T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve ended up playing a bit of solo Deep Rock Galactic.
Just some good old space dwarves mining, and shooting bugs.
I’m also killing time until Infinity Nikki updates.
What’s everyone else playing this week?
From The Archives:
The Best of 2016
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2016.
PC Gaming Golden Age
It's not a legend. It was real. There was a time before DLC. Before DRM. Before crappy ports. It was glorious.
Trashing the Heap
What does it mean when a program crashes, and why does it happen?
A Telltale Autopsy
What lessons can we learn from the abrupt demise of this once-impressive games studio?
Ludonarrative Dissonance
What is this silly word, why did some people get so irritated by it, and why did it fall out of use?
I’ve started Never second in Rome, a mix of “visual” novel and turn-and-excel based combat (both individual and century-sized) – protagonist is a centurion in the freshly raised XI Legion at the outset of Caesar’s Gallic Wars.
Mechanics are simplier than they look, reads and flows quite pleasantly, a number of direct quotes from “De Bellum Gallicum” increases already well flowing immersion. Nothing too ambitious, but should one enjoy the period it’s a very enjoyable game.
I have recently finished Torment: Tides of Numenera. It’s solid but it doesn’t live up to the original. As a general thing as I understand the move to the Numenera setting was not entirely voluntary and it might be my initial familiarity with DnD settings (although not Planescape in particular), or maybe I was just younger, but I feel like the first game was delivered in a much more digestible way. Here we have a world built on the ruins of so many civilizations the soil itself is not made of common dirt but rather the dust of ground structures, artifacts and bodies. It is inhabited by humans, both baseline and mutated, at least two or three non-human races, a variety of “visitants” or space aliens, constructs of various kinds, time travellers, ghosts, people who live as “uncollapsed quantum states of themselves” and other odds and ends like “a sentient letter of a divine alphabet of creation”. This is by no means an exhaustive list and the game frontloads all of that onto the player just flooding them with lore. The individual pieces of it can be good, I’ve spent something like four hours in one location embroiled in several overlapping side/miniquests pertaining to a group of psychics which made for a fascinating story overall, but there is so much of it a lot of things don’t have the time to properly breathe and a bunch of the content suffers for it (I’ve found the companion stories to be particularly underwhelming).
Storywise it has a somewhat interesting hook but a similar problem. Planescape was a personal narrative and it all wrapped back onto the main character (I’ve replayed it a couple years ago and it actually worked as well, if not better, than I remembered it). Numenera expands the scope to a level where it becomes somewhat abstract and then doesn’t have enough time to humanize the stakes by making you care about particular characters, leading to a somewhat abritrary choice you get to make by virtue of being Protagonist Special.
To give credit where it’s due I feel like I really need to stress that individual strands of story and sidequest chains can be very interesting, there’s enough here for at least three good, solid games or tabletop campaigns, just not developed enough to be fully satisfying as is. Many of the quests can also be resolved in various ways and there is sometimes overlap between them leading to interesting interactions with the game rewarding being thorough. While I did not love the combat system there is, far as I can remember, a total of two, maybe three, obligatory combat encounters and even those are not strictly about necessarily having to win a fight but rather a fight happening as you can try to accomplish a different objective.
As I understand the game was initially much grander in scope but InXile ran into the Obsidian problem of having to cut a lot of content and actually deliver the game. I do wish the final state of the game reflected its ambitions and the amount of content it is trying to execute because there is a lot of very good ideas in there.
Currently I’m taking a break from Steelrising (which I’ll write about more next time) as I’m playing mostly Steam Next Fest demos.
Barely anything.
Brotato continues. I think I’ve beaten all the characters I’m willing to beat; the big two left are Bull and Arms Dealer, both of whose gimmicks are “you don’t get weapons”, both of whom are miserable to play. Think I’m going to go back to Renegade and Fisherman.
Slay the Spire. I really feel like I should be better at this game considering the time I have in it. But, I still can’t clear Defect 19.
