#amwriting this afternoon, working on https://starbreaker.org/fiction/wip/spiral-architect/ while my wife and I enjoy a bit of pizza. I found I was able to reuse most of a chapter from an earlier draft of the novel with a few changes. And #Emacs in text-mode with olivett-mode makes a reasonable low-distraction writing app.
I'll admit to soapboxing a little here; I also think that fundamental human rights deserve more protection than can be provided by case law or legal precedent.
Hot take: 3rd person is completely superior to 1st person.
(Yet another reason I can't really enjoy #Cyberpunk2077 btw). I am not even one of those people who get motion sickness from games, but having your view limited to a widescreen monitor is like one step above climbing a tree in a knight's helmet.
Edit: I don't mind first person in #Fallout games, because I use VATS for 99.5% of all combat. I don't HAVE to see everything.
I'm not one for "New Year's resolutions", but I am one for overly ambitious projects.
For 2023, Project365 is "One New Game Per Day".
Given that I have 634 unplayed games in my Steam account and {mumble} unredeemed bundle Steam keys, there's a reason my unplayed collection is tagged "Pile of Shame".
I'll pin this to my profile, and give a brief summary here each day (or x, if I miss x days due to work or stuff).
I'll play 15-30 minutes of (at least) one new game I've never played before (or played less than 15 minutes of). I'll give every game at least 15 minutes, even if I hate every minute of it.
I'm also open to suggestions; if you reply to this thread with a game, I'll schedule it, or tell you what I thought of it.
One of the things that's come up is that I have a bunch of games that I've played once, and not touched again.
Jan 25, 2023 - Day 25 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 32
Game: The Norwood Suite
Platform: Steam PC
Release Date: Oct 2, 2017
Library Date: Feb 3, 2018
Unplayed: 1817 days (4y11m22d)
Playtime: 23m
Today was quite an odd day. I woke up after 6 hours sleep. Which feels quite offputting after sleeping 4.5 hours per day on average for over a year.
Made myself some breakfast, sat down to play this game, and... things got weirder.
The Norwood Suite is a first-person point-and-click adventure game, set in the Hotel Norwood.
It is quite a surreal game. It's unclear why the driver of the car who's dumped you outside the Hotel Norwood has done so, but you've been given a voucher for one free night, at this hotel, and thus your musical adventure begins.
Apparently, the Norwood was built by a once-famous musician, and the interleaving musical cues are great, but slightly unnerving, which is kind of the way I feel about the game.
After 20-odd minutes in-game, I was still just scratching the surface, and I feel like the game may be good, or may turn out to be a disappointment. This may well end up as a RePlay.
Feb 28, 2023 - Day 59 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 65
Game: A Story About My Uncle
Platform: Steam PC
Release Date: May 28, 2014
Library Date: Jan 11, 2019
Unplayed: 1509 days (4y1m17d)
Playtime: 20m
I'm on call this week, and it's kind of messed up my ability to play AND review games, so I played this on Tuesday, but am now getting the review done.
A Story About My Uncle is a first-person 3D platformer. It has something of a push-pull effect on me.
On one hand, the story (as it is), keeps pulling me forward, but the control scheme keeps pushing me away.
Unfortunately for ASAMU, the pull isn't enough to overcome the push.
In terms of design and sound, it's an atmospheric game, that really reinforces the story, but unfortunately, I just found myself repeatedly getting frustrated with the controls.
I'm not ready to delete it, but I'm unsure as to whether I'll be drawn to play it again.
For now, I'll give A Story About My Father a rating of:
Apr 17, 2023 - Day 107 - NewPlay Bonus Review
Total NewPlays: 116
Game: Dead Island Definitive Edition
Platform: Steam PC
Release Date: May 31, 2016
Library Date: Dec 4, 2018
Unplayed: 1595d (4y4m13d)
Playtime: 20m
Dead Island is another first-person zombie killing game, but this time it's set on a resort island.
It's a pretty run-of-the-mill "kill zombies, collect stuff, make stuff, kill more zombies" gameplay loop. Being set on a tropical island seems (so far) to give it a slightly different feel to other zombie games.
But it also felt kind-of familiar, not just like other zombie killing games, but like I'd played it before.
When I logged out, and looked up who'd made it, that feeling made sense; Dead Island is made by Techland, the same studio who make the Dying Light franchise.
Techland know how to make zombie games, but with the familiarity of the gameplay loop, if I was in the mood for killing zombies, I'd probably choose Dying Light 2 over this, as a more recent game with gameplay improvements.
