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I LOVED Kathy Rain, I got it in the last Steam sale! A great game for Halloween!

 

Speaking of Halloweeny games, I just beat Hugo's House of Horrors, the first game in the Hugo Trilogy and it was... short? It wasn't too hard because I saw someone review it recently and the game is so short they practically showed the whole game in the review?

 

It's a tiny game in all aspects, the game only has a few rooms and a few items to pick and use, but I still had a lot of fun, despite it's flaws, like having to type a command before entering a room to have time to do the action and having to deal with a man living in a basement by answering his nerd trivia... how appropriate?

 

 

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Copying something I posted in the slack.

 

I finished up the narrative portion of Slime Rancher yesterday. It's a pretty good but frustrating game.  Frustrating mostly because it feels like it promises a depth it can never deliver on.  But that promise seeps out of its pores.  You can see the opportunity for more complexity or interaction all over the place.  It's a really tiny team that made it though.  I suspect they ultimately just didn't have the bandwidth to include everything they laid the foundation for. 

 

It's greatest sin though is probably the raw amount of time that it takes to manage the most basic things on your farm, because it is sorely lacking in automation elements.  You use your vacuum for everything: gathering food for slimes, feeding slimes, gathering their poop plorts, etc.  But you have to first suck up the thing you need, then shoot it out.  So every action has to be repeated twice (suck up food from garden, shoot out food to corral; suck up plorts, shoot out plorts to sell).  This is fine when you're dealing in quantities of 10 or 20.  But once you get to the point of dealing with hundreds of things, it's a significant amount of time spent just sucking and blowing.  And you only ever have 4 inventory slots, so there's lots of running around, emptying, running back.  The market is also reactive to you selling, so in order to get the best price, you want to stockpile a bunch of plorts and sell at once.  To stockpile them, you need a silo.  Which just adds yet another layer of sucking and blowing.  At some point, there should be an upgrade to just insta-fill/insta-dump the gun without having to play out the animation for hundreds of items.  And the late game upgrades cost a lot.   You're going to sell tens of thousands of plorts, potentially seeing the sucking/blowing animation, a hundred thousand times to fully upgrade your ranch.  It's potentially hours of gametime just spent holding a trigger filling and emptying a tank. 

 

I....didn't actually mean to rant about that?  I think it was bugging me more than I realized. 

 

That's really a mid- to late-game complaint.  I'm quite glad I played it, and there's a ton of good stuff in it.  I think it's one of those things where the parts that are frustrating really stand out in comparison to what's good about it (it's gorgeous, exploring is a joy, the story is simple, but touching). 

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1 hour ago, Bjorn said:

it's a significant amount of time spent just sucking and blowing.

So you're saying it both sucks and blows? 

 

I quote recently finished Golf Story on the Switch. It was a good, charming and inventive game. It applied the idea of an RPG to a golf game very well. It varied up the quests in a way that made it all fresh and had good themed areas that were fun narratively as well as changing up gameplay. 

 

It was a smidgen too long, but I was very happy when I put it down. I'd like if more games took up the mantle of making an RPG but swapping out the battle system for another type of mechanic. 

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SBM, I enjoyed it as well but definitely enjoyed the golf quests more than the RPG style fetch quests. The mansion wasn't the high point for me. 

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Yeah agreed. It was best when it was inventive with the golf mechanics rather than falling back on 'traditional' game stuff like that section.

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I just beat Doki Doki Literature Club and wow, I'm tempted to start a thread just about this game... It's a free VN and like most good VNs... the less you know about the better?

 

All I can say, it thoroughly spooked me, like no come ever has.  And it's the most messed up thing I ever played... and manipulative too? 

 

It's say it's the new Hatoful Boyfriend, but this might even be better?

