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Nov 12th, 2024 at 18:18:10 - Card Shark (PC) |
This gives me vibes of Pentiment in style. The art is beautiful, very painterly, and if you watch the backgrounds, they kind of move or “dance” with shimmering particles, especially indoors. It’s set in 18th century France and you find yourself caught up in national political intrigue. The story is intriguing, the writing is sharp and witty, the concept is creative.
Card Shark is a game about cheating at cards. You play as a mute man, and you are taken under the wing of an infamous ex-noble/socialite turned conman. He teaches you card tricks as you travel around the country swindling rich people out of their money. Your targets are often chosen not just for their wealth, but because they have information, and your handler (and, it turns out, his handlers) is trying to unravel a mystery that will have huge implications for the country’s political class.
The card tricks start off easy. For example, you pour wine for an opponent, steal a glance at his cards, and signal with your hand which suit he has the most of. Or, you shuffle the cards, but palm an ace to deal to your handler. There are 28 tricks, or combinations of tricks, and the complexity escalates like crazy by the end. Here is the "tutorial" text when you are taught the next-to-final trick for the final card game. You'll do this long part after you interpret a code to give two specific types of cards to your ally. You’ll palm one card to deal to your ally and then sweep cards in a specific order according to the code to get the second card. Then, you get the following tutorial explanation, with visuals:
“First off, I need you to shuffle once whilst injogging the top card at the same time. Subtlety is key here so make sure you do this in one fluid motion. Nice job. We’ve already set aside two cards for me, your target, so now it’s time to sort out the other players. Go ahead and drop two cards per additional player. Now each player has two cards prepared for them. To secure the selection, outjog the next card. Outjogging is just like injogging, but the card pokes out away from you instead of in and towards you. Here, see, the outjogged card and injogged card are on either side of your stack. Your thumb can easily create a gap beneath the injogged card when you’re squaring the deck. And you’ll naturally grab everything up to the outjogged card, too. This creates a break below it. You can use these gaps to restore the stack on the next pass through the deck. Good. You know how this part goes. Shuffle down and injog in one motion. Now drop a pair of cards for each player besides myself. Now for that outjog we talked about to sandwich the stack. Good. The prepared cards will be easy to find thanks to those markers on either side. Go ahead and shuffle down the rest of the deck like the honest man you are. Then square as I showed you. With the deck squared, you need to drop all the cards up to the first gap. That way you can get back to dealing with the stack you’re preparing. Now my two cards are at the bottom of the stack. But they need to be distributed amongst the opponents’ cards. To distribute the planned cards in the stack, you’ll need to drop one individual card for everyone other than your target. The next card should be for me…But the ones you prepared are on either side of the next break. Drop everything up to the break. That should be my card with a card for each opponent above it. Great. Now there are two cards prepared for each of my opponents. But there’s only one for me, currently. Drop that next card to make sure both cards I requested end up in the same hand. Now you just need to offset the stack so that the requested cards are dealt to me. Simply drop as many cards as there are opponents seated before me in the deal. Look at that! Both cards are on track to end up in my hand. But in your celebrations don’t forget to secure your stack by injogging the next card. With the stack secured, all that’s left is to drop the rest of the pack and cut the deck at the marker. Let’s see what happens when you deal out the cards. Good job. The two low red cards are dealt to me. You’ll finish by reversing the opponents’ cut."
You will have to do this by yourself under the pressure of increasingly suspicious opponents, with money (and your life) on the line. Each instruction and term in the description above is a specific motion. The small parts form the whole trick. Also, in real time, players are not necessarily sitting in the order that they are in the tutorial, or there may be a different number of players, and the cards you need to hold may be high or low cards, which changes the number and order of the drops and all that. AND, in the very last card game, you not only have to give two cards to one player, but you also have to give two different cards to TWO different players, and you have to figure that part out on your own. It’s so complicated! So complicated, in fact, that I threw my hands up at the end and watched a YouTube video of the last card game. No shame! A read part of an AMA with the devs, and apparently this game turned a lot of people on to magic tricks. Tracks. Totally unique game, worth checking out.
