Recently completed video games

[plasticflesh]

5 hours ago, twmac said:

 

And Jontron is in it.

 

This is the first time I'm learning about Jontron. This is an unfortunate controversy that mires an otherwise excellent game. I do not support the views of this individual, and what is more conflicting is that his cameo is for a a security guard in movie studio that has two species of birds in rivalry against each other.

[twmac]

15 hours ago, plasticflesh said:

 

This is the first time I'm learning about Jontron. This is an unfortunate controversy that mires an otherwise excellent game. I do not support the views of this individual, and what is more conflicting is that his cameo is for a a security guard in movie studio that has two species of birds in rivalry against each other.

Yeah, he was removed from another game as a result of his views and people were surprised that he was still in this game.

[Professor Video Games]

Just finished Nier Automata the other day. I dunno, I expected to like this more than I did. There were a lot of interesting ideas and setups in there, but I almost never felt like they were examined enough or given time to develop into anything more substantial. New stuff seemed to just keep coming out of nowhere.

Like they drop that the YorHa soldiers are built using machine cores but then you get a one sentence reaction from 9S and that's it.

And the ending never really resonated with me...maybe because I never felt very attached to the characters? A2 could have been interesting but she felt underdeveloped.

Parts I liked:

Pascal's story. I walked out of the room instead of killing/hacking him. As you leave he calls out "How could you?" in the saddest voice and it's just crushing. Also the village music is the best in the game.

The flashbacks to the robot kingdom and the machine's inability to understand why the baby isn't growing up was great.

The Simone story was a really good use of the second playthrough.

[thenexus6]

Homefront - Normal Difficulty - 3 Hours

 

Got this free on Humble Bundle. Never played it when it first released. It's a "cod clone" but at least the setting is interesting. Totally unremarkable in every way but it was fine shooting people for a few hours. 

 

The multiplayer is kind of active in a tiny way so might play a few rounds here and there.

[Merus]

What Remains of Edith Finch is a bit more morbid than I like, and there are certainly a couple of scenes where as soon as I loaded in and saw what was about to happen, I did genuinely say 'oh no, nooooo' out loud, but it's bold and confident and brilliant. It takes one of the things games do best, putting the player directly into a character's head and using the abstraction to express how they think and not what they see, and pushes it further than I've seen any game do. Games like Psychonauts and Persona 4 show glimmers of how powerful this technique can be, but Edith Finch uses it as bedrock and it works.

 

No amount of random incidental text lying around would have gotten the personality of the Finches across, how much they revel in their own misfortune, as much as walking in their shoes does.

[Erkki]

I beat most of Grow Up, except for the challenges and achievements. Might go for 100% if I get bored of other games and want to play something else. It's pretty much the same thing as Grow Home, just more. The plant scanning simplification is definitely good - dragging them to the teleporter was one of the choriest things. I only used the new ability to plant scanned plants twice or so, so I think that wasn't a very useful addition to the game - especially since it isn't required. I don't remember any more which of the powers were present in Grow Home, but it feels like they were better tuned this time and it's really fun to fly around and look for crystals - kind of like Far Cry 2 diamonds, just more fun. The challenges seem more doable also. Although I haven't looked at the achievement descritpions yet - last time I had a lot of trouble with some, I think I did Grow Home 100%.

[Henke]

Played through The Long Dark's first storymode episode over the past couple days. The addition of a linear narrative to this open-world survival game has worked surprisingly well, and the story has it's hooks in me. I'm eager to see what happens in Episode 2, which I'll get started on tonight. My only criticism is that the mission-design so far has just been a series of fetch-quests. I'm hoping more variety is brought to your objectives in Ep.2.

 

Photos from my journey so far.

 

 

 

[Erkki]

Oh, I got The Long Dark a while ago, but it seemed too brutal or I didn't have enough time to invest into getting to know how it works. Should give it another go soon, especially since they've added a story mode.

[Henke]

You should definitely give it another go! The story mode starts off very tutorial-y and friendly to new players, before it opens up and you're left to your own devices. The difficulty is well-tuned I think. Even though I've played 20 hours of it, there are still times when I get turned around, lost in the woods, hunted by wolves and almost freezing to death.

