Three weeks of illness now. It worsened again, but then evolved into a form where antibiotics are effective. Several disgusting nasal discharges later and things are improving. I was well enough to power through a few games at least, and spent a lot of time revisiting old games for whatever reason.
I played more of Cryptmaster, and found that the dead character from the tutorial'ish area was now alive. Which was fine by me. As I've played more of the game, I've enjoyed it a lot more and have found the combat to be way less cumbersome. The humour is particularly noteworthy, to the point of almost carrying the game entirely. My only complaint there would be that the (generally well written) narrator repeats himself too often for someone who talks so slowly.
I checked in on the early access game Gridroad, which is a promising game about designing roads to route traffic to its desired locations. Since I last played it, a few challenges have been added or altered. I tried the simplest of these, and a yellow car immediately turned left, away from its goal straight ahead, and blocked three lanes of other traffic, causing me to fail. This happened with every redesign of the road. I think the game might be worse than the last time I played it. If the concept sounds interesting, play the superb Freeways instead.
Inexplicably I was briefly discussing with others the video games Audiosurf and Super Awesome Wagon Adventure, for the first time in years. Both those games are still a lot of fun. Audiosurf is still great, although bizarrely it interrupted me with every tutorial message all over again for some reason. I was also briefly surprised to see that some 'newer' songs still had active competitive scenes, before I remembered that the song "Bleed" by Meshuggah is in fact 16 years old now, and not as "relatively new" as I would like it to be.
Super Awesome Wagon Adventure has a lot more replayability than I remember. It's a series of very simple parody minigames where you control a wagon and/or American pioneer, wrapped in a metastory similar to Oregon trail. It's pretty fast paced, and there are lots of variants and things to unlock. My big complaint is that the repeat jokes take too long to play out once you've seen them more than once.
For whatever the reason, the controls of Braid - Anniversary Edition seem a lot less tolerable than they did in the original. The original version of the game is one of my favourite games, and I still think the ending is quite daring and original. I was planning to revisit the entire game, but I'm not sure if I can be bothered now.
South Scrimshaw - Part One is probably not a game, at most barely a game. But it is still excellent. It's the first part of a (free) nature 'mockumentary' made using Ren'Py. Its four chapters subject is the lifecycle of the fictional "Brillo Whale", a genus of whale discovered on a distant Earth-like exoplanet. The Brillo is notable for the dense symbiotic biome that grows in its dermis. The 'game' is impeccably illustrated with an incredible attention to detail paid to the alien florae and faunae, and the style and script nail the style of a self-serious BBC documentary from the 1970s. However it does also occasionally utilise the interactive features of Ren'Py to provide optional side-content, that fleshes out the universe of the game (like explaining the legend of the 'sea bunny', or the weeks-long nausea suffered from new arrivals on the planet.) It really is an astounding creative work, and I can't wait for the next part.
Mullet Madjack is an absurdly fast-paced first person action game. Your player character (a "fusion of MAN and INTERNET") is attempting to rescue a streamer princess from the "Robillionaires", but is limited by having only 10 seconds to live... Unless they kill someone and gain a few more seconds. The game is a lot of fun but did feel a bit like I was just mashing buttons. However I was able to transfer the skills to more precise boss fights, so the game is pretty well balanced. There are interesting upgrades/pick-ups at the end of a level that change the game up a lot, however an annoying metaprogression layer on top of this kind of ruins it. The collision of player and environment felt a bit off, and some action sequences felt absurdly slow for some reason. The games biggest sin is requiring a loading screen to quit the game
I played a bit of Read Only Memories - Neurodiver, but only really enough for the intro. It seemed decent and I'm interested to see where it goes. But there's also a weirdly rough edge to it: Spelling errors are common, there's a weirdly specific command line required for fullscreen mode to use native resolution, The dialog sounds like a natural conversation that has been savagely cut up from a natural conversation. And most weirdly the lip sync does not match the audio, but does seem to match the "audio minus all pauses and breaths" exactly. There's also the awkwardness over the gross and unacceptable behaviour of the now departed management of the developer from the first game, and the relatively minor discourse the current CEO has got themself involved in (I also don't remember this person assuming the role of CEO).
