Really digging Thief Gold but it’s kinda slow going readjusting to the long missions compared to the last few bite-size-friendly games I’d been playing. These levels are fucking huge! It rules. Don’t have much to say at this point. Sneaking around in the shadows is fun. The level layouts allow for satisfying strategic voyeurism and feelings of intimate trespassing. Love stealing that loot. Also, water arrows to kill torches and moss arrows to soften your footsteps and the combination of the two to expand the moss on the ground, love that videogamey shit! And rope arrows DIY rappelling, yesssss.
I finished Sakuna last night. Cool game, pretty impressive considering how few people apparently worked on it. Would be cool to see more games with a more focused, in-depth farming system like this, maybe a Beekeeper game or something.
I never once ate my ducks, I always set them free into the wild. Felt wrong to do otherwise after their helpful service.
The last boss was pretty limp though, especially after how hectic most of the action gets in this. It literally just stands there doing nothing much of the time, giving you enough time to stand in the corner and heal up.
Twelve Minutes was… super embarrassing? Literally the first thing you see after gaining control over your character is The Shining carpet, and it hints at the sensibility of the whole project – a hilariously basic mashup of a few Top 100 IMDb movies’ storylines (*) with such well-realized characters as “Wife” and “Cop”. The time loop concept amounts to nothing but a fun additional layer slapped over a standard Flash-era escape room game, the script is devoid of any sense of specificity (no names, no lived-in detail, nothing), each scene is presented from a top-down perspective which is clinically cold enough for all the mocap and Hollywood talent to feel completely wasted, Willem Dafoe in particular delivers possibly the most overqualified readings in the history of this medium. Annapurna keeps using their movie industry contacts and money to back the most middlebrow projects imaginable, they better use all the money and clout they get this way to give The Outer Wilds DLC all the backing it needs.
(*) Even naming the movies which inspired the game is enough to spoil the entire storyline early (tells you how worthwhile the entire thing is, really), so I’ll put them behind a spoiler tag: Memento, The Shining, Chinatown, classic Hitchcock (Rear Window, Vertigo…). All of it adds up to an extremely predictable tragedy that needed some proper close-up and detail to work, but I guess that would ruin the marketable diorama aesthetic. The storyline has no recognizable human impulse in it besides homaging the biggest classics of cinema, and the bird’s eye perspective feels like it was designed to tell a completely different story, so… what was the point, really?
feels like a case of money and polish making a project worse
there was something real here when it showed up in the interesting mechanics room in GDC 8? years ago. Putting the burdens of actors and budget and scope on it was bad news
Definitely seems like it, to the point I feel bad for saying Annapurna keeps backing middlebrow project when it’s more like a direction they keep nudging their projects towards. Same as Maquette, this really begs to get away from its misguided movie influences/design dogmas and spread its wings as a messier, more experimental thing.
Just realized I haven’t even fired up Last Stop since the vibes were so wrong, checked the reviews on Metacritic and the first one I clicked on had this familiar sounding summary
There’s that incredible gulf between writing that’s great and writing that’s surface-level good and unlike a lot of representative art, I think passable writing that attempts to express human connection can be offputting. It’s not just a bad attempt, it’s trite and false.
And it’s not easy to tell where a team will land when a game is in development and almost everything is terrible up until a few months before ship, but I think we have to treat writing differently to stop making these mistakes (and for that matter, I think we have to treat design differently – I hate the process of slowly improving a bunch of mediocre parts and am much more comfortable with a white-hot core found at project start that’s always protected and built on).
Some poor dev with an actually promising game that’s being published by Annapurna is, right now, begging, BEGGING to not have Justin Theroux cast as their protagonist. They’re terrified because they know this is how things get away from them.
I played through Last Stop. There’s a lot more care put into the pacing than I expected & that honestly went a long way, especially when it comes to that sort of cleaned-over Annapurna house style. It’s dressed up like a Nu-Telltale game but is more of a Visual Novel for 90% of it’s running time (with the exception of the ending, the ‘choices’ generally railroad you for the sake of characterization - at most they result in little easter eggs that unlock achievements)
It is kind of interesting to have characters be scummy or idiotic & force you to play that out. Gameplay-wise it also does a good job of filling the empty space w/ ‘cinematic’ stylings, mini-games & unexpected tricks that improve the pacing & sort of carrot-on-stick urge you to see how they’ll chop up the game next. The writing is bad & it absolutely collapses at the end in a way that felt racist to me (and also jeopardizes their whole stylistic premise rly)
I felt very mixed about it, I think it’s genuinely impressive how they managed to transpose a fairly dissimilar form (empty-headed watching trash tv) into something that didn’t feel dull (no offense 2 DontNod but their games are boring). But I also very much felt like, well, wouldn’t we all be better off if that energy & talent went towards something more interesting?
Immediately replayed Phoenix Wright afterwards for the first time in 10 years & that was nice + a million times better. I send Variable State well wishes🙏
After talking about it on here earlier, I popped back into Picross 3D Round 2 and my distaste for it feels…justified?
Like, it’s super disorienting the way orange blocks will morph shape mid-puzzle? Just completely throws off my sense of how many blocks are in a thing as I’m working on it.
Then! You get to the end of the puzzle, and your carved out thing just…sits there. No cool little animations! No mutant duck going apeshit congratulating you!
It’s a classier feeling affair, sure, but where’s the soul? Bah.
First time playing F76 with NPCs and one of the first ones you meet is voices by Jason Mewes. Through me for a loop as I tried to figure out why the voice was so familiar.
