henke on 8/3/2023 at 18:49

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If I were ever given the Tomb Raider license (lol) I'd make a first person spelunking adventure set in a single location. Heavy on puzzle solving and exploration. Alien Isolation-style enemy encounters. Today I spotted the 6 second microtrailer for a game called (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2328520/Climber/) Climber, and it basically looked like the game I'd daydreamed of making. It's just 6 bucks so I picked it up and finished it in 1.5h. It's the kinda indie game where if you start looking downwards the game won't stop you and your head will just spin right around until you're looking straight forward again. It's very janky. It's also very interesting though, and does some unexpected things when it comes to the gameplay systems. Made by developers with more heart than technical skill. I liked it.

Pyrian on 8/3/2023 at 23:38

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Hiding in Dishonored is mostly about going up, lol. They should've given all the enemies big ol' visors to represent how little they look above their own altitude.

nicked on 9/3/2023 at 08:34

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Next up on the Game pass list was Unpacking, which bills itself as a "zen puzzle game" and this is indeed true for the first level. The concept is you've just moved and you have to click boxes to open them and pull out someone's possessions, and then arrange them as you see fit in their room. Like a mild OCD simulator.
But then by the second level, you have three rooms to deal with, and it starts to feel like work, especially when the game then turns around and flashes objects red because they're not in whatever the game considers to be the "right" place for them, which is also complicated by the fact that I have no idea what some of the objects are supposed to be, represented as they are by simplistic pixel art. So having fudged a bunch of stuff into cupboards until the game stopped complaining, I then get presented with a house with half a dozen rooms, most of which are already packed with stuff, and I just feel exhausted at the prospect of trying to sort this mess out.
YMMV, but this game had the complete opposite effect on me to what was presumably intended. An exhausting, abstracted Tetris is not what I would describe as "zen".

Thirith on 9/3/2023 at 09:30

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Things such as verticality are also what I always have to remind myself of when (re-)playing any of the Dishonored games. I tend to default to playing them like Thief - too much so, at first, so the differences in how the guards see me or not and how they react tend to make the first half hour of play unpleasant. You have to unlearn some things that work perfectly in Thief and you have to learn some approaches that are possible and even necessary in Dishonored.

Sulphur on 10/3/2023 at 03:05

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Yup, the boss fights are where things get a bit grody. They typically are easy to crack with a few retries though, so if you have the patience, it's not much of a hump. That will change down the line though with a few of the harder bosses/minibosses, so if you're still into it, forewarned is forearmed and all that.