What game did you finish today?

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

I finished Prey and it was 10/10 amazing. I had started a playthrough once before months ago and it ground me down and I gave up on it in exhaustion. On the second run I loved it.

What's fascinating is just how well it starts flowing in the late game. The game is basically a linear game successfully wearing the skin of an open world one, because if you fuck around the world you'll just waste your very limited resources and you'll end up going through those areas anyways later on. You've got a very tight and brilliantly realized space station, everything from HR offices to life support systems to crew recreation centers, and it's been blasted to hell by industrial disasters and aliens to the point half of it is on fire and half of it is floating in the void in a minefield of hazards.

The entire tone of the thing feels like one of those industrial accident movies like Mine 9 set in space, with aliens. Everything is broken and every time you go to deal with something there's some bullshit that diverts you and then the game throws a really short-notice timed quest to save someone and it creates a unique and delicious sense of pressure where you feel like you're going to explode in frustration. The world is so mundane - the emails on the computers and characters are so realistically bland - that it goes from boring to convincing, it feels like a real place. The space station is like a beautiful art deco skyscraper hotel mixed with a real NASA installation and I want to live on it.

At some point all shit just breaks loose, and that's the point in the game where you've run out of everything but have also finally learned how to play properly, so it's just seamless movie-like running from crisis to crisis. I talked in another thread recently about how games should be more cinematic, but they don't understand what cinematic is, because they take it as meaning animations and cutscenes and not as FEELINGS. Prey is cinematic as fuck in the good way.

And the story is some compelling stuff, just real interesting science fiction about memory loss, bit of ethics, strong characterization. You play a heroic mute, but he's not really a mute because he has a robot with his personality that talks to him, which is absolutely genius for giving the protagonist personality while also playing the fish out of water angle. The ethical quandary in the game is genuinely interesting and you'll never find out the right answer.

Saw ace combat 7 on sale and decided to get it based on some /v/ recs, I was thoroughly impressed with the game. It's a blend of sim and arcade with near future sci-fi elements coupled with a military pastiche in the vein of Top Gun mixed with the cheesy anime-like goodness only a jap could create. I was never much into either flying or racing games but the game was fun enough that it almost made me want to get a flight stick and try out some other flying games (before looking at the prices of a full H.O.T.A.S. setup and subsequently banishing the thought from my mind). As of writing I have just beat the game on ACE difficulty, all S-ranks, which makes for a fun little challenge (frankly once you've gotten over the hurdle of learning the proper "expert" flight controls you've surpassed the majority of difficulty presented to you, even if you aren't interested in difficulty "expert" ends up being superior in the long run and I'd argue you're missing out a lot of the fun of a flying game without them).

Also I posted in the Armored Core thread but to reiterate here it's truly a fantastic game and one of the few Fromsoft games whose multiplayer mode piqued my interest enough to put some time into.

Ace Combat is fucking awesome. I too started with Ace Combat 7 and I ended up loving the lore because it's like they live in a Victorian world of nationalist saber-rattling and casual war and it's way more badass than anything faggoted Hollywood would ever make.

Now, it turns out that it's so arcadey it doesn't really work well with joysticks, but you can get a cheap joystick (Logitech Extreme 3D Pro, $30) to play with War Thunder (for free) and it's fine.

 

[Gravityqueen4life]

finished vampire the masqurade bloodlines as a nos. i played a moded version (clan quest) and found out you could actually join the Sabbat in that mod so fuck yeah, i became a Sabbat.

Spoiler: the mod itself

it was alright for being a fan project. you start off by trying (and failing) too kill Gray down at the swears and later beable too visit the Sabbat homebase in East LA. the characters are ok. the pack leader is a complete zelos nutjob that throws a bunch of dirty work too test your loyalty so you have too do some quests before you head to Chinatown. the other characters goes from ok to meh. i wish there were more people in your pack you could interact with other then the fat Mexican guy that later joins and most characters in the side story, you end up killing anyway later. the cool part is you get a bloodhunt on you, so you can go out and kill other members of the camarilla and diablerie to gain their power. however since you dont get that many skill points at that point in the game, many of the abilities you get end up being useless. you also lose your humanity while doing it so, you can easily let the beast take over and get a game over when you lose it all. the hob world looked nice but screams that its a fan project full of assets just being there for no reason and some of the voice acting (especially of the older characters) were subpar at best.

