 |
|
Oct 4th, 2024 at 13:42:18 - Children of Morta (PC) |
Another hidden gem in a Humble Bundle. This is like an action RPG roguelike with narrative emphasis. The thing that makes this stand out is that you don't play as a single character, or various character classes, but as a whole family. The Bergsons live together and are the protectors of a mountain. They love each other and have a happy life, but then some corruption starts spreading and they have to figure out what's going on and stop it. They free three guardian spirits and then confront a god.
Over time, you unlock more family members for play, and the unlocks coincide with story developments. The young daughter, for example, trains and hones her fire-slinging abilities. You see this in various scenes and interactions. Eventually, she joins you with another character in a dungeon, and then she's ready for you to play. The characters are not terribly different from one another, the main difference being either melee or ranged. But I mean, one melee character is really slow and strong (and sucks), a couple are pretty fast, one has a shield, one uses a spear and is more a mid-range fighter. But ultimately, the two ranged characters steal the show, the mage and the archer. Once they get leveled up a bit, it's easy breezy time. There are three main areas, each with three dungeons, and most of the dungeons have three levels. I beat the entire third area without dying (and maybe the last dungeon of the second area, if I remember) alternating between the archer and the mage.
You'll want to experiment with all the characters, not only because it's fun to learn their playstyles, but because of the family element, they unlock skills that help other family members. For example, as you move up each of their skill trees, you might unlock a skill that gives the whole family more critical hit chance or more speed or whatever. There are a whole host of other upgrades too, which you need to spend gold on (gold is found in dungeons), and all those other upgrades affect the whole family (every character). So there's a neat mixture of character specialization and unlocking things for the benefit of everyone. Also, you will HAVE to change characters sometimes because they will get "corruption fatigue" if they spend too much time in dungeons. That decreases their maximum HP for a while. So, use other characters for a couple dungeons, then that fatigued character will be good to go again.
Although dungeons are not particularly varied (some of the same enemy types appear throughout the game), it scratches the itch of being methodical, clearing the map of each dungeon to make sure you find all the chests, items, quests, and so on. This was probably more important in the early-mid game, when the difficulty was highest. Toward the end, you'll be stacked with buffs and, like I said, it becomes pretty easy, at least with the ranged characters. So yeah, very cool. I really liked this. Oh, also, it's got great pixel art!
add a comment  - read this GameLog  |
|
Sep 24th, 2024 at 19:39:01 - Suzerain (PC) |
I bought a narrative game bundle from Humble Bundle recently because it had a couple games on my wishlist on it, plus Immortality, which I played on Game Pass and which I loved, so now I own it on Steam. It had some others I'd never heard of, like Suzerain. It looked interesting, a political strategy narrative game. I've not played anything quite like it, but after playing it for a while, I realized I was nodding off every time I opened it. Even tonight, I'm not tired, but I'm starting to drift to sleep. That's a sign that I'm not engaged!
That's not to say I dislike it. It's well written and detailed, and the premise is intriguing. You play as the newly elected President of a fictional country with a revolutionary past. The country is in a recession and needs to carve out space for itself in the international landscape so that it can thrive. There are other alliances of countries, those which are capitalist, communist, and monarchies. You'll sort of chart your country's course (though I...doubt [?]...that you can become a monarchy), meeting with advisers and reading a lot of policy, deciding what to enact, who to ally with, and so on.
My favorite parts of the game are when the non-policy narratives move forward--when it's about your family adjusting to their husband/father becoming President, when it delves into the history between you and other cabinet members, when it explores the political history of the fictional world, when you get to attend a funeral of a communist poet and make a speech, when a violent event happens and you see how political violence affects you, your family, security, citizens in various political groups, relationships to other factions, and so on.
My least favorite parts are reading newspapers and reports, and talking with advisers about policy. There are like 6 different newspapers, and boy are they busy writing stories! It seems like after every decision you make, up to a dozen articles will be published. Papers span the range of political ideologies; one is communist, one is capitalist, one is centrist, one looks at international news, and so on. Similarly, reports from various cities and countries are constantly produced and icons beg you to read them. This all lets you know what's going on and lets you know the public's opinion on things, but it's a lot of tedium, I found. Policy wonks will love this game. Most of it is meeting with advisers about policies, listening to them banter back and forth about what they think you should do, reading about policy positions and deciding which ones to enact, then seeing their consequences on the story and the political scene.
I played about 5 hours in total, and it's losing its novelty and morphing into drudgery for the most part. I'm not committed to learning the ins and outs of the political scene. I think something like this could be used pedagogically to teach about politics, policy, and institutions for sure. Actually, I learned a new word. The game's title is an actual word in politics referring to when a state has control over another autonomous state, I suppose by influence or something. I learned this when I was giving a talk on interaction and socialization in digital games last week, and someone asked me what I was playing. I mispronounced the title of Suzerain and said I had no idea what it referred to, and some historians in the audience had their moment to shine.
add a comment - read this GameLog |
|
Sep 20th, 2024 at 15:14:46 - Doki Doki Literature Club (PC) |
I've never played an actual dating sim, just some parodies or riffs on them like Hatoful Boyfriend and Dream Daddy. I thought this one wasn't supposed to be a dating sim, was just supposed to look like one until it subverted the genre. Well, it's a dating sim for a long time, and I don't think I care for dating sims after playing! It takes its sweet time getting to the weird stuff! Yes, there is weird stuff.
