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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.
INDIKA (2024)
Finally I got this game. It always caught me eye. So glad I did. It’s so weird and interesting and well thought out, I was hoping for so long that it was what I thought, and it is. Hopefully that excited mess of words conveys my enjoyment of the game.
Sometimes the sound doesn’t match the animations in cut scenes, but the story and gameplay get me past those very rare and minor hiccups.
This one has been on my wishlist for quite awhile now. Keep meaning to pick it up every time it's on sale, but just haven't made the jump yet.
Mario 64
Its the first game I showed my two-year old and its the only thing she wants to see us play now -- much to my frustration. I remember playing this at kiosks and at a babysitters house when it was released and while I was in love with running around the castle courtyard then, I never really played it until now.
My wife knows it inside and out, but for me, gone is the wonder of backflips into the moat, crawling on the grass and zipping around the bridge. They're replaced with the frustration of a camera that doesn't know what it's doing, level design that's totally ridiculous and a game that feels more like a proof of concept than anything.
Looking back, I'm sure that's more or less what Nintendo wanted to achieve. It's still beautiful, but I wish that I had the muscle memory and nostalgia built in to make this whole experience a little less arduous.
Palworld has consumed my life, and the life of my wife. I set up a small private standalone server on our network, and we play there and do our own thing adventuring around the game world. It's like having an entire MMO but for just 2 people, and it's awesome. I haven't hosted a private server in easily 25 years, so this was a special treat to be able to do again. The wealth of configuration options ranging from casual to utter hardcore is awesome.
I played the 2021 Myst remake this last week, through one Age (Selenitic). I very much enjoyed the Riven remake, but for some reason this version of Myst really turned me off? To me it's like the original's style was very heavily based not just around particular aesthetics but the specific vantage points that you see the landscape from, and how those vantage points emphasized certain pieces of the Ages or puzzles. In Riven, I thought Cyan did a great job in 3D keeping the cohesion of traveling between five islands. Myst just feels... Wrong? Definitely cramped and lacking in impact.
One of my favorite bits was that all the Myst linking books from Ages spit you out directly and perfectly under the library chandelier; it feels like the border of waking up from a dream to land looking up at a disorienting geometric object looming between you and a painted sky before you click off, snapping back to the view of the library and refocusing your goal to the next loop through another Age. And the link process would always smack you with that abrupt black screen, the dramatic sound, and then immediately drop you in some completely alien point with no fade-in. The loosey-goosey 3D and loading screens really kill all the emphasis and foreign feeling, IMO.
Myst was always really video gamey, but it felt like it was in a way that stressed that there was stuff you could do with that to evoke a mood. Without the precise ambience it just feels... Like an Unreal Engine puzzle video game. And puzzles weren't really Myst's strong suit.
What would you (or anyone else reading this) consider the best way to experience Myst for someone who didn't have a sufficient computer when it first came out? I grew up on MS-DOS so I'm not allergic to outdated graphics, but I am a fan of quality-of-life improvements if a remake comes with those.
My Steam family library contains Myst: Masterpiece Edition, realMyst, and realMyst: Masterpiece Edition, but I'm happy to emulate an old Mac if there is some reason to prefer that.
Play Myst: Masterpiece Edition. It's a cleaned up remaster of the original 2D game which doesn't mechanically change it, and I would heavily recommend it as the one to play for the original aesthetics. There are some QoL things it's missing (mainly holding one page at a time) but nothing I would dissuade anyone over. I imagine they packaged this Steam release to run on modern computers just fine, but if not, then it should run in ScummVM. (I played my OG disc in 2009ish using a Win 98 virtual machine if that works for you.)
realMyst is the first attempt at a 3D remake that was reportedly not very good, and realMyst ME was them trying to fix that one up. Your post has made me want to try realMyst just to say I did, but the more recent edition was made to kinda make up for them dropping the ball the first time. I wouldn't suggest it first.
EDIT: Oh, and as always - if you enjoy Myst's aesthetic, please please please play Riven: The Sequel to Myst! It took a lot of development lessons from Myst, and Cyan made a way more impressive narrative. The puzzles are more anthropological in nature and baked into the story itself. Plays more like the puzzling in Outer Wilds than Myst, IMO.
