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Creaks (PC) by dkirschner (May 21st, 2024 at 07:48:19) |
I haven't played an Amanita Design game in a long time, and what a treat this was. I'd never heard of Creaks, but it was in some puzzle game bundle I purchased a while back. It’s got the exceptional art and music you expect from Amanita. The puzzles are creative and the concept is original. In Creaks, you are a guy who finds a hidden passage behind his bedroom wall. He turns on his flashlight and goes through the crawlspace. Turns out that below his room is a sprawling cavern with a massive tower, wherein live all manner of strange creatures. The anthropomorphic birds are the main ones, and they’ve got a problem. A giant monster is crawling around the outside of the tower, destroying everything. The birds are trying to figure out a way to stop the monster. You stealthily follow the birds down, down, down, watching what they are up to, solving puzzle rooms as you go. Eventually, they discover your presence and enlist you to help destroy the monster.
The puzzles in Creaks are great! Over time, you’ll be introduced to various mechanics, but they basically involve manipulating creatures and light sources, which when shining on a creature, change them into furniture. The first puzzle creatures you encounter are dogs. The dogs activate when you get close and bark at you. When you get too close, they chase you. If you jump off a ledge or go down a ladder, they’ll stand there barking for a minute, then trot back to where they were. So, for example, if you need to get around a dog, you might get it to chase you, climb down a ladder, and climb up a ladder now behind it while it stands barking at the ledge you dropped from. Or, if you lure it to a light source, then turn on the light, the dog will change into a chest of drawers, which (as long as it stays in the light!) you can move or climb on.
You’ll see jellyfish creatures, which have rules governing their constant movement; goat creatures, which run away from you if you go near, and which otherwise will move toward patches of grass to graze. Dogs will also chase goats. Then there are these weird plant (?) creatures. One type copies your movements and the other type does the opposite of your movements (e.g., you step left, it steps right). And so on. You are generally trying to position the creatures onto buttons or beneath light sources such that you can get past them and move to the next “scene.”
There are something like 50 scenes. Not only is the puzzle design excellent, but the larger environment design is cool too. As you’ll see, the scenes are all interconnected in the tower. The difficulty is just right. Some of the puzzles had me scratching my head and then feeling clever once I figured out the trick. I got really stuck only one time, but put the game down for a week, played Firework, came back, and with a fresh perspective solved the scene in 5 minutes.
Highly recommended for a creative, charming, chill puzzle game.
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Firework (PC) by dkirschner (May 21st, 2024 at 07:04:53) |
This is a point-and-click psychological horror game from a Chinese developer that one of my friends recommended. He's studying representations of traditional Chinese religious practices in games. This one has a sort of shaman woman, whom we never see, and spirits. The main character, a rookie police officer, can communicate with the dead, and he does so as he attempts to uncover the mystery behind a fire in a funeral home and the death of an entire family.
The story was the strongest part of the game. Although it could be confusing at times, I liked how the protagonist occasionally recapped what was going on as he talked about the case with the teacher of the child who died, who was also investigating for her own reasons. One reason that the story got confusing is because of what I don't know about Chinese folklore. I kept thinking, "A person from China would have all the cultural context and knowledge to understand this," whereas I lacked such background assumptions. This might have been why the humans or spirits were doing some of the things they were doing, various symbolism, the significance of the grandparents going to see the shaman woman, how she or those visits might have been viewed, and so on. In the end, the story is really, really sad!
The gameplay in this one is straightforward. There is nothing challenging about it. Puzzles are easy. The environments are tiny. You won't get lost or stumped. You generally navigate one or a few screens at a time, interact with a few interactable objects, perhaps pick up an item or two, perhaps solve a puzzle. All of the objects and puzzles affect something on the same or nearby screen, and it's very linear. In typical psychological horror game fashion, the environment changes (e.g., new object appears, color shifts, spirits appear, phone rings, etc.) in generally unnerving ways. There aren't many scares per se, but certainly the creepiness factor is present. The one novel mechanic was a camera that you can use to invert colors in certain places, which changes how the rooms look and reveals new areas or objects that you need to progress.