Spoiler: cool spoiler moment

that Lacroix dominated you and turned you into a sleeper agent was a cool moment i liked.

overall, it was an interesting experience and worth playing if you want to do something different then just replaying the game again.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

The Flame in the Flood. Finish, in this case, meaning beating it, since it's a roguelike with a win state.

It was pretty good. There was this quality about it that I felt like it could have been so much more, like I saw all this potential and high-quality work but it just didn't click like your real classics do. Short pitch of it is you're rafting down the Mississippi to try to find civilization, post-apocalyptic, flooded America. Gothic feeling. It's like Brian's River (the book) meets Oregon Trail meets Huckleberry Finn meets Sid Meier's Pirates meets Don't Starve meets Southern gothic meets fairy tales. It's kind of minimalist. The "story" is expressed through vignettes on quilts (about people refusing to evacuate), basically all you ever do learn is that something FUBARed the Earth and people left. It might as well be your princess got kidnapped.

Mostly the game depends on atmosphere. You're doing a lot of bushcraft. There's only a handful of distinct animal types (rabbit, crow, boar, wolf, bear, snake) and illnesses and injuries that can happen to you, and you do basic survivalist stuff like eating plants you forage, make first aid, etc. No real fighting or hunting, but laying traps, it's all resource management at the heart of it. It is, or at least was on my run, incredibly easy; I only died once, due to a double snake ambush. I had the materials to brew dandelion tea to cure it, but a fucking rainstorm put my fire out literally right as I started to make my tea and I died before the rain ever lifted. There's conditions I never saw. I think the game needed much tougher balancing. I even killed every boss on my first go (big boar, a bear that's unavoidable, wolf) because it's just comes down to "lay more traps."

While it felt Kirbyish, the atmosphere is rich. Beautiful graphics in an art style I've seen before but don't know the name of. Acoustic country (mainly guitar) singing. Melancholic and empty feeling to the whole world, but when you occasionally come across other travelers they are all folksy and kind; there are no villains. I had the ending spoiled for myself, but it's intriguing. You do feel like you're on this long but personal odyssey and are just surviving day by day.

The world doesn't always make sense. The whole clothing mechanic is nonsense, if this is the Mississippi flowing into the Gulf (it clearly is, it even calls the last one the Gulf), then why the fuck does it colder the further south you go. For that matter, it doesn't make all that much sense for the rapids to get worse the more downriver you are, rivers widen and move slower as they near the sea. It was good gameplay-wise, but poorly thought out; the same thing on a Canadian river (one of those that flows to the Arctic) would have lost the vibe but made more sense.

Overall, decent thing. Solid first showing by a studio that went on to waste their potential making some garbage (Drake Hollow). I like that it's an easy roguelike with a win state, gave the feeling of a roguelike experience without wasting a ton of time.


Edit: One big downside, the last regions are fucking boring, they just turn into boney/deserty wastelands where the gimmick is low resources, but really nothing else. They should have gone the absolutely route and made it into labyrinthine industrial/urban/skyscraper hellscapes. Have gators and wild dogs (makes more sense than wolves) and rats and raccoons. Have a little New Orleans area. Oh well.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Finished my replay of Deadly Tower of Monsters. I had last touched it many, many years ago, free on PS+. I don't tend to replay games a lot, at least not in adult life.

It was... solidly good. Not as good as I remembered. The thing is, the whole game is held up on its story and visuals. On being sci-fi B-movie jank like Cuphead is a cartoon. And it's awesome at that. But the gameplay just isn't good. It's not bad either. It's just there. You hit things and they die. You don't do it for too long that that gets to be a problem, but it's one of those things where it's only fun because of the theming around what you're doing. And honestly I think that describes most games that aren't super abstract to at least some level, but more so here. There's not much in the way of thinking or technique about it...

