WingedKagouti on 1/2/2025 at 22:52
Heart of the Machine is a turn based strategy... rpg? 4X? management? something? game where you play a newly awoken AI in a post-WW3 city. The city itself could be considered the primary antagonist, but that's not entirely true either, as your goals will likely align with some factions and rile up others. And you get to select your own goals by doing the things you want to focus on (once the first chapter is over, from a still limited pool of tasks (it just launched into EA).
Anarchic Fox on 2/2/2025 at 02:37
Quote Posted by Starker
Unrest, a game I once supported on Kickstarter, has only very minimal combat. Though, I have to warn you, it's not a typical RPG where you get to make grand world-altering or plot-altering decisions. It's rather more about how you react to things and exploring different perspectives. It's the only RPG I know, however, that takes place in India and if you can manage to deal with there not being some kind of a big pay-off to your choices and enjoy the game for its characters and setting, you can have some pretty good time.
Ooh, turns out I own it and never played it. Thanks for the rec. I prefer low-stakes plots, so that aspect is good to hear.
Quote Posted by Sulphur
Citizen Sleeper was a very interesting game, I finished the main campaign but am on the DLC now. It does a good job of making its statement (staving off despair in a universe where capitalism's constricting grip has forced you into needing to source a drug to keep living or die once your systems deteriorate), and the initial near-constant background stress of managing your funds, dice, and physical state hit home a bit. It does settle into a comfortable rhythm in the last half-ish, but I enjoyed the writing enough that inhabiting the space the words and the visuals carved out was enjoyable all on its own - a pleasingly confounding, ephemeral sense of intimate distance.
For all its initial bite, I don't think there's any real external threat in the game, though I assume you can reach a Game Over if you're bad at managing your condition. Each of the ways I ended the story were various shades of escaping the system with decent people, which isn't a complaint - that is, after all, the point, but neither your nor the game really confront the system that the game presents as the capital I Issue, and instead work around it or through it. This is a valid approach, but the game needed a little more meat on the bone to sell it, I feel. I could have done with more involved character stories and a higher sense of agency, even if it compromised the sense of fragility the atmosphere evoked. Overall, though, a well-made game. Looking forward to thoughts on the sequel from folks who play it!
I think the game's gist is that even when you're trapped in an exploitative system you can't change, you can still find ways to care for yourself and your loved ones. The DLC does undercut this somewhat, as your character has a much larger impact.
Impression so far: in the new game, each class feels more distinct, with a bespoke dice-related ability and a particular skill that can't be leveled, whereas in the previous game my character eventually became omnicompetent. The overall resource constraints are less tight, but the "contracts" (isolated, one-chance missions) are much more tense than the various countdowns of the original.
Jason Moyer on 2/2/2025 at 03:12
Quote Posted by froghawk
Freedom Force (which I have not played)
If you enjoy real-time with pause RPG's then both Freedom Force games are fantastic. Best superhero games ever made imo.
Sulphur on 2/2/2025 at 04:52
Quote Posted by Anarchic Fox
I think the game's gist is that even when you're trapped in an exploitative system you can't change, you can still find ways to care for yourself and your loved ones.
Which is a fair way to do things. I still wasn't entirely sold with the execution, given the multiple ways you could wrap up the Sleeper's main quest, as each of the stories and characters were a shade underdeveloped and missed the opportunity to make a more meaningful connection with the player. It's fine as is, but there was a feeling that, despite an ambient sense of satisfaction at the various endings I went for, each of them was still missing something.
Thirith on 2/2/2025 at 11:13
My main problem with Citizen Sleeper was that its mechanics kept me at arm's length throughout. I can see the thematic relevance of them and the way they minimise your agency, but while my brain found this reasonably engaging, my heart and gut more or less checked out, because I never felt that I was playing a character, I was just going through mechanical motions. Again, there may be a thematical point to this, but I ended up thinking that I would've probably liked reading a novel or a set of short stories set in this world and focusing on its themes, and I would've even liked the game's story better if I had been reading rather than playing it, but I didn't click with this game as a game.
Sulphur on 2/2/2025 at 12:07
The system's very tabletop-inspired, so if you mean it was designed to make you feel something like a robot, I don't think that was completely intentional. CS's creator was clear that they wanted to bring in more of the tabletop feel to the game space, and that informs a lot of its design. Because of that, all of its systems would work the same even if you were playing a flesh and bone person, you'd just have to relabel them slightly.
