Twist on 9/2/2023 at 21:47
Quote Posted by henke
I'm the kinda taffer who wants to make sure the people I knock out are lying in a comfortable position before I move on, so being able to move individual limbs means I spend a silly amount of time making sure they're comfy.
Ha! I do the same! I like to think if I leave them in a more comfortable position, they will be less likely to wake up before I've completed my work. I also just feel guilty if I leave them all splayed out awkward -- especially if their role in the mission was no more than doing some basic job.
Sulphur on 12/2/2023 at 07:10
Thought I'd make a Steam Next Fest thread, but it's too late because this thing ends tomorrow. Cross-posting my thoughts from another forum:
Oblivion Override: a very on the nose Dead Cells imitator, with the mediaeval fantasy swapped out for sci-fi where you are, of course, a robot. The artifice works to explain why you keep coming back after you 'die' and respawn at the base. They seem to have removed the procedural rooms aspect from it, which means it's only a half rogue-like. A half-like? Nah. Anyway, I usually appreciate handcrafted levels, but these are all as anonymous as your usual procedural generator would spit out, so I don't see the point. Gameplay saw weird stuttery issues for me, but the combat is all right. It is, however, unabashed in its aping of Dead Cells right down to the random weapons and upgrade structure, and so does nothing to differentiate itself. Dead Cells is just better to play overall, so they need to think about whatever game they make next a little harder.
Planet of Lana: very short demo, great first impression. Lush jungle areas and a nameless protagonist with a very adorable cat blob companion. You and the cat creature need to rely on each other to progress the various environmental obstacles, and it makes sense mostly. It's quite tranquil until some Planet Alpha style invading robot forces turn up, and then the puzzles ramp up the tension. Overall not bad, but it's nothing particularly new. Your catty companion is lovely though, it has some autonomy in pathfinding its way back to you if you leave it behind, and it does that adorable butt wiggle cats do before they leap onto a ledge.
I have quibbles with the level art being repetitive and kinda not approaching Ori levels (which is very unfair, I know) but there's a sort of bitmapped sprite-y translate/transform thing used to achieve the background animation of tree branches moving, which feels less nice than it should. Super nitpicky, and doesn't make a difference to 99% of anyone who'd play it, but I thought I'd note it.
Nocturnal: Great art, premise that's hard to follow because you're dropped into it in medias res, so-so gameplay. You're some order of the phoenix/flame guy who has to find his sister and defeat some forces of darkness and/or other soldiers? Anyway, the core conceit is you set your sword on fire by whacking a flame, and light torches to make mechanisms work. No, it doesn't make sense. You also fight enemies, with some mandating your sword to be on fire, which would have been fine if setting it alight didn't start a countdown to it being extinguished. I see where the devs are going with creating that element of tension, but I dislike having to constantly manage a resource and top it up every four-five seconds, it just feels quite unfun and not particularly right as a mechanic. It's sort of clever, but juggling enemies and lighting your sword is more irritating than fun, and then it gives you timed platform puzzles that require you to keep your sword aflame and quickly leap onto wooden platforms before they retract, which is even worse. And then it takes it a notch further with a forced-follow mechanic where there's a lantern on a rail and you have to be right alongside it while jumping onto platforms, else you start over again... nah. Stopped there.
Gripper: a sort of on-rails bike tunnel runner with floaty controls, irritating obstacles to dodge, and random button triggers for certain obstacles (only RT or LT, and no consistency for why it's either whenever it happens). Skip.
Shadows of Doubt: so. much. potential. Look, this thing procedurally generates a city, its interiors, NPCs, and their connections and relationships at the start. Then it tasks you with investigating a murder, where you have to pick through those elements, and the simulation is ridiculous. Almost everything is interact-able and inspect-able, everyone can be spoken to, and everyone has an address and a schedule and connections with other people. Your first crime scene involves breaking into an apartment, investigating the body, looking for evidence: this includes tracing the last phone call made from their phone, finding things in their trash, and get this, sweeping the area for fingerprints with a scanner. None of this is done in the traditional game sense with guardrails that ensure you're confined to an event scene until you hit every clue the story wants you to find; you do all of this yourself, and you're free to try and figure stuff out with whatever clues you can find. There's a case board that helps you place and identify connections, and you have to do things like identify names, addresses, whereabouts during the murder, and all of that.
Whew. That's a lot. So, what does this mean?
The Good: the simulation is, as mentioned, ridiculous. You can go anywhere you want if you have the tools, and don't trip security or alert people. The breadth of shit you can do to investigate a murder is fantastic. And it's all completely free-form!
The Bad: every single good point is a double-edged sword. The simulation is so heavy that it eats your CPU for breakfast if you pan the camera to any point that sweeps across the city. You can go anywhere, but that means you will encounter jank and unforeseen issues like security systems tripping on NPCs for random reasons. The procedural nature of the game means that just about every NPC is just a bunch of lines of text with no personality beyond agreeable to your requests/could you kindly fuck off, and there's no actual narrative to the experience that I can discern beyond you're a detective solving crimes. Things could get repetitive in the full game, but we can't know yet since the demo literally clocks you out at 90 minutes.
And yes, it does look like shit. But damn it, if they could weld some more compelling fiction into it, this could be beyond incredible.