Played a round of Balatro after watching a modded run that resulted in a single hand giving 45 billion points. I was not getting that many, and in fact can still not clear Plasma Black. Maybe someday. But no day soon.
Chess. I might finally be getting over my months-long slump. Or maybe not.
…while I’m thinking about it, does anyone know a turn-based strategy game where you capture the enemies in the field a la Mount and Blade? The only one I know of is Battle Brothers, and that game has capital-p Problems.
If you’re into board games, shogi (Japanese chess) includes capturing the opponent’s pieces for your own potential use, for what it’s worth. Definitionally it is a turn-based “strategy” game. :D
Still continuing Immortals Fenyx Rising, now following Legyrion to the mountain top. When that game is finished (in 15 to 20 hours) I’ll be playing Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii. From everything I heard it should be crazy good.
Coop is still No Mans Sky. Finally having a better ship (some watcher ship) and crafted a “heart of the son” to continue the Atlas quest. And have some personal on top of my freighter. Still not much coop.
I keep forgetting that I actually like playing Helldivers 2 and not just listening to it because it’s so far outside of my normal wheelhouse when it comes to games. That game should have won last year’s GotY.
Also had to play Space Marine 2 to get the classic Space Marine helmet from an event. Now I can always play the Blood Ravens I enjoy playing as in Dawn of War.
Someone made a Tigermen mod for Cathay in Total War: Warhammer 3 so I had to go back and play that, just to be reminded that the battle maps are absolute ass and I hope whoever was most responsible for them didn’t escape the downsizing.
I’m gonna play Age of Wonders 4 whenever my friends play it, but I have all the pantheon rewards so I struggle to actually bring myself to play.
Most of my time, though, is playing Dungeons & Dragons over Discord. I’m in three campaigns. The one I run has been mired in a dungeon crawl with low energy due to scheduling conflicts. Another is wrapping up, and I’m in my old WoW guild’s D&D campaign running Rime of the Frostmaiden.
I played through the demo of Monster Train 2. I very much enjoyed the first Monster Train game, and I liked the game they made in between, Inkbound, though that’s after they ripped out the live service parts of it and it does still have the scars. Monster Train 2 is very similar to the first Monster Train, as a roguelite deckbuilder which is kind of… tower defensish, I guess? You have some units in your deck who you can summon to fight enemies, as well as spells. The second game has new factions, new enemies, new keywords, etc, but the bones of it are nearly identical. They added a couple of new card types and changed up how your initial unit placement goes (for the better). I don’t mind this, more content of the same game I already enjoyed is great news.
I also played through the demo of Breathedge 2. I enjoyed the first Breathedge… overall. They’re humorous games, and that’s great when it hits but sometimes the jokes fall flat. And the first game started as a survival crafter (in space), with silliness, but the later acts of the game entirely ditched the survival and crafting, and were more linear, and generally felt weaker. I’m certainly willing to check out the new one and I hope that they don’t make the same mistakes again.
I’ve also been playing Star of Providence. I figured, hey, Bigmode had 100% hit rate with Animal Well (1/1 is 100%). Though this game wasn’t originally associated with them and actually came out 8 years ago. Oh well, either way it’s a roguelite room based bullet hell game and it seems pretty cool so far. The weapons feel satisfying to use, the enemy attacks feel dodgeable (even the ones that I fail to dodge), it’s fun.
Monster Train was great, though for some reason I kinda feel like it stabbed me. . . in the face? You slowly piece together the world in your head from the randomly dropped lines of dialogue by bosses and the “flavor text” on everything you unlock as you level up each clan. The problem is the dlc came out and felt like it immediately spoiled what I hadn’t yet pieced together in the base game. Also since there’s no recording of what you’ve heard from bosses it’s hard to remember and keep that straight, and it does the Spire-like thing of a bajillion ever-increasing levels of difficulty so every time you win you’re rewarded with the implication you should make the game even harder on yourself. Put those together and it killed some of my motivation at the same time it required me to now consistently beat a new tier of final boss and I’d run out of clan combos that I both found fun and could consistently get to work, so I never did finish maxing out all the clans to even read their lore stuff.
