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What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
For most of this week, I was playing Luna Abyss!
Luna Abyss
Where to start?
This game reminds me of Respawn's Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order (and its sequel.) Formally, Luna Abyss, a double-A bullet hell fps, developed by Kwalee Labs, released this year, bears no resemblance to Respawn's pair of third-person metroidvania action games. The similarities lie more in the fact that both games feel like amalgams of other, better games. In Fallen Order, that's Uncharted, and Dark Souls, and Titanfall; in Luna Abyss, the obvious inspirations are Control, Returnal, and DOOM Eternal; to say nothing of the megastructure the game is set in, inspired by the likes of Naissance and BLAME!
Undeniably, both of these works are derivative; they borrow a lot and add only a little that's new. But in Luna Abyss's defense, the result in this case is something that feels starkly different from its inspirations. It's not blindly borrowing ideas even when they don't fit; instead, it's remixing bits of gameplay formulae to create a unique combat experience; it's suspending its derivative visual ideas within stark and striking compositions. Compared to the Jedi games, it might be best to say that it's sampling and interpolating ideas from other games, not remixing them — and the result is a pretty unique experience even if its inspirations are obvious in every frame of every scenario.
The main, notably excellent thing about Luna Abyss is its pacing. The game is an entirely linear shooter, though it adds in some platforming segments to complement a moveset that grows as the game progresses, some gameplay set pieces about possessing giant robots for variety. What's notable about this is that the best parts of the game are often the parts where there is no combat. The artists at Kwalee Labs are masters of composition, and they're able to create extremely striking environments that made me feel tiny, agorophobic, and lost, despite how on-rails the game actually is. I've been writing a piece about the way Alan Wake 2 uses negative space — the space between combat — to build dread, and suspense; the way that game is comfortable with silence, happy to let the player stew. This is a quality Luna Abyss shares: for as frantic as its combat is when it breaks out, the game is very slow and deliberate with its pacing, and gives the player massive amounts of time to soak in its environment and world, to curate a specific emotion, which in its case is less dread, more worry and awe and smallness. But the game also uses negative space in a very literal, artistic sense. The game makes heavy use of blacks, of darkness with tiny areas of light and definition to direct the eye. On my super fancy high color accuracy HDR OLED display with all the fixings, there were often scenes where I literally couldn't see what was around me, not even the gun in my hand, and I was making leaps of faith towards a spot of red in the distance, hoping that it indicated a platform to land on. Even when the player isn't shrouded in darkness, the game constructs its environments and its skyboxes with stark, low-detail blacks and whites, often putting blurring distance fog between the player and the surrounding floor, ceilings and walls, to better frame major set pieces, create a sense of scale, and/or guide the player through the level. The way this game is composed, and the way it guides the player, should genuinely be studied in art schools. It's exceptionally good.
I'm not sure I would call the combat good — I might even be willing to say I dislike it — but it's certainly distinct. It combines DOOM Eternal's lock-and-key style combat design, where specific enemies can only really be damaged by specific guns, with Returnal's bullet hell attack patterns, and a healthy dose of fast, floaty movement to keep things interesting. It includes glory kills which can either heal the player (as DOOM's did) or turn the enemy into a grenade, to explode and damage other enemies, which makes every kill a decision instead of a brief breath of invulnerability. It often stretches its battles out over long platforming segments, forcing the player to balance moving forward with killing enemies before their pressure becomes overwhelming. The result is a very mentally fatiguing system full of constant decision pressure — so to alleviate the stress, the game has an ADS lock-on system so aggressive that it becomes almost physically impossible to miss your shots, meaning you can focus entirely on managing your weapon rotations and avoiding the enemies' attacks.
The system has problems, don't get me wrong; the weapons often feel too similar, and you only really get three of them — the fourth is only for the last couple levels, is super powerful but can only be fired very occasionally due to its tremendous cooldown period, a sort of BFG-9000 that you'll typically use as a fight opener. At certain points it feels like it becomes optimal to play the game like a cover shooter, hiding behind level props or bits of terrain to snipe at enemies, instead of dashing into the action like the game is clearly designed for. But the game is nine hours long, and probably less than half of that is combat, so it certainly doesn't overstay its welcome, and the very unique feel of the combat was more than enough to keep me interested in it. Oh, I should note that I played on the highest, "Scourge" difficulty because I remembered the game's demo being trivially easy — and that remained true for the first couple levels, but the game eventually grew some real teeth, especially in the bossfights, which all took several attempts and all were pretty interesting both visually and mechanically, even if they showed repetitive gameplay design patterns.
