Thymesia (PS5) - sort of budget. animations and character models are unimpressive. game is trying to hit all the soulslike notes but everything looks and feels kind of slapdash and the atmosphere is rather thin. the combat is alright. it’s a soulslike that integrates some ideas from sekiro as well, which is kind of neat (L1 is deflect rather than block). been getting my ass handed to me by the first boss. the game really expects you to simon says the hell out of these fights - i’ve got a dodge, a deflect, a feather interrupt, and a claw attack, and the game demands i use all of them at the prescribed times or failure is certain. might give it some more time. i think i preferred Mortal Shell as far as these go
HUMANITY (PS5) - god, this game is such a vibe. i wish i was not so terrible at puzzles because every level is a stumper at this point lmao
the music is amazing
i keep forgetting i’m a dog with an actual embodied avatar and am just constantly walking off ledges
It was, indeed, A Later Ice Area. In my case I was somehow able to phase a box through a purple forcefield, which meant I was unable to return it back to where it had to be to keep the Rube Goldberg chain going. Total puzzle shutdown.
Muscle cars tear through backwoods dirt tracks blasting hick rock. They slew around so much I had to switch to driver view ^_ ^…even then I still felt kinda motion sick afterwards. Gas and break are forward and back on the analog stick! This seemed weird at first but almost immediately I sort of loved the simple control. Oh and R2 is a boost. It seemed heck’a fun until I would pretty quickly smash into a fence or slip off course and then you’re kind of hosed, which was less fun; if you’re lucky your driver ragdolls out in amusing fashion; I think they–or was it other drivers??–are still there when you loop back around the track.
I have tried multiple compatability settings and junk to get Vangers to run right, I can’t seem to get it to run without the sound glitching and weird slowdowns. The steam version includes a linux version, so maybe I’ll pop that on the r-pie when I get that running.
I decided to finally fire up mega man legends 2, and the intro cutscene (which plays when the game starts up, but you can skip it if you press start) is really well done. The commitment to shot composition is still there.
“I sold all your equipment to upgrade the flutter, sorry!” is a funny excuse for all the equipment from the last game going missing
dude this game is so good. It has better map menus, a little better UI, and real twin stick controls. They also gave the mail man chest hair for some reason.
I think I found out about The Witch’s Isle from Colin Spacetwinks before that guy got to twitter-poisoned. It was on my wishlist for years and then one of the recent Steam sales I finally bought it and in the middle of family situations I played it until 12:30AM last night.
It’s a beautiful game with good writing and a neat structure and just enough Adventure Game Logic. Learning how to light the Flint is up there with Nier Fishing Subquest. The story is you gotta solve an island’s mysteries before morning. You have six-in-game hours and gotta learn the towns people’s patterns. I probably played 3 and a half hours and had only missed a path in the world that was pretty well hidden deliberately.
One more time saying the game is beautiful. I know I am poisoned from just looking at greater-internet game opinions but the number of times some ding-dong posts XmenVSSF and goes “modern games never pixel” makes me rend my garments and make that one Tom and Jerry yell. This simple adventure game probably played by less than a 1000 people is one of the best looking pixel games I’ve ever seen. The way it uses light makes me want to cry. What a piece of art.
It’s like 3 bucks at full price. I’ll buy it for you if that’s too much. It’s the non-PCE game I’ll champion. Get it!
played Humanity in VR through the Prologue last night and enjoyed it quite a bit. the VR mode feels like looking at an animated diorama which just feels different than rotating the camera usually would. i like that, at least so far, you don’t seem to lose if the humans fall off the side, like you would lose in Lemmings, etc. i get the sense you “lose” if you let the Goldies fall off, though, so there are some stakes there, but it feels less intense that way.
i might make a humanity thread, game is fucking great
possibly my favorite puzzler i’ve played in years
Thymesia (PS5) - gets a lot easier after the tutorial, but is still difficult. it really is the first sekiro-like i’ve played. it’s got deflect and they do a riff on the posture system with their “wound” system. you can even talent into an analogous mikiri counter.
combat remains pretty good. i would absolutely not recommend this until you’ve had your fill of fromsoft games, tho - it is pretty categorically inferior overall.
