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Griftlands (PC) by dkirschner (Apr 29th, 2025 at 15:53:58) |
This is a roguelite deckbuilder that’s neat in that you have two different decks and there is some interesting worldbuilding, with probably like 100 characters you can meet. It’s also narrative heavy. You play runs with one of three characters, each of whom has their own story. Unfortunately though, it never really clicked with me; I was always sort of bored. I played two runs with the first character, Sal, dying near the end of my first attempt. On my second attempt, I noticed “story difficulty,” set it to that, and steamrolled the second run. I left it on story difficulty and steamrolled the game with the second character, Rook, too. When I started the third character, I was sort of dreading learning his mechanics, the tedium of leveling up another set of cards (you can level up each card once by using it a specific number of times), the endless filler-feeling dialogue, and the tons and tons of negotiations and battles I would have to wade through to get to the end of another story that I didn’t care about. So, I played part of the first day for him to get a sense of the character and any new mechanics, then called it quits.
Here's how the two types of decks/combat work. The first is “battle” and needs no explanation. This is normal deckbuilder stuff. Do lots of damage and kill stuff. Some mechanics include “prepare” (a card is “prepared” when it is in the leftmost spot in your hand and can activate special abilities), “gamble” (one character has a coin that he flips, and some of his cards do different things depending on heads or tails), “burn” (deals damage over time), and so on. Each character has a few unique mechanics.
When you battle enemies, you can spare them or kill them. If you spare them, they might hate you (all the various characters you encounter can either hate, dislike, like, or love you). If you kill them, their friends might hate you. If you kill them in an isolated place, well, you got away with murder. It can be tempting to kill enemies because they drop items, and sometimes quite good ones, or maybe because they were real jerks and deserved it. But, when someone hates you, you get a debuff (e.g., status cards cost one extra action), which does go away if you kill that person later. When someone loves you, you get a buff (e.g., gain 4 defense and 2 power at the beginning of every battle). It’s obviously good to have a lot of people love you and few people hate you. I definitely had some hate debuffs that were pretty annoying to deal with.
The second thing you can do is “negotiation,” and this one is different. It’s the same basic idea as battle, except think of it as the passive option. This second deck is full of cards that are meant to manipulate, persuade, and intimidate others. In a negotiation, you have “arguments.” Characters all have a “core argument.” Then, they can make other arguments that do various things. All arguments have “resolve” (HP). When an argument’s resolve reaches 0, it is defeated. No big deal for a regular argument; these come and go during a negotiation. If your core argument loses its resolve, then you lose the negotiation.
So, there are generally two ways out of a situation: battle or negotiate. Sometimes, negotiations make subsequent battles easier. As you think about building your decks, remember that if you lose a negotiation, you might still be able to battle, but if you lose a battle, you can’t then negotiate…because you’re dead. That means that, for me at least, negotiation was far more useful, and I chose that option far more. On the other hand, there are more mandatory battles than mandatory negotiations, and bosses are typically trying to kill you, not argue with you. So, you can’t rely on only one deck; you must figure out how to balance them.
There are some other things to consider, such as the battle and negotiation grafts (like skills or perks you acquire each run), and then the various roguelite meta upgrades. You can unlock permanent upgrades for each character, perks that can be used on any character, as well as new cards that will appear in your runs.
In the end, it feels strange to say, but I wish I had just stopped after the first run. I feel like I wasted my time with this one hoping that it would click. There are certainly things I enjoyed (like the negotiations and trying to get a ton of characters to love me), but like I said earlier, I just found Griftlands tedious and boring.
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Gris (PS5) by jp (Apr 20th, 2025 at 20:25:52) |
I distinctly remember Gris getting a "meh" review score in Edge magazine. So, I was expecting to be underwhelmed gameplay-wise though wowed visually.
And yes, I was wowed visually (and aurally too - playing the PS5 version that makes use of the speaker controller in a cool way)...and the gameplay was sort of meh - but, it got better and better the longer I played!
