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Jun 24th, 2025 at 06:53:53 - Nine Sols (PC) |
Retiring this one (and Sekiro). I was really into Nine Sols for a while, but, like Sekiro, it's like beating my head against a wall, agonizing for hours to make inches of progress. Nine Sols is a Sekiro-like metroidvania, Sekiro-like because it features incredibly difficult parry-based combat. I am learning that this may not be my cup of tea. It's too bad because I enjoyed the metroidvania aspects and think this is a much better game than the last metroidvania I played, Ender Lilies (which I thought was solid). Nine Sols is more like Hollow Knight, but with that Sekiro influence.
The story immediately hooked me. It feels like slow-burn sci-fi. Your character gets pushed off a cliff, wakes up when a village boy finds him, and lives for a time in this village. The village does periodic ritual sacrifices, but when the boy who finds your character is ready to be sacrificed, your character pulls a plot twist and, short version, the village is not what you think it is. Off you go on a quest to defeat the "nine sols" and...do whatever it is that does.
I killed two of them and I feel like I was close to finding one or two more. The two sols I killed were HARD, but such good, unique fights. In the second one, you fight this cat-harpy (all the sols are cats) and her two enslaved humans. One human is quick and the other is slow, but both are strong, and you fight them at the same time. When you empty one of their HP bars, the sol descends to heal them, at which point you can attack her. But while you're taking advantage of your window to attack her, the other human is still coming at you. Rinse and repeat this until she is dead. The strategy lies in how you choose to deactivate the humans. Do you focus on taking out the big one or the small one? Which one is less dangerous when you are attacking the sol? Or, do you try to deactivate them both at the same time, thus giving you free time to attack the sol? Or, what I finally got good at was staggering them, so I'd try to take down both their HP, then deactivate one, attack the sol, then when she was done healing it, immediately deactivate the other so she came right back. When I finally killed her, I thought the fight would go into a second phase because that's what happened with the first boss, I spent a long time killing it, but when I thought it was over, it just went into phase 2!
I loved the hard-as-nails boss fights, but the regular enemies were brutal as well! I died countless times to archers, dogs, swordsmen, spearmen, little guys, big guys, everything. Nine Sols does the Dark Souls / Hollow Knight thing where when you die, you drop your money, or if an enemy kills you, then they have your money. Then you have to make your way back there WITHOUT DYING to retrieve it. But the enemies are so vicious, and the platforming is challenging too, that it's quite the feat to make the (sometimes long) trek back to your corpse. So, you lose your hard-earned cash all the time. And you need that to purchase upgrades. And if you are avoiding enemies too much, then you're not getting experience points, so no skills improve either. I wanted to learn enemy attack patterns so that I could effectively parry and kill them, but it was such a slow death-filled process for every enemy type (of which there are many), including the various elites you encounter.
Nine Sols does have some cool innovations. For one, you have a "talisman" that lets you do this attack where you sprint past an enemy, attach a bomb, and detonate it. This converts all internal damage to permanent damage. What is internal damage, you say? Well, that's like temporary damage. Your character takes internal damage when you parry but miss the perfect timing, which is nice. Internal damage refills over time. So, you can miss a perfect parry, take internal damage, and recover it. Of course, if you take too much internal damage, you'll still die, and if you get hit while you have internal damage, then it converts to permanent damage. Enemies do the same thing, so using your talisman when they have internal damage can really deplete their HP. Another thing I liked was this butterfly drone thing you have. If you press LT, you take control of the drone and can fly it around. This is really useful for scouting ahead so you can see what enemies there are, what platforming obstacles there are, etc. The drone can also fly into special spaces and hack electronics to open doors and whatnot. On the one hand, stopping to use a drone to scout ahead of you all the time slows the pace down a lot, but on the other hand, caution is really important.
In the end, I don't have the time or patience to dedicate to mastering Nine Sols (or Sekiro), as much as I like it. Therefore, it is retired (as is Sekiro)! Although I did read that if you change the difficulty to story mode, you can manually adjust damage dealt and received (to the tune of +/- %1,000!), so maybe one day I'll god mode my way through just to see more of the game.
