No fear of that, as part of my exhaustive explorahoarder personality I do all sidequests as soon as they are available and delay main story stuff as much as possible.
Turns out, this is a pretty good instinct in this game, because story missions actually change the state of the station and its inhabitants and can make previous things uncompletable! This is very good! I actually didn’t expect the game to be so bold about making events occur around the station that change its geography.
I also didn’t expect timed events - they just sprinkle a few in there without fanfare, they’re not A System or anything. It’s just, if it makes sense for something to be time limited… it is. Sometimes it’s like 2 or 4 hours, something that can be mulled over a bit but must be done with some alacrity. Sometimes it’s a real emergency and you’ve got like 10 minutes.
I’m into the endgame now and I have become very impressed. Usually this is where these games start to suck the most, but I’d say it’s some of the best design yet. Really have to put your knowledge of how the station is put together and all the different alternative modes of travel to use, and the game gets much harder! I am burning through some of these resources I have hoarded! That’s a pretty excellent payoff especially considering the complaint in my last post.
This flow - powerful opener, taut early game, loose saggy midgame, tough explosive endgame - is something I think a lot of games reach for but very few really succeed at. This is quite an achievement.
I mean I haven’t actually beat it yet, maybe something right at the end super sucks, but yeah… I am digging this more and more.
Funny thing my friend did when he played Prey was confuse obligatory fake-out ending that Shock games used to offer you for the real one, leaving about 1/2 through the game in an escape pod and sitting kind of angrily with feelings like he had gotten ripped off for paying full-price on a game that short and unceremonious. Was not the first concerning thing my friend had ever done, but it does stand out.
you’re making me want to give it another shot but I think I put it down at least 4 times, including trying out the DLC, even after @B_coma kept mentioning how structurally impressive it was, having been privy to the VA scoping.
I think my longest playthrough lasted up to the point of me having 6 or 7 weapons and having gone outside of the ship at least once or twice and I couldn’t get over the feeling of being led through the motions of an 0451 game, even down to the heavy-handedness of the NPCs (wasn’t there a professor calvino? tch) and the deliberately irritating encounter design. and I hate, hate, hate the way arkane insists on revealing skill trees to you from the start of the game and taking all the mystery out of them.
I was happy enough with their thematic goals and it’s almost certainly the best executed game of its provenance, especially considering how much worse scope creep is getting lately, but they withheld hooks and refused to subvert my expectations, idk
can’t remember if i posted about this, but i bought Xeno Crisis for the Sega Genesis and really dig it. i also beat it yesterday, but got the “bad” ending which means i used continues. i don’t know if i really feel like going for the “true” ending, as that’s sort of a ridiculous stipulation, but i’ll probably just work on it progressively.
I can’t imagine it would be much fun to play this game Felix-style, rocketing at blistering speeds towards the nearest required objective. If you don’t get a slight thrill out of taking every lemon peel out of every trash can on the space station I don’t think it’s for you.
Apparently there is an achievement for beating the game without using any skill points (which are also physical items essential to the plot which is definitely one of the game’s best strokes), which… that seems really boring.
He makes a whole diorama of his storm-tossed Italian village so he can project it into his experimental hologram screen technology out of nostalgia and homesickness. He’s also a cranky old asshole who bothers crew members half his age with his silly accent. Absolute top tier Felix character
it’s funny, I never think of myself as approaching games this way, but I guess I do require some amount of elision to save me from my own OCD and I wasn’t getting it
I don’t think I even finished the demo for Prey before bouncing off of it (I could not deal with the small quick enemies darting around), but people keep talking it up and making me think I should give it another shot, but then I realize that if there were a petition to stop people from making games about exploring an abandoned space ship/station trying to figure out what happened there for at least five or so years not only would I sign it I’d try to gather as many other signatures as humanly possible.
I finally setup and had a night with my PC Engine Mini. i did a bonk and a blazing lazers. And then I tucked in to Tokimeki Memorial.
I thought at first this game was only 2 hours long and then realized “oh it is 3 years long”. I quickly focused on one girl and equally quickly exhausted my options for this one girl. They want you to play the field.
The voice actresses do a real good job. Lots of nuance to their performances though you quickly get sick of your friend going “we don’t hang bro” and me going “WE HUNG OUT YESTERDAY.”
