I know I've mentioned a few times that when I'm between day jobs, I tend to give myself unfun tasks just to keep a routine so I don't go (further) into goblin mode. Last year's period was spent trying to clean up a bunch of lesser "RPGs" in my backlog, both to tamp down on buying any new games without a source of income, and just because nothing's more guaranteed to feel like a job than an RPG you're not vibing with. It's like having the world's shittiest tabletop GM for your boss, and it's a real good motivator for wanting to get back to work beyond "I would like money". (This year's unemployment quest: finish catching up on One Piece, then go through the how the fuck did I acquire 6 One Piece games in my library while never reading the series now that playing them won't spoil me on any arcs.)
At this point, I'm writing these writeups about some of the titles from that period which were weird enough to deserve the mention, because I've kept them installed for over a year now "just in case" I need to take more screenshots of what I was describing here. I could really use the hard drive space again.
Full Metal Furies
Full Metal Furies was the game that the team behind Rogue Legacy made fresh off their now-profitable success (as opposed to their less?-profitable success Don't Shit Your Pants). This was probably the first one that I found to be a real letdown in the whole experiment, because the RPG elements are basically just the game gating you in the same stages until you're at a "safe" level to play a brawler, with the XP curve being designed in a way where you cannot max levels without cheating or obscene grinding in a single loop1. Did I mention this game has a NG+ mechanic that boosts enemy stats and XP payouts? I did not complete multiple loops.
FMF is a game I wanted to enjoy and in fact found the opening chapters of pretty fun! It's got a good gimmick, being one of a myriad of modern RPG/beat-em-up hybrids, this one setting you up with a duo of four possible characters at all times (you can tag the other you choose in with a keypress to swap moves and weapons). It begins to wear a little thin by the middle, because it doesn't introduce a lot of fresh enemies on the main path, but that's where the twist comes in: this game has a weird, meta-layer of puzzles to unlock its final stages and bonus bosses.
I was tipped off to this one because of this article, the sole review/interview about this game while the studio was in between Rogue Legacies, and it made it sound like a fascinating failure! The problem is that a lot of the claims in this aren't true if you're not beating your head against the game, I "100%ed" the title in 19 hours, and it turns out that without the padding of trying to solve the "riddles", the game is pretty fast even with the extra content and stages. Claiming "40% of the game" are the post-game puzzles only applies if you've made things which are basically just going to be bashing your head against the riddles, since there's definitely not 40% more game to play.
This does not excuse how horrendous some of those conditions are, or things stages subject you to to keep the rote gameplay fresh. I want to praise this game because it has some cool ideas! A melee + gun brawler is a good setup, and some of the characters are incredibly technical and fresh for the genre. The tag-team system allows for a lot of variety. But there are also levels like the one shown above, where a heat-wave effect violently distorts and oscillates the screen, and on top of this the final section of this level adds in near-invisible enemies who you must kill to proceed.
That's another thing this game does, "stealth" enemies who are in a pixel-Predator cloaking but can really chew away at your health. A third set are just explicitly smaller, so they can better hide behind the foreground elements or "cover" in the area, and these are snipers. A lot of incredibly unkind moves that drag down the gameplay and really make it hard for me to recommend on any level unless you truly desire to solve the game's meta-layer for yourself, because... well, there really aren't a lot of games in this genre on any level to explore like that. And the hints are out there if you want a clue, but not the whole solution. Me, I got incredibly mad at how close I was to one without figuring out the extra twist and just got into guide territory from then on. Spoilers in the following footnote2.
Metal Gear Survive
Until the endgame grind loop this ruled. I think I liked its systems more than some of MGSV itself, and when I went back to play MGSV afterwards, I found out some of my biggest gripes with the options weren't a team shoving a thing out the door, they were flaws inherited from the prior, AAA-budgeted team. The story was better. I'll stand by that. It's real hard to go back to this one from memory since it briefly became a good depression loop game, but I didn't take a lot of screenshots.
It's not perfect. The post-game really is incredibly grindy and I disliked some of the story gating meaning my exploration was getting me access to tools the game gated off until I completed the right tutorial, but it also never made me re-run the same missions over and over trying to trigger endgame, and has probably one of my favorite uses of technology-as-magic technobabble in the entire Metal Gear Solid series. This is not exaggeration. I'll add it as a spoiler footnote if you want to hear me gush3.
Age of Solitaire: Build Civilization
I love a good casual game. I'll do solitaires, match-3s, hidden object games, the works. One of the first things I install on any system is PySol, because it's so light and gives me endless variation on these to fuss around with, but it's bare-bones. Therefore, I love a title or two every so often, and this one has cute artwork and animations as you work through different "ages" of man, in no particular order.
The problem is... this game's incredibly minimalist and grindy. You might think that's a silly statement in a solitaire game, but no, when I'm here for the goofy animations and cute between-stage progression, the fact that I am roughly a third of the way through the game and the XP earned for each round is so little, it moves the bar by one percent on a perfect round (no powerups used, time under two minutes). There are 9 such bars on a single Age. This is how silly the XP goals have become so early. As a result, since it means I'm going something in the range of one hundred rounds between little rewards... I don't play the game much. It's not a particularly great solitaire game, it's one-deck solitaire with 1/3 card draw options. That's it. The only real draw was the animations and they're now rare as hell. Hate to recommend it for that, but hate to slam it because it's not like the card game part of it is bad. It's just there. It has no frills. Nothing draws me to this over opening PySol for a variant or alternate game style.
I have two more games I want to talk about, one I just finished, and one I played during last year's period... but that last one is going to require a) content warnings and b) a lot of discussion about how much I love what it tried and how it fucked up so, so many of those ideas.
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Short version: everything gets 1XP per successful use. This means every blow landed which isn't nullified counts... with exceptions, like leveling up your dodges is basically by-character specific. It's complicated, and every loop adds +1XP per use. Also you can't hit max level until you find a hidden item. If you want more in-depth information, peep this guide.
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this is the FMF spoiler one, read at your own risk
okay, just adding some padding
alright anyway
One of the codes is given to you by going to the title screen, where the slow pan of the background eventually shows a "constellation" with the button code you need to enter to unlock a gate. The thing I did not figure out is that I had to continue to spam keypresses on the main menu to move the cursor so that it did not start playing a demo for... about two minutes, from memory? And then you need to keep this up while it's scrolling onto the screen and off, so you can write it down or screencap it without the demo triggering (it's about a 10? second inactivity that launches a demo, from memory). Needless to say, I got pretty mad about that whole bit. Others are way worse, imo. -
this is the MGSurvive spoiler one, read at your own risk
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paddington bear
The hostile-to-human-life Dust which revives the dead is basically the healing nanomachines from that Doctor Who episode everyone liked before Moffat ran out of ideas as he got the reins of the series. This isn't the good part. It's the fact that your AI pod theorizes that the reason the colony-entity which keeps perpetuating the time loop and ecological collapse, the Lord of Dust, is unstoppable is that "the nanomachines have no concept of death". How do you solve this? Why, the AI rocket-propels itself into a wound you create in the final battle in the LoD's armor so it can be absorbed directly into the heart of the hivemind entity, "so that I may teach it death". I love this. I love this so much.