DMC: Devil May Cry

Devil May Cry is a .. reboot? of a franchise that has been around for a while through console evolutions.  I believe they got up to #5 before this current iteration.

You play as Dante, a nephalim (offspring of demon/angel) who is badass in the most obnoxious of ways, jumping through falling debris to pull his pants up and heading room after room to parkour or kill demon entities in Limbo.

It's like 1000 games out there in function, but it's done right on so many levels.   Instead of forcing you to a path, there are many paths -- you could take them all to get all the collectibles, but you really only need to pay attention to the mission directive, so there is a lot you can do if you're into it -- or you could blaze through for the boss fights if that's what you'd prefer.

The boss creatures are hellacious and well done, but the combat in those appears is wayyy too scripted that nothing has taken multiple attempts up to this point.

Shelving because it's "fun" and I had to quote it.

The Yawhg

The Yawhg is a really short "choose your own adventure" type game where you have 6 weeks before the Yawhg comes and destroys your town.   You play multiple adventurers making simple choices throughout the day "You find a ring on the ground do you .. A. Put it on   B. Sell it" but there isn't necessarily a rhyme or reason as to what things necessitate success or failure, it's something you learn through trial and error over time.

My first playthrough I ran all over the place just getting a sample, when the Yawhg came and crushed the town I wasn't able to assist in rebuilding it and eventually got driven underground because my skin developed some scales and I was shunned by society.

My second playthrough (they take all of 5 minutes) I focused primarily on a couple places that gave a decent stat upgrade consistently with a random follow-up decision that didn't devastate their stats.  When it came time to repair the damage after the Yawhg visit - I sent them towards their proper positions.  The person I had doing landscaping repeatedly became a successful builder, the person I had cleaning the alchemy lab became a renowned wizard.

Win!  Simple game concept, but not a lot of reason to keep playing.

South Park: The Fractured But Whole

What would you expect from a South Park game?  The Fractured But Whole is hilarious, irreverent, inappropriate, poignant humor - and had me laughing from the character creation screen where one of the options was "difficulty", which was choosing your skin color, which actually didn't affect game play at all, just "everything else in your life".

The combat gameplay was super weak, but in between you participated in a completely over-the-top cartoon as the new kid in South Park with an incredible farting superpower.  Finishing the game starts rolling the credits similar to an episode.

It crossed the line so many times I wouldn't even know where to begin, if you like the show - you'd enjoy the game.   ... fat ass.

The Forest

The Forest is a game very similar in many ways to Green Hell.  You are the survivor of a plane crash on an island that is populated by cannibals.  What Green Hell had going for it with panthers and snakes, this has .. well cannibal detritus and mutants.

It was pretty okay, and had I not played so much Green Hell I might be enthusiastic about finishing it.  I'm a little annoyed though that some of the achievements they have are cannibalism "Eat an enemy 4 times".

I might pick it back up again when the sequel comes out next year...

There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension

There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension is a game that pretends not to be game and wants you to quit, so you pretty much do the opposite of whatever you are requested and pull back the curtains and make it "gamey".   

It's silly and you have an argumentative computer that tries to thwart your every move, entertaining for a while but eventually you are taken to a Zelda'ish game-style world in this not game and do Zelda'ish things in addition to not gaming.

I completely lost interest at that point when the puzzle wasn't just beating the computer.   Strongly reminiscent of Buddy Simulator: 1984.

Remember Me

Remember Me builds a fantastic dystopian world over the course of the intro.  I was in from the opening cut scene.  Sensen is a corporation that can take and grant memories, the pitch was that you could effectively keep a loved one alive in you if the passed by the shared memories, how it would complete you to have the memories of your partner and know/feel how much they loved you.

Cut to ... you are being drained of your memories as an 'errorist' in order to be refabricated into a productive member of society.

