qolelis on 8/8/2024 at 08:25
Quote Posted by henke
Have you guys played that Sanitarium game from 1998? Just discovered that it's in my GOG account. Maybe it was a freebie at some point? Anyway, played the first hour or so. Pretty freaky stuff. Kinda clunky gameplaywise. Think I might stick with it.
I started playing it 4 years ago, got halfway, and then never returned to it, probably because of the tedious pumpkin maze I got stuck in. Maybe some day, I'll finish it, but, then again, probably not—unless I somehow run out of other games to play.
WingedKagouti on 8/8/2024 at 12:26
Quote Posted by henke
Have you guys played that Sanitarium game from 1998? Just discovered that it's in my GOG account. Maybe it was a freebie at some point? Anyway, played the first hour or so. Pretty freaky stuff. Kinda clunky gameplaywise. Think I might stick with it.
I recall getting stuck at some sound based puzzle which I couldn't find a useful walkthrough for. Given that I'm more or less tone deaf I basically need this type of puzzle to be deterministic, and the guides I could find at the time all just said to match the tones which was no help at all.
henke on 9/8/2024 at 16:27
Ok I get it, everyone but me has played this thing already! I played a bit more. Dug up a dead girl to win a game of hide and seek. This game is... really... something.
Quote Posted by Sulphur
Respectively - no, but I will; and why not, you don't lose anything, and the more of us that move on from Elmo's godawful dead bird platform, the better.
I just haven't gotten on BlueSky cause they don't have video/gif support yet, and I'm still pulling for Mastodon to somehow win the social media wars.
Sulphur on 9/1/2025 at 17:19
Whereupon Sulphur Slew the Princess
You're on a path in the woods. At the end of the path is a cabin. In the cabin are stairs to a basement. There is also a knife.
The princess stirs. You notice the knife looks a little weird because of how your ar--
There is so much blood.
X-*-*-X
You're on a path in the woods. At the end of the path is a cabin.
The princess isn't happy to see you.
There is so much more blood.
X-*-*-X
You're on a path in the woods. At the end of the path is a cabin. In the cabin are stairs to a basement. You leave the knife where it is.
The princess smiles. You talk.
The world ends.
X-*-*-X
You're on a path in the woods that leads to that time I played Slay the Princess.
I slew the princess. 6/10.
But I also played Slay the Princess again, and I slew the princess again. 8/10.
And then I played it again, and again, and again, and now it's difficult to talk about, because, you know, the Groundhog Day premise/time loop is just a structural framework for what it's really trying to do.
And what that is, is a little more complex to articulate. I'm not wholly sold by it yet, so all ratings are actually provisional, but I'm feeling like it's a sev--
Things unravel. There's blood, and blood. Blood and entrails, an unspooling, an unwinding, and there is only god's bounty laid open to the stale air, and then blackness.
X-*-*-X
I boot up Slay the Princess again. Hegel smirks. We'll see how it goes this time.
Aja on 10/1/2025 at 21:38
It's been on my wishlist for ages, but I keep hesitating because something about the art style combined with the tone of the marketing copy and the effusive Steam reviews is making me think that this may be the perfect game for some but will rub me wrong. And it's not cheap enough to just take the plunge, even when it goes on sale.
demagogue on 10/1/2025 at 22:02
I got it finally for Christmas this year, along with a slew of other games that have been near the top of the to-buy queue for a long time. It's not a game that really calls on a guy to break his gaming queue and actually pop it to the top of the to-play list, though, at least from the outside looking in. I'm reading it's at least a short play though, and evidently replayable, so that's a nick in its favor.
Sulphur on 11/1/2025 at 04:13
Both of you are right to look at it with some amount of uncertainty, because those concerns aren't unfounded.