[Erkki]

I completed Human: Fall Flat (just bought it a couple of days ago thanks to a mention in this same thread here) and it's indeed quite good. It's very impressive that they managed to create a huge number of activities with one simple mechanic of grabbing stuff like in GIRP (or now Grow Home/Up) - you're climbing things, breaking things, bending things and using machinery like

(for best experience maybe it's best to be surprised about the range of things to do)

a catapult, controlling a boat, a ship, a crane, cars and more. The thing is though, that maybe I don't want to use a GIRP-like interface to control a dock crane for half an hour?

 

I think the game slightly errs on the side of not respecting the player's time occasionally, since the drunken GIRP-like feel to it means you will mess up a lot. Maybe you'll mess up with a controller more than a mouse and keyboard, at least I did. You could also be stuck attempting some amazing feats of GIRPness, but the solution is something else. Thankfully this didn't happen to me a lot, but it did a few times. Anyway, most of the time it's not bad - the entire game took me 7 hours to complete and I missed some optional stuff. I think generally each level is about an hour, with the earlier levels taking less than that and the later ones more.

[Erkki]

Completed Gorogoa, a unique puzzle game that I got bundled with Edith Finch. It's really great IMHO, you might think of it as belonging to a similar type of puzzle games as The Room games, but it's rather unique in presenting layers of 2D images that can have windows into each other and you have to explore and find a way to connect them in a different way. It has nice minimalistic music, and I think it's one of the most refreshing puzzle games I've played in years. Quite short, though, just a couple of hours.

[thenexus6]

Last game of 2017 I finished was Halo Wars on PC. I never played it on the Xbox 360 and finally got around to it thanks to a xbox game pass free trial. It felt a little RTS for babies but I enjoy Halo stuff. Definitely made me interested in playing Halo Wars 2 in the future. (I actually downloaded the Halo Wars 2 demo and it was pretty good, game looks SO much better visually, no surprise there though).

[miffy495]

What Remains of Edith Finch.

 

Yeah, I cried.

[Beasteh]

So I finished Gunpoint last night after discovering it was in a bundle I bought ages ago. A really fun little game, there's no one way to solve the puzzles. Also the writing's hilarious.

 

Looking forward to trying Heat Signature in the future!

[Henke]

On 12/28/2017 at 8:13 PM, Erkki said:

I completed Human: Fall Flat (just bought it a couple of days ago thanks to a mention in this same thread here) and it's indeed quite good.

[...]

Maybe you'll mess up with a controller more than a mouse and keyboard, at least I did.

 

Yay! I loved Human Fall Flat, for the same reasons. It would've been easy for the devs to just rely on slapstick physics madness for sales, but they actually went and made some well though-out puzzles and obstacles, every new level bringing with it totally new systems and challenges.

 

And yes, M+KB plus turn off the auto-look-forward-thingy was the best control setup I thought.

[YoThatLimp]

On 11/10/2017 at 5:07 AM, Simon said:

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.

 

I finished this last night on the train and I had the same thoughts about the pacing - even the ending scene felt a little, short? Obviously this was more about the journey than the destination, but I couldn't help but to feel a little disappointed by how abrupt it ended. 

[Erkki]

Just finished Edith Finch. Quite a touching story and I'm glad I played it and want to get some info about the background. Just looked at the achievement list and again I have to say achievements in games are mostly quite dumb.

[plasticflesh]

I just did a marathon tour of the Norwood Suite. I knew this game would be a surreal and evocative soundscape of hipster weirdos, exploration of a dream world in vein of Myst, the Witness, Yume Nikki, Kentucky Route Zero, LSD: Dream Emulator. I really enjoyed what was in there. I didn't expect the game to have any sort of puzzles at all, and indeed it is a actually a character based quest chain, which is a style of adventure game I really enjoy. What I didn't expect was that it had such an interesting story and cast of interesting characters, which I don't mean to over hype, everything had an understated tone. It didn't over stay its welcome,  perhaps just the right length for a restful trip. Short and suite.