Let’s focus that this is a game about the player being an adult and fixing high school with adult knowledge. There’s no way that’s not fucked up. This isn’t feeling nostalgia or regret for high school this isn’t a movie about high school. This is about having a time machine to fix the problems in an idealized high school. There are no parents or teachers present. No adults to call you on your shit.
I as an adult and a parent thought about that a lot. The most profound feeling it introduced in me is hoping my own child has positive high school experiences and lots of them. They are mathematically closer to high school than I am. I’ve been thinking about that I am at the inverse point in my life where I have been “an adult” for longer than I was “a kid”.
I guess I will betray my “girlfriend” and date these other animes just to see. It is if nothing else making me doing the linguisitic calculus in Japanese: いいならと思う。 That’s nice. Flex some social Japanese muscles I haven’t gotten to use since I haven’t had a conversation in 8 months.
I picked Heaven’s Vault for my little game playing club back in November and we’re finally going to discuss the ending tomorrow. I’m right at the precipice of the end so I don’t know yet what will happen; however, I think this game is pretty special. Now that I’ve played this and 80 Days, I’m convinced that I have to play all of inkle’s games.
This seems to be the most ambitious, highest budget game the studio has tried so far and I personally think that they’ve achieved many of their ambitions. There’s an open, mind map structure to the game that is very overwhelming to parse when you start in media res. But that structure works toward the games themes of knowledge seeking and discovery. Crucially, knowledge seeking is presented as a collaborative effort and the context-sensitive conversation system reinforces that.
At first, I found inkle’s jump to 3D to be somewhat awkward, yet there are several set pieces that justify the effort. I was also hesitant to embrace the sailing portions of the game, and while I still find them to be a little too drawn out, they set a slow pace that gave me time to reflect on new discoveries and how they fit into my understanding of the world and it’s history.
Crucially, little of the information presented to you is given as straight fact. Rather, it is shaped and molded by inferences on whatever prior theories you had spun earlier. Great stuff, beautifully executed.
The UI that facilitates the supposition/confirmation game and the timeline stuff is incredible; I really wish they had a better handle on 3D or the character cutout work they did worked better, because while it doesn’t matter, the game should be beautiful and I don’t think it is at all.
I agree that the visuals are merely passable for the most part. But the music does a lot of heavy lifting and Laurence Chapman deserves all the credit he can get.
I got mad today replaying through SMT1 using speedrun strategies and now the ESC key is missing from my keyboard and I’m not sure where it is. Why does the mapping in SMT1 have to be so bad? Also, running from a battle always pushes you back a tile, sometimes even pushes you back into the prior room you were in, which is absolutely infuriating when the same tile is giving you a battle four or five times in a fucking row and you keep getting pushed back through a door. Fucking hell. The American Embassy sucks. Thanks for taking Chaos Hero with his Estoma out of my party for absolutely no good reason.
Beat Prey. A couple different ways, which you can choose near the end in true Deus Ex fashion. I very much like the ambiguity of the two main ending branches, there is no obvious “good” and “bad” ending (though the internet seems dead set on insisting that there is). Also there is post-credits tag with one final twist which I more or less saw coming due to a bit of foreshadowing during the game which does a kind of organic final tally of your C&C’s, all in a way that makes diegetic sense.
I guess I kind of see where Felix is coming from in that it’s so expertly crafted as An 0451 For The Next Generation. It’s a bit pat. But I cannot deny how much fun I had while playing it; how satisfying it was slowly revealing the internal mechanisms of the station and learning to manipulate them; how cool the zero-G environments were; and, most surprising to me personally, how willing the game was to fundamentally alter its geography in response to plot events, completionist consequences be damned. It’s a very healthy game. You can take it seriously, but it resists perfectionism.
The 0451 game when I was getting into non-console games was BioShock so it’s really hard to take this as a knock. It’s far better than Human Revolution and even salvages some of the parts that suckered me in to BioShock e.g. art deco and encounter planning.
I’d love to play something written and scoped like Tacoma as an action game but Prey (2017) is probably the last 0451 for a while.
I have no real desire to play Mooncrash because level design is like, the reason to play this game but apparently it is constructed out of bits of gaiden content and I don’t know if I can resist…