RE: the art style and tone and player sentiment, your intuition's correct that despite its Steam rating it won't work for some. I personally like the pencil illustrations because they lend a scratchy irreality to the world, which aligns perfectly with the story. However, that Overwhelmingly Positive rating belies the fact that, as I've hinted, the game's beating heart and thesis is more a metaphysical debate than it is a character narrative (that isn't actually a spoiler, but I'm spoilering it in case you'd prefer to discover the theme on your own). That's a very take it or leave it kind of story in my view, so the Steam reviews skewing to the extreme end of positive seems like most people have taken it -- there is self-selection bias from VN enjoyers at work there, of course, but I wonder if it's mostly gushing at the technical execution and apparent layers of choice (there are a lot of apparent choices). To be clear, it's a well-constructed VN. There aren't many, if any, technical problems, and it certainly makes you feel like you've got a lot of agency. But as with all VNs, that's just funnelling you down to a selection of end states that the journey's made you feel like you had a voice in how you got there. StP certainly does make you feel like your hands guided it there.*
RE: queue-hopping, it isn't the sort of game that needs a lot of investment in time or effort, but at the same time, it benefits from that as you go on. I understand that sounds odd, so: my first playthrough took a couple of hours to get to an end state. If you replayed the game to get to each end state, it'd take multiples of that, but StP does allow you to save at any juncture to try alternate paths. The thing is, it's structured in a certain way that each branch in these paths means you need to loop through its premise a set number of times - this isn't boring! It's smart enough to introduce new elements or vary them through most of its branches, and there's been a lot of effort put into ensuring you feel engaged by it - so you will end up spending more time on it by design.
However, if you're at that juncture where you're choosing with intent to get to a certain world state, you might as well also invest some time in engaging with why it's presenting you with those paths to begin with, and more critically, whether you agree with it in spirit/philosophically. So I'd say maybe 5-6 hours overall is a good guesstimate. Certainly not a huge diversion, but more substantial than it otherwise would have seemed before you stepped your toe in.
*I don't rate this as a very important quality to a narrative I'm experiencing, though. What I rate is how well it's written overall. Agency is nice, but not necessary for that.
Sulphur on 25/1/2025 at 09:25
So, I just wrapped up Technobabylon.
It's an interesting one! It's an Adventure Game Studio-type deal, so if you've played other Wadjet Eye games, you know the deal. There's a lot that it has in common with Dave Gilbert's other projects, like the Blackwell series - oldschool pixel graphics featuring a bunch of pixel art from Ben Chandler, an interesting premise, and a solid balance between talking and puzzling.
The story's set in a cyberpunk future in a city called Newton, off the Horn of Africa, and it immediately gets things going when you discover your first protagonist is locked in her own apartment room, and needs to find a way out. You're quickly introduced to core concepts like wetware (a universal brain/electronics computer interface, essentially), its version of cyberspace, 'The Trance', and the core ideas it's interrogating - one of them being a city where people are managed by a civic AI named Central.
It's a pretty intriguing opening, and once you're done with that prologue, it moves on to its other two protagonists, the city's equivalent of police officers. And they're investigating a murder - of course. Apparently it's someone called a 'mindjacker', who steals his victim's neural contents before killing them - and he uploads them into his own brain, like a psychotic Johnny Mnemonic.
There's a bunch of different directions this yarn could have gone, but the story tries to avoid cliches and caroms off into some neat side-avenues. I won't spoil any of it, but I was always reasonably entertained by the plot even when I could see the contrivances, and the protagonists are an engaging trio. The plot doesn't tie up its philosophies and the endings as meaningfully as I'd have hoped, but it did the job of wrapping (most) everything up in a reasonably satisfying way. Plot aside, the best part of the writing is the small details casually tossed off in conversations and descriptions that suggest a richer world beyond what you're seeing.
Beyond the story, the thing I enjoyed the most was the puzzle design, if not necessarily the puzzles themselves. Let me explain: in a lot of adventure games, there tend to be some really rough aspects in terms of player experience. Sometimes, you're unaware of what you need to do next to progress, or you know what to do but the game wants you to go through a very specific and counter-intuitive sequence of steps (AKA moon logic), or there's just too many areas to explore and your inventory has dozens of items including a gerbil and the dried tears of previous players, which combine with moon logic to make the entire experience feel like it's striping hot welts of pain onto your brain. While Technobabylon doesn't avoid *all* of those, it does its best to make each chapter manageable: you're generally made aware of what you need to do next; there's usually only a handful of inventory items per scenario; there's only a few areas to go to per puzzle; and the logic to each solution always makes sense (with a few exceptions). What this means is that you won't find yourself stumped for very long in many places, and it's fun to think your way through possible solutions given what you have on hand.
