Yakoob on 14/10/2024 at 23:53
Recently beat Cloudpunk, which started as a strong 9/10 and ended as a bit more limp 6/10. This is definitely a game to play for the ~vibes~ and it nails those perfectly. The visuals, the ambiances, the music, the flying - all of it just clicks together! But it is more style than substance, and where things falter is... the story and characters.
The gameplay is fairly trivial, but I don't mind it being "walking sim but flying car" and found the combination of "mindless flying + listening to audio" worked really well. At first. However, soon, I started to find many of the characters really annoying, particularly the detective guy (in a very "haha he talks in third person that was a fun gimmick - oh wait, he's back and I need to listen MORE of this???"). And, worst of all, the main protagonist. She's pretty bratty smartass who quickly turns out to be kind of rude (particularly to her own friend Camus). There's a plot point centering around saving lives of a few key characters and I honestly didn't like any of them, so couldn't care less what happened to them (and found it weird both protagonist and Camus cared about them all of a sudden?). The deeper cyberpunk themes also felt very undercooked and the finale didn't land for me, forcing me to arbitrarily make a poorly-explained big decision™, about a world and people I honestly just didn't care about.
And prolly the most annoying issue - people talk WAY too much. There were many times I had to literally sit and wait for a dialogue to finish before I could proceed. The whole thing would have worked perfectly if they just gave you navpoints to fly to instantly and cut some dialogues by half. Maybe it's just something they didn't end up having time to polish, especially with the overhead of doing VA (and one reason why adding VA into my own games scares me haha).
Overall, I think it was worth experiencing, even if just for the first few hours for the ~vibes~
Tomi on 16/10/2024 at 14:44
I started playing Chants of Sennaar as a little snack before I jump into Mass Effect 2.
I'm only about two hours in, but it has been quite an interesting experience so far! I don't think I've ever played a game like this before. I love languages in general, so the "puzzles" in CoS are great fun. Trying to figure out the meaning of the words is fascinating, and once you figure out a whole sentence and it all starts clicking together, it just feels so rewarding. :D There's also some stealth action which feels a bit pointless, but I suppose that it's good to have something else to do in between the word puzzles.
Thirith on 17/10/2024 at 12:37
Prince of Persia: The Lost Throne added a bunch of Divine Trials in a post-release update, and boy, are they hard! I like them as a freebie, but I wish they had some that were a teensy bit more doable. And many of the platforming and platforming puzzles in the game are already no walk in the park, so I think I'll just return to the story mode, and then the DLC, and if I still feel like banging my head against a wall, I'll try my hand at the trials again.
henke on 17/10/2024 at 19:44
Cloudpunk was good. Chants of Sennaar was gooooooooood, man! That new PoP is... a game that I'll probably play, at some point.
Thirith on 18/10/2024 at 17:25
You're already one behind, henke. There's a newer Prince of Persia out, though in Early Access. It's a roguelite take by the devs who did Dead Cells.
Tomi on 18/10/2024 at 21:17
Quote Posted by Thirith
Prince of Persia: The Lost ThroneAh, is that like some kind of a mixture of The
Lost Crown and
The Two Thrones? :D
Harvester on 18/10/2024 at 22:01
Today I finished my first large open world game as I generally prefer shorter games in the 10-20 hour length. It was Red Dead Redemption (1) on the PS4 Pro so it's 4K but no other graphics improvements compared to the original version. It held my attention to the end and I spent about 50 hours on it. I'm a bit of a completionist so I did all the stranger tasks I could find and reached level 10 in 2 of the ambient challenges and traveled everywhere by horse and never used fast travel. The story was interesting but of course the ending was spoiled to me years ago so it was no surprise. But Rockstar is definitely better at writing tough outlaw dialogue than peaceful family dialogue because the last couple of quests where Marston is with his wife and son the dialogue went a bit all over the place and felt forced sometimes. The gunplay was just point in the general direction of an enemy, hit L2 to lock the aim and R2 to fire, not much skill involved. If I go on to play RDR2 in the future I will probably play it on pc with mouse&keyboard. I plan to buy a new rig this year or next year anyway (my current pc won't run Windows 11 and Windows 10 support ends next year) and this week I created a setup with the SteamLink app on my Apple TV and a wireless mouse and keyboard (or a controller for games where that's better) so I can play pc games from my couch on my big TV with soundbar. I can even alt-tab to desktop and play GOG games for example or anything I want. If the connection lags too much or I experience other problems with the app then instead of using SteamLink I will just get a 10m HDMI cable and connect my pc to my TV that way. For my job I sit at a desk all day long anyway, for gaming on the evenings and weekends I prefer the comfort of my couch.
My next game (on my couch) will be Return to Monkey Island.
Thirith on 21/10/2024 at 08:43
Quote Posted by Tomi
Ah, is that like some kind of a mixture of The
Lost Crown and
The Two Thrones? :D
Heh. What I meant to say was obviously
Prince of Persia: The Lost, Forgotten Throne of Sand Within.
henke on 21/10/2024 at 08:58
Replayed Resident Evil 2 Remake over the weekend. Leon's half of it at least. Still good. Maybe my fave resident evil game?
Stopped playing Chernobylite about halfway through. Fun game, but it started getting samey.
Played a bit of Little Nightmares 2, and it was pretty much what you'd expect. Polished and slick, but kinda hard to care about or get engrossed in.
Also played some Grunn over the last week. It's a game where you get hired to do yardwork in a Dutch countryside home over a weekend but then spooky stuff starts happening. Played 3.7h of it and got half of the endings. It's interesting and cool but I think I might've had my fill.
Dunno what to play next.
Briareos H on 21/10/2024 at 12:14
Until recently, the only thing I knew about
Fez was that one of its authors was kind of an asshole, but it's in fact a really neat game. Besides puzzles that require deciphering codes which I rarely enjoy, the use of 2D-in-3D both visually and as the main driver of gameplay is pitch perfect. Looking forward to playing more of it tonight.
Other games I've completed in October:
Bugsnax: Not sure if that thing really was a
big thing™ a few years back or if I imagined it. Either way the Pokémon snap-like gameplay was a welcome change of pace and worked well with the fun writing and voice acting. A shame that the interplay of game mechanics, something that really got me excited at first, didn't dare go beyond the surface level.
Devil's Hideout: In the same vein as (
https://cosmicvoid.itch.io/) Cosmic Void's previous point & clicks. Short, gorgeous, absolutely nails the vibes it's going for but with very loose narrative and weak puzzles. Still loved the magical realism and I just can't get enough of the visual style.
Selaco: Loved the well-balanced gameplay, slower and more methodical than other arena boomer shooters. When combat happens it's up there with the best, has great weapon feedback, lots of customisation, readable enemies and an orgy of visual effects. Great music too.
The story works well and thank god for that, because what happens in-between combat can get tedious and isn't helped by some bland aesthetic choices and predictable trigger placement.
Still, looking forward to chapter 2!
