What are you playing? (2024 Edition)

Kamlorn on 15/12/2024 at 20:50

Anachronox. Aged so beautifully!

demagogue on 16/12/2024 at 02:24

Might be a good time to replay Anachronox.
The only negative thing I can say about it is the lack of the sequel after it ends on a cliffhanger, no less! Little lesson there to never take a sequel for granted. Other than that it was pretty pitch perfect for the kind of game it is.

Neb on 16/12/2024 at 10:03

I am still waiting for Dungeon Keeper 3. Why did they have to put that trailer in the game?

Renault on 16/12/2024 at 14:55

Quote Posted by vurt

Intravenous 2, great Stealth game.

I'm playing this now too, I think it's kind of a mixed bag. Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but the stealth portion seems very wonky, with some real bullshit moments. Some examples... I'll take out a guy with silencer in a hallway, and some guard one room over with a wall between us will hear it and come out to investigate. So why am I bothering to use a silencer? Another time I was hiding out in a storage room, with the lights out, and two guys came in on a routine search. I took both out via melee and then suddenly 3 other dudes come rushing in to investigate. It's like, is it even possible to take someone out silently? And then there's the dynamic with guards who you've already shot and put down suddenly pop back up to the feet like a zombie and start shooting at you (usually joining in with others who have arrived on the scene). WTF? One more - when you take a guy out, silenced or not, he leaves a big blood pool behind. So you move the body...and other guards still are alerted when they see the blood. So moving a body is basically useless.

It's a hard game, no doubt, with not much room for error, but then they seem to kind of break the rules of traditional stealth and make it even more difficult. There's also the issue of once a single guy is alerted, everyone on the entire level comes running. While this is realistic, it doesn't make for a fun game. I believe in a similar game like Hotline Miami, there were at least sectors where if you were far enough away, AI would be obvious to what's going on. I've also had guards spot me and/or shoot at me from off screen - that's kind of unforgivable. How am I supposed to defend against that?

I want to like Intravenous, but it's testing my patience. I played the same level for about an hour last night, over and over, and I finally just quit out of frustration.

Tomi on 18/12/2024 at 17:16

Quote Posted by Renault

I want to like Intravenous, but it's testing my patience. I played the same level for about an hour last night, over and over, and I finally just quit out of frustration.

I'm having similar experiences with Nine Sols right now. It's a great metroidvania with really cool visuals, fascinating story, charming characters, and slick gameplay... but seriously, those boss fights that I mentioned earlier are just so damn frustrating. I remember getting through Dark Souls and Hollow Knight without too much headache, but Nine Sols is on another level, at least for me. I think it might be the hardest game that I've ever played (I don't count those early Amstrad games like Jet Set Willy that you weren't even supposed to ever finish).

The most frustrating thing is that the difficulty level is pretty well balanced for the rest of the game, but every two hours or so you're hit with this totally absurd difficulty spike when you encounter a new boss enemy. So far these boss fights have taken me something in between a half an hour and four hours. Now I'm at the final boss and I think I'm giving up. I'm sure that I'd beat the boss eventually, but I don't think that it's worth ten hours of frustration. I spent about two hours just trying to beat the first phase of this final boss for the first time, and when I finally managed to do it, I found out that the boss gets a full health bar and some new and more powerful attacks in phase two, and I was dead in like two seconds.

Now I've been banging my head against the wall for like four hours, and it takes me a few attempts and like 15 minutes to get another shot at phase 2. But I haven't had much progress there, and then I read stuff on the internet and found out that there's also a third phase that is supposed to be even harder than the first two. Just giving up at this point feels disappointing because I want to see how the story ends, and turning the difficulty down to "Story Mode" at this point feels like cheating, but I've had enough of Nine Sols. Other than the ridiculous difficulty, these boss fights are actually very well designed and fun to play when you finally memorise all their attacks and moves, but spending hours and hours playing the same stuff over and over again just isn't my idea of fun. If only I could play the three stages of this boss fight separately, I'd love this game. Now, when I'm done with it, I don't think that I want to see it ever again.

Renault on 18/12/2024 at 18:13

I played Nine Sols for about 30 minutes and decided it wasn't my thing. Strange, because I loved Hollow Knight, so it makes me wonder if maybe that ship has sailed and I'll have the same feeling once Silksong comes out. I hope not. And thanks to Gamepass, I didn't shell out 30 bucks for it. I hate to say that though, because I really like Red Candle's other games.

