Trying to use that “How Long to Beat” site as a metric and…I think I can do it.
I spent something like 250 hours on Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, after all. And that game was…mostly fine.
Wordle 198 6/6
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Wordle 198 5/6
are you guys going through and replacing the grey squares in these little share copy pastes with black coz i respect that but whew
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I’m not, but I have been wondering what other people are doing to produce different looking results. I saw someone with a blue tile!
Blue and orange are the high contrast colours that can be toggled in the settings. Black vs grey might be the dark mode toggle.
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ohhh that’d be it yeah
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so i just started playing Project Warlock tonight. as almost certainly the biggest Wolfenstein 3D fan on the entirety of this forum, i definitely appreciate a modern retro fps game basically sticking to that sort of raycaster/cooridor shooter style. the art style is definitely what drew me in, and i do think is the biggest appeal of the game. it definitely feels like an “indie game” in the early 2010’s sense of the word i.e. a pixely passion project with like some tropes of more recent rougelite style indie games, rather than a larger scale thing. the upgrade system and stuff is i suppose neat to have to distinguish it from others of the genre but it’s not anything that’s blowing my mind. the level design is really just okay but i wouldn’t call it great (contrary to popular belief i think Wolf3D squeezes way more out of its limitations than almost any of its imitators) it’s really just about blasting stuff and enjoying the enemy design and look of the game. especially these guys are well done:
i also just enjoyed the Antarctica setting (which is the second episode) a lot in general:
so i’m at the end of the second episode right now. i understand what you mean about the first boss. it basically just a large slow wizard dude that’s a damage tank and shoots magic at you and then turns into a thing that rushes you and is unavoidable. i died several times on that last rushing phase before lucking out and killing it with basically no health left.
from what i noticed the one time i ran out of lives - i’m pretty sure you can go to “level select” and pick the most recent level you’ve beaten and you dont’ have to start everything all over? at least that’s what i did the one time i died and it seemed to send me back on the path i was on before. i’m not sure if you keep your upgrades or not though. but yeah, that whole system was confusing to me.
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i was able to 1cc run saber on hard within two hours after having never played beyond the second stage on normal years ago. fun game.
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It’s pretty nice that you can touch anything in Dream Emulator and just be done with that section. The moment you feel any kind of fatigue with the area you’re in you can ram into a wall and be whisked away. More games should work that way.
I always liked Body Harvest’s “point”. The way that alien bugs could land pretty much anywhere on the map, would break open buildings and force people out, eventually making you lose if they did this enough times, it always came across as a clear effort to contextualize the entire overworld into some kind of overarching gameplay system.
I haven’t played it but it seems like Death Stranding is one of the only other open world games that presents its landscape as this big interconnected thing that you have to manage as a whole.
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Oh, I was actually referring to the episode 4 boss. Managed to get all the other bosses first try playing on whatever the hard (but not hardest) mode is called. Actually I think I only died twice total until that boss, then it was like 15 in a row lol. Had more lives but gave up. Would be interested to hear what you think of it when you get there. (It’s the tank. You’ll know.)
EDIT: Actually I think the only real way to beat that boss without grinding the rng is to build specifically for it. So if you want my advice, make sure you have Sprinter and Ghost before you get to the act 4 boss, and probably the shield spell as well. I did not, which pissed me off, I wasn’t about to restart the whole game to spend my points different.
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still on scarlet grace when i get chance, way ahead of my first abandoned playthrough from launch
getting confident, stacked my retinue with top tiers and some good gear + already have plans for how i would begin a second playthrough so i guess that means i’m going to be humbled fairly soon
i’ve left the english dub track on, some of these performances are hilarious - chiago is some incredible camp and i’ll never get tired of “This is going to hurt!!! a lot!!!”
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Wordle 199 6/6
Barely made it.
Dipped back into Animal Crossing, because it’s a hard habit to break, and finally got two artworks I’ve been after and a DIY…that I can’t build, because I need a sakura bonsai tree to do it. Oh well! Back to not playing it, until I inevitably do.
Missed a thing in Witcher 3 and couldn’t find my way back to it, so I, uh, deleted my saves to restart. So back to square one on that. I was only an hour or so in, so.
Started up Oceanhorn and dropped it pretty quickly. I guess it’s neat, but it makes you appreciate the sorta rigid directional movement 2D Zeldas opt for when you can’t aim at enemies for shit in this thing, or fall off hard to read ledges and gotta clumsily make your way back to where you were.
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Kind of bumbling my way through the first Witcher game, but I’ve been having a pretty good time. It’s a little rough, very much a “first novel” but you can tell it had something cooking.