That's exactly the kind of answer I was hoping for, thank you!
Edit: it looks like they recently went back and updated Myst: Masterpiece Edition to be Steam Deck certified, so that makes this an even easier answer to follow.
realMyst was really cool, it introduced new canon content (Rime) and had cool day-night cycles, and most of the trees on the island hadn't yet been chopped down ;) Too bad it was hard to get it to run and it can't be found anywhere. I vaguely recall the ME not being quite the same.
The "new" Myst was made to be VR-compatible; I imagine you would get more immersion out of it by playing it with a VR headset (I confess I haven't tried that yet though).
I wasn't going to bother with VR since I encountered some pretty frequent visual bugs on my (admittedly not officially supported) CV1 in Riven. I just don't think I need to try it again, honestly, but I didn't know going in that it was conceptually made for the Quest first. That would explain some wonky stuff... Every mouse area around the reset lever in the clock tower makes you move back out a screen, which made interaction with that super annoying in pancake. Probably makes more sense in VR.
My own glitchy experience with Firmament in VR is also why I haven't tried Cyan's more recent remakes. They refused to acknowledge or fix anything and it soured me on Cyan a bit (at least modern Cyan).
I have an unspeakable amount of hours in Slay the Spire 2 and have beat the game twice now on the highest level (ascension 10) with each character that's currently available. I really hope more characters become available soon. I'm by no means the best slayer of spires but I love puzzling out what makes a deck good or bad and trying new things. It's given me a lot of inspiration for my own game (where progress feels like it's at a crawl but I'm trying my best!).
Other honorable mentions of the month: No Rest for the Wicked, Ravenswatch, and Cat Mail Co. which have all been very fun and different experiences. Cat Mail Co. actually has me puzzling over whether or not I'd like to try my hand at a 3D game but Blender scares me!
I'm on ascension 3 and didn't know there were 10 and I'm very happy to hear about it. I'm currently on A3 with the Regent - I do each ascension on each character and have completed A3 with Ironclad & Silent, it's been a ton of fun so far. If you want to play multiplayer with a total stranger hit me up!
I've clocked 30 hours of STS2 so far, purely in co-op. I wanted to wait for it to be fully baked in 1.0 before I dove in, but my best friend got it on EA release and I didn't want to miss out.
Besides the game itself being a masterwork, the co-op is amazing, the interactions between players feel very thought out, and I appreciate that the co-op only cards both exist and seem slightly overtuned, which makes them more fun to pick and play and thus gives more of that fun working together feeling.
The ball was hilarious. Combined with some card draw cards we easily got it doing 100+ damage.
Started playing 007 First Light. Only a few hours in, but I'm having a real good time. It feels like a James Bond movie. I've never played Hitman, but I enjoy stealth type games that have some action like Dishonored. There's enough freedom to approach missions the way you want. The fighting isn't too complex, but there's some challenge and I enjoy it. I've heard complaints about the driving, but I picked it up pretty decently. It's really about getting the hang of drifting which isn't complex if you've done it in other driving games. The voice acting and graphics are real good as well.
To be fair, there isn’t much driving in the game. I think there are four setpieces in total which involve driving something with wheels, and only two of them need you to drive decently.
According to canirunit, my RTX 2060 wouldn't be able to run it 😔 one day I wanna play it!
Oof that sucks. I upgraded to a 5070TI last year. Hoping that will keep me good on PC gaming for a few years.
Returnal
Holy hell this game is fantastic and also demanding on both myself and my computer.
I have it running on the lowest settings, at 1080p resolution, with 80% resolution scaling, all so I can keep a consistent 60 FPS. Even then, the game, each time I boot it up, warns me that my hardware is insufficient. And, even then, it still looks great. The art direction, sound design, and lighting in the game do such an incredible job of immersing you in the game's alien environment.
Seriously, the sound alone is SO good. Play it with headphones and turn the volume up.
In terms of difficulty, it's definitely challenging. I'm 5 hours in and have made it to the second world twice. Part of that is my fault though because I keep trying to avenge my fallen comrades (i.e. trigger minibosses) and also I'm a sucker for the push-and-pull of the game's parasite and malfunction systems.
