My basement is a hot, humid pit right now and that’s where my PC and PS4 are so I haven’t been Gaming much lately.
But tonight I played about 30 minutes of Gravity Rush 2. What an extremely good looking game. Like the opening minutes honestly blew me away. I’m pretty surprised that some indie dev hasn’t ripped off this game’s mechanics wholesale. (If someone has, correct me).
I’ve been struggling to keep up with games but here’s a dump of things I played
Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo
I thought this would be a pretty neat ghost story, but it actually becomes about generating tension through narrative rules pretty quickly. Some characters unlock artefacts that allow them to curse other people depending on the conditions of whatever legend they are related to curses and killing. A lot of the tension of scenes is determining how you or the character you’re talking to might activate their nen ability. The goal of this whole drama is to resurrect various loved ones using the stones and killing others grants you more power to do this.
It took a while for me to work out that things in parallel narratives affect branching paths and that it’s not all solely choice based. You can manipulate characters to be in scenes by interacting with the previous scene on a different character’s ‘track’. The writing works around the player’s omniscient perspective in a fun way since you control multiple characters and allow them to do things that they couldn’t possibly do with the knowledge they have and there’s a textual element that supports this.
Auto text progression is best in class and I think was a big reason why a managed to get through this quickly. The maximum auto text progression speed is at an adult reading level so you and not having to wait five seconds for auto to decide everyone is caught up.
It also takes the premise of the curse conditions and applies them to real-life situations in dramatically horrific ways, including some bad endings that have huge implications. One of the curse bearers is a serial killer whose curse allows them to kill anyone they know the name, address, face, age, location, and occupation of the target are known one of their legs and arms are severed. Because the killer works in a school they manage to kill over 300 students in this way in one of the endings causing a worldwide hysteria.
The game feels like it takes on the legacy of the DS adventure game like many other Switch pseudo-visual novel/adventure games. It asks you to type some answers, turn the volume down, or use the save system to progress at times. The final ending puzzle is a bit obtuse and requires you really confront and puzzle out the story bit by bit. Ultimately the ending sort of retcons the entire game to nullify all curses from the beginning so that none of the main plot happened. They a lot of people hate this direction but it makes sense thematically with the fact that none of the regular endings can be said to be ‘good’. The point is that using the curses will always go wrong and the story told is still effective since we get to know our cast and see them find a positive resolution. I think certain characters get sidelined once their ‘arc’ is wrapped up but the game is short enough it doesn’t feel like anyone gets forgotten as such.
On Your Tail
I played the demo of this awhile back and I think I can sum it up as cozy mystery in a Ligurian village of furries. The art has a rough charm, and the premise and mechanics are fine. The central mystery solving asks you to gather clues by playing first-person spot the difference, and then just chronologically order them to reconstruct crime scenes. Outside of this there is a very large and extensive simulation of a town which makes me think that the game may have started as either the mystery game or cosy town simulation and one of the other got added midway through development because they felt there wasn’t enough game. Unfortunately, the developers were unable to pull off everything and so the game remains compromised in several ways.
The biggest problem by far got me to do my amateur digital foundry impression and actually time loading screens. The town is broken up into distinct areas that have load times of around 11 seconds if you walk more than 200m. Loading into a house or room can take relatively less time but then loading back out into the main world takes upwards of 30 seconds. Also when booting the game it forgets to save certain gameplay options which means you have to recalibrate them every single time you load up the game. Even dialogue won’t progress until character art has loaded. Unfortunately this means the game is extremely slow since it already has a relatively relaxed pace because of the cosy atmosphere. This makes it very hard to recommend since the game is quite long and extensive and has a very slow open and the load times challenge the average players patience. I think the devs had to give up on it as well since they presumably ran out of funding. Feels a little bit like they overscoped this one but I have enjoyed what I played. I think I could potentially finish it while on holiday, say if I’ve got little else to do on a train journey.
Finished up Rhythm Paradise Groove and am about eight medals from 100% (I don’t think I am going to perfect everything though). It turned out surprisingly voluminous even if I think the mini games themselves may not fully stack up against the Wii game. The final remix includes every game but it’s not quite as spectacular as the Wii’s final remix. As it said before the toys, multiplayer offerings, and other minigames historically felt very perfunctory but here they are really strong.
