voila!) you've used a safe to get to a ledge above you.
Puzzles utilize various combinations of dimensions, and often you have to find these little capsules to trigger the dimensions in the first place. So task 1 will be acquiring the capsules for dimensions in a puzzle area, then you can start solving the harder puzzles in an area. It is totally linear though, so it's not like you'll be trying puzzles you can't complete. Unlike something like The Witness, you're always at a puzzle you can solve. So if you can't figure it out, then it's you. Like Portal, there are various obstacles and death traps, including deadly pools of "science juice" (like acid), lasers, robots that push you off ledges, and so on.
I do recall getting bored and sleepy earlier on, but to be fair, we were always playing Quantum Conundrum at night after work, and I have learned that puzzle games are a genre not best suited to play while exhausted at night. Nevertheless, it held our attention, and by at least halfway through, we were thoroughly enjoying the puzzling. So, the short version is: Portal is better by far, but Quantum Conundrum scratches the itch.
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May 18th, 2025 at 10:48:06 - Heaven's Vault (PC) |
Excellent narrative adventure/mystery game. You play as an archaeologist and basically-a-PhD-student named Aliya who gets sent by her professor / university head / potential Empress (my, don't we believe university administrators have a lot of power!) to find out what happened to a roboticist colleague who may have uncovered some troubling truths about the history of the Nebula. You have a robot companion named Six (so named because you've gotten all your previous numerically named robots destroyed, which is understandably alarming to Six) and a ship. The gist of the gameplay is that you "sail" between moons from site to site (some ancient, some modern), exploring them, finding artifacts, translating ancient inscribed text, as you piece together the long and complicated history of the rise and fall of the Nebula’s various ages and empires. Your choices have implications for the Nebula’s future and everyone's survival.
The obvious comparisons here are to 80 Days (a previous non-linear narrative game from these devs) and Chants of Sennaar (which also involves deciphering ancient languages). The difference between this and Chants of Sennaar (and Tunic, now that I think about it) is that you don't have to correctly figure out the language. Like, it's helpful to understand the story, but you can progress fine by making total guesses at what symbols mean. This makes Heaven’s Vault an easy game, whereas Chants of Sennaar and Tunic were quite challenging. That’s fine because of the constant feeling of discovery, which motivated me to keep going. I loved finding new artifacts in the dirt, trying to puzzle out inscriptions, the satisfaction of confirming correct translations, discovering new moons and ancient sites, and going deeper into the history of this game world.
The constant sense of discovery counterbalanced what may otherwise have felt like a slower game. There is no “run” button; you slowly walk everywhere. There is a lot of dialogue, especially optional context-specific dialogue (e.g., you can press “Q” or “R” when prompted to ask a question or reply outside of any formal scene, which supplies extra personality to Aliya and Six and supplies deeper insight into what’s going on). The “sailing” involves slowly watching your ship move along a path, with you occasionally having to check the map and guide it left or right and having to press the right mouse button for a burst of speed. The sailing is meant to be relaxing and contemplative. It’s pretty sailing through the Nebula, but that was absolutely my least favorite part of the game. The distances between moons can be large, and the sailing speed is slow. You can occasionally “rest” and have Six take over for you, but I found that sometimes Six would annoyingly divert me from my path, and Aliya would wake farther away from her destination than when she went to sleep. Minor gripes in the grand scheme of things.
The writing is top-notch. I really enjoyed Aliya and Six; their banter is great, often funny. The art and sound are nice too. This gets two thumbs up from me.
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May 7th, 2025 at 23:30:46 - Eliza (PC) |
Eliza is a commentary on Big Tech through the lens of a character, Evelyn, who created a “listening machine,” which became monetized as an AI therapist after she left the game’s tech company three years earlier. She has been rather aimless since leaving, and at the beginning of this game, takes a part-time job as a “proxy.” Proxies are people who mediate between Eliza (the AI therapist) and the clients. Proxies wear smart glasses, which run the Eliza program. Proxies are fed a script from Eliza to read to the client. As the client talks, Eliza analyzes the conversation and spits out prompts for the proxies to read, based on its algorithm. Proxies are only to read the script, never to deviate. The idea is that clients find speaking to an AI too impersonal, and so the proxy provides a façade of real human interaction such that the therapy can be successful.
I’ve been talking with people for weeks about this game because AI always comes up. And I run a Human Services program with a Social Work concentration; half my students want to become social workers or therapists. It’s highly relevant. At the same time, the game is dated. Why? Because this was made in 2019, pre-generative AI. Eliza is algorithmic. It’s scripted. It essentially selects from dialogue options based on how the conversation is going. If the game were made just three years later after ChatGPT dropped, I don’t think that Eliza would require proxies. Most people now cannot tell the difference between speaking to a generative AI chatbot or a human online. Although, even in Eliza, the need for a proxy is questionable. Imagine sitting in front of a person who you know is just reading Eliza’s script. You know you’re really talking to a computer, even if there is a person sitting in front of you saying the words. You would have to delude yourself into thinking that the person made the interaction much different. And, in the game, most of the clients make comments like, “I know you’re just a computer, but…” So, despite the proxy, they are aware that they are talking with Eliza, an AI. Perhaps that’s part of the critique. Tech products promise a lot, but often fail to live up to their promises, despite the people who make the products feel alive.