It is very possible that I'm going to hit a skill wall with the game and won't be able to progress further at some point, but I'm genuinely not bothered by that as I'm having a ton of fun with it anyway.
Parasite Eve
This was one of those "this looked really cool as a kid but I never got to play it" games that I'm finally getting around to as an adult.
The game is sort of Squaresoft does Resident Evil, though I'd say it's aged considerably better than the OG RE. Parasite Eve doesn't have tank controls (which is great), and the auto-aiming active battle system is much better than Resident Evil's clumsy shooting (though, admittedly, that's a big part of the way that game builds tension).
Story-wise, it's a schlocky yet high-effort sci-fi/horror cop drama about a
personbeing terrorizing New York through the power of......mitochondria.
Like I said, it's pretty schlocky, but it's made with 90s Squaresoft’s undeniable talent. It's got a simplified RPG system for your weapon and armor, and the battles are turn-based but let you control your positioning to target enemies and dodge attacks. It all works pretty well, and I'm having fun with it despite my one major criticism of the game:
Ava runs too damn slow.
It's like some dev accidentally set the run speed to 50% and they didn't catch it before publishing. In the opening scenes of the game she legitimately looks like she's running on a treadmill on some of the screens, with the animation of her legs going so much faster than her overall character movement, which can feel glacial.
This is made even worse because the game has a lot of set pieces with long paths that take forever to run through. It's to the point that I'm considering changing the speed on the emulator.
That said, outside of that one criticism, I'm genuinely enjoying the game. It's a solid retro throwback that's giving me fond memories of the PSX era.
Rogue: Genesia
This is my play-while-walking-on-my-treadmill game, and it's great because I'll get SO into a run that I won't notice that I've been exercising for two hours.
I've played a lot of bullet heavens, and this is the most mechanically robust one that I've played. There are a lot of good design choices that help it rise above the traditional Vampire Survivors formula, the biggest being that it's got a Slay the Spire-inspired overworld map with paths and events rather than dropping you on a single stage for 30 minutes (though that is an option as well if you prefer it).
There are like, a dozen different fronts for metaprogression, and the game does a really great job of slowly introducing new cards and concepts so that you're not overwhelmed upfront and that the game stays fresh for longer.
If you don't love the bullet heaven formula, this won't change your mind, but I'd put this up in the S-tier of games of this type. It's one of my personal favorites.
Felt like playing a murder mystery so I installed The Sexy Brutale on my steam deck to try. Playing the opening scene would end in a crash so I set the proton version to Proton Hotfix and its been running mostly without incident so far. Though I do miss having at least a few graphics settings, thw game always runs above 40fps and for this slower style its more than adequate.
The gameplay is relatively simple and I do try to explore and try things by myself as much as I can before resorting to looking things up online.
A warning to anybody thinking of playing Tangy TD. If your PC powers off whilst you play it, whether due to overheating, a forced Windows update, a power cut, or in my case, a circuit breaker tripping in your home, you will lose all your saved data. So clearly something is incredibly broken with how Steam Cloud is set-up for that game.
I made my thoughts about that game and its repetitive nature known last week, and losing six missions worth of progress has made me not want to touch it again for the foreseeable future.
Punch Club is a terrible martial arts management sim game. The story feels like an incredibly unoriginal homage to past boxing movies (there is a whole section where your buddy dies to a Zangief-looking Russian fighter and you spend a good chunk of the game in a Russian village training to beat him in a straight-clone of Rocky IV's plot. On top of this, training your character becomes a grind-fest, and a huge part of the problem is that your stats drain rather excessively each day. At least its sequel, Punch Club 2 fixes some of the original's flaws, even if the dystopian cyberpunk setting is very contrived and feels more like a cross between Fifteen Million Merits and Soylent Green.
Right now I'm planning what I want to play over the next week. Halo: Campaign Evolved releases generally tomorrow and since Early Access isn't available to Game Pass subscribers, I'll have to wait. But also, League of Legends Classic actually releases on Wednesday alongside patch 26.15.
Nothing from Lazy Bear is good on the writing front. Graveyard Keeper is equally bad. I'm not sure why they're so bad, but the games definitely skate by on a good vibe, solid art, and ok mechanics.
Still on Remnant II, to my own surprise.
