Cross posting my comment which came at the tail end of Week 4's post:

Europa Universalis IV

The first thing that struck me was the background music, even as early as at the opening menu screen. Listening with headphones, I thought, "hey, this is really good music". Well-written, well-performed, well-engineered, etc. I went to go look for a Steam entry for the soundtrack, but found none. I would have happily paid for it, but, anyway, I found it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/hGrtN02XTI0 Is it stereotypical-sounding? Yes, but I still like it. Looks like this composer also created some music for Crusader Kings III, too.

Went through the game tutorial, and over several sessions, at that. Honestly, I was on the edge of "ugh, this is too complicated", and thought about giving up on the game. So many little details and UI elements and numbers to juggle and manage. Well, I powered through and finished all tutorial parts, then started my first game. For a while in the early going, I felt like I didn't know what I was doing, and was worried about something bad happening due to my incompetence, like getting attacked, or nationwide civil war, or some other disaster. Well, I'm now several in-game decades into the game, and the nation hasn't completely crumbled -- though I did have one civil war already, heh. I'm feeling more comfortable, but I still think I'm doing several things not quite optimally.

I've tried to avoid going online and learning best practices, or reading the wiki too much, as I want to learn just from doing, making mistakes, living with the consequences. I'll take that experience into the next playthrough. It's clear from what little I did read in the wiki that you can really microoptimize in this game if you really want to.

I'm still waiting to conclude whether I like this game or not. It's better than Crusader Kings III, which I kinda-sorta enjoyed (but it kept crashing on me). It's more detail- and management-oriented than CK3, which seems to be more focused on pseudo-roleplay, characters, and random events happening to characters. EU4's events are always about the nation, or the royal family (and the effects on the nation). A fair bit of the game seems to be just waiting for the next interesting point, or the point that you have enough X points to spend on thing Y that you want to buy or unlock. I understand that you can speed up and slow down time, but I worry about missing something important, so I only ever speed up to 3/5, and usually play at speed 2/5.

War is a little interesting, though not at all at the level of a 3D battlefield simulator like the Total War series -- but I understand it's not trying to be that. I've won most battles so far, but I am still getting the hang of things. Took me forever to figure out how to get troops onto a transport. Yes, the tutorial shows you this, but I forgot it, and couldn't find it in the UI that easily.

I made some early governing mistakes, and I think they hurt the nation significantly in the long run (such as having crown land % below a penalty threshold for a long time). I also don't quite understand how trade works. I mean, I see numbers, and arrows, and I see that I get money each month, but it's difficult to see what actions the player can take to influence the numbers in the right directions. The tutorial showed the very basic elements of trade, but it's not nearly enough. I might have to cave and read the wiki on this topic.

Overall, I'll still keep playing a bit more, but am still delaying judgement. Good so far, but only so far.

So, I checked off a few more games. And also decided to mark off Lost in Blue for the first square since, well, I do own it. It just felt kinds like cheating before.

Now, onto the games I played:

Just three squares left! Three squares which have zero overlap in my library. I started Oxenfree II last night for branching narratives, so I figure I'll round it out with a Zelda game on 3DS and then... I have no idea for the "create your own character" one. Could Kitaria Fables count since we can change the protagonist's fur pattern?? Hmm...

EDIT BINGO completed + a bonus entry!

KickBeat Steam Edition = Is music/rhythm focused

Last burner, I had the card that asked after a game that you don't know how you acquired it. I don't have that card this time, but I do have KickBeat for that kind of head-scratching. But thank goodness! This is the only game in my library that fulfils the music category.

As a martial-arts style game released in 2014 by Zen Studios, a Hungarian developer, KickBeat has an obvious European feel. It's a PC port, but feels surprisingly smooth. The premise: You are confined in a ring surrounded by wannabe kickboxers and a live audience. You must orientate yourself to the next kickboxer and perform a martial arts move at the time the beat strikes to block the attacks. The game provides you with visual cues by colour hinting at the timing, since you optimise your routine by hitting the attack before the beat actually hits. You play through the story by completing a track. It's pretty much a double album since there's only 24 tracks, some known but also others made by one of the devs. But you can apparently load in your own music, although review report mixed experiences.

I didn't grow up around platform arcade-style combat games and I'm notoriously bad at them as I'm not that great at co-ordination and intense response demands. So I made it through the tutorial but floundered on the first track. To my great joy, I got a Steam achievement for 'failing a track'! I did manage to progress a little, but the game is ultimately a little one-dimensional and unfortunately without nostalgia to fuel it my interest waned quickly. But I could see this game being a niche for those who like this kind of thing.