Not counting the "hub" area, the game has four zones/levels that each introduce a mechanic, as well as some in-world things to interact with. And so, the game really goes from less to more as later levels incorporate more in-world mechanics as well as require use of the character mechanics you unlock. It also all makes sense with the game's theme and story and balblabla (ludonarrative harmony is what my students brought up).
That being said, it's a pretty relaxing and flowing kind of game - nods to Journey in there as well - and there isn't really a fail state, though you can get stuck on puzzles and some dexterity-timing dependent puzzles. There's some swimming bits that are just glorious - as you dash from "water bubble" to "water bubble" (blocks of water in the air) - and I loved swimming up waterfalls.
What impressed me the most though were two things:
1. I kept on trying to "go the wrong way" and most of the time, it was the right way.
2. The onboarding and tutorials are really, really well done. You notice a thing, or do a thing, and then that's the thing you have to do later to solve puzzles and so on. It feels very natural and very normal.
So, I'm actually excited to try Neva now...
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Lost in Blue 2 (DS) by jp (Apr 18th, 2025 at 18:46:41) |
Perhaps the strangest thing for me about this game is that it's a bona fide survival game on the DS. In my mind, the genre is more recent than 2006! I'm thinking of all the indie survival games (craft stuff, gather food, don't die of hunger or thirst) and then ones on Steam..and here's this game - a sequel no less - and it's straight up THAT. Survival. And there's two characters to boot - and you can die (I did, pretty soon it turns out).
I guess I was surprised by how quickly I did die - and, from a novice perspective, it felt sudden and a bit unfair. As in, CLEARLY there was nothing I could have done differently to survive. I spent too much time exploring was probably the main problem, and I left the boy behind in a cave we found, and I'm not sure that's what you're supposed to do? You have to keep both of them feed, hydrated and energized, and I felt like I had my hands full with just the one character.
I think my biggest mistake was probably not getting the spear for fishing made sooner? But then, I'm not even sure how you're supposed to use it - and all the other food I kept scavenging wasn't really doing much. Like, you'd eat it and not see a huge effect. I'm guessing there's something I'm not understanding and it makes me wonder if a full reset makes the most sense? (instead of loading into a saved game that's already doomed/too heavily stacked against success).
Perhaps the strangest thing (for me) about the game is that there's a super simple mini-game for cooking! You collect stuff to cook and also stuff to use as spices and then need to sort of trial and error recipes - though I could set the boy (the character I was not controlling directly) to cook and he'd come up with his own stuff... it's weird.
And it's a sequel? I guess I should look up if this is a port to DS from someplace else? It would make more sense in a way - the game is also low-poly 3D as you wander around the environment. Still...I might just put it on the shelf.
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Phantom Abyss (PC) by jp (Apr 6th, 2025 at 19:14:27) |
I'd heard of the game's hook (or gimmick if you will) as, everyday it's a different 1st person platforming game/run, and if you die - that's it. Play a different run later.
I'm guessing stuff changed along the way, though the concept is still here - it's a reasonably challenging rogue-like 1st person platforming game. I've had fun, you have a whip to help you climb and each level has different modifiers (the whip has an ability) and you can pick up boons in your run (if you have enough coins to afford them) and hopefully make it to the end. BUT, you see a bunch of ghosts for everyone else who played this level - if someone died, you can collect their spirit or something for a small heal! During each run you collect keys you can use to buy permanent upgrades, and so you go up the progression ladder of many roguelites...
Someone described this as first person temple run, which is close enough? I mean, the levels themselves are a lot more interesting than the "mere" reaction times that temple run goes for, here you can side-step/etc. stuff - and there are different paths, and in all you can be a bit creative for how you approach stuff...I've had fun so far - unlocked all the green levels and I've started on the blue ones!
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Cuphead (Switch) by jp (Apr 6th, 2025 at 13:37:03) |
I only get to play this when my son comes around - and we play together and I realized, yeah - I need to either start practicing seriously or just give up. And, I enjoy playing it co-op, so there's not much sense in practicing, so I decided to give up.
