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Jul 29th, 2024 at 09:09:45 - Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess (PC) |
Another interesting and stylish game that I am retiring because (a) it's repetitive; (b) it's easy; (c) there's hardly any narrative; and (d) the UI sucks.
Why is it interesting? What do I like about it? It's a novel take on tower defense wherein, aside from placing "towers," you also control a character as in an action-RPG. I read a lot of reviews talking about how brand new this is, but it seems no one has played Sanctum! Granted, that is more traditional tower defense, and it's merged with FPS instead of action-RPG, but it's the same basic idea. You set up your defenses and then get your hands dirty killing enemies alongside your towers as they come in waves. Except the "towers" in Kunitsu-Gami are villagers whom you rescue. Villagers can be assigned different roles (e.g., woodcutter, archer, sumo wrestler, shaman, etc.), and each has strengths and weaknesses for your defense. For example, woodcutters are basic melee units that can be upgraded to chase demons; archers are basic ranged units; sumo wrestlers are like tanks; shamans are healers; etc.
Back up. Here's the set-up. You are a spirit guardian of a priestly type woman. Some demonic presence has defiled a holy mountain and all the villages along the path to its summit. You go from village to village rescuing the villagers and cleansing the corruption. To cleanse the corruption, there are two "phases" in each village: day and night (or, preparation and combat). In the day phase, you search the village, purge defilement (which provides currency that you need to assign roles to villagers and to cleanse torii gates), free villagers (whom you can then assign combat roles or building tasks), clear obstructions on the path, and ultimately carve a path through the corruption for the woman to follow to destroy corrupted torii gates. In the day phase, you'll also want to pay attention to where the corrupted torii gates are, because that's where demons will come from, where the woman is along the path (can the demons flank her? what paths do you need to defend?), and you need to set up your villager defenses. During the nighttime, you defend against waves of demons who are trying to kill the woman. Rinse and repeat until the woman gets past all the torii gates.
Once you have freed a village of the corruption, you often gain access to a boss battle. Boss battles let you use the villagers from the previous village, assign them roles, and tackle a unique challenge. They usually aren't that hard, but they are each different, require some special strategies, and reward you with a new mask (villager role). My favorite was the centipede boss, which requires you to assign villagers to light torches around the arena. Once all the torches are lit, the boss's weak spots are exposed and you can assign everyone to attack. He'll eventually get away and extinguish all the flames, plunging the level in dangerous darkness so he can prowl around. He'll also call down a bunch of worm minions, who make a beeline for the woman. So, you have to balance defending her with lighting the torches. Rinse and repeat until boss is dead.
Upon freeing a village, it also becomes a "base" and you can visit daily to assign villagers to repair things, and you can visit the woman and change equipment and upgrade villager combat roles. All bases are basically the same, and after every battle, you can revisit every liberated village for rewards. This means that the farther along you go, the more time you will spend just going from liberated village to liberated village collecting money, rations, and checking on building progress. I think this could have been handled better via menus instead of requiring you to actually go to 10 different villages after EVERY fight to check on things. Anyway, that's how the game works.
(a) and (b). Tower defense is an inherently repetitive genre. You defend against waves of enemies. But the excitement comes as the waves get longer/faster/harder, new enemies are introduced, you get new units, you must devise new strategies, and so on. If the game is too easy, then new enemies don't present a challenge, you don't need to devise new strategies, and your new units may not seem to matter much. Such is the case here. I played about half the game, and never even came close to dying during the village purges. I did die on a couple of the boss fights, but once you figure out a trick for them, they're easy. Your character is very powerful and can effectively hold down more than one lane of enemies alone. Pretty much every level could be solved by moving the woman to a place free of too many junctions, then just completely surrounding her with the most powerful units, then running around killing most everything myself. The "village repair" part, as I've said, is also monotonous.
And although the third-person combat is smooth and has a satisfying feel, it's also simple. There are a few different combos, one of note that lets you attack airborne enemies, and the other two or three are just variations on the same thing. You can also block and dodge, which you will rarely need to do. I pretty much went left click, left click, left click, right click (the most powerful combo) all level every level to win. As the hours went by, and I hit the halfway mark, I decided I did not need to keep doing this!
(c). Believe it or not, I've already described the extent of the narrative. There are a bunch of collectibles you can get that basically serve as encyclopedia entries about Japanese culture, if that counts as narrative for you, and other collectibles that give you the slightest perks and that I found mostly useless. So the narrative is not a compelling reason to play.
(d). Ah, the UI! So many questions about UI elements. First of all, several things are frustrating because the game is quite stylish and goes for style over substance and functionality.
Example: When placing villagers on the map, you cannot scroll the map outside of where your character is. Why? I have no idea. This means that you have to physically run to where you want to place villagers. Then, you have to call the villagers to you. Then, you can place them where you are. If you decide you want to place some of them elsewhere, you have to run over there, call them there, then place them.