Here’s a list of my favourites:
Main Games
Hoop Trundling (cute)
Slice and dice kitchen (may be the closest successor to Ringside in terms of the premise being most memorable)
Can Do (I always like the factory/mechanism themed games since they fit rhythm very well and this is the best of this bunch)
Soccer Dreams
A for Effort
Soda Hop
Sweeper Star 2 (Sweeper Star sucks, 2 is the full game)
Lightning Bolting
Co-op games
(the best are the ones where you have time to celebrate each other’s victories, a lot of the others move so quickly that it becomes too much of an endurance test)
Versus games
Toys and mini games
Tsunku♂, who lost their voice to laryngeal cancer before making this, is credited as “Miracle Producer” which I think is one of the greatest game credits ever conceived.
I did manage to beat all of Beatspell without too much trouble (by focusing on fire and heal + grabbing every treasure chest)
I’m at the end of my Rhythm Heaven Groove journey, though I don’t want to leave. I have every gold medal and about 30 perfects.
I like the restrictive way perfect works in this game. You can’t just get a perfect rating in a stage even doing every input perfectly. You have to wait for the game to allow you to have a chance to get a perfect on a stage, which is a random event (it happens more often with more gold medals)You only get 3 shots at the perfect before the chance goes away, and there can’t be more than one stage you can get a perfect on at a time.
These restrictions make it so you can’t just bash your head against a stage to get a perfect. The stars have to align, every try feels like a rare opportunity.
And they unlock silly comic strips / writing
I’d be down to continue playing and get more perfects, but I know I’ve already cleared the easiest stages, and as the stages left will get harder and harder on average, my chances to get a perfect will get so low I’ll eventually lose all motivation. And maybe I should stop before that happens
My favorite singleplayer stages are :
I have listed about half of the stages as my favorites… this game rules…
Everybody on youtube is showing every stage done perfectly, but the best parts of the game are often the consequences for failing!! - the angry moon, the shocked expression in Hoop Trundling, the surprise elbow strike to the face in Backup Spotlight, the cats jumping around in Slice N Dice Kitchen, the happy girl getting absolutely mortified in Soda Hop
I knew lightning was a mistake.
I never put much time into Dead Rising 2 proper, but I did fuck around with the free mode in Off the Record, and the jump scare zombies are maybe the meanest thing they could have added.
Like the ones on the ground you can kinda predict, the assholes crashing into or out of the save areas, fuck those guys.
Edit: while I’m DR2 griping, it’s lame that the short prologue and epilogue games are forever trapped on the 360. Same with that Tomb Raider Underworld DLC. Or the (apparently bad and misses the whole point) Prince of Persia DLC, that isn’t available on PC. Sins of that era…
a little over a month ago I played nuclear option for the very first time and was like learning the controls and stuff, it’s a flight sim type game, and my friend was like I thought you played a ton of these, how are you so bad at this game?
last night i got my revenge
she, in her infinite hubris and pride, goes, hey Veronica why don’t we do a guns on guns duel. I very innocently go okay sure because, well, this is my fucking specialty. dogfighting is literally one of the main things I practice. It’s just not something you get to do in this game a lot because it’s all super high tech stuff, you’re like shooting missiles at people beyond visual range and whatnot.
anyway she’s in the fs-41 eclipse, the game’s f-14 tomcat equivalent, and I’m in the vt-7 vagrant, which is like the harrier jumpjet. this makes me smaller and more manuverable. see, I love the tomcat. I know its weaknesses. It’s a heavy ass plane not necessarily suited to this kind of work. I only have enough ammo for 4 or 5 bursts, so I gotta make this count even when my WSO is screaming in my ear to pull the trigger and get her ass everytime we’re close enough.
she comes at me head to head multiple times, it’s the solo wing pixy joust, i’ve been in this situation so many times. i fire at her and they ALL hit, her left engine is shitting flames, WSO is verbally confirming the hits. she breaks off and comes around again, I roll out of the turn and end up head on, rolling as she’s shooting to avoid her burst. we do this two more times, I get hits both. now we’re getting low to the ground at this point, I end up behind her and hit her again right before her plane slams into the side of a hill. I pull up so severely I barely miss scraping the tops of the trees.
I completely stunted on her. I bet me and Prez fuckin high fived each other after that one. little a bit different when it’s just about piloting and gunnery skill huh?? regret getting rid of adversary squadrons now??? DEFEAT MUST TASTE SO MUCH BITTER UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL.
The defense department regrets to inform you your daughter’s dead cuz she was stupid!!!
Tales of Berseria
Tale 3
It has been a long minute since I last played. We carry out assassinations on high-ranking church members (but its ok kids, because they become demons right before we attempt to assassinate them so we are not killing any humans!)
Poor Laphicet. The little boy in a party of demonic rogues. He gets traumatised on a regular basis while everyone half-parents him with the worst advice, usually about women.
