Zemblanity

I really shy away from playing scary games, so I waited for the middle of the day to play Zemblanity.  (n.) the inevitable discovery of what we would rather not know; the opposite of serendipity.

I bought it as a recent release because most of the reviews were very positive and encouraging of a new developer, but one "I wasted two of my hours" is what put me over the edge.  I wanted to support the developer and be on the positive encouraging side and check it out.

You are called to a house of a childhood friend with information about your father.  Finding keys while navigating the jump scares of the house is pretty much the game play.  Things get stranger and stranger as you get lost in the property, and the story somewhat resembles AHS where getting stuck in the house is forever.  Your "friend" trapped you in exchange for a promise to get out, but you find his dead corpse ...

Escaping is living, but you go insane and spend your remaining days scratching madman artwork on your walls.  Well done game - great hour spent!

State of Decay 2

State of Decay 2 is a zombie apocalyptic team base building rogue-like survival game.   There, did it in one sentence.

Unlike Days Gone, there is no story really except general arcs.  The game is short enough and designed to be played multiple times, each generation of your clan gaining the power that your clan leader instilled in you.  The characters and stats that make up your crew, the various wanderers and traders, the teammates of other crews appear to be random, and you can carry up to 50 people onto the next generation.

That's an interesting idea and would potentially be fantastic if something changed each evolution.  Unfortunately it's pretty much the same shit, different generation - unless you manually turn up the difficulty.

I was enticed to play this game on a Free to Play weekend, but thought it would be longer so bought it before the discount expired.  Aaaaaaaaaaaand it's gone.   Ah well, I'd pay full price for SoD 3 probably.  This one I'm glad I got on sale.  It's a one and done for me.

 

The Long Road North

The Long Road North is another small and simple game that I would say is more of an art project created by the band Cult of Luna.

They released this game to accompany the song "Cold Burn" from their recent album.  They have an atmospheric metal sound - prone to long explorations in a Pink Floyd style around a theme, and the torn digital landscapes they propel you through perfectly fits the mood of the song.  There is a bit of a frantic pace as you are collect lights and escape from the tornados and crashing forces of whatever is behind you.

There are parts where it syncs perfectly to the music.  You are the music video.  Creative.  Worth the 10 minutes of gameplay, and I would love to see more bands do things like this!

Gibbon: Beyond the Trees

Gibbon: Beyond the Trees is a casual indie game where you are a gibbon, travelling with your family through 10 levels - swinging and sliding trying to maintain your momentum.

As the levels progress, the encroachment of both industry and hunters becomes apparent and it's not as easy to navigate the landscape.  Then at a halfway point, after you and your spouse have helped each other, a hand out if you were going to miss a jump, hunters chase you through a level - killing your spouse and kidnapping your child.

The remaining levels are chasing after the helicopter and navigating the (now "concrete") jungle, eventually rescuing and escaping.   The game was well done, the mechanics of swinging and sliding felt good, and with good subtle(?) messaging about the encroachment of industry on natural habitats.  

Once complete, you can play as your child "Lilac" where the game becomes more arcade-like, the landscape remains mostly urban but you rescue various birds and go for double-flip achievements and the like.  Meh - feels like it was tacked on and honestly takes a little away from the art piece of the main game.

Kenshi

Kenshi is probably a better game than I'm giving it credit for, one you could sink hundreds of hours into and the investment would pay off.  It's a complex open world sandbox squad based RPG.   Sheesh, even the genre is a bit of a tongue twister.

But it's not a world that has a plotline for you to follow.  There are a couple major factions, but the idea is that you can play as a trader/farmer/bandit/whatever you want and react to the world the way you want.  

Clunky complex describes the game in two words.  There is definitely a learning curve and I'm not sure wanted to try a couple attempts at building some sort of homestead base that's well defended from roaming bandits, only to bleed out while walking my animal caravan to the next city to trade wheat and copper.  The Sims - Peasant.

I'm on Observation Duty 5

I'm on Observation Duty 5 is a game where you are looking through a series of surveillance video cameras attempting to notice anomalies in the scene and survive the night.

Most of the anomalies are something simple, like an object appearing or disappearing, or a picture changing; but occasionally you get an intruder.  These are a bit of a jump scare, and you need to avoid the camera where you saw them until the anomaly is dealt with - all of them are wonderfully bizarre and intimidating, the phantom tugger wanking away in the background was definitely a shocker.

The game is simple in form, but with the quantity of anomalies you have to detect and report, it kept me on my toes wondering what I might be missing in the scenes.  It's embarrassing the amount of fun I had scrolling through 6 black and white grainy images to see if a salt shaker moved.  

STAR WARS™ Battlefront™ II

Battlefront II was the other game I picked up on the Steam May the 4th sale at 85% off.   It's the most recent Star Wars multiplayer game, but it does have a single player campaign as well.  ... Thankfully.  I am not one for twitchy multiplayer in many instances, but a game that released 5 years ago where people know every secret sniper spot -- no thanks.

Unfortunately that leaves me to rate a game that was probably designed for the multiplayer on it's campaign.

The campaign was actually pretty good though.   In the wake of the destruction of the death star, a couple imperials made the hard choices based on what they were seeing to flip sides.  There is no RPG element to it, effectively just cut scenes and then dropping you into either a FPS shooter role or ship combat.

The shooter combat was "okay", but suffered a bit from the ease of the headshot.  I played on "normal"/soldier difficulty, and since the enemies were so easy to one-shot, they threw a lot of them your way - so in most cases you needed cover, but things were easily handled by having them march like lemmings to your line of site.  AI ... lame.

