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Jan 31st, 2025 at 13:18:58 - Do Not Feed the Monkeys (PC) |
This game has some cool ideas, and I liked my brief time with it, but it becomes repetitive and frustrating. The game describes itself as a "voyeur simulator." You sit in your apartment watching live feeds of other people's lives ("cages" as the game calls them). This was really interesting. Each cage has a different self-contained story. One guy was an accountant moonlighting as a cross-dresser who is doing some shady business dealings and threatening people who want to expose his double life. Another cage was a room full of overeducated writers slaving away on a self-help book credited to a media mogul. Another was a field that gets a mysterious crop circle. Another was a janitor trapped in an elevator who had made an imaginary friend out of janitorial supplies and is writing his life story on the wall. Its darkly humorous, sardonic writing landed for me; I liked its vibe.
So, your job is to monitor an increasing number of cages and learn things about the people in them because you have joined some organization that wants you to do this. You're occasionally given tasks to deduce something about the cage (what is the name of the person in cage 10; what is the address of cage 3; etc.). You are rewarded with money for getting these answers correct. You need money because you are also managing your own hunger, sleep, and health levels. If you don't eat, sleep, or keep your "health" up, you'll die. You also have to pay rent, and you have to pay the shady organization employing you in order to move up in the organization. To earn money, you have to take jobs. To eat, you need to buy food. Everything costs time, which is a huge constraint. The clock ticks away regardless of what you do, which means you're always getting hungrier, your landlady is closer and closer to demanding rent, and so on.
This wouldn't be too hard if you just needed to watch a few screens, but it gets up to (as far as I got) 25 screens. This is practically impossible. You can't keep track of what's going on, you can't follow the stories, let alone trying to sleep and work and everything else. So, the game became about skimming the stories, clicking as fast as I could through information to try and solve the little puzzles, trying to stay alive as long as I could. I did one playthrough, but I think that's enough. If I start over, I'll have to just mindlessly click through stories again looking for keywords to file away until I have what I need to solve puzzles to earn the money necessary to stay fed and rested and housed until whatever the end game state is. I gather that there are more scenarios I didn't see, but each one blows through its content quickly, so it really would be just seeing the same short, repetitive scenes playing out over and over, with a few new ones tossed in.
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Jan 27th, 2025 at 15:30:06 - 60 Seconds! Reatomized (PC) |
Goodness, one more short one...
My students recommended this to me after I had them play Papers, Please last semester. Their rationale was that you have to make ethical decisions, but this game is completely lighthearted. Apparently it's an old browser game that they all played as kids, which got a Steam release in 2019. The premise is pretty funny. You play as either a mom or a dad, a nuclear bomb is falling on your town. You have 60 seconds to run around your house grabbing supplies and family members to put in your fallout shelter. Then, you have to survive in the shelter, or somehow get to safety, with whatever family and supplies you grabbed.
It's basically a choose-your-own adventure game heavily influenced by dice rolls. Each item is useful for various things. For example, your family members have to be fed and watered, so the cans of tomato soup and water bottles are crucial. The rifle can be used to defend from bandits or critters. The axe is also a weapon and can be used to shave. Checkers and cards are for entertainment, gifts, or trading. And so on. There are a bunch of random events that happen, from bandit attacks to finding a dog to the shelter becoming infested with mutant cockroaches to traders showing up on your doorstep. You often get to choose "yes" or "no" to resolve scenarios, and often have to have some specific item(s) to resolve them favorably too.
I played four times and never won. Everyone always ends up dying, though I got to 59 days once, which is a long time. And I feel like I was one or two steps away from getting rescued by the military, or moving to a friendly safe camp, or figuring out how to start a car. All these things require several random events to happen and be resolved, so it's just about if you're lucky enough to get them and have the necessary resources to resolve them. Your family members get thirsty and dehydrated, hungry and starve, tired and fatigued, sick, and they can go insane. You'll have to send them out to scavenge for supplies because you need more than what you take from your house, and they often come back from scavenging with various ailments. The art is pretty funny. As they are in the bunker longer and getting in worse and worse shape, they do start to look disheveled and crazy.
This was definitely amusing to play for a little while. I've got a couple others that my students were recommending based on Papers, Please too, so I'll need to check them out sometime.
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Jan 27th, 2025 at 12:32:02 - Everybody's Gone to the Rapture (PC) |
Well, that didn't take as long as I thought. 3 hours. HowLongToBeat says more like 4.5-6, so I was planning on this taking the whole week. I liked it overall, but it was slow. The walking speed, as I imagine nearly everyone who played it would agree, could be faster. There is also a weird effect, which I am assuming is just my computer, where the character would speed up and slow down. Like the walking speed would slingshot between faster and slower. I also noticed that effect with water in streams. Water in part of the stream would appear to be moving very fast, while water just a few feet downstream would appear to be moving at a normal speed. It was like the game would fast-forward at times. Very strange! Maybe that's why it only took me 3 hours, haha.
