Having come across videos of that new Dragon Age game and its (by the look of it) cool looking combat I've gotten the urge for something similar. Action RPG of some kind, being able to rock on as a wizard and blast spells all day. Some tactical element to spell slinging and comboing would be nice.

Love me some recommendations!

While for the most part this kind of damage is fine (this game is playable), it's questionable for how much longer. If you have the hardware or the capability, always remember to back up your physical games.

Arcade car games don't seem that popular nowadays, so what is your opinion on this series?

Some food for thought (not mine)

> It's hard to believe the OG NFS Most Wanted is 19 years old. To this day, I don't think there has been a better car game. In fact, I'd even claim it's the best car game ever, but that would be too dramatic, so let's just leave it at best in the franchise for now. I think a lot of people would agree with me though, and I mean a lot.

> A little explanation for that title: If you're a Need For Speed fan, chances are you support one of the following opinions:

> 1. Underground 1/2 is the best NFS. > 2. Most Wanted is the best NFS.

> Now, let's see how Underground 1/2 is objectively better compared to MW:

> * Customization is more extensive

> The end. That's literally it. MW on the other hand has:

> * Better graphics, physics, etc...it's just more polished in every way, which is to be expected from any game sequel, or at least it used to be. > * Police pursuits (more on that later).

> I could of course say a lot more, but I don't want to cross the blurry line of subjectivity, so let's leave it at that. Most Wanted is simply a better made game, with an extra added mechanic: Police Pursuits.

> Honestly, you could have an entire post just for the pursuits alone. Arguably what made the game as legendary as it is, at least partially. I don't know if I've ever played another game that features police as good as this one. And its beauty is in its simplicity as much as it is in its execution. There are levels to how "serious" a chase can be, called "heat". There is a counter and as long as you run from the police, it keeps counting. Get chased long enough and the heat level rises. Every time that happens, the police get more aggressive and use different methods to stop you. And it's just done beautifully. It starts out easy, and you get cocky. Maybe you feel like challenging them. The heat rises, but you keep having fun. Eventually, you feel like it's time to bail, and that's when you realise that you have been played. Now they won't let you leave. The difficulty really sneaks up on you, even though it's absolutely linear and predictable in its progression. It can be fun, annoying, stressful, hard, in all the good ways.

> That alone is enough to lift MW above any of the Undergrounds. And I've said virtually nothing about the rest of the game. I'm going to get into the subjective stuff now. The map is frigging awesome. You start out in what looks like the countryside, with its beautiful forested highways and what look like higher income areas. Then, as you progress further through the story and unlock more areas, you turn towards a more...dystopian look, for lack of a better word. Brown, filthy, rusty industrial areas, with garbage and graffiti. I mean look at this. This is a perfect image to give you a great idea of what this game is all about. Grunge, decadence, dystopia. You don't get the neon lights of Underground 1/2 here, as cool as they are. And the whole thing is absolutely elevated by its metal/rap mix soundtrack, one that would be called "grimdark" today, but would also be instantly recognizable by any fan of the game. This is another way MW excels over the predecessors in my opinion. And that is the vibe. The atmosphere. I know people love the night from Underground, but in my opinion, MW offers a far more cohesive, far more complete package, and not just when it comes to aesthetics.

> I feel like the whole experience is streamlined beautifully. Each thing flows into the next. The story is simple, yet it has stakes. At the same time, it plays into the game's Blacklist mechanic, which has you competing with members of the "blacklist", in order to climb up the ladder. But you have to challenge these drivers first, by completing milestones. That's how the game basically "forces" you to experience all it has to offer. No shortcuts here, you have to work to get to the top and earn back what's arguably the single most iconic car ever to be put in a video game: The BMW M3 GTR. The absolute legend, the unicorn. A car so iconic, they're still milking it 20 years later, to remind you of the long past glory days of the franchise.

> Yes, I am fanboying. I mean, this was THE GAME when it was new, especially for car people. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that it is, to this day, my benchmark for car games. Seriously, it holds up, graphics look good to this day (if you don't focus on the backgrounds), driving physics are arcade-y, but still grounded enough to make you feel like a hero, even though they're not even close to being realistic. This game has the mojo and the franchise has been in steady decline ever since. There were some highlights of course. Carbon was a good attempt at a sequel, but rushed, it even brought back the customization from Underground...or most of it at least. Shift tried to do something. Then there was the 2015 reboot, which is easily in my Top 3 Need For Speeds, plagued by issues as it may be, some tiny, others not so much. And ever since then...crap.

> What happened to Need For Speed? When did they lose the recipe? At some point, they went back to doing classic NFS, no customization, no story, not even the option to buy cars, nothing, just races to get to the finish line first. They just can't seem to get it right anymore. I still go back to the original MW every now and then and I can't help but appreciate how perfect it is, within reason. Everything in that game is what it needs to be, and every thing works with each other to create a great well-oiled machine that just does what's it's meant to do. I don't understand why newer games can't get it right. I thought the aforementioned NFS 2015 was an honestly GREAT attempt, but some of the decisions made for that game baffle me. But I can forgive virtually everything about it...except for one thing. Always online? Really? I can only hope that they patch the game before they inevitably take down the servers. Anyway, I digress.

> Need for Speed used to be THE franchise for car games, and now it's but a shadow of its former self, if not a joke. I guess it still sells though, which is why they're still pushing the games out. I just wish we could once again reach those same highs from -sigh- 20 years ago. It really is incredible that it's been that long.

> Play Need For Speed: Most Wanted if you haven't, it's great.

Seems to be the remaster of a PS3 / Xbox 360 title. The name rings a bell, but I never played it.

Some context on the remaster (not mine)

> For those who never heard of the game, it's a remaster(?) of an old PS3 Action RPG that apparently had a real rocky development. And you're absolutely gonna notice some rough areas with quests that don't really resolve, story wise, or choices that seem big having few(if any) consequences while others will turn a whole faction into your sworn enemy.

> Despite all that, there is certainly fun to be had here. I'm playing a pure rogue build at the moment and the shit I can get up to is downright silly. In town I rob basically everyone. If the pockets can be picked or the chests/drawers/desks/etc can be looted, I'm taking a look. I've got a smoke bomb to drop the odds of being detected to near 0%(or literally 0% when not picking pockets), and I use alchemy to craft potions to turn me invisible when the smoke bomb is on cooldown. Most recently I hit up a gnomish capital, robbed everyone of note I could find, and used their stolen bank keys to burgle the local bank.

> In combat, I've got a permanent poison application buff for my daggers and bow, and a permanent crit damage buff. I like to sneak up on enemies and assassinate them quietly, dealing absolutely absurd damage and often leaving a poisoned corpse that will likely explode and poison every enemy nearby. The smoke bomb I mentioned earlier? In a combat setting it stuns and poisons enemies while cloaking me. So often when I'm spotted I'll let the enemy get close, drop this and get behind the stunned, dying enemies to start assassinating again.

> When that's not an option is typically when the bow and mines come out. I've got a pretty chill set up for most battles where I scatter a bunch of bleed inducing mines in front of me, then fire a scatter of arrows that inflict poison and can stack bleed. And because of another silly skill of mine I've a chance per hit to add a nice chunk of damage against bleeding foes.

> But yeah, did I mention the game is fucking big? I think I've been at it for 50-60 hours and I'm still nowhere near the front lines.

Arcade car games don't seem that popular nowadays, so what is your opinion on this series?

Some food for thought (not mine)

> It's hard to believe the OG NFS Most Wanted is 19 years old. To this day, I don't think there has been a better car game. In fact, I'd even claim it's the best car game ever, but that would be too dramatic, so let's just leave it at best in the franchise for now. I think a lot of people would agree with me though, and I mean a lot.

> A little explanation for that title: If you're a Need For Speed fan, chances are you support one of the following opinions:

> 1. Underground 1/2 is the best NFS. > 2. Most Wanted is the best NFS.

> Now, let's see how Underground 1/2 is objectively better compared to MW:

> * Customization is more extensive

> The end. That's literally it. MW on the other hand has:

> * Better graphics, physics, etc...it's just more polished in every way, which is to be expected from any game sequel, or at least it used to be. > * Police pursuits (more on that later).