I also finished off 1000xResist after about 12 hours of gameplay. I don't have much to add onto what I said last week. The game continues to take swerve after swerve all the way through, but somehow manages to stick it all together at the end. The last half of the game just cements everything that was already great about the game, and makes it seem even more deliberate in the process. The design of the world is excellent, the story is excellent, the character, writing and performance are excellent. If I absolutely have to make a complaint, the "solving puzzles by jumping between different time periods" mechanic is a little underexplored. But the game more than makes up for it at the end, with a strangely interactive ending that refuses to let the player have any satisfaction unless the make hard choices. I'd be surprised if there are many better games in 2024.
The below section is about games that are not pleasant to play:
I tried to play more Animal Well, but was quickly discouraged and have probably put it down for good now.
Thronefall is a well-liked tower-defence/hack and slash game. I'm not sure why. I didn't play much of it, but there was almost no variety of options at the fixed points for buildings. But the game sure does love to make you click the mouse button and hold it down. I don't remember how I ended up owning this game, but I'll probably never play it again. Some people seem to enjoy these games, so this could be one of the infamous "me things".
The disappointment of the week/month/year for me is Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. A puzzle focused adventure game from Simogo. Aesthetically it's kind of a mix between Killer7 and The Witness, and has you navigating a hotel and its surrounds, solving puzzles to unlock doors/safes/computers. It has a decent spooky vibe, and a lot of quality flavour text in item descriptions that builds a surreal world. The puzzles aren't anything amazing so far, they err a bit too far to the boring side though; 90% of them are either reading a matching logic puzzle out of a book for a lock of the same number, or a letter with "Dear Bob, If I met you in 2020 and it is now 2 years later, WHEN WAS PHONE?" written on it and then you put '2022' in a nearby keypad. The other 10% tend to be the "critical path puzzles" that are slightly more challenging, but more in the sense of working out how the game wants the answer. The first one of these had a massive logical error. And the second one required me to rearrange shapes to make the number 1962, but I stupidly rearranged the shapes to make the number 1962 and was stuck for 20 minutes as a result. Regardless, the impeccable vibes and moderately pleasant puzzle solving would be more than enough to carry the game...
...Except that the controls and interface are fucking abysmal, and the game is a pain to play. For some absolutely insane reason, they decided to make Lorelei and the Laser Eyes a one button game (+ directional input, and a separate 'pause' button which you will need to be able to use, even though it is not useful to the game itself). Every action in the game is done by a single context-sensitive button, every button, bumper, trigger on the controller does the same thing. This makes almost every single action a chore (made all the more farcical by the under-utilised 'pause' button). I'll spare the specifics, you should instead read this post on the subject, which explains the problem quite well. But here is the story of the last action I took in the game: I found an item that would help in another room in the hotel, but I couldn't remember the specific path back there. Realising I would need to check the map and all the menuing and repositioning that would need, I quit the game rather than going to that much effort.
Developer comments and interviews have claimed that the one-button gameplay is an accessibility feature and that Lorelei and the Laser Eyes was built from the ground up with single button gameplay (A developer tweet from 2023 shows the game played on the Switch with one joycon in one hand, and a pen in the other hand to write notes with.) I simply do not believe this, and neither should anyone else. Everything about the game is about digging deeply into a pile of documents, and cross-referencing clues between them. Furthermore there are diagetic in-game tools to aid problem solving in game (like a fake Game Boy with various software, including calculator, on it.) There are also no actual accessibility features in the game at all. And anybody who cannot play a game and keep notes at the same time is shit out of luck. (In this context, the in game comment advising you to keep a notepad nearby has a real "There's no wifi here, you'll have to talk to somebody like in the old days!" vibe to it.)
I think I'm being generous by claiming these statements are false. Because assuming they are true would be even more damning. It seems to be particularly absurd that you would start from a premise of "Single button gameplay" and end up with "navigating up and down directory trees, and requiring multiple context switches to do one action" as the core of the gameplay.
Furthermore... This sucks.
All Games Played
- Slice & Dice: GREAT (Notable)
- Cryptmaster: Good
- 1000xResist: GREAT (Notable)
- Gridroad: Disappointing
- Audiosurf: GREAT
- Super Awesome Wagon Adventure: Good
- Braid - Anniversary Edition: OK (Original Game: GREAT)
- South Scrimshaw - Part One: GREAT (Notable)
- Mullet Madjack: Good
- Read Only Memores - Neurodiver: Good
- 1000xResist: GREAT (Notable)
- Animal Well: Disappointing
- Thronefall: OK
- Lorelei and the Laser Eyes: Disappointing