Overall, the game kept me engaged through the intriguing story. Gameplay was slow-paced and easy, and it's good that the story consistently moved forward through exploring the environments (mostly the deceased family's house) or else I would have gotten bored. Not essential, but neat game. Now, I've got to talk to my friend about it!
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Balatro (PC) by jp (May 19th, 2024 at 22:05:30) |
Having spent the last few months playing a lot of deckbuilders, and then hearing a lot of buzz around this one..well, I had to try it out! (fortunately I got it for my birthday as well, yay!)
And, is it fun? Yes.
Is it hard? Yes.
I got really lucky with wins in 2 of my first 3 games. Really lucky. But, now I have a better idea of how the game works, what's good, not so good, and when to invest in different things.
As far as deckbuilding games go it's got a few unusual things going for it...
1. Your deck starts out really large! (a regular deck of playing cards) Generally it's pretty hard to make it smaller - there are a few options you might get, but it's not a general/typical option as you play the game.
2. You can easily add cards to your deck, but mostly you want to upgrade either the cards themselves (not THAT easy, but doable) or (more often?) the value you get from the different poker hands you do. So, increasing the multipliers/base value of two pairs might be better than improving one card that may not appear in a hand all that often.
3. You can sell your jokers - these all have different effects and, if you get a n interesting one at the start you can (hopefully) lean into it and shift your deck in the direction that takes the most advantage of it. (and then hopefully pick up other jokers that "double down" on that option). For example, a joker that gives you money when playing face cards coupled with a joker that treats all cards as face cards is good.
So far I've won with a few different decks (there are starter decks that have a different effect) and I'm trying to get the green one to work! (you get money for not playing all the hands). I thought I had it when I last played earlier today - but no luck.
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Mass Effect: Andromeda (PS4) by jp (May 13th, 2024 at 17:44:13) |
After an "ooh, that was close" moment where I almost bailed (there was a door that bugged out and didn't open, wasted a lot of time backtracking to figure what I missed, went online saw that it was supposed to open and quit the game, next day, when I loaded again I was thankfully at the door and it worked), I must say that I'm really having fun with this. Mostly I'm enjoying the fantasy the game provides: lead a community in creating a settlement in an undiscovered (to you) galaxy.
So far I've created the first "foothold" on a planet (a science base instead of a military one) after "magically" (deus ex machina moment for sure) being able to interface with an ancient(?) alien technology that somehow near instantly controls the weather making everything work. There's apparently a whole network of these alien structures across different planets and I imagine I'll be investigating more of them!
Doing this unlocked a new mechanic/system in the game where I can automate some resource generation because there are enough "viability points" (well explained in the game's narrative!) to bring out a group of people from cryo-hibernation to continue working on settling.
I think I'm a little over 8 hours in... I have no idea how much longer I'll engage or id this will start to drag/grind a bit? We'll see..
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Battlefield 4 (PS4) by jp (May 13th, 2024 at 14:39:55) |
I decided to bail from the game - in frustration - I Was making "fine" progress in the campaign, but after losing a few times in a mission I decided to call it quits because - the checkpoint was too far (I had made slow but significant progress, then died, and had to go back to the beginning, and it was too many times at this point). But, more importantly, I just ran into too many technical issues that sort of "broke" the game experience for me. A few examples:
a. AI partner is 2 meters away from an enemy, both are shooting at each other - super close, and no one hits. The partner AI just seemed obviously too ineffective (as well as the enemy AI).
b. In the "escape from jail" mission - the part right after you turn off everything from a tower in the middle and then have to go back down to guards waiting for you - all the guards were somehow completely unaware of my presence, so I knifed them all, they died and then more respawned and ran in, and still did not see me. I eventually just moved on...
c. I'm shooting at enemies, through the scope and clearly and obviously hitting them - but there's no effect. I wasn't "hitting the ground" nor was there anything in between myself and the target. And the target wasn't that far for the ballistic drop off or weapon range to be an issue. I have no idea what was going on to be honest but I had experienced earlier similar issues.
d. They story/narrative started to rapidly decrease in its comprehensibility. I was captured in china, taken to a prison that was then in Singapore? Or that's where I arrived after escaping, but it was in the jungle, but the jail was at the top of a really snowy mountain? Maybe I'm just confused by the geography here? But there's also some super secret that involves a Chinese national I helped bust out, whose "wife" (not the wife?) was a double agent, she got us all jailed, but then she's "the good guys" again? But what's this all about anyways? Now, there's a difference between "the story's simple, but it's kind of stupid" which I'm usually fine with. But here I feel like it's in the "kind of stupid" camp - but too complicated to follow along with easily?
