had a free week on steam/was free to keep through amazon so i figured i'd play a bit since my friends were on. its, uh, it sure is fallout!

tried to do the main quest and it bugged out at the first real conversation and locked me out of progressing. tried leaving the room and coming back and didn't fix it so whatever. adding npcs to this actually probably made it worse. bethesda cowardly adding them in after people complained feels like a misstep--its pretty much impossible to care about anything narratively going on when it's so blatantly just an excuse for the gameplay.

but what about that gameplay? at the end of the day it plays nearly identical to every other bethesda game released in the past 20 years or so, lol. only took me like an hour to get bored of it, and probably 20 minutes of that was me trying to make david lynch in the character creator.

what new was here though i feel isnt very compatible with the nature of this game, at least as far as the learning curve goes. unless you and all your friends begin at exactly the same time you'll all be at different points and have different levels of understanding of the systems, so if you're late to the party it can feel like you need to rush to understand stuff like how you should optimize picking special cards or in what circumstances you're supposed to base build and how persistence even works on that. these are things that i could easily google but i don't want to do that, i want to play the video game. i think that mightve worked ok in a single player setting, being introduced to them sequentially and having time to digest them. but fo76 just throws you into all these mechanics with no more than a 3-minute-long hallway walk as a leadup. for me that just makes all that stuff seem kind of too annoying to learn to bother with, especially for a game i doubt my friends will be playing a week from now.

also not a fan of the servers being mostly occupied with randoms. this is a general problem I have with mmo adjacent games but there just isn't anything special about the adventure you're on if you're constantly reminded that other people are doing the same shit as you. i think you can set up private servers if you pay up but i'm not doing that lol.

overall, it's doubtless been said before, but it just feels like a worse version of Skyrim Together.

really great game! I went into it a little worried that trying to cram a whole game of story into one night would make it unfulfilling, but once I got a little ways in it was clear that wasn't the case at all. this game oozes charm so hard and every ounce of it is engaging and exciting. the overall story was great, and it always felt like it was keeping me on my toes - leaving enough head room to draw my own connections while also constantly surprising me, yet never feeling cheap or forced. I got really attached to the main cast as well. the gameplay is also really unique and fun, and the variety of puzzles is outstanding; there are a couple I was less fond of (see: prison. lol) but I think all those really needed was an undo button or something since it was just the constant re-doing puzzle setups to get back to a point to try something different that was a bit of a pain. but that's barely a stain on this wonderful experience - would love to see more games like this!

played pretty much just for the novelty factor of it having a YTPMV song as well as some bizarre theming juxtapositions, but WOW this is hard.

admittedly i havent played much othello before this, but I was able to get past the tutorial and world 1 just by intuiting some of the strategies. however once I hit world 2, even 30 minutes of othello strategy videos on youtube couldn't save me lmao.

it's still othello at the end of the day, and I can tell I like the core of it enough to search for another version of it, but it's probably a bad idea to keep trying to learn on this one instead of whatever the othello equivalent of chess.com is lol

fewer terrible puzzles than the first game so that's nice! still too many sliding puzzles and the fuckin endless peg solitaire and chess shit can die forever.

also somehow the plot twist of this game is even harder to believe than the first game?? the layton universe really just does whatever it wants and rolls with it lol

still a fun game. also still pretty rough around the edges