I never saw anyone talk about this game, but I streamed it for a few hours back when it came out for free on the Epic store, in deep pandemic times. Yeah it tries real hard, but there’s just something… missing, about it. I fell off and never felt an impulse to go back. It is just about too hard, but that wasn’t it. Kind of get a Blizzard Souls vibe from it. Like, a seasoned Vidcon Developer looking at Souls and saying, ok, how can we do our version of this? Without an animating spark of having anything of their own to say.
5 Likes
i dont think that part bothers me that much ig i just liked how the poison swamp was at the end of demons souls not the start
3 Likes
front loading blighttown felt like a good joke after i put those areas off in demons as long as possible? miyazaki like “no i didn’t want you to stomp 5-1 & 5-2 with a fire sword and regen ring, this is my true vision of hell”
15 Likes
i quite liked ashen as a dark souls 2-like.
iirc something around the end (maybe just the final boss) annoyed me and i never finished it, but overall i found it’s approach to the world pretty strong compared to other souls likes
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The Divine Force actually turning into a weirdly compelling time even though this is definitely what those in the business call a ‘6’. Very brisk conversations and you basically have a new objective and journey direction every 20 minutes. A lot of RPG writing can be classed as writers wanting to write but I am thankful for the brevity here.
Playing on Easy helps, feels like I’m always going somewhere new rather than plodding through a dungeon or cutscene for 2 hours.
The characters actually have neat abilities that work with a large battlefield, and you can just be the healer the entire time if you really want to. The AI are pretty bullish though. The party is also a fairly tolerable cast, particularly the grumpy wizard who everyone wants help from, but he just tells everyone to fuck off. The main guy sucks tho, boring protag-ass bro who has hair instead of flaws.
Immortality is ten times better without music. Far more eerie.
Using film medium to focus on a young actress helps with the unnerving question of her age but I feel like the twist is fairly clear? For her to look the same over a period of 31 years suggest she’s a vampire or something and the reverse scenes are confirming this so far. There’s something in there about filmmakers and young women but I wonder if this is a red herring.
When the first proper reverse scene cut to, it genuinely felt like a violation, a Kojima topsy-turvy moment. It’s a pretty unique project and I’m still generally gripped when watching it, but I just can’t shake the feeling I should be more active. I tend to find a scene, press ’I’ to get to the beginning of the scene, watch it in normal speed, listen for the sound, and then arbitrarily pick an object to transition through. Rinse repeat.
What’s most impressive about is it’s the footage equivalent of combing through loose notes in a non-linear and (seemingly) non-proscribed fashion. Since so many transitions happen through Marissa’s face it feels like they can control the direction of scenes in a probabilistic way. Inevitably if I click that face enough, I’ll find the vampire.
Also, there’s a lotta bare boobs. Have games finally piqued as high art?
Speaking of bare boobs, I played Garage: Bad Dream Adventure. After Decarnation, Immortality, and VRChat, feels like I’m entering a year where I play lots of psychosexual stuff. The core game loop of Garage involves fishing so you can get tickets to be fed milk by prostitute machines so you can move. It’s such a miserable aesthetic but I love it. Everything is pathetic junk or pathetic sexual depravity with little warmth. I’m worried that I am now basically stuck fishing for the next 12 hours while I build up resources.
9 Likes
ignoring absolutely everything else for a moment, this tune is fucking perfect
3 Likes
I quite liked it too and I didn’t find much overlap among episodes, but I also did not do a completionist run so I might have missed some optional dialogues.
It’s a very well told story, and while not the most original, it kept me hooked.
I also played its prequel, Before the storm, which is also nice although I prefer the original.
One of my main complaints with BTS is that, especially in the second half, everybody is talking in a slow fragmented way, which does not just convey their sadness/depression butncomes across as repetitive, tedious and obtains the opposite result (takes away from immersion).
Have you played LiS 2 and True Colors?
2 Likes
I haven’t played any of the other games, yet, though I did watch enough of a Before the Storm LP to be disappointed. How do you feel about the other games under this name?
1 Like
I’ve been playing Devil May Cry V at a chapter or two a night as my health allows. All these years I still do not understand the rhythm of DMC combat. Much more in tune with Platinum stuff. Feels like a lot of the game is I knock down one enemy to 30 feet away then have to very slowly move over to them to get more hits in.
