T w e n t y S i d e d
I didn’t play much this week.
I’m still playing a bit of Just Cause 3, but I’ve been just running around doing side stuff not even main story. At least it’s funny when you’ve liberated every settlement and done all of the challenges before main quests.
I doubt I’m going to play much for at least part of next week, since tomorrow I’m getting my wisdom teeth out, and I don’t know if I’m going to want to do anything except lay on a couch and watch mythbuters for a day or two.
How’s everyone else doing?
Trashing the Heap
What does it mean when a program crashes, and why does it happen?
Resident Evil 4
Who is this imbecile and why is he wandering around Europe unsupervised?
The Truth About Piracy
What are publishers doing to fight piracy and why is it all wrong?
Overthinking Zombies
Let's ruin everyone's fun by listing all the ways in which zombies can't work, couldn't happen, and don't make sense.
Stop Asking Me to Play Dark Souls!
An unhinged rant where I maybe slightly over-reacted to the water torture of Souls evangelism.
Got the second ending in Order of the Sinking Star, and I’m not sure I’m going to be able to get the third. Puzzles have gotten very tough. We’ll see.
I also played through Curse of Resthaven. You show up to be governor of a town on an island and also to find your niece, who’s gone missing. The governor stuff comes down to “get free stuff from the local shops, sell it to ships, spend money from that on upgrading the shops”. The finding niece stuff involves asking people questions and going on expeditions in the island. Every expedition requires 1-2 items or people. You get a bit of a hint about what’s needed but you can also just pay the local fortune teller to find out and you probably just should. Each day has 6 time segments and you decide how to spend them on talking to people or expeditions or selling to ships.
Oh, and there’s eldritch horror stuff going on out the wazoo. Every expedition is weird twisty stuff. And oh yeah there’s a time loop and you repeat the same week or so over and over. Notably the time loop is very, very generous – you keep your shop upgrades, you get shortcuts for a lot of the stuff you find out from townsfolk, and every time through you get to spend skill points on some permanent benefits. You also get to pick a buff/debuff pair each time but those really didn’t feel that important. You don’t keep money or items but that’s fine, shops give out free items and money isn’t
It does mean for mystery purposes that you can find something out on day 5 that would have been really handy on day 3 and that’s fine. It was interesting to meet the people in the town and I liked the writing overall.
That being said, once you reach the dramatic ending and resolve it, the game then resets you. Like, actually resets you – you just keep your skill points and the knowledge in your own head. And the ships still remember you for some reason. Which means you get to play through the game from the start. It does let you shortcut a few story beats and the skills do matter, but I didn’t really like this as a design decision, especially since to really end the game you need to do it yet another time.
Also, the game has mysteries but not really puzzles. Generally it’ll tell you what to do to progress your various quests, and when it doesn’t the answer is “go ask people (you can probably guess who’s a good choice)”. And as you may guess from how I discussed money and items the game isn’t particularly hard. Still, I did enjoy it and I don’t regret playing it. Some of the creepy stuff in the game is really creepy, it’s fun.