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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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2287 registered gamers and 3259 games. 7790 GameLogs with 13267 journal entries. 5110 games are currently being played.
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The Wolf Among Us (PC) by dkirschner |
| Pretty grimy environment. Reminds me of Watchmen's New York. I love the music. Action scenes are excellent. --------- Good game, no Walking Dead. Excellent characters, so imaginative! |
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most recent entry: Sunday 25 January, 2015
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Quickly huffed and puffed my way through this Telltale adventure. Overall impression: Wonderfully imaginative and adult fairy tale that for some reason is not as interesting to me as The Walking Dead. I feel like this should be more interesting and I can't quite put my finger on why it just isn't.
I love love love the notion of fairy tale characters leaving "The Homeland" on an exodus to New York City. The characters are similar to their representations in popular stories, but they are not the same. For example, Snow White marries Prince Charming, but then he cheats on her with her sister. Their lives become very different living in New York. Beauty and Beast are in debt up to their eyeballs; The Little Mermaid is a prostitute; Bigby Wolf (the Big Bad Wolf) is trying to put his days of terrorizing people behind him and be a good, upstanding guy. Unfortunately for them they mostly live in slums and are poor. They seem to live in a rather self-imposed ghetto and I don't understand why they can't get out. They are very wrapped up in their own drama. I've been reading Watchmen, the graphic novel, and the grimy NYC setting and in-group drama of the masked adventurers is similar to Telltale's story.
The cast of characters varies widely. At first I thought it was going to be only the most memorable fairy tale characters, but they bring in Disneyfied characters, more generic creatures like trolls, urban legends like Bloody Mary and more. It's really cool whenever a new character is introduced because you have to do this immediate reconciliation between where you know the character from and who they are in this story. I do wonder how much of their stories is drawn from the Brothers Grimm and other pre-Disneyfied texts. The violence of the game leads me to believe the old, more haunting stories were a major influence, but it's fascinating to see those versions juxtaposed with modern versions.
So in this game, you play as Bigby, the Big Bad Wolf. You're the sheriff of Fabletown, which exists sort of hidden within NYC. Any "mundy" (mundane person) can come in, but they don't see wolves or pigs or Mr. Toad or anything abnormal because the fairy tale folks use magic to make themselves appear normal. Bigby is trying to do right by Fabletown and basically keep its residents from ripping one another apart. Long story short, you and Snow (White) investigate two grisly murders that lead you deep into the underworld of Fabletown. Although I enjoyed the story, its twists and turns lie in the characters who appear, not so much in the details. Like, I didn't really care that someone was stalking Snow White, but that it was THAT GUY! What a weird juxtaposition.
Like in the Walking Dead, you make narrative decisions that affect little outcomes here and there and that affect how other characters act toward you. For example, you occasionally get to choose where to investigate (option A, B, or C). I found that these choices hardly mattered to me, although they are presented as very serious! After playing the Walking Dead, I wasn't that impressed because I understand how Telltale's branching works and how deep it isn't compared to Bioware games, for example, although it appears deep on the surface. I generally painted Bigby as a good guy, and I did kill a couple citizens of Fabletown for being assholes. Trust me, they deserved it, and I shrugged off Snow's reprimands.
One thing Wolf Among Us has over Walking Dead is action-packed fight scenes. WD surely has some, but WAU's fights are awesome. Being a big bad wolf affords some more adrenaline than being a regular person. I was disappointed, however, that there isn't any real transformation sequence for Bigby turning into a wolf. It just...happens. I was expecting something a la Werewolf in London.
The last thing I'll say is BUGS! Toward the end of the game in Episodes 4 and 5, I kept getting this dialogue option bug where every option said "This choice is blank!" I had to quit and restart from checkpoints more than a few times. My favorite bug though -- and I am pissed I missed getting a screenshot! -- was in Episode 2 or 3. I picked up a wad of cash from somewhere and Bigby got a dollar bill stuck on his thumb. It looked like his thumb pierced the bill, and it was just stuck there on his hand for the rest of the episode. It was hilarious, Bigby performing normal actions and walking around oblivious to the fact that a dollar bill is stuck awkwardly onto his thumb.
Are they making a season 2 for this?
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