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Oct 6th, 2024 at 10:58:31 - The Eternal Cylinder (PC) |
Played a couple hours and this did not click for me. Neat art design and silly enemies were the highlights, as well as, of course, the titular eternal cylinder, a massive thing that rolls forward, destroying everything in its path as the game progresses. You play as "trebhums," little creatures that can eat stuff and gain mutations, which allow them to do things like "take no damage from gas clouds" or "become a square and fit in some holes" or "convert food to water" or "jump higher." You can collect up to 5 trebhums, each of which can be mutated and has its own inventory. So, you run around with your little group of pals, eating stuff and finding water (because you have hunger, hydration, energy, and stamina meters to manage) and generally trying to figure out how to solve puzzles and where to go next. You can explore around, but it's rather minimal. The world is procedurally generated and quickly looked same-y. You are contained in little biomes. If you leave, the eternal cylinder starts rolling again, and you can stop it by getting to the next in a series of towers before the cylinder gets there and crushes it. Like, it's interesting in theory, but really weird and boring in practice. I also didn't like that the narrator tells you that you can run ahead and your other trebhums won't die, that they'll find their way to you, but they definitely do die for no reason sometimes. It costs resources to get new trebhums, and you have to find them, and you may have spent mutation resources on them, so this is not cool. They can also lose all the mutations you put on them, which I also disliked. In all, the game felt tedious, like a chore to play.
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Oct 4th, 2024 at 13:42:18 - Children of Morta (PC) |
Another hidden gem in a Humble Bundle. This is like an action RPG roguelike with narrative emphasis. The thing that makes this stand out is that you don't play as a single character, or various character classes, but as a whole family. The Bergsons live together and are the protectors of a mountain. They love each other and have a happy life, but then some corruption starts spreading and they have to figure out what's going on and stop it. They free three guardian spirits and then confront a god.
Over time, you unlock more family members for play, and the unlocks coincide with story developments. The young daughter, for example, trains and hones her fire-slinging abilities. You see this in various scenes and interactions. Eventually, she joins you with another character in a dungeon, and then she's ready for you to play. The characters are not terribly different from one another, the main difference being either melee or ranged. But I mean, one melee character is really slow and strong (and sucks), a couple are pretty fast, one has a shield, one uses a spear and is more a mid-range fighter. But ultimately, the two ranged characters steal the show, the mage and the archer. Once they get leveled up a bit, it's easy breezy time. There are three main areas, each with three dungeons, and most of the dungeons have three levels. I beat the entire third area without dying (and maybe the last dungeon of the second area, if I remember) alternating between the archer and the mage.
You'll want to experiment with all the characters, not only because it's fun to learn their playstyles, but because of the family element, they unlock skills that help other family members. For example, as you move up each of their skill trees, you might unlock a skill that gives the whole family more critical hit chance or more speed or whatever. There are a whole host of other upgrades too, which you need to spend gold on (gold is found in dungeons), and all those other upgrades affect the whole family (every character). So there's a neat mixture of character specialization and unlocking things for the benefit of everyone. Also, you will HAVE to change characters sometimes because they will get "corruption fatigue" if they spend too much time in dungeons. That decreases their maximum HP for a while. So, use other characters for a couple dungeons, then that fatigued character will be good to go again.
Although dungeons are not particularly varied (some of the same enemy types appear throughout the game), it scratches the itch of being methodical, clearing the map of each dungeon to make sure you find all the chests, items, quests, and so on. This was probably more important in the early-mid game, when the difficulty was highest. Toward the end, you'll be stacked with buffs and, like I said, it becomes pretty easy, at least with the ranged characters. So yeah, very cool. I really liked this. Oh, also, it's got great pixel art!
