Anarchic Fox on 16/12/2023 at 17:41
Quote Posted by demagogue
Roadwarden is the storyteller's game if ever there was one.
It was one of our game club games a few months ago.
It does take time to get through though. I still need to finish it off.
I'm glad you enjoyed it!
And that someone else here has played it! However, it's information-dense like Disco Elysium, so it's not a good idea to pick up an old incomplete savefile. The full game does a great job introducing its places, people and creatures gradually, but if you jump back into an old savefile, you'd have to binge all that information to remember what was going on.
The game does have a snazzy Journal, though, allowing you to easily look up specific pieces of information. It makes other games' quest logs look primitive in comparison.
vurt on 18/12/2023 at 19:24
Asgard's Wrath 2. Early on but those 10/10's are, as i expected, a bit exaggerated perhaps. Not a huge fan of puzzles either. Combat is fine.
Unfortunately i have lost most of that awesome sense of scale and 3D depth that you get when VR is new. Yes i can see that it's in real-life scale but it no longer Wow!'s me. Might need that 3-4 year break again from VR to experience it again because that's is amazing and much of the appeal.
henke on 19/12/2023 at 17:15
Played through Alan Wake 2 over the past week. More of a survival horror game than the first one, still easier than something like RE4 remake. Wonderful characters and engaging writing. Some real twists and turns. The best musical sequence since Super Mario Odyssey. Lots of great music, actually. You play as 2 characters in this one, Alan, and FBI agent Saga Anderson. Saga's sections are better, and her story is more tangible and easier to follow than Alan's trippy sequences. Honestly, some of Alan's parts were the weakest in the game, with extended sections where you have to keep shining your flashlight at shadowmen to make them slowly vanish. And there's some puzzle sequences that are less about puzzling and more about the devs wanting to show off how trippy they managed to make the game. Overall tho, a great, innovative, delightfully Finnish, trippy ride. It was really good.
Qooper on 20/12/2023 at 13:35
All the King's Field fans among you might be interested in Lunacid. Started playing a few weeks ago, haven't gotten far, am quite busy atm. Things quiet down at the end of the week so I'll play through it during Christmas.
Renault on 20/12/2023 at 16:49
I've been playing Lunacid too, quite a lot actually (I'm actually playing it now, at work, what can I say, we're slow). This is definitely my jam. Old school dungeon crawler with PS1 era visuals. Large open environments to explore, and the areas are all very interconnected, ala Dark Souls (probably ala King's Field too, but I've never played those). Nice variety too, each area has its own unique look. Combat is fun but actually pretty easy, not overbearing at all with stats and such (you can crank up the difficulty if you want). The game is more about exploration and finding items - lots of cool weapons and spells (rings) to locate. And a nice moody soundtrack. Fantastic all around.
Komag on 20/12/2023 at 16:54
It looks a lot like King's Field III The Ancient City which I played on PS2 back in the day and loved!
Anarchic Fox on 20/12/2023 at 17:42
Yeah, sounds appealing! I've got it wishlisted.
WingedKagouti on 20/12/2023 at 21:31
As per the GotY 2023 thread, I'm playing Against the Storm, which is a roguelite citybuilder. You're tasked with helping to protect the capital of a ruined land by venturing forth and establishing small settlements in the surrounding forest, gathering resources for the blightstorm that will arrive. For each small settlement you are offered a caravan of settlers of varying races, since each settlement can have at most 3 different races out of the 5, your starting caravan will guide you towards certain buildings and strategies. Then as you build a settlement you'll be presented with a pick between various tasks, helping you towards completing your obligation towards the queen. But the queen isn't eternally patient and if you waste time, she'll eventually demand you leave a settlement, while it hasn't happened to me yet, the implication is that the run will end and you have to start over.
And the queen isn't the only hostile force, she's more of a soft time limit as her impatience is counteracted by completing tasks. The forest itself is the main antagonist, growing more hostile with each passing year in a settlement as well as many actions, including exploration of the various clearings found on each map. And while it may be tempting to stay away from the clearings, they're also the source of the vast majority of non-wood resources. They also offer various events which can grant you points towards settlement completion.
And once you complete a settlement, your caravan moves onward and you have to start a new one further away from the capital, with the pick of a new group of settlers and having to build up from scratch in the new location. All your work isn't lost, you'll be able to trade goods to previous settlements (and the capital). But the real goal of each cycle is to find shards (usually awarded upon completing a settlement, higher difficulty awards more) and then reforge those shards into seals before the next blightstorm arrives. And once the blightstorm does arrive, your progress on the world map is reset, but completing settlements and forging a seal awards various meta-rewards, some of which can be used to upgrade various stats and unlock permanent bonuses.
henke on 23/12/2023 at 12:29
Mirror's Edge - this might be my 4th playthrough, but I think my last one was about a decade ago. Astonished at what a great action game this still is. Ran through it in a few evenings.
Mirror's Edge Catalyst - this game is a real lesson in "be careful what you wish for". I wished the original had spent more time on Faith's runner career before getting into the murder-mystery, and been more open world. Well this one does both of those things and as a result it lacks the sense of urgency and focus that made the first game's levels gel so well with the theme and the story. Gameplaywise I do think it's an improvement. Movement feels a bit refined, and the first person fisticuffs are fun. The open world is... so so. It feels designed with a lot of bottlenecks since you end up running through some of the same corridors over and over. All the side content and collectables makes it feel a bit too videogamey. Overall though, taken as a package with the first game, it's enjoyable enough. After finishing part 1 I wanted more Mirror's Edge, and this is certainly more Mirror's Edge. If you wanna just run around the city doing odd jobs, there's a lot of content. Still, if they ever make a part 3, I'm hoping they'll go back to the linear design of the first game.
Jason Moyer on 23/12/2023 at 19:22
The weird thing about Catalyst is that when they give you linear running sections, they're significantly worse than the levels in the original game. The original game had pretty amazing level design, with multiple obvious and non-obvious routes but when you get a "run from here to here" mission in Catalyst it's just a straight line, usually with some sort of un-avoidable combat at the end of it. The only thing I remember really enjoying about it were the Gridnodes or whatever they were called, with the platform challenge rooms that felt sort of like the breaks you got inbetween running sections in the original.
Mirror's Edge is in my top 25 all time. Catalyst might not be in my top 1000.
