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Jun 18th, 2025 at 07:14:41 - Submerged: Hidden Depths (XBONE) |
Finished this up with Patrick last night. It's a simple, relaxing one that boils down to being a collect-a-thon. You play as a girl and her brother (one at a time, in third-person) in a world hit by some kind of ecological catastrophe. The old world (our society) was ruined a long time ago, flooded, and a subsequent society built atop our ruins was also ruined by your standard bad black and red "mass" of vines and stuff creeping over everything.
The girl has some sort of connection to the mass (it is actually called the mass) and can heal it, turning the black vines a vibrant green. There is a pretty visual effect where flowers bloom wherever she walks (it's a pretty game in general!). She can cleanse large areas of the mass by finding seeds and placing them into pods.
That's how the game is chunked into areas. It takes place in this one section of the world, you have a home base in the middle of the map, and there are 10 seeds you have to find to cleanse 10 areas. Since this is a water world, you drive a motorboat around, using your spyglass to locate the seeds, each of which is at the end of some light puzzle platforming on its own building/island in the water. It's handy when you're looking for the seeds because, as your base is in the middle of the map, each seed is pretty evenly spaced around it in a circle.
The puzzle platforming is simple. You navigate to a dock, get out, and...push forward on the left stick. There is no other button except pressing "A" to use switches and pick up things. The character automatically jumps and climbs as you move her. I said "puzzle platforming," but really, both of these things are really light. You don't have to think much to solve the puzzles or platform. That's why I said the game is relaxing (easy, pretty, no enemies, etc.).
As you explore the ocean and the buildings/islands, you can find a couple hundred collectibles, from little pictogram diaries to boat parts to cosmetic items to relics you dredge up from the ocean, etc. It would be easy to get sucked in to ticking all the boxes to find all the things on the map. It was funny playing with Patrick because he is more likely to do that than I am, and he kept wanting to go back and find diary entries and stuff that we missed that he could see on the map. So when he was playing, he'd take time to look for items. When I played, I just went straight for the seeds.
So yeah, chill game to play together. Positive experience. Nothing to write home about though.
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Jun 17th, 2025 at 06:25:05 - Quantum Break (PC) |
This was ahead of its time. I've been trying to play it for years on PC, but it's always been unplayable on my computers, with stuttering, low FPS, and bursts of neon color with the infamous lighting bug (green, magenta, and yellow mostly) that blot out everything on the screen. I remember initially thinking that the colors were an art choice, which would gel with the whole sci-fi time travel story, before realizing that, no, these are bad colors! Anyway, I'd never gotten past Act 1 before, but this week I was able to play the whole thing. And FINALLY! Despite being 9 years old, parts of it still feel fresher than things coming out today.
The story presentation is the highlight. The game tells you something like, "Quantum Break is a seamless experience across the game and TV show." I used to think that there was a whole TV show related to the game, like the game was a spin-off or something. But that's not how it works. After each of the game's acts, you can watch a 20-25-minute live action "TV episode." These were cool! They add depth to the story, filling in information about other characters and what's going on behind the scenes of the game at Monarch (the game's evil corporation). I can't count the times where I was playing/watching, and saw something that connected to the game/show. It could be insight into a character's motivations or what they were doing, explaining how this or that event actually happened, or even a one-off comment that referenced some small detail. This sort of attention to detail is most impressive. I won't spoil the story, but in Act 5, you have all sorts of "ooooh shit!" moments as you remember what happened in Act 1 (and...see them happening again). Why haven't more games experimented with this blend of gameplay and live action? I'm not thinking of something like Immortality or Her Story that focus on interactive video, but more of a hybrid.
The story itself is mind-bending and engaging. My quibbles here were with some of the characters and relationships that felt implausible (never mind the implausibility of time travel). They were all really well acted with several Hollywood actors I recognized. But, our main character, Jack, seems to be like a loser-ish "Joe Everyman" (with a criminal record) who ends up being able to operate a time machine. It's alluded to that he had weapons training in Thailand or something, but...why? He comes into the picture because his best friend runs Monarch, the big evil corporation. And his brother was an eccentric physicist who created time travel. His brother only cares about two things: time travel and Jack. Why he cares so much about Jack, I have no idea. And why the best friend who owns like the world's most important multinational corporation cares so much about getting in touch with Jack (the only person he can trust?) in Thailand, flying him all the way to the US, I also do not know. And again, Jack and his best friend (who is a businessman, not a physicist) are somehow able to operate time machines. There is also a love (?) story between Jack and another woman that is paper thin. Other aspects of the plot don't make sense either. Monarch is described as having "hundreds" of employees. My School of Liberal Arts has hundreds of employees. Multinational corporations have thousands, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands. The physicist brother built a time machine and did all this work starting with a prestigious grant that was for...$150,000. I have a subaward right now for that amount. It pays for summer salary, data collection expenses, and conference travel for three faculty. This physicist has 50 computers, tons of other scientific equipment, several buildings, and a freaking TIME MACHINE. It was mentioned that he sold his parents' house for more money, but that would be like (20 years ago) maybe another couple hundred thousand dollars. This guy needed a grant for $150 million dollars, not $150,000.