All that being said...
I though the weapon system was interesting - you can hit the "boxes" in the level and just equip whatever you want (that you've unlocked/found). I was partial to some of the Chinese-manufacture weapons (are they based on real weapons?). It was also fun to ride around in vehicles (once I learned how to exit them). I also thought it was pretty neat how the art direction on the cover (blue/orange color palette) is also part of the game - at least in some of the earlier missions!
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Assassin's Creed II (360) by dkirschner |
| Don't remember much about the first one, mostly just assassinating, moving through crowds, and jumping off buildings into hay bales. --------- Yep, fun game! Sometimes wonky controls, but overall beautiful and exciting to play. |
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most recent entry: Monday 7 May, 2012
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Finished up Assassin's Creed 2 yesterday. Interesting game, worth playing for some of its cool ideas. I played AC 1 a couple years ago and found it also neat, but very very repetitive. AC 2 is a much better game with much more to do. If you played the Prince of Persia games for PS2, it's a lot like those too, and I suppose also sort of like Mirror's Edge for more reference. Lots of climbing up buildings and running over rooftops. One thing that struck me about AC 2 is that it's not really about being stealthy. I spent most of my time running full speed through city streets, weaving in and out of crowds, or jumping like a madman across rooftops. Rooftop archers and other guards didn't so much not notice me as they saw me a mile away and I ran at them until my dagger found their faces. They couldn't do too much to defend themselves. Sure, you can play it stealthy, but it got boring for me to do that all the time. The game has a neat mechanic for blending in with crowds that I very much enjoyed, and when I needed to use it, I did with great success. Also, the addition of hiring thieves, fighters, and courtesans to distract guards so you could go steal treasure was pretty fun.
My first impressions of the game, however, were very much like the first, and it doesn't pick up for a while. You don't get to assassinate anyone or even get weapons until several hours in. But yeah, after the extensive hand-holding, you finally get to start running around and doing real missions. AC 2 has equipment you can buy at various shops, paintings, treasure maps, health potions, weapon poisons, smoke bombs, and all kinds of other things. It's awesome but I didn't use half of them. Like I ever even tried smoke bombs or poisons because I'd rather just stab stuff, and the menu to select different types of a weapon is annoying because it always defaults back to the default weapon of that type. So you hit up/right for different weapon types on the D-pad. So up is my wrist blade. If I want to select my poison, I have to hit R2, move a dial around and select poison. But if I want to switch back to my sword then back to poison, I have to do the annoying radial menu again to get back to poison. Every single time you want to switch to something besides your main weapons, you have to go through the radial menu, even if you were just there. My solution was to ignore it.
All the cool stuff you get to do in the game is doled out over its entirety. This irked me for the most part too. Two examples: (1) you get a pistol near the end of the game. A PISTOL! What assassin doesn't want a pistol to snipe with? This one does. But I get it at the very end of the game where I hardly have time to play with it, and you only want me to use it in a few scripted sequences? I could have been sniping from rooftops the entire game. Lame. (2) 'super jump' - Yes, you get a super jump. Actually it's a leap technique you learn from the thieves' guild in like chapter 8 (out of 14 -- actually out of 12 because 12 and 13 are missing, which is another issue). The super jump lets you reach higher places on buildings by getting a little extra height in your reaches while climbing. This was so so so so stupid...but useful...at the same time. So I'd been trying to climb this tall tower forever. It was the only lookout point I hadn't gotten to in the city, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to scale it. I just couldn't find anywhere to jump up at some point, so I couldn't progress. It was really annoying and I kept trying to look for alternate angles, coming back to it after doing other missions, etc. Wellll, a couple hours later I did this section with the thieves' guild and they teach me how to climb better, which, you guessed it, lets me get up that tall church tower. Bullshit man. Why bother not letting you climb just a little higher for 3/4 of the game, and then giving you this giant tower to climb that you can't even climb until you do this mission, which you have no inkling that you would ever be able to reach any higher during climbs. It was just dumb. And then to make it worse, after that button was unlocked (push A while hanging to make an extended reach), like 1/2 the time I climbed after that when I just wanted to climb NORMALLY (also by holding A) it would read it as pushing A, which yeah I was doing but then holding it, and Ezio would leap up and fall back down. Constantly. It was so annoying and pointless.
