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Nov 21st, 2017 at 17:05:27 - Darkest Dungeon (PC) |
Ok, I've sunk 15 or so hours into Darkest Dungeon and I think I'm good. It's getting really grindy and, as promised, is hard and punishing as hell. I'll describe:
DD is a party-based roguelike with some strategy RPG elements. There's a hub town where you do normal things like upgrade buildings, purchase equipment upgrades, purchase trinkets, recruit heroes, and...wait this isn't normal...send characters to the tavern or the church to engage in stress-relief activities, send characters to get diseases cured, and look at the graveyard full of your dead characters. Oh no.
Form a party and delve into one of the dungeons around your ancestral home. Dungeons can be short, medium, or long, and range in difficulty from level 1-6 (same range your characters can be...well no, they can be level 0 also). You explore from room to room, interacting with curios, avoiding traps, fighting enemies, managing your party members, and micro-managing your inventory to collect maximum treasures. Curios are very interesting, in that there can be all sorts of shit wrong with them that can harm you (e.g., they are cursed, trapped, diseased, etc.). You can use consumables, purchased in the "provisions" phase before actually going into the dungeon, to remove bad stuff on curios (like keys to unlock chests, holy water to purify cursed things), and you learn what these do by a process of trial and error. Once I figured out how to disarm all the curios, I was getting much better treasure and having fewer bad things happen to me.
Now, party management is a huge deal in DD. This is not your typical game. Your characters have two main things for you to worry about: health and stress. Health is health, except that if you get to 0 health, you are at "death's door," and the next hit may kill you. If you heal while at 0 health, you are no longer at death's door; however any bleed effects or crits may be out of your control to trigger death. Stress is more interesting. This builds up over time as you take critical hits, as enemies use stress-inducing attacks, as your torch runs out, as you spend too much time in a battle or in the dungeon, and various other ways. If your stress reaches 100, the character makes a roll and either overcomes it or succumbs to it, usually the latter. When that happens, they develop an affliction. Maybe they will refuse healing, or they will randomly not want to act and skip their turn, or they will be paranoid and make your other characters more stressed out, etc. It's terrifying. If they continue to take stress, up to 200, they have a heart attack and die.
Now, if you do manage to beat a dungeon (and you will; I didn't start having trouble really till the medium level 3 dungeons), you have to deal with your characters' accumulated stress, afflictions, and diseases and quirks (which they will randomly acquire at the end of even a successful dungeon). That's where the inn and church come in, so they can go pray or visit the brothel or whatever to feel better. This costs a dungeon cycle though, so you wind up with a big roster of characters (I was up to 16) of a variety of classes (maybe also 16 that I had, one of each that I'd seen).
Oh, I didn't mention another important thing about combat in the dungeons. Your characters are in a horizontal line, and their positioning is crucial. Their abilities require them to be in specific positions in the formation (spots 1 [in the front] through 4 [in the back]), and their abilities affect enemies in particular positions also. Some abilities move enemies. So putting characters in good order is important. BUT, some enemy abilities will also move your characters. I almost had a party wipe one time because when the battle started my party was "surprised," which randomly jumbled their order, and I just got massacred.
There is a lot of strategy to pretty much everything in DD, but a healthy dose of RNG too, which can be maddening / make you cry. When I lost my three level 4 characters to getting surprised and jumbled up, I couldn't believe it. But I pressed on. The game is about making the most out of terrible circumstances. As I press on though, I feel the entire game is on big terrible circumstance, and it stresses ME out so much to play it. I really like the game. I think it's well designed and is as difficult as it is meant to be. But I'm on the edge of my seat, and it's going to take me forever to progress. I wouldn't mind so much if there were more story, but as a roguelike dungeon crawler sort of game, there's not much. Grind characters that get harder and harder to grind. Then lose some of them and be heartbroken. Pick up the pieces and try again. Etc.
I watched the final Darkest Dungeon levels on YouTube, and this poor YouTuber went into the first floor of the Darkest Dungeon (that's the name of the final dungeon) and just got beaten down with full level 6 characters. He lost them all. It was so painful to watch because I've been playing for 15 hours and have a handful of level 4 characters. This guy had his whole roster, like 20-something characters, at level 6. How long did that take?! Only to have his best ones wiped out. It was like 20 more episodes later in his YouTube channel that he finally beat the game (like 20 more hours of recorded content). And the bosses down there, no thanks! SO, glad I played, but glad to stop.
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Nov 4th, 2017 at 15:09:07 - Endless Legend (PC) |
Wow. I haven't played a game, aside from the odd Hearthstone match, in three months, literally since the fall semester began. Who am I?
Seeing the light at the end of the semester-long tunnel, my body decided to become sick and so I took a few days off work last week. I mostly watched movies, which is another reason I haven't been playing games (learned I can rent DVDs from library + new Roku TV + free Hulu trial for 2 months means I've had more movies and TV than ever in my life, and I have indulged). But I'm working toward re-balancing media consumption. I'm also 7 books behind schedule to hit my goal of 30 for the year, which is more motivation for re-balancing.
