cobysev
- 65 Posts
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Joined 2Y ago
Cake day: Jun 15, 2023
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I posted a review here earlier this year, but A Way Out was an excellent 2-player co-op game! I really enjoyed it. Story rich puzzles with some action interspersed. And it’s split-screen even if you’re playing online, so you can see what your partner is up to and coordinate with them. The ending was heart-wrenching too! Such an emotionally impacting story. Check out my review for a spoiler-free intro to that game.
Diablo 3
My wife, two friends, and I all played Diablo IV online together. We beat the main campaign together and had a lot of fun with it. We’re trying to beat the expansion campaign too, but my wife and one friend dropped out, so it’s just been me and a buddy powering through it.
That’s a game where you can just have fun dicking around in the world, even if there isn’t an objective. And it has plenty of endgame content to keep you entertained after you beat the campaign.
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- lemmy.world
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Surprise early review! I usually spend all night writing these (because I'm a night owl) and then post it first thing in the morning before I go to bed. But I wound up with a free day and nothing to do, so I decided to write a review this afternoon.
*Vampire Hunters* is essentially *[Vampire Survivors](https://lemmy.world/post/20925248)*, except instead of an 8-bit top-down survival game, you're now in the middle of the action with a 32-bit FPS view! The developers even admitted this game was designed to be a mix between old-school FPS games and the innovative gameplay from *Vampire Survivors*.
No, they did not make that previous game. [Gamecraft Studios](https://gamecraftstudios.com/) made *Vampire Hunters*; whereas [poncle](https://poncle.games/) made *Vampire Survivors*.
Like its predecessor, *Vampire Hunters* is a survival game, where you fight an infinitely growing number of monsters who are all slowly shambling toward you. Unlike its predecessor though, there is a time limit to pass each level. You need to survive for 30 minutes before you can escape the level.
Technically, you can stay as long as you want and continue fighting enemies indefinitely, but enemies will get significantly harder until you're overwhelmed. So having an escape is a nice change.
You start by picking your character. There are six characters to play, but only three are unlocked right away. You need to meet certain criteria to unlock the rest. Each character has different stats, so pick something that aligns with your play style. I chose the Paladin because I felt her weakness was easier for me to manage than the other two.
There is only one stage to play starting out - Brotherhood Chateau - so you can jump right in at this point. The game has eight main stages and three bonus stages. As you make progress, you'll unlock more stages to play.
The gameplay starts out real simple. You have one weapon that your character starts with, and you take out cultists as they spawn from portals within iron maidens scattered around the castle. There is no firing required; like *Vampire Survivors*, your weapons auto-fire as you point at enemies. When they die, most of them will drop a soul (that blue hovering dot) that you can pick up.
Collect a few of these and you'll get a full-screen menu pop up with four random options to pick from. Mostly weapons to acquire (or upgrade a current weapon), but sometimes you'll get a relic that will boost your stats in a specific way.
You can carry up to ten primary weapons, two passive items that will either damage enemies or buff you, and two secondary weapons for close-up combat. Which are a real life-saver when you get into a tight corner with enemies in your face.
And yes, you use all weapons simultaneously. So the bottom of your screen will slowly fill up with weapons as you acquire more. How many hands do you have?!
I don't know if it's strictly a Paladin ability (I haven't played any other characters yet), but I can do a stomp on the ground if I hit Shift while in the air. This blows back enemies and damages them, which is excellent for clearing a space when I'm getting overwhelmed.
There's also a Blood Skill you can use by pressing F when the red orb in the bottom center of the screen fills up. There's not much information about it in the game, except that it does some sort of attack or ability for a few seconds, so I keep forgetting it's there.
Every once in a while, a boss will spawn with a life bar across the top of the screen. They can be a nuisance, but generally aren't that bad to deal with as long as you keep moving and don't neglect waves of monsters for them.
They get really annoying when you're overwhelmed with hundreds of monsters and four bosses spawn all at the same time.
Fortunately, you can see all enemies through walls, so you're never surprised going around a corner. Bosses show up red when looking at them through walls, so you can quickly identify them from across the map.
When you inevitably die (or finish the stage), you can go back to the main menu and upgrade your character. There's a Skill Tree, where you can upgrade specific attributes or unlock/upgrade artifacts by spending the Reputation Level points or Boss Tokens that you earned from each stage.
If you've unlocked any artifacts, you can equip up to three of them on the main menu.
There are also Permanent Upgrades, which boost your character's stats in specific categories. You spend Upgrade Coins to boost each of these stats, which you also earn by playing each level.
When you meet certain criteria, you might unlock a constellation, which you can then equip for added benefits. You can only have one constellation equipped at a time, and they give you a positive and a negative effect, so choose them wisely.
Finally, you can select your main weapon to start with. The three main characters' weapons are unlocked right away, but you can unlock any others you've come across in your gameplay by spending Boss Tokens.
Running all over the levels can get you swarmed on all sides if you're not careful, so I like to plant myself on a ramp or platform with only one entrance, then pick off enemies as they come up to me. I stay until I'm completely overwhelmed, run to the other side of the map to clear the area, then go back to start again. That strategy seems to work pretty well for me when I'm just trying to run out the clock.
There are treasure chests that randomly spawn throughout the level. They'll appear as a gold chest icon in the world (See lower left corner of last screenshot). They bring up the full-screen menu with four optional weapons/relics/etc. to add or upgrade.
When you take down a boss, they'll drop a red chest, which will give you a buff to a particular stat for that round. All chests only last for a limited time, so fight your way to them as soon as you see their icon in the world! Or miss out on easy upgrades.
Each stage has different requirements for ending the stage after the 30-minute mark. I've beaten three stages so far: the Brotherhood Chateau requires that you approach each iron maiden portal and manually close it. The Corrupted Necropolis (Egyptian tomb-themed stage) requires that you slowly summon two ankh's on either end of the stage, then place them over the hands of the giant statue in the center of the stage.
In the Village Yard, you just need to get to a hot-air balloon and escape to the skies.
So if you enjoy fighting endless waves of enemies and surviving as long as possible, check out this game! It was a lot of fun. There are leaderboards for each stage, showing global rankings and points earned. My highest rank in any stage was 1,691st place, as seen below:
If I'm brave enough to stick around past the 30-minute mark and keep mowing down monsters, maybe I can get my ranking below the 4-digit mark. I've easily spent several entire evenings playing this game; it's pretty addicting. Now I need to go check out the fourth stage (Yuki Vale) and see what that's all about. Looks like it's Japanese-themed.
I personally really enjoyed New Dawn, but it gets a lot of hate from the community. Maybe because each Far Cry game is a completely unique game, and New Dawn is just a continuation of Far Cry 5. I read a lot of reviews that said it didn’t bring anything new to the franchise. Of course! It’s just part 2 of a previous game! You get to see what the world is like 17 years after the events of Project Eden, so the map is the same and a lot of the gameplay mechanics are the same. You do have a community that you’re trying to build up; restoring order and safety amongst survivors of the nuclear fallout, so that’s unique.
One thing I didn’t like was that your character from Far Cry 5 (the Deputy) makes an appearance in New Dawn. Turns out they’ve been brainwashed by Joseph Seed after spending 17 years trapped in a bunker alone with him, so they’re fiercely loyal to Joseph now. Fortunately, Joseph is not the enemy in this game. You actually ally with Joseph’s new group New Eden, so the Deputy (now called The Judge) becomes a gun-for-hire.
I did not like Primal. I played a couple hours of it and just couldn’t get into it. It’s more of a survival game than a Far Cry game. You have to craft everything to survive and you have a stamina bar that depletes unless you regularly eat and sleep. Fast-traveling takes a huge chunk out of stamina, which is annoying and defeats the purpose of “fast” traveling, but I guess it’s realistic.
Unlike most Far Cry games where you’re isolated in a region, trying to overthrow a dictator-wannabe or something, Primal is more about building a community and eventually becoming chief of your own tribe. Sure, there are other tribes to fight against, but it just felt weird not having a solid objective besides surviving. Maybe there’s more plot to it and I just didn’t play enough to get into it.
I still haven’t played Far Cry 3 and Blood Dragon. I own both of them and I’ve been meaning to get around to it. I’m an '80s child, so I love the retro-futuristic aesthetic of Blood Dragon. Are they related in story at all, or is Blood Dragon just a standalone expansion for Far Cry 3? If it’s unrelated to Far Cry 3’s plot, I might just jump into it and check it out.
It’s my favorite of the Far Cry games. I love the setting and gameplay! I actually wrote a review on it recently and posted it here to Lemmy.
I don’t think the nuclear explosion was related to Joseph Seed. He was just a “prophet,” claiming the end times were here. The nukes were going to happen regardless, he was just trying to save as many people as he could, whether they wanted to be saved or not. He was the villain, but only in an “ends justify the means” sense. In the end, he was actually right; the world did fall to nuclear holocaust.
Similarly, Far Cry 5. At the beginning, when you’re told to arrest Joseph Seed, you can choose to just turn around and walk out the door. The sheriff will agree with you, saying it’s best to just leave him and his cult alone and it would’ve only ended in your deaths if you tried to arrest him. Then the game ends.
Man… Call of Duty: United Offense was the game my squadron played all the time while we were deployed to Iraq in 2007. Someone had a cracked copy they brought with them and we installed it on all our computers in the squadron (we were an IT squadron).
Once a day, around lunchtime, we’d shut down the whole squadron for about 30 minutes. We’d hang signs on our doors that said we were closed for “simulated warfare training.” Then we’d jump into a massive free-for-all match and shoot everything that moved until there was one person left standing. Someone had dozens of custom maps people had made online, so we always had some new and unique map to play with.
I don’t miss Iraq, but I do miss those days. CoD was my favorite FPS series back in the day. Now it’s complete garbage.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (the 2009 original, not the 2022 reboot) was the first time I felt like the franchise wasn’t trying anymore. I mostly played the campaign mode and that was the first campaign that was basically just a carbon copy of the previous game. Same exact plot, same exact ending, just a new villain who took over for the villain in the previous Modern Warfare game.
Black Ops was kind of weird, but not that bad. However, I completely lost interest when trying to play Black Ops 2 and haven’t bought a new game since. I hear they’re up to Black Ops 6 now?
creator
toI’ve definitely wasted many evenings building in this game. I actually had to cut off one of my friends; he was exclusively building in my server and would message me all the time, asking me to boot up Enshrouded and leave it running overnight so he could play.
There is an Enshrouded Dedicated Server you can set up so the game is always running in the background for people to connect to. But I’ve had problems getting it working, and I’d rather not dedicate resources to hosting a game in the background if I only have a couple friends pop in once in a while.
So my friends mostly don’t play unless I’m playing too, which has encouraged me to spend oodles of time in Enshrouded over the past year. There’s a reason it’s my #3 most played game despite only being out for a year and a half.
creator
toWhen I first started playing, when lore was just a small thing you could piece together by reading bits of scrolls and journals scattered around the world, I theorized that The Shroud was keeping the world trapped in stasis. That’s why, no matter how much you changed, it’d always reset back to its original state after you left the area for 30 minutes (or logged out and back in again).
The Flame Altars kept The Shroud out, so you could enact permanent change near them. And your own Flameborn soul ensured nothing changed while you stuck nearby. But no changes would stick anywhere else in the world.
Of course, now there is tons of new lore in the game and my theory is practically debunked. But it’s still my little fan theory. I’m hoping that the final game will have an endgame plot to rid the land of The Shroud permanently. But I’ve been playing so long now, I’m kind of used to it perpetually being around and I’m not all that concerned with its tenacity now.
creator
toI haven’t heard anything specific from the developers about wiping gameplay for a final product, but I will say that I’ve been playing since it released and I’ve never once had my progress wiped. The devs have been pretty good about upgrading your progress to match the current build so you don’t need to start over. Even with radical changes, your base building is left untouched.
A friend and I spent weeks building a massive pyramid and temple on an empty hill once. One day, we logged in and found that a new village had been added to the game, near the top of that hill. Our base was completely untouched; everything we changed in our build area stayed the same.
It was weird to see a village spawned right up to our build area, then get cut off right at the border. But we were glad to see that our progress was left untouched.
Even stuff like XP and leveling has been progressing instead of resetting. I maxed out my character’s level and gear and spent months just exploring the game and building stuff, not worrying about character progression. Then when the latest zone unlocked for exploration, I noticed I could level up even higher and upgrade even more abilities in my skill tree. None of my progress was reset for the new zone.
Heck, even with a formally maxed out character, the new zone was surprisingly challenging and I had to work to progress my character’s stats and equipment even more in order to survive there.
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- lemmy.world
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Welcome back! Today we're going to be doing an in-depth look at [the first game I ever posted here](https://lemmy.world/post/20040119): *Enshrouded*. Now that I do long-form blog discussions instead of just screenshot posts, I figured it was time to revisit this game and give it a solid overview.
This is the third most-played game in my Steam library, which says a lot considering I have over 4,000 games. My friends and I have put about 532 hours into this game so far.
*Enshrouded* has been in early access for about a year and a half and the developers are still actively working on it. I'm kind of glad I waited until now to give it a full review because it's received tons of new content in the past year, and it's only getting better.
*Enshrouded* is unique in that it's a third-person open-world fantasy game, but it's also a crafting/survival game where you can dig/mine anywhere there is terrain and destroy almost everything placed in the world.
You can travel the world, discovering new quests and lore and improving your weapons, armor, and skills. Or, you can pick a place to settle down and build your own fantasy home, literally from the ground up. By the current endgame, you can have up to ten city-wide bases established anywhere in the world, where you can build to your heart's content.
You can also host your own public or private server and invite up to 16 people to quest in your custom world. You can fine-tune the settings of your server, so players or NPCs are stronger or weaker, determine how quickly weapons and tools break (or set them to never break), adjust how long daylight and nighttime is, and a ton more detailed customizations. Not needing food and water to survive is a default setting, although you can turn it on if you want the true survival feeling. You can also lock down your builds so strangers joining your game can't just destroy your cities and loot your resources.
I just started a new character to get screenshots for this post and I was surprised to see an opening cutscene explaining the lore of the game! That's a new addition.
Long ago, a stranger traveled to the lands of Embervale and presented the humans and Ancients with "The Elixir," a potent drug that boosted one's natural abilities. It was highly addicting and humans, of course, went a little nuts over this miracle drug, attempting to harvest their own elixir straight out of the earth themselves.
But like the Mines of Moria, humans delved too greedily and too deep, and they awoke The Shroud - a terrible fog that poisons the land and turns people into a sort of mindless undead creature called The Fell.
As The Shroud overtook the lands, humans and the Ancients worked together to create "The Flameborn," a type of person attuned to the power of fire, who is more resistant to The Shroud. This is your character.
It's never really explained, but Flameborn are essentially immortal. If you die, you just respawn from the last Flame Altar or Return Beacon you visited, so you can't ever truly have a game over. Also, you're resistant to fire.
By the way, if you find vials of the elixir in-game, it'll give a 30-minute buff of 30% damage increase and let you stay in The Shroud for up to a minute longer while it's active.
After you've built your custom Flameborn character, the game opens with you awakening within a Cinder Vessel. You climb out to find yourself in a long-forgotten Ancient Vault. Society has basically collapsed long ago and despite some scattered "Scavengers" (humans driven mad by elixir consumption) who roam the lands, there's no sign of people.
Traveling through the halls of the vault, you find a Flame Shrine, which ignites in your presence. (All sources of light in the world - even extinguished flames - will automatically flare up when you approach them.) The flame whispers to you, urging you to create a Flame Altar in the world to shelter yourself from the dark. The vault doors open, allowing you to explore the ruins of the world.
You step out onto a crumbling and overgrown terrace, where you get your first glance at the outside world and its various ruins. There are weather events in this game and it happened to be overcast at this point of my gameplay, but you'll see random sunny days and rainy days as well. Even snowfall if you're high enough up in the mountains!
The plains below are marked with a tall red flame, showing the general area for you to build your first Flame Altar. But to get there, you have to travel through a Shroud-filled cavern down the mountain.
This is your first experience in dealing with The Shroud. When you step into it, a timer bar appears at the top of the screen, counting down to your end if you don't escape The Shroud. You start with about 5 minutes of time, but as you strengthen the flame at your Flame Altar, you'll improve the amount of time you can spend in The Shroud.
When you make it to the plains, you'll need to pull up your crafting menu to make a Flame Altar. Make sure you have the proper materials to make it! In this case, you need 5 stones, which you can literally pick up off the ground.
Once you have made your Flame Altar, you need to place it in the world. See the faint yellow square around the borders of the plains? That designates the build area near the Flame Altar. Anywhere within that square, you can build whatever you want. As you level up your Flame Altar, that square will get exponentially larger, until you have space for a small city!
It's actually a cube space; you also have a limit to how high and how low you can build from that shrine. But as with the sides, that space will grow as you level up the Flame Altar. You can eventually build a massive tower to the heavens! Or a dungeon deep into hell...
Put multiple Flame Altars within range of each other to expand a single base's build region, or place them randomly around the world. Flame Altars are not only build areas, but also fast-travel points, so scattering them in hard-to-reach areas saves you on travel time around the massive map.
Remember that you can only place two Flame Altars when you start the game, so don't make a bunch of them. As you strengthen the flame at your Flame Altar, you will be able to use more. Ten is the current max number of Flame Altars you can have in the world, so place them wisely. You can always deactivate them and re-place them somewhere else, but anything you've built in their region will eventually disappear if you walk away for 30 minutes.
The flame at your new Flame Altar whispers to you, telling you to seek out more survivors who are slumbering in other nearby Ancient Vaults. At this point, you can either dedicate your time to crafting a base, or going out to find other survivors in the world. I chose to track down the first survivor - a blacksmith.
There are currently nine craftspeople, five assistants to the craftspeople, and ten villagers to find in the world. The craftspeople have specialized skills that will expand your crafting capabilities, the assistants have duplicate skills of specific craftspeople, so you can have two people with the same crafting skills scattered around your base, and the villagers are just NPCs to make your bases look more lived in.
Now that I have a blacksmith, I need a shelter for him. I guess I should at least build a house. You need to craft a workbench first, which will give you more advanced crafting abilities than what you can access from your crafting menu.
Once you've placed a workbench, accessing its menu will give you blocks of building materials you can craft. As you discover new materials in the world, this menu will expand with new types of building blocks.
I know the numbers don't add up - 100 stone blocks from 2 stones?! But hey, if I have to mine 100 stones to craft 100 stone blocks, I'll be mining all day! And 100 blocks don't go very far when building. So I'm glad I can craft more materials with limited resources. It keeps the gameplay moving forward without bogging you down with (excessively) repetitive tasks.
Once you have blocks crafted, ensure you have a construction hammer on your toolbar. (You can craft one from your crafting menu or from the workbench menu). Switch to your construction hammer, open the building mode (Tab button on PC), then select the shape and material you want to construct.
You can lay one individual brick at a time, or select a custom shape to build a platform, wall, giant block, ramp, roof, etc. If you have dirt or stones in your inventory, you can also create various shapes and sizes of terrain and edit the shape of the land around you.
You can also craft an axe and pickaxe to cut down trees and dig up the terrain. Everything is destructible around the world and will restore to their original setting if you leave the area for about 30 minutes. Except for anything within the build area of your Flame Altar; those changes are permanent until you remove the Flame Altar and leave the area for 30 minutes. So don't go mining in your backyard unless you want to destroy the natural terrain. Although you can always manually fill it back in with the construction hammer and some stones or dirt.
I found some flint to mine on a cliff side here, which is one of my favorite building blocks. There are dozens of different materials to be found around the world, so you can customize the look of your bases however you want.
I finished building a small rough stone house with plant fiber roof just as it started raining. Which was good, as the blacksmith was starting to complain about not having a roof over his head.
Then the blacksmith informed me of a nearby Elixir Well that needed to be cleared out. Yeah, yeah, as soon as I'm done taking a nap.
The Elixir Wells are home to Shroud Roots: giant red fungus-looking things which are the cause of The Shroud. Chopping them down with an axe will clear the area around the Elixir Well of any Shroud. Although if you leave the area for 30 minutes, it will revert to its original state and the Shroud will come back.
Shroud Roots are guarded by large bosses; in this particular case, a Fell Thunderbrute. When you take down these boss-level characters, you can claim their heads, which you can later mount on your wall in your home. I've been meaning to build a trophy room in my original game's castle...
Destroying the Shroud Root will give you a skill point, which you can spend in a skill tree to further spec your character. There are twelve categories to build out. By the endgame, you will have enough skill points to have nearly maxed out three of them, so you're not locked into one specific category of gameplay. I personally chose Battlemage, Wizard, and Healer. (Since my teammates are always jumping head-first into fights they can't handle, ha!)
As you play on, you'll find more enemies around the world, plenty of quests, materials, and cosmetics to discover, and tons of lore hidden in books and scrolls.
There are varying climates, like desert wastelands, freezing winter mountainscapes, forests, plains, and of course, Shroud valleys and mines everywhere. Or you can get to work building a cozy hobbit hole deep underground, a castle way up in the mountains, or a fairy home deep in the woods.
Don't forget to craft a glider, so you can coast quickly across the various regions. Besides fast travel between Flame Altars, gliding is the best way to travel between places. I like to place my Flame Altars high up on mountains so I can fast-travel there and then jump and glide to my nearby destination.
Just keep an eye on your stamina gauge while you're gliding. Nothing worse than being a mile up in the sky and all of a sudden falling to your doom. If you're about to run out of stamina, the best thing to do is just drop, which will stop consuming stamina, then glide again when you're just about to hit the ground. You'll tuck and roll and take no damage.
Here's my first attempt at building a small castle in the starting zone prairie. You can garden and plant pretty much anything that grows in the game, which is where that massive perfectly-aligned forest came from in the background. You can also build farms and raise animals, or find dogs and cats in the world to keep as pets in your base.
Here's a shot of the main floor inside the castle. The back wall inside the giant fireplace is a secret door, with steps leading down into an underground cavern where my alchemist and blacksmith hang out.
Here's my first attempt at building a castle wall near the top of a mountain. I used glowing blue blocks to create the impression of a moat, which looks fantastic all lit up at night. Water is the one resource you can't build with in this game. (Yet!) The developers have mentioned that it's something they'd like to do, but it's on the back burner for now.
Oh, and that dragon in the first screenshot? My buddies and I took it down. That was a rough fight.
This "Fell Dragon Youngling" is currently the endgame boss. I dunno how big an adult one of these will be, but there are dragon skeletal remains scattered around the world that are bigger than cities! I hope the developers incorporate an adult Fell Dragon in a later update, because that would be an epic endgame challenge!
The map is only about 1/3rd open for exploration, and since early access dropped, two new regions have opened up with new content, including several non-Shroud dungeons with rewards for completion. So there's tons more to come with this game. It's so much fun, no matter whether you enjoy questing, base building, crafting, or just exploring. I highly recommend you check out *Enshrouded!*
It can definitely seem unfair at times. I mentioned in another comment that it feels like the game has a story it wants to tell and it punishes you for straying too far from the plot. Fortunately, it marks your conversation choices, so if you have to redo conversations, you know which path you previously took.
I think 02 must be the sheep.
Ah! That makes sense! I wondered if there was going to be some twist in the plot where the original Jan was an alter himself (the actual #2) and the real original died with the rest of the crew. But I didn’t want to speculate and inadvertently spoil a good twist.
I’ve watched thousands of movies and TV shows and played a lot of games, and my wife gets mad at me because I’m pretty good at spotting a twist coming a mile away now. So I do my best not to speculate where the plot is going in these posts. But you’re right, it might just be as simple as counting how many clones have been made.
Yeah, there definitely seems to be a story the game wants to tell, and you’re punished for veering too far from the plot. I’ve definitely restarted a save or two to undo a bad choice.
I do like that it highlights your previous conversation choices, so you know which route you picked and could try another option in your next run. That definitely makes it a bit easier.
I’m excited to see what new alters you create and what their personalities will be like, but I’m also kind of dreading the personnel management system getting too complex.
Thanks! I do this as a hobby and would probably get burnt out if I had to do this for work. I attempted to make daily posts for a while as a personal writing challenge and I got to #50 before I had to take a break.
But my posting would definitely be more consistent if someone paid me to do it. 😆 I need to go back and redo the first handful of posts I’ve made here, since I started out just posting a single screenshot. It’d be nice to actually discuss those games in depth too.
Thank you! I enjoy discussing video games (and movies, but my movie review blog has been abandoned for the past couple years), and I’ve always wanted to find someone who goes into a little depth on games; someone who introduces people to the premise of a game and gets them interested. The little summary on Steam isn’t always enough to let me know if it’s going to be fun or not.
Since I couldn’t find any content like that, I decided to just create it myself. I’m retired young and I got nothing else going on, so why not?
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- lemmy.world
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I overheard someone talking about this weird sci-fi cloning space game with survival/crafting/base building elements a few days ago. It sounded so unique, preposterous, and yet intriguing. I had to track it down and check it out.
*The Alters* is a game about being the sole survivor of a space mission. You are stranded on a dangerous planet and are forced to create clones of yourself - with an altered past - to assist with various specialized roles around your base.
It reminded me a bit of *[The Invincible](https://cobyscreenshots.blogspot.com/2024/11/40-invincible.html)*, another game about being stranded on an alien planet and trying to escape. Except that game is more of a story-rich walking simulator, while this one actually has you collecting resources and building as you go to ensure your survival.
Also, I want to point out that this game looks incredible in 4K with maxed out graphics settings. So much detail was put into this world! I wish I had 4K video to show the rainfall and the ocean crashing against the beach. Screenshots don't do it justice.
*The Alters* opens with your character, Jan Dolski, crawling out of an escape pod on a dark planet. It's perpetually raining on this planet. He notices the emergency flare near his pod and sets out to find other crew members by searching for their flares.
He finds the captain's pod intact, but she's dead in her pod. Several other pods can be located nearby, but despite all being intact, they all hold deceased crew members. Jan discovers he's all alone and sets out for the nearby mobile base. It looks like a massive tire with shipping containers arranged inside of it.
All of a sudden, a radioactive wave hits! Jan has limited time to get to the shelter of the mobile base!
