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.