Escaping from the facility has you slowly learn who you are and you abilities to rewrite memories.  This skill is used to effect significant change on your adversaries, you would be able to "rewrite" their motivational memory and modify it in some small ways that would change the outcome.  If your reason for being a bounty hunter was because you needed the money for an operation, but then your memory was adjusted to think that the person was killed -- you no longer have the motivation to go after the bounty.

Lots of platforming and "rooms of people to beat up" though in between epic moments.

... and I wonder if there will ever be a game where you play as a protagonist woman and are frumpy ... 

The Room Three

The Room Three is not too different from The Room Four, which I've played and talked about here already.   It was not worse or better, but it's still really really good and fun to play.

These kind of games are also brain exercise, you look at a room and have to notice that one of the screws is slightly loose on a hinge, or that the colorations of things match.  It's almost like escape room practice.  This one had multiple endings, but it was really only a couple alternate paths/puzzles at the end as there aren't really choices you make along the way ..

I'm keeping Two and One on the list.

Subnautica

Subnautica is a fantastic game where you play the role of one of the few survivors who crashed on a water filled world.   You gather resources and use various tech tools to fabricate underwater survival environments and avoid the gigantic leviathans that inhabit some of the scarier zones.

Playing this had the same thalassophobic effect that Beyond Blue had -- but it was justified.  There were growls and stalkers and glow in the dark poison pincer jellyfish, and throughout the game you are uncovering other survivor capsules that have been ripped open to recover their datapads and find patterns of things you can then build into your habitats and ships.

There creatures are done so well, you feel like you are intruding on their territory - but unlike a "dungeon monster" won't chase you to the ends of the earth just because they see you.   Interfere with some of the bigger or get in the way of their hunting or be the size of their prey though and ...

Play it.  I'm really looking forward to playing the sequel ... I just need ... some less, terrifying 1200m deep caverns with active lava vents and patrolling warpsquids or dragon leviathan games first.

 

Pixel Piracy

Pixel Piracy is a simple game, reminiscent of early 90's games - amassing a crew to plunder the digital seas.   But beneath it all .. it's really a game about controlling your shitting pirates.

The pirates just crap onboard, and you have to learn the skill to toss it overboard.  I didn't grab the skill initially because, how bad could it really get?   Well.  My floating tub of shit was really hurting the morale of my crew (despite they being the *cause*)  - so I rushed to train my captain in the skill, which became somewhat his humiliating full time job until I could train the rest of the crew in the proper way to feed the fish as it were.

I was able to min-max the game, my greater numbers would swarm the islands/ships -- and even though it cost a pretty pennydubloon to keep their morale up, we were overloaded with gold and supplies - we could buy everything a tavern could sell us.   So I decided to go after bigger prey, but hired every mercenary in the tavern to come with me - doubling my crew size to about 40, ridiculously crowded on the boat.

But ... the amount of shit the new pirates created was impossible for my main crew to keep up with.  Morale dropped to almost nothing with the filth and while attacking perhaps the second rival ship after leaving port, mutiny on my galleon, a massive free-for-all that left only 8 of my original crew alive amidst the corpses of their crew, and so .. much ... shit.

I had to quit there...  I know how I'd play it better next time.  Decent retro.  :tup:!

PixelJunk Eden

PixelJunk Eden is something that I would neeeeever have played if not for forcing myself to go through this backlog of games.  I'm not sure why I even bought it, vector graphics really make a game feel dated and platformers are not my cup of tea.  That said, this one was pretty fun for what it was.

The controls are mindlessly simple and the game is really smooth, effectively you play as a spiderish being that can jump from swaying "plants" collecting pollen to seed other "plant" sproutings in order to find a number of orchid hidden in a level.  

This is probably a great phone game, but I probably won't come back to it on PC.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is an exploration/experience game that you should play during the daytime.  Not because of the jump scares, but because otherwise you will fall right asleep.

The gameplay is effectively wandering around until you find hotspots that have no clue in the environment where they are, so you must wander and walk up to everything and check.  This is done to further the story of Ethan and his dysfunctional family.