And lastly, Repeat: you run around while holding some girl's disembodied head in an industrial area with scaffolding. That's it. Fucking weird, massively unintuitive. Skip.
(Okay, more detail: the level's full of bouncy tarp, steam pipes that fling you into hard to reach places [you're on a sort of floaty balloon disc, for some reason?] and fans that play music when you knock them over that the head sings to. It takes a bunch of minutes to understand that patting the girl's head manipulates the level in places, and before that point all you know is that she makes dumb warbling noises when you do it.)
henke on 12/2/2023 at 07:50
Yeah I played Planet of Lana and Shadows of Doubt demos too and pretty much agree with your takes. Lana was nothing too original, but polished and fun. SoD is a very impressive technical achievement but I'll reserve judgement about whether it's a good game or not.
henke on 12/2/2023 at 13:17
Welp, I couldn't help myself. I bought Sports Story. And yeah it's just as buggy as Aja and PigLick have been saying. Weird things! Like when you jump into the water there's this water splash animation that plays, but sometimes when you're just walking along the edge of the water the same splash animation keeps playing under your feet. Sometimes pieces of UI gets stuck on the screen when it shouldn't be there. The game is very finicky in how close you need to be to other characters in order to talk to them, mostly you basically have to have your face pressed right up against theirs in order to talk to them. This is a fascinating mess. The visuals and music are good. The writing and characters aren't grabbing me like Golf Story did, but it has its moments. But it's like the devs just lost all their programmers since the last game? I just got to a new fishing village area where it always rains. And the rain effect looks really nice and atmospheric, but it's causing a constant slowdown and lag spikes which impact EVERYTHING gameplay related and honstly it's just too much. Think I might throw in the towel. I hope there's a PC port of this at some point, that'd at least brute force fix the performance issues (which a 2D game like this really shouldn't have).
I'd love to get a behind the scenes look at the development of this at some point because I am dying to know what happened here.
Thirith on 13/2/2023 at 11:59
I've been playing Pentiment; I'm currently about an hour into the third act. I'm enjoying it a lot, and the story's drawn me in more than most game stories in recent years, especially in the tense second act. I have an inkling that the player choices may not change all that much about the overall plot, but that's not something that bothers me, as I find the smaller changes (which are still quite momentous on the character level) highly engaging.
One thing I'm very curious to find out: whether there is indeed a solution to the game's central mystery, and whether you definitely find it out. I'm not sure Pentiment will present me with a neat resolution, and I'm not sure this would even be necessary, but I don't want to end the game thinking that there is no 'what really happened' there at all. My impression is that Pentiment is more about what do you do with conflicting stories and incomplete information and the responsibility you take on by deciding that this or that is the truth in the face of not knowing for certain, but that's still different from a story where key aspects are not just unknown to you but altogether undetermined. It's a difficult balance to get right, and the game's got it right so far, but the conclusion will be key to how I'll remember Pentiment.
Renault on 13/2/2023 at 16:24
I picked up Fallout 4 VR on the (
https://www.cdkeys.com/pc/games/fallout-4-vr-pc-steam-cd-key) super cheap because I thought it would be a fun game to experience in VR. I found it's pretty incredible if you add just a few mods (I actually thought vanilla wasn't too shabby either). So few VR games have the scope and scale of something like this, and it's awesome to just walk around the wasteland and check out the views. I started out by just putting the game on super easy difficulty so I could be a proper tourist, but I'm having so much fun with it, I think I'm going to ratchet up to at least normal and try to finish the game and all the DLC. It's a shame there aren't more AAA games in VR, but I get that it's a limited market to cater to and all that.
I'm currently doing a stealth and melee build, which works really well in VR. You can peek around corners and sneak up on AI fairly easily, and actually physically swinging a wrench/tire iron/baseball bat on top of a ghoul's or raider's head is really satisfying.
mtkafka on 14/2/2023 at 19:22
Wow, haven't been to this forum in a long while! anyway, been playing Hogwarts... its really good and is deserving the praise. Its akin to the meticulous open world detail of a RDR/GTA, but instead you play a teen wizard in a steampunk world. Got it on 'sale' thru cdkeys site for 15 bux off! I'm in house Ravenclaw.. whatever thats supposed to mean i dont know...
Shoshin on 14/2/2023 at 21:14
Well, for fun (and other reasons) I am replaying Thief Gold, probably for the last time. I'm also documenting my thoughts/nostalgia/critiques in a thread here:
(
https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=151980) Thief Gold final playthrough appreciation thread
Thirith on 15/2/2023 at 10:06
Practically done with Pentiment. Last light I found out who the Thread-Puller is, and while it looks like the game doesn't have, or give, clear-cut answers with respect to the identity of the killers, I think it does so in ways that are fair, reasonable and in line with the game's themes. Curious to see what's left in terms of an epilogue.
It's absolutely a game that won't be for everyone, and it will suffer from people having the wrong impression: in terms of player agency, it's closer to something like a visual novel than, say, Disco Elysium by way of The Name of the Rose. But it's a unique, fascinating and beautifully written game, with some of the best character writing in a game that I've seen in ages.
WingedKagouti on 15/2/2023 at 21:47
After completing Sleeping Dogs (including the DLC mini-campaigns) I decided it was time for my more or less yearly return to Vvardenfell.
Cliff Racers may be a pain, but poking them with a Bound Spear is satisfying.