 

edit: here's an interesting article about Cosmo D's broken leg influencing him to get into Unity, on how he views it as music creation, and how he pours his love of New York into his games.

https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/mvbk5b/how-indie-dev-cosmo-d-is-humanizing-new-york

 

I played a bit of his other games, Saturn V and Off Peak, and it was like a real life Beginner's Guide, seeing the signifiers of this man's life.

 

Spoiler

An interesting easter egg that isn't actually a spoiler to any story or discovery content. I was intrigued to see that the floor pattern of the lobby area of Norwood Suite resembles the floor tiles of NYU's Bobst Library. And alas, in that first floor area is wall art of NYU's Bobst library itself, with the tile pattern visible in the bottom left corner.

 

Spoiler

The game does make at least one explicit in game reference to NYU. Tonally the game fits the vibe of NYC hipsters going to a Catskills lodge, complete with jaded conversations about balancing creativity with business.

 

Spoiler

The floor tile pattern of Bobst Library were designed to look like spikes, so that students would be discouraged from jumping onto what appeared to be spikes.

 

Spoiler

Unfortunately this was ineffective, and tall glass walls -visible in the screen shot in the game- were installed to prevent further attempts.

 

Spoiler

However those were also ineffective, and an gated fence was later introduced in 2012. 

http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/08/26/nyus-brilliant-design-solution-to-a-buildings-suicide-problem/

 

Spoiler

What makes the whole thing that much worse is the original architect not was also a Nazi sympathizer.

https://nyulocal.com/the-history-behind-bobst-library-will-further-dissuade-you-from-ever-doing-work-there-9f77a3127e8a

 

Spoiler

I was attending SVA at the time of the 2003 suicide at Bobst, and heard third hand accounts that event.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[plasticflesh]

I also played Yorkshire Gubbins, a very short and cute SCUMM style point and clicker game. Great voice acting. 

[Cordeos]

I finished Ghost Recon Wildlands last night. The story was pretty terrible, lots of macho bs, drug war apologia and general jingoistic garbage, luckily all cut scenes are skippable so I was able to ignore most of it.

The map is very pretty, a lot of Just Cause vibes in terms of terrain variety swampy jungle, snow mountains, salt flats and everything in between. The part of the game I enjoyed the most was actually item collection. Weapon upgrades are scattered across the map and I wanted all of them to fully tune my equipment so I flew around in a helicopter launching little raids. There is something immensely satisfying about slowly picking off guards in groups of 4 with your squad or calling in a bunch of rebel support and just charging in lobbing grenades. I also like how freeform the game is, to get to the ending you only need to complete half the missions most of which can be done in any way you like.

 

If anyone is interested in playing I would gladly jump into a coop session. I am Cordeos on Uplay and Steam, hit me up.

[plasticflesh]

I recently completed Ossuary. (steam link) (developer's page)

 

A short dialog based adventure game, it is a esoteric philosophical nightmare based on "Discordian thought" which is a sort of subversive satirical religion. The Ossuary game plays like a more concise version of Yume Nikki mixed with the sword fighting from Monkey Island. You explore a small after life world talking to people, and using a verb inventory of Sins to incite them to action. It is interesting and short, I spent maybe 3 hours on the main game. I also recommend the free Ossuary Demo as it is basically a completely separate and unique episode of the game.

[thenexus6]

Shadow Tactics - PC - 19 hours - a few normal mostly easy difficulty

 

Boy oh boy this game. It looks and sounds gorgeous, I have never played one of these kind of stealth games, am now a fan. So many challenges, play it multiple ways. It was tough as hell sometimes though.

[thepaulhoey]

I'd highly recommend you check out Commandos 2. I don't know how much of it is nostalgia but that was the pinnacle of that style of game for me. I did replay the first few missions last year and thought it held up well.

[thenexus6]

1 hour ago, thepaulhoey said:

I'd highly recommend you check out Commandos 2. I don't know how much of it is nostalgia but that was the pinnacle of that style of game for me. I did replay the first few missions last year and thought it held up well.

 

I think I will, looking on steam the historic low was 39p so i'll wait until the next sale.

[thepaulhoey]

Yeah whenever there's a sale on it's reduced to that.