What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?

Oh, Esoteric Ebb. I was so sure I hated you.

If you follow games discourse you know that Disco Elysium is seen by many (present company included) as one of the best written games of all time. Disco is — was — truly special, a complex, thoughtful CRPG with beautiful prose, an incredibly compelling central character, a vivid and evocative setting, and extremely strong political themes.

Esoteric Ebb has the cunning idea to, insamuch as possible, simply copy everything from Disco Elysium. At least, that's the impression it gives. The way its skills have distinct personalities and talk to you depending on how much you level up? Ripped straight from Disco, without alteration. Its dialogue and roll system? Again, Disco, down to the presentation. Even its premise: a mystery, an inept boyfailure cop sent to investigate it, a small locale with different political factions to play off of, and a major political conflict brewing -- all sort of tenuously, suspiciously entangled… It's Disco Elysium all the way down: down to specific narrative beats, down to overt referential jokes, down to an acknowledgement in the credits, down to specific characters literally sharing the exact same political views as the Disco Elysium characters they were obviously "inspired" by.

This never quite stops feeling shameless, and hacky, and maybe even unethical, but it's at its worst during its opening hours. Esoteric Ebb does ultimately differntiate itself, mostly by adding new things to what Disco had: a fantasy setting, dungeoneering, combat, electoralism. All very welcome additions, with unique flair. And ultimately, Ebb's voice is quite distinct from Disco's in a way that I grew to appreciate. But in the early hours of the game, the ways in which Ebb differentiates itself from Disco mostly feel like ways that it's slightly worse.

I don't really want to dwell on the game's problems, honestly. Sure, Esoteric Ebb's setting seems a little "generic fanasy" at first. It's not as beautifully written. It feels more "online" in its political ideology. But it will suffice to say that ultimately the game actually does make something of itself, does grow to feel different enough that by the end I really loved it, and in a much different way than I loved Disco.

A lot of it just comes down to the tone. Esoteric Ebb feels more like the actual experience of playing a TTRPG than any other game I've yet encountered. Frequently, the game's writer/creator (and your Dungeon Master), Christoffer Bodegård, will break the fourth wall to talk to you directly, about the game, about your progress through it, about your decisions. There are frequently jokes based on modern (tumblr-ish) memes or twitterspeak in dialogue that makes it feel like you're a modern person, roleplaying a character (instead of embodying the character himself). There's just a lot of wacky stuff you can do in the game whose inclusion feels like pure, D&D-fan id, like drawing from the Deck of Many Things to get absurd, economy-breaking windfalls or awful, impending dooms; making a warlock contract with an eldritch patron; casting speak-with-dead on every skeleton, even the ones with whom you don't share a language. And really, if you've played D&D, you've probably met a DM who heavily rips off their favourite books and games and mvoies for their campaigns. It makes the borderline plagarism Ebb does feel, I don't know, like a cozy, intentional part of the experience, a curation of a certain "vibe."

Ebb uses a modified version of the D&D 5e ruleset, which I believe they're allowed to do because the base D&D rules are licensed under Creative Commons or something. As much as the game is built around the talking and the exploring and the investigating, D&D kind of requries combat and dungeoneering, and Esoteric Ebb's unique take on this — which mostly occurs through the dialogue menu — feels very similar to "theatre of the mind" games I've played (a style of D&D campaign that eschews maps and tactical combat in favor of a fuzzy, imaginative way of resolving battles). It's genuinely an excellent system, and wholly unique in the CRPG landscape. This and the wide variety of things to find made it a delight to descend into the Undercity whenever my investigation called for it.

That investigation, into an exploded tea shop on the eve of your city's first ever election (in contrast to Disco Elysium's hanged man on the eve of a class war), does take you everywhere you need to go, but it often feels almost incidental to the game's plot, which is about untangling a whole nest of conspiracies and plots — and that plot itself, though it eventually does conclude in a way that's satisfying and emotionally affecting, often feels incidental to the compelling experience of walking around, talking to people, and occasionally casting Grease on an assasin here or there. It's standard CRPG fare, about par for the genre in terms of depth and substance. There's a lot of worldbuilding here that feels just genuinely irrelevant. Maybe you'll explore more of the world in the heavily-teased sequel, and I'm sure Bodegård is (justifiably) proud of the actually-pretty-unique fantasy setting he's created, but for a game that's generally really tight and economical, there's a bit too much fluff in the setting.

