December '21 Play Log: New Years Edition

This game was disappointing. The story wasn’t remotely interesting up until the final part, at which point it was really interesting and enjoyable. Unfortunately by that time I was mostly ready for it to be over.

Pros:

• Good voice acting
• The end of the story was very good

Cons:

• I kept getting stuck with the puzzles and ended up repeatedly consulting a walkthrough
• No hint system. If there was a decent hint system the difficulty probably wouldn’t be a problem.
• The interaction system was occasionally annoying. You right click and then select how to interact (look, hand, foot, talk). If you double click you’ll redo the last thing, which often isn’t correct. There must be a less annoying way to do this.
• The story wasn’t interesting up until the end. It just jumped right in without doing anything to get me invested.
• You can click escape to ‘jump’ to wherever you’re walking. This resulted in me accidentally skipping conversations and having to reload to see them more than once.
• The escape to skip walking function is disabled at the end despite repeatedly having to go back and forth through sections. There doesn’t really seem to be a reason for it either.

Decent overall but it does get repetitive once you’ve played a few games.

Pros:

• Good cartoony visuals & sound effects
• Great variety between the different expeditions
• There’s an element of RNG in each expedition - locations, and what you’ll find on the map varies from playthrough to playthrough, adding variety which is important since the game is intended to be replayed numerous times
• You can choose 5 expeditions per game, but you don’t have to stop once the 5 are up
• The character specific campfire stories can make things interesting and help differentiate the characters and give them personality
• The different characters and classes have good variety of strengths/weaknesses and seem fairly well balanced for the most part

Cons:

• You have to really focus on money to upgrade your crew to stand any chance of beating the harder expeditions within a 5 expedition game
• Having separate achievement for every character to lead a winning crew is excessive, especially given that the only difference between the leader and the crew members is a small starting bonus.
• Some small bugs - one achievement seems broken, and one expedition’s difficulty is wrong on the world map (compared to what you actually encounter, which is much easier than it advertises)

I thoroughly enjoyed this game, it really messes with your mind. It reminds me a little of The Stanley Parable.

Pros:

• Good story
• Very well done artwork
• The mechanics are unique and work extremely well
• Good background music
• Good narration/voice acting
• Secrets/collectibles for an added challenge

Cons:

• I’m not a fan of the challenge mode. In theory it’s good, but in practice limiting the number of moves you can make requires to you resize objects perfectly the first time, which isn’t always easy
• The fire extinguishers & fire alarm collectibles were pointless

Experienced on Oculus Rift

I thoroughly enjoyed this and highly recommend it for anyone looking for a simple VR swordplay game. It’s very impressive for only two developers. The biggest downside is the lack of polish, but I suspect this was a case of sacrificing some things to be able to make the gameplay as good as it is in other areas.

Pros:

• Good variety in level design
• I liked being able to store weapons over your shoulder
• The gem on your wrist for health is a good way to avoid a heads up display while also making it clear what you’re health is at
• Mechanics wise it was well done - swinging a sword and holding a shield felt satisfying and realistic
• The larger the swing you take with your weapon the more damage you do - no Skyrim VR here. You can’t wield a two handed blade in one hand, stick it in an enemy, and wiggle
• Blocking and parrying felt good
• I’m not usually interested in simplistic arena wave fighting, but I actually quite enjoyed it here, although I suspect that’s because I had completed the story as well
• Good weapon variety including some interesting ‘just for fun’ ones such as bombs

Cons:

• Sometimes glitchy - I accidentally sent a shovel through a wall and out of the level once, and also glitched up onto a balcony somehow
• Doesn’t always cooperate if you take off the headset. Most of the time it was fine, but twice I had to restart after being unable to move my hands when I went back in.
• Sound effects for things you’re supposed to hit with your sword are fine, but most other things (walls, barrels, etc) default to a metal-on-metal sound effect that is often out of place.
• While it didn’t bother me personally, having the arena only unlock after beating the game may be an issue for people who often play in groups
• You can only unlock enemy weapons through the arena after beating the campaign, which seems reasonable except that the enemy weapons aren’t all that good anyway so really aren’t worth using except out of curiosity since you’ll probably have bought better ones by the time you beat the game.
• The visuals could use some polish. Randomly sticking your sword through a guillotine only for your sword to stop in mid-air with a clang is immersion breaking. Similarly with your sword stopping noticeably before hitting furniture, etc.
• I first thought there were lots of secret doors, but then realized it was just the wall panels had noticeable seams - the graphics didn’t blend them together
• There were often gaps between floor and wall around the edges of brick, etc, that you could see outside of the level from
• Strange achievement decisions. There is a separate achievement per difficulty per level which seems excessive, but nothing about unlocking all weapons, getting certain ranks on levels, etc.

Experienced on Ocululs Rift

Absolutely wonderful game, must have for anyone who enjoys a good story. If there was a sequel I’d buy it in a heartbeat.

Pros:

• Cutest main character of any game I’ve ever played
• Quill isn’t just a character you play as - she actually shows emotion and communicates with you
• Gorgeous, very cute graphics
• Lots of attention to detail in the environments
• Great background music
• Excellent voice acting/narration
• Some of the best puzzles I’ve seen in games, with a good difficulty balance - some parts are challenging, but not overly so.
• The chapter select screen shows you how many of what collectible you have left to find in each chapter
• Quill will occasionally mime hints

Cons:

• There’s no apparent point to the collectibles. They’re easy enough to get so it’s not a big deal, but I dislike it when games have collectibles without them either adding something to the story (lore, etc) or the story giving you a well defined reason for collecting them.

I’m giving this a tentative recommendation, but I’d only advise playing it if you enjoy a significant challenge and enjoy platformers. I don’t like either, so in hindsight this isn’t really my type of game.

Pros:

• For such an old game the graphics hold up reasonably well with a few tweaks (set the file to read only after you tweak it though or they’ll get overriden)
• The story is pretty decent
• Very well voice acted
• Being able to use a lightsaber and leaping around is really cool
• Good variety of guns

Cons:

• The game never stops to teach you much (e.g. how to deploy the turrets you get, how to heal, etc). Maybe this is all the same in the first game and you’re expected to remember? I haven’t played it.
• You’re never taught more advanced lightsaber techniques - how to move it in certain ways, etc. Actually understanding this would probably have made lightsaber duels a bit easier.
• Even on easy, this game is HARD. Up until the first boss fight it’s not too bad, but the bosses and the more difficult lightsaber wielding foes you face are quite difficult.
• Thankfully there are cheats. I don’t like platformers, so I ended up enabling god mode (invincibility) there, which made things easier in some areas.
• Enemies using force attacks you can’t block against (such as grip) are really annoying (e.g. loosing half your health to grip)
• There are a number of bugs in the save system. The most annoying is deleting saves. If you select a save and delete it, it deletes that one only. If you’re on the load screen and hit delete on the preselected save, it’ll delete all saves for that level. Since delete is right below load (poor design choice IMO) it’s surprisingly easy to mess up and have to restart a level.
• If you die and let it load the game for you instead of doing it manually, it’ll bring you back to the previous checkpoint even if you have more recent saves
• Checkpoints are few and far between - most levels don’t seem to have any, meaning if you don’t save manually you have to restart
• The final boss battle is next to impossible. God mode is your friend here. It’s too easy on god mode, but the alternative is it being so difficult that most people will end up so frustrated that they hate the game by the end of it.
• The slow-mo finisher for lightsaber duels looks neat at first, but gets annoying fast - especially if you still have enemies shooting at you while you wait for it to finish.