Content Warning = Randomness determines your fate

So, I'm being a little flexible about my emphasis on determinism here, but there are a possible total of 24 monsters that spawn in this game and some of them just eat you alive and seal your fate. While there is this chance element, the game is a bit like other procedural generated roguelikes such as Lethal Company in that you're supposed to learn how to counter each enemy.

Content Warning was a co-op pickup that my group just tried for the first time and it has to be the zaniest I've tried to date. You have a 3-day gameplay loop where you have to record footage using a handycam and achieve the required number of 'views'. It's this weird mashup of a horror dystopia with surreal elements and whimsical fun. You start in your technocolour world-sanctuary of a cosy house and verdant island where you can purchase utility items (e.g. torches, enemy countering items) and novelty items (e.g. emotes, party crackers, hats). You (and up to 3 players, if multiplayer) descend in a diving bell down to the depths of a sprawling underworld. The maps are limited and procedural generation appears to be more of variants inside maps rather than the whole map itself. The maps are: (1) some kind of tunneled underbelly of a mine/sewer; (2) a sunken ship; and (3) a barren disfigured industrial warehousing complex. Aesthetically the underground is largely monochrome and stylised as if it was sketched. Overall, the game is a postmodern pastiche, it's a bit of a play on the 'work or die' idea that I see increasingly in art/games etc. lately, although with a more specific emphasis on the labour of content generation.

The physics are buoyant and a little silly but don't seem realistic for swimming underground (you don't have the weight of water flowing against you). You navigate the map with the aim of filming 'scary' encounters (random appearances of monsters) on the handycam and pulling off stunts for extra views, since the aim is go to viral on the 'SpookTube'. You then have to make it back to the diving bell to ascend before you run out of oxygen with the footage. Back in your cosy paradise, you have to deposit the footage into a canister for it to be uploaded to a CD ROM and then physically carry that to the TV. You and your companions can then view the footage you filmed underground and watch your view count rise as procedurally generated comments from your imaginary audience populate the side panel. Bizarrely, you then have to all go to your allocated beds and sleep so that you can progress to the next day.

I get scared too easily to enjoy horror, but Content Warning is not too bad in that department although you can get jumped by enemies. Replayability is a concern, given the lack of variance in maps, but it's genuinely a funny game (such as when your character dies in a hilarious way). I would not recommend this game for singleplayer and even for multiplayer, I don't see my party sinking a significant amount of time into it, but for something casual and fun it's a good addition to our loadout.

Dear Esther: Landmark Edition = Set in a real world location

You're not exactly sure where you are, some island on the Hebrides, windswept and alone. Dear Esther, the narrator begins...

As you trek through overgrown footpaths, cave systems and abandoned shipwrecks the narrator recalls his story in short installments, infusing the island with his life, his pain, his relationships, and a historical persona who met a tragic end on the island. The story is told in a prose poem, omitting details, simply enough to be pierced by his lonely melancholy and search for solace in this state of mind.

I had been avoiding Dear Esther, not because of grief but just generally because of being too overwhelmed in life. But as fate would have it, this was the only as-yet played game in my library that is set in a real-world location. Clocking in at around an hour (non-completionist), it is a short but poignant experience. And it is truly a walking simulator, in that you can't run and you amble around, without any means to auto-walk. But the game draws you in to its meditative journey with its atmospheric design and soundtrack. There are no puzzles, no tests of any sort to distract from the story. Visually there also some splendid scenes and wonderful attention to detail.

Certain things in the game resonated with me deeply, things I don't have time or energy to dwell on here. But I'm glad I saw it through at last - and moreover, this marks 2/2 Bingo events that I have actually completed one game!

On one hand, I didn't get as far as I'd hoped, having only gotten to 8 games or so of my backlog. But! That's probably 8 more than I'd gotten to at any point this year. (I did play a few games here and there but only stuff I'd just bought, like the SH2 Remake.) I did find myself playing older, presumably shorter games because I figured I'd have a better chance of getting to more titles vs. loading up, say, Divinity II and being stuck on that all month with no hope of finishing. I don't see this as a bad thing, it was nice to force myself to just sit and play some games that don't require a steep learning curve or a ton of time investment. I would definitely try to do the bingo card again next year--this turned out to be a very fun way of forcing myself to pick something and go with it instead of staring forlornly at my ever-growing backlog.