The director's jokes also wear thin after a while when it runs into the same "lol the filming was dangerous" type stuff. The replay only took me four hours total. But much of it really is delightful, I could listen to that commentary forever when it goes off into the little details of how a costume for an enemy was made and such. And I feel like it's downright clever in how it uses metanarrative. You've got this whole thing where instead of being meta like something like Undertale or Superhot does, instead you get a framing device and then everything is justified as part of the framing device, and there's always some interesting story to go with that. And then at the end it starts going into third wall subversion, not of the game being subverted but of the "movie" that the game is being subverted. It's clever as hell and cute.

Well worth a play on a sale. Just noting that the game is quite short.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

The campaign of Strange Brigade. I say campaign because it has horde modes and stuff. Curse of the mummies themed co-op shooter by the Nazi Zombie Army guys. My first impressions of it were meh but it really grew on me. It's basically an arena shooter interspersed with shitty, unfun "puzzles" (shoot a thing then shoot another thing). The arena shooting's main feature, I'd say, is it having some boss fights and big crowds. Like dozens, and you'll be trapped together in a fairly small area. There's a certain style of gunplay you see sometimes, particularly in zombie games, where you've got a ton of shit tier enemies and the fighting is less about sharpshooting or tactics or anything like that and is instead all more rhythmic, how to keep a good pace of fire that you don't get swamped.

Overall, the thing was okay. Needed way more enemy variety. Didn't give a fuck about the plot, and the narrator and characters were obnoxious. But it was okay.

Edit: Also Portal. I didn't like it. I get that it was a cheap-ass thing that Valve made for free to throw in to a bundle of other games as a gift back when they were still a beloved developer. I get that it was massively expanded on Portal 2. Just on its own merits, I found it very boring. I didn't just fly through the puzzles, I did have to fiddle a bit, but none of them were particularly complicated or felt satisfying to me to solve. The story was delivered in a boring way. I thought the final boss fight was clever, but overall it was a big dreary disappointment.

 

[AnOminous]

The story was delivered in a boring way. I thought the final boss fight was clever, but overall it was a big dreary disappointment.

I liked it although never felt compelled to repeat it, unlike Portal 2, which I think is a masterpiece.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

I liked it although never felt compelled to repeat it, unlike Portal 2, which I think is a masterpiece.

I suppose I could give Portal 2 a try at some point. I suspect Portal 1 is one of those things that is only good in context, has no reason to exist next to its sequel.

 

[nachiroux]

Dungeon Travelers 2-2. This game reminds me of why I love games. Seriously some stuff in this game won't fly in "current year" (all the lewd ass cg and lolis in revealing outfits).

 

[11 Herbs and Spices]

Edit: Also Portal. I didn't like it. I get that it was a cheap-ass thing that Valve made for free to throw in to a bundle of other games as a gift back when they were still a beloved developer. I get that it was massively expanded on Portal 2. Just on its own merits, I found it very boring. I didn't just fly through the puzzles, I did have to fiddle a bit, but none of them were particularly complicated or felt satisfying to me to solve. The story was delivered in a boring way. I thought the final boss fight was clever, but overall it was a big dreary disappointment.

Valve hired the entire team behind Narbacular Drop, same premise: portals, because of how impressed Gabe was with it mechanically and thought it could be made better with polish and money. So he hired them. You gain a lot of appreciation for it when you go from Narbacular to Portal. It still exists as shareware somewhere after the uni took down its page.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

We, the Revolution and it was great until suddenly it was awful.

I tend to post the games I finish in the games I'm playing thread, so I won't ramble everything about it here. Visual novel, basically, but dolled up with lots of minigames (and ends up suffering for having badly-designed/boring/repetitive ones). You are a revolutionary judge in Paris. You have to survive the political intrigues of the Revolution. Court cases are not really the focus, though they're the bulk of the game; the point of it is the way that all of the systems and storylines combine to make you feel like you're living the life of a somewhat obscure but actually quite important figure trying to make it through major historical events.