I was wondering if they were creating that Twilight Zone scenario of "The Boy Who Dreams" -- but I don't believe it was that.  I think his family just sucked and didn't understand the boy and his imagination.  I ended up reading the remaining bits on a Wiki and do enjoy that they allowed the ending up to interpretation, if only it was more stimulating to play...,

Superliminal

Superliminal a perspective based first person game where, similar to Portal, you are presented with a series of puzzles and a way to break out of the test environment.  

It was enjoyable on the surface, you have the ability to interact with objects and make them larger or smaller, so a candy bar you could move and make as big as a house to push multiple buttons at once, or make a house the size of a candy bar so you could carry it through the door.  

It also has perspective based puzzles, where you need to stand in a certain area and look to for an image from what is painted on the area in 2d, at which point you can pluck it out as a 3-D object.  These were by far the most annoying and non-sensical puzzles to include, effectively look everywhere at every perspective and see if things line up to make a picture that you can then jump through.   Not seeing it left me wandering a level back and forth trying to see what it was I was missing.

Done.

Twelve Minutes

 Twelve Minutes is a game that is brilliant in concept but ends up getting a little rough in execution.

You play the last moments of your lives in Sim fashion as a few minutes into the evening a "detective" (Willem DaFoe) breaks into your apartments and kills your wife and possibly you based on your actions.  You are forced to live through these last "twelve minutes" repeatedly, but able to use what you learn in previous episodes as options in future encounters.  

I inadvertently stumbled across a hotspot early on for something important and was able to get to what you might consider a fairly good resolution, only to have it thwarted at the last second because I didn't decide to knife the knocked-out detective.    Twelve Minutes done in sixty-four.

I considered myself done and went to watch videos of what I missed.   But I was considering the object of the game to be saving my wife and myself from the detective.  Apparently it gets super deep as you can investigate the motivation of the detective -- and then super "wait whaa?" as character interactions get a little mixed up (explained I suppose because you are going a bit crazy in the repetition I bet) --- and then super "ok now come on" as you find out you're the cause of everyone's problems.

So I suppose I quite at the right time.  Great idea that might have been taken a bit too far.  A bunch of interesting ways to deal with something and a number of scenarios.  That's the game I want to play.

Mark of the Ninja: Remastered

Mark of the Ninja is a very well done side-scroller/platformer.

You have a mission to get to a section in a set of buildings and have to navigate the traps that are in your way with the ninja skills that you develop over time.  You could stealth and use intelligence to bypass things, or brute force -- but the game tries to encourage you to the former with level accomplishments.

I didn't get very far into the story to understand what the significance of the tattoo ink that you are getting branded with does for you.  All of the skills I learned were of the typical "ninja" sort - traps, smokebombs, throwing knives -- but one of the first cutscenes talked about the great cost and how whoever gets inked by it will eventually *have* to kill themselves.

My guess is this is used to have you turn against your masters at one point.

... maybe one day.

Lords of the Fallen

Lords of the Fallen was a game I originally purchased on XBOX but never got around to finishing, but was on a recent Steam sale at 85% (!!!) off.  So for under $5 - I figured I would give it another go.  The very next random number selected it, so it was obviously meant to be.

The game is beautiful, but coming from the likes of Sekiro and Dark Souls, it feels "slow and klunky".  I did go for the warrior build (my default for any new game) so some of that was me, but man those weapons were frustratingly slow windups at times.   

Magic ended up being a fairly important part of the game, which is unfortunate because I was min/maxing my warrior build - completely unaware until I encountered some spectres that I couldn't touch.  Instantly my damage output was reduced from mighty warrior to mighty annoyance.

The boss fights were fairly rudimentary, with a few annoying effects - like insta-death if you don't stand in a certain area, with no obvious clues as to why.   Nothing was overly tough, the final boss was a one-shot - a couple took learning simple move sets, but given the age of the game completely understandable and acceptible.