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I finished Beyond Good and Evil (via the PS3 HD edition). This is such an odd, interesting game in the Ubisoft back catalogue. A year ago, I don’t think anyone could have predicted that the sequel to what is now a fairly obscure cult classic from 2003 would be announced as potentially one of the biggest and most ambitious games they will ever make. And yet here we are.  

 

Encountered today, it seems like one of the better examples of that early 2000s tendency where video games were starting to develop a ‘mature’ identity, while largely still defining themselves by old mechanics and adolescent tropes. So we had Shadow the Hedgehog, Jak and Daxter 2, the death of Lara Croft, and so on. In this case we get a game with a cute art style, anthropomorphic characters, and whimsical dialogue that wouldn’t be out of place in a kids TV show, alongside a storyline set in a corporate dystopia that deals in some seriously dark conspiracy theories. Though aspects of it feel dated, the combination of a groovy European sensibility with an anti-authoritarian, pro-diversity message still feels fresh. But though it steps away from relentless violence as a way of solving every problem, it can’t entirely answer the questions it throws up at every juncture. 

 

You play as Jade, a young woman who lives in a lighthouse on a faraway planet, Hillys, with her uncle, a pig man named Pey’j. Jade’s world is under constant attack from an alien race, a vaguely Geiger-esque bunch called the Domz who’ve been kidnapping the locals for some nefarious purpose. They’re supposed to be defended by the Alpha Section, a local corporate military force — except the soldiers always seem to show up conveniently late to intervene in the attacks. Jade picks up her camera and goes to join a local band of rebels who have devoted themselves to finding out the truth about the invasion. In most games this would simply involve annihilating everything in your path. The solution in Beyond Good and Evil is charmingly old-fashioned: the rebels are publishing a secret newsletter, and Jade’s role is to sneak into suspicious locations and send back photographic evidence. (You point and shoot the camera manually, from a first-person perspective; a delightful side-quest involves taking pictures of the local wildlife.) There’s some combat — Jade is pretty handy with a quarterstaff — but it’s limited in scope. The game owes a good deal to the 3D Zelda games, especially in the way that players will divide their time between exploring a small open world, sneaking through long, complex, multi-layered levels. But unlike Wind Waker (to which it owes the most) the game is far smaller in scope. The overworld is tiny, there's not much to discover off the beaten track, and there's only one or two meaningful upgrades that change the way you play. 

 

The dark stuff, though, is pretty dark:

 

Spoiler

 

What Jade discovers is fairly horrific. Her cute animal companions are being kidnapped and trafficked off-world with the active assistance of the Alpha Section: they are packed off into space and shipped out to a station on the moon, where they are cocooned and slowly drained of their ‘energies’. Your cute animal buddies are being slowly murdered, basically. Moreover, the Alpha Section soldiers seem to have been corrupted by some kind of alien influence: within their armoured suits, their faces have become hideously deformed, and they can no longer breathe the same air as everyone else. 

 

For all that this seems like a predictable, family-friendly sort of conspiracy theory, there’s something really sinister about it. There’s implications of slavery and torture, but no blood and gore. The game never stops to explain why the Domz and the Alpha sections are in cahoots, nor why they require such a vast harvest of living souls. It won’t even mention how humans came to be living on a planet with humanoid animals -- something to do with genetic engineering gone wrong, perhaps. The shadow of Metal Gear Solid looms long over the whole thing, but whereas that game is nothing if not detailed, Beyond Good and Evil is vague about everything. There are long, long stretches where no particular storytelling is happening at all.

 

And then there's the ending: the whole thing goes out on a bizarre, leftfield cliffhanger. Several quite grim things happen, but are then undone, except not really? The whole thing is strangely melancholic. 

 

 

I'm fascinated by a comment I read somewhere by Michel Ancel to the effect that the events of 9/11 were a key influence on the shape of this game. I don't know quite what to make of that. The whole thing seems shot through with a deeply cynical distrust of authority: media, politicians, the military. Nobody and nothing can be trusted. It's that conspiracy theory mindset -- Metal Gear again -- but without the cinematic hooks that keep Kojima tethered, albeit on a distant orbit. By the end I kind of felt like the game was done with the world as much as I was done with the game; as if the game wanted to destroy itself, wanted to do away with all its own characters; but couldn't, because it was a big budget video game published in 2003, and not an art movie. 