The part of a game I care the most about usually is the story, and unfortunately I don't think Luna Abyss's is anything to write home about. Don't get me wrong, it had some elements that I liked: it was cryptic in a way that tickled my brain, without veering into Souls-level impenetrability; it had some neat twists, and some cool, genderfucked characters. But on the other hand, it leaned far too heavily into what felt to me like uninspired Tarot and Norse mythology references, and it had the kind of abrupt ending that usually indicates that the team ran out of budget. A charitable reading of the game could infuse it with a lot of depth. Some interesting points could be made about how the player character Fawkes is only ever a side character, is constantly offered choices that, for them and the player, aren't actually choices at all along a totally linear journey; the game is clearly making a point about power, revolution, and incarceration; its family-drama twist gives the game more emotional weight without undermining the narrative up to that point. But personally, I found the gameplay and exploration experience to be much more compelling than the story, which I would only call "good" in the context of first person shooter stories; which suffers from being too obscure to be affecting, too derivative to be arresting, and, in dialogue, too contemporary to feel mythic or symbolic or weighty.
So Luna Abyss is in some respects a flawed game, but I found it tremendously enjoyable and interesting, and, in terms of its art direction and pacing, genuinely, uniquely excellent. Much like last years Expedition 33, it felt like a really great freshman effort, where while I wasn't over the moon (haha get it because the game is set inside of a moon and Luna is in the title) about every aspect of the final product, I can't wait to see what the studio does next. Oh, hold on, I'm getting a phone call. One second.
Okay, so I've just been informed that the studio that made this game was unceremoniously shuttered and everyone was laid off and they might never get the chance to get another crack at making a game? Oh, ok. I mean, the credits were so short that they had to pad them out by listing the law firms and accountants that the studio contracted, the game had a Game Pass deal, it can't have cost that much to make but — well, I guess that's the state of the gaming landscape in 2026.
What a fucking bummer. Anyway. I encourage you to play Luna Abyss, because it's still excellent. And if you can find a way to get it without sending a dime over to the shit ass publisher so much the better. More than any game I've played, I think Luna Abyss deserves to be a cult classic that people stumble on and are fascinated by for years to come. How can a game be so derivative, and yet also be so compelling, and esoteric, and singular? Well, since the people who made it have all been summarily executed — that's what "laid off" means, right? I assume it's some kind of euphemism — I guess we'll never know, but playing the game and wondering at it provides its own kind of answer.
I also played the Through the Ashes campaign DLC for Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous (will this crazy DYKE ever stop talking about Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous?) I held off on playing the DLC for a long time because it's a self-contained campaign with very little relevance to the main game — only using the same systems, is only set in the same city as the game's opening act — but I'm actually disappointed it took me so long to get around to it. "Through the Ashes" is a really interesting piece of design that injects gallons of challenge and interactivity into Wrath's low-level adventuring experience. While Wrath of the Righteous is a power fantasy game, "Through the Ashes," a more im-sim inspired story about a few weak townspeople navigating a treacherous city in the wake of a demon attack, is brutally difficult, and on the higher difficulties, demanded a ton of thought and creativity to get through it. It exerts a ton of resource pressure, makes even getting basic gear a forbiddingly difficult task, and really stretches your system knowledge. "Through the Ashes" also has a neat gimmick where, if you want to be heroic, you can shepherd three to five NPCs through the campaign — but they're all ill, so keeping them alive will put even more pressure on your limited healing/restoration resources. When my journey through the DLC ended with me bringing them all safely to the end, it was delightful and satisfying. I had to really work to get there!
"Through the Ashes" would probably be better in a game with more in-built systems for environmental interactions, like Larian's Baldur's Gate 3. As it is, though the game works hard to offer alternative approaches to combat, the way it does so doesn't ever feel fully natural. Wrath's system was really built around fighting, so giving the player more out-of-combat options mostly just boiled down to putting a contextual prompt in the world here or there. It's certainly a step in the right direction, but it didn't get me thinking creatively about how to use the environment so much as it got me looking around the world for an encounter's auto-win button: a cart on a hill somewhere to push down into the enemies; a spot where I was prompted to throw a rope to climb up a wall and ping kinetic blasts down at cultists who didn't have rope themselves.
"Through the Ashes" was fairly light on narrative content and roleplaying, but the game used a milestone leveling system (where you got XP from completing story quests, instead of by killing monsters) to further disincentive combat, and to encourage you to protect the NPCs and see their stories. This system also works well as a pacing tool — since you level up after finishing a quest, you're often doing so at a moment of rest: after a big battle, or a decision, or an emotional moment, or at the end of an area, instead of the way it works in the main game where levels would often seem to come at a random time: in the middle of a dungeon, for instance, when you don't really want to have do the tedious work of leveling all your characters. Clearly this leveling system was an experiment for Owlcat — like a lot of the stuff in the DLC — and while I didn't notice much of its ideas making its way into their next game Rogue Trader, I think "Through the Ashes" does a good job introducing new gameplay ideas and using them to really stretch the player to their limits. Clearing it did require a frustrating amount of save scumming, though! It's not at all built for a new player.
I've completed Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. Good game on the whole!
