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    Dorfromantik (PC)    by   dkirschner       (Mar 24th, 2024 at 19:54:36)

    Got this for free at some point and decided to give it a shot since it is well-reviewed and seemed like something outside of my usual. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. It looks like a casual city-builder and mobile game. It’s definitely casual and definitely a builder of sorts, but it’s more of a puzzle game than anything.

    Your goal is to place various sorts of hexagonal tiles to build a landscape. Tiles can have, on any of their six sides, water, trees, grassland, fields, houses, and railroad tracks. You can rotate tiles and, ideally, match like sides. This nets you points. Not matching sides doesn’t net you points. You need points in order to get more tiles. If you run out of tiles, it’s game over. So, you have to strategically place tiles such that you maximize aligning edges with the same properties.

    To complicate this, some tiles have “quests,” which require you to string together x number of trees, houses, railroads, etc. So then you’re not simply matching sides, but you’re also trying to cluster certain types together in certain places depending on which quests you get.

    I found myself lost in it before realizing that I was almost out of tiles. I refocused and hit a stride, getting achievement after achievement for making long railroads, villages with tons of houses, etc., and built my stack of tiles back up. However, I have realized that if you don’t match like tiles early on, you’ll be disadvantaged later because you are “missing out” on points that you would have earned had you been more careful, and it will be difficult to “fill in” gaps that you’ve created. Another thing I realized is that you can’t “branch out” too much. You’ve got to remain clustered. If you branch out too much, then each tile you place can’t generate many points. It’s 10 points per matched side, so if you’re just like building a river straight out, each tile is only netting 10 points. If you are more clustered and placing each tile next to two or three others, then you’re getting 20 or 30 points per tile, and generating more tiles. It’s an interesting balancing act.

    There is no story; it’s a sandbox. There is infinite replayability to chase high scores and achievements. I’d be interested in giving it another shot and doing better, but I think I did really well for my first try. Maybe I’ll keep it on hand for a relaxing puzzle game. But I’ve got other stuff to get to!

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    Trials of Fire (PC)    by   dkirschner       (Mar 24th, 2024 at 16:38:43)

    I shouldn’t have purchased this. I must have been on a card battler kick, probably when I was playing Slay the Spire and Monster Train last year. There’s nothing wrong with Trials of Fire; it just doesn’t have the personality or the pizzazz that better card battlers have. In fact, playing it after Wildermyth, it comes off as a way less interesting take on the card battler/tactical RPG genre, and I can’t help but compare the two. The main difference, of course, is that Wildermyth has no cards; it’s a tactics RPG with procedural storytelling and character development that was really, really cool. Trials of Fire doesn’t have anything that is really, really cool. Trials of Fire has:

    - An overworld that manages to be duller than Wildermyth’s. The landscape is drab, and you just move around following a quest arrow, stopping on whatever blue question marks are around to try and find crafting supplies, food, obsidian (money), equipment, followers, battles (which is how you level up), and so on.
    - A stamina bar that means you have to rest and eat food. Resting or dragging food onto a character is also how you recover health lost in battle or through random events. As your stamina drops, your characters get stuck with debuff cards in battle, so you have to stop to restore stamina.
    - Time management that is not as interesting as Wildermyth’s. You have to make progress toward the golden quest arrow on the edge of the map, and if you are too slow, then your morale drops. If it drops all the way, it’s game over. So you are basically balancing your morale with your stamina and trying to keep your characters’ level high enough to win combat encounters (i.e., since combat is how you gain XP, you have to stop and fight to level up, but can’t stop too much lest you spend too much time fighting and your morale drops). This was less interesting than the incursion and enemy strength timers in Wildermyth.
    - Cards to collect and upgrade. Upon each level up, you can replace one of your existing class cards with another one, or choose to upgrade an existing class card.
    - Equipment to wear and upgrade. Equipment can be upgraded with crafting supplies when resting. Each piece of equipment bestows various cards on the wearer, and upgrading the equipment upgrades its cards, which is cool.
    - Unlockable character classes that can level up to award more class cards. The classes level up after a campaign, and I suppose that newly unlocked cards are available in future campaigns.
    - A bare bones story, random and generic events, simple quests, all of which totally pale in comparison to Wildermyth’s (and most other games).
    - Characters with no personality whatsoever, such a stark contrast to Wildermyth.
    - Bosses that pose a real threat!

