T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve finally played Cult Of The Lamb.
I’ve been meaning to play this for the last two years, but for some reason I never got around to it. I’ve only played for about two hours but so far it feels kind of like if Hades and Moonlighter got squished into a cute little cult game. It’s cute and I’m having fun. maybe someday I’ll get around to playing Hollow Knight.
I’m sorry I don’t write more about the games I play, it’s just that putting my thoughts into text is not my forte.
Anyway, what’s everyone else doing this week
Another PC Golden Age?
Is it real? Is PC gaming returning to its former glory? Sort of. It's complicated.
Silent Hill Origins
Here is a long look at a game that tries to live up to a big legacy and fails hilariously.
The Middle Ages
Would you have survived in the middle ages?
Spoiler Warning
A video Let's Play series I collaborated on from 2009 to 2017.
Was it a Hack?
A big chunk of the internet went down in October of 2016. What happened? Was it a hack?
Brotato, like a boring person. Finally bought a new mousepad, which ended up being 32 inches long, very close to the full length of my table, and all of a sudden my mouse stuttering problems have cleared up.
Didn’t make me any better at the game.
Got myself a month of GamePass Ultimate for very cheap, so I’m gonna pause everything I was doing and dedicate myself exclusively to GamePass games for a few weeks. Here’s what I’ve been trying.
The just-launched South of Midnight is an interesting case. It does a good job of introducing you to this world’s lore very quickly, quite differently from so many other games that seem to insist into making you do an hour of real world chores before the story can really start. I love the visual style, but there is a notorious though inevitable clash between the stop-motion stylized cutscenes and the fluid gameplay. I really don’t know how this could possibly be solved. You introduce frame-skipping into the gameplay and people are going to complain about bad framerate. Get rid of the style in the cutscenes and they lose major part of the appeal. Doesn’t get in the way for me, but I suspect some people might find it too contrasting. I cannot speak for the combat, as I haven’t reached any yet. So far it’s all been platforming, exploring and story development. So far so good.
I’ve been playing Power Wash Simulator. As the title suggests, you have a power washer and your objective is to wash stuff with it. This is the sort of game you see and your first thought is “This has to be some sort of trolling”, end up trying it and then lose hours with it. The game is just so relaxing. I really cannot explain it, you have to try it.
I am, for the very first time in my life, getting myself immersed in the world of Minecraft. Yes, there’s a movie coming out. No, I’m not interested in it, as it frankly looks atrocious, but with its release there’s a bit of marketing around the games too and I decided to finally give this a good try. I remember trying the original game years ago and getting motion sickness from it, but either they solved it on their end or for whatever other reason it no longer affects me, so I’m good. But man, either this game is harder than I thought or I just got a bad seed, because I feel like I have to walk for miles to even find a couple trees and by the time I reach there it’s already nearly night, where all the monsters come to attack. It has taken a few deaths for me to finally gain some upper hand. Tried Minecraft Legends too. Seems to be some sort of RTS, though a bit on the simple side, at least for now. We’ll see how it goes.
And for the last, I’m playing The Callisto Protocol. This game sold itself on the idea of being a spiritual successor to Dead Space, but I think that’s a bit too generous. This is basically just a reskinned Dead Space. The only real difference is the focus on Melee combat, but the movement, visual style, level design, structure, resource gathering, puzzle solving, menu system, pacing and even the dedicated “stomp” button are just Dead Space. As a result I feel less like I’m playing a game inspired by DS than like I’m playing DS again. I really hope the game finds its own voice later.
Admittedly it’s been a while since I’ve played Minecraft but that does sound unusual. There are biomes that have no trees but multiple types do and especially the most common ones. I mean, it’s RNG so outliers are possible but still…
As for Power Wash, chore/job simulators are a whole thing nowadays, if there isn’t one for a given job than it’s probably in development. I actually favour the ones where you get to restore environments (so Power Wash, Train Station Renovation, to some extent House Flipper) but the overall problem is there are so many of them and a lot of them are either trash or extremely similar. For example I suspect someone out there is selling an asset pack for a store sim that people just add a little to make it a different type of store, if that. The reviews can also be rather unhelpful, I got Internet Cafe Simulator with my Humble subscription and it has decent reviews but I personally really didn’t like it.
I played some Lonestar. It’s a roguelite where you have a ship with a 3×3 grid of equipment slots and a pseudo-deck of energy cards. The enemy will have some numbers they’re shooting you with in every row and you ideally want to at least match those numbers with your own numbers, so they take damage and you don’t. It has some interesting synergies you can set up but unfortunately it’s just way, way too easy. It has difficulty levels but they’re slow to increase and they’re unlocked per ship type, so if you want variety you don’t get difficulty for a long time. The steam forums answer to that is “download a workshop mod that unlocks all the difficulty”, and my answer to that was to stop playing the game. It’s too bad.
Started my Imperial Agent in The Old Republic. What always strikes me about replaying the stories are the scenes that I don’t remember seeing but almost certainly had to, although some of them might be new. And I’m talking about dramatic scenes here, not asides. That’s not happening as much with the Agent, though. Also, while Kaliyo is not a character that any of my characters would get along with, it’s probably worse here since my Agent is an intellectual and moral woman who has no reason to like anything about Kaliyo and want her around, making the fact that you have to stick with her for most of the early game really, really annoying.