Ship combat was much better, but it's always hard to get that right -- I think ship combat is designed for some sort of VR helmet.  I want to be able to look to my right and see that I'm at the point I want to turn.  As it stands, I turn like Michael Keaton's Batman, I have to commit to the motion with my whole body.

Pinball FX3 - Star Wars™ Pinball: Darth Vader

On the heels of the last lackluster Star Wars pinball table, this was pretty good.  Darth Vader is one of the tables that was part of the Balance of the Force pack.

Two things that I enjoy in a table are ramp combos and multi-ball, so this was kind of the best of both worlds in that the ramp combos would eventually spawn multi-ball.

The table was great, I'd say 8/10 --- it was nice having Darth Vader as the narrator "left kickback is lit" but a little disturbing when he would pay a compliment, "nice shot!".

My Friend is a Raven

My Friend is a Raven is a quick little indie free to play game that I had placed on my wishlist at one point.

It's a short tale in a dying world where you seek to have one last conversation with your friend(?) the Raven.  The house has minor interaction points, opening doors and picking up bird seed, and the navigation guides you down the path of the 4 possible endings depending on your actions before speaking.   It's DSBM, the game.

Extinction (do nothing), Unforgiven (apologize), Friends (become a raven), Venomous (kill the raven).

I suppose the Raven is death on some levels.  It has brought some plague or scourge that ended all of humanity and you are the last surviving vestige, whether it did this because the man ignored his plea or because it was the inevitable course is open to debate I suppose.  

Interesting "class project" type of game, I'd give an A.   As a game game, I'd give it a C-.

Trek to Yomi

Trek to Yomi is a highly stylized side scroller that feels like a Kurosawa film - you take on the role of a young samurai, Hiroki, in defense of your home.   The region is invaded by an evil warlord - and when you rush to the defense of the neighboring village, your own is ransacked and your love/ally/daughter of your teacher is slain.

Only because the plot forced it, I was killed by the warlord as well -- I had him in a blender flurry of my blades, whereupon you decide why you might need to fight back to life, the "Trek to Yomi" - do you want to return for duty, love or revenge.

I chose revenge at each of these junctures and fought my way through hordes of people who were condemning me for abandoning them to their doom as I went to help the neighboring village, and finally the avatar defending the way back.  Constantly harangued by dialog that that's "not the right choice" - I eventually fought my way back to my burning village to fight the warlord, who ended up being Kagerou - the bandit from the very beginning who died killing my master, and who apparently fought back from the underworld with bonus demon powers.

I turned on the blender again.

This was a fun little 4-hour quick romper stomper released yesterday, and a game I probably would have passed by if I didn't feel the freedom of not having any more games in the Steam backlog.   <3

Kagerou and I played "who's got your nose" as a young samurai

Pinball FX3 - Star Wars™ Pinball: Heroes Within

Well that didn't last long ... of COURSE there would be a Steam Star Wars sale on May 4th. 

Pinball FX3 does a great job with these machines, the feel of the machine hits right - as far as pinball simulators this is the best one.  It also has the ability to take the table design to another level entirely as you are not limited by mechanisms and wires. 

Most table are great, but they have overdone it on some franchises and it shows in this table.  There are 19 different Star Wars tables currently, and this is just "another one" in my opinion.  Dialed in with repeating dialog.  Is it good?  meh.  Is it fun?  meh.  The sad metric is that on sale this was $5 -- and even if this was a $1 price gouge game at an arcade, I wouldn't have played it 5 times.

The theme for the table was light vs. dark side, and themed events were based around those movie situations.  "Hit Darth Maul 3 times" before the timer expires, use ramp trap to launch ball and hit Yoda, etc...  The main table event was getting either light or dark Jedi Holocron on a sub gameboard you could get to easily, but was a series of quick ramps where you had to hit a frustratingly placed series of flashing lights.  After my first successful holicron, it simply said "holicron acquired" and the display showed 1/10 ... --- so I started avoiding it as an event.  

Look I don't want to nerd out too hard here, but a Jedi Holicron is a very significant thing to acquire.  It is effectively an artifact with infinite storage maintained by a lost jedi, potentially knowledge lost to the ages or secrets that could destroy a galaxy, one of a kind, finding one is a life changer, but ... yeah.  Lets collect 10.  

An amazing multi-ball experience could save a table ... it wasn't.

Heavy Rain

Heavy Rain is an interactive story with quick-time events that influence the direction of the story.  Apparently there are a LOT of alternate pathways as well.  From what I read, there were 2000 pages of script, whereas a normal movie movie would have about 120 pages.

The story centers around capturing "The Origami Killer" and you play a variety of roles to that effect, the father, a reporter, a private detective and a private eye - toggling between them as they work in parallel in trying to rescue the latest missing boy.

The story was well told, with twists and turns and a bit of a morbidity (think "Saw").  The interface needed some work though, as camera angles would change -- all the sudden your character that you were moving forward would turn around and go backwards, so you'd switch directions to walk but meanwhile your character had moved back to the frame before, correcting itself and turning around.  You walk with tank like controls, sooo frustrating at times.  

I can't complain about the quicktime events being "hard" as it's really the only gameplay (though I do wish I opted for controller over mouse motion) -- but there are things that you can't really exhibit the negative effect.  As an example, I swam away from a sinking car instead of untying the person in the front seat.   No takebacks, I chose the wrong random mouse movement from the list.

... Heavy Rain was the last of the backlog of games I have used this blog to help work through.   From 180 when I initially started way back when, it dwindled to approximately 80 or so.   This recent go at things had us start at 150.   

Good thing there's a steam sale coming up!