    Regarding the latter, at the end of each quest stage (there were three stages in the quest campaign I played), there is a boss battle. The first two of these were easy enough, but the last one just about killed me. It was a dragon with 90 health (double the previous boss). It killed two of my characters, and only my hunter remained. My hunter had like 13 health and 11 armor, and the dragon was at about the same. My hunter was also backed into a corner, and in one more turn, the dragon would have moved in melee range and my hunter would have been stuck (you can’t use ranged attacks in melee range of your target). But I drew like the perfect combination of cards, did double damage with my first attack and then my last card did x damage, and if the target was then below y HP, it automatically died. Well, the math was perfect, and I killed the dragon. If I had drawn different cards, the dragon would have killed me. Intense for sure, but what the hell! The difficulty came out of nowhere in the last battle. Battles are not repeatable, by the way. If your party wipes, it’s game over and you start the whole campaign over. I would have been pissed, because, like Wildermyth, these campaigns are not short.

    Upon winning, your classes level up and you unlock some new cards for each of them. I unlocked a new class for achieving something or other. Then you just go back to the menu and start over with another quest. Wildermyth has that cool Legacy system with persistent characters that grow over time, but there’s nothing like that here. Given that the storyline for the quest campaign I did was so generic, I’m not motivated to play another one (and there is only one more story quest, then the others are like roguelike situations where you just play with daily modifiers or create custom campaigns or do a seasonal challenge or whatever). There are surely a bunch more cards to unlock, and there are 9 classes in total to unlock (for completing x quests, for killing y bosses, for spending z crafting materials, etc.), so there is more to do in terms of progression. But it’s just not that compelling! Again though, nothing is bad about the game, but man, I guess it’s just rare that I play something that is so disappointlingly generic.

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    Galactic Quest + Atlantic Quest (DS)    by   jp       (Mar 24th, 2024 at 13:19:19)

    This is a 2-in-1 game collection of match 3 games that, as far as I've played each, are exactly the same in terms of gameplay even though the story and art is completely different.

    The one notable thing about these is that it's a match-3 game that supports three different types of matching which you can switch between whenever you want. It's interesting because it means it's a lot harder to get stuck, and that you have to think in a few more ways in order to identify matches and such.

    The three ways to match are:
    1. Typical swap two tiles to make a match
    2. Connect three tiles orthogonally to make a match
    3. Tap on group of tiles that are orthogonally adjacent to each other to make a match.

    There's overlap between the three modes, of course, and in the 3rd one matches don't happen automatically when new tiles drop to fill in the space of tiles that were removed due to a match. So, there's an interesting effect that happens when you've made a match in the 3rd mode and then switch to the 1st mode! You can get a lot of tiles to auto-match and disappear if you've left the board with lots of groups of 3-in-a-row.

    Other than this little wrinkle, which was interesting to be fair, there wasn't much else to note in either game. There's trophies and interstitial puzzles to play between every 10 or so match-3 levels, but it's pretty light on everything.

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    Super Princess Peach (DS)    by   jp       (Mar 24th, 2024 at 13:12:25)

    Made it all the way to the final boss fight - against Bowser, obviously? - but I've struggled enough with it that I decided to call it a day. It's a multi-stage battle that, as far as I can tell, requires you to use your rage ability. That's ok, except that it's hard for me to recharge it during the battle so it's a bit more frustrating than simply having to learn attack patterns and dodge attacks.

    Now that I think about it, I might be "underpowered" for the end? There's lots of things I could have purchased but have not and I don't really feel like returning to old levels to "farm" them, so I feel it's better to simply move on.

    And this is a strange thing to say about a Nintendo game! (that it's grindy...)

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    Flower (PS4)    by   dkirschner       (Mar 21st, 2024 at 13:13:56)

    Played this after Journey, knowing that it was the same studio’s former game. I see the DNA in the aesthetics. It’s visually striking, with an emphasis on the musical score, which harmonizes as the player guides their flower petals through other flowers in the levels. Basically, you control flower petals, first a single petal in each level, and then a “swarm” of them by the end of each level.

    Early levels are really peaceful and serene. You’re floating through grasslands, intrigued by the beauty of the surroundings and the fact that you’re bringing life and color. At the end of one early level, you “enliven” a big old tree, which grows and blooms. It’s all very majestic. The first half was the best.

