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Jan 3rd, 2025 at 09:31:53 - God of War (2018) (PS5) |
This is a great reboot of the series, featuring Kratos and his son, Atreus. They took a little while to grow on me, but as the story gets going, I really enjoyed the contrast between the two of them. Kratos is Kratos—terse, no-nonsense, disciplined. Atreus is a kid. He starts off sort of mopey and whiney, but comes into his own as he becomes a capable warrior (though briefly becomes an immature jerk during his development). They also represent two kinds of gamer: Kratos wants to get straight to the point. Don’t help anyone, follow the objectives, let’s get this shit over with. Atreus wants to help everyone, explore, talk. I see gamer-David in both characters when they talk about what we should do next. Gamer Atreus-David does like to explore when the world is interesting, talk to everyone when the dialogue is good, and help everyone when the quests are fun and unique. Gamer Kratos-David likes to get to the point when these conditions aren’t met, but also feels the pressure to get to the point when he has signed up for a month of Playstation Plus and has six or seven games to get through. Luckily, this game has all those positive qualities and my Atreus side is more in charge. It was cool to see both characters grow. Kratos isn’t a rage-filled monster anymore, and by the end he’s down to explore and help other characters too, or at least supports those qualities in Atreus. There is another dyadic relationship in the game where two characters have strife, but then grow and resolve it. I didn’t expect the blue dwarven blacksmith in the beginning of the game to be an important character, but I ended up really liking him and his brother too.
There are a lot of things to talk about with God of War; it’s far bigger than I remember previous games being. It’s a bit open-world-ish. There are 9 realms, 6 of which are visitable, and one of which is the main “hub” that is explorable (the others are for story paths or optional with trials for gear). Midgard (the hub) is organized around a lake. You can paddle around the lake docking at beaches. I loved the anticipation of what I would find in each place. Sometimes there were rift tears (challenging battles with good rewards); other times there were devious puzzles where I had to put to use various abilities; or runes that Atreus could find and interpret; or a treasure map; or a mysterious locked mirror-door; or some construction of the gods, giants, or Valkyries; or a shipwreck with a vengeful ghost for a quest; or a canyon with a large area full of secrets on the other side; and so on. Going off the main story path was perhaps my favorite thing. The exploration is classic God of War, gated by progression items that you receive through the plot. You’ll dock on a beach early in the game and see chests covered in red vines, a green energy orb hanging from a rope, poison gas covering an area, and think, “What the hell is all this?!” Come back when you get the items that can get you past all that stuff. This exploration gating actually feels pretty natural. The example I gave is a rare one; you won’t go many places where you can’t explore anything or open any chests. Usually, you can do everything there, like, it doesn’t let you go there until you at least have most of the exploration items. There are two (?) points in the game where the water level of the lake lowers and reveals more beaches, which makes for some interesting semi-backtracking (row back around the lake, but there are new beaches, and you’ll have new items for old beaches).
A special shout-out to the puzzles in God of War. They are so good, often relying on perspective and a clever use of multiple abilities to solve. I can’t tell you how many times I walked through an area three or four times and noticed a new item or chest or lock every time I walked through. Or how many times I thought that I couldn’t solve a puzzle yet, only to end up 15 minutes later having figured it out. I remember one island with a chest locked by three runes (those chests have health and rage upgrades, which are very useful). In this case, you had to throw your axe at all three runes in quick succession, but one of them was behind a gate. I could open the gate, but only from the other side, which meant I couldn’t throw my axe at all the runes. I couldn’t figure it out. Elsewhere on the island was a gear covered in vines, and I didn’t know what that gear did or how to get the vines off. Usually, there will be a red crystal that you can explode, but I didn’t see one. So, like 30 minutes later, I’m on a nearby island, and I happen to look across the lake and see a red crystal shining on the side of a cliff amidst some vines. I hadn’t noticed the crystal earlier, even though I’d run by that cliff on the beach several times. So, I went back to the island and exploded the crystal, which removed the vines from the gear. I turned the gear, which cranked a water wheel at the back of the island. The water wheel had some rungs missing. Ah! There was a second beach at the back of the island and I didn’t know why they put that there because it didn’t lead anywhere different than the other beach I’d docked at. Turn the water wheel so that the broken rungs are level with the lake. Paddle your canoe through the water wheel (previously blocked before turning the gear just right), land your boat at the back beach, and then you can manipulate the gate from the correct side and shoot all three runes to get the chest. Yeah, the exploration and puzzles were absolutely my favorite part of the game.
