I almost bought Redo when Broco mentioned it a while back, but I concluded that I’d find it too difficult and give up early on. But this time I did buy it (half price on Steam at the moment) so we’ll see. If there’s Nihei influence, that might be enough to keep me engaged even if I get frustrated.
Just finished the standard levels of Portal on the Switch. I like the cool things it does with portals, especially visually, when looking through a wall with the portal on, etc.
As a game, I tend to get bored by puzzle games, and in this case I disliked to have to hunt, sometimes, the small piece of wall to attach a portal on to proceed, especially in cases where such walls are hardly visible.
Also, I don’t like to have to hunt and calculate where beams need to go and keep producing more portals to follow the math. It feels like school homework for me… too much mathematics goong on in the level design.
It’s a similar feeling to what I felt playong Breath of the wild shirnes, which were a chore for me (math and physica puzzles).
Thankully Portal is short enough and the great things it does technically make the puzzles tolerable even for me.
I played the Advanced version of chamber 13 and it is already quite crazy, requiring a less conventional, more risky way to proceed. A bit more stressful but I liked it a lot.
Yeah I just finished the game and immediately played two more hours of NG+, the second quest is really sweet! The routes are entirely different from the normal game too, since shortcuts are unlocked early too and impassable boxes have been moved around. + the world is fleshed out a little more. Also, is that where the name of the game comes from?
While the game’s difficult, learning the map and enemies by simply playing helps a lot, and the execution barrier isn’t high. That’s why I’m finding the second playthrough on NG+ hard easier, despite the much harsher enemy placements and respawning bosses
I’m still not sure exactly why it’s called Redo!. IMO it’s a pretty poor choice of title, shoulda gone with something moody and atmospheric.
In my mind, the game has a fair bit in common with Elliot Quest, another lonely/punishing solo dev game. Including a not-particularly-evocative title that you have to look past before you feel a spark of genuine curiosity about what the game might have to offer
decided to see if halo infinite is any better and i’m glad there are more modes and btb matchmaking actually works now! makes it easy to meet and play with friendly people like
I started playing Ender Lilies for some reason. It’s a totally standard metroidvania. Every enemy flashes red before every attack because the game is terrified of being unfair. The second boss is tanky and has two levels of enrage. Music’s pretty good. I’m enjoying it
I’ll admit the artwork has nearly convinced me to buy this one a few times, I’ll be curious to see if you think it holds up
As a long time Ratchet and Clank enjoyer, my time with the series is often unrewarding and baffling. My theory is the series trundles along because there basically aren’t any other games that fit this genre niche – 3D platformer/third person run and gun shooter - especially at this development budget. It’s been going so long its target audience of younger players has probably shifted generation at least twice. Its tone has also got markedly tamer as the rough edges and innuendo have been smoothed out by its own lack of identity. I’m not sure it really has any ideas left or even much to say design-wise. It’s just become a place to render 1000 things on screen. What we are left with is a very round Pixar sphere that won’t be upsetting anyone.
So Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart does end up a somewhat technically pretty game with little soul. Jokes and character friction are weak and rely on the same shit we’ve sat through for literally decades. Robot empires and corporations are evil but in a mundane, employee announcement kinda way that is the basis for so much humour popularised since Portal. Mysterious or esoteric people and things end up having regular names like ‘Gary’. Uproarious cackling follows.
The series’ core mechanics are so expected we barely explore movement mechanics as a major focus of the level anymore. Grindrails, swingshots and jet boots are all briefly thrown at the player rather than being something we seek out to progress through the world. They just appear when we need them. Even new shit like the rift tether is just a fancy looking stationary swingshot target.
As a result, the game aspires to be nothing more than combat comfort food. You buy your guns and get on the weapon upgrade carousel. I don’t even like half the weapons but rotating through them just to get them upgraded is probably the most engaging the loop gets at this point. Some of the weapons are neat but most are too slow, low damage or short range by themselves that you basically have to invest in the weapons that work independently from you like drones, turrets etc. Because there have been so many weapons over time, the series now falls into the same weapon archetypes it probably tried to get away from in its earlier entries. Stingy ammo drops in particular seem really geared around getting you to switch weapons more regularly than NuDoom.
The plot premise is you go to an alternate universe of the series where the heroes suck and the villains are undefeated. The doppelgangers of the core cast are more interesting characters because they can afford to have some character conflict (because they don’t have 10 games worth of character writing weighing them down) and are more interesting because they are generally failures. Rivet (alt-universe Ratchet) in particular is generally more entertaining with dialogue since she has a fresher bag of character writing to draw from. She tends to have funnier responses to enemies that are less expected and she exists within her world a lot more than Ratchet does in his. She also expresses a lot more without dialogue in key scenes, better expressing frustration and cynicism without saying anything. The game may also be unintentionally pointing out how stupid the hero fixation in the series is. Ratchet is now extremely uninteresting as a character because the games remind us he’s a capital-H-hero at the start of every single adventure. Rivet is basically a rebel terrorist whose friends are mostly dead but maintains some realistic determination. It’s not much but she was an intermittent relief given half the planets are tied to Ratchet and the other to Rivet.
