“I Just Think They're Neat.” Like What You are Playing

[Becksworth]

Usually the nods to the backers are in a specific location, whereas here they are sprinkled around everywhere.

Also like 75% of the bosses feel like their someone's OC.

 

[JBear]

So I started playing Pillars of Eternity 2 recently and it turns out it's a direct sequel to PoE 1, a game which I loved, back in 2015, which I discovered when it asked to import my save file so it could remember all of my choices. Which should be very cool, only that I don't remember any of my choices, or who any of these people are. I remember that I loved the original PoE (140 hours on Steam) and thought the world-building was super cool and really wanted more, and now I'm super bummed that I waited so long to play this.

Anyway, despite all of that, I'm still super enjoying it and remembering why I fell in love with it in the first place. It's still easily my favourite WRPG. It's just so good at establishing a sense of place, and it's not just Tolkien with the numbers filed off like so many fantasy settings. It has a lot of neat ideas, and great writing and dialogue and voice acting. And it has it's own magic systems and religions and races and gods and slang and languages but it does this super smart thing where NPCs subtly repeat concepts, and every time a concept comes up in dialogue, it's key-worded like a twine game where you can hover over it and get a reminder blurb of what it is instead of having to dive into a codex.

Also, it has really fun bits where you get dropped into text adventure mode and it narrates events and you have to make choices and the choices will do D&D style skill checks depending upon your skills.

Oh, and it's genuinely funny: I have laughed out loud several times.

This game starts with a choice between real-time with pause and fully turn-based, and I was curious to try the latter but ended up sticking with the former because I'm the weirdo who actually likes RTwP. But it's super neat that they offer that choice!

Oh, and because they presumably offered it as a Kickstarter reward tier, PoE is crawling with pets that you can adopt that are presumably named after backer pets that give tiny buffs to the party, and you can get a little room for them all on your ship. Right now I have a tiny pig following me around who gives my entire party a small buff to disease resistance.

Anyway, just to give an example of how cool the world is (small spoilers for PoE 1): this is all events that took place before PoE, but informs the backstories of a lot of your characters and the current state of the world: The god of Life got reincarnated as a farmer up north (whether this is true or not is up for debate in the game world), and he staged a rebellion and led a peasant revolt. Then with his new state, he turned his sights south to the kingdom where the game takes places, but they, with the assistance of the god of Death, created what was essentially a divine WMD called the "Godhammer Bomb" and blew the god and half his army to pieces.

Also, the ~merfolk player race don't feature prominently in the first game at all, but are just world texture from nearby nations, so you only see a few of them, but now the second game takes place in the archipelago that they hail from, and now I have a ship and a crew and everyone is using cutlasses and guns and dressing for swashbuckling. My favourite thing is that when you have ship-to-ship combat, they've added custom animations to everyone where they jump over the railing from one ship to the other. *chefkiss*

 

[estragon]

So I started playing Pillars of Eternity 2 recently

It's so good. PoE 1+2 as a saga is maybe my favorite RPG experience of all time. It's tragic that the game took too long to be profitable and a sequel or even another game in a similar style from Obsidian is probably not in the cards. I like these games a lot more than their closest contemporaries (Pathfinder most direclty as an infinity engine-like and Divinity in the general CRPG space).

A great QoL improvement in PoE 2 that you might miss (or just forget about, because it doesn't matter as much at the beginning of the game when you have fewer party members with fewer possible actions) is that it has customizable party AI kind of like FFXII's gambits. You can ignore it more easily than in FFXII because it's an extremely refined approach to Infinity Engine style real time with pause combat to begin with. But, if you'd like slightly less micromanagement, then it's definitely worth fiddling with.

 

[Rascally Badger]

I need to play that. I really enjoyed the first one a during the pandemic (hahahahahawaahwaah)

 

[Mogri]

There are a lot of things to love about Potato Flowers in Full Bloom. It's the dungeon crawler that dares to lower the stakes -- both in terms of the story and the gameplay. You know I love a battle system where Defend is useful. But while I could write a whole post about the battle system in this game, today, I'm here to talk about theother best part of this game: how it encourages you to keep cycling your party of three through your roster of eight.