It’s God of War, so there’s violent combat too. I have less to say about this. It was fun, fast, kind of button-mashy in a Devil May Cry way, but more precise than that. You have an axe that you can use as a melee and thrown weapon. There are entire move sets for both. Later, you get Kratos’s signature chains, and there’s a whole move set for those. Then you have Atreus, who uses a bow, and you can give him commands to shoot arrows, which can impart status effects on enemies and distract them. You can also use runic abilities. I really liked the axe and the strategy involved in using it in multiple ways. When you throw it, you actually have to recall it, which is its own skill. If you’ve thrown the axe, then you fight with your shield and bare hands. Recalling the axe can hit enemies and lead into combos. It’s all very smooth. My only gripe is that sometimes there could be too much going on on the screen, enemies on all sides of Kratos, and it could be hard to see, maneuver, and respond to what was going on. Combat is nice and challenging though, and there are a lot of optional hard fights, especially with the Valkyries. I killed three of them, and probably sunk 20 or 30 minutes into learning each one. I don’t know what my favorite fight of the whole game was. Probably the dragon, Hraezlyr. That was badass.
Toward the end of the game, I was very powerful. I’d acquired every skill, upgraded most of my gear to max (though I didn’t have all the best optional gear), and had a ton of extra experience and hacksilver (money). There are some optional realms you can unlock and visit for even better gear, though I’m not sure what you need it for. I imagine there are some even harder Valkyries or something (maybe I killed the easier ones?). Anyway, I stumbled on this awesome combo that could devastate most tough enemies. I could drain a Valkyrie to half HP before the fight even started. Step 1: use the runic ability that is like a sustained laser. Step 1.5: use Atreus’s summon crow ability, and from here on out have him fire shock arrows on cooldown. Step 2: Trigger Spartan Rage and, if you time it just right, you can hurl four giant boulders. Step 3: Use the item that freezes time. Step 4: Use the runic ability that imbues your axe with tons of extra frost damage. Step 5: Go to town on the enemy while time is stopped. At this point, they will get away from you, if they haven’t already, but the laser and Atreus’s summon are probably just about off cooldown again, so you can use those real soon. This combo absolutely wrecks enemies. I loved figuring it out.
I’m really looking forward to playing Ragnarok. Now that I have a PS5 (God of War was my first game on the PS5!! Technically a PS4 game played with backwards compatibility but still counts), I can purchase new games that my laptop won’t run well. I can play Ragnarok, Black Myth Wukong and whatever other AAA games have come out in the past couple years. God of War looked amazing on the PS5. I cannot wait to see how great real PS5 games look.
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Dec 27th, 2024 at 08:29:15 - Death Stranding (PC) |
I should have been writing entries for this as I was playing (same with Disco Elysium…) so that I could chronicle the weird journey. I got this for free on Epic a couple years ago, but was waiting to play it until after I’d played Metal Gear V, which preceded Death Stranding in Hideo Kojima’s gameography. I wondered if there would be some noticeable evolution in game design or anything, but although similar in some respects, they are very different games. In fact, I’ve never played anything quite like Death Stranding.
I will not even attempt to explain the story. There is a good synopsis here: https://www.reddit.com/r/DeathStranding/comments/vdj26q/the_story_of_death_stranding_explained_in_a/. If you’ve played Metal Gear games, then you’ll know what to expect in terms of “wtf is going on.” Suffice it to say that you are a courier. You deliver packages. The setting is a post-apocalyptic North America. As you move westward across the continent, you connect cities to a network. You’re essentially rebuilding the United States of America by putting cities online. Your work is, of course, complicated! Mostly, it’s complicated by the fact that there is another “reality” of sorts that is bleeding into ours. This reality is related to something called a “beach,” which is something like a bridge between the real world and death. Other beings come from the death-reality and from the beach and wreak havoc, there is something called “timefall,” which is precipitation that accelerates time for whatever it touches, there are terrorists, there’s World War II, there are couriers who are obsessed with getting “likes,” and so on. And, of course, you’re carrying a fetus (a “BB”) for reasons. There are twists and turns, and a good portion of the plot that will help everything make more sense is delivered after the credits, as the game keeps rolling for like two more hours.
