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Sep 19th, 2022 at 06:57:15 - In Sound Mind (PC) |
I had zero expectations for this. Never heard of it before seeing it free on Epic. It seemed like a nontraditional horror/FPS with some trippy visuals. What did I get? A story-heavy game about a psychologist unraveling the mystery of his patients’ deaths, a government conspiracy, and his own psychosis. It's a VERY clever premise as presented. About 3/4 of the way through, I had a sad feeling that it was moving toward a more generic central plot and that the setup wouldn't deliver, but it mostly does. I even teared up at the end. It was so SWEET and I love cats.
You wake up in the basement of a three-story building. Eventually, you (the player) start to realize who you (the character) are. You find your office, your home (there’s a portal to it, don’t ask), a talking cat, and lots of mysterious purple substance that looks like radioactive waste. Most areas in the building are blocked off. The game is divided into "tapes," which you find through a series of other portals into your patients’ homes. Like a metroidvania, new parts of the building open up as you gain new items in each tape (e.g., a piece of glass to cut through police tape or smash boards, a radio device to jam electric boxes, etc.). The tapes are your recorded sessions with patients and the game proceeds as you play through each tape, transported into some hellish version of the patients’ realities. In each of their tapes, you trace their descent into madness, fight them in truly epic boss battles that span most of the tape, and bring some closure to their part of the story. But it only deepens the overall mystery and their connection to one another.
In Sound Mind shines in numerous areas, but I'll highlight the epic boss battles. Since the tapes are the patients' realities, you might imagine that the patients are omnipresent in each level. Good guess! Sometimes the entire tape feels like a boss battle. Not only are the tapes set where the patients finally lost it (a ravaged supermarket; a lighthouse and surrounding beaches; a state park; industrial mining operation), but the patients are there, manifested in horrific versions of themselves. It's hard to choose which one to talk about. The first one might have been my overall favorite tape. The second one presented me with the most tense moments of the game. The third one had the longest and most epic boss battle. The fourth one was probably the least impressive. And the final boss battle was whatever (he pesters you throughout the game and looks like a doddering Freddy Krueger).
The first tape is for a patient who can't handle other people looking at her. You (her psychologist) try exposure therapy and have her go out to a familiar local supermarket. She can do that, feels comfortable there. But then it closes, pushed out of business by the game's version of Wal-Mart. She goes there and, long story short, smashes it up and kills herself with broken glass. You get a piece of said glass, which is a creative tool for the rest of the game. Not only does it cut police tape and smash boards, but if you hold it up, it highlights objects (key progression objects, upgrades, electrical grids) behind you. They remain highlighted for like 10 seconds after you put the mirror down. So in this way, you can find hidden keys, health upgrades, figure out how to open electronically locked doors, see hidden paths, and so on. It's pretty neat!
In the third boss battle, you fight a man who is very angry over losing his job, transformed into a bull-head-shaped truck engine that zooms around the map trying to kill you. You basically lure it from place to place as you develop a way to pacify it. This involves a big puzzle synthesizing a drug, navigating a conveyor belt maze, completing a puzzle with fuses to lift an elevator and navigate a power grid, avoiding the bull in a train yard, and more. One of my favorite parts was in the second boss battle where you are fighting "the darkness." You have one fuse and have to get through dark areas by sprinting from fuse box to fuse box trying to create lit areas so the darkness wouldn't get you. Scary!
Sometimes, the levels can feel a bit long though. This is due to the game's main weakness: its combat (not good for an FPS!). Shooting is very basic and enemies dart around too much for the guns to handle. It is the least fun part of the game. There is basically one enemy type, besides the bosses. It does have a couple variations, but they both jerk around and are hard to shoot in the head. Stealth is also totally broken. I may have snuck by one enemy once. There's a whole stealth stat! You will never need this, rarely be encouraged to try it, enemies will see you anyway, and you'll always have enough ammo to kill them.
To sum, In Sound Mind was surprisingly good. Most of the time, I thought it was great. The story, bosses, and puzzles are highlights. Combat with normal enemies becomes a slog. Actually in the final boss battle, I quit killing them and learned I could just run past them. I'd definitely recommend this for something a little different. Oh, also, the soundtrack is excellent. I have to look up the band that did the music, The Living Tombstone. Their songs fit/set the tone of the game perfectly.
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Sep 12th, 2022 at 09:29:41 - Subnautica (PC) |
This is the first survival game I’ve put time into and really enjoyed! I’m so happy I found an exemplar of the genre. Since I haven’t played many survival games (though I’ve played plenty with survival elements, including recently completed Metro Exodus), I can’t well compare this with others. But I can say why I liked this one.
The game begins with you hurtling through the atmosphere of a planet and crashing into its ocean. Chaos! Your ship has exploded, the crew who managed to eject in life pods are scattered in the surrounding ocean. You lose consciousness and wake up to an insistent life support system. Take care of that, exit the hatch of your life pod, and behold the open ocean, calm, beautiful. Except for the burning wreck of the Aurora, your ship, in the near distance, leaking radiation.
Subnautica immediately establishes that the water world around you is beautiful, intriguing, and deadly. Colorful, cute fish swim near the life pod. Vibrant corals and plants with long stalks and luminescent seeds sway in the current. You’ll quickly be given some tasks, though. Read the survival manual and listen to radio distress beacons to figure out that (a) you need food and water, (b) you need to establish a safe base, (c) you should try to reach other survivors, and (d) other instructions that I don’t remember.
