rocky41_7

I will be honest upfront and say I haven't finished the DLC, but I'm also not sure I'll bother, so it seemed as good a time as any to review. Spoilers below.

I don't know if this is because it's been so long since I played the base game, or because I just came off of finishing Hades for the first time, but Fate of Atlantis felt so...lackluster. I've been trying to consider why.

The designs of the gods were incredibly boring, for one. They didn't look like gods, they looked like half-assed shiny computer sims, which is basically what they were, I guess. After the absolutely stunning designs and voicework of the gods in Hades, these felt like Dollar Tree knock-offs. So Hades has black scelera...so what?

And the voice acting was terrible. Hermes and Persephone's lines were cringe worthy every time for the stilted, halting way they delivered them. And why did everyone say her name that way? I was relieved to get out of Elysium just so I didn't have to hear them anymore.

The missions were similarly unengaging. Especially egregious was the missions involving Phoebe and the Cyclops in the fields of Asphodel...we are literally just repeating missions from the base game at this point. Defeat Cyclops again? Rescue Phoebe again? The aggravating roteness of these missions robbed Kassandra's reunion with Phoebe of any real emotional weight, because I was busy being annoyed at the game design. Also, the fact that the Cyclops gets to go on tormenting people in the Underworld just as he did in life makes basically every good deed Kassandra ever did feel useless, because the same shit is just going to go on in the afterlife.

The whole set-up of the DLC wasn't inspiring either, but reasonable minds will differ on this. After emerging from the actual Greek underworld in Hades, playing through an alien's simulation of it felt pointless and lacking in weight. The only moment that garnered real emotional investment for me--the moment where Kassandra chooses whether or not to betray Leonides, her grandfather--was almost immediately eviscerated by remembering that he isn't real, just a simulation created by the Isu. So who cares if you stab him in the back and throw his corpse at Persephone's feet?

We didn't even get to collect any particularly cool or superpowered armor or weapons. Neither the armor collected in Elysium nor the one from Asphodel was very exciting, and none of the new weapons were worth hanging onto; the stuff I finished the base game with was more powerful than anything I collected in the DLC.

I finished a good chunk of this because I was laid up with a fractured foot, but I just don't think it's worth any more of my time. Majorly disappointing, because Odyssey is one of my favorite AC games.

Tell Me Why is an output of DontNod studios, which is for some reason not included in the Life is Strange universe, although it follows the same pattern as their other games. I'm not sure why it's never taken off in the fandom, because it hits many of the same sweet spots as the other games.

In Tell Me Why you play as a set of twins, Tyler and Allison, who are returning to their childhood home in Alaska to sell the property now that their mother is dead. Tyler has just been released from juvenile detention and a rehabilitation program. Like the LiS protagonists, Allison and Tyler discover they share a strange new mental power, and use it to uncover their family's past and understand the circumstances that led up to Tyler's arrest years earlier.

DontNod released Tell Me Why free in June for Pride month because Tyler is trans, which is not the sum of his character, but neither is it irrelevant to the plot of the game. Tyler's reception by the locals of their small town and his perception of that reception shapes his relationship with the town and his history with it. No one is openly transphobic to him, but occasionally they do make deeply insensitive comments, which Tyler can either gently call them out on, or more aggressively shut them down. Tyler's struggle with whether or not his mother would have accepted him if he had come out before her death is central to his emotional journey.

The game does a great job of setting up two young adults who had been essentially two halves of the same whole as children coming back together and wondering if any of that closeness can be regained, or if they're simply too different. And part of that is up to you as the player--in lieu of LiS' famous "this action will have consequences" notice, you'll get one of two symbols after making choices, which will indicate either Allison and Tyler growing closer or further apart.

The game also posits some really interesting emotional difficulties with the twins' relationship with their mother, Mary-Anne. Obviously they loved her, and they exclaim at various points over how imaginative and creative she was, as well as how well she managed with little resources. However, it's also clear that Mary-Anne's erratic behavior damaged the twins growing up, and their deeply isolated childhood created strange dynamics in the house where Allison and Tyler were often each other's only company, with no Internet and limited technology to reach beyond the boundaries of the property.

Like DontNod's other games, Tell Me Why firmly situates itself in the locale, with vast expanses of Alaska's wilderness serving as the backdrop for the family drama. And like its other games, Tell Me Why follows the same pattern of ferrying you around to different locations in town so you can explore, have conversations, and then use your powers to wring more information out of the moment.