There are several factors that contribute to this. First, enemy resistances matter, and some roles are better at using certain damage types. Second, while anyone can equip anything, you get big bonuses for using equipment that pairs well with your character, and the game frequently gives out new weapons that are huge improvements over what you have. Third, it's almost trivial to get benched characters up to the party's level, and because equipment tends to make more difference than level anyway, it's fine to swap out your entire party for characters five levels lower. Great choices all around.

 

[Fyonn]

Yeah, Potato Flowers in Full Bloom is great. I haven't talked about it at all on the forums because like. What is there to say? It's one of the few games I have played where they did exactly what they set out to do and I have no complaints about any of the nuances or pacing. I tried playing Etrian Odyssey IV again after Potato Flowers and it felt like a meteoric step down.

My favorite Potato Flowers element is that status effects will always work if they can work, and I only know of exactly one enemy that was immune to a status effect: I couldn't freeze an ice monster. The fact that you have perfect information in every fight is also incredible because it makes the Defend command so much better. Aggro control is very powerful, but it's mostly powerful against large groups because even a mage can decide to Defend for a like 60%? 75%? damage cut if there's too much heat coming their way. Many classes have access to emergency dodges or emergency 90% damage cut defend commands that cost MP, too. There are bosses that have enrage timer-esque "if the battle lasts long enough for me to cast this, you lose" moves and you can go "actually. no."

Oh yeah, to balance out status effects just working if the attack connects... Defending makes you immune to most status effects. (Your emergency defense moves might not count as "defending" though, so there's another nuance to consider.)

 

[Peklo]

I think it's one of the best games ever made--but you might've known that.

 

[Octopus Prime]

Love them Taters

 

[JBear]

I absolutely adored the taters when I played it last year:

Potato Flowers in Full Bloom is really good. Just very charming in a way that trailers and screenshots don't really convey, and yet surprisingly mechanically dense. And very adeptly translated (it looked like the sort of Japanese dungeon crawler that often doesn't get a very good English translation). It also looks... bizarrely good despite its minimalist presentation. Nice lighting effects, and it does some fun stuff with the lighting.

Pretty much my only complaint is that it made me kill the cutest wolves that I've ever seen in a video game.

Anyway, it's on Steam for cheap and it's about the most fun I've had with a dungeon crawler in ages. It doesn't overstay its welcome, and is in and out in about 20 hours, and I enjoyed all 20 of those hours. A fun and novel take on a kind of ossified genre with some real fun ideas that I won't spoil here. Highly recommended.

That said, this surprises me:

it encourages you to keep cycling your party of three through your roster of eight.

Because I rolled up a party of 3 (it's been long enough that I don't recall the precise class names, but I think it was something adjacent to Warrior/Ranger/Mage) and never once swapped anyone out all game. Building a trio that can take on all comers was part of the appeal for me.

 

[Octopus Prime]

Yeah; I swapped out one character early on and otherwise stuck with the same party; perfectly manageable.

Grand ol’ time

 

[Mogri]

Sure, you can do that, but then you'll miss out on some really cool stuff. Some classes are more niche by design: Sorcerer is walled by any nonliving enemy that resists fire but incredibly strong otherwise. Besides, I get to feel extra clever when I see an efreet and think, "This would be a cakewalk with Warrior/Cleric/Wizard," and then it turns out I'm right. (That may be a bad example because I got the feeling that boss was just not very hard to begin with, but I'm not sure.)

I love all eight of my little dudes, so I can't keep anyone on the bench for too long. I'll call out Ranger as my least favorite for lack of versatility, but then I slept on the summoning abilities for most of the game, and they're very good. The bow that gives +50% damage to living targets is what got her off the bench, and it's just amazingly powerful.

 

[FelixSH]

Lufia 2 is still very fun. I like the slight focus on puzzle solving (and I mean real puzzles, like you could find in a Zelda game, that may even stump you for a bit) and exploration (it's nice how you often find rooms, with no clear way to get to them). I also like how it looks, and the boss theme is pretty good.

