Unsubtly4665
19 Reviews liked by Unsubtly4665
Hitman: Blood Money
2006
While the latter games in this series are undeniably more polished experiences, Blood Money still manages to be a memorable time. Maybe it's the jank that makes me love this so much. There's something exhilarating about pushing people, and the melee combat--hilariously broken as it is--only adds to the amusement factor.
That might not seem like high praise, considering one man's trash is another man's treasure and vice versa. But even if you aren't a fan of just how 2006 the whole thing is, the variety on play here will keep you interested long before the credits start rolling. The Hitman series has almost always nailed level variety, and Blood Money is no exception.
But what I really love about this game is that the cheats that are secretly built into it are really, really stupid. If you want a good example of why, here's me beating the game in less than twenty minutes using nothing but cheats, and here's me doing the same thing but with slightly more attitude attached. This is more or less an excuse for me to shamelessly plug some of my "work," but even if you aren't trying to break the game in record times, it almost creates this sandbox within the already established sandbox. A couple of the cheats are broken: if you're playing past the 1.0 release, don't use Give All. Using it more than once causes your game to crash. And if you decide to use a weapon that's not in the level you're playing, you're probably going to crash, anyway. The timemultiplier cheat is funny because it breaks all of the animations, but it requires a key spammer if you're going to use it past a certain speed. Other than that, it's a bizarrely enjoyable experience for those of us who still think that cheating in games is the funniest thing.
That might not seem like high praise, considering one man's trash is another man's treasure and vice versa. But even if you aren't a fan of just how 2006 the whole thing is, the variety on play here will keep you interested long before the credits start rolling. The Hitman series has almost always nailed level variety, and Blood Money is no exception.
But what I really love about this game is that the cheats that are secretly built into it are really, really stupid. If you want a good example of why, here's me beating the game in less than twenty minutes using nothing but cheats, and here's me doing the same thing but with slightly more attitude attached. This is more or less an excuse for me to shamelessly plug some of my "work," but even if you aren't trying to break the game in record times, it almost creates this sandbox within the already established sandbox. A couple of the cheats are broken: if you're playing past the 1.0 release, don't use Give All. Using it more than once causes your game to crash. And if you decide to use a weapon that's not in the level you're playing, you're probably going to crash, anyway. The timemultiplier cheat is funny because it breaks all of the animations, but it requires a key spammer if you're going to use it past a certain speed. Other than that, it's a bizarrely enjoyable experience for those of us who still think that cheating in games is the funniest thing.
A case study in how one of the most prolific and resourceful game studios in the world can be led by a single man’s beliefs to create something that is immeasurably hollow and hateful, exacting a grueling human toll in the process. Free Palestine.
Panoramical
2015
We actually used this in a gallery setting; showing this as a part of a showcase of pieces we projected this on the ceiling of a planetarium. Laying on the floor with a midi fighter on my lap watching these projections warp on the ceiling was transcendental.
Makes sense that most of the communist-chanting options are played almost as jokes, because no one believes those grand statements anymore. More than that, they can't believe. They almost lost their meaning. This town is more complicated than all of that.
The sense of longing and the pain that comes from nostalgia are not enough: the world, the people, society, they have layers and layers. Reality is broken, and the past holds too many traumas for everyone. But you can still peel most of those layers, and get to the bottom of the heart. It doesn't feel like a task or a chore in any moment, it's like the answers are always driving you forward in such a small and concrete environment. You HAVE to keep going!! Be the detective, untangle every mess in your life and roll those dice!!!
The sense of longing and the pain that comes from nostalgia are not enough: the world, the people, society, they have layers and layers. Reality is broken, and the past holds too many traumas for everyone. But you can still peel most of those layers, and get to the bottom of the heart. It doesn't feel like a task or a chore in any moment, it's like the answers are always driving you forward in such a small and concrete environment. You HAVE to keep going!! Be the detective, untangle every mess in your life and roll those dice!!!
An accesible, brilliant, insightful, funny CRPG about rebuilding your personality from scratch with the backdrop of political stagnation in a fictional post soviet republic. Not for everyone, its extremely text heavy, but its great at what it does
This trilogy sits happily in my All-Timers list and, while it understandably might anger purists of the genre, this does firmly fit into so much of the Immersive Sim genre.
There's very few games for the price-to-gameplay value this trilogy has. It's honestly quite stunning.
For people who want to jump in though for the first time: Do yourself a favor and turn off all mission story guides. Just drop into a level and ... work.
There's very few games for the price-to-gameplay value this trilogy has. It's honestly quite stunning.
For people who want to jump in though for the first time: Do yourself a favor and turn off all mission story guides. Just drop into a level and ... work.
Citizen Sleeper
2022
Fun, short, and just great to play. The game has a lot of amazing moments and is really heartfelt.
Undertale
2015
I wish I could understand why people love this game so much, I really do. Clearly its resonated with a lot of people but I just cant get into it. Ive tried a few times but I hate the bullet hell combat, I dislike the puzzles, I never get a clear sense of what anything is progressing towards or what is even really going on other than ironic meta stuff thats not that clever and the piano music gets on my nerves. Different strokes I guess
This War of Mine
2014
I never finished This War of Mine, which is why I never left a review for it but its kind of creeping back into my thoughts lately so I think its worth it, if only for myself to explain why I have mixed feelings on it.