My overall thoughts are that if you enjoyed any of the other games in the Life is Strange universe, you'll also enjoy Tell Me Why. I did and I'll probably play again to see what changes if you pull the twins apart rather than pushing them together.

This is actually a game I bought in 2017 and binged then. It's been a hot minute since I touched it, but I picked it up again yesterday and I love it as much now as I did then.

80 Days is a text-based game based off Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days. Inkle's game takes a more modern approach, placing the game in a steampunk version of the 19th century and affording a great deal more attention to women, characters of color, and queer characters than the original novel. The people you meet throughout the game are truly a diverse and fascinating set of characters.

In the game, you take on the role of Passepartout, valet to Phileas Fogg, a wealthy Englishman who has made a bet that he can travel around the world in 80 days or fewer. Naturally, most of the planning for this affair falls on poor Passepartout.

This game is an absolute delight; it charms at every turn and manages to capture Passepartout's sense of wonder and awe at the many things he sees on their travels so well. The text is beautiful and the game truly strives to present each city through which you pass in its most interesting light; there is nowhere on the map which is lacking in culture or intrigue. What graphics are present are crisp and clean, giving just enough to flavor the setting.

There are gameplay mechanics to be had as well--the whole journey is timed (although the clock stops when the game presents text for you to read, so you aren't having to speed through it) and your goal is to win Mr. Fogg's wager. Different routes will afford different speeds, some cities will be easier to get out of than others, and time-consuming calamities lie around every corner. You will also have some minor money management and needing to keep track of your supplies--various bits of gear and clothing may help you along the way, but some routes only allow for so many suitcases!

There are such a variety of narratives, some of which span across the globe, that the game has phenomenal replay value. My only real criticism of it is that some of the narratives are so niche and require such serendipitous choices that you could play the game a thousand times and never get the full story without an achievement guide. Still, it's a game packed full of possibility!

I think 80 Days will be one of those games I just perennially return to, always eager for a new adventure--or a refresher on an old one. I really cannot recommend this one enough.

I have FINALLY finished my first playthrough of Sunless Skies so here I am to talk about it. I should say upfront it didn't take me that long because I was putting it off, but because there's a lot of content and I've been very busy the last year (I graduated in May!) The Steam page description for the game is:
It's a very brief description for a pretty detailed game. Sunless Skies is part of Failbetter Studios' Fallen London universe, but you don't need familiarity with the past games to play this one. This was the first FL game I had ever played and I didn't find my experience hampered at all (and I've heard the gameplay is a huge step up from Sunless Seas, the last game).

First, Sunless Skies is a HEAVILY text-based game. There is gameplay, in the form of flying your train around the universe and occasionally battling enemies while managing your resources, but the overwhelming bulk of the game takes place in the text, so if you're someone who doesn't like a lot of reading in your games, this one is probably a miss for you. That said, the text is very well-written, which is a relief from some of the more recent text-based games I've played which just do not hit hard enough for something so reliant on the prose.

Second, the atmosphere of the game is exquisite. It captures so well the kind of eldritch/Lovecraftian horror I love. It never overplays its hand, either by wielding the cudgel of eldritch horror too frequently--it often lurks under the surface or just around the corner, hinted at but not seen directly--or by explaining too much--you must accept that most things about this world you will simply never understand, and that's appropriate for your poor captain.

Third, while the graphics are somewhat limited--the game is primarily an isometric view of the map with landmarks, landmasses, and engines seen from overhead--what does exist is beautiful. Even well into the game I still found myself charmed by the beauty of the stars passing by under my engine and the details on the map. The character avatars too are unique and varied, with so much personality in each of them.

Fourth, the options! Because it's text-based, Sunless Skies has a bit more freedom to give you a massive breadth of choices on how to play your captain and what you want to do while exploring the perpetually-dangerous universe. There are many things in the game which are not super relevant from a gameplay perspective, but which may make a huge difference to you and your PC from a roleplaying perspective, so if you're someone who gets really into developing your PC's motivations and personality, you'll enjoy this aspect.


Fifth, the game provides two difficulty modes, which is great. With the first, if your captain dies, you have to start with a new one. You'll retain some benefits from the last captain, but you will also be largely reset. Under the "merciful" mode, you have the option to continue from the last save with your same captain OR accept that captain's death and start with a new one. If you love a game that really challenges you, Sunless Skies can be that. If you prefer minor challenges and a focus on story, it can get you closer to that too. Sunless Skies, particularly early in the game, can be brutal in terms of managing your nightmares, terror, fuel, supplies, and trying to discover new ports and necessary landmarks. I've heard it's not as challenging as Sunless Seas, and there are various adjustments--such as aiming assist--which you can use to lighten the load, but it will certainly present you with difficult choices at some points.

