I’m still deep in the Withering Rooms trenches - almost literally now (although I can’t say more without spoilers). The game is just absolutely excellent, and I am even starting to get used to the janky and clunky combat. I’m in Chapter 4 now and starting to get some kind of idea of a possibile endgame, although I’m sure there are plenty of more mysteries and secrets and twists to uncover. I also know there are multiple endings, but I am still unsure what decides which one you get as I’ve just been playing blind and I don’t feel like I’ve locked into anything yet.

I know it’s a completely different game and a completely different vibe, but this game’s exploration is giving me almost similar vibes to back when I was first exploring Dark Souls 1. An interesting and dangerous world, weird ass NPCs, distinct art direction, mysteries and secrets, world building and story in item descriptions, locations that connect through shortcuts and link back to previous areas… It’s just great.

Next on the agenda is exploring the extremely cursed attic, but I think I might need a dedicated gear loadout for it as my default set gets overwhelmed by curse damage after just a couple of seconds in there. After that’s it’s the endgame, I guess? Can’t wait to see how it ends.

I played some Desperados last year and tbh they hold up pretty well apart from some graphics/UI stuff. I don’t think I ever played Robin Hood beyond the demo back in the day, but I played enough Commandos/Desperados to know it’s quality.

One final subject i wanted too touch on is that this game makes me wish for a Robin Hood game.

I don’t know if it’s your type of game but Robin Hood: Legend of Sherwood is a classic.

Rise of the Ronin is like Ghost but less cinematic and less graphically impressive but with better combat. I guess it depends on what you’re looking for exactly.

The upcoming I Have No Change has a certain Papers-esque feel to it. You’re stuck in a kiosk doing mundane things, and narratives are told through the characters that visit your kiosk.

Pope also said he was more wary of releasing a major new game now because he enjoyed such critical success with Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn that he doesn’t want to let players down.

“There’s also the sense that I was pretty happy with Obra Din and Papers, Please and I don’t… you know, maybe I can’t do it again, kind of thing. Do I really want to maybe just go out on a high note? Why drag my myself down with the next thing that people may not like?

You know, I feel him there. I can’t even imagine how to make a successful follow-up after two games that were not just smash hits, but brilliant and unconventional too. Everyone is basically expecting a piece of genius (me included). Not to mention the step up from Papers to Obra Dinn was so huge in terms of production and scope that it’s easy to expect another escalation.

I don’t think I play enough retro games to warrant owning one of these, and if I was to buy a handheld it’d probably be a Steam Deck. But they are such nice objects I kinda want one anyway.

Great article as always, I love your content. I especially appreciated the developer interviews about the 8GB RAM limitations.

Sorry, I forgot to answer but thanks for the reply! I do like Team Ninja so I might pick it up on a sale.

Same thing happened with music too, music piracy cratered with the success of Spotify.

I could barely get through one playthrough of it to be honest. The first 20ish hours were alright but by the end of the 60h playthrough I had to actively force myself to finish it. I agree that the story is competent but nothing special, and the way it’s mono-serious and every line is delivered in the same dour, stoic monotone just wore me down over the playthrough. Plus the quest design is repetitive and pretty dull, as is the open world stuff. And the combat is fine but really not deep or varied enough to fuel such a long playtime.

While the world is gorgeous from a visual design perspective, I didn’t really get the alive sensation at all personally. That is something I felt in RDR2 for sure, but Ghost just felt like a bog standard Ubisoft open world to me.

But I seem to be in a minority feeling this way about Ghost so maybe I’m just getting old and cranky.

I’m with you. I thought it was alright but I never saw what everyone else seemed to see in the game. I do admire it for being both beautiful and immaculately optimised however.

How are you finding Stranger Of Paradise? Since getting into Ninja Gaiden this past year I’ve come into contact with some more CAG players and some of them talked it up as having really great combat.

I like Civ V personally. I like the hexagons and I like the one-unit-per-tile instead of death stacks, even though the AI isn’t great at using it without community patches. I also like its visuals the most.

It also has the beloved fan mod Vox Populi, if you want to get into all that.

Withering Rooms

I’ve been absolutely absorbed by this game the past week, having finally pulled the trigger on it after eyeing it for a long time. It’s a 2.5D light horror roguelike, but there is so much more to it than it seems at first. Whenever I think I have a handle on it it keeps throwing new cool stuff at me, and the world building and story just keeps getting more interesting the more I play. It has a very unique vibe to it and a very distinctive and unique voice and direction.

The combat is clunky and janky yes, but you do get used to it and it gets a bit better after you start unlocking more tools, spells and weapons and start being able to actually make focused builds. The build crafting and customization is fun even when the mechanics of the combat itself is a little clunky. But this isn’t a game you play for the combat anyway, but for the exploration, the lore, the story and the world building. Which is also partly told through item descriptions, Dark Souls-style.