There have always been games about War, Spacewar! was the first Computer game (as in made for an actual computer and not a cabinet/console) but beginning in 6th/7th gen there was a bigger rise in contemporary war games. Now whilst gamifying human conflict wasn't necessarily less iffy when it was SciFi and later WW2 shooters, there was enough detachment from our current understanding of war in the modern day that it wasn't all that different to watching Hollywood movies about heroic american commandos fighting in France for the 1000th time. Silly and romanticizing conflict, but that's been such a constant for western (and others) culture that you would have better luck persuading the tide to turn back around than to demand this sort of thing stops being made.
It's a lot easier to spot the blatant propagandism and exploitation of death and violence when you're playing as highly equipped US/Nato soldiers killing waves and waves of poor people from the Third World fighting back with rusty Kalashnikovs. This is compounded by the long suspected but recently confirmed fact that these developers consult with the US military, which see it as an avenue for recruitment. If a Russian dev released "Operation Denazification" with a similar vibe to the average COD campaign, they would be sanctioned and boycotted out of existence.
"There is no such thing as an antiwar film" - famously said by Truffaut, commenting on how even the most gruesome depiction of conflict on screen will never approach the real experience and only serve to romanticize conflict and the spectacle of war set pieces. I think I mentioned in my Spec Ops the Line review that "Saving Private Ryan", a movie with a pretty harrowing and realistically depicted portrayal of the D-Day landings, boosted recruitment numbers for the army significantly.
I think if this is true for film and literature it's even more true of videogames, which by virtue of its interactivity and lesser editorial control by its creators will find it harder to steer the player to a conclusion of the brutality and/or tragedy of war, especially if its gameplay is driven mainly by viscerally satisfying "fun" combat.
This is why, after all the preamble I definitely could have edited down, I admire the effort of making a non combat war game based entirely on the experiences of civillians. This is not to say that this approach doesn't have its pitfalls or opportunity for exploitation of conflict for cheap drama, but I feel its more productive to the message. Quite frankly, I would be much more willing to play a game about the experiences of civilians during the Iraq War (perhaps in the format of something like Svoboda 1945 or Attentat 1942) than any number of Imperialism simulators.
"The Mechanic is the message" is proclaimed in the seminal work of Brenda Romero by the same title, a series of analog games demonstrating the power of pure game design as an avenue for storytelling. So what IS the message of This War of Mine and why does it throw me off?
This War of Mine is a survival (horror?) sim about 3 civilians in an unnamed conflict but implied to be the Yugoslav Wars, specifically the siege of Sarajevo. It's divided into 2 phases. 1 During the day living in a previously abandoned house and using your resources to craft and build the necessary amenities to carve out a semblance of normality in this chaotic situation. There will also be daily events such as neighbours asking for medicine, a valuable but infrequent enough to be unreliable trader etc. The second phase consists of raiding other buildings at night for resources, at first abandoned and later occupied ones.
The purpose of these survival elements is to highlight both the brutality and desperation created by these sieges and drive the player to be forced to confront themselves about the harsh decisions one might be forced to make when pushed into such conditions. Now, I am a first worlder who has only known peace, my grandparents were kids when the last war that affected people in my country happened, so excuse my ignorance if I have completely the wrong idea but when I was playing this game the thought that most popped into my head was "This seems more like a zombie apocalypse".
I am not so naive as to suggest that everything is cumbaya in warfare and indeed the Balkan wars were by all accounts brutal with snipers in sarajevo picking off civilians regularly. In the Siege of Leningrad in WW2 for example there were reports of cannibalism and murder to steal ration cards driven by starvation, so even civilians are liable to turn on each other when survival is on the line. However, when playing This War of Mine it feels so... forced? Everything is pushed to 11 so that you quickly have to abandon your humanity to survive, a pivotal moment being the first time you raid the home of an Elderly couple who are alert to your presence but do not fight back, leaving you to loot their home unopposed. Now this is a pretty effective moment in using the mechanics of the game to make a point about the player and the situation in which they're in and obviously placing you in these situations to force you to do these morally dubious acts IS the point of the game. The problem for me is it's pushed seemingly so hard and very little alternative is presented that it feels insincere and hollow.
The actual gameplay is compelling, it's quite absorbing and you grow to have some attachment to these characters even if they have in practice very little personality beyond moaning about the lack of cigarettes and/or running faster.
But again with the message, there is some attempt to portray the better aspects of civilians in war, you can help people out in exchange for resources or time but there doesn't seem to be much benefit and you yourself will be raided at night. Again this IS the point to make being a good person hard like in say, Papers Please, but it just doesn't seem coherent to how humans actually behave. I will reiterate that I'm not so naive as to believe that everyone got on famously in the Balkan wars but humans have only survived so far because of our general altruistic, prosocial attitudes. And from what little I've read of the Balkan wars it seems most people in the siege of Sarajevo helped each other out as much as possible (between the civilian population, obviously).
The game creates an almost hobbesian view of Humanity, so it can wallow in gritty melodrama, some of which is admittedly effective but ultimately rings hollow to me. It's preferable to most modern war games but I think it is still exploitative of recent conflict for pure entertainment value in a way that just weirds me out, personally.
