Wednesday Action Log 01-22-25

By Issac Young Posted Wednesday Jan 22, 2025

Filed under: Epilogue, Action Log 19 comments

This week I’ve actually played some games.

I played the demo for Heroes of Hammerwatch II. It was fine. I don’t know if it was just the demo, but there was almost no tutorial or guide, so there was about an hour of playing where I didn’t know what I was doing at all. Other than that, it was just fine.

Most of my time this week has been spent on a newly released game that is outside of my normal genre. Infinity Nikki. It’s a hard game to explain; it has a lot of modern Nintendo elements, some Super Mario Odyssey, a bit of Breath of the Wild, and a tiny bit of Pokémon vibes, all wrapped up in a game about dresses and fashion. Every thing you do is related to your outfit, your double jump has its own outfit, and so does your bug net.

And an outfit for combat.

A lot of the game consists of making outfits and finding clothing, as well as materials for your outfits. Then you have your ability outfits. You can’t change your ability outfits the same as your regular outfits. You can get alternate ones, but can’t really customize (at least as far as I know).

There’s also parkour.

Since I’m not the best at explaining games, I’ll just say: if you played Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom, and got excited when you found a new piece of armor, you’ll probably like this game.

Anyway, what’s everyone else doing this week?

 


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19 thoughts on “Wednesday Action Log 01-22-25

  1. Syal says:

    Unicorn Overlord has a postgame level that is hilariously easier than the endgame level (because of those endgame bosses). It also unlocks various bosses as new party members, which is weird, because that’s the last level and there’s no New Game so you can’t really use them. (I hoarded all the stat-gain items expecting them to carry over to NG . All of them, wasted.) I started a new game anyway, and was happily surprised to recognize all the prologue party members. I was much less happy to discover that all the early-game tutorials are unskippable even when you’re on the postgame-only difficulty setting. That, the first levels not being that much harder, and the realization that a one-squad run is probably impossible, means I’m finally done with the Unicorning.

    Restarted Soul Nomad and the World Eaters to compare it to Unicorn, but gameplaywise it’s mostly apples and oranges. Plotwise, it’s pretty fun to go from Unicorn’s barebones plot to Soul Nomad’s absurdly overstuffed one. We’ve got TWO ancient emperors who united the land, THREE characters with mysterious pasts, ONE cursed sword containing the Devil, ONE legendary martyr who is inexplicably still alive, and ONE OR MORE Philosopher’s Stones, and all before our first* fight. This is a very fun game to come back to. Although it is confirming that the late-game reveal that I thought didn’t work, totally definitely doesn’t work, and contradicts the early game. (Also they have you pick your gender, and the voiceover switches depending on what you pick, but it switches to the OPPOSITE of what you pick. If you pick the girl, you get a male voiceover, if you pick the boy, you get a female voiceover. Weird and weirder.)

    *(There’s one fight before it, but it’s a training fight that’s literally unlosable; the win condition is “allies or enemies defeated”.)

    After 100 hours in Brotato I’ve finally realized the Elite I’ve always had the most trouble with is completely trivialized by just circle-strafing it.

    1. Fizban says:

      Is it those slicey dicey elites? Those guys are the worst.

      1. Syal says:

        It’s the big laser one that starts running and spawning tons of enemies when they’re weakened. Turns out their lasers only cover ninety degrees in front of them, and if you just keep circling they’ll never hit you. And also if you just keep circling they won’t know how to run away and will circle right along with you.

        A hundred hours.

  2. Lars says:

    Satisfactory Tier 9 is reached, all the milestones done. 3 out of 4 project parts are being manufactured. Almost done.
    Subverse Lily till Huntress are level 40 and the devotion quests done. Just Demi, Blythe and the final mission left. Demi will be a neverending grind.
    In Monster Hunter World I saw the end credits just yesterday. And did the “The Witcher”-Bonus quest. The Iceborne Expansion is bought but only from me, not my buddy and he tends to buy Rise instead.

  3. sheer_falacy says:

    I played through The Forgotten City. It’s a puzzle game, and the closest comparison that comes to mind is Outer Wilds, though it’s not a great comparison. I liked it a lot (not as much as Outer Wilds, but that’s praising with faint damns). The premise is that you travel back in time to a roman city where people follow the Golden Rule, which is that if anyone commits any sin, everybody dies. So there’s fun questions about what a sin is and you really, really don’t want to push the boundaries. Generally you’re trying to figure out what’s actually going on and how to resolve things without everyone dying. There are a few different endings, depending on how well you do at that – you can “beat” the game in like 5 minutes if you know what you’re doing, though you won’t exactly get the best result.