> I could of course say a lot more, but I don't want to cross the blurry line of subjectivity, so let's leave it at that. Most Wanted is simply a better made game, with an extra added mechanic: Police Pursuits.

> Honestly, you could have an entire post just for the pursuits alone. Arguably what made the game as legendary as it is, at least partially. I don't know if I've ever played another game that features police as good as this one. And its beauty is in its simplicity as much as it is in its execution. There are levels to how "serious" a chase can be, called "heat". There is a counter and as long as you run from the police, it keeps counting. Get chased long enough and the heat level rises. Every time that happens, the police get more aggressive and use different methods to stop you. And it's just done beautifully. It starts out easy, and you get cocky. Maybe you feel like challenging them. The heat rises, but you keep having fun. Eventually, you feel like it's time to bail, and that's when you realise that you have been played. Now they won't let you leave. The difficulty really sneaks up on you, even though it's absolutely linear and predictable in its progression. It can be fun, annoying, stressful, hard, in all the good ways.

> That alone is enough to lift MW above any of the Undergrounds. And I've said virtually nothing about the rest of the game. I'm going to get into the subjective stuff now. The map is frigging awesome. You start out in what looks like the countryside, with its beautiful forested highways and what look like higher income areas. Then, as you progress further through the story and unlock more areas, you turn towards a more...dystopian look, for lack of a better word. Brown, filthy, rusty industrial areas, with garbage and graffiti. I mean look at this. This is a perfect image to give you a great idea of what this game is all about. Grunge, decadence, dystopia. You don't get the neon lights of Underground 1/2 here, as cool as they are. And the whole thing is absolutely elevated by its metal/rap mix soundtrack, one that would be called "grimdark" today, but would also be instantly recognizable by any fan of the game. This is another way MW excels over the predecessors in my opinion. And that is the vibe. The atmosphere. I know people love the night from Underground, but in my opinion, MW offers a far more cohesive, far more complete package, and not just when it comes to aesthetics.

> I feel like the whole experience is streamlined beautifully. Each thing flows into the next. The story is simple, yet it has stakes. At the same time, it plays into the game's Blacklist mechanic, which has you competing with members of the "blacklist", in order to climb up the ladder. But you have to challenge these drivers first, by completing milestones. That's how the game basically "forces" you to experience all it has to offer. No shortcuts here, you have to work to get to the top and earn back what's arguably the single most iconic car ever to be put in a video game: The BMW M3 GTR. The absolute legend, the unicorn. A car so iconic, they're still milking it 20 years later, to remind you of the long past glory days of the franchise.

> Yes, I am fanboying. I mean, this was THE GAME when it was new, especially for car people. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that it is, to this day, my benchmark for car games. Seriously, it holds up, graphics look good to this day (if you don't focus on the backgrounds), driving physics are arcade-y, but still grounded enough to make you feel like a hero, even though they're not even close to being realistic. This game has the mojo and the franchise has been in steady decline ever since. There were some highlights of course. Carbon was a good attempt at a sequel, but rushed, it even brought back the customization from Underground...or most of it at least. Shift tried to do something. Then there was the 2015 reboot, which is easily in my Top 3 Need For Speeds, plagued by issues as it may be, some tiny, others not so much. And ever since then...crap.

> What happened to Need For Speed? When did they lose the recipe? At some point, they went back to doing classic NFS, no customization, no story, not even the option to buy cars, nothing, just races to get to the finish line first. They just can't seem to get it right anymore. I still go back to the original MW every now and then and I can't help but appreciate how perfect it is, within reason. Everything in that game is what it needs to be, and every thing works with each other to create a great well-oiled machine that just does what's it's meant to do. I don't understand why newer games can't get it right. I thought the aforementioned NFS 2015 was an honestly GREAT attempt, but some of the decisions made for that game baffle me. But I can forgive virtually everything about it...except for one thing. Always online? Really? I can only hope that they patch the game before they inevitably take down the servers. Anyway, I digress.

> Need for Speed used to be THE franchise for car games, and now it's but a shadow of its former self, if not a joke. I guess it still sells though, which is why they're still pushing the games out. I just wish we could once again reach those same highs from -sigh- 20 years ago. It really is incredible that it's been that long.

> Play Need For Speed: Most Wanted if you haven't, it's great.

I love this game. I played the Dreamcast version as a kid so many times and recently replaced the PC version.

I learned that you can unlock metal sonic after 100% completing the game, but he is just a cosmetic for sonic and thats it.

My problem with this is that once the game is 100% complete, do I want to still play just to see a different cosmetic?

Maybe if there was some variety to make the levels a bit different or if he was able to be used after getting all the B rank emblems so there is still some challenge to complete.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/warcraft-2-orcs-and-humans-remastered-apparently-leaks-ahead-of-the-rts-series-30th-anniversary-direct-next-week

Found this review elsewhere (credits at the end). First time I hear about it, curious to see what people think

I expect most people have heard of Return of the Obra Dinn. It’s a 2018 Game where you are investigating the fate of the crew of the ship Obra Dinn, and its perhaps even more mysterious return. Your task is to discover what became of each crew member (and passenger), with the aid of a watch that lets you return to the point of their death and a ledger that confirms correct fates in sets of three. It’s probably one of the best known and regarded indie games of recent years.

I started the game years ago, got stuck, and gave up. Last week I went back and started a new game, and completed it fairly quickly. As far as I know Obra Dinn is the only game where you play as an insurance investigator, which makes me regret never completing a Chartered Insurance Institute qualification as that might have given me an advantage.

To keep from going on too long I'm just going to talk a tiny bit about the gameplay, then focus on the atmosphere & story, before giving a few tips that I hope might help new players avoid frustration.

Gameplay

Return of the Obra Dinn is partly a game of deduction. But I think it’s a game of observation most of all. Paying attention to where people are, who they’re with, what accent they have, making sure you look all around, being careful to pick up on every mention of someone’s name.

It’s meant to be possible to complete the game without guessing at all, but I expect only a vanishingly small number of people manage this. How much to guess is really up to you. I generally held off unless I had 1 in 2 odds or was particularly struggling. (I was more flexible with the notoriously difficult Chinese topmen.)

Atmosphere & story

To me Return of the Obra Dinn is a triumph of atmosphere and empathy. The stark presentation, the design of the scenes, the vivid voice acting, the need to pay attention to what’s around you. There are few, if any, games that have made me feel for the characters so much; the crew cracking as the voyage goes from bad to worse.

There are scenes that stay vividly in my mind: on a walkway around the edge of a deck, peering in through narrow viewports to a scene of terror and violence; perched on the rigging as a lightning strike cracks the sky; two characters sitting in shock by the bloody body of another in the mess, one holding his head in his hands.

I wonder if this is helped by the fact that you don’t interact with the characters. There’s never a reason to think of them instrumentally, as a means to a gameplay end, and they will never react (or fail to react) to you in ways that seem odd or limited.

What feels less successful is the overall story and characterisation. The story never seemed to fully come together. It mostly followed logically enough from an initial incident, but there were a couple of things that seemed to come out of left-field (eg. the background to “justice at sea”). The background to what’s going on should be mysterious but I never felt quite satisfied with how it was set up. Of course it’s always possible I missed some important details.

If anything I think the limited characterisation matters to me more than the story. It was hard to get a read on the characters and how their feelings and knowledge changed over the course of the story. I would have loved to get a better idea of the relationships between the officers, why some groups formed, exactly what motivated some actions, even why some people were on the ship at all. This would add depth to the scenes and tie them together better.

That kind of detail is always going to be difficult when you have 60 odd people to investigate, and you’re only seeing flashes of them at particular moments. It’s perhaps a problem that can’t be solved within the format of the game, without incongruously jamming in extra information or scenes.

Tips

I don’t want to stop people figuring things out how to approach the game by themselves, but these are a few things that I wish I’d thought of when starting the game. The first two are to help keep track of what you’re doing, the last is something that can potentially screw you over a bit if you don’t do it.