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Jun 24th, 2025 at 06:15:43 - South of Midnight (PC) |
I've got several of these to update, burning through Game Pass games before the end of the month as I am.
I enjoyed South of Midnight, especially for the creative writing, the neat animation, and the stellar music. The combat, while fine, gets repetitive, and the game starts to drag toward the end because of this and the way that most of the 13 or 14 chapters unfold in the same formulaic way.
What's cool about the writing? The game takes place in the Deep South (something like New Orleans or Mississippi or the bayou). It features Southern folklore. The main character is Black and the game deals with slavery and racial trauma. It also deals with child abuse, social work, interracial relationships, grief and loss, and more. As someone who teaches social work students, it was really cool to have the main character's mother be a social worker, and to have all these themes be important parts of the story!
The game is divided into chapters, and each chapter or two covers a particular story of some tragedy or trauma happening and the victim turning into a monster. The main plot is that Hazel's (main character) house with her mother in it gets swept away in hurricane waters and she goes to find and save her. On the way, she meets a big catfish (the narrator) and various other characters, some related to her family and others related to the traumas she heals. And that's basically how the chapters play out. Hazel enters a new area and finds out there's a sad story there that explains whatever monster is around. Then she has to find the three or four memories that tell the story of the trauma, fighting in arena battles to get each one. Then, she has to go to the monster and cleanse it. Then, there is a platforming chase sequence. Repeat.
All combat takes place in arenas. You walk into an area, it becomes gated off, enemies spawn, and you kill them. There are several different enemy types that behave quite differently, and a bunch of them will spawn together (especially later on). So, you'll have like two aggressive melee enemies, one "healer" that protects an enemy, one that stands back and fires homing missiles, and another giant one that spreads rot on the ground. And they're all flitting around the arena attacking you. It can feel a bit chaotic, but you have some neat tools to handle them. You have a push and a pull, a stun that makes enemies take extra damage, a strong area attack, and you can send your little doll companion to mind control one. You can also like purge an enemy after you kill it, which deals some AoE damage and slightly heals you. It all feels good and can be challenging, but like I said, there is just too much of it. The combat starts to feel like padding.
Another thing that got old by the end was searching for skill points to upgrade attacks. These are collectibles hidden all over the place that require you to search in every nook and cranny if you want them. You don't have to find them all, but I think the upgrades helped me in combat. They are often obtained by the lightest of platforming and puzzle solving, "going the wrong way" on purpose. These give you either 5, 10, or 20 skill points. Upgrades require around 100 points on average to unlock, so you have to find a lot of these pickups to get rewarded. I didn't mind this too much because the environments are pretty and the movement and platforming feel good. So, I did enjoy the combat and exploration for a while, but searching high and low for skill points became tedious.
One thing that consistently made me want to keep going despite knowing that I was going to keep having to fight and do an end-of-chapter chase sequence was the music. As you get closer to the monster in each chapter, there is like a special song that starts playing. So, when you're searching for Two-Toed Tom, a giant alligator (yes, he is a victim!), a song starts playing about Two-Toed Tom, ramping up in intensity through a boss battle, almost seeming to narrate what you're doing. I LOVED the music because it was related to the story and what was going on in the game.
I'm glad I played South of Midnight. I'd recommend if you want something narratively unique.
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Jun 18th, 2025 at 07:14:41 - Submerged: Hidden Depths (XBONE) |
Finished this up with Patrick last night. It's a simple, relaxing one that boils down to being a collect-a-thon. You play as a girl and her brother (one at a time, in third-person) in a world hit by some kind of ecological catastrophe. The old world (our society) was ruined a long time ago, flooded, and a subsequent society built atop our ruins was also ruined by your standard bad black and red "mass" of vines and stuff creeping over everything.
The girl has some sort of connection to the mass (it is actually called the mass) and can heal it, turning the black vines a vibrant green. There is a pretty visual effect where flowers bloom wherever she walks (it's a pretty game in general!). She can cleanse large areas of the mass by finding seeds and placing them into pods.
