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Jul 9th, 2018 at 11:37:23 - Hand of Fate (PC) |
I was sold on the idea of Hand of Fate before playing it, and I tried it at a friend's house sometime last year, bought it, and just got around to playing it the last couple weeks. It's a mixture of deck building, dungeon crawling, and action RPG. You are "the player" sitting across a card table from "the dealer." There's no exposition. You're dropped into this mysterious situation. The dealer is an enigmatic figure, and I want to know more about him. Throughout the game, there is little in the way of story regarding who he is, who you are, and why you are there. The dealer tells you that you're playing "the game" that he's created, many have played before you, the dealer always wins, and all the players have died. And he alludes to the fact that somehow I’m regaining my memories through the cards, which leads me to believe I was some adventurer or another who maybe just stepped through the wrong portal and found myself here.
The dealer explains the game to you over the first level, but you’re figuring a lot out yourself (e.g., that some cards get locked to you until you fulfill their conditions, that the icon on the bottom of the card is a token that grants rewards for fulfilling conditions, that you can equip as many rings as you want, etc.). Very intuitive way to present rules and information. So *basically* how the game works is as follows:
- Deck building is fantastic and never gets old. You have two pools of cards, equipment and encounter cards. Equipment is your various types of weapons, armor, rings, and artifacts (trinkets that have some special use like making you temporarily invisible, giving you a fire aura, reflecting ranged attacks, etc.). Encounter cards are little scenarios that determine much of what happens to you in each level. For example, The Maiden can give you food, increase your max health, and bless you. Ambush gets you a combat encounter with an equipment draw card as reward. Dark Carnival has you choosing a series of chance cards as your character explores a weird carnival. There's usually some element of risk/reward with the encounter cards. The Altar, for example, gives you a 50/50 chance to be blessed or cursed. All these give the feel of a tabletop game with the dealer as DM. Anyway, you choose a prescribed number of equipment and encounter cards to fill your deck, and then you enter the level.
- Dungeon crawling is exciting. Levels are made up of a series of encounter card arrangements that your player, as a tabletop game piece, moves across. Find the exit, go to the next area, explore the area, find the stairs, and repeat until you find the level's boss in the final area. Each card you land on flips over and you resolve the encounter. There is *tons* of chance here, though you have some control over what encounters you will...encounter...based on what you chose to include in the deck. When you have to choose chance cards, you can have either a Huge Success, Success, Failure, or Huge Failure, which will change the outcome of the scenario. However, as I learned when reading an FAQ one night, the chance cards are not completely random! You're shown the cards, and then they are shuffled. But there is order to it. If you watch closely, you can follow individual cards as they shuffle. It’s not too hard when there is like one or two slow shuffles, but it’s pretty impossible when the shuffle speeds up and especially when there are three or four shuffles. But it makes your odds of the easy shuffle encounters almost 100%, which means guaranteed equipment or blessings or whatever. Prior to this, I'd just been picking the left-hand card every time because I thought it was random. But now, if I choose the wrong card, it feels like my fault!
Each level also puts different default curses on the player, and the dealer shuffles different negative cards into the decks, and this can make things really tricky! One level that stood out cursed me with "Whenever you acquire a curse, lose 10 max HP." You begin with 100HP, so 10 is a lot. I had runs where I was cursed down to 40 max HP because he also shuffled encounter cards in that would put a random curse on you. Another level curses you such that when you counter-attack, you consume a food (every space you move consumes a food, and if you run out of food, your health begins to drain, so you *really* need to manage your food) AND every character takes additional 50% damage. The next-to-last level, the dealer shuffled a bunch of Rusty Axes (the worst weapon) in my equipment pile, so it was difficult to acquire a good weapon. These starting curses and insidious dealer cards can really change what equipment or encounters you put in your decks. For example, to combat the "lose 10 max HP per curse" curse, I only included one helmet in my deck, the one that reveals the exit from each area when you enter an area, and then included every encounter card that had a chance to give me a helmet. Once practically guaranteed to get that helmet, I could make a beeline for the exit in every area, thus not veering off in unnecessary directions landing on more curse cards, and allowing me to attempt the boss with sufficient HP. The one that consumed a piece of food every time I counter-attacked and made everyone take 50% more damage meant that I couldn’t counter and I couldn’t get hit much. I wound up removing most of the combat encounter cards from my deck and luckily discovered a couple rings that let me heal in combat (one saved me on the boss).
