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Before Your Eyes (PC) by dkirschner (Apr 14th, 2024 at 13:51:13) |
I've been looking forward to playing this, especially after playing One Hand Clapping, which had a singing mechanic. That game activates your mic and you use your voice, raising and lowering pitch, to interact with the game. Before Your Eyes was similar in that the game activates your webcam and uses your eye blinks as input. Before Your Eyes works WAY better than One Hand Clapping, and it's the better game all around. I figure that detecting blinks (yes/no) is easier than detecting notes along the range of human vocal pitch, so kudos to One Hand Clapping for trying.
Blinking in Before Your Eyes doesn't do anything unless you do it over a prompt (mouse over the prompt, then blink to interact) or unless you do it when the metronome icon is visible, which progresses the story to the next scene. The rules are simple, and it became a game in and of itself for me to blink strategically. I imagined that at the end of A Clockwork Orange, Alex's eyes are forced open so that he could successfully complete this game. At times, I felt like holding my eyes open with my fingers. This is because your eyes will get tired/dry/itchy while playing and you will screw up and blink when you don't mean to, skipping dialogue or ending a scene early. That's frustrating enough. Make sure you do the blink calibration, but I think that no matter how well you do it, it will still occasionally register some non-blinks as blinks. This really didn't happen much for me; through calibration, I think I turned the sensitivity way down, and I wonder what effect wearing glasses had. But like I said, it works surprisingly well.
So, the game itself is narrative-heavy. It's an obvious play on the idea that a life can pass in the "blink of an eye." You're picked up by a ferryman of souls who asks you to tell the story of your life. Back in time you go to remember it: your childhood, your parents, your career, etc., blinking your way through each scene. I won't spoil the story, but there is a twist that I absolutely did not see coming (though I should have paid more attention to the mysterious dark scenes) that changes the narrative and the tone of the game. This is one you can spend time reflecting on.
Aesthetically, it's got a simple visual presentation, sort of painterly, with some really nice piano music. The voice acting is good, with the exception of the girl-next-door (who sounds the same at 10 as she does at 40). For some reason, they also used the same voice actor for your dad and her dad, which made the one scene with her dad calling her very confusing ("Why is my dad at her house?!"). But I liked the dad and mom's performances. I was wondering through the whole game if your character was mute and/or on the spectrum because he doesn't talk--only through a typewriter later in the game--and otherwise expresses himself through his prodigious musical and artistic talents. But I think he's just a silent main character, not actually mute.
Anyway, the game won a BAFTA for a reason. It didn't blow my mind, but it's a neat experience that's worth having. It's short too, doesn't waste your time. I'm considering incorporating it into a class.
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Stray (PC) by dkirschner (Apr 13th, 2024 at 12:00:39) |
Patrick and I have been playing this together this semester, and finished it a couple weeks ago. We were talking after beating it about despite how simple and straightforward of a game this is, it manages to be something new. Playing as a cat (and being able to do cat things like curl up and sleep, scratch things, knock objects off tables, etc., so cuuuute) was novel, and the setting and story were interesting. But really, playing as a cat. I smiled a whole lot throughout the game. The lil companion robot was cute too.
On the other hand, I was often tired and bored while playing, and literally fell asleep during several sessions. Patrick would be making dinner or something in the kitchen, and I'd snap awake, cat walking into a wall, and I'd pretend I had not fallen asleep, and that I was just watching the cat walk into the wall and thinking. Like how my dad always used to claim he was "resting his eyes" when he'd fall asleep on the couch.
I would not call the game exciting. It was a lot of wandering around the city and talking to robot NPCs, fetching things for them. The city is a really good-looking dystopia, and the robots are quirky, but I wish they had more dialogue. You don't get a sense that many of them have personalities besides whatever one-note thing they do. I mean, the lack of dialogue makes sense, and it's not really "dialogue" since the cat can't talk. The fact that you are a cat adds a whole layer of silly to the game. Like, why has this lil robot befriended a cat? Why are all these robots putting all their faith in a cat to save them? Cats don't understand what we're saying to them, and cats do whatever they want! Playing as a cat in a game where you're doing fetch quests (fetching is dog stuff!) and doing things to help people is very un-cat-like.
But, you know what? The ability to play as a cat and do cat things trumps how little sense it makes, and I would play as a cat in this dystopia again. Idea for next time: more cats. And what do you think? Were there cats at the end?! Optimistically, I think so.