And started MOTORSLICE. It's a "parkour" platformer game. Mildly apocalyptic aesthetic, with machines gone rogue. Megastructures that must be climbed/traversed, and such. @countchocula recently played it and had a very lukewarm opinion of it. Too bad it wasn't enough to put me off! Because I'm finding the game extremely mid.
A game like this lives and dies by the low friction of its controls and the smoothness of the player's movements throughout the in-game world, but this protagonist has a penchant for jumping into the void, or just from too high up. She'll easily push off walls into the void or drop like a rock, because the controls aren't always intuitive - the button for dropping without pushing off when climbing is the reverse of the one for doing that while running, for example. There's a button for softening falls but it only works on a narrow band of altitudes. And worse, there are only two camera modes: The one that swerves abruptly mid-sequence, changing the direction of your controls relative to the player and making you die, or the one that sticks very close to you, preventing you from seeing where you're going and making you die.
Narrative cutscenes are another problem. You do have the option to not engage with them, thankfully, although of course that means you will miss out on whatever story the game has. Or you can enter them and experience... Slow paced, unskippable lines of dialogue that force you to stare at the character for a long moment before allowing you to proceed. The camera will be positioned to get a good view of, say, her butt. Yes. Let's just say her butt. You will also get dialogue options for yourself. I'm sure the dialogue choices you make do something at some point but certainly they do not affect the dialogue (monologue?) progression, possibly because you play as an AI drone who is incapable of speech, so it's all actually just beep beep boop no matter what you choose. Plus, after you're done with the scene, you're still prompted to engage with it again - literally nothing changes.
The designers saw fit to be on the wrong side of realistic when it comes to the lighting inside the megastructures, perhaps to justify the presence of the player drone. You, the drone, turn on a flashlight in these situations so the character can, theoretically, see where she's going. Meaning in much of the game you can only see what you're doing through a narrow flashlight circle overlaid with a crappy, pixelated flashlight cookie sprite. I'd say this is a puzzling decision, except I find 9 out of 10 times a designer chooses to use any flashlight mechanics they're already as misguided as it gets.
Checkpointing is mostly OK if you're not trying to collect the optional floating orbs spread throughout the game world. If you are, expect some deaths to put you in a checkpoint that's beyond the collectible you were carrying to its drop-off location... without the collectible. Oops.
And I'm afraid there are several other small irritants. For some reason, if you go into the menu the game is incapable of remembering the status of the camera and flashlight for one. The radar button that shows interactables doesn't show doors at all, nor do they show any interaction prompt, even though they look just as flat as the many non-interactable doors save for different coloring (I think). Combat isn't super interesting as it doesn't follow typical industry practices; dodging works poorly because the little excavators (why are there even excavators of that size anyway?) beeline for you no matter what.
I should be clear in disclosing that I'm still early into the game. Maybe it gets better! There are certainly good ideas and typically most of this is stuff - the megastructures, the climbing, the parkour - would appeal to me, which is why I wanted to check out the game in the first place. Even the implementation details - the moves you have or the types of traversal you must perform - are theoretically appealing, but none of it ever quite feels good. It doesn't feel too bad either, which is what makes it even more annoying. I keep expecting better.
There are a lot of positive reviews on Steam which others may find more aligned with their own tastes. But there are also negative ones and they echo my opinions.
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Hahahaha dang im sorry i didnt save you some time. 100% agree on all the points. Good writeup. The flashlight/dark levels i think exist as a cheap mechanic to mix up standard play. Its honestly just more of the same from here except wall grinding gets introduced and that was janky for me right up until the last fight, i could never get it to do exactly what i wanted.
Similarly to the dialogue options in the cutscenes, i dont think the collectibles have any impact on the game either. Theyre just there as celeste-like strawberries, to make sections optionally difficult but i found a lot of them to just be in annoying places that took too long to get back from.
The game dips its toe into fun design choices but never really tries anything deeper. Youre introduced to a mechanic and then thats literally all there is to it for the rest of the game.
OK, I've played a little more since I wrote that. I'm currently in chapter 4 (of 8).
Cutscenes: Gave up on them almost immediately after. I'm just ignoring them all. I heard some things about a foot fetish, but I guess I'll never know...
Orbs: I collect them when they're not too far out of the way. I think while you're carrying them they might let you survive a hit from the enemies? Not entirely clear on that though. A few more types of enemies were introduced but the combat remains pretty basic. I think for every enemy the game just wants you to press the right button with the right timing or they one hit kill you. That's it.
There have been some fairly satisfying parkour sequences to be fair. I'm more familiar with the controls, and sometimes the game gets it "right" for a while and traversal actually feels good... until you run headfirst into the next spot where for some reason you press left and P jumps to the right to her death, requiring you to repeat the same thing fifteen times. Camera/controls annoyances and the flashlight remain the worst part of the game.
