Games You Played Today IV: Quest of the Avatar

King of Posters
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Recent games played:

Spellcaster University - Harry Potter knockoff Hogwarts Builder with a few interesting ideas and a lot of flaws. Your choices of how to build the harry potter castle are based around which cards you have in hand, and you generate various currencies from student behavior that you spend to draw from six “decks” of cards which contain different kinds of rooms.

This could be cool, but most of the optimization mechanics present in facility builder games like the Two Point games, theme park sims, etc, are missing from this game–you cannot move or demolish rooms, you cannot fire or hire or optimize your teaching staff beyond a few upgrades, which again you cannot select for because you draw them randomly, etc.

Optimizing the wellbeing of the simulated students is very hard to do because the event log is pretty constrained and most of the visual tricks that games in this genre use to show character mood are simply not being used–there’s not many popups above heads, there are no alert windows telling you when bad things are happening, etc.

I sunk like 6 hours into this because I thought it was interesting and I really wanted it to be good, but I’ve finally decided that it’s pretty much not worth playing in its current form. Interestingly enough… the devs seem to be aware of the school sim flaws in their product, because their main campaign mode actually puts a timer on each level and makes you start again, over and over. If they had any optimization mechanics it would be fun to play for longer, but they don’t, and it’s not, so their solution was to just make you play the beginning experience over and over again? Wild.

Genesis Noir - backed this on kickstarter and only breifly checked it out today, finally. It’s incredibly expensive looking!! So many things are one-off animations and so many basic one-off animations have custom little bits in them–like a guy runs through a door and instead of the door opening, the door bursts into bits and there’s like, debris particles flying out, etc. The game is basically a point and click adventure and it feels very optimized for mobile. A lot of dragging and tapping gestures, etc.

The big problem is that I am simply not buying the basic premise of the game. If I have to be honest with myself, I really never have, despite being a kickstarter backer. I backed this one because it seemed so weird that I was really curious how it would turn out. After about 30 mins of playing I still have no idea why we are choosing to tell the story of the big bang as a noir detective mystery about a woman being MURDERED. The main character is Time; he has the hots for Mass, a woman who seems to be perpetually naked. He calls her on the phone (figuring out how to do this took me forever, and crashed the game once) and something cryptic happens and suddenly he’s running across town just in time to see her being shot with a giant gun by a guy with a pompadour. I still have no idea what he’s supposed to represent. We immediately transition into an excessively long sequence of incredibly custom one-off minigames where we are planting various seeds in a kind of alternate PLANT DIMENSION? in order to create LIFE in the galaxy? I don’t know. If you wanted to make a game about plant based minigames, why make a game about the origin of the universe? If you wanted to make a game about the origin of the universe, why make it a noir detective mystery? If you want to make a game about the origin of the universe, why is the origin of the universe, and life, and all good things, the murder of a naked woman in a bed? I don’t know. The game has not persuaded me yet that it should exist in this form or at all. Wild stuff. Curious if anyone has finished this because it seems short and I am interested in learning whether it comes together at all in a coherent way… not sure I want to do a lot of mobile minigames on my PC to figure it out, though.

Unexplored 2 - Still in early access, has some issues relating to this (balance seems off, loading screens are long) but it’s decent? Decently interesting? It’s one of these Moebius-influenced sci-fantasy games that are coming out more often now (Fauxbius games?) and it’s a roguelike with a persistent overworld map filled with factions who rise and fall in power between your various character deaths.

I would like it a lot more if each death didn’t seem to result in such a complete wind-back of stuff in the overworld, though!! It feels like everything is falling in power constantly. You make an alliance with a faction and when you die they get attacked by 1000000 spiders and just get deleted off the map. I dunno. I’d like to feel that my accomplishments are sticking around a bit and don’t need to be constantly re-done.

Accomplishing anything is unbelievably hard because the combat is extremely brutal and you are constantly juggling various currencies that can really fuck you over if you hit zero. Your inventory is unbelievably small and it will constantly be filled with objects that you are using to reduce cold damage by 1 on a journey or whatever, and not on anything cool you can do shit with. There is a stat called Hope that is extremely easy to lose and extremely hard to replenish and if it hits zero you LOSE AN ABILITY. I dunno. I played on standard difficulty and got rolled pretty hard, then I played on easy and got rolled just as hard after I died (I think I recharged a cool scrying stone and then it got defeated by kobolds after I died? Not sure). The idea of having to go recharge it again made me so tired that I uninstalled.