Bus Simulator 21 Next Stop (PS5) - extremely jank, extremely dry. the cockpit controls are ass - it technically works on a controller, but it is clear that this game was only ever intended to be played on a KB+M. the framerate wildly teeters between 60 and…something much lower, lol. it’s actually really funny, the game lets you walk around a bit before you pick your bus, and if you look at the bus models, the framerate tanks, but looking anywhere else it mostly holds 60… until you move, then all bets are off lol.
the actual driving physics are fine. i don’t think this game is really doing it for me, though. the technical bits are just way too ass for a sim like this. immersion is very poor, which is a death knell. Euro Truck Simulator, this is not
yeah something i forgot to post that i was thinking while playing last night is that the PS5 (and VR2) have really strong “Playstation 1” vibes in some of the games, in a way i haven’t really seen from their consoles in a long time. while comparing the game to something like Intelligent Qube is maybe too on the nose because of the visual style, it can’t be helped. the sound design and game design are simple and work well together - it’s a game that respects your time and is happy to be played as long or as short as you like. it’s exciting to have stuff like this
I already had (but failed to equip) a monster trading card that when upgraded increased my base damage by 240%
I had misunderstood how base damage works, and that it applies before any multipliers, therefore many of the blacksmith upgrades were 500x more useful than I thought
One of the potions I’d brewed could be upgraded very easily to increase damage by another 100% or more
So within about 45 minutes I had more than quadrupled my damage. Doing 15 billion damage on the low end, over 425 billion on certain critical hits.
I still haven’t unlocked multiple entire sections of this game either. Game rules.
Firmament patch came out and I confirmed via youtube that I hadn’t missed any dialogue triggers, so I went back to my save and finished it.
I’d say it’s like a B- Cyan product, which makes it an A+ adventure game relative to most entries. It’s quite small and narrow in scope which I appreciate in a way but it definitely makes it feel more like a proof of concept for the tech Cyan used to make it and to get experience with a VR-forward product than a full-featured game in their ouvre. Not nearly as impressive or ambitious as Obduction, which was a real return to form for them.
I also like that even when a Cyan game is only a few hours long and has a barely-there plot it’s still interested in very grounded human themes of treachery and redemption. Rand is just interested in people in a way that almost no other videogame writers seem to be. And, it’s funny that it’s sort of an optimistic take on Bioshock, that optimism filtered through the fact that the whole edifice is built on a dark underbelly that you spend most of the game literally and metaphorically crawling through.
Even a mediocre Cyan effort gives you this much to think about! Still have an unparalleled light touch and tastefulness. Good game.
OH it’s also still buggy as shit though, any time you can see you are going to be manipulating a big device make sure you save beforehand, because it is easy to push junk into corners in a way that gets stuff irretrievably stuck
Well I guess I have officially picked up the Relicta torch as I just passed the glacier of potential softlocks. I got bit by one where I sent a crate flying somewhere that then had to drop onto a button that raised a magnetic panel elsewhere, except it bounced back a bit and landed on top of the force field preventing one from just dropping a crate directly onto said button. I tried to use the other two crates I had to nudge it back to where it needed to go (all crates can be magnetized to either red or blue (no clue which is positive or negative) and sorta have gravity removed in a “once moving continues to do so even if upwards” as opposed to “instantly starts floating away” way) except when doing so it sent one of the other blocks flying elsewhere and when I turned gravity for it back on it got stuck on a tiny ledge where it was impossible to retrieve. Very stupid problem that made me go repeat about five minutes and two previous mini-puzzle/stages.
I should have taken a screenshot or two but this is softlock glacier as by now you have these rather vast areas that are impossible to parse without doing a full walkthrough first full of all sorts of force fields of different colors and behaviors, and every crate movement is handled via actual physics as opposed to scripted behaviors. This is mostly fine and typical for this particular subgenre but it is both possible to get around intended solutions via having a floating crate nudged around a bit (you can’t nudge them directly yourself which is good as it likely is the only thing standing between the game and utter chaos) and having a floating crate end up in an unretrievable place because you didn’t keep track of it after it bounced off of something.
As noted elsewhere the game seems to have moved on to a “the way to make puzzles harder is to staple three or more of them together in a row” path, which is dumb as much more often than not once you reach the next part the earlier parts either play no role or are literally cut off. There was one cute bit where one had to magnetize the crate in the prior section that opened the path to this final part so that a floating crate in said part can be nudged up and towards an elevated magnetized panel, but that’s the only real case so far with elements from different puzzle areas bleeding together in unexpected ways.
(TBF many of these puzzles put in failsafes so that if you screw up in a normal way you won’t have to restart all of them, but there are gaps than can get you in trouble.)
Also feel like noting that the game and narratives have basically little to do with each other at this point. In the tutorial bit it is explained how you are doing some of this stuff to test out the technology, but there’s really no explanation as to why this involves puzzles that I recall and by now when you have these increasingly ornate as coined by someone else rube goldberg machines there really isn’t any justification beyond “well I gotta get to point C and there’s a bunch of these between here and there”. I don’t need everything to be perfectly integrated, but this is a fairly stark divide.
