T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve been playing more Cult of the Lamb.
Still going well. My favorite follower so far has been this little bunny guy who just writes poetry as one of his traits, he doesn’t build or worship, just poetry.
I’m pretty far into the game now with the fourth area cleared, and probably kill last boss, assuming that there’s not some extra final boss like in Enter the Gungeon.
I’m also still playing Deep Rock Galactic. The easter event started the other day so now I get to hunt down robot bunnies that inevitably got lost by the cargo ship.
What’s every one else playing this week?
Bowlercoaster
Two minutes of fun at the expense of a badly-run theme park.
This Scene Breaks a Character
Small changes to the animations can have a huge impact on how the audience interprets a scene.
Borderlands Series
A look at the main Borderlands games. What works, what doesn't, and where the series can go from here.
If Star Wars Was Made in 2006?
Imagine if the original Star Wars hadn't appeared in the 1970's, but instead was pitched to studios in 2006. How would that turn out?
Secret of Good Secrets
Sometimes in-game secrets are fun and sometimes they're lame. Here's why.
I played through some Subnautica: Below Zero, a survival crafting game (very much not my usual genre) that mostly takes place underwater. It’s really reminding me of the things I liked about the base game… and the things I didn’t like. Exploring and finding new tech and resources is a lot of fun, and the game is quite pretty. On the other hand, grinding resources I’ve already found is really boring. I also am not sure how to build a base currently – possibly I need to follow some of the story breadcrumbs. Or I could just run around in my SeaTruck, which is a brilliant iteration on the original concept. Love taking inventory space and crafting and so on with me!
I still think one of the funniest features of the game is that you get deep enough that your submarine would be crushed by the pure force of the water if you went any further… and your way to work around that issue is to get out and go yourself. It’s well known that the human body is immune to pressure, after all.
I’ve also been playing Blue Prince. It’s a roguelite where you’re exploring a mansion, but every time you open a door you get to draft what room comes up next. So you have to figure out if you want rooms with a lot of connections, or good resources, or special effects, or maybe just nothing at all to recommend them because you only get 3 choices and RNG be like that. It has a bunch of puzzle aspects to it that I’m not going to spoil, and fairly limited permanent progression. Also no enemies or anything like that. Seems pretty cool so far. There really is some serious randomness to it, sometimes you get a bad run of rooms and just run out of places to go… though ok, I’m sure there are often other decisions I could have made along the way to reduce the odds of that. Also there are a few cases where you need specific items that only spawn randomly.
Below Zero does have a problem with getting your base started, in that you have to scan a repair tool, and none of those are immediately obvious. Vague spoiler, IIRC
they’re only found in the aboveground bases, or more specific spoiled locationthe fastest one is if you follow the shore wall in the east shallow, you’ll find an underwater passage that leads up to a base, basically just beside the start of the game. Makes a huge difference if you already know where to look or not.Which wouldn’t be a problem ’cause the Seatruck is cool. . . except you also need to know exactly where to go to get the modules you need to make it a functional mobile base, and it has obnoxiously low storage, and the sleeper cabin is basically deadweight. Just give me like 4 slots in one of those obvious cabinets in there to store the other helmet ffs.
I remember frowning at the water pressure mechanics in the original Subnautica. It makes gameplay sense (force the player to be vulnerable without just killing them) – but given how much of the rest of the game is inspired by science (“What is this creature? What does it eat? How is it adapted to / how does it shape its environment?”) it seems weird.
Though Sub-Zero has a new fun one: the conditions are arctic, and on land you have to watch how cold you get. It’ll kill you! So, to avoid freezing to death on land you…
…jump in the ocean and warm up. Yep, just like real life!
I feel like I’ve read that the game was originally going to have you not be able to function outside of vehicle at low depths, like there was originally a pressure suit upgrade or something required for it, but they removed it because. . . gamers suck? At least in Below Zero it feels like with all the extra bubble plants that they’ve intentionally made it beatable without vehicles, because reasons.