Honestly I really don’t want to spoil anything as the game has some interesting surprises so if you think this is your vibe I recommend just giving it a chance. It’s very cool and I can see why it’s such a beloved hidden gem. I can’t wait to see what else it has up its sleeve.

I mean, I don’t know about that personally. It’s definitely not a game that glorifies the police, but I also wouldn’t call it an ACAB propaganda machine by any stretch of the imagination. If anything it’s completely neutral on the matter. It contains both examples of police being absolute scumbags and police being just good people trying their best to help others (such as Kim, Judit and even to an extent Jean - as well as others I’m sure).

Even beyond characters I feel like it is pretty even-handed, and multiple times goes into detail about the hardships and emotional toll of policework in a sympathetic manner, such as during the death notification.

Ah, gotcha! Yeah that makes more sense. BG3 is very impressive from a systems perspective and how flexible many of the encounters are for sure.

Crazy to hear that about BG3, the world is absolutely static there. NPCs are just standing around waiting for the player and there isn’t even a day/night cycle! The game has its qualities but a living dynamic world really isn’t one of them.

You can also try Chrono Ark if it gets stale, which I feel compelled to proselytize for every time roguelike deckbuilders come up now. Incredible game and super underrated somehow.

I’m exposed as a filthy console user XD

*glass shattering noises*

There might be some lower level person who has some writing credit left, I’m not sure. I know Anton Vill (who drew the thought cabinet) still works at ZA/UM and I think is involved in the artwork of Zero Parades. But none of the original creators of the IP are left, and none of the major contributors (Robert Kurvitz, Argo Tuulik, Martin Luiga) are left.

Oh… I didn’t realise you were on console. I highly doubt it :( I’m pretty sure save files are encrypted to prevent cheating, at least on PlayStation.

First game I got or first one I bought for my own money? The first game I ever got and played was Super Mario Land for the GameBoy. I remember when the hype around Pokémon Red/Blue coming to Europe was building I was trying to calculate how many weeks of allowance I would need to save up to afford it, so that might have been the first one I actually purchased, I can’t remember for sure if I bought it myself or got it as a gift. Diablo 2 launched a year later and I know I bought that one as I vividly remember the car ride back from the store, so otherwise that might be it.

All of these were of course incredibly worth it. I would never have gotten into video games without that GameBoy and Super Mario Land I think, and Pokémon was a formative experience for me as I got to participate in the whole Pokémania phenomenon. And Diablo 2 is one of the games I have the most hours in over my childhood, it kept resurfacing over my school years as me and the other gamers in my school would randomly get the urge to start playing Diablo 2 again randomly almost yearly over the course of like 8 years after its release.

Ah damn that sucks! :(

I’m sure there are save files to download at various points from the internet, but that’s not as fun either I suppose.

Yeah that would be fantastic.

Mine as well, although not super high up on it. I keep hearing good things though.

The game has no identity, it’s literally just stuff the team saw in other popular games thrown in haphazardly. It’s a soup. RDR2 had trains? Chuck it in there boys. Same with the random Zelda sky islands. There is some fun to be had in it I think and it seems to appeal to a certain type of gamer, but I wouldn’t expect the game to make any sense.

Depends on what issues you had with the way the game was. Some fundamental issues remain but the game is much better now than on launch. Here is a good video about it.

I forgot to ask the other day. What happened to your DS3 save?

Final Fantasy XV is the greatest fishing minigame for me personally. Haven’t played Okami though.

I have a feeling this will be to Owlcat was BG3 was to Larian.

INMOST

I have been hit by open world fatigue in my Rise of the Ronin playthrough and so I needed an intermission. INMOST is on 70% sale and has been on my radar for a bit after being recommended to play it some time ago, so I finally got around to it. It’s only a 5-6h game so it was perfect to sneak in, played through it in two sittings over two days.

I really loved this game. Puzzle platformers are not my genre of choice but this one felt perfectly fine for me. Not really any precision platforming to speak of and the puzzles were all intuitive enough that it never felt frustrating. Overall the gameplay felt smooth and tight and the generous save states on death further minimized frustration.

This game is not really about the gameplay though as much as it is a work of art. The pixel graphics are stunning, the art direction is perfect and the music is absolutely breathtaking. On top of that the writing is also quite good. The ending is a little on-the-nose for me for what is otherwise a nicely allegorical game, but even so it doesn’t bring my ratings down. There are even some quite funny moments here and there, despite the otherwise heavy themes.

