Getting back into Sakuna: of Rice and Ruin, and forgot how good it is. Simulating the annual/seasonal process of harvesting rice feels really gruelling in a tight resource-y way and like most people I would never want to physically do this unless my life depended upon it. You get to learn a lot about rice farming but it’s not shoved down your throat in a ‘did you know’ kinda way, the game seems content to make things more experiential and pseudo-simulate the rest. The conceit is that the characters are all trapped on an island together as punishment from the gods and having to grow rice together is how you learn to not be a whole bunch of arseholes.
The bickering gets pretty grating after a while and it’s clearly meant to be bad but they really oversell it. People be slapping infants and just having a spat every other line of dialogue. Character development could make Sakuna a bit less of a priggish brat a lot earlier and everyone else a bit more willing to literally work to survive together. There’s a nice scene where the characters are arguing but one just starts singing a song they remember - the rationale being that because growing rice is so difficult, people who talked during the work would end up just complaining eventually. Singing prevents that which leads to a really basic but heartwarming cutscene
There’s a lot of PS2 energy and I think it’s:
- Drastically compressed and abrasive english VO
- Unintuitive user interface (fertiliser) which you crack through brute force experimentation
- Novel set of 3D rice farming minigames which are somehow contextualised by really videogame-y elements like ‘hunting’ which is a bunch of 2D character action - my brain still reels that this feels both experimental and cohesive
- Houses you can enter that have no purpose other than to store rice or be a menu for weapons or some late-game unlock
- Somewhat challenging legibility because font is thematically tied to game’s setting
- Cutscenes leaning into super static camera placement and movement
Melty Blood: Type Lumina is a game about punching vampires to acquire dopamine. My brain is all about the game and really wants to get into it but my hands say ‘please I am tired thanks’ after an hour. I really like what it is borrowing from UNI and, to some extent, Strive, keeping the basics simples and the deeper systems deep. I like Miyako a lot since playing Potemkin in Strive has given me a taste for a game plan that is one half ‘how the hell do I get in’, one half ‘BAM’. I badly need a wsad hitbox.
G-String is really good but between extremely finicky aiming and too much precision required of physics and platforming puzzles. I absolutely love the world, but I think I’m just going to watch the rest since a firefight takes about five times as long using this joystick, even with sensitivity calibrated. Levels just have such tight and miniscule geometry I am literally fighting to keep myself away from damage and falls. The game wanted me to stack boxes to get over a really iffy collision mesh at one point and I’m just exhausted. Getting over a videogame fence should not be physically more demanding than planting a videogame rice paddy.
I created the only custom controller config for Steam users since there wasn’t already one so I guess I’ve done my good deed for the day.
The Forgotten City is a comfy timeloop mystery and kinda reminds me of Paradise Killer/Danganronpa if they were targeting a classics scholar. The premise is that you are trapped in a commune physically sequestered from society but located in the latter half of the Roman period. All citizens are Romans (or have acquired Roman citizenship) but must abide by a supernatural rule that says that if anyone commits a crime all must die. When this does inevitably happen you get to timeloop and try to figure out what’s going on with new knowledge. I had an idea for a short story like this a long time ago whereby an unseen supernatural force silently destroys the worst actors of society starting with the wealthiest (corrupt billionaires would be killed in bizarre and impossible ways, tax havens would descend into the ocean etc. - looking back on it I think I was having a weird Neil Breen period).
Anyway, the problem with this kind of premise is that it always comes back to some kind of moralising and Forgotten City does a good job of muddying the waters by blending the high concept republicising with historical and political details, and doing its best to explore what would happen. In this way it’s probably one of the better science-fiction games I played in a long time. So far, the player doesn’t really do much but run around and have conversations with people but that’s fine by me. They might explain this a little further in, but when you first get there the commune say they’ve survived seven months. 23 people (mostly strangers to each other on first arriving) having never committed any major crime for seven months. At first I thought this was hard to believe but it’s actually more engrossing to turn over the absolute horror of living through this. Reminds me of the Twilight Zone episode with the omnipotent child except here the child is invisible and has a specific political agenda.
Since this is a remake of a mod from an Elder Scrolls game it’s interesting to see the details they changed. Who knew just fading to, and back in from black and having the NPC start by facing away from, and then turning towards, the player would make the Elder Scrolls NPC dialogue transition more bearable.