That's how the game is chunked into areas. It takes place in this one section of the world, you have a home base in the middle of the map, and there are 10 seeds you have to find to cleanse 10 areas. Since this is a water world, you drive a motorboat around, using your spyglass to locate the seeds, each of which is at the end of some light puzzle platforming on its own building/island in the water. It's handy when you're looking for the seeds because, as your base is in the middle of the map, each seed is pretty evenly spaced around it in a circle.
The puzzle platforming is simple. You navigate to a dock, get out, and...push forward on the left stick. There is no other button except pressing "A" to use switches and pick up things. The character automatically jumps and climbs as you move her. I said "puzzle platforming," but really, both of these things are really light. You don't have to think much to solve the puzzles or platform. That's why I said the game is relaxing (easy, pretty, no enemies, etc.).
As you explore the ocean and the buildings/islands, you can find a couple hundred collectibles, from little pictogram diaries to boat parts to cosmetic items to relics you dredge up from the ocean, etc. It would be easy to get sucked in to ticking all the boxes to find all the things on the map. It was funny playing with Patrick because he is more likely to do that than I am, and he kept wanting to go back and find diary entries and stuff that we missed that he could see on the map. So when he was playing, he'd take time to look for items. When I played, I just went straight for the seeds.
So yeah, chill game to play together. Positive experience. Nothing to write home about though.
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Jun 17th, 2025 at 06:25:05 - Quantum Break (PC) |
This was ahead of its time. I've been trying to play it for years on PC, but it's always been unplayable on my computers, with stuttering, low FPS, and bursts of neon color with the infamous lighting bug (green, magenta, and yellow mostly) that blot out everything on the screen. I remember initially thinking that the colors were an art choice, which would gel with the whole sci-fi time travel story, before realizing that, no, these are bad colors! Anyway, I'd never gotten past Act 1 before, but this week I was able to play the whole thing. And FINALLY! Despite being 9 years old, parts of it still feel fresher than things coming out today.
The story presentation is the highlight. The game tells you something like, "Quantum Break is a seamless experience across the game and TV show." I used to think that there was a whole TV show related to the game, like the game was a spin-off or something. But that's not how it works. After each of the game's acts, you can watch a 20-25-minute live action "TV episode." These were cool! They add depth to the story, filling in information about other characters and what's going on behind the scenes of the game at Monarch (the game's evil corporation). I can't count the times where I was playing/watching, and saw something that connected to the game/show. It could be insight into a character's motivations or what they were doing, explaining how this or that event actually happened, or even a one-off comment that referenced some small detail. This sort of attention to detail is most impressive. I won't spoil the story, but in Act 5, you have all sorts of "ooooh shit!" moments as you remember what happened in Act 1 (and...see them happening again). Why haven't more games experimented with this blend of gameplay and live action? I'm not thinking of something like Immortality or Her Story that focus on interactive video, but more of a hybrid.
The story itself is mind-bending and engaging. My quibbles here were with some of the characters and relationships that felt implausible (never mind the implausibility of time travel). They were all really well acted with several Hollywood actors I recognized. But, our main character, Jack, seems to be like a loser-ish "Joe Everyman" (with a criminal record) who ends up being able to operate a time machine. It's alluded to that he had weapons training in Thailand or something, but...why? He comes into the picture because his best friend runs Monarch, the big evil corporation. And his brother was an eccentric physicist who created time travel. His brother only cares about two things: time travel and Jack. Why he cares so much about Jack, I have no idea. And why the best friend who owns like the world's most important multinational corporation cares so much about getting in touch with Jack (the only person he can trust?) in Thailand, flying him all the way to the US, I also do not know. And again, Jack and his best friend (who is a businessman, not a physicist) are somehow able to operate time machines. There is also a love (?) story between Jack and another woman that is paper thin. Other aspects of the plot don't make sense either. Monarch is described as having "hundreds" of employees. My School of Liberal Arts has hundreds of employees. Multinational corporations have thousands, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands. The physicist brother built a time machine and did all this work starting with a prestigious grant that was for...$150,000. I have a subaward right now for that amount. It pays for summer salary, data collection expenses, and conference travel for three faculty. This physicist has 50 computers, tons of other scientific equipment, several buildings, and a freaking TIME MACHINE. It was mentioned that he sold his parents' house for more money, but that would be like (20 years ago) maybe another couple hundred thousand dollars. This guy needed a grant for $150 million dollars, not $150,000.