I wrote last week that I finished the campaign, and while it's basically the tutorial, it felt satisfying enough for me to move on. Or so I thought. I did a few adventures, found new maps, bosses, and loot, and now I've just restarted the campaign, with a higher difficulty level.
There are so many secrets and stuff to unlock with this game, it's impressive. Even setting reasonable goals (unlocking all the archetypes and traits) could take me a very long time because a lot of these unlockable require you to find items on specific levels that may or may not appear in your current run. On one hand I find that really charming that a modern game requires you to put some effort to experience it fully, but on the other hand some unlockables are absolutely ridiculous and impossible to be found without a wiki. Like "stand still on this particular spot for 5 minutes" level of ridiculous.
On the Deck, I've finally unlocked the second open world area of Wayfinder, and it only took me 45 hours. Phew.
I've also earned a few achievements for finishing questlines, and it makes me a bit sad to see that less than 10% of players earned them. Like sure, you can feel the game suffered a bit from transitioning from MMO to solo/coop RPG, but the devs did a great job, and for me it strikes a perfect balance of depth, accessibility, exploration, and session length. Though now that I write it, it also maybe puts it in some weird place: it's certainly too casual for more min-maxers that want more build complexity and depth, but the combat can be too demanding for casual players that want to mindlessly mash buttons.
I have hundreds and hundreds of hours in Remnant, I've unlocked everything, even the hardcore campaign rewards; I've maxed every weapon, it's probably my favorite Soulslike.
Actually if you're talking about what I think you are that "stand in the spot for five minutes" class unlock (the Invoker, right? The skill focused one?) is one of my favorite things in the game and an anecdote I use to explain why I love it! That map was DLC, and when I watched a livestream where they found the class on day 1 it was then insanely rewarding to spend the next week joining random co-op games and showing clueless newer players where to stand and say "just wait... I promise!" There was one DLC hunt with a puzzle and a secret weapon behind it that I recall taking literal weeks to find a general solution for in the Discord (I got it earlier through brute force).
Because the game's secrets are so obscure, it really incentivized joining the community to get information and then actually play co-op, which is what the game was designed for! But because the rooms you get (and therefore the loot in them) is random each campaign, you still have to come up with your own builds instead of following community guides 1-to-1. I had more fun making and testing builds in Remnant than in any other game and then rocking up to the boss in someone's nightmare co-op campaign with some bullshit that no one's ever used before in my loadout and having it somehow kinda work was just a delightful experience.
Ah, that must be my problem 😄 I only play coop with friends, but none of them own the game so I only play solo and enjoy the fact that I can pause and leave whenever I want. Nevertheless, the game is awesome and it's just a minor quibble. I actually prefer to not engage with the wiki and stumble upon things as I play.
Been dabbling in a couple of Super Famicom games. The great thing about the NES and SNES is that their libraries are so vast that every year, I come across stuff that I've just plain never heard of before.
Rudora no Hihou
1996 JRPG from golden age Square. I came across a guy on a Japanese forum who really rated this and being someone who generally loves old Square JRPGs, I had to check it out.
Man, it's not for me. There's some good stuff here like a pretty original setting involving Indian mythology and the whole story taking place in the days leading up to the end of the world as part of a cycle of destruction and rebirth, but the moment to moment gameplay isn't really enjoyable from a modern day perspective.
The encounter rate is high, fights play out slowly and there's no twist to the standard turn based combat to give it some sauce.
There are some large maps, but there's rarely anything interesting to find. The castle at the very start of the game is emblematic of this - it's huge but empty other than a few places blocked off by NPCs. It's the same with the island you start out on - you can walk to other villages, but there's no real reason to. You can't afford any better gear there and there are no side quests.
For a game that came out 2 years after FF6, it's not nearly as engaging.
Marvellous: mou hitotsu no Takarajima
Despite this being:
a first party Nintendo title;
inspired by Zelda: A Link to the Past; and
directed by Aonuma Eiji who went on to lead the Zelda team,
I'd never heard of this game until last week. LTTP is easily my favourite Zelda, so I had high expectations going in.
It's... okay. Fun to try for the novelty, but I can understand why it didn't get pushed to a worldwide release.
