Finished Unpacking, and good god, what an effectively told story. Or maybe I’m just a sap. Or both. My favorite detail is probably the matter-of-fact way the protagonist’s eventual disability is handled.
3 Likes
I’m still convinced that there was going to be an Unpacking level where a family member died, and you had to pack up their home, but they dropped it because they didn’t want the game to have a bummer in it. My favorite detail is after she breaks up with her boyfriend, if you put his photo on the cork board she puts thumbtacks through his eyes.
7 Likes
I didn’t bother trying to learn the boss patterns before summoning a specter, and I found the protection wishstone very helpful. (I barely used the others.) Especially after getting the upgrade that makes the cube activate more quickly.
1 Like
Honestly this just sounds like what Souls became after 2 and they’re just being faithful to their influences. 3 is lousy with transforming multihealth bar bosses. The levels are still decent but the bosses are where Souls eventually fumbled for me.
4 Likes
For I think the first time ever I completed the sound caves in Myst. Still think it’s the weakest part of the game, but it’s OK.
After that I did the gear number puzzle, and organically discovered how to move the center gear. I think this puzzle was explicitly designed to frustrate you, and you only learn that the center gear moves when you hold down a lever because you’ve gotten so frustrated at the puzzle that your brain is bluescreening and you’re just holding a lever down because you can’t think of anything else that’s possible. Just a lovely little experience that only exists through play.
10 Likes
Been real tired lately but as my other in-progress games are still stuck in limbo (sorry DQ 1 HD-2D, Bioshock, Phantasy Star, Yakuza 5, probably many more), I’m still on that Zelda train (but not Spirit Tracks…not yet, anyway).
Zelda 2 beat my ass and made me cry. That game is hard. I save state’d myself in the middle of a dungeon about one hit away from dying. I don’t want to die…
Anyway I paused that for a bit and am working my way through LTTP. I played the GBA port a million years ago, so it’s nice to play the SNES version (which I’ve started a million times but haven’t actually gotten far in before) without the super long attract screen intro and Ocarina yelps.
Currently in the Ice Dungeon, so not too far from the end I guess. Game’s still good, who woulda guessed.
I like running into the trees that spit out a dozen bees that slow the game to a crawl. I mean I don’t like the bees it’s just a fun “ah shit” and probably better than the chicken swarm.
9 Likes
Isles of Sea & Sky: a sokoban with a cute tropical Polynesian pixel artstyle (yes the game makes a cheeky Star Tropics reference at one point) and lovely music. Also has a Zelda-style surface layer where you wander a world from screen to screen and even pick up a few tools that give you new forms of interaction with puzzle elements that allow you to solve later puzzles.
Also an insane icebervania with multiple layers of metapuzzles that keep revealing themselves and constantly recontextualizing the way the world is built and references itself. This is kind of a spoiler I guess but I mean you may as well know going into it. I didn’t and have fallen into a very pleasant hole.
I really wish someone else was playing this game so I could compare notes about some of deeper, later metapuzzles but I guess that is only a thing one can do on Reddit in the year 2026 and fuck that.
There is not a single word in this game and that is so great.
13 Likes
Went to add it to my wishlist and it’s apparently already there. I expect I’ll try it this week; we could do a thread.
3 Likes
the art style of this reminds me of Analgesic’s games
1 Like
Pac-Man (NGPC) in Mednafen
Inky glitched out = o
7 Likes
I’ve always wondered if being able to turn into a wall at any time to stop is a unique rule for the NGPC version of Pac-Man, or if like Tetris there’s different branches of Pac-Man rules.
2 Likes
Hm turning into walls is not making me stop in my NGPC Pac-Man. I’ve played it for a while both emulated and not and I’ve never noticed Pac-Man stopping by turning into a wall in it.
1 Like
I guess I’ll just have to dig up my copy then, because I have a strong memory of that working, and always being annoyed when it didn’t work in other versions.
2 Likes
I played through IoSaS at release but it had a major update a year or so after release that added a ton of extra stuff (probably much of those metapuzzle layers) that very few people experienced because it came so long after release in a puzzle game, I hope they are pretty neat! The original game had a definite issue in that each main area got progressively weaker the further in one got so hopefully that is one of the things they sorted out.
I agree that Dark Souls 3 had way too many multihealth bar bosses, but I think I am underselling how much of a pain they’ve been for me and I found the perfect way to describe it: it has taken me longer to defeat most Lies of P bosses (I’d estimate 60-70% of them) than it took me to defeat Malenia in Elden Ring, and that is not hyperbole. I fortunately had a minor one tonight that only took me 20-30 minutes to sort out but before I started summoning helpers my average boss battle time was probably about an hour give or take. Very few From bosses have taken me an hour to defeat, this just feels way overtuned.
3 Likes
If you post it, I will come.
I’ll give you all the hints you want to get you to the part I’m at so you can help me. Lol.
1 Like
Kinda lame that saving counts as a death (I don’t really get to complain since I save state’d the hell outta this).
Feel like I skipped a bunch of rooms in Ganon’s Tower but…oh well! Good enough!
15 Likes
picked up lost judgement again, and thinking newly about the care on the rendering of all these j-actors’ faces compared with the nvidia ai villainy from the other day
11 Likes
~demos for today~
Motorslice: cool! platforming and pacing very much taken from PoP Sands of Time, but there’s kind of a parkour-ish energy to the movement that I like. just slidey and fluid enough, still has some heft. combat is pretty basic, but given you and the enemies die in one hit idk, I’m fine with that. you’d mainly be here for the platforming I reckon. MC is cute, wish they didn’t have to play up the waifu angle but so it goes.
Super Alloy Crush: promising. amazing presentation, reminiscent of GBA action games, CyberConnect2 etc. digital, immediate control with basic platforming. main focus is the combat, and it feels pretty good. different moves assigned to d-pad + attack buttons, moves can be swapped out. meat of the game seems to be a round-based survival battle mode? roguelike power-up progression inbetween rounds, build focused. nice to play, but enemies felt like they should be doing a lot more. like…anything. they attack like maybe once every five seconds. not sure if the demo’s stuck on a lower difficulty but yeah, cakewalk. I’d be interested if it gets a lot tougher.
Acrolyte: this is the fuckin’ sauce yeeeeeeeees, feels great. Metroid 2 vibes all over, with some Prime niceties thrown in. has a…“weighty floatiness” to it, a sense of heft and gravity but as soon as I got the dash upgrade it turned buttery. aside from Metroid, getting echoes of older Amiga shit and maybe Abuse? hope it goes a bit nuts with swarm enemies later on. very impressed.
8 Likes
Been messing with “Biorand,” a randomizer for Resident Evil 1, 2, and 3. It seems to really only be designed for RE2, as randomizing RE1 causes the game to crash, and shares the same issue that RE3 has of never giving you a weapon or having completely nonsensical in-game cutscenes happen at random.
A real highlight was running into Marvin in the RPD office, barely clinging to life, deciding to do the entire opening narration of Resident Evil 8 before forcing me to leave at gunpoint.
14 Likes