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Kill Knight (PC) by dkirschner (Oct 18th, 2026 at 15:28:37) |
Retiring this one too. It's a twin-stick shooter / bullet hell type of thing mixed with modern Doom. Slick, for sure, but I didn't know it would be so arcade-y. There's not much story to speak of, and it's basically a test of mastering the controls to beat, with additional motivation provided by leaderboards. It is fun, intense, for sure, but as with Civ 6 and Noita (although Kill Knight isn't long per se), I don't have the patience right now to commit to it. I might be at a point where I'm exhausted by more open-ended or twitch-based games. I could feel it with Drop Duchy (roguelite fatigue?), which I saw through to the end, but perhaps I should find something more story-heavy with a clearly defined ending for next.
Anyway, like I said, Kill Knight is slick. The controls gel really well. You use RT to shoot pistols, circle to melee attack, and LT to shoot like a shotgun spread. All the attacks synergize in different ways. You have to use melee to get shotgun ammo, for example, which incentivizes running up and slicing enemies. Each attack generates some kind of resource that you need for other attacks (or health, very important!), so you have to vary attacks. It really does feel like a twin stick shooter / bullet hell version of the newer Doom games. I think that's about it...
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Noita (PC) by dkirschner (Oct 18th, 2026 at 15:12:28) |
My first thought was "this is like Spelunky." And of course it is because it's another roguelike where you go down, down, down into the depths, and the only way you get better is to die a hundred times, learn what killed you and why, and just skill up. Also learning the wand system, which is one of the two things that make this stand apart. The other is the pixelated destructible environments.
There are huuuuuundreds of enemies, spells, and perks. I saw like 5% of stuff and made it to the third "biome" a few times. In my longer runs, I had cool wands and spells, like spells that made my projectiles home or explode or that covered a wide range. The way it works is that each wand you find has stats (which seem to just randomly vary), including some number of spell slots. You can find/purchase spells, and you can move them around between wands. This means you can load up your favorite wand with a variety of useful/synergistic spells that'll help you kill enemies, move around, and explore the biomes. Perks are also helpful, like ones that make you immune to certain elements or that give you a little ghost companion to augment your damage output.
The destructible environments are cool. Each pixel is categorized as a type of material (e.g., wood, water, coal, gunpowder...), and they have various interactions. Wood burns, for example, so if you shoot a lantern and it falls on wood, it'll light up and maybe collapse. If you're on fire, go find water to put yourself out. I don't know what "blood" does, but I saw that it ticks up to 100% as you stand in it. Acid poisons you. Occasionally stuff blew up and I wasn't sure why. I'm sure there are a lot more interactions. It reminded me of Divinity: Original Sin 2's elemental combat system.
Anyway, so what this looks like while playing is that you're zooming around (you have a jetpack and can float a bit; this replaces a typical game's jump), firing spells and getting fired at by enemies, blowing up the environment, trying to get gold (to purchase wands and spells), find secrets, do whatever, and ultimately get to the bottom of the biome, where you enter a portal and can buy upgrades and rearrange your spells, and then you go to the next biome. There is often a lot of fire/poison/projectiles/etc. on screen at once and it can feel pretty hectic.
I certainly appreciate the game and the ways that it makes something like Spelunky 2 feel traditional. There's a ton of customization with the wands, strategy in manipulating the environment, and so many things to discover. But having recently bashed my head against the Spelunky 2 roguelike wall for a while, I realize I have little interest in a similar head-bashing-against-the-wall experience playing Noita.
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Fallout 4 (PS4) by jp (Oct 17th, 2026 at 17:37:02) |
Ugh. I'm not sure I want to continue playing. We'll see.
I've hit level 7 and I would say that the experience so far is really mixed. The game seems to want to encourage scavenging all the things. But, you hit a weight limit super fast - and it becomes really annoying to manage that, especially since you can't fast travel when you're encumbered. So, why bother?
I've also picked up all kinds of things that...I can't do anything with? Tings have "value" but I've yet to run into a store or any place where I can sell. So far everything has involved killing all the raiders/enemies - and the towns I've been setting up/helping out (two so far) don't have shops. Though I think I can build one if I get the materials? (something to try out the next time I play).
I also nearly worked myself into an unrecoverable position - I left a car manufacturing plant (running away from enemies) only to load immediately into 4 enemies right there. I don't know how I was able to survive them - a lot of luck I think, and more than a few tries. But it was really bad. I might have quit there if a few more tries hadn't worked out...
Also, so far at least, there's surprisingly little in the way of story/narrative. I'm surprised because it's a Bethesda game - so I was expecting a lot more.
I'm ignoring the wonky glitches and weird graphical things because that would be a bit unfair at this point (old game and all that, and I don't think it downloaded an update because I think the game's content servers are offline by now?)
Anyways, we'll see how much further I go...
Oh! The other thing that's really annoying is how hard/rare it is to find the item that decontaminates you such that you can heal back up. Every rad lowers your max health, but getting rid of rad has been SUPER hard/rare. Most of my time I'm running around with 1/2 health just because of the rad capping it.
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Shroom and Gloom (PC) by jp (Oct 17th, 2026 at 17:02:29) |
I played this enough to complete a full run with the starter character (this unlocked new characters - but I haven't gone back to play since). And WOW, the final boss fight was super stressful and cool. I'm feeling kind of lucky that I beat it on my first try actually. First try at the boss, not first run. I might have been 3 or four runs before I got that far...
