I'm only about halfway through Heaven's Feel and I am absolutely not going to try and finish it today, but I've actually seen that route via the movies so I feel at least reasonably confident in posting this review. This is probably going to be my last "real" post on Cohost (and I'll inevitably polish it up a bit after I finish HF and post it on my blog), but for now, let's do one last review for the road. It's been fun, guys.
- Star Rail (pre 2.0)
- Chants of Sennaar
- Prince of Persia
- 7R: InterMISSION
- Jubilee
- Jedi: Fallen Order
- Star Rail: Penacony (2.0 - 2.3)
- Lies of P
- Tsukihime: A piece of blue glass moon
- Animal Well
I wrote a little bit about my thoughts on Animal Well a week ago, and most of them still stand. But for the sake of completeness, let's take it from the top:
Animal Well is a wordless metroidvania with some...unique power-ups, let's say. Your goal is to travel through four themed areas, collect a colored flame from each of them, and use it to unlock a final area where you have to do a big puzzle while being chased by what we'll generously call a boss, before rolling credits. This part of the game takes 8-10 hours to finish and is broadly pretty mediocre. I wasn't a big fan of how a lot of the power-ups work, the platforming is extremely precise in places, and it has a lot of annoying progression. That said, I was playing it as a break from something more wordy (I had just finished Tsukihime), and in that context, it fit the bill very nicely.
Of course, once the credits roll, then the real game begins
- Star Rail (pre 2.0)
- Chants of Sennaar
- Prince of Persia
- 7R: InterMISSION
- Jubilee
- Jedi: Fallen Order
- Star Rail: Penacony (2.0 - 2.3)
- Lies of P
- Tsukihime: A piece of blue glass moon
- Animal Well
- No Case Should Remain Unsolved
I don't want to say too much about this one, because it's a really neat experience and it's hard not to spoil it, but here goes.
No Case Should Remain Unsolved is a piece of interactive fiction where you take on the role of a retired police detective being asked to look into a missing persons cold case. A young girl named Seowon disappeared and was never found, and once you start looking into your case notes, it quickly becomes obvious that literally everyone involved in the case was lying somehow. From there, your goal is to piece together the testimony and figure out who said what and when, with the game helpfully locking them into place once you've identified both.
About half of the game's fragments are available from the start, but some testimony is locked via small logic puzzles - what did this person carry with them? Can you prove that this person wasn't where they said they were? Others require you to figure out dates or codes from the information you have available - when was this person discharged from the hospital? This character uses their daughter's birthday as a combination lock, etc. And finally, some is just outright locked by a gold key, which you earn by locking testimony into place; these are usually the biggest pieces of the plot. I played this with a couple friends, and the only place we got stuck was a red lock that asked for "three reasons to suspect the mother" when literally everything in the plot was pointing toward her, so we had to basically click everything until we found something it wanted and could extrapolate from there.
We finished our first pass in about 3 hours, and spent another 20-ish minutes cleaning up and getting the true ending, so it's not a very long game, but all four of us really enjoyed it. Plus, it's only $7, and I've spent way more on way less interesting afternoons.
- Star Rail (pre 2.0)
- Chants of Sennaar
- Prince of Persia
- 7R: InterMISSION
- Jubilee
- Jedi: Fallen Order
- Star Rail: Penacony (2.0 - 2.3)
- Lies of P
- Tsukihime: A piece of blue glass moon
- Animal Well
- No Case Should Remain Unsolved
- Famicom Detective Club - Emio, the Smiling Man
The madmen actually did it. After the remakes of the first two FDC games a couple years ago, Yoshio Sakamoto and MAGES are back with a completely original game, the first in 35 years. And it's...good! It's got some quirks that some people aren't going to jive with, and the ending is definitely going to be controversial, but by and large it's a good murder mystery that anyone who has interest in the genre should check it out.
- Star Rail (pre 2.0)
- Chants of Sennaar
- Prince of Persia
- 7R: InterMISSION
- Jubilee
- Jedi: Fallen Order
- Star Rail: Penacony (2.0 - 2.3)
- Lies of P
- Tsukihime: A piece of blue glass moon
- Animal Well
I wrote a little bit about my thoughts on Animal Well a week ago, and most of them still stand. But for the sake of completeness, let's take it from the top:
Animal Well is a wordless metroidvania with some...unique power-ups, let's say. Your goal is to travel through four themed areas, collect a colored flame from each of them, and use it to unlock a final area where you have to do a big puzzle while being chased by what we'll generously call a boss, before rolling credits. This part of the game takes 8-10 hours to finish and is broadly pretty mediocre. I wasn't a big fan of how a lot of the power-ups work, the platforming is extremely precise in places, and it has a lot of annoying progression. That said, I was playing it as a break from something more wordy (I had just finished Tsukihime), and in that context, it fit the bill very nicely.
Of course, once the credits roll, then the real game begins
- Star Rail (pre 2.0)
- Chants of Sennaar
- Prince of Persia
- 7R: InterMISSION
- Jubilee
- Jedi: Fallen Order
- Star Rail: Penacony (2.0 - 2.3)
- Lies of P
- Tsukihime: A piece of blue glass moon
- Animal Well
- No Case Should Remain Unsolved
I don't want to say too much about this one, because it's a really neat experience and it's hard not to spoil it, but here goes.
No Case Should Remain Unsolved is a piece of interactive fiction where you take on the role of a retired police detective being asked to look into a missing persons cold case. A young girl named Seowon disappeared and was never found, and once you start looking into your case notes, it quickly becomes obvious that literally everyone involved in the case was lying somehow. From there, your goal is to piece together the testimony and figure out who said what and when, with the game helpfully locking them into place once you've identified both.
About half of the game's fragments are available from the start, but some testimony is locked via small logic puzzles - what did this person carry with them? Can you prove that this person wasn't where they said they were? Others require you to figure out dates or codes from the information you have available - when was this person discharged from the hospital? This character uses their daughter's birthday as a combination lock, etc. And finally, some is just outright locked by a gold key, which you earn by locking testimony into place; these are usually the biggest pieces of the plot. I played this with a couple friends, and the only place we got stuck was a red lock that asked for "three reasons to suspect the mother" when literally everything in the plot was pointing toward her, so we had to basically click everything until we found something it wanted and could extrapolate from there.
We finished our first pass in about 3 hours, and spent another 20-ish minutes cleaning up and getting the true ending, so it's not a very long game, but all four of us really enjoyed it. Plus, it's only $7, and I've spent way more on way less interesting afternoons.
- Star Rail (pre 2.0)
- Chants of Sennaar
- Prince of Persia
- 7R: InterMISSION
- Jubilee
- Jedi: Fallen Order
- Star Rail: Penacony (2.0 - 2.3)
- Lies of P
- Tsukihime: A piece of blue glass moon
- Animal Well
I wrote a little bit about my thoughts on Animal Well a week ago, and most of them still stand. But for the sake of completeness, let's take it from the top:
Animal Well is a wordless metroidvania with some...unique power-ups, let's say. Your goal is to travel through four themed areas, collect a colored flame from each of them, and use it to unlock a final area where you have to do a big puzzle while being chased by what we'll generously call a boss, before rolling credits. This part of the game takes 8-10 hours to finish and is broadly pretty mediocre. I wasn't a big fan of how a lot of the power-ups work, the platforming is extremely precise in places, and it has a lot of annoying progression. That said, I was playing it as a break from something more wordy (I had just finished Tsukihime), and in that context, it fit the bill very nicely.
Of course, once the credits roll, then the real game begins