BTW Inscryption has a very generous demo on Steam if anyone’s curious. It lets you basically play through the entire tutorial, which is a pretty engaging 30-60 minutes or so. It convinced me to get it. The one downside is that if you do end up buying the game, you’re going to have to do the tutorial again.
5 Likes
the reason i actually watched the E3 streams this year was to discover the small handful of games like this… and this is one of them that i kinda just could tell that it went way beyond its initial presentation. def going to try and play it at some point in the future.
1 Like
R u on switch? On switch it’s all phone players and other switch players. It’s awesome it makes u feel so competent it’s like the goosebumps where kid asks a genie to make him the best basketball player so everyone else becomes awful
7 Likes
I’m on pc, so I have no idea if I’m killing a bunch of children using controllers or I’m playing at the hours when the good players aren’t online or what. when I did the pve mode some kid was making fun of me for being pc.
5 Likes
good kid
5 Likes
Curious to see what you think of the rest of the game. I loved the opening - theatrical folklore horror roguelike card game embedded in an escape room is an inspired concept.
But because its a Daniel Mullins meta-game, there are going to be gameplay shifts. It worked OK in his prior games as a lot of the gameplay wasn’t super compelling, but it works against him here as the opening game is too compelling. The remainder of the game can’t help but pale in comparison.
5 Likes
Yeah, I’ve played a little bit of the second segment. It was a very cool surprise, and it recontextualizes the first segment in some fun and interesting ways. So far though, it does feel like a pretty significant step down from the gameplay and presentation of the first segment. I also still had something I wanted to accomplish in the first segment and I have no idea whether I’ll ever get back to it. I also don’t know how long this second segment will last though, maybe it changes a third time.
If the rest of the game remains in this style, then it’s a weird choice. Feels like the two segments would have been more impactful in reverse order.
1 Like
I never did any of the taxi or pizza delivery missions, but I was doing everything I realized that I could be doing. A big problem, I think, is that I unconsciously spent like probably 40k on weapons that I didn’t always need. idk lol…
1 Like
You can’t flip the first and second parts as only a fraction of people would buy this if they only saw part 2 in trailers and demos.
I can sort of come to terms with the genre change - it was a gamble that was doomed to fail as I imagine every player will vastly prefer the presentation and escape-room mechanics of the cabin. However, the makers should have recognized the second act’s card game mechanics are worse in almost every way than the first act’s. Removing the squirrel deck in particular kills a huge part of strategy (even if it’s somewhat illusory strategy, it’s hard to lose in this game as you progress) and turns it into a RNG battle.
The first act’s game mechanics aren’t rock solid (there are multiple ways cheese it, once you figure out one you’re nearly unstoppable), but it’s a lot of fun regardless with a good, fast paced loop and excellent presentation.
4 Likes
Been playing a bunch of Tale of Immortal, a sandbox game about cultivation: a subgenre of Chinese fantasy literature that focuses on becoming a god by kicking asses, doing meditation, guzzling medicine, and talking to enormous animals. If this game and Amazing Cultivation Simulator are representative of the genre, anyway; I haven’t read any xianxia.
My first character was a twink named Weed Bong. I don’t have any screenshots of Weed Bong because an update corrupted the save, which is unfortunate because I was about to ascend to Qi Condensation.
Instead, meet Loose Woman.
She is divinely beautiful (characters only go from “stunning” to “divine”, there’s no ugly cultivators), extremely vengeful, and loves to be “demonic”, which basically means going around kicking asses like a delinquent. Contrary to her name, Loose Woman holds no passion in her heart for anything except cultivation.
So what do you do in this game? Well, you… cultivate.
Cultivation means either going around to random nodes full of qi and cultivating (meditating), or doing dual cultivation (meditating with someone else). As you cultivate, all of your stats increase, often to an absurd degree; a cultivator at the “Foundation” tier can easily wreck one at the “Refining” tier, and so on and so forth up the chain. You periodically reach “breakthroughs” where you have to consume items to earn the ability to gain more XP; pills for the middle breakthroughs, and mystical items for the tier advances. The main reason to do this is it makes you much better at combat.
Combat is pretty simple. You have 5 slots for consumables and 4 slots for active skills: Main, Special, Move, and Ultimate. It plays basically identical to Realm of the Mad God, including all combat taking place in a relatively featureless plain without interesting terrain but with the occasional tree or rock to block stuff. Normal enemies die really quickly, while bosses take longer and have more complicated patterns. Overall though it’s honestly too simple, and I wish there were different arenas and more interesting encounters. As is you mostly breeze through combat (if you’re around the right tier, have good skills, etc) or you get obliterated (if you aren’t prepared).
When not in combat, you roam a tiled world map composed of towns, dungeons, danger regions, and sect fortresses. You get 30 turns to do stuff before the month ends and “the world evolves”.