Apr 25, 2023 - Day 115 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 129
Game: Sir, You Are Being Hunted
Platform: Steam PC
Release Date: Aug 19, 2013
Library Date: Nov 24, 2017
Unplayed: 1978d (5y5m1d)
Playtime: 15m
Sir, You Are Being Hunted is a first person stealth survival game.
If you've been reading up on my reviews, you might assume how this is going to go, and you'd be correct.
Up front, though, let me say how utterly refreshing it is to have a game where the gameplay voiceover heavily features a gendered honorific, & allows you to change that from "Sir" to "Madam" with a button at the main menu.
Unfortunately, any potential gender euphoria from this change is overwhelmed by playing a stealth survival game.
For the newcomers: I'm not a big fan of survival games, and even less so of stealth games where you're primarily helpless; this is both. Not great for a woman with anxiety issues.
If that's your cup of tea, have at it; a game set in a quaint & creepy English countryside, where you're being hunted by robots was always going to be a big ask, & it was a "please be over, please be over" every time I died and checked the clock.
There's a whole layer of real-world subtext for me about being hunted by English people who want me to not exist that really drives the final nail into this game's coffin.
Apr 28, 2023 - Day 118 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 133
Game: Unfortunate Spacemen
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Jun 13, 2020
Library Date: Jun 14, 2020
Unplayed: 1048d (2y10m14d)
Playtime: 31m
Unfortunate Spacemen feels like a first-person mash-up of Among Us, Dead By Daylight, and Alien. It's a free multiplayer survival game that's suffered the same fate as most of the other free & paid multiplayer games that sat in my Pile of Shame for too long: no-one is playing.
The game starts with a slightly over-the-top tutorial playing as one of the titular Spacemen. It's frustratingly slow as the voiceover drones on endlessly, switching out halfway through in what was (I guess) supposed to feel funny, but just felt odd & forced. There's nothing here you don't already know from every other FPS.
Next, the "playing as the monster" tutorial. You start out disguised as one of the spacemen; you can then switch into monster form to kill a spaceman, then back to spaceman again, or even take on the identity of whoever you killed.
The gameplay feels a bit janky in the way it plays, but the biggest problem is the same one experienced by most F2P PvP games: get big quick, or go home.
The servers are still running (unlike many other games), but there aren't a lot of players, & apparently most are just griefing.
May 25, 2023 - Day 145 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 161
Game: Demon Pit
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Oct 18, 2018
Library Date: Aug 17, 2022
Unplayed: 281d (9m8d)
Playtime: 18m
This was the third unplayed game I played today. First was Due Process, a free multiplayer shooter with no players. Quit, uninstall. Then Bomjman, which had an auto-translated and generated voiceover that was so bad, I quit and immediately uninstalled it too.
Then came Demon Pit. Apparently I bought a bundle of mash-up games on the same date. Unlike yesterday's game, though, Demon Pit did not scratch any itches.
It's a retro-styled first-person boomer shooter, with a grappling hook, like a mashup of Doom and Just Cause. You're in a single arena where you need to kill a set number of mobs to end that wave, then you get a new weapon, the arena re-arranges around you, and more mobs spawn.
Keep going until you die.
It's a short review because... there's not a lot to it. The grappling hook mechanic is OK, but you frequently get flung past your goal into more mobs.
It gets repetitive very quickly, and it's just not much fun after that.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a first-person open world RPG set in medieval Bohemia. You play Henry, a young man set on a mission of vengeance.
This was a game that I really knew nothing about, that was part of the August 2019 Humble Bundle. After I disappointed @bluntelk by not enjoying ToeJam & Earl, he asked if I'd played this.
I had not, and since I owned this on one Steam, away I went.
Once again, going into the game without knowing anything about it proved somewhat beneficial to the setup of the story. RPGs often follow the pattern of the Hero's Journey.
Henry's life in this bucolic village in Bohemia was obviously not going to be the whole of the game. Had I read the logline for the game on the Steam page, it gives away the catalysing event that sets Henry on his journey, so it was devastating to experience it first-hand, but also gave me a fire in my bones that I might have lacked knowing what I was in for.
In terms of gameplay, it's a good looking game for a game released five years ago, & built in Crytek's CryEngine.
Will I complete it? I'm not sure. Statistically, it's unlikely. I've started multiple Assassin's Creed games, and haven't completed any of them. I was hours into Cyberpunk 2077 before discovering I hadn't even completed the prologue. In all my time gaming, the only open-world game I've even completed is FarCry 5.