I disabled the setting that allows the camera lens to get dirty from the dust clouds raised by the protagonist when she runs, requiring you to constantly "blink" the camera shutter. It was cute for a couple minutes but I appreciated being able to get rid of it.
How spooky was Lorelei? We love puzzles games but have low-medium patience for too much spookiness and no tolerance for jump scares
I noticed it's on your wishlist. Lorelei is a little difficult to describe in that regard. Most of the time it's just kind of a dead, desolate world. You are pretty much always "alone" except for an old woman lying quietly on a bed and a labrador, who you can pet. He's a good boy.
When is Lorelei and the Laser Eyes spooky?
Sometimes you will meet A Man, or The Man. He'll randomly come to you in the hotel when you do certain things that advance the plot, and have an interaction with you. You will progressively learn about him throughout the game. You never see his face. He may be unsettling because of his unsettling demeanor, because he loves brandishing a revolver, or because of you not expecting an interaction in a seemingly empty hotel, but that's all. Typically you hear the sound of footsteps before the beginning of the cutscene, although you'll also find him waiting in a couple locations.
There are some very mildly unsettling scenes. A skeleton. A dead body. They don't move.
The game features manifestations of the "supernatural" on occasion, including visits to a "spirit world" (spirit world locations flip the palette, using cherry red as the primary color). When you are close to something supernatural you are always forewarned by Lorelei's glasses flashing red. The closer you are, the more they flash.
There is a ghost that appears almost at the very beginning of the game floating through a certain room. After that she will be waiting in a specific room and not move anymore. This is the first of two things you might actually find spooky, but it's a one and done thing.
Finally, and this might be the most unpleasant to you, which is why I'm spoiling it (it's also the biggest spoiler here) - at one point nine ghosts will be "released" into the hotel. They all look the same. After this happens, a ghost will approach you at regular time intervals and chase you down until it touches you (or you can just turn around and touch it). Despite the flashing glasses forewarning you, this may be a little unsettling due to happening unexpectedly and regardless of where you are. The ghosts want to play a memory game with you and will reward you with Pages (maybe it's the tormented ghost of Atrus ;) ). You need to play all of the scenes and get all of the pages in order to complete the game so you might as well go and get it over with. After all nine memory games have been completed the ghosts stop coming.
I appreciate the thorough response! that doesn't sound too bad. Definitely sounds like the sort of thing we'd save for October. 😁
I was a Teenage Exocolonist
This is effectively a stat raising card game with a focus on story and with exploration elements.
The name helds the important elements of the setting. The atmosphere is hopeful yet grim sometimes and the artwork can be cute.
It is meant to be played multiple times and the first playthrough will be grim. The subsequent ones then can vary in tone.
It is casual and nonjudgemental in how it views gender, relationships or society.
There is far too much grinding. Especially if you want to play optimally and more so with multiple playthroughs.
I had a lot of fun playing this but they definitely didn't think through the balance between length/grind and making people play multiple times. One playthrough was enough for me!
I'm playing Outer Worlds, which I consider good still modern FPS RPG game.
But I'm gonna talk about sidekick taht I play along it - Fallout 2. I remember my friend back in the days doing Unarmed run (only melee fist weapons like knuckles, no cold weapons like knives etc.) and I wondered if it's feasible. I knew it is from his experiemce but I wanted to try it myself. After some reading I picked Finesse and Jinxed as my traits and started with 10 agility and 8 luck (you can make it 10 later). I also did Navarro run when I was in Den and I out all my skill points into Unarmed to the point that I have 180% Unarmed and I hit with 95% accuracy and score criticals almost everytime. And since then, the game is simply broken - there is no challenge for me in the game right now.
But if you don't know much about the game, it is actually very challenging. You can and very likely will die in a rat fight. But the game is also rewarding - if you play as it was intended, you are slowly rising up and get better as a character and also with your gear, the tempo is quite nice.
And for the story - story itself isn't that great, but all the locations and many characters have so much background and local atmosphere, that you don't really need story. This 25 years old game is superior in many aspects to many modern games. Graphics and ease of play and ease of combat isn't everything - sometimes if you are able to look past the aging of the game, you may be surprised how good it still is.
Steam version of Fallout 2 can run in higher widescreen resolutions and doesn't crash (as original sometimes did), I don't know about other versions. I don't use any community mods or reworks of the game.
Eternights really surprised me. I didn't have high expectations -- indie action dating sim with time management and Persona inspiration on its sleeve makes for a tall order. And yet, I ended up loving it. While level design and combat felt dated, the characters and scenes were delightful.
The main character is a young man that gets caught up in an apocalypse with their best friend. A creep cuts off your arm and the goddess gives you a magic one with a sword. You're to end the apocalypse and along the way end up gathering a motley crew (or harem if so choose) with some recognizable archetypes: pretty pop idol, cute runner girl, hot scientist lady, and the 800 y.o. twink boy.