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Hadean Tactics (PC) by jp (Apr 7th, 2024 at 13:32:36) |
This game is supposed to be a deck-building tactical game and it sort of isn't, but very lightly is - at least in my experience so far.
So, like CD2: Trap Master this game REALLY wears it's Slay the Spire inspirations on its sleeve. Again, there's a path you that branches and you need to pick which nodes to visit - and there's fights, boss fights, resting spots, stores, artifact/rewards, and shops. Oh, there's also "story encounters" where you make a choice that often results in a benefit and a drawback. VERY Slay the Spire - though I noticed the way the events are distributed is different and that it's much more important to plan your way through it since the paths intersect a lot less and you can, for example in my last run, set yourself up with 4 rest/upgrade a card spots in a row!
In addition to a deck of cards you have the character you chose and two "minions" (they're all monsters) that exist on a 2D grid that's quite typical of tactical games. The enemies will spawn, you have energy to cast your cards - generally you cast your cards, unpause and wait for the timer to pause the game when it hits the threshold (7 seconds) for your hand to flush, a new hand is drawn, and you get more mana to cast spells. What isn't really tactical about it is that all the fighting on the tactical grid (which includes everyone having abilities they cast once their mana is full) happens automatically. You can't (afaik) give orders to anyone. At best, if you have the right spells, you can move creatures around (your own or enemy), but they then move back to whatever it is they want to do (e.g. attack the nearest enemy).
One of my runs used a character that had access to "trap" cards which are pretty neat since you lay them on the grid and then have to trigger them (with a different card) and ALL the trap laid will trigger. Some do damage, others heal your allies, and so on. So, the game isn't tactical at all in the turn-by-turn combat and movement decision-making sense. Yes, you choose whom to roll into a fight with, which spells to cast on whom, and when to cast things. But, since you don't directly control your combat units it all feels pretty indirect.
Where the game goes pretty wild (and above/beyond what Slay the Spire does) is that once you've cleared a run - you gain access to making your own hero - choose skills/talents from a list AND choose which spells will be available (again from a list, which only has the ones you've unlocked). So, in this sense the game has a lot, lot more options/replayability and that sort of thing. But, I'm not sure it's that much more interesting?
Oh, there is a meta-progression. When I beat my first run a giant death/reaper creature appeared and said "ok, now you can start to make progress towards winning - you have to collect wings". And I've collected a few since, you get them from killing the stage end bosses (which is nice in that you don't have to get all the way to the end). I need to get 7 - so I wonder if I'll just have to play over and over until I randomly get the right bosses or will the game feed me different ones until I get them all? I've also unlocked a new (third) character...but I kind of don't want to use it because I want to get all the wings with the character I've made some progress with.
I've played about 4 hours and I've really enjoyed the "decay" and "trap" mechanics... we'll see how it goes!
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Deathloop (PS4) by jp (Apr 4th, 2024 at 11:14:36) |
Argh. The longer you go without playing, the worse this game's experience becomes. This is almost entirely due to me forgetting both how to play, but also all the localized information and knowledge you pick up - like who is where, when, and so on.
I love the idea of a "clockwork" game where you deftly navigate your way through things that happen and certain times and places - there's a sense of beauty and elegance to the choreography you develop and create (sort of like when you watch those time loop movies and see a character weave through people and places because they know what's going to happen when and they've just learned it). BUT, that beauty also creates an entry barrier - at least a psychological one for me, because the game's on-ramp is past and now you're in the thick of it. But you've forgotten everything...
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Devil May Cry 5 (PS4) by jp (Apr 4th, 2024 at 11:09:05) |
So I took a break - and then came back to the game and had forgotten how to play. It took a bit to remember (I purposefully avoided looking stuff up because I wanted to see how easy it was for me to remember). So, some of the fights with V took longer than they should have - because I had forgotten that V has to "finish off" the enemies...lol.
While I often focus (for my own personal interests) on game play and game design aspects of a game - I realized as I was playing this game that..wow, the visual design of the large enemies really is phenomenal. They're both beautiful, awesome, creepy, gross, and disgusting. It's quite the accomplishment and I really appreciated it. And, this is in the context of me playing a game that is ~7 years old and running on last gen hardware. Perhaps I haven't played enough PS5 games yet so I'm still too impressionable? Have things moved that far in terms of photorealism?
