Progress Report: September 2019
Just got back from vacation and am settling back down at home. Played a lot of interesting games since I’ve been back, but this progress report has been very delayed considering the last post was from August 1st.
Looking at that post, the games I wound up played this month differed greatly than those I had planned. I tried again to get through Crazy Machines 3, and at least now I know why I dislike the game so much.
Each level in Crazy Machines 3 feels like it has only one possible solution that requires each component to be perfectly placed on the grid. The heavy restriction on what components I can use turned this game from sandbox to puzzle, but it fails at being a good puzzle. The solutions never have any revelation about interesting ways to use parts. Instead it's all about perfect placement of Component A so that it can interact with Component B.
This might have been fine for Crazy Machines 1, but there are far better puzzle games now and Crazy Machines 3 has clearly stagnated in the level design department. I would recommend watching GMTK's "What Makes a Good Puzzle?" video to find better alternatives.
The game runs awful considering how little they actually have to render. Each stage requires a substantial wait to load all the assets and exiting the game causes the executable to glitch out and crash.
Then there's the forced Social Media requests that it shoves down your throat after clearing a few stages. This is not a free to play game, stop asking me if I'm enjoying it, it's a bit disgusting to be subjugated to this.
Picked up the Dangonronpa Trilogy and the Zero Escape Trilogy during the Spike Chunsoft Sale. For Dangonronpa I did watch the anime a feel years back, so I’m hoping it doesn’t spoil anymore than the first game, although even finding small differences between the game and the anime has been interesting.
- Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc
3.7 hours playtime
- Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair
2.3 hours playtime
- Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls
1.0 hours playtime
- Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony
3.6 hours playtime
“Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors” was my favorite game for the Nintendo DS so I’m looking forward to playing the sequels.
- Zero Escape: The Nonary Games
1.2 hours playtime
- Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma
2.3 hours playtime
Finally as with previous months I’ll end this post with some reviews for notable games I played.
Reviews
Last Word is an amazing take on a role playing game without combat elements. Conflicts in the Last Word are resolved through discourse which is a clever puzzle game that I would describe as a more tactics based rock paper scissors. Without going too much into detail each move has a counter, but playing counters constantly is sub-optimal as positioning is just as important.
My favorite part of the game was not the discourse mechanic, but the discovery system. The heroine Whitty must reach a certain level of knowledge in a given subject to progress at certain points. You gain this knowledge by talking to people, there's a lot of interesting dialogue so even dead ends reveal a lot of interesting facts and lore. The ability to change discussion topics is probably the coolest feature of the game and makes reading everything even more enjoyable.
Last Word is not perfect however, it can be grindy if you are bad at the discourse combat system and the game contains missable content that forces a second playthrough if you are trying for 100%. That said there is a New Game+ mode that tries to alleviate the worst of these issues, as well as let you see what would happen if you manage to win the hopeless boss fights from your original playthrough.
Overall I loved my time with the game. It's got innovative mechanics, beautiful art, masterful storytelling, and is extremely polished overall. Highly Recommended
Pony Island is a fantastic metagame in the same sense as Frog Fractions. You play as yourself, playing a video game against a vindictive developer. The game is rigged against you, so cheat and hack your way to victory. The game is deeper than it looks so make sure to collect all the tickets and unlock the secret ending. It will totally be worth it.
Pichon is a cute platformer where your character is always jumping. This creates some interesting mechanics as you time your dips and hops to duck under spikes and get over hot oil.
You die in one hit, but the game is fast-paced and has lots of checkpoints so you will be back in the game instantly. Dying is generally painless as long as you're not going for a perfect run.
Most of my criticisms deal with achievements which looks like were designed to just pad the amount of playtime. Requiring 30 perfect playthroughs of each stage makes it seem like the achievements haphazardly added.
The game is primarily played with keyboard, with the exception of menuing which is done via mouse. This makes getting achievements frustrating as you have to switch to mouse to restart a failed run. Having a dedicated reset shortcut key would help.
Dialing is a cute 2048 styled Match-3 puzzle game. The games simplicity is where it shines, You control a rotating dropper that places numbered balls into center of the play area. If 3 balls with the same number are adjacent to each other they combine and the resulting number is doubled. The game is over when either you run out of rotations or the play area is full.
The game is very easy to pick up and needs no tutorial, as you play through the game you will learn a few advanced tricks that will get you a bit further. Creating combos reverses your rotation a bit so you can get more drops in. The game tell you what your next ball will be and if an area is full attempting to drop a ball in that area will let you swap it for the next ball.