I found them endearing and enjoyed going through their conversations. I'm not sure how to put it yet, there was a nice quality to it all, none of it felt creepy or inappropriate. Like in one scene, your best friend asks another character out after some good chemistry. She says she's not into anyone and he takes it well, asking if they can still be friends. So not only did they include aro/ace rep, but had a character respond positively to it after being rejected. You can tell your best friend you love him in a show of platonic love that's rare to see presented between men with sincerity. I think that's the word, this game is sincere in a landscape flush with irony.
Some parts are corny, like one scene where you're having a dramatic not-death scene with your bro and MC is like "I need you to get rid of my hentai". There's other bits of humor teasing at MC being a perv like when you start the game in your room, you can approach a tissue box and get a though bubble like "there's no time for that!", but nothing gets more explicit than that. Even the "romance" scenes fade to black and let you assume what's going on.
Relationships don't end when you start dating, there's another full scene plus a couple minor dates afterwards. A nice touch compared to many contemporaries where its treated like the end goal and once you hit that, that's it, they're in the middle of calibrations for the rest of the game.
Sometimes the plot works and has some oh shit moments, but mostly is mid with a hole or two. The level design and combat feel like PS2 era, but in a charming way. But these shortcomings didn't bother me and combat was still engaging enough for the runtime.
It was mainly made by one guy and I get the sense he's kind and wanted to put out an uncomplicated game where you can date cuties and beat up bad guys. I would've appreciated more time with the characters, but I can see the combat overstaying its welcome if it was much longer than 15-20hrs, though more of an epilogue after the world is saved would've been nice.
I picked up The Artisan of Glimmith during the Steam sale but didn't get around to playing it until just before the weekend.
This was a bad idea because it ate up my entire weekend. Cheers for lost productivity.
As I get older, I'm finding myself less tolerant of games with elaborate stories, opting for games where I can just jump into gameplay without having to run through 2 hours of cutscenes. In that respect, I consider Tetris to be the perfect game because it's easy to learn, difficult to master, infinite replayability, no two play sessions are the same, can play short sessions or long sessions, etc. Artisan of Glimmith isn't Tetris but it has a lot of the same things that make me like Tetris.
At its heart, Artisan is about drawing shapes on grids. Each puzzle has certain rules to which you must adhere, such as only certain shapes allowed, shapes must have certain areas, shapes must contain certain symbols on the grid, certain shapes can't be next to each other, etc. The variations can get pretty intense, especially when they start combining rules. The easy puzzles can be finished within seconds but the harder ones can take up to an hour to get the right combinations of shapes in the right place. Most of the puzzles, though, are short enough that I got easily trapped into the "just one more" loop.
My only real complaint is that some of the puzzles seem to be mislabeled in their difficulty. Each puzzle receives a label from 1-7, with puzzles rated 1 supposedly being the easiest. I've only run across one 7 puzzle so far and a handful of 6's and I've been kind of disappointed with some of the 6's because they seem pretty easy. In fact, I solved the first 6 I saw within five minutes. This is opposed to some of the 3's and 4's, which had me pulling my hair out for dozens of minutes (with one particular 3 keeping me occupied for an excess of 45 minutes).
Still, this is easily my best buy of the year and I would've been happy to pay full price for this.
I've had the same issue with single-variable "difficulty" ratings on puzzles lately, and I think it's because there are actually multiple types of difficulty with any puzzle that's about a chain of reasoning:
Within The Artisan of Glimmith, high difficulty puzzles seem to ask you to keep more in mind, and the boards are big and complex, but having only a single possible starting spot is not necessarily harder. If you can identify it and keep the rules in mind, even a giant board can be resolved fairly quickly because the ruleset just makes the solution propagate across the entire surface without additional complex solving. Some of the "medium" difficulty puzzles are actually 3 or 4 smaller puzzles in one board with unclear borders between them, and so you need to pick away at multiple lines of unrelated logic. Perhaps some people would find this easier, but I do not.
Working my way through Robocop: Rogue City, about 2/3rds done, I think. It's... Fine? There's a story, there's gameplay that basically hasn't changed since the start of the game. The movement is clunky, but I think intentionally so to imitate the movement of Robocop. But it's also kind of gratingly clunky. The game is also terribly optimized. I don't have a very robust system these days but I had to drop my resolution to 1080p and lower the graphics way down just to get a steady 30fps.
The true-to-its-janky-movement Robocop: Rogue City gets a huge pass despite its flaws because a licensed game in the hands of a smaller, Unleaded developer cranked out a "guilty treasure" love letter to the original movie compared to the money trap it would have been had it fallen into the sticky fingers of a Premium developer.
My complaints:
Still a good game worth playing. It's so good, I'd consider buying the DLC even without knowing there are cyborg ninjas in it.