 

It's all very strange. I'm not sure it's the timeless classic I've sometimes seen it described as, but it's certainly worth a look for anyone interested in a unique, offbeat Zelda clone.

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I finished SteamWorld Dig 2, albeit with plenty of secrets still to find and optional caves still to complete. I was very much looking forward to this game - it's the first thing besides Mario that I've played on my Switch. I liked it a lot and can recommend it, but the pacing felt off, especially in retrospect. The credits came as a surprise - I didn't know I was tackling the final boss (was anticipating a big plot twist and then a whole new area to dig) and there were lots of upgrades I was still saving up cogs for.

 

SteamWorld Heist, whilst very different mechanically (no pun intended), did a great job of balancing and gating itself to make sure I reached the endgame feeling pretty powerful and armed to the hilt with almost everything available - whilst somehow making the grind minimal. In fact, it was very satisfying to return to a level you'd once barely scraped through, and ace it with your improved crew to rustle up some extra cash. Somehow I was able to complete the story of Dig 2 with lots of the upgrade tree still to go. Perhaps I was playing it wrong, but I wasn't rushing at all.

 

At some point I'll see if I can reload to just before the final battle and keep levelling up, then tackle some of the more fiendish caves. I'm not someone who tries to 100% everything but I do feel I've short-circuited this game somehow and want to spend more time with it.

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I finished SpacePlan, a clicker game released on Steam - totally awesome. I didn't think I'd have an interesting narrative experience via a clicker game but it was a totally enjoyable experience. 

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On 11/10/2017 at 3:07 AM, Simon said:

I finished SteamWorld Dig 2, albeit with plenty of secrets still to find and optional caves still to complete. 

 

I enjoyed Steamworld Dig 2, and also have tons of secrets to find, but haven't gone back to scour for them yet. The story did feel a bit short, but I also played it pretty thoroughly. A good mix of digging exploration and designed platforming.

 

On 11/10/2017 at 3:07 AM, Simon said:

there were lots of upgrades I was still saving up cogs for.

 

The cogs can be removed from any upgrade they are applied to, it's not a lifetime commitment, for what that is worth.

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I've finished Sonic Mania (although not with a complete set of Chaos Emeralds, as I'm terrible at those special stages and was avoiding them by the end).

 

In every respect it captures the classic Sonic feel, with clear nods to environments and bosses past, but it has enough new ideas to keep things interesting. I love how all the zones are transformed in Act 2, with some new mechanic always introduced to raise the stakes.

 

The boss battles are more of a mixed bag, with some very fun and clever twists on classic Robotnik appearances, but also several frustrating and punishing encounters, where it's just trial and error to work out what you're allowed to hit without losing rings. The same is probably true of Sonic 2, but coming to this directly after the friendly, forgiving Mario Odyssey, it took a while to adjust to!

 

Highly recommended, and it seems to have been a big hit so I'll be surprised if there isn't eventually a sequel.

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48D2EA37EA2F49F74FD58BE9378B1E34FE78EFC4

 

Night In The Woods. It was wonderful.

 

Also finished Super Mario Odyssey. Also wonderful.

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1 hour ago, Henke said:

48D2EA37EA2F49F74FD58BE9378B1E34FE78EFC4

 

Night In The Woods. It was wonderful.

 

Also finished Super Mario Odyssey. Also wonderful.

 

Definitely going to jump back into NIIT when that new game of the year edition is released soon!

