1. This is a platformer that's in the same vein as a lot of
walking-sim/"relaxing"-type games. It's pretty good. I'm going to say I like this one just to prove I don't hate all these kinds
of games.
2. I think the main difference between Refunct
and a million of these games is this doesn't overstay it's welcome. It
is like, hey, this is a game where you hop about and listen to emotional
and epic sounding electronic music, you got me? Good. It doesn't make
you play for two or three hours to get that point across.
3. My
biggest complaint is you are plopped right in there w/o any explanation
of the controls, which are non-standard--at least on a controller. Who
puts jump as the right bumper? I mean, really.
4. I feel like this game asks a very important question: Like, what are we even platforming for, man?
5. *spoilers* We platform because we love it. Get on it.
6.
Oh, going back to number 3, once you check the controller mapping in
the game options, the jump button is labeled jump/climb or some such but
you can't actually climb. I am not sure why they did that but I am
seething w/ anger about it.
7. Seething.
8. The amount of
time it took me to play this was approximately one beer. I had to pee
in the middle and grabbed another beer while I was up but didn't open it
until after the game was over. Use this information how you will.
9. You can't fail at this game. You can only fail at life. Take a moment to let that sink in.
10. It is extremely hard to not call this game extremely easy. Hard enough that I won't bother. This game is extremely easy.
11.
Ok, there are a few things that will take you more than one try but
nothing that is going to take you more than a minute or two to get past
really. You never die and no part of the small game world takes any
considerable time to get to.
12. I put the graphical settings of
this all the way up to 4K ultra super mega and it ran well on my 1060 w/
just a couple stutters. I am not sure it looked any better than on the
default, rather low resolution settings though. This is more about style
than pixel/poly/frame pushing by a country smile.
13. The more I
think about this game, the more I like it. Just dig in and hop on some
platforms for no good reason. Listen to music that sounds like you are
just starting to feel better after a tough divorce.
Wednesday, May 30, 2018
Thursday, May 24, 2018
13 Points on Portal 2 - Valve - 2011 [PC]
1. I wanted to give this one a negative review just to
be a butt and because it doesn't have the same spontaneous fun feeling
as Portal but, on its own merits, Portal 2 is just too good. You should play it.
2. Portal just had this very immediate feel to it. It is hard to describe but it feels like you are just having a bit of a laugh w/ the developers as you play it. It feels special, the kind of shared experience you can only really get from gaming. Portal 2 feels a bit like it was made to capitalize on the success of Portal.
3. Portal is a bit rough around the edges, Portal 2 is much more polished. You can call it a cash in but it's a respectful one. I appreciate that.
4. At this point, we all know the deal as far as gameplay. You get a portal gun. You shoot portals at two surfaces and you can traverse between those two points instantly. You use this and a few other mechanics that are introduced along the way to solve 3D environmental puzzles. Huzzah!
5. The puzzles here are not too tough. I suspect most relatively patient gamers will be able to plow through w/o looking up solutions in a walkthrough. I did! And I am dumb enough to spend like a hundred hours a year writing game reviews for zero compensation and zero recognition.
6. The reason they are not too tough, I think, is because they add new mechanics rather than burn the same few to the ground by adding more and more complexity. I have mixed feelings about this since I do like hard puzzles but it avoids the trap of repetitiveness that many puzzle games fall into.
7. Portal 2's plot is you wake up in a secret science facility and try not to die until you win.
8. There is more to it than 7 though. Stories are told here but they're not tied that directly to what you are doing. This is more about world building and that is just fine. Star Wars is more about world building than storytelling. You learn about the history of this secret science facility as you go through it. The picture you are given is imperfect but compelling. At the end of the game, you will inevitably want to know more about it than what you were given. This makes for a memorable experience.
9. J.K. Simmons's performance as Cave Johnson really makes this aspect of the game. If you want a complete Portal experience for as little time possible. Play the first game and then listen to the Cave Johnson parts on YouTube.
10. The music is also fantastic. You can download the whole thing from the game's website as MP3s for free. Thanks Valve! I mean it!
11. There is a co-op mode here which I really want to play but just makes the fact that I have no friends painfully unavoidable in my case.
12. I found the ending here just a touch disappointing. Story-wise, it was fine. It just wasn't very hard. I will take this over a super-frustrating final boss for sure but I think a stronger final challenge would have made the whole package just a little more satisfying.
13. To save the answer the $64,000 question for last: yeah, you should play the first Portal first. There is nothing stopping you from playing this first, really. The plot is not that important and it's well hashed out here anyway. It's just... well... not to keep harping on this but there is really an unmistakably special quality to that first game that this does not quite have. In the long run, play both, play them in order. That's my advice. Take it or leave it, nerds.
2. Portal just had this very immediate feel to it. It is hard to describe but it feels like you are just having a bit of a laugh w/ the developers as you play it. It feels special, the kind of shared experience you can only really get from gaming. Portal 2 feels a bit like it was made to capitalize on the success of Portal.
3. Portal is a bit rough around the edges, Portal 2 is much more polished. You can call it a cash in but it's a respectful one. I appreciate that.
4. At this point, we all know the deal as far as gameplay. You get a portal gun. You shoot portals at two surfaces and you can traverse between those two points instantly. You use this and a few other mechanics that are introduced along the way to solve 3D environmental puzzles. Huzzah!
5. The puzzles here are not too tough. I suspect most relatively patient gamers will be able to plow through w/o looking up solutions in a walkthrough. I did! And I am dumb enough to spend like a hundred hours a year writing game reviews for zero compensation and zero recognition.
6. The reason they are not too tough, I think, is because they add new mechanics rather than burn the same few to the ground by adding more and more complexity. I have mixed feelings about this since I do like hard puzzles but it avoids the trap of repetitiveness that many puzzle games fall into.
7. Portal 2's plot is you wake up in a secret science facility and try not to die until you win.
8. There is more to it than 7 though. Stories are told here but they're not tied that directly to what you are doing. This is more about world building and that is just fine. Star Wars is more about world building than storytelling. You learn about the history of this secret science facility as you go through it. The picture you are given is imperfect but compelling. At the end of the game, you will inevitably want to know more about it than what you were given. This makes for a memorable experience.
