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Aug 1st, 2024 at 06:03:10 - As Dusk Falls (PC) |
This is a narrative "your choices matter" game with a unique art style and a really compelling story. However, it made me realize that Detroit: Become Human will overshadow any of these types of games. I have been thinking about that one forever, and have even gone out of my way to read some research on it and talk to someone who studied it. Anyway, trying not to make constant comparisons because As Dusk Falls is great on its own.
This is a NARRATIVE game, strong emphasis. It tells the story of two families whose paths cross during a motel hold-up and ensuing hostage situation. There are a variety of main characters, several of whom you "control" over the course of six chapters. Some are more central than others, including the father and daughter of the family that is held hostage in the motel and the youngest brother of the family who is holding up the motel. You'll learn about events leading up to the hostage situation from both sides, about relationships and hard decisions and whatnot affecting each family and their motivations. That is, it's easy to just say "hostage takers bad," but as that younger brother says, their family was dealt a bad hand. It raises all sorts of ethical questions and made me think about how people handle inter- and intra-personal conflict and process trauma. You'll also fast-forward years later and see what happened to the main characters.
Your narrative choices do matter, do change the outcome of characters' trajectories. Most of the main characters have a variety of different outcomes, and most of them can die. As Dusk Falls pulls a card from Detroit and shows you the choices you made and their outcomes for each chapter in a narrative chart, along with what percentage of players made the same choice as you. It also encourages you to go back and replay sections to see alternate outcomes. It's all really well done. Another interesting feature, which I didn't get to try out, is that you can play co-op or online, and everyone gets a "vote" in the dialogue choices. I would have played this with a friend and done that, but Game Pass expires in a few days and there wasn't time.
When I said that you "control" characters, I am referring to the fact that the only inputs required from players are selecting occasional dialogue options and pressing a button during QTEs. This isn't Detroit or The Walking Dead where you actually move your characters through the world. That's fine, as the art style was this cool blend of realistic/comic-bookish/stop-motion animation. I could watch it all day long! But I do wish that the QTEs were more engaging. When I say that you press a button, I mean that literally: you press ONE button, the same one, every time, with no variation. It doesn't challenge you in changing which button, there are no "up with the left stick and down with the right stick" prompts, no button mashing. This is great for accessibility, but I wonder why they didn't have an option to make it more engaging. I played the game reclining with a controller or mouse held lazily in one hand, finger on A or LMB.
I really enjoyed the ending(s) that I got. You would probably call it the good ending. And there is something that happens at the end that is open to interpretation and sets up for a sequel, which I hope it gets.
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Jul 29th, 2024 at 09:18:11 - Portal: Revolution (PC) |
Finished this today, having been playing it on and off for months. It's an incredibly polished Portal mod, like Valve quality. The story is fun and fills in gaps after Portal 2. One might say this is basically Portal 3. The puzzles are creative and often challenging, but not overly complicated or difficult. I looked at a walkthrough once, and had a head-smacking moment because that solution relied on thinking about time, which I think I had purged from my memory after that "4d" Portal mod. I'm proud of myself though for sticking with it and not looking anything up aside from that.
Revolution introduces a couple new mechanics in later chapters. One is pneumatic tubes that suck cubes (and sometimes test subjects) through them. Another is like portal laser redirection cubes. Normal laser redirection cubes just redirect lasers. The portal ones come in pairs. If you put one in front of a laser, the laser comes out of the other cube. This all adds to the dynamism of how different elements can interact. I thoroughly enjoyed Revolution's puzzles.
You will spend a chunk of the games walking through the "backrooms" and doing light puzzle-solving, as you follow around new personality spheres, learning more about the Aperture facility and going from area to area. So, interestingly, and unlike other Portal games and mods I've played, the run time isn't a reflection of how long you're solving puzzles, but also includes a good amount of walking. The personality spheres are well written and acted, so I enjoyed the backrooms parts. They were also a nice break from completing puzzles!
Highly, highly recommended Portal mod, best one I've played.
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Jul 29th, 2024 at 09:09:45 - Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess (PC) |
Another interesting and stylish game that I am retiring because (a) it's repetitive; (b) it's easy; (c) there's hardly any narrative; and (d) the UI sucks.
Why is it interesting? What do I like about it? It's a novel take on tower defense wherein, aside from placing "towers," you also control a character as in an action-RPG. I read a lot of reviews talking about how brand new this is, but it seems no one has played Sanctum! Granted, that is more traditional tower defense, and it's merged with FPS instead of action-RPG, but it's the same basic idea. You set up your defenses and then get your hands dirty killing enemies alongside your towers as they come in waves. Except the "towers" in Kunitsu-Gami are villagers whom you rescue. Villagers can be assigned different roles (e.g., woodcutter, archer, sumo wrestler, shaman, etc.), and each has strengths and weaknesses for your defense. For example, woodcutters are basic melee units that can be upgraded to chase demons; archers are basic ranged units; sumo wrestlers are like tanks; shamans are healers; etc.
Back up. Here's the set-up. You are a spirit guardian of a priestly type woman. Some demonic presence has defiled a holy mountain and all the villages along the path to its summit. You go from village to village rescuing the villagers and cleansing the corruption. To cleanse the corruption, there are two "phases" in each village: day and night (or, preparation and combat). In the day phase, you search the village, purge defilement (which provides currency that you need to assign roles to villagers and to cleanse torii gates), free villagers (whom you can then assign combat roles or building tasks), clear obstructions on the path, and ultimately carve a path through the corruption for the woman to follow to destroy corrupted torii gates. In the day phase, you'll also want to pay attention to where the corrupted torii gates are, because that's where demons will come from, where the woman is along the path (can the demons flank her? what paths do you need to defend?), and you need to set up your villager defenses. During the nighttime, you defend against waves of demons who are trying to kill the woman. Rinse and repeat until the woman gets past all the torii gates.