- Action RPG combat leaves something to be desired. It hearkens back to simpler days of button mashing hack-n-slash games. A little slow response to buttons (e.g., slightly sluggish movement, you can get caught in combo or finisher animations, etc.), but there is a rhythm to it in the attacking and counter-attacking. It's almost got an Arkham/Shadow of Mordor feel. If this was polished, the game would be significantly more fun. As it is, the combat becomes nearly as frustrating as the randomness. Blessings and equipment can change the feel of combat, but it's generally basic and easy to get overwhelmed (e.g., 6 lava golems, multiple bosses at once). Some encounters just kill me (Lich, &#*!@ Kraken), and randomness plays in both to (sometimes) what monsters you will fight and what equipment, blessings, curses, and health buffs, you will have accumulated up to that point. For example, I almost rage quit after I unlocked the Kraken encounter, which becomes a locked card in your encounters pile (i.e., it cannot be removed until you defeat it). I kept landing on the Kraken, at least 6 games in a row. You can't flee from the Kraken, so you have to fight it, and the fight involves actually fighting the last regular boss, the King of Scales, whom I hadn't even encountered at that point outside the Kraken battle, WHILE trying to kill the Kraken. It was brutal.
This turned really detailed, huh. One of my favorite things about Hand of Fate is that you can play the game with different goals (e.g., progressing through quest lines; trying to kill a particular boss or complete a particular task; or going for the level progression). There is also an endless mode, and DLC that adds different modifications to your character (think classes). I wonder how differently Hand of Fate 2 changes up the formula. I mostly want to see improved combat. Super interesting game though, highly recommend checking it out.
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Jun 30th, 2018 at 15:24:45 - Fatal Frame (PS2) |
I got this cool RCA --> HDMI adapter off Amazon that lets me play PS2 on my newfangled TV. It should also work with Wii, so I've been accumulating Wii games to exhaust that system now that I'm done with PS3 and Xbox 360. Fatal Frame was the last PS2 game I had, but I acquired a stack of Final Fantasy games, including V and VI (PS1), which will work with my new combo, so I'm also excited to see SNES era Final Fantasy games that I never played.
ANYWAY. Fatal Frame. I had a girlfriend once who was always talking about this game. She liked horror games. We had an Xbox version that we never played. At some point I bought a PS2 version, no idea why. I didn't even know I still had it, but I was cleaning and found it.
ANYWAY again. Fatal Frame has some serious pros and some serious cons.
PROS
- The atmosphere is terrifying. The game is set in a haunted old Japanese mansion. Creaky. Falling apart. The site of horrific rituals. Mean ghosts. The visuals and audio hold up surprisingly well. After I heard how good the sound design was, I played with headphones on. Good choice. It's totally haunting. Very immersive.
- It FEELS like survival horror games of the era (e.g., Silent Hill, Resident Evil). This is both good and bad. For example, the controls are tough to handle, but for the beginning of the game, it's not too hindering. As you walk, the fixed camera angles will change, forcing you to reorient yourself before you accidentally walk back where you came from or run into a wall or an enemy. The game is very dark, which makes your flashlight especially important. Right, this is all nostalgic in a good sort of way. But, it is bad because (see con 3).
- Puzzles and story. Thoroughly enjoyable puzzles to move the story forward. They haven't been difficult so far, but I'm sure they get a little harder. It's how the story uses puzzles that's really cool. So for example, one thing I picked up on is that the game centers around the "strangling ritual," which is basically that a sacrifice victim is drawn and quartered...well, no, fifthed (add the head)...with ropes tied around the to-be-removed body parts. In the game, you have to find five shattered mirror pieces and put them together. Puzzles are replete with Japanese folklore and imagery. The first mirror piece you've got to find a Buddha statue, and solving this puzzle reveals where some missing children have gone to, who were playing something called "demon tag," which is like a Japanese version of tag where "it" is a demon. Anyway, I enjoyed how steeped in Japanese folklore the game is. Really added to the atmosphere.
CONS
- Voice acting is generally bad. Par for the course for Japanese survival horror from this era though. The ghosts sound good, but the humans do not. Very flat and emotionless. Slow talkers.
- Combat. Combat in the game involves pointing your Camera Obscura at a ghost, holding the targeting circle over the ghost as it moves and as your shot powers up, and then pushing X when you want to attack (or square when the circle turns orange for a critical hit). I like the combat for its novelty and how scary it can be, but hate it for other overwhelming reasons. The ghosts are extremely irritating enemies. Yeah, they're scary, but as I played more and more, they became more annoying than scary. They disappear and reappear on another side of you, become untargetable, move through solid objects, and take a large chunk of your life per hit. Each hit slows you, and since you may be disoriented from a fixed camera shift (see below) it's not unlikely you'll get grabbed again quickly before you figure out which direction to run. Add to that limited healing supplies, and this became so tedious.