Once inside, your view changes to a sort of 3D side-scroller. You can walk around the various interconnected rooms of the base, or you can switch to a base overview mode, which is a cutaway view of all the rooms.
You need to get to the Communication Room to call for help, but you can't currently use the elevator for... reasons. The game teaches you how to rearrange the rooms from the Command Center. I brought the Communications Room down to my floor so I could just walk across to it.
Once there, Jan answers a call, only to get a garbled message from the distant end. They seem able to hear him, but Jan is only getting partial transmissions. The words "imminent danger" catch his ears, and he surmises from the jumbled communication that he has until sunrise in 9 days before he's burnt to a crisp by a nearby star. So now we're on a time limit!
He retreats to the captain's cabin to read the logs for his next steps, then goes to sleep for the night.
I should mention that there is a limited time to be active each day, as you can see in the bottom left of the screen. I definitely wasted a few days wandering around, trying to get familiar with the local area and the mechanics of the game. I'll probably be more streamlined on my next playthrough.
The next day, Jan sets out to find shallow deposits, as there is a shortage of metals on the mobile base. You can track them down by their red glowing light.
When you get enough metals, you can create a Workshop room, where you can craft items.
The first thing you need to craft are scanners. You're looking for organic deposits, which present themselves as blue smoke coming out of the rocky surface. When you find an area like this, you place down several scanners in a square to help scan underground for the best place to drop a mining outpost.
You want to identify the darkest red area underground. I had to make 3 separate scans of the area to find it. Fortunately, you can individually pick up and move your scanners and it will leave the previously scanned area visible.
Once you've dropped a mining outpost, you then need to run pylons all the way back to your mobile base to transfer the organic deposits to your fuel reserves.
I had flashbacks of running transmitter nodes in *Deep Rock Galactic* while placing all these pylons.
While exploring, I also stumbled across a strange glowing area that made the region fuzzy and streaked. You can see, even on the ground near me, it looks like it's been smeared upward with a giant paintbrush.
This is Rapidium, a plot-centric mineral you need to harvest. Extract a sample and get it back to your base!
You receive a new call from your mysterious garbled connection. You mention the Rapidium, which gets them very excited. They insist you test it to verify it's real. You're sent blueprints to create a new room called "The Womb," along with a DNA sample to test the Rapidium on. You set it up and out pops...
Rapidium, it turns out, was the resource you were sent to find on this expedition. It's an incredibly rare resource that, in theory, can rapidly age an organic item. By combining it with sheep DNA, out pops a cloned adult sheep! Jan names her Molly.
Incidentally, the name of this expedition is "Project Dolly." In real-life history, Dolly was the name of the first cloned sheep. So, a very apropos name for this game's expedition.
By now, the waterfront valley you're located in has (ideally) been picked clean of resources and your mobile base is fully fueled. It's time to get it moving! You go to the Command Center and attempt to start up the engines, but they fail to start. You reset the machinery and try again, which causes a catastrophic failure!
Not knowing what to do, you turn to your garbled friend for help. They mention something about Rapidium being able to save you, and they direct you to check out the data in the base's Quantum Computer. They give you the captain's access and you log in... to find "mind records" of all the crew.
It maps out memories of the major life events of Jan, from his childhood, leading up to his joining of the Project Dolly expedition in his 30s. You can click on each life event and read up about his past.
In the Communications Room, the distant contact suggests using this life data on Jan to create an "alter" with a branching past. The Quantum Computer pinpoints a branching life path in his childhood that would lead Jan to join Project Dolly as a technician, then simulates a fake memory path leading to that end result.
The Womb starts churning, and before you know it, out pops a clone of Jan! Except he's a bit more rough around the edges.
I noticed he has a "03" on his clothing. Jan has a "01" on his suit. What happened to "02?"
"Jan Technician," as he's known in the subtitles, is not happy to discover that he's a clone with fake memories of a life that never happened. He begrudgingly helps you get the base's engine working, but he doesn't want anything else to do with you.
You get a new menu to track your alters. It's important to be aware of their emotional status and keep them happy, as they'll perform poorly if they're in a bad mood. While you're talking with them, you'll occasionally get emotional state clouds pop up behind them. If they're red, they're negative. If they're green, they're positive.
With the engine working, you start up a journey. The mobile base goes on autopilot, heading toward a better pick-up location for your eventual rescue. Meanwhile, you repair the communications (because Jan Technician refuses to help) and you're finally able to speak clearly with someone! Your distant contact is named Lucas Peña and he's fascinated with the results of the Rapidium branching.
When you mention that your clone isn't talking to you, Lucas suggests bonding over a shared memory. I went and convinced him to make pierogi with me, just like Mom used to make!
In a much better mood, Jan Technician informs you that this mobile base is a beast to operate, and the only way the two of you are going to survive is if you make more versions of you. You'll make branching memories to create alters who end up as scientists, botanists, refiners, miners, and doctors, to name a few.
It will quickly get crowded in the mobile base and you'll have to upgrade the size of the base and create more rooms to house all the resources and people that you bring into the world.
I played for 3 hours and only barely finished the prologue! Granted, I took my time and explored everything. By the time Act 1 was starting, I was already on Day 7 of my 10 days until sunrise. So I bet I'm likely to die soon and will have to be more efficient with my next playthrough.
Or who knows where the plot will go; maybe I'll be able to survive the sunrise somehow and get more time to build and expand my army of clones. It seems like too short of a timeline for how story-rich the gameplay is. If you've played this game, let me know how much you enjoy it! I'm excited to play more and find out where the plot leads.
When I first bought Red Dead Redemption (well over a decade ago, for the Xbox 360), I got it exclusively for the “Undead Nightmare” expansion pack. I love zombie games, and setting it in the Wild West? That’s a unique twist I hadn’t seen yet.
However, I didn’t want to just jump right into the zombie gameplay. I wanted to be intimately familiar with the world and its lore first, so I could squeeze all the enjoyment out of the zombie expansion. I wanted to know all the townsfolk, so when I had to blow someone’s brains out, I’d understand their relationship to the main character and how emotionally impactful that choice was.
Suffice to say, I was so anxious to get to the zombie expansion that I rushed through the entire game in maybe 2 evenings. I didn’t really enjoy my playthrough because I was just trying to get it over with as quickly as I could.
When I finally got to the zombie expansion, I didn’t really enjoy it that much. It was at that moment I realized that the original game was far more fun than the zombie expansion. But I had rushed it and wasted my whole experience.
Last year, I finally got around to playing through the game again and I made sure to slow down and really enjoy it. It’s such a fantastic story. I played the Undead Nightmare expansion afterwards and made a post about it here for Halloween month. That, too, was more fun than I remembered.
Now I need to finally play Red Dead Redemption 2. I’ve owned it for years, but I always get bored maybe an hour into the gameplay. They put so much effort into making it as realistic and complex as possible that I just get distracted and lose the plot. RDR1 was a more straightforward plot and kept me engaged, but I keep losing focus on the sequel. I need to force myself to sit still and power through it sometime. #ADHDproblems
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Hey, it's been a minute! I took a break from gaming for a bit; partly voluntary, partly because some jerk destroyed the Internet cable in my yard and it took forever to get someone to come fix it. But I'm back! And just in time to play a really fun co-op game that just dropped last month.
*PEAK* is a climbing game where you can either solo the various mountain regions, or climb with up to four players. I highly recommend playing with others, as you can help each other out on your journey. As you can see from the first screenshot above, my good friend [Victor McKnight](https://victormcknightmusic.com/) is offering a hand to help lift me up a ledge.
The game starts in an airport, where your team of scouts is preparing for a flight. You can pull out a passport and customize your character's appearance at this point. More outfits and facial features will unlock as you gain achievements in the game.
Notice that your achievements in the game will appear as badges on the scout sash you wear across your chest. They'll fill out both the front and back of the sash.
When your team is ready to depart, someone will select the game mode from the terminal gate. You can play "Peak," which is the game's standard difficulty, or "Tenderfoot," which makes climbing a little easier, requires less food to stave off hunger, and grants unlimited time to explore each area.
After departure, you find yourself waking up on a beach near the ruins of a plane. Your flight has crashed and you and your scout team need to climb to the highest peak to signal for help.
There is one backpack nearby and a couple luggage cases on the ground. You can hold 3 items in your inventory, one in your hands, and up to four items in the backpack. One of your team members can equip the backpack and everyone else just packs as many supplies as they can in their inventory. You will find more luggage scattered all over each region, so there are plenty more supplies to pick up along the way. Keep your hands free for climbing!
You have five regions to climb before you get to the highest peak (and thus, the end of the game):
1.) SHORE: Rocky, sandy bluffs
2.) TROPICS: Lush vine-covered jungle cliffs with slippery rainfall
3.) ALPINE: Frozen snowy alps with piercing cold wind storms
4.) CALDERA: A lava pit with hot rocks and fire tornadoes
5.) KILN: The inside of the volcano.
The regions are always the same, but their layout is procedurally generated daily, so you never have the same climb from day to day. That forces you to be creative and learn good skills instead of just memorizing a certain path up the mountains.
You can rest at a campfire at the top of each region, which will recover all your ailments. You'll also find marshmallows to roast over the fire. I recommend cooking them twice for the best stats boost. Perfectly golden brown. You'll also get a new backpack at each campfire, which lets another scout carry additional supplies.
You'll notice that your green stamina bar is quickly filled up by weight. So don't carry too many heavy items or else you won't have enough stamina to climb!
Also, as your hunger grows, it will fill part of your stamina bar. Remember to eat to give yourself more stamina. Everything takes up space in your stamina bar. Poison, cold, heat, injuries... if you run out of space for stamina, you will pass out.
If you pass out, you have a very limited time where a fellow scout can revive you. Or if they don't have anything to revive you with, they can carry you on their back in place of a backpack. So don't leave your scouts behind!
If you're passed out too long without aid or being carried, you will die and turn into a ghost. Ghosts are tied to another teammate and can switch between living teammates to watch and call out assistance. As you can see below, I was the last hope for my team and I passed out. Oops.
At the end of each climb, you can revive your fallen scouts at a statue. If everyone is still alive, the statue will instead give a random beneficial item. Like this Bugle of Friendship, which will give unlimited stamina to nearby teammates while it's being played. If everyone dies, the game is over and you have to start over at the very beginning.
If you're playing with "Peak" difficulty, you will have fog that slowly encroaches on you from behind. If the fog envelopes you, you will quickly freeze to death. Make sure you out-climb that fog! Here's my buddy Victor confidently giving himself to the fog as the rest of our dead team watches on.
Just a heads up, this game is about teamwork so don't leave your teammates behind. I found out the hard way that if you climb on your own and get too far ahead of your teammates, the Scoutmaster will come for you. If he catches you, he'll attempt to throw you off the mountain. And he's absolutely terrifying to encounter, running at you on all fours like a nightmare skeleton creature or something. (Although you get an achievement and a costume item if you summon him)
Little tip: If you carry the bugle from the airplane, you can serenade some capybaras in a hot spring in the Alpine region. This is also an achievement. Don't forget to eat the apples on their head. They'll fill you up and give you a stat boost.
Victor and I got real close to beating the game. We were so close to making it out of the volcano!
Then his game froze and his character fell to his death. I tried to finish solo, but without his help, I ran out of stamina and fell too. It's practically impossible to finish that final climb without some climbing gear to help you! Oh well, we'll clear the summit one day.
I have two original Steam controllers and I absolutely hated them. The track pads, whereas a cool innovative technology, weren’t good for 90% of my games. I needed that D-pad, or at least a joystick. I hardly used my controllers, and now I just hold onto them as a piece of Valve history.
Mine came with the physical Steam Link box. I bought two of those boxes, so I could use Steam from a couple different places in my home away from my gaming desk. Instead of the controller, I just plugged in a keyboard and mouse to the Steam Link box. They did away with the hardware though, and now it’s just an app on Smart TVs and app stores. So I can’t use my keyboard and mouse without some extra steps.
creator
toLike I mentioned, this game was released for April Fools Day 2023, so of course the trailer had to troll everyone. 🤣
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Sheesh, Amy, don't look so happy that Sonic's dead...
Hey all! It was my birthday last week, so to celebrate, I wanted to play a game themed around a birthday party. And since I'm a *huge* Sonic the Hedgehog nerd, I decided to play the murder mystery game, *The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog*! As usual, there will be no spoilers in this post, so read on for details!
*The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog* randomly dropped for April Fools Day in 2023, with the announcement that SEGA has decided to just kill off Sonic. This was a free game to play and turned out to be pretty fun! (It's still free on Steam, if you want to check it out.) It's a point-and-click visual novel, where you get to help Tails and Amy solve the death of Sonic the Hedgehog.
But he's not really dead... is he?
The game starts with Barry the Quokka, a timid and insecure character, beginning his first shift aboard the Mirage Express. This is a passenger train designed to host parties and events. You play as "Barry," although you can give him whatever (respectful) name you want. For simplicity's sake, I stuck with his canon name. I'm not one to mess with the canon.
In the dining car, Barry meets the conductor, who is one day away from retirement. That always goes smoothly in murder/mystery stories, right? He coaches Barry on his roles and responsibilities and offers to assist him in greeting the guests and collecting their tickets, before disappearing to the conductor car to run the train.
By the way, the conductor's mention of 32 years as conductor was a reference to the 32 years since the first Sonic game released in 1991.
The guests show up, dressed in unusual attire. It's Amy Rose's birthday and she's rented the train for a murder mystery party!
You and the conductor collect tickets from the party members, giving you a chance to chat with everyone and get to know their personalities a bit.
Vector has misplaced his ticket, which gives you a quick warm-up mystery to solve. It's mostly to ensure you're observant of the rooms you're in. You'll need to find various things to click on in every room throughout the game, in order to solve each mystery. Don't worry, clickable items are highlighted in neon green when you hover over them; you can't miss them.
When it's time to collect Amy's ticket, the conductor hands her a key that opens every door on the train. She's the birthday girl; it's the rules.
You may notice the robot hand giving her the key. The train itself is sentient, responding to the needs of all its guests. Barry, despite being hired to work on this train, is basically a glorified microwave expert, as the train handles everything except heating up food for guests. You'll see robot hands working in every car of the train.
Amy gathers the party together to announce the rules of the murder mystery party. One person has been designated as the murderer and they have an hour to mingle amongst the guests and pick one person to murder, which must be done in-person. The rest of the guests have to collect evidence and interrogate everyone else to determine who the murderer is.
Everyone has a role and a car they are stationed in:
- Sonic is the ship captain and is stationed in the conductor's car.
- Tails is the detective and stationed in the dining car.
- Knuckles is the sheriff and stationed in the saloon car.
- Vector is the butcher and Espio is the poet, and both are stationed in the library car.
- Rouge is a business tycoon and Blaze is a titan of industry, and both are stationed in the casino car.
- Shadow is the locksmith, stationed in the lounge car.
- And finally, Amy Rose is the journalist reporter, with freedom to roam around all the cars.
The detective and journalist are the only two who CAN'T be the murderer, as they're trying to solve the crime.
Everyone disperses and Barry hangs back in the dining car with Amy and Tails. After chatting for a while, the train suddenly jolts forward at an incredible pace! Tails, Amy, and Barry are knocked into the dining car's closet. Upon awakening, they find themselves trapped! Amy is acting suspicious and ignoring direct questions about their predicament. Tails jumps into detective mode! He asks Barry to help him figure out what's actually going on.
You can scan the room for various things to click on, which will give dialogue between you and Tails. Anything that seems like a clue, Barry will keep in his inventory for later.
Tails and Barry can then interrogate Amy and try to solve the mystery! While trying to formulate a reasonable argument, Tails encourages Barry to close his eyes and think... *what would Sonic do?* Barry follows this advice, which spawns a mini-game to play. This mini-game will appear every time Barry is attempting to resolve a mystery, and it only gets more challenging as the game goes on.
The "Dream Gear" and the overall design of the handheld device is a loose parody of the SEGA Game Gear, which was SEGA's first portable gaming system.
The objective of this mini-game is to collect enough rings to pass the level. If you succeed, Barry puts together a logical and reasonable argument to help solve the current mystery. If you fail, it will just restart the level. There's no way to actually lose unless you give up playing.
After solving the first real mystery and escaping the closet, the team finds the dining car trashed... and Sonic dead on the floor! (See first screenshot) Amy is excited that the murder mystery has started and runs off on her own to solve the case! Barry has some reservations, though...
Barry and Tails move on to the saloon car to begin interrogating the guests. Be sure to click on everything you can to find clues! Tails will tell you when you've collected enough clues and when it's time to interrogate the guests.
The "Birthday Girl" has decided to solve the mystery on her own, so she runs ahead. All the doors are mysteriously locked, but she has the Birthday Key, so she can help herself to each car. The guests have their own keys to their cars, which they lend to Tails and Barry so they can move on when they're ready.
In the library car, Amy is already wrapping up her investigation with Vector and Espio and leaves Tails and Barry behind once again.
The clues are pretty simple, and if you're struggling to figure it out, Tails will basically hold your hand through the game. If you say or do the wrong thing, he'll usually tell you to try again until you get it right, so it's not a particularly difficult game.
If you're not familiar with Sonic lore, Tails is essentially a genius with a 400 IQ, so he mostly sits back and lets Barry solve the mysteries, giving him a guiding nudge if he's off-course.
When Tails and Barry get to the casino car, they get roped into a heist mission with Rouge and Blaze. As usual, Rouge is more concerned with looting valuables than playing the murder mystery game.
In the lounge car, you catch up with Amy, already throwing accusations at Shadow! It's up to you to do some quick deductions that will either support or refute her claims against him.
Finally, you end up in the conductor's car, where signs of a struggle are visible. This was where Sonic was stationed, after all. After a quick assessment of the room, you're ready to solve the murder! Amy calls all attendees to the conductor's car to hear the results. Who do you think did it?
For a simple, free game, this was actually quite enjoyable! I think I beat the whole thing in roughly 2.5 hours of gameplay. It's mostly linear; you have some places where you can choose multiple options for dialogue, but it's mostly inconsequential. If you get too far off the plot, Tails will assist you in the right direction.
Despite being a straight-forward plot, there were a few surprises and twists along the way. They managed to keep it interesting so you're not just spending 2 hours clicking through the same dialogue options with everyone. And it doesn't end the way you'd expect... Go play it to find out what happens!
By the way, Sonic says something in this game that's really excellent life advice. I'd share the screenshots, but the background might be a bit spoilery, so here's just the dialogue: *"I get it, the road's getting tough. It's easy to question the decisions that got you here. But when negative thoughts hit you, let it pass, and keep on living."* There's a reason Sonic is my #1 favorite character!
I was excited for this game, even had it wishlisted on Steam for a while now. But its rating on Steam is mostly negative right now.
Most of the reviews are saying this is an incomplete mess, with bad audio levels, cringey voice acting, incoherent/confusing plot, and awful graphics regardless of what setting you use.
I still have high hopes for this game, as it’s in early access right now. But I’m not gonna buy it for a while. I’ll give the developers some time to fix it up.
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Today I'm going to be looking at the demo for an upcoming narrative-driven simulation game that looks like a lot of fun! It's called *inKonbini: One Store. Many Stories*. This demo is free on Steam, so feel free to check it out for yourself.
"Konbini" (コンビニ) is the Japanese word for convenience store. It's a borrowed word from English, but the Japanese don't have a "v" sound in their language, so "b" is the standard replacement consonant for "v" in words. And of course, the Japanese have abbreviated the English word to make it easier to say.
*inKonbini* takes place on a rainy night in Japan, in late August of 1993. I actually spent 3 years living in Japan in the early 2000s, so this game felt very familiar and nostalgic for me.
You play as Makoto, a college student who is just starting work at her aunt's konbini, called Honki Ponki, while between school semesters.
Aunt Hina recommends all her employees keep notebooks on them for taking notes. She specifically asked Makoto to journal her experiences each night. She calls to check up on Makoto, since it's her first night shift.
Aunt Hina has already taken notes for Makoto in the journal, so you have a general idea of what to do if you get lost. However, you can call her anytime to receive more advice.
Looking around the office, there are several things you can click on and Makoto will comment on them. One is a postcard about to fall off a shelf. It's an unsent card from Aunt Hina, to a mysterious stranger.
*Note: Most of the Japanese characters on this card seems to be flipped backwards, and some of the characters are even flipped upside-down! I also noticed this throughout the store. I have no idea why.*
Calling the phone number from the postcard gets you the answering machine for Chief Matsuda's Treasures. Hmm...
Whelp, time to go straighten out the store so you can open for the night!
There are several things to do besides just stocking shelves. Look around for anything that needs reorganizing or adjusting. You have to be detail-oriented; I'm neurotic about details and took several laps around the store to check everything, and even I missed a few things!
I found a notebook from one of the other employees. In it, he mentions that Aunt Hina threatened to change his nametag to read "Charlie" if he didn't stop making mistakes, so customers would think he's a foreigner and be more forgiving. Considering he's only known as Charlie, looks like Aunt Hina followed through on the threat.
Once the place was straightened up, I started restocking shelves. There are some limited supplies in the back office, both on the shelves and in the large fridge and freezer. I packed as much as I could on the shelves, even reorganizing some products to make them all fit.
All done! Time to flip the sign on the door and start taking customers.
The first (and only) customer of the night was an old man, braving the ongoing rainstorm to pick up some supplies.
He almost immediately noticed a mistake I missed. Someone stocked bread in the wrong place!
You can go and chat with him, where he'll reveal he knows your aunt very well. Although they're not on speaking terms at the moment. You'll quickly deduce that he's Chief Matsuda! The plot thickens...
There are several multiple-choice options during conversations, so there are several ways to play out each scene. I only played through once, so I'll be showing the general direction my game took. I'm not sure if it would be dramatically different if you chose other options, though. You can definitely experiment and see what happens.
I also forgot to stock a brand of ramen that Chief Matsuda always eats. He takes this as a sign that it's time to make some changes in his life and he asked me for a recommendation on a new brand of ramen.
Chief Matsuda heads over to the pet food section and asks for further assistance. His cat has been avoiding him and acting strange. Someone recommended he try a hypoallergenic cat food, but he can't read the labels very well.
If you inspect the cans, you'll get more details to read. Eventually, I found the right brand for him.
When he's done shopping, he'll meet you at the register and you'll have to scan the barcode on everything in his basket.
Then of course, you'll accept his money and make change. Fortunately, the register keeps track of what you owe the customer and deducts each time you pull bills or coins from the till.
Random trivia: In Japan, it's considered rude for an employee to take money directly from a customer's hands, so they have a small (usually blue) rectangle dish that the customer puts their money in, then the employee makes change and puts it back in the dish for the customer to take. That way, no one is directly handing money to the other.
More trivia: Japan's smallest bill today is 1,000 yen (roughly 7 US dollars). They used to have a ¥50, ¥100, and ¥500 bill back in the '50s, but they were mostly phased out by the '60s and turned into coins. Considering this game takes place in 1993, these bills are not accurate to real life. They also have never had a ¥25 coin; the next denomination after ¥10 is ¥50.
Chief Matsuda is still feeling depressed and may vent a bit about some of his bad luck to you at this point. I got a choice in how to respond:
I chose to cheer him up, and it seemed to do the trick.
He stands outside to admire the rising sun as the rain lets up. If you join him, you get a little more dialog with him before the demo ends.
Overall, it was a fun little game to play and I'm excited for the full release! I enjoy simulator games, and this one was very relaxed and story-heavy. Unlike other store simulators I've played, where you spend a whole shift desperately running around, managing a bunch of customers and store inventory as fast as you can. Working a night shift means a slower pace to the game, so you can have one-on-one conversations with the customers and really enjoy the atmosphere.
There's also no clock in the game, so you can take all the time you want to do everything. I probably spent over an hour just wandering around the store, clicking on everything and getting to know where everything was. I was expecting an influx of customers, so I wanted to be prepared for the busy rush, but I ended up with a single customer who was chill and fun to chat with.
*Note: I haven't been paid to advertise this upcoming game. As I've mentioned in the past, I'm very anti-advertisement, so I will never accept money or favors to advertise anyone's game. This is just a personal creative writing hobby of mine; if I'm writing about a game, it's one that I personally enjoyed and wanted to discuss.*
Far Cry 6 was a huge letdown, I hated it.
I felt the same way. It was even more disappointing because Epic Games got their claws into it, so it released as an exclusive title. I had to wait a year before I could play it on Steam, and it didn’t even live up to the hype!
I recently re-installed Far Cry 6 and a friend and I have been replaying it in co-op mode. It’s actually a lot more fun than I remember. I don’t know if it received a bunch of patches/updates since I last tried it, or if I was just super-critical after Far Cry 5. But it’s not a horrible game. At least not yet; we’re only a couple hours into it so far.
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Welcome back! For my next screenshot-laden game discussion, I'm going to be talking about my favorite of the Far Cry series, *Far Cry 5*.
The original *Far Cry* was released in 2004 by Crytek to demonstrate the expansive capabilities of their brand-new CryEngine. As such, it was more of a tech demo than a solid video game title. Sure, it had a story and missions to complete, but it was mainly focused on showing off long-distance outdoors scenery, something that was difficult to render in those days. The game took place on a lush green tropical island and pushed computer hardware of the time to the limits of their functionality.
Ubisoft quickly bought up the Far Cry franchise from Crytek and proceeded to remake the original game, including several direct spin-offs/sequels of it, all for consoles. These were severely limited due to console hardware at the time, so they were far more linear and lower quality than the original open world PC game.
Crytek, meanwhile, made a deal with EA to develop a whole new game called *Crysis*, which would become famous for having realistic physics rendering and graphics far beyond consumer PCs' capabilities. *Crysis* would become the benchmark for high-end computers for many years afterward. But that's a game discussion for another time...
When it came time to make a true numerical sequel to *Far Cry*, Ubisoft decided they needed to get away from the tropical jungle setting. A lot of games at the time were focusing on that setting, including the new Crysis franchise. Plus, they felt like the main character from *Far Cry* just wasn't interesting enough to become the face of the franchise. So *Far Cry 2* was actually a completely new game, with a new story, a new protagonist, and set in an unnamed African nation.