There have always been games about War, Spacewar! was the first Computer game (as in made for an actual computer and not a cabinet/console) but beginning in 6th/7th gen there was a bigger rise in contemporary war games. Now whilst gamifying human conflict wasn't necessarily less iffy when it was SciFi and later WW2 shooters, there was enough detachment from our current understanding of war in the modern day that it wasn't all that different to watching Hollywood movies about heroic american commandos fighting in France for the 1000th time. Silly and romanticizing conflict, but that's been such a constant for western (and others) culture that you would have better luck persuading the tide to turn back around than to demand this sort of thing stops being made.
It's a lot easier to spot the blatant propagandism and exploitation of death and violence when you're playing as highly equipped US/Nato soldiers killing waves and waves of poor people from the Third World fighting back with rusty Kalashnikovs. This is compounded by the long suspected but recently confirmed fact that these developers consult with the US military, which see it as an avenue for recruitment. If a Russian dev released "Operation Denazification" with a similar vibe to the average COD campaign, they would be sanctioned and boycotted out of existence.
"There is no such thing as an antiwar film" - famously said by Truffaut, commenting on how even the most gruesome depiction of conflict on screen will never approach the real experience and only serve to romanticize conflict and the spectacle of war set pieces. I think I mentioned in my Spec Ops the Line review that "Saving Private Ryan", a movie with a pretty harrowing and realistically depicted portrayal of the D-Day landings, boosted recruitment numbers for the army significantly.
I think if this is true for film and literature it's even more true of videogames, which by virtue of its interactivity and lesser editorial control by its creators will find it harder to steer the player to a conclusion of the brutality and/or tragedy of war, especially if its gameplay is driven mainly by viscerally satisfying "fun" combat.
This is why, after all the preamble I definitely could have edited down, I admire the effort of making a non combat war game based entirely on the experiences of civillians. This is not to say that this approach doesn't have its pitfalls or opportunity for exploitation of conflict for cheap drama, but I feel its more productive to the message. Quite frankly, I would be much more willing to play a game about the experiences of civilians during the Iraq War (perhaps in the format of something like Svoboda 1945 or Attentat 1942) than any number of Imperialism simulators.
"The Mechanic is the message" is proclaimed in the seminal work of Brenda Romero by the same title, a series of analog games demonstrating the power of pure game design as an avenue for storytelling. So what IS the message of This War of Mine and why does it throw me off?
This War of Mine is a survival (horror?) sim about 3 civilians in an unnamed conflict but implied to be the Yugoslav Wars, specifically the siege of Sarajevo. It's divided into 2 phases. 1 During the day living in a previously abandoned house and using your resources to craft and build the necessary amenities to carve out a semblance of normality in this chaotic situation. There will also be daily events such as neighbours asking for medicine, a valuable but infrequent enough to be unreliable trader etc. The second phase consists of raiding other buildings at night for resources, at first abandoned and later occupied ones.
The purpose of these survival elements is to highlight both the brutality and desperation created by these sieges and drive the player to be forced to confront themselves about the harsh decisions one might be forced to make when pushed into such conditions. Now, I am a first worlder who has only known peace, my grandparents were kids when the last war that affected people in my country happened, so excuse my ignorance if I have completely the wrong idea but when I was playing this game the thought that most popped into my head was "This seems more like a zombie apocalypse".
I am not so naive as to suggest that everything is cumbaya in warfare and indeed the Balkan wars were by all accounts brutal with snipers in sarajevo picking off civilians regularly. In the Siege of Leningrad in WW2 for example there were reports of cannibalism and murder to steal ration cards driven by starvation, so even civilians are liable to turn on each other when survival is on the line. However, when playing This War of Mine it feels so... forced? Everything is pushed to 11 so that you quickly have to abandon your humanity to survive, a pivotal moment being the first time you raid the home of an Elderly couple who are alert to your presence but do not fight back, leaving you to loot their home unopposed. Now this is a pretty effective moment in using the mechanics of the game to make a point about the player and the situation in which they're in and obviously placing you in these situations to force you to do these morally dubious acts IS the point of the game. The problem for me is it's pushed seemingly so hard and very little alternative is presented that it feels insincere and hollow.
The actual gameplay is compelling, it's quite absorbing and you grow to have some attachment to these characters even if they have in practice very little personality beyond moaning about the lack of cigarettes and/or running faster.
But again with the message, there is some attempt to portray the better aspects of civilians in war, you can help people out in exchange for resources or time but there doesn't seem to be much benefit and you yourself will be raided at night. Again this IS the point to make being a good person hard like in say, Papers Please, but it just doesn't seem coherent to how humans actually behave. I will reiterate that I'm not so naive as to believe that everyone got on famously in the Balkan wars but humans have only survived so far because of our general altruistic, prosocial attitudes. And from what little I've read of the Balkan wars it seems most people in the siege of Sarajevo helped each other out as much as possible (between the civilian population, obviously).
The game creates an almost hobbesian view of Humanity, so it can wallow in gritty melodrama, some of which is admittedly effective but ultimately rings hollow to me. It's preferable to most modern war games but I think it is still exploitative of recent conflict for pure entertainment value in a way that just weirds me out, personally.