9. J.K. Simmons's performance as Cave Johnson really makes this aspect of the game. If you want a complete Portal experience for as little time possible. Play the first game and then listen to the Cave Johnson parts on YouTube.
10. The music is also fantastic. You can download the whole thing from the game's website as MP3s for free. Thanks Valve! I mean it!
11. There is a co-op mode here which I really want to play but just makes the fact that I have no friends painfully unavoidable in my case.
12. I found the ending here just a touch disappointing. Story-wise, it was fine. It just wasn't very hard. I will take this over a super-frustrating final boss for sure but I think a stronger final challenge would have made the whole package just a little more satisfying.
13. To save the answer the $64,000 question for last: yeah, you should play the first Portal first. There is nothing stopping you from playing this first, really. The plot is not that important and it's well hashed out here anyway. It's just... well... not to keep harping on this but there is really an unmistakably special quality to that first game that this does not quite have. In the long run, play both, play them in order. That's my advice. Take it or leave it, nerds.
Tuesday, May 22, 2018
13 Points on Ruiner - Reikon Games - 2017 [PC]
1. Ruiner is a game that is a game that combines the stylish ultra-violence of Hotline Miami w/ the stylish ultra-violence of 2016's Doom. More specifically, it takes the twin-stick combat and disposable weapons of Hotline Miami and throws in a chance to finish off a stunned enemy for some extra health from Doom. It's also got a good deal of DNA from old arena shooters like Smash TV. It is incredibly, extremely ultra-violent.
2. Is set in a dystopian future and it is the dystopianest dystopian future you could imagine. Everyone seems to be physically held together w/ a patchwork of cybernetic parts and it is taken for granted that your actual thoughts are being spied upon by sinister organizations. Everything is in absolute ruins and even those in positions of power seem mostly decrepit. This lends some cool visuals but it's a bit much for my taste. I prefer a dystopian future where a thin veneer of democracy and economic prosperity barely conceals decaying infrastructure and the degradation of human life after the reigns of control have been seized by a celebrity man-child. This just seems more believable to me. Couldn't tell you why.
3. For a setup, your unnamed character--who has a video screen for a face, by the way--goes through a brief tutorial level. You are then told you're being manipulated by an unnamed woman who also seems to be manipulating you. She tells you you need to save your brother and thereafter you do her bidding. Nobody in their right mind would believe this woman but apparently her powers over you are quite strong so you have no choice but to do what she wishes. She seems to have similar sway over other characters as well.
4. The process of finding your brother consists of slashing and shooting your way through room after room full of enemies. It's high octane and very satisfying when you get in the groove, dodging projectiles and finding just the right window to attack. The combat system is simple and beautiful and then a bunch of other things as well.
5. You get a melee attack and a gun w/ unlimited ammo. You get more powerful weapons from fallen enemies that run out of ammunition or wear out eventually. You get a skill tree. You get to rearrange the skill tree whenever you want. You get a shield. You get the ability to control enemies. You get more health. You get to regenerate health. You get more ammo. You get to call in supply drops. You get an area of affect weapon.You get another kind of shield.You get the ability to dash, the ability to teleport and the ability to slow down time. That is not even all you get.
6. If this seems like a bit much, it's because it is. It creates the distinct impression that the dev team brainstormed every cool mechanic they could come up w/ and just chucked all of them in there. You don't really need or want any of this stuff most of the time. Getting to re-do your skill tree seems nice but it also takes away some of the satisfaction of building a skill-set that is truly yours. Options sound good on paper but sometimes you've just gotta let the player play.
7. The art-style fits the overall tone perfectly. It's grimy, dark and mechanical, w/ blood red highlights. It feels like a combination of man and machine, just like the game's characters. The actual quality of the graphics are outstanding and there's a few UI touches that keep gameplay from getting too confusing. You can always tell which way you are facing and what you need to kill. If I have a complaint it's that it doesn't really change up its style from level to level and it winds up looking a bit samey in the end.
8. There is an epilepsy warning when you start this game up due to the flashing. I feel like this is well needed. I don't have epilepsy but the flashing in this did evoke an actual physical reaction from me at times. I honestly can't think of another game where this has happened. Well, Super Mario Galaxy does make me nauseated for some reason.
9. Ruiner's story is presented almost entirely through cutscenes and dialog outside of gameplay. These are really cool but I do wish they'd tried a bit harder to incorporate some story into gameplay. As it is, the story just floats over the top. Really, once you get past the initial "find your brother" setup, there is no more story until a long cutscene at the end to explain everything and *spoilers* doesn't completely make sense.
10. Sonically, this delivers the dark techno you'd probably expect given its cyberpunk visual style. It was produced by a handful of artists but sticks together as a cohesive unit. It's a rather understated mix for the most part and ends up being the kind of thing you feel rather than really listen to while you are playing.
11. This whole thing looks and sounds like it could be a AAA game w/ only a few things indicating its humbler origins. Much of the cutscene content is still images and there's no voice acting anywhere. I kinda hate voice acting because I'm old so this is all good w/ me.
12. I just assume this game was at least partly inspired by the Nine Inch Nails song of the same name. I'm not going to do a blow-by-blow on the whole thing but it's a song about manipulation, abuse of power and violence. Kinda seems like a natural fit for a game about a cybernetic human who slaughters countless other cybernetic humans while put on a possible wild goose chase to find his brother by someone who may have completely taken away his agency. There's also just something particularly 90's inflected about Ruiner's general presentation. There's murk and grunge all over everything and there's just so much... angst.
13. My biggest takeaway from playing through Ruiner is that there are some very talented people behind its development. The graphics, the music and its style are all excellent. It lacks polish in some aspects, esp. in terms of pacing and its use of skill trees, but I can't help but recognize the potential of the team behind it. Ruiner was a fun game to play but it's predominant effect on me is to make me really excited for whatever Reikon Games does next.
Thursday, May 17, 2018
13 Points on Lucky's Tale - Playful - 2016 [PC - Oculus Rift]
1. Remember when pack-in games that came w/ consoles were essential system sellers? You got a new Genesis and it came w/ Sonic. You got Mario 64 w/ N64. System defining games supplied w/ the system. Lucky's Tale is a pack-in game for Oculus Rift and it can be best described as a game that you can play on Oculus Rift.