I want to come back to this but I think I’m going to wait until it’s ready for release. Right now it feels like an exercise in heartbreak!! Stop killing my friends, kobolds!!

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After a bit more of Sable I think I’m putting it down. I got through the tutorial/opening area and went on to complete one more task and honestly, even though in theory this should be 100% My Shit in practice it’s not because I’m not enjoying the moment-to-moment play.

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mod to make hoverbike podracer

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It only gets more and more spectacular with even wilder visual tricks, and only falls deeper into a new-agey love and togetherness pulls the universe together in an even less considered way than post-Star Wars Campbellians.

It only gets more from here.

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so I can only assume that there’s more large nude murder in this game and that the minigames become even less and less related to the core themes? Perhaps in that case I will not complete it… expensive flashy visuals are no replacement for, like, a premise that compellingly demonstrates why it deserves to exist, I think

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i tried to play a bit of Unexplored 2 because i liked the art style and it was utterly excruciating. i had such a bad time with it. the controls were so weird and i hated the combat. the game’s presentation kind of lies to you and makes it seem like things are going to be way more breezy. it also started with a ridiculous tutorial that i hated a lot. i was amazed that something with this much hype and resources couldn’t seem to make some of the basic stuff just feel in any way intuitive, and i don’t really get the feeling that the clunkiness was really the point. plenty of people with way less resources have done this basic system stuff perfectly well in their games. i don’t get why it was such a struggle.

also i liked the art/presentation enough of Genesis Noir to give it a pass on a lot of other things but i didn’t finish it. maybe i will at some point. it was kind of surprisingly mundane from a moment-to-moment perspective for something that’s so flashy. felt like a phone game in places. but there are other games i like that sorta fall into that as well.

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hard agree on unexplored 2–the extremely long loading screens are the worst. I was tabbing out during loads at first but I think tabbing out actually STOPS it loading, which is wild as hell. Everything in the game takes too long to do, and the constraints they put on character power (inventory size, encumbrance mechanic, hope mechanic constantly deleting your abilities, extremely high cost, risk, and time commitment for any overworld travel, etc) just make you feel like shit no matter what difficulty level you are playing at!

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Unexplored the first felt like a smart academic project that almost but not quite got turned into a game. I was hoping the sequel would be, “now with game”, but I bounced off it too, for the same reasons – it’s just not made well and the raw ideas are an underchannel. Which is a shame, because I’m really into what they’re trying to do

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oh yeah of course I didn’t mean to insinuate any ill intent on your part, I think it might have been a chicken-or-egg thing where I don’t know if I knew about zauner’s identity before I heard of the name? or I just heard about both at the same time? but yeah

I wanted to come back to this because there are just so many games where the conceit is S++ for me intellectually but it turned me off because of how slow and clunky it felt just to move around in, I think I’ve come all the way back around to like, I honestly would rather a game say nothing and feel good to play than say something and feel bad to play, and so few devs understand how the methods of abstraction we’ve built in videogames and the spaces that players fill between what is meant and what is told say so much more than whatever text you could put on the screen

I worry that in the process of legitimizing narrative design we’ve taken the wrong path from like, “narrative design should touch every part of the game up to and including the way the player avatar moves around” and toward “we need a narrative designer to just write a whole bunch of stuff to tell the player why they should care about THIS puzzle box as opposed to the one they just came from”, which is 1. a misunderstanding of what narrative design even is and 2. patronizing as shit

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i don’t necessarily agree with this, but it depends. i guess the question is are a lot of these things really saying anything that substantive (i’d argue they aren’t) and are we in a climate that heavily values surface presentation and surface novelty above being able to adequately execute on your ideas (we are). that’s why i said i’d prefer something that plays interestingly rather than me just saying something that feels good to play.

