Dan Plays Games 8

In a semi-concerted effort to play and finish games I own rather than buying new ones, several games on this list will be those I’ve played before but haven't touched in many years.

Elden Ring: Nightreign

I played two rounds and then refunded it. Turns out when you take all the parts I like out of Elden Ring, I don't like the end result. So I bought Expedition 33 instead.

Expedition 33

Game fucking good. It deserves its own post.

Odallus: The Dark Call 

I played less than an hour of this back in 2015. It’s one of those early indie games that went extremely hard on the retro influence (in this case, pre-Symphony Castlevania), and that works in its favor for the aesthetics. Unfortunately, its dedication to period accuracy means that it has several design choices that are absolute bullshit.

You have a limited number of lives: fine. You can buy more at merchants, but like with every other item the price increases every time you buy it. Okay, fine. If you lose all your lives you have to restart the level. Okay, fine.

But when you die and get kicked back to a checkpoint,  all the sub weapons and lives you used remain used and the price increase remains in effect. You’re kicked back in space but not in time. 

Maybe the game would be too easy if this wasn’t a factor - it’s not particularly complicated or long once you come to grips with the movement (which doesn’t feel great, but intentionally so) - but as it stands I feel little desire to finish it despite how short it is. With achievement percentages at 50% just for beating the first level, it seems I am part of the majority on this point.

One Finger Death Punch

Another one from 2015ish. The tutorial narrator voice has aged particularly poorly (I get that they were going for “bad dub of an old kung fu movie”, or at least I hope they were, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good to begin with), but the gameplay is an immaculate encapsulation of ye olde Newgrounds stick fighting animations. Feels good sometimes to winnow down the cognitive load to two buttons and flow state.

Rift of the Necrodancer (revisit)

Returning here, now that I've completed the story mode, with a comment to say that I do not know why there was a story mode. Just having the mini games of characters doing stuff would have been sufficient.

Binding of Isaac: Repentance

BoI is my most-played video game that isn’t TF2, at least in terms of games that I have stats for. I fell off years ago when I updated to Afterbirth+ and found that it had become extremely unfun to play thanks to item bloat and successive waves of Edmund’s favorite hobby, nerfing anything that is remotely fun into the ground (instead of giving people more options to play the game on their own terms. Heaven forbid a game have opt-in extra difficulty modes.)

But I had never gotten Repentance, and got it in my head that I should return to the old stomping grounds as I continue on through Hell Summer of Hell Year. Started a new save slot and everything.

And starting over from scratch feels good! The old monster is still under there and getting a Pyromaniac + Kamikaze run feels fucking good. Getting Brimstone feels fucking good.

It’s only after putting a couple dozen more hours into it that the feeling of “man, this ain’t quite right” starts to creep in. There’s been a lot of little things tweaked in the years since I played BoI regularly, and on the whole I don’t like them in ways I can’t really put my finger on because I don’t know the extent of the damage. Several issues I had with Afterbirth+ are still present (paucity of damage up items, a bloated boss item pool weighted towards items that are either useless or just feel like a mediocre reward, outrageously nerfed Devil Room chances) and several more seem to have emerged just for Repentance (inflating drop percentages, even more good items reduced to mediocrity, decreasing soul heart drop rate.)

And don’t get me started on how the External Item Descriptions mod is absolutely necessary to play. It’s bonkers we’ve gone over a decade missing the basic feature of “telling players what the fuck an item does”. This has always been Edmund’s other big design issue - I remember the shitshow with the Lost and the “no patch notes for updates” era. He's a good designer at base but once the game is in the wild I think he just kinda barrels over people who have a different way of having fun. It's always been a relaxation game for me, where you occasionally become obscenely overpowered. Making it harder lessens both of those things. Maybe a mod to undo the nerfs will help.

Is it still fun? Yeah! But it feels like it's fun in spite of itself, nowadays. 

Date Everything

While my experience with the genre is limited, it’s my understanding that dating sims are predicated on the premise of choosing a character you like and focusing in on their specific story route, which precludes you from those of other characters.

Date Everything does not adhere to this structure: while everyone has a specific plot, these are extremely short (maybe 5-7 conversations, and I've run into several that can be wrapped up in 1 or 2) and pretty shallow, narratively speaking. When you finish their story, there’s basically nothing else to do with the character besides one final short scene.

This would be okay were it not for the fact that the game forces you to engage with all of the characters. “(You Must) Date Everything”, not “(You Can) Date Everything”. 

The only way to skip anyone is if you take the content warning opt-out, which you can only take for certain characters and which you can only activate during the first conversation with them. If you ever think “oh that doesn't sound so bad / I can handle this” and then change your mind, you’re fucked; you are locked into their storyline unless you reload a save. If someone doesn’t have a warning but is still just kind of a cunt you’d rather not deal with, you’re just stuck with them for days until you can piss them off enough to get a Hate ending.

This leads to a paradoxical and self-defeating gameplay loop where you are disincentivized from interacting with the characters you like. In a fucking dating sim! Talk to them too much and you burn through their plot and are stuck with the characters you don’t like or actively hate. Even I know that shit is whack!

The game desperately, desperately needs a “fuck you, get out of my house” option. Not just because the Content Aware warning system is inadequate, but because sometimes players just don’t like talking to certain characters for reasons entirely unconnected to serious topics! Let me skip Timony Timepiece! It should not take this long to get this shitty submissive twink catboy out of my god-damn house!

You can just be rude to people and sandbag everything they say, but it’s still going to take multiple days to get a Hate ending for most of them.

I appreciate the inclusion of content warnings, but they’re basically useless in the game by being vaguely worded and given without any context to help you make an informed decision (so like most content warnings).  I’m not fucking psychic, I can’t tell what warnings are under / over / accurately stated without more info, and if I get more info it’s too late! There are characters who absolutely need a warning and don’t get one (the fact that this game launched with no warning on Errol is baffling) and those who get one but probably don’t (Deenah is, at worst, mildly weird.) I ended up taking most of them not because of the content, but because the characters are immediately gigantic assholes that I don't want to deal with. (Special shout-out to Sophia, who is both content I don't want to engage with AND an enormous asshole. She's the domme who subscribes to the "start throwing insults around before establishing boundaries" school of BDSM. You literally don't even get to choose a single line of dialogue (let alone get to the content warning) before she starts growling about how you're a worthless piece of shit. Get the fuck outta my house and remind yourself what 'safe, sane, and consensual' means, you clown.)

The game is at its best when you’re wandering around discovering kooky new characters. The writing is generally pretty good, got some great jokes in there, character designs are cool. Sometimes you get in a flow state and juggling all those characters doesn't seem like that big of an ask. But sometimes the illusion breaks and the connective tissue starts showing and you remember that 100 characters is a lot less fun when you have to do all 100 plots to finish the damn game, especially when you've met a good number of characters that you'll get you fill of (positive and negative) in one meeting. 

(Also: the mouse and keyboard controls are outrageously bad. You can use arrow keys to select options in the main menu, but not dialogue options. And there’s no key rebinding!)

(Also also: I know it's 110% unintentional, but I am incredibly amused by the fact that the character voiced by Matt Mercer is a bad DM.)

Yes, there will be a tierlist eventually.