The mechanics are pretty straightforward and enjoyable as you enhance your deck, but the main part of the gameplay involves working around the ways a boss can cheat (steal your cards, destroy everything, etc).
What is unfortunate and made me stop playing is that you are not working on a main deck/card/anything -- if you die, you try again. That's tolerable when you are 5 minutes into a game, but as you progress - the end boss you have to figure out how to cheese is 30-45 minutes deep.
The puzzles are very quick and oftentimes simple, like clearing the scales off a fish and assembling the remaining bits into the correct locations, nothing that involved deeper thought like a sliding pane puzzle, they are more about finding missing components by noticing things like loose threads you can pull on.
I would say it is as fun and plays similar to the recent Boxes game, but with 2D animations.
The gameplay is fairly well done for an aerial combat, aim assist is a huge help -- but it does suffer from the same problems every game like this does, losing track of things that go past you. It doubles down on this problem by having no reverse ability - so when navigating a corridor with obstacles it can be a pain to nose bump your craft back onto the correct path.
The game introduces a symbiotic ship, that you're able to use some meta abilities with - like a short range teleport and a way to drift in space (which one would think would be automatic with no friction ..). I have no interest in playing more nor watching the remaining as a Let's Play for cutscenes to make it make more sense.
Each of the guests is an animal and every night has you visit one of the rooms and work through a series of puzzles where the hotel guest ends up getting served up as part of the next days meal. It matters that you do certain things in order though because you need all of the ingredients on a certain day for a "perfect" meal. Like the Pheasant Lady has to die earlier so that you can collect her red wine and use it on a different day, or there will be an optional puzzle for something like a sprig of Rosemary.
It was about an hour and a half total to finish. Well done puzzles, nothing too crazy to figure out, and some creative ideas.
Instead you and your shopping cart companion are castoff experiments from an Evilcorp, you are a homeless man who has half a brain and the power to control pigeons, and your companion is a wisecracking shopping cart with googly eyes. Graphics are basic and repetitive, like an early PS3 - but not to the point of being too distracting.
The world is silly in that way, but follows a lot of the similar premises as GTA and the like -- the main story mission is to help your buddy get his body back and you to get your other half a brain I assume, but the map has an Ubi number of side missions that are "race to this area", "put 5 bodies into this bin", "be rude and avoid police", "shoot targets".
I would have toughed it to the end for the amusement, but some missions are locked behind upgrades that you are forced to do to your base -- which means you have to collect resources to create smelteries, and collect wood and metal to smelt ingots, and craft metal plates from ingots to upgrade pigeon coops, etc. It's not a paywall, it's a timewall/grindwall - meanwhile rival gangs come to destroy your stuff so you have to run back and defend your upgrades whenever you are raided.
As a proof of concept it's great, fund these guys and lets have them make a game. As a game/story, it was a bit of the same "get the [artfully named creature] in the [location]" with no purpose beyond that. The additional hunt was given by an odd professor guy looking to fill out his bestiary compendium and looks like a Nickelodeon cartoon caricature of a hunter.
There was a tribute to reddit face in one of the boss rooms with a bit of a slapstick intro creating a mutant. 😁
Nothing was too difficult to solve, there were numerous puzzles where there was probably an optimal solution but you were able to eventually easily work through like sliding tile puzzles. On the few occasions I found myself at a loss for what to do, I usually smacked my forehead for not looking closer at one of the legs or something that seemed so obvious in hindsight.
Great simple low stress game, will play their others.
The game tells the story of Miquella and his attempt to ascend to godhood. It's hard to judge true motivations when you're speaking of the will of demi-gods, especially one whose magical abilities are to subvert the will of others.
Previously one of the more "hated" in Elden Ring was Mohg, who kidnapped the eternally youthful Miquella and imprisoned his seemingly dead body in a cocoon to attempt to revive with blood magic, but apparently Miquella was manipulating Mohg to give up his own soul and use it as a vessel for Miquella to install his brother Radahn as the god consort.
What's great about it, is that "maybe" that's the story -- environmental storytelling has got to be the cooler ways to reveal a story. You serve as a video game archaelogist as you guess what transpired to create a battleground scene from the tattered remnants, the fact that one tent has a rival soldiers armor set, or a bunch of unexploded gunpowder helps you come up with a guess and support it by descriptions of the tattered remains you uncover.
10/10 and I can't wait to replay this again.
The game looks and plays like a PS3 game though, cutesy but a button masher mainly with some parkour levels. The bosses were not interesting, the physics were bad, the jokes were cornball, there is no real draw to play the rest at all.
There is a difference between funny and corny that these developers didn't care to differentiate between.
