Blogging the experience of gameplayhttps://www.gamelog.cl/gamers/GamerPage.php?idgamer=1269https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7784I'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! Tue, 29 Oct 2024 19:38:58 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7784&iddiary=13327https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7812Another quick retirement. Webbed was an exercise in frustration with the controls. So, in this game, you play as a spider, and you can spin webs. You aim to a surface you want to attach to, left-click, and release to shoot a web to swing. Or you can aim to a surface, right-click, aim to another surface, release, and you'll spin a web connecting the two surfaces that you can walk on. My favorite part of the game was the movement, which took some getting used to. I first tried to play with a controller, but the aiming was finnicky. It seemed like it'd be better with a mouse for precise aiming to shoot webs. It was better, and I got past the very beginning, but I quickly realized that this was a sort of physics puzzler. It's less about the movement itself and more about manipulating the environment and objects to move yourself and to move things where you want them. You constantly have to attach things to webs to move them around, spin webs connecting surfaces, but spinning other webs to connect the first web for support (if you've ever played World of Goo, it reminded me of that). I found it so frustrating trying to manipulate objects with webs. An early task required me to bring a cog to an ant. I accidentally dropped the cog into a pool of water that killed me if I touched it. So, I kept trying to shoot a web at the cog to pull it out, but I kept getting pulled into the water when I did that. Or, I'd attach to the cog, try to pull it out, and it would get stuck below a tree branch. I spent about 10 minutes trying to figure this out, and finally got lucky when I realized that I needed to spin a web higher to stand on to pull the cog out. Half the time, I would still fall off the web into the water anyway. In another spot, I had to pull an ant out of a pit, and that freaking ant would not come over a ledge onto solid ground. It's hard to pull stuff around where you want it, it's hard to precisely shoot a web where you want it, and objects stick to one another. For example, another time, I was trying to move a cog to some gears, but an ant that was there kept getting stuck on the cog. I kept having to try to get the ant off the cog before I could try to move the gear, but they kept inevitably getting stuck on each other. It was driving me nuts! The game is cute, and I think the webby physics puzzling is neat, but I didn't like doing it. I noticed that 97.5% of players have the first achievement, which comes a few minutes into the game. The rate for getting the second achievement (which I didn't make it to after an hour) drops to 57.4%. 40% of players bail within an hour. I wonder how many quit because they got frustrated!Tue, 29 Oct 2024 19:08:31 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7812&iddiary=13326https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7816I don't remember where I got this. Amazon? It's in my Steam account. Humble Bundle? Somewhere for free or in a bundle...Anyway, it wasn't on my radar, but it sounded interesting and it was so good! The Pale Beyond is a narrative, point-and-click(ish), survival, resource management game. You are recruited for an expedition to the South Pole to find a missing ship that was searching for [mystery]. Once you arrive, things go south (ba-dum!). Your ship gets trapped in the ice, the captain abandons ship with several other crew members, and you are thrust into the leadership role. After the caption & co. left, I had 25 people to manage. Those people have different roles. There are "key" story people like a photographer, the head engineer, the doctor, and the benefactor's contact, who is clearly withholding information. They can't die except through narrative choices. Then there are the regular sailors, some more engineers, scouts, and a medical team. They can die. Every day, you talk to the crew members. They will petition you for things, argue with you, your relationship (and their relationships with one another to some extent) will increase or decrease. This is the "loyalty" meter. You want them loyal to you so they don't mutiny, and for some other reasons later on. I actually had a really rare ending that netted me the rarest achievement I currently have on Steam (0.8% of players!) because of how my relationships played out. It's pretty easy to figure out which dialogue options increase loyalty (hint: be kind and understanding for the most part). You also have to manage food and heat resources. To get food, you'll need to use scouts to explore the ice around you and send crew to hunt game. To get heat, you have to constantly fuel the boiler with whatever you can find, from animals you hunt to resources you scavenge from the ship. There is also a morale to manage. If you don't provide enough rations or fuel for heat, morale goes down. Sailors will get malnourished, which, if left untreated with food, turns into scurvy. If that's untreated, the character dies. Sailors will get "freezing," which, if left untreated with heat, turns into frostbite. If that's untreated, the character dies. They can also become demoralized, which decreases the whole expedition's morale unless that's treated. You can send crew to the doctor for scurvy and frostbite, and they'll recover. The game progresses from summer to winter, so it gets colder and colder, which means that crew freeze more and more often. And as game becomes scarce, if you haven't managed food resources well, hunger becomes more common too. So, you're constantly managing your human resources too because you need people to hunt and perform a variety of other tasks. If people are out sick, you can't use them. And if they die, well, you've got less mouths to feed, but also that's fewer resources you can get. I think I had one sailor die fairly early on, then I had a bad week about halfway through the game and lost another three. I ended the game with 21 crew out of a potential 25. Not too bad! I really liked the story. Each of the main story characters plays a big role in the expedition, and they all have backstories and whatnot that influence their behaviors and relationships as the expedition progresses. Even the minor characters (the regular crew) have histories and relationships with one another. What the game does so well is create a horrific survival setting, and you feel it as you play. Like, it's life and death out there. The game plays out in several "chapters" where story events happen and then the setting and conditions for