Dan Plays Games 13

Index 

The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante

A visual novel of sorts, where you follow the titular character over the whole course of his life through the waning years of a brutal fantasy empire and its theocratic caste system. The mechanics, as they are, are fairly standard: make choices, choices affect your relationships and skills, relationships and skills influence what choices you make, cycle continues. The story and setting work for what they’re aiming for - fairly standard dark fantasy vernacular, with a couple elements thrown in for pizazz. The VA who does Brante’s monologues in the inter-act cutscenes has a distinct southern US accent and it’s nice that they didn’t default to “fantasy = English”, even if the line reads aren’t the best. In the dire age we live in, a human doing a decent but flawed job should be celebrated.
 
I like that you can turn the notifications for what effect a choice will have on or off - I turned it off early on because I didn’t want the numbers influencing my story choices, and it’s worked out for me so far.
  

Moonlighter

It just feels bad to play on about every criteria I can judge a game of this type on. The combat is stiff, the dungeon delves are repetitive, the grind is enormous to get even minor upgrades to your gear, patrons in the shop waste time standing around admiring the floorboards. It’s built for a roguelike gameplay loop but lacks the meaningful progress and or variety that makes that loop work. I can see the vision, but it’s not working.
 

The Message from Deep Space (Update)

Finished the game. There’s a dip in enjoyment once you get to the back third and messages start getting more abstract. You get fewer tips from the other characters, the puzzles are more obtuse, and you spend a lot of time trying to brute-force answers because either you forgot a word from 150 transmissions back or have a definition that is slightly off from what’s intended or just can’t follow the logic of the question. I found myself relying on the guide more and more as time went on, and there are a couple puzzles in there where I don’t know if it’s possible to figure them out without a guide pointing you at the answer.

Still, it was a fun time. There were some very strong narrative moments in there, though if the achievements are anything to go by only ~9% of players have actually reached the end. So take that into account. Definitely keep the guide on hand if you get frustrated (and turn off the scanline effect if your graphics card is struggling.)

Decade

Recommendation from friend of the blog Semiurge. One o’ them artsy games by a solo Finnish dev with an incredible premise: you’re locked up in a bunker at the end of the world with 3 younger children. You also have a time machine, which can send people back in 10-year intervals. So you send your child soldiers back in time, filling in a mad-libs mission of item + objective + target, and seconds later they return ten years older and maybe the course of history has shifted. There are a lot of timelines out there, and all of them that I’ve found are a different kind of bad.

The game elicited some moments of actual discomfort from me during the first few rounds, and that’s a gold star on the good noodle board. The disjointed, distorted, deep-fried collage-mess of the graphic and sound design helps in that regard. The many dystopian futures are interesting, and it’s fun watching how different ideologies mutate over time and which ones can seize the spotlight given the right circumstances.

From a gameplay angle, though, the game’s just plain bad. The clues are obtuse (if they’re present at all), most combinations of item + objective have no purpose but wasting your time (you don’t even get lore for most of them), most dialogue is repeated, and progressing without a guide is going to involve a frankly ridiculous amount of trial and error that the game doesn’t have the content to support. The discovery and experimentation of the first few rounds quickly turns to tedium, and once you start using a guide there’s really no reason to stop using it.

Thousand Hells

A game that should have been my bag (narrative-focused heists of hell), but I ended up refunding it after 24 minutes because the resolution system felt way too obtuse to be fun.

Each of your four party members has a collection of traits, represented as tiles that you draw from a bag, which you apply to the challenge at hand and will give you a bonus or penalty to the dice roll - but the traits are vaguely worded, there’s no feedback as to what effect they had even after you use them. In order to pass a skill check you have to:

• Be lucky enough to draw a relevant trait tile
• Figure out if the game thinks the very vaguely-worded trait is relevant to the challenge
• Succeed at the die roll, factoring in the lasting penalties you’ve accumulated from previous failures (which are handed out like candy)

The tile-drawing mechanic effectively means you have to get lucky in an extra layer of RNG just to be allowed to use a character’s skills; my shaman was a nature specialist, and ate shit three challenges in a row in the jungle because I never pulled “so-and-so is a nature specialist” tile. In 24 minutes I succeeded at one die roll, but since all challenges require multiple die rolls, I still failed. If success and failure are going to be this arbitrary and obscured, why even bother with skills? Just make it a CYOA.

Sovereign Tower

Mythic Bastionland: The Management Game. I love basically everything about it, except the time loop mechanic that is an unfortunately large component.

The basic cycle of “hold court > send knights on missions > check results of completed missions” feels good at a base level, in a “slip into a zen state” sort of way. Art style is wonderful. Some of the writing is a bit on the nose but overall it’s enjoyable and some of it is very good.

Very early on, you’re offered a demon who can kick you back to any point in the current act. You keep any knowledge you’ve obtained, but nothing else: I cannot stress enough how, for the sake of your enjoyment with the game, don’t engage with the time loop mechanic unless someone dies, you really fuck up and hit a fail state, or you reach the end and want new game +. Using it outside those contexts will swiftly drain all the fun out of a very fun game by running you running through the same dialogue, buying the same items, trying to remember the stat upgrade you had the previous time through. There’s no real penalty to using the power in-game, but there sure as hell is one on the player side, and I don’t feel like the occasional “ooh I get to solve the problem with foreknowledge” moments justify the tedium of fiddling with everyone’s inventory again. 

