no amvs no sale sorry
5 Likes
etc etc
6 Likes
Breakpoint? thatâs about 3pm, when I saunter over to the coffee shop for my afternoon latte
6 Likes
Thatâs Metal Gear Survive!
3 Likes
THE TALOS PRINCIPLE
so is there a mod for this that puts in serious sam because that would rule
anyway iâm really not sure about this one. the puzzles have been okay so far but not terribly engaging. lots of stuff involving line of sight. the game is very pretty and i like exploring but there isnât much to find when exploring except qr codes. i quit when i was stumped by a puzzle and looked up the solution and it was really simple, i feel iâm just gonna quit altogether if i get stumped too much. in my defense i felt it was more of the perspective that threw me off, so many of these puzzles would be easier to parse if it was overheard.
before i quit i just unlocked BOXES. oh boy, no puzzle game has used BOXES before, i canât wait to pick up and move BOXES to solve puzzles
the god voiceover just makes me think of high school productions of technicolour dream coat or something, or the god voiceover from zoo race, i cant take it seriously
also the writing desperately wants to be marathon, except itâs way too up its own arse and it keeps trying to impose itâs ideas on me and it frankly feels condescending. it keeps trying to be clever with the writing, trying surprise me, but it just ends up feeling desperate. the writing in this game is bad. luckily you can avoid most of it
EDIT: wait this game is a minimum of 16 hours long?? fuuuckkkkk that
6 Likes
Yeah, ultimately Talos Principle is only like Marathon in the sense that it requires long-term endurance.
4 Likes
the few times I interacted with Milton was mostly me steadfastly refusing to engage with the terrible strawman choices they offered, while shouting âcâmon bro give me a breakâ at the tv. Elohim was fine, the terminal writing helped teach an important lesson to my kids that games can be experienced on your terms if you want. training for skipping Zelda cutscenes
skipping all the audio logs and docs made the ending reveal slightly? interesting
2 Likes
Hard disagree on Talos Principle, I think it is very rewarding to take seriously but I am too lazy to assert why. Summoning @Tulpa for cogent defense
5 Likes
I did really like the Wizard of Oz door in Talos Principle thatâs like âDONT GO HERE PLEASEâ and itâs up to you to obey.
2 Likes
Totally! After I figured this out I tried to draw a mental map of a level whenever I got stuck and it really helped. And Iâd draw a real map of the most difficulty levels. I actually really loved this
5 Likes
Talos Principle didnât strike me as trying to be entirely serious, but I thought both the narrative and the puzzles were pretty clever. I played it around the same time as SOMA, and it felt like a lighter version of a similar story.
I remember one puzzle in particular that I was stuck on for a long time, but which after the fact didnât seem particularly difficult. I donât think I ever solved every one of the outside puzzles.
I was going to link to the SB1 thread about the game if it had anything interesting but Iâm getting an error.
2 Likes
Hylics 2 (PC)
PC version of the RPG / platformer by Mason Lindroth, developer of the similarly gorgeous-but-slippery play-in-browser free platformer Muldulamulom.
Didnât find it as nice to play as it is to look at and quit just over halfway through, about 4-5 hours in.
Mundane design pitfalls cramped hybrid weirdness:
- Slippy-slidey 2D isometric jumping puzzles
- Clumsy navigation
- Interminable surprise action segments
- Forcefully nonsensical story
- Blank characters
- Multiplying, self-healing, auto-countering enemies showering you in long-lasting debuffs throughout frustratingly prolonged turn-based battles
- Main character skills exhausting your skill points in a single use, leaving you with the generic poke attack
- Repetitive music
- Kludgy UI
My party of abstract humanoids gained skills but not skill points; they squeaked along tropical silly putty micro islands chugging life-giving burritos more than every other turn. The burritosâand less-humorous resurrection itemsâcost mere pennies so maybe this was the intent.
Switching to âEasyâ after the first few hours failed to alleviate burrito stuffing. Had I left my characters underpowered by avoiding too many see-them-coming encounter triggers? Almost every battle felt overlong, but you canât try to rush through them, because aside from being interrupted w/o warning by enemy turns, your left-right targeting doesnât necessarily cycle through the anonymously weird enemies in their left-right visual order. You canât load a save during a battle, maybe to discourage trying to sneak past them again. Couldâa been a warning sign that the first fight came along only after an hour of meandering around picking up weirdly named battle items.
