Renault on 4/3/2019 at 21:48
I started playing the DLC for Dying Light (The Following) over the weekend. It's great fun. Being a huge fan of DL, I'm not sure why I didn't finish this thing when it came out, but for some reason I shelved it after only playing an hour or so. These guys (Techland) really know how to make a good looking and interesting open world. I can't even argue that the quest and objectives are anything other than the usual fetch quest type tasks, but the gameworld is just too damn fun to navigate around in and explore. The introduction of a vehicle was a good touch for the most part, but I find myself often just ditching it and heading somewhere on foot. Attracts far less attention that way.
I just read that the world in Dying Light 2 is supposed to 4 times the size of the original game, so yeah, where do I preorder again?
Aja on 4/3/2019 at 22:32
I finished Undertale. I found it cute and mostly well-written but pretty cloying at times, and it has a tendency to drag out events for dramatic effect to the point of tediousness. I didn't particularly enjoy the bullet-dodging parts, and since I did a full pacifist run, I had to endure a lot of them. Undertale really tries to make you care about its world and characters, and I could see how it might be immersive to some people, but it was too silly and full of non-sequitur to really draw me in. I did laugh out loud a few times, and the music was great all around. But as far as RPGs in this style go, I think Earthbound (its obvious influence) is a lot better.
demagogue on 6/3/2019 at 13:44
Following on Gris, I'm still on my trip for artistic ventures into female mood with
Forgotton Anne.
The basic schtick is it's animated like a Ghibli cartoon, with a kind of quirky story (a parallel universe where lost things end up), and just enough platforming to make it a proper game and not just an animated visual novel (which it still largely is beyond the platforming). I like it. It (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPuJqut__9c) looks great. Really great... I've never felt like I was "playing a cartoon" like this before. The story is great fun (for me). Personally, I think there's a whole untapped genre here for interactive cartoon, so I hope more are made like this. (Cuphead is I guess in the neighborhood, but I wouldn't call it an interactive cartoon, just a decent & nice looking shmup that happens to be in the style of an old cartoon.)
The platforming itself technically suffers from making the animation flow smoothly, kind of like how fluid body awareness screws up 3D movement. That would be a problem if you were buying this to be a good platformer. But if you were getting this to be a good interactive cartoon, then the addition of some puzzles and platforming is a bonus. So I'm happy with it. Oh, and on the puzzles, a lot of them are kind of deduction problems that you can actually screw up. You're the enforcer and can "execute" bad lost items; but sometimes you're not sure who the guilty party is, or there are better ways of dealing with them. It won't stop your progress if you handle a problem wrongly, it's just you'll have messed with the wrong guy (or whatever the situation is) and feel like a floormat. I kind of like this approach to interactive storytelling. You aren't going to screw up your progress, but you want your story to play out as best it can. The characters are all around great too, so basing gameplay around character relations works pretty well because of that. All that and moods will be felt. It's good storytelling.
I recommend it for people that look at it like I'm looking at it, but you'd mostly want to play it if you're into interactive storytelling first. It's no Cave Story or Celeste.
WingedKagouti on 6/3/2019 at 17:13
Quote Posted by icemann
Kept wishing for the Tyranid's but had to wait till DoW 2 for that.
I remember playing a Tyranid mod for DoW1 and DoW2 never clicked for me despite having 'Nids.
Malf on 6/3/2019 at 23:01
I much preferred DoW2's moment-to-moment gameplay in single player, with it playing like something more akin to Ground Control mashed up with WC3's hero concept. But I wish they had kept the Risk-style strategic map they introduced in Dark Crusade and expanded upon in Soulstorm, which while it didn't review as well as Dark Crusade, I remember preferring.
There was a stripped down, anaemic version of the strategy map in vanilla DoW2. But then they completely abandoned it, settling instead for a more linear, narrative driven mission structure. I found that a massive shame. Soulstorm was a fantastic WH40K sandbox, and I would have loved to have gotten more of the same, but with DoW2's combat.
henke on 8/3/2019 at 06:39
Played the first section of Tacoma last night, courtesy of the Humble Trove. The game it reminds me of the most is the VR-title The Final Hours, which was a similar unstuck-in-time piece-together-the-story experience. Tacoma is slightly more hands-on than that one tho, with more interactible objects and even a few, light, probably-optional puzzles. So far I like it a lot.
Sulphur on 8/3/2019 at 07:44
This might be damning Tacoma with faint praise (though I did make a thread about it, so maybe that evens it out), but it's a nice follow up to the Gone Home school of thought, and its core conceit of interactive theatre with a rewind-at-will function that helps you follow the thread of each individual's actions in the wider tapestry of the story is kinda beautiful. I wish it had more urgency/story conflict and, for lack of a better word, flavour, but that's me taking the unfair tack of reviewing what isn't there. What is there is a nice enough story that I had a decent time with.
Jason Moyer on 8/3/2019 at 12:40
Gone Home and Tacoma convinced me that I like "walking sims", and every other walking sim I've played has convinced me otherwise. Tacoma was pretty brilliant, I especially loved how all of the conversations would start off in separate areas then come together then spin off into separate areas so you'd have to play the logs repeatedly and wander around the station to hear everything.
Tony_Tarantula on 8/3/2019 at 14:59
Quote Posted by Malf
I much preferred DoW2's moment-to-moment gameplay in single player, with it playing like something more akin to Ground Control mashed up with WC3's hero concept. But I wish they had kept the Risk-style strategic map they introduced in Dark Crusade and expanded upon in Soulstorm, which while it didn't review as well as Dark Crusade, I remember preferring.
There was a stripped down, anaemic version of the strategy map in vanilla DoW2. But then they completely abandoned it, settling instead for a more linear, narrative driven mission structure. I found that a massive shame. Soulstorm was a fantastic WH40K sandbox, and I would have loved to have gotten more of the same, but with DoW2's combat.
DoW2 is great in co-op too. I just haven't gotten further because the game crapped out and was refusing to launch a mission for me and my co-op buddy.
Quote Posted by Jason Moyer
Gone Home and Tacoma convinced me that I like "walking sims", and every other walking sim I've played has convinced me otherwise. Tacoma was pretty brilliant, I especially loved how all of the conversations would start off in separate areas then come together then spin off into separate areas so you'd have to play the logs repeatedly and wander around the station to hear everything.
You might like Hitchiker. It's a great "sitting in the passenger seat" sim.
Quote:
I remember playing a Tyranid mod for DoW1 and DoW2 never clicked for me despite having 'Nids.
Any chance you've got a picture of your Tyranids? I'm curious now.
Thirith on 11/3/2019 at 06:59
Having greatly enjoyed Supergiant's games (often for their style more so than the actual games), I got their roguelike Hades when it came out in Early Access. At first the game didn't do much for me, but now that it's been updated a few times and I've become used to how it plays and how it communicates things to the player I'm finding it quite moreish: one more encounter, one more run, one more skill upgrade. There are simple but effective mechanisms that make me play with the different options, where usually I'd just find one way of playing a game and then doing that for the next dozen hours or so. It's also quite enjoyable to see the game develop, both in small and big ways, and the genre lends itself quite well to Early Access, as far as I'm concerned.
