Games I Beat in 2024
The year of VR
List items
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9/10
Very happy with CD Projekt Red and what they managed to pull off with this game. Whatever game I initially played felt sterile, half baked and unsatisfying. Years later, however, with continuous patches and updates Cyperpunk has been fleshed out into one of the best single-player RPG experiences out there.
Night City truly feels alive. Driving down the streets answering text messages between gigs, getting nudes from your girlfriend on the way to the bar where someone owes you creds, some gonk gets in my way as I head down the stairs so I knock him out. My choom gives me a nod from across the bar, someone's sold us out and zeroes our netrunner... just preem... It all flows together seamlessly and characters say just as much with their subtle gestures and eye-rolls as they do with their words. The guy at the front door will remember you and give you a sorry hello next time you visit, after a while the bartender warms up to you and you even learn the name of that quiet guy in the back. It's a level of attention that's more akin to a game like The Last of Us rather than a massive open world RPG like this. It makes characters memorable, it makes the twists and turns that much more interesting and it makes it easy to lose hours and hours into this game.
The game, despite being version 2.1 and having initially releasing in 2020, is still quite buggy. Missions could not be completed, characters carried shotguns and baseball bats during cut-scenes where they should have empty-handed, occasional crashes and more than a few instances where I had to reload to an older save to reset the situation allowing me to proceed... It sure didn't ruin my experience with the game and otherwise it runs well and looks STUNNING, especially character models and level design... but it was absolutely an issue.
Johnny Silverhand will likely be one of the most memorable video game characters to ever exist, I don't know who tied poor Keanu in the basement for however many months it took to record all this dialogue but they deserve some kind of Nobel prize. Not only a charming, complicated and flawed person to have with you every step of the way but to help explain the world, constantly play devils advocate and finally evolve from annoying CGI ghost in my brain to a dear friend. Not to mention other powerhouses like Jackie, Panam, River! GORO! KENNY! ROUGE!!! VIKTOR!!!!! the list goes on and on each character more interesting, complex and charming than the last. The cast carries this game to extremely high heights.
Otherwise the open world is almost entirely empty. You will never drive by a mission and naturally fall into anything, all missions are called in by the gaggle of side-quest givers called Fixers. I would have loved a more natural and alive world to explore, especially because it's just so much fun to explore. There really is not a world quite like Night City in it's endless verticality, diverse areas and beautiful architecture playing off the slums and sketchy back alleys. Seamlessly running into characters, missions or setpieces would have really brought the game up a notch. It didn't take me long at all to almost completely avoid driving just because there was literally nothing to do but listen to japanese phonk and drift into sides of buildings.
Despite any criticism, the game is fantastic and the pros massively outweigh any negatives. The base game as well as the Phantom Liberty DLC are well crafted, memorable experiences and absolutely worth the wait for CD Projekt Red to tweak and perfect.
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8/10
Job Sim is a great way of orienting yourself with the Quest headset. Essentially there are four jobs with around ten or so "levels" to each job. You can work as a restaurant line cook, a car mechanic, an office worker and a corner store cashier, however, the setting is more ridiculous and over the top as this is how machines (the dominant race) perceive how these jobs would have worked. As such, putting LIQUID in car until SATISFACTION or creating PROTEIN DRINK for customers are some examples of these "jobs".
Everything is endlessly interactive and you operate within a very small space, no walking around or exploring, as such it lends itself perfectly to VR. If you think you can combine X with Y then you probably can! If there's a garbage can in the back of the store then confetti will fly out when you toss something inside, if you throw a cup of coffee over the cubicle wall then someone will poke their head over and ask what's going on...etc. It rewards you for pushing at the edges of the game and hardly ever disappoints.
Recurring characters, funny interpretations of human life and deeply interactive world make the whole game a blast. One downsides would be the length of the main game. Each job can be completed within under half an hour, making the "campaign" beatable in around two hours if you wanted to power through it. Beating all jobs then unlocks modifiers (dollhouse mode, low grav, bouncy mode) and there is another endless mode where you simply fulfill requests at your leisure. These are fun additions but lack content and will probably only have me returning a few more times before I fully uninstall it.
Despite all that a fun time and definitely a game I'll boot up when showing off the ability of the Quest headset to others.
