So on Netflix there’s an interactive cartoon called Cat Burglar. It plays out as a 10-minute Tex Avery-style cartoon where a cat (who is a burglar) is trying to steal a priceless piece of art from a museum. You don’t do QTEs or make choices, though. You will be, at various points, confronted with “Trivia” questions, and you’ll need to answer 3 before a short timer runs out.
They don’t realllly require knowledge. You get two answers to choose from, and one usually seems to be obviously wrong but worded in a way that can momentarily fake you out. So I guess the challenge comes from the limited time you have to read and answer. For each round of trivia, you must answer all three correctly or the Cat Burglar gets killed in a cartoonish way, complete with little Cat Angel ascending from his body. You’ve got 3 lives before game over.
Now here’s the one wrinkle that’s interesting, I suppose: There’s an intro part of the cartoon, but after that, there’s basically one of 5 random paths the cartoon takes. Generally the same, just with a different set of antics (and a different priceless painting to be stolen). The game lets you know this after you finish a run. So there winds up being about an hour worth of content. I’ve only gone through once but I will probably check out the rest here and there when I’ve got a few minutes to kill.
As far as the animation and such goes – it’s pretty good! Typical japes and hijinks and slapstick violence kind of stuff. Nothing too grotesque, btw, when I say violence. It stops short of Itchy & Scratchy territory. I did get a chuckle once when I did die, because the cat narrowly averts dying in a gruesome way only to get iced a second later by a complete non-sequitur. The action does seem to branch off reactively to failures and successes, though sometimes you just get a do-over.
i played the demo of this game Cursed To Golf when i was streaming other demos this past monday (in particular enjoyed the Slayers X and SIGNALIS demos) and like… i truly didn’t expect to hate the game as much as i did. the thing is the tutorial contained some “story” to the game which made it initially seem more interesting. but then it shoved me through what felt like ages of annoying tutorials with a heckin’ epic lolz scottish ghost dad guy telling me in detail how to do everything. and then when i was free i immediately did horribly because the controls are so bizarre and unintuitive in a way you don’t expect games that look this hyper-polished to be… and then it immediately shoved me into another long tutorial trying to get me to understand some new concept with the game that took me forever to understand.
i assume it’s built not for PC controls? i don’t know. all i know is i usually like Golf games (love Golf Story) but i genuinely hated my experience with this game and i’m still thinking about it almost a week on. also the chiptune music was shrill and constant. not a fan!
also i started Disco Elysium earlier this week. i like it so far! i’m always worried i’m going to hate stuff that’s super hyped these days, so glad to find that’s not the case at all with this game so ffar.
I bought a PS5 and so thought I’d try and clear out my PS4 backlog. The only two games I had left to do were Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin and Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye.
Das2 I managed to get to the Pursuer before I realised I still cannot actually play the game with my hands the way they are (but they’re getting stronger thanks to some putty the NHS gave me!). If there was a toggle shield option or an easier way to manage camera, lockon and dodging without needing your right thumb I might’ve bothered. In the end I just watched the rest of the game. I was initially attracted by what people here had discussed about it being a remix similar to a ROM or bizarre NES sequel. I liked some of the changes made to enemy placements and ideas in some areas, but I felt like these really fell off hard once you get a few areas into the game.
I think I’ve got a better appreciation for the dreamy lost memory theme in the game, but I still find the game just too slow and drab-looking to tolerate for too long. I had a memory of liking Velstadt, Executioner’s Chariot and Demon of Song, and that is mostly intact. Area-wise, I thought I liked Brightstone Cove Tseldora, Aldia’s Keep and Vendrick’s Castle but I just came away feeling like the game is pretty combat oriented for most levels. The world and feeling of presence in a space is lost but maybe that’s the point. I read back on 2, Bloodborne and 3, and I realised that they came out within 3 years of each other and I get the impression that 2 is the B-team? There’s just so many basic level design decisions, so many gigantic square rooms with 3-4 chests in them and nothing else. Not every level suffers from this but locations are just so bereft of sense and place. Some good ideas exist in places like Doors of Pharros or the Majula well but they’re drowned in slog. It’s flexibility for builds in the early game is generous and Majula remains a great hub but I just had an awful time watching it. I was hoping to revisit it with a kinder outlook but some frustrations are fathoms deep. The DLC (which I’d never seen before) was pretty dull too. I’m hoping that when I come to the Demon’s Souls Remake I won’t find that I am now just bored of all Souls games.