    Later levels change the tone significantly, as you float through areas that are like cold, dead, electrical grids or something. There are lots of power lines and electrical towers. It’s all very grey and drab. Gone is the color of the first half of the game. Touching towers can shock you, so you have to slow down and navigate between the metal to touch the flowers beneath them. Navigating the petals could be tedious, like when you miss a flower and keep circling around trying to get it, or in this later level when you’re trying to slowly creep through electrical towers. I was often unclear as to the “hit boxes,” for lack of a better word, of my petals and the other objects, which is why I’d miss flowers I thought I touched, or get shocked when I thought I’d avoided a tower.

    Anyway, the last level is like a triumphant return of nature to the gray city-scape, smashing through the electrical towers now. Take that, cities! Take this, industry! Eat dirt, electricity! Flowers rule! I did enjoy the revenge of destroying electrical towers. Interesting game for sure, and haven’t played anything quite like it, but the experience itself wasn’t as captivating as Journey’s was.

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    1 : dkirschner's Portal Stories: Mel (PC)
    2 : dkirschner's Dorfromantik (PC)
    3 : jp's Galactic Quest + Atlantic Quest (DS)
    4 : dkirschner's Trials of Fire (PC)
    5 : dkirschner's Wandersong (PC)
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    1 : dkirschner at 2022-10-12 08:51:09
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    Little Nightmares (PC)    by   Neuschwanderer

    Simple controls with a very dark and horror like aesthetic make for great fun if played in the dark.
    most recent entry:   Friday 31 August, 2018
    Picking back up from where I left off I found out that I was not in fact done with creepy long arm dude. Instead I had to run through the vents while he was reaching for me through the cracks. Interestingly enough it was after this that you are put into your final confrontation with the long-armed monster where I was actually interested in the game play mechanics that were chosen here. The challenge for them being how to do you fight against something when you have made the game where your only controls are to move and grab things. So, I was quite impressed when they set up this encounter where your first idea would be to climb and run away, but then you can see that the bars of the cage bend and it may give you the idea, for me it took a while, to pull the cage bars and as logic would have it you basically disarm the long-armed monster.

    However, you’re not free as the next scene give you a glimpse of the next monster you have to face off against, which by the looks of him and the fact there are meat hooks going in his direction I can only assume is a cook. Of which I instantly predicted that I was going to see some humans either being stored away like raw meet in a freezer or I was going to literally see these people getting used as cooking ingredients. What I saw next though felt a bit like foreshadowing that you are getting more and more monstrous with how you get food for yourself, as this time when we get hungry we latterly kill a rat which was foreshadowed in the times that we got hungry the last time. As I got closer to the area that reminded me of a food cafeteria I was just waiting to see what your first encounter with the cook would be like. Following the blood on the floor to the kitchen I saw the big boy himself who isn’t as blind and easy to dodge as the blind one. He caught me very quickly and instantly went about cooking me up. After sneaking past the cook and climbing into the rafters I found out that now there were two cooks that I had to evade for the next part of this game. Which from an artistic standpoint it’s interesting how they chose to almost make them look like twins and make the connection even greater by making them look like two halves of the same monster. I continued to progress until I reached the point where you are tasked with creating a sausage link long enough to swing into the next area with. Which posed the question, was I going to have to put a body into the sausage grinder to get to the next level? Luckily, I didn’t have to do that, but as I got into the next area I got to do the same old song and dance with the monster’s brother. This one was actually grinding one of the human like things in a grinder, but at this point I was getting a little desensitized to the whole feel of the human meat processing plant vibe. My last run against the cooks was hoping onto the meat hooks to safety which was really fun actually cause of the horror elements of having no other options but to run away as fast as I possibly could. Once I was out and away I got the achievement for the kitchen level and I was out of there.

    For the Kitchen level I felt like a lot of the gameplay was the same for each cook. Honestly speaking, looking at what the game had been thus far just from mechanics alone it was a large amount of repetition without many new mechanics being added in per level. With the long arm guy it introduced the idea of distracting the monster with an item that made a noise, but not much of anything new for the cooks. The only thing that I could think was possibly added was having to go around the zone to find multiple items to solve the puzzle like with the sausage grinder, but with it only being used that one time I was questioning if it was just that one puzzle or an attempt at another mechanic.

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