And thus began Ubisoft's trend of resetting the whole franchise with each new title. So jumping to the 2018 title *Far Cry 5* isn't skipping any important story or background; it's an original standalone game. Although *Far Cry: New Dawn* is a direct sequel to this game; don't play it unless you want spoilers to the ending of *Far Cry 5*.
If you want a cool intro to *Far Cry 5*, Steam has a free 30-minute video called *[Far Cry 5: Inside Eden's Gate](https://store.steampowered.com/app/868490/Far_Cry_5_Inside_Edens_Gate/)*. It's a live-action prologue, following three people (one of which is a vlogger) who attempt to infiltrate the Eden's Gate cult. They meet with a local man who claims his sister just abandoned her home and joined the cult. She's changed, dedicating her whole life to the cult's religious beliefs, and refuses to come home. This video shows how people are brainwashed into joining Eden's Gate, as well as how news of the cult spread outside of Hope County, Montana, which brings us to the intro of the game.
*Far Cry 5* begins with clips of a documentary talking about Eden's Gate, a dangerous cult in the fictional Hope County, Montana. They discuss how the cult started buying up land, then the local radio station, then even the cops. Before the locals realized it, Eden's Gate was in control of all of Hope County. They're a militant religious doomsday cult, preparing for the End Times, which they believe is coming soon. Their leader, Joseph Seed, is worshiped by the cult followers as a prophet. He's also known as "The Father."
We cut to you riding in a helicopter over Hope County. You play a rookie deputy to the local sheriff's department, accompanying a U.S. Marshal. You, the Hope County Sheriff, and another local deputy, are escorting the U.S. Marshal to an Eden's Gate compound. The sheriff keeps mentioning "Peggies," which he explains is what they call the cult followers here.
Your helicopter lands in the compound and you find yourself in a tense situation. Peggies are everywhere and not happy at your presence. The four of you nervously walk up to the church in the compound and let yourselves in, approaching Joseph Seed at the altar as he gives his congregation a dangerous sermon.
Despite the sheriff trying to keep the situation calm, the hot-headed U.S. Marshal walks up to Joseph and thrusts a warrant for his arrest in his face, demanding he turn himself in. The crowd gets agitated and you suddenly find yourself surrounded by angry, armed Peggies... until Joseph himself calms them down. He tells them that it's all right, they planned for this, and he will NOT be taken. He then offers himself up for capture.
Now, here's an opportunity to play a secret (and quick) ending to this game. You can choose not to cuff Joseph at this point and instead walk away. If you do, the sheriff will comment that it's best to leave the cult alone and that the team would likely die if they attempted to arrest Joseph anyway.
But then we wouldn't have a game to play, so... you cuff Joseph and escort him back to the helicopter. The Peggies outside are highly agitated at this turn of events and the closer to the helicopter you get, the more tense the situation gets.
You strap Joseph into the helicopter and are prepared for takeoff, but the Peggies don't want you to leave with him. They start jumping on the helicopter and the team is forced to fight them off as they lift off into the air. One climbs over the windshield and into the blades, causing the helicopter to come crashing down!
You awake to find Joseph recovering from the crash. He calls off support over the radio, then tells you, "I told you God wouldn't let you take me." He gives you a grave warning:
Peggies gather around Joseph as he rallies them toward action. Which begins by taking you and your team captive.
The Peggies manage to grab the deputy, but a burst of flames from the helicopter holds them back long enough for you to unhook yourself and bolt into the woods. You run from shouting and gunfire, quickly learning how to hide in the foliage and silently pick off stragglers.
Arming yourself, you meet up with the U.S. Marshal in a trailer house, where you have a stand-off with a wave of Peggies. Hopelessly outnumbered, the U.S. Marshal jumps into a pickup truck and instructs you to ride shotgun and keep the Peggies off your tail. Thus ensues an action-packed car chase, through blockades, gunning down trucks and ATVs filled with Peggies, and even an airplane armed to the teeth!
Despite your best efforts, the U.S. Marshal ends up crashing the truck into a river. He's captured by Peggies, but some stranger fishes you out of the river downstream. You wake up in a bunker, facing an older guy who calls himself Dutch.
He explains that your coming was prophesied by Eden's Gate and it's set off "The Collapse." Basically, they think society is on the brink of destruction now, so they're leaning hardcore into their plans to secure Hope County. All roads are blocked, all signals in and out of the valley are cut. We're completely isolated out here. And now they're going to force all the locals to "save themselves" and convert to their cult... or die.
Dutch tells you to change clothes so he can burn your uniform. It's just going to make you a target from now on, so best to get rid of it. This is your first opportunity to customize your character's appearance and clothing outside of just picking a gender.
When you find Dutch, he's hanging out in a sort of war room of the bunker, with an information board on the wall showcasing the four leaders of Eden's Gate. You can read the bios on all four of them at this point. There are the three brothers: Joseph, Jacob, and John Seed. Then the "sister" Faith, a woman who mysteriously showed up one day to join their family. Joseph is leader over all of Eden's Gate, while each sibling controls a region of Hope County.
Dutch's bunker is on an island between all three regions of the map. He sends you out to help him clear Peggies off his island before you set off to build a resistance and liberate all three regions of Hope County. Every mission you complete, whether it's part of the main story or side missions, helps to free more citizens in a region and build a stronger resistance against the Eden's Gate leader in that region.
Once you clear the island, you're free to go anywhere on the map you desire. There are three main quest lines for you to follow, one per region. They will eventually lead to toppling the leader of that region, which you have to accomplish before you can go after Joseph himself. Or you can just explore anywhere and knock out any side quests or other objectives you come across. You can also rescue and hire resistance members to follow you and help out.
While approaching enemies, it's best to first look at them down your sights or through binoculars to tag them, so you can follow them no matter where they go in the area. You can even tag objectives in an area, to help you plan your strategy accordingly.
You get bonus points for clearing missions undetected, so I highly recommend the stealth approach. You can sneak up and break enemies' necks or use silenced weapons from afar. My preferred weapon of choice is the bow and arrow. No one ever hears it coming! Just remember to hide bodies, because roaming patrols will alert a whole compound if they find a body. And some compounds have alarms that will draw in reinforcements. Make sure to disable the alarms before assaulting a compound, or take out anyone running to set off the alarm.
This game also includes hunting and fishing, as you need supplies to trade, barter, and survive in the wild. The wildlife in this game is very diverse, and some deadly if you're not careful. I've been bitten by several snakes and my only warning was a rattling sound just before they struck. The sound effects are not just ambient noise! Pay attention to them!
If you lose all your health, you pass out and get a cutscene of being captured by the leader of whatever region you're in. They go over how they're going to "free you of sin" in their own sick twisted way, before you're shipped off to a detention center.
But your prisoner transport is ambushed by the local resistance and you manage to escape! Then you have to fight through the internment camp, clear it of Peggies, then survive wave after wave of Peggies before a rescue helicopter comes for you. Only then can you go back to exploring the map. So losing all your health (without a resistance member nearby to quickly revive you) is kind of an ordeal.
I really like that they include this gameplay in the game. It allows the story to continue, so there's no actual death of the player. And it ties into the lore of the game while making you work to get back on track with your mission; a sort of entertaining punishment for failing to survive. It's much more creative than just showing a "Game Over" screen and then resetting you at your last save point, and it gives you motivation to stay alive and not just accept a quick defeat.
These same prison vans can be found driving all over the map and you can assault them and free the captive locals inside. After being captured once yourself, you'll likely feel the need to chase after every prison van you see afterward. No one should be subjected to that torture!
I absolutely love the visuals in this game! The forested mountainous region of Montana is absolutely gorgeous and they do an excellent job showcasing it, especially if you have a computer than can max out this game's graphics. Here are a few screenshots of my actual gameplay in the world, no cutscenes involved. Open them in a new window to enjoy their full 4K quality:
I guess this game resonates with me because I used to be extremely religious in my youth. I even carried a pocket Bible with me everywhere I went and would quote scriptures as I felt they applied to situations. My friends all voted me most likely to become a pastor one day.
But I was also a very curious person who loved to learn and study new things. I wanted to understand the Bible as much as I could. And when I started to find contradictions and inconsistencies in my Bible, I turned to my pastor and congregation for answers. But I received a resounding "have faith; don't question the Lord" dismissal, from pretty much everyone. The more I looked into it, the more problems I found, and the less friendly my religious community got about helping me resolve it.
After giving the Bible a full read from cover to cover, I discovered that it was an awful book full of glorified rape, torture, infanticide, bestiality, war, incest, as well as plenty of other horrifying topics, all sanctioned by God. It's no wonder we cherry-pick passages every Sunday! There are too many stories that aren't church-friendly in that book. You can't do a straight reading of the Bible without losing your congregation. I turned atheist pretty quick and learned to apply critical thinking and logic in the future instead of blindly trusting something to be true.
This game is all about the extreme end of that religious faith. Joseph Seed is considered a prophet, supposedly given direct communications from God about an upcoming apocalypse and how His chosen few can survive. Joseph's methods are based on the concept of "the ends justify the means." He will do whatever it takes to save "his people," even if it means violently kidnapping, torturing, and brainwashing them.
Even worse, the way the four Seed siblings preach to their congregation, the serene country/gospel music, even the way cult members worship, all remind me of my church-going days. Which were very happy, nostalgic days for me. So I personally feel this nostalgic pull toward this very evil cult and I have to remind myself that this cult is doing an excellent job in making it seem so appealing.
Joseph Seed is what happens when a cult is designed to dominate a culture and indoctrinate all its citizens, and this game is a good look at this kind of world from an outsider, trapped within it. It is a terrifying concept, but all the more fun to play a protagonist who is able to resist and fight back against this fascist takeover of an indoctrinated region. Which seems rather relevant in today's world.
If/when you find Boomer, make sure to give him lots of pets! He's a very good boy.
Video games and collecting Sonic the Hedgehog comics are my two expensive hobbies; I don’t spend money on much else besides essentials (food, shelter), so I can afford to splurge a bit on these hobbies. I am not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, but the US military took really good care of me for 20 years and continues to provide for me in retirement, so I’m able to live a pretty relaxed life now.
If you somehow dont have Metro 2033 yet, you can still add it to your library for free today.
I saw that it was free for 48 hours! I already have the whole Metro franchise, but I’ve informed my gaming friends about the deal this morning. Thanks for spreading the news!
One caveat to my Steam library is that I always try to wait for deals before I buy; I rarely buy anything at full price. I don’t want to think about how much money I might’ve spent if I bought everything at full price! 😱
I really like video games. And I’m retired young(ish), so I have all the time in the world to game now.
Plus, I have a (relatively new) blog dedicated to introducing games to people, which encourages me to play through a variety of games in my library. It’s basically just archiving my “Random Screenshots of my Games” posts in [email protected].
And according to the SteamDB, I’ve played 26% of my games. The last time I checked, it was at 38%, but that was maybe 2,000 games ago. I need to keep working through my library!
creator
toIt’s not that bad. They have three difficulty settings: Normal, Black Mesa, and Hard. I played on Normal and I haven’t really struggled anywhere. I think I’ve only died once in my whole gameplay, and it was when I was fighting off waves of Marines flooding a single large space that I couldn’t leave. I’m assuming “Black Mesa” is their suggested difficulty level.
creator
toThanks for your support! My posts originally started as just a random screenshot or two of the latest game I was playing. But I always hated how people just talked about specific video games like everyone on the thread was intimately familiar with them. Especially if it was a game that sounded interesting to me. I wanted to know more about it!
So I decided to use my screenshots as a way to introduce newcomers to each game; give them a little intro to the plot and gameplay so they’d be interested in trying it out for themselves. Or to remind previous players of a great game they hadn’t played in a while.
By the time I started writing long-form blog entries on video games, I already had a bit of a series going and I didn’t want to suddenly change the title of my numbered posts. So they are “random” screenshots of my games, but they’re also a spoiler-free in-depth exploration of each game.
One day, I plan to go back and re-do some of my earlier posts so I can actually have in-depth discussion on those games too.
I’ve also been archiving my posts on a personal blog, in case any of them get taken down or blocked here for any reason. If anyone’s interested in checking out my history of posts, it’s a bit easier to review the archive at that link.
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Long time no see! I really need to stop promising to write about specific games. I get too in my head about it, then I feel *obligated* to write instead of *wanting* to write. This is supposed to be a fun personal writing project, not work!
But enough about me. This is a space for discussing games! And as promised, today's discussion is on *Black Mesa*, a fan remake of *Half-Life* that was officially sanctioned by its creator, Valve.
The *Black Mesa* project was started in late 2004, shortly after the release of *Half-Life 2*, using Valve's new Source engine to rebuild the original *Half-Life* game from the ground up. It would be 16 years before the game was fully completed, although you could play most of it online for many years.
With new advancements in the Source engine over the years, the fan team kept rebuilding and enhancing sections of the game. Eventually, Valve stepped in and allowed them to sell the game commercially so they could afford the commercial license for their newer Source engines. The fan team never intended to make money off this game, but a source of income did help them keep building and improving the game.
*Black Mesa* is still available on Steam for $20, and I highly recommend supporting the team and buying it over the original game. Valve makes tons of money with their Steam store; they don't need the income from their old game.
So let's get into this game. Apologies in advance; I played this in 4K resolution, which resized everything appropriately except for subtitles. If there are subs, they're really tiny near the bottom of the screenshot. Open the image in a new window to see its full resolution and read the subtitles.
*Black Mesa* opens with you riding a tram line deep into an underground research facility in the New Mexico desert. You're playing as Gordon Freeman, a Theoretical Physicist with a PhD from MIT. You're running late to work today.
*Side-note: I always saw Gordon as a much older man (I was a teenager when* Half-Life *first released), but now in my early 40s, finding out Gordon is only 27 makes me feel super old. He's so young!* >_<
This game's opening was revolutionary for early games, as it played out like a film. You're stuck on this single-car tram for a few minutes, just taking in the sights of the research facility while opening credits slowly fade in and out. This was unheard of for a game in the late '90s and really pulled you into the world of the game. And this remake has so much more detail than the original game! Here's the same scene shown from *Half-Life* and *Black Mesa*, respectively:
In a "blink-and-you'll-miss-it" scene, you pass by another tram on the left with a creepy-looking government man, or "G-Man" staring at you. He's wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase. With all the scientists and security guards running around this place, this one G-Man stands out. This mysterious figure is important later in the game, but I'll let you discover that story for yourself.
If you're trying to find G-Man in the opening, you'll see him right before you approach a hazardous chemical spill. If you see this, you just missed him:
Eventually, you'll reach your stop where a security guard will come to let you off. He'll make a comment about you running late. If you linger around other scientists and security guards at the beginning of the game, you'll hear some interesting and funny chats. You can also interact with everyone, although some people won't have time to chat with you.
You enter the research facility (see main screenshot) and are instructed at the front desk to hurry up and get ready. Everyone's been waiting on you. You go to the locker rooms and don the H.E.V. suit, or Hazardous Environment Suit. This orange and black suit will protect you from most damage, heal you if you're injured, and will give you a HUD (Heads-Up Display) with some information about your health and weaponry.
Its protection status is on a scale of 1-100 and you can recharge it at H.E.V. charging stations. You can also find Health charging stations, which will recharge your suit up to 100 health. Think of H.E.V. as armor and Health as... well... health. You'll be fine if your H.E.V. drops to zero, but the game is over if your health runs out.
After making your way deeper into the research facility, you run into several other scientists who give you more information on today's research project. You are doing an analysis on a sample and are instructed to go down to the test chamber to get started.
One of the scientists leads the way, where the two of you run into Eli Vance (on the left below). Eli wasn't in the original *Half-Life* game, but he is an important character in the sequel who apparently worked alongside Gordon at the Black Mesa Research Facility, so *Black Mesa* chose to introduce you to him before the game gets rolling.
There's a malfunction in their equipment, so Eli and the other scientist stay behind to fix the machines. They complain that there's been so many issues lately and they can't explain why. They instruct you to go ahead without them.
You run into two more scientists at the giant blast door to the test chamber. They're eagerly awaiting your arrival, but are also worried about the test potentially going wrong. They have the utmost confidence in your abilities though, and encourage you to do well today. They use dual retinal scanners to open the door for you.
You find yourself in a giant room with a Mass Spectrometer filling the center of the room. Once inside, a voice over a loudspeaker instructs you to get up on the catwalk and start the rotors from a computer so they can get the test going.
The sample is brought into the room through an elevator in the floor and you're instructed to push its cart into the beam of the Mass Spectrometer.
Once you add the sample to the beam, everything goes haywire! A Resonance Cascade occurs! The scientists feared this was possible, but the chances were so slim, they didn't think it could actually happen. And yet...
In a flash of green, Gordon finds himself in an alien world. The Resonance Cascade has opened a portal to another dimension!
Some intelligent alien creatures approach Gordon, speaking in an unintelligible language. We'll later learn these creatures are called Vortigaunts.
In another flash of green, Gordon finds himself back inside the test chamber, which has been destroyed by the Resonance Cascade. People are dead, the lab is destroyed, and all sorts of alien creatures are portaling through the dimensional rift to Earth. You run into Eli and he instructs you to get to the surface so you can contact someone and let them know they're all trapped deep underground.
As a scientist, you're not especially trained to fight with heavy weaponry, so you make due with a crowbar you find on the ground, fighting through invading alien creatures on your way to the surface. Along the way, you'll come across the infamous Headcrab, which leaps at people's heads and munches on their brain, turning them into walking zombies.
There are also Barnacles, which attach to the ceiling and drop a super-sticky tongue of sorts that will grab you and drag you up to their awaiting mouth. Be careful; their lure is hard to notice if you're running around in dark hallways.
Then there's the Houndeye, a multi-eyed alien dog of sorts with a super-sonic bark that will injure you, even from a distance. And many more creatures to find along the way!
If you're paying attention, you might just run into G-Man again, who observes you curiously before calmly disappearing down a corridor. *Who is this man?!*
Once you get close to the surface, you learn the military has arrived and has orders to clean the entire site - terminating aliens and humans alike! They're intent on covering up the Resonance Cascade! If you manage to hold your own against the Marines, you'll earn yourself a nasty reputation and the military will call in Black Ops to take care of you once and for all. These guys are extremely fast and deadly:
Having nowhere left to go, you fight your way back into the underground facility and search for other survivors...
Why am I playing the fan remake instead of the original *Half-Life* game? Well, because *Black Mesa* was built not only to be easier to play through for modern gamers, but it also fixed plot and story inconsistencies, and flows better than the original. It's not just a visually-improved version of the game, but they rearranged parts of the story and gameplay to better introduce modern gamers to the world of Half-Life.
'Cause let's be honest, back in the late '90s to early 2000s, before games had standardized controls across platforms, FPS games were kind of the Wild West, with their control schemes varying from game to game. They were great fun in my childhood, but playing them nowadays is difficult and frustrating when there are much better controls in modern games.
So if you want to get into the Half-Life franchise and you're not sure where to start, *Black Mesa* is a great introduction to the series! The main games are *Half-Life*, *Half-Life 2*, *Half-Life 2: Episode 1*, and *Half-Life 2: Episode 2*. The other games in the series are either expansions, multiplayer-only arenas, or spin-offs.
One could argue that the new VR game *Half-Life: Alyx* is part of the main series, but you spend the entire game playing as Alyx Vance, a side character from the series (and daughter of Eli). However, from what I've heard, it does advance the plot of the Half-Life franchise a little bit, so that sounds like it could be main game content to me.
Also, as I mentioned in my last post, the Portal games are set in the same universe as *Half-Life*. Their Aperture Science company is the competitor to Black Mesa; although the Resonance Cascade led to events that would negatively affect both companies. *Portal* and its sequel take place after the first *Half-Life* game.
A childhood friend of mine worked as a developer for Riot Games over a decade ago, when League of Legends first became popular. He tried to get me to play it with him, but the community was so toxic, it’s the first and only game I ever quit solely because of the community.
If you didn’t play specific characters with very specific builds, you were just wasting everyone’s time and any losses would be blamed on you. It was really bad.
I love the content and lore that comes from LoL (Arcane, K/DA, etc.), but I can’t stand the game itself.
I honestly got tired of the “Xbox vs. PlayStation” BS they were pushing well over a decade ago. I actually bought a Nintendo Wii during that generation’s console war, because Nintendo was the only company just doing their own thing and not trying to compete for best graphics, processing power, etc.
But Nintendo consoles were limited in themselves. Nintendo doesn’t like to share their properties, and they very rarely port classics to modern systems. So if my Wii ever broke, the only way I could play my games again was to find another Wii. Even if they stopped making them; is have to find a second-hand shop and buy a used console.
I almost gave up on the gaming world, until I found Steam. Any games I buy there stay in my library forever, even if they’re removed from the store. And they emulate the original supporting hardware, so even classic games are still playable on a modern Windows 11 PC.
Thanks to Steam, I have a renewed interest in gaming and have built up a library of nearly 4,000 games over the last decade and a half.
I don’t bother with console gaming anymore. If I miss that style of gaming, I have a Razer controller plugged into my computer that I can use instead of my keyboard and mouse. If a game is exclusive to console… Oh well, maybe I’ll catch it if/when it ports to PC. But until it does, that’s a lost sale for that developer/publisher. I’m not going to feed the exclusivity BS by buying games while they’re only available on one device.
I’ve been saying, I’d really like to play Alan Wake II, but as long as it’s an Epic Games exclusive, I can’t buy it. If they want my money, they’ll have to allow it on Steam too. And since it’s owned by Epic Games, not just published by them, it’s gonna stay exclusive. So I guess I’ll never get to play that game. I don’t agree with Epic Games’ predatory practices, so I will never give them a penny of my money.
Epic just recently announced that they’re never releasing it outside of their store. They’re the exclusive publisher, so they have distribution rights, and their CEO Tim Sweeney is determined to snub his nose at Steam, even though Alan Wake 2 still hasn’t earned back its production costs. It’s a complete flop, but they won’t extend to the Steam market to help sales.
Unlike other games, where publishers sign exclusivity contracts with Epic Games for a certain time period, Alan Wake 2 was actually published by Epic Games, meaning that Epic Games gets to decide what systems the game releases on. So it’s not coming to Steam. Which means I’ll never get to play it, because I’m never giving a penny to that awful store of theirs.
The plots of Portal 2 singleplayer, co-op, and PTI are very “distant” from anything happening with Half-Life.
From what I understand (it’s been a while since I read up on the lore), Portal 1 and 2 take place after the Combine invasion of Earth, shortly after the first Half-Life game. That’s why Aperture Science is almost completely devoid of life, minus the personality cores that are attempting to continue running things. It’s because of the resonance cascade incident at Black Mesa that Aperture Science is now mostly defunct, and Chell is trapped as a lab rat at GLaDOS’ mercy.
So the Portal series is pretty reliant on Half-Life’s story to justify their plot, even if it’s never directly addressed in the game itself.
This is actually my second Steam Deck. I bought the original LCD-screen one back when they were first announced, but they had a nasty habit of the bumper buttons (L1 and R1) breaking. Sure enough my L1 button broke and I just never sent it back to get it fixed. I’ve just been re-mapping that button to the L2 (trigger) button instead.
Recently, my wife expressed interest in having a Steam Deck (she almost bought her own when they first came out), and she claimed she was perfectly content taking my old one, since she doesn’t game as much as me anyway. So I bought a fancy new HDR OLED-screen Steam Deck. It’s much more responsive than my first one. And the bumper buttons work! I forgot how nice it is to just play a game without re-mapping buttons first.
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I was actually in the middle of a *Half-Life* review (spoiler for my next post!) and I got a new Steam Deck in the mail, which thoroughly distracted me for the past few days. That, and I threw my back out, so sitting comfortably at my gaming PC has been impossible lately. Instead, I've been lying in bed, enjoying some of my Deck-ready games like the free Valve game *Aperture Desk Job*. The screenshots for this post will all be 1280x800, the default resolution for the Steam Deck.
As you may know, Steam (and the Steam Deck) is owned by Valve, the company behind the Half-Life and Portal games, which both take place in the same universe. *Aperture Desk Job* is a short Portal-esque game they made for the Steam Deck, which teaches you all the controls and functions of the new portable gaming device. While also having a fun, comedic game to play.
The game opens up with a pre-recorded speech from Cave Johnson (voiced by J.K. Simmons), the owner of Aperture Science, welcoming you to the company. That's a portrait of him on the right:
Your view traverses down through various floors of the company as he espouses all the wonderful things that you can do for Aperture Science. After all, you are a gifted scientist who will save humanity with your genius!
...Or not. Turns out they were playing the wrong recording.
It turns out, you're just a lowly product inspector. You're introduced to Grady, a personality core overseeing your new position in the company. Grady is excessively chatty.
He says you're going to be inspecting... something. It's not written on his chart, so he moves on to your inspection desk. Look familiar? It has all the same buttons and joysticks and touch pads as your Steam Deck, including the four buttons on the underside of the device (the L4, L5, R4, and R5 buttons)
Your first product comes down the line and it's a puke-green toilet with a white lid. *(Incidentally, it looks EXACTLY like the toilet in my childhood home, right down to the color scheme!)*
The board in the back seems pretty self-explanatory, so you start pressing buttons in sequence to go through the whole testing cycle. You fill the tank with water, test pressure on the seat, flush the toilet, then move it down the line.
Grady notices one of the toilets is burning and decides to ignore it and continue testing regardless.
Shenanigans ensue and the burning toilet ends up filled with live ammunition, firing rounds all over the room. Which gives Grady an idea.
Six months later... Grady returns to show off his new invention: the Aperture Science Turret! (See first screenshot) It almost immediately breaks, but he claims that was just the initial prototype and brings out the *actual* turret he's been working on - the Mark Two. He asks you to take a picture of him with it, for the history books. Which teaches you how to take screenshots with the Steam Deck.
Grady aims it away from you and asks you to test it out. He opens up all the panels on your desk and tells you to go wild, pressing absolutely everything.
You proceed to shoot up the entire warehouse, with enthusiastic encouragement from Grady. Once all the ammunition is spent, Grady comments on how 90% of the features didn't even work. Then police sirens can be heard in the distance...
Grady quickly assigns you to take the blame for the whole incident, while he runs off to "streamline" the turret.
