Blogging the experience of gameplayhttps://www.gamelog.cl/gamers/GamerPage.php?idgamer=1269https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7489Going 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. Sat, 07 Sep 2024 11:21:45 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7489&iddiary=13304https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7797MGSV, 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! Sat, 07 Sep 2024 10:56:50 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7797&iddiary=13303https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7800I 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!Sat, 07 Sep 2024 10:10:47 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7800&iddiary=13302https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7779Retiring this. Another surprise freebie from my wishlist on Amazon Luna, and the third game I've played on that cloud gaming platform. This was more stable than Devil May Cry 5, no crashes at all. Though I didn't play for too, too long. ULTRAKILL is really freaking hard. It's a boomer shooter with new Doom vibes because, as with new Doom, you regain health by getting close to an enemy and getting their blood on you (aka attacking them at point blank). So you have to be aggressive. I made it to what, I learned, is considered the boss that forces you to get good at the game, V2. It's challenging up to that point, but you learn each enemy and you can methodically get through the levels. V2...killed me like 100 times. I got him pretty close to death two or three times, but man, he was frustrating! He's hard to hit, super fast, flies and slides around like crazy. He's actually an upgraded version of your character (so I imagine how annoying I am to the enemies!). I was trying to blame this on Amazon Luna, but honestly it's my fault. I couldn't learn him well enough. I mean, I learned his attacks, and I kind of figured out how he choreographs them. But then once you do that, you need to be able to dodge the attacks that need to be dodged, parry the attacks that need to be parried (the shotgun blasts), and do all that while constantly zipping around yourself and shooting at him. It's so fast, and I am having the horrifying thought, "Am I too old for this?!", like are my reflexes just not what they used to be?! Oh no... The guns are fun and the movement is tight. Each gun (that I got) has two special attacks. For example, the pistol has a charge attack and a neat one where you toss a coin in the air, then shoot the coin, which ricochets with a 100% chance to hit an enemy. The shotgun has a grenade launcher and a charged shot that you have to be careful with lest you blow yourself up. The machine gun can deploy mines and has some sort of exploding scattershot. The whole thing is wrapped up in that low-fi boomer shooter aesthetic where it looks like Quake. The music was great, lots of pounding industrial/metal music, with other moments of classical and whatnot. I would have liked to play more of this, see what other guns, enemies, and bosses there are, but V2 is kicking my butt, and there wasn't all that much compelling me forward anyway, despite it being a tight game and obviously at the top of the boomer shooter genre. Fri, 09 Aug 2024 15:18:34 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7779&iddiary=13287https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7778Oooh, I forgot to write an entry for this one. This was a really cool adventure puzzle game, sort of like a Limbo or Inside (because apparently same lead designer). It gets better as it goes on, as it becomes more complex. I didn't know what exactly I was doing for most of the time (like, the story is...??...until you start to make some educated guesses about why you are doing what you're doing later). But the gist of it is that you're this bug guy and you solve puzzles in the world by using these orbs/spheres/moons that you pick up and carry around. The gimmick is that you can go inside of each sphere, and inside of each sphere is another world, with its own puzzles. When you get a second colored sphere, you'll realize that you can take it inside of the first one. Like, whenever you enter or exit a sphere, you take what you are holding, which could be a sphere, or later, a sphere within a sphere within a sphere. It gets pretty mind-bending later on, as you are figuring out how to get spheres inside spheres to solve this or that puzzle. There are also some boss fights, which were fun. The whole aesthetic of the game is mysterious and otherworldly. All the other creatures, the environments, the music, it's very like bio-mechanical sci-fi type stuff. I thought I would like this, and sure enough, it landed. Really creative, super well designed, never played anything quite like it. Highly recommend. Fri, 09 Aug 2024 15:03:10 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7778&iddiary=13286https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7780I bought this for the interesting premise. You get inside Freud’s head and help him dig into his crisis, as well as help him conduct psychotherapy on his patients. It's a point-and-click with a lot of reading and listening to Freud unraveling. Most of the game takes place in his office, where you can click on things (ooh, aah!), solve the same frustrating Egyptian hieroglyphics puzzle over and over (ooh, aah!), treat patients, and watch Freud spiral. As such, the game is quite small and quickly becomes repetitive. The puzzle, for example, is an artifact that Freud acquired during his travels. It spins like a slot machine, and you have to use a legend to decipher the hieroglyphics that appear on its face. Easy enough, but they are out of order, and