Once you have freed a village of the corruption, you often gain access to a boss battle. Boss battles let you use the villagers from the previous village, assign them roles, and tackle a unique challenge. They usually aren't that hard, but they are each different, require some special strategies, and reward you with a new mask (villager role). My favorite was the centipede boss, which requires you to assign villagers to light torches around the arena. Once all the torches are lit, the boss's weak spots are exposed and you can assign everyone to attack. He'll eventually get away and extinguish all the flames, plunging the level in dangerous darkness so he can prowl around. He'll also call down a bunch of worm minions, who make a beeline for the woman. So, you have to balance defending her with lighting the torches. Rinse and repeat until boss is dead.
Upon freeing a village, it also becomes a "base" and you can visit daily to assign villagers to repair things, and you can visit the woman and change equipment and upgrade villager combat roles. All bases are basically the same, and after every battle, you can revisit every liberated village for rewards. This means that the farther along you go, the more time you will spend just going from liberated village to liberated village collecting money, rations, and checking on building progress. I think this could have been handled better via menus instead of requiring you to actually go to 10 different villages after EVERY fight to check on things. Anyway, that's how the game works.
(a) and (b). Tower defense is an inherently repetitive genre. You defend against waves of enemies. But the excitement comes as the waves get longer/faster/harder, new enemies are introduced, you get new units, you must devise new strategies, and so on. If the game is too easy, then new enemies don't present a challenge, you don't need to devise new strategies, and your new units may not seem to matter much. Such is the case here. I played about half the game, and never even came close to dying during the village purges. I did die on a couple of the boss fights, but once you figure out a trick for them, they're easy. Your character is very powerful and can effectively hold down more than one lane of enemies alone. Pretty much every level could be solved by moving the woman to a place free of too many junctions, then just completely surrounding her with the most powerful units, then running around killing most everything myself. The "village repair" part, as I've said, is also monotonous.
And although the third-person combat is smooth and has a satisfying feel, it's also simple. There are a few different combos, one of note that lets you attack airborne enemies, and the other two or three are just variations on the same thing. You can also block and dodge, which you will rarely need to do. I pretty much went left click, left click, left click, right click (the most powerful combo) all level every level to win. As the hours went by, and I hit the halfway mark, I decided I did not need to keep doing this!
(c). Believe it or not, I've already described the extent of the narrative. There are a bunch of collectibles you can get that basically serve as encyclopedia entries about Japanese culture, if that counts as narrative for you, and other collectibles that give you the slightest perks and that I found mostly useless. So the narrative is not a compelling reason to play.
(d). Ah, the UI! So many questions about UI elements. First of all, several things are frustrating because the game is quite stylish and goes for style over substance and functionality.
Example: When placing villagers on the map, you cannot scroll the map outside of where your character is. Why? I have no idea. This means that you have to physically run to where you want to place villagers. Then, you have to call the villagers to you. Then, you can place them where you are. If you decide you want to place some of them elsewhere, you have to run over there, call them there, then place them.
Example: When assigning roles to villagers, you can only assign roles to those who are right next to you. You can cycle through villagers, but it will only show those right next to you. And I mean RIGHT next to you. If there is a villager like 3 feet away from you, you need to exit the management screen, move 3 feet to your left, open it, and then assign the role. The same thing applies to healing villagers, which is especially frustrating during combat when there are a lot of things that will highlight and you are trying to mouse over the specific villager you want to heal, or you have to keep moving around opening the management window trying to get close enough to that one villager so that they appear as healable.
Given that the day cycle is on a timer, these two oversights are especially frustrating. All the extra actions you have to take to manage villagers is a waste of time and makes it so you will have to fight through extra night cycles. These functions could have all been handled on the map. Open the map, select villagers to move and move them from there. You should also be able to move from the map or villager movement menu to the role assignment menu. You should also be able to "group" villagers by proximity or role type. Like, if I've set up a defense around the woman, but I want to move those villagers together, I should be able to select and move them all together instead of having to run to where I want them, open the management screen, tab to each one, taking care not to select any villager who isn't in that group (because it's easy to select the wrong one!), and move them to where I am.
Final example of bad UI: Equipping mazo talismans is a pain in the ass. These trinkets provide miniscule buffs and are not even worth messing with in the first place. There are about 100 of them. They are listed in numerical order on a scroll, but you do not find them in numerical order, and it shows you ALL of them instead of just the ones you own. If you find talisman #54, you have to literally scroll through 54 pages to equip it. You can "jump sections" but that requires knowing which section it's in and then still scrolling through all the talismans in that section. I finally realized that you can "favorite" talismans and then sort by favorites. But why is there no option to sort by "owned" so you can just see the ones you actually have? This drove me crazy. Like, I actually did have like talismans #3, 30, 50, and 80 or something. Scroll scroll scroll...
There are several other annoying UI things. Alongside the fact that the game became repetitive and is not that hard, the UI issues are harder to overlook.
It's still a fun game with great art and music. The enemy models are sick to look at. There are some cool ideas here. It knows what it is trying to do and focuses on those elements of the game. But man, I think the UI stuff was the most frustrating and is what killed it. I can handle repetition if it's still fun, but trying to manage villagers with the UI kept making me wonder why they didn't implement this or that little feature. Maybe they will make a sequel with improvements.
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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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