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May 28th, 2025 at 07:51:46 - Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights (PC) |
This is a solid metroidvania, hits high marks in all aspects. It's not Hollow Knight and it's not Ori, but it's up there. It’s set in a dark medieval fantasy type world, has a beautiful soundtrack and great artwork. The story is presented in that cryptic souls-like fashion and told primarily through notes in the environment, usually written by characters that you defeat or White Priestesses. It tells of the Blight, a never-ending rain that falls, infecting people and driving them mad.
Combat and movement are both tight and responsive. There are like 25 weapons. I think that the most unique design piece is that your weapons are not weapons at all, but are the spirits of (mini)bosses that you defeat. Your character is a frail priestess and the spirits fight at her command. You can equip six of them at once (in two sets of three), so you always have a variety of attacks to deploy. Some are “main” attacks and others are “subskills.” The difference, usually, is that main skills can be used an unlimited number of times, while subskills have a specific number of uses before they run out. When you stop at a respite (save point), you refill your skill uses and health potions. Some main skills do have limited uses though, and near the end of the game, I realized that you can equip multiple main skills in each set. I had assumed that you could have one main skill and two subskills per set of three. This seemed so obvious to me that I didn’t even try to equip multiple main skills and only did so by accident! I wonder if my play style would have changed had I discovered that earlier. Anyway, some skills are melee, some are ranged, some excel at hitting airborne enemies, there is a strong poison cloud that deals damage over time, a movement skill, a stun skill, fast weak attacks, slow strong attacks, skills that can charge attack, and so on. Since you can equip six, you’ll have something for every occasion, and can really tailor them for boss fights. One neat thing is that you can use multiple skills at the same time. Since “you” are not attacking, your spirits can do so simultaneously. All skills can be leveled up using a specific type of experience, basic stuff.
The level design is pretty good, but the rooms do get kind of same-y and boring after a while. This sucks because you will backtrack a lot. The map doesn't help with this, since it doesn't give you much information. For example, the rooms are all represented with variously sized squares or rectangles and no other defining features. The only icons on the map are respites (save points), white lines connecting rooms you have been to, and red dots for entrances/exits that you haven't been through yet. Rooms will also turn orange if you have collected all the items inside, which was handy. But there are no icons indicating other objects, obstacles, or enemies. Metroidvanias often mark bosses on the map, mark obstacles with some icon indicating what it is or what tool you might need to bypass it, and so on. Given the amount of backtracking to explore new areas after getting new traversal abilities, it became frustrating that the map didn’t tell me which obstacles were where. This meant that I had to try and remember what obstacle was blocking the constant number of 10-20 unexplored entrances, making my way back through sometimes maze-like rooms to check each obstacle to see if I could bypass it now. So, the map was a bit disappointing, but I guess props for giving me a feeling of achievement and discovery by making me work for exploration.
Miniboss battles were easy, basically just buffed versions of regular enemies. I recall dying a few times on the first ones, but I think I one-shot like 15 of them. Boss battles were excellent and provided more of a challenge. Most bosses have three phases that predictably change at 66% and 33% HP. Most took less than a few tries, but I remember three that took a while, including the last boss, which I looked up how to beat because I just wanted to finish the game. I learned that a lot of weapon and relic combinations are (over)powerful. I had been dying for a good hour on the final boss, but after I looked it up and tried a suggested build, I killed it in two tries (and had full health, no health potions used!).
There is a sequel out. It has overwhelmingly positive ratings on Steam but it looks really, really similar to Ender Lilies. It would be another solid metroidvania to play, but if it's just more of the same (though by all accounts polished in every way), then I'm not particularly interested, at least no time soon. I do have Nine Sols to play on Game Pass (soon?), so maybe I’ll get a pretty direct comparison to another recent highly rated metroidvania.