Balan Wonderworld
2021
This game sucks. Everyone knows it sucks, even its creator who is going to prison (though not for making Balan unfortunately).
However this being Backloggd and indeed the Internet generally, in a couple years times everyone is going to pretend that actually Balan is secretly genius and cool and smart you guys.
So I am going to play the long game and pre empt the re evaluation of Balan (or reebalanuation I should say) before anyone else does.
Balan Wonderworld is good, actually! The one button control scheme is a great attempt at making platformers more accessible. The Balan bouts are actually an intentional metaphor for the unforgiving nature of punching emo willy wonka across space in this Late Capitalist hellworld we call earth. The BoxFox is actuallly a really funny joke and if you didnt find it funny youre stupid! The framerate drops are actually an accessibility feature allowing kids to nail tricky jumps with bullet time. The story written by a dude who said he worked out how to write stories by reading hero with a thousand faces once is actually really deep and smart and something something, theatre of the mind, carl jung, subconscious, pychonauts etc. I take off half a star for the CGI cutscenes, their polish clash against the intentional roughness of the graphics for thematic reasons (People are sad and dont clean their brains)
Now you may shower me with praise for being ahead of the curve, contrarians of the future
However this being Backloggd and indeed the Internet generally, in a couple years times everyone is going to pretend that actually Balan is secretly genius and cool and smart you guys.
So I am going to play the long game and pre empt the re evaluation of Balan (or reebalanuation I should say) before anyone else does.
Balan Wonderworld is good, actually! The one button control scheme is a great attempt at making platformers more accessible. The Balan bouts are actually an intentional metaphor for the unforgiving nature of punching emo willy wonka across space in this Late Capitalist hellworld we call earth. The BoxFox is actuallly a really funny joke and if you didnt find it funny youre stupid! The framerate drops are actually an accessibility feature allowing kids to nail tricky jumps with bullet time. The story written by a dude who said he worked out how to write stories by reading hero with a thousand faces once is actually really deep and smart and something something, theatre of the mind, carl jung, subconscious, pychonauts etc. I take off half a star for the CGI cutscenes, their polish clash against the intentional roughness of the graphics for thematic reasons (People are sad and dont clean their brains)
Now you may shower me with praise for being ahead of the curve, contrarians of the future
Betrayal At Club Low
2022
The first of the Cosmo D games to not be a an adventure game/walking sim for better and for worse. All the hallmarks are here, excellent use of music, the surreal humour and colourful characters, purposefully stiff and silly animations, the lot. If like I you have played all the previous ones you will no doubt get a lot of the callbacks to those games.
This time though, Betrayal At Club Low is essentially a CRPG in a sort of Disco Elysium type model : skills and dice rolls etc. The main wrinkle is that you are a pìzza deliveryman and can make modifier dice with different effects and pizza ingredients. I'm going to be real though, this game and I do not really gel together in terms of the gameplay. At first I found all the dice rolling stuff charming, trying to manage risk and collect ingredients. Unfortunately at some point you realize you have to be really careful what dice rolls you do and what skills you choose to improve cause if you get one or two bad status conditions, you are fucked : Its a death spiral of fucking up and getting debuffs and losing morale and health and etc etc. According to the global achievement stats, the most common ending people got by far is the game over by lost morale (45%) And I just died this way like 3 times.
And I get that this was mostly my fault but geez it felt incredibly punishing and demoralizing. And its not like this is some grimdark ass Darkest Dungeon situation or hell even Disco Elysium where fucking up all the time is kind of the point. Anyways in the end I just bumped the difficulty down to the easiest and started to save scum every dice roll. This didnt make the gameplay feel great but it at least got me an ending without tearing my hair out. Admittedly the point seems to be the replayability and getting multiple endings so perhaps I will get to grips with the game at some point and play at the normal difficulty at some point.
I think its a good first step to try out new gameplay styles but I still feel like it isnt quite as engaging as Tales From Off Peak City or the Norwood Suite. The Architecture is a lot more coherent which seems paradoxically bizarre in a Cosmo D game. At least the various skill checks keep the game's signature humour and where most of the fun came from in my playthrough.
Edit : Okay after a second playthrough on normal difficulty I've gotten the hang of the game more (though I still save scummed a bunch cause fuck you) and am bumping the score up by 0.5 stars
2nd Edit : This game rules, playing it on hard and iron pizza mode, once you get a hang of it its a really compelling experience. Its become my go to "yeah I can spare like 45 mins, lets do a run"
This time though, Betrayal At Club Low is essentially a CRPG in a sort of Disco Elysium type model : skills and dice rolls etc. The main wrinkle is that you are a pìzza deliveryman and can make modifier dice with different effects and pizza ingredients. I'm going to be real though, this game and I do not really gel together in terms of the gameplay. At first I found all the dice rolling stuff charming, trying to manage risk and collect ingredients. Unfortunately at some point you realize you have to be really careful what dice rolls you do and what skills you choose to improve cause if you get one or two bad status conditions, you are fucked : Its a death spiral of fucking up and getting debuffs and losing morale and health and etc etc. According to the global achievement stats, the most common ending people got by far is the game over by lost morale (45%) And I just died this way like 3 times.
