 |
|
Jul 8th, 2023 at 14:39:21 - Chicory: A Colorful Tale (PC) |
Completed last night. This is a charming game reminiscent of old-school RPGs like Earthbound, but without traditional core RPG systems like leveling up or combat (they are there, but simpler). The draw (ha-ha) here is that you get to be creative and artistic and paint things. Points for creativity for sure. You play as the new "wielder," a person (or animal...it's a world full of anthropomorphic animals) who brings color to the world with a magical paint brush. The old wielder (the titular Chicory) is depressed (mental health is a theme), and you've always wanted to be the wielder. Except...the wielder's artistic talent is only as good as the player's, which was a consistent source of humor. Nevertheless, everyone thinks that whatever you paint is magnificent, life-changing, deep (even if you paint WTF on a t-shirt that characters then wear around; create terrible portraits; or even paint nothing at all!).
All is not well in anthropomorphic painting land. The color is gone from the world. Oh no! A bad time to become the wielder. Off you go then to fight back the corruption and restore color to the world. On your journey, you'll meet many cute characters, find lots of cosmetics to equip, pick up a lot of litter, solve a lot of puzzles, and generally enjoy getting to draw and color things. Honestly, my favorite part of this game was going into a dark cave and filling the whole thing in with color. I LOVED when I got to go into caves. Filling the screens with color was so satisfying. I imagine that most players have something like this that they really enjoyed, whether it was painting portraits, coloring houses, painting characters, or whatever.
The game's length started to feel inflated by about halfway through because there are a lot of "presents" to find, which have the cosmetic items in them. I eventually started ignoring anything optional--presents, litter, decorating, side quests--because they don't make your character "better" in any way. There are no stat upgrades. I was playing instrumentally, so the extra artistic and playful stuff, I more or less skipped. There is a lot of dialogue as well; every character will tell you like 10 things. And the longer dialogues between you and main characters like Chicory in story parts can feel like they go on and on. One thing I found interesting is that because the dialogue appears quickly on the screen, I read it quickly. This is in contrast to Pentiment, which I am also playing, where the dialogue slowly appears on the screen, and thus I read it slowly. I wonder how much of my reading speed can be explained by the text speed...this would be an interesting little experiment. Certainly the depth and complexity of the dialogue is different between the two games, and Chicory features gameplay that isn't just reading text (whereas Pentiment is almost all reading text). Anyway, it started to drag toward the end when you have to complete four "wielder trials," and I was glad when it was over.
This was a cute game with a lot of charm. I wouldn't say it's like a "must play," but perhaps more so if you want to see the painting mechanics, which are pretty cool, or are interested in taking your time and playing with the art tools that it provides. If you want an old-school RPG or a Zelda game, and don't care about painting stuff, then you can find something you'll probably like better.
add a comment  - read this GameLog  |
|
Jul 8th, 2023 at 14:19:00 - Immortality (PC) |
Utterly engrossing FMV mystery, following Her Story and Telling Lies. Played in two sittings, separated by a night's sleep. This is the best scripted, best acted, and best produced of these games so far. Each one has been more complex than the last. For Immortality, they basically wrote and shot three movies. Piecing together the plots of the three movies was captivating enough, and then there's a whole other supernatural layer to make sense of (my understanding of that part was incomplete at best, and made a lot more sense after I read the plot online). I was more interested in the three movies themselves, but I guess they wanted the supernatural piece to add some mystery to the game and to say more about its themes. I feel like I have played a lot of games recently that were about art...
This game does away with the "keyword search" of Barlow's previous two games and instead uses an interesting image search to find similar images across scenes. Let's say you see a bright red apple in a scene. Click on the apple, and it will open another scene (of any of the movies) with a red apple. Click on the apple, and it'll open up yet another scene with an apple. Click on an actor and it'll take you to another scene with that actor. In this way, you build an archive of these three films that you can sort by objects, or time, or actor, or whatever. It allows you to follow symbols, stories, careers. They removed everything that I previously had found annoying about rewinding in previous games. Rewinding in this one was fast. The scenes were also shorter than Telling Lies, which had some really long ones. I found the pacing excellent. Toward the end, it does get a little bit annoying (some people hated this, but I didn't mind much) when you've found 95% of the scenes and you're trying to figure out what you need to click on to reveal what's left, what you need to actually wrap up the story.
Absolutely loved it. I couldn't stop thinking about it. Play with a controller. Trust me.
add a comment - read this GameLog |
|
Jul 8th, 2023 at 14:05:21 - Hi-Fi Rush (PC) |
I suppose I should write some entries for all the games I’ve been playing. I’ve just been trying to burn through Game Pass games while I can, before I have “crunch time” at work, then vacation, then the new semester. Last weekend, I house/dog-sat for Sasha’s mom and dedicated the days completely to sitting in air conditioning and playing games. Hi-Fi Rush is the first one I played. I think I had a smile plastered on my face the whole time through. It’s pure joy, fun, funny, action-packed. This is a rhythm action game. Imagine if you had to play Bayonetta or Devil May Cry to the beat. That’s Hi-Fi Rush. This is different than other rhythm games I’ve played because everything—every thing—moves to the beat. It’s not just that you have to attack to the beat, but enemies move and attack to the beat and everything in the environment pulses with the beat. Actually, I suppose in this way it’s like Crypt of the Necrodancer. And, since I recently completed Metal: Hellsinger, I couldn’t help compare it to that, though they are very different games. One thing they have in common is that both encourage you to keep a combo meter up (though Hi-Fi Rush doesn’t penalize you for not doing so).