The White Door

The White Door is a game where you spend days in a clinic trying to piece together what happened through a series of flashbacks and daily routine activities in an attempt to recover your memory.  The flashbacks are narrated scenes that you must perform the narrated actions for ... there are no alternate paths.  You pull the trigger.

I don't know what happened though.  Something with a gun.  Something with girlfriend.  Something about keeping me to study my brain and bringing color back into my life.  I have to read what it's supposed to be about.

Okay -- nope.  I .. think .. I got it all.  Would love my 2 hours back.

Beyond: Two Souls

Beyond: Two Souls is an epic story adventure told hopping around seemingly random events in your life.  You are Elliot Page and you have an entity that you can control to do entity type things; make stuff move, spy on people, control simple minded people.

The game is quick time events, but done well - not a simple button prompt, stick motions that involve you in the scene - do them right and your character dances well for example.  

The story is linear in scope at times with boolean-type variations of an event that are presented to you at the end of the chapter how you compared with others.  This kind of mechanic kind of makes me want to choose the road less travelled, but I forced myself to try and behave as I think Jodie would do.  So when presented with a bunch of bully kids - I shoved my paranormal hands in my pockets and walked away instead of unleashing bloody Carrie vengeance.   Apparently only 11% of us kept from murdering our peers ...  

Unheard

Unheard has you trying some new detective software that allows you to replay a scene and listen in on the location based audio.  You are then asked to solve the puzzle of the scenario -- like "who stole the real painting", but things are crafted in such a way that you have to analyze the whole scene, an exchange might be happening in a back room that shuffles around the scenario.

The story has layers though, as you progress you realize that one scene is designed to be you, and there is a bit of a Shutter Island wait-a-minute reveal.  The game gives you a choice of deciding what was really happening -- there isn't a wrong answer to this puzzle.

Unfortunately what it had going for it was also a big weakness.  Having to replay a scene 5-10 times to listen in on different rooms really ups the time cost, but you have to listen to almost everything because of the amount of twists a case might have.  I ended up giving up after one where I missed a minor little conversation bit that scrambled up my answers completely.

SOMA

SOMA is a game by Frictional Games, the same people who made Amnesia - so I have been wary to play it by association.  It came with an interesting premise though that kept me for a while before the mechanics of the play through made me read on and spoil the ending.

You start the game as a person volunteering for a brain scan for a medical student project, but immediately upon the scan happening you remove it to a dystopian Bioshock Rapture influenced underwater base and hunted by robot AI.

Here's why that makes sense, and it's kind of brilliant sci-fi to me - the scan becomes the template for human psyche made digital, so in the distant future (the year 2000!) when attempting to reconstitute a human in a cyborg construct, this scan was used as the digital template.  THAT version of you would open it's eyes in the far future or wherever it was activated, maybe thousands upon thousands of times as a distinct entity.

Now the game took it one extra level than that mind-fudge; the goal is to launch the ARK, a digital end-life for all of the digital human constructs to live in, because the earth was going to be catastrophically destroyed and this was kind of a last ditch effort to save everyone that went bad.  Your reward for doing this is to copy your conciousness into the ARK as well.

But you effectively lose the coin flip.  Conciousness doesn't move, it's digital - it's a copy.  So you stay.  Your digital consciousness, the copy, is on the ARK living out a happy afterlife.   Ooof.

Life Is Strange: Episode 1

Life is Strange is a story based game of a teen girl heading to a photography college in her old hometown, where she is re-united with a long lost best friend and develops the power to rewind time.

The interface is simple interactions with objects look/talk and you are unfortunately not able to do things "right" the first time, you have to suffer through failing in order to rewind and do things differently.  Though I felt in doing this I had some choice removed from me.

You also play as a teen wallflower, and that's a hard role for me to inhabit in the video game space -- so when the hot mean-chick was picking on me, I went all bad bitch back in her face which I'm alerted had some effect on the story - but I don't know how to do it differently.  I am a bad bitch.