It does rather bug me, because up to a point it’s not wrong- you can easily have a poorly built submersible that would start failing at pressures a diver could withstand if they did it right, and with a sub to support diver can go surprisingly far down. Just, not as far down as the game has you go. And they literally have a deep sea suit/vehicle styled quite similarly to the real life version, which you big sub can carry down for you. They have everything they need in the game already except a scanner tool for the prawn suit, and there is no goddamn way *that* was the limiting factor. The only reason I can think of is that yeah, gamers suck and can’t handle the idea of real pressure mechanics, that they didn’t want to restrict their “sandbox” game to actually having a required mechanical progression, or people just couldn’t live without building bases at endgame depths (gee, add a building module arm). But the game was in early access for ages and has wide swaths that they never got around to putting content in because they had to ship, and would have also had a whole player base that would have whined about diving pressure mechanics being added so why bother? Gamers suck.
Meanwhile there’s a super hardcore mod that hacks in pressure and blood/gas levels for the bends and will even put a “poison” effect on the atmosphere so you can’t just swim on the surface without the right tech, and damn does it make the game more interesting. All the way until the point where you can’t actually progress the game without getting *out* of your deep sea dive vehicle.
The warm ocean is explicitly called out in Below Zero though: just like the first game, the water is heated by all the nearby volcanic activity: you’re literally jumping into a heated pool. And further, I’m pretty sure IRL wetsuits made for cold water will keep you warm in the water, but are even worse outside of it. So until you’ve got something that can transition, yeah you’re in a weird situation where climbing out of the water immediately starts you freezing to death at warp speed, but staying in the water is a heated bath.
Water can only get so cold and stay liquid (even salty ocean water), so if the water is liquid you know there’s a certain minimum temperature it could be (~0 °C/32 °F), though I don’t know the specifics). Air temperature though can get a lot colder before the atmosphere starts to liquefy. So if your suit can handle the water temperature then it kind of makes sense that you could freeze outside the water but be fine in it; the near-freezing ocean water could actually be a lot warmer than the air.
Ha! Science’d!
Also, above the surface of water you’d have to deal with windchill, which would be significant?
(This is also something of a reply to Fizban’s point above)
I’m not complaining that you can warm up by diving into arctic water; it would be prohibitive to game progress if that wasn’t true.
Now, If you can come up wth a reason why navigating areas with the burrowing iceworms is so frustrating, I’ll be impressed…
Got nothing for you there, I didn’t have a problem with that part and just sped through. Well, aside from the bugged iceworms lag-grabbing me from like half a mile away, but much like the sea vehicles it was not instant death so I’d just stand up, repair the bike, and be moving again before the next attack.
Navigating the other surface area though, that was madness. A maze of tunnels and side passes at different elevations constantly turning back on each other plus the occasional polar bear to stop you from getting your bearings. And I did the whole thing without the cold suit, expecting I would find a schematic for it in the base at the end. But once again, the extremely forgiving game design made it easy to just stave off hypothermia by eating chili peppers nonstop, because that makes sense *eyeroll*.
I’m hooked on Talos Principle II. This game is … different. And great, and has a lot of variety for a puzzler. All that philosophy in this game let’s me think about it when I’m not playing. It sure is helpful for a puzzle game to have different characters to interact with and not just messages from the past. So long I’m pretty much on par with Melville but also like the arguments Alcatraz and Byron have.
I completed East and North at this point, just some stars and the gates left. Each of them having 3 sets of 10 puzzles, each set gets a new mechanic. East had laser color inversity, laser color combination and wall piercing. North had body swapping, laser battery and tool exchange.
Analog: Perch got delivered this weekend. I had some rules learning solo plays. It’s a far fetch from the game quality of Earth from the same company has. A kind of mean spirited game about birds flying around a neighborhood trying to have the biggest or second biggest flock in an area. But a lot of randomness can shift the balance of the game in favor of the already leading player. In both learning games the winner had more than double the points than the other contestant.
I loved Talos II. Really great game.
Still focused on GamePass offerings.
South of Midnight continues to develop. The lore gets interesting and the combat, while not groundbreaking, is fun and well executed. While the main story itself has its appeal it’s the side stories where it gets interesting, sometimes very dark. And while I like the soundtrack and I understand all of this is basically how that style of music goes it’s always a bit shocking to hear a happy tune while the lyrics tell a horrifying story. It’s not a bad thing by any means, it just feels a bit clashing.