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9/10
Boneworks is focused around the one thing that almost all other VR games lack: freedom. In almost every other game for the Quest you are bound to a small area, have a singular task to focus on or are progressing normally through a standard story. Boneworks has a "campaign" to accomplish (which is more like a series of worlds/scenarios to interact with) but the meat and potatoes of it is a sandbox where you can ride rollercoasters with turrets glued to the front, climb buildings while flame wizards fire spells at you, get into intense firefights with a huge catalog of different weapons... etc.
The entire engine is largely based around physics, you can push yourself off the wall or toss your empty magazines at enemies heads and everything will react accordingly. Of course this also means things do mess up but that janky fun is part of the appeal, making some moments feel like something from GMod where object clip together or an enemy steps on a coffee mug and slips breaking his neck.
The game also slowly provides you with different player models, each of which has strengths and weaknesses. Tall is great for reaching/climbing, and Strong is best suited for firefights, Heavy can beat people over the head with whoever happens to be standing closest...etc. Later you'll end up switching on the fly as needed to best approach certain scenarios.
This is one of the first games I bought and played on the Quest and it was extremely overwhelming. Now that I've gotten more comfortable with the system though, I was able to approach rooms with the efficiency of a heavily inebriated John Wick, a pistol in each underarm holster, an AR on my back and a shotgun in my hands. It felt good to feed shells into the gun and cock it after every shot. Toss the gun away when it's empty and dual wield some SMGs you found in a box somewhere. It's messy and awkward but you cannot help but feel like a badass.
There's basically no characters or antagonists, you're just exploring an abandoned center filled with secrets and questions, which is certainly interesting but not very compelling. Listening to weird audio logs and reading notes about the abandoned VR world you're walking around. It's almost inconsequential to what you're doing. I don't care about the Lava Gang or the techno goop on the ground, I want to stab and jump on the moon. The devs would have benefited from either focusing more on a story or completely embracing the "this a toybox, let's fuck around" aspect and doing away with it entirely.
Boneworks is nothing if not deeply imaginative and it rewards you for meeting it with the same mindset. I've played a good chunk of games on the Quest 3 so far but Boneworks is definitely not like anything else on the system. There's nothing even close. The only thing that could have improved the game would have been some better pacing and more of a focus on the story.
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2/10
Barely a game. You're in an elevator and each floor has a different little environment or item you can pick up. The point is to collect all the pieces to the space suit so you need to use the TORCH to melt the SNOWMAN who had a HAT on then put the HAT on the PIG who drops a DOLLAR then give the DOLLAR to the GUMBALL MACHINE who drops GUM get the PIG to chew the GUM then bring the GUM to the FIREPLACE and leave then come back and it's BIGGER?? bring the BIGGER GUM to the FLOWER where the BEE lands on it and drops his BOOT...............etc etc etc
Really reminds me of those nonsense Newgrounds "puzzle" games where the solution is as nebulous as what's actually being asked of you.
And it has a 4.6 star rating on the store page.
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5/10
While one of the games I was most excited to try out with my Quest, AND, while one of the first games I open up when letting people try VR for the first time, I quickly found myself unimpressed with the game as a whole.
For a $35 price point, the game comes with a few "packs" of music already unlocked. These packs vary quite a bit in both size and quality. There are quite a few "meme" songs in total, those being hyperbop japanese inspired brostep songs that are hard to listen to or songs made for Beat Saber like the one from Dragonforce where they sing about cutting blocks in half. You give these a try or two and then never revisit them again. The rest of the other songs range from okay to pretty good but by the end there were only about 3-5 that I actually had fun playing with.
The game also does not introduce it's mechanics at all. Cut the blocks in half is pretty simple but it turns out the angle of which you're slicing as well as the speed of each slice directly influences your score. This is never mentioned and had me extremely confused as to why I wasn't getting high scores. Really odd.
There are quite a few music packs you can pay for, Billie Eilish, Queen and The Weekend to name a few. Each one comes with maybe ten or so new songs for you to play with and are priced at $15 before tax, meaning I have yet to pick one up and likely never will.
Getting into the groove with the few songs that don't such IS fun. Walls of color fly at you that you need to dodge in order to keep your chain going, you have to make you you don't hit the bombs that come along with the blocks and on Expert it gets pretty hectic.
