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.