to put them in order, you just have to guess at what the hell it wants you to do. The words will form a sentence, but sometimes it's a question, sometimes the independent clause is first, sometimes it's second, sometimes it's just worded in a strange way. You have no way of knowing any of this, so you will assemble the four images in all possible configurations until you happen to get the correct order. Super annoying. So far, the resulting sentences have just been Freud posing existential questions to himself. I thought the most interesting part would be conducting psychoanalysis. Well, when this game says that's what you're going to do, by god, that's what you're going to do! You get some excerpts/summaries of Freud's writing, an encyclopedia of psychoanalysis terminology, a breakdown of mental diseases, types of patients, dream symbolism, and so on. As your patients lay on the couch, you are sort of cross-referencing what they are saying with all this information to get to the root of their problem and diagnose them. This is interesting for sure, but I think the problem is, well, most psychologists don't do this anymore. This isn't what clinical mental health counseling or social work is. So, trying to play this, I could not help but constantly be like, "No, don't ask that!" or "He should do this..." or "But that's not what the patient said..." This is a case where my prior knowledge and experience probably got in the way of "becoming" Freud. He's a hard person to become as it is, considering the smoking, cocaine addiction, obsession with sex, and so on. In addition to treating patients and posing existential questions to yourself, you also need to manage Freud's finances. To do this, you go out to fancy places and schmooze rich people, trying to get patrons to fund your research because your books are selling poorly and the newspapers are calling you a fraud. In all the game's social interactions, you have to choose dialogue options that will appeal to the other person, or get them to do what you want. For potential patrons, this might mean sucking up to them, appealing to their desires. For patients, this might mean taking an approach that aligns with their sickness (e.g., don't be direct if they are suffering from anxiety because it will make it worse). Characters make facial expressions and you can see patients' hearts beat, so you can read them. The game also visualizes the id, superego, and ego as layers in the head. As you're appealing to characters, or digging around during treatment trying to find causes of their problems, you identify topics and "move them" from the id to the level of conscious awareness. Pretty neat. Anyway, at this point I might have written as long as I played, and I don't feel like finishing. The cases "solve" themselves as you scrutinize case files for a magnifying glass icon to click on important words, and I've gotten bored of listening to Freud. The marketing material for this game heralds the "visionary game designer" who made it and goes on about how this is the pinnacle of Italian game design. I should have been wary of that. It's a neat idea for sure, and obviously a lot of knowledge and passion is on display here, but it is not a good time in practice. Fri, 02 Aug 2024 13:18:29 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7780&iddiary=13285https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7777This is a narrative "your choices matter" game with a unique art style and a really compelling story. However, it made me realize that Detroit: Become Human will overshadow any of these types of games. I have been thinking about that one forever, and have even gone out of my way to read some research on it and talk to someone who studied it. Anyway, trying not to make constant comparisons because As Dusk Falls is great on its own. This is a NARRATIVE game, strong emphasis. It tells the story of two families whose paths cross during a motel hold-up and ensuing hostage situation. There are a variety of main characters, several of whom you "control" over the course of six chapters. Some are more central than others, including the father and daughter of the family that is held hostage in the motel and the youngest brother of the family who is holding up the motel. You'll learn about events leading up to the hostage situation from both sides, about relationships and hard decisions and whatnot affecting each family and their motivations. That is, it's easy to just say "hostage takers bad," but as that younger brother says, their family was dealt a bad hand. It raises all sorts of ethical questions and made me think about how people handle inter- and intra-personal conflict and process trauma. You'll also fast-forward years later and see what happened to the main characters. Your narrative choices do matter, do change the outcome of characters' trajectories. Most of the main characters have a variety of different outcomes, and most of them can die. As Dusk Falls pulls a card from Detroit and shows you the choices you made and their outcomes for each chapter in a narrative chart, along with what percentage of players made the same choice as you. It also encourages you to go back and replay sections to see alternate outcomes. It's all really well done. Another interesting feature, which I didn't get to try out, is that you can play co-op or online, and everyone gets a "vote" in the dialogue choices. I would have played this with a friend and done that, but Game Pass expires in a few days and there wasn't time. When I said that you "control" characters, I am referring to the fact that the only inputs required from players are selecting occasional dialogue options and pressing a button during QTEs. This