Echoes of the Eye was pretty cool but like Das2, I tried playing it and could not handle how many buttons I needed to hold. I really enjoyed the base game back in the day but I could really tell this was gonna be too much effort so I just watched this as well. The stealth sections confirmed my fear that I’d really hate some kind of repetitive navigation challenge which sets you back too far if you fail. Best choice by far is doing away with translation altogether – not because it’s bad but it makes it stand on different strengths to the base game. Makes me think that the Nomai story might’ve had a similar sense of dread without all the friendly banter everywhere. It’s a shame that the ending is a lot less interesting than the initial premise. It’s tidy how it contributes to the entire game’s ending but there’s a bit too much time spent in the simulation for my taste. Towards the end it becomes about systemic exploration of rules more so than the studying of a solar system and its history. They are both interesting but I found the latter more compelling. But I also watched it so imagine that I am shrugging.
played about an hour of Half-Life: Alyx, it’s good, really solidly done VR with a lot of attention to detail. There’s something great about walking into a room and realising it’s full of headcrab zombies and whispering “oh fuck” to yourself quietly so as to avoid waking them (even though that’s not actually a game mechanic)
I actually decided to do this on my own with certain teams and it did seem to help things go better. The game at this point seems to jumble your team up frequently so I decided its probably best to not worry too much about setting up paradigms too in depth just yet, but whenever I get a new team I look at the default ones and if I feel like it adjust their order and mentally figure out when to jump around. I also decided that I’ll just look at the level up system whenever I get to a save point and always defer to maxing out a characters “unique” role first, it might not be technically correct but it is nice to sort of set on autopilot for now. I also asked the internet if I need to worry about upgrading stuff and the answer was “maybe around chapter 11” so yay at one less thing to worry about.
Likely nearing the end of chapter 4 and I think the game has gotten into a bit of a groove here. There’s enough stuff to play around with now that I have some basic strategizing to mess around with and knowing that things are linear is enough for me to accept it on its own terms. I cannot overstate how much of a psychological benefit the lack of random battles is for me, seeing a certain amount of enemies ahead of me is so much easier to live with than the ever present light dread of the game deciding to strike at me.
Fate rules. It’s a 2005 dungeon crawler by a bunch of people who would later go on to make Torchlight, and it shows. This is essentially Torchlight Zero to me, a person who never played Fate before. Things that carried over to Torchlight:
Pets that can take your stuff back to town
Fishing in dungeons
Fish that transform your pet into monsters (sometimes permanently)
Fame levels that give you skill points outside of normal levelling
Gambling to add enchantments to your existing items, or curse them
It was also developed in five months and I respect the shortcuts they took to get this game going. All quests are randomized, including the main quest, which I love. The dungeon is in no particular order, switching from theme to theme at its leisure. The dungeon is so randomly generated you can just keep playing it forever. There’s no end. Well, apparently the dungeon goes down to level 2,147,483,647, but you only have to get to level 50-something to beat the game. Still.
There’s only two player character models and no classes - everything is built on the fly using skill points and found spells.
For a game that was developed in five (5) months, it’s very well balanced so far. I’ve died twice, which is about right for 3 hours in a genre I’m tremendously familiar with on the Normal difficulty. The equipment jumps are pretty huge too - I went from taking a while to kill stuff to one-shotting it with a single weapon. A weapon, by the way, that was a quest item but I just cancelled the quest and kept it. The tips screen told me I could do it!!
I also bought some gems that let me increase my attack speed by 15% each - I’ve slotted 3 of those now. So I’m doing 45% more DPS thanks to some wise purchases.
Anyway, game rules, I probably should have picked a harder difficulty but I’m having a blast.
Playing Neon White and I like it a lot, but I don’t think this is a game I’m going to be able to binge; on the 14th(?) stage or so, I could feel myself getting extremely hung up on getting the Ace rank, but sometimes I really struggle with the aiming and I can feel my skills plateau after trying it over and over again. Real important to step away and refresh my head; feels like the tetris effect for bomb-jumping and environmental routing.