2. Okay, that is more than a bit harsh. I tried all the games that came w/ my Oculus Rift and Touch package along w/ several games I otherwise owned that had VR support and Lucky's Tale is the one I picked to actually play through first. It's a solid little platformer but maybe a bit unremarkable beyond being one of the first such experiences available in VR. Still, it does show off a few ways this decades old genre can make use of this new tech while being a relatively enjoyable experience in its own right.
3. This plays quite a lot like Super Mario 3D Land or 3D World. The gameplay is on three axis but rather than have free roaming open levels, you are pushed down a path w/ various challenges, enemies, collectibles and secrets along the way.
4. The VR element--aside from having all of these pixels right in your eyeballs--is that the camera moves along w/ your heard. It is a good element and felt immediately natural to me. Looking down on these scenes felt like I was driving a remote control car or something like that.
5. Only it's not a car but a little fox named Lucky. He has a tale. It's a pun. Get it?
6. For the life of me, sitting here a few days after finishing this, I can' remember how the story was set up. I assume there was some story but, you know, I didn't take notes on it and I just can't seem to muster up the spirit to give a damn. Lucky has to do something for some reason. There's a couple bosses. It's cute.
7. Lucky's Tale's world--whatever it is that's going on there--is quite the gorgeous place. The art direction here isn't exactly ground breaking but the bright colorful scenes are beautiful and convey the game's light-hearted tone quite well. Getting to see the next area was a good deal of what pushed me through much of the game. Some places were absolutely breathtaking on first gander.
8. The controls are similarly adept. You play using a controller and Lucky has a pretty standard moveset for a 3D platformer. Looking around w/ the headset lets you find little secrets here and there and it's satisfying to see something in the distance and to be able to fairly adroitly pop on over to get it.
9. The one issue I had was judging the distance of jumps. This is always a problem in 3D platformers. I was hoping VR would help but it doesn't help w/ this at all.
10. I will say though that the VR does add to the dramatic tension when completing a tough bit of platforming. The fact that the camera actually moves when you tense up or flinch adds a certain physicality you just never get playing games on a standard display. The sense of relief you feel after completing one of the more difficult sections is even more compelling.
11. So this is mostly well and good but one cannot help but to get a nagging feeling this bright, cheery, cartoonish 3D platformer is a bit generic. One of the enemies, just for example, is a red bird w/ black eyebrows and a scowl. You have seen this character in a game before. It is an Angry Bird. Time and time again, various elements of Lucky's Tale will have similar familiarity.
12. Credit where credit is due: the final boss battle of Lucky's Tale is epic and satisfying.
13. Taken for what it is, Lucky's Tale is a pretty good game. It looks great and has solid mechanics. It is a 3D platformer and a VR game and it's exactly equal to the sum of its parts. I can't help but to wish that it was something a little more special but I suppose I feel that way about most games so I can't complain too much in this case. You might call it a diversion or a glorified tech demo and that's not unfair but it's worth taking some time to enjoy even if it won't blow your socks off.
2. Okay, that is more than a bit harsh. I tried all the games that came w/ my Oculus Rift and Touch package along w/ several games I otherwise owned that had VR support and Lucky's Tale is the one I picked to actually play through first. It's a solid little platformer but maybe a bit unremarkable beyond being one of the first such experiences available in VR. Still, it does show off a few ways this decades old genre can make use of this new tech while being a relatively enjoyable experience in its own right.
3. This plays quite a lot like Super Mario 3D Land or 3D World. The gameplay is on three axis but rather than have free roaming open levels, you are pushed down a path w/ various challenges, enemies, collectibles and secrets along the way.
4. The VR element--aside from having all of these pixels right in your eyeballs--is that the camera moves along w/ your heard. It is a good element and felt immediately natural to me. Looking down on these scenes felt like I was driving a remote control car or something like that.
5. Only it's not a car but a little fox named Lucky. He has a tale. It's a pun. Get it?
6. For the life of me, sitting here a few days after finishing this, I can' remember how the story was set up. I assume there was some story but, you know, I didn't take notes on it and I just can't seem to muster up the spirit to give a damn. Lucky has to do something for some reason. There's a couple bosses. It's cute.
7. Lucky's Tale's world--whatever it is that's going on there--is quite the gorgeous place. The art direction here isn't exactly ground breaking but the bright colorful scenes are beautiful and convey the game's light-hearted tone quite well. Getting to see the next area was a good deal of what pushed me through much of the game. Some places were absolutely breathtaking on first gander.
8. The controls are similarly adept. You play using a controller and Lucky has a pretty standard moveset for a 3D platformer. Looking around w/ the headset lets you find little secrets here and there and it's satisfying to see something in the distance and to be able to fairly adroitly pop on over to get it.
9. The one issue I had was judging the distance of jumps. This is always a problem in 3D platformers. I was hoping VR would help but it doesn't help w/ this at all.
10. I will say though that the VR does add to the dramatic tension when completing a tough bit of platforming. The fact that the camera actually moves when you tense up or flinch adds a certain physicality you just never get playing games on a standard display. The sense of relief you feel after completing one of the more difficult sections is even more compelling.
11. So this is mostly well and good but one cannot help but to get a nagging feeling this bright, cheery, cartoonish 3D platformer is a bit generic. One of the enemies, just for example, is a red bird w/ black eyebrows and a scowl. You have seen this character in a game before. It is an Angry Bird. Time and time again, various elements of Lucky's Tale will have similar familiarity.
12. Credit where credit is due: the final boss battle of Lucky's Tale is epic and satisfying.
13. Taken for what it is, Lucky's Tale is a pretty good game. It looks great and has solid mechanics. It is a 3D platformer and a VR game and it's exactly equal to the sum of its parts. I can't help but to wish that it was something a little more special but I suppose I feel that way about most games so I can't complain too much in this case. You might call it a diversion or a glorified tech demo and that's not unfair but it's worth taking some time to enjoy even if it won't blow your socks off.
Tuesday, May 15, 2018
13 Points on NEON STRUCT: Die Augen der Welt - Minor Key Games - 2015 [PC]
1. Normally, I got along w/ developers who decide to stylize their game names in all-caps but I'm not in the mood for it today. I am going to write it as NEON STRUCT just once and be done w/ it. This game will be called Neon Struct henceforth. I don't care.