isn't Detroit or The Walking Dead where you actually move your characters through the world. That's fine, as the art style was this cool blend of realistic/comic-bookish/stop-motion animation. I could watch it all day long! But I do wish that the QTEs were more engaging. When I say that you press a button, I mean that literally: you press ONE button, the same one, every time, with no variation. It doesn't challenge you in changing which button, there are no "up with the left stick and down with the right stick" prompts, no button mashing. This is great for accessibility, but I wonder why they didn't have an option to make it more engaging. I played the game reclining with a controller or mouse held lazily in one hand, finger on A or LMB. I really enjoyed the ending(s) that I got. You would probably call it the good ending. And there is something that happens at the end that is open to interpretation and sets up for a sequel, which I hope it gets. Thu, 01 Aug 2024 06:03:10 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7777&iddiary=13284https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7721Finished this today, having been playing it on and off for months. It's an incredibly polished Portal mod, like Valve quality. The story is fun and fills in gaps after Portal 2. One might say this is basically Portal 3. The puzzles are creative and often challenging, but not overly complicated or difficult. I looked at a walkthrough once, and had a head-smacking moment because that solution relied on thinking about time, which I think I had purged from my memory after that "4d" Portal mod. I'm proud of myself though for sticking with it and not looking anything up aside from that. Revolution introduces a couple new mechanics in later chapters. One is pneumatic tubes that suck cubes (and sometimes test subjects) through them. Another is like portal laser redirection cubes. Normal laser redirection cubes just redirect lasers. The portal ones come in pairs. If you put one in front of a laser, the laser comes out of the other cube. This all adds to the dynamism of how different elements can interact. I thoroughly enjoyed Revolution's puzzles. You will spend a chunk of the games walking through the "backrooms" and doing light puzzle-solving, as you follow around new personality spheres, learning more about the Aperture facility and going from area to area. So, interestingly, and unlike other Portal games and mods I've played, the run time isn't a reflection of how long you're solving puzzles, but also includes a good amount of walking. The personality spheres are well written and acted, so I enjoyed the backrooms parts. They were also a nice break from completing puzzles! Highly, highly recommended Portal mod, best one I've played.Mon, 29 Jul 2024 09:18:11 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7721&iddiary=13283https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7776Another interesting and stylish game that I am retiring because (a) it's repetitive; (b) it's easy; (c) there's hardly any narrative; and (d) the UI sucks. Why is it interesting? What do I like about it? It's a novel take on tower defense wherein, aside from placing "towers," you also control a character as in an action-RPG. I read a lot of reviews talking about how brand new this is, but it seems no one has played Sanctum! Granted, that is more traditional tower defense, and it's merged with FPS instead of action-RPG, but it's the same basic idea. You set up your defenses and then get your hands dirty killing enemies alongside your towers as they come in waves. Except the "towers" in Kunitsu-Gami are villagers whom you rescue. Villagers can be assigned different roles (e.g., woodcutter, archer, sumo wrestler, shaman, etc.), and each has strengths and weaknesses for your defense. For example, woodcutters are basic melee units that can be upgraded to chase demons; archers are basic ranged units; sumo wrestlers are like tanks; shamans are healers; etc. Back up. Here's the set-up. You are a spirit guardian of a priestly type woman. Some demonic presence has defiled a holy mountain and all the villages along the path to its summit. You go from village to village rescuing the villagers and cleansing the corruption. To cleanse the corruption, there are two "phases" in each village: day and night (or, preparation and combat). In the day phase, you search the village, purge defilement (which provides currency that you need to assign roles to villagers and to cleanse torii gates), free villagers (whom you can then assign combat roles or building tasks), clear obstructions on the path, and ultimately carve a path through the corruption for the woman to follow to destroy corrupted torii gates. In the day phase, you'll also want to pay attention to where the corrupted torii gates are, because that's where demons will come from, where the woman is along the path (can the demons flank her? what paths do you need to defend?), and you need to set up your villager defenses. During the nighttime, you defend against waves of demons who are trying to kill the woman. Rinse and repeat until the woman gets past all the torii gates. Once you have freed a village of the corruption, you often gain access to a boss battle. Boss battles let you use the villagers from the previous village, assign them roles, and tackle a unique challenge. They usually aren't that hard, but they are each different, require some special strategies, and reward you with a new mask (villager role). My favorite was the centipede boss, which requires you to assign villagers to light torches around the arena. Once all the torches are lit, the boss's weak spots are exposed and you can assign everyone to attack. He'll eventually