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May 21st, 2025 at 11:13:31 - Monster Hunter: World (PC) |
Next up is a retirement (ooh, ahh!). I bounced right off of Monster Hunter: World. Never played a Monster Hunter game before and am surprised that I don't like it. But after playing a while, at least I understand why. My expectations were a bit different than the reality. I know that the name of the game is what you do, but I assumed there would be more narrative or more traditional, tight, RPG or action RPG elements. But I would characterize the game as a massive grind. I know that this is how it is described (kill monsters to get materials to improve equipment to kill bigger monsters to get more materials to improve equipment, etc.), but I just thought there would be something else to it. And I'm sure that the hunts get more exciting, but I also know that the game is long, and I don't feel like grinding my way there to begin enjoying it after 50 hours or whatever.
Some things that made me bounce off include:
1. A gazillion items to pick up. What is all this stuff? If you walk around in the field, you are prompted every 2 feet to harvest an herb or mine some ore or something.
2. Inventory management. Inventory was full very quickly, which prompted me to sit there trying to learn what all the stuff does. Short answer: crafting.
3. I usually don't enjoy crafting a lot of stuff in games, so this was not good for me.
4. Annoying cat puns.
5. The map is so busy, and the first area was super confusing to navigate.
6. Boring story and characters.
7. "Tracking" monsters was a matter of clicking on enough footprints to "level up" your knowledge of it or something. Then, you follow some glowing flies around until you see it. This did not make me feel clever, like I was hunting. I was following a green path of fireflies the whole time and pressing B when prompted to "study tracks."
8. The UI is really cluttered and could be improved in so many ways.
9. You have to play online (though you can set your game to 1 player). I didn't know there was such an online multiplayer focus.
In the end, Monster Hunter: World feels like a single-player(ish) MMORPG. My days of World of Warcraft are far, far behind me, and this brought back all the memories of years of grinding in that game. I can't do it! And now I know that Monster Hunter isn't for me!
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May 21st, 2025 at 10:48:42 - Quantum Conundrum (XBONE) |
Been playing this with Patrick for most of the semester and we finally beat it last night. It's a mixed bag, but overall positive. It absolutely rides the coattails of Portal, and we read that it was directed by the lead designer on Portal, so no surprise at the similarities. I'll get the negative things out of the way first:
1. It tries to be funny, but it falls mostly flat. The funniest things were Ike (this little imp creature that makes silly faces at you) and the way that the paintings change when you use the abilities (often funny and surprising!). What was supposed to carry the game's humor--the narrator/uncle--didn't. He delivered his lines just fine, but they didn't land. Given that you play as a child, he can't be as sarcastic as GlaDOS in Portal. Given the more family-friendly aesthetic, the jokes were sillier. Given that he and the child actually don't seem to have much of a relationship, nor is it developed throughout the game, there's little relational history and context to draw from. And he usually only pipes up in between puzzles to make brief comments that don't add much.
2. The level of precision required for the first-person platforming was rough. Many puzzles require excellent timing and precision for jumping, throwing and catching objects, and so on, and the game just didn't handle that well. The movement controls are oddly both too tight and too floaty at the same time (I'm sure I'm mischaracterizing this in my description, but this is what it felt like). We OFTEN fell off flying objects, jumped too far or not far enough, missed catching things because of the camera, and so on. Actually, it was irritating for the first half of the game, and it became funny to us as the levels became more complicated. Like last night, Patrick tried for 15 minutes to execute the moves on a puzzle before handing it to me to finish. It would take 1 minute to figure out what you need to do and 14 minutes to accomplish the task. I felt bad watching Patrick sometimes because he's not great at precision controls, so he would fail and fail and fail, hand me the controller, and I'd do on the first try what he'd tried 20 times (though I certainly failed my fair share of times because of the controls!).
3. The ending was uninspired and happened quickly. I'm not entirely sure why what happened happened and I don't care. It obviously set up a sequel that never came.
