Ah, damn, so is it no good? I was looking at SH Chapter One since I tend to really like investigation games but I’ve never got into the Frogware Sherlocks
Can’t speak for the newest one but i’ve enjoyed previous Frogwares SH games. I feel like they need to be taken on their own terms though - they’re a bit janky and uneven, occasionally involve awkward leaps of logic, and the whole enterprise feels a bit rickety. But if you’re okay with the ricketiness I find them to be extremely charming and unique.
2 Likes
I was startin’ to feel the way Miles Edgeworth Investigations does its thing (piecing together logic bits, sometimes having macguffin evidence), until the end of this second case made a bunch of weird logical leaps that I just can’t really go along with. It’s a bummer, because it was a decent and interesting case!
I’m gonna see it through, but I worry this is the start of what y’all were talking about, with these games making less and less sense 
This week on Keep Your Battle: Unchained, a weekly game of Dungeon Fantasy (powered by GURPS) our party tasted hubris. We were without our cleric, Esther Ville, as well as our warrior, Roy McCoy. Chauvini Bombassus got our friendly NPC Mike Lee and the labourer named Gormal. Esther (before her player had to leave) went to the church and found a surgeon named Balinsky. This guy had an attitude! We armed ourselves with crossbows and trained one level in the skill with all our characters. Then we went hunting Slorn for their ‘blast glands’. We knew there are Slorn in the Chokehole but we were overly cautious in our travels to the cave dungeon and Chauvini (I) mismanaged his (my) rations and soon ran out.
Before we got to the dungeon we got an infestation of bugs all over our bodies. Esther had left, and only Mike Lee, Balinsky and Charlotte DeBuff were spared. Chauvini immediately stripped and jumped into the ice cold river which damaged his Fatigue Points. We decided to go to Hasselville, a nearby town, and rest up.
Chauvini bought a bunch of rations and we all headed back to the Chokehole.
At the mouth of the cave dungeon there were a pride of karkadann which we chose to avoid and so we went around the dungeon to its rear entrance, so to speak. Once there we found some ogres who walked across a bridge. When we crossed it, the bridge gave in under Gormal and all the weight he was carrying and Chauvini and Mike jumped in after him. Charlotte did a float spell on herself and Balinsky and the water bound trio found themselves being sucked into a whirlpool. Gormal and Mike went in, Chauvini caught ahold of some rocks and made his way down the river to a waterfall!! It hurt when he fell.
Charlotte moved Balinsky down the whirlpool and brought herself to Chauvini who she floated up to the surface. They found a room with a bunch of dwarven shit and a stone chest decorated with an open-mouthed dwarf’s head. Chauv stuck his finger in the mouth and began to be sucked into the chest. He tried holding on but couldnt test his strength forever and was brought into the chest. There he met a guy named Hugo the Axe who had been stuck in there for a couple hundred years and lived on the victims of the chest (mostly goblins, and his old friends who tried rescuing him). They ended up fighting each other, who went in after him, and he was the only survivor. He may have been going in after some other guy, too. Kinda stupid lol. Anyway,
Chauvini meets this guy and he’s kinda crazy but as usual Chauvini’s charisma and choice apparel impressed this dude so Chauv could talk him down. My character has Higher Purpose: Duelling, so of course, I had him challenge this guy to a duel and whoever wins gets to do with the other as he wilt. In the end Chauvini won a great duel with a stab to his enemies eye and patched him up afterward the best he could do (not well). Now theyll just wait to die until they are hopefully rescued.
The others went into the whirlpool and they found it led to a weird zone with a goat-headed demon and a lot of mist. Basically Gormal was dead, Mike Lee was fighting with his nunchaku against the demon, and Balinsky was praying in a corner. Mike yelled to Charlotte to save Balinsky and gtfo, to which Charlotte complied.
We lost a lot and Mike is probaly dead+Chauvini might still starve to death cos Im out of rations (shared the remaining rations with Hugo before we duelled cos I wanted us to be in good shape for a fair fight). We didnt make any money, we lost so many supplies with Gormal and things are pretty much screwed right up.
6 Likes
playing the first umihara kawase and being reminded the bosses are so miserable despite the rest of the games being so good.
at least sayonara lets me just start at any stage i want so i can skip already cleared bosses, which makes it by default better than the first game regardless of anything else.
8 Likes
Yeah I played Sagebrush during my deep dive into said Bundle and while it isn’t a game whose narrative will really ever surprise you it does handle the subject matter with as much respect as one could reasonably hope for in a game and I think that redeems the whole experience.
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I can’t write the whole thing off as bad yet. this was one particularly bad case that really emphasized the more irritating aspects of their attempts to keep some difficulty and challenge to the investigation system and not just have it purely be a visual novel you can click through to the one solution. usually in the last couple games even when they were being frustratingly vague with the suspects, there were little details, a line of dialogue, a scratch on the wall in the environment that’s not even interactable, etc, something like that that doesn’t go in your little case log thing, you just have to be paying attention to, that clues you in on which solution is more probable. this case didn’t even really have that, or when it did it all pointed to the wrong person if you go by how much money they reward you depending on who you accuse, which seemed to also be the only official indicator of guilt?
