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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.
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Sep 7th, 2024 at 11:21:45 - Gwent: The Witcher Card Game (PC) |
Going to go ahead and retire this one. I've been dabbling in Gwent again for the past month, and most of my time has been spent opening card packs (acquired from Thronebreaker), spending resources, and building decks, but not actually playing matches. This is because there are not many people playing anymore (as I typed this entry on a Saturday afternoon, matchmaking found me no opponents). Actually CD Projekt Red discontinued support for the game in 2023, and now the community runs it, so the only changes from now on are regular rebalancing.
In the cases where I have played matches, it's great fun. I really enjoy Gwent! At least at my low newbie level. There are SO many cards now that it's quite overwhelming. Like, I've probably opened 75 packs, and, still, often times I'll get 4/5 or 5/5 new cards. Alas, maybe one day this will be reinvigorated, or I'll convince some friends to get into it and play with me or something. But, on the bright side, after retiring this and finishing MGSV, two of the longest games in my backlog are done! I have one game, Lobotomy Corporation, at 105 hours, and then the next longest is Death Stranding at 60.
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Sep 7th, 2024 at 10:56:50 - Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (PC) |
MGSV, on the other hand, was incredible. It took me around a month to get through it. The story is batshit crazy, as per usual, so I will not even attempt to comment on it. The stealth-action sandbox is one of the best around. And this one adds some persistent online features and reimagines the series in a semi-open world.
The game occurs in Afghanistan and the Angola-Zaire border region. The environments are totally war torn, and the only really negative thing I can say about the game is that the settings are dull, locations are drab. I got tired of running across endless desert and grassland with scant interesting features. But these are two semi-open world locations. Missions take place in either region, and once you take a helicopter to either one, you can run around the whole place if you want to doing side ops (which I mostly ignored), gathering resources, and doing whatever else you want, or you can just land in your mission area, do your job, and leave.
There are 40-something main missions and another 150-ish side ops. Of the main missions, completing the first 30-something will get you to the credits. Then, you enter "chapter 2," which...is optional I guess...and continues various story threads. The missions in chapter 2 are a mixture of story missions and replaying old missions with new constraints (e.g., total stealth, extreme difficulty, etc.). I actually didn't complete the last two story missions because I didn't know how to trigger them. Previous ones seem to have been triggered by completing some other mission or side op, or just letting enough time pass. I let a lot of time pass, and nothing. Finally looked it up, and oh my gosh, it's grindy! You have to max out your relationship with Quiet, a sniper companion, do something with her, upgrade your base to a certain point, and do various other tasks. This would have taken who-knows-how-many more hours, so I'll watch the "true" ending on YouTube.
Anyway, who cares about all that. The fun in this game for me is playing with all the toys. There are all manner of weapons: pistols, semi-automatic rifles, sniper rifles, tranquilizer guns, grenade and rocket launchers, C4 explosives, a water pistol (seriously), an arm that you can detach and fire at people, a rideable mech with its own armaments, a dog companion that will distract, stun, or kill enemies on command, a sniper companion, vehicles like tanks to drive around in, ability-boosting drugs, inflatable decoys, shields, sleep grenades...I mean TONS of stuff. You can approach missions in a hundred different ways. I never ever got tired of jumping out of that helicopter, creeping up to the mission area, scouting, deciding how I was going to go in, trying out different equipment, companions, and tactics, and playing on my feet as the mission unfolded, sometimes according to plan, and other times not. Sometimes I'd be spotted and enemies would engage; other times, I'd pick up a fun looking weapon and decide to use it instead; or an enemy chopper would appear and I'd have to complete the mission without being seen from above; or I could steal a mech to pilot; or I'd try to get no kills; etc., etc.
In addition to the stealth combat gameplay, there is also a big base management aspect to the game. You build and operate a whole war effort. The basis of this is using your "Fulton device" to capture enemy soldiers. Snake literally attaches enemies to a balloon and they fly away to Mother Base. It's so silly and I love it. They lift off the ground a little bit, pause, then the balloon whooshes upward and they go, "Whoooa, aaaaaah!" Haha. If another enemy is nearby, they might notice. They'll panic a bit, call their buddies, and say, "One of our men just got carried away by a balloon! Should I check it out?!" Then you Fulton them too.
Captured soldiers become part of your army and fill various roles, from intel to medic to R&D. They all have graded strengths and weaknesses. The more soldiers you get, and the bigger your various teams become, the more the teams' skills upgrade. So, level up R&D and you can research more weapons. Level up intel and you'll have more information about the battlefield, like enemy locations. Level up medical, and your wounded soldiers recover faster. You can send soldiers off on missions to collect resources, fight enemies, recruit others, and so on. All in all, your goal is to accumulate resources to upgrade your base, which helps you on the ground.
There are a lot of interrelated systems, and they work together beautifully. I didn't mess with the online stuff much, but you can Fulton defenses to put on your base. Other players can invade your base, and you need to defend it. There are also a ton of challenges that grant rewards, animals to Fulton and a zoo to build, and other collectibles like posters and photos. The game is big, truly.
I'm working on getting a friend to start playing it. He will love it (he digs military and sniping games and MGSV has solid sniping). Looking forward to watching him play!
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Sep 7th, 2024 at 10:10:47 - Else Heart.Break() (PC) |
I picked this up because some PC Gamer staffer from way back when I subscribed to that magazine used to write glowingly about it all the time. Supposedly, it's this deep hacking type game where you end up being able to manipulate all these systems in really creative ways in a city. Sounds cool, finally bought it!
Utterly failed to grab me. Clunky and obtuse. You can rotate the camera, and it has a short zoom, but you cannot pan the camera, which for an isometric perspective game is bizarre. It automatically pans when you get near-ish the edge of the screen, then jerkily snaps in place. There are no tutorials. The map of the city and navigation are awful. The map has no details. Parts of the city, which do have names, are not labeled on the map. I played for nearly an hour and half the time couldn't figure out where I was. There is no "you are here" marker.
Movement is painfully slow. Everything feels stiff. You can double-click to run, but after you run for about 50 feet, it says "too tired to run." Maybe I should drink something? Pick up a water to drink. Nope. Maybe eat? Pick up some food to eat. Nope. I probably need to sleep because I've seen beds. Continue wandering around until my character literally passes out in a road (there is no "tired" meter or anything, so how in the world was I supposed to know this?). He ran for another 10 feet upon waking, then "too tired to run." Sigh.
There are objects to pick up: radios, water, beer, food...I stuffed about 3 radios, 10 bottles of water, a dozen beers, and other miscellanea into my backpack. When it got full, I drank the two dozen beers. My character swayed a bit when standing still, but otherwise gave no indication of intoxication. This game is supposed to be all cool hacker stuff, but the systems I've interacted with so far make no sense. Food, water, and beer don't do what they seem like they should. There is obviously some sort of sleep/rest mechanic, but there isn't info about it. Movement and navigation suck. Dialogue is dull. I have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing and am not interested in exploring further. Bummer!
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