Dan Plays Games 6

Previous posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Damn, I have played a lot of video games recently. I believe this is what is called a “coping mechanism” in the biz.

Buckshot Roulette

It is definitely three dollars worth of the good part of Inscryption and delivers on the singular thing it sets out to do, which is a game of Russian roulette with a shotgun.

Epigraph

A language decipherment puzzle, and a damn good one. Ate my focus for a few days, and I filled up five or six notebook pages trying to decipher it. I’d only recommended it for people who really, really like word games and know enough about linguistics to get into trouble, but if that describes you it’s a good time. It’s all just the one puzzle: you’re given some artifacts, some untranslated text, a couple clues and that’s it.

Mouthwashing

If you like space horror and have an afternoon and 13 bucks to spare, this one is a must. Go in sight unseen if you can. Top-tier Mothership fuel. One of those games that carries an “if you know, you know” feeling of in-group induction (positive) along with it. If you know, you fucking know.

Up front content warning, it’s fucking grim. It’s an isolated group of human beings in a time of crisis, with all that entails. It’s got some ugly human souls to bare to the world. The PS1 style graphics are used to great effect here: the gore is polygonal and abstracted, but that doesn’t lessen the effect. If anything it is a case study in how photorealism isn’t necessary at all for a good scare.

The parts where it stumbles a bit can be counted on a single hand with fingers left over and ultimately if the worst thing you can say about a game are “there are two sections where it’s a 7/10 for a couple minutes”, that’s a gold seal of quality.

Katana Zero

From a mechanics and aesthetics perspective, this is an all-time banger. Tens across the board. Everything working in unison to deliver a singular artistic experience that is just fucking rad. Good pixel art isn’t hard to come by and this stands out even in that crowded field. The gameplay itself is honed to perfection. Nails the responsiveness and the eternally important “games where death is common should have short load times.”

But there is a catch: the game’s not done. You hit credits on a cliffhanger, and the promised DLC has yet to emerge and likely never will. The 12th chapter, even though you can select it, just doesn’t exist beyond an empty room and a “come back in a few months” message. It is a sour note to end on, but not enough to really damage the whole. There’s enough closure to leave reasonably satisfied. It’s like there’s been a chunk cut out of an incredibly good steak - you still get an incredibly good steak.

Selaco

This game runs on fucking GZDoom, which makes it nothing short of a miracle, but man am I bad at boomer shooters. Barely even scratched the surface on this one.

Shadows of Doubt

I thought I was going to like this one more than I did. Maybe it’s just a bad tutorial, I don’t know. It feels like it should work, but it doesn’t work.

Quester | Osaka

I bought this because I enjoyed the first Quester and this one was 85% off: it is functionally exactly the same game as Quester, to the point where buying it for 3 bucks feels like a ripoff. No meaningful changes, to the point where I wouldn’t even call it a sequel. It’s a new map (which isn’t saying much), one new mechanic (a canoe to cross water) and some new characters (who are a .jpg and some stats).

ABI-DOS

This is a puzzle game that I absolutely have no skill in and I am unlikely to get far with, but it is free and if your brain works well with programming puzzles.

Luck Be A Landlord

Another freebie. Proto-Balatro, slots instead of poker. Good for an unwinding game, since it doesn’t ask much of you and the cost of failure is low. There is some ability to go after particular builds, which is nice, though sometimes the game will just refuse to give you what you need.

Gods vs Horrors (Demo)

A simple autobattler where the pantheons of Earth fight lovecraftian gribblies. Just a demo for now, but I wishlisted it instantly which says a lot. The art is nice, there’s a good selection of pantheons on deck already, and most importantly it allows you to pull off some disgustingly busted

The Roottrees are Dead

WESTERN PA MENTIONED

This one’s a winner. Scratches the Obra Dinn itch, with another mystery of freeform research and logical deduction. I am 110% on board with this genre, and if the idea of digging around in a database for fictional magazine back issues to find clues is appealing to you, you’ll be on board with it too.

What makes it (and Obra Dinn) work, I think, is that both games make it very clear what information they want you to find, and then they go hands off. There are occasional chokepoints that might leave you stuck, but it’s got a solid hint system (the sort where it doesn’t tell you exactly what to do unless you hit it 3~4 times) and most of these points were in the Roottreemania second mystery (which is basically a postgame challenge)

Caves of Qud

I am cybernetically fused to a floating flamethrowing throne. I have four arms with an ax in each hand. I have a fungal infection that gives me minty fresh healing mushrooms. My best friend is the Ape God, and my battle party is displaced time-clones of myself.

I fucking love Caves of Qud. It’s like if Gene Wolfe got into the really chill kind of self-actualization-focused transhumanism and then wrote a video game where baboons stone you to death while you try to strip the wiring from an ancient missile silo.

UFO50 

I’ve got 70 hours in, 5 golds, 1 cherry, here’s the tier list as it stands

As an artistic work, UFO50 is unimpeachable. They've managed to encapsulate an era of video games as perfectly as a modern recreation is capable of, I think. Most devs stop at aesthetics; here they've gone the full 9 yards, here.

The downside of this is that 80s video games were developed prior to the introduction of such modern innovations as "fairness", "game balance", "responsive controls", “respecting the player’s time” and "non-instant deaths". UFO50 emulates the warts along with the rest, and while that is commendable artistically, by god am I glad that this era is dead and gone.

Still; it’s 50 games for 25 bucks, and I’d say it’s more than worth it even if you only find 5 you like.

Rapid-fire comments

• Night Manor is my current best-in-show. It’s a point-and-click’em-up adventure game with coherent, non-bullshit puzzles.
• Velgress is another champion of the collection, because it remembers the key points of a good high-difficulty game: fast respawn, no time wasted.
• I love Overbold but it does that thing where the health bar isn’t indicative of how much health you actually have: you start with six pips, and die in one hit. Also has some of the worst hitboxes I have ever seen, downright impossible to gauge.
• Grimstone starts strong (and I love the gimmick of a wild-west Final Fantasy), but it’s got a serious midgame slog and the devs removed an extremely helpful glitch (you can resurrect party members with Cure outside of battle, including the caster) that was so barely an exploit that most people thought it was intentional. Don’t remove fun and useful bugs: not just because they’re fun and useful, but also because stuff like that is true to the era.
• I want to love Valbrace, but it’s very slow and saves so infrequently that you’re liable to lose progress in half hour chunks or more, and there’s not enough variety or speed in the game to keep me invested in doing the same damn thing over and over.
• Devilition is growing on me, same with Mortol 2.
• This tier list is way less authoritative than it may appear, and shakeups are bound to happen at some point or another.
  

Rift of the Necrodancer

Yet another game I enjoy and am dogshit at. They threw a curveball in the genre by giving all the monsters different behaviors and then throwing track hazards on top of that, which I think is great design but also OH GOD THIS IS ONLY MEDIUM DIFFICULTY WHAT THE FUCK.

Sorry We’re Closed

An astoundingly horny and extremely queer Resident Evil-like. One of the devs worked on Paradise Killer and you can absolutely tell. Oozes style like no one’s business, which would be great on its own - but then it comes out of nowhere to tell a pretty philosophical story about love. When the super-horny and incredibly queer Resident Evil-like starts talking about how demons are trying to fill the hole in themselves that formed when they got tossed out of Heaven and lost access to divine love and that they’re jealous of humans for being able to heal from heartbreak? Big neon sign that this story is going to go interesting places. So far, it has delivered.

Combat can be a bit frustrating, though, especially with the 1st person melee. Comes with the genre, I suppose.