There are generative AI therapy chatbots today. Even the large commercial chatbots like ChatGPT can be used for this purpose. They are far more sophisticated than Eliza. I don’t think the main point of the game is the therapy chatbot, but the big tech ethics stuff. The chatbot is just an example to generate ethical questions. Do people need human interaction for effective therapy, or does just talking to something human-like help? Can AI chatbots do harm? Is it ethical to use a chatbot to monetize mental health services? What about the proxy: do they become alienated? What are the impacts on proxies when they cannot respond to the client, but must observe the client’s suffering and simply convey an algorithmic prompt? Do proxies have an ethical obligation to help if they can offer better advice than Eliza? What if such deviation from the script gets them fired? The game raises questions about surveillance and privacy (the tech company develops a new service where Eliza can provide more detailed evaluations if the client lets Eliza access their texts and emails), the effects of technology on emotions, the possibility of resistance to technological development, and so on.
The game was thought-provoking for me, not necessarily in its self-contained story, but because I was able to connect it to so much else. The game itself is not terribly captivating. But that may be the point. Evelyn is something of a blank canvas. She has a history, of course, and there are other static characters. But the player gets to decide how Evelyn thinks about the big tech company, about Eliza, about experimental technologies, about ownership and control, about privacy and surveillance, and ultimately about her own purpose and goals. In the end, I had her abandon the tech world and leave the city to go find her father (where I hope she will find some meaning in understanding her family and herself, if not develop a good relationship with them). As one of Evelyn’s last lines of monologue says, “There is no message, no point, no overarching story here.”
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May 7th, 2025 at 15:28:13 - Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (PS5) |
I’ve been playing Sekiro on and off for most of this semester and have gone back and forth between liking it and disliking it. It’s a great game, really focused and tightly designed, no doubt about it, but it is so, so difficult, and I find myself questioning if I am having fun or if I am driven by the desire to not let the game beat me, to prove that I can beat another notoriously difficult game. FromSoftware context: I tried and quit Dark Souls years ago because I thought it was too hard and frustrating, though admittedly I didn’t give it a lot of time. Then I picked up Bloodborne, enjoyed it a lot, and ultimately beat it. Sekiro is my third FromSoftware game.
My first impressions were positive. Sekiro’s atmosphere pulled me right in. It’s dark and gritty and violent, something I liked about both Dark Souls and Bloodborne. I explored around one of the first areas, the Ashina Outskirts, and discovered my first mini-boss (some general or another), though I didn’t know it at the time. Mini-bosses have two health bars instead of one. I got my ass handed to me a few times before thinking, “What the hell is this enemy?!” and changing direction.
I found another area, Hirata Estate, where I stayed for many hours of gameplay. This is where I learned about how death works system works. When you die, you lose half of your accumulated experience (at the level you are on; you can’t lose a level) and money. This means you can grind experience for skills by redoing areas over and over (and not dying!). Well, I was dying, and so I reasoned that more skills could help, so I grinded, redoing the same area numerous times, reaching the next experience level before flirting with the next mini-boss, the Shinobi Hunter, who attacks with a huge spear. I may have found another mini-boss in that area too (or just a hard enemy), but I pretty much explored everywhere I could until I determined that I had to pass the Shinobi Hunter to move forward.
You can’t beat the Shinobi Hunter until you learn how to counter thrust attacks and sweep attacks. In Sekiro, success in combat is heavily dependent on your ability to parry, dodge, and counter thrust and sweep attacks. If you can’t read enemies and respond very quickly and precisely to their moves, you’re going to die. To counter a thrust attack (indicated by a red symbol), you press circle (dodge) just before it lands, and you’ll stomp on their weapon, causing a lot of posture damage. Posture damage is something like stamina. When you block attacks, you take posture damage. When your posture damage reaches max, then you can’t block anymore. The same is true for enemies. Dealing posture damage opens them up to health damage. Countering thrusts and sweeps is good because it’s a way to hammer their posture. To counter sweep attacks (indicated by the same red symbol), you jump as they sweep, then press x (jump) again in the air and you’ll kick the enemy in the head. The timing on these has to be impeccable, or else you’ll get nailed, and it only takes a couple hits to kill you in this game. Since thrust and sweep attacks are indicated by the same red symbol, you have to learn what the attack animations look like for each enemy. Usually, it’s pretty obvious, but occasionally something that looks like a thrust is actually a sweep.