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Nov 12th, 2024 at 03:47:08 - A Space for the Unbound (PC) |
This is a narrative 2d sidescrolling game, pretty close to a point-and-click, but with a little more action. It's set in rural Indonesia in the 1990s, which was one of my favorite things about it, just the different setting and different perspective to offer. Some women have hijabs on, which is something you don't see in games. Characters dress is reflective of the culture, with the sandals, the uniforms of various people, and so on. It's got a neat story, often touching and sweet, but also serious and sad. It's about a couple high school kids and the end of the world, tackles death, grief, guilt, suicide, hope, community, and more. The pixel art has a great style.
Gameplay-wise, things are really simple, and I think this contributed to my overall gripe about it, that it is overly long and padded. You walk around the town where the game takes place talking to people. You'll get objectives and solve really easy point-and-click style puzzles, finding objects to use here and there to progress. Often, you'll get the object you need, whereupon you will then have to go find three more things. Collect those, and then you will need to go get three more things. It's rarely exciting, but they did try to add some action into the game in the form of "combat," which involves a button timing minigame to attack and block opponents.
A central mechanic is "spacediving," which is when the main character goes into the minds of other characters to solve their problems (by doing some easy puzzles). This was interesting at first, then it became tedious (how many people do I have to spacedive?!), and then at the end it added some complexity to it with the ability to spacedive and go back in time, which led to these inception moments, where you go inside someone's head, then go back in time, then go back some more, then go back some more, and you have like four timelines inside this person's head. As you make changes in one, things change in the others, and you need to figure out how to tweak various things to fix the person. Those last couple spacedives were the most interesting. I wish the game had more complex puzzle solving throughout!
So, things are definitely slow moving; the game goes at a deliberate pace. The fact that the gameplay is easy, repetitive, and fairly dull doesn't help when the story is also being slowly doled out, or, especially toward the end, when it repeats over and over what is happening to one of the characters and drags the finale. But it's a good story; otherwise, I would have put the game down. Still, it shouldn't have been as long as it was. Recommend? Eh, probably only if you really like these kinds of games.
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Nov 7th, 2024 at 17:14:19 - Resident Evil Village (PC) |
These Resident Evil games have top notch production values. I played the RE2 remake over the summer and freaking loved it. Resident Evil Village (8) isn't as good, nor is it as good as Biohazard (7) before it, but it was still a good time.
I liked:
- The main antagonists, who were very creative in their design and powers. I had seen the 8-foot tall woman with Freddy Krueger claws in trailers. Most of the others are cool too.
- The merchant, who was morbidly obese and mysterious. I can't stop hearing him say in my head, "To hunger is to be human" and then making like a sloppy chewing sound.
- The methodical way you are encouraged to explore the map. Rooms that still have items in them are red on the map, while those completed are green (or blue). You know what you've completed, and you know where you can still look for stuff. The map was excellent all around.
- The little side areas and extra puzzles. I found special artifacts, weapon modifications, mini bosses, and more by exploring side paths. These paths were always interesting.
- At the end, you get to go on a one-man rampage (with two different men). I always love it when games do this at the end. It's like a reward for making it that far. "Here's a ton of ammo and a new super weapon. Go crazy!"
I didn't like:
- The bosses were easy. You could cheese nearly all of them, mostly by walking backwards in a circle around a pillar or some other object in the center of the room, or doing some version of square strafing, and shooting at them as they followed you. Even bosses that were otherwise cool ("propeller head") or should have been difficult were easily dispatched like this.