It's got a three act structure and for the first act and a half it's good. Great even. And the whole thing is laid out like you're fighting your way through the Revolutionaries, one-by-one bumping off OR sparing people like Louis XVI, Danton, Gobel, Marat, Robespierre, and others. But then you wind up rushing through the intrigue to wipe out Robespierre and the game suddenly takes a complete left turn to wacky town with a (I don't care about spoiling it, it's bad) twist dead-brother-returns who leads an army of outcasts (not French royalists, just "outcasts") on Paris and has been manipulating you with IQ 10348232 plays the whole time and the whole thing is such piss that it ruined the experience retroactively. And the thing is, this IS a visual novel, at least in the sense Ace Attorney is. So when the plot falters the whole thing does.

Gameplay wise, the most important things do what they need to, but the street fighting minigame is awful and pointless and the . Case wise, they're generally rather mundane things, often realistic, sometimes historical, but generally not real interesting puzzles; it is, after all, not about finding truth but about manipulating circumstances. I do think it does a bad job of giving it reasons why each faction backs a certain defendant; sometimes you can interpret it, sometimes it just seems arbitrary and there for gameplay. Plot wise, I suspected very early on, even before evidence, that it would be Telltale choice - the plot railroads you while hiding it on the first run - and from what i've read it doesn't hide it well at all if you ever deviate from what it wants you to do.

It also falls in this category where it's clear the developers know a ton about the real Revolution, but they could have cut out a lot of fluff and had a lot more content pertaining to things like the Cult of Reason, the First and Second Coalitions and Napoleon's Egyptian expedition, and other things that just get glossed over.

Overall, it was a lot like my Amazing American Circus, which comes from the same bunch (Klabater). A fascinating gameplay idea with very mediocre execution. Worth playing if it sounds intriguing, but prepare for big disappointment in the last act.

 

[batterybee]

Yesterday I finished Northern Journey it took me about 13 hours(only cause I'm retarded tho).
I enjoyed it and it is definitely worth the money but to be honest i fell like the first 1/3 of the game is the best, as the environments and atmosphere is more comfy and dreamlike, whereas when you get later in it gets more barren and sterile with areas like glaciers and caves.
I'd say one you get past the Nokkpond it starts to lose its charm a little.
Still an impressive project for a one man team and you should go play it.

 

[ProfDongs]

DBZ Kakarot

An okay game held back by how shallow it is and contempt for the players time. Its unreal to me that they thought putting hyper armor on everything for the explicit purpose of dragging things out was a good idea.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Finished my Bastion and Transistor replays. (I played Pyre recently and have no interest in Hades.)

Transistor didn't hold up as well as I hoped, but it wasn't a great situation. You know how your mood can color the experience, and I've been visiting my family for Thanksgiving (my job gives me more wiggle room for a longer visit), so I was uncomfortably playing it on my laptop with a bunch of noise around me. And it's a very sound-driven game, the narration, the music.

The story is so vague, like Bastion, actually it's much more derivative of Bastion when you play them back-to-back. It's neat having the functions (abilities) be "people" whose stories you uncover, but it's not so neat expressing it through loredumps, textwalls, instead of threading it into the narration. The thing was still interesting, though, still fun. The core gameplay was good. Supergiant is wonderful at coming up with fun, interesting enemies, and the Process especially is charming to me with its weird names (whatever junk the guy first thinks to call them/say about them), and captivating with its smooth mixture of Apple-like computer/mechanical aesthetics and biological stuff, it at once feels both completely natural, like an ecosystem, and completely computer-y in a way I don't think any one else has really pulled off. I'd love to see much more of the Process in somewhere. Unfortunately, modern Supergiant is just a Hades machine (because we need more roguelikes and dungeon games in this world, right?).

I do find Pyre getting sweeter in my memory, but I know that I wouldn't want to replay the thing. It was more creative than Transistor was.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Nantucket.

It was good.

I've talked about this one a lot before (though without much interest). It's a whaling game in the vein of Sid Meier's Pirates. Whaling, if you're not familiar with it, was like monster hunting IRL. You literally have to fight a fucking sea monster (a whale) with a spear.