As I said, Ebb's whole political framework revolves around an election. Conversations are always framed in terms of "which party are you voting for?" Is it the angelic neocolonial liberals pulling strings and inserting candidates from overseas, the dwarven communists, or the homegrown human nationalists? Or do you vote for yourself, or for a party that will never win, or are you kind of checked out of this whole politics thing? I will say here that, playing as an Azgalist (communist) I felt like I was kind of having the 'intended' experience, and the DM never really challenged me about my beliefs, to the point where I got the sense that he was just probably a commie himself. Disco, despite being a far left game, is much more sharply critical of its own ideology, which makes playing a leftist as a leftist still a somewhat challenging and uncomfortable experience. And sure, Ebb is generally cozier as an experience, but I somehow doubt that a player playing as a fascist had such a pleasant time.

The game's relationship with democracy is interesting. In its setting, "elections" are a genuinely new idea, and the weight it lends them, lends the act of voting (despite the fact that, as in real life, your vote will change almost literally nothing, and you have virtually no influence over the outcome of the election) actually made me tear up a bit. The game climaxes in an epic battle and a high-stakes converation with a shoemaker, but it ends on the act of dropping your ballot in the box. After all the effort I put into keeping hold of my voter card, after all the schemes I'd uncovered to subvert the election (that you can only expose, not stop), it felt like a hugely impactful moment. I don't know, I'm not explaining it too well. Esoteric Ebb actually manages to communicate, at least on an emotional what a big thing it is to be able to vote, how much it should matter to you. I found that to be quite striking.

Anyway, I'm not sure whether the fact that Esoteric Ebb is in constant conversation with Disco Elyisum — that it would be complete malpractice to write about it without mentioning Disco — is a strength or a weakness. Compared to Disco, Ebb isn't quite at the same level, can't quite keep up, is sometimes painfully derivative. But that it can hold the covnersation at all, that it can bring its own new ideas to the table, that it is, in its own right, an enjoyable and well-differentiated experience, is commendable.

I'd especially reccomend Esoteric Ebb to anyone who hasn't played many CRPGs. It's short, accesible, and very well paced, with a lot of gameplay variety and a ton of interesting characters to meet and talk to. And it's a great onboarder to the genre, containing simple and easy-to-learn takes on both the turn based combat and the dialogue systems that are core to the CRPG experience. If you've already played the genre greats, it might be a bit of a tougher sell, but it still does bring some genuinely new ideas to the table, and if nothing else, it will do a great job at reminding you of one of the best games ever made.

I've already started Pathfinder: Kingmaker, though it might take me a few more weeks to complete. I'm really impressed with it so far, and I can't wait to talk about it more.

I got my money's worth out of UNBEATABLE's Arcade mode. I started by clearing every song on Hard, including every new song unlocked as I went (some 70 songs? The game includes songs not from its own soundtrack, for example from no straight roads). Then I set out to get S or A ranked full combo on every song; currently only 6 songs remain un-combo-ed. I also cleared several songs on Expert, did a perfect combo (S++) and cleared at least one song on every other difficulty level up to Unbeatable just to get at any pesky unlocks I was missing. Finally, I played some songs on Critical mode (a modifier). I wish I had discovered it earlier since while I was full combo'ing everything I might as well have done it on Critical mode; either way I couldn't miss or play too poorly, so they would have gone well together.

Arcade was definitely more fun than Story, and it became abundantly clear while I played it that Story didn't even teach me to play the (rhythm) game properly. Difficulty-wise, once you learn, the game isn't too bad (except for cop mode!) Even on Expert, there are plenty of levels that aren't significantly more difficult than Hard (mainly, this difficulty level seems to introduce a greater degree of required autonomy between left and right hands). Unbeatable level, on the other... hand, tends to have too great a rate of required keypresses for me to keep up with. I guess there's a reason it's not called Beatable!

For other players who understand the scoring: I'm sitting at around 6.2 stars with >91% average accuracy. I feel like the way stars are calculated discourages tackling challenging levels since you seem to lose rank for failing each time, but I didn't play for stars anyway, so for me that's fine. Currently I'm fairly satisfied with what I got from the game and might be ready to move on.

EDIT: Syntax

So, I'm not a guy who really follows games. I check this thread every week and read the reviews of games that I'll probably never play because I'm a basic bitch with basic bitch tastes. But I kept seeing these ads for Crimson Desert, so I checked it out on Steam and saw the positive reviews, did a very quick Google that lead to a reddit comment where someone described it as RDR2 meets BOTW. Those are two of my all-time favorites, so I was sold. I didn't look at anything else because I like to go into things as blind as possible. I've put in about 30 hours so far and I both enjoy it and despise it.

The good part is its beautiful, incredibly ambitious, and gigantic. It has the go anywhere thing that BOTW did, and the sweeping gorgeous landscapes of RDR2, so credit to that random redditor. In fact, the first major area looks exactly like the Valentine/Horseshoe Overlook area, and the stamina bar and movement is basically a carbon copy of BOTW. It's the kind of game that I feel like I would absolutely love, but there's just one or two major flaws.