There's also the issue of playing a male protagonist. When I play a game with a female protagonist I feel a sense of connection that's noticeably absent with male protagonists; in fact, recognising this was another small piece in understanding the puzzle that is myself.
However, the story did pique my interest, and it might be one of those games that draws me back, so I'm going to sit with it for a while.
Overall, (and this should make @bluntelk happy), I think Kingdom Come: Deliverance is:
June 28, 2023 - Day 179 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 198
Game: Recursive Ruin
Platform: Steam
Release Date: May 18, 2022
Library Date: Jun 8, 2023
Unplayed: 20d
Playtime: 29m
Recursive Ruin is a first person narrative-based puzzle game about grief.
I read about this game last year, and added it to my wishlist; when it popped up on sale three weeks ago, and so I added another game to the pile of shame.
The game's conceit is in the title, because a large chunk of the game's environments are recursive. This is deeply disorienting, and feels like the diametric opposite of a cozy game.
It's standard WASD keyboard and mouse navigation, and with the addition of what is, effectively, a companion cube, it's a bit like "What would it be like to play Portal on psychedelic drugs?"
This is an interesting, but disquieting game; I'm genuinely not sure if I like it, or just solving puzzles.
First cab off the rank, is The Outer Worlds "Spacer's Choice Edition". The Outer Worlds is a first-person ARPG that answers the question "What would the love child of Fallout: New Vegas and Firefly look like?"
The "Spacer's Choice Edition" includes all of the DLCs and some graphical spit-and-polish to the original release from October 2019.
As it turns out, after turning to Google, I suspect the main reason it feels like that is because it was developed by Obsidian who also developed... Fallout: New Vegas.
Once I reached the ship ("The Unreliable") that apparently serves as the main hub of the game, and completed the first quest onboard, I turned around and started exploring the ship.
Entering the hold, was an immediate raised-eyebrow moment, as it could have all but been the Serenity. Up the stairs, and further exploring lead me into the galley/dining area, which - once again - could have been lifted straight from Firefly.
There are differences, of course; it's obviously a homage, rather than a straight-up lift. With Disney owning Fox, I'm sure the Microsoft-owned Obsidian wasn't looking for a lawsuit.
Still, it provides some nice sans-Whedon warm-and-fuzzies.
So far -and in 39 minutes, I really didn't get very far, what with the character conversations and all, it seems like a capable ARPG that want to give a bit more time to.
It's very polished, and is gently tugging at me to come back and play a bit more, but... alas, the incessant coughing means I really need to try and sleep.
The Outer Worlds: Spacer's Choice Edition pretty much justifies the cost of this month's Humble Bundle; it's:
July 28, 2023 - Day 209 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 228
Game: Call of the Sea
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Dec 9, 2020
Library Date: Mar 10, 2023
Unplayed: 140d (4m18d)
Playtime: 5h48m
Call of the Sea is a first-person 3D puzzle game, set on an island near Tahiti, in 1934.
You play as Norah Everhart, a woman trying to unlock the mystery of the disappearance of her husband on an expedition to this remote island.
I bought this game as part of an "International Women's Day" bundle, where all the games have female protagonists. Capitalism will find any excuse for a sale, but in this case, part of the money was going to charity, and I wanted more games with female protagonists, so it felt like a win/win.
This is a wonderful game. The graphics are lush and gorgeous, and the puzzles are mostly of the kind that pushed me just enough that I enjoyed them, but not so much that you need to keep a walkthrough open in a web browser. The kind that are satisfying to solve.
The kind that kept me playing non-stop until I'd completed the game. The last game that hooked me into playing through in a single session was Firewatch, which is one of my all-time favourite games, and Call of the Sea comes close.
The game opens with Norah waking up from an odd dream, in a cabin on a ship, which has just reached its destination.
As Norah looks down at her hands, they're covered in small brown blotches, and her voiceover starts talking about her illness. These blotches are symptoms of her illness, and her husband's expedition to this remote -and possibly cursed- island was an attempt to find a cure.
It's Norah's illness that is at the core of this game. While to say more would involve spoilers, I think if this were just a puzzle game, I'm not sure it would have hooked me. But Norah's story, the mystery of her illness, but a smart & capable woman who refuses to let her illness define her, and whose relationship with her husband appears to be one of equals, drew me in, and as each puzzle solution revealed a little bit more of the story, I just wanted to solve one more puzzle.
When I read a review of Shadows of Doubt a few months ago it absolutely fascinated me. You're a private-investigator in a first-person voxel-based fully-simulated city sandbox, solving crimes, and through that, hunting for a serial killer.