I was actually closer to the end than I thought and I'm just hitting credits now. I'll give it this, there are very few no frills FPS single player campaigns these days and I appreciate it for that. The industry would be better served (for players, not financially) if they pivoted back to this mode.
It is very strange to call a game based on a blockbuster film franchise "modest", but here we are. Beat 'em ups have had a wealth of successful licenced properties come out lately (TMNT, Marvel, GI Joe) that are decidedly smaller in scope than what their branding would have you believe; here's hoping that more new games will follow through and aim for a more modest middle.
I'm actually playing a game I picked up during the Steam Sale. Which is surprising. Usually I wouldn't get around to these until a Backlog Bingo.
Anyway, tried out Two Point Museum. I've played a good deal of Two Point Hospital (and it's spiritual predecessor, Theme Hospital, and even Theme Park), so I have experience in this "world." But still, was a bit unsure how TPM would go, since TPH/TP's mechanics don't make sense for a museum.
But it's actually pretty fun. I've been wanting to play something a little more slow and low-key and this is it. I'm still in the early game, only in my second museum, so the challenge level has been pretty low. It's still basically the tutorial. Curious how it'll ramp up though. I know in TPH/TH, some of the levels could get wily. But that's because you're often working against the clock. Sick patients are throwing up everywhere. Sick patients may leave. They may die. I hope no one is dying in a museum waiting to buy their entrance ticket! So yeah, I'm interested in seeing how that kind of pressure gets translated into a game about growing and maintaining museums.
I haven't played it. Please let us know if your in-game museum:
Ooh maybe I'll have to build a Noah's Ark-like museum, complete with two of every animal, before my museum patrons get raptured!
Or have to figure how to deal with 100% totally-not-fake Dead Sea Scrolls!
I'd definitely be down for stopping an Ocean's 12 like heist. Or...enabling it as an inside job!I
I shall report back in future weekly posts.
Today I started Cottonville, which I got in the Steam sale for $1. Saw it recommended by a cozy game Youtube channel, and figured why not? It's a combo farming/fashion game where you farm crops to use for making clothes to sell.
As far as cozy games go, this one's definitely on the slow side and the balance is a bit off. It's kinda annoying making clothes at times because of the various needed fabrics. You need to pre-dye fabrics to use. The good news is you can make clothes while the store is open, so you can just hoard undyed fabric until you get a request and then dye and make clothes to fit the criteria.
Meanwhile, the farming is painful. As far as I can tell, there's no bulk option for planting seeds or watering them. And the watering can only holds enough to water 6 spots at a time, and as far as I can tell there's no option to upgrade the capacity... And you fan only water one square at a time... Watering is REALLY tedious.
But making money is surprisingly quick compared to some games. Like... I easily make at least $3k each day so far. And the boutique system actually isn't that bad. Customers will have three requests (style, fabric and color), and you can use a combination of items to fulfill them. You don't need to fill each one, but you do get a bonus for it. Presumably once you have more materials and clothes, you can have a lot of fun.
The game also has an in-game achievement system tracking milestones and gives you rewards (namely money, crafting materials and clothing items).
One neat thing: the character creation has limited options, but also has some hair/eye colors I don't see often. It has a couple gradient options, AND there's a vitiligo skintone! (Was so tempted to make one of my old OCs in it, even though she is definitely not the Cozy Farm type.)
It's got a cute charm to it, and the art style reminds me a good bit of Cozy Grove. But it definitely feels a bit incomplete, and it's very slow-paced. I'll keep an eye on this one and hope for updates (seriously, watering crops should NOT be this tedious).
Typing of the Dead: Overkill
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I don't need to ever make a tier list for video games. All you need to know about me is that the original **Typing of the Dead** is the S+ of video games. Compelling gameplay, strong meta narrative, lucid self-awareness: basically, everything you could ever ask for from the most violent educational video game on the market.Typing of the Dead transcended the limitations of its campy House of the Dead acting and suffocating genre rules by doubling down on its cliches, actualizing its potential in a cocoon of wit and whimsy, and finally emerging from its metamorphic transformation as a bold po-mo vision that dared to crank the camp to 11 with battery-operated, back-mounted, keyboard-equipped, in-game Dreamcasts and zombies that swapped out their lethal weapons in exchange for more kid-friendly plungers and lollipops. It was like nothing we'd ever seen before. And then it just vanished. That was over twenty years ago.
I was so sure that there'd be more games like Typing of the Dead, but there weren't. No more typing games about zombies, educational games with zombies, or zombie educational games (though Wordle is doing a good job nonetheless). So when Typing of the Dead: Overkill came out on Wii, I knew that the follow-up I had wanted for so long would soon follow.
Now, years and years later, I finally have it, and played it. I've been on a typing game kick since my sublime time playing Cryptmaster, and so I bought it during the Steam Sale. For me, it's shining magnificence exemplified. Speaking objectively, it's a step down from the original Typing of the Dead which, and I can't believe I'm saying this, they should have copied more.