get away and extinguish all the flames, plunging the level in dangerous darkness so he can prowl around. He'll also call down a bunch of worm minions, who make a beeline for the woman. So, you have to balance defending her with lighting the torches. Rinse and repeat until boss is dead. Upon freeing a village, it also becomes a "base" and you can visit daily to assign villagers to repair things, and you can visit the woman and change equipment and upgrade villager combat roles. All bases are basically the same, and after every battle, you can revisit every liberated village for rewards. This means that the farther along you go, the more time you will spend just going from liberated village to liberated village collecting money, rations, and checking on building progress. I think this could have been handled better via menus instead of requiring you to actually go to 10 different villages after EVERY fight to check on things. Anyway, that's how the game works. (a) and (b). Tower defense is an inherently repetitive genre. You defend against waves of enemies. But the excitement comes as the waves get longer/faster/harder, new enemies are introduced, you get new units, you must devise new strategies, and so on. If the game is too easy, then new enemies don't present a challenge, you don't need to devise new strategies, and your new units may not seem to matter much. Such is the case here. I played about half the game, and never even came close to dying during the village purges. I did die on a couple of the boss fights, but once you figure out a trick for them, they're easy. Your character is very powerful and can effectively hold down more than one lane of enemies alone. Pretty much every level could be solved by moving the woman to a place free of too many junctions, then just completely surrounding her with the most powerful units, then running around killing most everything myself. The "village repair" part, as I've said, is also monotonous. And although the third-person combat is smooth and has a satisfying feel, it's also simple. There are a few different combos, one of note that lets you attack airborne enemies, and the other two or three are just variations on the same thing. You can also block and dodge, which you will rarely need to do. I pretty much went left click, left click, left click, right click (the most powerful combo) all level every level to win. As the hours went by, and I hit the halfway mark, I decided I did not need to keep doing this! (c). Believe it or not, I've already described the extent of the narrative. There are a bunch of collectibles you can get that basically serve as encyclopedia entries about Japanese culture, if that counts as narrative for you, and other collectibles that give you the slightest perks and that I found mostly useless. So the narrative is not a compelling reason to play. (d). Ah, the UI! So many questions about UI elements. First of all, several things are frustrating because the game is quite stylish and goes for style over substance and functionality. Example: When placing villagers on the map, you cannot scroll the map outside of where your character is. Why? I have no idea. This means that you have to physically run to where you want to place villagers. Then, you have to call the villagers to you. Then, you can place them where you are. If you decide you want to place some of them elsewhere, you have to run over there, call them there, then place them. Example: When assigning roles to villagers, you can only assign roles to those who are right next to you. You can cycle through villagers, but it will only show those right next to you. And I mean RIGHT next to you. If there is a villager like 3 feet away from you, you need to exit the management screen, move 3 feet to your left, open it, and then assign the role. The same thing applies to healing villagers, which is especially frustrating during combat when there are a lot of things that will highlight and you are trying to mouse over the specific villager you want to heal, or you have to keep moving around opening the management window trying to get close enough to that one villager so that they appear as healable. Given that the day cycle is on a timer, these two oversights are especially frustrating. All the extra actions you have to take to manage villagers is a waste of time and makes it so you will have to fight through extra night cycles. These functions could have all been handled on the map. Open the map, select villagers to move and move them from there. You should also be able to move from the map or villager movement menu to the role assignment menu. You should also be able to "group" villagers by proximity or role type. Like, if I've set up a defense around the woman, but I want to move those villagers together, I should be able to select and move them all together instead of having to run to where I want them, open the management screen, tab to each one, taking care not to select any villager who isn't in that group (because it's easy to select the wrong one!), and move them to where I am. Final example of bad UI: Equipping mazo talismans is a pain in the ass. These trinkets provide miniscule buffs and are not even worth messing with in the first place. There are about 100 of them. They are listed in numerical order on a scroll, but you do not find them in numerical order, and it shows you ALL of them instead of just the ones you own. If you find talisman #54, you have to literally scroll through 54 pages to equip it. You can "jump sections" but that requires knowing which section it's in and then still scrolling through all the talismans in that section. I finally realized that you can "favorite" talismans and then sort by