What are you playing? (2024 Edition)

Sulphur on 1/9/2024 at 03:29

Quote Posted by Aja

I've been playing Dark Souls and Dark Souls II lately, and more than once I've wanted to throw my controller at the wall for some bullshit too-long boss bonfire run or enemy that uncannily tracks your movement as it swings or mob of skeletons that stunlocks you and kills you in an instant. But five minutes after I put it down, I've got the urge to pick it back up and try again. For me that's a mark of a good game.

I've been thinking about whether or not all the quality of life improvements in newer games like Elden Ring make it better overall, and I find myself leaning towards the notion that some amount of frustration, of friction, to tie it back to the discussion, actually improves the whole experience even if it sucks in the moment.

For all the hype and excitement about the new AstroBot, I just think about the PS5 pack-in, and, eh, game practically played itself.

I think you've hit something more important than friction there, which is that the game's designed well-enough that it makes you want to come back and play it. The Dark Souls games have been something I appreciate at a distance, because the pace of combat moves too slowly for me, and this trips up my reflexes because they're expecting the action to move faster. That, along with the high-damage moves and instant KOs makes them feel like a trip to the dentist. The combat isn't what interests me about the Souls games, it's the architecture and the very considered design to how you explore the places. While the combat has an immediate pull in that it's a challenge to be overcome (if it's a good day and I can slow down and sync up to it), what draws me back is discovering new parts and secrets and surprises to the world. Sekiro, in contrast, is all about the constant pull of the combat for me (I guess I just jive more with dex builds), and the world's a nicely designed stomping ground for me and the enemies.

Ragnarok has a decent amount of friction - it's not something you can just plough through by button mashing for many boss encounters, for instance, and some of the traversal puzzles can be fun to work through (if Atreus and Mimir could just shut up with the hints). The individual elements are fine. But it's still a sanded-down big budget game engineered to have mass appeal to the point of shiny blandness, so while it looks great and plays well, it's not doing anything design-wise that makes me sit up and pay attention. The story is generally fine, even good in a bunch of spots, but the rest of the game is constructed in such a way that at 60% through it seems overfamiliar at this point. Which means I find it isn't really calling me back to discover more of it, and that's a shame. I'll finish it, but so far it feels like I've been playing it under an obligation more than anything else.

Tomi on 1/9/2024 at 16:25

I'm playing Like a Dragon: Ishin! I've only ever played the remake of the first Yakuza game before, but this is almost identical to it, except that Ishin is set in mid-19th-century Japan with samurais and stuff. Even some of the main characters seem to have travelled in time, because they also look identical. The crazy minigames are still there (and there's a lot of variety!), some are great fun like the karaoke minigame, and some are truly awful like chicken racing or wood chopping. There are also tons of sidequests, and some of them are quite funny or just downright silly, and it makes for an interesting contrast between the silly sidequests and the overly serious and cruel main story. Again, it's very similar to the Yakuza games (or the one that I played, anyway).

I understand that Ishin is also a remake, and I think it shows. Even though it's a 2023 game that uses the Unreal Engine, it looks mediocre at best. Not that it really bothers me, it looks good enough to me. The melee combat feels pretty good, but there's just too much of it that it occasionally gets a bit annoying. I mean, there's a group of bandits or something waiting for you behind just about every corner in the city, and even though you can sometimes avoid them, you still kinda need to fight a lot to level up your character. There are lots of combos to learn and four different fighting styles, and I'm never going to learn them, but so far I've managed just fine on hard difficulty using a couple of easy combos and normal attacks. In other areas the gameplay feels old and I wonder if the level design is copied straight from the 2014 original.

I've enjoyed my journey to Feudal Japan so far, and I can't wait to see where the story takes me, but I just hope that Ishin isn't one of these games that go on for way too long.

Thirith on 2/9/2024 at 07:59

As part of Operation Mop Up, I played the latest game in Octavi Navarro's Midnight Scenes series, A Safe Place. Navarro is a Spanish pixel artist, and he's been releasing these Midnight Scenes shorts, which are somewhere between point and click adventures and visual novels, for a few years. The conceit of the series is that it's something of a collection of Twilight Zone-style stories, though in practice it's only the earliest ones that felt Twilight Zone. Like the other games, A Safe Place is very nicely done, with moody pixel art that has a distinct personality - but as always, I think his visual artistry exceeds his storytelling abilities. There's a samey quality to the stories he tells, and I'm also getting a bit tired of his handling of mental health: it's pretty pulpy and a bit exploitative, which worked okay for one or two games, if we look at them as genre pastiche, but I wish he'd slowly move on from this. Still, the games are cheap and they're short, and his art is very nice, if you're into the style.