Recommended for anyone that likes artsy indie games, especially if you enjoy darker themes and depressing vibes.

Out Fishing Demo

Wishlisted this when I saw the announcement trailer so I had to check out the demo when it dropped last week. It was… okay. It was much worse than it looked from the trailer and worse than I had hoped in general. It’s a shame because the concept is great and has tons of potential. Fishing and horror is a great combination that fits together perfectly. Unfortunately the fishing mechanics are too simple to be really engaging and the horror is pretty bland. It also goes too hard and fast into shock value and jump scares and whatnot instead of doing what a horror fishing game in an isolated setting should do: slowly build suspense and unsettling atmosphere and work with creepy environmental storytelling.

I’ll still keep it wishlist to keep track of it as I like fishing games but I am much less hopeful now than when I first saw the trailer.

I never played it but I watched the ChristopherOdd Let’s Play of it and enjoyed it. Fun little game for sure.

Combat looks so-so but the card based abilities sounds cool enough for a wishlist.

• Withering Rooms - 2.5D horror roguelike in a procedurally generated victorian manor. I’ve only heard great things and it looks phenomenal and unique.
• The Drifter - Australian point and click with beautiful pixel art, a supposedly amazing story and some stellar voice acting.
• Death Howl - turn based strategy meets deckbuilder meets Soulslike!? Looks beautiful and interesting.
• Radiolight - Horror walking simulator that looks inspired by Firewatch and Alan Wake. Looks interesting.
• Seance of Blake Manor - Was a huge hit last year, I’m keen to try it. Agatha Christie simulator in a mysterious manor sounds good to me.
• Murders on the Yangtze River - Chinese Ace Attorney but more serious and less silly is what I’ve heard it described as. I’m intrigued.

Oh right, this game is coming. Might check out the demo it looks pretty cool.

Same goes for some of the main story writing I’ve seen. Truly uninspired stuff, just absolute blandness.

I see an FPS with a slide and kick from F.E.A.R., I wishlist. It’s a simple equation. This looks like a blast.

For me it mostly depends on what the ending of the main story is like, and how invested I was in the narrative. If I was really invested and the game ended in a satisfying way my overwhelming impulse tends to be to immediately uninstall. A kind of “snapping the finished book shut and placing it on the bookshelf” thing that is satisfying in and of itself.

Oh of course not, I was just musing out loud. But I think maybe I just don’t “get it” and am not in the target audience anymore. I think what made me understand what the game is is someone said that it’s just an offline MMO. I think if I was still sixteen or something I might have been into dedicating the next six months to nolifing this game. But these types of games are just not for me anymore. I don’t play any MMOs anymore for a reason.

Chrono Ark

I went back and finished Chrono Ark. Well, okay, I still haven’t won a run with every character yet and I have some DLC content to get to if I want. But I reached both endings and the epilogue. Which, as a note for anyone who gets this game because of my recommendation: your game might bug out and unlock the epilogue before you’ve seen both endings (it did for me and I sadly started watching it unbeknownst before reaching the second ending). Try to avoid watching it until at least after seeing the second ending, or it won’t make a lot of sense. Though having watched it now it really would make the most sense after having reached golden friendship with all investigators first.

Anyway, I really loved this game. I’ve already waxed about it in these threads. The gameplay is really fantastic, and while the actual prose itself isn’t always the best (partially due to translation I’ve been told) I really enjoyed the story and several of the themes it touched on. It surprised me at several moments, and even with the prose sometimes lacking it still managed to land the big moments for me.

I do have one small complaint, and that is in the marriage of cinematic storytelling and a challenging roguelike deckbuilder. Now granted, this might be exacerbated by me sucking at the game. But I did find the climax of the story somewhat frustrating since it took me a couple of attempts to clear the final two bosses. And that’s fine in a roguelike usually, you shouldn’t expect to win against the final boss on the first attempt. But here the story and the presentation was all laid out in a way that made the losses feel very bad - I just wanted to see the conclusion of the story. Especially since unlike something like a Souls game or whatever it’s not just like you can gradually work on beating the final boss. You have to invest over three hours into another run just to see if this time maybe your deck is good enough. Though I will say: there is a “Hope” difficulty meant for those who just want the story, and maybe I should have used that when it was time to see the endings. So it might be partially user error.

Having gotten that off my chest though, it still does nothing to tarnish my overall rating of the game. It’s a phenomenal roguelike deckbuilder that will appeal to anyone who likes the genre purely through gameplay, and on top of that it’s a full fledged visual novel with an actually surprisingly interesting story. I will definitely keep playing it, maybe I won’t 100% it but I would like to explore the DLCs and try out some of the team setups and combos I still haven’t tried out.