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Jul 29th, 2024 at 08:15:45 - Chants of Sennaar (PC) |
I was into this for a while and then lost interest. It's a neat game, like a point-and-click where you decipher hieroglyphic languages. Here's an example from the very beginning. You encounter another person, who speaks to you. They speak in hieroglyphics, and you don't know what they mean. However, the person gestures to you as they say a word, then to themselves as they say another word. Maybe they said "you" and "me." They gesture to you, then to themselves, then to a closed door. Maybe "you help me open the door"? When you help them, they say something and then leave. "Thanks"? "Goodbye"?
You proceed to a hallway with carvings that tell a story. Again, you don't know any of the hierogphyics' meanings, but you figure something out about people following a sun god, then some warriors barring the way to a temple. Proceed, and you'll encounter more NPCs in various situations who say a few lines, gesture, and you start to see that this is a game about figuring out what the heck people are saying by talking to them, interpreting context cues, and observing your surroundings. You have a journal wherein you are occasionally presented with pages with images and you can match the hieroglyphics that you have discovered (and what you think they mean) with the images. You can type up to 20 characters of guesses for each hieroglyphic in your journal. So, you might encounter an NPC and they say "You help me go/move/create ______ to the temple/church/worship." In this case, you've got a couple guesses for the symbols for what might be go or move or create and temple or church or worship, and then you haven't guessed the blank. The more NPCs you talk to and objects you interact with, the more context you have for each word. However, this makes it hard too, because the more situations in which you encounter a word, often times the more potential meanings it seems to have.
There are a total of five languages to learn, each used by some type or class of person in the city. Admittedly, I only finished the first language, got kind of frustrated/bored, and looked up a lot about the game online, then decided I didn't care to finish. There are a few reasons I got frustrated/bored.
1. There is a lot of backtracking, slow movement, and no map. I spent more time trying to remember how to get to various rooms than actually thinking about solving puzzles. I read that there is a good reason for there being no map, but that it doesn't become apparent until later in the game. Well, in the first part of the city, I can tell you that it sucks without a map. And you have to go through every screen, watching your character run and run and run. It would be nice to double-click on a door and have your character go straight to the next room. Like, I know I need to go to a place 8 rooms from here. Why can't I just GO there instead of click click click and watch him run through 8 rooms (and then back, and forth, and back, and forth...).
2. You can make various plausible interpretations of some hieroglyphs, and this became frustrating. The languages are actually pretty simple, and I understand why they need to be for the sake of making the language game work, but I kept overthinking, like assigning more complex or nuanced meanings to symbols than was actually the case. This led to me getting stuck for long periods of time. Until I realized that...
3. It solves words for you. This one I really didn't like. When you are working on the journal, sometimes (or all the time?) if you just slot the correct hieroglyphic with the correct image, it will automatically reveal the meaning, even if that's not what you guessed. So all your hard interpretive work is wiped away in favor of a process-of-elimination matching game. The more I played, the more Chants of Sennaar reminded me of The Case of the Golden Idol, which left a really sour taste in my mouth with bugs at the end where it was auto-solving scenes.
In the end, I felt like I had the gist of the gameplay and puzzling, and that it would just be doing the same thing with four more languages, possibly with more fun challenge, but also possibly with the ability just to cheese the whole thing by doing process of elimination. The story in the first part of the city isn't terribly compelling, though I am sure it becomes more interesting. Even though my experiences with the last two word/mystery games I've played (this and Case of the Golden Idol) haven't been great, I am still interested in Return of the Obra Dinn and Heaven's Vault. But, it is possible that this is a genre that just doesn't click with me. Will determine that after those other two games!
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Jul 26th, 2024 at 09:42:39 - Jusant (PC) |
This was neat. You basically climb a mountain, but it's like for real mountain climbing. You have to attach ropes and use LT and RT to grab holds with your left and right hands and stuff. I played the whole thing in one long sitting last night, and when I got done, realized by hands were cramped from pressing triggers for four hours. There are some other elements to the climbing mechanics related to the game's fantasy world, like various plants and creatures that help you climb. It's not hard, and I fell into a quiet rhythm.
A narrative guides you up the mountain, too. It's about climate change and environmentalism. In the past, there was rain and abundant water. But it seems like people used too much water / mismanaged their resources / polluted and the source from above dried up. Now, people live in a sun-baked wasteland. They go on expeditions into what was once a great ocean to try and find any water. One expedition went up instead to chase a tale of some creatures that brought water to the mountain. Your character is following in the footsteps of that expedition and actually (for some reason) has a baby one of those water creatures. What will you discover at the top?