All the button combos and mode switching is real fighting game sicko shit. I guess there are enough people in the world that really go for it. I appreciate this one is easy enough for a layman to just play. More than just play they bathe you in instant continue items.
I had to stop because like a character from a christmas carol I start coughing when I get to excited. I also started coughing so hard I had to lie down while typing that sentence hell yeah me
8 Likes
It’s funny, this past weekend I started God Hand for the first time. I’ve been acclimating to its glued-to-the-ground boxing matches, and sometimes longing for the fluid movement of Devil May Cry.
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Once you get better at it you will forget all about DMC
10 Likes
God Hand has a perfect 3rd person camera for an action game, I can’t go back to DMC’s terrible camera after God Hand
8 Likes
(spoilered all of these thingsbc they got really rambly and incomprehensible, whoops!!!)
1st game i playing
been playing X-Town 3D Game. tis odd. it’s this virtual architecture thing w/ utilitarian controls+options (you can control the fog, lighting, zoom, movement speed etc. to your liking in appreciating the Russian architecture; movement has that kind of “jerk → smooth movement” action you get when trying to scroll w the arrow keys). there’s also an option to turn the game into a shooting gallery where you shoot meandering fireballs that make the windows error sound when they die. afaict it loads a different map every time you boot it up, in each case a forest clearing w a single unique building in the middle. its feels oddly purposeless and alien given its utilitarian design which makes it feel v mysterious
2 game i plae
also been playing Uriel’s Chasm which is a religious sci-fi experimental game that’s apparently meant to imitate the experience of playing old broken computer games? i never had that experience so i can’t say much abt that. its mostly known for being exhibited as one of the “worst games of all time” on an unwatchably stupid n irritating stream by vinesauce. the 1st stage immediately blasts u with a wall of instructions abt how to beat it and in general is very obtuse systems- and presentation-wise, which i like. i also like how the game presents you w lengthy bible excerpts but not enough time to read them, giving them the haphazard/spewy/whatever feel that regular vgame text can often have (a la Bat Castle); and how the frame narrative of the Shovelware Queens recording themselves playing the game and the game itself blend together at the end. having only played it once i dont know what to make of the religious stuff, tho i notice that you shoot bibles at the final boss, and the monologue that keeps repeating in the demented bgm is kinda like the aforementioned bible excerpts, but blasphemous… me brain small… anyway v creepy+grotesque and complex and good
3
also been playing+replaying Growling In My Demise, which is the only game listed on what seems to be John T Candy’s Gamejolt page? (the name got changed… also, all his old games like Miracles Magpie’ve been taken down). i like how concise and emotionally opaque it is, altho i have a feeling that once i watch more of Lynch’s stuff i’ll realize that its just derivative… there’s a p effective moment of horror right at the beginning too… i like the sequence where you just watch the protagonist driving somewhere for about a minute straight
20 Likes
Uriel’s chasm fuckin rocks. I beat the final boss and the game crashed so I had to watch the ending on youtube but it’s still awesome. just getting blasted in the head for like 20 minutes by some cool shit while the steam reviews whine that its like unplayable (tbf it took me like 5 mins to figure out how the first level worked and finish it.) Great religious deprogramming tool!
6 Likes
i eventually got bored of DUST THE FURRY ADVENTURE mainly due to the uninspired level design BUT it did hold my interest for a long time and i’d still recommend it if you see it cheap
THE WAY REMASTERED is clearly inspired by flashback and another world except all of the game i played was really boring busy work forcing you to go back and forth between areas, or insipid platforming. also the story starts with a fridged wife and it feels like it’s trying to be serious sci-fi but then it’s filled with goofy references. not recommended. looks and sounds good though!
REDO! is a horror metroidvania but i didnt get far because the delay on the jump is unbearable and also the combat seems shitty. looked interesting otherwise but eh
snow bros special is fucking ugly. is there any reason to play this version instead of on mame? probably not. oh i looked it up, there are new levels (but are they actually good levels? more doesnt mean better yo) and some boring extra modes but the best extra mode is DLC lol fuck that. didnt even include the new elves!!