I had fun with Beat Saber and got it down-pat enough to beat most songs on Expert difficulty, but I was really expecting more from a game that has such reverence. I'm assuming you can mod the PC version and put whatever songs you want in there but the Quest version needs a lot of work.
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7/10
Killer Frequency is the first story forward game I've played and the only one I see commonly referred to people talk about VR games with an actual plot. KF puts you in the shoes of Forrest Nash, an ex-big shot DJ that recently moved to sleepy Gallows Creek in the year 1987. There's a serial killer on the loose and the local Sherrif is the first reported victim, the only other cop in town can't call for backup and needs to drive to the next town over for help leaving YOU to man not only the local radio station of 189.16 - The Scream but also 911 dispatch. You will go back and forth from playing hot tunes to answering calls from potential victims as you try to piece together the mystery of The Whistling Man over the course of one bloody night. Such a great premise for a game.
Despite the edgy title and design there is one spooky moment that's HYPER telegraphed at the beginning. The rest of the game turns into a very Gone Home situation where things are kind of creepy but ultimately nothing happens. Again, this is despite there being a serial killer on the lose. You spend 90% of your time in the DJ booth answering calls or changing records but once in a while Peggy will tell you that you need to go to another office in the building for X item which will help you make calls or help callers deal with their situation. It does eventually just boil down to busywork fetch quests but it's an abandoned radio station at night so it keeps the tension high.
The writing (most of the game) is pretty decent despite some corny moments. It genuinely thrilling to help each strange person out and potentially get a few clues to help you further solve who the killer is. The main issue I have with Killer Frequency is that it doesn't do a great job in convincing you that this needed to be a VR game. Playing mediocre songs and boring ads isn't fulfilling and truly becomes almost entirely irrelevant to the game until your co-host Peggy says "AND NOW FOR AN AD" where you and her both sit in silence and listen to some corny pitch for a corn maze. Most record you put on will play for roughly 10 seconds until the next caller rings in and then you HAVE to totally turn it off to answer. That also means you are standing with nothing to do but toss trash into the garbage bin across the room and I ended up draining over 150 of them because there was nothing else to interact with.
Given how little input is really required with the game, it almost feels like it would have done even better in a visual novel type of presentation. Having to dig around the kitchen for a discarded pizza box to get the phone number off the front really isn't as exciting as it sounds and with trips to the dark basement being entirely uninterrupted or dangerous, the facade of being a horror game quickly fades away. I was convinced that I was going to at least see someone peering in through a window or have a door shut quickly behind me... literally nothing happens.
I had fun with Killer Frequency and I'm happy to play a game from Team17 in 2024 that isn't Worms Armageddon. I just feel like I spent a long stretch of time standing in my room with my hands in my pockets which isn't what I'm looking for in a VR game.
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I'll use this entry to talk about both the built in tech demos that the headset offers.
First Hand - 4/10
A series of things to do in order to get you used to the headset as well as Meta flexing their hand tracking abilities. You get to select how your little robot gloves look, pick the colors of your little drone buddy and then build and paint a robo-kite in order to ASSEMBLE THE HUB. There's no real gameplay, barely a story and little to no writing but it's a decent way to get your toes wet when it comes to VR.
First Encounters - 8/10
For what it is it's actually pretty fun. Takes place in AR where a rocket lands in your room and little cute fluffy aliens whom apparently deserve a swift and bloody death begin to bust down your walls. You shoot em and capture as many as you can. By the time your done most of the walls and ceiling of your room have fallen down. It was the first thing I played with the Quest and I think it makes a great first impression.
I brought out this game to my girlfriends parents house in order to show the capabilities of VR and they were both blown away. The walls fell away and they could see the fluffy puffins jumping on the rocks in the distance which really impressed. You don't even need to explain the controls with this kind of game, it's all intuitive and the "accuracy" of the Quest is honestly really good. Menu navigation and aiming with a gun never feels off, lending to the quality of the tracking tech.
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5/10
Ever since I beat Inscryption I've had Slay the Spire in the back of my mind. Multiple reviews and commenters said this is the only thing that scratched that itch since finishing the game and, since Inscryption is one of my all-time favs, I had to give it a shot. They weren't wrong that this is very similar in play style, but that's where the similarities end. Slay the Spire has a no story, no character building and an ugly style that reminds me a lot of older Newgrounds flash games. It's a deckbuilding game where you start at the base of a spire and work your way up through the levels, pushing through three bosses until you reach the end. It's not explained what the spire is, what your motivations are or even why slaying the spire would be a good thing to do. You just speak to a large whale and then begin your trek.
