It's June already. Which is crazy. This year has flown by for me so far, and in about a week's time I'm gonna get 2 months off work (being a teacher sure is nice in that way). All that time off is gonna mean a lot of video games, but.. not quite yet. I did manage to sneak some game time in this week, despite being way overloaded with work. I didn't write a World of Warcraft blog this week because nothing much has really changed in that regard - we're still banging our heads against the wall that is the final boss of the current raid, but I expect we'll get him down in a week or two. I also managed to play one new game and one somewhat old at this point.

Overboard!

Overboard! is an inkle joint - the makers of 80 Days and Heaven's Vault, among others. I'm not well versed in their portfolio, but I did find this game very intriguing from the description. It's 1935, you're aboard a ship heading for New York and you just killed your husband. You now have 8 in-game hours to get away with the murder.

The game's loop is laid out in that 8-hour timeframe that you replay in a visual novel/adventure/puzzle game format where you have to play through the day enough times to uncover information that can be vital in your success in either having the death of your husband be ruled a suicide or better yet, pin his death on someone else aboard the ship.

From the looks of things, you can pretty much pin the murder on any of the 6 or so characters that are present, or you could go the route of killing key witnesses or indeed everybody else aboard the ship. Doing so requires a lot of precise movement across the ship. Everytime you go to another area or talk to a character, some time passes and you only have so many hours in the day before at the end of it, everybody gathers in the restaurant to piece together what's happened.

I enjoyed it for the most part, though after a while I was going for some specific things that I wasn't quite sure how to pull off, but every time you fail you have to sit through the same conversations and do everything else perfectly but still try to find some wiggle room where you can experiment and see how your actions can have an effect on the outcome. It's a hard game to describe, but well worth the 4 or so hours I spent playing it.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order

This game was on my radar when it came out back in 2019, but it was plagued by performance issues so I thought I'd hold off on playing it. I recently picked it up on sale and... a lot of the performance issues are still there. But it sounds like it's gotten a lot better, it's mostly framerate dips and the occasional crash. Don't get me wrong, those things are very annoying, but I can still get through the game.

It's quite reductive to boil it down to its genre inspirations, but it really wears its influences on its sleeve. The movement, climbing and cinematic set pieces are very reminiscent of Uncharted/Tomb Raider. The exploration leans heavily on metroidvania tropes (traverse old areas with new powers, gaining access to previously blocked off sections) and the combat is a somewhat watered down take on a parry-based version of the Dark Souls combat. When I put it like that, it feels like I'm shitting on the game, but I most assuredly am not.

So far, I don't care that it doesn't bring anything unique to the table. I'm not even that much of a Star Wars fan. I just think these environments and enemies look cool, the sheer fidelity of the animations, not to mention the facial expressions and voice acting, just leads to what should have been a really polished Star Wars action adventure game that I think everybody wants to be good. And it is really good! It doesn't get into the same depth when exploring the systems it's borrowing from other games, but it's easy to imagine that's because they want to keep it relatively appealing to a broader audience.

I don't think I'm the only one that would enjoy it a whole lot more if it didn't occasionally crash my PC or the framerate didn't just disappear everytime I'm entering a new area.