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Battle Chef Brigade

It's part 2D hack n' slash a la Muramasa, crossed with match-3 puzzle game. It's about an Iron Chef-inspired competition, with two chefs going head-to-head by running out of the kitchen, killing monsters, gathering ingredients, and bringing them back for cooking within the time limit. The combat is fluid and responsive, and the puzzles get increasingly more complex as the game progresses, with the introduction different types of gems, limited-moves gems, combos, and specialties which reward you for particularly difficult dishes.

I bought this on whim based on the weird premise alone and I was not disappointed. Cooking and the Iron Chef competition isn't an easily ignorable backdrop. The story mode is the star of the show here, and they create a world that revolves around cooking monsters. My biggest surprise was how pleasant most of it was though. Almost everyone was super-friendly. It takes at least a couple of chapters for conflicts to get more serious. Before that we still have the competition, and they could've gone the obvious route and made every opponent an over-the-top villain, but instead they are all very sportsman-like, and quick to become friends with the main character. I didn't know how much I really wanted to play something this upbeat and lighthearted until it already got its hooks in me. Now I'm left looking for another fix, with no idea where to find it. Best case scenario: maybe the sales will be good enough that the devs can afford to do the updates they're planning.

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I completed Yakuza Kiwami (remake of the first Yakuza) just now. I liked it a lot. For an openish world game with a lot of crap in it, it keeps a pretty tight pace. The main plot had enough momentum that I always wanted to see the next beat instead of getting sidetracked with all the optional content (although some of those side quests were very good). I aso like that the world is relatively small. 

 

It's very much not woke at all, which I gather is a theme for the series. There are some other issues, too, like the combat being pretty uninteresting. It's super easy most of the time, with difficulty spikes on bosses, but even those can be easily brute-forced with healing items. 

 

One of the best features is something called Majima Everywhere, where this one dude keeps ambushing you to keep your skills up, kind of like Cato Fong from the Pink Panther movies. His increasingly absurd plots to drag you into combat are amusing. I was surprised to find out that it was an addition for the remake and not part of the original game, because it fits in so well.

 

I guess now I'll get Yakuza 0 and hope Kiwami 2 gets an English release.

 

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I got Yakuza 0 last month and its my first time playing the game. I am chapter 4 of 17 I think and i'm like 15 hours in.. and i've hardly touched any mini games or side stuff. Beating up dudes is pretty fun.

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Out There Somewhere is a fun puzzle platformer with a teleport gun mechanic. It's awfully short (I got stuck on a couple puzzles and ended up finishing in 90 minutes) but it's only two dollars (and I think I got it for less via some Humble Bundle) and I definitely enjoyed it. My only complaint is the elements of combat, which are not great and it unfortunately doubles down on in the end.

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I was going to hold off on Yakuza 0 for a while, because I figured playing 2 of these games in a row would be a good way to burn out, but I didn't want to play anything else, so here I go. 

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I know I said I finished Freeways on the iPad a few pages back, but I bought and completed it again on PC and this time I have VIDEO EVIDENCE. I made a cool timelapse.

 

 

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On 12/7/2017 at 3:15 PM, Salacious Snake said:

I was going to hold off on Yakuza 0 for a while, because I figured playing 2 of these games in a row would be a good way to burn out, but I didn't want to play anything else, so here I go. 

 

Yeah, I played 1, 2, 3 and 4 in the space of 2 years and it was not the way to play that series. By the time I got to 4 the story telling and mechanics and melted away and I just felt like I might as well do data entry.

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I've been enjoying A Hat in Time. Pros: Super cute platformer. Lots of fun unique stuff in each level so far, I'm about 25% in. Cons: The environment design has a rough edges feeling, rolling through texture planes and weird camera stuff.

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On 12/11/2017 at 6:53 PM, plasticflesh said:

I've been enjoying A Hat in Time. Pros: Super cute platformer. Lots of fun unique stuff in each level so far, I'm about 25% in. Cons: The environment design has a rough edges feeling, rolling through texture planes and weird camera stuff.

 

And Jontron is in it.

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