18 months later... you're released from prison on probation, and Grady shows up to claim you. Note that this is an "Aperture Incarceration." Meaning that Aperture Science has their own in-house prison that they can keep law-breaking employees locked up in.
You're required to sign a prisoner release form, which requires 3 forms of identification - vocal recitation of your name, typed name, and signed name. Again, showing off more features of the Steam Deck, including the microphone, on-screen keyboard, and touch screen.
Oh, and it turns out, Grady is now licensed to be a probation officer. He studied for his license while you were incarcerated. So he takes you under his charge and escorts you, and your desk, back to your station. He's very excited to show off the Mark Three version of the turret.
When everything seems to go off without a hitch, Grady informs you he arranged a meeting with Cave Johnson to show off the turret. If all goes smoothly, the two of you could be rich beyond your wildest dreams!
But when does a plot with Grady go smoothly? I'll let you play through the rest to find out what happens.
I enjoyed this little sub-plot going on between the floorboards, where a bunch of praying mantises discover electricity, then rapidly advance as a civilization over the months this game takes place.
Even though *Aperture Desk Job* is the latest game in the Half-Life/Portal franchise, it actually takes place in an alternate universe. Valve has confirmed that it happens in the "Portal expanded universe," a concept created in the "Perpetual Testing Initiative" DLC for *Portal 2*. As far as a time frame goes, it's been speculated that it takes place sometime in the '80s-'90s, if this universe's Aperture Science lines up with the main timeline.
Which is kind of a shame, because it was a great opportunity for Valve to introduce more lore to the Half-Life universe. But at least they're continuing to write new stuff for their famous franchises instead of completely abandoning them. COUGH*Half-Life3*COUGH
Still, this was a fun little game with plenty of comedy, an opportunity to control an Aperture Science turret to shoot up stuff, and also taught you all the various functions of the Steam Deck. The whole game took maybe 40 minutes to play through, so it's a pretty decent tutorial for the Steam Deck without being a nuisance to sit through.
My first Steam Deck came with this game already at the top of my library, but you can find it on the Steam Store for free. I don't know how well it would play on the desktop, since it's reliant on Steam Deck specific controls, but if you can re-map all the buttons to a controller or keyboard, more power to you!
[…] the devs got a bigger cut than they’d get on steam
Inconsequential, considering the game is still not profitable, even after a year. The devs lost money on this game. If it came to Steam, they’d be swimming in cash right now. The cut they get from the store doesn’t matter if the game releases on a single store that most people refuse to use.
If Epic Games would be an actual competitor to Steam instead of trying to lock their content behind a paywall and force users to use them over the competition, then people might consider using their service. But as long as they continue to use shitty practices, most people are going to avoid them and use their competition’s service.
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- lemmy.world
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- 8M
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On the surface, *MiSide* looks like a dating simulation game. And I very nearly passed right over it in the Steam store. But then I caught the "psychological horror" tag and thought, *'That's an odd tag to put on a dating sim.'* At worst, maybe it's commentary on dating sims as a whole; letting you experience a loving relationship with the perfect partner that you may never find in the real world. But at best...
This game just released on December 10th, just over a month ago, and it was currently for sale on Steam, so I figured, why not? I'll give it a shot and see what it's all about. And it's even better than I imagined.
By the way, I want to apologize in advance for the subtitles in these screenshots. They moved so fast, they were already swiping away at the beginning of the line as the end of the line appeared. So some of these subtitles might not be very legible. Hopefully you'll still understand the context.
*MiSide* starts out a little meta; you're hanging out in your bedroom when you get a text from a friend, suggesting you download this cool new game. As a former IT guy, I was internally screaming at the fact your character just installs a random file someone texted him, especially with a vague clickbait message like "check this new version!" But... there wouldn't be a game if you didn't. So you install the game and check it out.
You boot up the game on your phone and are greeted by Mita, the protagonist, who asks for your name. You can type any name you want and she'll use it to address you throughout the game.
She asks for help tidying up her home a bit, and you assist her in a mini game.
You play more mini games with Mita, helping her cook, find lost items, and even earning money in-game to buy her nice things. Time passes in the "real world," and after about a month of playing this phone game, Mita suddenly shows a desire to meet in person. After a dramatic pause, she just announces that now you're together! Huh?!
You look up from your phone and you're no longer in your bedroom, but in a familiar apartment...
You can explore the empty apartment if you like. I especially enjoyed the "Love Note" notebook; a cutesy version of the Death Note. Also, some of the books on the bookshelves were a bit concerning...
In Mita's bedroom, you find a machine hooked up to a platform. The whiteboard on the wall gives you directions to get it updated and functioning.
You get it running and it opens a portal on the platform. Having nothing else to do, you step into it...
You find yourself in a creepy, dark bedroom. The machine tells you to go hit the breaker in the living room, then track down four batteries to get the portal back online.
Things start to get a little weird. The rooms have a nasty habit of changing when you go through doorways, and creepy scribblings start appearing on the walls.
When you get the machine working again, you jump on the portal pad and find yourself in a normal bedroom. When you step away from the pad, you might find yourself jump-scared by Mita suddenly being right behind you.
She's so grateful to see you! She explains she built the machine to bring you into the game world with her, but you accidentally ended up in another version of the game. But none of that matters now, because you're finally here!
At this point, you start getting some different paths you can follow. I tried my best to explore every option, but some choices required you pick one of two options and forced you down that path. So my gameplay may not be exactly the same as yours, but the overall game probably went down the same path. Probably.
I helped Mita cook some food, got drugged by some "love sauce" which made me sick, and Mita forced me to take some pills to help me recover.
She also wanted to play games with me. I picked a card game, but I kept hearing an unsettling banging noise coming from her wardrobe.
I wouldn't drop it, and when I went to investigate, she threw herself in front of the closet door, desperate to change my mind.
Finally, Mita grows tired of everything and her personality shifts. She decides, with an evil grin, to let me check out the wardrobe... if I dare. She snaps her fingers and the room goes dark.
Suddenly, I found myself in a horror game, terrified of what's lurking in the dark. The wardrobe had a door inside it, but it was locked, so I grabbed a flashlight and explored the dark apartment, looking for a key. All while terrified of being jump-scared by Mita.
I found the key and unlocked the door in the wardrobe, to find stairs leading down into a basement. In one small room, there's a studio with a camera, where it looks like Mita was broadcasting herself on an overlay of the apartment for the mini games. You can see yourself on the screen when you step in front of the camera.
And in a locked cage under the stairs is... Mita. Except not the same Mita.
You help this Mita escape (dubbed "Kind Mita") and she sends you on a journey through multiple versions of the game and its backdoors, trying to find a way to stop "Crazy Mita" and get yourself home. You even run into many other versions of Mita, some that are exceptionally fun...
And some that are quite terrifying...
...As well as a variety of different looks and personalities. Cool Mita, a.k.a. "Cappie" (because of her cool cap) is by far my favorite Mita. She's funny, playful, and a bit flirty.
This was a unique twist on the horror genre. I haven't beaten it yet, but I've been enjoying it thus far. I'm still not sure where the plot is heading, but I've heard that there are at least three endings that have been discovered, so it will be interesting to see where my initial run lands me. Here's hoping I can survive and escape the game world!
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- lemmy.world
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- 8M
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*Don't worry, I'm alive! I took the holidays off and traveled to visit family, then had a hard time getting back into posting about the games I've been playing, so I apologize for my nearly 2 months of silence. I actually have a bunch of games lined up that I want to write about, so hopefully you'll see more posts in the coming weeks.*
*Despite setting this game to 4K resolution, it apparently only stretched to 1080p, so these screenshots are smaller than my usual ones. I'm sure 90% of you won't even notice a difference, but I'm sorry for the 10% who like my 4K screenshots.*
*A Way Out* is a brilliant 2-player co-op game about two inmates escaping from prison and seeking revenge against a common enemy. To be honest, I originally thought the whole premise of the game was just to work with a partner to devise an escape route from prison. But there's an actual story with some deep lore and intrigue, and escaping from prison is only the first chapter of the game.
This game is ONLY 2-player, so you'll need a partner to play. It's been sitting in my Steam library for a few years now, until I finally convinced a buddy of mine to play with me. The first thing you do is pick which character you want to play as. It just so happens that Vincent's personality mirrors mine perfectly, and Leo's personality mirrors my friend exactly, so this was an easy pick for both of us.
The game opens in 1972, with Vincent arriving to prison while Leo looks on from within the fence.
The first thing you'll notice is that you get a split-screen view, even if playing online with someone. This allows each player to explore their area independently, while also being able to see what the other is up to. Which is very convenient when you need to work in tandem from different locations. You also end up occupying cells right next to each other, which is advantageous for working together to escape.
Almost immediately, Leo is cornered by some thugs in the yard who were paid by a guy named Harvey to kill him. While trying to see what's going on, Vincent finds himself thrown into the action and he ends up helping Leo fight off the thugs until the guards come to break it up.
Later in the cafeteria, the leader of the thugs makes another attempt at Leo's life, this time landing Leo and Vincent in the infirmary. While there, Leo tries to convince Vincent to cover for him while he sneaks around the offices. Vincent wants no part of it, but begrudgingly helps to avoid getting them both thrown in the hole.
Leo manages to steal a chisel and toss it onto a ledge outside the window, then crawls back into his hospital bed before being noticed.
Later in the yard, Vincent approaches Leo, asking him what his plan for escape is. He asks what Leo plans to do to Harvey, which sets off Leo.
Turns out, Vincent also has a bone to pick with Harvey, and he's willing to escape with Leo if it means they can help each other track Harvey down.
The first step is to retrieve the chisel from the window ledge. Leo gets himself and Vincent on roof repair duty, then distracts the guards while Vincent climbs to the window ledge.
Chisel in hand, the two go back to their cells, where they take turns chipping away at their cell walls. Turns out, there's a hole in the wall behind the toilet, covered with metal bars. Some quick chipping at the concrete around the bars (while one person keeps an eye out for the patrolling guards) and you're both free from your cells!
You come across a drop that's way too far to jump, and too dark to see. With no way forward, you return to your cells to prepare the next step in your escape plan.
Soon, you're both volunteering for laundry duty, where you cause a commotion so you can sneak into a back room and throw some sheets through the vents. Now you can make a rope to climb down!
You also grab a couple flashlights. Now you're ready to continue! That night, you sneak out again and climb down the deep shaft into the sewers.
On the other end of the tunnels, you find your only way out... a tall narrow shaft upwards.
Vincent convinces Leo to climb it together with him by interlocking their arms and walking up the shaft. This can be tricky if your game partner isn't very coordinated. I highly recommend doing a countdown for each step or you're likely to fall.
The two get to the top... only to find a metal grate over the hole. No way to get through this without a wrench. So... you go back to your cells once more.
The next day, you volunteer to help in the workshop so you can sneak a wrench out. Again, you need to work together to sneak a tool out without being caught.
Later that day Leo gets a visit from his wife. He lets her know he's about to escape with Vincent, reassuring her that Vincent is legit and they're both going after Harvey together. It's only a little longer until they can be together again, along with his young boy who doesn't yet know his daddy is in prison.
Vincent is also waiting for a visit, but no one shows. Asking to make a phone call, he calls his very angry and very pregnant wife, who is pissed he's still planning to go after Harvey when he's about to become a father. Now we're getting some emotional stakes for each character!
That night, the two plan their final escape attempt from prison. It just so happens to be storming out, which provides some noise cover in certain areas.
The two are almost free when they're spotted! Sirens blare through the night and the prison goes on full alert! Vincent and Leo run off into the woods, where a mad foot chase (and car and boat chase!) ensues. And so ends the first chapter of this game...
This was truly an incredible game! Escaping from prison was fun, but also the slowest part of the game. The story gets more intense as you go on, and the stakes for both characters get higher and higher as they bond while plotting revenge against this Harvey guy.
The game has two endings and it's up to you and your partner to decide how it ends. I wish I could gush about the ending because it's just fantastic storytelling, and the gameplay is so intense and emotional. I was in tears by the end! It's definitely one of those games I wish I could wipe from my memory so I could play it fresh again.
You can play this online with strangers, but I highly recommend playing with a friend, as the personal connection makes the game much more interesting. Only one of you needs to own the game; the other person can install the trial version, then play through the entire game with the person who owns the full game. You will only earn achievements if you own the full game though, so if that's your thing, you should buy it.
Another great game by Hazelight Studios is *It Takes Two*, which I will probably be reviewing soonish. It's also a 2-player co-op only game, about a divorcing couple who are forced to work together in a fantastical version of their home when they find themselves transformed into tiny dolls!
Their studio is also about to drop a new game in March called *Split Fiction*, which is, again, a 2-player co-op only game. Sounds like it's about two writers who get trapped in their own fantasy/sci-fi stories and have to work together to escape with their memories intact. I'll need to check that out when it drops!
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- lemmy.world
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- 9M
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*Get To Work* is a tongue-in-cheek game about climbing the corporate ladder. But it's more metaphorical than literal, as you spend the game on your hands and knees, rollerblading your way up difficult obstacles (and falling back to the ground level) just for the slightest recognition in the workforce.
It's one of those climbing games, like *Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy*, or *Only UP!*, or *A Difficult Game About Climbing*, except you're on rollerblades instead of climbing with your own two hands. This game just released two days ago, so it's very new.
I like the title screen of this game. It's designed to look like a business magazine, while showing off the main character and your game options. Your character reminds me of the political activist Charlie Kirk, with his tiny face on a large head.
I also love the article call-out for Sam Bankman-Fried. In case you're not familiar, he was considered the poster boy for all things crypto, having founded FTX cryptocurrency exchange. That is, until FTX went bankrupt and he was arrested and charged for fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering. As of this year, he's serving 25 years in prison and was forced to pay back $11 billion.
*Get To Work* opens in your bedroom, with you staring at a poster encouraging you to climb that corporate ladder. So you set off, with rollerblades on your hands, feet, knees, and elbows. There is no walking or standing in this game; you rollerblade everywhere.
You reach your first room of obstacles, with the goal being to show up for your first interview. You may notice that there's a clock in the top left corner, giving you a subtle tracker for how long you struggle throughout this game.
A narrator explains the jist of this game for you, essentially claiming that NFTs were more far-fetched than a game about rollerblading up the corporate ladder. If you can't read the narration subtitles at the bottom of this screenshot, open the image in a new window to see its full 4K resolution.
Hidden around each room are these spinning logos for The Grindset, a podcast about business. They have short (usually funny) discussions about corporate life and what you need to know to succeed in today's work climate. As if the climb wasn't hard enough, most of them are in hard-to-reach areas. But there are three achievements for collecting these, so grab every one you can find!
Here's an excerpt of unprompted narration. It sounds silly and preposterous, but is also real in America and kind of sad. Two of my close friends are in this exact situation right now, having spent the past year job-hunting and *still* not having any luck being seriously considered. And one of them has a Harvard degree!
I'm almost to the interview...
You finally get to your first interview, only to find that it's not going to be that easy. We've gone so far metaphorical now, it's wrapping back around to literal!
You finally get an offer letter!
...Only to be rejected and fall all the way back to the start.
Thankfully, you have a family member who can hook you up with a warehouse job in the meantime. So you set out again to climb a new corporate ladder.
The game starts to get really sassy at this point. I got stuck in this room for about an hour, and the more I fell to the ground, the more the narrator had to say about it.
Eventually, the game gave me a GIVE UP button to press, for when I'm "feeling like this game is too much and it's time to give up." They also started mentioning shoes a lot, claiming it would probably be in my best interest to buy a pair and just walk my way to the top instead.
I finally made it to my first pay raise! ...Only to learn it wasn't feasible at this time and instead I received a pizza party. Goddamn, that's too real. But at least there's a manager role that I can promote to, so I'm not done yet, right? RIGHT?
I finally made it to the promotion to manager! Woo!
Only to have a brick wall literally pop up in my face, proclaiming that a college degree is required. Which I apparently don't have.
This was the first time my character seemed to be in real despair. Normally if he fell, he'd immediately pop back up and be ready to go. But after this one, he just lied there, unmoving. I had to jiggle the controls to get him back up.
There was a hallway off to one side that led to an unpaid internship, the only option left for a warehouse worker with no degree. Sigh.
After climbing this next room of obstacles and getting accepted for the unpaid internship, I finally had to call it a night. This humor in this game was starting to get too real and painful. And I spent an hour and a half just to get this far! You will eventually work your way up to CEO before the game ends, so I still have a long way to go.
By the way, [I couldn't resist making this](https://vimeo.com/1035892227). 🤣
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- lemmy.world
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- 10M
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*LocoCycle*, despite its appearance, is not actually a racing game, but an action/adventure fighting game that happens to take place on the open road.
*LocoCycle* opens with a live action B-movie cinematic. We get a few of these cinematic cutscenes throughout the game. We see important military leaders from China, Russia, Africa, and America, along with a ton of other guests in elegant formal wear, gathering at a secret formal event in Nicaragua. It's a gallery held by the arms dealer Big Arms, to show off two new motorcycles: the sentient combat bikes S.P.I.K.E. and I.R.I.S., with advanced AI and powerful weaponry. The bikes will be auctioned off to the highest bidder.
Yes, that is James Gunn in the background. He plays the host of this event, showing off the two bikes. The girl in blue (Lisa Foiles) actually performed the AI voice for I.R.I.S., and S.P.I.K.E. was voiced by Robert Patrick, the guy who played the T-1000 in *Terminator 2: Judgment Day*.
A thunderstorm starts brewing and the party is moved indoors. Some armed guards are asked to move the bikes to the garage, but while one steps away to take a call, I.R.I.S. is hit by lightning!
We're then introduced to I.R.I.S.' mechanic, Pablo, who is asked to repair her. Her circuitry is fried and she needs to be fixed up before the auction begins. Pablo only speaks Spanish throughout the entire game, which makes it impossible for him to communicate with I.R.I.S., whose database of 5,000 languages is now corrupted. If you don't know Spanish, make sure you turn on subtitles!
While Pablo is fixing her up, I.R.I.S. scans the magazine he was reading, then watches a commercial on the nearby TV about a Freedom Rally being held at the fairgrounds in Scottsburg, Indiana. She's inspired by the ad's tagline: "Live Free. Ride Alive."
She decides she needs to find this rally in Scottsburg, IN and she invites Pablo to tag along. Problem is, Pablo's pant leg is caught on I.R.I.S.' rear wheel frame. When she takes off, he finds himself dragged along!
The rest of the game is I.R.I.S. racing to find Scottsburg, IN while dragging Pablo on the pavement behind her. That trip is over 3,000 miles long! I hope Pablo is wearing some durable britches.
I.R.I.S. breaks out of the Big Arms facility and is quickly pursued by men in black suits and heavy firearms.
You'll quickly notice that I.R.I.S. drives on her own, and you only control her other functions. You can steer her back and forth, attack with front or rear wheels (Pablo himself usually being the rear-wheel attack), shoot unlimited rounds from her forward guns, and boost forward for a limited time.
Despite occasionally aiding I.R.I.S. in combat, Pablo insists that he's being dragged along against his will. He begs for help from anyone who comes after them, but is mostly ignored as they do everything they can to take down I.R.I.S.
There are several types of enemies you'll encounter. The armed men in black being the most prevalent, but there are also guys with jet packs, helicopters, and even rocket launchers. I.R.I.S. can counter all their attacks with quick-time events, including throwing rockets back at their launcher.
S.P.I.K.E. himself will come for I.R.I.S., but she refuses to go home with him. So he resolves to take her out and you get a boss fight with him.
When S.P.I.K.E. realizes that Pablo is a "powerful human ally" in I.R.I.S.' escape, he decides to get his own human companion. He grabs the first lady he finds at a campground, who willingly goes along with him despite being dragged on her back for miles of gravel and pavement.
Oh, and I'm pretty sure I.R.I.S. is just holding onto Pablo; he's not actually stuck. Because she can throw him like a ninja star to attack ranged enemies! He always boomerangs back to her and ends up with his pant leg "stuck" on her again.
Because I.R.I.S. is technically malfunctioning, there are times when she might shut down completely and stop in the middle of the road. Then Pablo has a limited amount of time to fix her up before a pursuing semi truck catches up and runs them both over.
It's a little tricky moving Pablo around until he finds problems to fix, but the various fixes themselves are relatively easy to complete.
This is an extremely campy and silly game, but very fun to play! Combat is mostly button-mashing and swerving around obstacles on the road, with some quick-time events to either counter an attack or dodge an obstacle. There are three skill trees to improve I.R.I.S. and Pablo's abilities, and the more stuff you unlock, the easier the game becomes. The whole game is 5 levels with 3 missions per level, plus a final boss fight level. You could probably beat the whole thing in a few hours of gameplay.
Here's a shot of S.P.I.K.E. eating a sweet corn and black raspberry buttermilk ice cream cone:
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- lemmy.world
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- 10M
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Good morning! Today I'm going to be looking at the latest game in the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise: *Sonic X Shadow Generations*. This game is a 2024 remake of the 2011 game *Sonic Generations*, which itself was a modern tribute to Sonic's past games fighting against Dr. Eggman.
*Side note: His name was Dr. Robotnik in the old American version of the games, but he's always been known as Dr. Eggman in the original Japanese. The game* Sonic Adventure *fixed the discrepancy by making "Eggman" a teasing name Sonic called Robotnik. Robotnik liked it enough, he made it his official moniker and he's been known as Dr. Eggman ever since.*
The original *Sonic Generations* inspired the creation of new games in the classic side-scroller series, including *Sonic 4 Episode I* and *II*, *Sonic Mania*, *Sonic Origins* (which was an updated collection of *Sonic 1-3 & Knuckles*, *Sonic CD*, plus 12 Game Gear games), a cameo of "Classic Sonic" and his side-scrolling adventures in *Sonic Forces*, and recently, *Sonic Superstars*.
*Sonic Generations* firmly established in the canon that the 2D side-scroller Classic Sonic was a younger Sonic. Every game since his redesign in *Sonic Adventure* is the 15-yr old "Modern Sonic," whose 3-dimensional third-person games continue to this day.
Today, though, I will be focusing specifically on Shadow the Hedgehog's story in *Sonic X Shadow Generations*, since this is the "Year of Shadow" according to SEGA. He's going to be the new villain in the live-action film *Sonic the Hedgehog 3*, which is releasing late next month.
I do my best not to spoil the games I review, but I need to be extra careful with this one, as the opening cutscene basically explains Shadow's whole tragic past. For those unfamiliar with Shadow's games and don't want his story spoiled before they see the live action film, I will be avoiding any revealing details concerning his past.
*Shadow Generations* starts out with a brief glance at Shadow's past aboard the space colony ARK, a massive station orbiting Earth. This was where Shadow was created 50 years prior, by Professor Gerald Robotnik, Eggman's grandfather.
Shadow lived on the space station, alongside Gerald's young granddaughter Maria, who was a constant ray of sunshine; the only beacon of optimism and light in Shadow's life. The two of them were the best of friends.
Long story short (skipping a lot of revealing backstory), Shadow ended up captured and contained in a cryogenic tube for 50 years, where he was awoken by Dr. Eggman in the game *Sonic Adventure 2*. After losing a half century of time and everyone he's ever known in his life, the despairing hedgehog agreed to team up with the grandson of his creator to fight Sonic and destroy the world that ruined his life. Later, he realized he was fighting for the wrong side (and for the wrong reasons). He eventually teamed up with Sonic to save the world instead, then went off to become an anti-hero, searching to discover the truth about his dark past.
Cutting back to modern-day Shadow, we find him exploring the ARK because of an unusual bio-signature detected aboard the space colony. He's contacted by his partner, Rouge the Bat, who claims he's missing Sonic's birthday party. This was the opening for *Sonic Generations*, showing that Shadow's story takes place at the same time.
Suddenly, Shadow comes across a creature from his dark past: Doom's Eye! This tentacle starfish alien creature is an extension of Black Doom, a world-conquering alien from the game *Shadow the Hedgehog*. Even though Shadow defeated him in the past, he's somehow back!
Doom's Eye can warp reality, trapping Shadow in a Doctor Strange-esque mirror dimension of sorts.
Shadow fights Doom's Eye and after giving him a solid poke in the eye, Doom's Eye runs away through a portal, exclaiming that they'll meet again soon. You receive an alien-looking artifact that's in the shape of the Black Arms symbol, the mark of Black Doom's alien army. If you ever played *Shadow the Hedgehog*, you'll recognize this symbol as part of the game's logo.
As if there weren't enough trouble, the Time Eater from *Sonic Generations* shows up, trapping everyone at Sonic's birthday party in a time anomaly!
This was the latest plot by Dr. Eggman, to control the Time Eater and thus control time itself. He planned to rewrite past events and erase Sonic from existence! Shadow finds himself caught up in the anomaly, although he lands in a barren land of his own past which is frozen in time. There is a floating orb in the sky with eyes surrounding it, which awakens from the Black Arms symbol you collected. Every one you collect throughout the game brings it more to life.
Having no way out of this "White Space," you start exploring various stages, reliving places and villains from Shadow's past. Every stage has two acts, which bring life and color to the area as you complete them.
This area is different from Sonic's White Space in *Sonic Generations*. Sonic explores a 2D White Space, where all the frozen stages are lined up in a row. Shadow gets more of an open map to explore, like the recent open-world *Sonic Frontiers* game.
Eventually, you find others who have been trapped in the time anomaly, like E-123 Omega, Shadow's other partner; Orbot and Cubot, Eggman's robot lackeys; Big the Cat, a friendly fisherman whose looking for his best friend, Froggy; and... Maria and Gerald Robotnik?!
These two familiar faces from Shadow's distant past are a sight for sore eyes. Vowing to protect them, he runs off to save more of the time-frozen realm and stop Black Doom, the main villain of Shadow's past. Black Doom plans to use the time anomaly to accelerate his plans and destroy the world before Shadow has a chance to stop him.
Shadow, as the "ultimate life form," has his own powers, including Chaos Control. It's a way he can use chaos emeralds to warp time and space, which he usually uses to teleport. In this game though, it freezes time for a few seconds while Shadow continues moving. It's used as a way to freeze impossible obstacles so Shadow has a moment to cross, destroy, or escape them. It also freezes your game clock, giving you a few spare seconds to complete an act without dropping to a lower final grade. Destroying enemies fills the Chaos Control gauge at the bottom center of the screen.