1. Write down fates you’ve tried which aren’t correct: when you verify three fates, you know that every other fate you’ve put in is wrong.

2. Write down your guesses at matching names and faces: you’ll usually have a mix of people you’re certain of (but don’t know the fate of) and those you’re not sure of, so it helps to know the difference.

3. Use fates you’re certain of strategically: if you’ve got three fates you’re sure of, fill in two and then test out one you’re unsure of.

Conclusion

Return of the Obra Dinn is a highly praised game so you probably don’t need me to recommend it. What I will say is that it worked for me. I got caught up in the atmosphere of the game, which doesn’t happen easily, and the deduction in the game struck that tricky balance between challenging without being frustrating (well, second time round).

Also the music gets stuck in my head really badly.

https://old.reddit.com/comments/1gjd93l

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/22140088

> ! > > PS. Play Grim Dawn! Amazing ARPG with really good classes and customisations. > > If you'd prefer something older and simpler, the same devs made Titan Quest.

Hi, In early 2000 , my dad, my brothers and I used to play the shit out of this game called Chicken Invaders.

It's basically shooting chickens invading the universe or something.

We only had 1 PC at home and we used to play in turns.

I stumbled upon it somehow yesterday and couldn't stop playing.

May be it's just nostalgic value, but it was fun!

Sharing a link to the official game (it's free) Website: https://www.interactionstudios.com/chickeninvaders.php

Direct Link to Exe: https://www.interactionstudios.com/files/ChickenInvaders1Installer.exe

Hope someone else reconnects with their childhood, like I did .

Cheers!

I just wrapped up on playing the iOS version of Professor Layton: The Curious Village (HD) and let me just say, it was an experience I wasn’t expecting. I’m curious how other people think about these games.

My overall impression was that the game is really well animated and stylized, the music is really well done and relaxing, and the story is (in my opinion) mostly just fine until the end where things close out on a very sweet and touching note. The controls are also surprisingly good for being a DS touchscreen port.

As for the puzzles, there’s really good variety here and the hint system makes sure that you never get stuck unless you want to be. They’re basic puzzles for the most part but I’d say your average adult is still going to take 5-10 minutes on harder puzzles and 15-20 minutes on just a few of them. Some of them are looking for obscure solutions or are worded wrong, not a big deal but noticeable.

If you like brain teasers or logic puzzles and you want a good mobile game that’s easy to pick up and put down, this is really good and it’s worth the $10 or so. I got about 8 hours out of it (so says my save file), so I’d say that was money well spent.

Let me know if you played these games on the DS and how the other ones in the series are!

This is a long post about the various aspects of Fallout, don't read it all unless you care to. Instead, find a section and comment on that so we can have a focused discussion if you prefer.

Summary

I modded the ever loving crap out of Fallout 4 with minimal effort using the A Story Wealth mod pack . My reasoning was that on my first play through I found the world empty but I mainly enjoy stories and quests, which this modpack seemed to do. Also I didn't have time to spend modding and didn't want to get lost in that hellhole of doing it myself. This play through was long, about 150 hours (yikes) which is probably all the fallout I'll need for many years to come. I also used an addon to the modpack to make the game extremely difficult with healing items. More on that later.

Mods

The mods here are really quite varied and I was surprised at how coherent they are. With Skyrim modding, I always felt that the mods are somewhat disjointed and it takes skilled modders to stitch together. Here in FO4 its impressive how stable the pack was and how well the quests worked together. The most standout mod by far is The Fens Sheriff Department which adds hours of story, actually interesting quests, and in my opinion content miles better than Bethesda's own content. It was worth coming back just for that alone.

Story

spoiler

After seeing what mods have done, I have no good words to say about FO4 in terms of story. The entire plot revolves around you getting your son back and its all in service of setting up the surprise that he isn't a child anymore. Its predictable, boring, etc. All of the factions are uninteresting. Minutemen are nobodies and their story is minimalist. So is the Railroad. The Brotherhood of Steel are cool in concept but can't back up their grit at all and end up being too friendly with zero depth to them as well. The Institute makes an attempt at depth but geez, its barely deeper than a puddle. I chose to end the game with the Fens Sheriff Department and it ended up being way more interesting despite the muted ending to their plot. If you're playing this game for story, don't.

Graphics

I'll spend little time here, I didn't spend any time beautifying the game at all but it looks surprisingly good at times. But at other times, the engine is terrible. The way it handles LOD stuff is awful and graphical glitches and clipping are extremely common. And yet, I do enjoy the aesthetic. The art is charming as ever and my main and only complaint is that the wasteland itself is very one-note and could've used some changes.

Engine

Take it out back and kill it. I won't blame the vanilla game entirely but mods didn't contribute to the instability of the game much. It has always been rough. In the city, due to a lack of proper culling you will get half your FPS or worse. My rig is very well equipped and still struggled to maintain 30-40fps in the cities. Then add in the few quest bugs that I had (mostly vanilla quests too) and the large amount of physics and items bugs and this really feels barely glued together in ways mods can't fix. This engine needs to be worked on. A lot.

Characters/Followers

I'll be honest, I'm not a huge fan of Fallout 4's followers. Dogmeat is great but the interaction is minimal and Nick Valentine is easily the best in my opinion. He's one of the few with a great set of dialog that actually makes use of the setting and feels grounded. Everyone else could almost belong in a different game. As with the story, a lot of the characters are poorly written and have lackluster dialog. The DLCs fix this but the main game struggles big time to ground everyone properly. I played the entire game with Heather Casdin and that was a real treat. She is what every follower could have been and provides really unique story commentary and relationship moments. It actually feels like you get to know her well instead of her just spouting backstory at you constantly. Bethesda take notes.

Locations

One of the better noted parts of Fallout 4 and Skyrim are the random locations and storytelling within them. Only problem is, FO4 doesn't reward you often enough with location exploration beyond loot and thats not what people play fallout for in the first place. Its a mixed back here, some of the locations are very well done and are 10/10 settings where others are bland as mayo and waste your time.

Settlements

As intrigued as I initially was a long time ago at launch with them, the settlement system really brings the game down. Its impressive, don't get me wrong but it eats up way too much of your time to configure and there isn't any real point in setting them up. Sim Settlements helps with this but it still misses the mark in my opinion. I hope this system returns but very diminished in terms of tedium.

Gameplay

Guns feel good, fights are great. The mods all enhance that by giving the high stakes gunfights I really enjoy. Yet the game still became too easy despite me playing on survival. Needs just became annoying distractions. And being overencombered is just... awful. Especially with scrap being a thing and I hate scrap honestly. The scrap is a cool idea but has you doing the even more annoying part of Bethesda games, looking in every nook and cranny for a desk fan or box car. Its stupid and it takes you out of the game completely. I think this could have been fine if they toned it down, not every item needs to be able to be used like this.

DLC

This was the highlight of my time because I had never played the DLC, I couldn't afford it back when this launched. Far Harbor blew me away with how cool it was and just really showed what parts of the base game were missing. The moral grays presented here were fun to work through and the quests unique. I wish Far Harbor was its own game almost. Nuka world feels more like a lightweight DLC but still shows that Bethesda can write decent stuff and have decent art when they try. I have no idea why the quality of these DLCs is so high when the rest of the game is kind of bland compared to FO3 or New Vegas.

The Takeaways

I hope Bethesda gets their act together because FO4 was a pretty decent game. Not perfect but also very dated. Quests are mostly bland and are often fetch quests or don't reward you with much dialog or story. And the mods just show how easy it would be to get this stuff right the first time. The lack of grit to the story is something that really sucks in my opinion. Its not a game for kids clearly, there is blood and guts and mutants abound. So why don't any of the major characters die? Why don't they meet horrible ends? Why not have your son meet a horrible demise if you make the wrong choices? The only time any of that happens is the end of the game. Far too little far too late. The game just has absolutely no stakes to it, no impact. At least in Skyrim the Civil War shakes things up. Thats what I really wanted from this game is to feel like my actions were doing something and the mods really helped with that.