It took around ten hours before I finally finished a run. You unlock more cards the more you play and I would say it's impossible to get very far with the default cards, making it imperative that you throw yourself against the wall repeatedly until you can unlock stronger cards and flesh out your deck. There are also relics that you randomly obtain through each run that give you buffs or debuffs accordingly. You spend your stamina to play cards, blocking, attacking and casting your own buffs and debuffs as you go. If you fall into a defbuff and a monster happens to steal some of your stronger cards then fuck you! Try again.
Upon completion of your first run, you still die. And the game lets you know that you need to beat it with two more characters to unlock the keys. You would then need to do a run where you collect all three unlocked keys and then beat the game with them in hand in order to fight the true boss. I will never do any of those things. I found StS to be bland and unrewarding. I found that you could be having a fantastic run and one pair of enemies that heal and buff each other could totally ruin it. This isn't a game where you can accidentally find yourself being OP, at least not ten hours in. My favorite rougelikes are the ones where you could find a strange pair of items that makes you a God character, like Isaac or Vampire Survivors. Instead, StS forces you to be weak, to lose constantly and come back again and again hoping that someone doesn't snuff your lucky run. It's boring, unfulfilling and Inscryption kicks it's ass all day every day.
GECK FOR LIFE!!
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3/10
If this is the best that AC has to offer then I'm happy to put a hidden blade into the back of the rest of the series. Back in 2013 I loaded up BF, made it to Nassau and wrote off the entire game for being boring. I probably should have trusted my old instincts but people KEEP TALKING ABOUT THIS GAME! All the way into 2024 with the release of Skull & Bones people jab their elbows and say heh nice try but that ain't no Black Flag, the greatest pirate game ever created! So I bought it for $5 and gave it another chance.
What frustrates me more than the EXCESSIVE tailing missions, worse than even the SHIP TAILING MISSIONS is how Ubisoft thought they were fucking clever by flashing you at the end of their games with seven seconds a story that's actually interesting. All the way from AC1 and furthered into Desmond's story and also with Black Flag; the game is boring and predictable and right before the credits roll they wink at you and say "by the way humanity is a slave race for Gods ;) see you next time" and that's it. Every fucking time. It's a masterclass of poor storytelling especially when held up next to the uninspired and deeply predictable main story the game presents the rest of the time.
Edward Kenway is boring and his sole motivation is about money, no one likes him and all his friends are equally shallow. Your fellow pirates die or betray you but who cares? I've spoken with each of them three times and they were dicks. Blackbeard tried to retire but was murdered! Who CARES he's literally was hanging innocent people last mission. Consorting with uninteresting pirates is 90% of the game and the final 10% actually has something to do with the Piece of Eden. A skull that lets you see what anyone on the planet is currently seeing/hearing. Edward wants it so he can sell it (to who???) but eventually learns his lesson somehow and returns it to the assassins and becomes a father to the woman he ditched years ago. Ask me this guys name in one week, I will not be able to recall.
Gameplay is the only bit that's worth your time but, I'm being sincere, every second mission is a trailing mission. Freerunning is still hard to handle, I want to run into this door but now I'm climbing over it, I want to jump into that tree but I'm stuck holding onto this cart. Turns out the Caribbean doesn't have many tall buildings nor any intricate architecture so you're mostly jumping from shacks or tall rocks. It's "fun" to mow down a group of enemies by counter-chaining them and then scrounging through 20+ British soldiers pockets for bullets.
Sometimes you can stand up from your Animus desk to walk around and perform the most annoying hacking minigames you've ever seen. A disembodied voice tells you what to do and you do not question it. This was a great opportunity to get more of that behind the scenes assassin/templar in modern times story going but they never fully lean into it. Instead it's just a means to read post-it notes and listen to poorly voiced audio files. The one cool thing was that it takes place in Montreal and my boss got mad and said TABARNAK, lol.
Go play Sea of Theives.