And I get that this was mostly my fault but geez it felt incredibly punishing and demoralizing. And its not like this is some grimdark ass Darkest Dungeon situation or hell even Disco Elysium where fucking up all the time is kind of the point. Anyways in the end I just bumped the difficulty down to the easiest and started to save scum every dice roll. This didnt make the gameplay feel great but it at least got me an ending without tearing my hair out. Admittedly the point seems to be the replayability and getting multiple endings so perhaps I will get to grips with the game at some point and play at the normal difficulty at some point.
I think its a good first step to try out new gameplay styles but I still feel like it isnt quite as engaging as Tales From Off Peak City or the Norwood Suite. The Architecture is a lot more coherent which seems paradoxically bizarre in a Cosmo D game. At least the various skill checks keep the game's signature humour and where most of the fun came from in my playthrough.
Edit : Okay after a second playthrough on normal difficulty I've gotten the hang of the game more (though I still save scummed a bunch cause fuck you) and am bumping the score up by 0.5 stars
2nd Edit : This game rules, playing it on hard and iron pizza mode, once you get a hang of it its a really compelling experience. Its become my go to "yeah I can spare like 45 mins, lets do a run"
This review contains spoilers
Its the Portal 2 to BOTW's Portal 1. There is more of it but it feels somewhat bloated, some faults of the first (or aspects that were perceived as faults, anyways) are remedied whilst adding as many issues of its own. The first 10 hours are great and perhaps surpass the original, but then it goes on and on at a more subdued level of quality.
I loved the original Breath Of The Wild. When I played it around 2019 for the first time it felt like a game that was made specifically for me; every major aspect of it being described to me by a friend once and I could only go : "yes! yes!" at everything he said. When I played it it lived entirely to my expectations and even surpassed them. The microdungeons that kept up the pace, the ability to declare yourself ready to face the final boss at any time, the environmental physics systems organically interacting, the willingness to let you approach puzzles in any way : if you could find a way to cheese it you could.
I didn't have any problems with the weapon durability system and I thought it incentivised getting creative with the various systems to efficiently dispatch the various monsters. Nor did I have all that many issues that series veterans had with the weaker plot and lack of big dungeons; in all honesty that was a selling point for me personally. My first Zelda was Ocarina of Time 3D which I never finished as a kid, I dropped the game after the magic lens dungeon because something else caught my eye and when I came back to finish it my card reader had broken and I didnt have enough money at the time to fix it. I also played some of Oracle of Seasons and maybe Link's Awakening? I wasn't really grabbed by either of those. All design decisions are inherently alienating to someone, but I am not blind to the fact that the design decisions of BOTW were welcoming to me but alienating to others.
There is part of me that wonders if I would have loved TOTK more if I hadn't done 3 full runs (all shrines) of BOTW. As much as there are many new systems and locations and quests and all the things you would expect from a new entry, it is at the end of the day the same map. This does have its benefits from returning players in that going back to areas from the first game and seeing them change is always great : Tarrey Town in particular. It does however somewhat dampen my enthusiasm for exploration, paradoxically because there is also a lot more of it to do with the addition of the Sky Islands and the Depths.
If my Steam library is to be believed, I have 900 hours on Garry's Mod from when I played it religiously as a teen and let me just say, the first few hours playing with the various systems of constructing vehicles was akin to getting new toys for christmas, fond memories of thruster boosted bathtubs around GM_Construct. Unfortunately as I seem to have discovered is the case of most of this game, its burns brighter but burns itself out sooner. This might have worked in its favour if it werent for the expectation and obligation of expanding the game overall meant everything felt a bit more exhausting than it ever had in BOTW. Indeed, having the previous map as base, 6 years of dev time and a 70 dollar pricetag did make it obvious that this would be the case but I hope one day we get a sequel that tightens the game as opposed to overextends it.
The first 20 times you do a combat challenge dungeon or find a crazy new enemy in the overworld its new and refreshing, but not by the 50th time. Its the Elden Ring issue, repetition inherently dampens the mystery, the awe of exploration and discovery. This was also somewhat true in BOTW but didnt feel anywhere near on the level of TOTK.
I didnt have a problem with the Great Plateau in BOTW, I didnt think it was overlong at all but I definitely felt that in TOTK. When I finally got to the overworld it made me wonder : "Is there no paraglider in this game? Maybe they want you to really use the new vehicle stuff to overcome the terrain" and I'm not saying that would have made a better game but I am genuinely curious how TOTK would have turned out if your Paraglider was straight up removed (it wouldnt have worked because of the Sky Islands and the wind dungeon but still these could have been changed).
Another element that might have been excised to improve the game imo was autobuild, which I got very early on but almost entirely removed the fun of the game, you make one or two or three general purpose builds and you never have to think about clever vehicles again outside of shrines. They cost resources to make but it just adds a small unwelcome grind to proceedings really.
I quite like the MrHudson sign sidequests. In general I quite like the setting which includes some of my favourite themes : the PostPostApocalypse. The people of this world are dealing with aggressive armies of demons but are nevertheless rebuilding, using the various new zonai tech to their advantage, a kind of industrial revolution.
The theming is cool, I like the Zen motif of the shrines and Rauru. The ancient hylians have a Mesoamerican thing going on in their design but this is mostly just aesthetics and not used for anything particularly interesting that I found.