If you want any advice, prioritize obtaining and getting the stats to use the wrath of heaven canon. It is ridiculously OP and allows you to 1-2 shot most enemies in the game, which is useful because the combat is easily, to me, the worst part of the game. It's so frustrating that for the first three-fourths of the game, before I had the wrath of heaven, I just avoided combat entirely.

Overall, this game felt really creative to me, I had a lot of fun with the narrative, and I've already started my next playthrough in order to play an absolutely bastard captain. Thumbs up from me!

Augh okay. This game was such a mixed bag, so I'll try to apportion my review accordingly...This is a game I was interested in buying for a long time, and I don't regret buying it, but there was also a stretch of several months where I wasn't sure I was going to bother to finish it.

The Good

- Art. The game employs a loose, evocative art style that's what first caught my attention when it was just a stub article in a Game Informer issue. It suits the folk tone of the game very well and the character designs are both varied and say so much about each character. The game is especially good at evoking a shiver of horror with only a simple image.

- Music. Loved the soundtrack! Different styles of music for different cultural regions of the US was a great touch.

- The storytelling. The game is almost a visual novel, with very little gameplay, so the storytelling is key, and the game does knock this out of the ballpark, imo. Both the stories that you collect around the country and the stories of the characters you camp with are fantastic. They're emotional, vivid, and excel both at the realism end of the spectrum (a soldier returning home to find his girlfriend getting married) to the fantastical (The woman who could draw anything).

- Atmosphere. The game does a great job drawing you into its atmosphere, and coloring its stories to fit each region where you "find" them. It really drives home the desperate situation of the country in the 1930s for people across many walks of life, and its continual reminder of the thick thread of horror going through the game is balanced with its frequent reminders of the simple beauties of life and love. It really comes across as very heartfelt, tender storytelling, which I appreciate.

- Voiceacting. The voice actors throughout do a fantastic job, narrator included. I read much faster than I hear so given the option I will usually speed through the written text and ignore the voice reading it, but I found myself often forgoing that even on repetitive lines here because the actors were just so compelling.

- Themes. Just generally, I loved playing a game about telling stories! The mechanic where stories would "grow" on their own as other people spread the tales you'd told them was particularly fun and I really enjoyed hearing how the story had changed since I had last told it.

The Bad

- Travel. This goes first because it's the most frustrating thing about the game, imo. Your character moves across the map at an absolutely glacial pace, so much so that I'd set her up in a particular direction on autowalk and then go browse tumblr or read the news until she got close to where I wanted to go. You can make her marginally faster with the whistling minigame, but as soon as you stop punching buttons she returns to her usual pace. Perhaps this is to encourage you to hop rides on trains (which either cost money or health) or hitchhike (where you have no control of how far a car will take you and don't know ahead of time how far that will be), but mostly it's just annoying.

- Story-swapping. Overall I want to say I did actually enjoy this mechanic. I think it was a fun, interesting way to engage and using stories of your own to coax out another character's story is cool. However, characters will ask you for a specific genre of story--and nowhere in the game does it tell you what genre the various stories you collect are. You may think "How hard is it to tell a scary story from a funny story?" and the answer is a lot harder than you think. Especially as the story changes over time! Characters react badly if you give them a genre they didn't ask for, and you only have a handful of swaps per meeting to get them to open up to you before you have to track them down again on the map. You have to just remember the genres based on character's reactions, which even if you have a good memory is going to be difficult if you, like me, often take long breaks between gameplay sessions. The only thing that got me to finish the game at all was that someone on Steam has uploaded a guide breaking down the different stories into their respective genres.

Additionally, the progress bar that shows how open a character is to you is not reliable. I often told them the exact type of story they asked for only to not progress the meter at all, which usually resulted in having to track them down again. Other times, the meter reset with each new meeting, requiring me to start all over again. This made the last ~2 hours a slog of repeatedly tracking down the same characters to try to get to the end of their stories.

- Limited gameplay rewards. There's no reward either in-game or as an achievement for collecting or growing stories. In the beginning I was working hard to collect every story I saw on the map and grow as many of them to completion as possible (generally a story will change twice before it's complete), but then I realized...there's literally no benefit. It doesn't matter. As long as you have enough stories not to repeat tales to the same characters, you could finish the game with the same handful of stories and it would be no different than if you collected all of the stories and grew them all. Given the slow walk mechanic, I then gave up on grabbing any stories that weren't in my existing pathway.