it’s just nice to know that the designer is really thinking about the design, in one way or another… and it isn’t just a vessel to get you from one environment or character model or another. something feeling nice to play could be an indicator that the designer is really thinking about how the design plays into your relationship to the overall experience of the game… but it doesn’t necessarily mean that. plenty of AAA games that “feel” good to play but wear you down over time cuz the experience feels so meaningless or incoherent.

and there is a side to indie world that still has the problem that those “Sillywood” era 90’s FMV games had. just this endless desire for more of the surface trappings of respectability without really reckoning with game design as its own interesting tool of expression. i see that with some of those big indie releases that market themselves on the presentation. it’s almost like they’re frustrated by the prospect that they have to design an actual game with it. but they know they have to do that and can’t just make a walking sim if they want to reach a bigger market. so some of the design ends up feeling obligatory, bland, and poorly thought out.

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yeah I regret the good/bad dichotomy I used there, and I don’t mean anything serious or rigorous by it, I’m just kind of exasperated by games these days because I don’t feel like I’ve played anything in recent memory where just the act of pressing buttons is interesting at all; it feels like people have just totally lost interest in the interfaces themselves and how people interact with them, and instead the buttons and joysticks and all that are a burden that get in the way of the Things That We Gotta Say

…thinking about this more it makes sense that I am far too deep into a music technology rabbit hole that I can’t seem to find my way out of, my kingdom for a small pocketable bank of 16 rotary encoders that send MIDI via TRS (don’t tell me about the TX-6 I already know about it, it might as well cost a kingdom)

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since I started reading a bunch of Heavy Metal I started to notice that a lot of comics that aren’t drawn by Moebius are cribbing a lot of style and story from Moebius comics, probably in an attempt to get published by Heavy Metal. I guess games are now too.

I remember a particular forward for The Incal where someone wrote “don’t directly lift stuff from this work, because that isn’t the point” and I think about that every time I see these.

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Did you play Poinpy?

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An even better reason to not lift this stuff is because of where Moebius was taking it from. It requires more work and careful thought to lift than people generally devote.

He’s super influenced by North African artstyles. Which is wild when you remember that he is a French dude who started making stuff just after the Algerian War. However, people who lift his art seem to be doing it because it feels alien, unique, or sci-fi to them. What’s really going on IMO is that people who want to explore fantasy stuff without doing medieval Europe are lifting Moebius because it feels “more unique” or “unusual”… but that’s only because they cannot recognize where HE is lifting his cultural references from!

Anyway when I see Fauxbius games with a yurt under a pyramid or whatever, I instantly check out. Unconsidered stuff like that is a great sign that the creators lifting from Moebius haven’t thought sufficiently about the actual art they’re lifting. Sable was VERY heavy on the yurts-and-pyramids stuff, but they also had some stuff mitigating these elements… unfortunately, as others here have said, I didn’t feel that it all hung together as well as it could have.

The other reason I disliked Sable is the core fantasy, flying the jet thing, felt pretty bad. It was so easy to bump off a tiny pebble and lose all momentum. I was there to basically have an experience like Zineth and I could not have it!!! Oh well.

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I think all genres of art will develop from the accumulation of derivatives of derivatives of derivatives, but yes, if you want to make great art, it is best to look to the inspirations of great artists rather than to the great artists themselves

Same reason I recommend the NHK Silk Road documentary so heavily, it’s a real rosetta stone for 80s/90s fantasy anime aesthetics

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got some custom work done at a gemstone festival this week

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i mastered locksmithing (it took years. actual years. i started working on it before 9/11 and every time i play gemstone i grind locksmith mastery. now that im done i dont know what to do so i spiked my greaves with all my mistakes i made along the way)

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i tried like four times to get spun for a feature alteration so i could look SWEATY and get a towel and do laura from DDD cosplay that only bachelors friend who plays gemstone with me would understand. but i didnt get sweaty. next time

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that is one of the ones I am excited for as soon as I figure out my wife’s netflix password

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as a non-artist i just want to say this is rewarding to do on its own too , like connecting the dots and finding the branches between inspirations and artists makes it so much easier to figure out what you like and where to find it and how to talk about it!

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yeah it was super cool to read the Nausicca manga and be like “oh thats where Chocobos came from!”

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and then you watch the silk road documentary and become like “oh that’s where the clothing and architecture of nausicaa came from”

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