One of the best things about the game was your uncle's villa that served as your headquarters. You could upgrade its buildings, get discounts from merchants there, and generally pay for its upkeep. Then, you get to reap the rewards of your hard work there by taking profit from the coffers. The coffers filled up every hour and twenty minutes. I always like games where I get my own keep or something to maintain, like one of the Neverwinter Nights expansions.
There were a lot of different types of collectibles in the game -- feathers, statuettes, assassin's seals, etc. There were also 300 treasure chests (wow!) that you could hunt for with money in them. I spent most of the game unlocking and doing everything on the map, but near the end realized I had more money than I would ever need, so much so, I calculated, that I probably didn't need to open a single treasure chest, which would have saved me a lot of time...but opening them was still fun. I haven't had as much fun going and collecting things in a game in a while, so I'm glad I liked running across rooftops and stabbing guards. I upgraded all my weapons and everything to the best available, and got the special set of armor, Altaire's armor, by completing all 6 of the assassin's tombs and getting those seals. Those were some of the most fun and challenging areas of the game, complete platforming challenges and very Prince of Persia-esque. They were huge tombs that you had to navigate your way around, and you had to be precise about it because one misstep and sometimes you were back to the beginning!
AC has a cool story, complete with a database and conspiracy flowchart showing who you've killed and who is still around. The database was very cool. I haven't mentioned yet that this game is absolutely steeped in history from the time. I know nothing about 15th century Italy, and I can't say I learned a lot, but I read a lot of factoids about palaces and chapels and popes, and I found it compelling because the designers obviously cared about the historical aspect of the game. And of course, the cities and churches and other things were painstakingly recreated I'm sure. Lots of research went into this one. The descriptions in the database often had little jokes here and there, usually pointing out ironies of papal rule or making fun of the church's brutality back then.
What else...oh, there's no death penalty. You just restart at a checkpoint. That plus the insane amount of health you get and the simplicity of fighting (X, X, X, X, X, X) means the game was REALLY easy and you could do stupid things like jump off the tallest building in the city and die and it didn't matter. Kind of lame, kind of cool. The hard parts of the game involved getting jumps just right and remaining invisible when you had to. But yeah, a failure sets you back about 30 seconds on average.
And finally, since I was talking about endings earlier, the ending of this one is cool, but it comes pretty quickly. Meaning that you're assassinating some people in memory sequence 11 and then whoooooaaahahhahah hazy dreamy stuff happens and you're transported to memory sequence 14 to kill the main conspirator! What happened to 12 and 13?! I looked it up because I'm not a huge fan of gaps in my games. Guess what. DLC! Wow really, you mean I have to buy more to get story that should have been in this game? Awesome, thanks! This isn't 'extra' stuff that's missing. It's the stuff that happened between memory 11 and 14, the stuff that you figure should be there or else they would have just named the last two memories 11 and 12. Creative design or creative marketing? You decide.
Either way, the 12...or 14..chapters of the game are lengthy enough without dragging. Overall enjoyable experience. Definitely better than AC 1. I have AC: Brotherhood sitting on my shelf as well, but I don't think I want to play it any time soon. And I just borrowed Arkham City from a friend, which will be similar to AC, so I'll probably hold off a bit on that one too. Maybe squeeze a couple other games and a little vacation in first. Good times. Oh, and Brotherhood has the multiplayer I've been excited to try out!
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