I tried the demo for Skin Deep after the trailer piqued by curiosity. It’s an FPS where you play as Nina Pasadena, “insurance commando”, which means you work for an insurance company and get deep-frozen among the cargo on space ships to be thawed out if pirates capture the vessel, at which point you go on a rampage to reclaim the ship. Which is crewed by…sapient cats. Who look, in contrast to the high-poly (if slightly cartoony) humans, as if they’d come straight out of Minecraft in terms of being made up of blocky cubes. None of this is explained. (At least in the demo, though I kind of hope the full game doesn’t either and just leaves the weirdness unaddressed.)
Oh, and the pirates have some (in-universe) expensive high-tech thing where if they get killed, their heads pop off (in little self-contained spacesuit helmets), slowly float back to a literal respawn machine, and get new bodies, so to stop them you need to flush their heads out of the ship (and the choice of “flush” was deliberate there). Oh, and Nina can also just breathe and auto-locomote about in space on her own without equipment, allowing you to escape one room of the spaceship by blasting open a window and getting sucked out, then maneuvering your way around until you bust in at another point (perhaps spacing some pirates in the process). It’s just an absurdist trip from start to finish, in a way that makes me think “Now this is a video game.”
Also finally finished up the story in Raft. I’ve sort of already seen it so it wasn’t anything too surprising, but it was a decent ending after a moderately tough series of puzzles and final boss fights. (I wish there was a way to get people back up on their feet in the field, as my friend died in one of the fights leaving me to finish it alone and then take a five-minute trek allll the way back to his bed in the raft, which really kills the momentum.) I like the idea of Raft (make your own mobile home self-sufficiently!), but I always feel like I’m fighting the controls to play it, so I don’t know if I’ll come back to it in the future.
I played the demo of Skin Deep during last Next Fest and it was a lot of fun and has welcome immersive sim elements. The demo levels were mostly a tutorial so I don’t know how they reflect on the full game in that they were largely divided into somewhat discreet areas but even then once you got past the basics they let you approach encounters in varied ways and use mutliple tools and environmental effects and elements so my hopes for the full game are high.
I’ve mostly been playing Magicraft, a wandcrafting roguelite. The main character sucks (you’re a gamer chode who gets isekai’d via toilet and immediately starts asking if you get a harem), but the gameplay is great. It’s got Hades style many upgrades to buy and new levels to reach, and understands that making busted wands should feel busted. You’re clearly meant to automate most of them, machinegun wands can be made to empty near-instantly, and summons feel busted. Then you go up the difficulty tiers to reach new areas and bosses and your supposedly busted machinegun is just barely enough DPS and your summons get wiped constantly and need to also be replaced, so ‘busted’ is just expected. I don’t want to make Noita compairisons because they’re not anywhere near the same, but hence the wandcrafting moniker: it’s an actual wandcrafting roguelite instead of whatever Noita is (a discovery rogue-like w/no-meta).
You do in fact get a “harem”, as in nearly all the camp followers are cute chibi anime waifus, two of which (so far?) are tentacle girls you rescue mid-conversion, which I don’t actually mind if the dialogue wasn’t so cringey about it. I had a both horrible and pleasant surprise when what is obviously the
Skull Reaperfrom Sword Art Online shows up as a mid-boss, definitely was not expecting that and quite enjoy getting to fight something I find so iconic.And I only just discovered that you *can* have more than one of the tanky summon, indeed, more than the stated limit of any summon, if they’re on different wands. Granted, the massive swarm will become useless as enemy damage starts clearing them instantly, but with more wands they’ll pop back out several times faster as well, let’s see how that run goes.
I recently started playing Avowed. It’s one of those games that I really want to like, but for some reason the world and the story just don’t quite jive with me. Aesthetically it feels like some odd mix of Skyrim and Guild Wars.
And my character has coral sprouting out of her head, which causes everyone to call her a “godlike”. It’s just weird.
What would you say is your forte, Issac?
I would love to know what my forte is. But unfortunately all I know is that it isn’t putting my thoughts into words.
Don’t know if this will clear anything up but Avowed is in the Pillars of Eternity setting. Not that it justifies doing a poor job of explaining the lore to new players.
After finishing Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii I started playing Talos Principle II. It’s actually very good – not just the puzzles but the story and characters around the puzzles are fascinating. Like for example the common understanding that the circle of life is good and necessary get a different viewpoint when an ageless robot moans about his organic cats.
Also playing The Sims 4 for some reason. The game got greatly improved since the last time I played it, meaning that there is at least some sort of neighborhood around your house that you can access without a loading screen. Not the whole town like in 3, but more than just your lawn.
Analog I played Bomb Busters with family. Mission 1 – 3 was easy-peasy one shot done. Mission 4 took a few tries. Also Draftosaurus and Tribes of the Wind and Yu-Gi-Oh! with a friend. Cyber Darkness is such a bad structure deck. It’s miss all the XYZ and Link monsters that make Cyber Dragon and Cyber Darkness playable. On the other hand Crimson King (Resonators + Red Dragon Archfiend) is such a good deck out of the box. Replace the Assault Mode and Dangers! with some other cards and you have a viable Rogue deck.