If you made it through this wall of text, I appreciate it. I spent way too long on this but I felt like telling someone about my experiences. Don't get me wrong, I had a lot of fun with this game but by the end I was exhausted of Fallout 4's short comings. Let me know what you think!

So picked this up in the recent Steam sale and just finished it. What does everyone think? I liked it, though I definitely enjoyed the earlier portions more, when it felt more grounded than fantastical. I would love to see a game centered around LeBlanc and his time as a PI before Kay returns. I feel like that would be a good setting to really dig into this awesome dystopia that was created here.

I've never been a fan of Visual Novels, or at least, of the ones I'd always come across. But I'm also a sucker for good cyberpunk, and a good story. When I saw that Snatcher might tick both those boxes, I decided to give it a shot.

!

Snatcher (nice use of negative space on that cover) is one of Hideo Kojima's earlier titles, originally released in 1988 for the MSX2 and PC-8801 over in Japan. It was only years later in 1994 that it was updated, ported, and localized for English speaking countries, exclusively for the Sega CD.

Kojima's now famous insatiable desire for lengthy cutscenes and dialog lends itself to VNs. As with many of his works, it's heavily inspired by whatever western movies he'd seen at the time. In this case, Snatcher is heavily inspired by Blade Runner.

!

You play as Gillian Seed, an ex-scientist with amnesia that's now working as a Junker (the equivalent of a blade runner) in Neo-Kobe, a cyberpunk metropolis that's not quite as dark and dreary as Bladerunner's, feeling more like something out of Akira.

The game features a surprising amount of voice acting, some of it actually pretty decent for a game of that era. It also has a particularly fantastic FM soundtrack courtesy of the Genesis' soundchip, and even some redbook audio for the intro (I'd recommend listening to the soundtrack even if you have no intention of playing the game).

The story for the game can get surprisingly dark and gruesome at times, though the overall atmosphere has a more 90's anime up-beat vibe. As an interesting anecdote, the gore in the Sega CD version is actually far more visceral compared to the Japanese versions, but the small amount of nudity that was in the Japanese versions is censored in the English localization.

Unlike some of his other games, this is one of Kojima's more linear and coherent tales; The characters are pretty fun to talk to, and the writing was compelling enough to make me push through some of the more dated design decisions (you sometimes will have to click the same action/dialog 3 times or more, despite the lack of any new information, before something unlocks to progress the story).

!

The gameplay is a bit more involved than a standard VN, sharing some attributes with an Adventure game.

In addition to being able to move around the city and various buildings (skillfully drawn with some of the finest pixel art of the era), the player has access to an inventory and can investigate various parts of a scene. There's a small combat mini-game that will sometimes spring up that was designed for use with a lightgun (The Konami Justifer), but thankfully the combat works just fine with a standard controller, and is used sparingly enough that it doesn't overstay its welcome.

In fact, I'd say the combat is surprisingly well integrated into the story, adding a bit of tension since you never know when it'll pop up (I imagine it would've been quite immersive back in the day with the lightgun, since you'd have to quickly drop your controller and physically 'draw' the pistol to defend yourself).

!

Snatcher is a short game, usually averaging about 4 or 5 hours for most people, but that's all it really needs to tell its tale, and by the end I was thoroughly satisfied.

The Sega CD version, or indeed any version, is no longer legally available to purchase anywhere. With physical copies being rare and demanding a premium ($200 or more), I'd recommend emulation to experience it.

In conclusion, I'd have to say that Snatcher changed my views on what a Visual Novel could offer, and opened me up to being willing to try more. I haven't spotted anything that has appealed in the same way Snatcher did, so if you have any suggestions, I'd be interested to hear them!

If you were like me, and generally glossed over this genre, maybe this write-up will convince you to give it a try as well. And if you do: good luck, Junker!

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Never in my life have I felt so used by a game. Feels dirty. The video game equivalent of emotional abuse.

5 stars, would recommend.

I enjoyed Respawn's first Star Wars game, Fallen Order, a pastiche of present-day gameplay concepts on top of a venerable, popular IP. Eager for something with the potential to improve upon some of Fallen Order's shortcomings, I was interested in Survivor from the moment it was announced. There were damning reports about Star Wars: Jedi Survivor's performance on PC, so I held off until the recent patch. Happily, I can report a patient gaming win here.

Survivor ran well on my aging, mid-tier PC (3060Ti, overclocked i5-10600k), with some framerate dips here and there. It's interesting to play a Star Wars game that gives a sense of scale to the planets, and I think adding in fast travel this time created room to stretch things out a bit. Between that and how Star Wars the game feels by blending in distinctive architecture, character design, and fashion, this was a visual treat for me.

Some of that was a big dose of the prequel films, surprisingly. These two games are set in between Episode III and IV, and this one leans even more into the prequels by introducing a local faction that rose to power by taking over a Lucrehulk and its droid contingent. There are B1 droids sprinkled throughout the game (you know the ones, wiry builds and rather chatty), and if you'd told me that ahead of time I would have groaned, not being a fan of the prequels myself. By the end of this one, however, I'm starting to think these games could rehabilitate the sequels in my mind, as I enjoyed this dose of flavor. I suspect they have a smart writing team being selective about what to pull from the established universe, seeing as how they also made the excellent choice late in the game to draw from the same well Andor has.

On the gameplay side, it's interesting that I have zero interest in any of the side content and Metroidvania-style exploration. Survivor does feel just as good in battle as any of the Jedi Knight games (massive praise coming from me, being my favorite melee combat in gaming until Souls came around). Maybe I'm okay with taking my lightsaber fencing fantasy in small doses. Cosmetics being exploration rewards is also a problem here--not interested--and running around wasn't always consistently fun for me. I had whiplash from how awful Jedha was at times and then suddenly being the best parts of the game. There's certainly a concerted effort to give the exploration-oriented players something to do, but I wonder if this would be a better overall experience if it were trimmed down.

Overall, I enjoyed Survivor more than Fallen Order. I'm excited to see where this trilogy goes with more iteration on this winning formula.

This will be a bit of a hybrid review of both the digital edition of Scythe and the board game.

Scythe takes place in an alternate timeline known as 1920+, though much of its canon was changed by the release of the next game, Iron Harvest. The main appeal remains the same: mechs instead of tanks (and other alt-techs, like airships instead of planes). It made numbers on Kickstarter, but today people are ambivalent to it, and either love it or hate it.

The video game was created to be like the board game, and when it was released a simulated version of the board game on Tabletop Simulator was permanently deleted. The main differences, aside from the occasional bug that makes a legal move impossible, are the way the game is organized visually and, more importantly, the relationship between the player and the scoring.

Reviewing the video game is going to make more sense if we start with the board game. So, let's start with the board game.

Scythe: The Board Game

Scythe successfully compresses the 4X experience down to an hour or two. You're definitely still doing all of the four X's, and there are many different win conditions you can pick and choose from depending on your circumstances.

That alone puts the game above many others. It is truly an achievement.

The game has a lot in common with chess, and in many ways it felt like a sequel with more lore and without all its flaws. For all of chess's beauty (though any Go player can tell you it's overrated), it's a paintbrush that doesn't fit comfortably in its hand. Scythe does.

The game's beginning is more varied than chess, like chess960. Unlike it, the variation is just small enough that it's still practical for players to study specific opening lines for specific situations, and so Scythe fails to avoid the problem of needing to study boring opening lines in chess (though Scythe's opening lines are much more intuitive and don't feel as arbitrary as chess).

So it's a more varied, more colorful chess with more mechanics, more players, it's more intuitive, and it has more lore. It's pretty good.

The lore is really nothing to write home about beyond the surface. "Cool, mechs!" is about the highest praise you'll find yourself giving the lore. The actual historical writing is nauseating and could be a whole rant-post unto its own.

Sometimes it gets racist and victim-blaming. For example, Usonia, this world's version of the United States, abolishes slavery much earlier. Why? The slaves fought harder in war, and everyone was so moved they abolished slavery right away. Riiight. If only those slaves weren't such lazy soldiers, amirite everyone? There's all kinds of shit like this.