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9/10
Tons o' fun B-tier action movie in the form of a video game. RE3 moves at a mile a minute and keeps you engaged with it's crazy story, eccentric characters and rewarding gameplay. While certainly not very scary, zombies actually pose a individual threat. A group of three zombies is enough to warrant breaking out the heavy artillery and they only get more and more difficult as the game progresses with paleheads, hunters and lickers popping out of vents and breaking down doors, adding to the anxiety of what could possibly be in the next room.
Despite dying ten times I never found the game particularly difficult. Most deaths were the odd insta-kills which I never found to be very fun. I think I ended the game with a box filled with health spray, enough explosive materials to level RC and enough red herb to get me arrested for distribution.
The story can be a little too silly. I think Nemesis had me in a headlock 40 times and is also strong enough to walk through cement walls. He also wrapped his tentacles around my throat another twenty times only to softly let me drop every time. What's wrong with him? Is he stupid????
Nonetheless I had a blast and it was certainly worth the $12 price of admission.
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10/10
Surprise, surprise. The game that everyone said is amazing and constantly has Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam is actually pretty good.
Celeste is a side-scroller somewhat similar to Super Meat Boy and Hollow Knight. You're Madeline who felt the draw to climb the mountain known as Celeste. People are called to it in order to face their inner selves on their way to the summit and Madeline runs into a few such people on her journey. The characters are cute and interesting, the design is great and the music evolves as you progress in a beautiful way.
Celeste is also hard. I knew when, through grit teeth, I said "I'm going to fucking kill myself" as I died on the same screen for the 40th time that I was having great fun! It scratches that Dark Souls itch in a very satisfying way. Celeste does not hold your hand in any way which I truly appreciate. Each stage has a new mechanic and it eases you into it in the first few screens then you're on your own. Nothing aside from trial and error will reveal the path and some of these puzzles are extremely smart and the game will reward you for thinking outside of the box by granting you shortcuts through the stage or by giving you a STRAWBERRY! Useless collectables that serve only as bragging rights amongst your friends. Still, there are tons of screens and sections dedicated to only collecting a strawberry. Normally I walk past collectables but the level design is so strong I wanted to collect them only to test myself.
There are boss fights, chase/run sections, screens that go on forever with no checkpoints, mind-benders...etc. The game never felt boring for a second and the controls feel tight and precise. The stages also reward speed, typically if you get a good pace at the beginning everything just so happens to be timed perfectly if you can keep it up.
By the end I died 1400+ times and I don't think I'm done with the game yet as there's a prologue to complete once you unlock enough hidden gems in earlier stages.
Exceptional game.
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10/10
A triumph of a game.
Signalis, while obviously inspired by Resident Evil and Dead Space, is extremely original in it's presentation. The world, style, controls and story are completely their own and unlike anything I've played before it.
To keep it as vague as possible, you are exploring a facility that's suffered some sort of catastrophe, looking for someone as you piece together what exactly transpired. The few people you find tell you that to turn around but you push your way through the cold metal halls to discover what's happened.
The style is BEAUTIFUL. In-engine cutscenes cut to animated segments that cut back and forth to first person dream worlds and the usual harsh reality. In-engine is a middleground between 3d and pixel art and the animated moments are a gorgeous anime style. All of this in a military-futuristic world with bold colors and beautiful set pieces. It's a pleasure to witness and play through.
Puzzles treat you with respect, I have pages of scrawlings for puzzle solutions and things that might be important for later that I could reference. Combat is the perfect balance between stressful and manageable and there's a healthy assortment of weapons and tools at your disposal.
It's not too scary either. There's no cheap jumpscares, it's mostly just the tone the game sets. It's certainly SPOOKY but I think it's a totally accessible "horror" game that almost anyone could enjoy.
Great game!!! It's hard to talk about without spoiling key moments or the philosophical story it's pulled you into. I would just suggest you pick it up and play it. Can't wait for the next thing these developers put out.
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4/10
Mehhhhhh.
It turns out not every Overwhelmingly Positive-ly reviewed game on Steam is a banger...
Don't Nod Studios (Life is Strange) returns with a very different game than their usual with Jusant. No dialogue, no lesbians and no fun, oops! Wait, I mean-...
The main point of the game is that you are climbing this big tower of rock and reading the many letters and diary entries that people stapled to the wall before disappearing forever. They talk about how there's no water left and some people mention leaving to find some and others are more resigned to their fate, sticking it out and hoping something changes. Otherwise, there is no characters you meet and very little story telling aside from cave carvings and just lookin around and seeing long abandoned abodes. All tell and no show. I cared extremely little for the people who lived on the rock, there's very little back and forth between characters as it's mostly a single diary entry or a letter/response from one person to another.