I added it to my wishlist, and it came up as a flash-special on one of the sales websites, which in turn I had a voucher than gave me a further 10% off, which meant it was almost half-price.
I want to say I love it, but I don't know if I do. It looks wonderful. I fell in love with voxel-based games thanks to Cloudpunk, and Shadows of Doubt has a similar kind of cyberpunk visual flair.
By fully simulated, they mean that the area of the city you're in contains NPCs and critical characters that are actively going on with a life, irrelevant of your presence. It felt strangely realistic.
Unfortunately it's not an easy game to make headway in, and I don't know if that's a "game" think or a "me" thing.
You collect evidence, and you can pin it together Pepe Silvia style, but by the time I decided to quite out, I was feeling like Charlie. I'd collected so much evidence, I felt overwhelmed, and I didn't know what to throw away.
However, I was incredibly exhausted, and that probably didn't help at all. It's definitely a game I'm going to go back to, as it's in Early Access and is still being developed.
August 5, 2023 - Day 217 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 237
Game: Titanfall 2
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Oct 28, 2016
Library Date: Nov 25, 2022
Unplayed: 253d (8m11d)
Playtime: 78m
Titanfall 2 is a first person shooter with mechs. While it has a multiplayer mode, I was focused on trying the campaign.
Technically, this is not the first time I've played Titanfall 2. I attempted to play it via Gamepass on the Xbox a few years ago, and try as I might, I just couldn't coordinate on the controller in any way that felt playable.
It was one of those games that I'd heard people rave about, and when it came up on deep sale late last year, I took the bait.
A seven year old game, with mouse and keyboard?
Yeah, that's the good stuff. Wall-running, which is a critical part of this Titanfall 2, went from making me want to throw the controller in frustration to something fluid and fun.
The gunplay while in pilot mode is incredibly satisfying. The guns feel weighty, and the sniper rifle in particular has a wonderful heft to it; putting a sniper round into a drone is particularly enjoyable.
By the end of my 78 minutes, I'd just loaded into the mech and completed the first mission, with the mech's abilities being a lot of fun, particularly the "catch all the projectiles and return-to-sender" ability.
August 6, 2023 - Day 218 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 238
Game: Builder Simulator
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Jun 10, 2022
Library Date: Jun 4, 2023
Unplayed: 63d (2m2d)
Playtime: 16m
Builder Simulator is a first-person work simulator, and most work simulators suck.
In my experience there are two kinds of games I describe as work simulators.
The first involves cleaning. I'm not sure why, but when I was experiencing quite a dark time in my mental health, I discovered House Flipper. Leaving aside the real-world ethics of house-flipping, the game is essentially a cleaning & decorating sim.
Power Wash Simulator is another oddly satisfying work sim.
Building Simulator... is not.
Building Simulator opens with your new assistant, Bill Derr. Mmm, I love the smell of bad puns in the morning (I do not.).
Bill Derr is Claptrap from Borderlands mashed up with a cement mixer, and the annoying dialed up to ten.
Bill's role is -apparently- to tell you how to play the game. I found myself in the middle of nowhere, with an outline on the ground that I had to turn into a foundation.
A cement mixer, a wheelbarrow, a couple of piles of sand, and gravel, and... "OK, now build".
I spent the next few minutes poking around trying to work out exactly what I had to do. Eventually I dug into the options menu to find the controls to see if there was something I was missing, and it turns out that the tools menu is accessible through the middle mouse button.
If only there was some kind of in-game character to provide that sort of instruction.
Once I had access to the tools, grab shovel, dig out the marked outline, buy formwork through your handy tablet computer.
How much? Who knows. Not enough, not enough, too much. Install formwork. Sell overpurchased formwork back to story. Buy reinforcement. Rinse and repeat.
Now make concrete. Fill wheelbarrow with concrete. Lay foundation.
Look, there's probably someone out there who finds deep levels of satisfaction in this. It's just not me.
There's something soothing about cleaning work sims that I don't experience in this kind of work sim.
I got to play the beta of PC Building Simulator 2, and having actually run my own real-world computer store for several years, I found it teeth-grindingly frustrating.
The biggest problem with Building Simulator is that it's just like starting a new job, where no-one will tell you anything, and you just need to poke at things until you get what's going on.
I have a job, I don't need to simulate having a second one.
August 7, 2023 - Day 219 - RePlay Review
Total RePlays: 7
Game: Road 96
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Aug 16, 2021
Library Date: Nov 16, 2021
Playtime: 40m (Total: 3h)
Road 96 is a cel-shaded procedurally generated first-person adventure RPG set in a vaguely midwest alt-American quasi-dictatorship in the summer of 1996.