The third-person shooter gameplay is what does feel 9 years old. You can equip a pistol, a machine gun, and a shotgun. You have various time manipulation powers, which boil down to sprint, sprint version two (sprint for longer...), shield, explosion, and one that I never quite figured out, which places a "time bubble" on an enemy, which you shoot bullets into, and then the bullets do extra damage when the time bubble bursts. Enemies are mostly straightforward. Later on, there are some "heavies" who are really armored and take more bullets. Then there are some guys with chronon harnesses, which let them "sprint" like you, and some others with fields that negate your abilities if you get too close. For those guys, who also pack a lot of heat, you have to get behind them to destroy theirs suits' power. Some snipers later on. And one boss fight at the end. That's it. Not a lot of strategy required.
Levels are linear with a decent amount of collectibles, mostly of the "reading emails" variety and the "find skill points" variety. With the skill points, you slightly upgrade abilities; these were not necessary. I enjoyed the extra story details though; the emails and memos made some of the characters (especially those at Monarch) deeper and went into more detail about Monarch's plans. This stuff was also explored more in the TV episodes, and I like how it all reinforced one another. In combat situations, you dispatch a wave or two of enemies and move on. There are always exploding barrels. And since this was 2016, it's a bit of a cover shooter, but without a dedicated "cover" button. Jack squats down when you move behind things. It worked pretty well.
The thing that doesn't work as well is movement through the environments. I take this for granted that modern games usually let you hop over things that are at shin-height. Not so in Quantum Break. If you see a ramp, you can't jump onto the side of the ramp. You have to go to the beginning of the ramp, get on, and walk. You can't jump over any boxes or objects in the environment. The only exceptions are those platforming segments where you're meant to jump on something, and those are usually marked with yellow. This made for a lot of me jumping, Jack grunting and just sort of colliding with the shin-high object, and me rolling me eyes and walking around it.
Another thing that I take for granted these days are excellent checkpoints. Often in action games nowadays, when you die, you restart at the beginning of that battle or right before the obstacle that killed you. Sometimes you go back to a clearly marked save or checkpoint. Quantum Break sets up checkpoints in strange places. For example, in the last battle, you cross a large room and run up a ramp to talk to someone, then the boss comes out, talks at you, and the battle starts. When you die, it doesn't just restart the encounter. It puts you back at a door, and you have to run across the room and up the ramp to the NPC, talk to him, the boss comes out and talks at you (which you can skip), and then the battle starts. Why not just immediately restart the battle?! That kind of thing happened a lot, where instead of just restarting a battle or a platforming sequence, it would take you to like 30 seconds or a minute before that and you have to re-do some boring part like...running across a room or going through a gate or whatever.
I'm really glad that I finally got to play this in its entirety! Actually, I thought I wasn't going to make it because the lighting bug was there. It first happened toward the end of Act 2, but I was able to play through it, then it happened in a good chunk of Act 4, and again I managed to squint my way through that too. It's like playing with a mod that makes the game harder! "Color burst" where you can't see well. Can you still kill all the enemies in the room with "color burst" activated?! Then it came on really bad in Act 5 during a tough battle and I had to restart the game a couple times because I couldn't see, but luckily that was it. So yeah, I feel like I played something out of time because so much of the game was so impressive and unique. I didn't even mention the time-stopped environments, which were so, so cool to play through. I can't believe that a game pulled this off nearly 10 years ago. It feels like something that would be incredible even today, and playing Quantum Break, I felt that sense of incredulity at the way that time fractured in the environment. Definitely recommend, but with the caveat that it took me like 5 years to finally be able to play it on PC, so I have no idea how that goes for other people or other systems.