2. Neon Struct is a stealth game and I feel obliged to let you all know I don't like this kind of game all that much. There is an inherent design flaw built into the genre which has not yet been fixed while maintaining its so-called purity as a stealth game. The two most common methods of encouraging stealth w/o things turning into an action game at points are to make being discovered be an automatic game-over or grading you at the end of each level docking points for killing people, which is essentially just scolding you for not playing the game correctly. Neither of these are all too appealing to me. Again, I don't care.
3. The latter method is used in Neon Struct and, you know what, it's done extremely well. It's generally clear if you are in cover or visible. If you alert a guard, you almost always have some chance to get away undetected and just running while letting alarms go off is still a viable option if it comes to it. As you progress, you get a variety of cool tools to get out of the more difficult situations. You will be able to get through most of these levels w/ only a little trial and error if you are okay w/ receiving a low grade on it.
4. I actually finished it despite not liking the whole sneak around and wait style of gameplay. I did this because it looks cool, sounds cool and the story is pretty cool too.
5. Graphically, this is the low-poly w/ good anti-aliasing look that is pretty common in 3D indie games these days. The art style here reminds me a lot of the pre-rendered cut scenes in Flashback and Neon Struct seems to cop a lot of its vibe from that moody 90s platformer in terms of sound as well.
6. It is fittingly silent for most of the stealth segments. The only sounds are environmental and I find there is something inherently pleasing about trying to tease the sound of enemy footsteps from your own. It is just how you might imagine situations such as Neon Struct puts you in sounding in real life, breathlessly quiet. These long segments of silence are broken when you are discovered and some 80s action flick chase music pops on. This works really well too.
7. Story sections are soundtracked by 80s-inflected synth music usually blaring from little radios you can turn on and off. It's a small touch but it's one of those details that makes a world seem a little more real. The music is by a group called The Home Conversion and it'd be a mistake not to check them out even if you don't wind up playing this game.
8. At the start of the game, you are dropped into your first mission which functions as a brief tutorial as well. From here you find you are a secret agent in a very wired-in world. Your goal is to do all the secret agent stuff your secret agent boss tells you to do. Neon Struct plays it straight enough early on but pretty soon you start to get the inkling that some of the business you're getting involved in is kinda fucked up. This is where the story gets good. You wind up double crossed and in intrigue up to your eyeballs. There is a tendency toward melodrama but everything stays relatively believable here.
9. I found some levels got a bit samey-looking area to area and you can get lost for this reason. There will be endless hallways of indistinct doors at times and it just gets a bit frustrating to accidentally re-visit and area you've already been to. To be fair, this is true to life as far as how real buildings are designed but we're playing a video game here. Just give each area different colored rugs for God's sake.
10. I found myself going through levels using the the de-facto easy mode of just taking out every single guard I saw, which became kind of tedious after a while. Not gonna lie: I ended up dropping the in-game difficulty settings to expedite my way through the game. The easiest mode is basically the walking-sim version where you can just run completely amok w/o a care in the world. The next level up lets you sneak right in front of guards as long as you're slightly careful which considerably cuts down the amount of time you have to sit and do nothing. Normal mode is normal. Higher difficulties you just spend a lot of time getting insta-killed by guards.
11. This might be a pet peeve but there are little collectables hidden throughout the levels and they are frequently in the hardest to get spots. I found it really, really annoying to painstakingly bip and bop past a set of guards only find that what was at the end of my travels was non-essential. Some people might like this. There's no accounting for taste.
12. There's a few story beats you can change through your actions--or, rather, the ending of the game changes slightly--but the main reason you might play through Neon Struct more than once is to simply try to do better. This is where those grades come into play. Also, the hidden collectables. As mentioned, the game plays out fairly but if you are going to find absolutely everything without getting detected, you are going to have to play through a few times to learn the lay of the land.
13. Neon Struct is a spy thriller with a stealth game built into it. The genres are a natural match and Minor Key Games do well playing the various elements off each other. The game uses this dynamic to builds an impressively complete world during its relatively short playtime and will certainly strike a chord w/ fans of either genre. I liked its presentation and story so much that I really enjoyed it despite not liking its style of gameplay. I probably shouldn't dwell so much on this point but, you know what, I don't care.
2. Neon Struct is a stealth game and I feel obliged to let you all know I don't like this kind of game all that much. There is an inherent design flaw built into the genre which has not yet been fixed while maintaining its so-called purity as a stealth game. The two most common methods of encouraging stealth w/o things turning into an action game at points are to make being discovered be an automatic game-over or grading you at the end of each level docking points for killing people, which is essentially just scolding you for not playing the game correctly. Neither of these are all too appealing to me. Again, I don't care.
3. The latter method is used in Neon Struct and, you know what, it's done extremely well. It's generally clear if you are in cover or visible. If you alert a guard, you almost always have some chance to get away undetected and just running while letting alarms go off is still a viable option if it comes to it. As you progress, you get a variety of cool tools to get out of the more difficult situations. You will be able to get through most of these levels w/ only a little trial and error if you are okay w/ receiving a low grade on it.
4. I actually finished it despite not liking the whole sneak around and wait style of gameplay. I did this because it looks cool, sounds cool and the story is pretty cool too.
5. Graphically, this is the low-poly w/ good anti-aliasing look that is pretty common in 3D indie games these days. The art style here reminds me a lot of the pre-rendered cut scenes in Flashback and Neon Struct seems to cop a lot of its vibe from that moody 90s platformer in terms of sound as well.
6. It is fittingly silent for most of the stealth segments. The only sounds are environmental and I find there is something inherently pleasing about trying to tease the sound of enemy footsteps from your own. It is just how you might imagine situations such as Neon Struct puts you in sounding in real life, breathlessly quiet. These long segments of silence are broken when you are discovered and some 80s action flick chase music pops on. This works really well too.
7. Story sections are soundtracked by 80s-inflected synth music usually blaring from little radios you can turn on and off. It's a small touch but it's one of those details that makes a world seem a little more real. The music is by a group called The Home Conversion and it'd be a mistake not to check them out even if you don't wind up playing this game.
8. At the start of the game, you are dropped into your first mission which functions as a brief tutorial as well. From here you find you are a secret agent in a very wired-in world. Your goal is to do all the secret agent stuff your secret agent boss tells you to do. Neon Struct plays it straight enough early on but pretty soon you start to get the inkling that some of the business you're getting involved in is kinda fucked up. This is where the story gets good. You wind up double crossed and in intrigue up to your eyeballs. There is a tendency toward melodrama but everything stays relatively believable here.