I played five hours of Dread Delusion this weekend and it’s fantastic shit. It came out in Early Access a few weeks ago and it’s still missing a lot of stuff/studded with broken dialogue lines, but it’s extremely playable and very satisfying to sink a bunch of hours into.
it’s essentially a PSX Morrowind demake. It’s set on a bunch of floating sky islands covered in mushrooms; the sky is hot pink; the land is covered by nasty factions who are all gross but fun to mess with; you can absolutely steal everything in the starter town. You can enchant yourself to run fast and jump high, you can brew potions, you can equip two pieces of armor and upgrade them at a smith to be nicer. The sun that lights the land is a giant neuron in a neural network brain that you are also trapped inside. There is an NPC trying to do science to prove that everything in this setting is actually made of brains. It’s great.
The combat is extremely throwbacky and is the kind of weird old shit where you are wiggling WSWSWSWS in a terrible attempt to get hits in and dodge the enemy’s strike range. I dunno how I feel about it. I played five hours of it though and intend to play more so I guess that says something about me.
Several quests appear to be unfinishable, so if you are not into that kind of Early Access stuff, wait for the final release, I guess. But please check out some screenshots because they go so hard!! This game looks incredible. So glad I checked it out.
Elechead: This was a pretty nice and slight puzzle platformer. I finished it a bit under two hours, effortlessly completing most puzzles and only getting stuck once. It maybe wasn’t as tight as it could have been, as most secret rooms I found were somewhat lazily hidden and the semi-metroidvania structure gets in the way of hunting for secrets. What can I say but « lmao » at the 100% ending though
Your little Megaman robot protagonist just destroys Earth with a giant orbital laser. No reason given
Archvale: This game’s USP is « what if a RNG-heavy, top-down, twinstick, bullet hell game……………… wasn’t a roguelike? »
It really has nothing to say whatsoever but it’s a blast nonetheless. My only regret is how normal mode is too easy and hard mode too hard IMO
played some more Alyx and the biggest issue I’m having is the reliability of the Quest 2’s inside-out tracking; the hand-cupping-clip weapon posture is most comfortable, but causes your arms to occlude the tracking so your off arm will drift, lol
I tried The Looker last night (freeware parody of The Witness) and it’s actually pretty good from what I’ve seen so far. I got stuck for a while, not knowing what to do next, and had to go to sleep. But I will probably try it again this evening.
Played Trigger Happy Havoc: Danganronpa. I’ve played V3 before and never any of the others so going back is a bit weird given how that game goes but I really got into it. The premise is always strong and plays into the numbers games and rules-establishing, then subsequent rules-lawyering
I’ve probably said it here before, but Masafumi Takada is probably my favourite VG composer and this playthrough was partially motivated by just wanting to hear the music in context. There’s some really excellent stuff. Although there are a lot of remixes that show up again in V3, it’s cool hearing the vanilla compositions.
I'll yammer on about a few of the tracks I really liked:
This one plays in more paranoid scenes, and you can just about hear a scuffling noise that is balanced in such a way that it almost sounds like someone is moving a chair behind you as part of the backing beat. You can hear it repeat in the right channel about 0:40 seconds in. Seems more prominent in the in-game mix, not sure what’s happened to it in these uploads but it’s a little quieter than I remember. Kept creeping me out.
There’s a track that plays during most of the investigation portions of the game which has a real detective-on-the-case breakbeat with woozy passion trumpet, the whole thing being kicked off by mystery synths. It’s a light track that sets the clue-gathering tone. During these sections you’re usually helped along by other characters who are much more experienced at investigation and mystery solving than your character is.
Later in the story, these characters either disappear or don’t trust you enough to investigate with you anymore. The body is literally destroyed in an explosion, the case looks hopeless and then this kicks in. By all accounts it should be jarring given the dire situation but it’s a good case for how repetitive background music can be set up to create narrative peaks through music alone. It starts with ‘you’re awesome’ guitar leading into the breakbeat, no prior theme is present yet but the rhythm is familiar. We come back with some of the previous synths, building up to a duo between the trumpet and guitar implying that we, like the guitar, are roaring through clues, logical deductions in the manner we’ve been taught by our fellow trumpets and synths. We’re on the same page. The connection back to the original intro at 2:00 makes me clench
A lot of the excellent driving electrobeat stuff that Takada excels at tends to be in the class trials and one track kept standing out to me. After countering a person’s incorrect statement with a truth bullet, the music switches to this track as your character then begins to deconstruct what was just said. The intro is just about 15 seconds long which is enough time for two text boxes worth of voice acting to play (the average time it takes your character to explain the rebuttal). I could swear it’s intentional that the kickoff 15 seconds in is meant to punctuate the ‘gotcha’ of the counterargument. Then it becomes a glorious goddamn Wipeout track.
