I completed a couple of games this week and tried a few new ones.
Felvidek remained excellent right up to the end. Remaining bizarre and surreal throughout, with the story going in a particularly crazy and unpredictable direction, albeit with a strangely muted conclusion. The translation seemed to suffer a tad in some places too, occasionally slipping from bizarre to incoherent. In general though, it was excellent. A 96-screenshotter!
I started playing Mouthole, which is a dentist themed horror(?) game. I really enjoyed the intro, then I started playing and I found the "Invert Y axis" option did not function. So I stopped playing. On pause for now.
If you take a rough surface-level approximation of the first GTA and mix it with the progression of an A.S.S. game, then you end up with Maniac (from the creator of Soldat, Michał Marcinkowski and co.). A top down game where you are a murderous crazy person running around a city being indiscriminately violent and stealing cars. While the cops/army/special forces/aliens attempt to kill you in the process. There are a few interesting power ups in the game, but the most interesting thing is just how clumsy and inaccurate the player is at the outset. Of course being one of the modern roguelike impersonators, these interesting early game challenges are immediately permanently removed with the first few meta-progressions. Still it's promising and I hope it improves more as early access progresses.
The much anticipated Broken Roads released mid-week to a tepid reception. It's a mostly dialogue focused CRPG set in (seemingly very) post-apocalyptic Western Australia in the actual towns midway between Perth and Kalgoorlie. I've played a few hours, right up to the point where the pseudo-open world and the "passage of time" (as opposed to pre-scripted breaks in the narrative due to plot) opens up. During this time the game is mostly focused on narrative choices and adventure game-ish quests.
Broken Roads isn't as bad as the initial reception suggests, but I've had a very mixed time with it. The biggest criticism I would level at the game is that it's inconsistent. For example; The characters in game all speak in a caricature of Australian vernacular, but will suddenly drop into Americanese to say "Ass". Or there's a bit about the rules of cricket being forgotten, but cricket stumps are everywhere. It's most noticeable with the voice-acting though. Much like the original version of Disco Elysium, Broken Roads has some lines voiced while most aren't. Unlike Disco Elysium, this choice is seemingly completely random and often voiced characters will have one-sided conversations with muted partners, and there's a really jarring moment 30-40 minutes into the game where the narrator actually narrates (until then I didn't even know there was a narrator) for the first time to describe the player character's internal thoughts about an violent imagery of a fatal gunshot wound. I'm hoping the game improves as I play more.
Another game I started and finished over a few days was Children of the Sun, a very stylish sniper puzzle game about enacting a revenge fantasy. The story is told through a series of visceral disjointed cutscenes between some levels. The protagonist is a young woman who has escaped from a violent cult and is enacting violent revenge on them using her sniper rifle and one bullet. With her supernatural psychic powers, after killing one cultist she is able to re-aim the bullet mid-air to start its path towards its next victim (or some sort of explosive or innocent wildlife). Later she gains the ability to bend the bullets or accelerate them to armour-piercing speeds. Thus the levels become elaborate puzzles to discern a viable path to kill all adversaries with one bullet. At its best this is viscerally satisfying and good solving the levels is an intriguing mental challenge. At its worst the game is frustratingly inconsistent, buggy and lacks a robustness to make the game live up to its potential. I found the game to be very good, but frustrating, as if for every two or three positive qualities they decided to add a bad one just to mix things up.
All Games Played
- Balatro: Good
- Dragon's Dogma - Dark Arisen: Good
- Felvidek: GREAT (Notable)
- Mouthole: OK
- Maniac: Good
- Broken Roads: OK
- Children of the Sun: Good