9. I found some levels got a bit samey-looking area to area and you can get lost for this reason. There will be endless hallways of indistinct doors at times and it just gets a bit frustrating to accidentally re-visit and area you've already been to. To be fair, this is true to life as far as how real buildings are designed but we're playing a video game here. Just give each area different colored rugs for God's sake.
10. I found myself going through levels using the the de-facto easy mode of just taking out every single guard I saw, which became kind of tedious after a while. Not gonna lie: I ended up dropping the in-game difficulty settings to expedite my way through the game. The easiest mode is basically the walking-sim version where you can just run completely amok w/o a care in the world. The next level up lets you sneak right in front of guards as long as you're slightly careful which considerably cuts down the amount of time you have to sit and do nothing. Normal mode is normal. Higher difficulties you just spend a lot of time getting insta-killed by guards.
11. This might be a pet peeve but there are little collectables hidden throughout the levels and they are frequently in the hardest to get spots. I found it really, really annoying to painstakingly bip and bop past a set of guards only find that what was at the end of my travels was non-essential. Some people might like this. There's no accounting for taste.
12. There's a few story beats you can change through your actions--or, rather, the ending of the game changes slightly--but the main reason you might play through Neon Struct more than once is to simply try to do better. This is where those grades come into play. Also, the hidden collectables. As mentioned, the game plays out fairly but if you are going to find absolutely everything without getting detected, you are going to have to play through a few times to learn the lay of the land.
13. Neon Struct is a spy thriller with a stealth game built into it. The genres are a natural match and Minor Key Games do well playing the various elements off each other. The game uses this dynamic to builds an impressively complete world during its relatively short playtime and will certainly strike a chord w/ fans of either genre. I liked its presentation and story so much that I really enjoyed it despite not liking its style of gameplay. I probably shouldn't dwell so much on this point but, you know what, I don't care.
Thursday, May 10, 2018
PSA: It Is Extremely Difficult to Drink Beer While Wearing a Virtual Reality Headset
My evenings and early mornings are often spent
glued to my screen, drink at my side and controller of choice in my
hands. It is second nature for my mouse hand to become my beer drinking
hand whenever a game gives me a quick moment. I don't even
have to look--or, I used to think I didn't have to look.
I am here to tell you that it is not easy to drink a beer you cannot see. Being immersed in virtual reality blinds you to actual reality and that is not great for getting having a responsible drink or two while unwinding w/ a VR game. It is absolutely balls for drinking a civilized amount of alcohol during a night of virtual reality gaming.
I figured I would need to show a bit of restraint out of fear of nausea but what I did not expect was for the physical act of drinking beer to become challenging in its own right. You will see videos of people punching TVs and tripping over chairs while wired into their VR sets. What you don't see is the far more tragic scene of a gamer blindly fumbling for a bottle on a desktop only to have their hand helplessly clank off the bottle's side because they've forgotten to put the controller down. It's a horrible situation, more blind and fumbly than you can imagine.
To make matters worse, you are pretty much stuck drinking beer straight out of the bottle. You need to nudge the headset up and out of the way in order to tilt a glass or can up an appropriate amount and that is more immersion breaking than a bad inventory system. It's terrible and we, as gamers, deserve better. I put in order online, waited for the box to arrive, plugged everything in and installed the software. Am I not entitled to at least an easy way to easily drink a glass of beer?
For now, I am finding myself considering putting a long piece of tubing into a growler and taping the other end to the back of my hand such that I always have beer at the ready. It is a stop-gap solution at best but a person can get desperate in times like these. There is a lot of potential for integration of beer into virtual reality but for now the situation absolutely stinks.
And don't get me started on what a pain in the ass it is to go to the bathroom.
I am here to tell you that it is not easy to drink a beer you cannot see. Being immersed in virtual reality blinds you to actual reality and that is not great for getting having a responsible drink or two while unwinding w/ a VR game. It is absolutely balls for drinking a civilized amount of alcohol during a night of virtual reality gaming.
I figured I would need to show a bit of restraint out of fear of nausea but what I did not expect was for the physical act of drinking beer to become challenging in its own right. You will see videos of people punching TVs and tripping over chairs while wired into their VR sets. What you don't see is the far more tragic scene of a gamer blindly fumbling for a bottle on a desktop only to have their hand helplessly clank off the bottle's side because they've forgotten to put the controller down. It's a horrible situation, more blind and fumbly than you can imagine.
To make matters worse, you are pretty much stuck drinking beer straight out of the bottle. You need to nudge the headset up and out of the way in order to tilt a glass or can up an appropriate amount and that is more immersion breaking than a bad inventory system. It's terrible and we, as gamers, deserve better. I put in order online, waited for the box to arrive, plugged everything in and installed the software. Am I not entitled to at least an easy way to easily drink a glass of beer?
For now, I am finding myself considering putting a long piece of tubing into a growler and taping the other end to the back of my hand such that I always have beer at the ready. It is a stop-gap solution at best but a person can get desperate in times like these. There is a lot of potential for integration of beer into virtual reality but for now the situation absolutely stinks.
And don't get me started on what a pain in the ass it is to go to the bathroom.
Tuesday, May 8, 2018
13 Points on Hob - Runic Games - 2017 [PC]
1. I don't know if you've read any other reviews of this--or anything on it at all--but you might have heard it is along the lines of The Legend of Zelda. Well, congratulations, you heard right. The influence of that classic franchise is all over Hob.
2. It is not exactly a clone or anything. Hob has a much lower emphasis on combat and puzzle solving and a greater emphasis on pure exploration. A good deal of the appeal of Hob is simply being in its gorgeous world. You are rewarded for diligent adventuring w/ new places to diligently adventure. It's a good system when there's things that are worth seeing all over the place.
3. And seeing things in this game is something else! Hob really grabs your attention w/ its visuals. It's got a playable cartoon vibe w/ its cel-shaded graphics and bright, high-contrast fantasy setting. Stunning bright greens and purples in the overworld which cool off to muted blues and purples underground. It is simply gorgeous, start to finish.