- As you progress, the clunky controls (a) break the immersion and (b) get you killed. Here's a prime example in combat: As you run from an enemy, the fixed camera will change positions, which sometimes makes you run in a direction that you don't want to go. Trying to control your character in tense moments breaks immersion. Add ghost teleportation in the mix, and the controls become extremely frustrating when you are hit and die because the camera keeps changing and the ghosts keep disappearing and reappearing. Worse, the sound doesn’t accurately tell you what direction ghosts are coming from because often the sound will change with the camera angle and not the ghost direction! You literally can't tell when this is happening when you're in camera mode because it's first-person and you don't see the camera shift. The ghost noises just seem to spin around you, then a ghost will kill you from behind when you were listening to the ghost sound coming from in front of you.
Add into that how the controls change while using the camera! You normally move with LS and look around with the flashlight with RS, like every other game. But for some reason when you go into the camera mode, LS moves the camera, and RS moves the character. I cannot tell you how many times I was hit and/or died because I'd go into camera mode and walk into a ghost when I meant to move the camera up, or moved the camera around when I meant to run away. It makes no sense! And you can't change it!
I had a harsh lesson in manual save points (and Fatal Frame's combat) the first time I played. I hadn't seen a save point in an hour and then got killed by a ghost. Had to play the first 45 minutes or so, after the tutorial, all over again. That repeated over and over, the dying, if not with so long between saves. I made it about 30% of the way through and figured I'd gotten the gist of it. Read the rest of the story and watched the ending bits on YouTube. Glad I played a little bit of Fatal Frame. Also glad to cut it short.
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Jun 21st, 2018 at 14:51:57 - Catherine (PS3) |
I just checked, and I bought Catherine about 5 years ago. It's outlasted all the other PS3 games on my shelf, those that I bought, played, and sold since acquiring that console. As I'm in the midst of cleaning house, I realized if I would just play Catherine, I could sell my PS3 since I've played everything else I want to on it. Strange motivation to play a game, but it worked.
Catherine is a puzzle game published by Atlus, who I came to love in my PS2 days for publishing excellent RPGs like the Persona and Shin Megami Tensei series. The story here is excellent, the high point of the game. You play as Vincent, a directionless guy in his early 30s who's been dating Katherine for the past 5 years. Vincent suffers pressure from Katherine and her parents to get married and, you know, grow up. Upon reflection, this may have contributed to why the game sat on my shelf for years. I was living with a girlfriend who put this pressure on me, and I didn't want her to see me playing a game about it (especially when the character ends up cheating). Anyway, at the bar he and his friends frequent, he meets another young woman, Catherine, who is opposite Katherine in many ways. She's younger, hotter, loves sex, seemingly uninterested in a long-term relationship. Vincent starts cheating, and so begin his nightmares. There's more going on, but to keep it simple, Vincent increasingly struggles over what he's doing, and increasingly struggles to keep Katherine and Catherine from finding out about one another. The game explores these themes well (relationships, parenthood, responsibility, transitioning to adulthood), and larger themes that the two K/Catherines represent, order and disorder.
The game alternates between Vincent's time at the bar at night, where you hang out with your friends, get to know other patrons, and respond to texts from the K/Catherines, his nightmares where he climbs daunting puzzle towers, and his days, in which there's usually a story bit of him waking up and/or meeting someone for lunch. I wasn't terribly impressed with the puzzling, and that turned out to be a tedious hindrance to hear more story. These are spatial block puzzles. In each stage, you climb a tower of blocks, and you'll have to navigate and move various kinds of blocks to create stairs, to remove obstacles, and so on, in order to reach the top. The bottom of the level falls away periodically, so you have to keep moving, which puts temporal pressure on. The last stage of each area features a challenging boss. The bosses remind me of Bayonetta or Devil May Cry by character design. They're all creepy or disgusting, especially the fucking baby level.
Catherine is a DIFFICULT game. I played on "normal" (don't be fooled!) for the first three areas, and was pulling my hair out by the end of it. I couldn't wait to beat the third area's final boss so I could switch to easy difficulty. Easy is significantly simpler than normal, but still can turn challenging. Note that you can't change difficulties when you're in the nightmare, so you need to keep a save in the bar, as I learned the hard way (otherwise, I would have been on easy halfway through the third area). The game is generous with checkpoints during your tower climbs. I read that Catherine used to be even harder upon release, and that the devs patched it to make it easier because players were complaining. I'm glad they did!
There's more complexity than I've described to the story and the puzzles, but this is the gist. It's a cool game, and I'd recommend it for something different. Don't feel bad if you have to use a walkthrough for a couple puzzles. And if you really get into it and love the puzzling, there's days more worth of it in challenge modes and striving for perfect runs.
