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Jan 20th, 2022 at 10:20:22 - Superliminal (PC) |
Superliminal blew me away. This actually wasn't on my wishlist. I thought it looked pretentious (my fault for being judgy). But I'd been curious about the size/perspective-shifting mechanic and when it popped up on Game Pass, I figured I'd try it. Picture me with a smile plastered on my face (punctuated by occasional furrowed brow of confusion) the entire time.
Adjectives describing playing Superliminal that I said aloud include "ridiculously cool," "so fucking cool," "trippy/a trip," and "inspirational." Seriously, the end is like therapy. As soon as I completed it, I started it over with the developer's commentary (which I plan to finish later), and got some insight on how purposeful this therapeutic angle was from the beginning.
The game reminded me in style and tone of Portal and The Stanley Parable, though the gameplay for me was wholly unique. You're led through surreal surroundings and have to manipulate the sizes and positioning of objects to proceed. You can make objects bigger or smaller by shifting how you are looking at them relative to other stuff in the environment. It's not necessarily easy, which is a commentary (as the game points out later) on how difficult it is to change your perspective, especially as you get older, and see things in new ways. I'm pretty sure toward the end there is an area with "cigarettes" that is meant to make you think about breaking bad habits.
New aspects of the perspective-shifting mechanic are added over time, such as making it work with the addition of doors, changing your own size, manipulating objects that emit light, making objects "pop" out of the environment, and so on. The game is short (3.5 hours for me), so these new elements were pretty constant. You're never using the same trick for too long before it tosses a new one at you. These usually aren't explained (which led to a few cheats on YouTube), but when you figure it out (or look it up) you're like, "OH MY GOD!" and then you have learned a new trick!
Yeah, so I absolutely loved this. Highly recommend.
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Jan 19th, 2022 at 08:46:02 - The Pedestrian (PC) |
The Pedestrian has a unique style. You are a stick figure in 2d puzzles, the faces of which are on the surfaces of other objects (road signs, monitors, architectural blueprints, etc.). As you solve puzzles, you sort of move throughout 3d areas (a university campus, subway, apartment building, etc.). There is a huge twist at the end that opens up far more complex puzzles that I am sure will be featured in any potential Pedestrian 2.
The puzzles themselves are very clever and become very challenging. I definitely experienced my share of frustration, but when I finished a puzzle, I usually didn't feel like a genius. They are typically set up like this: Your stick person begins on one piece of a puzzle. That piece has doors on the top, bottom, left, and/or right. There are other pieces too. You have to connect the pieces of the puzzles together by drawing lines between doors, through which you move your stick person. You'll have to find and move boxes (to gain height), keys (to open doors), wires (to power elevators, lasers, and other things), and various batteries. Once you connect puzzle pieces, you can't change the lines between doors or else the whole puzzle resets. And the lines are 1:1. Each door can only be connected to one other door.
So, this means that there is a lot of trial and error, especially later in the game. For at least the first half of the game, the possible combinations of doors are few enough that I could play the whole puzzle out in my head, then do it and exit. Later, it became too complex for that, and I would inch toward a solution, moving my stick figure and making connections a little bit at a time, before either solving it or realizing there was an error and resetting it.
This was fine (it's a puzzle game, after all), but there was one mechanic that I hated so, so, so, so, so much. Occasionally, puzzles will have these pieces with windows. These allow you to layer puzzle pieces and like...toggle the foreground to fall through a window and into a different puzzle piece. This is usually either done to get somewhere with no doors or to avoid a trap. I had such a hard time figuring out how exactly these windows worked. One puzzle in particular had like 5 windows, and I was trying to layer them like 3 windows deep, switching in and out of puzzle mode (where you manipulate the connections and pieces) and platforming mode (where you control the stick person) trying to fall just right to avoid lasers.
That was the first thing I looked up on YouTube. I wound up looking up several solutions on YouTube because I was getting frustrated with the windows, and whenever I started a puzzle that had a lot of pieces (especially if any had windows), I'd tense up, turn off the game, sit there, think, "No, I can do it," load it back, try and fail a lot, get frustrated, turn it off again, turn it back on, stare at the screen, and finally go to YouTube. Props to the people who made videos about this.
And that's my experience with The Pedestrian. Overall novel puzzle platformer with puzzles that increase substantially in difficulty, a cool style, and an interesting narrative premise.
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Jan 18th, 2022 at 10:02:19 - The Forgotten City (PC) |
What an interesting concept. You awake on a riverbank, are led into old Roman ruins, and discover an ancient city with inhabitants through a portal. They live under "The Golden Rule," which I first discovered when doing what I ALWAYS do first in a first-person RPG like Skyrim. (You'll probably do the same thing and if you haven't read about the game, you'll be as intrigued as me!).
Thus you are plunged into the mystery of what exactly The Golden Rule is, who created it, and how to get out of the loop caused by someone breaking it. The game itself is pretty straightforward. You explore the city and talk to its inhabitants. You pick up and follow "leads" (quests) that unravel the mystery, until you get to one of four endings (you can and should see them all through; the last one is especially rewarding, if a bit tedious to get). The game guides you through the mystery and does a good job making sure you know what to do and where to go.