You also unlock Doom powers for Shadow, allowing him to use the dark energy for new abilities. But the stronger Shadow gets, the stronger Black Doom gets, making your inevitable fight a tough one.
There was an act in *Sonic Generations* where Sonic goes back in time to a race/fight with Shadow in *Sonic Adventure 2*. This fight was retconned in this remake, where modern-day Shadow runs into Sonic in the time anomaly and they chase each other into the past act where they originally raced. Sonic is looking to take the Chaos Emerald that Shadow has on him, because he needs it in order to stop the Time Eater. But Shadow needs it to perform Chaos Control, so he has an advantage against the Black Arms. Who do you think will win this fight...?
This game was a masterful remake of a tribute to the classic games in the Sonic franchise. Not only modernizing graphics and gameplay, but also adding more lore, exploring Shadow's past games, and introducing his gameplay to elements of more modern games, like *Sonic Forces* and *Sonic Frontiers*.
The gameplay is fantastic, seamlessly blending action and speed with the controls so you actually feel like you're moving at mach speeds while controlling Shadow. And the visuals are just incredible for a Sonic game! Like in the Kingdom Valley stage, where you ride an eagle several times throughout the two acts! This is a throwback to the game *Sonic the Hedgehog (2006)*, where the eagles provided characters transportation throughout Kingdom Valley.
This game is full of references and updated levels of older Sonic games, but you don't need to play the previous games to get enjoyment out of this one. There is plenty of story and lore to fill in the gaps, so you don't feel left out. The important details are fully covered, while also giving you a new full story to enjoy. The only thing that might stop you from playing it is Shadow's backstory, which might ruin parts of the live-action *Sonic the Hedgehog 3* film that's about to release. But that film series is already deviating quite a bit from the original games, so you probably won't spoil much of the film if you play this game.
As a huge Sonic the Hedgehog fan for over 30 years now, I can say that I really enjoyed this game! So much so, that I'm actually going to go back and re-play some of the older Sonic games from my childhood. I wish I could play *Shadow the Hedgehog*, which introduced Black Doom and his Black Arms, but it only released for the PS2 and it never got a port to any other console. We need a modern port and/or remake, SEGA!
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- lemmy.world
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- 10M
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How do you do, fellow gamers? I'm back with another set of video game screenshots! And today's game is a simulator game. I actually love simulator games; I have a whole category in my Steam library dedicated to them. It's the only library collection I've made that's specifically for a genre of game.
I got *Tavern Manager Simulator* on sale yesterday, and whereas there are probably better simulator games in my collection, I did enjoy this one in particular.
It opens with you acquiring a run-down tavern just outside a large castle. The place is boarded up and you need to remove some planks in order to get in the back door and open up the tavern.
The place is in disrepair and you spend some time picking up trash and cleaning stains on the floor before you can open the place.
The large piles of garbage are too much for you to deal with right now, so you just throw a cloth over them to get the place open and running.
You have a small private room just off to the side of the bar room. There's a bed in here where you can sleep until 6 AM the next morning. There's also a desk where you do all the "paperwork" for the tavern. This desk is where you can upgrade your tavern and its amenities. The more you level up your tavern, the more variety of foods you can sell, and the larger the tavern will grow. Literally; it will actually expand into a proper dining hall if you upgrade it enough.
Although the most important category is the Delivery tab, where you can order resources (food), furniture, and decorations.
You will need to make regular food orders as your supplies dwindle. You can place an order anytime and it will be at your back door in less than a minute. You can actually watch a horse-drawn cart show up down the road as soon as you order. Almost half the wait time is just watching it turn in a loop before stopping for you to unload it.
Next, you need to fix your sign out front. This is what you will use to signal when you're open.
When it's facing the tavern, you're closed. But when it's turned to face the road passing by your tavern, you're open. You can switch it anytime, day or night, to start or stop the flow of customers. You can also customize your new sign. Here is my tavern's sign, turned to signal that I'm open for business:
To start, you'll only have ale. Pouring ale is a bit of an art; you have to hold the pour button until it fills to the green line on a bar. Any less and it's just a "good" ale. In that green, it's a "perfect" ale and will have a sparkle to it. And if you go over, you will spill on the floor (requiring a clean-up) and it will be a "bad" ale, with a puke-greenish tint to it.
Make sure you hand out as many good or perfect ales as you can to customers! You're earning reputation to help improve your customer base and upgrade your tavern, so keep those customers happy! I don't know what the customers will do if you serve them a bad ale. I've just been dumping them in the trash and taking the financial loss so I don't hurt my reputation. Here was my very first customer:
You have a limited supply of dishes, so make sure to clean them as often as you can in the kitchen sink. You can get water from the well behind your tavern, and every dish you scrub counts for 2 cleaned dishes. It's super easy to clean, just swirl it in the soapy water for a few seconds and all the gunk will disappear from the dish.
You also have to clean your tavern as you go. Most patrons will leave a mess on the table when they leave. Collect their coin and dishes, but also don't forget to wipe down the tables as needed. Some customers will also leave footprints all over your floors. Don't forget to sweep them up!
Most customers will only make a single food/drink request, then leave when they're done. But this guy kept requesting more beers until he passed out on the bar. You can literally pick up these drunk customers by the scruff of their neck and toss them out. You can also ask anyone to leave anytime you want, but it's more fun to throw them out while they're black-out drunk. Plus, you collect a ton of coin from all the booze they consumed.
There are also beggars who might come into your tavern. You can give them what they ask for, which will give your tavern a boost in reputation, or you can tell them to scram. Later, you acquire a frying pan, which you can brandish as a weapon against unruly patrons or beggars.
This beggar lady came by pretty often. I had one guy come by saying he was dying of thirst and just needed some water. I went to the well out back and got a pail of water and he was very satisfied with that.
Over time, you start to expand the menu; first to sausage, then vegetable soup, and then grilled meat. It gets more complicated as you go on, because you now have to pay attention to customer's requests and not just hand out ale to every customer. Eventually, your kitchen gets fixed up as you level up your tavern and expand your menu. It starts to look like a nice place to work!
You will also unlock fairy helpers, whom you can assign jobs in the tavern. Which is nice when you have to cook soup, grill meat, chop firewood for the stove and grill, pour ale, clean the outhouse, and do dishes. PLUS ensuring customers are getting the food they want in a timely manner, cleaning up after them, and ordering more food when your supplies are getting low. It can get intense. Thankfully, I have not been completely swamped with customers yet. I got maybe 1-3 orders at a time, so I have a little time to balance everything. Just having a fairy to do dishes is a huge relief during open hours.
When you're closed up for the day, if you explore the grounds outside your tavern, you'll find hidden tributes to other medieval fantasy series. So far, I've seen references to Zelda, Dark Souls, Shrek, World of Warcraft, and Lord of the Rings. Let me know if you find any others!
If you catch a break (which I rarely did), you can chat with your customers, which gives you a +1 to your reputation. Although they usually just have either something weird to say, or a medieval dad joke.
Overall, this was a very enjoyable game. I had fun running back and forth, trying to keep food and drink prepared and dealing with customers as they came in. I had to make a lot of orders in the middle of the day to keep my stock up initially, but as I got used to the game, I was able to more effectively plan my food and drink and I was mostly able to make an order at night and be ready for the entire next day. It helps that none of the consumables ever went bad, so I could prep a bunch of stuff and leave it sitting out until customers ordered it.
I always felt there weren't enough hours in the day, though. Every minute of the day was a real-time second, so I basically had 24 minutes max to host customers every day. I'd run my tavern until I was almost out of everything late at night, then I'd spend the last few hours of the night/morning restocking and prepping for the next day. If I went to bed, it was usually with only an hour or two of sleep before getting up the next day. So far, I don't think sleep deprivation is a thing in this game. I ran my tavern for 3 days straight without any side effects at one point.
So if you like restaurant managing/waitressing games, this was a pretty fun medieval spin on the genre. Come grab a pint and enjoy!
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- lemmy.world
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- 10M
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*Happy (belated) Veteran's Day! Sorry for posting this so late; I'm a recently retired veteran, so yesterday ended up busier than I expected.*
*And speaking of busy... I started these daily posts as 1.) a writing challenge for myself, 2.) a way to geek out about the games that I've been enjoying lately, and 3.) with the hope of adding some interesting and unique content to /c/games. But my ADHD/hyper-focus has been taking the wheel lately, and I've been taking longer and longer to write these up, not counting the several hours of gaming I do every night to acquire screenshots in the first place.*
*I was trying to find something to play the night before last and I ended up bouncing between several games that I just couldn't get into. Then I found* Remember Me *and it was so much fun, I didn't want to stop playing to write about it. I stayed up until dawn playing, then had so much on my schedule for that day, I didn't have time to write until later that night.*
*Basically, I've been spending most of my free time preparing these posts (which is a lot, considering I'm 100% retired now), and as much fun as it is, I need to cut back a bit and focus on other stuff in my life. Like actually finishing some of the fun and interesting games I've been writing about. I can't complete most of these games in a single night, despite my best efforts. But I don't want to make multiple posts about the same game several days in a row; I want to provide new and interesting content for you to read.*
*I'm not going to stop writing detailed (and spoiler-free) posts about video games, but I will cut back a bit on my posting schedule so it's not eating up all my free time. I never promised to do daily posts anyway; that was just a personal writing goal of mine and I've made it to 50 posts with only 3 days missed (including this one), so I'd consider that a win. I'll try to aim for an absolute minimum of a post a week; although I may post more often as I find and play interesting games. I still have a list of games I want to write about, so there's still plenty of content to come.*
*All of my screenshot posts have been archived on a blog, which you can find [here](https://cobyscreenshots.blogspot.com/). I draft them on the blog initially, then copy/paste to Lemmy and post both simultaneously. I have another blog where I review movies, although I've been ignoring it for over a year now and would like to get back into it; another reason I want to slow down these gaming posts. You can find a link to that blog on my blog profile if you're interested.*
*And now back to today's game...*
*Remember Me* is a fascinating cyberpunk game taking place in Neo-Paris in the year 2084, a dark future where people have merged their brains with technology and can now have their memories accessed digitally. This has created a market for buying, selling and trading memories. This has also led to a surveillance society, where corporations can access memories and either wipe or replace them as they desire.
You play a French woman named Nilin, a memory hunter who can not only access memories, but has the extremely rare skill of editing details within them to give a person false memories. She's part of an underground resistance movement, fighting against Memorize, a corporation trying to create a monopoly on human memories. She's classified as an Errorist, which is not only the name for people who can create "error" or false memories, but is also a brilliant take on the word "terrorist."
I'd like to point out that this is a game developed by a French studio, the story takes place in Paris, and the French language is written on signs and billboards and graffiti throughout the game's world, so I felt it was appropriate to play this game in French with English subtitles to get the full effect. It's such a beautiful language and it felt wrong to play this game in English. Especially when Nilin has a British-English accent in the English version.
Unfortunately, this game originally released in 2013, so it wasn't designed for 4K displays and despite having that resolution option on the Steam version, the subtitles don't scale to the size of my screen. They're extremely tiny in these screenshots, so I apologize in advance for that. If you see a fuzzy white line across the bottom of a screenshot, open the image in a new tab and you can zoom in to read the subtitle.
*Remember Me* opens with Nilin squirming on the floor of a prison cell as her memories are erased. When the procedure completes, a doctor approaches her and asks her name. Surprisingly, she's able to remember her name! She doesn't remember much else though, so the doctor consults the head of the department, Dr. Quaid, and Nilin is scheduled for a more detailed memory wipe to scrape out any remnants.
Barely able to stand, she's directed to follow an orange line down the hallway, where she joins a queue for another memory wipe. While waiting in line, a voice pops into her head. A guy by the name of Edge, who claims he's attempting to rescue her.
The power goes out and a blast door next to Nilin raises a little bit, exposing a small gap. She's instructed to slip through the doorway. Her escape is detected though and she's pursued by a large robot, which she's barely able to stumble away from in her dazed state.
Eventually, she falls down an air vent and stumbles across a machine loading up bodies into caskets. She's told to climb into a casket, which she does begrudgingly. The machine seals her in the casket, then launches her out of the prison facility and into a river.
Edge explains who Nilin is and why she's had her memory wiped. Apparently, their resistance movement failed and everyone was rounded up except for their leader, Edge. Nilin was his best fighter though, so he's rescued her so she can help recover their resistance.
Her casket drifts up to Slum 404, a garbage-filled slum of Neo-Paris. She's freed by some scavengers known as Leapers. The correlation to lepers is not lost; deformed and monstrous, they're the corrupted and insane remnants of citizens whose memories have been edited too many times. Their instinct is to attack Nilin when they find her.
Suddenly remembering some basics on how to fight, Nilin is quick to take them down. Her memories start coming back a little at a time throughout the game, although only enough for her to remember key details. Edge informs her to travel to Tommy, her best friend and former memory hunter who is loyal to their cause. He runs a bar in the slums called The Leaking Brain.
He is grateful to see her, even though she doesn't remember him. He rescued her glove that she uses to manipulate memories, as well as her combat skin. He comments that it's a good thing they caught her on her day off, or else they would've gotten their hands on her high-tech gear.
But just as soon as she's suited up, a bounty hunter jumps out of the shadows! Olga Sedova, one of the best in the business, and she's out to collect the bounty on Nilin's head.
Before she can secure her though, Nilin gets her glove close enough to Olga's neck to grab hold of her memories. We're transported into her memory from three hours ago, when Olga was at a hospital watching Dr. Quaid tend to her husband.
Her husband had deleted too many memories over time, causing a syndrome that is breaking down his mind. It's implied that he may be turning into a Leaper. Dr. Quaid promises he can fix it; although it will be very expensive. A bounty for Nilin pops up and Olga promises she can pay, heading off to hunt Nilin.
At this point, you're able to fast-forward and rewind the memory, finding small glitches that you can edit in the details, like unfastening the husband's mask or removing one of his wrist straps. Changing these little details leads to a different outcome for the memory. Your goal is to find the right edits to make Dr. Quaid appear to have killed Olga's husband instead of saving him.
This part may take a while and some tinkering with various details until you find the right combination of edits, but once you figure it out, Olga is forced to watch as her husband dies a violent death due to Dr. Quaid's incompetence. Snapping out of the memory, Olga suddenly decides to side with you as revenge against Memorize for killing her husband! She offers to give you a lift to your next objective.
From here, you carry out missions for Edge, fight more people from your past whom you barely recall, return to the prison to regain more of your memories from their memory backups, and along the way, question who you really are and what you're actually fighting for.
This game is kind of like a cyberpunk version of *Assassin's Creed*. You're part of a shady underground organization, sneaking around, climbing all over the structures of Neo-Paris, and fighting the controlling organization ruling over the land, all while stealing and/or editing people's memories.
You can't free-roam like in *Assassin's Creed* though; you're stuck on a singular path toward your objective, which prevents you from back-tracking even a couple rooms as you progress forward. It does help keep you focused on the story, though. I've played nearly 7 hours and I just finished episode 4 out of 8 total. So the lack of exploration doesn't make this a quick story to burn through.
The combat is extremely fluid, too! You have combo streaks that you can build yourself from various types of attacks (power, healing, cooldowns for special attacks, and chain abilities). Completing combos will grant you points to eventually unlock even longer and more powerful combos, which can make defeating even the toughest enemies no effort at all.
Not to mention, Nilin is extremely light on her feet. Every time an attack is incoming, you can just press your jump button and she immediately cartwheels out of the way, or even flips over enemies' heads if she's up close in combat. You can weave and dodge in and out of a dozen enemies without taking any damage because they always indicate when they're about to strike.
You can also find collectibles in each level called Mnesist memories, which are cultural memories of Neo-Paris, preserving actual history so corruption from edited memories doesn't wash away what actually happened. These are more background lore, if you're interested in world building. They give a history of the fall of Paris during a global war in the 2040s and how Neo-Paris and its current social and economic structure sprouted from the ashes. As well as many other detailed bits of lore to flesh out the world.
One of the only things I didn't enjoy about this game is the camera controls. They're a bit dated and erratic. It is an older game, so it doesn't have smooth modern camera controls. It keeps trying to default the camera to a position that doesn't give a good view of your surroundings, so I found myself constantly adjusting the third-person camera, which didn't want to move smoothly and precisely most of the time.
Also, the shadows and lighting effects are pretty bad. There were tons of dark scenes where I could hardly make out Nilin or others. Her skin tone is so unnaturally dark and shaded in this game, it looks like she spent way too long in a tanning bed. The only time she looks halfway normal is when her face is directly illuminated in a bright space. But if the light wasn't directly on her face, even in bright sunlight, she was unnaturally shadowed.
But again, those are problems due to the age of the game. Physics engines have evolved a ton in the past decade, and if this game was remade today, it would look absolutely stunning. Even for its time, this is a gorgeous look into a future cyberpunk Paris. And the story is captivating and kept me engaged for hours. This is an incredible game, it just needs some tune-ups to the graphics and controls to be perfect.
The orchestral soundtrack gives this game a very cinematic feel, too. I wish they released the soundtrack on Steam so I could listen to its music outside of gameplay.
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- lemmy.world
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- 10M
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*Say No! More* is a relatively short but comical game about empowering people to say "no" more often. It mostly plays itself, with you interacting enthusiastically at key points throughout the gameplay.
The game starts with you creating a character. You can pick one of their 16 presets, or create your own. I modeled mine after my wife, because she's really good at saying "no." 😅
Next, you pick the way you say "no." There are 17 languages, with both a masculine and feminine voice to choose from. I think my favorite is Irish Gaelic. Instead of a 2-letter word, theirs is long and super complicated sounding.
Then the game opens up on a video game called "Wizards of Nay," where you play as a wizard who fights imps and a Devil King by using the word "nay."
When you get a game over, it zooms out of your cell phone to show your character sitting on a park bench. Your roommate approaches you and offers you a custom lunchbox he made, with a home-cooked meal inside. How nice!
But was he just buttering you up? Because the very next thing he asks is if you can cover the rent this month... AGAIN. He has all sorts of excuses as to why. He's short on cash, still job hunting, etc. You try to respond to him and all you can muster is a "..." Which he takes as "we'll discuss it later" and he lets you run off. It's your first day of work at a new company!
You arrive at work and meet up with two other interns, who are already waiting with your new supervisor. He reprimands you for being late and when you can't respond with an excuse, he threatens to fire you before lunch if you don't learn to speak up. But he's one of *those* supervisors, who tries to play off all aggression as just a joke.
He instructs all three of you to say "yes" all the time if you want to promote within the company. The other two interns are motivated and on board, but again, all you can muster is a weak "..."
He decides to have a practice run. He claims he's hungry and wants your lunchbox. What do you say to that...?
When you can't give a straight response, he laughs it off, saying it's just a joke and no one will take your lunch. At least, not yet...
You and the other interns go off to the tiny cramped corner behind the vending machines that has your new desks. After the other two interns are called away, your supervisor pokes his head around the corner and claims he actually forgot his lunch and really needs one today. So...?
Unable to give a response, he takes it as a "yes" and runs off with your lunchbox. You bang your head on your keyboard, defeated.
That is, until a cassette player drops on your head from somewhere. Inside is a cassette tape labeled, "NO!" You put on some headphones and listen to it.
You're introduced to the confident voice of a motivational speaker! He instructs you to have confidence in yourself and speak one magic word: NO!
He has you practice using the word a few times, then shows you how to laugh at people, to confuse them and break their confidence so your "no" is that much more powerful against them.
You chase down your supervisor in the office and use the new word you just learned against him. It's super effective!
You relentlessly pursue him through the office, throwing your powerful word at him, attempting to shake him so he gives your lunchbox back. All your coworkers jump in your way to ask you to do menial "intern tasks" for them, but you can knock them back with the word "no!"
From here, your lunchbox gets passed around to various levels of leadership in the office, while you continue to chase after it.
Thanks to the motivational speaker on your cassette tape, you learn how to say no in different ways to affect different types of people. You have the standard angry no, but you will also learn a cold no, bored no, and wacky no. On top of that, you learn an add-on response to shake your target and make your "no" more brutal. You start with laughing at them before hitting them with a "no," but you will also learn how to slow clap, nod in agreement before saying "no," and a sarcastic "hmm" before landing that solid "no."
Eventually, your coworkers notice you speaking up against management and they start rallying behind you. You go out to lunch together and teach them all how to say "no" as well. Before you know it, you have a whole crowd of employees willing to say the word "no."
The game gets more wacky and outlandish as you go on, with all sorts of hilarious twists and turns to the plot. It's a fun journey through a day in an office where the word "no" is banned. Like I said, the game mostly plays itself and you just shout the word "no" at every opportunity you can. You can probably beat it in about an hour, but it's so much fun, I've already played through it a few times.
Despite all its silliness, this game comes with a pretty decent moral at the end about standing up for yourself, but also knowing when to say "yes" too. So take charge of your life! Learn to say "no" instead of caving to social pressure! And empower those around you!
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- lemmy.world
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- 10M
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*Note: I set this game to display in 4K resolution, but it enabled a resolution scale and wouldn't scale larger than 1080p for some reason. After I beat the game, I realized I was in borderless windowed mode. Changing it to fullscreen granted the full 4K resolution. So these screenshots are all going to be 1080p instead of my usual 4K.*
*Death From Above* takes place in the Ukrainian town of Nenatsk during the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War. You play a Ukrainian drone operator who is captured by invading Russian forces. But you're freed by a little old lady whom the Russians took for granted.
You grab a drone and a bunch of grenades and set out to clear the region from Russian invaders.
You can customize your drone and its pilot. As per usual, I switched to a female drone pilot. I also chose a camo pattern for my drone with Ukrainian colors and a Ukrainian flag trail behind it. Not very good camouflage in real life, but colorful and fun for a game!
You set out to restore communications with your military unit. There's an antenna nearby, guarded by several Russian military members, so you move to engage them. You can switch between your pilot and your drone, and for the most part, you only fight with your drone. Your pilot can't pick up a weapon and engage the enemy, so you want to keep them tucked away somewhere safe. Your drone has some seriously good range on it though (and unlimited battery life), so raise it high enough in the sky so as not to be seen by enemy forces and go scope out the target area ahead.
You can also turn on thermal imaging to make people and vehicles show up easier. Good for finding those stubborn forces hiding in the woods.
An interesting detail is that every time you kill a Russian combatant, their body immediately sprouts sunflowers. The sunflower is Ukraine's national flower, and if you haven't heard the story, there was a Ukrainian woman recorded on video who approached an occupying Russian military member and offered sunflower seeds to put in his pockets, so his dead body would blossom sunflowers. ([Source](https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/europe/ukraine-russia-soldier-woman-confrontation-b2022993.html))
Once you restore communications, you receive a message from Special Forces HQ, asking you to clear out Russian forces in the nearby village. From this point, you'll receive messages from HQ after each mission, directing you toward your next mission.
Also, you'll see a wanted poster of Putin on the wall in this room. Make sure you improve the poster for a huge score bonus. There are several of these posters to be found around the map. Don't forget to deface all of them!
To take out enemy forces, you switch your drone to a bomb view, giving you a target reticle directly below your drone. In this mode, you can drop your grenades on enemies.
Also, you can ask troops to surrender using the drone.
I've only had one guy surrender to me so far, but I got blown away by a tank before I could accept his surrender. The tanks just sat there idly, unmoving. I didn't realize they were armed and ready to target my pilot as soon as she wandered close. Oops.
The Russian troops were looting washing machines from homes, but after you clear out the enemies, you can pick up the washing machines with your drone and drop them onto designated pallets for homeowners to reclaim when they move back in. It doesn't matter which pallets in an area you drop them on; they get beamed up into the sky every time you drop one off, as well as giving you a score bonus.
Once you take over a Russian command post, you'll find the FPV drone. It acts like a guided missile; when you launch it, it shoots rapidly in the direction you're facing and blows up whatever target it hits.
You have some control over its direction, but it needs space to make big turns and it has a very short battery life that will drain in seconds, so make sure you're prepared when you launch it toward a target.
I should mention that you have unlimited ammunition in this game. Despite blowing up the FPV drone on each use, it will respawn in your inventory after a few seconds. Also, your regular drone can only hold 6 grenades at a time, but every time you fly it close to your pilot, it automatically refills all your grenades. So go nuts and take down as many enemies as you can from a safe vantage point!
By the way, the soundtrack for this game is awesome! Starring all Ukrainian bands. You can download it on Steam. The title song, also called "Death From Above," was made and performed by the band *Antytila*. They have three versions of the song: an English version, Ukrainian version, and a 21-minute instrumental version. I've been playing this song on repeat for months now; it's my favorite on the soundtrack!
There's also the band *Surface Tension*, who released their single "Завтра (Tomorrow)," both the original song and an instrumental version.
The band *Odarka Zyrko* released their single "за тобою (Behind You)," also the original version and an instrumental version.
Finally, there's *GO_A* with their single "Kalyna," which is the Ukrainian name for the guelder rose. It's a prominent symbol in Ukrainian culture, showing up in a lot of their media. This is probably my second most favorite song on the soundtrack.
You can hear "Death From Above" playing on radios scattered all throughout the game. But in the first village you come across, if you follow the sound of music, you'll find the actual band jamming in a house! Sadly, you can only watch from a single window. I had to take 2 screenshots to get all the band members in there.
This game actually benefits Ukrainian forces in their ongoing war. The publisher, Lesser Evil, claims that 30% of their proceeds are donated to two organizations helping the Ukraine war effort: "Come Back Alive" and "Army of Drones." Once they've earned back their production costs, they'll change their donation amount to 70%, using the remaining 30% to continue improving this game.
So if you want to show support for Ukraine (while also experiencing what it's like to operate a combat drone in occupied territory), I highly recommend playing this game. It's only $10 on Steam, or $16.46 for the supporter's edition, which includes this rockin' soundtrack and more skins for your pilot and drone.