After many hours of learning the basics, grinding, and not feeling like I was accomplishing much of anything, I finally beat the Shinobi Hunter. I slowly bested a couple other mini-bosses over the next few weeks. Then one day, I sat down to play a long session, and I got in the deepest groove. Everything was clicking. I must have killed like 6 or 7 mini-bosses and one of the actual bosses, Gyoubo (the guy on horseback). I even one- or two-shot a couple. I was optimistic, like “Yeah, I can beat Sekiro!” But of course that was premature and naïve! I think that day I ended up stopping after getting killed about 20 times by Lady Butterfly, another main boss.
I abandoned her and went elsewhere, eventually getting to a mini-boss called the Lone Shadow Longswordsman. I didn’t fight him so much as fight the camera. He (like Lady Butterfly) was fast, but unlike Lady Butterfly’s fight, his took place in a tiny, enclosed space. The camera constantly got stuck, I couldn’t see him, I’d lose him, I couldn’t see where I was going, etc. He killed me over and over, and I was getting irritated. Finally, I complained to Google and found that this fight is notorious for the bad camera, and learned how to cheese it a bit. There is a way to cheese a lot of the mini-bosses for some reason. I guess it’s strategy, like if you can figure out that there is a ledge you can jump from to impale the mini-boss and take off a chunk of his health bar, then more power to you. Anyway, I learned how to start the fight with him at 50% health, and ironically I missed the surprise attack one time and beat him normally.
Fast forward to today, where I started in the Ashina Depths, stuck from last time on the Shichimen Warrior miniboss. This guy induces “terror” by shooting you with purple spirits. When your terror meter fills up, you die. So, you have to avoid the spirits and try to close in to attack the Warrior. This is hard because he’s constantly summoning and firing off spirits, and when he’s not doing that, he’s shooting flames from his staff. If you get close, he tends to teleport elsewhere, where he proceeds to summon and shoot more spirits. I abandoned him and pressed onward into the Depths until I got to another mini-boss called Snake Eyes.
Snake Eyes carries a rifle that does tons of damage, sometimes one-shotting me. I did immediately figure out how to get behind him for a stealth attack that lopped off half his health. But I could never take him down. I tended to get myself backed into a corner, where the camera again killed me as much as he did. There are other enemies in the combat area, except if you attack them, then usually Snake Eyes triggers and shoots you dead from across the room. Eventually, I figured out how to kill some of the extras, then stealth attack Snake Eyes, but I could still never get his second health bar down. I haven’t figured out how to counter his thrust/sweep (not sure which it is, but I haven’t timed it right for whichever it might be, and if it hits me, I’m dead). So anyway, I was again getting irritated by the camera and just was not in the mood to consider spending my day dying to Snake Eyes, so I looked up how to beat him. I learned that you can cheese him too. There are pools of poisonous liquid in the combat area, and apparently you can kite him into a poison pool, then grapple out of his reach, and he’ll stand there shooting at you (which you dodge) taking poison damage until he dies. I tried it a few times with partial success. The last time, he was stuck behind a rock shooting into the rock, his life slowly ticking away. I went to brush my teeth, came back, and he was dead. Just kidding. I was dead. I guess he got unstuck and killed me. I sighed and turned it off.
I am feeling very frustrated with Sekiro. Today’s session was not fun. Grinding was not fun. Dying 20 times each to Lady Butterfly or the Shichimen Warrior or the Blazing Bull or whoever was not fun. Dying itself is fine, but one expects to learn something, to do better next time, to make some incremental progress. I rarely feel that with Sekiro. On that day when I had a hot streak, I don’t know what I’d eaten for breakfast, but I was certainly enjoying watching the enemies fall like dominoes. It clicked on that day. But that was only one afternoon of gameplay out of many over the course of the last few months. Can it click again? Can I derive pleasure from trying and failing so many times, only to finally notice an attack pattern I hadn’t noticed before, or to try an item I hadn’t tried before? Probably. It’s weird thinking about quitting Sekiro because I do like it. It’s good. I’m just not having much fun. But the potential is there to have fun. Though even when I do beat a boss, it’s just like, “sigh, okay, here is the next one, who is probably going to be agonizing to learn and overcome.” That’s the thing. It’s definitely not a “come home from work and play” kind of game because it’s so brutal. On the other hand, I often don’t want to play it during my limited free time because I’d rather do something more rewarding. So, what’s its niche? Maybe when I have more time over the summer. I don’t want to give up quite yet. Maybe if I put it down and come back in a couple months, I’ll feel refreshed. Maybe if I try some other games with parry mechanics inspired by Sekiro, I’ll get some practice with this type of combat. Or maybe I’ll try Elden Ring! (And if I never make another Sekiro post, then I probably picked it up for another hour months from now and said “nope!”).
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