anyway I would NOT have guessed a few years ago that I’d become someone who only plays yakuza, resident evil, and xcom/fft knockoffs, but eh, good for me
definitely haven’t played 3 hours of anything new in one sitting for a long time, probably since the RE2 remake
Even though I’m using spoilers, I still want to be vague:
I found the option to take some sort of action which would have consequences that I couldn’t anticipate. My curiosity was too great, so I decided to go through with that choice. Before I made that choice, I had been cooperating with one character to generally undermine a second character; after the choice, I found that my loyalties had reversed, and I now found myself wanting to work with my earlier opponent against my former collaborator.
I had mostly the same outcomes here as the ones you described.
I definitely visited more locations than you did, but as far as that last location is concerned, I don’t think there’s any way for Aliya to get there.
The reason the last part is possible is that you’ve found the Heaven’s Vault. If a hopper shifts you a short way through space, a vault shifts you dramatically further; potentially out of the nebula. With that kind of technology, it’s a trivial affair to get you back to Iox; it was only a point of no return if you were trying to use the rivers to get back. (There was no way to be sure before you reached it that the Heaven’s Vault would still be operational.)
Been playing Barotrauma with some non-SB friends, and also another campaign with veronica. trying to rope some other people into a game.
It’s great! The store pitch is “FTL but with subs” but the better pitch is “sea station 13”. You play a crewman on a sub in Europa’s under-ice oceans. Explore, trade, craft, rewire, repair, and inevitably die to the abyss.
Because the whole game is physically modeled, there’s lots of emergent behaviors. Like, let’s say an ocean current is keeping you from descending. Break one of your bulkheads to flood a room and turn it into a makeshift ballast! Or maybe you want to set up an automatic grow op for selling tobacco to the stations you pass by and dock at. Or maybe you just want to cause havoc with a clown mallet that forces whoever you hit to ragdoll for half a second.
(My personal favorite is that whenever the sub gets hit, all that kinetic energy goes through the hull and makes everyone inside ragdoll and get flung around)
There’s basically no penalty for death - you simply reset to your last save, which is always the last station you undocked at - so rounds range from the quiet and uneventful where you mine and explore, to sheer chaos where your sub almost explodes and everyone kills each other to force a save load.
There’s a couple different modes too, including traitor/PvP. The meat of the game seems to center around campaign, though, which is structured similar to FTL (go to nodes, random events) but more focused around establishing human settlements and trading and such. Elite might be a better comparison, actually.
Veronica and I’s first game ended in disaster because we didn’t have enough fuel rods. The second game, we got attacked by crawlers (the weakest enemy type) which flooded our entire ship and caused the whole thing to sink to a depth where the pressure made the hull start cracking apart. We managed to make it back up to normal depths, but the damage to our reactor was too great, and it exploded, setting the sub on fire and killing us.
Oh and there’s a whole sub construction angle, where you can make your own subs in an editor, as well as wiring up or altering the sub you have already. Make that space your home!
Glad I ended up picking it up, because it satisfies the inner systems nerd in me, and also it’s just fun to constantly be on the verge of disaster without the anxiety of it permanently destroying a save. Here’s a meme video to celebrate:
I checked out RE2 remake and Yakuza Like A Dragon this year and my reaction in each case “this isn’t bad and I can see why it’s popular but I think I’ll refund this and go play something else now” so I am the person you imagined you’d be a few years ago I guess
granted, I had that reaction to Bloodstained and Horizon, both of which I know you liked for probably similar reasons!