    I also played through Axiom Verge 2. I played through the first one a while ago, and don’t remember everything about it, but there are some definite changes. It’s still a 2D metroidvania game, but the combat is more melee and less gun and overall less good. On the other hand, the grappling hook in Axiom Verge 1 actively upset me, while the grapple in Axiom Verge 2 is quite pleasant to use. The metroidvania elements get a bit hard to keep track of, because there are two different worlds and you get several different options to move between them which mean you really want to flip back and forth between the two maps and see what lines up and what doesn’t (which luckily is pretty easy). You also get a fast travel, which I really wish let you go between the two worlds since it’s not hard to fast travel to one of the places that goes between worlds, it just adds some pointless busywork to it.

    Also, the first game had a drone which was handy for getting into tight areas and eventually got more exploration abilities. The second game also has a drone, and it actually gets the vast majority of the exploration abilities to the point that your human body feels kind of extraneous by the end of the game (for that matter, you don’t even get a choice sometimes because only the drone can go to the alternate world).

    The first game had a number of big bosses. The second game… basically doesn’t have bosses. There are some larger than usual optional fights, but the rewards are pretty minor unless you’re a completionist and it’s really not the same.

    Overall I’m not really sure I can recommend either Axiom Verge game. They have some interesting ideas but some issues in execution.

    1. Olivier FAURE says:

      The Forgotten City is pretty cool. I really liked the anthropological elements (eg “how did different civilizations interpret ‘sin’?”) though I don’t know how historically accurate any of it is.

      The characters are unique and interesting too.

    2. Alarion says:

      I love The Forgotten City and recommend it whenever I can. Game Maker’s Toolkit has a good video on it if you’re interested

      https://youtu.be/8W_WHbZDBKU

    3. Retsam says:

      I enjoyed Forgotten City, mostly – the premise was interesting and there were some interesting ideas, but I remember the writing rubbing me the wrong way in a lot of places. It’s been a few years, but IIRC there were some points where it felt like some modern biases ended up smuggled into this game about theoretically ancient roman characters, and in particular I remember the true ending epilogue feeling pretty clumsy – a bunch of exposition to explain ‘don’t worry, even though everyone escapes, bad things end up happening to all the ‘bad people’, that had nothing to do with the actual plot of the game’.

      1. Sleeping Dragon says:

        There are definitely anachronistic parts to The Forgotten City but it isn’t actually a game about ancient Rome, not really. What I have found somewhat annoying was that after all the rather interesting ruminations on the idea of “sin”* the “real” ending of the game has actually not much to do with it and in fact the person behind the whole system is arbitrarily cheating. It is still a lot of fun to play and there is some decent food for thought along the way and I didn’t mind the “karmic justice” at the end because, in my opinion, it kinda ties to the themes of the game overall.

        *Do not get me started about how that concept is, especially if we go backwards in time, much less universal than we tend to think.

  4. Daimbert says:

    As it turns out, I didn’t play ANYTHING this week, mostly because I wanted to watch curling, as it took over my normal long-term gaming slot and took over one of my errand spots which meant that I didn’t have a chance to play The Old Republic either, which wasn’t a problem because I’m a bit ahead in entries for my TOR Diary anyway. This weekend will likely be back to normal.

  5. Jaloopa says:

    I’ve been playing Road 96. A Telltale style story about teenagers trying to get across the border of a dystopian 90s country. There’s an election going on, with a challenger trying to oust the incumbent who appears to be verging on dictatorship. You hitchhike as various different kids on their way to the border, meeting a range of colourful characters. Sometimes you get the choice of whether to heelp them or not, sometimes you’re more railroaded into playing out the scene but there are usually at least a couple of meaningful choices. I haven’t finished it yet but I’m interested to see where the story goes. I probably won’t replay it as stuff like this tends to lose the illusion of your choices mattering when you see how the alternatives play out

  6. Fizban says:

    I was going to try playing Marvel Rivals, but it does not like Steam Remote Play, which is how I intended to run it on “this” comp same as I’ve been with Total Warhammer, so I did not. Did try a bit more Our Darker Purpose, but yeah the slow controls tiny projectiles questionable hitboxes and less structured item aquisition (and playing on gamepad while trying to remember what’s mapped to what) just makes it rather unengaging.

    So I played a bunch more Dicefolk, which has a pleasantly large number of monsters and equipment to unlock, much of the latter via special runs. I can generally always either finish a run or tell exactly where I screwed up, as long as the rng on dice upgrades doesn’t completely screw me, so the balance seems just about perfect (of course I’m not using any ascension/danger/whatever penalties either). Rather than trying to desperately claw your way to a victory, it’s like hey, there’s a ton of monsters you haven’t actually used yet ’cause you only use 3 per run, let’s see what turns up this time. Downside is the 2-hour runs are just short enough I go for one more, but that’s also long enough that “just starting” one more means deleting 2 more hours.