Jusant is a very pretty game, colorful and with impressive scale. I never tired of looking out over the ocean basin or marveling at the vast interior hollows inside the mountain. The sound design complements this, and makes the adventure feel both peaceful and epic. The movement is fluid, and climbing feels good. I encountered some movement quirks, like that the character often won't jump forward, sometimes it can be tricky to get her to do some of the more fine maneuvering, and getting her to detach from a long rope swing doesn't always work how you think it will (she tends to hang on and not want to let go!). There are a lot of texts to find that provide context to the story. The "main" ones chronicling the mountain expedition I enjoyed, and there are more of those as you go higher. Lower on the mountain, there are a lot of collectibles that are just like mail that mountain residents pass to one another with them just chatting. I lost interest real fast in finding those ones.
Jusant was definitely something different. It's not a hard game; it's not even a particularly exciting game. It's rather calming and, like I said, sucked me into a rhythm. I was thinking about studies of flow among mountain climbers and it seems this can be reproduced with mountain climbing in a video game!
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Jul 26th, 2024 at 09:21:39 - Clone Drone in the Danger Zone (PC) |
A random find on Game Pass, it's got like 30,000 "overwhelmingly positive" Steam reviews. It's a (mostly melee) arena combat game with robots that can slice off body parts. Case in point: I beat the final campaign boss fight with one leg, after systematically slicing off the legs (so it couldn't move) and arms (so it couldn't use weapons) of the boss. The campaign is just a few hours long, has a silly story that is way better than it has any right to be, and has some good humor, especially the announcers in the first two chapters.
In the campaign, the first two chapters let you play around with the skill tree and design some custom robots. Do you want to use a sword, hammer, bow, or spear? Do you want your weapon on fire? Do you want a jet pack? Etc. Limited skill points keep you from becoming overpowered. They also introduce the idea of the clones. You can, instead of purchasing a skill, purchase a clone. After I died the first time, and had to start the whole chapter over, I realized that the clones were like extra lives. From then on, I always had a clone purchased in case I got sliced up! The other chapters introduce co-op, further upgrades, and the idea of "transference" where you can take over enemies that kill you. This is strategic. If you know what kinds of enemies are coming, you can purposefully get killed by an enemy type that is strong against the upcoming ones. If a boss is coming up, you can purposefully get killed by a massive flaming-hammer-wielding armored robot or something.
After completing the campaign, there is co-op, with a lot of challenges, deathmatch, and some other multiplayer modes. I dabbled a bit. There are far, far better multiplayer battlers out there, but this one certainly has charm.
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Jul 26th, 2024 at 09:11:25 - Still Wakes the Deep (PC) |
Who came up with the idea for this?! It's like watching North Sea Tiktok but there are monsters. Still Wakes the Deep is a horror game set on an oil rig in the North Sea. You play as an electrician named Caz who took the job to escape some legal trouble back home in Scotland. The crew drills into *something* under the ocean, which proceeds to wreak havoc on the crew and the rig. You attempt to escape as the situation becomes bleaker and bleaker.
My favorite thing about the game is the setting. It reminded me of Dead Space and other horror games where the setting is so well-realized that it feels like a character. You'll go back and forth across the oil rig, watching it slowly be destroyed over the course of the game. You'll learn which crew-member-monsters are terrorizing which areas. And you'll be rooting (hopefully!) for your crew buddies to make it, and be sad (and experience serious dread as another one bites the dust) when they don't. The setting is oppressive, the kind of place where you're waiting for the next bad thing to happen. The weather is stormy, the waves roll beneath the rig, and as it gets progressively destroyed, paths you once took are obstructed and you have to take new ones.
It's also incredibly authentic due to the wonderful voice acting by the Scottish cast. Turn on subtitles because, unless you are Scottish, you won't understand a chunk of the dialogue. Interestingly, the subtitles "translate" what they are saying into American English. This was strange because I am used to having subtitles on American English media, where I can just read along with what they are saying, and on foreign media, where I don't understand any of what they are saying and I have to read instead. I can't recall the last time I understood like 80% of what was said and relied on subtitles for the other 20%, and where the subtitles didn't write the words they said, but rather translated them into American English.
Gameplay-wise, it's straightforward. I've seen this described as both a survival horror game and a walking simulator, but I don't think it's either. By my definition, it's not survival horror because there are no resources to manage. There is no combat, you have no health, no inventory. There is some light stealth. Yes, you are "surviving," but this doesn't require much special effort on the player's part. And it's not a walking simulator because it's very action-heavy. Walking simulators, to me, are associated with a much slower pace. I'm calling it a linear horror game. You will constantly progress forward. You won't get stuck, you won't get lost, and you'll rarely die. For some, this may make it a bit boring, but we were engaged.
Overall, I really enjoyed this. It's a good one to swap the controller back and forth with a friend. Solid story, solid (if simple) gameplay, and thoroughly impressive setting. It kept us on the edge of the couch the whole time.
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