July Report
Bought the game chiefly because it helps charities rescue stray cats. Aside from the cute visual style and informational tips on taking care of cats, the Sudoku part is good enough but not outstanding, lacking QoL UI conveniences such as highlighting all the instances already filled in the grids when the mouse is hovering over one of the number on the numpad (or cat on the catpad, to be precise). Though I do acknowledge I've been spoiled by Sudoku games designed for more hardcore players and am thus harder to please.
All in all, it was a great purchase and I definitely will purchase other games from this studio.
Game design
I'm not a huge fan of the design decision where there are 4 different endings you can get, especially because
- the section you must go through to achieve all endings have the clues scattered across multiple rooms
- I can't identify much logical reasoning behind the locations of these clues
- said sections no longer include in-game hints
so in the end I had to resort to online walkthroughs to get all endings.
Performance
I personally also encountered more bugs in this one out of all 4 The Room games, most notably: mouse jittering when rotating wheels, making it extremely difficult to turn it to the desired position; some textures are not rendered correctly on the Steam Deck despite rated as Playable.
All that said, this is another solid installment in the series and I enjoyed it a lot.
This is my favorite The Room installment by a decent margin, because of the way this one is structured. It no longer has multiple endings the way the previous title, The Room Three, does; but it features nonlinearity by interweaving multiple chapters, i.e. constantly placing clues required in one chapter in another one, while also providing a logical path for the player to realize the clue belongs to another chapter, e.g. the chimney running along the outside of the dollhouse from the kitchen to the study, or the speaker running from the maritime room to the curiosity room. But the logicality also made the game easier to complete, at least for me (there was even 1 trading card left to drop when I completed the game), so I hope future titles are slightly longer while keeping the similar logicality and nonlinear structure.
SG win:
The good
The game blends light elements from multiple genres, resulting in an experience that is, as far as I can tell, quite unlike anything else:
- base building / resource management / economy
- puzzle
- automation
- RPG
I also enjoyed the cute pixel art.
The bad
- Maybe it's because I'm bad at the resource management genre, but the reverse difficulty curve really threw me off at first. I lost 3 runs before finally completing the 4th, because I kept going bankrupt and failing to pay off my debt at the start.
- Traveling can be tedious at times. When you are driving a slower ship model and/or run into a storm, it's frustrating to watch the little ship icon crawling slowly on the map. I think it'd work better if the icon moves at the same speed, while only raising the fuel consumption rate.
Aside from early titles such as Half Life, this is actually my first modern "boomer shooter" that pays homage to older FPS designs. It's a rich genre the history of which I know little of, but I can say I enjoyed it greatly despite lacking much cultural context. The gunplay feels satisfying, the enemy variety is great and the level design is complex and rich enough that there're still much left for me to explore and discover after beating the main campaign. I'll definitely continue playing it every once in a while, looking to complete the game.
The second installment of New Blood Interactive's FPS trilogy, after DUSK. I enjoyed this one even more, somehow much more, than DUSK, which I already enjoyed immensely.
The good
- The maps feature incredible verticality, and combined with the absence of fall damage, it can be very satisfying to explore them
- The visuals are stunning, even without RT on my Steam Deck
- Because the player character uses magical weapons instead of firearms, those projectiles travel much slower than the bullets in most FPS games I've played. It constantly feels like I'm throwing objects at enemies with formidable strength and precision, and makes hitscan FPS games feel much less satisfying for me.
- Each chapter introduces different enemies, and not long after playing, I could develop an intuition for which weapon's traits work best against which enemies' traits, which felt incredibly rewarding
The bad
Some bosses left much to be desired, mechanics-wise. Most notably for me:
- The Solar Saint. I can enter Soul Mode and destroy the boss within 20 seconds, without even giving them a chance to attack me once.
- Evil. There are four mana fountains in the arena for the four different mana types, from which both Evil and the player character draw mana. Evil will always draw from the fountain the player character is standing the closest to, and the player can easily exploit this by standing next to the blue fountain, which corresponds to the weakest boss attack pattern.
A very endearing metroidvania, short and charming. The writing and humor are pretty solid, the controls are tight, and I loved the visual style. Nothing bad for me, but also nothing outstanding or groundbreaking.
One of my favorite and most memorable indie games in recent memory, it's a lovely combination of stealth and puzzle solving. Next up I'm going to complete it and also buy Heat Signature from the same dev while it's on sale.
Also the achievements are hilarious for me.
SG win:
At first I was slightly turned off by how illogical and absurd the solutions to the puzzles often were, but very quickly I adapted to the goofy humor and got surprisingly good at coming up with the exact silly solution the game had in mind. The story is nothing noteworthy but the characters are lovable, due in no small part to the great voice acting and writer(s)' sense of humor, which I loved.
Wow! Spectacular assassination right there, congratz! So many games!
I also loved the Completed / Beaten tabs. But at 2/3 games beaten per month, tops, I’m far from having a good excuse to steal the idea. Another good reason to aim for more :)
July was my first month after joining BLAEO so my motivation was/is sky high :D The HTML snippets for the tab panes were actually sent to me by samwise in the PAGYWOSG/PoP discord, and here they are in case you, like me, don’t know HTML but want to steal the idea in the future!
<ul class="nav nav-tabs">
<li class="active"><a data-toggle="tab" href="#" data-target="#1">Name of first pane</a></li>
<li><a data-toggle="tab" href="#" data-target="#2">name of second pane</a></li>
<li><a data-toggle="tab" href="#" data-target="#3">name of thrid pane</a></li>
</ul>
<div class="tab-content">
<div id="1" class="tab-pane fade in active">
Put content of first pane in here
</div>
<div id="2" class="tab-pane fade">
Put content of Second pane in here
</div>
<div id="3" class="tab-pane fade">
Put content of third pane in here
</div>
Nice! Thanks for sharing that! I actually do know html, but I resort to viewing the code here on the site (F12 in most browsers I know) and copy/pasting the parts I’m interested in reproducing.
Yup that does come handy! I plan to do the same with my profile hehe, checking out how other users coded their profile so that the tabs and the paragraphs play nicely together.
I blatantly stole the structure and format (+tabs) of your profile info. Mine was empty, so double thanks for inspiring me to break that one in!
Lol in fact I was just fumbling with my profile info just now and suddenly saw four unread notifications from you! I still haven’t got it working in my profile, the HTML heading doesn’t start in a new line but instead starts at the same line right behind the tabs. So I got rid of it for the moment and might tinker with it later. Glad I could provide some inspirations for your profile! <3
Edit: I figured out why I couldn’t get it working! Turned out I accidentally deleted a </ul> closing tag :p
I remember the room 4 was on my pfp for 2 years, you can download backgrounds and pfps from their website.
My favorite the room series was the third one, very big world, hard puzzles and nice easter eggs. Not to mention the multiple endings
Found it! Oh wow these are super exciting, thank you so much for bringing it up, Tenta! <3
I think the reasons that made The Room Three your favorites are a huge part of what made me like it the least out of the four (though I still enjoyed it a lot). My personal sweet spot for difficulty sits square between 3 and 4 :D