We did make it to the 2nd island(?), and played some of the levels there - but I was clearly starting to see a steeper path to success. As in, it too us (mostly my fault) more and more tries to make less progress. He's already played it, beat it too? So, not much point for him really.
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Phoenix Wright: Justice For All (DS) by jp |
| If you like the others, you'll like this one. Felt a bit too long for me, but that's been the case earlier as well. The last case is really interesting. |
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most recent entry: Friday 15 April, 2011
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For some reason the Phoenix Wright games really drag out for me past a certain stage. They're fun, and funny, and all good...but I just wish they were shorter. This one is definitely interesting...well, the last case mostly (which I just finished earlier today, so I guess I should have written more about it).
Ok, some general observations:
In my experience so far, the game series has established a few "conventions" about what you're supposed to do and how things work. For example, you should always "press further" (when prompted) and always "hold it" to get witnesses to discuss their testimony in further detail. Also, when you need to present some evidence, you can always tell if you got it right because the music will stop...
This game played with some of those conventions, which was a bit of a surprise. So, a few times the music would stop when I presented evidence...but no, I was wrong. (and I think the opposite happened at least once). Also, there was one occasion when the correct choice was to admit that you had no evidence to prove something (and then, fortunately, something out of your control happens that lets you proceed). Going against convention can sometimes be good (keeps you on your toes) but other times it doesn't work so well since it can be confusing and also seem arbitrary.
I though the new "mechanic" of psyche locks was implemented in an interesting way. Now and then you run into a character who has a psyche lock - this shows up as a bunch of chains criss-crossing the character and some giant padlocks in front. The idea is that you have to "interrogate" the character and present evidence that will break the locks, thus unlocking some testimony that will help you progress in the game. A character with many locks is supposedly much harder to "break" compared to one with only one lock. I had assumed that each lock represented a clue/piece of evidence or something you'd have to present. So, when running into a character with, say, 5 locks, you'd have a sense to do a lot of investigating before trying to break them. The game isn't that consistent though (perhaps to avoid player's metagaming?), sometimes you have to present more than one thing before a lock breaks and at other times more than one lock breaks with only one piece of evidence. (this happened at least once for great comedic effect with a character that basically hates Phoenix Wright but is so desperate for something you have that all 5 locks break as soon as she finds out you have that item). So in the end, I'm not sure what the point of the multiple locks was other than to give you a sense of how "difficult" (stubborn?) the character was...
Of all the cases in the game, the last one is definitely the most interesting since it directly addressed a minor issue I have with the series so far: as a defensive attorney, your clients are ALWAYS innocent. In the last case, although you start out convinced your client is innocent, after a while you discover that he is in fact guilty, raising the issue of what you should do. Interestingly, the game argues that what's most important is that truth and justice prevail. So, your job as an attorney is NOT to do what's best for your client! In the last case, Edgeworth (who finally appears!) basically works together with Phoenix in order to draw out the truth in the case while, in some sense, ignoring the difference between prosecution and defense. At some times, Phoenix has to do things that jeopardize his client because truth is more important. The game's narrative mixes things up a little as well (to save a friend you need to get your client acquitted even though he's guilty AND in getting an acquittal would result in an otherwise innocent person taking the blame), perhaps a little too much, in the sense that the "right" answer is obvious. You could make a strong argument that Phoenix should do his best to get the acquittal regardless of the additional circumstances (so long as he does not do anything illegal or improper to get the acquittal). Similarly, the prosecution should always try to get a conviction. Interestingly, in the series, the prosecution side has always been portrayed as "wrong", especially with those characters who favor the conviction over anything else (basically, Franziska, Edgeworth and Von Karma) and would stoop to nothing to obtain it. The last case definitely represents the series moving "forward" (with Edgeworth repentant on his former errors) with both sides (prosecution and defense) presented as a team that works together to ensure justice is done. Curiously, it is usually the judge who has no idea what is happening...even as he recognizes that something unusual is going on.
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