The game focuses on a group of 3 (presumably American) kids camping on an island that turns out to have buried pirate treasure. Each of the kids can be controlled separately and has their own items that they can use. It's kind of like if you had 3 Links but they each only had 1/3rd of his tools.
You can move around as a party or leave the others behind and go solo, which is sometimes necessary to position the kids to solve puzzles. This mechanic is quite neat and reminded me of The Lost Vikings, although it is a bit unpolished in that sometimes the kids you aren't controlling will just decide to stop following you and you have to whistle to get their attention.
From what I've seen so far, there's no combat in this game, but the puzzles can be fairly involved and some require pen and paper notetaking. Many involve investigating things more closely by going into an adventure game style first person view where you can click on things directly (although there's no mouse, so moving the cursor feels kind of bad), but there are also a fair number of action and environment-based puzzles once you start unlocking more of the items and skills.
Visually, it looks very nice. The Zelda inspiration is definitely visible in the big colourful sprite work and some of the assets like the stakes may well have been lifted directly from it. The tone is also very lighthearted and makes me wonder if the devs took inspiration from stuff like The Goonies.
For anyone who wants to check it out in English, there's also a fan translation available.
Ghost of Tsushima at the LCD steam deck, runs really good, better than it run on the ps4, the handheld easily allows me to pop into the world whenever I want and the story and world feels amazing. I often get into exploring and doing side missions just to interact with all the different things that exist in the world.
A buddy and I just started replaying Grim Dawn because the final expansion (Fangs of Asterkarn) just released. They re-tuned the game content to be significantly harder, so it is a big adjustment (and lots of complaints about it online), but it has been fun to get back into the game with the new class. I haven't gotten to the new content yet, but it is apparently very large. Based on previous games, I imagine this will have me captive for a good month.
I accidentally posted this on a different thread, but Ill repeat it here:
Ive been replaying Blightfall
Its a minecraft modpack that takes place on a fixed map. The premise is that you are a colonizer on an alien planet that has been overrun by a magical disease called Blight from the thaumcraft mod.
Your main goal early on is just to survive, but as you explore this alien planet you discover the remains of the former civilization that lived there and discover the principles of magic that their civilization was built on, which eventually gives you options to clean up the planet entirely.
Ive played the game before but never finished it. The basics game loop of trying to gather resources while staying alive in a hostile environment is fun at first, but the endgame is a real slog because there is no quick amswer to how to clean up the map. There are several options to pursue but they all involve a heavy investment.
Blightfall as a whole is a great modpack. A lot of work has been done on crafting a map with lots of secrets to be found, and exploring all the different mods feels very rewarding with how much they inprove your quality of life.
The biggest complaint I have is how much of a slog the endgame is, but my second complaint is that the food changes are too much.
Normal food has diminishing returns for how much hunger it restores, which over time makes any reliable food source seem like a waste of time to cultivate. You definitely could go through the effort of making lots of different foods like you are supposed to, but personally I always just make mana cookies because its less hassle. On one hand I like that they included this special reward for people who bother to cultivate mana beans, but on the other hand I feel like I would have been willing to explore more with culinary variety if they didnt make the diminishing returns so penalizing.
Id definitely recommend this modpack to anyone who enjoys minecraft.
King’s Field: The Ancient City
Games from FromSoftware’s King’s Field series, or at least inspired by them (affectionately referred to as “Fieldies” in some corners of the internet), are a very interesting pill to swallow. They are often unwieldy and obtuse, even more so than the games FromSoftware would go on to develop (Elden Ring, Dark Souls 2 and its inferior siblings, and the like). There exists plenty of media that goes into what makes King’s Field games unique, so I won’t dive too deep into that here. For now, it suffices to say that these games are old-school first-person dungeon crawlers with a decent cult following.
I posted a while ago about working my way through the first two King’s Field entries, and I’m happy to report that I’ve “beaten” all of them. That is to say, I properly beat King’s Field (jp) and King’s Field II (jp), aka King’s Field outside of Japan, as well as King’s Field: the Ancient City for the PS2. I got about 50% of the way through King’s Field III (jp), aka King’s Field II outside of Japan (confused yet?) but had to call it quits because my emulator ISO seems to be corrupted :/ the first half of the game seemed excellent and was a great send-off to the PSX era of the series.