The subsequent discussion stemming from the counterargument usually resolves itself pretty quickly before another new discussion or debate begins, but in cases where the counterargument is more dramatic and requires characters to react or argue at more length, there are developments in the track that happen at about 1:35 and 2:19. 1:35 is a mild breakdown that avoids the loop sounding too ‘loopy’ and punctuates the end of most dialogues as they generally progress this long. At 2:19 a much more harsh and hammering helicopter staccato breakdown happens to draw out the tensions since characters are usually annoyed or yelling at this point in a post-debate dialogue. No idea if any of this is intentional but the synchronicity is glorious
I don’t remember being able to save what people are saying as bullets to use against them mid-debate in V3 but the conversational metaphors are generally quite strong with a few notable stretches of game logic. The rhythm game rebuttal thing is silly, as is the comic book summary/closing argument. Fuck the comic book summary/closing argument. Knitting everything together into a cohesive narrative is satisfying at the end of a mystery but having to guess at which tiny icon represents a panel in the story actually took the wind out of the sails more often than not. You can also fail the closing argument which causes the whole trial to end in disaster as everyone votes for you to die despite all the cogent arguments for who is the killer having already been made. It’s stupid and I regularly failed one closing argument about 5 times in a row due to a couple of panels being very ambiguous. I really don’t think it would be a problem for this section to just play out automatically. The player has paid attention if they got to this point, and the climax is either ruined, or nonsensical if failure is still possible here.
I’m not sure what the convention for autoplay dialogue is in most visual novels but it would be really nice to be able to customise the timer for it. A person saying ‘Yes’ or ‘…’ Is on screen for the perfect amount of time but if anyone uses the maximum space of the text box you’ve got to wait an excruciating like 3 extra seconds before it progresses. I assume it’s calibrated to a certain degree of reading comprehension but just let me customise it. Normally I’d mash through but these were basically rest breaks for my fingers after work.
Well Done for typing this just as the 7/7 bombings and Vanquish soldiers happen. My hopes of fighting classic villains has been well and truly dashed now; with the costumed Rhino being the most rotten tease of all
Night in the woods: while I dislike that it’s a bit slow (just like Oxenfree, for example) and not very satisfying to control, I really liked the story and how gently and intensely it was told
Mutazione: I have started this one, but after the first 1-2 hours I am feeling a bit bored without much motivation to proceed. Should I endure?
Shire the wanderer (ds remake): I played for a few seconds and got slaughtered by some bunnies which kept coming. I had no way to avoid their hits. I am fascinated but also terrified by the idea to retry it
Oh, also:
Thumper: it’s really cool and satisfying but I dont see myself finishing it, because it requires a lot of reflexes, concentration, and it ends up being stressful for me.
More sidequests in Solatorobo, the combat is throwing enemies and then hitting them, but take a look at the upgrade screen
yeah your upgrades are little tetrimino pieces and they correspond to different stats and so you have to not only arrange them in a certain way but add slots strategically to fit certain builds you want to do. It’s very in depth for being basically useless thus far in the game! I don’t care it’s fun.
I’m tired of only playing it on my laptop so I may try to find a non shady R4 flash cart to slap a rom onto. Being able to screenshot and post the dialog via emulator is nice though.
Now that my game’s save system actually sort of works I can play through more of my game instead of the first 2 or 3 in game days. After 6 years of development all the stupid systems actually kind of mesh pretty well together despite a lot of inherit jank and me knowing how to play the game (*). I have it tuned to be very easy right now but there’s still a lot of tension going on with the game, tension that is 100% systems driven, so it’s tension i feel fresh. Hopefully I can fix the dozens of bugs I found
(*) On hazard of game development is you are the only person who plays the game and therefore don’t get a lot of outside feedback for a very long time, and as a result things you don’t know to signpost for or point out in a tutorial are things you just get muscle memory for because you’ve played 100s of hours of it