I remember liking the story more, though. The general story is pretty simple ("a random woman in a cave told me my destiny was to fight, so why not go?"), and the character interaction is too focused on who will marry whom (and I don't like how the topic with every woman seems to be "will she find a good man?"). But i do enjoy the character interaction in general, and how Maxim marries Selan, and they get a kid. DQ V does it better, but it's nice that Lufia 2 clearly shows how characters and their relationships develop, if only a bit.

While I'm surely not going to beat it, I'm looking forward to diving a few times into that roguelike dungeon. This game really has a bit of everything, with most stuff done at least somewhat competently, and it becomes more then the sum of its parts, I think. There are even proto-Pokemon (I'll go for something else then the thing that becomes a dragon, this time, when I played this game a few times many years ago, this was always my go-to monster). There is so much in there.

 

[Issun]

I do like that, when Maxim does the old trope of making Selan and Tia stay behind, they get in a little "Hey, fuck you" at the boys.

 

[FelixSH]

After complaining about Lufia 2 a bit ago, I made it through the dungeon where Captain Dumbass dismisses the girly girls, because it's too dangerous. The boss fight was surprisingly easy - I understand that the game is way easier than I remember it being, but that guy who can demolish a whole island goes down surprisingly easily. Kinda pathetic.

After that, though, the story, or maybe more the character development, gets to the part I remember really liking, back 20 years ago. And I still like it a lot. Spoilers for a 30(?) year old game, I guess.

So, Maxim, our hero, was supposed to die after beating Gades, but gets saved by Prophecy Woman (who is a Sinistral herself, and I forgot why she is helping us). Which ruins everything, as Maxims bloodline is still alive.

So, what we get is a scene with Tifa and Dekard, where he shows some actual empathy and insight. And Tifa herself is pretty well realized, I think, for a female character of that time. Like, it's not even just that she realized that her love for Maxim wasn't real. But she understood, that he just isn't a good fit for her. He is a warrior, and she isn't. So she breaks off contact with him. Trying to get past him, to actually live her life in a way that will have a future.

That seems pretty complex, for an RPG of that time (or maybe in general?). Love won't solve everything, sometimes things just don't work out, with no fault of anyone.

Also, while Tia makes it clear to Selas a few times, that she won't give up on Maxim, she never gives Selan any crap. I mean, I guess here, but the game never states so. They are a team, working well together, and seemingly liking each other. Which, too, is an adult way of dealing with these things.

I also like how we get a bunch of story next. The story acts, like the world is saved, and we get something that might seem like an epilogue, with Maxim and Selan marrying, having fun and getting a kid. Until, in the last scene, that kid gets kidnapped by Gades' underling, who tells us about some other threat. And Prophecy Woman explains, that Maxim not dying changed everything.

Also, Gades' underling was a way more dangerous enemy than Gades. Might be partly, because my team at this point was only made up of two people, and while Selan is great, she doesn't take hits very well. Especially from the absurdly strong monsters that get summoned in battle here. My first game over.

Still enjoying myself, even though the puzzles are easier than I remember. Most of the time, I see them and know immediately what to do. I get the feeling, that even after all those years, some part of them is still stuck in my brain, and gets activated whenever I get to one of those puzzles. Which is a shame, I would love to solve them fresh.

Or maybe they are just easy. I'll never know.

 

[JBear]

Booted up Shadow Tower (PSX) last night to play blind, streamed to some friends over Discord, and played for a few hours. This game is rad as hell! My only previous pre-Souls From Software experience is King's Field IV, and this definitely seems to be in conversation with that, although this moves a bit faster, despite the inability to run (I think? If there's a run button, I haven't found it, at any rate.) The enemy designs are super fun and novel and there's a ton of variety (particular shout-outs to laughing beak flower and laser beam eye flower), and there's a very cute mole. 10/10, would get stuck in a tower again.

 

[Rascally Badger]

I'm really enjoying Fire Emblem: Engage. It feels a lot like the GBA games to me, which are my nostalgic favorites.