4. Hob's world is set up as a formerly lush and green living world that has seen finer days. While swatches of it maintain its character from better times, much of it is taken over by a venomous purple creep. Early in the game, your character loses a hand to this active, slimy growth and another of the world's stony-looking residents helps you replace it w/ a giant mechanical stone hand. The same stony-looking humanoid marks a point on your map and from there, the majority of your in-game time will be spent going from marked point to marked point. Your task, it seems, is to repair the world--and I mean repair in the same sense that a mechanic repairs a car. Hob's green and living game world is made out of some sort of crazy, somewhat magical seeming machinery. As you progress, machine pieces pop into place and lead you to more areas to explore.
5. The storytelling here is sparse and basically all told environmentally so you are really just feeling your way through. The few NPC's you meet speak in gibberish and gesture vaguely before marking points on your map. In-game lore is presented through murals only. It's not a whole lot to go on and intentionally ambiguous at times.
6. The general lack of direction and outright explanation fits Hob well. As you literally explore the world so too are you invited to explore within yourself, the possible nature of your task and the reasons behind the current state of the world.
7. *the sound of minds blowing*
8. Speaking of sound, what Hob has going on is equally as sparse as its storytelling. Its soundscape consists mostly of drones and ambient sounds punctuated by an occasional short melody when various tasks are completed.
9. The world is designed such that it takes a long time to see everything but you open up paths over time that allow you to traverse most areas much more quickly. Several fast travel locations help out as well. The biggest frustration is some areas require a bit of platforming and this can be a bit fiddly. Save points are placed pretty generously but this is still enough to be occasionally frustrating, esp. because platforming mistakes frequently feel like they are more the fault of the controls than player input.
10. Also, holy crap is the camera ever bad. It is mostly a slightly angled down top-down view but it changes angles and zoom levels as you move around. These moves seem to be mostly for the sake of creating dramatic shots rather than giving you more information about your surroundings. Every aspect of the game from combat to exploration to platforming is negatively affected by this at some point.
11. Enemies are pretty well varied throughout. There's not a ton of different kinds but many can be felled by different strategies and your combat style can evolve a bit as you unlock new abilities. Combat never really gets into too engaging of a flow though and it is ultimately a good thing that almost all enemies stay dead once you kill them. It also means the classic gamer logic that finding living enemies mean you've discovered a new area.
12. Hob has puzzle solving elements but they are mostly of the find-the-switch-and-hit-the-switch variety. It is more of a call to further explore each area than something that really teases your mind. In a sense, the entire world is a puzzle like this. It might not be too difficult but the game keeps you engaged enough that seeing each piece snap into place is enormously satisfying.
13. Going back to the Zelda comparison: that feeling when you finally get an item that allows you to reach an area you could see but couldn't, that is the drug that Hob deals. I have used the word explore approximately three million times in this review because exploration is so unquestioningly the core of this game. Hob builds a world that is worth exploring and then sets you off too explore it. It's awesome.
2. It is not exactly a clone or anything. Hob has a much lower emphasis on combat and puzzle solving and a greater emphasis on pure exploration. A good deal of the appeal of Hob is simply being in its gorgeous world. You are rewarded for diligent adventuring w/ new places to diligently adventure. It's a good system when there's things that are worth seeing all over the place.
3. And seeing things in this game is something else! Hob really grabs your attention w/ its visuals. It's got a playable cartoon vibe w/ its cel-shaded graphics and bright, high-contrast fantasy setting. Stunning bright greens and purples in the overworld which cool off to muted blues and purples underground. It is simply gorgeous, start to finish.
4. Hob's world is set up as a formerly lush and green living world that has seen finer days. While swatches of it maintain its character from better times, much of it is taken over by a venomous purple creep. Early in the game, your character loses a hand to this active, slimy growth and another of the world's stony-looking residents helps you replace it w/ a giant mechanical stone hand. The same stony-looking humanoid marks a point on your map and from there, the majority of your in-game time will be spent going from marked point to marked point. Your task, it seems, is to repair the world--and I mean repair in the same sense that a mechanic repairs a car. Hob's green and living game world is made out of some sort of crazy, somewhat magical seeming machinery. As you progress, machine pieces pop into place and lead you to more areas to explore.
5. The storytelling here is sparse and basically all told environmentally so you are really just feeling your way through. The few NPC's you meet speak in gibberish and gesture vaguely before marking points on your map. In-game lore is presented through murals only. It's not a whole lot to go on and intentionally ambiguous at times.
6. The general lack of direction and outright explanation fits Hob well. As you literally explore the world so too are you invited to explore within yourself, the possible nature of your task and the reasons behind the current state of the world.
7. *the sound of minds blowing*
8. Speaking of sound, what Hob has going on is equally as sparse as its storytelling. Its soundscape consists mostly of drones and ambient sounds punctuated by an occasional short melody when various tasks are completed.
9. The world is designed such that it takes a long time to see everything but you open up paths over time that allow you to traverse most areas much more quickly. Several fast travel locations help out as well. The biggest frustration is some areas require a bit of platforming and this can be a bit fiddly. Save points are placed pretty generously but this is still enough to be occasionally frustrating, esp. because platforming mistakes frequently feel like they are more the fault of the controls than player input.
10. Also, holy crap is the camera ever bad. It is mostly a slightly angled down top-down view but it changes angles and zoom levels as you move around. These moves seem to be mostly for the sake of creating dramatic shots rather than giving you more information about your surroundings. Every aspect of the game from combat to exploration to platforming is negatively affected by this at some point.
11. Enemies are pretty well varied throughout. There's not a ton of different kinds but many can be felled by different strategies and your combat style can evolve a bit as you unlock new abilities. Combat never really gets into too engaging of a flow though and it is ultimately a good thing that almost all enemies stay dead once you kill them. It also means the classic gamer logic that finding living enemies mean you've discovered a new area.
12. Hob has puzzle solving elements but they are mostly of the find-the-switch-and-hit-the-switch variety. It is more of a call to further explore each area than something that really teases your mind. In a sense, the entire world is a puzzle like this. It might not be too difficult but the game keeps you engaged enough that seeing each piece snap into place is enormously satisfying.
13. Going back to the Zelda comparison: that feeling when you finally get an item that allows you to reach an area you could see but couldn't, that is the drug that Hob deals. I have used the word explore approximately three million times in this review because exploration is so unquestioningly the core of this game. Hob builds a world that is worth exploring and then sets you off too explore it. It's awesome.