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Jun 14th, 2025 at 13:35:10 - Frostpunk 2 (PC) |
I never really got into this, despite getting most of the way through the campaign (about 4 out of 5 chapters). There is a lot more to manage than in the first game. In Frostpunk 2, you no longer have just one city around a generator, but also outposts to run and a big map to explore. There are more resources to manage. There are more systems to manage. There are multiple factions to manage. It's hard to keep track of everything!
Despite the bigger scope, it's a really similar game. Build your city, keep the people warm, calm, and free of disease and squalor. The temperature goes up and down and you must adapt accordingly, reallocating heat to different districts such that citizens can continue working (ideally uninjured) and not get sick or die of cold. If the cold sets in, things break down fast. Threatening again are the "whiteouts," huge blizzards that last for weeks. You must prepare for them ahead of time, stockpiling food, coal and oil, materials, goods, and so on. There was a major whiteout in chapter 2 or 3 that I had prepared well for in terms of stockpiling, but I hadn't accounted for how unhappy all the factions would get because of the cold. All four factions hated me, my trust went to 0, and they were going to vote to depose me (which is a game over). I couldn't believe it and the only thing I can figure I could have done differently is overheat the generator. But I didn't do that because I was scared it would malfunction. Or perhaps you are supposed to come out of the whiteout hated by everyone and have to rebuild their trust. I funded factions' projects, reallocated heat to their homes, let them pass whatever laws they wanted, and promised them power, and just in the nick of time before the vote, I gained the amount of trust I needed.
I rebuilt all that trust, continued exploring and expanding into chapter 4, where a new outpost required for progression became unmanageable due to mistakes I made. With this particular outpost, you can choose to settle it or salvage cores (valuable and rare resources) to power the generator of your main city to the max level. I chose to salvage, but there are toxic fumes in the outpost. These get worse as you break the ice and extract resources, and I just kept losing so many people from disease. I replenished them over and over, but couldn't keep track of that and funneling other resources to the outpost at the same time, as well as managing my main city and first outpost. The outpost's generator kept losing power, one faction was really pissed off and kept destroying housing districts, which meant my people kept becoming homeless and freezing to death. I finally researched and built a watchtower for security, but then the faction attacked my industrial zone that was automating extraction (so fewer workers died from toxic fumes). Through all this, the generator kept powering down, I think because I didn't have energy extraction set up there and I wasn't funneling efficiently from my main base. Looking back on it, I probably should have built housing in the hills above the toxic fumes so at least my workers wouldn't die at home.
My favorite thing was trying to play all the factions. There's a system again where you pass laws, and each faction can gain and lose representatives in a chamber. They each have different ideologies too, and you might align with one over the other. But of course, doing something aligning with one or two factions might piss off another one, so you're always balancing. The game is transparent about how many votes laws need to pass, and if you need more votes, you can make promises to factions that were hesitant. This serves the dual purpose of getting your law passed and making a hesitant faction happy by fulfilling your promise.
Anyway, managing all these different things was very stressful and felt like pushing a boulder up a hill. I appreciate the complexity of Frostpunk 2, and I still love the environment, story, and tough choices. But like the first game, it's not enough to make me love playing it. I saw, oddly enough, that these developers have another game that just came out on Game Pass, The Alters, which looks unique. I might give that a look in the next few weeks.
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Jun 12th, 2025 at 16:51:43 - Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (PC) |
Epic epic epic! I had zero expectations for this, having never heard of it until sometime after it came out and seeing that it got really good reviews. If you like Uncharted, you have to play Indiana Jones. Or if you like Indiana Jones movies. It's very authentic. It's by MachineGames, who has been doing the (mostly) excellent Wolfenstein games. They're sticking with the Nazi antagonist theme. This has Wolfenstein DNA, it feels like Uncharted and Tomb Raider, and it also feels like (unexpectedly) an immersive sim like Dishonored or Thief or something. It's REALLY good. I’m going to rattle off a handful of things I liked and then note a few rough patches.
(1) Story. Solid. I was invested. It’s a typical treasure hunt mystery “go to x places to get the x items” thing, but well done. The voice acting is top notch from all the leads, and even from side characters and random Nazis. The Harrison Ford likeness was cool to see. Characters were well written, good dialogue, good banter between Indy and Gina. An excellent bad guy, a Nazi archaeologist named Voss. He’s sufficiently patriotic and out of his mind for power, arrogant, cruel, and manipulative.