Example: When assigning roles to villagers, you can only assign roles to those who are right next to you. You can cycle through villagers, but it will only show those right next to you. And I mean RIGHT next to you. If there is a villager like 3 feet away from you, you need to exit the management screen, move 3 feet to your left, open it, and then assign the role. The same thing applies to healing villagers, which is especially frustrating during combat when there are a lot of things that will highlight and you are trying to mouse over the specific villager you want to heal, or you have to keep moving around opening the management window trying to get close enough to that one villager so that they appear as healable.
Given that the day cycle is on a timer, these two oversights are especially frustrating. All the extra actions you have to take to manage villagers is a waste of time and makes it so you will have to fight through extra night cycles. These functions could have all been handled on the map. Open the map, select villagers to move and move them from there. You should also be able to move from the map or villager movement menu to the role assignment menu. You should also be able to "group" villagers by proximity or role type. Like, if I've set up a defense around the woman, but I want to move those villagers together, I should be able to select and move them all together instead of having to run to where I want them, open the management screen, tab to each one, taking care not to select any villager who isn't in that group (because it's easy to select the wrong one!), and move them to where I am.
Final example of bad UI: Equipping mazo talismans is a pain in the ass. These trinkets provide miniscule buffs and are not even worth messing with in the first place. There are about 100 of them. They are listed in numerical order on a scroll, but you do not find them in numerical order, and it shows you ALL of them instead of just the ones you own. If you find talisman #54, you have to literally scroll through 54 pages to equip it. You can "jump sections" but that requires knowing which section it's in and then still scrolling through all the talismans in that section. I finally realized that you can "favorite" talismans and then sort by favorites. But why is there no option to sort by "owned" so you can just see the ones you actually have? This drove me crazy. Like, I actually did have like talismans #3, 30, 50, and 80 or something. Scroll scroll scroll...
There are several other annoying UI things. Alongside the fact that the game became repetitive and is not that hard, the UI issues are harder to overlook.
It's still a fun game with great art and music. The enemy models are sick to look at. There are some cool ideas here. It knows what it is trying to do and focuses on those elements of the game. But man, I think the UI stuff was the most frustrating and is what killed it. I can handle repetition if it's still fun, but trying to manage villagers with the UI kept making me wonder why they didn't implement this or that little feature. Maybe they will make a sequel with improvements.
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Jul 29th, 2024 at 08:15:45 - Chants of Sennaar (PC) |
I was into this for a while and then lost interest. It's a neat game, like a point-and-click where you decipher hieroglyphic languages. Here's an example from the very beginning. You encounter another person, who speaks to you. They speak in hieroglyphics, and you don't know what they mean. However, the person gestures to you as they say a word, then to themselves as they say another word. Maybe they said "you" and "me." They gesture to you, then to themselves, then to a closed door. Maybe "you help me open the door"? When you help them, they say something and then leave. "Thanks"? "Goodbye"?
You proceed to a hallway with carvings that tell a story. Again, you don't know any of the hierogphyics' meanings, but you figure something out about people following a sun god, then some warriors barring the way to a temple. Proceed, and you'll encounter more NPCs in various situations who say a few lines, gesture, and you start to see that this is a game about figuring out what the heck people are saying by talking to them, interpreting context cues, and observing your surroundings. You have a journal wherein you are occasionally presented with pages with images and you can match the hieroglyphics that you have discovered (and what you think they mean) with the images. You can type up to 20 characters of guesses for each hieroglyphic in your journal. So, you might encounter an NPC and they say "You help me go/move/create ______ to the temple/church/worship." In this case, you've got a couple guesses for the symbols for what might be go or move or create and temple or church or worship, and then you haven't guessed the blank. The more NPCs you talk to and objects you interact with, the more context you have for each word. However, this makes it hard too, because the more situations in which you encounter a word, often times the more potential meanings it seems to have.
There are a total of five languages to learn, each used by some type or class of person in the city. Admittedly, I only finished the first language, got kind of frustrated/bored, and looked up a lot about the game online, then decided I didn't care to finish. There are a few reasons I got frustrated/bored.
1. There is a lot of backtracking, slow movement, and no map. I spent more time trying to remember how to get to various rooms than actually thinking about solving puzzles. I read that there is a good reason for there being no map, but that it doesn't become apparent until later in the game. Well, in the first part of the city, I can tell you that it sucks without a map. And you have to go through every screen, watching your character run and run and run. It would be nice to double-click on a door and have your character go straight to the next room. Like, I know I need to go to a place 8 rooms from here. Why can't I just GO there instead of click click click and watch him run through 8 rooms (and then back, and forth, and back, and forth...).
