Eight long weeks of rolling: The Witcher 3

The Witcher series is one of the oddest progressions in the history of RPGs. It's also, maybe, one of the best attempts and best successeses at creating a real RPG that actually has you play a role in a story as opposed to a video game where a story plays in the background while you grind for goat butts.

The thing that stands out here is that the first Witcher game is weird and janky, and I rather liked it, but it was clearly limited by its engine. The Witcher 2 is much closer to realizing what they wanted to do, with an interesting and multi-threaded story that can go many different ways. The Witcher 3 realizes what Witcher 1 and 2 wanted to do - It's one of the few games I've ever played where the feeling of budget or design rarely if ever hits that sense of them wanting to do something

The Witcher 3 might ultimately be compared to Skyrim, albeit with mods so ladies can get their bits out, and then it would utterly crush Skyrim. That's not to say Skyrim is a bad game in any means, but Skyrim feels so bland and lifeless compared to the sharp wit of TW3. Though, to be fair, I have my complaints about the writing style as well, but Skyrim never makes you stop and pause to think about how much you're going to mess with people's lives. TW3 will trick you into it.

Witchers are tricky.

Witch cards will drop: Fire

So I think of myself as an individual who dislikes adventure games, but when I look back over the games I've played since starting up this blog, there are a pair of adventure games - Primordia and Morningstar - which I actually look back on positively. And that's my entire line of adventure games, right there, so maybe I'm wrong.

Or maybe those were just good games.

Fire is an adventure (puzzle/exploration) game set in a fantasy stone age world, along the lines of something like There was a Cave Man, or maybe a better example is Bonk's Adventure or the Flintstone's. I wish there was a Bonk's Adventure game on Steam, that would be good to review, since those games are acid trips. The game does not have english writing nor english dialogue, instead conveying information entirely through visual and more basic sounds than pure language. Though it does onga bonga blap blap at you as well, I guess. Basically, Fire is "in the stone age" through the lens of a drug high sliding in the wrong direction toward a bad trip.

The game's interesting hook is that complete lack of writing; puzzles are not really themed in any meaningful way as per the setting. The last section I bothered to finished had you feeding berries to creatures who looked like cartoon bushes, which would then allow them to play music. Once you lined up the tunes, and then spoke to cavemen in masks, the music would reduce them to meat. You then feed the meat to baby birds, who go back into their eggs and...

Well, you get the idea. Basically, it's not "the stone age", it's just goofy illogical puzzles without much in the way of explanation. The game cheats a little, even, using visual elements that convey speech or convey the meaning behind speech. Pictographs are still text, you know? Visually the game is a total thematic mess, it's pretty obvious the art team just didn't care and made whatever they felt like making. The music and audio, on the other hand, are just there to chill you out and provide gentle ambience while you play. Those are good, or at least, good at suiting what the game needs out of music. I don't think people play Adventure games to rock out while going through the puzzle sections or something.

Basically, the game is a generic puzzle/adventure thing, but entirely lacking any story or narrative structure. You appear on a screen, try to puzzle out the development logic and then you get a firefly that teleports you to the next level. The game's humor is utterly puerile, and the visuals are often weirdly off putting. There's just like, a frog anus or dinosaur brains or people being electrocuted to death to go with happy smiling flowers and dancing dudes who melt into meat. If it was trying to be cute, it would be cute, but instead it halfway tries to be cute and then slops over gore in the other direction.

Basically, I dislike this game, and at about the halfway point I shrugged my shoulders and stopped playing it. The puzzles are a mix of hunting pixels for what you're supposed to click on and then from there warping your brain to logic out puzzles that have so little to do with the setting. Maybe it's normal for adventure games to be so lacking flavor and story, I don't know, but it doesn't feel normal to me.

Facsimile souls: Lords of the Fallen

First things first, and I feel like I'm doing this a lot, Lords of the Fallen is spoken of as a clone of Dark Souls. I played a couple hours of Dark Souls in something like 2012, and found I hadn't quite gotten the hang of the xbox controller enough to enjoy it. I told myself I'd go back, once I felt like I did, and yeah that took years. I've been meaning to, but I've been rushing through a lot of games lately.

As an aside, this game has too many buttons. It amazes me, looking back on people mocking console players for babby controller sort of stuff. The xbox one controller here has something like twenty or whatever inputs, and when I first got my 360 controller I couldn't reliably hit the right button every time. There's just so many! You know how many buttons my precious Sega genesis had? A d-pad, a start button and then three. The SNES doubled that, but it didn't use the shoulder buttons often. I'm not sure when controller design blotted up to such numbers, but it's pretty impressive

Anyway, I don't strongly remember Dark Souls, but it's pretty evident right from the start that this game is attempting to copy a lot of elements of it. I mean more mechanical elements, gameplay and so forth, not stylistic choices. As such, it's sort of a RPG, although 'rolling person game' might be a better use of the acronym.