Alex Kidd in Miracle World (Remake)

This was my interpretation of "giving something a second chance" because I wanted to focus only on games I hadn't actually played before--but I used to play the heck out of the original Sega Master System version of Alex Kidd. I remembered liking it a lot, even though I never could get particularly far in it, but I was maybe about 10 years old at the time. With a nice-looking full remake (not a reboot, it's 1:1 to the point that there's even a button you can tap to switch between the original 8-bit graphics and modern), and an added 3 decades of gaming experience since then, gotta be a good time, right?

Well, sorta. It is a delightful and fully faithful remake, I can't fault it for that. Anyone who loved the original will love this. What I quickly learned however is that the reason I could never do well in that game whereas at 10 years old I usually tended to beat any platformer I started is that Alex Kidd is the extreme opposite of a precision platformer. It's like every surface is made of ice, or at least it felt that way to me. If, per a previous N24BB post, it was an adjustment coming off of Celeste and into the comparative sponginess of platforming in Cave Story+ (which I still finished and loved btw), Alex Kidd makes Cave Story look like Hollow Knight.

I still had a good time with it though. I only did a little better this time around then 10-yr-old me, and did not beat it, but I definitely see myself picking this back up on a rainy day and brute forcing through it. It helps that unlimited continues as well as reduced difficulty settings are available where they weren't in the original, but I really wish they had introduced a save system, in both the original and this one, as it would remove most of the frustration of skating off a platform once again into a scorpion for a one-hit death.

Anachronox

This game has been sitting on my digital shelf for 20 years. I used to have a PC disc of it, never even installed it, then later (we're talkin' like 2010), I bought a digital version on GOG telling myself I would get to it as I like RPGs in general and a good buddy of mine used to rave about it.

I have to say, that I think I would have liked it best at the time and age I was when it came out, if I was going to like it at all. It does have a certain charm, but that charm doesn't extend far to me, as I feel like everything that game does decently well at was eclipsed even at the time by better games. This would be totally fine and would still be a fun way to kill time if it weren't offset by the things the game doesn't do well. The world setting is legitimately interesting, starting in the slums of a cyber-mechanical world built by a dead alien race, running a slipshod detective agency with the ghost of your dead secretary as your literal mouse cursor. But the script is pretty terrible--mostly just sub-Whedonesque quips that don't give me any real connection to the characters, when it's not a straight infodump. You spend many hours at the beginning of the game running back and forth between various grey, nondescript hallways and elevators before anything remotely interesting begins to happen. Battle Skills that you use during combat launch a short cutscene similar to the Final Fantasy 7+ games, and like FF7 can't be skipped, so although they're fun at first they just tediously drag out combat in short order. (Although I will say I laughed aloud the first time I used Grumpus' "Yammer" skill.)

All in all, there's a somewhat mediocre game in there that could be elevated to a good game simply by having writing that was inspired more by Ken Levine's work and less by Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and just a few quality-of-life improvements around menus and battles. But even the mediocre game is buried under enough tedium, and awkward and style-less blocky graphics that didn't even hold up at the time, that I can't recommend it in this day and age, or any other.

My final card remains unchanged from last week, unfortunately:

I did install Synth Riders - thanks @kfwyre and @Wes for the recommendation - but never really had the opportunity to play. I also installed Duskers which I read about from someone else, but never tried it. The only thing I really did this week was take antibiotics (stupid lungs and their stupid respiratory infection), drive my kids places, help my oldest kid with her stats course, and work. I only had one "relax" night and I went to play Magic at the local game store with my friends. I guess I could say that the stuff I was doing with Adobe Acrobat was gamified, and put it under Courage. But editing PDF fillable forms is a game, I lost and I am out of courage.

What a great event! I love the evolution of the Bingo card over the past several events, and I really liked this form. The highlight for the whole event to me was @SingedFrostLantern's hole-in-one and the wonderful writeup that went with the game. There were so many great entries that I enjoyed reading this time around, actually, and I really wanted to keep trying games that other people tried. Overall, this was another great event, and I really enjoyed it. Thanks for putting it together K&W!

A bingo for the road!

So this month got rather derailed for me. Ended up playing a few more games, not nearly as many as I wanted to. Had a couple of other things that I didn't even play for an hour that I left off my card.

Oops! My underestimation of my procrastination has foiled me once again, which led me not being able to finish my bingo card before the end of November Backlog Burner event. Despite having a lot of free time, the presence of my smartphone that makes compulsive and mostly unproductive web browsing and video-watching got me sidetracked numerous times. Guess it’s really time for me to consider checking with my local Telus store and hopefully find a good dumb phone, as addons like LeechBlock for web browsers didn’t suffice to curb my persistent addiction.