Thursday, May 3, 2018
13 Points on The Norwood Suite - Cosmo D - 2017 [PC]
1. The Norwood Suite is a game where you run errands for people in an old hotel. Don't worry; it is more about the hotel and people than it is the errands.
2. The work of David Lynch obviously influenced this quite a bit. Specifically, I have a feeling developer, Cosmo D, has spent a good deal of time watching Twin Peaks. The Norwood Suite has a similar humorously off-beat but always creepy atmosphere. Everyone seems to have secret motivations and desires. There's a special focus on sound. There's a hotel. It all follows.
3. The setup here is your boss drops you off at the Norwood Hotel and sets you off on a vague task. The twist is that the Norwood Hotel has a rather odd history and since, for whatever reason, you look like you work there, other people are going to give you vague tasks and you are going to have to do those too.
4. The graphics are stylishly low-poly but w/ some rather loud textures add a bit of an edge to set The Norwood Suite a head above many games that go for a similar look. It is not going to make your GPU scream or anything but it's still a very striking game due to its art design. I found myself struggling not to blow up my social media w/ ten thousand screenshots.This is a thing that happens sometimes.
5. There is an extent to which this feels almost like an interactive soundtrack as much as a game. Choppy, beautiful music blares from speakers everywhere throughout the hotel grounds and it melts together as you walk from location to location. NPC speech is represented by staccato notes from various instruments and adds another layer to everything. It works really well and you begin to associate songs w/ locations and instruments w/ people very quickly.
6. As far as gameplay, you walk around, talk to people, figure out what sort of problems they are having and then solve them. It's very much inspired by point and click adventure games but much less involved from a puzzle-solve perspective.
7. The Norwood Suite draws you in by opening up more of the hotel for each task you complete and each new thing you find. There's just so many off-kilter curios scattered about that just getting to see more is an enticing enough reward to keep you going.
8. Certain tasks have other prerequisite tasks before you can get to them but you are allowed a good amount of flexibility in what order you do things. Simply going off and finding all you can find at the start of the game is as good of a strategy as trying to complete each of the tasks int he order you get them. This goes a long way towards making the Norwood Hotel feel like an actual place rather than a level of a video game.
9. There's a few places you can get hung up or lost but The Norwood Suite is not really meant to be a challenge. The solution to every problem is to just keep looking. It is a metaphor for life.
10. There is what at first seems to be an oddball cluster of guests and employees there but getting deeper into things you begin to see how everything is interconnected. Things get more stilted and unreal as the night progresses but always in a way that's believable w/in the game's setting. This gets back to the Twin Peaks influence I mentioned way back in the old days of this review.
11. Not everything about The Norwood Suite is shiny perfection. Specifically, there are some bugs and weird glitches that happen frequently enough it's worth mentioning. It seems Cosmo D is responsive to issues but they still persist to at least a degree. I didn't find anything game breaking but I did have to trigger something twice to advance the plot at a critical point and wound up spinning my wheels quite a bit before figuring this out. The half hour or so I spent wandering aimlessly in the meantime proved to be a very significant portion of my playtime.
12. Also, the ending is kind of abrupt and random. You can tell you are building up to the big conclusion but what happens just doesn't seem to have anything to do w/ anything. I don't need everything wrapped up in a neat package but I didn't feel like there was any kind of foreshadowing at all to what occurs in the final scene.
13. Really, I only mention flaws in The Norwood Suite in order to maintain my thin veneer of objectivity. This game is great and I love it. I love it! It builds a real sense of place w/ its unique setting and atmosphere and feels like something special from the moment you start playing. Pick it up. It is more than worth the asking price and the time you will spend playing it.
2. The work of David Lynch obviously influenced this quite a bit. Specifically, I have a feeling developer, Cosmo D, has spent a good deal of time watching Twin Peaks. The Norwood Suite has a similar humorously off-beat but always creepy atmosphere. Everyone seems to have secret motivations and desires. There's a special focus on sound. There's a hotel. It all follows.
3. The setup here is your boss drops you off at the Norwood Hotel and sets you off on a vague task. The twist is that the Norwood Hotel has a rather odd history and since, for whatever reason, you look like you work there, other people are going to give you vague tasks and you are going to have to do those too.
4. The graphics are stylishly low-poly but w/ some rather loud textures add a bit of an edge to set The Norwood Suite a head above many games that go for a similar look. It is not going to make your GPU scream or anything but it's still a very striking game due to its art design. I found myself struggling not to blow up my social media w/ ten thousand screenshots.This is a thing that happens sometimes.
5. There is an extent to which this feels almost like an interactive soundtrack as much as a game. Choppy, beautiful music blares from speakers everywhere throughout the hotel grounds and it melts together as you walk from location to location. NPC speech is represented by staccato notes from various instruments and adds another layer to everything. It works really well and you begin to associate songs w/ locations and instruments w/ people very quickly.
6. As far as gameplay, you walk around, talk to people, figure out what sort of problems they are having and then solve them. It's very much inspired by point and click adventure games but much less involved from a puzzle-solve perspective.
7. The Norwood Suite draws you in by opening up more of the hotel for each task you complete and each new thing you find. There's just so many off-kilter curios scattered about that just getting to see more is an enticing enough reward to keep you going.
8. Certain tasks have other prerequisite tasks before you can get to them but you are allowed a good amount of flexibility in what order you do things. Simply going off and finding all you can find at the start of the game is as good of a strategy as trying to complete each of the tasks int he order you get them. This goes a long way towards making the Norwood Hotel feel like an actual place rather than a level of a video game.
9. There's a few places you can get hung up or lost but The Norwood Suite is not really meant to be a challenge. The solution to every problem is to just keep looking. It is a metaphor for life.
10. There is what at first seems to be an oddball cluster of guests and employees there but getting deeper into things you begin to see how everything is interconnected. Things get more stilted and unreal as the night progresses but always in a way that's believable w/in the game's setting. This gets back to the Twin Peaks influence I mentioned way back in the old days of this review.