I have decided to move on even though I realize, from the back of the box, that I'll miss out on the 3rd playable character. It's no fault or problem with DMC5...it's just that I've got too many games to play and I think I've understood enough about this game to move on to another.
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Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator (PC) by dkirschner |
| More visual novel than I thought, but some good humor and hopefully the ability to actively date. ------------------- Love this game. |
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most recent entry: Monday 1 April, 2019
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Completed Dream Daddy! What a great game, wow. I first heard of this around the time it came out when I was working on stuff related to GamerGate, and that semester had a student who wrote me a paper on its depiction of sexuality and fatherhood. She would rave to me about how it handled gender and insist that I play it. My immediate comparison is the only other visual novel/dating sim I've played, Hatoful Boyfriend, but genre is really the only similarity. Nonetheless, Hatoful Boyfriend (the pigeon dating sim) prepared me for Dream Daddy. Thanks Hatoful Boyfriend.
What is Dream Daddy? It's a dad dating sim. You create a dad and begin the story. I made mine look like Carl from Aqua Teen Hunger Force and named him Carl McDad. The similarity is uncanny. You and your daughter, Amanda, move to a new town, to a house in a cul-de-sac where every other resident is also a dad. Some dads live with their kids, some are married, some are single. Some are more openly gay, some are in heterosexual relationships. They welcome you to the neighborhood, and you begin the process of meeting the game's 7 dads. This is essentially the prologue.
Once you meet all the dads together at a barbecue, you sign up for Dadbook (like Facebook, but for dads). It's unclear whether Dadbook is only for dads or whether anyone can join and it's just called Dadbook because Amanda and other kids will pop up on there. It's also unclear whether it's more of a dating site or more of just a messaging app. Anyway, through Dadbook, you ask the other dads to hang out or go on dates, and they will occasionally message you too.
The game flows like this: You choose a dad to message on Dadbook and go on a date. The date usually has two or three activities, and you get to know the other dad better. The date ends, you get a score based on a dialogue options you chose (the "best" dialogue option triggering a hilarious animation of hearts and eggplant emojis emanating from the wooed dad) and mini-games you completed, and you go home. You usually chat with Amanda, go to sleep, and repeat. You can initiate three dates with each dad (that's 21 dates). On the third date with any particular dad, as we found out last night, you can end the game by choosing to start dating that dad. You probably have to make correct dialogue decisions during the date, and I assume you can be rejected or choose not to date any of the dads (We will verify this later!). We went with Hugo, an English teacher and closet wrestling fan. Our other choices, in order, were Robert (mysterious, hunts cryptids), Mat (cool coffee shop owner, post-hardcore and emo fan), Joseph (married, youth minister), Craig (athletic, cool, but seemed too busy for us), Brian (competitive), and Damien (goth dad).
"Being a dad" is the main thing the game depicts, believe it or not, and so your relationship with Amanda often takes center stage (and the other dads' relationships with their kids are important too). Amanda is a high school senior planning to go to art school. She is a great kid and is going through some of the issues of teenage life--boys, friends, college applications, etc. You and her have a wonderful relationship, and the father-daughter scenes were some of my favorite in the game. The game does not hyper-focus on sexuality, which I had sort of assumed before playing. It's a game about dating dads, yes, but the emphasis is on relationships, romantic, sexual, or otherwise. Carl never comes out and says he's gay. He's just attracted to the dads that the player guides him toward. The other dads don't identify as gay either. Hugo was married to a man, and that statement is the closest we get to a statement about sexual orientation. Sexual orientation is conveyed more through thought and behavior (e.g., Carl sees Brian shirtless and notes that he's hot or Carl flirts with Craig by making a joke about kissing). I'll keep thinking about this. At first I was disappointed that the game was avoiding talking about sexuality, but the more I think about it, I think it's really clever how it doesn't focus on identity, but instead focuses on relationships, sexual fluidity, and performance. There's a paper in there somewhere...that has probably already been written.
I really liked how dates were not all one-on-one affairs, but involve other dads, kids, and are wrapped up in other aspects of daily life. For example, for one of the Hugo dates, he invites you to help chaperone his class on a field trip to the aquarium. I had to figure out how to get some mischievous kids out of the penguin enclosure. One of the Brian dates was a fishing trip that your daughters (who get along really well) tag along for. I always found the Brian dates funny because Carl and Brian's relationship was so competitive. Brian would always one-up Carl. If Amanda got straight As, then Brian's daughter got straight A+s. If Carl caught a 20-pound fish with his father, then Brian caught a 40-pound fish. Some of the dates involved mini-games. Sitting in Robert's truck overlooking the city, he teaches you to whittle wood, and you carve increasingly silly objects. You get separated from Mat at a punk concert and try to make your way to the front of the crowd where he is by avoiding moshing teenagers. To catch fish with Brian, you play a match-three game lining up the same kinds of fish. These were always fun little diversions.