Anyway, while I was sick I booted up Steam and downloaded 3 months' worth of game updates. Then I decided to spend an evening playing something. I chose Endless Legend since I had played the tutorial back in August and another "Endless" game before that. The main reason I had bought Endless Legend is because I want to like 4x games, and this one seemed different enough from the typical Civilization games to warrant my attention. Great reviews always mentioned more of a formal narrative arc somewhat different depending on which of the diverse races you chose, and a narrative with quests and goals (aside from one of the victory conditions) is something I always found missing in Civilization games.
So I played a game on Easy against the AI and lost. Then I played another against just one Easy AI and won. And I'd had enough of it because I guess it's still a pretty standard 4x game, just with sci-fi fantasy dressing. The faction-specific narratives provided nice flavor exploring the motivations of each faction for world domination and the characteristics of them and their leaders. But ultimately, yeah, you explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate. Just with "Endless" resources (dust, gold, industry, etc.) instead of regular game resources. And I don't play enough 4x games to be able to describe other differences. It felt the same to me, and I was a little disappointed. The next one that's been on my list forever is Crusader Kings, which seems like it has a lot more politics in it and is more grand strategy. Maybe I'll like it better.
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Aug 6th, 2017 at 20:07:01 - Who's Your Daddy (PC) |
Ok so...I'd heard about this before, but some friends showed me another video about it and we decided it would be fun to play. Last Saturday, I paid $4.99 and downloaded Who's Your Daddy (no question mark in the title), a silly, stupid, buggy, funny, morbid two-player game. One player is the daddy and the other is the baby. The baby's job is to get into everything a baby shouldn't and kill itself; the daddy's job is to make the house safe and stop baby from dying.
Baby can do things like take pills, drink bleach, burn alive in the oven, steal daddy's car and crash it, eat batteries, etc. Daddy can prevent these accidents from happening by putting pills and deadly things in high places, locking all the cabinets, locking the oven door, following baby around to fish it from the pool if baby crawls in, etc.
And that's it. Pretty good fun for half an hour. There are some solo challenges to practice with each character and some achievements to unlock. You can also wear an assortment of hats and sunglasses. Yes, the baby can too.
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Aug 6th, 2017 at 19:41:31 - Dungeon of the Endless (PC) |
Wow, long time no updates. I haven't been playing much of anything for about a month. I am chilling in Montreal this week before a conference though, so I find myself playing some games instead of working on my conference presentation. I've officially retired Dungeon of the Endless, which a friend told me about at the tail end of this summer's Steam sale. Sounded cool, and I had some good times with it.
Dungeon of the Endless is a roguelike tower defense game. Interesting merger of two genres that works well. There is some threadbare story and some "narratives" between characters that play out in small dialogue snippets on the elevator between floors. Your ship crash lands and you have to escape the dungeon...But there are some characters who are jailors and others who are prisoners and a couple other types...including Team Fortress 2 characters for some reason. None of that affects anything.
You choose two characters to begin the game, and you start at floor 1, trying to work your way up to floor 13 (with the basic ship; you can unlock other ships that crash deeper into the planet, meaning you have to go up more floors to escape). You begin in a room with a crystal. This crystal is important. It generates a resource called "dust." With dust, you can power new rooms. So basically, open doors, acquire dust from doing so, power rooms. But it's infinitely more complicated. If you don't power a room, monsters might spawn there every time you open a door. Of course there isn't enough dust to go around. So you're going to have to build "towers," aka "major modules" that generate other resources and "minor modules" which are a variety of weapons, buffs, and debuffs.
Major modules generate three other important resources: industry, science, and food. Industry is what you need to construct modules. Science lets you research new and upgraded modules. Food lets you level up your heroes and heal them in battle. So be smart when choosing among modules to build. These resources also let you buy things from merchants, who will sometimes appear and charge one of the three resources seemingly at random for their items. If you don't generate much industry, you'll have a hard time building modules. Not much science, and you won't be able to upgrade modules very well. Not much food, and your characters will be lower level, which means they'll have lesser stats and fewer perks. Always a tough call!
So. How do you clear a floor? You need to find the power source for the crystal. It's hidden somewhere on the floor. Once you find that, you can carry it to the crystal and escape with whoever is in the room. I learned that the hard way one game where I escaped with no one but the hero carrying the crystal, and I lost all my party members. Terrible! As soon as you pick up the crystal power source, be warned that monsters will spawn from every unpowered room. So you need to power a path from the power source to the crystal and ideally power other rooms such that monsters don't catch you (you run slower with the power source) or don't make it to the crystal room.
Enemies are all different. Some go straight for the crystal; some attack heroes; some attack modules. You'll be fine until floor 6 or so, then different enemy types appear and you can't just stand in a room and kill everything.
You know what. I'm about halfway through describing all the systems in the game. If this sounds cool to you, pay a few bucks for it. I probably won't revisit it, and I never escaped, not even on Too Easy mode, but I had fun and found the game unique. Also I hope this was a decent primer on the "Endless" games, because I think I'm going to start Endless Legend next.
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