So, there’s a lot going on…but you’re delivering packages. Mostly on foot. Gameplay largely consists of piling up packages on your back, then running from Point A to Point B, pressing “RT” and “LT” to steady yourself as you traverse fields, slopes, rocks, rivers, mountains, snow, and so on. It sounds boring, but it’s oddly engaging. If you aren’t careful delivering packages, they will get damaged, which can ruin the item and negatively affect your rating (positive ratings = more gameplay bonuses). Sometimes you have to stealth through sections where BTs are (hostile things from the beach) or avoid the rogue couriers. There is combat, especially later on, with a host of grenades and guns, and there are plenty of items to craft (a la Metal Gear). I actually barely touched crafting and minimally engaged in combat, only really enjoying it during the spectacular boss fights (which were easy, but visually stunning). The hardest parts of the game are dealing with delivering packages through BT-infested areas, and it’s less hard than annoying, because you have to slow down, and if they catch you, then tar bubbles up from the ground, BTs try to drag you under, packages fall from your pack and get damaged, and you’ll lose a vehicle if you’re traveling with one. Going around BT areas is more trouble than it’s worth, though.
There are so, so, so many mechanics that I didn’t touch. Death Stranding has this online feature whereby other players affect your game. And you’re encouraged to do things that will help other players. You can put ladders down to help people cross a river, put signposts that encourage players and refill some of their stamina, put signposts that alert players to BTs, leave equipment, build roads, and so on. I do not pretend to understand how all of this works. But it was neat whenever I was able to use something that someone else left, or when I was notified that someone gave me “likes” for something that I did that benefited them. This gels with the theme of the game of connecting people.
Trying to write one coherent summary of my experience after beating the game is challenging because there was so much going on. This hodgepodge of elements mostly works well together. You can (as I did) safely ignore what feels like the majority of stuff. For example, I rarely delivered “extra” packages, didn’t bother about my rating, rarely fought, didn’t craft hardly anything, didn’t engage in any of the extra social layers of the game, and so on. I went straight through the main mission. And it was quite the journey. If Death Stranding 2 is much like this one, I’ll probably skip it. Sasha asked me if I liked Death Stranding, and I said “most of the time.” I liked the “dull” moments traversing the landscape with packages the best (especially the ambiance when the soft music starts playing). And the boss fights were cool. The story is confusing, the combat is fine, and a lot of the game is avoidable. It’s wildly creative and something different for sure, though, which is why even though I only liked it “most of the time,” I’m glad I played it.
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Dec 25th, 2024 at 14:14:51 - Disco Elysium (PC) |
I should have been writing entries for this as I was playing (same with Death Stranding, coming soon…) so that I could chronicle great moments. But man, I got sucked into this hard, and the great moments are uncountable. I don’t know how many times—dozens, at least—I thought, “Wow.” The writing is the best in any videogame ever. My total time was well over the “completionist” time on howlongtobeat.com because I read everything I could. Approach it like a novel; part absurdist, part political philosophy, part murder mystery. There is nothing like Disco Elysium. Here are some things that set this apart from a typical isometric RPG / point-and-click (the two genres this borrows from the heaviest):
1. You play as a loser, not a hero. And not just any loser, but an alcoholic cop who also loves to do speed (although you can swear off drinking and drugs; in my playthrough I was mostly clean). This is not an RPG where you can "be anyone." You can choose the "flavor" of alcoholic loser cop, but you're still an alcoholic loser cop.
2. The writing is smart. Like academic smart. Like if I didn’t have a PhD in Sociology I would have understood far less. If you like social and political theory, you may be the target audience here. And a variety of political theories are present, their virtues and flaws explored. None are upheld as “the answer” to organize society, yet special critique is reserved for people and systems that exploit the marginalized.