2. You can make various plausible interpretations of some hieroglyphs, and this became frustrating. The languages are actually pretty simple, and I understand why they need to be for the sake of making the language game work, but I kept overthinking, like assigning more complex or nuanced meanings to symbols than was actually the case. This led to me getting stuck for long periods of time. Until I realized that...
3. It solves words for you. This one I really didn't like. When you are working on the journal, sometimes (or all the time?) if you just slot the correct hieroglyphic with the correct image, it will automatically reveal the meaning, even if that's not what you guessed. So all your hard interpretive work is wiped away in favor of a process-of-elimination matching game. The more I played, the more Chants of Sennaar reminded me of The Case of the Golden Idol, which left a really sour taste in my mouth with bugs at the end where it was auto-solving scenes.
In the end, I felt like I had the gist of the gameplay and puzzling, and that it would just be doing the same thing with four more languages, possibly with more fun challenge, but also possibly with the ability just to cheese the whole thing by doing process of elimination. The story in the first part of the city isn't terribly compelling, though I am sure it becomes more interesting. Even though my experiences with the last two word/mystery games I've played (this and Case of the Golden Idol) haven't been great, I am still interested in Return of the Obra Dinn and Heaven's Vault. But, it is possible that this is a genre that just doesn't click with me. Will determine that after those other two games!
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Jul 26th, 2024 at 09:42:39 - Jusant (PC) |
This was neat. You basically climb a mountain, but it's like for real mountain climbing. You have to attach ropes and use LT and RT to grab holds with your left and right hands and stuff. I played the whole thing in one long sitting last night, and when I got done, realized by hands were cramped from pressing triggers for four hours. There are some other elements to the climbing mechanics related to the game's fantasy world, like various plants and creatures that help you climb. It's not hard, and I fell into a quiet rhythm.
A narrative guides you up the mountain, too. It's about climate change and environmentalism. In the past, there was rain and abundant water. But it seems like people used too much water / mismanaged their resources / polluted and the source from above dried up. Now, people live in a sun-baked wasteland. They go on expeditions into what was once a great ocean to try and find any water. One expedition went up instead to chase a tale of some creatures that brought water to the mountain. Your character is following in the footsteps of that expedition and actually (for some reason) has a baby one of those water creatures. What will you discover at the top?
Jusant is a very pretty game, colorful and with impressive scale. I never tired of looking out over the ocean basin or marveling at the vast interior hollows inside the mountain. The sound design complements this, and makes the adventure feel both peaceful and epic. The movement is fluid, and climbing feels good. I encountered some movement quirks, like that the character often won't jump forward, sometimes it can be tricky to get her to do some of the more fine maneuvering, and getting her to detach from a long rope swing doesn't always work how you think it will (she tends to hang on and not want to let go!). There are a lot of texts to find that provide context to the story. The "main" ones chronicling the mountain expedition I enjoyed, and there are more of those as you go higher. Lower on the mountain, there are a lot of collectibles that are just like mail that mountain residents pass to one another with them just chatting. I lost interest real fast in finding those ones.
Jusant was definitely something different. It's not a hard game; it's not even a particularly exciting game. It's rather calming and, like I said, sucked me into a rhythm. I was thinking about studies of flow among mountain climbers and it seems this can be reproduced with mountain climbing in a video game!
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Jul 26th, 2024 at 09:21:39 - Clone Drone in the Danger Zone (PC) |
A random find on Game Pass, it's got like 30,000 "overwhelmingly positive" Steam reviews. It's a (mostly melee) arena combat game with robots that can slice off body parts. Case in point: I beat the final campaign boss fight with one leg, after systematically slicing off the legs (so it couldn't move) and arms (so it couldn't use weapons) of the boss. The campaign is just a few hours long, has a silly story that is way better than it has any right to be, and has some good humor, especially the announcers in the first two chapters.
In the campaign, the first two chapters let you play around with the skill tree and design some custom robots. Do you want to use a sword, hammer, bow, or spear? Do you want your weapon on fire? Do you want a jet pack? Etc. Limited skill points keep you from becoming overpowered. They also introduce the idea of the clones. You can, instead of purchasing a skill, purchase a clone. After I died the first time, and had to start the whole chapter over, I realized that the clones were like extra lives. From then on, I always had a clone purchased in case I got sliced up! The other chapters introduce co-op, further upgrades, and the idea of "transference" where you can take over enemies that kill you. This is strategic. If you know what kinds of enemies are coming, you can purposefully get killed by an enemy type that is strong against the upcoming ones. If a boss is coming up, you can purposefully get killed by a massive flaming-hammer-wielding armored robot or something.
After completing the campaign, there is co-op, with a lot of challenges, deathmatch, and some other multiplayer modes. I dabbled a bit. There are far, far better multiplayer battlers out there, but this one certainly has charm.
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