- You can only "earn money" once per city, which is frustrating if you're traversing back and forth because you instead have to count on stumbling across an opportunity in the field. Several times I ended up walking the character to death because every city I passed I'd already earned money in on the way west so I couldn't earn anything to buy food.

- Rose. While most of the game is entrenched pretty clearly in the 1930s Great Depression-era--characters will talk about Hoovervilles, one of the recurring places you can "hear a story" is in line at a soup kitchen, one of the characters you camp with is an "Okie" who traveled to California from the Midwest to find work after the land dried up--Rose is very clearly a hippie. She even talks about her parents voting for Nixon. It's extremely jarring and while I liked Rose and her story, it pulled me out of the game every time because she is so clearly from two generations down the road of everyone else.

- The final achievement is intentionally impossible. It's a minor gripe, but it is irritating to be permanently stuck at 97% completion.

Ultimately, I would say that if this is in line with the games you usually like--story-based, visual novel type things--it might be worth checking out despite its flaws. However, if this is a stretch game for you and this genre is not usually something you enjoy, it's probably not worth the time.

I'm five years late on this game, which is usually par for the course because I'm rarely looking to pay full price for a game. This was another Steam fall sale purchase. About the game, Steam says:

I remember hearing about What Remains years ago through Game Informer and wondering if a game like this could manage to make itself interesting. There's virtually no gameplay here; it's all narrative. You walk Edith through her monstrous childhood home and she relates to you various stories about her unfortunate family (Are they cursed? Is it all in their heads? Up to you.) The writing in a game like this is critical.

Now, having played it, I think What Remains deserves the praise it's gotten. This game does an excellent job of engaging you in Edith's world with the beautiful visual details and different methods of conveying each character's story. For each tale Edith tells you about a family member, you take on the relevant character and guide them through the tale. This puts you front and center for their fate, as the story usually centers around the events leading up to their last moments of life. To keep the game interesting, each narrative style is unique to the character it features. For example, one story is told as Edith reads a comic book about the event and you navigate the protagonist through the various panels of the comic.

Death is an overarching theme of What Remains; if death or surrounding issues are troubling or triggering for you, I recommend giving this one a hard pass. It addresses a lot of dark themes, although I think it handles them tactfully. It's easy to see, with so much life and trauma intertwining in the house, why it's difficult for Edith to parse out her feelings about her family and their ancestral home.

The house is located on Orcas Island, one of the San Juan Islands off the coast of Washington, which I have to point out because I went camping almost yearly on Orcas Island when I was growing up; one year I went to summer camp at Camp Orkila. The artists captured the gloomy atmosphere of the area quite well! (Although I must note there is not, nor has there ever been, a train on Orcas Island.)

I really enjoyed What Remains and I will play it again. Visually it's a beautiful game. It's emotionally touching and I loved being drawn into the world of the Finches. The game really invites you to get to know each of them, if only for a brief time, and does some excellent visual storytelling in the spaces that belong to each character.

It's not a long game (took me about 2.5 hours to finish and I did hit all the stories), but I think it lasts just as long as it needs to.

Today I finally finished Heaven's Vault! I bought this game because it was put out by Inkle studio and I was fanatical about their text-based travel game 80 Days (based on the Jules Verne novel Around the World in 80 Days). Heaven's Vault is a very different game, but with the same story-telling prowess Inkle showed in 80 Days! The description from Steam is:
This is a little skimpy on details so I'll give some more: You play as Aliya, an archaeologist and amateur linguist who works for a university. Sailing around the galaxy in her trusty ship the Nightingale, Aliya seeks out remnants of the galaxy's long-lost history of the Ioxian Empire which came before, and peoples who existed even earlier. The game begins with Aliya investigating a small mystery on behalf of her benefactor at the university, but she quickly realizes there's more at play here and more secrets of the galaxy to uncover.

The main mechanic of the game is the translation puzzle (this is a combat-free game). Aliya's main method of learning more about the galaxy is uncovering old artifacts and translating the Ancient script on them. I think this mechanic works very well; it's intuitive and as you build out your dictionary of words it's exciting to able to translate longer and longer phrases. It's not especially difficult, so if you're looking for a brain-bender puzzle, look elsewhere.