Climbing is simple, you cannot die so there's no stakes here. It's supposed to be a very chill game. But chill and boring live right next door to each other and the game doesn't do enough to hold my interest for very long. RT to grab with right hand, LT to grab with left hand. You scurry up the sides of cliff faces with ease where the only risk is getting JAMMED into the wall due to poor geometry. I beat Jusant in around four sittings, each time I got stuck somewhere maybe five times a session. Even walking down a hallway, an errant pebble jutting out would stop me in my tracks and I would need to spam-jump and spin around to free myself. This is a FOUR HOUR long game and the fact that I ran into so many issues in that amount of time is staggering. Don't Nod isn't even an indie game company anymore, not that it would make it any more acceptable.
Funnily enough I did just beat Celeste, another game about climbing a mountain, and I had so much more fun with that game. You have a true and personal reason for climbing the mountain and the experience of climbing and making progress is rewarding. Jusant cuts between chapters which breaks the flow of the climb, you ride on creatures backs to ascent a great portion of the tower, the world looks so different from one chapter to the next that it doesn't even seem like you're working your way up the same thing you saw at the start of the game and the ending/cutscenes are shallow.
Visually it's pretty cool. I like the character design of your guy and he's got a cute lil creature in his backpack. The world was once underwater so mundane things are covered in barnacles and strange plantlife. It gets pretty repetitive and loses it's luster quickly but it's impressive for a bit.
Jusant is "chill" insofar as I could play it through a breathing apparatus if I was paralyzed, but it's not rewarding nor very interesting. People on steam mention it's similar to Journey which puts me in a fury as Journey was deeply interesting, beautiful that had a message for you beyond "wow abandoned homes". I also played Journey with Tim Schafer which Jusant did not offer me the opportunity, so it's much much worse of a game as a result.
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9/10
Absolutely a one of a kind game.
Outer Wilds from the ground up bucks typical gameplay design in almost every way. There's no "story" as you're just the newest astronaut on their first day exploring the galaxy, there's no "progression" as you can explore every planet in the galaxy at any time and in any order, there's no "characters" as you're typically following in the footsteps of a species of people who have been dead for hundreds thousands of years, even traversal, physics and level design are atypical and require you to be open minded and patient to understand and thrive in this tiny yet endlessly interesting galaxy.
I player Outer Wilds years before and while I found it interesting, I bounced off it. It doesn't hold your hand in any way, if you can't find the string the developers left behind for you then you simply cannot proceed. I did a few cycles and started to scratch the surface of a few questions then dropped it for something simpler. Revisiting the game, I was able to come back to it knowing what I was getting into. This game requires time, attention to detail and a deep curiosity. It's certainly a game that, after work or dinner, I would have to ask myself "am I in the mood for this right now?" which is, again, atypical for the most part. Sometimes I knew I wasn't mentally capable of enjoying/absorbing what the Outer Wilds was going to deliver to me, so I had to be more conscientious. I feel like if I had endless free time and no major responsibilities, Outer Wilds would be the perfect game.
I feel torn between a 9 or a 10 rating as a result. Not that my scores truly mean much, even to myself, but Outer Wilds can be hard to enjoy in some ways. Twenty two minutes is a decent chunk of time but it can also feel like forever as you sit in your ship waiting for sand to be sucked from one world to another, or waiting to be able to step over some cacti. I would purposefully suffocate myself in a dark corner of space or hurtle myself towards the sun over to expedite the cycle because I had ran out of fuel or missed my chance to visit X because Y had already happened. It's something that will inherently happen in a game who's core concept is "everything is moving/happening across a live galaxy within 22 minutes" but it also pissed me off more than a few times or caused me to turn off the game and start something else out of frustration. You also end up solving what feels like a riddle and only come out with more questions or another dead end, which can feel somewhat unrewarding at times. I remember finally solving the tornadoes on Giant's Deep and then running face-first into the electrified core and having to leave with my tail between my legs because I hadn't been to Dark Bramble to learn about the jellyfish...
