I finished up Torment: Tides of Numenera tonight. I think I like the concept behind the story well enough, I’m just not sure they used it to craft a particularly well told tale.
The ending bit was much more talkative than one would expect (I mean the game seems like one where that would be an option, but the in-game context around it was a bit wild). I went with the least bad ending that didn’t involve me having to fight anything.
I think I enjoyed my wildly misunderstood version of combat from Planescape: Torment more than the system I understood okay enough here, sure it lacked strategy but it was a lot quicker >_>
the one thing that P:T combat has going for it is that the optimal party configuration is like, one healer, four melee attackers, and you as the sole mage, so the RTwP AI is conspicuously neither lacking nor too complex to manage, since you’re mostly just picking from one character’s skill slots
I mean I guess this is technically helpful dialogue but lol. Between this and the solutions to puzzles being yellow spray painted on walls this isn’t the most subtle game ever!
Got the River City Girls collection because of the hype on here about the double dragon content. In theory I shouldhate this for the leveling up, but it doesn’t feel grindy. Not sure like the double dragon content, but it’s otherwise a fine game.
The opening shot of STALKER 2 being a bombed out apartment flat is a visceral moment for me and I think for a lot of Ukrainians. Such images have been everpresent over the last few years. Russians have bombed so many apartment blocks into rubble, seeing that particular image so faithfully realized hurts but also feels like a reification of the immediate past; that the ordeals ukrainians have gone through are real. I have no doubt that some of the developers have personally experienced that opening scene in their actual lives (I remember hearing, before GSC moved headquarters, that one of the programmers was working out of a makeshift basement bomb shelter in 2022).
One of the biggest changes from the original STALKER is the way the voice actors sound. It is not just that they spoke Russian in the first game and Ukrainian in this one. They sound like real people now instead of gopnik bandit stereotypes. Only a few characters have done a ‘tough guy’ voice so far. Its very different from what I expected (from the execrable english dub that has been in all the trailers and previews)
You know how Joseph Gordon Levitt tries to sound like a grown up by speaking an octave below his natural register? That’s what everyone in the original game sounded like to me. I also felt that the polish dub of the Witcher games had this same affect so it isn’t just how one language sounds to my ears vs another. It’s an actual change in direction. Now only the posers sound like posers instead of all the characters sounding like posers. Everyone else just talks in a natural voice
I think the consensus on Tears of the Kingdom (and Breath of the Wild for that matter) was that every language but the English dub was a better choice.
I was mad the final bit of the game wasn’t subtitled, and the lip flaps didn’t match it, but playing Assassin’s Creed Unity in French was much better than everyone running around with quasi English accents.