I absolutely love the story-telling in this game, as noted. One of the things I noted with this game is how respectful Aliya is of the cultures she's investigating. She's never dismissive or demeaning, or with the cultural arrogance one might fear going into a game with this premise. There are a lot of mysteries in this galaxy, and most of them the game will not give you a concrete answer about. With Aliya you can spend as much time as you like looking for puzzle pieces, and then make your best guess about what happened, and often it will just be left at that. If you're looking for a story that wraps everything up neat with a bow on top, this is not the right game for that. As befits a story about ancient long-lost cultures, there's often only Aliya's best guess about what happened.

That said, the game gives you some vivid hints at some of the things that went on in the Ioxian Empire and things that came before, both on a large scale (I still think my worker/robot solidarity idea wasn't totally ruled out by canon!) and on a smaller, personal scale (investigating the site of the mining moon gave me chills).

The game does a fantastic job of sharing with you Aliya's excitement over finding scraps--a bit of sailcloth from an old Empire ship here, a carved figure from Ancient times there--and about puzzling through the translations. When you do (minor spoilers!) find some relatively in-tact Ancient sites, the game shares with you Aliya's awe and amazement--although some of this technology may look very familiar to you.

For some criticism, it's clear the game was made on a low budget. The artwork is lovely but the animation is jerky and glitchy. The characters doesn't have feet (character models just fade out, presumably to avoid some walking animation) and the camera can be pesky at times, but none of these things I ever felt overshadowed the gameplay. The other thing I'd say is that the ship sailing minigame as Aliya moves from planet to planet gets old fairly quickly. You can skip it by passing control of the ship to your robot, but if you're sailing somewhere you've never been before, she'll pass control back to you once you move out of familiar space. There are reasons to want to sail yourself (dialogue, opportunities to snag more artifacts) but I don't think you miss a ton by letting the robot steer.

You can also do new game plus, where your dictionary of Ancient translations carries over, which I will definitely be trying. Choices do have an impact in this game, so your outcomes may be different on a second playthrough!

Overall, this is a fairly mellow exploration game which goes hard on the "exploring the ruins of lost space cultures" angle, so if you're into that, definitely check this one out! Thank you Inkle for another great game!

I'm knocking 'em down this month because I won't be taking the X-box with me to Louisiana.

Sea of Solitude is a simple 3rd person game with smooth, cartoony graphics and basic gameplay. The basis of the game is that Kay--the protagonist and PC--has become so consumed with loneliness she's transformed into a monster. In her quest to heal herself and defeat the monsters of her fear and anxiety that tail her throughout the game, she finds that most of the people around her are also dealing with loneliness in some way and it's her efforts to help them that help her help herself.

This game drives hard at the emotional element. There's not much subtlety and it might come off as hokey at times, but overall the game has a lot of heart and its very earnest. I've been interested the last several years in the theme of loneliness and some of the inherent isolation of the modern world, especially if you don't have a romantic partner in your life, so I was really interested to see a game try to tackle this theme and I think they did pretty good overall.

They did a good job of showing how Kay struggles to overcome her own inertia, not knowing when to try to help vs. when to let go and give space, and realizing that she's really overlooked the people in her life crying out for help until now.

The gameplay itself gets a little repetitive; it's mainly 3D platforming with a few other small mechanics, because the point of the game is really about Kay's emotional journey. It gets a little stale, but the game isn't long enough to feel really bored with it.

It seems to be only available as a digital download right now, not sure if the studio is planning on releasing a physical copy later.

I enjoyed the game, but I will add a warning that it deals with some pretty heavy subjects including depression and suicidal thoughts, so mind your triggers if you play.

I finally picked up Jedi Fallen Order from Gamestop this week and I got it for a steal of $4 after my monthly coupon was applied.

Honestly, I'd have paid more for it now that I've seen some of it. It's really well done! I've only made it as far as Zeffo, with a brief detour to Dathomir because I couldn't not visit Dathomir on the earliest available opportunity (plus there's a dual-bladed lightsaber upgrade there), but it's got gorgeous visuals. It so captures the Star Wars atmosphere and that peculiar mix of the modern and the archaic which makes Star Wars so charming. It also does an excellent job of encouraging exploration and creating that sense of wonder over seeing new places and trying to piece together the story of what happened there.

The combat definitely takes a note from Dark Souls, but in a far more forgiving sense, which makes it (imo) more fun. I'm still getting used to the mix of lightsaber and force powers but for the most part it's been a fairly smooth ride and I appreciate that.

I'm very interested to see where the rest of the game goes because I've enjoyed the first two (and a half) planets so much!