Typing of the Dead: Overkill puts all its eggs in the grindhouse basket and comes out like a UFC press conference attended by an unsurprised Nates Diaz. The game revels in its sex, violence, and profanity, and doesn't come out better for it. The on-rails gameplay is decent and the graphics are leaps and bounds better from what I remember it being on the Wii, but the try-hard attitude that insists upon itself wears out it welcome. The copious and prolific swearing is all to set up one big joke that will delight one thirteen-year-old boy out there, so it's good that at least somebody can make this game a part of their personality for a summer.
But wait, there's more! It's not just swear words with the cleanest "ck's" you'll hear in your life. Typing of the Dead: Overkill has multiple modes for added replayability. This includes custom dictionaries with which you can import your own lists of words, a feature with which SEGA offers its own DLC dictionaries that they somehow still keep charging for. Want to memorize human biology terms, French verbs, or all the Pokemon names? Just plug them into a custom dictionary and go to town. Right now I plugged in my own lists for palindromes and the dialog from TNG's "Darmok at Tanagra" for kicks, and even made a custom dictionary for Glup Shitto characters. It's a recontextualizing of this game that takes it to another level, the same kind of thing the original did when making the bold jump from arcades to edutainment.
Great fun. I still want more zombies in my educational games, though. It's the only reason that's holding me back from learning French.
Lyric Sonata
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Modern art gets a bad rap. People think it's obtuse, impersonal, and unrelatable. Most of all, people think it's elitist. You try to counter with "Modern art is for everyone" and "The significance of modern art is what it means for you." But then your reasoning goes out the window, but not because these people are right, but that they are proven right by bad dreck that hits all the points on the naughty list.Lyric Sonata is just that kind of video game. It is the kind of pretentious drivel for which its only redeeming quality is to serve as a submission for a government grant, or as fodder for a complaining video game review like this one.
Lyric Sonata is Saltbae as a video game: looks fancy, looks impressive, but contains no substance. With no objectives to fulfill, no rules to follow, Lyric Sonata could have been an interesting free-form exploration that contrast two media representations of the same thing. But Lyric Sonata isn't that. No, it has designs for us, the player, but won't tell us the rules. And yet, the joy of discovery is abandoned when this game shows It's playing both sides of the net where rules don't matter.
This game features unique visuals that serve as your backdrop through a fantastical depiction of music theory come alive, this is true. If you're not annoyed by the way the written notes doesn't match the performed music, then you're also likely a fan of tattooing yourself with Chinese calligraphy without actually knowing how to read Chinese.
The idea of Lyric Sonata appeals to someone with my taste. I know because I tried playing it before. And, being the same person with the same luck, I got stuck in the same underwater section as before, the same place where I gave up on this plonk not worthy enough to be used for cooking. What does the ending mean at this point when the game is openly hostile and condescending to the player?
As an interactive music maker, Lyric Sonata is everything that the sublime Prodeus is not: cold, indifference, passionless. In the same was as its lesser Baldwin brother, Prodeus is a free-form adventure game where can kind of go anywhere, making your own music as you go. However, in that game, there is a very specific ending that the game gently guides you towards, putting an emotional emphasis on the present, making for a unique experience that resonates with honesty. Lyric Sonata is a poker-faced HR representative telling you that the corporation is deeply sympathizes with your predicament, and checks off a clipboard noting that the requisite sentiment has been spoken aloud and heard.
As Homer Simpson did for Naked Lunch, I can think of two things wrong with the title of Lyric Sonata. The game is telling me two words, and they're not "Happy Birthday."
Keeb Quest: Typing Battles
I just started playing this, and it is exactly my kind of thing: typing skill gamefication through RPG-style encounters and nerd-iffic stat collection. There's no campaign yet to this Early Access game, but the this educational game smartly co-opts the grind of RPGs to make a wholly satisfing typing tutor.
Still on Wayfinder - see here for my previous post.
Two weeks ago I was saying "I'm 20 hours in, and in the end of the first open world area". Now I'm 40 hours in, and huh, somehow still in the first open world area. Not that I'm complaining, and I'm actually surprised that the game manages to still give me more fresh things to do here. I wonder if the rest of the game will keep the same pace, because the more I play it, the more it opens itself.
The passives systems become really interesting as I unlock more challenging dungeons, I keep swapping characters depending on the situation (or on my mood), I still find new weapons and gems that change the gameplay... Though beware, I almost put it down when I first started it 40 hours ago. I'm used to playing more front-loaded games (exciting features are very quickly unlocked), and this one is quite back-loaded. The first hours are rough with only 2 or 3 characters, almost no skills, no gems, and no gear. It's a good thing that the complexity is progressively introduced, but the pacing could have been a bit better.
Burning through the last of the random-ass-requirement wanderers in Tokyo Xtreme Racer an excellent nostalgia bomb from the old games.
