demagogue on 5/12/2024 at 21:51
The sheep symbolizes Stilt Fella's soul. :angel: I just know it!
And don't get me started on the hats.
Thirith on 6/12/2024 at 09:10
Stilten Hill. "In my restless dreams, I see those stilts." Trying to make it over pyramid-headed crocodiles in one piece, that sort of thing. And your stilts are two chunks of wood with a couple of nails hammered into them.
Sulphur on 6/12/2024 at 10:57
I would at the very minimum expect Stilten Hill to feature a harrowing adventure through making ranch dressing with a sentient blue cheese uttering devastating putdowns at you in a Cambridge accent.
Yakoob on 7/12/2024 at 21:33
Been playing (
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1851280/Samurai_Bringer/) Samurai Bringer last night and it's pretty neat. It's basically an iso action-slasher-rougelike, with the gimmick being that you can create your own moves through different scrolls (like "slash", "reverse slash", "bow") and apply modifiers (like "fire" or "grow your weapon"), which leaves a lot of room for experimenting and customizing your style.
Only an hour in but it feels solid. Only complaints is that the camera is tad too close and sometimes the world gets annoying in the way so you constantly need to keep rotating it (there's no object fade or anything), and re-setting your moves each run can get tedious (you can't save your loadout). Definitely not something I'd want to grind thru, but popping in for like a run here and there is a fun way to kill half an hour or so.
Thirith on 10/12/2024 at 07:31
I got started on the RPG Sovereign Syndicate, which is set in a Steampunk fantasy-inflected London. So far, the game is atmospheric and the world interesting (even though the Steampunk-meets-Shadowrun mashup isn't all that original), but I'm not too keen so far on one key thing: the game has clearly taken a page out of Disco Elysium's very wordy book, with the character's various abilities getting their own portraits and chipping in on the interior monologue, but what's missing so far is actual choices. Disco Elysium let you shape your character pretty much from the beginning, it let you choose how to relate to others and to yourself, in ways that felt substantial to me. One or two hours into the game, I haven't been given a single choice that felt like a genuine choice. Dialogue options are basically differently-flavoured versions of the same thing. I'm sure this will change later, but the lack of real choice makes at least the beginning of this game feel a bit like a visual novel dressed up as an RPG.
Harvester on 10/12/2024 at 12:36
I played some point & click adventures.
Return to Monkey Island, it was fun to play, had the right difficulty for me (on hard mode), quirky and charming characters and a fun story. The ending was actually kind of meta and self-reflective when you think about it, but I guess that's fitting. I mean, what can the secret of Monkey Island actually be besides something like this? The animation style didn't bother me but also never grew on me, it continued to look a bit weird but not so much to spoil my enjoyment of the game.
The Blade Runner Remastered edition nails the atmosphere, the voice action is also good and the story is sufficiently captivating. The characters are very ugly though (it uses some kind of voxel technology) and terribly animated. It's also one of the pixel-huntiest adventure games I've ever played. Interactable objects blend in with the background, you have to scour every inch of the screen with the only indication that the cursor turns green when you can interact with something. Very easy to miss stuff. It also doesn't have any verbs (like talk to, look at), there's no way to explicitly give something to someone or use an object with the environment for example. Nor can you select topics to talk about. In that sense it's quite limited. The difficulty is pretty easy with one or two head-scratchers. I got two of the different endings, but there are quite a few more.
The Excavation of Hob's Barrow is kind of a folk horror game with charming pixel-art, a British countryside environment you don't see often in games, good voice acting and a captivating story that turns quite macabre at the end. You can tell it's somewhat low budget, in many cases where there should be animations where the characters do something, it simply fades to black and back when the act has been performed. That didn't really bother me though. The difficulty is alright, I didn't need a walkthrough. I noticed with this game that during workdays I was looking forward to the evening where I could play again to see how the story develops, I found it quite gripping and mysterious. It also has quite a downer ending, which you don't see often in the genre.
The Dig by LucasArts, this has environment-based puzzles in an alien environment. I'm only partway through it, eager to see how the story develops. The environments look quite beautiful and sufficiently otherworldly. Dialogue was co-written by Orson Scott Card but still sometimes a bit hokey. The voice acting is good, but there really isn't a very large amount of dialogue, it's not really about the characters but more about uncovering the mystery. Characters look good and are well-animated, cutscenes are a mix of cell animated characters and 3D rendered stuff, of course it's a game from the 90s and it shows, but in a lo-fi way it looks alright.
Malf on 10/12/2024 at 15:55
I started Indiana Jones and the Great Circle last night, and it's reeeaaally good so far.
It performs flawlessly on my system with everything maxed out, and just looks the dog's danglies. The amount of rich, incidental detail is insane, and Vatican City being the first proper level after the intro really shows that off.
And it's pure old-school Starbreeze through and through, giving me serious Riddick vibes in its approach to stealth and exploration, while at the same time offering much more refined and fun fisticuffs. I staarted giggling with glee during the initial infiltration level when I discovered I could fash-bash with literally anything that comes to hand, including guitars, mandolins, bells, umbrellas, busts, spades, frying pans, etcetera, etcetera. All making exactly the satisfying slaps, bangs and wallops you'd expect thanks to phenomenal sound design.
I've approached it pretty purely using stealth at the moment, and it does a good job with the stealth systems. In fact, I'd say that for an accomplished stealth gamer, it's probably a little too easy so far, and I'm playing on the highest difficulty. There's no immediate punishment for guards discovering a downed buddy (yet), and in fact, it's a really good strategy to leave bodies where you know they'll be discovered so that you can take down the next poor sap that investigates.
It's also incredibly easy to lure lone guards into an ambush by making unexpected sounds, whether by throwing one of the many props or by cracking Indy's whip.
But it's also very effective to just bum-rush lone geezers if you can't sneak up on them, because they don't get much of a chance to react if you twat them with something blunt.
At the same time, it's early days yet, so it might yet humiliate and infuriate me.
Good stuff, can't wait to get back to it.
Harvester on 10/12/2024 at 16:20
Yes, that seems like fun, but I have neither a PS5 or a PC that can run it. But in the future I'd like to play it.
That reminds me, I still have the P&C adventure Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Will it be too dated for me to enjoy (it precedes even Monkey Island 1) or can I still have fun with it? I might give it a try someday.
Thirith on 11/12/2024 at 09:21
I'm hoping to get a new PC by early 2025, and the new Indy game is definitely one of the ones I'm looking forward to (together with Stalker 2). From everything I've seen so far, they've done a great job translating the look and feel of the best of the films into a game.
Sulphur on 11/12/2024 at 09:27
You can probably play the Indy game on max with your current PC (not the path-traced full RT, though), because it's actually well-optimised; though Malf's basically said that already, I guess.
And cheers for the Sovereign Syndicate update, it sounds like it's flawed but promising, which to me is much more interesting than the morass of AAA games with the edges sanded off. I don't mind my RPGs becoming VNs though, so mileage varying and all that.