First, I have no idea what the hell is going on. I mean, I kind of do, but the story is a mess. Maybe that will become more clear over time, but I'm four chapters in and there's not much to write home about.

Second, and more importantly, there's just too much. Waaaaay too much. To paraphrase an analogy from NFL commentator and multiple time front office fuck up Michael Lombardi, it suffers from the 'too many items on the menu' problem. Meaning, if you go to a restaurant that has 5-10 things on the menu, there's a good chance that those things are going to be good. Conversely, if you go to a restaurant with 150 things on the menu, which includes a wide range like spaghetti, chicken tika masala, sushi, foie gras, and gumbo, the quality is probably going to suffer. Crimson Desert has 1000 things on the menu, and, unsurprisingly, most of them aren't very good. You can do so many things, but it's a complicated, convoluted mess, and more often than not, a huge pain in the ass. For example, there are items you can come across that you can trade in bulk. However, in order to do that, you need to invest some money in the bank. How do you do that? You collect 500 silver from mining/logging/stealing/pillaging/whatever, turn that into a gold bar at the bank (or steal one from a secret place), then invest it. Then, you need to get yourself a wagon. But in order to do that, you need to find the wagon fence, then build up your camp, find the missing members of your tribe, do some tedious missions for those members so you can find other members, make sure you've found the right specialist for building the wagon, then assign them to build a wagon for 14 game hours, then do a few other things that I haven't looked up yet because all of that tedious work takes a shitload of time. By the way, none of this is ever clearly explained to you. You either slowly come across this info as you play the game, or, look it up when you first come across one of those trade items that are everywhere. This happens all the time. You find something while you're out exploring or traveling for a mission, but you don't know what it means and you won't find out until you do a different mission or look it up. I find myself googling multiple times per hour, and the last time I did that, the top comment on the YouTube video was "you have to search every fuckin step of this game."

Maybe this will be a Cyberpunk type thing where 18-24 months from now they'll have worked out some of the kinks and a good game will emerge, but for now I wouldn't recommend it unless you're the type of person who really enjoys getting into the nitty gritty and doesn't mind clunky controls/combat.

Extinction Day just came out and I have mixed feelings about it.

It's basically a 3D Plague Inc but with the scope heavily expanded to include natural and man-made disasters, like wars, volcanoes, storms, etc. Where I have mixed feelings about it is in how badly it performs and how frustrating the whole countermeasures and corruption points system is.

Also booted up Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age on my Steam Deck to revisit the game. Given all the game crashes and technical problems I've dealt with when running the X/X-2 remaster on Windows, it's shocking how well this game actually plays on the Steam Deck. I'm not sure if I like the Zodiac Age changes, as it feels like the game's revamped Licence board both presents you with the option of selecting a class for each playable character and punishes you for picking an option that doesn't fit the character's starting equipment and stats.

I didn't know for example that Penelo was meant to be the White Mage of the game with low physical stats but high MP. I stupidly specced her into the Archer License Board. Similarly for Fran, I specced her into Uhlan, but she starts with a bow, which no class other than Archers can equip.

The original also had a really good title opening cinematic which for some reason is completely absent in the Zodiac Age remaster...

Glad that the Zodiac Age version does do away with some of the bullshit in the OG release though. For example, did you know that the Zodiac Spear was the best-in-slot weapon in the original game, and could only be obtained if you didn't open any of the four "forbidden" treasure chests which were arbitrarily programmed to make the item despawn? Did you also know that the original game's optional superboss took literal hours to kill because it had 50M health, all attack damage was originally capped at 9,999 and the superboss cut damage by 1/3 halfway through the fight making max hits 6,999? Damage is uncapped in the remaster and this boss no longer reduces it.

This is a fairly simplistic answer, but…I’ve been playing the demo for the new Tomodachi Life game that’s supposed to come out later this week. The demo has been out for weeks at this point, but I had been purposefully avoiding it because I knew it would immediately make me impatient for the full game. And, as expected, I’m now feeling impatient. Still have three more days of distracted impatience to go, blehh

And since this topic also includes board games, I’ve been playing Gloomhaven with my partner. Not really something I would’ve expected to like, but they wanted to play and I ended up enjoying it. We’re playing the JotL version, which includes a very nice “tutorial” mode that has made everything a lot easier for me. Don’t know if the normal game has the same, but I think I would’ve been completely overwhelmed without it so I’m thankful

I've been playing Reverse 1999 after a recent Infinite Cringe video. It's a gacha game but with a unique premise where a storm is turning time back from 1999. I like their use of magic, many systems are too rigid to feel like magic whereas here you never know what trick a new character can wield.

There's also an insane amount of content. It has been my main game for weeks and I'm not even half way caught up on the main story and have barely scratched events. I'll think I have a grasp on how much there is, and then they toss a wholly new game mode in. I'm fond of the characters and the art as well, it's like really gay without having overt romance plots -- no one has said "I'm a lesbian!" but it's evident enough from how they talk and act.