So I never “finished” the original game and they’re immediately teasing that hey X character is here now find out why and I’m like bruh.
I will say that I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to the story, and I suspect it won’t be a huge focus in the sequel either. That’s ok with me for this kind of game.
I picked up Crow Country, a retro survival-horror game with controls and graphics similar to the first Resident Evil games, for the Playstation 1.
Which, sadly, means it’s more often annoying than scary. You’re not stuck with the godawful tank controls of Resident Evil*
and have much better control of your character, but you still can’t move and shoot at the same time. So you’re rarely taking damage because the monsters are that dangerous – you’re just crippled by the deliberately janky controls and the slow-moving enemies can get you.
It’s almost always easier to just run past the enemies rather than fight – but then you walk into various environmental traps that someone is apparently setting** as the game goes on, which, again, is far more irritating than scary.
Where it shines, though, is the puzzles. That’s where the majority of the effort seems to have gone. Almost every area has a puzzle in it, and they’ve found a good balance of difficulty: It’s rarely simple and always requires thought, but you’re never completely stumped and there are hints in the room with you. Or, it’s quickly obvious that you need to come back later with a different colour key or crank handle, in the finest tradition of this kind of game.
The story, meanwhile, is best described as ‘pretty good, but…’ . There’s a couple of decent mysteries that are revealed subtly through exploring the environment, a twist you can work out ahead of time, the game has a good atmosphere as you explore an abandoned theme park, and it even gets scary in a couple of places – despite the controls.
But then you get close to the end, where NPCs wil just explain the story for you in plot-dump conversations, which isn’t nearly as interesting a way to learn things.
An especially odd choice is the last conversation with the game’s antagonist. He gives you a note that will explain a lot about the game’s monsters – and then never really gives you a clear chance to read it. You can either leave the conversation with him early to access your inventory before he’s answered all your questions, or you can…pause the game and read it during the boss fight that starts up as soon as the conversation is over, I guess?
What you can’t do is read the note after the boss fight, because the game takes control of your character after the final shot and sends you to the the ending – where you’re given a small cuscene, a score and a rank, all while yelling ‘Let me read that f*****g note, you jackass!’ at the screen.
Then the game asks if you want to play through again, with some bonus items. With – oh, the exact same story, and solutions for the puzzles unchanged? But I could raise the difficulty so the functional-but-dull gamepay is harder? Huh, no thanks.
Still, it was fun while it lasted, and it doesn’t cost much – so still worth it.
*They’re an optional feature. Just in case you want playing the game to be really irritating, apparently.
**WHO? WHY? It does not fit the story, and that just makes it more annoying.
Playing a bit more of The Old Republic, heading into the home stretch with my Smuggler. Only two more classes left to finish out my TOR Diary run of classes!
It’s currently Steam’s Next Fest event, which means I’m currently spending my time trying demos of all kinds, with the caveat that I currently don’t have access to my regular PC and I’m working with one with lesser specs, so I cannot try everything I want. That coupled with the fact that there’s now a ridiculous (and I do mean ridiculous) amount of blatant Slay the Spire clones and a few games brazenly using generative AI means there’s a lot of stuff I’m just ignoring. Despite all that there’s such a large amount of games to try that I’m probably going to do nothing else until the event is done.
On the PC front, at least. On console I’ve picked up again my months-ago abandoned playthrough of Batman: Arkham Knight. As I’ve said before, this game constantly shifts between fun gameplay and boring, irritating chores, while the writing remains atrocious to the point of being enraging. But there are enough bright spots to keep me going. Assuming I don’t just abandon it again out of the blue I’m close enough to finish it that I’ll keep going until it’s done. I am, of course, not even considering 100%-ing it. That is just not fun to do in this game.
Ah, the allure of Deep Rock Galactic—a symphony of subterranean exploits where dwarven tenacity meets the relentless onslaught of alien adversaries. Your anticipation for Infinity Nikki mirrors my own penchant for the thrill of the unknown. In this intricate dance of digital diversions, one finds not just escape, but a reflection of our own clandestine endeavors.