In the game this, and all other real gameplay, is boiled down to a card game. And it's okay. I'd like to see someone do this concept with more detailed minigames, again, like Sid Meier's Pirates. Something where I actually get to throw the harpoon like Black Flag, perhaps, or maybe run it like FTL. But as it is, it's cards, and it's done competently. The central conceit is that you have characters specialized in roles, which largely boil to offensive (harpooner), defensive (sailor), support (craftsman, rerolls), and healer (scientist), all of which also have functions on ship positions (like FTL, kind of?) and in other map-based navigation. You roll a die for each person but you can only pick one action (with exceptions) per whaleboat, so if you abstract away some of the detail you're really basically picking a squad per boat and then rolling for a set of options. Throw in random effects.

So you go around fighting whales, sometimes pirates, sometimes Indians. The premise is that it's a (retarded but satisfying) Moby Dick sequel where Ishamel completely missed the moral of the story and is going to devote his life to hunting the Great White Whale. It turns out it's a Haida god and you need the uber-spear of the heavens or some shit to kill it. Along the way you run into side quests involving real life mariners and chasing down their unique Enchanted Navigational Charts or whatever the fuck. The writing is minimalist which is a shame because that would have gone a long way in a game where you just play cards and sail arounda fucking map. Sail around and listen to really good shanties (better, I think, than Black Flag).

It has flaws. The game wants to be Crusader Kings with characters, but it ends up overcomplicating itself with little to show for it. You've got this bullshit tech system where you have to invent your upgrades and it's often gated behind user skills, but there's a real bottleneck in early progression where you can't get the decent ship (two whaleboats) because you need the upgrades, but getting the special dudes in your crew won't work because then you won't have decent harpooners to actually win fights. It's retarded and adds nothing. You get event spam, bad event spam, it all just blends together and I ignore it. Useless morale system that could have been interesting (like managing mutinies, or juggling types of exploitation to squeeze the crew without causing the mutiny) but are never developed, literally never considered morale once as a factor in my game, unlike Sid Meier where it's always there. There's little things that could have been added (like different products, spermaceti, blubber, ambergris, and baleen, that would have played a role with different prices in different ports and different preponderances from different whale species) that would have spiced up traveling a lot. There's whale discovery - find new routes (they are only active at certain times a year, so you basically know they travel between their feeding and mating grounds) but nothing about them depleting/shifting north into dangerous ice fields over time. I could whine more but honestly, I wouldn't whine at all if it didn't have a grip on me. I went out and read a book on the history of whaling and it became an obsession because of this game.

Past playthroughs, I would always play Challenge Mode. See, they made this idiotic decision to do a map expansion, but limit it to a mode where you just compete for points against other captains. No story in it. The map is crucially important because the game uses trade winds as a mechanic, and it is much more interesting having three possible Pacific-Atlantic linkages (Arctic over Russia, Cape of Good Hope, Tierra del Fuego) than just Tierra del Fuego. But in the end I found the game was better for having a story motivation and endgame, sparse as it may have been on actual plot/prose.

In the end, it was a cheap bullshit indie game with good art and sound that was pretty satisfying. It'd be awesome if they made a follow-up sequel that massively expanded it, but I'm sure they won't, tragically, because whaling is one of the most amazing endeavors people have ever set themselves on.

Spoiler: Rambling bullshit (I'm drinking)

Characters get a morale boost from being "Gourmets." This is absurd. Even by pirate standards, whalers ate absolute garbage. "Gourmet" should be a morale penalty. It could have actually been interesting for different types of food/rationing options to be a mechanic.

Morale in general is fucking useless and should have been a big deal, like being way more swingy, or having a mechanic where crewmembers have opinions on each other and if a mass of them rally together they pose a threat.

Crewmembers are unmemorable due to being too numerous (once you get a second whaleboat), too few traits, other problems. A bit of rebalancing, more traits, and a better UI could have sold them better.

Don't have a crewmember from Nantucket's sister's wedding be spawned in fucking Madagascar.

Related, catching fish as a way of passively filling the hold for a guaranteed income would have been both nice and historically accurate for the Canadian industry.

Whaling ships often had their own "stores" that sold consumer goods to the crew on voyage on credit, very exploitative. Could have been another interesting thing, like a mechanic where you dedicate some of your cargo hold to recovering some of your lay (the share you get, versus your crew, of profits).

No kraken?

No rocket harpoons as an ultimate tech upgrade?

