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Oct 29th, 2024 at 06:05:03 - Manifold Garden (PC) |
Quickly, this is a really disorienting puzzle game. It gave me motion sickness. I tried to play twice. The first time, I made it like 30 minutes, but I didn't recognize the dullness behind my eyes and the yawning (which happens either when I'm tired, bored, or about to barf) as motion sickness. I thought I was just tired. Then yesterday, I sat down to play and started feeling sick within like 10 minutes and retrospectively interpreted the other day's symptoms as motion sickness. I went to YouTube to see more of the game, and felt even worse watching the YouTube video. Blech.
The handful of puzzles I did solve were mind-bending. You shift gravity by pressing spacebar. Doing so basically rotates the world around you by 90 degrees, so you can "run up" walls, change gravity again to get on the ceiling, and so on. There are all these cubes and switches, and it seems like you're really trying to navigate Escher-esque structures and figure out how to get cubes in the right places to open doors. I'm not sure I would have stuck with it anyway, or if I'm just interpreting it more negatively because of how I felt. But it seemed really hard, and the lack of narrative was turning me off. Also, puzzle games after work are not necessarily the best idea.
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Oct 16th, 2024 at 16:51:22 - Paradise Killer (PC) |
This was a huge surprise, and yet another gem in that narrative Humble Bundle from a couple months ago. I actually got this game once before and gave it away because I was on the fence about whether I thought I'd like it. But I got it again and figured I'd give it a shot. Good decision!
Paradise Killer is extremely creative. It's like a detective game / visual novel. I don't play either genre, so this was all pretty new to me. You play as Lady Love Dies, an "investigation freak" who gets called back from exile to solve a murder. There's a whole fiction here. Lady Love Dies is part of "The Syndicate," which is a group of...I don't even know what they are...special people, I guess...who live on an island. Every so often, they destroy the island and create a new one. They usually destroy the island, it seems, because demons invade it. That's more or less the case this time, too, except that on the night that they were supposed to move to the new island, the entire Council (the Syndicate leadership) was murdered. That's the one you're called back to solve.
There are 10 or so other (alive) Syndicate members. You run around the island, exploring it, finding clues and collectibles, learning about the history of all this, and meeting the other Syndicate members. You're collecting evidence, trying to make sense of the murder. Who did it, why, and how? Once you've collected enough evidence, you have a trial. Actually, you can have the trial immediately if you want to, just wildly accusing people. But, I was a good investigator. I think I explored most everything and discovered most all the evidence, and waited to call a trial until I had a good picture of what happened.
And there is a lot to explore. The island has like 10 areas, and there is hidden stuff everywhere. I thought the game was going to be more like a visual novel, and although I knew there was some exploration moving through a 3D world, I didn't know that that would be most of the game. I got completely engrossed in scouring the island for clues and collectibles. You will find a ton of stuff, and you will keep on discovering new areas and secrets if you're looking hard enough, all the way up until the end. I used the word "engrossed" earlier, but "exhilarated" also is appropriate. Like, it was really exciting to find hidden objects, secrets, to get more evidence against a character, to realize I learned something that could break an alibi, and so on.
I 100% want a sequel to this on the next island, and actually, I have some things I want to look up about this one, like what happens if you execute everyone and there is no one left to move to the next island? If you execute Lydia, can anyone be transported there? If you execute the Architect, then who builds the next island? Each character has a role, so what happens if those roles are empty? All the Syndicate members are suspicious for various reasons, and I gather in this game that there is no "right" answer. Like, it doesn't tell you if your accusations are correct; you just piece your evidence together as best you can, and if the Judge finds it reasonable, then the people you accused are sentenced and either executed or exiled. So, I guess that different players can have different outcomes of the trials.
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Oct 16th, 2024 at 16:52:38.
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Oct 15th, 2024 at 17:11:30 - En Garde! (PC) |
This is a silly, short adventure game (~4 hours) featuring fencing, and the combat is really quite good. It's predicated not only on fencing moves (dodge, parry, riposte), but on using the environment to gain advantage over enemies. For example, you can kick things at enemies (boxes, crates, vases, etc.), which will momentarily surprise most enemy types. Surprised enemies are opened up to being kicked themselves, and you can kick them off ledges, into traps, and so on. You can pick up objects (buckets, turkeys, lanterns, etc.) and throw them at enemies too, distracting them or, if you're close with a bucket or turkey, putting them on the enemies' heads. It's amusing seeing an enemy running around with a turkey on his head.
You can also interact with the environment, such as by throwing a lantern at a cannon, which will cause it to fire, or by cutting a rope holding up a chandelier, which will cause it to fall. You can jump on tables, swing on poles, and generally run circles around your opponents, throwing and kicking things at them. Doing such acrobatics also surprises them, opening them up to kicks and attacks, or just distracting them so that you can focus on other enemies, because they will swarm you.
There are a variety of enemy types that, especially when there are a lot of enemies together, can be pretty challenging. They basically escalate in the complexity of their patterned moves. If their swords highlight red, it's an unblockable attack that you must dodge. If their swords highlight blue, you need to parry. Different enemies have different combinations of these two moves, and they come at you fast, so you have to react quickly to their series of attacks. As you dodge and parry the more advanced duelists, you wear down their guard bar. Once that's depleted, you do damage to their health. If you get hit, their guard bar replenishes. So, you need to string together perfect moves to defeat enemies. Combat happens in arenas, often with waves; it's intense and fun!
The fencing and acrobatic antics align with the narrative and tone of the game. You play as a heroic rapscallion who is against the "Count-Duke" and his evil scheme to milk the population and enrich himself. The plot and characters are usually over-the-top. There are plenty of funny one-liners. It's all very silly, endearing, and colorful. And I say all this with the feeling, in the end, that it was missing things. It moves at a fast pace and feels like it could have been fleshed out more, perhaps even taken a bit more seriously, and been a more engrossing action game. What's here is solid, but it feels like more of a foundation for something else than anything I'd encourage others to go out and play, although it was totally fun.
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Oct 6th, 2024 at 10:58:31 - The Eternal Cylinder (PC) |
Played a couple hours and this did not click for me. Neat art design and silly enemies were the highlights, as well as, of course, the titular eternal cylinder, a massive thing that rolls forward, destroying everything in its path as the game progresses. You play as "trebhums," little creatures that can eat stuff and gain mutations, which allow them to do things like "take no damage from gas clouds" or "become a square and fit in some holes" or "convert food to water" or "jump higher." You can collect up to 5 trebhums, each of which can be mutated and has its own inventory. So, you run around with your little group of pals, eating stuff and finding water (because you have hunger, hydration, energy, and stamina meters to manage) and generally trying to figure out how to solve puzzles and where to go next. You can explore around, but it's rather minimal. The world is procedurally generated and quickly looked same-y. You are contained in little biomes. If you leave, the eternal cylinder starts rolling again, and you can stop it by getting to the next in a series of towers before the cylinder gets there and crushes it. Like, it's interesting in theory, but really weird and boring in practice. I also didn't like that the narrator tells you that you can run ahead and your other trebhums won't die, that they'll find their way to you, but they definitely do die for no reason sometimes. It costs resources to get new trebhums, and you have to find them, and you may have spent mutation resources on them, so this is not cool. They can also lose all the mutations you put on them, which I also disliked. In all, the game felt tedious, like a chore to play.
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