 

[Exposition Owl]

Just got off the Medical Deck in Nightdive’s remake of the original System Shock, and it’s a fascinating trip back in time. It’s the first pre-Half-Life shooter I’ve played since … well, since Half-Life came out. The maps are cramped and maze-like: they would certainly read as utilitarian spaces from an era in which spaceflight is still pretty basic, if it weren’t so hard to determine what their actual use might be. Why, for instance, is there a big old radioactive pit off to one side of the medical bay? I’m also finding that SHODAN is coming across as more campily over-the-top than chilling (though certainly not in a bad way!), which is not how I remember her from Shock 2. I don’t know whether that’s a real difference in writing or just the fact that I’m decades older now than I was when I first encountered SHODAN on the Von Braun.

All of these different kinds of videogaminess don’t take you out of things as much as they might, though, because for the remake Nightdive has leaned pretty hard into a “you’re playing a videogame” aesthetic. The textures are intentionally a little pixelated even at the highest graphics settings, I assume to recall the game’s 1990s roots. I’m used to playing 2D games with a purposely retro look, but this is the first one I’ve played with 3D environments. It works!

 

[Octopus Prime]

Double Dragon Gaiden: Rise of the Dragons neither looks plays nor feels like a Double Dragon game, but is very much a follow up to the same developers earlier Streets of Red wearing a Double Dragon skin. Much like how Cadence of Hyrule was a Crypt of the Necrodancer sequel with Zelda characters.

I also like it way more than Streets of Red, as combat feels more satisfying, more visually dynamic, more colourful, weird thematic street gangs are more interesting than zombies, and having a single franchise it’s an overt homage to beats Reference Humour every time.

 

[Octopus Prime]

As frequently happens when I’m on vacation; I wind up playing some random game from the depths of my backlog on a lark and learn that, *by george*, it’s a corking good time!

In this case, the painfully generic title of City Wars: Tokyo Reign is one of the most unique deckbuilders I’ve ever played;

The gist of it is that you and your opponent are competing over a timeline that represents a single round of combat and each of your cards has an Accuracy and Damage stat; whoever has the higher accuracy on a segment of the bar is the one to land the attack, and whoever dies first loses, and besides unique abilities and stat differences; each card also fills up different chunks of the timeline bar; so half the battle is trying to figure out where to position cards just as much as actually laying out enough damage to kill them before they kill you, and there’s lots of effects that screw up your or your opponents ability to play cards. Combat really feels more reliant on properly positioning the cards you have than hoping the RNG doesn’t screw you.

Boss fights bring in some really different mechanics too, rather than being A Guy With More Health.

 

[Fyonn]

Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse Remaster has a less than elegant translation of the original version's Wiimote flashlight + nunchuck tank controls to a more conventional control scheme. But somehow that feels appropriate for a franchise that is maybe dedicated to be very slightly not the ideal version of itself in every release. Otherwise the game is good! The extremely claustrophobic interiors of Mask do a great service to the game's ghosts, who are largely much easier to deal with than ghosts from earlier games, but must be dealt with in much less player-friendly environments. I'm playing on Normal, so I usually just tank damage, but I'm sure on Hard and Nightmare you really have to lean into each character's play style to effectively crowd control, be that Misaki's actual crowd control tools, stacking Ruka's options to increase her damage output, or leveraging Choshiro's massive area of effect.

I wish I could say something about the game's conveyance of horror, as there are some bits that I'm sure must hit hard for people, but Fatal Frame's combat disarms its horror for me. There's definitely joy for me in that contrast, but it means I have a very different experience than the one that gets people to say that Fatal Frame is one of the scariest franchises of horror game ever.

 

[JBear]

Presented without comment, some notes from my blind playthrough of Shadow Tower PSX:

-There's a pig who repairs gear for HP in Earth World, Rotting Cavern, just off the main shadow tower.
-I can swap between main and reserve weapons by hitting A, then Y. (My reserve weapon is currently a BOW)
-I can cast magic by hitting B, then Y, or off-hand magic by hitting B, then X.
-I can use my quick item slots by hitting B, then A, or swap between quick item slots by hitting B, waiting a beat, then hitting X or Y.
-I can cancel out of my quick item menu by hitting B again.

(This game owns bones; loving every inscrutable minute.)

 

[Fyonn]

Shadow Tower sure is a game. I eventually gave up on it due to some mid-to-late-game enemy types, but it's definitely a fun experience to explore.