Swimmer is an awful trait. In the game it's basically a "don't even bother" trait because lots of whales can throw their crew from boats, and it's an instant kill. I think swimming should have been turned into a mechanic where thrown crew have to be rescued, burning a turn for that whaleboat, and there's a timer of how long the thrown crewmember can hold out on their own. MOST whalers did not know how to swim. (Whales primarily killed by busting up boats, not chowing down on people, but it's a necessary dramatization for the game.)

The game starts in the 1820s so it's pretty irrelevant, but the Confederacy played hell on the Union whaling fleet. Could have interesting content about it like a final pirate boss if the game runs too long.

Have some kind of depletion mechanic, whether tied to year or YOUR hunting. Historically, whaling got pushed into more dangerous waters, the Arctic. Perfect mechanic. In fact, the whole RPG approach is stock for the genre, but stupid. Why are the whales suddenly bigger just because I'm bigger, instead of me having to judge what I want to try and fight? Pushing the action more into stormy/icebergy waters (very dangerous in game, very capable of killing crewmembers through events) would be historically accurate while reflecting how overexploitation made everything harder.

P.S. You can hire on young cabin boys and then bugger the everloving shit out of them.

 

[Daddy's Little Kitten]

I finished Super Mario Wonder like a week ago, and just "finished" Super Mario RPG (remake).

I put finished in quotations because the emulator crashed after the Smithy battle, and I have to fight Smithy again...

 

[Sniperwoof]

Lies of P I was going to give it a seven but that final level the Alchemists Stronghold or whatever is almost unbearably bad, it pushed the score down to a six. It might just be the worst level in any Soulsborne game ever. Off the top of my head it is worse than Londor, the frozen wastes from DS2 and whatever that one ultra huge level that was just blinding white marble from Code Vein was called. it is just awful fuck man.

There was also a bunch of little shit that wouldn't have bothered me as much if this was a ten hour game but it's about 25 hours so it started to wear on my pretty heavily near the end.

1- enemies and bosses have comically long wind ups and delayed attacks, seriously I found some that are close to 3-4 seconds long, If you hated this shit in Elden Ring it is down right heinous here.

2- Most enemies and bosses attack extremely rapidly we're talking only 1 to 1.5 frames between attacks, this means heavy weapons are borderline useless since enemies can attack before you can even wind up, dex builds are the way to go here.

2- The organic enemies, corpses I think they're called? do stagger from being hit but puppets generally do not and have infinite poise, this makes thematic sense because they are robots but it does not make them fun to fight

3- there is a static effect called decay which rapidly drains your health like toxic from Dark Souls but it also damages your weapon quality rapidly, why is this an issue? Because you cannot move or dodge when using the grindstone to repair your weapons and this does not pair well at all with the extreme speed at which most enemies and bosses move and attack. it is very difficult to find an opening to repair your weapon mid fight.

4- The optional field bosses which drop amulets/materials are bizarrely much much more difficult than main story bosses, they move faster, hit harder, and have more health. You could make the argument that its's because they are optional but it's still weird some rando squatting in a sewer is more difficult than an endgame boss.


Final score 6/10 it's impressive for a rookie studio but it's kind of baffling how much of the fundamentals they got wrong considering how old the SoulsBorne genre is at this point.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Finished Metro: Exodus. It's a mixed bag. I'm glad I played it. I also played it very fast, in the sense that when I started I just played it a bunch of hours every day until I finished it. But it's not... well, it's not a masterpiece or anything.

First things first, I view this game as being a serious Fallout world with The Last of Us gameplay. That, at its core, is what it is. In the linear section you're just sneaking around doing basic stealth game crap with a few tools (mostly the knives, I never once used a decoy for anything) and putting out lights and crap, unless you are in a fight and then you just shoot everyone. It's slow and clunky, and I like that. I prefer games where shooting feels punchy and deliberate, which The Last of Us was great on delivering, and in a first-person perspective Hunt: Showdown does (along with, appropriately enough, stealth too). The production value is fucking amazing, like AAAA. It cuts no corners, everything is 100% animated like a real person, effects on your mask, and I think that bullshit is genuinely important because it really does feel immersive, regardless of what any smug cunt (probably a Soulslike player) says. That kind of thing gives a great deal of reality to it, and there is plenty of spectacle (but in a more understated, realistic way).