It's one of those “easy to learn, difficult to master” things. The difficulty curve isn’t too high on normal, and I figured out about halfway through the game that you can button mash, and later on in the game that as long as you’re rotating your party’s attacks in your combos, you’ll pretty much kick the shit out of everything and get high scores. But you have tons of attacks, special attacks, party member attacks, dodge, parry, and everything both on the ground and in the air. There are dozens of button combinations to memorize, from the simple X X X X combo to something like X [rest] X Y [hold X] Y [now they’re airborne] X X [hold Y] Y [chain enemy] Y Y Y X [switch characters for the finisher]. Okay, I made the last one up, but you can pull off combos like that.
I don’t think I would have cared all that much about Hi-Fi Rush if the story, setting, characters, and art weren’t so great. The music was really one of my least favorite parts. I found the songs to be pretty boring rock music (compared to the much more exciting metal in Metal: Hellsinger!) that got lost in the background of everything going on on the screen anyway. But that art! Man, the attention to detail in the setting, the character animations, it’s great. Everything is colorful and vibrant. The setting is alive. One of my favorite things about the game were the other robot characters—the vacuuming robots that run around frantically when you attack, the stoner guy mechanics, the robots made to move boxes who are perpetually worried about losing their jobs, the jabs back and forth between the newer model worker robots and the older ones. They’ve all got funny one-liners, and they always say something if you try to attack them (e.g., the box-carrying robots plead for you to stop so they don’t lose their jobs). The main characters were great, the bosses were great. It was just so charming, and I was always eager to see what the next little NPC was talking about, who the next boss was (and how insane they were!).
Some of the boss fights were pretty creative, and didn’t always involve traditional fighting, though like I said, I did eventually realize that as long as you’re including your party in your combos, you can pretty much stand right next to them and button mash your way to victory. I felt cheap. This helped me beat the last two.
Definitely recommended.
add a comment - read this GameLog |
|
Jun 28th, 2023 at 19:57:03 - Citizen Sleeper (PC) |
This game has a wonderful, expertly written story that kept me in my chair long after the novelty and challenge of the gameplay wore off. Also, I'm...a slow reader. I have nearly the longest completion time for the game over on howlongtobeat.com. So, what is Citizen Sleeper? It's a narrative game with tabletop mechanics. You roll a number of dice corresponding to your character's health at the beginning of each cycle (day), and you have different outcomes for various actions depending on which dice you choose for which actions. It's an engaging loop of sleeping, getting your random dice rolls, exploring the space station, triggering events, speaking with characters, and sleeping again to get new dice rolls and do it again the next cycle. It adds a constant forward momentum to the game.
That forward momentum is consistently interesting in terms of narrative, but not in terms of gameplay, which is the same at hour 20 as hour 1. Except, once you start spending skill points (obtained through completing "drives" [aka quests]), the tension of poor dice rolls ("Oh no, I have to slot a 3 into this dangerous action! It's got a good chance for a negative outcome with nasty penalties!") dissipates ("Ah, that +2 modifier on every single skill means that anything 4 and above is perfect, and even 1s are only moderately risky! I'll just sink into my chair and read the story then.").
And so, really, that's what Citizen Sleeper becomes: reading a good story. I would have liked the whole thing to be half as long, and the three free DLC added a chunk of story too. But man, I really enjoyed the tale. Basically, you are a "sleeper," which is (and I'm simplifying) a human consciousness semi-transplanted into an android. You wake up on The Eye, a space station with a few factions and a history rooted in corporate expansion and exploitation. You eke out survival with other people, meet them, learn their stories, solve their problems, learn the history of The Eye, become embroiled in its underbelly. But you're special. You're being hunted. By whom? Why? Do you even want to stay here? You can try to leave, you can stay. There are a variety of endings (I think I read 8), plus a couple endings in the DLC, which brings a larger threat to The Eye.
This was a good one, AND, I found out was made by the same person who created In Other Waters (the interface has a similar feeling), which was quite interesting, too (and, I realize, also places you in the role of a newly awoken AI). Citizen Sleeper 2 has been announced, and I hope the quality surpasses this one. Shorter, though, I hope. I'd rather read a good 20-hour book than have 5 hours of good story and gameplay, but then followed by 15 hours of good story and mundane gameplay. Or maybe I should learn to read faster.
add a comment - read this GameLog |