Intravenous 2 is growing on me. There are still plenty of bullshit moments, but I'm (slowly) learning to play by their rules, and trying to get a little creative with my stealth strategies. I think I'm just too set in my ways from playing Thief for 25 years, so this will be a good thing. You can kind of tell the sign of a good game by how even though you bitch and complain about the mechanics/gameplay/difficulty, you keep coming back to it.

Tomi on 18/12/2024 at 19:08

Quote Posted by Renault

Nine Sols starts quite slowly, and it takes a while until you learn any fun skills. Your character can't even sprint in the beginning for example, and you only learn double-jump (=THE metroidvania skill!) very much later. But it does get better soon, especially when the story progresses a little and you meet some new NPCs. I'd say that Hollow Knight is better for the exploration, platforming, and the atmosphere, whereas Nine Sols has better combat and story.

Aja on 18/12/2024 at 23:17

I'm not sure if your guys' description of Nine Sols is making me want to play it less or more.

Anyway, I played two more weird art games. Arctic Eggs is an egg-frying game where the frying pan has some wacky physics. You play as the poultry prepper at a dystopian Arctic base rooftop party, where you talk to strange people who ask you to cook for them. The twist is that people start asking for things like bullets and cockroaches along with their eggs, and each new thing you have to cook adds a unique challenge. Bullets explode, pushing your eggs out of the pan, while cockroaches try to escape. I won't spoil all the strange things you get to fry, but apart from a few frustrating cooks I had a good time (it's probably easier with a mouse than a joystick). The characters all have absurd dialogue, most of which is pretty funny, some of which feels like the author is trying hard to be, but it's endearing, and the wobbly pseudo-PS1 graphics fit the theme. The music is also really good.

Mouthwashing I'm a bit lukewarm on. It's a first-person visual-novel-adjacent game set on a spaceship, where a horrible accident leaves the captain in a mutilated condition. It has some interesting themes, particularly around whether "our worst moments make us monsters," which the game repeatedly asks us as we uncover the motivations and actions of the five crew members. When it focused on this narrative, it was engaging. But it leans hard on using surreal imagery to evoke trauma, and by the third or fourth time I had to play through an instafail stealth sequence or gather ingredients to put in the food dispenser, my patience waned. In other words, when it tries to tell a story, it succeeds; when it tries to be a game, it does not.

I was interested enough that I went online to see the discussion around it, and lo and behold the discourse consists mostly of anime-themed fanart and trite conversations about which crew member would you date and what do you think their pronouns are and could you ever forgive ______ for what he did?? Ah, this makes sense. I thought. This game is for children. My pretention and the silly fanbase aside, I could see Mouthwashing resonating with some people, but for me it undermined its strong writing with bad gameplay.

Sulphur on 19/12/2024 at 07:45

I'm not sure most narrative horror games have good gameplay to begin with. I think Alien: Isolation's best in class when it comes to that, but even then people were complaining about its design being restrictive while they were hoarding their tools for later, and not using them when they should have.

Anyway, frustrating stealth aside, what part of the narrative's hooking you? I played the demo and I got a sense of ye ol' corporate capitalist critique from it, combined with being stranded/alone and starving to death, which seems a potent combination regardless of the surrealness (which these days I'm starting to see in games as an excuse for simply being bizarre for the coolness factor and not as a comment on anything in particular).

vurt on 19/12/2024 at 08:50

@Renault, yeah, certainly isn't perfect.
The amount of patches they release is quite insane though, i've seen one like daily lol. I've stopped for now, i'll wait and play more in a few months or so.. Not sure how the first one compares, never tried it...

Warhammer 40000: Battlesector. 3 missions in and i'm having fun! I just love this universe.

I also gave Lords of the Fallen (the new one.. what's with naming a game the same as something else you've released, so confusing, stupid). No, this isn't for me. I like Dark Souls, Elden Ring but i don't like the mechanics here, switching worlds, lots of other shit that i just feel "but whyyyy? does this really add anything fun or is it just a mechanic?" Refunded, sorry. It looked nice. Combat seemed good enough.

Edit:
STALKER 2 patch out with 1800 fixes.. so i'm gonna play that now i guess.