It’s saccharine and stuff but I like the cannery and the snake parts of that game.
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yeah i didn’t have a bad time with it but it also didn’t wow me, is sort of my take away. like aspects of it are obviously very-well crafted, but the overall experience feels indulgent and not really substantive to me
the sped-up sections usually go away after a few more cleared lines; and save your “zone” for those parts to help clear stuff out if you’re about to get owned
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The whole Winchester House vibe is mostly what kept me going but I thought the little bits where they changed gameplay modes were at least a nice change of pace from other more straightforward walking sims. I liked it. But the trying-hard-for-prestige vibe is very present and I get why it’s a turn off.
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yeah, I started to try to do that but it kind of just ended with me not using zone at all lmao, maybe I’ll get it with some more practice
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The Vanishing Remains of Ethan Edith
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So is Persona 5 Strikers actually good? Five hours into it and I’m loving it. I got burned so hard by DQ Warriors 2 that this is like… I can’t believe I’m enjoying this so much.
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I sort of want to play Persona 5 Strikers, but I don’t want to commit the number of hours it would take to get through Persona 5 first. I liked the beginning of that game quite a bit, but I hear that it gets pretty mediocre as it drags on.
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I bailed out of P5 after like 20 or 30 hours I think. And I just read a plot-synopsis to get me up to speed and I’m going to give Strikers a whirl so, join me? (Eventually)
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i have so many games i’ve played over the many previous days i haven’t posted in this thread. i have so many to post about! so here’s some
necesse
top-down terraria + minecraft where you can create settlements and even set up villager routines. the world is a collection of level chunks, each one a specific biome and shape, and you run around exploring it and setting up little towns. i quite like it; scratches the same itch as terraria while addressing something i want from vanilla minecraft (that is, more robust NPC interaction). weirdly under-popular honestly, i would expect people to be all over this after starbound went down the tubes
mech engineer
very strange game. easiest comparison is a sort of x-com/battletech survival mode auto-battler. you are in charge of a spaceship that returned to earth after a wormhole revealed a biological ship which immediately traveled to earth and started an extinction event. you have managerial control - building parts, researching technology, tuning weapons and reactors, determining missions, etc - but when in battle your pilots will disobey orders and react their own way.
i’m not clear on the goals because the translation is awkward and the difficulty brutal. but that’s also kinda part of the charm. the soundtrack is cousin to pathologic’s, the art dreary, the premise beyond grim. half the numbers in the interface don’t have an explanation. the other half have no feedback. i feel trapped in an alien machine that’s crushing me to death, and i love it.
biggest thing it lacks is all the tactile stuff. for a game that’s mostly about clicking things, there’s not much snap, crackle, or pop to all the stuff you’re clicking. i can’t help but think of highfleet’s absurdly detailed interface and how every element feels diegetic. the UX here is kinda rough, and while that’s charming in some respects, i wish the manual was of more help.
nightmare reaper
procedurally-generated doom levels mixed with some diablo itemization. every time you finish a level you sell all your gear except a single level 1 weapon (the vibe of a pistol start). you slurp up oodles of coins and spend them on meta-upgrades through pico-8 platformer minilevels. every weapon has an alt fire, and while some are normal (like ADSing on a rifle) others are weird and fun (like drinking some molotov and then spitting like a flamethrower). feels like when i was playing a lot of my DoomRL+RPG mod setup and that’s cool
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You can’t do this to me I’m already playing too many games
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Been playing Ys IX on Switch the last few nights. I’m a couple hours in but taking my time, so I’m not very far.
In dungeons, the game looks a little blurry but runs smoothly. Exploring the big city, on the other hand, feels like playing a different game. It’s like a coat of varnish is missing and the whole thing could fall apart at any moment. That being said, the vertical wall run and warp grapple abilities, paired with the low quality visuals and performance, make for some really engaging exploratory gameplay. I love all the low poly bits of architecture and weird in-between spaces that I can access in this drab cityscape.
I knew about these abilities before buying the game, but experientially, this was not what I was expecting after playing Ys VIII last year, where exploration was more like Final Fantasy XII maps x Breath of the Wild’s point-of-interest sightlines.
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Ultimately, Little Dragons Cafe is too much filler, not enough thriller. The characters are pretty charming/cute and the game is so pretty, but you have to fight the game for every inch – even more so than your Harvest Moon et al, the daily grind really feels like a slog. There’s practically nothing you can do to vary things up significantly, and the plot events come at a drip feed. I’m hanging it up.
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I’ve been playing the indie darling The Last of Us Part 2 for the past week or so. I am generally cool with the Naughty Dog games for what they are yet this feels like so far it is missing a bit of something those games had and it is hard for me to figure out exactly what it is. It might just be that the design in this game feels a good bit more open for stretches and that messes with the tight “cinematic” pacing their games often have.
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I did the exact same thing @Mikey said he’d do, and I feel pretty good about playing P5S. I played maybe 4-5 dungeons into P5, and it just drained on me. I actually feel really good about watching Youtube summaries for it, tbh. I kinda want P5R, but also I kinda want 120hrs of my life for living, so… we’ll see what happens.
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I’m really enjoying FUGA a lot despite its flaws.
Fighting is very stressful at the beginning of the game with limited resources and no way to recover outside of fixed points, it soon becomes more relaxing as you unlock HP healing, and eventually (weak) SP healing. Then it starts to get tight again as enemies ramp up. I’ve tried to stay ahead of the difficulty curve by fighting harder fights on purpose, but the game’s pretty smart about challenge : choosing to fight harder enemies grants better items and more experience, but fighting easier enemies means you’ll end the battle with a better rank and thus a better experience multiplier. The game is rewarding those who choose the harder path while not penalizing those who choose the safer path too much.