3. There is no combat, except for theory combat and some dialogue-based combat toward the end.
4. There is equipment, but it’s just clothes to make you look cool and/or absurd, and they affect stats.
5. All stats affect various checks and dialogue options.
6. Your stats are characters. Okay, this is a seriously unique feature. Your Empathy, your Logic, your Endurance, your Hand-eye Coordination…they all talk to you. They give you advice (sometimes bad advice), narrate situations, provide background information, crack jokes. You would think that high stats are all good, but this isn’t the case. Yes, you’ll pass checks, but any personality trait in an extreme has drawbacks. For example, Encyclopedia is great for providing you with background information, which you can use to your advantage, but at high levels, it provides a constant barrage of useless trivia (even claiming to know things that it doesn’t!). Or, Drama is great for putting on convincing performances, telling if people are lying, and so on, but at high levels, it becomes manipulative and mean.
7. You can talk with objects.
8. The game “remembers” dozens of choices you make and tweaks dialogue accordingly. I was constantly surprised, like “it remembered I said that?!” The ending calls back to many decisions that you made, tasks you completed, and so on. It was a bizarrely sweet, touching ending.
9. You can internalize thoughts such that you have an “inexplicable feminist agenda”, understand “race theory,” become an “art cop” (a cop who is also an art critic), or fervently believe you are the one who will usher in global communism. There are like 50 thoughts. Usually, you suffer some penalty while having the thought (for a few in-game hours), and then you get whatever pros and cons for internalizing it (and you don’t know what these pros and cons are ahead of time, so it’s a gamble as to what the thought does). To unlearn a thought costs a skill point, so I basically never unlearned anything once I learned it. I actually disliked this aspect of the game, that I couldn’t experiment with thoughts because of limited thought slots and limited skill points (that I preferred to put into stats). I also disliked that if you remove a thought, it’s gone forever; you can’t have it again. When clicking around one time early in the game, I accidentally unlearned “inexplicable feminist agenda,” which I was so curious about, and didn’t realize it until a couple hours of playtime later, so I couldn’t go back and keep it.
Characters and worldbuilding are top tier. Many characters are extremely memorable, such as Cuno, a speed-addled tween who talks in the third person and poses so hard to be badass to some girl peering over a fence behind him; a “high net worth individual” who is so rich that light literally bends around him; and a group of electronic music fans who want to create a meth lab and a dance club in an old church (in which also currently reside a “crab man” who is a religious zealot who lives in the rafters and a computer programmer who DMs the world’s largest RPG and who is trying to find some rip in the fabric of the universe or something). Oh, and of course, Kim, your trusty sidekick, a cop who is better than you in every way. Regarding worldbuilding, the game takes place in one downtrodden part of a city, which serves as the lens through which you learn about the past like 50 years of world events—a communist revolution; the spread of a religion; a suzerainty; etc. It’s dense in the best way.
Quests (or tasks) are creative and, like the characters, extremely memorable. The main quest in the game is to solve a murder, but that was often the least interesting part. Instead, things like helping those EDM fans make their dance music more “hardcore,” hunting for cryptids, exploring a haunted commercial building behind a book store, trying to collect everything you need to sing karaoke at the hotel, and arguing with the hotel staff about karaoke and rent and whether he’s a bartender or not and constantly listing off new things you find that are wrong with the hotel, are all highlights. I think that by the end of the game, I did pretty much everything possible.
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Dec 14th, 2024 at 17:03:55 - Ynglet (PC) |
Chill little arcade game that was an Amazon freebie. You control this creature, which reminds me of a long snake/dragon, and basically navigate it around each level with the aim of getting various pickups, including the one at the end that completes the level. The levels are 2d planes. You can move in any direction, but gravity pulls you downward when you are outside geometric shapes. Inside the shapes, you are unaffected by gravity. So, to move through the levels, you basically "jump" from shape to shape. There is a "dash" move, which helps you jump up or across long distances. There are other surfaces: the blue ones bounce you like trampolines unless you dash through them, while the orange ones bounce you only if you dash into them. It's pretty straightforward, and there are difficulty modes which, as it gets harder, reduces the frequency of safe shapes (and, I assume, either shrinks blue and orange surfaces or places more of them as obstacles). One neat thing is how Ynglet handles checkpoints. If you pause within any geometric shape and wait like 5 seconds, the game creates a checkpoint right there, and you begin there when you die. It was a really cool way to save, something between a manual save and an autosave. The main game is just over an hour long, and there are some extra "levels," which all feel like unfinished concepts. Simple, somewhat interesting game.
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