Have put way too many hours into the Iron Nest: Heavy Turret Simulator demo and enjoying every moment of it. Looking forward to the full game and an expanded story already hinted at in the demo.
I heard so many good things about this game. It looks amazing, and I hope there are no human elements to ruin the immersion. You didn't say, but I imagine it is enjoyable.
You have a very refined taste in video games, fellow connoisseur. You should share some of your gleamings with us: what's it like to live in a tank that's a crab? The scope of this game looks amazingly small/big; you are limited to this tiny environment, but take part in massive battles.
Tokyo Xtreme Racer, in true-to-its-roots fashion, has zero multiplayer involvement. It's just you, your machine, and the road (and the other racers who don't want you to be faster than them). If you played and enjoyed the earlier games, specifically Zero, you'll enjoy this one as well. I do wish it had more cars (it has 69 vs Zero's 165) as I am a car enthusiast (to say the least), but Zero also used unlicensed cars while aside from a few custom cars, the new version is primarily licensed cars.
Iron Nest is beautifully solitary, nary a detail is missed or overly difficult to grasp, the aesthetics and design choices are spot on and there are so many small touches that show how well the game is thought out to fit the theme. While I do wish I had some more outside views than the tiny window at the front of the turret (a window that closes automatically when you fire the massive artillery), I also understand that having such would ruin the simulation aspect of the game, so I respect the choice. Just a world I'd like to explore for sure. In fact I came across it/Steam suggested it to me at the same time it suggested Dust Front and due to aesthetics, I honestly thought they were from the same team and one was an RTS and the other being in the mobile artillery. Played both of course, and Dust Front is also on my wishlist now for when it is released.
Two things to add:
The tutorial stages that get you accustomed to how to run the thing do not prepare you for the feeling of urgency once the enemy starts firing back.
With not-insignificant effort, I can make a relatively decent cup of dieselpunk coffee.
I've spent much of my time away from my PC this summer.
I needed something for my phone.
I have been using an emulator to play Pokémon ROMHacks.
There are a quite a few good ones that have come out in the last few years.
I've really enjoyed Emerald Seaglass and Lazarus by Nemo.
Also: Pokémon Odyssey was really cool.
I finished and then reviewed The Incident at Galley House! It was made by the folks behind The Roottrees are Dead and is a remake of Type Help, a text-based deduction game. It's pretty story heavy and the core puzzle is great. The Steam release is highly polished, so it was fun to revisit the world!
I'm currently going through Elden Ring as someone who really isn't into Souls-likes: Precise combat that requires exact timing makes me lose patience and get frustrated, vague story communication just gets me lost, etc.
Saying all that, I'm now almost 200 hours into the game, and I think I'm nearing some sort of ending? I'm not sure if I made it so far due to frustrated perseverance, or the game is actually that good and it tricked me. The opaque story is still there, the frustrating combat has only been bypassed by me going the sorcery route and upgrading my blasting powers. It's very polished and well done, but I'm not actually sure what is pulling me forward other than just the desire to see it through...
Deltarune Chapter 5, PC/Steam Deck: Another solid chapter in a great game, though the relative lack of main plot advancement is wearing on me (and a chunk of the community, I've learned). Character writing, comedy and music remain fantastic.
The House in Fata Morgana, Switch 2: I'm not a visual novel person despite liking what I'd call VN-adjacent games like Ace Attorney. This managed to hook me nonetheless with a very heartbreaking story. Visuals are also really, really gorgeous.
OneShot: World Machine Edition, Steam Deck: Very early on in this one. Want to see what all the fuss is about. I have a lot of anxiety about the "one shot" aspect of it though…
Deltarune Chapter 5 was not what I expected, but it was delightful.
You're right that it feels more like a side-story rather than a significant advance in the main plot. After Chapter 4 took the story in a darker, more forboding direction; it felt that playtime was over, and we'd be delving into the real story and lore from then onwards.
Chapter 5 didn't seem to follow in that vein (although perhaps it will feel different when the tale is finished). However, every moment was enjoyable in its own right, and none of it felt like a waste of time. The main characters had meaningful, believable development. The new 'antagonists' were funny and endearing, and went through a satisfying mini-arc. As always, the music was fantastic, and the gameplay mechanics were full of nice surprises.
I did somewhat expect this. In the release newsletter Toby stated:
It's kind of a last hurrah of "old Deltarune." I think that'd have landed better if 3, 4 and 5 came out together as was originally planned because 4 was so packed with plot that we managed to basically guess 5 already from all the hints!
Nonetheless it was extremely fun and I still loved it.
Finally trying Void War as I had an FTL itch I needed scratched.
It's still fun and I'll enjoy unlocking things, but does seem a shame that I'm still looking for something like an FTL 2 (although I need to check the mods on FTL as I know there's some gold there and I've never done it).
Oh and in relation
5. I just miss FTL's aesthetic. It was perfect.