I’ll have to see how the rest of the cases compare. unlike the previous sherlock games this one’s an open world so it does have side cases that are simpler and have more definitive conclusions, which is good. I think sinking city was similar but the thing about a city that’s sunken is that it turns out those are miserable to navigate, so I never got back to that one.
frogwares is interesting. I can’t think of anybody else really trying to make a true detective style of game like these, that’s not just crime set dressing to a visual novel or traditional style adventure game.
it’s often a thin line between genius and boneheaded in a frogwares game. here was a part in this case that reminded me of something out of their older style of games. you build a fake elephant to lure out a real one
here’s sherlock wearing adidas
also the mind palace / deduction board thing from previous things is finally no longer clicking on tiny neurons and synapses in a giant void. still not as cool as in ripper when it was yarn and index card on corkboard but it’s an improvement
wow young sherlock holmes was just like us, having to come to the same realizations we all had to in our youth
11 Likes
I’m enjoying MGSV so much more than I expected, wow! All these little systems are engaging but kept simple enough to not overwhelm. The game provides tangible and fun rewards for even the most basic side quests. Astonishingly, it feels like it respects my time. In fact, I don’t know if I’ve ever played a high budget open world game that respects my time as much as this one. Maybe that’ll change later though, I’m still early on. The sense of humor is great too, the comic timing on the fulton device alone is masterful.
I don’t care about the plot even a little bit aside from the dog. And I know things are gonna get pretty gross at times. But man, infiltrating these bases as I swiftly accrue increasingly absurd technologies that actually make a difference in gameplay… It’s great!
21 Likes
I can’t pinpoint precisely why, but I’m getting, like, NES vibes from this game. It’s nothing like an NES game, but I’m feeling the Deep Videogame Energy coursing through it. It feels like part of a grand lineage. It sort of has that New Media energy that I rarely feel in 2010’s-2020’s AAA games. It’s reveling in being a Videogame For Itself, instead of trying to be like a movie or a serious artwork or something. It’s embracing the peculiarities of its medium and finding the humor in that.
14 Likes
They’re just going for realistic policing here
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Replaying Wind Waker and ‘It is too soon for us to venture in this direction. We should sail directly to our next destination.’ is the worst.
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Playing through the Krastorio 2 total conversion mod for Factorio one Saturday every two weeks with my usual Factorio partner (who is way more into it than I am). Last session he set up a builder locomotive using a vehicle roboport and massively expanded the train system, while I solved the gas chemistry/rare metals puzzles needed to automate the sixth level of tech card (out of ten that K2 has).
I’m convinced now Krastorio 2 is the one good Factorio total conversion. Yes it doubles the complexity overall but it also deliberately makes other things easier to balance that out: compared to vanilla, smelter speed is 3x higher and underground pipe/belt range is doubled. So it’s more automation puzzles, and less mindless scaling and less getting in your own way.
4 Likes
This sort of shit was exactly why I found Breath of the Wild mindblowing (and not in the sense of “this game is great”, more in the sense that I legitimately was surprised by it). It’s such a massive shift in design appraoch for a team that had been amazingly conservative in terms of funneling the player for quite some time.
14 Likes
Yeah, starting as early as Zelda 2, come to think of it.
But they had actually started experimenting with nonlinearity again a little bit before BotW: in Link Between Worlds.
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I guess what makes it so frustrating in wind waker is that the overworld has already been designed with freedom in mind in contrast to something like Skyward Sword or even Twilight Princess. There are always a number of clearly defined landmarks on the horizon to invite curiosity and the fish hint at mysteries and adventures without outright spoiling them. You don’t even need to look at the map because the wind and compass are decent visual cues. Yet the critical path forces you through at least 3 really dull dungeons before you can do any of that. It’s a disconnect that reminds me a lot of the difference between non-Morrowind Bethesda main quests and the rest of their games.
11 Likes
i didn’t get the appeal of Vampire Survivor the first couple of times i played it. I think this is mostly because the first time I played the library I beat it, just through some good random choices and whatever a moderate amount of skill brings to the table in this game.
Now that I’m trying to beat it I’m finding it essentially impossible, so now I understand what people see in it. Balancing offense and defense, thinking about what upgrades will meaningfully change your outcome, and grinding out coins to better your chances of winning.
Anyway I think I need to stay away from this game but I’m glad I understood why people like it, maybe.
6 Likes
I got completely hooked on Vampire Survivors for two days, just could not stop playing it. It’s so compulsive! I got all the achievements, and now it kind of feels like I’ve seen everything. Unfortunately, it seems to me that there is a pretty narrow range of optimal builds, to the point that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to play differently. This really cuts the replay potential for me. I’m glad it’s early access, so hopefully future updates will open up new build opportunities and other ways that the game can vary between runs. I do think it has the makings of a truly excellent roguelite.
5 Likes
I kept losing right before reaching 30 minutes until I discovered that you can evolve more than one weapon in the same run. If you do several, it almost doesn’t matter which ones you choose.
Also, you can “cheat” in the library by picking up the two upgrades on display after filling all of your normal slots with other things.
3 Likes
I watched a low-key, kinda funny YouTuber play like 45 minutes of this game and I feel like that was good enough for me but the game looks like a hoot.
yeah i think it’s a bit simple. if you want a literal slot machine + make interesting choices for builds game i think Luck be a Landlord is a much better game, but it also costs $10 so more than 3x as much.
LbaL also features a lot less down time between choices which is nice because i don’t find the act of playing Vampire Survivors very engaging (the most skill-intensive thing i noticed in VS is that that the whip always attacks forwards and then backwards, so if you turn around between whip attacks, you can hit the same side multiple times and thus has 2x DPS on that side).
also in the “make a choice every turn” genre is Super Auto Pets which i was addicted to for weeks and heartily recommend. it’s probably the most accessible auto chess there is (it has no time limit because it’s asynchronous, and you can save in the middle of run). it’s also free until you want to play with the expanded animal set (makes it more complicated but not necessary more fun / better). you’re only ever matched with people using the same sets as you, so it’s always “fair” in that regard.
it is pretty tough at the beginning while you learn the ropes and figure out how to optimize & spend your money but it has a pretty wide variety of viable builds too.
think it’s even better than SNKRX, which was the previous king of accessible auto chess
6 Likes