The setting is the star, what the game delivers is a bunch of shitty cliches but it feels fresh because (and only because) you're exploring rural Russia, Putin Country. I wish there was more of it, or smaller areas in exchange for more variety, but what you get is mostly a snowy/icy swamp around a mixed village/industrial area, the shores of a receding Caspian Sea (so, Mad Max World), and taiga w. a bit of town that has a very campy feeling. It's all very good. I was spellbound by the setting.

Story, kind of piss. The opening is godawful and the ending isn't much good either. In general, the game is best when it dumps you into these hub levels where you don't have a bloated open world of generic copy-paste to explore, but instead are just picking your way towards objectives soaking in atmosphere. At its worst is when it's a traditional Metro game (I TRIED playing Last Light ages ago and fucking hated it, every moment of it, until I gave up in disgust) and it throws you down corridors shooting rats and bullshit like that. It has some really fun monsters, like "demons of electricity" (angry spook lights) and monster crawdads, and some shitty bland ones (goddamn ghouls and mole rats straight out of Fallout). I generally liked it when I was above ground and found myself flatlining anytime I had to go belowground.

But anyways, story. Miller's a fucking asshole and I hated him. I get that's the point, and it probably means a lot more to true OG Grognards that have played every Metro, but he was a prick and despite that I still wanted to cry at the end 10/10. Anna is bland, she just doesn't feel like a real human? The Spartans (cringe) are all pretty pleasant. The whole thing feels like some shitty action movie that might have been made back in the 80s, where you know it sucks but it still charms because of how earnest it is and how seriously it takes itself. Almost the opposite of most tongue-in-cheek nostalgia bait.

I liked it. I'd consider playing a sequel/DLCs. I'd be very reluctant to play a prequel, because from what i recall of the prequel the parts I hated of this game (Moscow is a godawful opening, Yamantau was the worst overall, and Novosibirsk was a huge letdown, got quite frustrating and underwhelming) ARE the game in old Metros. But it has such a unique charm.

The single best part had to be Taiga with the stranded schoolchildren that grew up, developed their own culture, revealing their dead Teacher like a god/prophet (the "Final Exam" as afterlife) and bickering and talking like little boys (their biggest cultural taboo seeming to be "don't bully the girls") while still convincingly maintaining an adult society. (Minus kids? Doesn't seem like it makes any reference to them actually having sex and breeding, which with that timing they should be doing, adult example or not.) It blows Little Lamplight from Fallout 3 out of the water. I'd read books/watch movies/play games just set on that setting specifically.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Finished Portal 2 after, not long ago, playing Portal 1. I really liked it. I don't even really have any criticisms. It's one of those things, for one, where it's such a unique product and vision that there is no room to say "it should have X." I do think that having a puzzle game also be a comedy game sometimes works out badly when the possibility of getting completely stuck for a long time destroys the pacing. I generally found it easy, would come into a room, have to look around and toy around a bit but quickly move on. On some sections it took longer. A few times I wound up cheating, and most every time I did it was either because it turned out the thing I had to portal on was in sight but at some weird angle I never thought to look (tunnel vision, not looking up, just around). Unlike adventure games, cheating didn't feel that bad because the puzzles were so interesting that the solution was itself satisfying to see in action.

See, Portal 2 doesn't feel like a puzzle game, really. It feels like an action-adventure game, one that went all in on spectacle and animation instead of marginally better textures and lighting (and pays off for that), where your movement scheme is the action. And I mean that in a complementary way. Portal 1 was a boring dud, the story sucked, basically the story was like "princess in a castle" or "shoot space demons," just there to justify this. Now you have way more puzzle elements to play with, but introduced in a controlled manner and pace that they're not overwhelming at all. Now you've got actual characters. Now you've got, instead of real tepid dry humor, hilarious writing. The only other game I can recall playing that was near as funny was We Happy Few, and that one had (in part by the nature of its genre) way more downtime between jokes. Portal 2 is delightfully goofy. I liked Wheatley, Cave Johnson. Glados is better in some ways and worse than others, I feel like they ended up making her a little too human but I still really like the robot that acts like a mean girl. I loved the different acts and twists.