But hey! Cool, mechs! Oh right, and airships! Guess it was wrong about mechs being all there is to praise.

Scythe also tries to solve two problems in interesting ways. One is the problem of people taking forever in strategy games to calculate the totally optimal move. Scythe tries to capture that element of earlier Eurogames like Catan where games went by fast as fuck because there was so much you couldn't know, while being deterministic. To solve this, Scythe makes it illegal to calculate everyone's score on your turn, so you just have to get a feel for everyone's relative strength and act accordingly even if sub-optimally.

Another problem is the problem of having to keep track of what everything does. Scythe takes intense care, far more than most board games, to set everything up so that it's very intuitive what everything does. Pieces cover up things you don't need, and the game works where the moment those things become needed, other things need to be covered up. It's gorgeous and satisfying.

Scythe: The Digital Edition

Both of those solutions are thrown out the window in Scythe: The Digital Edition. Everything else remains the same.

Because there's no need for it, all of the beautiful ways in which Scythe communicates to the player with the way the board is arranged is gone in the game. Everything just becomes a button that does a certain thing, and which leads to you needing to push other buttons.

That's fine, although you miss the elegance of the board game.

More importantly however is that scoring is now instantly computed. This completely changes the game. Seeing everyone's score puts everyone back in the position of taking longass turns, although the game is overall faster now so it's not so bad. Playing on a computer just speeds things up for some reason.

Speed is the least of your problems. It's just that the two games are now incredibly different experiences. In the board game, you often play intuitively. You intuit how strong everyone is, how strong your position is, and you act on principles like "whoever achieves all of their objectives first with the most area tends to be the winner" and the like.

But now, everyone has access to their precise score. And near the endgame, games slow way down. You're call calculating precisely how many points you'll end up with if this happens, or if that happens, or, ooh, what if that happened? And that can be fun, it can be challenging, it can also be a headache. Sometimes it's in the mood for it, sometimes it isn't. Very frequently, not that it's enforceable, its friend group will ban looking at the score so we can play it like the board game, for old time's sake.

They're such small changes but the two games are now just such different experiences. One is elegant and flows, the other is clunky and slows (even if it is overall faster). Both have their merits. Gun to its head though, it prefers Scythe the board game over Scythe the video game.

Conclusion

Scythe is...alright. It's a fun time, but of course, there's better games. It's also pretty racist and chauvinistic and liberal and shallow in its lore? So there's that.

When it moved from being a board game to a video game, it definitely lost something meaningful. It's still a fun time, but if you've only ever played the video game, try the board game out some time. Used to be, you could've done that on Tabletop Simulator, but to prevent competition they removed it.

And that's a damned shame. Because they're not the same. And we lost something worthwhile when The Digital Edition became the way to play online. It's alright. But it could've been, um, alrighter.

Definitely worth trying out and taking in all there is to appreciate about it, but you're probably not going to walk away with a burning passion for it.

So after eight years since VI's release, it decided to get into Civilization VI. People were often talking about how innovative this game was, and it knew the Civilization Players League had a ton of cool balancing tools to make the game really engaging.

And obviously, the fact that there's a league for competing at all means a lot of people have found a lot of meaning in competing in the game.

The main worry it had was that 4X games are often all about knowledge checks, and you can often win with next to no experience against people who've played the game for years by just looking up strategies that dominate the meta if they haven't already done so. For those who are used to competing with strategy board games that throw you into a new, random situation every game and understanding principles is more important than knowing all the knowledge checks, it can be very frustrating to play strategy video games that add a ton of complexity just to make it hard to know all the things you're "supposed" to know.

Unfortunately, despite all the talk of innovations, Civilization VI was not much different. Just like how you had to know to Radio->Ideology in Civilization V, or that Great Scientists, Engineers, and Merchants are pooled together and so Merchants harm your science and production, you have to "just know" all kinds of things in Civilization VI and it makes for a very unpleasant experience with friends, competing over who knows more specific facts rather than whose intuition is better calibrated to the game's underlying patterns.

Not every game needs to be almost entirely principled like Spirit Island, Sidereal Confluence, or Go, but as an example, you can make up for a lack of knowledge in games like Twilight Imperium in all kinds of ways. It's just a very frustrating experience to know that to get to that point of making clever decisions, you and your friends are going to have to commit to like a year of doing homework so that you're not just one-upping one another on the basis of who happened to find the best resource for understanding the game.

And then if you want to play competitively, the main competitive leagues harbor tons of abusers who regularly try and drive vulnerable members in the league out, and refuse to do anything about harassment campaigns against minorities in their community because "this is just for gaming, we won't pick political sides" or whatever.

After playing with friends for about six months and feeling like any victories were awarded to whoever found the better tutorial for how to play the game, like it was rarely a matter of who found the insight necessary at a critical point to win, it was hard to keep going. The innovations of Civilization VI didn't make a meaningful difference between its experience of VI and V.

If you don't like dealing with abusers who face no consequences in CPL while those who call them out get punished, if you want to very quickly get up to date on all of the mechanics of a game and how they tie together and start just seeing who can outpace who in terms of decision-making, then Civilization VI is largely going to be a big waste of time. Obviously there are plenty of people outside of that demographic.

But for it and its friends, well, back to trying out new strategy board games. Been meaning to try out Brass: Birmingham from six years back. ___

One alternative strategy video game that's really fun is Red Alert 2 (Mental Omega mod) with a fairly low required APM much like 4X games, a thriving community and easy to get friends into, and a fairly low knowledge check barrier with a lot of room for experimenting and sharpening one's intuition.

While a lot of people praise Chrono Trigger (and right they are! Play it! It's an often recommended game for a reason), its sequel Chrono Cross doesn't get as much love. There are valid reasons for that in my opinion, but I want to argue that CC is still a strong and good game, but it needs to be looked at separated from its ancestor. They didn't call it Crono Trigger 2, in order to separate it more from the first game, but people still expected a sequel to the characters they loved in the first game. And they didn't get that. Spoiler for CC now:

While the game is obviously set in a different world than CT, there still is a connection to the first game.

spoiler

The 3 main characters from CT Chrono, Marle and Luca only appear in a short sequence in the late mid game of CC where they tell the player characters that the universe of the player characters is fucked and they live in a crapsack world. Nearly everything you did in the first game is wasted because of time shenanigans. So the players of the original game get a sucker punch to the stomach, while non-CT players are wondering why 3 ghost children are telling you the world is fucked. While the end fight was interesting in that the player finally learned what happened to Schala, it ultimately wasn't a net positive.

That is the biggest problem in my opinion. By including this link to the original game they hindered CC of being its own thing and instead alienated fans of the first game and non players alike.

But Chrono Cross has its own strengths, which still create a good game in my opinion. First and foremost I would praise the world itself, set in a tropical archipelago, which was great to explore in combination with a wonderful soundtrack. The atmosphere is often nicely serene, but there is also humor and drama there during the story. I don't know many other RPG games building a tropical world to explore. The story has some interesting twists in it and the parallel world setup means some interesting interactions between them. And while 42 playable characters is a bit overkill, I was surprised how well their language modification works to give nearly every character a characteristic speech tic.

So it should not be seen as a direct sequel, but rather as a story in an universe adjacent to the original one. To keep those stories separated makes both stronger in my mind.

This one got a little longer since there are so many things to talk about. TL;DR at the end

Valkyrie Profile's world and story is nordic mythology inspired. Meaning it takes some characters and concepts from it but gives everything it's own spin and also adds its own characters, like the main heroine for example. You are playing as the valkyrie Lenneth tasked by Odin with finding worthy souls to train them and bring to Valhalla as Einherjar in order to fight the giants in the coming battle of Ragnarök. Since Odin has clairvoyant powers, he knows when Ragnarök is coming, meaning you play under a certain time limit. The game is made up of a set amount of chapters, which themself have a set amount of periods depending on the difficulty. One period means you can visit one location on the map or rest & heal. The available locations change between the chapters and could either be a dungeon for monster slaying, a city to buy things/progress the story or the recruitment of a worthy soul. The worthy souls are the characters you can use in the battles and each one is unique. If you know your nordic mythology, you know that you have to be dead to become an Einherjar. Meaning you will see each and every single character you can recruit first die and the circumstances that brought them to their death in a 2D pixelart style cutscene (or some 3D animated cutscenes if you play the remaster Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth). And if you don't like cutscenes, this game is definitely not for you: the YouTube "all cutscenes" video for Valkyrie Profile 1 is longer than 5 hours! The stories range from bittersweet to downright depressing, as is fitting to the nordic myths. They even managed to connect some of the stories, so you will meet some characters again, sometimes because you will recruit them this time. The main story is about who Lenneth is and what her part in preventing Ragnarök means for herself and for the world.