This game is so dense and there are so many things to discuss that I think I could go on forever : the champions kind of break the challenge of the game, the voice acting and story continue to be kinda bad, the dungeons are a bit more elaborate and better but thats honestly a negative to me personally, horses are even more useless now, I was annoyed at the final ganondorf fight despite not dying to him at all the combat controls have always been kind of shit and the joycons are terrible so asking me to do two perfect dodges to even touch this Kikuchiyo looking mfer tested my patience; I got a bit annoyed at that fight (more than I have in a while and I did a soul level 1 run of DS1 on that very switch).
At the end of the day the best decision BOTW did was to make fighting Ganon at any point possible. That is still technically the case in TOTK but after I was "done" with the game and finished the 4 main quest and wanted the game to end before I started to dislike it, the game threw me a whole ass sequence of quests that dragged on and started to drain my goodwill and the boss annoying me was the icing on the cake.
A lot of games don't know when to finish. A lot of games in fact do not finish at all like arcade games and the like. New Game+s, HighScores, etc these are all elements to marry two concepts : 1) Unlike other media, Videogames are a lot of the times not dropped by players at "the end" of the game especially in earlier times, rather when the player is "done". Not to say these two necessarily always clash but its definitely something that must be kept in mind when designing a game that isnt a relatively short or cinematic linear game. 2) Games need endings to bring closure and structure to its narrative and mechanical difficulty curve.
The Structure of BOTW was genius in this respect because a 100% obsessive and someone who just wanted to play for 10 hours could both enjoy the game and declare it done so long as they could defeat Ganon. Again, this is still somewhat the case in TOTK but the game doesnt really tell you. The number 1 reason I'll dislike a game is that I will be "done" with it when it has started to outstay its welcome and it simply will NOT end. If a game can speed along to its conclusion when I have reached this point it will look at a great review, if it does not, well, I am liable to either hate it or even drop it (I have never beaten Aria of Sorrow for this very reason, I reached my "done" point near the end and when Soma turns into dracula and youre asked to do some bullshit I just didnt care enough to conclude it). I'll admit I am generally a rather impatient person, but if you've read this far you're probably aware of the fact that this is just my personal perspective at the end of the day.
Tears of The Kingdom is a great game buried in a shell of bloat that didnt quite stick the landing despite still being a good game that I enjoyed for longer than most these days.
I loved the original Breath Of The Wild. When I played it around 2019 for the first time it felt like a game that was made specifically for me; every major aspect of it being described to me by a friend once and I could only go : "yes! yes!" at everything he said. When I played it it lived entirely to my expectations and even surpassed them. The microdungeons that kept up the pace, the ability to declare yourself ready to face the final boss at any time, the environmental physics systems organically interacting, the willingness to let you approach puzzles in any way : if you could find a way to cheese it you could.
I didn't have any problems with the weapon durability system and I thought it incentivised getting creative with the various systems to efficiently dispatch the various monsters. Nor did I have all that many issues that series veterans had with the weaker plot and lack of big dungeons; in all honesty that was a selling point for me personally. My first Zelda was Ocarina of Time 3D which I never finished as a kid, I dropped the game after the magic lens dungeon because something else caught my eye and when I came back to finish it my card reader had broken and I didnt have enough money at the time to fix it. I also played some of Oracle of Seasons and maybe Link's Awakening? I wasn't really grabbed by either of those. All design decisions are inherently alienating to someone, but I am not blind to the fact that the design decisions of BOTW were welcoming to me but alienating to others.
There is part of me that wonders if I would have loved TOTK more if I hadn't done 3 full runs (all shrines) of BOTW. As much as there are many new systems and locations and quests and all the things you would expect from a new entry, it is at the end of the day the same map. This does have its benefits from returning players in that going back to areas from the first game and seeing them change is always great : Tarrey Town in particular. It does however somewhat dampen my enthusiasm for exploration, paradoxically because there is also a lot more of it to do with the addition of the Sky Islands and the Depths.
If my Steam library is to be believed, I have 900 hours on Garry's Mod from when I played it religiously as a teen and let me just say, the first few hours playing with the various systems of constructing vehicles was akin to getting new toys for christmas, fond memories of thruster boosted bathtubs around GM_Construct. Unfortunately as I seem to have discovered is the case of most of this game, its burns brighter but burns itself out sooner. This might have worked in its favour if it werent for the expectation and obligation of expanding the game overall meant everything felt a bit more exhausting than it ever had in BOTW. Indeed, having the previous map as base, 6 years of dev time and a 70 dollar pricetag did make it obvious that this would be the case but I hope one day we get a sequel that tightens the game as opposed to overextends it.
The first 20 times you do a combat challenge dungeon or find a crazy new enemy in the overworld its new and refreshing, but not by the 50th time. Its the Elden Ring issue, repetition inherently dampens the mystery, the awe of exploration and discovery. This was also somewhat true in BOTW but didnt feel anywhere near on the level of TOTK.