I cannot gush enough about the dialogue. The writing is outstanding. The tone turns serious or heartfelt when it needs to and is often laugh-out-loud funny. Additionally, there are a lot of dad jokes and dad puns. There is a certain type of humor that the game has, and I think we were a target demographic. People who were children of the 80s and early 90s, teens in the 90s and early-mid-2000s will find a lot of shared cultural references. Another SUPER WEIRD thing about the game is that it is like it has been listening to our conversations. We joke all the time about cryptids and starting a cryptid podcast and interviewing my dad, whose favorite story is of hearing a Bigfoot in the woods. We even recently went to a Bigfoot museum and are bummed to miss the first ever Georgia Bigfoot Conference because it falls on the same weekend as the World's Biggest Fish Fry in Paris, TN. Anyway, Robert is into hunting cryptids, and during one date he tells a story (I think he's kidding) about seeing this one, and then y'all spot something in the woods, get really scared, and drive away. My girlfriend and I also like to go see monster trucks, and that is discussed in detail in the game. There were no joke like 6 or 7 other even more specific things that we say to each other or that we had just talked about and that then were in the game. One thing my girlfriend always says is "You'll see..." like in a jokey-sinister way. Like about April Fools Day today, she says she's going to do something to me. I ask what she's going to do. "You'll see..." THE GAME ENDED WITH "YOU'LL SEE"! That was the last piece of dialogue between Carl and Hugo before the credits! What a coincidence.
Okay okay, I've gone on forever about Dream Daddy, but it's not a perfect game. There are pacing issues and issues regarding what the game "knows" about your interactions with other dads. Like I said before, you can go on three dates with each dad. Sometimes, in between dates when you log onto Dadbook, another dad will message you for some sort of outing. These totally stopped before we had gone on one date with everyone, and we were then trying to figure out how the game might have expected us to date. Did it account for the player going on three dates in a row with one dad (and will this end the game after literally three dates)? Did it anticipate the player going on one date with each dad, then a second date with each dad? We assumed, once the other Dadbook messages stopped, that the meta-narrative (like the progress through the school year as Amanda applies to art school, learns she gets in, other time-sensitive events in other dads' lives, etc.) would progress once we went on one date with every dad, and that it would progress again after two dates with every dad. But after one date with every dad, nothing happened. Still no meta-narrative advancement, still no new Dadbook messages. And nothing happened after completing a second date with each dad. Why? It's like the game front-loads you with a variety of social interactions and narrative events over time, but then completely stops before you are 1/3 through dating around. After the third Hugo date, it's like time sped up to wrap up the entire story. All of a sudden Amanda graduated from high school. I thought it would follow her off to college, but it didn't.
The other issue is what the game knows about your interactions with other dads. For example, at the end of the prologue, you are re-introduced to all the dads you've met at a barbecue. Then, as you go on dates and outings with other dads, even if you've seen dads three times since the barbecue, Carl will still think things like, "When we met last at the barbecue..." or someone will message Carl saying, "I had a great time at the barbecue! Let's go do such-and-such..." And we're like, but we just went to the art gallery with Damien, Hugo, and Craig yesterday! Why don't you remember?! This kind of thing happens enough to be noticeable. There was another glaring error last night after a Mat date. Carl was at Mat's house after shopping for records, and Mat has a lot of instruments around his house. He was in a touring band with his late ex-partner. Carl asks Mat to play the piano, and Mat doesn't want to. It dredges up memories. You have the option to push the issue and get him to play or to drop it. I dropped it. Then later that night, Carl tells Amanda about the date and says that Mat played the piano and goes on about what I assume would have happened if you push Mat on the piano issue. But Mat never played the piano! Either the game has an error in the narrative or Carl has revealed that he is a dirty liar and makes up stories to tell Amanda. I wish these issues had been ironed out.
Play this game. I want to use it for my game-based learning SOCI 1101 course somehow. It's smart, funny, deals with gender, sexuality, parenthood, and other issues in a thoughtful way. And it might be listening. Also, the theme song is a real ear worm.
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