Opening the door I was presented with a fuse box puzzle that effectively was going to control the way you get into various doors by powering up some systems instead of others.
I lost all interest. I think these things work best when you have immediate and visceral feedback, like the "Boxes" game, or at least incentive to play outside of the puzzle existing in the universe.
The ability to turn to stone at any point, made it very friendly to a Dark Souls player -- I didn't have to learn any of the boss fights really. After I learned to use mechanic well, almost every boss cycle became jump attack, stone, run to safety until recharge despite any abilities they had. I fought the first boss ten times, every other boss was one or two shot at most.
Where it probably suffered from most is level design - I'm prone to getting lost, and I've also experienced amazing dungeon level designs. I like doors that lead back to hub rooms, I like ladders you can kick down, I like opening shortcuts along the way -- the prospect of going through an area carefully and killing everything is fun once, then I want to run past the grunts on the way to something more interesting. These were long and linear, perhaps intentionally so because you had to replay them in hard mode in order to escape once you killed the baddies in each of the towers and ... extracted their gland.
This is a great game for a small developer.
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Dead Island franchise needs to figure out what they're trying to be -- it feels like they are going for a Saint's Row vibe, but putting in a C- effort. Shamblers .. lead to Brutes ... lead to Fatties ... lead to Screamers ... lead to Bloated Exploders ... lead to Hunter Seekers ... lead to Cronenberg gigantibeast. I was being spoonfed zombie baby formula.
Respawning was just stupidly fast too -- they weren't a problem to deal with, but it was annoying to clear the top floor of a house and have the bottom floor respawn. Let me clear a zone!
The end of the game came abruptly right as I was saying I was going stay behind and look for Nikki who is "the key to it all". ... a DLC ending? Are we really setting up for a fricking DLC ending!?
/uninstall
#HATS ARE COOL
Lots of people start wearing hats, and the story evolves.
It's an interesting idea, and I would LOVE to see this explored in a way that can stretch things out - but as it stands the game is quite linear, progressing you towards chaos and destruction and therefore rests as an art project.
If you've read this blog, you'd know I'm a huge Star Wars nerd, I love the (original) canonical universe and therefore I hold it to a high standard. I was distracted by a few other pursuits when I first tried this and it did not grab me ... but when I went to go write this, I realized I hadn't really given it a fair chance.
Now I have. It was great, not too embarrassed to say I might have shed a tear even in the drama, there was a "Micah-sized" double-cross that caught me completely unaware, I had chills when Darth Vader stepped around the corner when I was trying to flee the archives. Well done.
I guess the one complaint I have is with Darth Vader -- and in general all games like this that rely on you struggling hard with combat. First, it's Darth Frikkin' Vader, the most powerful dark lord next to the Emperor Palpatine -- he should cleave me ruthlessly and dispassionately. I should fight to barely survive and be thankful if I do. The terror I felt when seeing Vader was something of my own manufacture -- I parried his shit, I was on the offensive and as I took him down in 25% increments I was given a cutscene were it showed I was really struggling. I wasn't. He wins in the end, but in that Bushido 'one second oops your dead' way after I made him a clown.
If you are going to have a boss kick my ass, you should do it in a more cheaty way where it soaks damage or reacts quicker and has a moveset that make me seethe with frustration. Respect your big bads or you will develop a Superman problem (constantly needing to outdo yourself with the next bigger/tougher thing).
It was well done, there wasn't anything that left me too lost with what to do -- my only complaint would be that I didn't do the math myself. There were a few puzzles where (for example) pulling one of 4 levers would move one to four different things by varying amounts, and I just felt my way through all those puzzles instead of writing down and planning X number of lever pulls. Kind of like doing a Rubik's cube, I can solve it when it's close -- and I do a bunch of random stuff in patterns that sort of reliably get me to that "close enough to solve logically" state, like trying to isolate one correct answer and then get a second answer in place while the one answer is isolated, then using those two to figure out where the third needs to be set so that the other two are right.
This is the first of three that this company has made so far -- and if this is proof-of-concept, I think I am looking forward to the next two.
The anomalies can be obvious, like all of the lights turning off - or very subtle, like the man passing you eyeballing you as he goes by, or even occur late in the hallway - and you are given a limited amount of time to assess and run back if necessary.
I ... struggled ... with some of the less obvious ones because you're not told what you missed, you only see that you failed after you turn through the tunnels and realize that you're back at the starting location without the ability to go and assess. Super frustrating when you get to 7 and feel like you saw nothing ... perhaps it was because I had failed so many times previously that I had seen all the anomalies, but I lucked out at the end of my first playthrough with two rather obvious ones at the end.