If I had anything to complain about, it's that the controls currently can't be changed. I'm used to using Shift and Ctrl to go up and down in helicopters in other games, but you use E and Q to fly your drone up and down in this game. It took me a while to adapt to their controls, and I kept getting them confused and dipping into enemies instead of flying away. Developers, please let us change the controls!
Also, the game is relatively short. The whole game takes place on a single large map, but you are directed toward missions in specific regions of the map. There are 8 missions in total (plus a secret warship mission!). If you rushed through it, you could probably beat the whole game in an hour or less. But you earn points toward your total score for every little thing you accomplish in game - every enemy you kill, every vehicle you destroy, every flag you raise or propaganda site you discover. Heck, every washing machine you return gives you a boost to your score. So if you were to run around doing everything you possibly can... well, it took me about 4 hours to complete, and I know I missed a bunch of stuff.
Your total score gives you a global ranking, which you can see on the main menu. I started last night at #5,549 (I had previously played the first mission then quit), and by the time I beat the game, I was #194 globally.
So long story short, this was an extremely fun game with an amazing soundtrack, if not a bit short on gameplay and clunky controls. I hope they continue to improve on it and make it much more enjoyable. Lesser Evil, on their Steam page, claims, *"We are uncompromisingly anti-authoritarian, anti-prejudice, and pro-democracy. We publish video games with clear political or social intent and messaging. We publish games that take a stand."* So even though it's a short game, it's meant to deliver a message against fascism. And I think it did a pretty good job in getting that point across in the span of its gameplay. *Slava Ukraini!*
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- lemmy.world
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- 10M
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*Cult of the Lamb* is a cute game about building, maintaining, and running a cult in order to overthrow the four Bishops controlling the Old Faith. But is there such a thing as a good cult...?
You play as The Lamb, about to be put to death by the four Bishops. They've eliminated all of your kind to prevent a prophecy of "The One Who Waits" returning. With your sacrifice, the prophecy will be impossible to fulfill.
As soon as the blade lands, you wake up in a strange land, in front of The One Who Waits. He's imprisoned by four chains. He says that the Bishops, in trying to keep you from him, ended up sending you directly to him. He claims that he will grant you life again if you would start a cult in his name. Your choice is either "yes" or "absolutely." No middle ground option, I see.
He gives you his Red Crown, which revives you and grants you the power to command the loyalty of your followers and strike fear into the hearts of your enemies. You awaken at the sacrificial grounds, renewed with life, and fight your way out, taking out some of the Bishop's cultists along the way.
On your way out, you run into Ratau, a former vessel of The One Who Waits. He was instructed to help you with starting your cult. He will pop in and give you advice and guidance from time to time.
He also instructs you to save a poor soul about to be sacrificed. The grateful sacrifice will be your very first convert.
From here, you learn how to build your own cult grounds. It takes some work! You can't just leave your cult members to their own devices; you need to check in on them, provide food and shelter, task them with jobs, and overall just ensure they're happy and loyal so they continue to praise and worship you.
The more loyalty they have, the more power you build and the larger you can build your cult. Placing a shrine in the middle of your cult grounds will give your followers a place to pray and grant devotion, a sort of currency that you can use to upgrade various aspects of your cult.
You will also need to build a temple in order to give sermons, enriching your followers and also collecting more devotion from them.
Cultists can be tasked with collecting resources, which are needed to build up your cult grounds. But you also need money and more followers, both of which can be obtained by fighting your way through the lands of the Old Faith.
You ultimately need to end the lives of the four Bishops in order to release your imprisoned leader, so working your way through each of their lands is your overall goal. But it takes time to build up a cult and gain power, so you will slowly work your way up to each Bishop. As you gain more followers, each of the four lands will open up so you can travel through them for resources, money, followers, and power.
Good luck in building a faithful following! And remember:
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- lemmy.world
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- 10M
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Did you know you can save Doretta's head in the Escort Duty missions? I make it my goal to always return home with her. No dwarf (or machine) left behind!
*Deep Rock Galactic* is my second-most played game on Steam, with about 546 hours. Which may not seem like a lot for you hardcore gamers, but with almost 3,600 games in my Steam library, it's impressive that I've put that much time into a single game. Their Halloween event just wrapped up this morning, so apologies for the Halloween decorations in some of these screenshots.
For the uninitiated, *Deep Rock Galactic* is an FPS bug-shooting and resource-gathering game, with dwarves as the playable characters. Except you're on a space station, mining minerals from Hoxxes IV, a scorched, tidally-locked planet orbiting the blue star Creus. Every mission, you board a drop pod and are dropped deep into the caverns of the planet to accomplish some sort of mining expedition.
You can have up to four players per game, and there are four classes to play as: the Driller, Engineer, Gunner, and Scout. You can play on a team with any combination of classes you want; you're not stuck with just one of each. There are also tons of cosmetics you can deck out your dwarf crew with. Here are each of the classes with my own custom cosmetics:
The Driller specializes in drilling tunnels and igniting alien bugs with his flamethrower:
The Engineer crafts sentry turrets to protect the team and can shoot platforms against the wall for easier vertical climbing:
The Gunner is the tank of the group, laying down heavy suppressive fire, and he can also shoot ziplines across rooms for the team to traverse:
And the Scout is the lightweight, able to travel quickly across the caves with his personal zipline and illuminate the darkest rooms with a powerful flare gun:
As you can tell, I've sampled all the classes, but I play almost exclusively as the Gunner. It's a running joke among my friends that I'm gold-obsessed (because I'm always making them harvest all the gold they can find in each mission), so I leaned into it and decked out my gunner in all gold. He even juggles a couple gold nuggets at the end of each mission.
There are nine separate types of missions to play, scattered randomly across 10 diverse cavernous regions within the planet.
You can either select random missions to play, or you can pick an assignment from the Assignment Board, which will have a series of specific missions you need to accomplish in order to achieve the assignment and collect its rewards. There is always a Weekly Priority Assignment and a Weekly Core Hunt, both of which have several missions to complete in order to reap the rewards.
There are several robots that aid you in your missions. First and foremost is the Mining Utility Lift Engine (aka M.U.L.E., or "Molly" as the dwarves refer to her). She's a walking mine cart, collecting all the minerals that you mine so you don't have to be weighed down during your missions. There is no limit to the amount of resources she can carry, so call her over to you and regularly empty your bags!
Then there's the APD-B317 (aka "Bosco"), who is a flying drone that helps solo dwarves with their missions. If you're not on a team, Bosco joins you. You can point him at minerals and he will automatically dig them up for you. Pointing at blank walls will cause him to illuminate the space for you. And if threats appear, like alien bugs, he will automatically engage them. Although he has weak firepower, so don't expect him to take on all threats on his own. You can change his appearance and color scheme on the space station, as well as upgrade his abilities, so have fun customizing him for your missions!
Finally, there is the Drilldozer (aka "Doretta" or "Dotty"). She appears only in escort missions, where you have to protect her (and refuel her) while she slowly ventures toward an Ommoran Heartstone.
Doretta will take damage from bug attacks, so make sure you hop on top of her and repair her damage as you go. Once she reaches the Ommoran Heartstone, she will begin drilling into it (when you're ready) and you need to protect her from waves of bug attacks, as well as several defenses from the Heartstone itself.
Don't forget to find and collect her head after the Ommoran Heartstone explodes open! She's still "alive," and I'm sure she appreciates being brought home.
Every mission has a primary objective and an optional objective, which can be seen at the top right of your screen while on the planet. The optional one is usually collecting a particular resource, but not always.
The main mission ranges from harvesting minerals or alien eggs, refining liquid resources, eliminating giant deadly aliens, and salvaging lost equipment left behind by dead teams. Every cave is procedurally generated, so you never play the same area twice. It's always a unique mining expedition.
*Deep Rock Galactic* has recently started doing seasonal content, and the seasons have brought more missions to the game, including industrial sabotage against a competing dwarven mining company, and deep scans, to pick up rare minerals buried very deep beneath the planet's cave structure. As well as various events to encounter within the missions.
The best part about their seasonal content is that you can always acquire all the season rewards, even if you're just starting the game today. Not only can all unclaimed cosmetics be found in various chests scattered throughout the game, but you can actually select which season you want to play and earn the rewards from that season. You're not forced to jump into the latest season. Which is awesome, because there are story missions connecting all the seasons together. You can play through them relatively quick and get caught up with what's going on with the in-game lore. Or just enjoy the unique events that only happen during specific seasons.
So grab a beer at the bar, dance to some jukebox tunes on the dance floor, kick some barrels into the launch bay (to annoy the bureaucrats in Mission Control), then go explore some bio-diverse regions of Hoxxes IV!
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- lemmy.world
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- 10M
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I think *Subnautica* was the first crafting game I ever played, and I didn't really understand the genre, so I found it frustrating and slow. I prefer my games to have an ongoing story, and this... didn't. Not to say there isn't a story here, it just takes a backseat to the gameplay, which is exploring and crafting.
The game opens with you jumping into an escape pod. Something's wrong with your spaceship, the Aurora, so you're abandoning ship. As you fly away, you watch a massive explosion erupt from your former ship. The blast damages your escape pod and you're hit in the face with a metal panel. When you come to, your escape pod is on fire!
You jump up from your seat and grab a nearby fire extinguisher. Putting out the flames, you realize your secondary life support system and radio are both broken. You need parts to build a repair tool. You climb out of your escape pod to find yourself floating on a water planet, with the wreckage of the Aurora nearby.
In desperate need of resources, you dive into the ocean and start exploring. At first, all you can do is pick up a few resources found on the shallow ocean bed. But with the right kind of components, you can craft a scanner at the fabricator on your escape pod.
The scanner allows you to scan almost everything in your environment, collecting data from this strange alien world. It may also help you to unlock new crafting recipes. You find scattered wreckage all over the ocean floor, and scanning broken components will help you to reassemble their recipes so you can craft them yourself.
Once you've found the necessary resources, you can build a repair tool, which you can then use to repair your secondary life support system and radio.
Almost immediately, your radio picks up a message. Listening to it, you hear survivors of another escape pod. They're nearby, and under attack from a giant sea snake of some sort.
You swim out to their location, only to find the remains of their escape pod. You pick up a PDA left behind in the wreckage and download its data, which will give you the crew's log.
Your own PDA has been communicating vital information to you throughout your journey so far. Around this time, you may hear her say that the Aurora's drive core is going critical and is about to explode. You can actually watch the explosion from the surface, just make sure you're not swimming anywhere near it at the time.
From here, you're just responding to radio signals, exploring and collecting resources to build more and more advanced technologies, and eventually, you can build an entire underwater base to live in.
I didn't get much further than this, because this game is so incredibly slow for me. I enjoy the crafting game *Satisfactory* because all the resources I need to get started are right nearby, almost within eyesight of my landing pod, and I can scan for the location of more resources as I start to branch out. Plus, your hub gives you instructions on what to build, so you have some direction to progress toward.
*Subnautica*, on the other hand, just dumps you in the water with no explanation and expects you to just swim around and collect stuff until you figure out what to do with it. The first time I played this game, several years ago, I spent maybe 2 hours swimming in circles, unsure what I was supposed to do. Eventually, I realized that I needed to repair my escape pod, and then I started getting radio broadcasts.
But even then, every escape pod I tracked down was wrecked with no survivors. It was just demoralizing for me. I was hoping for some sort of plot, or an eventual rescue or *something*. But instead, I found myself just floundering about in the water for hours, not really sure what I'm doing or if this gameplay is going anywhere.
Not to mention, this is a survival game, so on top of trying to figure out what I'm doing, I was also trying to figure out how to find food and water to stay alive. And despite being a game about exploring an alien ocean, I could barely be under water for 30 seconds before I was drowning. It took an exceptionally long time for me to find appropriate resources to build more advanced oxygen tanks so I could stay underwater for longer. I couldn't ping for resources, I kept getting lost or turned around under water, and I could never find exactly what I needed to progress in the game.
I know this game is exceptionally popular and I rarely ever hear a bad thing about it. But I personally just can't get into it. I gave it a second chance last night, and I progressed much faster than I did my first time playing, but it was such a slog. I have no idea if it gets better later, but it's frustratingly slow and I just can't enjoy it.
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- lemmy.world
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- 10M
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*Pacific Drive* is a fantastical driving/survival/crafting game, where you are sucked into a reality-altering unstable zone, with the only working car the trapped residents have seen in ages. This is a very story-rich exploration game.
In 1947, the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state became a staging ground for developments in a new technology. Unfortunately, it didn't go as planned, and by 1955, the government had walled off parts of the peninsula. 30 years later, after expanding the radius of the walls many times, the government finally sealed all access and abandoned it. No one ever found out what happened inside the wall. All was quiet until you happen to be driving by in 1998...
Finding the road blocked by the wall, you turn off on a dirt road parallel to the wall, hoping for a path through the region. The ground in front of you starts shifting and morphing until you drive near it and it pops back into stability... until a large enough burst of energy kills your car's engine completely.
You sit in dark silence for a moment, until a massive burst of red glowing energy suddenly swells next to you, dragging your car off the road and into the vortex!
You wake up on the ground, surprised to see bits and pieces of your car floating through the air. The slightest tingle of radiation courses through the air around you. You realize that you're inside the walled-off peninsula now.
Wandering down the path, you find an old station wagon in a garage, flashing its lights at you. Over its radio, you hear someone chime in. They've detected strange but familiar energy readings coming from your vicinity. They identify themselves as Tobias Barlow and Francis Cooke.
The vehicle is extremely beat up, rusted, missing several panels, two doors, and the front left wheel. You find a wheel sitting nearby and install it yourself. You try the engine and surprisingly, it starts up!
You can't respond to Tobias and Francis, but they're tracking the energy your car is giving off. They instruct you to drive a few miles up the road to a safe zone, before the incoming instability scrambles you. You pull up to an auto shop, right as your left front wheel falls off again.
This shop belongs to Dr. Ophelia Turner, or Oppy, as the two guys call her. But without working vehicles, the shop has been mostly abandoned for years. When you turn on the power in the shop, she's alerted to a trespasser and threatens you over an intercom. But Tobias quickly sends out an emergency broadcast, insisting that you're there on official business for them. Oppy is annoyed, but intrigued that you have a working car. She lets you patch it up in her garage and assists you in your journey, if only to help you find a way back out through the border walls and out of her hair.
This will become your staging area for the rest of the game; you'll always return here after each mission. This is also the only place you can save your game. You can't save during a mission; you either need to complete your mission and return home, or abandon it.
At this point, the game becomes a crafting game, except almost exclusively for your vehicle. You learn how to repair, build and replace parts, and even upgrade and add components. You can also upgrade various stations in the garage, and even upgrade your gear to better protect yourself in the wild.
Oppy instructs you to use this strange "repair putty" on the damaged parts of your car. It's a pale green glowing goop that seems to magically restore parts to their full strength! It's in limited supply, but you can always make more at the workbench. This is how you repair your car as it gets beat up in the field.
She also has you fill your trunk with cardboard boxes and a craft mat. The boxes will be your excess storage, outside of your backpack. The craft mat will let you build tools and resources on the road. Your tools have a limited durability and will break after so much use. But as long as you have resources on hand, you can easily craft another one from the trunk of your car.
Finally, Oppy has you install an Arc Device in your passenger seat, her own personal invention. This will be your map, as well as a guide to warn you as anomalous storms approach. It auto-rotates to face you no matter where you're standing, so you can glance over at it while driving, or you can run up to the passenger window and view it quick.
Also included is a status screen on your dashboard, which will inform you of the "health" of your car's parts. As you take damage, each component will turn from green to yellow to red, then gray as they break off the vehicle. Be sure to repair your car as needed!
There is a giant map on the wall of the garage, and Oppy is able to remotely access a projector to display data on it. This is where you'll pick your missions. She instructs you to go find parts to build an antenna for the garage; otherwise, you'll never be able to travel far. The zone within the walls is unstable and entire regions could be erased entirely, or reconstructed into another land that didn't exist previously, so you need to be able to receive data about each region before - and during - your travels there.
It's explained to you by Tobias that your car is a Remnant, which is essentially a shabby cast-off item imbued with strange properties, that randomly appears within the zone. He gives the example of a broken microwave that freezes food instead of heating it, or a rusty paint can that produces every color of paint in existence. Your car gives off this same energy, which is exciting for him because it's been several decades since the last remnant appeared, and it remains to be seen what strange properties your car will produce.
Most of the game is spent exploring regions and scavenging all the parts you can find. You're told that most all of the zone is abandoned and each region could cease to exist if a wave of instability passes through, so you might as well loot everything that's not bolted down. Be aware of aggressive machines roaming the lands. These floating guys in particular will just grab your car and drag it into the woods before abandoning it.
While out scavenging for parts, I ran into these creepy mannequin-like guys stuck in the ground. They pulse red from the head or chest, and if you bump into them, they explode. The creepiest part is, if you get close enough to them, then look away, when you look back at them, they'll be much closer to you. You never see or hear them move, and they never attack you or anything, but if you're not paying attention near them, you might turn and walk into one suddenly. You need to stare them down while backing far away, so they don't pursue you behind your back.
Once you've completed your objective in each zone, you need to find and grab a stable anchor, a round glowing ball sitting on a large semi-circle device, and feed it to your Arc Device. It will cause some instability in the vicinity when you pull it, so be careful.
Grab as many of them as you can! Your map will point them out in the region. There are always a few of them scattered around, and you use their energy to unlock more advanced technologies and blueprints back at the garage. So the more you find, the quicker you can upgrade your crafting capabilities.
Once you have at least one, you will be able to use the Arc Device to open a gateway directly back to the garage. But only activate it when you're ready to leave, as it will quickly collapse the stability in the region. Make sure you know where the gateway is and that you're relatively close to it, Then once you summon it, drive like mad into the giant sky beam! Be prepared to do a bit of off-roading for this part.
As you explore, you can find paints, decals, and other trinkets to deck out your car. Plus, keep upgrading its components to make it stronger and more efficient. Here's my car after applying some glow-in-the-dark decals, adding off-road tires, and replacing all of the panels and doors with steel.
This has been an extremely entertaining game so far! I'm enjoying the open world exploration, scavenging parts off other vehicles or wherever I can find them, and of course, I love driving games! That's your main mode of travel in this game, so you'll be doing a lot of it. Your car is your lifeline, so stick near it at all times!
This game is pretty in-depth, and with 11 hours of gameplay already, I've barely scratched the surface of the plot. I've been so preoccupied exploring around and looting everything that I can get my hands on, that I haven't actually made it very far into the story yet. I'm debating taking a brief hiatus from posting these so I can really enjoy this game.
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- lemmy.world
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- 10M
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*Little Kitty, Big City* is a cute game where you play a cat who fell out of their owner's window, way atop a high-rise apartment.
Miraculously surviving the fall (thanks to some well-placed obstacles and a bird you cling to), you find yourself on the street level several blocks away, unable to find your way home.
The bird admonishes you for your poor flying skills, then offers to get you a fish when you insist you're too tired and hungry to climb all the way back up your building. But you need to pay him in "shinies," which you can find lying around all over the city. You will need to find 4 total fish around the city before you'll have the stamina to climb your way back home.
From there, you're traveling around the city, interacting with other animals and collecting cute hats to wear. You either find the hats lying around in places, or you can pay 5 shinies to the bird at a vending machine and he'll get you a hat out of the machine.
You rescue a rambunctious tanuki stuck in a pipe and he professes to be an inventor. He offers to let you be his test subject for interdimensional travel.
He's been messing with the spacetime continuum and has connected all the sewer pipes through a sort of wormhole. This is your fast-travel in the game, so you can cross the map quickly without having to run across the whole city.
He calls it the Petwork™ and insists you unlock each one with a single bird feather.
Another cat will teach you how to sneak up and pounce on birds, causing them to drop a feather. Don't worry, it's a catch-and-release game; you let the birds fly away as soon as you catch them.
You also meet a duck who has lost his four children. You agree to track them down for him, but be warned that he won't take them back until all four are accounted for. So you'll have a trail of ducklings following you everywhere until you find all of them.
Another fascinating character you'll run into is a chameleon who can't change his colors to match his surroundings. He's convinced you're a magician (like he is!) because you can always see him. He gives you riddles, then "hides" and you have to track him down across the city.
There's also a beetle, who is the manager for Taffy, a wealthy social influencer cat. The poor guy is stressed beyond belief and hanging by a thread. #JusticeForBeetle! He gives you a phone, which you can use to take selfies. In Steam, snapping a selfie will actually take a screenshot.
There are a few other cats who will teach you how to behave more like a street cat, unlocking different cat reactions you can use throughout the game.
And that's pretty much the jist of the game. There are a few other characters to meet and plenty of small puzzles to figure out. Ultimately, you need to get your stamina up so you can scale your building and get home. Which will be a challenge in itself, even with a full stamina bar. But there are plenty of fun things to do around the city on your way there.
Or just find one of many nap spots all across the city and take some time to relax.
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- lemmy.world
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- 10M
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*I was almost forced to take a hiatus from posting today! I was up all night playing this game, when around 5 AM, my PC popped and shut off suddenly. It felt hot, so I just left it to cool down and went to bed. This afternoon, it wasn't booting back up, so I opened it up and blew all the dust out of it (it was due for a cleaning anyway). Nothing looked broken, so I flipped off the power switch and flipped it back on... and it started right up! Woo! Adventures in custom-built PCs...*
Anywhoo... today's game is *The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria*. This game is like a blend between *Satisfactory* (minus the automation) and *Deep Rock Galactic*, with a Lord of the Rings theme. It's a crafting game, but takes place deep in the mines of Moria. You can play solo, or play online co-op with up to 8 players on PC or 4 players on console. The mines are procedurally generated, so no single gameplay will play out the same.
You get to custom-build your own dwarf to play as, including their appearance, name, and origins. Of course, I like to play as women in my games (my mother was a strong, independent type, so I'm drawn to strong women in my life and games), so I made my dwarf a woman. I named her Nordri. I seriously debated giving her a beard (that's an option!) but it made her almost indistinguishable from the men... so clean-shaven for now! You can edit your character any time from the main menu, so you're not stuck with a single look for the entirety of your gameplay.
Gimli declares that it's time to stop waiting for Durin's potential return and that the one true home of the dwarves, Moria, needs to be rebuilt. He calls on dwarves from all regions of Middle Earth to converge on the Misty Mountains and help excavate it. But for some reason, they can't get through the Doors of Durin.
While attempting to use explosives to blow their way in, you end up falling through a fissure that opens up and land deep in the mines. Unable to be heard by anyone, you decide to make your way to the Doors of Durin from the inside.
Along the way, you find Aric, a Raven of Erebor. He's also trapped in the mine, but some "ill curse" prevents him from leaving. So he scouts ahead for other routes out of the mine while you forge ahead on your own.
This is where you get your introduction to crafting and building. Crafting helps you build tools and weapons, while building will create structures that you can use to improve a home, or in this case, climb a wall.
You make your way to the Doors of Durin, only to find them sealed with a shadowy curse from the inside. No wonder no one could get in! It looks like you need to venture further into the mine and find a different exit.
If you explore in the halls near the door, you'll find signs of the Fellowship!
Venturing further into the mines, you find that it's orc-infested. They're pretty cowardly on their own, choosing to run instead of engage you, but be careful of packs of them roaming in the middle of the night. They can be aggressive when they're prepared and in larger numbers.
You run into Aric again and he suggests you rebuild an old camp nearby, so you have somewhere to shelter and prepare food. You fix up an old stone hearth, a furnace, and a forge, and you now have the basics for crafting! You can find mushrooms, berries, and some other plants growing around the ruins, and you can kill roaming rats and wolves for meat. All these resources respawn pretty regularly, so you're never in short supply.
You need to eat at least 2 meals a day to keep from getting hungry. If your hunger bar runs out, you'll take the occasional small bit of damage to your health. You also need to sleep at least once a day to prevent exhaustion. Your stamina bar will get smaller and smaller the more tired you are, until you can barely trudge from one place to another. Sleeping will fast-forward the clock 6 hours.
There is a day and night cycle, and the luminescent stone ceiling in the mines will mimic the time of day, so it's extra dark and cold at night and decently bright during the day. Make sure you keep a torch on you at all times, to keep your courage up in the darkest corners. There are small buffs you get depending on various situations, and you'll see them in the bottom left corner of your screen. Also, certain meals will give you an additional buff if you eat them at certain times of the day.
Occasionally, a pack of orcs will attack in the middle of the night, targeting your current camp. Be prepared to fight them off before they break everything. I learned the hard way to build a wall to keep out the orcs. The first time I came under siege in the night, they just walked in and wrecked my stuff.
Fortunately, you can make a hammer that will restore damage to structures; both your own constructions and to the ruins of Moria. If you spent enough time, you could technically fix up all of the ruins, single-handedly restoring Moria!
If you find damaged statues, be sure to rebuild them. You'll get recipes from some of them which will expand your crafting capabilities. I've mostly received improved armor and weapons from them so far.
Of course, what would a game about dwarves in a mine be without some mining? You need to mine ore in order to smelt various types of metals for armor and weapons, as well as some fancy furniture and structures later on. While mining, you get the option to sing an inspirational tune, which will give you a buff. There are various songs that may be sung and your character may comment on the songs too! They put some serious effort into this detail instead of just designating one mining song that you always sing.
I once found a barrel of ale in the ruins of an old tavern, and it was still good! I drank and sang merrily for a bit, which gave me a little buff.
There are more than just endless dark ruins in the deep. You can find other places, such as an Elven Quarter to explore, and the Great Forge of Narvi, which you can repair to gain more forging abilities.
Keep pressing deeper into the mines to find more advanced crafting and building options, and be sure to move your camp forward as you go. I learned the hard way that sticking with my original camp meant hoofing it a long ways back to drop off supplies or forge new supplies. Eventually, I learned that I need to make a new hearth and rebuild my camp, then move my supplies forward so I'm not spending 90% of my game time running back and forth.
This would probably be easier with multiple players, as you can move all your resources quickly. I had built up my original camp so much, I had to make at least 3 trips to collect everything. I was also stockpiling resources instead of using them, so that made it more difficult to move.
This was a very fun game! It just released in August, so it's relatively new and still being tweaked by the developers. I haven't had any issues with it yet, besides my beefy desktop computer overheating for the first time ever. But that was after 7 hours of continuous gameplay, and I maxed out all graphics settings, so I may have been pushing it a bit on this one.