So, this is a narrative-heavy exploration game. A "walking simulator," if you will. The setting in the English countryside is beautiful, and whoever did the sound design and music deserves awards. My favorite part was the music, which was making me feel emotions, especially when it swelled to an orchestral or hymnal sounding piece. The lighting effects were cool too, and played with the music to create some nice moments. The story is a little difficult to piece together since it requires you to explore the map and find these "remnants" of events and these glowing lights that trigger scenes between characters, who are all either raptured or dead. If you miss finding these scenes--and I think they are mostly skippable--then you won't understand who characters are, what their relationships are, and what exactly is going on. Although there is a mystery unfolding regarding the light and the raptured people, the game really reminded me of Eternal Threads because it's a "slice of life" of the characters. You'll play through the stories of six or so characters, delving deeper into their lives and what they were doing before the rapture. The whole game takes place in like an hour of in-game time. I did inadvertently miss the ending of one of the characters' stories, so...woops, I have no idea what happened to him.
Since you have to explore a fairly open map, it's good that you get a guide. There is a floating light orb that you follow around. It guides you from scene to scene, although it can be a little difficult to figure out where exactly it wants you to go, and you can lose the orb. When I didn't finish that one character's story, it's because I lost the orb. I saw a windmill in the distance, and knew I was trying to get there, so I just cut across the landscape toward it, thereby missing everything along the main path to it. It's neat that it lets you roam though. Another time, I lost the orb, and I found myself backtracking and going in circles. I had no idea where I was supposed to go, so I found a tall hill nearby, climbed it and looked out to see if I could spot the orb anywhere. After a minute, I noticed a flash of light through some trees, then saw it again. Spotted! I went straight down the hill through the woods and reconnected with the orb.
It's important to have that orb guide. Although the English countryside is beautiful, there is a tension between its allure and your walking speed. I wanted to poke around in houses, see what was down side paths, and explore more, but the character moves soooo slowly that I also didn't want to explore. Like, "I want to see what's in that house over there, but it will take five minutes to walk there and back. Eh, I'll just follow the orb to the next main thing." And so on and so forth until the end...which was...fine.
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Jan 25th, 2025 at 17:50:50 - Astro's Playroom (PS5) |
I didn't realize this was even a game, but apparently it is and it comes free with the PS5! I thought it was like Dreams, which was the free software with the PS4, and which was basically a content creator application for minigames. Astro's Playroom is a little Mario-esque platforming game / experience / tech demo / celebration of PlayStation. It was cute, short, enjoyable, and OH MY GOD THE PS5 CONTROLLER IS INCREDIBLE.
Seriously, what's up with the PS5 controller? What magic conjured it? This thing is so freaking cool. The new Xbox controller has haptic feedback, but nothing like the DualSense, and it doesn't have the adaptive triggers. I first noticed those in Returnal, which uses a half-press for one firing mode and a full press for an alt firing mode. Ratchet & Clank uses the adaptive triggers throughout. Astro's Playroom really showcases the range of vibrations for different environmental elements and actions. For example, walking on different surfaces produces different vibration intensities, patterns, and sounds. Like, you could close your eyes and guess that you were walking on glass or sand or whatever. It is SO impressive.
The controller sound is also well done. I completely disliked the PS4 controller audio and turned it off in every game that used it. The sound was tinny. But the PS5 controller audio is much improved, and I have noticed it most so far in Spider-Man 2, which I just started. Your phone calls come through the controller and various other sounds, those that are supposed to be especially proximal or "in your ear." It's really immersive. The only downside is that I often play PlayStation sitting next to Sasha while she is working. She has a preternatural ability to tune out my videogame noise, but the controller noise is right next to her and it is distracting. So, if I'm playing next to her, I need to turn it off, which is actually kind of neat to compare how the game feels and sounds with and without the controller audio.
I do wonder if third-party games or PS4 games use these features of the DualSense to their capacity. Actually...I know they don't, now that I think about it, because I just got done with a month of PS Plus, and God of War and the indies that I played didn't use vibration (beyond what is typical) or adaptive triggers. Are developers going to keep incorporating these features? Are there some games that are especially creative in their use of these features? Are they a novelty that I'll get used to or that will wear off?
Uuuh, anyway, I was writing about Astro's Playroom. Comes with the console, tech demo, Mario-esque...collect coins, stomp some bad guys...different levels showcase different features of the controller. Aside from the controller, I really enjoyed the PlayStation nostalgia. In each level, you find "artifacts" of the PlayStation days of old, like each console generation and its accessories. It was a trip down memory lane seeing the start screens of each console, especially the PS2, which I probably played the most of any console (till I got into PC gaming). You also see characters acting out different PlayStation games, which was fun. I noticed a Solid Snake in a cardboard box, Cloud's sword from FF VII, a plane flying around like in an Uncharted game (I think), the Horizon Zero Dawn main character, and others to guess at.
So, that was really cool! And, after my first month of owning a PS5 and month's subscription of PS Plus, where I knocked out a whopping seven games from the wishlist, I can cool it with the manic gaming and start digging into the physical discs. My plan is to purchase physical discs, beat the games, sell the discs back on ebay, and basically fund my PS5 gaming through buying and reselling. I am already halfway through Spider-Man 2 and purchased Persona 5 for when I am done with that (though I realize I could have played that on PC, so maybe I'll grab something newer that my PC probably won't run well like Black Myth: Wukong).
Hooray PS5!
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