I don't know how this would land for people who like to play dating sims. I imagine they would like the part until the weird stuff more than I did, and then I think that their appreciation of the genre subversion may scale according to how many games they've played (or how much they like games) with unreliable narrators or games that "mess" with you (Pony Island, Stanley Parable, etc.). I also wonder how the experience might be different for people who read something about the game compared to those who go in without any prior knowledge. Since I knew that it had a psychological horror twist, I kept looking for it. Every time a girl went into the closet, I was thinking, "There's something about that closet!", or every time one of them would say anything at all that could be interpreted as deviant, I would think, "Aha, now they're going to be cannibals/witches/cosmic horrors/vampires/etc." I do wonder if I missed clues as to the twist, but I definitely didn't pick up on any and didn't guess what was coming.
That's all I'm going to say about this because I don't want to spoil anything, and it really is that simple of a game. Dating sim for most (too much) of its run time, then takes a distressing turn. Overall, I enjoyed it, aside from the mild boredom of the first three quarters. Am I raving about it? No. Would I recommend others play it? It's fine, but no need unless it's your thing.
add a comment - read this GameLog |
|
Sep 8th, 2024 at 14:06:43 - Lobotomy Corporation (PC) |
I feel a little bad closing Lobotomy Corporation so quickly (4 hours play time), but I see where it's going. HLTB has the Main Story at 54 hours and Main+ at 105. I know that the game is very difficult and punishing and that I will have to start over at least once, and just don't see myself spending 54-105 hours here. It's already repetitive and has some irritating features, despite piquing my interest in other ways. Apparently there is a whole popular universe that spawned from this game. They've made two more big games, plus comics and other media.
The game gives vibes of Darkest Dungeon, Cabin in the Woods, and Control, but is a management sim horror rogue-lite genre mashup. You play as the manager of this company (the Lobotomy Corporation, I guess?). You hire and train employees. Employees have various stats that govern health, combat prowess and other things, and you can equip them with weapons and armor. They can go insane, murder one another, kill themselves, be paralyzed by fear, etc., in a Darkest Dungeon kind of way.
In the facility that you manage are Abnormalities. Abnormalities are like the objects in Control or the monsters in Cabin in the Woods. They are in containment cells, and you have to send employees to work with them. Employees can do four kinds work with the Abnormalities. Each of the four kinds of work is tied to one of the four employee stats, so if you do "insight" work, for example, the character's SP increases after the day is over. But each Abnormality is also strong or weak against certain types of work, so you generally want to send employees who can handle the Abnormality's own strengths so that they don't die or go insane or suffer whatever negative effects the Abnormality can impose.
When you work with Abnormalities, the idea is that you're learning about them and extracting energy. You extract more energy the more successfully you work with them, and spend energy to unlock new information about the Abnormalities, purchase weapons and armor, and ultimately the energy you extract finishes your "day" in the facility and allows you to progress the game. So, you'll learn about what the Abnormalities do when they escape (containment breaches happen from time to time and you have to quell the Abnormalities), how to manage them (they all come with a set of rules for interacting with them, increasingly complex with the danger level of the Abnormality), and so on. You have to learn all this by just trying to work with them in different ways and accumulating energy to spend, hoping all the while that something bad doesn't happen.
And something bad WILL happen. The game is punishing! You don't know at first what a new Abnormality is strong or weak against, but you have to try to do some kind of work with them to get energy to learn about them. If they happen to be strong against that kind of work, they could straight up kill your employee. There was one where you have to keep the employee in the room for longer and longer periods to unlock information, and it kept killing my employees. I finally realized that, when I unlocked one of the management tips, after 20-30 seconds listening to the Abnormality (a music box with a ballerina figurine on top), the employee's SP will start to drain. If the employee continues listening to the music, they will go insane. Good to know.
The idea is that, even though your employees will die, and you can restart days or go back to checkpoints (losing all your progress), YOU, the player, will still have learned the information and can use it to do better next time. So, for that music box, I set a timer on my phone for 20 seconds and any time someone was in there, I started the timer and pulled them out after 20 seconds.
So, you're doing this kind of micromanagement with an increasing number of employees monitoring interactions with an increasing number of Abnormalities. I was up to Day 7 (out of 50) and 6 Abnormalities. Presumably you'll have dozens at a time by the end! And they all have specific rules and ways to interact with them, strengths and weaknesses, breach conditions, and so on. This is a lot to remember, and that's fine, that's a challenge, but managing employees was already becoming difficult.
For example, although they have HP and SP (die if HP drops, go insane if SP drops), you can't see HP and SP meters in real-time. Like, if they're in a containment room working with an Abnormality, you can't see their HP level. You can only see it when you are selecting which employees to send to containment chambers. And on the UI, when employees are wandering around the facility, their HP/SP bars are constantly obscured by little speech bubbles above their heads as they say random nonsense. In a game where it's necessary to micromanage, actually clicking on any single employee is hard, the more there are. They actually made the main thing you do in the game, micromanaging during the days, difficult to do from a UI point of view. In the last day, an employee died and I didn't even know until I completed the day. A tiny little text box window is hard to read. When you zoom out, necessary to see the whole facility at once, you can't read the employee names, so you don't know who is where unless you constantly zoom in and out to read names and pan around. When someone dies, if you didn't actually see them die, you have no idea why they died. These are all really pesky issues!
So anyway, I see where this is going. I'm going to manage more and more employees, more and more Abnormalities, which have harder and harder conditions to meet. I'm going to lose a lot of employees and have to start days and checkpoints over a lot. And I'm probably going to lose the whole game and have to start all over (although you retain your gear and knowledge). It's a rogue-lite because you do keep that stuff when you start over, and you usually get a choice of three mystery Abnormalities to choose among each day that will be added to the facility. Once you learn which ones are which, I suppose you can choose ones that are easier to deal with. So, really neat game. I love the idea. There are things I would change to make it easier to manage everything. It's kind of bogged itself down already for me, and I know that I won't see it through to the end.
add a comment - read this GameLog |