 

[Kirin]

Is there some kinda in-world justification for that control scheme, because, wow…

 

[Peklo]

That sounds more confusing than the game is in practice--probably not helped by at least I being unable to work out whether a Nintendo or Microsoft alphabetical button layout is being used. This is how the game manual details the combinations:

In essence, square is the left hand, triangle is the right hand, and circle is used for casting both kinds of available magic, which are dictated by equipped rings in either hand, and so all the combinations used correspond accordingly. I think it's a pretty intuitive layout after a few minutes of acclimatizing.

 

[Kirin]

Ohhhh-kay, yeah, I had a feeling there might be some body-part based scheme going on but wasn't quite seeing it.

 

[Fyonn]

The controls are way more intuitive if you move the right and left hand buttons to R1 and L1 respectively, which you absolutely can because pre-Souls From Software games have far better control customization than any console game I've played since, well, From Software games on the PS2.

 

[Fyonn]

Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water (Fatal Frame 5) has a really interesting aspect missing not only from the rest of the franchise but most survival horror games. These people aren't stuck, isolated, in mortal peril with no escape. The cast of Fatal Frame 5 not only can leave Mt. Hitomi, they often do leave to rest, recuperate, do research, and escort people they've found to (presumed) safety. And yet, they always go back.

The reasons the cast keep subjecting themselves to this obvious supernatural danger they have first-hand experience of say so much about them as people. But the nature of Mt. Hitomi also calls those observations into question. (Content Warning: suicide) Is Yuri trying to save people the same way she was saved by her mentor? Or can Mt. Hitomi tell that Yuri was on the verge of killing herself, and is being drawn back so it can push her towards that outcome just like the rest of its victims? Is Ren's interest in his past and the lost works of a folklorist genuine, or has the sight of the postmortem photography drawn him to his inevitable doom, just like we learn has happened to so many others before him? Is Miu... uh, well. I haven't seen her since the prologue, but I'm sure there will be a similar theme at play with her.

Much like with Fatal Frame 3, Fatal Frame is by far the most interesting to me when it is deliberately blurring the lines between the ideas of safety and danger. Both games delight in showing you through indirect glimpses that no, there is nothing inherently more secure about being in your own home than the depths of a nightmare dreamscape or a deadly mountain with an agenda of bloodshed. And here's the thing - you aren't shutting your entire body down for eight hours at a time while in the Scary Danger Place.

 

[Peklo]

The controls are way more intuitive if you move the right and left hand buttons to R1 and L1 respectively, which you absolutely can because pre-Souls From Software games have far better control customization than any console game I've played since, well, From Software games on the PS2.

This is something you can do, but which I never did, because to me the movefeel of old From (extending to Armored Core, which uses King's Field controls almost as is--only the perspective shifts) is defined by strafing mapped to shoulder buttons, and additionally vertical look mapped to L2/R2. I experimented simulating more modern layouts but found they were either unnecessary for the design language of the games, or in some cases actively intruded upon the experience through impreciseness that was not previously there.

 

[Violentvixen]

During the Steam narrative game sale earlier this year someone pointed out a game called Stray Gods was coming out and I played the demo and loved it. Might be best described as a musical interactive novel murder mystery? I've just started Act II and am loving it. The game is on the short side (edit: just finished and it took me about 6 hours). It sounds like things can change quite a bit with later playthroughs depending on your choices but no idea how much yet.

My only complaint is that characters lines change in volume oddly sometimes. At first I thought it was a mimickry of how they would be moving on stage relative to the audience, but then there was a conversation where both characters were sitting still and lines would change in volume more than I expected. Nothing that makes it hard to hear or suddenly blows out my speakers, but odd. There are a lot of sound options to fiddle with so maybe I'll toggle some things and see if that helps.

I do like that there is the option to turn off the timed options. I've kept them on since they do seem to be well-used in cases where making a decision does have to happen quickly plot-wise and I've had more than enough time to read the options then think about 'em.

 

[FelixSH]

Replaying Hollow Knight. Just beat the Mantis Lords. In a game with a lot of fun bosses, this is one of my favorites. It feels like a dance.