The third-person shooter gameplay is what does feel 9 years old. You can equip a pistol, a machine gun, and a shotgun. You have various time manipulation powers, which boil down to sprint, sprint version two (sprint for longer...), shield, explosion, and one that I never quite figured out, which places a "time bubble" on an enemy, which you shoot bullets into, and then the bullets do extra damage when the time bubble bursts. Enemies are mostly straightforward. Later on, there are some "heavies" who are really armored and take more bullets. Then there are some guys with chronon harnesses, which let them "sprint" like you, and some others with fields that negate your abilities if you get too close. For those guys, who also pack a lot of heat, you have to get behind them to destroy theirs suits' power. Some snipers later on. And one boss fight at the end. That's it. Not a lot of strategy required.
Levels are linear with a decent amount of collectibles, mostly of the "reading emails" variety and the "find skill points" variety. With the skill points, you slightly upgrade abilities; these were not necessary. I enjoyed the extra story details though; the emails and memos made some of the characters (especially those at Monarch) deeper and went into more detail about Monarch's plans. This stuff was also explored more in the TV episodes, and I like how it all reinforced one another. In combat situations, you dispatch a wave or two of enemies and move on. There are always exploding barrels. And since this was 2016, it's a bit of a cover shooter, but without a dedicated "cover" button. Jack squats down when you move behind things. It worked pretty well.
The thing that doesn't work as well is movement through the environments. I take this for granted that modern games usually let you hop over things that are at shin-height. Not so in Quantum Break. If you see a ramp, you can't jump onto the side of the ramp. You have to go to the beginning of the ramp, get on, and walk. You can't jump over any boxes or objects in the environment. The only exceptions are those platforming segments where you're meant to jump on something, and those are usually marked with yellow. This made for a lot of me jumping, Jack grunting and just sort of colliding with the shin-high object, and me rolling me eyes and walking around it.
Another thing that I take for granted these days are excellent checkpoints. Often in action games nowadays, when you die, you restart at the beginning of that battle or right before the obstacle that killed you. Sometimes you go back to a clearly marked save or checkpoint. Quantum Break sets up checkpoints in strange places. For example, in the last battle, you cross a large room and run up a ramp to talk to someone, then the boss comes out, talks at you, and the battle starts. When you die, it doesn't just restart the encounter. It puts you back at a door, and you have to run across the room and up the ramp to the NPC, talk to him, the boss comes out and talks at you (which you can skip), and then the battle starts. Why not just immediately restart the battle?! That kind of thing happened a lot, where instead of just restarting a battle or a platforming sequence, it would take you to like 30 seconds or a minute before that and you have to re-do some boring part like...running across a room or going through a gate or whatever.
I'm really glad that I finally got to play this in its entirety! Actually, I thought I wasn't going to make it because the lighting bug was there. It first happened toward the end of Act 2, but I was able to play through it, then it happened in a good chunk of Act 4, and again I managed to squint my way through that too. It's like playing with a mod that makes the game harder! "Color burst" where you can't see well. Can you still kill all the enemies in the room with "color burst" activated?! Then it came on really bad in Act 5 during a tough battle and I had to restart the game a couple times because I couldn't see, but luckily that was it. So yeah, I feel like I played something out of time because so much of the game was so impressive and unique. I didn't even mention the time-stopped environments, which were so, so cool to play through. I can't believe that a game pulled this off nearly 10 years ago. It feels like something that would be incredible even today, and playing Quantum Break, I felt that sense of incredulity at the way that time fractured in the environment. Definitely recommend, but with the caveat that it took me like 5 years to finally be able to play it on PC, so I have no idea how that goes for other people or other systems.
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