It is the third game in the August Humble Choice bundle, and the second of the games that I already owned, having bought it three months after it came out.
You play a succession of teenaged runaways attempting to escape cross-country by whatever means possible to reach the titular Road 96, the one route out of the country.
As you make each journey, you encounter a cast of characters, slowly piecing together their backstories as you make each journey.
Each journey can end in arrest, or (apparently) death, or escape.
So far, my first two chapters have resulted in being arrested each time, so at least I'm not dead?
The soundtrack is quite wonderful, and I find the storyline quite moving.
Between this and Disco Elysium, I think either game justifies this month's bundle, but if you don't have either, it's a definite buy. Even if you do end up with Chivalry II as well.
August 9, 2023 - Day 221 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 241
Game: Arcade Paradise
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Aug 11, 2022
Library Date: Aug 4, 2023
Unplayed: 5d
Playtime: 54m
There comes a time in every monthly Humble Bundle where you hit the cruft. The games they chose to pad out the bundle to eight games.
...and so we come to Arcade Paradise, game number five.
This is not that game.
I really didn't expect much of this from the title. The apparent love of retro games by indie devs is lost on me, and going on the name and the artwork, I made the assumption that this was going to be something a la Capcom's "Arcade Stadium" with a bunch of retro-styled games, and maybe some vague narrative thread to string them together.
Having just finished re-assembling my PC at 11:45pm, I figured I'd put in my 15 minutes and write the review later.
The game intro didn't do much to assuage my fears. A bunch of hand-drawn animated graphics. Not badly done, but I've been burned before.
The intro ends, and the screen morphs into... full first-person high resolution 3D.
blink wut.
This is a pleasant surprise.
As it turns out, Arcade Paradise is a love letter to retro arcade games, wrapped in a business sim.
As 19yo college dropout Ashley, you've been handed the keys to one of your father's run-down laundromats, in the hope that you'll "make something" of yourself.
The game opens with you dropped off by the bus in front of said laundromat, with a series of answering machine messages from your father telling you each step of managing the laundromat.
Hope you don't mind doing laundry, kid. There's a lot of it to do. There's also cleaning, garbage collection, maintenance, and emptying coin hoppers.
Oh, and there are a couple of arcade machines in the back room.
This is the heart of the narrative. Yes, you need to do all that stuff in the laundromat, working long days, to earn money... so that you can afford to buy more arcade machines, and prove to dad that there's more to life than just the grind of doing laundry.
I was hooked, and am tired this morning as a result.
There are some things that frustrate me about the gameplay. The "opening the safe" process gets old very quickly. The inability to interact with the garbage piled outside the laundromat just annoys me.
I WANT TO CLEAN IT UP. There are empty vending machines that I want to fill, and cannot interact with. I don't just want to build the arcade, I also want to clean up and renovate the laundromat, but that's a "me" thing.
Ironically, you can also play the arcade games themselves, something that just doesn't grab me at all, but that's OK by me.
In a completely unexpected twist, Arcade Paradise is:
August 10, 2023 - Day 222 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 242
Game: SuchART
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Aug 14, 2022
Library Date: Aug 4, 2023
Unplayed: 6d
Playtime: 1h44m
Game number six: SuchART.
I figured this might be the game where I sigh, and force myself to 15 minutes and write my little review.
Almost two hours later...
Conceptually, this game is much like Passpartout: The Starving Artist that really surprised me back in January.
Instead of a humble garage in Paris, you find yourself in a future where all art is created by robots, and realising the dead end of this, real live artists are being sponsored to create real art, with real paints and canvases...
...based on a space station.
It's a cute twist. You're supplied with everything required to make basic art, and you can paint commissions or just create paintings and sell them in the "marketplace" (no other players required).
My first commission was a request for a unicorn from my sister.
It was a very bad unicorn. She loved it. Of course.
You can pretty much grind out anything, and it will be accepted and loved by those who commissioned it.
White polar bear in a snowstorm doesn't cut it though.
You have to put something on the canvas.
I kept painting, and churning out crap to complete quests and level up. It was kind of fun, and a chill way to kill some time.
Then... I saw something. An idea. An actual idea. In fiddling around with the in-game tools, something unlocked, and I found myself frantically grabbing paints and rollers and brushes, and a water pistol filled with paint, and creating.
When I was done, I sat back in my chair, and just loved that thing I'd created.