Ho there wanderer, how farest you upon the roads of the Internet? Well, I hope. Not being in school and only working part-time right now means I have way too much free time on hand to engage in dumb video games or sleep for a regrettable number of hours. But that’s not your problem. That’s my problem. And I’m working on it. But while I’m working on improving myself and my life in general, there’s still plenty of time for writing about the games I have been playing in an act of self-indulgence and vanity that assumes any of you actually care what I think.I’d like to think some of you do, but I think I’ve figured out that this sort of stuff is as much writing practice and self-expression for me as it is anything coherent for the rest of you. Did you read my review of Pillars of Eternity? You should. I think that game is really great. Even as I totally backed The Bard’s Tale 4 like a sucker, knowing fully well that I had some problems with Wasteland 2 and have yet to see Torment: Tides of Numenera prove itself (assuming it comes out this year, which I sincerely doubt), it’s good to be reminded that Kickstarter can produce some absolute winners. But I think I’ll start this thing with some talk about a game that I don’t necessarily think is a winner…

Games I should like, but don’t: Klei's revenge

I think it’s telling that even when I wrote my last blog, I totally passed over that I did a playthrough of Invisible Inc. That game should have my name written all over it. Turn-based tactics? Sneaking stuff? Isometric camera perspective? The developers of… exactly zero games that I’ve really loved? Ok, maybe that should have been a bigger warning sign. Don’t get me wrong, I liked Mark of the Ninja just fine (and I like Don’t Starve in concept), but it felt like a stealth game for people who didn’t actually like stealth games. I like stealth games. I put that damn Thief reboot on my Game of the Year list last year as one of 3 people who didn’t totally hate or dismiss it as a Dishonored wannabe.

So with that in mind, I didn’t much care for the 5 or so hours I spent playing through Invisible Inc on its “beginner” difficulty. While it didn’t enrage me the same way CounterSpy did with its brand of soul-crushing mediocrity, I think I’ve come to realize that procedurally generated levels and roguelike elements aren’t so much a portal to infinite replayability as they are an excuse for not needing to design any hand-crafted scenarios that might actually be interesting on their own merits. But while the core mechanics of Invisible Inc. work as advertised (you can, in fact, be a sneaky dude who hacks things, steals stuff, maybe knocks out a few guards along the way in a turn based fashion), I don’t think they’re very fun to mess around with. I like it when stealth games allow me to work with machinelike precision, but also improvise if things go wrong (that, or abuse quick saves like no tomorrow). Because it’s all randomly generated nonsense, Invisible Inc is all improvisation around environments that were spit out by a computer instead of a human designer. Throw in a FTL-esque race against the clock and the part where it has roguelikelike elements and suddenly it’s a game that focuses on the parts of stealth games that annoy me, especially when you get screwed over by a random guard that you didn’t know was there or whatnot. If you want to approach this game from the perspective of turn-based tactics, I usually like those games if they allow for a breadth of options. This game? Not so much. Each agent has one or two gimmicks that might make certain things easier, but it’s not like you have a wide variety of actions you can take between knocking a guard out or just trying to sneak out of his field of vision. You can’t go too aggressive because ammo is in short supply/stun rods take power or have to recharge, and you can’t be too passive because there’s a constantly ticking up alarm level that will eventually end with heavily armed guards knowing exactly where your agents are. If I sound a little vague talking about this game, it’s because I’ve already started forgetting the specifics. It’s obviously meant to be replayed multiple times on higher difficulties with different starting agents and hacking programs, but the core of the experience wasn’t entertaining enough for me to want to do that, and not just because I finished it like right before I bought that PS4. If this sounds like something that might interest you, in spite of my relatively underwhelming experience, maybe wait for a sale? It’s probably not as bad as I’m making it sound out to be, but I didn’t much care for it.

(Hopefully this segment won’t return next blog. I’m hoping Massive Chalice becomes more interesting than it initially appeared.)

So I own a Playstation 4

As mentioned in my last blog, I sorta blew my federal and state tax refund on a Sony Playstation 4 and a handful of games. That’s worked out pretty well. I think Mortal Kombat X is a solid, fun fighting game that thankfully seems to have an abundance of people who don’t know what the hell they’re doing online. Far Cry 4 might be the game that breaks the concept of “climbing towers to reveal more of your minimap” for me, but it’s also chaotic nonsense in the same way the 3rd game was, so I’m pretty happy about that. I also picked up Lords of the Fallen and Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin, but haven’t played enough of those to write anything serious, at least not yet. (oh right, also my PS4 was bundled with The Last of Us. I haven’t played it) Instead, let’s talk about that game the rest of you already talked about like 3 months ago: Bloodborne!

Bloodborne was a pretty good motivator to get a PS4. Sure, it helps that this computer is on its last legs as something that can reliably play modern stuff, but this game alone makes me feel alright about my poor financial decisions. It’s been just long enough since I found Demon’s Souls sorta underwhelming for one of these kinds of games to be fresh again, and to its credit, Bloodborne does enough differently from its forebears to be an unique experience, even underneath the larger Souls umbrella (which it is still undoubtedly a part of). I just got the benefits of faster loading times, a couple balance and matchmaking tweaks and all the important information in the wikis already filled out, unlike the rest of you. I’ll refrain from reiterating the broad points about the game, because I imagine a lot of you already know them. For as much as I really enjoyed the way Dark Souls 2 allowed for a larger variety of interesting character builds and made the multiplayer side of things a lot better than the first game, I don’t particularly resent Bloodborne for going in the complete opposite direction of only a handful of different builds and far less emphasis on multiplayer covenant funtimes. That’s fine. While I might consider a platinum somewhere down the road, I’m not enough of a super duper hardcore souls guy to be incredibly bothered that I can’t run around with dual greatswords like a maniac at all times like I did in DS2. The trick weapons have enough variety unto themselves and they all seem useful. I personally found the most use out of the Blade of Mercy, with its ultra-fast attack speed allowing me to lock down most enemies long enough to rip them apart, though before that the Threaded Cane also did the job quite nicely. But then I made a new character to mess around with some of the strength weapons and the Hunter’s Axe seems preeeeeeety good too. And boy, the game really goes there with its enemy and boss design, especially by the end when it changes from a more gothic Van Helsing-esque monster hunt to Lovecraftian Moon Aliens being crazy. If I do have a problem with it, it’s that it hides too many of its character building features until around the halfway mark. That includes Caryll Runes (hidden in a totally optional area), interesting blood gems to socket into your weapons, like half the weapons themselves unless you know exactly where they are, and the hunter’s tools that are this game’s equivalent of magic (as a counterpoint, most of them seem to be of dubious usefulness).

I don’t really feel the need to prattle on too much, chances are you already know what Bloodborne is and how you feel about it. But needless to say, I enjoyed it quite a bit and it will likely show up somewhere on my game of the year list. But this year isn’t quite over yet. I still have some things I’d like to play, things that haven’t come out yet, and likely things that haven’t even popped up on my radar. Lemme tell you about Serpent in the Staglands. It’s like someone made Baldur’s Gate. In 1993. And set it in a world inspired by Romanian folklore. It’s sort of insane and I’m digging it thus far, given the way it commits to being “olde skoole” wholeheartedly. And hey, maybe Massive Chalice won’t continue to be sorta “eh”. We’ll see. Until next time!