Otherwise, it was very enjoyable, not only exploring Moria, but getting to fix it up and restore it as I go. Definitely scratched that itch for a good crafting game that *Satisfactory* gave me. And like I said, mining resources, tunneling through caved-in halls, and fighting occasional roaming enemies felt like a medieval fantasy version of *Deep Rock Galactic*, another game I thoroughly enjoy. I give *The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria* top marks!
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- lemmy.world
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- 1Y
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*Road Redemption* is a unique game, in that it's a motorcycle racing game, but also a fighting game.
There is some lore, presented with a single screen of text. According to the Steam store page, this takes place in a post-apocalyptic world, ruled by a brutal dictator. Biker gangs rule over segments of the country. You're part of the Jackal gang and basically racing against other biker gangs through their territory, pursuing an assassin for the bounty.
Every once in a while, some other Jackals will show up to help you (see first screenshot with the peace symbol over a Jackal's head), but you're on your own for most of the races.
This is a game of stamina. There are 17 total races across 3 gangs' territories, and your status carries over to each one. Any loss of health, nitro, and if you've unlocked it, your jump boost, all carry over to the next race and require you to replenish them during races.
You either pick up resources on the road, or kill other gang members to collect resources. Or you can also gain a small bit of nitro every time you have a "close call" with an oncoming car. Just steer so you nearly miss oncoming traffic and you'll be rewarded with some nitro. Which is needed to catch up to the racers in the lead; you'll never gain on them otherwise.
There are two main types of races: 1.) a straight race to the finish, either finishing in 3rd place or better, or just survive to the finish line by a certain time limit; or 2.) enemy takedown, which requires you to eliminate a certain number of enemies before the finish line. Sometimes the cops show up alongside the gangs to fight everyone, sometimes the cops *are* the takedown enemy.
Cars are especially hard to take down. Explosives are pretty much the only way I've found to stop them. During takedown races, they'll also plow through oncoming traffic, denying you that needed nitro boost to gain on them. It can be very difficult if you're stuck behind a car with no nitro left.
The last race in each territory is a takedown enemy race against the gang's leader. They're pretty tough and you need to kill them before you reach the end of the race.
There is one random event that may take place called "Hallucinogenic Chemical Zone," which will have cars and trucks randomly spawn in the sky and fall onto the track, creating hazards to navigate around. None of these vehicles have their parking brake on, so if they land on their wheels, they'll slowly roll across the road, making it harder to determine the best path around them. You never know which direction they'll start rolling until it's almost too late to change direction.
After each race, you spend the money you earned taking out enemies or meeting the objective to upgrade your current stats or replenish health or nitro.
Whether you win or lose each race, you'll automatically continue on to the next race. But your health bar will shrink if you lose the objective.
The races continue until you die. Then you get to spend all the XP you've earned on permanent upgrades, which will make it easier the next time you play. You likely won't beat the game in your first playthrough. As a matter of fact, I couldn't even beat the first territory until I'd upgraded my permanent stats quite a bit. I've replayed the campaign race many times over and I've finally made it all the way to the assassin, but I still haven't beat him. Gotta keep upgrading my character!
Before each game, you get to select your bike and character. Both come with various stats and weapons, so pick what works best for your play style. You can unlock more bikes and characters as you accomplish certain criteria throughout the game.
I like to play with Admiral Uganda (a Captain America knockoff) because he has 35% resource gains from regular kills, 140% resource gains from shield kills, and 115% max nitro. He also doesn't use guns, which is fine with me. I'm terrible at aiming a gun while also steering my bike, so I mostly fight with close-range weapons that only require a button press to use.
There are other joke characters like Santa Claus, who's a pacifist and can't kill anyone except for bosses; Helloween Rider, a Ghost Rider knockoff; PC Master Racer (see screenshot above); or Theranos, a blonde woman with Thanos' golden gauntlet. Plus a ton more to unlock.
My personal play style is to just kick other bikes. It sends them flying off to one side, and if you time it right, you can kick them into obstacles or off bridges and kill them instantly. Much easier than hacking at them with a sword or beating them with a lead pipe, etc.
Most races are on roads cross-country through mountains, snowy terrain, or post-apocalyptic cities. But the most interesting races (in my opinion) take place across building rooftops. You spend the entire race speeding from rooftop to rooftop, and it's easy to knock people off to their doom. Or fall to yours, if you're not careful. These levels are where the jump boost comes in really handy, keeping you airborne longer if you don't time a jump between buildings well.
Then there's the extra rare rooftop race through a hallucinogenic chemical zone! Don't get hit by falling cars while soaring across rooftops!
I've mostly described the campaign mode for this game, but there is also a 4-player split-screen mode where you can play together or against each other, or you can play online with other gamers.
There's a DLC you can buy on Steam called "name a character" that lets you put a custom name into the game itself. You'll notice that every time you take someone out, it shows their name across the bottom of the screen, then scratches it out in red. Supposedly, these are all names added by other players over time. So the next time you play, keep an eye out for cobysev...
I normally don't like games that force me to replay them over and over, grinding just to level my stats enough to continue the plot (I'm looking at you, *Hades*). But the gameplay is so enjoyable in this one, I can't help but play it over and over. I don't even care if I don't finish; the racing and fighting is so much fun! Every time I play this game, I end up doing nothing else for the rest of the day.
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- lemmy.world
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- 1Y
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October is over, and that means I'm back to playing all variety of games, not just horror or Halloween-themed games. But I did miss one day in my daily October marathon, and I said I'd try to make up for it.
So... consider this game to be a happy medium. *The Invincible* isn't exactly horror - more sci-fi mystery/thriller than anything - but it is kind of a personal fear of mine: being stranded alone on an alien planet with amnesia, limited oxygen, and no certain escape. I definitely shared in the anxiety and fear that the protagonist suffered at times on her journey.
*The Invincible* is a blend between a walking simulator and a visual novel. You spend most of the game walking from one point to the next and performing some basic tasks along the way, while also communicating back and forth with your ship's commander. It's not a particularly strenuous form of gameplay.
There are dialogue choices, but for the most part, the game plays out the same regardless of your choices. Although certain choices can open up deeper philosophical discussions into the theme of the plot. Also, investigating the areas around you might help you learn more about the planet itself, which provides a richer story experience than just trying to get to the end of the game as quick as possible.
Also, as the game progresses, your story path is documented in comic form, which you can pause and read at any time.
This game is actually based on a Polish novel of the same name, published in 1963 by Stanisław Lem. Although I would recommend not reading the summary of that book, as its main plot gives away most of the mystery in this game's story.
*The Invincible* opens up with Yasna waking up on a rocky desert planet, with no memory of where she is or how she got there. Her radio is broken, her locator beacon is missing, and she's all alone. The only thing going for her is that she seems uninjured, and her space suit and oxygen tank are still intact.
She checks her notes and discovers she's there with her team of researchers. Using her logs and hand-drawn maps, she triangulates her approximate position, then sets out to find their main camp.
Along the way, bits of her memory start coming back to her. She remembers her research ship's commander, Novik, who is known for making rash decisions. Previously, his insistence on making an unscheduled stop for a valuable mineral cost him a broken leg and severe pain.
Now, the team was finally on their way home when Novik awoke them early from cryogenic sleep. He made the decision to stop at *yet another* planet, Regis III, because he has intel that it's potentially valuable to the Alliance, and he wants to find out what is so valuable that it would draw them there.
The book followed characters from the Alliance aboard their massive ship, The Invincible. This game, however, follows a small research team of the Interplanetary Commonwealth, an opposing faction. So it's important to Novik that they do their research quick, then get off-planet before the Alliance arrives in their deadly ship.
Yasna reaches her team's base camp, only to find one of the members in a stupor, babbling unintelligibly. His vitals are all normal, but he's unresponsive and helpless. Yasna takes his radio and is finally able to speak with Novik, who is aboard their spaceship orbiting the planet.
Novik has been unable to reach the team for a while now. He's grateful to speak with Yasna and instructs her to find the rest of the team. She catches up on their research notes and sets out to round up the team.
The team was investigating a strange metallic structure sticking out of the ground. It proved impossible to unearth, and scans with their metal detectors showed it stretching underground like tangled metal roots. One of the research team, Dr. Gorsky, ventured off in search of the end of this metal root structure, so Yasna pursues his trail.
She bumps into a damaged probe and, with the help of Novik, is able to boot it up. Using the probe, Novik is able to remotely control it and assist Yasna more directly on the ground. You get the opportunity to pick its name, if you like.
Pursuing her team, Yasna explores complex metallic structures, finds herself lost in underground caverns, and even has run-ins with the Alliance!
Finding all of her team members and getting off-planet proves to be a challenge, with setback after setback. It's up to you whether she'll find the courage to proceed, or succumb to hopelessness and depression.
This was a fantastic story that explored deeper philosophical topics on life and biology, evolution and invasion, and of course, the will to survive. It's an easy-going game, where the most dramatic twists and turns come more from the dialogue than the action. If you want a simple sci-fi game that lets you ponder life's greater mysteries instead of shooting aliens, this may be for you.
Plus, you get to drive around in a little rover! How cute is this thing?
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- lemmy.world
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- 1Y
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Happy Halloween! I had planned to play one of my favorite games this month, *Alan Wake*, but @[email protected], the other screenshot poster here, already made several posts about that game recently. So in order to generate new content, I'm posting a tangentially-related game, and another absolute favorite of mine, *Control*.
This game is loosely based on the [SCP Foundation](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com), a fictional secretive organization that contains anomalous or supernatural items and entities away from the eyes of the public. They Secure, Contain, and Protect (SCP).
Their wiki linked above is a creative writing project, where anyone can sign up and submit their own creative writings on supposed anomalies that the SCP has encountered in the world. And they have a Creative Commons ShareAlike license (CC-BY-SA) for all work posted to the wiki, so anyone is able to use it for their own creative projects. As such, a lot of SCP-related video games have been popping up lately. If you search on Steam alone, there are about 75 games with SCP in the title, and that's not counting derivative works like *Control*.
*Control* starts out simple enough. You play a 28-yr old woman by the name of Jesse Faden. She's been looking for the Federal Bureau of Control for 17 years, ever since they kidnapped her brother, Dylan, in their childhood. The shady secret government organization has eluded her all this time, but Jesse just happens to find them in New York City and enters to an empty lobby.
The place seems deserted, except for an odd janitor with a heavily-Scandinavian accent, named Ahti. He asks Jesse if she's here for the job interview, because he's in need of an assistant. He points Jesse toward the Director's office.
The first thing you might notice is that you're trapped in the building now. When you turn around, you realize that the hallway you came down just dead-ends, as if there was never a hallway there in the first place. Also, some of the offices and meeting rooms in the hallway don't seem to have any doors leading into them, just windows. Welcome to "The Oldest House," the office building which is an ever-shifting anomaly in itself.
You enter the Director's office and find the Director dead on the floor; an apparent suicide. Jesse is compelled to pick up the handgun lying next to him, where she suddenly finds herself pressing it to her own temple. You hear distorted voices who refer to themselves as "The Board," and they test whether you're capable of wielding it.
Jesse is transported to the "astral plane," a bright white space with disjointed black and gold marbled cubes to walk on. A giant inverted pyramid looms ever-present in the background.
You fight some faceless humanoid enemies, learning to harness a limited psychic ability to attack them. When you find the gun in the astral plane, you learn how to take down the faceless enemies with it. You have a limited clip of ammo, but it regenerates infinitely, without the need to manually reload or resupply.
When you've completed the training, Jesse is appointed the new Director by The Board. All of a sudden, you're in charge of the Federal Bureau of Control! Portraits can be found already updated with professional photos or paintings of Jesse all around the building.
You also start to find official documentation scattered around the offices concerning various Objects of Power (OoP), including your own service weapon. Just like SCP documentation on their wiki.
Almost immediately, Jesse finds herself exposed to an invasive hissing noise that feels like it's trying to invade her soul (See first screenshot). She's able to withstand it, but it takes over other Control agents and forces them to attack her. Fighting your way to the Central Executive room, you find a marked circle under an inverted pyramid and realize you can use your psychic energy to dispel the "Hiss" from the area and restore the distorted space to its normal state.
Survivors call out from a nearby shelter and Jesse gives them the all-clear. The assistant to the Head of Research, Emily Pope, comes out and immediately recognizes Jesse as the new Director. She's stoked that Jesse's able to withstand the Hiss without specialized equipment and she's excited to perform some experiments to test Jesse's abilities.
Pope quickly becomes your go-to for any information you need about this strange place. She explains that the building has come under attack by a deadly and invasive anomaly that Jesse helped dub the "Hiss," and since Jesse is the only one who seems able to resist and fight back, she's needed to help clear sections of the building and rescue other survivors.
Jesse is also desperate to find her brother, but Pope doesn't have access to that level of information. She suggests Jesse rescue the rest of the former Director's team scattered throughout the building and they should be able to fill her in on what happened to Dylan.
From there, the game is spent running back and forth across the various floors of the building, rescuing people, fighting the Hiss and liberating areas, and learning more about Control and what they do. You can find various sources of media scattered throughout, including documents, tape recordings, and video recordings.
Not to mention, some more OoPs that bind to Jesse and enhance her abilities. You can telekinetically lift and throw objects, rapidly dash through the air to evade enemies or reach far-away platforms, construct a shield out of psychic energy and physical objects, and even fly! Keep progressing through the game to find these OoPs and bind them, then enhance their powers through missions and side quests. Eventually, you'll be practically invincible!
Amongst the video recordings, there's a cheaply made kid's puppet show called the "Threshold Kids" that has episodes randomly distributed all over the building. It goes over various anomalies and supernatural situations, as if it was meant to explain complex topics for young children. It seems simple enough at first, but there's something creepy and off about it, and it gets very dark and existential in later episodes. I love the world-building it brings to the game!
I mentioned *Alan Wake* was tangentially-related to this game. That's because the development studio of both franchises, Remedy Entertainment, included documentation you can find in *Control* that explains *Alan Wake* as an Altered World Event (AWE), with Alan's typewriter being a suspected OoP! And if you play *Control*'s AWE expansion after the main campaign, it sets up *Alan Wake II*.
I love SCP-related content, and the Federal Bureau of Control is a whole SCP-like organization, with rich and detailed lore dealing with supernatural and otherworldly objects and powers. And then adding lore to tie two separate game franchises together in the same universe? I absolutely love it! This has been one of my all-time favorite games since it released and I'm really excited to play *Control 2* whenever it finally comes out.
By the way, the Alan Wake Franchise bundle is 80% off on Steam, so you can play the first game and its spinoff game for only $5, then save a few bucks off *Control* by buying the Alan Wake/Control Franchise bundle. Or wait for a better deal; *Control* was only $8 for a couple weeks last month, so keep an eye out for their next sale and get it super cheap.
My one gripe is that *Alan Wake II* was published by Epic Games, which means it will probably never come to Steam. I'm adamantly against using Epic Games, as they have very anti-competitive practices with the gaming community. So unless someone else gets PC publishing rights, I may never get to play *Alan Wake II*. (Note: I don't own any current-gen consoles, so playing it on console is out) The rest of the franchise is published by 505 Games or Remedy Entertainment themselves, including the upcoming *Control 2*, so I can enjoy everything else in the meantime.
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- lemmy.world
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- 1Y
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I had another game I planned to play last night, but then the first *Red Dead Redemption* finally released on Steam yesterday, including its *Undead Nightmare* story mode, and I found myself up all night enjoying the zombie western horror fest! Finally! It only took them 14 years to port it to the PC.
I'm going to be talking exclusively about *Undead Nightmare* today. I'll go over *Red Dead Redemption* another time, but this extra content is basically its own game, with a story that veers off from the main game's campaign. Treat it like an alternate universe to the main game.
*Undead Nightmare* takes place after the main campaign of *Red Dead Redemption*, but before the epilogue. Honestly, you could say it's an alternate ending to the game that replaces the epilogue with a dark twist.
John Marston, the protagonist of the main game, sends his boy to bed and is settling in to bed with his wife when Uncle shows up, bloodied, deranged, and violent. John knocks him out, then goes to get his shotgun. But Uncle isn't down for long, and he chases John's wife out of the house, getting a solid bite on her throat before John returns and guns him down.
John's son comes running to his mother's aid, only to be bitten by her! They both rapidly turn into the undead, and John hog-ties them to keep them from hurting anyone else. He leaves them tied up in the bedroom, then promises to return once he's found a doctor.
John goes to the nearest town to find it overrun with the undead. He helps the few remaining citizens liberate the town, then asks random survivors what's going on.
One girl mentions that her mother came back long after being dead and buried, and ate her dad's face off! She recommends burning coffins at the local cemetery to keep the dead from rising again. And also suggests she had an evil uncle who was buried there.
Considering her contempt for him and the loving message scrawled on his tombstone, it hints at the dark kind of relationship they may have had. Also, she mentions all the horribly abusive things that her own father does, but dismisses them because "he's a good man!" So her uncle must've been a truly terrible person.
From here, you're going from town to town, helping people survive undead attacks, following rumors about what might be causing it, and trying to find an end to the nightmare so you can cure your wife and kid.
In the original campaign, there was an easter egg where you could go way up north into the mountains and find a family of Sasquatch hiding in the forest. In *Undead Nightmare*, you get a quest to hunt them down.
After killing several of them, you find one crying against a tree. He can speak! He begs you to end his life because "some maniac" has killed all of his friends and family and he's the last of his kind left. It's up to you whether or not to end his life.
There are several other mythical creatures to be found roaming the lands, like chupacabra, black horned goats with red eyes, unicorns, and even the Four Horses of the Apocalypse - War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death. The Four *Horsemen* of the Apocalypse are not to be found.
You can wrangle and tame the first three horses, then the horse Death will appear in the wilderness to be tamed. Death is automatically awarded to you when you complete the whole storyline too. My favorite is War, because it's the only one with a fiery mane. The other three just look like regular horses with creepy eyes.
My original horse was just a normal horse... until I encountered an undead bear, which knocked me over and killed my horse. The next time I called for my mount, this undead horse showed up! Turns out there are some tame undead; although the undead horses have a bad habit of ignoring commands and doing their own thing sometimes.
There are many theories as to what's causing the undead to walk again. Some have some merit and warrant investigation, but others are completely outrageous.
Still others are so wrapped up arguing over what to do in this new chaotic world that they don't pay attention to their surroundings...
The most interesting theory I heard was that this was just a thing that happens every couple hundred years. A sort of cleansing ritual or something.
I bought *Red Dead Redemption* ages ago, specifically for this *Undead Nightmare* content. But I didn't want to jump into a story-rich game without knowing all the characters and lore, so I rushed through the campaign as quick as I could.
I later regretted it, as I felt like the campaign was much better than this zombie storyline. Sure, you get a quick tour of all the characters from the campaign and see how they're handling the "zombie apocalypse." Hint: most aren't handling it well. But the undead story just feels like it was tacked on last-minute, with very few story missions and a lot of side quests to keep you running back and forth across the land.
Don't get me wrong, *Undead Nightmare* is a lot of fun to play if you want to run around and shoot zombies in a "spaghetti western" setting. But I much prefer *Red Dead Redemption*.
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- lemmy.world
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- 1Y
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I went into *Call of Cthulhu* blind, not knowing anything except that it's somehow connected to the Cthulhu mythos. Not only was it another period piece supernatural detective story like yesterday's game, *Kona*, but it also stars a private investigator who was a former veteran. This time, though, it takes place in 1924 and our protagonist is a veteran of the first World War. You play Edward Pierce, a down-on-his-luck P.I. who is struggling with insomnia, alcoholism and PTSD from his service in the war.
The game opens with Pierce lying in an underground cavern, panicking as he realizes he's soaked in the blood and guts of mutilated marine animals. He escapes, only to witness faceless cult members attacking a faceless intruder on their ceremony. Then they come for him...
He awakens on the couch of his office. Just a nightmare. A client comes to his door, the father of a famous painter, Sarah Hawkins. He wants Pierce to investigate the mysterious death of his daughter and her husband and son. Supposedly, they all burned to death in a house fire, but the police blamed it on Sarah. They said she went mad and killed them all. Her father doesn't believe it and asks Pierce to uncover the truth.
Pierce travels to Sarah's former home, an island off the coast of Boston called Darkwater, which has been mostly forgotten by the mainland. It's home to a small town of fishermen, as well as the wealthy Sarah Hawkins and her family. While trying to investigate Sarah's old warehouse, Pierce runs into the local muscle, a woman named Cat. She doesn't take kindly to him snooping on her territory.
Did I mention this game has dialogue choices? Depending on how you handle situations (and in what direction you level your character's stats), you can change the course of action in the game.
In this instance, I got my ass kicked by Cat. But, as you may remember from my former posts, I like to play the altruist in my games. I got the option to sneak into the warehouse again, but I was also given a chance to talk with Cat directly instead, and I was polite and honest enough with her that she decided to help me out instead of kicking my ass again. She actually escorted me to the warehouse this time!
In the warehouse, you switch into detective mode, which allows you to scan for clues and piece together the crime scene. Kind of like the visions in *Kona*, except instead of glowing, moving silhouettes in a dark space, they're transparent, unmoving silhouettes in a frosty space.
The local police burst in and kick Pierce out, but through dialogue choices, I got them to not only give me more valuable information, but also give me a lift to the decrepit Hawkins mansion on the island. Which did NOT burn down. Hmm...
Exploring the mansion, Pierce eventually finds an underground passage and ends up falling into a cavern full of mutilated marine animals... the same one from the nightmare at the beginning of the game! Panicking, Pierce attempts to escape, only to experience the same cult scenario play out similar to his nightmare earlier. While running for his life, he's knocked unconscious by falling debris.
From this point, the line between fantasy and reality starts blending. Pierce wakes in an insane asylum, breaks out, and then has to confront the indescribable horrors that he's witnessed. Finding allies to his experiences is difficult though, as most end up insane or dead. Or some people he witnessed being murdered will instead show up healthy with no memory of being harmed. Edward Pierce finds his grip on reality slipping and he needs to solve the case quick, before he falls into complete madness...
There's a lot of lore throughout the story, and despite my lengthy explanation of the plot, there are tons of details that were omitted, to avoid spoilers. Plus, your choices can lead to slightly different outcomes. There are actually four different endings to this game, depending on interactions and how intact Pierce's sanity is by the end.
Like a lot of horror games right now, *Call of Cthulhu* is currently 80% off on Steam, so take advantage of the seasonal deals if you like this kind of thing. Apparently, this game is the latest original story in a (non-related) series of "Call of Cthulhu" video games, which are independently licensed works based on an old tabletop RPG of the same name, *which itself* is loosely based on the H.P. Lovecraft short, "The Call of Cthulhu." So my initial impression, that it's "somehow connected to the Cthulhu mythos," is a pretty good summary of this game.
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- lemmy.world
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- 1Y
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*Kona* is a supernatural detective story, taking place in Northern Quebec in October 1970. You play as Carl Faubert, a private investigator from Montreal and a veteran from the Korean War. He's hired by the wealthy industrialist, William Hamilton, to come to Atamipek Lake and investigate a simple vandalism issue. Most of Carl's thoughts are spoken aloud by a narrator as you play through this game.
As soon as you arrive, a car desperately trying to get out of town swerves out of control and sends you careening into the ditch. When you wake up a few hours later, a blizzard has set in and you find yourself freezing to death.
You immediately set out to warm and heal yourself so you can repair your truck and get back on the road. The other driver took out a bridge, trapping you in the town. The driver is nowhere to be found, so all you can do is continue on to your prearranged meeting with your client.
You eventually get up the road to the general store, where you were supposed to meet your employer... only to find him dead! Your detective instincts kick in and you start exploring the store for clues.
You find an unusual chunk of glowing ice behind the general store, almost as if an iceberg came out of the ground (see first screenshot). There are wolf tracks leading away from it, but when you take a picture of it, you discover hidden moose tracks alongside it too.
Following the various trails of glowing ice and hidden moose tracks, you will occasionally find completely frozen people - encased in ice from head to toe! Walking up to them will start a vision, showing you what they were up to before they were frozen.
The screen started pulsing uncomfortably with a heavy heartbeat sound every time I got close to them, so I avoided them at first, thinking I would freeze or die or something. It wasn't until I accidentally wandered too close and started a vision that I realized I was missing out on story-advancing clues.
As you uncover more clues, you scribble in more details on your map of Atamipek Lake, giving you more places to explore.
You also discover that Atamipek Lake is mostly a ghost town, with everyone either frozen, having fled, or are dead. There is one living person I came across early on; a surly old French man who's defending himself from the "hybrid wolf/moose creature" in the woods that's freezing everyone. He has some folklore books on his table about Wendigos and what creates one, which I suspect is either a clue as to what's happening, or possibly a red herring.
Either way, the old man gives you a proper winter coat if you go find him a bottle of Caribou (a sort of bootleg alcohol one of the residents was making in their cabin).
I've only played 3-1/2 hours of this game so far (and most of it was spent wandering in the woods or rummaging through abandoned houses), but it's been quite enjoyable. You learn about each of the townsfolk and their motives against William Hamilton. Being a rich guy who swooped in and took over the town, he's not very well liked, so there are plenty of motives for the people to kill him.
I also like that there's a driving aspect to this game. You can walk around in the cold, but you need to occasionally warm yourself and drink/eat to keep your brain power up. And when the cold is affecting you, you can't move fast. So being able to climb into a truck and quickly drive cross-country to the nearest house is convenient. And I do love driving in games.
All of the text in this game is in French, with an automatic English translation popping up over it. I'm not sure if this was originally a French game and/or made by a French developer, or if they were just trying to be authentic to Northern Quebec, a French-speaking region of Canada. But I do enjoy the authenticity of seeing everything in French. The narrator speaks in English, and the old man you run into speaks French, but with English captions.
There's apparently a sequel to this game that released in October last year - *Kona II: Brume*. It follows Carl again as he explores the same region, trying to explore the reality-altering "brume" (French for mist or haze) that covers the region and isolates it from the rest of the world. Sounds almost like a tribute to *Silent Hill*.