“Women are creatures of deceit, boy”
- ToB’s protagonist (woman) on Women
All the dungeons are the most modkit levels and are so long. RPGs really sucked when the dungeons are both:
I’m nearly 20 hours in and I fear we’re at risk of no more Tales. The main thing dragging me through is seeing the little angelic boy tortured by his adult captors in new ways. That and I’ve calibrated autobattle such that I can just put the controller down. We just met a sultry older lady cat mascot witch who is the latest stop on the wild goose chase to kill the church. Idk man.
Ah, the reverse Xenosaga gambit. Well played
Won an A10 in Slay the Spire 2 because my friend hassled me to get good at Necrobinder. I keep saying I’m going to hold out playing (except multiplayer) until 1.0 but dangit I get sucked in because people keep talking about it. But now I’ll see how long I last only playing MP until I get bugged about another character 
Finished The Roottrees Are Dead with my sis, the last five entries took way too long for us to sort out. We eventually used a hint for the very last stretch (which we combined to get about 75% of the way solved via logic and going “this guy is the kind of jerk who would do that…”) where we had the right notion but had one slight bit wrong which kept a ton of info from us. Anyways gonna take a break for a month or so and then we’ll give the follow-up campaign a shot.
Am also currently up to about… 570 or so in The Message from Deep Space. I feel I can safely say that my hunch before the game was correct and that the game would have benefitted greatly from an editor. It’s not bad but this middle stretch has been rather “saggy”, in no way is this a “every single puzzle serves a purpose and could not be removed” situation at all.
Avatar and The Legend of Korra: The Series the Fighting Game (2026)
Well, I would have liked to play this. Unfortunately the PS5 is such a closed ecosystem that my hitbox controllers are not registered by any fighting game with a budget below a certain threshold. Probably going to refund this and get it on PC but I am curious to try it since it seems quite mechanically unique.
Hello Kitty Island Adventure
My partner got all the DLC and has become a collecting machine. The late game is so grindy there just wasn’t enough to do from the drip feed of daily and weekly quests. The game has pushed us down the Sanrio rabbit hole learning all about the strange and inconsequential trivia of Hello Kitty and friends. Hello Kitty is canonically British which is fucked up imo. We’re enjoying the wheat-themed magical girl expansion. Yeah. My partner enjoys collecting items much more than completing quests because it’s easier and more fun and it’s given me much to think about.
Hitman continues. I won’t write too much other than to say that the Berlin level rules (I’ll never be good enough to take out all of the targets in the level, but apparently if you do, you can hear their handler freak out over the radio). So many targets in so many little areas, lotta fun opportunities.
Chongqing is still pretty good. As cool as the neon soaked rooftops and streets look, you spend most of it indoors, which is kind of a bummer. Luckily the big escape sequence is optional on subsequent playthroughs, though I was smart this time, unlocked a lot of doors ahead of time, and snuck out without any issues.
I’m of course gonna grind challenges on Chongqing until I hit 20/20 before moving onto Mendoza, which I recall being really good. There’s a video out there of someone dragging almost every (maybe every?) NPC into the industrial grape smasher and setting it off. I’ll never have the time or patience for such a feat, but I’m glad it can be done…
not with that attitude bud
I’m very bad at aiming! And timing! Hahahaha.
I recently found out that Mike Z is involved in the creation of this. Bummer but I can’t in good conscience support it.
I am neck deep in the Riven remake. What a gorgeous game. I love it much more than Myst so far.
https://emlise.itch.io/conservation-of-bass
30 minute fish-with-legs teleport puzzle game with perfect graphics and a little collection of evil levels if u beat it. i finished it in 36 mins then downloaded it and finished it again in 29 (this time aiming for perfect clears (no wasted moves) for each stage) it’s chill af.
edit: this is my fav lev
Goddammit
a few weeks ago, knockoff JRPG publisher FuRyu announced Anomalith, a janky looking third person shooter from NatsumeAtariWinning Entertainment Group that looked kinda extraction/survival game adjacent
well they randomly put a demo out over the weekend
yes, this is the garbage I crave. this is the PS2-core I’ve been looking for. what if RE4 suffered one too many concussions. your character is an asshole and everyone around her are just different stripes of asshole. they even have a version of “shoot a mook’s legs and then up to them for a suplex” thing except it’s way more random and janky. pretty much the most interesting thing they have going on is as your health goes down, you become more tainted and mutated and this powers up your anomaly skills but the only skills in the demo are a parry and a simple melee slash and I hope nothing else gets added because we need not muddle such finely honed simplicity, which probably came about by accident
videogames is good once again