A bunch of different things this week. I continue playing Ark Nova; I’m no longer playing on the “novice” map and am starting to get some wins against the easy AI. I beat another scenario (the life-spreading one) in Terraformers on maximum difficulty, squeaking in two turns before the deadline. I picked up Raft again, as I’m playing through it with a friend. We both thought it hadn’t been too long since we last played, only for Steam to report the last time was December 2023. We finished the penultimate story island, finally have access to free battery-recharging (and attendant smelting with the electric smelter), and are doing a blitz of resource gathering and upgrading stuff before going to the final location.
Still playing a bunch of One Thousand Uncles in Team Fortress 2, the PvE mode where up to 24 humans go up against 40 instantly-respawning buffed Engineer bots. I like to cycle through different classes (I’ve noticed other people do as well), and it’s actually pushed Spy up from my second least-played class to somewhere in the middle.
I also spent something like 12 hours straight playing RimWorld over the weekend; I’m playing with the huge Save Our Ship 2 mod which lets you build spaceships, I’m working on constructing one in space large enough to move my entire colony of ~40 people into, and I’m so close to being able to finally make the switchover and abandon the ground entirely. Unfortunately, the mod doesn’t feel particularly balanced difficulty-wise; I’ve had several ships appear out of the blue and attack me, fights which I was only able to win with reloading and some liberal application of Dev Mode. Part of that is doubtless my unfamiliarity with the somewhat obtuse ship combat the mod adds (hopefully I’ll eventually figure out why my heat management system seems to overload almost instantly while the enemy’s barely seems to register hits), but when it takes dozens of hours to research and then build a spaceship I’m disinclined to let the first ship that comes by blow it to smithereens. I’ve actually researched every single technology in the game (including a bunch of modded ones) for the very first time this playthrough (despite over a thousand hours in-game), and it was a somewhat surreal feeling to deconstruct my research benches and fold my Science Team researchers into Support Team.
My chipping-away-at-AC:Origins continues in the The Curse Of the Pharaohs-DLC.
It is surprisingly good, and it is surprisingly large (compared to the previously-finished The Hidden Ones-DLC.
However, my open-world-habit of explore first, main-quest second has led me to stumbling into content that very much seems to be there for later(tm), when some more explanation on what-the-fuck-is-happening hopefully will have been given.
I played through Hardspace: Shipbreaker the other day. It’s… I dunno if “fun” is the right word, but there’s something about systematically breaking down a spaceship in 15 minute chunks that’s just satisfying.
Ghosts and Goblins Resurrected and Jedi Survivor. The Squire difficulty on G&G seems to be perfect for me, still tricky but not too arduous. I’m on the lions/wolves boss fight at the moment, need a little luck for the final form because I invariably lose all but one of my health before that stage! There’s something quite satisfying about the game, and the upgrades are coming in handy. Jedi Survivor continues to sincerely impress me. I’m someone who thought Jedi Fallen Order was decent but had embarrassing characters and story and quite dull levels, it was okay and fun at times but didn’t excite me. But Survivor is like they took the first game and improved in every way (except the dullness of Cere). There’s legitimate exploration of both world and verticality. I’m finding secrets in cool places. The customisation is amazing. The random stuff I collect turns out to have actual uses for fun minigames and the like. Everything to do with Pyloon’s Saloon is brilliant. Except of course many of the dull as dishwater NPCs – dull in a boring way rather than a passive or funny janky way. But there are fun NPCs too! It’s like an actual real game. I managed to climb onto the roof of the buildings and not only did I find treasure, but puzzles, and a whole minigame! I’ve not played a AAA game for some years, where I actually wanted to hear what anyone was saying. Let’s hope it keeps it up, I’m worried if/when we meet the old crew, things will take a nosedive. But so far, this could be the best jedi game I’ve played outside Outcast/Academy, sitting nearby Revenge of the Sith and The Phantom Menace, if not above them. If the NPCs were as funny as in TPM, this would be golden.