Ratchet and Clank (the actual characters) used to bitch and argue with each other in the first game. But by Tools of Destruction they’re basically forever-friends with no arc left. Ratchet is still trying to find his native race who all vanished to a pocket dimension. This has been his arc since 2007 and it will never resolve. Meanwhile Clank is really smart. They try to give Clank a disability for him to come to terms with in Rift Apart but it’s so rushed through as an arc it kind of feels a bit like they wanted a prosocial message without setting it up with the nuance it needs. Especially since Clank has been broken many times before and is a robot. What’s the difference in this case, what rules do we operate by? Everyone is trapped in a non-arc of vaguely wanting something but then this is a ‘series for children’ which became abundantly clear by the credits which ignored resolving the tensions the arcs presented and popped a mirror out of the console to reveal that I was the oldest person.
One interesting thing they do try is the alternate version of Ratchet and Clank (Rivet and Kit) first met when Kit maims Rivet (Kit initially worked for the bad guys). They don’t realise this upon first meeting since it’s not mentioned for a while and Kit was transformed at the time. When Rivet finds out she’s understandably fucking furious and they almost do an interesting darker version of the original narrative, but everyone is friends by the end because friends help each other.
This type of game on a PS5 means the scope has been severely curtailed and there are only 10 planets (dwindling from 22 down by 2 roughly every entry) – some with big open areas, some that are literally 2 grindrail tracks or an arena. This is the smart decision given the resources spent elsewhere but it does feel like the series’ time is kinda over (has been over?), except I assume these keep making money because they occupy the aforementioned niche.
The biggest highlight for me is probably the accessibility which just about let me play the entire game with my left hand and two fingers on the right (one on right analog and one on face buttons). Toggling being possible for most combat buttons was a lifesaver and more games need to consider it. The game is buggy as hell though. The accessibility option that lets you toggle all movement inputs to Circle kept triggering the jetboots upon landing like 40% of the time with no clear reason why – so I’m zooming off small platforms or into a boss attack. I ain’t even pressing Circle. Then when holding Circle to actually activate them my character would just freeze in place and not complete the dash animation like half the times I did it. So yes, the game is technically impressive and has good accessibility options but it’s not really in service of much and is oddly unpolished. I’ll probably platinum it because this is my comfort food but I don’t think I can play any more of these without frustration.
This was my exact experience with sunset overdrive…hold one button to traverse and then use the auto weapons as much as possible because nothing feels particularly satisfying.
My lord Alundra is long. Did I save before I quit? I saved right. Lord I don’t even remember. Ah jeez.
Edit: I didn’t
I played Corrypt. I didn’t even know Brough made anything that wasn’t a roguelike. It is the most powerful sokoban I’ve played outside of Baba is You. The bricks are sticky and it makes visualizing movement so much harder. After two hours, I made it to the point where the game reveals it’s true self and my head exploded with possibilities. It is a true successor to Metroid.
Magic is perilous.
Yeah it’s a very similar feeling. I really wanted to like Sunset Overdrive but it’s almost not strange enough.
Yeah Corrypt is such a genius little thing, I think I referred to it as a “lightbulb” game before for all the lightbulb-lighting-up-over-your-head moments of realization it provides.
my sister was streaming wolfenstein old blood and every time she had to kill a dog paused the stream and was like “okay I have to send this dog away to live on a nice farm, close your eyes if you don’t want to see that”
Rygar splashing out on hazy golden god rays and cool blue caustics in this first level which is lovingly stuffed with banners and broken statues and brush and billboarded ruins layered into the distance of barely glimpsed exteriors.
Unfortunately the second level drops off in this ̶r̶y̶g̶a̶r̶d̶ regard, hope it picks up again. Some of the transitions between static camera angles are a bit disorienting like going from this spike corridor
to this little nook on the side
but with that kinda moody framing I can’t complain too much (not a combat area either so). MVP environments for sure, combat is pleasantly braindead so far and the plot/characters are thin cheese but the environments…I love how much rock and ruin you can demolish into bits, that was definitely a big fat bullet point under Core Values or whatever in the design document and hell yes well done.
this game was kind of ahead of its time imo
TIS-100 kills me with easy levels and then showing the efficiency of my solution on the global leaderboards. yes I know my code is shit, let’s move on and not spend 10 minutes looking to squeeze out a couple more cycles/drop some instructions
am up to the images and too busy trying to remember how to write nested loops in assembly. reminded of uni lab sessions and failing to implement print in MIPS in less than an hour
the way you’re capturing these images looks so great
thanks 
just using a phone to record my little 14" CRT (which used to be part of my friend’s performance art show many years ago, it’s seen some action!) then converting .mov to .gif online