The game was originally a Skyrim mod, so it looks and plays familiarly. The facial animations are pretty bad (often funny-bad) and the voice acting can be slow, but I was nevertheless immersed in the city's environment. Some little holes or oversights are apparent. For example, right at the beginning, you meet a character who doesn't want to tell you her name. Fair enough, I said. But when I opened my journal, my character had recorded her name. And it turns out her name is a REALLY big clue as to her identity and a clue to other parts of the story, which I guessed part of really, really early on all because the journal told me her name when I shouldn't have known. That was a bad oversight!
You'll be listening to a lot of dialogue, all well written and often philosophical and thought-provoking. It's rare that a game makes me really think deeply about some moral or philosophical question, but this one did, namely, how do we know the difference between right and wrong. It doesn't necessarily present arguments between characters in the most believable way, but I can look past that for what it is aiming at. Later in the game, you get a bow, which opens up some light action and platforming parts. I wouldn't say that the game is in any way difficult. It felt like a well-paced exploration.
I have to compare this to Outer Worlds, which I recently played and didn't like all that much. The main reason I didn't like Outer Worlds is that the loop is forced on you. In The Forgotten City, you control when the loop happens and you usually trigger it on purpose. You start back at the same place, as in Outer Wilds, but it's quicker and easier to get back to what you were doing. In Outer Wilds, the loop doesn't change anything. It just resets you. It doesn't open new avenues for you, except that you have knowledge that you didn't have in the previous loop (but which you had gained anyway even if there were no loop). In The Forgotten City, the loop resets the city's inhabitants, so you can lead them down different conversation paths, intervene in their actions, and so on in order to change things. The interweaving and accumulation of these changes in their knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors is what drives the story forward. I just found this all so interesting to see unfold! It's not a perfect game, but I'd recommend it for a cool story told in a different way (especially if you like Roman/Greek/Egyptian mythology).
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Jan 16th, 2022 at 11:53:48 - Outer Wilds (PC) |
I appreciate what Outer Wilds is doing, but overall did not enjoy the experience. This is a time loop game. I have played/am playing two of these recently (12 Minutes and now The Forgotten City) and therefore have few data points to compare. However, I disliked 12 Minutes considerably, whereas The Forgotten City I find extremely engaging. Outer Wilds is somewhere in between.
Outer Wilds is, perhaps more than a time loop game, an exploration game. Yes, the sun goes supernova every 22 minutes and forces you back to your home planet, but the fun lies in exploring the unique planets and other bodies in the solar system and unraveling the mystery behind an a group of space travelers long gone. Where did they come from? What were they doing? Where did they go?
The game is open-ended. You can travel nearly anywhere from the very beginning. It doesn't matter where you go first. You complete the introduction, then hop in your space rocket and fly somewhere, land, and explore. I went first to my planet's moon, and then to the next-closest planet, and outward from there. You will slowly discover strange writing, ruins, and the ever mysterious quantum objects, and begin seeing threads to follow.
I said that the planets are very creative and unique. For example, the two closest to the sun are the Hourglass Twins. The Ash Twin and the Ember Twin are next to one another, connected by a constant stream of sand Ash Twin sheds onto Ember Twin. Over the 22-minute loop, Ember Twin's caverns fill up, closing or opening some areas, and Ash Twin's surface becomes visible as sand flows away. It was a cool moment when I realized that the planets actually change over the course of the loop, and that I could actually investigate Ash Twin, which I had previously assumed was always covered in sand. If you pay attention, you will see that a lot in the solar system changes over the course of the loop. Another planet has a giant black hole in the center, and as you explore the ruins beneath, you're constantly in danger of getting sucked into it. That is theoretically neat and all, but boy is it annoying when you accidentally fall and get sent through the black hole to the edge of the solar system, where you must wait for a space station to come near (the "white hole"), which will let you warp back to the planet once its orbit aligns with the station. It wastes at least 5 minutes every time.
And that is the main issue I have with Outer Wilds. I understand that the 22-minute supernova is explained through the story. I appreciate that. But everything is intriguing enough without you being forced back to your home planet every 22 minutes! The time loop feels punishing and like it arbitrarily extends the game's length. The worst part was when I learned how the Hourglass Twins work, then solved a ton of puzzles on Ash Twin, and was ALMOST DONE, like literally running toward the end that would give me a final piece of knowledge, and the sun went supernova and back to the start I went. I had to go back to Ash Twin, wait for the sand to flow out again, and re-do all the puzzles. That kind of thing happens constantly. You're in the middle of doing something, the sun goes supernova, and you have to go back to the beginning, fly yourself back to where you were, get out of your rocket, walk back to wherever it was on the planet, if you even remember how to get there, then pick back up where you left off. I played about 6 hours and I bet at least a quarter of that time was re-treading my steps.
How to solve this problem? Well, as stated, I understand the supernova is part of the story. So perhaps some fast travel? Better controls to make flying and jetpacking around more precise? Something to make movement more fun? Artificially extended supernova time so you can always finish if you're in the middle of something. I mean, is anyone sitting there with a 22-minute timer? (Probably...). I wouldn't know if the supernova happened at 20 or 25 or 30 minutes. I'm busy exploring, reading, thinking. I know also that the two time loop games I've recently played reset the loop when you die or when you choose some action. Having that control over when to reset taken away was frustrating. As I said, I am playing The Forgotten City now (probably getting close to done), and I enjoy it so much more for a lot of reasons that I'll reflect on when I'm done. But I know that time loop games are hot right now, I expect I'll play more of them, and I'm excited to see how else this mechanic is implemented.
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