Still, my bingo card actually got me playing a fair amount of games I never played before, which was what ultimately mattered. I’ll write down more details about how the event went for me in the final Backlog Burner thread. Here’s my last minute writeup for the only game I played since the last time I updated my bingo card.

Metroid Dread

My first prolonged exposure to the 2D Metroid series came from the Wii Virtual Console port of Super Metroid, to which I beat the entire game entirely blind, save for the unintuitive wall-jumping tutorial trap. Although I never went out of my way collecting every thing, let alone speed-running as it was designed for, I thought that the bounty hunter’s atmospheric and solitary expedition was enjoyable all the way through. Then, I made halfway through Metroid Fusion, beat the original Metroid once with the password cheat and reached to the credits screen of Return of Samus.

I couldn’t believe that after two decades since the last original 2D Metroid instalment, that Metroid Dread finally got announced for the Nintendo Switch. It didn’t matter for me that it might not wield as much of weight compared to the AAA gaming scene production-wise as it was back then.

The first time the existence of Metroid Dread was publicly “revealed” originated from Game Informer issue #146, claiming that it’s a 2D Metroid adventure releasing in 2006.
Former IGN Staffer Craig Harris then allegedly and vaguely backed it up after seeing it at E3 2005. But rather than the game itself as he seemed to be implying, he most likely saw the documents containing ideas, according to gaming researcher Liam Robertson.
The rumors and Nintendo’s denials would then go on cropping up every once in a while for a decade and half.

Yoshio Sakamoto, the producer of Metroid Dread, confirmed the idea of relentless threat pursuing the seemingly invincible Samus Aran came around in 2005 or so. Despite the relatively healthy financial success of its predecessor, the development sadly halted at some point due to the lack of technology and expertise needed to get it to its fruition. That is, until he appointed Mercury Steam after overseeing how well they remade the Game Boy original Return of Samus for the Nintendo 3DS, known as Metroid: Samus Returns.

A lot of its gameplay elements, such as the counterattack punch and 360° aiming, were carried over and perfected for Dread. This time around, the former no longer overpower the base firepower as even the weakest enemies perish within a few satisfying well-aimed shots. Because of this, I’m much more likely to consider Samus Aran’s position when defeating foes, rather than solving every fight with nothing but a decently-timed punch. The upped overall frame rate, increased Samus’s mobility and a near limitless rate of basic firepower made the pacing even more brisk and fluid by comparison.

In Dread, Samus is tasked to investigate on a planet where the lethal and indestructible E.M.M.I robots designed to exterminate the straggling X parasites has quickly stopped sending any signal. Shortly after landing, most of her abilities got stripped away after battling an imposing Chozo lookalike figure and quickly found out that the robots are hostile to her.

Thankfully, these metallic fiends are confined to their clearly dedicated patrolling areas that she has to traverse around sneakily and fast. All the escape doors lock out until the intruder can’t be detected by them through sights and sounds after a short while.

With the combination of a persistent instant Game Over threat, a dissonant music and confusing maze-like level design, dread sets in and panic ensues when an E.M.M.I robot chases. And when all that happens, you bet first-time players are going to die.

The second one I went through, for example, has a fork where the topmost route is wide enough to lead the player to believe this is the path of the least resistance, only to be greeted by a dead-end due to the lack of ability. By the time they figured it was impossible to cross, the robot will very likely have caught up to Samus.
If you’re not in panic mode, you would be far more likely to figure out sooner that you’re supposed to slide in the tiny gap underneath the otherwise blocking wall for the door.

This sort of design choice can come across as mean when viewed purely on a gameplay standpoint, because the move isn’t often used at that point in the game. However, laying out a more obvious path would pull back the sense of dread the instalment sets out to achieve. Not all is doom and gloom here, since the patrolling areas are short and all death here will warp you back to this area instead of the last save point for a quick retry.

You might be wondering what this all has to do with the silence theme? Well, it’s the fact that the extremely capable Samus Aran has to go through the entire ordeal all by herself. The underground area where she’ll spend exploring blocks all signals outside the occasional ADAM communication system peppered here and there. Since she spends the majority of time alone on such a dark and dismal place, silence usually follows through her limited dialog and the game’s heavy focus on visual storytelling, even in the many cutscenes.

I’ve yet to come across even a mini-boss fight, but what I’ve seen so far doesn’t disappoint me in the slightest.