As can be expected from so many cutscenes, the story is front and center for this game. But Valkyrie Profile doesn't need to hide its gameplay. They also included a lot of interesting and, as far as I know, for its time unique features. While fighting, your team is always made up of Lenneth and up to 3 other Einherjars making a diamond shaped formation. The position of each fighter corresponds to the same positioned button on the right side of the controller. When you press a button, the corresponding character will start its attack animation. Each hit fills a combo meter and when it reaches full capacity, you can start a special move, again with a button press for the character you want to attack. Now it is your job as a player to learn the characters moves, when to activate the next attack sequence and in which order to start the special attacks. It is a great feeling when you finally manage to fire all 4 special attacks for the first time and do massive amounts of damage. Only downside is, that you always want to use this attack sequence after finding it, since every other one would be suboptimal play.

To shake this up, Valkyrie Profile doesn't let you keep your characters forever. As I said in the beginning: your mission is to train Einherjar for Ragnarök. So after training and giving equipping good items, you need to let them go and send them on to Valhalla to fight in the Aesirs war. While you can just send anyone or even noone, your rewards from Odin change depending on the fighters strength and attributes you send him. Odin often has requests, for example a mage or a person with the cunning trait, which stirs things up for you as you need to decide: do I fulfill Odins request and send my best fighther with the ruthless trait to get a better reward from Odin or do I send this untrained & useless mage but risk making the Aesiers side in the war too weak? After each chapter you gain information on how the gods do in their battle against the giants. Depending on Odins favour you can also gain strong items, so sending strong warriors with strong items themselves to increase their worth is also a viable tactic.

Due to this mechanic you are forced to always change your team composition and seek out new worthy souls, in order to stay strong enough but also gain Odins favour. The forced change in characters is something I first experienced in Pyre. There it also worked to make you experience the many different stories of the characters and then letting them go. Only while writing this review did it occur to me, that Valkyrie Profile already established this mechanic nearly two decades earlier, to the same great effect.

Edit: I misremembered, you need to play on normal or hard to get the best ending

One aspect that was not good when it came out and isn't good today: You need to play on the Hard difficulty to get the best ending. And I seriously doubt that many people got that ending without a guide. You need to reach specific thresholds and do certain actions in the right chapters, making it everything but clear how to reach that ending.

And last but not least: the music is one of the best of the Midi era. The simple but satisfying melodies evoke a lot of emotions in me, even now years later. They effectively use the music to convey the emotion of the situation.

What fascinates me about this game is that they managed to make the game mechanic fit to the story so well. You need to train the warriors but then let them go, because Odin needs Warriors.

Spoiler for the full story for a great example of ludonarrative harmony:

You learn in the late game, that the big difference between the gods and humans in this world is that gods are static, but humans can evolve. You training the future Einherjars is necessary because they can't grow later on, when they are in Valhalla. Odin himself was half human, which made it possible for him to grow when he was younger and ascended to a much more powerful godhood then the other Aesiers, so he got to be the ruler. But by ascending he also forfeit his human part and can't grow stronger any longer. Thus Odin is always watchful for any other powerful human, that could become a danger to him by becoming too powerful and ascending as an even stronger deity than him. This fear made him steal one of the artifacts that stabilize the realms, ultimately setting Ragnarök in motion himself. So bonus points to the game for portraying Odin as he is in the Eddas: a powerful scheming & manipulating mastermind and ultimately responsible for Ragnarök himself due to his scheming.

If you like JRPG even a little, I highly recommend to try this game via emulation or playing the remaster on PS4/5, because it really is a great game with a great (albeit deprimistic) atmosphere.

TL;DR: great music & atmosphere, nice interplay of story and gameplay for ludonarrative harmony, sadly need guide to reach best ending

I highly recommend this game to all those who want to have a more wholesome game and bemoan that so often we can just solve things by violence. In fact, that is one of the main ethical points of the protagonist: he doesn't want to use violence. The problem is just, the world is ending and a hero is needed. And what is a hero who doesn't wield a sword and uses that sword? Well, play this game and find out if the protagonist can stay true to their convication or not.

The protagonist is a bard or in fact The Bard, no other name given. Every problem the bard encounters is solved by what the bard can do best: singing. This is represented by you selecting the note for his singing via a radial menu, using either mouse or gamepad stick. The developers managed that this simple mechanic didn't feel annoying to me over the roughly 10 hours playtime. Instead they reused/recontextualized it in different ways multiple times, so that it doesn't felt overused. In general this is an easy game without really difficult parts besides some rythm parts. But even then you don't need to hit the right note by ear, it is shown which note to hit like in other rythm games.

It is sometimes a silly game, but silly in a wholesome way. Where I often couldn't stop smiling due to the siliness. Like who has ever heard of singing coffee pirates? Or the fact that there is a dedicated dance button, which you can press nearly at all time, making some cutscenes a bit less serious. It feels similar in a way to Night in the Woods regarding the atmosphere and talks between the main characters.

This game is not however for people who want to have action sequences, a realistic graphic or can't stand some silliness in their games.

One of the games that cemented Tim Schafers reputation for creating fantastic games. This is a classic Point & Click adventure from 1998, so keep a spoilerfree guide open if you aren`t up for trying each item combination.

In a little longer than 10 hours Grim Fandango tells the story of Manny Calavera. He is a guide for the dead working in the department of death... selling them packages how to reach their after life depending on how good they were on the other side. Sadly Manny isn't doing so well, he only gets the loser souls who aren`t worth anything. But this is only the beginning, you will puzzle your way all around the afterlife, through cities and forests and oceans. And you will learn that Manny is a suave and cunning businessman who manages to turn nearly every situation to his advantage.

The underworld is astethically styled after the aztecs and wonderfully brought to life by the story. The dead built their own unique society with the same vices already present in the living world. the atmosphere is a little grim noir themed, but still with humor in it. While the polygon count on the characters may be low, the world itself is beautifully pre-rendered.

This game probably is not that unknown, considering it sold more than 1 million copies, but I still recommend it because it fantastically showcases the power of the human mind for anthropomorphism. The game is only made up out of rectangles. So graphicwise, a potato could run it.

The charm comes from the narrator and the characters (meaning the colorful rectangles you can control) he brings to life. The game is a platformer where each character has a special skill (can jump high or be a trampoline to others, etc) and you need to find the right combination of combining their abilities to reach the goal of each level.

The story isn't anything great, but with the narrator it feels much more emotional and at the end you don't see a small red rectangle, you see Thomas, who is not alone anymore, because he found some friends.

The game is a 2D side scroller where you can create clones of yourself which mimic your movement and you can also swap into those clones to solve puzzles with switches and pressure plates to find out what happened on a derelectic space station stranded on a planet. Fitting to the central mechanic is also a bit philosophy about what is the mind etc. involved, but not as explicit as in Soma.

The puzzles are not so convoluted that you don't understand what you need to do, but also not so easy that it's just busywork. The art style is a bit different, because they modelled everything in clay and then digitized it, leading to a pretty unique style. Together with the sparse lightning it creates a wonderful eery atmosphere in the space station. The story plays into this atmosphere, but it is not the main focus of the game. Still, I found a certain philosophical concept they introduced fascinating, because I never thought about it.

story spoiler

Namely, the concept of minds without senses and the concept of the great chain they developed out of this. In the middle of the game you learn that the planet is not without life at all. But it is life in the form of rocks that don't have any sensory organs but are telepathic in their surrounding area. Which means they don't have any feeling for where the other rocks are, but just that they can speak with some and don't speak with a lot of others. But in a long chain they can speak over vast distances. When they are taken for studying by the humans, they realize that they got cut off from that great chain and wonder what could be the reason. Only later do they find out it was done by another life form, us humans. And we exemplify completely alien concepts to them: none telepathic and apparently able to interact with something called "space".

