Sulphur on 28/1/2024 at 13:32

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All right, so I dusted Tunic off because it was next on the list after Origins of the Assassins' Colon, and I am digging it. There's a lot of stuff going on with this game despite its immediate, unassuming nature, and I appreciate the twinkle that must have been in the team's eye as they made this.

Look, it's clever, okay?* If you had a childhood like mine where gaming was escapism, and a television screen or computer monitor was a window into something else, you know what this is channelling. No, not the feeling of going into 'another world', though there is some of that; but beyond that - the sense of excavating something strange and tantalising out of the pixels on the screen, chipping your way through an experience that was both hostile and alluring at the same time, getting stuck, stuck for hours, days, and then something clicking in the back of your head, and *bam*, you figured it out. And in the case of those NES games I'm invoking, your thought process may have been: devious game, shitty game, fucking ingenious game, ugh. And then losing yourself in it again.

Tunic's a little like that. It doesn't have those extremes of peak and valley, but it summons those feelings even while looking like it was folded from construction paper, and yet it also belies a precision no child could manage, cut and measured out to exact specifications almost as if made with tape and graph paper - which it probably was, if you swap those out with level design tools. It looks lovely, and I don't mind the soundtrack - it's chill enough, and functions to accentuate what's going on the screen, which is fine, though I imagine synth fiends might find its arpeggiating a little, er, one-note.

As for gameplay, the combat's fine once you figure out how to do the Zelda-like stuff. You know, getting more health, upping your stats. This is of course not helped by the game refusing to explain itself. As with those NES games, it's like looking at a manual written in a language you can't really comprehend, and drawing the connections together from images and symbols, and the in-game manual represents that pretty much exactly. One thing, though - this game is in love with hiding shit from you. Because of the isometric camera, it hides stuff behind everything: behind a wall, behind a waterfall (all of them?), in a dark corner, behind an area that looked like a dead end before the camera turns around and says, 'ha, it was a path all along!', it hides a secret area in a secret area, and it keeps going. I'm getting secret fatigue, and I'm still only halfway through. It'd be nice if Steam's notes feature let me annotate screenshots, because this is the perfect use case for it. Also, the wandering around is more frustration than eureka moment for me, but that's probably because I have no sense of direction. I'm not embarrassed to say I looked up a walkthrough once to just get on with the next thing, and I don't feel like I've robbed myself of something by doing that.

I guess I'll have something more to say when I finish the game, especially with what it does in terms of how its core mechanic is actually information. But we'll get to that when we get to that.


*And as you keep going, may be too clever, even.

demagogue on 29/1/2024 at 03:25

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I played This Bed We Made. It's a good snapshot of society in the 1950s. It's an investigation point & click game that's does a good job actually making it a legit investigation. It's also what EvaBot would denounce as an agenda game. I'm fine with the agenda, but I'd say it does get a little in the way of a pure police procedural kind of investigation, as in bits sometimes feel added and sometimes people do things that don't make sense to draw the game out or make some points that probably wouldn't be if it were a pure mirror of the chaos of real life. But anyway the great story, setting, and characters, and the flow the game itself is good, and the investigation is what pulls you through all of those things. So it's worth that bit of stretch. But anyway it's as a snapshot of being in that world, doing things and talking as one would in that world, that's really great.

I also got through Chants of Sennaar. Also a point and click that's stands out in the genre. The language puzzles are as interesting as advertised. It also makes a point about how different cultures miss each other, and how their different ways of thinking leak into their language, values, way of life, aesthetics, etc. Also lots of low key P&C puzzles and stealth sections. It's a bit of a mix, but a good one. A few things push the challenge, but it also makes you feel really good when you figure a puzzle out. I think anyone can figure them all out if you explore enough.

Both of these were great games and keeps my faith in point & click games as still a good platform for games with a good flow and story.

henke on 31/1/2024 at 06:31

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Awwwww yeah baby check this shit out

[video=youtube;kW2eJ4dmWug]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kW2eJ4dmWug[/video]

POW POW POW!

5000 souls --------> IN DA BAG

Tomi on 31/1/2024 at 16:03

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Yeah, there was indeed a setting that you could change to make the quest markers go away. In the end I chose to keep the quest markers anyway, because I just wanted to get through the game...

... and I actually did manage to finish the main campaign today! It's supposed to be leaving Game Pass at some point today as well, so talk about perfect timing. :D

Hitman WoA is the first Hitman game that I've ever played, and it's much better than I thought it would be! The level design is awesome, and not just because of all the beautifully crafted locations, but because there are always many different ways to get through a mission. Sometimes I felt that there were too many ways to assassinate some poor soul - the game always gives you like five different ways to get rid of your target, and you just choose whichever is the most fun way to do it. There's not so much challenge if you're patient enough to wait for the perfect moment and you don't care about scoring points. But I like it that way, it's quite entertaining.

I had to rush through some of the Hitman 3 missions, but at that point I was starting to get a bit bored anyway. There would have been some DLC left to play, but right now I feel like I've assassinated enough people for quite some time!

Sulphur on 1/2/2024 at 06:07

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What's wrong with the idea? I've always been fascinated with the idea of video games and the people who play them making a mutual assumption that the protagonist is the player, that a player by default embodies the character they control, and the video game reinforces that at every turn. Bioshock's a fun little turn on the idea that this provides you, the player, with anything like agency, but it does eviscerate its own point after it bashes it into Ryan's skull.

Or is it the critique of objectivism, which devolves into a very unsubtle tale of autocracy vs. collectivism when you take a step back and look at it and its sequel together?



Yeah I dunno. I liked TR 2013 when it came out, but in retrospect that was mostly the graphics razzle-dazzle. It's a muddled game and trilogy, and Lara Croft: First Blood is an interesting direction, but it's hefted with all the nuance of a sledgehammer, and the sheer amount of combat while you're supposed to be playing a vulnerable, fledgling Lara who's somehow only psychologically scarred in cutscenes... it's a schizophrenic mix. This is easier to ignore in Uncharted, because you can internalise that Drake's possibly just a psychopath underneath the quips and charisma, but also because Uncharted's tone is much breezier, and the action movie pacing makes it a fun ride. The new TR trilogy always makes me go, 'Okay, so you want me to take her seriously', but then instead of exploring Lara's frame of mind, it just piles into its mess of skill trees and crafting loops while moving its plot through a series of motions designed to funnel set pieces in and handwave any real development for her. It just doesn't hold together in the end, which is a shame because I could see the combat reinforcing the fun situated in a different context in a different game, or the story being more interesting in a game trilogy filled with actual exploration and tomb raiding.

RE: Horizon Zero Dawn, I dunno what the itch might be, but it's definitely not the same thing a Tomb Raider does. HZD is essentially a Ubisoft map game, just done with more panache and a better-written backstory. The mystery of the world and how it came to be like that was HZD's driving force for me, not so much its present-day narrative. It plays well, though, and it's an entertaining romp if you can engage with its overall construction.