Unlike DS, Lords of the Fallen is specifically about one mang, and one mang only. Though you can customize your mang in various ways that as far as I can tell don't matter much to the experience, you play as HARKYN, a convicted criminal, possibly of the heretical iconoclast sort, possibly of the just a violent punchy man sort. Harkyn has made his way to the... Top of the world? A temple? A place where people are and it's cold? Anyway you're here to have sex with sexy ladies and dodge roll everywhere.

And there's like no ladies up here because it's a monastery. Er. Yes.

Odallus: the Dark Call

Nostalgia or "homage" driven game design is an interesting and oft-times frustrating way of building games for the end user. I've often thought about what defines the niche, and from there, whether or not I'm complaining about something most of the niche enjoys or if it's just something they piled into the game because they could.

Odallus: the Dark Call wears its retro styling in big bright pixels on its sleeve. The game resembles a visually superior Castlevania 2. Yes, that Castlevania. The one you're not supposed to mention. Look at that sentence and look at the paragraph above, and you can start to wonder what I was worried about when I picked this up in a bundle a couple weeks back.

But there's a lot of mechanics in Castlevania 2 that could be good or bad, right? Just as there's lots of mechanics in Sonic, or Shadow of the Beast, or the whole potential variety of retro gaming to draw from, including a lot of games I honestly can't remember even though I've probably played most of them.

And draw from it does, in fact. Odallus feels like a mish-mash of themes and homages jumbled together, all drawn in with an almost Berserk like overtone and pixel graphics with a sweet "television" filter that makes it look super retro in a way pixels along rarely convey fully.

The result? Well, let's see...

Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas

There are a fair number of mascot, high profile games that define or defined a genre that you see surprisingly few clones or at least attempts at. For all the complaining about Darksiders being a 'zelda clone' (whatever) you really don't see many others in spite of it being a pillar franchise for an entire console. There's not really many Megaman clones - not precisely, not really - and very few Sonic clones. There are lots of platformers, of course, but of those very few really live up to Sonic or Mario. They're all brownity torture platformers that don't really have the same crisp, refreshing feel of those games.

(I've always been, as a total aside, completely baffled by the treatment of a lot of mascots and their games. Sonic is obviously the most confusing one, where they seemingly just toss out random garbage to weaken the brand, but it feels like the recent efforts in Starfox and Metroid are just baffling. Metroid especially. Metroidvanias have a market, Metroid has a market, Nintendo has ... Never mind)

Oceanhorn is ostensibly a zelda clone, or something, although I haven't played enough recent Zelda games to pretend I'm much of an expert on the matter. It is a Zeldalike more toward the charm and simple puzzle solving, also it has boats and I feel like there's some major Zelda games that had boats. It is otherwise a charming, colorful game about a boy with a sword and a shield and he has bombs and hearts.

Yay.

Top down days: Hammerwatch

There is a terrible feeling when I look over my Steam collection.

It isn't the biggest backlog in history or something, but I'm at something like 200 games tried out of 1200 games. That's nice. What isn't nice is realizing I had bought a game I wanted to play, and then forgot to play it for a long time due to it falling into that giant pit of unplayed games. It's an unpleasant abyss.

Hammerwatch is one of those games. I got back in ... It looks like 2014? Yeesh, is that seriously right, that's brutal. Back logs are the most first world problem not involving purse dogs or speculating on ebay sales, but it's still kinda dismal when you flip through the Badge page and realize you've been playing games you're not exactly too impressed with instead of games with Very Positive scores and pretty consistent reviews.

It's also really bad when you go over how many games you've played from six months of the Humble Monthly - which ain't cheap, after six months - and that is seriously at a whooping 1/30 or something. Ok that's worse.

But I did finally manage to play Hammerwatch

You're back I see: 2015 in review

General rules apply for my year in review process. I rate games as A, B, C or D. Note that none of these ratings are recommendations based around whether or not I thought the game was good. Not exactly. Rather, the ratings are recommendations as to whether or not I think you should try the game depending on your personal, subjective take on a given genre.

Also it is really worth noting that like ... Maybe one or four games on this list came out this year. This blog is about playing games that have gotten cheap, or that someone gifted me, or come out of a bundle. So the titles in here could be from as far back as 2008 or who even knows. Don't worry, just game.

A rated games are games I think supersede their genre and everyone should give a try if they think they could possibly like the game. If you totally hate platformers, of course, an A rating doesn't mean I think the game will overcome that. If you dislike them or usually find them samey, though, the A rating means I think you'll like this one or at least should give it a try.