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this game felt like “what if we filed the serial numbers off of wind waker, then continued filing until nothing was left but dust”
i hated it
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I got Axiom Verge minutes before a sale for it ended on New Years Eve, and played it for like an hour yesterday. Currently feeling mixed by slightly hopeful about it.
When the vibes of the game resonate with me, it feels really good. It just hasn’t quite been hitting all the right notes so far.
I like the way the game looks, in general, but I’m struggling to find a sense of place to glom on to. idk, this is like the least of my complaints thusfar, as I expect the world will make more sense eventually (besides being a pleasant mass of grody NES tilework).
Combat and gunplay feels weird. Not sure if I like the idea of having a bunch of separate, selectable guns. More crucially, aiming diagonally downwards is surprisingly finicky. Pressing forward and then down has you aim forward while crouching (that can’t be right), so to aim in that direction you have hold the aim lock button to plant your feet on the ground (which in a game with 8-way aiming rather than full 360 free aim feels quite limiting). It goes against all my Metroid and Contra shooting instincts, and just makes the laser drill a pain to use.
What’s really taking me out of it is the writing. The game only marginally benefits for the weird terms and verbiage at work, but this is undercut by basically all of the conversations so far ending with “Well, I guess they stopped talking to me for now.” Also, the protagonist flat out sucks. Just a boring dude with the personality of stale bread, and he’s not hot enough or ugly enough either. It’s like what if a game forced you to play as that dumb human dude from Gato Roboto, without the benefit of putting him in a humiliating situation or giving him a humanizing affection towards animals.
Honestly wondering if I should have played this in Speedrun or Randomizer mode for my first playthrough at this point.
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these are all significant standing issues with it imo
ah, thanks for letting me know here. i already had the Sprinter perk (it basically always feels good to go fast in videogames) so i bought Ghost as well.
as someone who likes Egyptian/desert themed things in general, the 3rd episode was pretty disappointing. just a bunch of damage sponges i could easily hack down in corridors. i’m sure i could play on hardcore with a different build, but that wouldn’t make the levels more fun. i do like this game’s Wolfenstein 3D style commitment to having a lot of secrets and areas that you don’t necessarily need to go to in a level, but a lot of them look the same.
the 4th episode’s definitely had a difficulty spike, and is a lot more visually interesting. i like the game’s commitment to keeping the action/movement flat but making things more visually interesting around it:
but this city setting especially just really reminded me that in spite of enjoying the visual style of this game a lot, i’ve still had a lot more fun playing some Doom WADs than i’ve had with this game. which is how i’m starting to feel about a lot of these retro fps games in general tbh. it feels like a miracle to me that DUSK and AMID EVIL were able to mostly escape that.
anyway Project Warlock feels like the definition of a 7/10 game. not a waste of time and good enough for what it is… but not going to blow you away. and it’d probably be like a 5/10 or 6/10 game for me without the distinctive visual style and a few of the more novel features.
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I mean I don’t know this for 100% certain but I am nearly positive it is impossible to permanently miss anything in that game that the game tracks collection of. It’s the lawnmower sim to end all lawnmower sims (if only)
I know you can get back to the starting areas even though you can’t right away
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I finished Unsighted in about 6 hours. 2 NPCs dead.
There’s a « New Game extra » mode which is a pretty neat novel idea for a Metroidvania / search action / keyring / etc game. It starts you off with the blueprints for every navigational item ( but the first one) Most of the necessary materials to craft the items are very easy to find or buy, and I had all of them in about 15 minutes without looking for them
So this mode essentially starts you off with every navigational item, so you can sequence break however much you want
Extra neat is how the blueprints are not even necessary to craft the items; if you start with external knowledge about how to craft them, you can sequence break from your first playthrough. Meaning that while New Game Extra facilitates sequence breaking, it does not actually give you any tangible advantage over New Game
FUGA Melodies of steel:
I’m surprised to be the first one talking about this on this forum? It’s from the Tail Concerto / Solatorobo team (I haven’t played either)
A group of children during not-WW2 in France find a massive tank and roam the land just like in Slay the Spire but as a full fledged game instead of a roguelike, and with social link stuff and X-com base building. The tank has three canons which act as three « characters » in battle that you can assign different kids to depending on the situation. Solid so far
I’m sorrry to the little furry friends but the tank is the star of the show, it’s a behemoth that at once looks extremely powerful and ready to collapse at any moment
I chose the French voice acting and aside from the narrator, all the French voice acting is done by obviously Japanese people with thick accents. This might be the best form of voice acting there can be
The story is charming, it’s a bit annoying to have the larger kid talk about eating all the time though, like aren’t we over this in 2021
The tank comes equipped with a soul cannon and asks you to sacrifice one kid 10 minutes in to feed it, which is fucking grim! But the game immediately cancels that sacrifice and from what I’ve heard it’s generous enough that you should not have to use the cannon again
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