I didnt have a problem with the Great Plateau in BOTW, I didnt think it was overlong at all but I definitely felt that in TOTK. When I finally got to the overworld it made me wonder : "Is there no paraglider in this game? Maybe they want you to really use the new vehicle stuff to overcome the terrain" and I'm not saying that would have made a better game but I am genuinely curious how TOTK would have turned out if your Paraglider was straight up removed (it wouldnt have worked because of the Sky Islands and the wind dungeon but still these could have been changed).
Another element that might have been excised to improve the game imo was autobuild, which I got very early on but almost entirely removed the fun of the game, you make one or two or three general purpose builds and you never have to think about clever vehicles again outside of shrines. They cost resources to make but it just adds a small unwelcome grind to proceedings really.
I quite like the MrHudson sign sidequests. In general I quite like the setting which includes some of my favourite themes : the PostPostApocalypse. The people of this world are dealing with aggressive armies of demons but are nevertheless rebuilding, using the various new zonai tech to their advantage, a kind of industrial revolution.
The theming is cool, I like the Zen motif of the shrines and Rauru. The ancient hylians have a Mesoamerican thing going on in their design but this is mostly just aesthetics and not used for anything particularly interesting that I found.
This game is so dense and there are so many things to discuss that I think I could go on forever : the champions kind of break the challenge of the game, the voice acting and story continue to be kinda bad, the dungeons are a bit more elaborate and better but thats honestly a negative to me personally, horses are even more useless now, I was annoyed at the final ganondorf fight despite not dying to him at all the combat controls have always been kind of shit and the joycons are terrible so asking me to do two perfect dodges to even touch this Kikuchiyo looking mfer tested my patience; I got a bit annoyed at that fight (more than I have in a while and I did a soul level 1 run of DS1 on that very switch).
At the end of the day the best decision BOTW did was to make fighting Ganon at any point possible. That is still technically the case in TOTK but after I was "done" with the game and finished the 4 main quest and wanted the game to end before I started to dislike it, the game threw me a whole ass sequence of quests that dragged on and started to drain my goodwill and the boss annoying me was the icing on the cake.
A lot of games don't know when to finish. A lot of games in fact do not finish at all like arcade games and the like. New Game+s, HighScores, etc these are all elements to marry two concepts : 1) Unlike other media, Videogames are a lot of the times not dropped by players at "the end" of the game especially in earlier times, rather when the player is "done". Not to say these two necessarily always clash but its definitely something that must be kept in mind when designing a game that isnt a relatively short or cinematic linear game. 2) Games need endings to bring closure and structure to its narrative and mechanical difficulty curve.
The Structure of BOTW was genius in this respect because a 100% obsessive and someone who just wanted to play for 10 hours could both enjoy the game and declare it done so long as they could defeat Ganon. Again, this is still somewhat the case in TOTK but the game doesnt really tell you. The number 1 reason I'll dislike a game is that I will be "done" with it when it has started to outstay its welcome and it simply will NOT end. If a game can speed along to its conclusion when I have reached this point it will look at a great review, if it does not, well, I am liable to either hate it or even drop it (I have never beaten Aria of Sorrow for this very reason, I reached my "done" point near the end and when Soma turns into dracula and youre asked to do some bullshit I just didnt care enough to conclude it). I'll admit I am generally a rather impatient person, but if you've read this far you're probably aware of the fact that this is just my personal perspective at the end of the day.
Tears of The Kingdom is a great game buried in a shell of bloat that didnt quite stick the landing despite still being a good game that I enjoyed for longer than most these days.
The Bookwalker was mildly disappointing. Not greatly, midly. Its setting and premise offered a promise the game couldnt really live up to but it remains a perfectly serviceable game. Im not entirely sure what it is the game messes up but I think I can elucidate a few reasons why I might feel this way.
If you played the demo like I did you might have been excited at the promise it showed. Half first person adventure in the house of a writer who is serving 30 years for an initally unknown crime, half isometric adventure game "atoning" for said crime by entering novels to extract certain artifacts ; hence the title : The Bookwalker.
In this fictional setting original works are no longer produced, the ability to enter worlds and manipulate them (as well as the scheme we are involved in removing elements from certain books to be transplanted into others for the benefit of subpar writers) has led to all new works being highly derivative of each other. And whilst I wouldnt say this is where the game's cleverness ends, it certainly is where it peaks.
I think the biggest missed opportunity is the fact that the novels we enter into are all entirely fictional. Obviously they are fictional since they are novels but what I mean is that they are made up by the writer of the game, they are not real. Its perhaps understandeable that making the novels fictional offers greater lattitude in setting up the various puzzles which the writer can choose entirely but I just cant help but think what a much better game it would be if we were entering the altered versions of classic works! Surely that would also greatly enhance the point of creativity being dead and new works being derivative. There would be a lot of mileage in exploring these works from new angles and clever puzzles somewhat based on an understanding of the original works.
Perhaps copyright law is to blame, there arent all that many novels in the public domain written after 1910 or so but even with older works I still feel it would have made an overall more solid experience.