And both games are on sale on Steam right now. 80% off for this game; 70% off for the sequel. If this sounds like your kind of game, it's only a few bucks right now, so now's the time to check it out.
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- lemmy.world
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- 1Y
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*Cry of Fear* was originally a *Half-Life* mod that evolved into its own independent horror game. And being that it's a *Half-Life* mod, the game is free to play on Steam!
I knew this was a *Half-Life* mod immediately, because it always gave me a "Half-Life Launcher" error and crashed when I tried to load it in 4K resolution. Also, the pause screen was the old classic settings menu from the original *Half-Life* game.
I apologize that the subtitle in the first screenshot is so tiny. This game wasn't originally designed for 4K resolution. I normally run my display scale at 200% so text is easy to read, even at 4K. But this game tried to launch at 4K, blown up to 200% display size, so I could only see a quarter of the screen. Bringing it back down to 100% meant text, and my interface as a whole, was going to be really tiny throughout the game. Good thing I have a 48" monitor; I could still see my interface and read subtitles while playing.
Just a note: These screenshots are automatically squished and blurred a bit to fit here, but if you click to view them separately, you can see the full high-def 4K resolution. (On desktop, right-click and select "Open Image in New Tab." In an app, depending on what app you're using, you may just be able to click on them.)
Cry of Fear takes place in a Scandinavian town. You play a young boy named Simon who stops to help an old man lying on the ground... before a car drives right at you!
After some flashes of some creepy-looking doctor and a padded room, you wake up in a bedroom (with a Half-Life 2 poster on the wall!). You have blurred vision and are carrying a camera in your hands. You leave into a dark room and snap photos on designated spots to find your way out.
After you escape, you find yourself in a back alley in a town, with text messages on your phone to guide you. As you navigate the town, you run into numerous bleeding ghouls who attempt to stab you to death.
You also find creepy murder rooms and child-zombie-things that attempt to kill you too. The more you wander through the streets, the more Simon descends into madness...
*Cry of Fear* has multiple endings and over 20 unlockables, including an extra campaign after you beat single-player. You can also play co-op with up to four people. And of course, this is a horror game, so there are plenty of surprise enemies and jump scares. I actually scared my wife in another room when the first jump scare popped up. I was so surprised, I apparently let out a loud curse that spooked her too!
The graphics may be outdated (and my game crashed several times just trying to get it to load on my 4K monitor), but the spooky atmosphere is there. I actually got a lot of requests to check this game out. It's not exactly my thing; I prefer a more defined storyline instead of flashes of horror scenes and aimlessly wandering around, trying to figure out where to go next or what to do. But if you like dark atmosphere, supernatural horrors, and haunting music, this is the game for you. Don't forget to play it after dark and turn out all the lights first!
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- lemmy.world
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- 1Y
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That farmer dude is super creepy!
*Happy's Humble Burger Farm* is a game about working in a fast food restaurant, with all the standard horrors that come with a job like that. The game opens with a couple surgeons chatting as they install a "Reality Fabrication chip" into your brain.
You're then walked through the steps of cooking and assembling a burger, then bagging it and delivering it to customers. With the added warning that making a mistake will summon Happy, the mascot cow, who will pursue you until you feed her a burger with a rotten patty. She only moves if you're not looking at her, so keep your eyes on her while making her burger...
You then wake up in your bedroom, with the goal of getting to work for your first night shift (you only work night shifts). The game defaults to a "VHS filter" over your screen, making everything a little fuzzy and staticky, but you can change it to some other filter in the settings, or turn it off completely. I personally preferred to play it clear, without the blurry imagery.
You'll be working the night shift at Happy's Humble Burger Farm, alongside the manager Toe. But Toe's brain has been turned to mush from all the experiments done to him, so he only mumbles incomprehensibly while standing over the grill. Like in real life, you need to do all the work yourself because your manager is completely useless.
As you explore and find more cassette tapes with audio logs, you learn that all employees of this restaurant have basically been test subjects for some sort of experiment. But all of them either went missing or insane. Toe is still hanging by a thread, but he's a shell of a human being at this point. And you appear to be the latest subject, who still (somewhat) retains their sanity.
Remember this farmer dude? All the various restaurant mascots have large plaster statues scattered around the dining area of the restaurant and will throw out a few catch phrases if you click on them. The farmer, though, speaks with a horrifying deep demon voice and only speaks of death, murder, homicide, etc.
Also, he's the only mascot who moves. When you're not looking, he'll move back and forth around his corner of the restaurant. It's unnerving when he's facing the door, then you walk past and look back and he's suddenly right next to you, staring into your soul. (See first screenshot)
Then there's the weird fry guys. I have no idea what these guys' deal is, but occasionally, the music will turn creepy and then one of these guys will just spawn randomly and scuttle across the restaurant floors for a minute.
As the game advances, more of the town between your apartment and the restaurant will open up for you to explore. There's this interesting "Steal & Sell" shop, which I guess implies you can steal things from your work to sell them for a profit here.
Then there's a coffee shop with a live band playing in the front window. Drinking coffee before a shift will speed up your burger-making process, so make sure to load up on that java!
Finally, there's this Happy's Humble Burger Farm warehouse under construction that opens up after a truck crashes through the fence. Be careful exploring within, though, because there's a massive pig inside that attacks you if you disturb him. He throws something green at you (snot bombs?) while these creepy mannequin-like people stumble toward you and explode.
I'm not sure what to do here, but there's a burger station to one side, so I wonder if I can satiate him by feeding him burgers. It's a little hard to assemble burgers while constantly under attack, though. I was trapped in this building and struggled to make any progress, so that's where I left off for the night.
You might notice that I don't have any screenshots of Happy herself. That's because I used to work in a couple fast food restaurants as a teenager, and also spent 20 years in the military where attention to detail was paramount to keeping people alive. So I didn't make a single mistake making burgers, even with all the custom orders people requested, and Happy never made an appearance during my gameplay. Although that giant pig kind of cut my gameplay short.
When the game starts, there's a loading screen where someone logs into a computer with a username and password. When you get a game over, it shows a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death). So maybe part of the experiment is that this is all a simulation? You're not actually at a restaurant? I dunno; I'll have to play through the whole game to figure out what's actually going on.
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- lemmy.world
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- 1Y
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And now for something completely different... *The Complex* is actually an interactive film! Sort of a "choose your own adventure" kind of story. You play as Dr. Amy Tenent (played by Michelle Mylett, of *Letterkenny* fame) as she deals with a medical science crisis.
The game opens with Amy saving lives in the war-torn fictional South-East Asian nation of Kindar. Which feels like a stand-in for North Korea. They even refer to the leader of the dictator regime as the Supreme Leader.
Immediately, you're given a choice, and choices matter in this game. You also have a limited time to make your choice. (Although you can turn off the timer in the options if you struggle to make quick decisions.)
Fast-forward 5 years and Amy is now working for a large organization, developing nanocells that will help heal and repair people. But one of the company's interns collapses on a public transit, having a bad reaction to the under-developed nanocells.
Amy is rushed to an underground complex, where she will attempt to save the young intern's life, while also extracting the nanocells from her blood.
But the complex suddenly goes into lockdown, and some mysterious terrorists attempt to break in. Amy needs to figure out what's actually going on and survive the threat from outside - and from within...
Like I said, choices matter in this game. There are 9 different endings and 196 different scenes to discover. And there isn't a way to save your progress and go back to a previous decision. If you make a bad call, you're locked in to the repercussions of that choice until the end of the game. Just like real life.
I played through this game twice. The first playthrough, I almost made it to the end and got a lot of people killed along the way. I did my best to be kind to everyone - if you remember my previous post, I mentioned that I don't like to be cruel in video games. I try to play as altruistic as I can. But apparently, that didn't work too well in this game. I had to be the "tough bitch" sometimes and make some harsh decisions instead of people-pleasing all the time. They gave me a final assessment of "neurotic." Damn, okay.
My second playthrough, I made a slightly different choice early on in the game... and died almost immediately. At least I got an achievement for getting over 50% relationship status with everyone I'd met... which is called the "People Pleaser" achievement. That hurts. 😖
I actually got this game in a bundle with other interactive film games, although I can't remember the names of the others. I'll need to dig through my Steam library and track down some more of these kind of games. I really enjoyed it.
For me personally, video games are basically interactive stories. I want to have an entertaining tale to follow, where I get to influence the way the main character completes the story.
This kind of game is exactly that, except super heavy on the film side of it with minimal interactions. It was fun to sit through once, but on concurrent playthroughs, I found myself spamming the skip button to get to the choices quicker. And some (lengthy) cutscenes were unskippable because they went over important story details. I would love to find all the endings to this game, but I don't think I have the patience to sit through it many more times. Not when I have many more video games that need my attention. 😉
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- lemmy.world
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- 1Y
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Officially, this game is called *Duck Season*, but ~~when they ported it to Steam, they added "PC" to its Steam title~~ the version on Steam without "PC" in its name is VR only. They're both just called *Duck Season* in the game itself.
Old guys like me know the game this is parodying - *Duck Hunt*, for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). The "Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt" cartridge was the first video game I ever owned and I had the original gray gun controller for it. I spent a lot of time shooting ducks in that game back in my youth!
There are a few differences between this game and the original one. Firstly, this one is a high-def simulation of a kid playing the original Duck Hunt. Secondly, instead of an actual dog, it's a guy in a dog costume. And finally... this is a horror game!
Strangely enough, I beat the entire game and was surprised that there were no horror elements. Besides a couple slightly weird scenes, nothing out of the ordinary happened. I beat the game, then the kid I was playing as moved on to "Final Fiesta II," a parody of *Final Fantasy II*. It was the best ending! I even got tons of food, like I was having a sleepover party with friends! Definitely brought back some nostalgic memories of my childhood in the '80s-'90s.
Then the kid's mother mentioned that she would've shot the dog if she was playing, and it hit me - I actively avoid being cruel in video games! That's why nothing bad happened; I wasn't mean to the dog. Oops.
My next playthrough, I accidentally (read: automatically) dialed 911 when I picked up the phone, and I dropped the receiver instead of hanging up, which led to the "Best Men" ending. I was mean to the dog this time, but instead of whatever horrors he would've brought to my house, I instead watched a live news coverage of a police helicopter pursuing him through the neighborhood! I guess I need to play through it again and avoid doing anything logical this time if I want my horror ending...
Interestingly, the game opens like a stage production, with backdrops to tell the story leading into the game. Which is an odd way to introduce a nostalgic video game simulator.
Also, the game itself takes you into the TV, where you're essentially on-stage performing. There are props and boundaries to the stage, and if you turn around, you can see yourself sitting in front of the TV!
I enjoyed the nostalgic toy commercials. Especially with all the blocks that the toys crash through. Very much like old '80s/'90s commercials. Personally, I always wanted those blocks so I could crash my own toys through them! They made it look very appealing for young me.
Here's an amusing bit of trivia: The hunter guy in the shotgun tutorial video is Sam Gorski - someone I went to high school with! He and his buddy, Niko Pueringer (the guy in white who yells at his mini dude in the game's Bootloose VHS tape) are the creators of [Corridor Digital](https://www.corridordigital.com), and I knew them both when we were teenagers.
I wasn't super close with them; they were a few grades below me and we had intersecting friend circles. But I've been following their CG film career on YouTube for the last 2 decades and I was surprised to see their familiar faces in this game.
Digging into the production details of *Duck Season PC*, I discovered that the writer/director, Brandon Laatsch, is the younger brother of an old friend of mine from high school!
And he's not credited, but I'm 99% positive the guy in the "There's No 'I' in Iowa" VHS tape is my high school homecoming king. Small world.
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- lemmy.world
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- 1Y
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I was hoping to keep up daily Halloween-themed posts through all of October, but I had way too much on my plate yesterday and didn't get a moment to myself until almost midnight. Who knew retired life could be so busy? Oh well; at least I never promised to do daily posts. Maybe I'll make a double post sometime to make up for it, or review an extra horror game on November 1st.
Today's horror-themed video game is *Alien: Isolation*. This takes place in the Alien movie franchise (specifically after the first film), and actually follows Ellen Ripley's daughter, Amanda, as she tries to track down what happened to her mother aboard the Nostromo.
As you may remember from the original 1979 film (Spoilers ahead; click to reveal)
::: spoiler spoiler
Ellen Ripley's crew responded to an emergency beacon and found an abandoned ship on a small planet. During their exploration, they ran across alien facehugger eggs and accidentally bred an alien, which escaped aboard their ship and managed to kill the whole crew except for Ripley. She managed to barely escape in a small vessel after blowing up their mining ship, the Nostromo.
:::
This game takes place 15 years later. Amanda Ripley, now an adult and working for Weyland-Yutani (her mother's company), heard about a remote trading station called Sevastopol that had recovered the flight recorder from the Nostromo. She was invited along with the recovery team, only to find that the station was under duress and not responding.
Amanda is split up from her team while trying to board, finds the trading station mostly empty except for a few panicked people running and looting for their lives, and eventually discovers what's happening... an alien is loose and hunting people.
Worse yet, the androids running the trading station have locked everyone out of the communications hub and are refusing to contact the outside world. When you try to break in to contact your team on the orbiting ship, the androids mark you as a threat and turn violent. Nothing worse than hearing kind words from an android while being strangled to death...
This game is mostly stealth, sneaking around and avoiding aliens. But it definitely falls under the horror category and has its jump scare moments. The aliens patrol certain regions of the ship and you have to find your way around them using various tools, such as smoke bombs, noisemakers, flash bangs, and EMP mines. All of which you have to craft yourself using items you find scattered around the various floors of the trading station.
Plus, it's everyone for themselves, so you have to be careful about the people you run into. Some will help you; others will attack you. Use your best judgment when approaching others. And don't forget to use your motion tracker to see how close the aliens are to you. They like to hide in the vents and surprise you. But they can also hear the ping of the motion tracker, so use it sparingly if they're close by...
*Alien: Isolation* faithfully reproduces the original film in video game format, with the same theme music from the film, as well as high-quality reproductions of the film sets. The original film was a beautiful sci-fi spectacle, with incredible details on board the Nostromo. You get to see that same level of quality applied not only to your own ship (the same type as the Nostromo), but to the trading station as a whole. No corners were cut in the music and graphics department. Check out these familiar scenes reproduced from the film:
Note: these screenshots are all from my 4K gameplay with maxed out graphics settings. They may look a little blurry here, but click on them and you'll see the full 4K detail. It's absolutely gorgeous level of work that went into replicating everything in game. There are hardly any copy/paste levels; it's an insane amount of work to create a world that feels like you're actually living in it. I keep pausing just to admire the details of everything, even just random hallways!
This game is a masterpiece in graphic design, and the soundtrack pulled right from the 1979 classic film helps to pull you into this world even more. I really enjoyed this game and I can't recommend it enough!
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- lemmy.world
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- 1Y
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*Sir, You Are Being Hunted* is a comedic survival game, where you are stuck on a collection of small islands. You need to gather up fragments of an artifact and bring it back to a circle of runestones to create an escape portal.
You are being hunted by British robot gentlemen, though. So you need to be aware of your surroundings and keep quiet. Stealth is the key to survival in this game.
You will lose vitality over time and need to replenish it with food and/or drink. You can hunt game and cook it for fresh meat, or you can scavenge the abandoned villages for resources. Most options in the houses are dubious at best, though, and you need to decide just how important your survival is.
The robots are pretty intelligent, and they only get better as you raise the difficulty. They're actively hunting you, so they will continue to pursue you forever. Your only hope of survival is to avoid them and, if caught, lose them or destroy them. If you are caught and killed, you will get a nice little screen showing off your survival stats for that game.
The five islands are randomly generated, so you never play the same map twice. You can pick between five biomes for each island: castle, industrial, rural, mountainous, and fenland. So you get a variety of terrain to run, hide and scavenge on.
The game is officially called *Sir, You Are Being Hunted*. But if you're not a sir, there is an option on the main screen to switch to *Madam, You Are Being Hunted*. The disembodied voice of Walter, your butler, will refer to you by your chosen pronoun throughout the gameplay.
This is a silly, extremely British survival game, and it's loads of fun to play, even for someone like me who hates survival games. Happy hunting!
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- lemmy.world
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- 1Y
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*Dagon* is originally a short story by the creator of the eldritch horror genre, H.P. Lovecraft. This version is a free game on Steam that converts his short story into a visual novel. A narrator reads through the tale while you experience the visuals and landscapes described in the story. You can look around you (and it supports VR too!) but you can't walk and explore. You're stuck in place and only move on as you advance the story.
Throughout the game, you can find hidden bits of trivia, which dive deeper into topics surrounding H.P. Lovecraft's life, the story itself, or other bits of background lore to help you understand the time period in which this story was written.
H.P. Lovecraft himself was terrified of the ocean and all aquatic life, ever since he was two years old; although he has no idea what event may have instilled that fear within him. However, he took that fear and translated it into a new genre of unknowable and incomprehensible horror that defied the rules for standard storytelling of the time. As someone who is also afraid of any body of water in which I can't see the bottom, I totally get it.
*Dagon* is a tale about a sailor who escapes from enemy capture on the high seas by slipping out in a small rowboat in the night. But when he awakes the next morning, he is no longer on the ocean, as a muddy land mass has risen above the ocean level, stranding him along with all sorts of hidden creatures from the deep.
He sees a peak in the distance and spends the next day and night journeying toward it, only to discover on the other side, a giant monolith illuminated in the moonlight, engraved with pictograms of horrifying creatures. But then a creature stirs from deep within a pool at its base...
As a narrative short story, this game will only take you maybe 30 mins or less to play through. But it's fun to search through each area for trivia to collect. There are 20 bits of trivia to find scattered throughout the core game.
The base game is free on Steam, but there are two separate short story DLCs you can buy for a few bucks each. The first is *The Little Glass Bottle*, a short story H.P. Lovecraft wrote when he was seven years old! It's a cute tale about treasure hunting in the ocean that has no horror elements in it.
The second story is *The Railway Horror*, which was a nightmare H.P. Lovecraft experienced and wrote about to a friend of his. Both stories have eight bits of trivia each, giving you further background into Lovecraft's life and works.
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- lemmy.world
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- 1Y
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*Bendy and the Ink Machine* is a game about an animation studio that tried to bring their classic cartoon characters to life... with horrifying consequences.
You play a man named Henry who was invited back to the old animation studio he used to work at, by Joey Drew, the head of Joey Drew Studios (which is also this game's developer).
When you arrive, you find the place empty(?), but you also find a giant ink machine that you've never seen before. Through cassette recordings, you learn how to power it up and... before you know it, there's an ink demon running amok through the halls!
You try to run for the exit, but find yourself falling deep into the bowels of the studio. From there, you're solving puzzles and fighting off ink monsters, while also hiding from Bendy himself as he awkwardly staggers around the floors randomly.
You also run into Sammy Lawrence, the former studio's music director, who accidentally ingested some of the ink and partially turned into an ink monster himself. He offers you up as a sacrifice for Bendy, hoping to be rewarded with his humanity.
At one point, you get a choice to head toward either The Demon or The Angel. I chose the angel and found myself at the mercy of a disfigured and insane Alice Angel from the Bendy cartoon series. I'm not sure what's on the demon side; perhaps I should replay it and try that route.
Eventually, you receive a sort of handmade black light that lets you see hidden messages on the walls that guide you. Once you beat the game, it will let you start the game with the black light. I'm excited to play this game over and see what messages I can find in the various rooms and hallways.
I first played this game when it was releasing in 5 separate chapters and I was hooked! Unfortunately, I never beat it. The instructions weren't clear back in the early versions of the game and I found myself wandering aimlessly around several floors, not sure what I needed to do. I don't think I ever finished chapter 3.
Then I picked it up again last night and ended up beating the whole thing in a single sitting. It was much clearer with the full version of the game, and I powered through the whole thing in about 5 hours.
There is a spin-off called *Boris and the Dark Survival*, which is a top-down survival game where you play as Boris the Wolf. You collect supplies while trying to avoid Bendy as he roams around. According to its Steam page, the game will soon be renamed to *Bendy: Lone Wolf*, add a bunch of improvements and add-ons to the game, and increase its price. It's only $3 right now, so might as well snatch it up before it gets more expensive!
Then there was a sequel to the main game called *Bendy and the Dark Revival*. You play as Audrey, an animator who found herself trapped in the dark studio at the mercy of Bendy and his ink monsters.
There is also a free Steam game that came out this year called *Bendy: Secrets of the Machine*, which doesn't really give a description and its trailer is just a tease without explaining anything. I need to play that and see what it's all about.
Finally, there's a upcoming game called *Bendy: The Cage*, which takes place during Bendy and the Dark Revival. It sounds like it will follow our original protagonist, Henry, during that game.
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- lemmy.world
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- 1Y
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This Zombie Army franchise is actually a spin-off of the Sniper Elite video game franchise, which portrayed fictional Allied missions carried out by the series' main hero, Karl Fairburne, during World War II.
The Zombie Army story takes place in a separate alternate history where Hitler, upon losing WWII, decided to enact "Plan Z" and resurrect all of the Wehrmacht's soldiers as zombies.
The first two Zombie Army games were compacted into a trilogy release with the third game. This trilogy had Hitler raising his undead army, being killed off, and then resurrected as a sentient zombie leader before being tossed in hell.
This fourth and latest game has millions of zombies running rampant across Europe. It's discovered that Zombie Hitler is still leading the hordes from hell and is now amassing a new zombie army with which to invade Earth.
You play as the hero from the Sniper Elite games, Karl Fairburne. Or, if you prefer, you can play as various other characters from the franchise (and even some from the Left 4 Dead franchise). I personally prefer to play as Jun, an original Chinese character for this game. Each character has different stats, so it's not just choosing a skin for your character; you have to be mindful of their abilities too.
Like the Sniper Elite games, one of the core mechanics of this game is to snipe zombies from afar. Thankfully, these are the clumsy, shambling, slow zombies, so you have time to line up shots, even in a short and narrow area. If you get a perfect aim on a vital organ, it rewards you with a slow-motion cutscene of your bullet firing, zipping across the map, and an x-ray view of the enemy's skeleton shattered or vital organs exploded by your bullet. With rotting zombies, though, there's not much difference between the x-ray view and their normal appearance.
These are supernatural zombies, raised with occult magic, so they don't stay dead. If you don't get a headshot on them, don't be surprised if their body suddenly glows with occult magic and comes back to life. A good way to ensure they don't get back up is to stomp on their corpse until it disintegrates in a gory mess. It'll sometimes release ammo and other beneficial items too!
I love the attention to detail in this game. All across the map, you can find zombie rats and crows with glowing red eyes. They leave you alone, but it's still super creepy how they just linger in the shadows, silently watching you. It's truly a world-building detail, which makes me think about how The Black Plague was spread through rats. I wonder if these rats would turn people into zombies if they got bit...
There are also other signs of the occult in the background, like a zombie hand running around each level that you can snipe for bonus points. Or these creepy china dolls that pop up in various places. Sometimes they're just dolls, sitting there unmoving in dark corners. Other times, they talk or move slightly. And sometimes you have mere seconds to shoot them before they just straight-up vanish into thin air after taunting you. Creepy dolls, man...
You can also find these random zombie heads that are technically alive, but unable to do anything. This one in particular, you could turn on the stove and cook it until it melts into the soup. I like the sign someone wrote on the wall behind the stove. Very important detail to remember!
I find it interesting that this game takes place in mid-1940s Europe, but the music in the game is reminiscent of '80s horror flicks, including posters for each mission that look like worn B-movie horror films from that generation. Also, when you pick up equipment and ammo during a mission, it makes a sound like an old-fashioned mechanical pinball machine from the '80s.
It's like they kept the WWII setting from the Sniper Elite games, but wanted an '80s horror vibe for this game. Classic horror films from the '80s have been pretty popular in the past decade; I feel like Stranger Things helped to bring back that nostalgia for us millennials who grew up in the '80s and '90s, so they were probably trying to cash in on that nostalgia trip while it's hot.
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- lemmy.world
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- 1Y
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Don't let the colorful kiddie-friendly graphics fool you; Pumpkin Jack is a game about literal hell on Earth. It takes place in a world where everything was so happy and peaceful, the devil himself got bored and decided to shake things up a bit by releasing monsters across the world.
Humans didn't like having their peaceful lives interrupted like that, so they hired a wizard to protect them against the invading hordes of demons. In response, the devil summoned an infamous trickster known as Jack to take out the wizard. He granted Jack a jack-o-lantern body and offered to free his soul if Jack did this one task for him.
You play as Jack, roaming the lands and fighting various monsters who prevent you from tracking down the wizard. You recruit a crow, who helps you with ranged fighting while you engage in close-quarters combat.
Some places require you to explore and solve a simple puzzle in a place your body can't reach. In those situations, Jack will detach his head and let it crawl around on vine-like tentacles.
Despite releasing in 2020, this game feels like a classic Xbox 360 game from 20 years ago. From the graphic style to the gameplay, this feels like something you'd find in a bargain bin at the game store. It's entertaining, silly, and filled with mechanics that feel like they were designed for a controller.
Not to mention, each level is essentially a single path through various obstacles and enemies. If you do explore, it's only slightly to one side or another, looking for collectibles. If you find crow skull collectibles, you can exchange them for skins for Jack at a vendor who randomly pops up in each of the levels.
You can also find gramophones. I believe the only purpose of collecting them is to get an achievement, but Jack does a little dance number every time you find one, which is mildly amusing.
The game itself is relatively short. There are 6 main levels, but various checkpoints and stages throughout each one. So it should only take you a few hours to beat the whole game. Plus, there are 20 crow skulls and one gramophone per level, so 120 skulls and 6 gramophones in total. Honestly, that's the most early-2000s game vibe I get from this - searching for pointless hidden collectibles that aren't remotely connected to the story.
It's not a bad game, but as old-fashioned as the gameplay is, I definitely wouldn't pay more than $20 max for it. And hey! It's 88% off on Steam until October 20th, so you can get it for only $3.59 right now. Not a bad Halloween deal.
Interesting… This was right about the time that I started getting pop-up messages on my phone about pre-ordering the Pixel 10 Pro and getting $450 off. Coincidence? 🤔