All of that said, upon booting up King’s Field: The Ancient City (TAC) for the first time, I immediately understood why the genre is experiencing a sort of resurgence, and why TAC is such a big influence. The game oozes atmosphere, the music is excellent, and there is so much of the current FromSoftware DNA that clearly got its start in this entry. There is still tons of the characteristic charm (read: obtuse and oft frustrating mechanics and design decisions) found in earlier entries, but a lot of the sharp edges have been filed away and it made for a really enjoyable experience.
I emulated all of these entries on my Steam Deck and I would highly recommend doing the same if you’re interested. Primarily because when you’re backtracking through the game, you can bump the emulation speed up to 150-200% for quicker traversal. I’m all about taking in the game at its intentionally slow pace, but when I’m backtracking to find a single item that may or may not exist several areas back, I lose my patience pretty quickly. At any rate, I’m glad to have finally immersed myself in the King’s Field universe.
Shadow Tower: Abyss
(note: I also emulated this on the Steam Deck, it’s a PS2 game like TAC)
While not directly tied to any of the King’s Field games, Shadow Tower: Abyss (StA) is the amalgam of everything FromSoftware learned while developing all of the KF entries. For the first time, you could control your character’s movement with two joysticks—what a concept. Every KF game before this used tank controls with a combination of shoulder buttons to strafe and change vertical look; it was pretty miserable.
In classic FromSoftware style, there are several new mechanics introduced in StA. Weapons were the biggest change by far, ending up somewhere a lot closer to some weird middle ground between a looter shooter and Breath of the Wild. Weapons in all of these games have durability, but it is purposefully incredibly low in Abyss. On the flip side, weapons drop from enemies somewhat frequently, and enemies have pretty quick respawn timers that are not associated with any sort of gameplay “trigger” like the eventual bonfires of the Souls universe. In other words, you’ll be coming across a lot of weapon drops in Abyss, but said weapons won’t last very long. On the flip side, you can repair weapons at special stations, at the cost of… your own HP. So if you find a weapon you like, there’s a constant dance of either spending your health to use it if you don’t mind the expense, or using worse weapons if you’re not in a good place to use the somewhat rare HP potions in this game (HP doesn’t refill at save points automatically). This mechanic is weird as hell, but in practice it works fine. If you like holding onto a single weapon to use it and you’re strapped for HP potions, I’d imagine this to feel pretty rough. I’ve not felt this pressure yet, though. I feel that the weapons are varied and effective enough that it’s worth trying new weapons as I find them and falling back to low-tier weapons that I don’t mind losing when I’m re-exploring areas or dealing with trash mobs.
There are two other “stations” associated with weapons, one as common as the HP->repair station, one unique to the hub of the game (as far as I can tell given my current progress). First are shops wherein you can use the in game currency to buy more weapons (and other equipment) or sell spares. Intact weapons give 2 of the currency, broken weapons give 1. Weapons range in price drastically but I’ve not seen any higher than the 20s. In other words, shops can’t be your primary source of weapons, but they are helpful to sell junk or pick up other items.
The final station will consume a weapon entirely, regardless of its condition, and refill your HP and MP. This is a great option if you start to accumulate poor weapons and break them over time, as you can repair your good gear with HP, then burn the junk to refill your health. The one catch: there exists only one of these stations and its unique to the hub world, so you can’t do this in the middle of clearing out a world.
All of this to say, Abyss tries some new things but it still feels like more King’s Field at its core, and that’s a good thing! Oh, it also has guns now. Did I mention the guns? It’s admittedly a very silly feeling to be creeping through what feels like a mystical medieval land, only to whip out a Glock and smoke a harpy with it. It works with the narrative but I won’t get into that now.
Anyway, that’s a lot of text to explain a single mechanic, but the point is, I’ve been enjoying it a lot and I highly recommend folks who enjoy the Dark Souls gameplay loop to try out any Fieldies they can get a hold of.
Ball x Pit - having a good time. But I don't think I would be sticking around if I didn't add the mods for unlimited harvesting and auto looting. If I had more of an incentive to slow down the town creation I might, but right now I'm repeating a few gold mine harvests at a time to earn enough to maximize land space. Definitely kneecapped some of my fun by cheating, but the gameplay isn't enough for me to want to make that many runs.