What does this mean? Well, other cultivators are playing the same game you are, so to speak. So at the end of the month, they all take their particular turns, interact with you, put items up for auction, join sects, defeat monsters, stare, stare, and then you get to take your turn again.
You can also do all this with other cultivators as well; ply them with gifts, cultivate with them, have them become your master (or student), marry them, steal from them, kill them, etc. In fact, cultivators are easily the most dangerous enemy you’ll face in this game, because as mentioned above, a cultivator who is merely one tier higher than you can often kill you in 2-3 hits. And doing things to lower-level cultivators with more powerful family or friends is… a very bad idea. The cycle of vengeance!
A big part of what cultivators do is form sects. There was actually a big update recently that added a whole strategy layer to inter-sect combat, but since it’s only half-translated, I can’t make heads or tails of it. However, that’s not the main reason to join a sect. Rather, you join sects to get high-level manuals for the type of martial art you want to learn (like Fist or Earth or whatever).
In order to learn a skill, you have to find a manual, have the appropriate number of spirit stones, have enough time left in the current month, and do this little minigame depicted above where you left click blue bubbles (to collect) and right click red ones (to destroy). Once you do all this, if you avoided enough “deviation”, you learn the skill.
Did I mention skills are basically like Diablo items? They get random affixes and effects that you can pump up by “comprehending” (read: enchanting) them. Main and Special skills also often play into each other. For example, Loose Woman has an earth attack that builds Stoneskin, and then an earth special that summons a meteor which consumes all stacks of stoneskin and does more damage.
There’s also some passive skills that buff normal stats like your defense or resistance. Very important to get some of these, and they have their own little build considerations too.
It’s complete systems hell, and despite how totally average the combat is, I’m starting to like it a lot. The relationship system between cultivators means I’m constantly accidentally sending ripples through the web by pissing off the wrong guys, and the sheer amount of stuff crammed into this game is ridiculous. And I’ve only puttered around the first relatively safe area too; there’s three areas of ascending difficulty and loot value.
Between this and Sands of Salzaar (more on that in a future post) I’m enjoying the newly-translated Chinese RPGs being released on Steam.
Oh and I wanna see if I can change what names are used for other cultivators so I can create a whole cultivation world of Selectbuttoners.
17 Likes
Armored Core 3 Portable rules but it’s brutal. Thanks for the PSP @VastleCania, putting it to good use :))
7 Likes
Guy who whines about the omnipresence of Marvel movies and content here to say that while I’m fucking awful at the combat (I gotta be doing something wrong because I’m getting swarmed and my ass kicked constantly), I am having a good time with Guardians of the Galaxy.
It’s a very Expensive Game with incredible art design and with writing that has so far cracked me up way more often than I expected it to (it came off so stilted in those E3 trailers, but I gotta assume they slowed those down so people watching them could read the choices).
I dunno, it had me doing the thing where I kept glancing at my alarm clock and doing math on how much sleep I’d get before work this morning if I kept playing it, and those types of games don’t come around often! But it is also very much a laser honed Grandpa game, so take all this as you will.
10 Likes
Made a list of all my favourite stage names in Super Monkey Ball: Banana Mania
Serpentine
Composition
Lunchbox
Scabrous
Jolt Channel
Veer Field
Millefeuille
Fat Seesaw
Hounds Tooth
D.N.A
Concentric
Spatiotemporal
Paper Work
Twin Attacker
SEGA Logo
Fall Down
Spiral Hard
Bonus Bumpy
Ant Lion Super
Speedy Jam
Quake
Cassiopeia (my favourite)
Bowl Open
Breathe
Metamorphosis
Magic Hand
Sanctuary
Daa Loo Maa
Stamina Master
Edge Master
Dance Master
Monkey Master
Windy Slide
Fluctuation
Gravity Slider
Totalitarianism
Organic Form
Mad Rings
Curvy Options
Cascade
Giant Comb
Dynamic Maze
Triangle Holes
Amida Lot
Jump Machine
Switch Inferno
Double Spiral
Hierarchy
8 Bracelets
Soft Cream
Momentum
Entangled Path
Vortex
Swing Shaft
Serial Jump
Orbiters
Strata
Train Worm
Intermittent
Long Torus
Spasmodic
Double Twin
Sliced Cheese
Dizzy System
Destiny (AKA Gamecube)
12 Likes
I hollered out loud when I saw “TOTALITARIANISM” pop up on my screen.
9 Likes
Loose Woman and her successor, Oneten Pulltime, both died permanently in Qi Refining Late. Turns out hunting Mythical Beasts on Nightmare difficulty is a lot harder than I thought!
My newest guy, Bungo Bilbis, has the Reincarnation destiny, which led to this funny intro text.
Imagining the light novel title for this. A Car Hit Me And I Ended Up In The World Of Cultivation?!
7 Likes
all my names keep getting killed! rip oneten pulltime, another victim of an early pull
2 Likes