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Sep 24th, 2024 at 19:39:01 - Suzerain (PC) |
I bought a narrative game bundle from Humble Bundle recently because it had a couple games on my wishlist on it, plus Immortality, which I played on Game Pass and which I loved, so now I own it on Steam. It had some others I'd never heard of, like Suzerain. It looked interesting, a political strategy narrative game. I've not played anything quite like it, but after playing it for a while, I realized I was nodding off every time I opened it. Even tonight, I'm not tired, but I'm starting to drift to sleep. That's a sign that I'm not engaged!
That's not to say I dislike it. It's well written and detailed, and the premise is intriguing. You play as the newly elected President of a fictional country with a revolutionary past. The country is in a recession and needs to carve out space for itself in the international landscape so that it can thrive. There are other alliances of countries, those which are capitalist, communist, and monarchies. You'll sort of chart your country's course (though I...doubt [?]...that you can become a monarchy), meeting with advisers and reading a lot of policy, deciding what to enact, who to ally with, and so on.
My favorite parts of the game are when the non-policy narratives move forward--when it's about your family adjusting to their husband/father becoming President, when it delves into the history between you and other cabinet members, when it explores the political history of the fictional world, when you get to attend a funeral of a communist poet and make a speech, when a violent event happens and you see how political violence affects you, your family, security, citizens in various political groups, relationships to other factions, and so on.
My least favorite parts are reading newspapers and reports, and talking with advisers about policy. There are like 6 different newspapers, and boy are they busy writing stories! It seems like after every decision you make, up to a dozen articles will be published. Papers span the range of political ideologies; one is communist, one is capitalist, one is centrist, one looks at international news, and so on. Similarly, reports from various cities and countries are constantly produced and icons beg you to read them. This all lets you know what's going on and lets you know the public's opinion on things, but it's a lot of tedium, I found. Policy wonks will love this game. Most of it is meeting with advisers about policies, listening to them banter back and forth about what they think you should do, reading about policy positions and deciding which ones to enact, then seeing their consequences on the story and the political scene.
I played about 5 hours in total, and it's losing its novelty and morphing into drudgery for the most part. I'm not committed to learning the ins and outs of the political scene. I think something like this could be used pedagogically to teach about politics, policy, and institutions for sure. Actually, I learned a new word. The game's title is an actual word in politics referring to when a state has control over another autonomous state, I suppose by influence or something. I learned this when I was giving a talk on interaction and socialization in digital games last week, and someone asked me what I was playing. I mispronounced the title of Suzerain and said I had no idea what it referred to, and some historians in the audience had their moment to shine.
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Sep 20th, 2024 at 15:14:46 - Doki Doki Literature Club (PC) |
I've never played an actual dating sim, just some parodies or riffs on them like Hatoful Boyfriend and Dream Daddy. I thought this one wasn't supposed to be a dating sim, was just supposed to look like one until it subverted the genre. Well, it's a dating sim for a long time, and I don't think I care for dating sims after playing! It takes its sweet time getting to the weird stuff! Yes, there is weird stuff.
I don't know how this would land for people who like to play dating sims. I imagine they would like the part until the weird stuff more than I did, and then I think that their appreciation of the genre subversion may scale according to how many games they've played (or how much they like games) with unreliable narrators or games that "mess" with you (Pony Island, Stanley Parable, etc.). I also wonder how the experience might be different for people who read something about the game compared to those who go in without any prior knowledge. Since I knew that it had a psychological horror twist, I kept looking for it. Every time a girl went into the closet, I was thinking, "There's something about that closet!", or every time one of them would say anything at all that could be interpreted as deviant, I would think, "Aha, now they're going to be cannibals/witches/cosmic horrors/vampires/etc." I do wonder if I missed clues as to the twist, but I definitely didn't pick up on any and didn't guess what was coming.
That's all I'm going to say about this because I don't want to spoil anything, and it really is that simple of a game. Dating sim for most (too much) of its run time, then takes a distressing turn. Overall, I enjoyed it, aside from the mild boredom of the first three quarters. Am I raving about it? No. Would I recommend others play it? It's fine, but no need unless it's your thing.
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