Music is hot fire.
I do kinda wish there was a bigger story to the game. Not expecting a Hades rougelite but something, y'know?
I was doing a playthrough of Stellaris. I got to the end crisis and... it was Cetana again. I'll give one solid shot to try to actually beat her this time, but I honestly don't know if I can. I feel I am way too far behind on repeatable techs to even try and you only get one shot.
Maybe I'm just bored of her questline over and over. I was hoping for a war in heaven to dodge big awoken empire fleets while trying to quell some other upstart bullshit. Maybe I'm grumpy because the one fallen empire that did wake up was about to finally deal with the Grey Tempest once and for all. All I know is that this very eventful run is ending on a whimper and its really bumming me out.
While it takes some of the mystery out of it, you can choose which end crisis you want to fight (or have them all trigger.) I don't know if you can exclude one in particular, but there's probably a mod for that.
The problem is that you cant exclude one specific one (at least without mods) so I'm kinda SOL here. I like the random. I just don't like when it doesn't feel random.
Yeah, it's rough. And because it takes so long to see what it is, a 20% chance to get the same crisis as last game feels bad.
Blackberry Honey
I may have gotten in over my head with this one.
Click for more
So I got this free. And I think to myself, why not? So I give it a try. And now I'm overwhelmed.
Blackberry Honey is what I think is called a yuri story. Not knowing which side of the LGBT tag this on, whether realistic or fantasy, lurid or sober, I booted up this linear visual novel to have exactly half of my expectations met, and the other half wildly exceeded.
The story follows Lorina, a plucky young woman who takes up a new job working as a maid at the Lennard mansion who finds oppressive work conditions, unfriendly coworkers, a gruelling lifestyle, and love.
The things I have come to dread about this genre are all here. As a visual novel, the story likes to take its time, wallowing at a slow pace during story beats that go nowhere, making it so that each button press feels satisfying as another step taken in this mammoth journey of words. More than that, visual novels tend embrace their limitations wholeheartedly, resulting in long passages where you're looking at nothing but a background image, or only ever see character portraits of the main characters. And I was not prepared for that.
These ladies are loaded for bear. They have personality to spare, so to speak. Or to be more colloquial about it, remember that graphic artist from the Conan show who was featured many times for his hobby of drawing anime woman with enormous breasts? This is Pierre territory. Honkers if you're horny. Like, 5318008 times a million. Like, if the state allowed people to choose their own capital punishment, and you said "motorboat," this would be your death.
It could be that I'm very superficial to focus on these points of interest, but the fact remains that the story never brings it up. No one talks about it; it never once becomes relevant to the story. The characters have massive boobs; deal with it. And so the story goes on.
And how it does. Maybe others have used it before, but there's a genre I like to call "suffering porn". It's usually a soap opera about an unlucky person and the oppression they encounter every day. As the lowest person they know, every encounter shows the hero to be exploited and picked. It brings a lot of satisfaction to the viewer for being an audience stand-in; you get to sympathize with someone else's suffering and also enjoy it blamelessly. It's a show of solidarity that acknowledges the injustice of the system without the messiness of directly challenging it.
And, very smartly, that's what Blackberry Honey is: an indictment of the class struggle that is Victorian England. All of the conflicts and injustice come from this unfair system that oppresses people like Lorina. There is no escape from the exploitation inherent this world.
But Blackberry Honey wasn't written by Charles Dickens, who might've had a big boob fetish, it's possible. The story uses the backdrop of an unjust Victoria England and populates it a complicated character like Lorina. For one thing, she's very naive. When she calls out the other maids for not being good workers, the others rightfully call her out for allowing herself to be exploited. To what use are her demonstrated traits of loyalty and diligence if she is just meat to be ground up, never to be appreciated? If she's not smart enough to avoid work like the others, then it's on her. What's more, Lorina isn't as virtuous as she may think she is. She is full of malice, wishing retribution on her fellow maids and her 12-year-old mistress, Constance.