Another thing that ended up irksome is a specific issue with how the romance works in the game. Most of the NPCs are romanceable; locking yourself into a romance does not lock you out from pursuing other ones, but the game doesn’t make it clear that this isn’t the Sovereign tower of free love fun times and yes, you will fuck things up for cheating (there’s a heart icon to designate if a dialogue choice is flirting, but no icon with a broken heart and the person’s face); normally this wouldn’t even mean doing a time reset, you can just exit the game and go back to the last autosave, but it’s possible to fuck yourself over and have to replay a chunk of an act - if you lock in a romance with one of the knights before you lock in with the Lady of the Tower (who is more or less the canonical choice & doesn’t care if you have another partner), and you don’t cut things off with the Lady on a specific cycle early in act 3, which no one in their right mind would do because there’s nothing in the game indicating you should, you’ll be forced to either reset or lose a knight in the breakup. And with the number of knights available already too few to handle the late-game workload, that’s not a cost anyone can really afford. So now I’m locked out of a satisfying ending with the Lady.

It’s a very fun game, but it is frustrating in almost equal measure. But it does make me want to see a solo hack of Mythic Bastionland based on the fun parts.

Halo 2 (MCC)

We used to make fucking video games. 

I had somehow skipped Halo 2 as a teen (Halo 2 had a bad PC port + I didn't have an OG xbox), so my only real memory of it is watching the first level and a half at my cousins’ one Christmas.

It’s such a tightly wound and tightly paced experience. I'll gladly handle some Jackal snipers (on normal, I am not a maniac) for a singular, complete package.

Halo 3: ODST (MCC)

I really, really like wandering around New Mombasa at night. I like the way that wandering paces out more frenetic flashback levels, I like how it is almost a prototype blueprint for an immersive sim that never was. I never really felt much more fragile than Chief, but I found myself going out of my way to duck behind cover and sneak around the edge of the map even if I didn’t really need to. The piss filter in VISR mode is annoying but it was 2009, everything had a piss filter back then.

However: I hate every single one of the characters, sans Rookie (who is blessedly silent) and Vergil (who is the best). If the entire game had just been those two, it would have been perfect. But no, we’re stuck with Manchild McGee and the One Notes. 

Also: I grant Halo 3 ODST the “second most racist game of 2009” award for somehow setting a game in a major city in Kenya and having two, maybe 3 characters who are actually from Kenya, all of whom are entirely off screen. I saw one word of Swahili the entire time. I can understand the marines being from all over, but the local police? Like if you were really making a point about the neocolonial hellscape of the UEG’s junta government I can see it working, but the story is mostly “Buck whines because he can’t get over his ex."

Halo 4 (MCC - Campaign)

Jesus Christ and all the saints in heaven how do you fuck up Halo this badly. What lunacy would possess a dev team with the budget of a small country to go “you know what Halo needs? Combat that isn’t fun.”

Everything I brought up when I played some Spartan Ops a couple years ago is still in effect: Forerunner guns feel like shit to use and Forerunner enemies feel like shit to fight. The former feel weaker than their equivalents and don’t have a unique sandbox niche (which even the sentinel beam did as an anti-Flood weapon); the latter are all visually-monotonous erratically-moving damage sponges. The Knights appear with the frequency of Elites, and they can teleport, soak a shit-ton of damage, and be revived by these flying drone assholes who move like fruit flies and have more armor than the fucking tarrasque. They don't respond to being shot, there's no ammo anywhere to the point where just picking up a new weapon every time you have to reload is a good strategy.

It’s very 2012. Video games are Big and Important and Cinematic. They have QTEs and scripted climbing sequences. Everything is very pretty, but greebled into incoherent visual noise. The plot is mostly pressing buttons, which isn’t new but there’s nothing to zhuzh it up. Didact is a nothing antagonist, and Cortana's rampancy doesn't really becoming a meaningful factor until the last two missions and even then there's barely anything more than crumbs.

The post-war era was the perfect opportunity to change things and introduce new elements - there was a blank slate to add new aliens and say they were from the Covenant fringe, or were non-military clients, or even that they had been fighting the Covenant on the other side of their territory. Power vacuums are great for shaking things up, but instead get the Forerunners! Bland, bland, boring blah. At least Javik had the decency to be an interesting twist on expectations (and also had more than two colors). The Covenant splinter we fight here gets fucking nothing.

For all the lavish detail on Chief’s suit, Cortana is done dirty by the design department and looks worse than she did in 3 or even 2. The disparity in quality really exaggerates the uncanny valley effect. She’s always had a solid amount of fanservice (all of her previous designs are basically a tight bodysuit), but she’s just straight up nude in this one in ways that don’t feel great. Like the plot is about how her brain is cooking itself alive and 343’s preferred way to emphasize this is to just realllly focus on how well-defined her tits and ass are. The vibes are bad. 

Needler and plasma pistol are the best they’ve ever been, though.

The Gameable Content Bit

Hardlight gun (for Mothership)

A shifting assemblage of gold and fuligen; angular components re-assemble themselves to align with the image in the wielder's mind. There is no trigger or firing mechanism, simply point and think and a burst of burning argent light will burn through whatever is in its way.

• May act as rifle, SMG, revolver, sniper rifle, or shotgun; transforming requires 1 round of focus.
• Deals 5 + 1d5 rather than d10 damage; # of dice remains same as basic version.
• Effectively infinite ammo: however, using it generates an extreme amount of waste heat and renders it searing hot even through moderate protective gear (1d5 damage if not immediately dropped) and will take2d5 rounds to cool off before it can be safely short again.