The game has a nice persistent progression system that rewards you with more rotations so you are less rushed the more you play, but it doesn't ever feel unbalanced, as the real problem you face as you try to create larger balls like 1024 and 2048 will be running out of play area.
Road Doom is a solid bullet hell game. Controls feel great, game play is very fair, and the story is quirky and ridiculous.
It's got several difficulty options for masochists, but I found normal to be the perfect balance of challenging yet enjoyable. I would recommend this game to people looking to get into the genre.
E3.13CENTER is a strange and weird twinstick shooter/puzzle hybrid where you type your commands like "FIRE" and "SHIELD". The levels are well-designed and discovering new commands is fun. In my playthrough I kept comparing the game to Scribblenauts, constantly trying new words to see if there was any effect.
Once upon a death is a necromancy themed resource management clicker.
The idea is innovative and I love the art style, but the gameplay is terrible. You're essentially just idling as you create zombies and then smashing them into castle after castle. I can't tell if the game wants to be a clicker or an idler, but it does both terribly, the zombie summon rate is incredibly slow with no way to increase it, but it has no window mode and will pause if you minimize the game.
Upgrades to zombies take time, you can only upgrade one and a time, and there's no queue system so you have to be watching it constantly. There's no audio cue when a new batch of zombies are created so you need to check that regularly too. This means you are essentially clicking a few times, then waiting 10~20 seconds and repeating the process a few thousand times. Ridiculously repetitive as you will need at least 100 level 3 zombies for the final castle.
There's also no point in defending your castle from counterattacks (besides the achievement) as you only lose soldiers if you lose (with an upgraded ditch you actually come ahead sending all your units on the initial attack), not that losing resources would matter.
The game is poorly balanced, the only resource you will need initially is Metal and by the time you reach half way through the map you will likely have millions of resources and nothing left to upgrade.
The Town of Light takes you through the life of Renee a 16 year old girl who spent her teenage years in an asylum. This game explores the topic of mental illness and the abuse that patients suffered in the early 20th century. The setting - an asylum in Italy is vividly detailed, the story elements feel eerily real, and you will likely sympathize with Renee by the end.
Gameplay itself falls flat. Walking is slow, a lot of the puzzle elements don't have any explanation, and while there's a lot of objects to interact with, most serve no purpose.
The games atmosphere relies on entering Renee's memories to evoke horror, but these are my least favorite parts, because the developer tries to emulate film techniques to blend reality with the nightmare. Things like further slowing the character movement, washing out the color palette, and distorting the scene. I couldn't finish the game because I was getting motion sickness from the filters and room distortions.
Overall I didn't hate the experience, but I don't think it's worth going back. I would best sum up my experience as I would have preferred to watch the movie.
Just played both Danganronpa games and loved them. I’ve not watched the anime, but my boyfriend says it spoils game one and two. He says it’s like night and day compared to the two though, so you’ll get much more enjoyment and surprises out of the games then you did the anime.
Last Word looked interesting, but I had to search online to find out how to save/quit, for chrissakes, so that kind of soured the experience for me. Apparently they are targeting the JRPG crowd, who would find it intuitive that interacting with a floating, glowing bow tie is how you save/exit the game. All they would have had to have done is add an informational bubble or other indication of its function, or maybe just change it to a disk icon instead of a glowing bowtie. Oh well. :)
That’s too bad about The Town of Light. It was on my wishlist at one point, and picked it up when it was bundled, but I haven’t played it.
From memory, the anime version of Danganronpa was critiqued for being a bit rushed. Since it’s a 20-25+ hours game it’s hard to fit it all in an anime season. I haven’t watched it but it’s basically the whole first game (and only the first game).
What I find most troublesome is that it seems the DR3 anime is recommended to watch to complete the DR experience and it should be watched before starting DR V3 (the game). Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/danganronpa/comments/5729qm/danganronpa_series_guide_for_the_totally_clueless/
I want to get the full experience but I am not sure I’m ready to watch the full 24 episodes of it D:
Also, a small personal warning concerning the Ultra Despair Girls. It is a rather boring game (to me at least). Don’t expect too much from it!
This is an instant bookmark, thanks a lot for the link!
Yeah I recall seeing warnings about Ultra Despair Girls too, but I probably was caught up in the lowest price of all time for the series.
Thinking about it now, I paid $5.39 for Ultra Despair Girls, which I probably wouldn’t have under normal conditions, but I was probably thinking $23.36 for the full series is a great deal.
I think it might be on purpose that they don’t have a single collection with all four games.
Interesting to see the type of tricks good marketing uses to cloud our judgement.