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Oct 15th, 2024 at 17:11:30 - En Garde! (PC) |
This is a silly, short adventure game (~4 hours) featuring fencing, and the combat is really quite good. It's predicated not only on fencing moves (dodge, parry, riposte), but on using the environment to gain advantage over enemies. For example, you can kick things at enemies (boxes, crates, vases, etc.), which will momentarily surprise most enemy types. Surprised enemies are opened up to being kicked themselves, and you can kick them off ledges, into traps, and so on. You can pick up objects (buckets, turkeys, lanterns, etc.) and throw them at enemies too, distracting them or, if you're close with a bucket or turkey, putting them on the enemies' heads. It's amusing seeing an enemy running around with a turkey on his head.
You can also interact with the environment, such as by throwing a lantern at a cannon, which will cause it to fire, or by cutting a rope holding up a chandelier, which will cause it to fall. You can jump on tables, swing on poles, and generally run circles around your opponents, throwing and kicking things at them. Doing such acrobatics also surprises them, opening them up to kicks and attacks, or just distracting them so that you can focus on other enemies, because they will swarm you.
There are a variety of enemy types that, especially when there are a lot of enemies together, can be pretty challenging. They basically escalate in the complexity of their patterned moves. If their swords highlight red, it's an unblockable attack that you must dodge. If their swords highlight blue, you need to parry. Different enemies have different combinations of these two moves, and they come at you fast, so you have to react quickly to their series of attacks. As you dodge and parry the more advanced duelists, you wear down their guard bar. Once that's depleted, you do damage to their health. If you get hit, their guard bar replenishes. So, you need to string together perfect moves to defeat enemies. Combat happens in arenas, often with waves; it's intense and fun!
The fencing and acrobatic antics align with the narrative and tone of the game. You play as a heroic rapscallion who is against the "Count-Duke" and his evil scheme to milk the population and enrich himself. The plot and characters are usually over-the-top. There are plenty of funny one-liners. It's all very silly, endearing, and colorful. And I say all this with the feeling, in the end, that it was missing things. It moves at a fast pace and feels like it could have been fleshed out more, perhaps even taken a bit more seriously, and been a more engrossing action game. What's here is solid, but it feels like more of a foundation for something else than anything I'd encourage others to go out and play, although it was totally fun.
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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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