The regular fights got really old by the end of the game there’s just not enough enemy variety in the later stages. It’s a shame because the battle system itself is very robust with interesting and unusual skills and choices. And for a game with a tight SP economy, status effects are very powerful.
One issue I have with Persona 3+ and Fire Emblem is that I don’t care that much about s-links because I don’t care that much about most of the characters… here I (almost) love them all. It’s very interesting to have all your characters be younger children (they’re between 4 and 12) that act and talk like younger children! They’re in way over their head and they’re all dealing with the situation in their own childish ways and it can be at once cute and heart wrenching. My favorite is the de facto leader / pseudo main character who’s often reminding others and himself that, since he’s the oldest, he has to protect everybody. (He’s 12) The other characters start to pick up on this at one point. Very cute.
There was a bizarre ominous vibe towards the end and I couldn’t help but spoil myself to know what was happening by looking at guides online. I don’t know why I am ruining things for me like this
Also each chapter you can collect pages from an in-universe comic book you can read in the menu
And there are a few side scrolling ruins to explore, they take up like 1% of the game
Medium-naut:
This is the short horror space shipwreck exploration game from the La Mulana creator. It feels very much like a side project though.
Uuh whatever you do don’t get this on Switch. Massive frame drops whenever a few enemies are on screen, missed inputs, a random grey bar that randomly starts appearing and only disappears when restarting the game, etc
The game itself is very hostile, it feels like a Metroid game with just a few tweaks to make it a less action/more horror focused game. The enemies are uncaring and dangerous; they’re mostly very passive but when they move they act very erratically like they were in a NES game. They can come out of seemingly nowhere and there aren’t any invincibility frames. Enemy placement is heavily randomized. Your default weapon sucks and you have to crouch to hit most of the enemies.
Ladders are plentiful and bad, they’re slow, you can’t catch them mid jump, and going down is imprecise.
The whole premise of the game is that you start with this huge lifebar but have to slowly give it up to unlock both mandatory upgrades and weapon upgrades. There’s a temptation to skip the weapon upgrades but your default peashooter is such garbage that you won’t want to.
Your map is an old map of the ship, it’s not up to date (it doesn’t show destroyed or secret areas) and it doesn’t show your position. A lof of this game’s tension comes from managing your own mental map while heavily relying on this incomplete one and it’s an interesting challenge. Reminds me of S.O.S. / Septentrion
Yeah so they made a horror game by taking a Metroid and making everything annoying, and it works very well? You’ll spend 15 seconds shooting your unlimited ammo at a mostly passive alien until they die, and it will feel deliberate. Very soon you will rapidly start skipping enemies alltogether because fighting is too cumbersome. Your life bar looks infinite at first and you’ll spend it carelessly until you’re stuck in NES enemy hell with 5 max HP in the most remote areas of the ship
The game seems too expensive as it is (especially on the switch) but it’s interesting and short enough to try at a discount IMO
Also I finally understood the title. The protagonist is a medium! -Naut is supposed to be the suffix meaning « explorer » like in astronaut! But this is nonsense because according to the -naut suffix rule you should be exploring the medium, and you’re not exploring the medium, you’re the medium!
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also playing medium-naut, not far in, but it’s at least more interesting than most things in that field. there’s a pray button.
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Extinction boldly asks “What if we made a game that was Attack on Titan with a bland fantasy webcomic art style, clunky writing, and was also boring to play?”
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Regarding the performance issues in Medium-Naut, one of the other “PIXEL GAME MAKER SERIES” titles on Switch that I’ve tried, The Witch and the 66 Mushrooms (recommended), also has bizarre performance issues. Random stutters (especially after significant playtime), and an ability that inexplicably has a full-screen effect that makes the Switch chug.
I don’t necessarily think that these issues are fully a fault of the engine itself, per se, but rather an artifact of whatever their porting process is.
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i did find a button combination that got rid of the grey bar. i’ll see if i can work it out again when i have my switch to hand.
edit: R+start
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So I’m playing Figment, a very simplified Zelda kinda game. Visually it’s great, real great picturebook vibes. The dialogue is a weird mixed bag – a lot of the characters speak in sing-songy rhymes and the banter is self-consciously punny and groan-worthy. I’m generally finding it endearing. But despite the story-bookish setting the main character swears casually so the tone is all over the place. The main antagonist basically spouts nihilistic shit at you about how everything is meaningless, blah blah. One red flag/strike against this game is the first boss, who is a “Plague Lord” or whatever. He taunts you in song and lays down a throwaway line about (tw: ableism(?)) vaccines and autism which was a real what-the-fuck moment that has marred the experience so far.
Right, the premise: Your avatar is Dusty, a world-weary defender of a little girl’s inner mindscape, like if the main character from Inside-Out was kind of dick and had a sword. He also low-key looks like a riff on the kid from Where the Wild Things Are in terms of his garb. A little bird follows you around and offers the occasional hint/fleshes out the backstory of the protagonist by alluding to their previous adventures together. She’s almost annoying but her affection for the protagonist is hard to get mad at. Dusty calls her “turkey tit” one time which genuinely made me laugh out loud because I wasn’t expecting anything like that.
The voice acting is strange, all the English is oddly-inflected, and I assumed it was mostly just people who speak it as a second language providing the dialogue. Dusty, his sidekick and some of the other characters pretty much just sound regular British/American. But then a lot of the others sound like non-English speakers trying to put on British accents or others. Maybe it’s a deliberate choice? I could look up the developer and see where they’re from I guess, but I am sort of enjoying this particular quirk and might prefer to stay in the dark.
I was having trouble placing the name but the main antagonist kinda sounds like Peter Stormare
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