Progress Report: October 2019

Kimi ga Shine (Your Turn to Die) is a free logic-driven psychological horror adventure game created by Nankidai and unofficially translated by vgperson. The story revolves around a series of death games where kidnapped players are forced to play a voting game where the losers die.

Content warning: The game deals with mature content and contains many graphic scenes of people being killed (some in extremely gruesome ways). After playing through the current version, I would say those scenes are generally required for the story and in general are done in a tasteful fashion, but they can be very shocking in the moment.

Kimi ga Shine is a point and click adventure game that plays like Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. You spend most of your time gathering items and clues to help you survive until the next majority vote game. During the majority voting game, each character is assigned a hidden role and the player has to use logic to deduce each person's role. This vote is where the games main crux comes into play, in the best case scenario two people die, in the worst case, everyone does.

Nankidai has done some amazing character and world building. Despite there being 12 main characters, each character has substantial time to be fleshed out. Some of this is even done posthumously. I think it's a right of passage for players to try and protect their favorite character. There is a lot of lore about the death game, its organizer, and how the participants are all connected that is slowly trickled out as you go through each chapter.

Characters generally play the majority voting game strategically; lying, cheating, and stealing at times to ensure they live during the next vote. Reaching a turnabout, despite all of this, feels amazing.

Got an invite into the Ghost Recon Breakpoint beta earlier this month. The genre of looter shooter has appealed to me less over the years, due to microtransactions becomng the dominant revenue model.

The game is visually stunning; I am shocked at how far graphics have come in 2019. The world felt lush and vibrant, all characters have amazing detailing that make each of them feel unique. I found it really cool that character customizations persist even in cutscenes, which now feel like part of the game rather than something prerendered.

The games emphasis on exploration was great for me. Despite being restricted to only three areas on the world map, there was a lot to see. From mountains, to heleports, to cold war bunkers, the map was litered with interesting locations to search for loot. Optional quests also emphasize exploring the world, interacting with certain quest NPCs will give the player three fuzzy clues about a treasures location, for example "Southeast of the Behemoth Defense Zone". Using the clues and the world map, players need to triangulate possible locations to search.

There were no microtransactions in the beta, but it's looming presence was felt constantly. From the mediocre drops despite hours of playing, to the amount of grinding necessary to reach the next step on the progression tree, you do quickly notice that "time-savers" will be available for purchase on the game's full release.

Overall for a AAA title, I would say Ghost Recon Breakpoint is solid. The microtransactions based model is not for me, so I will not continue beyond the beta, but I enjoyed my time and don't have any major gripes beyond those tied to required grinding.

Princess.Loot.Pixel.Again is a dungeon crawling platformer rogue-lite. It's got vast amount of loot and artifacts to collect and is fairly generous at letting you stack effects if you manage to survive all the monsters defending it. Each of the seven classes are fairly unique having their own pros and cons. This game is heavily inspired by the Binding of Issac, even going as far as having a cameo.

The drawback to this is that I constantly compare it to the far more polished Binding of Issac. The games needs a healthy amount of rebalancing. Deals with the devil rarely make you substantially stronger and bosses are far too meaty to give up health. The Binding of Issac solves this by making unique Devil only artifacts that are incredibly powerful, but Princess.Loot.Pixel.Again in contrast draws from the global pool.

Hitboxes need fixing, the Berserker's giant battle axe doesn't hit further than a Ninja's dagger, clipping right through enemies at time.

Finally the completely random generation of rewards disincentives anymore than the shallowest exploration. In one run, I blasted through some rubble to access a locked room that contained two more locked doors with a locked chests behind them, I was "rewarded" for all this resource consumption with some gold and health.

Princess.Loot.Pixel.Again does have that one more run addictiveness. I recently ended a run where I finished just 50 gold short of the "Line one's pockets" achievement and one friend short of the "Friends!" achievement, but the next day I was back at it, trying again. Would recommend for masochists.

Cally's Cave 4 is a run and gun action adventure platformer. It's got many interesting mechanics like evolving weapons, weapon parrying to reflect enemy bullets, and a radar system that rewards players for clearing a map. Personally I feel the developers overdid it and the combination of all these systems takes away any challenge of playing the game.

The game is great for those looking to get a bit of a power trip as Cally is super overpowered compared to anything you'll ever face, but it gets stale once you realize that, even the final boss will fall in seconds against certain maxed out guns. Even if you do manage to keep your weapons underleveled, because enemy damage never scales, you would need to take 15 ~ 30 hits to exhaust your health by the end of the game, not even considering that you have 8 backpack slots to hold Chicken Fingers which full heal on death.

I found the story very generic and constantly references the previous games which I didn't play. Overall I think this game is more directed to children with it's incredibly forgiving nature, but it's got a lot of interesting mechanics which are worth checking out.

In Forest Harvester Simulator you drive around in a tree-cutting machine felling trees and turning them into lumber.

Pros

• Tree cutting machine feels nice to drive.
• Game has such terrible physics that it becomes comical at times watching my machine fly into the sky when tripping over a log.

Cons

• No variety in level design, a single map for all 9 levels.
• Extremely grindy with some levels taking more than 20 minutes of the same task (It's also possible to get stuck in certain objects which concerns me for the longer stages).
• Invisible walls with trees that you think you can cut beyond those walls.
• Level rewards scale badly, it's more worthwhile to grind level 1 than play other stages if you are trying to get gold to unlock base upgrades.
• The base upgrades are useless, which you quickly figure out after the first unlock. The base system has secondary resources that quickly invalidate all previous resources as you just convert everything to gold. Not having lumber requirements for buildings seems like a missed opportunity. Having gold has no actual effect on gameplay, just achievement unlocking.

Overall, I would say the game is strange and interesting, but shallow and not worth playing for more than 10 minutes. I am more disappointed than anything else, as the concept is novel and I feel like all the cons could have been hashed out with a bit of extra polish.