cowabunga collection seems pretty good but i only got it for two of the game boy games lol i suck at the beat em ups. i might try to finish the NES game with the rewind though, and maybe then a run without using it
HOT LAP LEAGUE seemed amazing at first but i just can’t get my head around the drifting mechanics which is what the game is basically built around so i ended up dropping it
crusin blast is an incredibly shallow but also incredibly fun game
i’m still playing fortnite though it’s definitely starting to lose it’s luster
kero blaster is a fun, solid, short gun and jump, though the some of the boss fights are annoying
games
10 Likes
oooohhh… didn’t know this existed, will probably pick this up on sale
so, here’s some random griping about ps+ premium that hopefully is useful to someone:
there is quite a bit of overlap in terms of games you can stream and games you can download. for games you can stream, the platform indicator (PS4/PS5) can be misleading - on PC, the place where it would be is just blank. on PS5, it might show PS5 if a PS5 version is available. make no mistake, however - the games you get when streaming, whether on a PS console or on a PC, seem to always be the PS4 versions (regardless of whether a PS5 version is available).
it also seems like, maybe related to the above, the saves created while streaming these games are in some kind of limbo - the PS5 sorts saves into PS4 and PS5 saves, but these streaming saves don’t show up in either. even checking directly on the ps+ cloud storage for the PS4 saves, they don’t show up.
this led to a situation with Bugsnax where i siloed my progress to the streaming version with no apparent way to export my save:
played bugsnax (streaming) for about 2 hours
liked the game, decided to install it for a better experience
booted up the installed game - but now it doesn’t see my save file!
no problem, bugsnax was patched to allow importing a save from the PS4 version. except, i appaarently don’t have a PS4 save on my console.
OK, i can also try and “download” a save from the PS+ cloud… but this doesn’t work either
so even though streaming the game wasn’t even explicitly marked as being the PS4 version, and even though bugsnax was patched after release to allow importing your PS4 save to the PS5 version… if you play the streaming version first and then try to continue on the PS5 version, you are straight-up SOL… despite this seeming like a really obvious case for when streaming a game might be useful - you know, to try it out before installing
sony needs to get their shit together, jeez
8 Likes
I finished the main quest of Dragon Quest Treasures in about 23 hours - nice breezy game! The story is nothing but it’s enough of an excuse to go through the game and get Treasures.
I’m the kind of person who doesn’t do post-game stuff much because without the narrative reason to do stuff I just…don’t. Not that I need to see more narrative in most games like this, but something about continuing to play around in a world that has explicitly told me there’s nothing more to see is existentially depressing.
Luckily, this game also has a narrative post-game. I wasn’t ready for this to be over so I’m going to keep plugging away at it for now. I think I have less than a quarter of the possible treasures, which is sort of mind-blowing, so I want to see how much I can spin up the treasure-seeking machine to get as many as possible as quickly as possible. Tellingly, the narrative supports this explicitly.
I really enjoy this game!! First time in like, a year that I’ve bought a game for $60 and not regretted it afterwards.
I still don’t know how much I’d recommend it unless this already sounds appealing to you. It is essentially Busywork: The Game. But there are so many little goals that I can always be thinking about what I want to do next while I am doing the thing I am currently doing. It reminds me of Factorio or Minecraft in that way, although obviously much more structured.
I am almost done with Citizen Sleeper but I’m not sure I have it in me to finish that game. Really weird how strongly I started with it and how little motivation I have to complete it. We’ll see.
13 Likes
I’ve been unwisely playing Monster Train until 4:00 a.m. or so the past few nights. I still lose about half the time, and unfortunately that makes me determined to try again even if I’d intended to do just one run.
I’ve learned that this game is like FTL in that it doesn’t matter how well you craft your spells and units if you don’t specifically plan for the boss. Especially when you get this one.
8 Likes
finished disco elysium
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I played the plate up (overcooked/diner dash rogue like) demo with my bossy friend and it was really neat except for the part where she couldn’t STAY OUT OF THE KITCHEN. when I worked front of house I went through the kitchen as a shortcut ONCE, but it was to get food to people faster so we didn’t fail. she kept coming into grab meat, wash dishes, and not let me do my thing so we kept failing in the kitchen which made her think that she needed to be in the kitchen MORE which made us fail MORE and it’s like THIS IS WHY FRONT OF HOUSE STAYS FRONT OF HOUSE YOU CONTROL FREAK spilled from my mouth and my bossy friend just solemnly said ‘yes. I do excersize a disproportionate amount of control in videogames’, then laughed instead of getting mad and this is why I like playing games with her even though she’s bossy.
I’ll probably get this game on sale cuz the co op seems chaotic in a fun way as long as FRONT OF HOUSE STAYS OUT OF THE KITCHEN LET THE COOKS COOK
17 Likes