11. Not everything about The Norwood Suite is shiny perfection. Specifically, there are some bugs and weird glitches that happen frequently enough it's worth mentioning. It seems Cosmo D is responsive to issues but they still persist to at least a degree. I didn't find anything game breaking but I did have to trigger something twice to advance the plot at a critical point and wound up spinning my wheels quite a bit before figuring this out. The half hour or so I spent wandering aimlessly in the meantime proved to be a very significant portion of my playtime.
12. Also, the ending is kind of abrupt and random. You can tell you are building up to the big conclusion but what happens just doesn't seem to have anything to do w/ anything. I don't need everything wrapped up in a neat package but I didn't feel like there was any kind of foreshadowing at all to what occurs in the final scene.
13. Really, I only mention flaws in The Norwood Suite in order to maintain my thin veneer of objectivity. This game is great and I love it. I love it! It builds a real sense of place w/ its unique setting and atmosphere and feels like something special from the moment you start playing. Pick it up. It is more than worth the asking price and the time you will spend playing it.
Tuesday, May 1, 2018
13 Points on THOTH - Carlsen Games - 2016 [PC]
1. This is a game where you are a circle that shoots other shapes.
2. A friend of mine told me he once took so much LSD, all he could see was shapes and colors. I never really believed him but I suppose if you took said dose of LSD and played Hotline: Miami, the end result would look a lot like Thoth. The music also sounds like some sort self-inflicted cerebral chemical abnormality.
3. This is a twin stick shooter played w/ only the two sticks. You move w/ the left stick, shoot in whatever direction the right stick is pressed. You go a bit faster when you are not shooting. This works well--elegance, simplicity and all that. It can be a bit of a mindfuck when you are in tight situations somehow.
4. You will be in a lot of tight situations. This game plays fast.
5. You have to beat four levels in a row to advance, the fourth of which is something of a boss battle. This is extremely, extremely frustrating like you wouldn't believe. Some of the boss battles might take a dozen attempts to come up w/ a strategy and to get to try again you have to play the three levels before them over and over.
6. and over and over and over and over and over...
7. Frustrating isn't strictly bad in this case. You fall into sort of a trance repeating the levels and you naturally start challenging yourself to find the fastest way to complete them.
8. The shapes you shoot at are 3D shapes that bounce around in 3D space but you only see them on a 2D plane. This adds a certain unpredictability but it seems to be deterministic; if you input the exact same controls, you will see the exact same behavior from the game. Most games would use random number generation for this sort of unpredictability but I like this better. It also makes this an interesting option for tool assisted speed runs if you are into that sort of thing.
9. As you shoot the shapes, they gradually turn into black space. If you incompletely convert them to black space, the shapes gradually return to their original color. If you completely convert them, they still exist and can still kill you but don't block your shots from hitting the other shapes. They also get a burst of speed. Between this and the fact that your little circle moves faster when you are not shooting, a surprisingly large amount of strategy emerges.
10. Thoth does not wait to get hard. In fact, I can't really even think of another game that gets so hard so soon after starting. By the second level of the first set of four, you are already having to start to think in terms of strategy and not just adept movement.
11. Actually, it does not even really get all that much harder from that first set of levels. Or, in any case, the difficulty curve is really gradual. Again, it is surprising how much good strategy plays a roll beyond just twitchy stick. It is better to invest your mental energy into trying to learn the dynamics of each enemy type and level than it is to worry about your increasing your manual dexterity.
12. You still need manual dexterity in spades. Don't get me wrong. There is just a lot more to it than that.
13. This is a game that gives you a lot w/ very little. I think many people will complain that this looks and feels like it should be a browser game--not that there's anything wrong w/ that. This may well be true but I think investing some time to get into Thoth's rhythm and seeing how it ticks reveals a level of attention to detail and craftsmanship that is seldom seen in any sort of game no matter the production values.
2. A friend of mine told me he once took so much LSD, all he could see was shapes and colors. I never really believed him but I suppose if you took said dose of LSD and played Hotline: Miami, the end result would look a lot like Thoth. The music also sounds like some sort self-inflicted cerebral chemical abnormality.
3. This is a twin stick shooter played w/ only the two sticks. You move w/ the left stick, shoot in whatever direction the right stick is pressed. You go a bit faster when you are not shooting. This works well--elegance, simplicity and all that. It can be a bit of a mindfuck when you are in tight situations somehow.
4. You will be in a lot of tight situations. This game plays fast.
5. You have to beat four levels in a row to advance, the fourth of which is something of a boss battle. This is extremely, extremely frustrating like you wouldn't believe. Some of the boss battles might take a dozen attempts to come up w/ a strategy and to get to try again you have to play the three levels before them over and over.
6. and over and over and over and over and over...
7. Frustrating isn't strictly bad in this case. You fall into sort of a trance repeating the levels and you naturally start challenging yourself to find the fastest way to complete them.
8. The shapes you shoot at are 3D shapes that bounce around in 3D space but you only see them on a 2D plane. This adds a certain unpredictability but it seems to be deterministic; if you input the exact same controls, you will see the exact same behavior from the game. Most games would use random number generation for this sort of unpredictability but I like this better. It also makes this an interesting option for tool assisted speed runs if you are into that sort of thing.
9. As you shoot the shapes, they gradually turn into black space. If you incompletely convert them to black space, the shapes gradually return to their original color. If you completely convert them, they still exist and can still kill you but don't block your shots from hitting the other shapes. They also get a burst of speed. Between this and the fact that your little circle moves faster when you are not shooting, a surprisingly large amount of strategy emerges.
10. Thoth does not wait to get hard. In fact, I can't really even think of another game that gets so hard so soon after starting. By the second level of the first set of four, you are already having to start to think in terms of strategy and not just adept movement.
11. Actually, it does not even really get all that much harder from that first set of levels. Or, in any case, the difficulty curve is really gradual. Again, it is surprising how much good strategy plays a roll beyond just twitchy stick. It is better to invest your mental energy into trying to learn the dynamics of each enemy type and level than it is to worry about your increasing your manual dexterity.
12. You still need manual dexterity in spades. Don't get me wrong. There is just a lot more to it than that.
13. This is a game that gives you a lot w/ very little. I think many people will complain that this looks and feels like it should be a browser game--not that there's anything wrong w/ that. This may well be true but I think investing some time to get into Thoth's rhythm and seeing how it ticks reveals a level of attention to detail and craftsmanship that is seldom seen in any sort of game no matter the production values.
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