resource management change a bit. It kept me on my toes the entire time, and I never got bored. I often felt in a precarious position, like one mistake, one poor week of resource (mis)management could have a domino effect and ruin the expedition. I only died one time, and that was because of an inevitable story event that I didn't anticipate would happen (at least, not as soon as it did). The ending is different than what you would expect and, although it changed the game up, I thought it was neat. If you want a harrowing polar adventure with some challenging resource management and decisions (that isn't overwhelming with the amount and complexity of mechanics!) and a well written story, then this is a good bet. Tue, 29 Oct 2024 06:31:19 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7816&iddiary=13325https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7822Quickly, this is a really disorienting puzzle game. It gave me motion sickness. I tried to play twice. The first time, I made it like 30 minutes, but I didn't recognize the dullness behind my eyes and the yawning (which happens either when I'm tired, bored, or about to barf) as motion sickness. I thought I was just tired. Then yesterday, I sat down to play and started feeling sick within like 10 minutes and retrospectively interpreted the other day's symptoms as motion sickness. I went to YouTube to see more of the game, and felt even worse watching the YouTube video. Blech. The handful of puzzles I did solve were mind-bending. You shift gravity by pressing spacebar. Doing so basically rotates the world around you by 90 degrees, so you can "run up" walls, change gravity again to get on the ceiling, and so on. There are all these cubes and switches, and it seems like you're really trying to navigate Escher-esque structures and figure out how to get cubes in the right places to open doors. I'm not sure I would have stuck with it anyway, or if I'm just interpreting it more negatively because of how I felt. But it seemed really hard, and the lack of narrative was turning me off. Also, puzzle games after work are not necessarily the best idea. Tue, 29 Oct 2024 06:05:03 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7822&iddiary=13324https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7808This was a huge surprise, and yet another gem in that narrative Humble Bundle from a couple months ago. I actually got this game once before and gave it away because I was on the fence about whether I thought I'd like it. But I got it again and figured I'd give it a shot. Good decision! Paradise Killer is extremely creative. It's like a detective game / visual novel. I don't play either genre, so this was all pretty new to me. You play as Lady Love Dies, an "investigation freak" who gets called back from exile to solve a murder. There's a whole fiction here. Lady Love Dies is part of "The Syndicate," which is a group of...I don't even know what they are...special people, I guess...who live on an island. Every so often, they destroy the island and create a new one. They usually destroy the island, it seems, because demons invade it. That's more or less the case this time, too, except that on the night that they were supposed to move to the new island, the entire Council (the Syndicate leadership) was murdered. That's the one you're called back to solve. There are 10 or so other (alive) Syndicate members. You run around the island, exploring it, finding clues and collectibles, learning about the history of all this, and meeting the other Syndicate members. You're collecting evidence, trying to make sense of the murder. Who did it, why, and how? Once you've collected enough evidence, you have a trial. Actually, you can have the trial immediately if you want to, just wildly accusing people. But, I was a good investigator. I think I explored most everything and discovered most all the evidence, and waited to call a trial until I had a good picture of what happened. And there is a lot to explore. The island has like 10 areas, and there is hidden stuff everywhere. I thought the game was going to be more like a visual novel, and although I knew there was some exploration moving through a 3D world, I didn't know that that would be most of the game. I got completely engrossed in scouring the island for clues and collectibles. You will find a ton of stuff, and you will keep on discovering new areas and secrets if you're looking hard enough, all the way up until the end. I used the word "engrossed" earlier, but "exhilarated" also is appropriate. Like, it was really exciting to find hidden objects, secrets, to get more evidence against a character, to realize I learned something that could break an alibi, and so on. I 100% want a sequel to this on the next island, and actually, I have some things I want to look up about this one, like what happens if you execute everyone and there is no one left to move to the next island? If you execute Lydia, can anyone be transported there? If you execute the Architect, then who builds the next island? Each character has a role, so what happens if those roles are empty? All the Syndicate members are suspicious for various reasons, and I gather in this game that there is no "right" answer. Like, it doesn't tell you if your accusations are correct; you just piece your evidence together as best you can, and if the Judge finds it reasonable, then the people you accused are sentenced and either executed or exiled. So, I guess that different players can have different outcomes of the trials. (This entry has been edited1 time. It was last edited on Wed, 16 Oct 2024 16:52:38.)Wed, 16 Oct 2024 16:51:22 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7808&iddiary=13320https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7813This 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.Tue, 15 Oct 2024 17:11:30 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7813&iddiary=13319https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7810Played 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. Sun, 06 Oct 2024 10:58:31 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7810&iddiary=13315https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7809Another 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! Fri, 04 Oct 2024 13:42:18 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7809&iddiary=13314https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7803I 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. Tue, 24 Sep 2024 19:39:01 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7803&iddiary=13313https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7709I'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. Fri, 20 Sep 2024 15:14:46 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7709&iddiary=13311