I don't disagree in principle about the lack of agency, though. I found it an interesting spin on the usual RPG systems, nevertheless. Two possible reasons why you often feel at a remove come down to the dice: they represent a lack of freedom since they act as a hard limit to the number of things you can do each day, and each of those things being successful is usually up to the die roll, not you. The fact that you have to roll a die to be successful at a job in a far-future gig economy means that it evokes powerlessness maybe a little too well, perhaps.
kdoug on 2/2/2025 at 19:43
Started off the year playing Anger Foot. It's a really great, fast-paced, arcadey shooter. Highly recommend.
Thirith on 3/2/2025 at 07:21
Quote Posted by Sulphur
The system's very tabletop-inspired, so if you mean it was designed to make you feel something like a robot, I don't think that was completely intentional. CS's creator was clear that they wanted to bring in more of the tabletop feel to the game space, and that informs a lot of its design. Because of that, all of its systems would work the same even if you were playing a flesh and bone person, you'd just have to relabel them slightly.
I don't disagree in principle about the lack of agency, though. I found it an interesting spin on the usual RPG systems, nevertheless. Two possible reasons why you often feel at a remove come down to the dice: they represent a lack of freedom since they act as a hard limit to the number of things you can do each day, and each of those things being successful is usually up to the die roll, not you. The fact that you have to roll a die to be successful at a job in a far-future gig economy means that it evokes powerlessness maybe a little too well, perhaps.
I get the tabletop thing, though what I found weird while playing
Citizen Sleeper was how different playing the game felt to me from, say,
Planescape Torment or
Disco Elysium, both of which are just as dice-driven. I wonder whether it's that these games break their storytelling and decisions down into smaller units, giving the player more choices (even if they were often just about what to say and how to say it), and that in turn made me feel more like I was actually doing (and sometimes failing to do) things. With
Citizen Sleeper, it often felt more to me like I was choosing which stories I was going to read, and the dice then decided which version of a story I'd get. Or perhaps it was something different altogether - maybe even just my mood and mindset while playing the game. I can't really put my finger on what it was, but the role-playing element of
CS ended up feeling more abstract and remote to me than in the RPGs I've enjoyed most. (It's definitely not the text-heavy aspect of it, though.)
Sulphur on 3/2/2025 at 08:21
It's interesting, I was mulling over that and I think it's a combination of many things that contribute to the feeling. Part of it is that while the dice are responsible for your outcomes, and you have some say in how successful each roll is, the results are still out of your hands. As you say, it gives you another version of the story. In my estimate, this is further compounded by the sense that the narrative makes the Sleeper never feel like an agent in their own story - most of the time its focus is stuff happening to you or around you, and the narrative will trundle on regardless of your successes or failures. (Also important: despite its various warnings of peril, there is no actual failure state built into the game.)
This confers something weird to it because you arguably have more control over which outcome you get than in either DE or PS:T. The fact that you can choose a die that gives you a higher chance (or a guarantee of) success should mean you feel more control over the outcomes, but you... don't. Both PS:T and DE don't allow you to skew the chances of success for any given roll, but because most rolls happen in the background, it's an acceptable abstraction of 'shit happens' when you whiff a critical moment, and more importantly, it feels like you were responsible for it, whatever the consequences were. It's curious that CS simply doesn't land the same feeling. Either by design or accident (or both), it's a unique feature of the game. I haven't played many tabletop RPGs, and I wonder if there are others that do something similar.
Thirith on 5/2/2025 at 13:01
I'm currently playing Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, in parallel to Thief: Shadows of the Metal Age, and it's pretty good video game comfort food. Visually, it's stunning, provided you like the aesthetic. As a game, it's exactly what you expect from Ratchet & Clank, no more - which is a shame, because there was potential for at least some tweaks to the formula. Much of the time, you don't even play Ratchet but a female parallel universe counterpart, so why not make her play a bit differently or give her a different set of tools? Same with the dimension hopping: it's a neat effect, but in the end it's not particularly different from what we've played many, many times before. I wish they'd had at least a touch of, say, Dishonored 2's "A Crack in the Slab". As it is, this is a reasonably fun, well crafted but extremely samey game, it's perfect for a 15-30 minute session after work, but there's definitely a pretty big gap between the production values and the game itself.
