Games You Played Today ver.1.22474487139...

[Rudie]

I had spoiled for me by a podcast there was a JOKE in Death’s Door. See you play the game for 4 hours without voic, then a Grandma who’s house you’ve destroyed yells YOU LITTLE SHIT.

After starting a second Elden Ring character (Arbys Sponsorshi) and running through to beat the first big bad (not enough HP.) I went back to Death’s Door. It was said podcast’s favorite game last year.

Death’s Door is isometric Dark Souls by Nintendo Fans for a Nintendo Console.

Someone’s above post about Tunic being all the ways you can hide something from the camera kept playing in my brain. There is a moment early in in DD where they do this and I expelled every ounce of Carbon Dioxide in my body.

Turns out the Little Shit line isn’t voiced.

I knew what this game was going to be. But sometimes I like to try and be surprised by stuff in this art form that other people think is great.

Well time to go play 3-4 credits of a new shooter before my wrists give out in a way that Elden Ring…didn’t.

[Rudie]

Mirai Ninja owns but also all these white screen flashes makes it unplayable (like 80% of Arcade Games).

[VastleCania]

My current take on Satisfactory is that it fucks up really badly by making the tech trees mostly hidden.

As counterexample, the main goals always shows you 6-8 different sub-goals you need to achieve, and exactly what each node will unlock, which is pretty good. I don’t mind that the main goals are revealed 2 at a time instead of showing all 8 or whatever - I think that’s enough information to direct my play.

But the other tech trees work like this:

1. First, there are no tech trees at all until you pick up a relevant resource. This is okay.
2. Then, the first node on that tree is revealed, plus the amount of nodes that you can eventually unlock, but not the specifics
3. Researching the first node will unlock the next set, but not anything below that

That means that I have no idea what’s in each tech tree, and it turns out there’s a ton of extremely useful shit in there. For example:

• Boots that make you run faster and jump higher
• A vehicle explicitly for transportation
• Power poles that have more than 4 nodes on them
• A melee weapon that isn’t total garbage
• Ranged weaponry
• Bombs that let you destroy rocks covering up critical resources

But also, there are like 8 tech trees and so not only do I not know what each tech tree unlocks, even if I have an inkling of it existing I don’t know which tech tree it is in.

The absolute worst example of this is lighting, a fairly basic requirement for, uh, doing fucking anything at night. It’s not in any tech tree, it’s in a separate “store” that you dump excess resources into to unlock tickets to buy blueprints. But it doesn’t show in the store until you’ve gotten far enough in a certain tech tree, AND the store doesn’t even indicate that there are items that you can’t purchase yet!! I thought I had seen everything there was to offer in it, but suddenly new items appeared without any warning whatsoever. The tech tree node doesn’t even mention that this is going to happen!!

It’s infuriating because, as far as I can tell, this is a purposeful design choice. I get that you don’t want to overwhelm new players with this stuff but I’ve been playing for 30+ hours and only now discovered some basic necessities due to this.

My gut reaction is that they want to “surprise and delight” the player by hiding information and building a sense of suspense, but frankly it’s extremely awful. I know the game is in early access but it’s been in early access for, uh, 2 years I think?

Also the information is readily available online! Not marked as spoilers! Because tech trees aren’t spoilers!

Anyway, absolutely baffling decision that nearly caused me to drop the game because I thought I would never get better movement options than I had, and that most of the terrain was awful and unnavigable. And also Darkness.

EDIT: I want to counter this with Factorio which absolutely dumps every single tech tree on you in such a way that reveals exactly how massive the game is from the very start. Seeing that I’ll eventually be manufacturing resources using resources I don’t even know about, which are themselves manufactured using resources I don’t even know about, which are themselves…etc. etc. is kind of cool to me. I understand not wanting to do this though.

But this game is an order of magnitude less complex than Factorio, therefore fuck you show me the tech tree

[VastleCania]

i apologize if i sound like an entitled GAMER here btw. maybe i am too harsh. i just get very upset when a game trips over its own feet this hard when it seems to have an answer for almost every other criticism i could level at it. i want this game to be great!!

[Chevluh]

Factorio worked hard on how to display its tech trees in an informative and enjoyable way and it shows.

Satisfactory did not and it also shows.

[km]

No that’s fine, I think there’s a difference between a game being hard or mysterious and a game just wasting your time and this feels like the latter

[Shahczyk]

I beat Star Wars Fallen Order and started up a Ninja Gaiden sigma run pretty much right after.

I felt like Fallen Order was so smooth and flatly UI’d that it made it easy to forget that I was actually playing it most of the time. I have the same effect sometimes with Slay The Spire where I just start inputting with no thought in head. I think this game tapped into that but specifically in it’s traversal. I got most of my enjoyment in platforming from point A to point B. It makes me want to revisit the Ps2 Prince of Persias.

I think a lot of what made the combat so terrible was actually the UI. I feel the same way about RPGs, as soon as I can see the mathematics behind a strategy game it ceases to be a game and becomes an equation I balance with my time. The fact they made the basic goon combat so transparent as to seem farcical took all the play out of it. Maybe pressing square three times and then rolling away was all character action ever was but please don’t make me aware of it.

Being a prequel child and playing games that Fallen Order is a chimaera of as a child was enough to make it to the end. I’m surprised with how much I was affected by the games big moments. I’m just about neutral on star wars but apparently I have a lot of built up brain matter specifically for light sabers.

Ninja Gaiden still rules. It’s one of the games that means the most to me and so I’m glad it doesn’t suck when I finally got around to playing it as an adult. Not all the way through just yet but this game is proper sticky, a set the alarm for 5 hours from now kind of experience.

[captainlove]

And with that my collection of Pikmin sentai is complete and I have unlocked Pikmin Bloom 2: I Can’t Believe My Pikmin App is Such a Fancy Pedometer ~ Now and Forever.