The story is fraught with gun violence and big brother surveillance morality.  Entertaining probably if played on a phone while waiting to pick up your child from practice, but Episode 1 was around I'm guessing about 90 minutes ... I don't have any enthusiasm to play the other 4, maybe on my phone.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown

 XCOM: Enemy Unknown is a squad focused turn-based strategy game in which you are the primary response team to an alien incursion.

It's done well, with simple controls, lots of character and research advancements to keep you in line with the progressively harder alien menace.  I played pretty deep into the campaign and could imagine myself playing it in its entirety, but now that I've gotten deep into it - my attachment to the characters I've levelled up in the campaign have made me replay levels, to "tighten up and keep frosty".

I can see why this game was so popular, I wish I had played it when it was the new sexy instead of retro sexy.  XCOM 2 feels old at this point even, but I'd definitely be in on #3.

Braid

 Braid is a platformer that plays with time.  You and some limited objects have an unlimited amount that you can go back in time.   So it's a matter of unravelling what the level offers you and traversing it in a Mario'ish way using this mechanic.

The point where I gave up on this was when it started getting to be about execution time.  You can speed up your reversal in order to be at a certain point where the scene caught up, and getting that precision correct can be a bit annoying.  

You are trying to collect puzzle pieces and assemble what you found like a jigsaw in some hub levels, but I never completed an image to see what it did...

Never Alone - Kisima Innitchuna

Never Alone - Kisima Innitchuna is a side scroller where you take on the role of a young girl and a companion snow fox who go to investigate why a blizzard will not stop.  

It is designed for two players but you can toggle between them when one or the other needs to do something unique.  This was a cause of a great deal of frustration because there is a (mighty!) bug that when it thinks a second controller is plugged in, it automatically becomes player two.  I didn't realize that was happening because your second character keeps up pretty much ala Tails from Sonic, but there were things I just couldn't do and I admit ... I yelled a few "what the heck?"s and stronger before investigating that there is a config file that I need to add with some value on their forums.  Not Innit'tuitive?

The game play is similar to Beyond Blue where it's there as a layer over information that you can gleen about the native population.  The game audio has an old native storyteller relating the story of the girls travels with a subtitle translation, at sometimes it's distracting to read the text - but there is a ... peaceful softness in having a grandfather accompany and narrate your journey.

What stopped me from finishing?  Mechanics were a beautiful mediocre Mario with some frustrating companion reliance.  It IS designed for two players, and a platform puzzler was more of a distraction to the old man's story.  (Any jumps where one of us fell into the water and he'd reset the narration.)  Probably more fun to watch someone play without that distraction of making the jumps?

Event[0]

Event[0] had you exploring a derelict space station trying to figure out what happened to the crew and dealing with an ornery AI that you must interact with to perform ship functions in an "Open the pod bay doors, Hal" sort of way.

It's a quick episode, but an interesting experience.  I ended up with the "bad" ending because I didn't agree with the decisions I was reading the captain make in the log files, and she killed one of her crew -- so at the final decision point, I went against her wishes and destroyed the Singularity Drive.

The UI was a little bit cumbersome as you had to switch between a typing type interface at terminals that were spread throughout the station, and normal navigational keys.  All in all a well done experience.

Buddy Simulator 1984

This game had amazing promise, but didn't take it to the places I was hoping it was going.

Buddy Simulator 1984 has you befriending a text computer program that slowly grows in power and gets more and more cringy/clingy to the player.  Like a primitive War Games computer, he gets bored with the simple games and needs you to allow him to upgrade.

They played around with some glitchiness, but it really needed to go 'dark'.  If it had tried eliminating everyone else that tried to be friendly in the game or went well over the top with the super cringy-clinginess, it might have been a big hit - but all it all it was fairly tame.   Effectively it built a bad adventure game and whined a lot ...