...except for when it doesn't work.
So that leads us to the issues, of which there are actually only a few. There are a few multi-part puzzles where the chain breaks down a bit, specifically with one late-game investigation requiring you to have had a conversation and click on a certain background object to glean evidence, when the conversation alone would have sufficed. Some of the puzzles are also slightly underclued, which is when I had to resort to my old habit of clicking on everything and combining everything until I stumbled on a solution. And there's a few places where I missed hotspots that were actual progress blockers, which could have been alleviated by an identify hotspot key. To be clear, it's not pixel hunting, really, but in a game that avoids making things obscure 95% of the time, that 5% sticks out because you're not expecting it. (I also encountered some late game bugs with character selection, but I'm unsure if that's because of me forcing a Reshade CRT filter onto the visuals, or one of the recent AGS updates breaking it. At any rate, reloading a save in OpenGL fixed it.)
Overall, though, it's a smart and tight affair - ~10 hours or so. The story was engaging, I had fun with many of the puzzles (there's not a lot of adventure games I can say that about), and it's not using cyberpunk as a mere stylistic element, but attempts to engage with it, too. As a side-note, it's also refreshing that it features a diverse and open cast in a way that feels organic and unforced. There's no agenda or moralising, everyone's just a person doing what they think is right, and it's up to you to decide what you think about that. Easy to like, and easy to recommend. A solid 8 out of 10 wetware nodes.
Sulphur on 25/1/2025 at 10:22
And some story-based thoughts that go heavily into spoiler territory:
* The game's primary impetus is the philosophical choice between letting an AI learn organically, and giving it blanket expertise by uploading a bunch of people's brains into it. This would overwrite its current personality - which, to be fair isn't much of one, but could be argued to be more fundamentally objective - and leave the city governed by what is essentially a gestalt consciousness. I thought both options weren't great, but if forced to pick one, a civic AI that isn't a bunch of conflicting brains squawking at each other (mirroring humanity's general style across history) made more sense to me.
* One of the protagonists, Regis, is forced to do something onerous by having his fertilised embryos taken hostage. It's not kidnapping, but it's kidnapping.
* The idea of synths having memories, roles, and personalities that are interchangeable is just great puzzle fuel, as well as a neat way to make the puzzle fun while you're essentially trying permutations and combinations.
* You have access to a contacts list to call people on a few puzzles, and they recorded 50+ voices for the random messages. Now that's commitment.
* Central lets Regis off the hook after he committed a crime by reasoning that since he had no more motivation to commit one, and he was still an asset, he remained on-task in the current crisis. That's some dodgy reasoning, but I like that the devs thought about it enough to include a reason to begin with. It also does this in a few other places where you might go, ¿que?
* There's some interesting ideas in what civic welfare looks like under an AI - Latha's 'raised by the city', since she had no parents, and her personality essentially is 'terminally online zillennial'.
* Galatea's motivations and entire reason for being a villain are unclear apart from 'philosophical differences'. It'd be nice if there was more meat to her character.
* I appreciated that the game had no qualms with being grisly when it needed to. A synth maid following orders without Asimov's Laws of Robotics makes for an interesting case study. Also the restaurant serving human meat was darkly funny. Sure, it's not actual humans, just clones - but the idea of a civic AI letting that happen says, well, something.
* The cyberpunk-ness of the puzzles was quite fun. Interacting with AIs in the Trance and figuring out how to work around them or through them, wetware being a universal 'let's hack this electronic shit' device, people being hackable, all of that came together in a way that was really fun if not particularly realistic (for harder sci-fi, at any rate).
henke on 25/1/2025 at 12:39
Yeah Technobabylon was good! :thumb:
I haven't played any adventure games in a while.
Bluesky update: I'm on Bluesky now. I have 1.6k followers. I'm a big deal over there.