The in-universe novels arent devoid of cleverness - there are themes of greed, the point of fiction, theres a climate change analogy in one of them and the last chapter I found particularly compelling in its setting but I think the game's second biggest misstep is that for a game about literature its characters are not very compelling nor does it have all that much to say beyond the surface level. The two main characters are not likeable or even very interesting and all the characters in the novels suffer from being 1. only shown in their specific chapters so there's not much time to flesh them out and 2. They are supposed to be 1 dimensional literally in-universe because the books you are stealing from were written by hack writers! Which is the lamest goddamned excuse I have seen to make the somewhat unrealistic function-as-personality that NPCs often have in videogames seem clever. There is also a running storyline through the game that touches up to danganronpa V3 in terms of its themes but without wishing to spoil, its resolution felt very unearned to me.
I have spent a lot of time railing on this game but in all honesty I didnt hate it. Its insubstantiality is also its greatest ally as the pacing is great and fast and did not outstay its welcome whatsoever in the 5 or 6 hours taken to complete it. The adventure game and turn based combat portions work fine and I found the general artstyle and GUI to be excellent, particularly the Isometric sections look gorgeous to my eyes.
The interaction between the two halves comes from the fact that whilst you cannot take anything out of the book for long, you can take anything inside, leading to amusing exchanges asking to borrow your neighbours' pickaxe or sledgehammer etc.
Its not a particularly tough game, in fact I was hoping for slightly meatier puzzles but it was fine, the game employs a semi-optional crafting system which shakes up the usual point and click inventory puzzles by including multiple solutions and a slight resource management element which also rewards diligent exploration of the relatively short levels.
Funny, this exact resource inventory puzzle idea I once saw proposed by Yahtzee Croshaw of Zero Punctuation fame in a podcast I used to listen to back when I was an insufferable teenager, I wonder if thats where the devs got it from?
Overall, Im not mad at Bookwalker, just disappointed. I have since learned this is a gamepass game and I would certainly recommend it if you are subscriber to this service, otherwise I am not too sure but perhaps you will find it more compelling than I did.
If you played the demo like I did you might have been excited at the promise it showed. Half first person adventure in the house of a writer who is serving 30 years for an initally unknown crime, half isometric adventure game "atoning" for said crime by entering novels to extract certain artifacts ; hence the title : The Bookwalker.
In this fictional setting original works are no longer produced, the ability to enter worlds and manipulate them (as well as the scheme we are involved in removing elements from certain books to be transplanted into others for the benefit of subpar writers) has led to all new works being highly derivative of each other. And whilst I wouldnt say this is where the game's cleverness ends, it certainly is where it peaks.
I think the biggest missed opportunity is the fact that the novels we enter into are all entirely fictional. Obviously they are fictional since they are novels but what I mean is that they are made up by the writer of the game, they are not real. Its perhaps understandeable that making the novels fictional offers greater lattitude in setting up the various puzzles which the writer can choose entirely but I just cant help but think what a much better game it would be if we were entering the altered versions of classic works! Surely that would also greatly enhance the point of creativity being dead and new works being derivative. There would be a lot of mileage in exploring these works from new angles and clever puzzles somewhat based on an understanding of the original works.
Perhaps copyright law is to blame, there arent all that many novels in the public domain written after 1910 or so but even with older works I still feel it would have made an overall more solid experience.
The in-universe novels arent devoid of cleverness - there are themes of greed, the point of fiction, theres a climate change analogy in one of them and the last chapter I found particularly compelling in its setting but I think the game's second biggest misstep is that for a game about literature its characters are not very compelling nor does it have all that much to say beyond the surface level. The two main characters are not likeable or even very interesting and all the characters in the novels suffer from being 1. only shown in their specific chapters so there's not much time to flesh them out and 2. They are supposed to be 1 dimensional literally in-universe because the books you are stealing from were written by hack writers! Which is the lamest goddamned excuse I have seen to make the somewhat unrealistic function-as-personality that NPCs often have in videogames seem clever. There is also a running storyline through the game that touches up to danganronpa V3 in terms of its themes but without wishing to spoil, its resolution felt very unearned to me.
I have spent a lot of time railing on this game but in all honesty I didnt hate it. Its insubstantiality is also its greatest ally as the pacing is great and fast and did not outstay its welcome whatsoever in the 5 or 6 hours taken to complete it. The adventure game and turn based combat portions work fine and I found the general artstyle and GUI to be excellent, particularly the Isometric sections look gorgeous to my eyes.
The interaction between the two halves comes from the fact that whilst you cannot take anything out of the book for long, you can take anything inside, leading to amusing exchanges asking to borrow your neighbours' pickaxe or sledgehammer etc.
Its not a particularly tough game, in fact I was hoping for slightly meatier puzzles but it was fine, the game employs a semi-optional crafting system which shakes up the usual point and click inventory puzzles by including multiple solutions and a slight resource management element which also rewards diligent exploration of the relatively short levels.
Funny, this exact resource inventory puzzle idea I once saw proposed by Yahtzee Croshaw of Zero Punctuation fame in a podcast I used to listen to back when I was an insufferable teenager, I wonder if thats where the devs got it from?
Overall, Im not mad at Bookwalker, just disappointed. I have since learned this is a gamepass game and I would certainly recommend it if you are subscriber to this service, otherwise I am not too sure but perhaps you will find it more compelling than I did.
Exo One
2021
(Game Pass) Atmospheric and mesmerizing. This is a game that you can play in a single setting and just enjoy the speed, sounds, and visuals of flying through planets. Great game and great replayability.
modern hitman is fucking awesome