This is a lot of negatives in a row but still I have to note that it’s not bad. It is very much a “7 out of 10” game and I like the basic mechanics in play. It is almost certainly too long (I’ve got three full sections left and it definitely feels like we should be to the wrapping things up stage by now) and could be improved by a few changes here and there, I can’t really recommend it because of these but none of them have been enough to chase me away yet either.
To the game’s credit, as it went on there were moments when you character is like “Can you please turn off these stupid test tracks so I can just get to the thing I actually want” and the increasingly standoffish AI is like “oh no since YOU hit the reset button I can’t turn off the tests! You have to do them to get through!” And even before things started getting noticeably dicey, the AI was always reminding and priming you to do more test tracks. My theory when I quit was that it’s kind of a low grade Glados situation where the AI is doing everything it can to make you do its tests, for reasons as yet unknown. Dunno how it figures in with the whole, I got eaten by a magic space rock and there’s a venom alien yelling at me in my head part of the plot. But yeah. It’s setting up some sort of twist/reveal.
They finally address getting eaten by the space rock near the end of the glacier section BTW. Turns out it at some point hacked the AI and is currently hacking you, also your friend froze to death “it seems weeks ago” which was gonna be addressed before Venom voice started talking to us again. How that will tie into everything else is up in the air, since they’ve all been up on the moon for at least two years barring an unexpected swerve I think the courses have to have been a thing for most of that run, plus I take it the other groups were doing non-puzzle course stuff.
…That said the base section by the desert area a few chapters back had some damage that mostly went uncommented on that struck me as suspect, so when the twist is that it hasn’t been two years but two hundred I guess I shouldn’t act super surprised.
it took me like 2 days to install this il-2 sturmovik 1946 (beautiful russian flight sim, not to be confused with the new one for rich people that uses the same name for brand recognition and costs 400 dollars) mod that includes 100 years of planes from 1906-2006 because its spread across 5 installers that all have a dozen parts each and the first installer is so huge and bad that it takes hours to make sure each part isnt corrupt and then extracts them. there is another mod I was recommended for dynamic campaigns that confusingly requires you to download three installers labeled ALL, UPDATE and finally FULL which i did not end up installing. I did not even mention that the steam version comes out of date (4.13.4m) but all the mods use patch 4.12.2m anyway, so you have to switch into a old version beta branch to use any of this stuff to begin with, and if you want to get up to date on IL-2 patches (not that there’s any reason to because this game is from 2001, has been pretty much complete for over a decade and the people patching it changed the structure of the game files last year to disable certain mods???) you have to upgrade sequentially from 4.13 → 4.14 → 4.15 because I’m getting the recurring sense these people like to do things exactly one way. This is also like the fifth time I’ve bought this game because the gog copy I already had won’t start for some reason. Ive been playing this game since I was a little baby so I cannot imagine having to navigate this shit if you have never played it before
ZIEGLER DANE is one of those flying tigers volunteer guys who fought the japanese in china before the us was officially in ww2. this first mission was a scramble ace combat style to intercept bombers
i always liked that you can see the little dudes bailing out as you watch their plane turn into paper, you gotta hope they survive that shit. also jesus christ the default plane from strikers 1945 handles like a fucking brick in a dogfight i never thought i would almost pass out from gs in a fucking ww2 plane
Everybody’s Golf (PS4) - great game. my only real criticism is the sheer magnitude of golf you have to play to progress through the game. you better be down to play like 1,000 holes of golf minimum just to progress through the ranks, and that’s assuming you are breezing through - start hitting hazards and missing putts and you’re looking at a lot more. luckily, the golf is incredible, so it isn’t too much of an ask. some of the music is starting to grate though.
also one of the tunes puts the “in a young girl’s heart” melody from the lovin’ spoonful’s do you believe in magic next to the “smilin’ back at me” melody from the 7th heaven theme and it is just… no. that’s illegal
yuka is best caddie don’t @ me
Rain World (PS4) - this game is good. it reminds me how much i fucking hate hollow knight. fuck hollow knight, team cherry could learn some lessons from this game
Wolfenstein: The New Order (PS4) - me, 9 years late to playing this game: hey, this is a really enjoyable shooter! i mentioned not having played these awhile back and i figured i’d rectify that. kinda ugly on this old 2014 PS4 version but it does run at a nice clip. gunplay feels real good
