The Apothecary of Trubiz
A cute little three-dollar cipher-puzzle game that’s three dollars worth of puzzles.
TR-49
Research and deduction games are taking off as a genre, and this one’s a solid entry into the roster. You’re given a computer terminal and the task of finding and identifying one specific book in the database, and it sends you right down the rabbithole of an alternate literary history. There are a solid number of aha moments, I never felt like the path forward was too obtuse to stump me for long, and I was able to 100% it in a reasonable 7 hours. Nice and satisfying.
Scarlet Hollow (Episode 5 update)
I can’t remember if I’ve written about Scarlet Hollow in this series before, so here’s the precis just in case I haven’t: Slay the Princess devs, southern gothic horror VN, it’s fuckin’ good. Unicorn Meat is probably happening the next holler over.
Where Slay the Princess is a line diverging into a fractal, Scarlet Hollow is a bowl of recursive spaghetti. Events connect to each other in unexpected ways, older episodes are called back to, choices you made hours or episodes ago can compound in ways you never saw coming. Moments with a clearly-signposted binary choice will often lead directly into a second similar choice, or add a third option because of something you did two episodes prior.
Playing through on both my old save and a new one from the beginning (as a refresher) was an excellent choice. If you’re not patient enough to wait for the final story update, it’s a great excuse to play it twice and make different choices.
Hell is Us (update)
Having now finished the game, I can say that it’s mostly solid, succeeds at most of the things it set out to do, and is let down by the most “we ran out of money and / or time” third act I’ve seen in a long, long time. Honestly, calling it a third act borders on falsehood: it’s a hallway, a large room, four elite enemies, four switches and a cutscene. The narrative ties itself off in a burst of action movie shlock that poorly suits the story that’s been woven together so far. I can’t say that it ruins the game, because it feels so disjointed from the previous ~27 hours that it doesn’t feel like it’s part of the game.
Removing Act 3 from the equation, there are still some pretty substantial issues: after nearly 30 hours the fights do become pretty tedious from the woefully limited enemy variety, and upping the difficulty doesn’t really stop you from being able to face-tank your way through the game. The plot of act 2 spins its wheels a bit and fizzles out after a while, losing the strength of the opening hours and becoming more median video-gamey, and the attempts at deep lore only really get to shallow depths.
Still: on the whole the game was engaging, and I played through till I hit credits. It won’t go down as a favorite of all time, but it was worth the playing and I hope it inspires some people to make something like it.
Dorfromantik
Hoo buddy this is a dangerous one in terms of the feel-good brain chemicals. I can easily lose hours in it, even when the gameplay solely consists of rotating hexes so their edges match. Pattern-Seeking Brain is pleased; Time-Management Brain is horrified.
The Seance of Blake Manor
An extremely Irish sleuth-em-up with great visual style. You’ve been summoned to a manor-turned-hotel in western Ireland, to find a missing attendee of a multi-day seance. Everything you investigate ticks time a minute forward, and you have to juggle everyone’s schedules along with your own. The cast is a wonderful gamut of folks you’d find in a Call of Cthulhu module; everyone has their own plot, sometimes connected to each other, sometimes not. It feels excellent to make a breakthrough and have a new crop of clues pour in, especially if you stumble on it by chance while exploring.
While the mystery itself isn’t going to change on repeat plays, there’s enough stuff in the game that I think it’ll be worth a second run-through to clean up things you’ve missed.
Lingo 2
Never played Antichamber but it’s got the same sort of hyperminimalist visual vibe and obtuse puzzles. You’re running around collecting letters, and then plugging those letters into consoles scattered around the world. Each console has a word, you need to transform it into another word, but you also need to decode the function you need to use (since the transform commands are all clusters of symbols).
There’s often a lack of feedback when you solve a puzzle - you get a tone and the console turns green, but it’s not always clear what has changed in the world when you do so.
Sol Cesto
I was sold on this just from the visuals, and was not disappointed. “Weird” is accurate but insufficient. “Fever-dream (positive)” is closer, but still feels somewhat reductive.
The sun is gone, and you need to get to the bottom of the dungeon to find it. Each layer in the dungeon is a 4 x 4 grid of squares filled with monsters, treasure, & traps; you select the row, but the exact square you land on is random, and the crux of the game is a combination of pushing your luck and managing the odds of getting a given square type.
Once you really get a hang of it you can break the game wide open, which I think is nice; it’s not a forever game. It also manages to sidestep the issue of running out of metaprogression unlocks before beating the game; you use the same currency to buy progression unlocks and in-run items (sending coins back up to the surface via a bucket on a rope), so once you have nothing left to unlock you don’t have to worry about saving for the next bucket room or sending part of your winnings back home; you can spend it all on items, which is secretly the best upgrade in the game.
Scriptorium
A paper-doll style art studio featuring the best weird little guys medieval marginalia can provide. Comes with a sandbox mode where you can just do whatever you want, and a campaign where you fulfill requests for clients and gradually increase your library of sketches. It’s a wonderful time, definitely has RPG applications.
Blue Prince
Late to the game, but I’ve been mostly unspoiled - (having forgotten most of what I glimpsed my partner do when she played it last year). I’ve hit credits, gotten 4 trophies, and begun digging into the deeper puzzles. So far I’ve managed to squeeze out a little progress every run, even if it’s just checking out a new room or finding one minor clue or something like that, but even then the spectre of getting repeatedly fucked over by RNG remains a consistent threat and I can already feel the frustration setting in on occasion. Half the game is puzzle solving, the other half is mitigating the game fucking you over, and your enjoyment will be contingent on how well you can mitigate that. So far I’ve found having multiple goals is the best defense, but that's just a defense, not a solution to the tension. I legitimately don't know if this game should be a roguelike - being a roguelike certainly was part of what elevated it to popularity, but I don't know if the roguelike elements are good for the game, exactly. But they're not exactly wholly bad either, I like the sense of increasing familiarity you get with the manor and its systems so shrug.
I have, by my count so far, cheated on four puzzles, one of which I absolutely would never have gotten on my own and one that I probably could have gotten only after a massive flaming crash out. take that for what you will.
Gameable Material Section
Steps = Exploration Turns
There's no reason to count exact time when you're already counting turns.
In OSE, an 8-hour day is 48 exploration turns and costs 2 flasks of oil. Erase the "8-hour day", no more hours, hours are fake. (Not bumping it up to 50, because 48 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12 and 16. Easy clocks.)
Each step (exploration turn) = 1 new room. Going through a room you've already been in is 1/2 a Step, going through it a third time reduces it to 0 (stopping to re-examine costs a full Step).
If you run out of Steps, you need to make camp and rest or you'll start taking penalties to everything from exhaustion.
Combat encounters count as 1 Step. Not because they take long, but because they exhaust you.
A party member can avoid getting hit in combat at the expense of Steps (probably according to hit dice of enemy? Unsure)
Certain interactions (room mechanisms, sickness, magical effects) can decrease Steps; potions and some rare magical items can increase Steps.
You can pay a Step to secure a location from ambush.
Doubtlessly there are other applications.
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