favorites. But why is there no option to sort by "owned" so you can just see the ones you actually have? This drove me crazy. Like, I actually did have like talismans #3, 30, 50, and 80 or something. Scroll scroll scroll... There are several other annoying UI things. Alongside the fact that the game became repetitive and is not that hard, the UI issues are harder to overlook. It's still a fun game with great art and music. The enemy models are sick to look at. There are some cool ideas here. It knows what it is trying to do and focuses on those elements of the game. But man, I think the UI stuff was the most frustrating and is what killed it. I can handle repetition if it's still fun, but trying to manage villagers with the UI kept making me wonder why they didn't implement this or that little feature. Maybe they will make a sequel with improvements. Mon, 29 Jul 2024 09:09:45 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7776&iddiary=13282https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7772I was into this for a while and then lost interest. It's a neat game, like a point-and-click where you decipher hieroglyphic languages. Here's an example from the very beginning. You encounter another person, who speaks to you. They speak in hieroglyphics, and you don't know what they mean. However, the person gestures to you as they say a word, then to themselves as they say another word. Maybe they said "you" and "me." They gesture to you, then to themselves, then to a closed door. Maybe "you help me open the door"? When you help them, they say something and then leave. "Thanks"? "Goodbye"? You proceed to a hallway with carvings that tell a story. Again, you don't know any of the hierogphyics' meanings, but you figure something out about people following a sun god, then some warriors barring the way to a temple. Proceed, and you'll encounter more NPCs in various situations who say a few lines, gesture, and you start to see that this is a game about figuring out what the heck people are saying by talking to them, interpreting context cues, and observing your surroundings. You have a journal wherein you are occasionally presented with pages with images and you can match the hieroglyphics that you have discovered (and what you think they mean) with the images. You can type up to 20 characters of guesses for each hieroglyphic in your journal. So, you might encounter an NPC and they say "You help me go/move/create ______ to the temple/church/worship." In this case, you've got a couple guesses for the symbols for what might be go or move or create and temple or church or worship, and then you haven't guessed the blank. The more NPCs you talk to and objects you interact with, the more context you have for each word. However, this makes it hard too, because the more situations in which you encounter a word, often times the more potential meanings it seems to have. There are a total of five languages to learn, each used by some type or class of person in the city. Admittedly, I only finished the first language, got kind of frustrated/bored, and looked up a lot about the game online, then decided I didn't care to finish. There are a few reasons I got frustrated/bored. 1. There is a lot of backtracking, slow movement, and no map. I spent more time trying to remember how to get to various rooms than actually thinking about solving puzzles. I read that there is a good reason for there being no map, but that it doesn't become apparent until later in the game. Well, in the first part of the city, I can tell you that it sucks without a map. And you have to go through every screen, watching your character run and run and run. It would be nice to double-click on a door and have your character go straight to the next room. Like, I know I need to go to a place 8 rooms from here. Why can't I just GO there instead of click click click and watch him run through 8 rooms (and then back, and forth, and back, and forth...). 2. You can make various plausible interpretations of some hieroglyphs, and this became frustrating. The languages are actually pretty simple, and I understand why they need to be for the sake of making the language game work, but I kept overthinking, like assigning more complex or nuanced meanings to symbols than was actually the case. This led to me getting stuck for long periods of time. Until I realized that... 3. It solves words for you. This one I really didn't like. When you are working on the journal, sometimes (or all the time?) if you just slot the correct hieroglyphic with the correct image, it will automatically reveal the meaning, even if that's not what you guessed. So all your hard interpretive work is wiped away in favor of a process-of-elimination matching game. The more I played, the more Chants of Sennaar reminded me of The Case of the Golden Idol, which left a really sour taste in my mouth with bugs at the end where it was auto-solving scenes. In the end, I felt like I had the gist of the gameplay and puzzling, and that it would just be doing the same thing with four more languages, possibly with more fun challenge, but also possibly with the ability just to cheese the whole thing by doing process of elimination. The story in the first part of the city isn't terribly compelling, though I am sure it becomes more interesting. Even though my experiences with the last two word/mystery games I've played (this and Case of the Golden Idol) haven't been great, I am still interested in Return of the Obra Dinn and Heaven's Vault. But, it is possible that this is a genre that just doesn't click with me. Will determine that after those other two games! Mon, 29 Jul 2024 08:15:45 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7772&iddiary=13281