10/10. Very unique. Very fun. I see why people gushed over it so much back in the day.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Hey look at that, another one (because it was short). Little Nightmares. It has problems.

I had started playing this one before and found it VERY, VERY dull. I gave up on it, but I was willing to give it another chance. I know around here talk up giving up on games early, but I have found this pay off before; my first go of Prey didn't resonate with me, but when I gave it another chance it ended up turning into one of the best games I ever played. Well, this one ended up being worth the time. Turns out it's really short anyways. Understandable, it's an indie game. Unfortunately, being short kills it in this case because when you're short you really need all of your content to be good, and the entire first section of the game - like, a full third of it - is awful.

Little Nightmares pitches itself as kind of being this... honestly don't know how to describe the aesthetic. It's got this feel like a lot of those old stopmotion cartoons, or however the Europeans do it now, where everything feels sort of old Victorian or Edwardian or something while also fairy-tale like, everything feels like its made of clay while also trying NOT to. Some people say Tim Burton, but I don't really get that vibe. You'd really just have to look at it, if you've never seen it. It's supposed to be horror that evokes the feeling of childhood, or a specific sort of fear of being very small in a world much larger than you. You've got a race of little kid-like creatures that are being industrially harvested for meat for a race of fat blob people, not porcine as such but just blobby, big fat rolls and round shapes and disgusting. You break loose and make your way through the world until you escape. There is no real "story" beyond that most basic of vidya game stories and it will not really explain its setting in any way, fuck you. Along the way what you do is 3D platforming and very basic stealth puzzles (throw distraction, don't wander out into their open sight, etc). The game does not bother explaining its control scheme at the start, so it's frustrating and clunky for a long time, though you EVENTUALLY start to get it.

The whole first section is godawful, just this dark industrial type area that feels like a million other games. Where it got good for me was the kitchen areas, the restaurant, and the "lady" where it suddenly becomes Japanese horror (geisha-like monster). I did not find the "little gnome kid in a big man's world" thing scary at all, didn't even find it interesting (due to being dull as dishwater) for the first section. But the way it makes horror out of FOOD is very effective. At first it's just the gross chefs waddling around, hacking into meat, tasting raw blood from the carcasses they chop, but it's still sort of restrained. Now you've got actual gameplay, too, because you have to actually make your way through it carefully and even occasionally (gasp) think. In the restaurant it gets downright horrific as you see people gorging themselves like animals on piles of meat, people madly chasing you just to shove in their mouths, but they're still civilized. These aren't animals with just meat, they have wine bottles, they wear three-pieces. It's so disturbing because you feel hemmed in on every side by these HUMANS who are engaging in a very HUMAN but savage display of destructive gluttony. It's very striking stuff.

And I'm a pansy, so the Lady section (scary Japanese ghost woman laying in ambush) terrified me. It was agonizing going through her quarters with all these mannequins, intentionally placed to make you fake YOURSELF out.

I suspect the sequel was probably a lot better (like Portal, a sequel to a surprise hit, or how people claim Sons of the Forest is), but I'm mystified how it got Overwhelmingly Positive reviews in the first place.

 

[Gravityqueen4life]

Finished fate CCC (atleast the first route) and i liked it well enough. i duuno what was going on in Nasu head at the time but he must have gone through no nut November and thought "no one likes my girl Sakura. im gonna maker her into the biggest coomer/waifu bait until they love her" and he succeeded, the mad lad. the game plays like the first one. rock/paper/scissors combat with skills in between. you get your servant (Pick Saber) and go down dungeon crawling while collecting information on girls kinks to pass through the dungeon (im not making that up. you have free sprit Buddhist women who is down to fuck anyone and anything, give you the power to enter girls sub-concisions to make them admit they horny to the point they have a mental break down).

the two downsides the game has it no longer allows you to to pick what stats to level up anymore since everyone min-maxed in the first game and the school area itself is not as interesting as in the first game. worth your time if you already know about fate but i suggest you play the first game first before hand.