    I also eventually noticed that Marvel Rivals is playable on Steam Deck, so I could just play it on that the same way I did Exoprimal, assuming it will recognize the mouse and keyboard there. And it did. So I’ll be trying some of that next. There are wacky marvel wizards and at least two characters with turrets. Hilariously the “duelist” (read: dps) category seems to have double the options of the rest, ’cause people wanna be the damage I guess.

  7. Dev Null says:

    There’s also parkour.

    Freely admitted nitpick: that’s not parkour; that’s just platforming.

  8. Sleeping Dragon says:

    I’ve played Dredge I… did not enjoy it as much as I thought I would. To be fair I think it’s in part because I came into it with the wrong mindset. It feels like it’s a great game to go in, do some fishing for an hour and maybe do a quest bit or two whereas I kept wanting to dive into the deeper layer of the stories. I did actually rather enjoy the way the main narrative escalated but the substories for the individual areas and sidequest chains mostly ended abruptly neither delivering proper resolutions nor raising the stakes or diving into lore enough to give the proper sense of horror. I’d still recommend it if you want a sort of casual, lovecraft-adjacent, fishing game to spend a couple evenings with.

    The Case of the Golden Idol in turn was an absolute delight to play. Where Dredge just didn’t click with me the mechanics of The Golden Idol pulled me in more so than it’s story. For those who don’t know, it’s a sort of puzzle game where you first locate clues in the environment, the clues give you words which you then have to use to fill puzzles deduced from said environments. What I particularly loved about it was that there would often be additional clues that may or may not be obvious, for example one puzzle has you determine the seating positions of people at a table, the way you’re primarily meant to do it is through compiling information on who ate and drunk what but there is another, non-stated but obvious in retrospect, layer of logic to it, for example the host would be sitting at the head of the table. Throughout the whole game and both DLCs there have been maybe one or two moments that I’ve found somewhat arbitrary although it is possible that I’ve missed a clue as in at least one spot I forgot about a clue that was pointed out to me later. I did feel the way the story of the main game has been wrapped up was a bit unsatisfying but the sequel is at the absolute top of my wishlist right now.

    I have also just started Torment: Tides of Numenera but I feel like am too early in the game to really talk about it so I’ll probably report on it more in a week or two. So far… On the one hand I like the weirdness of the setting to the point where I want to have a look at the tabletop sourcebok but on the other hand that is a lot of proper nouns. And when you have to literally tutorialise things like “Nanos are wizards, witches, mages or sorcerers” or “esoteries are spells” than what is even the point other than just trying to be different? Also, I understand wanting to make a “spiritual successor” but isn’t it a bit on the nose? I mean you’re playing a protagonist who wakes up from a near-death experience with no real recollection or understanding of who they are but has fragmentary memories of their previous lives and needs to follow in their footsteps while being hunted by a mysterious hostile entity now try to guess which of the two games this is? And I am fudging it only ever so slightly for increased effect, although I will admit that the point of the original Planescape:Torment was a deeply personal narrative and I fully expect (and hope) that this will diverge into its own thing pretty quickly.

    1. Kincajou says:

      I also recently finished the case of the golden idol! (not the doc yet)

      The base story was fun and I don’t think I suffered too much with regards to the sleuthing (to be fair I had the clickable points highlighted, as they reccomend) , I only had one point where I had to check some online hints at the second to last level where I found that things weren’t particularly clear…. Sure maybe if I’d left and come back with a clear head I would have got it but…. Eh

      My gripe though is the hint system in game isn’t particularly great, it could do more to just nudge one in the right direction

      Still, great game which scratched the Obra Dinn itch but was easier (because it allows you to take things in small bits) and without the first person induced nausea…. I’ll probably get the dlc soon!

      However, now it’s time for tactical breach wizards, we’ll see how that goes

      1. Sleeping Dragon says:

        I ended up not using hints in the few places where I was kinda stuck so I don’t know how they actually work. To be fair I was thiiiis close, if it was only a single button press I totally would have but the “hint warning” screen actually worked as intended and I stared at it for a while then came back to the game and eventually managed to figure it out (and in one case just plain guess) on my own.

    2. sheer_falacy says:

      Case is really good, including the DLC. It also has a sequel now, Rise of the Golden Idol. Rise doesn’t change up the formula too much, and that’s fine when you’re starting with something genuinely fun and relatively unique.

      1. Sleeping Dragon says:

        Rise is at the top of my wishlist but I’ll be waiting for the DLCs to come out which should happen in 2025

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