This begins a constant progression that didn’t slow down for many hours of gameplay. The progression occurs in terms of narrative, construction, and exploration. Narratively, you uncover what happened to crew members, their life pods, and other ships. You also catalog flora and fauna and learn about the ocean planet. Eventually, distress beacons from crashed life pods are too deep for you to dive, or surrounded by dangerous predators, or may just be really, really far away. Sometimes narrative events are set to occur in the future, like when a nearby ship catches the Aurora’s distress signal and announces a time and location for rescue. I’ll give you one guess as to how that goes; the rescue scene filled me with dread.
You’ll need to construct tools, vehicles, and a better base to reach, explore, and survive in new places (ocean biomes, as the game calls them). There are tons of things to fabricate (craft). You’ll be swimming around collecting ores and blueprints to build a laser cutting tool (cut metal, useful for exploring wrecks), a Seamoth (your first vehicle that offers some protection from the outside), fins that let you swim faster, O2 tanks that let you dive deeper, rooms for your base that let you scan for resources or store more items or use fish to generate power, and so on.
This is actually one point of improvement I have for the UI. It is not easy to search items to fabricate or to inventory what you need to fabricate more complex items. It would be useful if there was a search box so that you don’t have to scroll through 100 items looking for the one you want. It would also be useful if more complex items listed all the individual components they need. For example, building the Seamoth requires 1 Titanium Ingot, 1 Power Cell, 2 Glass, and 1 Lubricant. Each of these things requires some combination of other things (such as 2 Batteries and 1 Silicon Rubber for a Power Cell). Sometimes those things require still another combination of things (such as 2 Acid Mushrooms and 1 Copper Ore for a Battery). Without a search function, or a more comprehensive list of components for complex items, it is a chore! I can’t imagine the hell in doing this with a controller. I would prefer that the Seamoth blueprint tell me what’s in a Titanium Ingot, what’s in a Power Cell, etc. right on its fabrication page. Honestly, the game would be a magnitude shorter without time spent going back and forth in fabrication menus.
But progression through fabrication is fun nonetheless because it leads you to new places for materials. Narrative, construction, and exploration are all tied together well, as you are led with a constant trail of breadcrumbs to the next thing. At some point, though, the trail slows, and this is when I lost interest in continuing. I had built the big daddy submarine, which is basically its own mobile base. At the depths the sub can go exist leviathan class creatures, huge sea serpents and things that will wreck your vehicles and eat you for breakfast. I began to lose patience as my survival became more precarious. The final straw was when my sub caught fire. I was like a mile away from my base and I had one fire extinguisher on board (I didn’t even know it could catch fire!). The fire extinguisher ran out and the sub still burned. Every time I died, it spawned me back on the burning sub. I’d leave the ship and get killed by a leviathan. Return to the ship and get killed by smoke inhalation. This was a reload-to-an-earlier-save situation, but I decided to call it and watch the rest on YouTube. I didn’t spoil the main mystery here, but there is something else going on (of course there is!) that you will be unraveling. It turns out I wasn’t that near the end of the game. I’d built a lot of the major equipment, but needed a lot of upgrades and access to materials I hadn’t yet discovered, which meant using the sub to enter deeper waters.
Are other survival games like this? Are they this intense? This beautiful? Do they have better crafting UIs? Pros and cons of some others? Others to recommend?
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Sep 7th, 2022 at 15:53:21 - The First Tree (PC) |
I watched my girlfriend play most of this. She’s not beaten it yet, probably won’t, and neither will I. The game is story-focused, layering a story about a fox’s dead cubs over the story of the narrator’s dead father. It’s kind of an interesting premise but falls flat. The gameplay is barely there, which would be acceptable (see walking simulators) if the story (or stories) were compelling and if the walking were serviceable.
So here, you play as the mother fox, and you follow pinpoints of light to reach beacons and advance the story. If you deviate from the path, you’ll hit invisible walls. There is no exploration. But even when following the light, navigation is a chore. You’ll lose your way, turn around, and inevitably be unable to scale rocks that are too high to jump over. There is a double-jump mechanic, which involves collecting butterflies or something. I never really worked out why this was the case, or why there existed large rocks that required double-jumping in the first place. This is more irritating because the fox controls like a tank. You’d think the fox would be agile, but it jumps about as well as I do.
Anyway, you’ll occasionally reach beacons and other locations where you dig up audio snippets of the narrator talking about his upbringing and relationship with his father. I hate to talk badly about the execution because this was probably an intensely personal project, but the narration is aimless. Someone might feel like I do when people hate on That Dragon, Cancer for being clunky. The narrator’s stories are utterly mundane and delivered to a woman interlocutor (his girlfriend?) who comforts him and agrees with his words and insights. The story seems like it’s presented out of order for the player to piece together. It could have actually been that, or it could be poorly assembled, or I could have been paying more attention.
There are a hundred better games in this genre. Play A Short Hike, Gone Home, Dear Esther, What Remains of Edith Finch, etc., etc.
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Aug 13th, 2022 at 16:06:44 - Enter the Gungeon (PC) |
And then Enter the Gungeon. A game about gun puns. It was interesting comparing it to Nuclear Throne. There are several playable characters with different abilities. But Enter the Gungeon has way more stuff than Nuclear Throne. Tons more enemies, bosses, guns, passive abilities, secrets, and everything. For that reason alone, even though I'm retiring it and didn't play it that much, I think I like it better than Nuclear Throne. I *could see* myself spending more time with this to see more content. It also seems a bit easier than Nuclear Throne though. None of the bosses I got to gave me trouble like Lil Hunter. Gameplay is a little less hectic. A little easier to wrap my head around. There's a shop and secrets. I think you can unlock shortcuts to the different gungeon levels, which adds some persistence between runs. It also had more of a story, however silly, so was a little more intriguing for that reason too. But like I said, I didn't play much, just a few hours, and I know I'm not going to beat it, so I'd rather move on. I got the gist!
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