This is all to say that she's a complicated character. She's not some Mary Sue, or some helpless damsel. No, she's somebody with conflicting morals. That has gargantuan breasts. Like, back-problems-by-30-sized chest pillows that she is depicted as using one arm to hoist up in order to stand. It's like you have to divorce the text from the visuals, that her oversexualized appearance is somehow inconsequential to the suffering porn of the story. It's like it's not supposed to be titillating, but there most definitely will be porn be to come. I understand that this is a slow burn, that the agony of the daily oppression will build up Lorina's eventual lesbian lay-up with Taohua who, from where I am currently in the story, only shows up once but remains top-of-mind. But I'm too engrossed to get the Kleenex out.
Blackberry Honey is very far removed from other LGBT-type games I've played before like Get in the Car, Loser and Arcade Spirits that have more realistic contemporary portrayals. It's a long way before I get to the end, but I'm most interested to see what the game has to say about Victorian England, but I feel the lesbian love story will get in the way of that.
Stray Observations (so far)
Orbital Bullet
It's a 2D platform shooter rougelite with its main distinction being the circular rooms that allow your bullets to loop around. Take 2 guns, specialize in one of the four gun types/classes (bullet, explosive, energy, shotgun), and shoot things between picking which random skill tree path to take. I thought explosives & Hellion were the best, but are completely reliant on getting the explosive resistance perk to avoid self-damage while the Engineer is the 2nd best class to me for having spammable turrets and energy synergy.
It's a buck on sale and runs are about 30 minutes so I had my 17 hours of fun, but it also faltered at the beginning and end because of the meta-skill tree and the rougelite scaling. In true roguelite fashion, several mechanics are locked behind needing to grind in the beginning like HP potions, free shop/end of level healing, kill streaks, and overcharging skills. It also puts HP, damage, and gun level boosts behind the grind which hampers the first few runs and puts the need to keep pumping points into them to keep up with the ascension Overcharge levels that inflate enemy damage/hp/density and puts later enemies into the starter zones. I hit my stopping point at Overcharge level 9 of 10 since the game disables the healing spots that come from the skill tree and things just hitting for half hp at this point. The sheer amount of enemies with overlapping hitboxes, homing AoE, and lane wide shots make it difficult to avoid damage and the game does not provide invincibility frames when spawning in the next area which leads to a lot of cheap shots if not outright death.
Hell Clock
It's an ARPG/Roguelite that I got from the previous Humble Monthly and waited for the 2.0 update before starting. It was less grindy than I remember from the Next Fest demo; after the initial difficulty bump after the 1st boss, all the gear I got was enough to smoothly run through the rest of the campaign though the game did hand me some broken stuff. The 3 cornerstones of my build were the relic that turns the shotgun into a single piercing bullet and multiplies the damage for DPS, the relic that makes shotgun blasts deal plague damage (which stuns with enough buildup) and ricochet for AoE, and the relic that gives the ghost followers a copy of your specific shotgun which of course boosts damage, deals out auto-pilot clearing, and they don't cost mana the way the shotgun does. I did get one-shotted by the last Act 2 boss and the Act 3 bosses, so I had to invest in the 5 min cooldown death revive and chose the slowing field, dash, and crit boost for my remaining skills for better glass cannon safety, but I got all the achievements for defeating the bosses in X runs.
Each Act/dungeon has 21 floors with bosses at the 7th floors and a survival floor at the midway point of each. Bosses drop a guaranteed red Unique relic that changes how a skill works, but even normal relics can be converted to blues and then yellows to fill out the grid inventory. There is the timer running down, but it's just a DPS check and the only things to really check for on a floor are chests and elite enemies for their drops. After the campaign's finished, there's 2 higher tiers of difficulty to beat the campaign again on and the repeatable dungeon that has it's own tiers going up to 16 apparently, still working my way through. Beating the campaign also unlocks an Ascension mode for a new save file which lets you choose some random loot to start off with and gives you a limited amount of runs before resetting the world and invoking Hades-style debuffs for difficulty progression.
Mostly my points of contention would be how Act 2 forces you to preemptively return to base thrice and how the inventory filter just darkens items instead of just showing the relevant ones (and my hoarding tendencies for all the loot I'm not using but that's besides the point). My campaign file has a broken build so I'm otherwise fine with having this as a podcast game while my Ascension file is struggling a bit more and I guess for learning/experimenting with other builds.