by mento
Blarg. What games I beat. A list of them. Is what this is.
Man, twelfth one of these now, huh? You'd think I'd find something better to write up in here after all that time. Like an apposite Robert Frost quote or something. Ah well, the road not taken and all that (who even said that? Keanu Reeves?).
Disclaimers:
(NB: I eventually hit the 100 items limit for ordered lists, so here's Part Two.)
Showing 1-10 of 100 items
02/01. The first 2017 game of the year. Another one of these atmospheric horror puzzle-platformers that leans a lot on its perturbingly lumpy enemy designs and dour setting. Some minor issues with its interface didn't sour what was a brief but richly detailed playthrough. (4 Stars.)
08/01. The two-hundred-and-first Indie Game of the Week. After the big 200 milestone, went back to basics with this 2D explormer based on Slavic mythology. Nothing too impressive or novel, but a solid enough "one of those" that I had a fair time with. (4 Stars.)
19/01. The two-hundred-and-second Indie Game of the Week. I made it seem like I felt affronted by this game's many dick moves, what with creating a blog titled "I Was Affronted By This Game's Many Dick Moves" and all, but I actually appreciated its candor and a return to "old-school" difficulty; apropos for the equally old-school grid-based first-person dungeon crawler genre it homages. More a Wizardry than a Dungeon Master, Operencia is rich with lore (based on Slavic mythology again) and has some smart innovations to the format including character customization that you can endlessly re-tune. (4 Stars.)
21/01. The two-hundred-and-third Indie Game of the Week. A leisurely mystery adventure game about a disastrous space exploration mission in a distant star system. Piecing together the particulars of what happened one breaking bad planetside scenario at a time was a great slow burn approach to storytelling, and even if some of the character graphics were iffy the alien vistas and mechanical graphics generally looked pretty stunning. Reminded me of The Dig and Mission Critical, very much in a good way. (4 Stars.)
22/01. The second 2017 game of the year. Cute little action game about a bird shooting their own hotel guests in order to appease some health inspectors, though it's a bit too short and not all that involved for my liking. A modest game for a platforming fan looking for a modest time. (3 Stars.)
23/01. Elaborate rice-farming sim and 2D brawler that proved to be quite a bit more challenging and involved than I anticipated. The farming doesn't just generate consumables: it's integral to the stat development of the title character, given she's half harvest goddess, and making sure to complete all thirty-eight (maybe an embellishment) stages of a rice growing season correctly is the most effective way to succeed in the more combat-heavy exploration mode. That side of things plays a bit more like Viewtiful Joe in that there's a heavy emphasis on juggles and combos and hitting enemies into other enemies to start a highly damaging chain reaction. The game does not pull its punches, from the macro to the micro: as well as surviving the tough battles and getting the harvest right (which gets as granular as putting the correct amount of insecticide in fertilizer and making sure the water levels in the paddy are always just so), you have a strict time limit per day, need to consider foe weaknesses and your own statistical shortcomings or else get blindsided by new enemy types and bosses, and also ponder the quality and rarity of the ingredients that go into the meal eaten the night before to ensure you have the most cost-effective buffs for your next outing. It's a demanding game on every level, but rewarding in the way that hard graft and eventual success through much failure and adversity can sometimes be. As someone who hates hard work though, I have to admit to only mostly tolerating it. (4 Stars.)
23/01. The third 2017 game of the year. It's a HOPA, so if you've played one of them you've played them all. This one stands out a little more because of its insane premise - the daughter of a kidnapped inventor in 1900 goes out to rescue him, and during the course of her adventures steals a Zeppelin and falls in love with Albert Einstein - but it's otherwise the same mix of inventory and hidden object puzzles they all are. (3 Stars.)
28/01. The two-hundred-and-fourth Indie Game of the Week. A hauntingly beautiful puzzle-platformer about a mourning woman who rediscovers the color in her life, figuratively and literally, as she goes through the grieving process. Very much aimed at the Journey "games are art" set, this is one you'll want to play largely for the audio and visuals rather than its more straightforward gameplay. (4 Stars.)
30/01. This might be my least favorite Uchikoshi work along with the last chapter of the Zero Escape trilogy, but it's still a damn fine game. Put in the gummy shoes of a gumshoe that works for ABIS (Advanced Brain Investigation Squad), which means he's trained to enter the heads of suspects and witnesses to learn valuable clues from their dreams and memories, the player is tasked with solving the murder of one Shoko Nadami, whose body is found missing her left eye. Creating some interpersonal awkwardness is the fact that the protagonist, Date, knows Shoko and is currently fostering her daughter Mizuki at the father's request. What results is a twisty murder mystery that breaks into many different branching paths, each of which terminates in a non-canonical ending that nonetheless spits up a valuable clue about the case that helps with the other routes (indeed, some of these routes are temporarily closed off until you learn more). The game splits at what it calls its Somnium sequences: when you're inside someone's head, trying to figure out how to progress deeper into their memories and find out what they know. While the writing is generally excellent - able to inspire dread, laughter, heartbreak, suspense, curiosity, and fremdschämen whenever applicable - it is a little too eager to overindulge in crude humor about porn and boobs that starts to get tiring fast. I get that Uchikoshi (or whichever writer was in charge that day) is riffing on the lascivious hero of City Hunter and other playboys like him, but it's hard to take the protagonist seriously when he's so single-minded about motorboating them tig ol' bitties. The ancillary characters, like your various female partners Aiba (an AI that lives in your eye socket, don't ask), Mizuki (the aforementioned foster child), and A-Set (a pink-haired teenage internet streamer who maybe knows more about the case than she lets on), tend to be more fun with their reactive exasperation and one-liners. The Somnium chapters meanwhile are hobbled by an obnoxious time limit that extends to every action - just walking takes up precious seconds, but some actions can devour entire minutes unless you figure out a way to mitigate the loss - and every puzzle ultimately boils down to experimentation and trial-and-error, operating as they do on literal dream logic, meaning you'll have to start over many times. Towards the end I was practically reaching for a walkthrough so I could get through them quickly and painlessly and back to the visual novel half of the game. That said, some of those "dead ends" at least led to some amusing non-sequiturs and dumb jokes. I certainly wanted to like AI: The Somnium Files more than I did, in part because the asking price was so high and that created a sort of heightened Veblenian expectation of quality, but I can't say I was too dissatisfied either. Certainly garnered more than my fair share of laughs from its goofiness. (4 Stars.)
31/01. The fourth 2017 game of the year. To the Moon's sequel, which treads the same thematic waters of exploring a lifetime of regrets and what one might change about it while lying on one's deathbed. Finding Paradise goes less towards the heartbreak of To the Moon and veers towards an interesting direction involving an anomalous presence in the clinical memory sifting process, but if the narrative-heavy and interaction-light combo of the original didn't grab you (nor its RPG Maker visuals) I don't think this will either. I appreciate this series for as occasionally maudlin as it can be however, and hope to see several more instalments. (4 Stars.)