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Jun 7th, 2018 at 18:23:26 - Prison Architect (PC) |
This one student of mine has been bugging me to play Prison Architect for two years. "Did you play Prison Architect yet? Did you play Prison Architect yet? Aw man, you gotta play Prison Architect!" He also bugged me to play GTA V, so I guess he likes games about criminals.
I didn't know until I booted it that Introversion made the game. I really liked Darwinia back in the day, and DEFCON was interesting. This made me more excited to play Prison Architect. Sims / god games / city builder type games are not usually my thing, even though I sometimes think one will look really cool (Crusader Kings II and Kerbal Space Program are both awaiting their unboxing in my Steam library).
My initial impression...wait, back up. I spent an hour playing in sandbox mode on accident before I realized that the campaign was an extended tutorial. Why? Because when I ran the game, it just...started in sandbox mode. No title sequence or anything. Just a plot of land with trucks delivering some workers and supplies, a letter from the CEO giving me basic tips, and a couple basic goals. I thought, "Wow, drops you right in!" But no, this is not the tutorial. In my first hour, I was so lost. I couldn't figure out how power generators worked. My piping was all tangled. I didn't know how to assign a function to a building. Hell, I didn't even properly know how to build buildings. The difference between building a foundation and just laying concrete and putting walls around the perimeter was unknown to me then. That meant I couldn't build a holding cell, and the prisoners, they just kept coming! By the time I went to start over, I had about 35 prisoners roaming around near the road, all hungry and dissatisfied with my prison management skills.
I don't remember exactly how it happened, but I think I clicked "help" shortly after starting over, and it opened a wiki that said at the top, "STOP! Don't read this until you play the tutorial in the campaign." Who knew the campaign was a tutorial? Why doesn't the game say that? Why doesn't it start you there? The campaign is broken up into 5 chapters, and it does indeed teach you, beginning with the very basics in chapter 1 (like how to designate a building), moving through dealing with riots, rehabilitating prisoners, assigning prisoners to work, assigning guards to patrol, and tons more. It does this through a really well told narrative, where each chapter is connected despite each one taking place at different prisons. It begins with you building an execution chamber and holding cell for a man sentenced to death for a double homicide. The next chapter sheds light on who he killed. And so it chains prisoners and events together.
Despite all the things I enjoyed about Prison Architect (I looked at a clock and it was like 4 hours later), the campaign has some seriously annoying bugs. Here are a few I wrote down in my frustration:
--Objective: Build a common room and place 8 chairs for a meeting space. Problem: There was already a common room, but I had built another one earlier. With 8 chairs. But this objective wouldn't tick off. Solution: I looked up why I was stuck and the internet said you have to just put the chairs in the original common room (even though it tells you to build a common room). So it doesn't recognize the second common room with 8 chairs and you cannot proceed.
--Objective: Use riot guards to stop a prison riot! Problem: Riot guards get stuck going through doorways and killed one by one by prisoners with batons. No more riot guards come and I cannot figure out how to proceed. Solution: Restart the mission. This time the riot guards move a little more smoothly through doors, and the NPC correctly hits his cue and gives me reinforcements and moves the story forward.
--Objective: Put out the fire. Problem: The fire is out and it won't tick off the objectives list. Solution: Call in a fire truck and move firemen to where the fire was even though they extinguished it 30 minutes ago.
--Objective: Build phones in all the yards. Problem: I only see one yard, and I built phones in it. It's telling me I'm 50% done, so there must be another yard, but I don't see one. Solution: There was another yard that was not labeled, and I built a building on top of it. The game didn't overwrite the yard and replace it with the new building. If I want to place payphones in the second yard, I have to demolish my buildings one by one to find out where the yard was. Why not just let me put phones in the one remaining yard?
--Objective: Oversee 20 family visitations. Problem: I have built a visitation center, but no one is visiting (by the end, I had built five lonely visitation centers). Solution: There is a specific spot you have to build the visitation center. You probably built over it with another building. You have no way of knowing. I guess this one isn't technically a bug, it's just not giving the player necessary information. Same as before. Demolish buildings and build visitation centers until you figure out where the mandatory spot for it was.
I was planning to play in sandbox mode after the campaign, but the last campaign level is pretty much sandbox mode, and I have no real desire to build and manage a prison anymore. Oh , and also, the game does grapple a little with nature vs nurture and prison as deterrence vs rehabilitation. It comes down on the side of rehabilitation, and I think the game does a really good job of using procedural rhetoric to explore what it is like to be a prisoner or run a prison, including putting the player in the position to contemplate issues of the criminal justice system both while playing and once they are done playing. Good job Introversion!
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