That's it! Those are the negatives. The positive, though, is the puzzles. They are great, consistently fun and challenging. You're in your uncle's crazy science mansion, and there are four ways that you manipulate objects to solve puzzles by swapping to different "dimensions." First, you can make objects "heavy." Second, you can make objects "fluffy." Third, you can slow time. Fourth, you can reverse gravity. Only one dimension can be active at a time, but by choosing sequences of dimensions, you do some cool things. For example, one common object is a big safe. You normally can't pick up a safe (or other large objects), but activate the fluffy dimension and it becomes light as a feather. This way, you can move safes around to toss them through windows (throw and change to "heavy" before it hits the glass), depress buttons (place them them change to "heavy"), or fly through the air using a combination of dimensions. For example, carry the safe with fluffy, throw it and quickly slow time, jump on top of the safe you just threw, use reverse gravity to travel upward, and (voila!) you've used a safe to get to a ledge above you.
Puzzles utilize various combinations of dimensions, and often you have to find these little capsules to trigger the dimensions in the first place. So task 1 will be acquiring the capsules for dimensions in a puzzle area, then you can start solving the harder puzzles in an area. It is totally linear though, so it's not like you'll be trying puzzles you can't complete. Unlike something like The Witness, you're always at a puzzle you can solve. So if you can't figure it out, then it's you. Like Portal, there are various obstacles and death traps, including deadly pools of "science juice" (like acid), lasers, robots that push you off ledges, and so on.
I do recall getting bored and sleepy earlier on, but to be fair, we were always playing Quantum Conundrum at night after work, and I have learned that puzzle games are a genre not best suited to play while exhausted at night. Nevertheless, it held our attention, and by at least halfway through, we were thoroughly enjoying the puzzling. So, the short version is: Portal is better by far, but Quantum Conundrum scratches the itch.
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May 18th, 2025 at 10:48:06 - Heaven's Vault (PC) |
Excellent narrative adventure/mystery game. You play as an archaeologist and basically-a-PhD-student named Aliya who gets sent by her professor / university head / potential Empress (my, don't we believe university administrators have a lot of power!) to find out what happened to a roboticist colleague who may have uncovered some troubling truths about the history of the Nebula. You have a robot companion named Six (so named because you've gotten all your previous numerically named robots destroyed, which is understandably alarming to Six) and a ship. The gist of the gameplay is that you "sail" between moons from site to site (some ancient, some modern), exploring them, finding artifacts, translating ancient inscribed text, as you piece together the long and complicated history of the rise and fall of the Nebula’s various ages and empires. Your choices have implications for the Nebula’s future and everyone's survival.
The obvious comparisons here are to 80 Days (a previous non-linear narrative game from these devs) and Chants of Sennaar (which also involves deciphering ancient languages). The difference between this and Chants of Sennaar (and Tunic, now that I think about it) is that you don't have to correctly figure out the language. Like, it's helpful to understand the story, but you can progress fine by making total guesses at what symbols mean. This makes Heaven’s Vault an easy game, whereas Chants of Sennaar and Tunic were quite challenging. That’s fine because of the constant feeling of discovery, which motivated me to keep going. I loved finding new artifacts in the dirt, trying to puzzle out inscriptions, the satisfaction of confirming correct translations, discovering new moons and ancient sites, and going deeper into the history of this game world.
The constant sense of discovery counterbalanced what may otherwise have felt like a slower game. There is no “run” button; you slowly walk everywhere. There is a lot of dialogue, especially optional context-specific dialogue (e.g., you can press “Q” or “R” when prompted to ask a question or reply outside of any formal scene, which supplies extra personality to Aliya and Six and supplies deeper insight into what’s going on). The “sailing” involves slowly watching your ship move along a path, with you occasionally having to check the map and guide it left or right and having to press the right mouse button for a burst of speed. The sailing is meant to be relaxing and contemplative. It’s pretty sailing through the Nebula, but that was absolutely my least favorite part of the game. The distances between moons can be large, and the sailing speed is slow. You can occasionally “rest” and have Six take over for you, but I found that sometimes Six would annoyingly divert me from my path, and Aliya would wake farther away from her destination than when she went to sleep. Minor gripes in the grand scheme of things.
The writing is top-notch. I really enjoyed Aliya and Six; their banter is great, often funny. The art and sound are nice too. This gets two thumbs up from me.
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