The gameplay itself is fine. Each character has two abilities and an ult, you have a line up of several characters and draw from a deck of their abilities. Like cards can combine for a stronger effect. There's a rock paper scissors system which pushes for horizontal progression, thus grinding more characters and more reason to do character pulls. Most battles can be auto played except boss fights. The auto player is an idiot. There's a ton of different systems that go into a character's overall strength.

I'm pretty certain they've utilized AI in development, I can't fathom how else they've produced this much content as a new studio. Some of the art and text seems like they could've been cleaned up AI output, or could just be amateur art mistakes and clunky writing/translation.

I'd sworn off gacha after the unceremonious shut down of Dragalia Lost (and subsequent offline mode for Nintendo's next shut down mobile game, Animal Crossing), yet here I am. I haven't spent money yet, though the grind is a bit much, but you can't directly sub grinding for money. Banners guarantee a max star character after 70 pulls. I've been given enough currency for >140 pulls so far and they've got a daily free banner right now. Power creep is definitely real here too, I got a lucky pull with a new character and she's just stupid stronger with an entirely different DMG formula doing double the damage of similarly leveled characters and more actions per round. I'm not sure it's that big a deal though, I haven't uncovered a PvP mode and the story has an easy mode.

So I played Terror at Oakheart recently, and as much as I wanted to like it, it just doesn't work. The possibilities seem bright with a pixel adventure game that serves as a love letter to the slasher film genre, but the result is a disjointed mess. The dev seems quite taken with the horror/gore genre, but the games don't seem to demonstrate an adequate understanding to what makes the genre work.

Cliches are just an expected part of any genre, and this is certainly the case with a slasher film. One watched film is all that is needed for an audience member to go, "Oh yeah, they had sex, they're gonna die," or "He's a jerk, he's definitely going to meet his comeuppance." With expectations set, filmmakers operate within these parameters to deliver the necessary beats, but to do it with the flair and imagination required of telling a good story.

Terror at Oakheart doesn't have any of that. It steps onto and off home plate as though rounding the bases is some kind of antiquated traditions. In the first half of the game, you maneuver you pawns to the correct location and context so they can be properly disposed of in the most slasher film way possible. It's playing both sides of a checkers game, knowing exactly what the next move will be, just so set up these elaborate glory kills (which look great) that feel unearned. As a result, the game is mostly protagonist-less; and by the time you play a character that doesn't die immediately, the game shifts gear, changing from a suspenseful inventory fetch quest to becoming a jumpless side-scrolling shooter.

I am guilty of wishing this were another game, so let me lay out my elevator pitch for the pixel sidescrolling slasher game that I want to see: You play as the killer who is tasked with disposing of the victim in as a cinematic fashion as possible. Even though you are invincible and can walk up and murder them where they stand (as Terror at Oakheart does), you get the most points for killing them using situational props that lead to cheesy oneliners ("Welcome to Prime Time, bitch!" comes to mind). In order to do this, you the killer need to sneak around in shadows, keeping out of sight, holding back your murderous urges even though you're standing right behind them because the spot isn't correct. As levels become more convoluted, the killer needs to spend more time hiding behind curtains and in closets to avoid detection, and set up the props of the stage to unlock the cheesy oneliner. Think of it less like Hitman and more like the gameplay of Manhunt crossed with the cheesiness of Night Trap.

I would like say the requisite "fans of the genre will enjoy", but they won't. This is more for pixel purists who enjoy seeing the medium be explored in various genres. This is still great work for an indie dev, but man, do not expect John Carpenter's Halloween, more like John Carpenter's later work.

Zombie Gunship Survival lol

Mindless and lots of grinding but exact thing one needs when they don’t want to think about anything.

Want to get back to Wizardy Daphne but too lazy lately. Awesome for fans of old school Wizardry with lots of quality of life improvements and great storylines.

Still slowly making progress in Slay the Spire 2, I'm enjoying it immensely, but haven't switched over to the Beta branch as I haven't wanted to ask my friends to also make the switch to keep friction to a minimum when playing together.

I also booted up and played a couple of levels of Creeper World (the original game). For those who haven't played it is a tower defense game where you play against a "goo" that is gravity based. It will slowly fill up lower areas before rising up to higher areas on the map. I picked it up years ago, and I enjoyed it enough to pick up Creeper World 3 which follows the format of the original game with more added to it. I wanted to "finish" Creeper World 1 by beating all the maps before I moved to Creeper World 3 since I don't think I'll want to go back to the original after playing with all the new bells and whistles. A fun game that goes on sale for cheap, and I've definitely enjoyed enough to say I got my money's worth. I think once I beat all the maps I'll have ~15 hours in the game