a lot of recent instalments in these big ambling japanese franchises have been really, really funny which helps – it feels like they were able to get their tooling out of the way of their writers and designers, which makes a big difference with big games
Yeah it makes me think there’s more room for subjectivity in big sloppy maximalist games. There’s more opportunity for two different players to be playing a different game both in the literal sense of picking a different route and build and in the subjective sense of what do you perceive and think about as you’re playing
new protagonists was just what they needed in yakuza and I love this loan shark whose a friend of the hobo’s voiced by spike spiegel
at one point when our ship was sinking down to crush depth i got knocked into the airlock by an intruder i was knife fighting and sucked out into the open water, where the current proceeded to carry me upwards. after literally like 5 minutes of helplessly drifting upwards i came upon the corpse of a crawler we’d killed with the ship’s guns during the initial disaster and grabbed it, weighing myself down enough to sink back down onto the deck of the ship and then crawl like 100 feet back to the airlock dragging the fucking thing behind me. its so fuckin cool that my first thought actually worked and saved my life, well, for the like 15 minutes before the engineer developed psychosis and let the reactor explode
Treachery of Beatdown City can jump in a lake. After far too much talking and a reference to Obama, I got a tutorial on beating up a vending machine AND THEN a stop play tutorial on how to pick up items.
oblig 
AM2R impressions so far: this game is a morality tale about my impatience and hubris in repeatedly trying to kill several larval-stage Metroids in a row instead of conservatively trekking back to the save point between each kill.
I’ve killed these before and they’re so simple, what could go wrong
New subplot: why it may not be a great plan to sequence break into the high-jump area without high-jump
I picked up Metroid II at a thrift store the other day, marvelous find, for three dollars! Reading others’ experiences even in the remake is joyous
we were on a routine salvage mission in Barotrauma when i cut open a hatch in a wreck and literally 8 parasite infested corpses in diving suits poured out to fucking beat me to death. it was absolutely terrifying. anyway immediately afterwards two of our AI crew members started talking about unionizing. RIP captain paul wall, your death was unnecessary and wasteful
i finished biohazard viiillage and it fucking RULES!! i was admittedly a bit worried about it, as i was not especially thrilled with the re2 and re3 remakes, but this was unfounded. i won’t go into too much story detail because it literally came out yesterday, so i will instead say that 2021 will be dominated by me getting high scores in the mercenaries mode.
and i’m still shocked the game went there (blurring the image for intense spoiler reasons)
i think this somehow infected one of our ai crewmates with a husk parasite. the gunner he was working alongside shouted about him being an enemy and shot him in the head with her revolver. i finished him off with five harpoon shots to the chest.
we got caught in a loop of fixing the leaks and mechanical problems only for one measly enemy to flood the junction box and all the ship power to fail and the sub to sink to the bottom. eventually i figured out that i needed to put the remaining gunner crewmate on the TOP gun. after we finally killed the one extremely weak enemy causing our enormous attack sub to sink over and over, we finally made it to base, but not without failing our extremely easy mission.
god bless the crew of the esn shitbox
Chroma Squad is pretty cute, I think Sentai show is an underutilized theme for games and I think it lends itself very well to a light SRPG. The meta-layer of having to keep the audience entertained by fulfilling optional objectives keeps things interesting although I can see for myself personally that it’ll probably be a source of frustration.
Probably not going to play more of it than I have but I appreciate that this game exists.
Reporting back to say that I think this was just a weirdly balanced beginning, and not emblematic of the challenge that the rest of the game poses.
Okay, Action Henk is a helluva game. It’s a time-attack platformer. There’s a greater emphasis on precision platforming to shave off seconds, the levels being of middling challenge in terms of being able to complete them.
Shades of Trials and Sonic but maybe that’s a bit misrepresentative. Downhill slides, grappling hooks, wall jumps, etc. are part of the move set and it feels great to maintain your momentum in this game. I think the walljumps are maybe a hair fiddly but that’s a minor gripe.
Mikey’s suggestion: turn off the boring music, turn down the vfx to a just-audible level, put on your favorite uptempo jams.
Finally got around to trying Gyroscope (c64).
It’s every bit as compelling as it looks.
They really nailed the movement/controls:
It doesn’t feel like I’m directly moving the gyroscope, it feels like I’m tilting the world to control the gyroscope.
I love the music. I especially love the way the music slows down when a new stage loads in.