However, countless missions to planets where nothing was discovered is a required disappointment, however. It makes the discoveries that much more massive. Breaking into the core of Giant's Deep, transporting into the Twin Project or finding The Vessel are truly awe inspiring moments that are made all the more poignant by the incredible score that is absent when it needs to be but swells when you come across these major moments. You do feel like you're the first person to discover these remote areas or abandoned buildings filled with bones. Finding Poke and Pye's dead bodies as they attempted to crawl out of the exploded core of The Interloper, the bones of the dead children who played next to the Angler fossil, the Nomai Grave where survivors who desperately attempted to track the Vessel's signal suffocated in failure, or walking across the surface of the Quantum Moon and seeing Solanum waving in the distance... the previous failures elevate these discoveries and make them all the more precious.
This is certainly a game that will stick with me and one that I think I'll only ever feel fonder of the more time that passes. As I slowly forget about the endless boring/fruitless cycles I made around the imploding sun. Instead I'll focus on the incredible planets and their individual designs, the fantastic and tragic story of the Nomai people and the incredible discoveries I made exploring the vast and complicated galaxy. It's almost immediately evident that the team who made this game are extremely intelligent and have the respect to hand their players the reigns and let them take what they want from their experience. That kind of trust in a fanbase is to be celebrated and I hope the game's success might inspire future devs to do so also.
I'll certainly be whistling the theme nonstop for the foreseeable future.
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6/10
Across ALL of Hades, I never died to a Fury, I died once to the Bone Hydra, and never to Asterius and Theseus. I died twice to Hades before finally beating my first run and then was kicked back to the bottom.
I think the game is too easy, I think the combat isn't very interesting and I think expecting your players to enjoy having to slog through NINE more successful runs to get the credits to roll is pretty nuts.
I don't enjoy the Pact of Punishment system that unlocks after your first win. The game quickly pulls back a curtain and says "that thing you've been striving for? it just got a lot more annoying" where the more wins you get under your belt, the more Halo Skulls you need to enable to proceed with the weapon that you prefer.
I thought the concept was cool, I had a good amount of fun the first couple of days with it but the more Hades I play the more I realize it's not a game for me. Hades is something you pick up and do run after run after run until you get lucky and roll the necessary build to shit on Hades. All other bosses are almost inconsequential so it's just a matter of how many revives can I smuggle into this final fight.
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7/10
Are you a bad enough dude to brute force an entire language?
In Chants you are the lil hooded man to the left who awakens in a world where he does not speak the native tongue. There are statues and frescoes on the wall, depicting a confusing history and it's up to you to surmise what exactly is going on. An older man bends over and says something to greet me, I catalogue that as "Greetings". I find a sign that points to a graveyard and another to a church, I add those to my little built-in dictionary. After a while, once you've ran into enough words the game will stop to quiz you. Do you know what symbol means "Hello"? Which one means "Church"? As you progress you can put together entire sentences and start to understand this civilization you're surrounded by. It's complex and there's a hierarchy to it that needs to be understood as you climb this tower/city.
Similar in some ways to Outer Wilds, this game requires patience and a natural inclination to explore. Besides a few gambling street vendors there isn't really a "game" here. It's all about immersing yourself in language. I know that the little swirl means "Book" so I can later surmise that the little swirl under a line means "Library". Then I reverse apply that knowledge to the other symbols I have at my disposal. Then suddenly that board I read a few minutes ago makes MUCH more sense and I can make some small progress. Different languages also looks and act different. Similar languages repeat words twice in order to convey pluralization where more complicated languages have plurals, negatives and even ways to convey "opposite of" with a single symbol. It is genuinely rewarding and fun to uncover.
There is certainly a story here and the game changes in major ways, be it from the people who live higher up the tower and how they treat you, to the different languages they speak and trying to compare one to the other as you go. I got the true ending which took a bit more legwork but I managed to complete it all in under eight hours which is a good length of time for a game like this. I think it's just hard enough to keep things interesting but it's also almost necessary that you take 2-3 symbols that you have no idea about and slam them into random slots over and over until you get it right and then it turns out that symbol ironically meant "idiot" the entire time. Nice.
While I did enjoy my time with it, it's hard to recommend. Do you like linguistics? Does slowly uncovering the mechanics of a strange society interest you? Do you want to run into room after room and be totally lost and confused and then have to do that over and over...? If so then you'll enjoy Chants of Sennaar.
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