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Aug 9th, 2024 at 15:18:34 - ULTRAKILL (PC) |
Retiring this. Another surprise freebie from my wishlist on Amazon Luna, and the third game I've played on that cloud gaming platform. This was more stable than Devil May Cry 5, no crashes at all. Though I didn't play for too, too long. ULTRAKILL is really freaking hard. It's a boomer shooter with new Doom vibes because, as with new Doom, you regain health by getting close to an enemy and getting their blood on you (aka attacking them at point blank). So you have to be aggressive.
I made it to what, I learned, is considered the boss that forces you to get good at the game, V2. It's challenging up to that point, but you learn each enemy and you can methodically get through the levels. V2...killed me like 100 times. I got him pretty close to death two or three times, but man, he was frustrating! He's hard to hit, super fast, flies and slides around like crazy. He's actually an upgraded version of your character (so I imagine how annoying I am to the enemies!). I was trying to blame this on Amazon Luna, but honestly it's my fault. I couldn't learn him well enough. I mean, I learned his attacks, and I kind of figured out how he choreographs them. But then once you do that, you need to be able to dodge the attacks that need to be dodged, parry the attacks that need to be parried (the shotgun blasts), and do all that while constantly zipping around yourself and shooting at him. It's so fast, and I am having the horrifying thought, "Am I too old for this?!", like are my reflexes just not what they used to be?! Oh no...
The guns are fun and the movement is tight. Each gun (that I got) has two special attacks. For example, the pistol has a charge attack and a neat one where you toss a coin in the air, then shoot the coin, which ricochets with a 100% chance to hit an enemy. The shotgun has a grenade launcher and a charged shot that you have to be careful with lest you blow yourself up. The machine gun can deploy mines and has some sort of exploding scattershot. The whole thing is wrapped up in that low-fi boomer shooter aesthetic where it looks like Quake. The music was great, lots of pounding industrial/metal music, with other moments of classical and whatnot.
I would have liked to play more of this, see what other guns, enemies, and bosses there are, but V2 is kicking my butt, and there wasn't all that much compelling me forward anyway, despite it being a tight game and obviously at the top of the boomer shooter genre.
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Aug 9th, 2024 at 15:03:10 - Cocoon (PC) |
Oooh, I forgot to write an entry for this one. This was a really cool adventure puzzle game, sort of like a Limbo or Inside (because apparently same lead designer). It gets better as it goes on, as it becomes more complex. I didn't know what exactly I was doing for most of the time (like, the story is...??...until you start to make some educated guesses about why you are doing what you're doing later).
But the gist of it is that you're this bug guy and you solve puzzles in the world by using these orbs/spheres/moons that you pick up and carry around. The gimmick is that you can go inside of each sphere, and inside of each sphere is another world, with its own puzzles. When you get a second colored sphere, you'll realize that you can take it inside of the first one. Like, whenever you enter or exit a sphere, you take what you are holding, which could be a sphere, or later, a sphere within a sphere within a sphere. It gets pretty mind-bending later on, as you are figuring out how to get spheres inside spheres to solve this or that puzzle.
There are also some boss fights, which were fun. The whole aesthetic of the game is mysterious and otherworldly. All the other creatures, the environments, the music, it's very like bio-mechanical sci-fi type stuff. I thought I would like this, and sure enough, it landed. Really creative, super well designed, never played anything quite like it. Highly recommend.
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Aug 2nd, 2024 at 13:18:29 - Freud's Bones (PC) |
I bought this for the interesting premise. You get inside Freud’s head and help him dig into his crisis, as well as help him conduct psychotherapy on his patients. It's a point-and-click with a lot of reading and listening to Freud unraveling. Most of the game takes place in his office, where you can click on things (ooh, aah!), solve the same frustrating Egyptian hieroglyphics puzzle over and over (ooh, aah!), treat patients, and watch Freud spiral. As such, the game is quite small and quickly becomes repetitive. The puzzle, for example, is an artifact that Freud acquired during his travels. It spins like a slot machine, and you have to use a legend to decipher the hieroglyphics that appear on its face. Easy enough, but they are out of order, and to put them in order, you just have to guess at what the hell it wants you to do. The words will form a sentence, but sometimes it's a question, sometimes the independent clause is first, sometimes it's second, sometimes it's just worded in a strange way. You have no way of knowing any of this, so you will assemble the four images in all possible configurations until you happen to get the correct order. Super annoying. So far, the resulting sentences have just been Freud posing existential questions to himself.