Edit: I'd originally written that the game is free, which was incorrect.

Sulphur on 2/9/2024 at 08:44

I have some of them from a bundle, but I don't recall them being free. They're certainly reasonably inexpensive enough to try, at any rate.

I've been wrapping up Sunset Overdrive after having started it 5 years ago. It's... all right. There's some reasonably fun Insomniac design with the weaponised rail grinding combo mechanic, and of course the weapons themselves are interesting (though there are more duds in the arsenal than you'd find in a Ratchet & Clank). The overall tone is fratboy apocalypse party, with people turning into zombies by drinking soda from a megacorp while you grind around and try to get out of the city by making friends with various college-themed groups, and it is exactly as unapologetically obnoxious as it sounds. The moment-to-moment gameplay's all right, but the sandbox isn't very memorable, and the story borrows a large amount of tropes and puts them in a blender for shits and giggles, but none of it lands very hard. It's fine, more or less, and got me to chuckle a few times, but beyond the punk veneer it feels very disposable and/or throwaway. Which was probably the intent, for something you can pick up and put down whenever you want, but it feels a fair bit like Insomniac plucked a bunch of frat culture memes out of the 00s, put them together with their signature competence, and still phoned it home some.

Ah well. It's all right. Enough that I'll finish it.

Thirith on 2/9/2024 at 09:12

You're right, I misremembered the Midnight Scenes games being free. I've corrected it in my post.

I like most of Navarro's art a lot, but I sometimes wish he'd work more with other storytellers. IMO he's definitely better at visuals than at writing, though at least for A Safe Place he worked with someone else. And on the whole I like his art better when he's riffing off a genre or style, which was less the case with the last couple of Midnight Scenes than with earlier ones.

Thirith on 3/9/2024 at 07:35

Also, I finished The Enigma Machine yesterday, the first part of a three-parter that I believe henke recommended a while ago. It's a relatively short atmospheric sci-fi horror game with a glitchy PS1-style aesthetic. I liked it, but not enough to immediately jump into the second game in the series, Echostasis. I might've felt differently if the last sequence wasn't made frustrating by the low-fi approach: the game kicks you to desktop if you're caught by the enemies, and there's one that spawns in a place that makes it a bit of a faff to kill it before it gets to you. The puzzles that the game presents you with are interesting, but on the whole it's the kind of game I'd say I appreciate more than I enjoy it.

Next up in Operation Mop Up: Loretta.

henke on 3/9/2024 at 10:24

Glad you liked it! (mostly) The second game in the series is Mothered, actually. And that one is perhaps the best(and scariest) of the trilogy. Echostasis is this year's release, and it's huge compared to the first 2 parts.

henke on 5/9/2024 at 04:29

I'm playing Star Trucker because of course I am. It's kinda an odd one. It looks fun and accessible, but is actually a pretty hardcore space sim, and your truck is filled with systems that can and WILL go wrong and mess up your hauls. The long-nosed truck designs look wonderful at first, but once you get behind the wheel and everything below the horizon is obscured by your hood you'll be wishing for perhaps a more realistic space truck design instead, with more visibility out of the cockpit. For any kinda 6 degrees of freedom space travel I'll want analogue inputs so I renewed my Game Pass and started playing this on the XBox, but after a while I'm kinda wishing I'd gone with M+KB on PC. You do a lot more than just drive in this game. You'll spend just as much time on your feet, running around the cab picking shit up, swapping out batteries and blown fuses, popping on the space suit to go outside and patch hull breaches from the last time you smacked into an asteroid. The truck is slow-moving enough that keyboard inputs should be just fine as well. Functions like attaching cargo, disabling stabilizers, or using the CB radio doesn't have a gamepad button, you gotta look at the thing in your cockpit and interact with it.

All that aside, good game so far. I'm just 3-4 hours in yet. Have made a lot of mistakes, ended up in debt, but I'm getting my bearings now. This is a hard game.

Thirith on 5/9/2024 at 09:00

Quote Posted by henke

If I'm not mistaken, there's a demo/prologue for Echostasis that may be its own thing and not just a slice of the actual Echostasis. Not 100% sure though.

henke on 5/9/2024 at 10:03

Yeah the demos are unique things as well that flesh out the story. According to some guy on Steam forums this is the proper play order:

Quote:

1. The Enigma Machine
2. Echostasis demo
3. Mothered (normal ending first, then secret ending)
4. Mothered: HOME - aka Mothered Demo (DONT UNINSTALL MOTHERED, THE SAVE DATA OF THE FULL GAME IS IMPORTANT)
5. Echostasis full game

Buuuut ehhhhh... that's for true freaks only. You'll get enough of the story just playing the main games.