By that point, slipping off cliff edges while trying to navigate the play-maze-style maps and their vertical, winding, narrow, 3D but seen in beautifully colored bafflingly depthless 2D, railing-free paths already had me moaning âwhyyyy.â Characters slide down funnel holes and âjumpâ up laddersâpress Jump repeatedly to navigate a ladderâin a stiff standing pose. Fear the spiral staircases.
Unlocking at least several key items involved plunking characters down at a lumpy arcade machine to launch a new extended 2D platforming stage playing like Muldulamulom except w/ twice as many buttons to manage, much tinier platforms, and constantly respawning swarms of enemies; far longer than youâd think, their loose layouts allow jumping over big chunks but not the worst ones.
A maze draws itself in as you wind along strange paths in another action-style sequence; looks super cool but goes on forever with no saving allowed and increasing numbers of dead ends and huge floating enemies triggering more long, pointless-feeling battles. The maze-running notably sported a different musical style, imitating an escalating countdown timer; I did not enjoy the contrast.
The game forgets your selected camera zoom level when reloading or enter a new area, resetting to medium rangeânice for seeing the sharp if generically blobby visuals closer up but bad for navigating and avoiding enemies.
Battles award HP-raising items requiring teleporting to the afterlife aka another bumpy island.
1/3rd through you get an airship flown in 3rd person 3D. Like the action segments, feels like an absurd amount of work went into another dazzlingly clunky and tedious side modeâamazing looking from afar, but not fun.
The graphics could impress but the over-the-top indexed color stylized pre-rendered claymation-ish battle animations, especially the unending debuffs, often verged on incomprehensibility. Gibberish names and the nearly invisible visual indicator for your currently at-bat personality-free character didnât help.
Some battles would have gone much faster if Iâd more quickly taken to heart a stray hint from some nameless NPC to light the later ubiquitous self-multiplying Poolmen enemies on fire w/ an expensive acquired skillâseemed to stop them from cloning themselves, thank goodness.
Discordant beach music aged rapidly.
14 Likes
No, but there is a DLC that replaces the voice of Elohim with that of Sam.
7 Likes
I really liked that the conversations all try to push basic ass turing arguments on you because you as a player know that you are a person and not a machine but the game world refuses to ackbowledge this. It felt intentional to me that nothing the computer terminals say is particularly persuasive and yet you canât give the response you would want to give. The world is weighted against your being able to express your own sentience.
Itâs all sophistry but that feels like the point.I felt like the game wanted me to be mad at the writing
13 Likes
I, an idle mutant gourd
6 Likes
pretty sure i got that terminal to acknowledge i canât respond in any real way. like, actually just mentioning i seem to be picking choices off a menu
i remember you could place those pre-built messages at specific spots which seems to be an extension of all that as well. especially when they seem to be shared with your friends. saw a couple signed by one of my psn friends, but those might as well be generated by the game
3 Likes
I got Overcooked all you can eat just as an excuse to replay all of Overcooked 1 and 2 all over again. Got 2 level breaking bugs in 2 hours (teleporting into a shelf and just disappearing) when I never had any with 1 and 2. Itâs not that big of a deal though
Moving Out is We Have Overcooked At Home but curiously both games the same publisher (Team 17) Itâs Overcooked + Physics - Good and the novelty wears off after 2 levels. Turns out that slowly carrying a box across a level 10 times without even a dash is not fun.
3 Likes
I donât play it as myself, Iâve been playing it as Iâm some kind of robot as that what the game has cast me as (though I feel there is gonna be some kind of twist where it turns out youâre a human consciousness in a simulation or some such)
The strawman questions arenât what bug me (though I do think theyâre written in a way to troll you which I felt was condescending), it was when I asked for my results and it said I want people to have both liberty and happiness and that I was wrong because they are incompatible ideals, and Iâm like, no theyâre not dipshit. Itâs like being in psychology class with a bunch of dumbasses again.
4 Likes
TOMB RAIDER UNDERWORLD
i had to look up a longplay to get through the tutorial
7 Likes
Yeah, like⌠exactly? That you keep insisting that âthese writers are really good at writing in the voice of a very obtuse programmatic thinker, like a chatbot would beâ is somehow a criticism rather than a compliment is very bizarre to me. Thatâs what theyâre going for. Youâre supposed to think The Voice Of God is a dipshit! Itâs working!
8 Likes