It's the sequel thread, and this time I'll do it right!
I'll reply to this thread every time I "finish" playing a video game this year. That could mean getting to the end of the story it tells, or just getting to a point where I think I've experienced what the game has to offer me.
By "doing it right" I mean that I won't forget about the part where I don't actually have to play to what would be considered the end of the game.
So this #Metroidvania's been out for a week and a half and, while I didn't have much free weekend time, I've played 32h in the evenings after work.
Moon Mikono, space scrapper, searches for her mom after a rebellion against an oppressive colonizer corporation goes wrong. Crashing on the planet, Moon is later woken up by an artificial intelligence and sets off to explore a world that is now inhabited only by machines and monsters.
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.
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.
What's black and white and red all over? Tankies on social media. Also, Othercide.
Othercide is a roguelike tactics strategy game with an extremely limited palette. The entire game is in black and white, with shades of red.
The game initially starts out in a instructional level set in a gothic-almost-Victorian-London-by-way-of-Lovecraft 1897 where you play as "Mother", the "protector of the veil" -a warrior with Barbie feet (more on that later)- in a tactics battle with a number of supernatural monsters.
Towards the end of the battle, Mother sacrifices herself, for reasons that are not entirely clear, other than to set up the rest of the game, but she appears to be trying to stop some greater supernatural evil, called "the other" and represented by "the child"; as the child is obviously not Grogu, I have the assumption that it may, in fact, be her child? In any case, kiddo is a bad seed, and he wants to destroy... everything. Destroying the city in the first battle wasn't quite enough.
Then Mother is... kind of... resurrected. Not exactly alive, but... alive-ish? She reforms among innumerable dead bodies piled everywhere, like a naked red Barbie with just as much physical definition, but alarmingly lifelike bare buttocks, and inexplicably, "Barbie" feet that are positioned as if our shoeless Mother is wearing high heels. It's definitely a choice.
From here, you find out that through Mother's sacrifice, you are now in some kind on aethereal interstitial plane where you can spawn "daughters", in one of three roles - ranged, melee, or tank.
The thing is, in the original version of the game, there was only "Nightmare" mode. There is no healing class, because there is no healing... except for sacrificing another daughter after the battle. The game has since introduced a second mode called "Dream", where as each day passes, each daughter regains 50% of her HP back.
Maybe I won't have to sacrifice any daughters. Based on what the game told me, though, that's unlikely. It tells you upfront that dying is part of the game, and you should expect to die. A lot.
Red-Barbie-Mother aside, it's quite an interesting game. It doesn't grab me quite as much as some of the other tactics-style games I've played this year, but I can definitely see myself spending some more time with the game when I'm in the mood for something dark and angry.