- Mini bosses glitched like three times. One, the first time you fight one of the big werewolf enemies, it was on the other side of a wall. I don't think it was supposed to come up the stairs to that spot because its head was sticking through the wall, allowing me to casually shoot it while it growled at me. Then it moved to the doorway but couldn't fit through it, so I shot it some more there until it died. Another time, there is a side boss called "the cannibal." You fight him in a room that looks something like a meat-packing warehouse. If you go out the door, he "resets" usually by "jumping" up to a platform. If you open the door, you can fire some rounds at him up there before he jumps down. Then you can go back out the door, he jumps back up, then you open the door fire at him, he jumps down, etc. Actually this was a common way to cheese enemies, when they would stop following you if you turned around and went back the way you came. They "reset" but their health doesn't. So you can just attack them, walk away, come back and attack them more, walk away, and so on. It made lots of fights really easy.
- The whole game felt a little on rails. Puzzles were not difficult, and it always felt like I was being kindly led to the next place. This made it so that it never felt like I was really exploring or that I was really in danger.
- The main character was so one-note. Half his dialogue was "Mia!" or "Rose!" or "You bitch!" or something like that, always yelling at the bad guys about his wife and daughter.
Pros and cons. It felt almost overly polished. Like, a RE game should feel more gritty? But overall, I did enjoy it, even though it wasn't very scary compared to the last two RE games I played.
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Oct 29th, 2024 at 19:38:58 - Eternal Threads (PC) |
I've been playing this with Patrick all semester and we've finally beaten it. It's a strange one, like this slice of life narrative game about some housemates in England. The house burns down and everyone dies. Your job is to go to the house after the tragedy and watch fragments of past interactions, some of which you can affect by having characters make different choices, and prevent the housemates from dying in the fire.
To do this, you engage in incredibly mundane gameplay, watching incredibly mundane scenes of the housemates. One woman is pregnant, and another character figures it out, and she can hide the pregnancy or not. Another guy is being blackmailed, he grows pot in his basement for his ill mother, and has a psycho ex-girlfriend who he may or may not sleep with. He also has a secret door in the basement (ooh, aah!). Another woman is a photographer and artist who owns a creepy doll. Another guy has anger issues, takes another guy's bike out for a spin, and gets beat up and the bike is stolen. He also likes to play video games. One guy's sister moves in because she separated from her husband and sleeps with one of the other housemates. Another guy is a doctor and is considering taking a job far away, but doesn't want to tell his girlfriend (who is secretly pregnant). All these things cause minor drama. All of the characters are some degree of annoying. The voice acting is mediocre. After every event, your character types some "clever" name for the event on his timeline-travelling handheld device, and you have to wait for him to type out all the letters.
Despite all this, it's oddly compelling. You select events to watch on a timeline spanning about a week before the fire until the fire itself. Select the event, walk to the event location in the house, watch characters' interactions in the event. Select another event, walk to the event location in the house, watch characters' interactions in the event. Literally this for the entire duration.
We decided to start from the beginning and watch all the scenes, assuming that we'd uncover information that would allow us to make dialogue choices (available in some events) that would save characters from dying. I will save you a lot of trouble: there is no way to know which combination of dialogue choices will save characters and there is no way to prevent the fire. Even when you learn what caused it, there is nothing you can do about it. The easiest solution would seem to be to have a character make a decision to do something that would prevent the fire. But no. You go by trial and error. It follows zero logic. I do not know why they designed it this way. Toward the end, you'll sort of realize that you need to make decisions for each character that will result in them being out of the house, or like at least away from their place of death in the fire. One woman, you need to get her out of her bed; another two characters, you can get them out of the house together; another guy, you need to prevent from falling down the stairs and knocking himself out; etc. And there are long chains of events throughout the timeline that apparently lead to, for example, the woman getting out of her bed.
So, we played through every event and saved two of the six housemates. We clicked around on different decisions that seemed important, changing them, trying to reason our way to saving other housemates. Eventually, we found a walkthrough with instructions, which was wrong. I later found another walkthrough, which was right, and saved everyone. What an odd game!
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