So all in all it is a fun little game of around 5h with a little bit of philosophical concepts if you want to think about it or just some neat puzzles and atmosphere if you don't.

Eternal Darkness is a game for the GameCube and was the first Nintendo published game to receive a Mature rating by the ESRB. If you play the game today, I think most will agree that that rating was a bit too much. But the damage was already done, the game didn't sell enough copies and was a commercial failure. A decade later, two attempts by the game director to finance a successor via kickstarter failed, so it seems the game is as cursed as its protagonists.

But why do I recommend it here to you?

Because it has a great story and atmosphere (two big criteria for me in games) and it also has a fascinating (but sadly underused) magic system. The magic system is based on runes, which you can freely combine to try and cast a spell. You will also find translations of a rune and the recipes for spells, but in principle you could cast every spell if you have access to the runes and want to try things. The runes correspond to either a verb or a noun. If you combine Protect with Self, you will cast a shield on you. If you instead combine Protect with Area, you will place an enemy damaging area on the ground. Sadly they did not utilize this magic system to do many interesting things, as you can only combine one verb with one noun and that's it. You will find greater magic circles where you can put in more runes and in principle could cast more complex spells. But alas, they only allow you to put more Pargon runes, which just increase the power of the normal spell. Since every rune is voiced after you cast a spell, I think the last memory of my dying brain will be pargon, pargon, pargon...

The game is horror themed but doesn't include jump scares (with one exception), but instead tries to unnerve the player via sanity effects, as befits its name. Sanity is one of the resources next to health and mana and when it gets low, the chance increases that something will happen, maybe while changing the rooms you will enter an upside down room or your controls will be mirrored. They even included some meta fourth wall breaking stuff like decreasing sound. But nowadays those will not work on you any longer, as the interface looks different today. But still, the goal was to fuck with the players mind and that they achieved. You often question yourself while playing: is that real or not? Which is a masterfully done mechanic for a cosmic horror game.

And did I mention that they patented this and thereby hindered other developers from doing fun stuff like that? Maybe it was deserved karma that the game failed...

But now onto the story and atmosphere: in the game you don't fight against a cosmic horror, but instead three. They each keep one other in balance, so that no one can get the upper hand without being overpowered by the third one. But there are plans in motion to topple this delicate balance. And you are only able to interfere with these plans, because you are the pawn of anotger ancient one yourself. The binding element throughout the story is the Tome of Eternal Darkness, which binds the wearer to it in a nice little ritual with a floor of eternal damned souls and architecture made of bones, oh and did I mention the suspiciously agonized looking statues of the former hosts? Oh and did I mention that the book is bound in human leather and bones? Yeah, your patron isn't exactly nice either. Armed with this good book you fight and puzzle your way through different places around the world which you visit multiple times at different epochs from antiquity to our modern era.

This cosmic horror atmosphere of never really being totally in control is in my opinion wonderfully captured in this game. And due to time shenanigans, it is also made clear, that the power scale is so far outside of humans reach, that cosmic horror insanity is the only sane response.

The controls aren't exactly the strength of the game, but it is functional after getting used to them. If you want to play it nowadays, emulation is probably the easiest way to do that. I used that and was glad for the additional save states and higher resolution.

I highly recommend this game to all those who bemoan that all games are the same and nothing new gets released.

Gorogoa is best described as a really pretty puzzle game with a gameplay mechanic I haven't seen anywhere else. The puzzles are non obvious at first, but at the end you get an eye for them, a little bit similar to The Witness. You have 4 different panels of a comic and you have to align and combine them in a way that they interact to solve the puzzle. It's easiest to understand if you look at a trailer or let's play, since it directly works with the visual medium of comics (but don't watch too long or same problem with every puzzle game, you will know the solutions already).

The developer started in this direction by cutting up comics and rearranging the panels. This gave rise to the idea to incorporate a similar mechanic into a video game.

There is even a story being told in the panels without a word in the roughly 2 hours of puzzling. But you will probably not understand it completely till a second play through, since the story is told in the background pictures and isn't chronological, but disjointed, as fits the games central mechanic of rearranging panels. But this anachronistic storytelling style in combination with the pastel color and very ornamental graphic style is the reason I compared this game to an LSD trip. A highly enjoyable one.

Several Star Trek licensed games are on Steam, now at a significantly discounted price for the annual Star Trek Day celebration.

These include the MMP Star Trek Online, but also single player games Star Trek Bridge Crew and Star Trek Resurgence (a choose your own path role play game).

We’d waited until Resurgence came to Steam, because we did want to buy it from Epic, but decided to be even more patient and wait for a sale so we could get it for our teens as well. I’ve been playing in parallel with one of our teens and debating the impacts of our very different choices.

I have had Bridge Crew since 2022, but we got copies for the teens yesterday. One is into it. It requires running an Ubisoft account synched to Steam which can be annoying, but otherwise G2G.

The Longest Journey takes apparently 17 years, because that is the time span between the release of the original game in 1999 and the last game of the series in 2016, which finally finished the story. The Longest Journey is a classic point and click adventure game, meaning it has a wonderful story and world but sometimes really, really, REALLY stupid puzzles. But luckily only sometimes, often they are both entertaining and brain teasing, but you should still keep a guide nearby to not get frustrated.

You mainly play as April Ryan, a college student in a low futuristic SciFi world. But as it turns out, there is not only one world, but two. There is Stark, where April and technology (as usual, mostly defined as electricity and higher) lives and Arcadia, the world where magic lives. And as it turns out, April is a shifter, somebody able to travel between the worlds. Which is sorely needed, because you need to travel between the two worlds and try to bring balance back, since certain forces try to destroy this balance and forcefully merge both worlds.

That is the basic premise and starting point of a long adventure through two worlds, where you meet a lot of colourful companions, first and foremost "Crow". He is a speaking, well..., crow that follows April after she freed him and always has a comment regarding the situation but sticks to April trough everything and is a true friend and companion. The story starts a little more on the whimsical side, especially when you first reach Arcadia, but the more you progress the more dire the situation becomes and towards the end it leaves the humor completely by the wayside and rather chooses drama as a traveling companion.

While the original game is a full story from beginning to end, it created a fascinating world where many more stories could be told in. So they did and in 2006 they released Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, which tells the continued story from three perspectives: Zoë Castillo, a stark resident, Kian Alvane, from an theocratic empire in Arcadia, and April Ryan again. The sequel was no longer a point and click adventure, but rather a 3D adventure. Sadly, it released in the mid 2000s, which meant it of course had to have stealth and some basic combat sequences. While not disastrous, it still was not really necessary. This time the story is much more melancholic and darker than the original game. Kian is part of an invading empire in Arcadia, April is part of the resistance against them and Zoë tries to find out in Stark why people disappear and a new VR headset+drug combo turns many people into zombies. While I did miss the more whimsical nature of the first game, I still highly enjoyed this game and its story. Walking again through Arcadia and Stark felt like visiting old friends, especially when you meet characters from the first game. I was invested into the player characters and always wanted to know, what happens next. Especially if you remembered a certain name from the first game, you couldn't help but wonder how 2 characters will come together. But sadly the game ends on a big cliffhanger.

... Which wasn't resolved for 8 very long years. In 2014 they finally released the first of Dreamfall Chapters, which concluded with its fifth episode in 2016. As the name suggests, the gameplay was again rather a 3D adventure like in Dreamfall, but this time they cut out the combat & stealth, which was the right call. The story that mostly began in Dreamfall finally got its ending and also the framework story around The Longest Journey in general. Albeit partially in a very quick way at the end where I would love to play 2 or 3 games in that in between time that is only mentioned with a "ah remember that time...".