..it's an interesting game! There's a new element in the "safe areas" where you also have a (separate) deck of cards that lets you do things in the safe areas - find new cards, upgrade stuff, and that sort of thing. When you get new cards they can either be for the combat part of the game or for the safe zones, and there's some neat interactions there. Interestingly, when you rest at a safe zone it can have negative consequences - but you only want to do it to draw a new hand of safe zone cards. I'm not sure I entirely understood how everything here worked - lots of card play reduces the "danger rating", but I don't know if it matters at all other than resting there. As in, does leaving a safe zone with a high danger rating mean harder combat later? A less safe state for the next safe zone? All of this I couldn't figure out from what I've played so far.
There was some stuff I thought was a bit unfair - there are some things in the safe zone that you can play a card to unlock, but some require multiple cards - and more than once I left a safe zone without having unlocked the thing. It felt like I had wasted those cards on a thing I didn't know I couldn't unlock - and as far as I could tell, the progress towards unlocking is reset when you leave.
Visually, the game is so cool - it's like a slicker version of Inscryption.
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Mewgenics (PC) by jp (Oct 17th, 2026 at 16:52:57) |
I've been enjoying this a lot more than I expected. It's crass and adolescent in ways I no longer find funny or even charming or endearing - but the game's design is really interesting to me. So, I've just been ignoring the representational aspects to focus on gameplay.
So, it's a turn-based tactical rogue-like game. You have a squad of max 4 cats and must fight enemies while staying healthy and alive during a "run" - basically a series of fights with some treasure and shopping and "narrative" encounters. So far I've been unlocking new locations that let you go "deeper" (it also branches) and I'm curious how "deep" (i.e. long) each run can get. It's getting longer such that I cannot play a run over lunch break any more - having to save, stop, and resume the next day.
But...here's some fun/clever game design:
1. The cats are random in their stats and so on - BUT the game layers "classes" on top of that, that really help you shape what your team can do. The classes are basically "tags" (like dog tabs, but for cats) than mod the cat - give them random within-class abilities, and off you go. I was worried that the game would be too random, but here you can adapt the roles to the cats you have and try to have a well-balanced team for the runs. I've unlocked two new classes so far (it's vanilla fantasy in this sense: fighter, mage, archer,etc.): the cleric and the thief. I'd be surprised if there aren't a ton more. We'll see.
2. Once you finish a run. That's it for those cats. You've levelled them up and so on, but they can never venture out again. Sure, you can have them stick around for breeding (I can't tell if levelled up cats with good stats because they've levelled up have kittens with higher stats)...but that's it. So, you can't stick to a team - it really forces you to experiment with new cats (with different skills, etc. - while still giving you some control, see above).
3. There's durability on all the gear you find. Again, you can use stuff a few times before it breaks/runs out - but mostly you'll be using new things and such. Again, encourages experimentation. I don't think I've seen a duplicate item yet?
Things I'm not so sure about...
1. There's base building, but it seems REALLY slow and grindy. Mostly it involves donating cats to NPS, but the 2nd round of donations all need at least 10 cats...which seems like a lot to me.
2. You also have to provide for "happiness" in your base - happier cats breed more often, unhappy ones get into fights - and they can (and do) kill each other! (winner gets a buff - but if it's a veteran, the buff doesn't matter? or maybe it does for breeding)
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SUPERHOT (PC) by dkirschner |
| Very cool. Indeed, it is an innovative shooter. |
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most recent entry: Thursday 16 July, 2020
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"SUPERHOT is the most innovative shooter I've played in years." The joke makes sense now. Goodness, what a meme. Seriously though, this game is cool. They managed to make an FPS feel like a puzzle game. The passage of time is tied to movement. When you move, time passes. When you stand still, time freezes (actually, it moves really, really slowly so you can't pause and think too long).
If you've played Pony Island and Hotline Miami, SUPERHOT feels like the two had a baby. A baby that can slow time. The combat is stylish and smooth as butter like in Hotline Miami. If you imagine that Hotline Miami had a slow time mechanic, it would basically be this with a top-down view. The Pony Island comparison is for the story and the 2D parts. It's got this narrative about hackers and mind control and some malicious entity. The unnamed entity hassling you is basically Lucifer from Pony Island, but not quite as hellish.
Gameplay wise, you progress through various levels killing "red dudes." That's it. That's the game. You can punch, pick up objects, hit enemies with objects, throw objects at enemies, and shoot guns. If you throw an object at an enemy holding a gun, he drops the gun. Later on, you get a cool teleport ability. So you can do this sweet ballet like pick up a vase, hurl it at an enemy with a handgun, sidestep the bullet that he shot at you, rush him and take the handgun when he drops it, shoot him, whirl around and narrowly dodge 6 shotgun shells, shoot that guy, see another enemy materialize with an assault rifle, teleport into him (you actually inhabit his body), turn (in your new body), fire at three enemies coming your way and hit them all with one clip. End level. And remember, every time you stop, time stops. Enemies only move and shoot when you move. It's like staccato FPS. When you complete a level, you're treated to a replay without the pauses. You think, "Wow, that took a few minutes, but it was only 20 seconds in real-time!"
After you finish, there are a ton of challenges, an endless mode, and the clever marketing meme tying into the meta-story after the credits. They also just released a standalone DLC that is free if you already own SUPERHOT on Steam. Lucky me! Time to kill some more red dudes.
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