Power Wash Simulator continues to relax. It’s the sort of game I can genuinely play while listening to something else without feeling like I’m missing anything from either side.
Minecraft is Minecraft. You all know it. Not much to say about it.
Finished The Callisto Protocol. Last week I called it “a reskinned Dead Space” and I’d like to modify that statement a bit. The game is just Dead Space, only worse in every aspect. It’s much more linear, the level and enemy design is boring, the graphics are very detailed but marred by poor art direction that makes it all blend together, the combat is either stupidly easy or annoyingly irritating depending on the situation, the upgrade system is far less interesting, the exceedingly long uninterruptable animations constantly get in the way, the weapons are not satisfying to use, the progression system is unbalanced, the little exploration that exists is annoying, there are no puzzles to speak of unless you count “find the key to this door by walking a few feet” and by God this game put all its horror eggs into the jump scare basket. And they’re not even effective jump scares. Not even one of them made me jump, and I saw dozens, perhaps over a hundred of them. Also, from what I hear, the actual ending of the game is in paid DLC, which is absolute BS. I don’t hate it or anything, but the more I played the less I felt “I want to see more of it” and it went into “I just want it to end” territory. The developers did themselves a major disservice by deliberately aping their previous game. All of these faults wouldn’t be so apparent if we didn’t have the original game to compare it to. Still, even if I had never played Dead Space there are too many issues with it. I don’t entirely regret my time with it, but I’m never going to play it again, and I don’t even care enough about the story to get the DLC.
Like sheer_falacy up there I’m also playing the just launched Blue Prince. It’s an odd but very interesting roguelite puzzle game. The gist of it is that you have to reach a certain room in a mansion, but the mansion is ever changing. Every day you start in the same room with a certain number of steps. Each time you reach a door you decide what the next room will be from three random choices. There are many kinds of rooms, with different advantages. Maybe one has three exits, so you get two more potential rooms to create. Maybe one has no exits but comes with items. Maybe one has no immediate reward but will allow for more substantial rewards in the future. Every new room you create is added to the floor plan and can now be traversed back and forth as it had been always there. Every time you enter a room you consume a step. The run ends when you either run out of steps, run out of rooms without reaching your goal (since the random nature of the room creation and your personal choices mean that sometimes you might get yourself into a dead end) or when you make the deliberate choice to end it. Then you start a new day and the floor plan is reset and you lose all your items, but you’re a bit wiser about how things work. This is the sort of game for which it’s advisable to have a notebook or journal around to keep notes, since the game itself doesn’t, and information is your most valuable resource. Good stuff.
Started Commandos Origins. It’s been a while since I’ve played one of these games. Bit curious about this one. I downloaded the demo for it a couple months ago or so and I remember deleting it almost immediately, and I can’t remember why, because I have no issues with the full game. It’s pretty fun even though this sort of game is made for mouse and keyboard, so the gamepad controls are a bit unwieldy. That said, the game supposedly supports m&k in Xbox, so I’ll have to try that.
Had other stuff I’d been thinking of playing, instead just continued Magicraft. I’ve now beat the final boss on hardest difficulty, as well as the ridiculous superboss. Haven’t unlocked everything so there’s still some life left, but I’ll probably be retiring that build on future runs. The higher end unlocks start to have more “meta” stuff that cares about slot position and making things do other things, which get more Noita-ish in the wandrafting- but still an actual action roguelite where the goal is just smash.
Also, the aesthetic is quite strong. The first zone is forest ruins but the first enemy is mushrooms with an eyeball and it gets progressively more eldritch horror from there. Kinda like Darkest Dungeon having skeletons at one end and “vampires” and so on down to halls of flesh. None of the bleak horror tone, but shows that you can get plenty of enemy variety without resorting to poop monsters. The final zone is a series of bosses in random order, though I think the one called Apostle would be more appropriate if it was always the penultimate, good vibes. Actually more eldritch vibes than the final boss, not that it’s bad either, good ‘ol
giant worm.