It's a discussion more of what I think - based on you, the reader - might find fun. That's the biggest issue with reviewing in general, I think, since there's a thousand subjective factors in play. A rated games are the ones I think somewhat overcome the subjective, at least to some degree. That doesn't mean if you're hostile to the genre it is going to get past it, though.

B rated games are games I think are just good examples of their genre. If you tend to like such a genre, then you'll probably like a B rated game. So if you like shooters, and it is a B rated shooter, you should go check out the review and see if you're into it.

C rated games are, inversely, games that I think you need to like the genre or really want to play an example of the genre to need to play. C is about the point where I tend to start giving up on games midway through playing them, and generally don't think too highly of them. Sometimes I really like a C rated game, but sometimes they're scrapping right along just being trashed.

D rated games are games I would generally avoid. Very few games are truly so bad that you can't squeeze an hour of fun out of them, but some are, and some do. I'd avoid D rated games.

It's about robots: Primordia

So, I'd be the first to admit I couldn't tell you the difference between a puzzle game, a HOG or an adventure game or any of the myriad divisions. I mean some games are puzzle games, but there are also games which have puzzles in them? They are puzzling but not puzzled out? I would also be the first to tell you that I delight in robots - robots are very important to me. And Primordia is about robots.

Or it is sort of.

Primordia is a well-written adventure (!?!) game centered on a robot with a wacky pun spewing sidekick that has to solve the essential problem of power, since another robot showed up, shot him and took his "power core" that provides power to his ship. And oddly that song does fit the theme of the game, somehow. The game's story slowly comes together, and I don't really want to spoil elements, but I found it sort of an interesting take on post-apocalypse sort of things since the robots don't really recognize it as such. Or much of anything as such, but since they're robots, you go yeah ok this makes sense.

There isn't a lot to say about Primordia, given the gameplay is very simply and very soothing. The characters, pardoning the one, are very interesting and unlike Morningstar they're not intentionally pushed to be annoying. I wish I could have screenshotted more of the sidekick's puns, but unfortunately the game won't allow you to use the steam overlay screenshot tool OR the raptr screenshot tool (how that is even possible is beyond me) but will allow you to screenshot using the printscreen key.

Which makes no sense! Unfortunately that also advances the dialogue, so I'd see something funny and then the game would eat it. Sigh.

Morningstar: Descent to Dead Rock

I was sort of hoping this would be a horror game, albeit a VN one, so I could quickly push through it and play through at least a pair of horror games for scary games month. Bad news: It's not a horror game. On the other hand, given my expectations for HOGs is rock bottom, the ironic title and fact it isn't horrible I will take as victories. Extra bad news: I forgot I never posted this review. Whoops!

I don't know much about Hidden Object Games, or even Adventure games in general. I consider the genre as sort of the opposite of the various genres lost in the rise of 3d: Adventure games were generally terrible, unenjoyable, and sort of a bad way to enjoy reading. The puzzle concept was largely about trying to figure out whatever nonsense logic the designer was employing, and every adventure game felt weirdly disconnected, poorly plotted out, or you could play leisure suit larry which was supposedly an adult game but as an adult feels more like a juvenile cartoon.

Regardless, much like platformers and pixel graphics, adventure games made a comeback and nowadays "HOGs" are apparently decent sellers for their investment of development time. I don't even really know how I ended up with Morningstar on my account - it might be a groupees bundle or maybe it came from indiegala or who knows - but it showed up and I installed it for whatever reason.

I can't really rate it relative to other adventure games due to this being my first in ten years or something; It is about two hours long, has no gameovers and is a gently paced adventure. The basic plot is your space ship, which appears to be a small cargo runner of a vessel, crashed on some generally off limits planet. One of your three man crew is dead, and your other crew member got a rod through his gut so yeah he isn't doing so great. You basically tromp around the little desert world, searching for mysteries and solving all the clues.

Visually the game looks pretty much like something I'd play on my 486, although obviously the resolution is up to modern snuff. The art is a mixed bag, with some elements looking quite good and others looking quite drab. There are a couple gentle FMVs, but don't expect any pulse pounding action out of this one.

The voice acting is ... It's hard to say? The VAs aren't fantastic, in fact are a little unlikable, but I definitely feel like the secondary character is supposed to be that way and the protagonist probably is at least a little. I like the fact they sound like they're of different races, at the least. You never see their faces since everyone is in space suits,

The story is ... Simple, honestly, and how you personally take it depends a little on your outlook as a person. You're trapped on a relatively hostile alien world, and your protagonist wants off, so while the game hints at a bunch of mysteries, you basically solve all the clues and work to get out of there as soon as possible. He's not an explorer, and while he's curious, it isn't his overriding concern.

I appreciated that, though I do feel like the game could have expanded out its assets a little bit with minimal fuss to give the game a bit more depth. On the other hand if you're the sort of person who wants all the mysteries explained, the game won't really gel with you.