[Khan]

been playing that new kirby and i gotta be honest yall, i think its really fucken good. its just fun to move around in! the soundtrack constantly playing off of the established theme actually really works for me in this game, even though frankly i usually find working a motif to death kinda grating. also i love the way the game looks! they set up so many wonderful shots

i am slightly terrified that i’m in what i feel like could be the second to last world and only have 35% completion or something like that, but thats also a little exciting because i’m an absolute fucking sicko

it’s not perfect but like, it’s frankly giving me something much better than what i expected out of 3D kirby! (and i probably wouldve enjoyed what i expected)

[OneSecondBefore]

Yeah, I just started playing that kirby too and it is really solid! I absolutely love the presentation of it, just totally cute and stylish. You can go in Kirby’s house and it plays that classic Kirby theme, and you can put a collectable figurine on his table, and when you press the button to inspect it you get this wild shot looking up from the surface of the table with a gigantic too-close kirby peering down at you and the figurine. Love it! The soundtrack is great. Some of the secrets in these levels are actually pretty clever. I think a lot of recent kirby games have felt kind of bland, but this one has that classic kirby spark to it.

[Drem]

@loki

also, it’s a co-op game themed like a videogame, where you go through 6 stages with boss fights, and the 500 minutes time given is assuming you’re going to play through the whole thing in one go, which is insane.

Yeah, the rulebook says you can take a picture of the game state to pickup wherever you leave off, but it was much funnier to make a joke about how a long a full game takes. I guess games like Testament fall into a category similar to tabletop RPGs, where they’re designed for a set group of players to play over an extended period of time? How big of a genre is that in boardgames?

It does seem really neat though. It’s simultaneously faster than I expected it to be, since the board always moves up a phase every turn, but also slower than I expected because each turn takes a while despite it just being like 4 actions. I think half of the time is fiddling with the tokens- fishing them out of the ziploc and counting what needs to be moved where. There’s a lot of token moving in this game.

The other game I bought, Bullet is… I’m not sure I get it yet. I feel like I need to play it outside it’s established rules just to get some card familiarity, because it’s a board game about manipulating the board state so it matches conditions on cards that will drawn from you deck. But since I’m new, I don’t actually know what kinds of cards there are, so I don’t really have any sense of planning or strategy. Without that element, it feels like a completely random game with little thought.

@Broco

The thought level varies a lot too, and the most mentally demanding phase of any game is in my experience when you’re first learning the rules and basic tactics.

Yeah, and I also found that not playing for a few days between sessions makes it really hard to recollect some of the intuition you develop on basic game strategy, so it feels like I need to commit a few days to learning the game. I should probably also not try to watch movies at the same time.

@Tulpa

the best japanese board game I’ve played is tragedy looper , which despite its awful art direction and questionable legibility produces some of the most unique board game fun I’ve ever had.

I did see this at the convention and remembered you saying it was good. Unfortunately, it seems like it’s a competitive game so it needs multiple people. I’ll check out the Oink games stuff though- it’s neat that there’s a Switch collection too.

This board game phase I’m in is actually born out of the TCG phase I was just in after playing Yugio Duel Master. I wanted to try out all sorts of the current crop of TCGs but was never able to find anyone to play them with. So now I’m looking at cooperative boardgames because many of them have single player rulesets, or it’s possible to just have one person play as multiple players. Also, I really wanted to play a boardgame like Bloodborne where you’re exploring a board with a figurine, because that looked fun.

If anyone knows some good single player board games, particularly ones that feature a little figurine of a dude moving around a dungeon fighting other figurines, please let me know. (Granted it sounds like a really expensive type of boardgame that you should really get in on the kickstarter years in advance rather than buying off the shelf.)

[Tulpa]

Gloomhaven is the ultimate dungeon crawl board game right now, and you can play it solo if you play as 2 characters, but it is indeed on the expensive end

[wourme]

Given what you said, I’d recommend Aeon’s End. It’s a very good co-op game with deck building elements. No miniatures, though.

There are lots of base sets and expansions, but I’d recommend starting with this one:

Aeon's End: War Eternal

One nice thing about this game is you really don’t have to buy a lot of sets to have a complete experience. I have just one base set and some of the small expansions and I don’t think I will ever need any more. (I would prefer never to have too much to fit in the base set’s box, actually.)

[OneSecondBefore]

Gloomhaven is indeed a great dungeon crawl game. There’s a smaller, much cheaper version of it called Jaws of the Lion that they sell at Target. I have it and I think it’s pretty good.

[OneSecondBefore]

Mage Knight is also an excellent explore-a-board RPG type game, and I think it comes with an explicitly designed robust solo mode. Kind of expensive but not absurdly so for a board game like that.

[captainlove]

All this Kirby love and watching recent streams has got me reconsidering it. Kirby is just too gosh darn cute in this one. I dismissed the demo as too easy but I did enjoy myself. That and I’d be paying that Nintendo tax.

[isfet]

Tunic has accessibility options but not a key configuration lol

playing a bit more. gradually getting into it a bit more. just had to post this observation as my hand cramps up from holding L to lock on to stuff

[Victor]

@isfet

holding L to lock on to stuff

you can also click r3

[isfet]

good to know! that’s slightly better

[Mikey]

Okay, I take it back, at least one of the upgraded hats you can get in Kirby and the Forgotten Land is both clearly more powerful and way cooler looking.

It’s funny to hear people sort of ragging Death’s Door and Tunic upthread for their reliance on secrets hidden by forced camera perspective, only because KatFL is chockfull of those kinds of secrets and like, I feel like a Very Clever Boy whenever I notice one even if all I’m doing is keeping my eyes peeled.