The problem I have with talking about these 3 games is that I mostly enjoyed them for the story, which I don't want to spoil, and the world, which takes a lot of words to explain. While the concept of two worlds with magic and technology is by no means unique, Arcadia is for sure unique with a lot of love and care taken in creating it and its characters. The gameplay is okay, nothing I would recommend playing the game for.

Let's talk about a more well known game this time. Bioware is most known for their 3D RPG series Mass Effect and Dragon Age nowadays, but in the past they created isometric RPGs like the Baldurs Gate or Neverwinter Nights series. So how did that transition happen? Well, they published 2 games between those periods that helped them find their formula for 3D RPGs. While the first one was Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, which fits more to Dragon Age:Origins due to the pausable real time combat system with multiple party members (which I couldn't play till now due to gamebreaking bugs), I want to talk about their second intermediate game today: Jade Empire.

Many of the elements found in Mass Effect were implemented first and tested in Jade Empire: RPG character development but real time action combat sequences, a group of companions of which a few are romancable and a great epic story with many twists, where the player can influence the outcome somewhat.

#Combat

The combat and character development was build around 3 ressources: health, chi and focus. Health is self explanatory, chi is mana and focus is a third ressource for activating time slow mode or special weapon styles. You can choose between different weapons and magic attacks (ranged or melee) and also later transformations, which were really awesome. Nothing like transforming into a giant golem and smashing the ground to attack all enemies around you. You can also select one companion to follow you around and into combat.

#Companions

The companions are one of the highlights of Jade Empire. By fighting with them side by side they will reveal their past to you and also comment on your actions regarding their own orientation regarding the Way of the closed Fist or the Way of the open Palm. For example The berserker like Black Whirlwind will congratulate you on a well done ambush but will scoff if the solutions don't involve at least 2 murders. The characters are all a joy to experience. They even included a romance for three of the companions.

#Way of Fist/Palm

The way you could influence the main and side quests is also with a unique twist: You have the Way of the Open Palm, which stands for friendliness, understanding and helping each other BUT it could also mean you just want to squeeze a little higher reward out of people with problems by being chummy with them. The opposite concept is the Way of the Closed Fist, which stands for autonomy, strength and doing things YOUR way, but also for teaching people to stand for themselves instead of cowering. Both paths can be used selfishly or for helping build a world more fitting to your ideology. I haven`t really seen that concept elsewhere, in that the normally "evil" way is not only selfish, but rather wants to instill strength in everyone worthy.

#Story

While Jade Empire is set in a faux east asian world, it is an amalgam of many different concepts and best described as east asian counterpart to standard kitchen sink western fantasy with sword, magic, orcs & elves. You are a young spirit monk and after the destruction of your order in the tutorial actually the last one of your order. Due to your training you can interact with the spirit world, which is a highly sought after ability, since the spirits of the recently departed don`t leave the world any longer but linger around. Your goal is to find out why your order had to die and how you can help the spirits move on. The story contained some great executed twists which give the story a nice flow. And it is I think the first game I played, where you can agree and join the antagonist in lieu of a boss fight at the end.

Story spoilers:

As it turns out, your dear Master Li who raised and trained you is in fact the brother of the emperor and the master mind behind the attack on your order in the first place. The spirit monks were the monks of the water dragon and the emperor needed the water dragon (or rather its never ending blood, which is pure water) to end the drought that was plagueing the empire. But with the psychopomp removed, the spirits of the dead had no guide to the afterlife anymore, bringing a lot of unwanted side effects with it. When you attack the emperor, Master Li reveals his decade long scheme and kills you and his brother, making him the emperor instead. The water dragon saves you with its last bit of power and setting you on the path to dethrone Emperor Li, restoring the water dragon and thereby the natural order again. But you can agree with him in the end and subjugate to him, which was something I hadn`t seen before in games.

While this game is by no means a forgotten gem, I don't really see a lot of discussion about it online. So if you haven't played it yet, I highly recommend it, especially if you like Mass Effect.

This time I want to put the spotlight on a free game called Iji, named after the main character and developed by Daniel Remar. As the titular character, a nanomachine enhanced human, you are the last hope in the fight against alien invaders to rescue the last bits of humanity that survived the alien invasion. It is mostly a 2D action game with a little bit of platformer & RPG elements. You put ability points gained by finding them or killing enemies into different stats. Thereby you gain more health, more attack/kick power or can even use the weapons of the enemies against them. There are multiple difficulties for those who seek a challenge. The gameplay consists of you running and jumping through the levels and fighting against the enemies via weapons, kicks or tricks (like making enemies fight against each other by dodging a rocket and letting it hit the enemies behind you).

The game may not look like much at first glance graphic-wise, but it shines with its personality in world & story and the action game play. The characterization of the invading aliens is really well done for such a small game (~5 hours per playthrough). While they have destroyed most of humanity, you can kind of understand them with time, as you read their logs and see their side of the story. So it gets a bit more interesting then the DOOM like beginning. This game uses the video game medium in an interesting way to tell a story about violence and revenge.

What I also enjoyed about this game besides the story and game play is the level design, which is surprisingly complex but well thought trough. You need to learn to navigate the levels and you often have keys and buttons to search for to be able to continue. Another high point are the boss fights. Except the first, who is just to teach you a bit more, all others feature special mechanics and are nice orchestrated tests of skill, especially the final boss fight.

The developer updated this game for 13 years after publishing it in 2008, showing his determination to make it a great game. He incoporated player feedback into the story and switched some things around in order to even make a total pacifist playthrough possible, albeit with the caveat that I needed a guide to make it through a certain situation. But Daniel is merciful and also provides a complete game guide on his website for the game.

The Vale is a game like no other game I played before, because you see it through the eyes of a blind woman. Meaning you won't see shit. Instead you rely on your ears to navigate and fight. The game was developed based around the thought to create a video game for blind people. This meant that at minimum a stereo speaker system (so at least a headset) is necessary, since the attacks will come from left, center or right. You have to block and counter them with the correct timing by listening to the sounds your enemies are producing. Menues are also visually presented in addition to being read by a narrator, so that you don't need to select each option in order to know it, if you are not visually impaired.

According to the comments on steam, a lot of people directly refuse this game, just because it has no visuals. Which is a shame, because when I played it and closed my eyes, I was strongly immersed in the game world after a few minutes. The voice actors of the two main characters, Alex (a blind princess who got attacked by foreign enemies and wants to travel back to the capital as fast as possible in order to warn her brother, the king) and Shepherd (a shepherd who found Alex after her entourage got killed by an ambush and helps Alex get back & is her eyes) do a wonderful job of bringing those characters to life. When Alex gets another bad case of CHS (chronical helper syndrom) while Shepherd gives off cynical quips as answer, but helps nonetheless, it shows the nice dynamic between these two. Since there are no visuals, the whole game happens in your head. Which was a great experience, because it made it pretty easy to imagine to be the protagonist. Listen to your right, don't your hear the laughing of playing children? And on the left your companion is murmering to finally continue on and not just stand in the village square.

You also orientate yourself on the village maps by sound (e.g. go to the hammer hitting the amboss for a smith, a merchant will cry out their good wares, the pub will have laughing and music, etc.), but I couldn`t translate that into a mind map. But luckily the village maps were not complicated, but mostly on a central plaza, meaning everything was around you and nothing was in your way. The fights are of course not on a dark souls level, but I still lost some times, because I wasn't paying attention.

For me I could immerse myself best into the game by playing with closed eyes. But since my brain was not used to all that navigating by ear, I played it in 30-60 min bursts, because I got mental fatigue from it. If you have a blindfold to put over your eyes, it will make it easier, since you can relax your eyes and can also play with opened eyes while not being distracted by your real surrounding.

The main highlight of the game are the two main characters, but I still liked the world and the immersion it offered. And playing a game blind was an experience I didn't had yet, so the novelty factor was also there. The game is not very deep mechnically, but I hope the developers will learn from this beginner step and build more complex and even better games for the blind, because I enjoyed this one. If you want to try this game, there is a demo on steam as well.