I thought the most interesting part would be conducting psychoanalysis. Well, when this game says that's what you're going to do, by god, that's what you're going to do! You get some excerpts/summaries of Freud's writing, an encyclopedia of psychoanalysis terminology, a breakdown of mental diseases, types of patients, dream symbolism, and so on. As your patients lay on the couch, you are sort of cross-referencing what they are saying with all this information to get to the root of their problem and diagnose them. This is interesting for sure, but I think the problem is, well, most psychologists don't do this anymore. This isn't what clinical mental health counseling or social work is. So, trying to play this, I could not help but constantly be like, "No, don't ask that!" or "He should do this..." or "But that's not what the patient said..." This is a case where my prior knowledge and experience probably got in the way of "becoming" Freud.
He's a hard person to become as it is, considering the smoking, cocaine addiction, obsession with sex, and so on. In addition to treating patients and posing existential questions to yourself, you also need to manage Freud's finances. To do this, you go out to fancy places and schmooze rich people, trying to get patrons to fund your research because your books are selling poorly and the newspapers are calling you a fraud. In all the game's social interactions, you have to choose dialogue options that will appeal to the other person, or get them to do what you want. For potential patrons, this might mean sucking up to them, appealing to their desires. For patients, this might mean taking an approach that aligns with their sickness (e.g., don't be direct if they are suffering from anxiety because it will make it worse). Characters make facial expressions and you can see patients' hearts beat, so you can read them.
The game also visualizes the id, superego, and ego as layers in the head. As you're appealing to characters, or digging around during treatment trying to find causes of their problems, you identify topics and "move them" from the id to the level of conscious awareness. Pretty neat. Anyway, at this point I might have written as long as I played, and I don't feel like finishing. The cases "solve" themselves as you scrutinize case files for a magnifying glass icon to click on important words, and I've gotten bored of listening to Freud. The marketing material for this game heralds the "visionary game designer" who made it and goes on about how this is the pinnacle of Italian game design. I should have been wary of that. It's a neat idea for sure, and obviously a lot of knowledge and passion is on display here, but it is not a good time in practice.
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Aug 1st, 2024 at 06:03:10 - As Dusk Falls (PC) |
This is a narrative "your choices matter" game with a unique art style and a really compelling story. However, it made me realize that Detroit: Become Human will overshadow any of these types of games. I have been thinking about that one forever, and have even gone out of my way to read some research on it and talk to someone who studied it. Anyway, trying not to make constant comparisons because As Dusk Falls is great on its own.
This is a NARRATIVE game, strong emphasis. It tells the story of two families whose paths cross during a motel hold-up and ensuing hostage situation. There are a variety of main characters, several of whom you "control" over the course of six chapters. Some are more central than others, including the father and daughter of the family that is held hostage in the motel and the youngest brother of the family who is holding up the motel. You'll learn about events leading up to the hostage situation from both sides, about relationships and hard decisions and whatnot affecting each family and their motivations. That is, it's easy to just say "hostage takers bad," but as that younger brother says, their family was dealt a bad hand. It raises all sorts of ethical questions and made me think about how people handle inter- and intra-personal conflict and process trauma. You'll also fast-forward years later and see what happened to the main characters.
Your narrative choices do matter, do change the outcome of characters' trajectories. Most of the main characters have a variety of different outcomes, and most of them can die. As Dusk Falls pulls a card from Detroit and shows you the choices you made and their outcomes for each chapter in a narrative chart, along with what percentage of players made the same choice as you. It also encourages you to go back and replay sections to see alternate outcomes. It's all really well done. Another interesting feature, which I didn't get to try out, is that you can play co-op or online, and everyone gets a "vote" in the dialogue choices. I would have played this with a friend and done that, but Game Pass expires in a few days and there wasn't time.
When I said that you "control" characters, I am referring to the fact that the only inputs required from players are selecting occasional dialogue options and pressing a button during QTEs. This isn't Detroit or The Walking Dead where you actually move your characters through the world. That's fine, as the art style was this cool blend of realistic/comic-bookish/stop-motion animation. I could watch it all day long! But I do wish that the QTEs were more engaging. When I say that you press a button, I mean that literally: you press ONE button, the same one, every time, with no variation. It doesn't challenge you in changing which button, there are no "up with the left stick and down with the right stick" prompts, no button mashing. This is great for accessibility, but I wonder why they didn't have an option to make it more engaging. I played the game reclining with a controller or mouse held lazily in one hand, finger on A or LMB.
I really enjoyed the ending(s) that I got. You would probably call it the good ending. And there is something that happens at the end that is open to interpretation and sets up for a sequel, which I hope it gets.
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