(2) Environments and level design. Outstanding. There aren’t a ton of areas that you’ll visit, but there is a lot of variety. Some areas are like semi-open world maps, while others are more linear. The semi-open world maps are full of places to explore, secrets to find. Discovery is organic. You’ll be infiltrating a Nazi camp and come across a “mystery” (the game’s category of puzzles, often finding and deciphering codes to open safes or locate a tomb or something). You might start the mystery by reading a note. Or, you might come across a piece of information from a note or an NPC or something that starts “fieldwork” (the game’s term for side quests). Fieldwork can be involved and is the side content that is most worth doing. There is usually a story component, often new characters, good puzzles, a great trippy sequence after Indy touches a poisonous frog, and so on. You can take or leave all the side stuff though. Some of it is well hidden, and I imagine it would take a good long while to find all the secrets in this game. Side content gives rewards you with money, adventure points (experience), and items. I purchased every skill I had access to by the end of the game, had a ton of points left, and had plenty of side content left to do. So, you won't be starving for experience. Also, the pacing is on point. There is a good mix of puzzles, exploration, combat, and cut scenes. You’re always moving forward toward some goal or another, even if it’s self-directed goals like “I’m going to clear out this Nazi camp” or “I’m going to stop at all these islands and see what’s on them.” The platforming is fun too, which usually goes along with the puzzling.
(3) Melee. Something that felt unique about this game is the melee focus. Indy famously punches Nazis, so that’s what he does in the game. There are melee weapons scattered all over the place, everyday items like pots and pans, guitars, pickaxes (lots of excavation equipment), clubs, hair brushes, brooms, etc. Near the end of the game I found a violin and bow and made sure to clobber enemies with them. You can block and throw a charged punch too, as well as parry and counter-attack. You can also employ your signature whip to disarm enemies. Especially as you go further in the game, enemies will have guns, which you are also welcome to pick up and use as clubs, or you can shoot them. Enemies tend to match your combat style though, so if you use your fists, they probably will too, or they’ll pick up a nearby weapon (and often will throw things at you). If you open fire though, if they have guns, they’ll shoot back. Plus, enemies from all over the place nearby will converge on your location. Shooting someone often meant death a minute later.
Some things that felt broken:
(1) Dogs. Patrol dogs are annoying. I couldn’t figure out how to stop them from attacking me. The game says that if you whip them, they flee, and that they’re also scared of gunshots. I would whip them and they would completely ignore it, latching onto my arm anyway. I would shoot them, and it seems that the game has a “no animal violence” thing because bullets simply don’t do anything to the dogs. The game also says that you can mash left and right click to get the dog off you, but it didn’t work. So, every time a dog saw me, there was nothing I could do but let it attack me! Then, once it attacked, a whip crack would keep it away.
(2) Dropping items. You can drop items by pressing “Q” and you will drop whatever you’re holding if you press “tab” to open your bag or “2” to take out your camera or lighter. This was very annoying early on, though less so as you learn the rules by which Indy drops things. It was also less annoying as I realized that it was just being realistic. Indy has two hands. He can’t use a camera and steer a boat at the same time, can’t climb a ladder and hold a gun, can’t bandage himself and hold a map, etc. BUT, what didn’t get any less annoying is that way too often the dropped item will “disappear.” You can’t see it on the ground. Sometimes this was because you’d drop it and it would “bounce” away. Other times, it just resets to its original location. And one time, I couldn’t complete a mystery puzzle because I dropped an item in a pit, but I couldn’t get it back out of the pit because Indy can’t hold his whip with both hands and carry an item at the same time. Actually, thinking back to this now, I probably could have thrown the item up and out of the pit. At that time, I didn’t know I could throw things. This is because…
(3) Not much explanation for UI. The game tells you surprisingly little in terms of how to play and what things mean. This was neat for “figuring it out,” but, like I said, I didn’t know how to throw items until later in the game! And I had to look up what the various bars meant (hint: the white bars are health, the blue ones you get by eating food are “bonus” health, and when you eat fruit, you get extra yellow bars which is like reserve stamina). There is an in-game manual that doesn’t have this stuff in it. It’s weird. The game also doesn’t explain how to go back to previous areas of the game until AFTER you do it. And there’s a scary “you will lose unsaved progress” when you click to go back to a previous area, so I didn’t do it at first, and eventually looked it up.
I would play a sequel in an instant. Hopefully MachineGames is making another! Or they could make another Wolfenstein game. At this point, I'll play whatever they make, especially if it's about killing Nazis, which they seem to be the best at making games about.
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