Le new intro

Since the last post I’ve only finished 2 games. I’ve finished Tengami and The Banner Saga. I’ve also tried getting into Dracula 4 & 5. Here’s the update on how things went.

Tengami

• Tengami
  

  57 minutes playtime

  4 of 4 achievements

Tengami is a very short game. Only took me about 1 hour to 100% it. It has a really nice vibe to it, the atmosphere is very nice and the music really fits too. The game feels like you’re playing a book. Every time the map switches it’s as though you go to a new page. The character is a flat character, just like in Paper Mario, where your character just “flips” as you change direction. It has a very nice and authentic feel to it. As for the puzzles in the game, they were all pretty easy. None of them really took too much effort, except for some backtracking in one or two of them. Nice and quick 100% :)

Screenshots

The Banner Saga

(SG win)

• The Banner Saga
  

  10 hours playtime

  22 of 39 achievements

Now, this is a game that was both better and worse than I had expected it to be. When I joined giveaways for this game, I was mostly impressed by the visuals of the game. The visuals of this game are indeed, great. It looks very nice and that really helps in me liking the game more.

The reason it ended up being better than I had expected it to be is that the game actually has a lot of nice mechanics that I had not expected it to have before. The idea is that you have a big group of people with you and you travel the land. Now, as you travel you need to not only fight any enemies along the way, or help any people that need your help, you need to also make sure that you always have enough provisions for your people. If you do not have enough provisions to feed the people, they will start leaving. If you do not have enough people, you will start having trouble fighting the enemies, due to them outnumbering you, thus giving you a disadvantage. The fact that you need not only care for yourself, but also for your group of people really adds that little extra to the game for me. You travel with a big band of people, of which you have a few that are able to join your own combat party. Those people all have their own story and you can choose wheter you use them or not. Now another thing I really liked is that when playing this game you learn more and more about the people you are with (if you choose to) and it’s nice to get to see some backstory on them. It’s not too much, but it was still enough for me to not want to lose them.

The reason the game ended up being worse than I had expected is due to the combat mechanics. This is mainly because it is not really a style that I like. When I play games I try to stay away from the “Turn based combat”. Now, this game definitely does have turn based combat. This is mostly a personal preference though. As for people who do not mind turn based combat, this is probably not as much of an issue. The turn based combat has some nice mechanics to it. It’s got, ofcourse, the standard: “One of mine, one of yours” effect. By which I mean that there’s a queue of whose turn it is when. First it’s one of my character’s turns, then one of the enemies, then one of mine, then one of the enemies etc.. All characters can either attack the armor of the enemy or the health of the enemy. The more armor the enemy has, the smaller the chance you’ll deal good damage to the health. You can also use “Will” to use special attacks or just to deal a bit more damage to your normal attacks. The combat mechanics work pretty well and the battles weren’t too hard. Although, sometimes there were some enemies who just did a blatant amount of damage, usually you could still manage to fight them and kill them though. I think I’ve only lost like 1 or 2 battles in the entire game (I did play on easy though, since I dislike the turn-based combat and didn’t want that to be a thing to get stuck on).
One thing I’d like to note though is that the “will” mechanic wasn’t properly explained (to my knowledge). I only found out about the fact that you can use will to deal more damage in your attacks about 80% into the game. It made combat a lot easier when I figured it out. At first I thought you simply did more damage if you had more will remaining, but this didn’t seem to be the case.

Another thing that sometimes got on my nerves were the “events” while travelling. Sometimes when travelling some events would pop up and you need to make a choice. The choice is usually something like “Save the people”, “Save the food” or “Don’t do anything”. The idea is that saving the people or saving the food would cost you more time. Saving the people would increase morale, where saving the food would make you have more food to get through the journey (and thus lowering the chance you run out of food and lose people). Not doing anything on the other hand means you can keep travelling and won’t have to waste any time, but people will get sad about losing people and food and thus morale goes down. These events can sometimes really be a bitch. I’ve had one take away about 90% of my food stocks after just spending everything I had on buying it.

Overall I did really enjoy playing the game. The mechanics and the looks together really made it a nice game and the combat wasn’t as bad as I had thought it’d be (although I still didn’t like it).
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Dracula 4 and 5 - Special Steam Edition

• Dracula 4 and 5 - Special Steam Edition
  

  11 minutes playtime

  no achievements

Soo, I was actually planning on playing this game, but when reading the reviews of the game and actually trying it out, I’ve decided not to do it. The reviews I’ve read on steam all seem to mention that the “Special Steam Edition” is like the actual game, but with lots and lots of pieces cut out of it. This definitely doesn’t seem like that’s a good thing. Now, apart from the game not being “complete” it’s one of those point and click, gather items and solve puzzles kind of games. These kind of games are really not my kind of game. I’ve tried giving it a shot and I got through the first room before I already thought it was a drag. I know that if I don’t mark this as “Won’t Play” and need to force myself to play this game that it’d just make me put it off over and over again so I won’t have to get to it since I really don’t feel like it. For this reason I have decided to just… Not do it and mark is as “Won’t Play”. Maybe the fact that the game doesn’t even have achievements doesn’t help the matter neither. Anyways. Sorry for the one that requested it! It’s just not for me!
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Le outro

Not sure if I’ll be having a lot of gaming time upcoming week. Got an exam I’ve got to learn for thursday, so I should spend some time on that. I’ll still be playing some games ofcourse.
And again, list of the games I’ll be playing next in the correct order:

Next games