It seems that you're using an outdated browser. Some things may not work as they should (or don't work at all).
We suggest you upgrade newer and better browser like: Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer or Opera

×
Samorost 1 (2021) (Linux)

Well, nothing spectacular here, but with 15-minutes gameplay there's no chance to get bored ;)

List of all games completed in 2021.
avatar
ciemnogrodzianin: Samorost 1 (2021) (Linux)

Well, nothing spectacular here, but with 15-minutes gameplay there's no chance to get bored ;)

List of all games completed in 2021.
Same here!
I don't know why GOG (or anyone else) calls it an "adventure"? It's a puzzle game, like Lemmings (e.g.), but different.
It was free, the artwork is nice, it's short. It's not my favorite type of game - like most puzzle games. I like puzzles integrated into adventure games... (not Myst-like puzzles: win at checkers to open door... or something like that)
Feel free to disagree with me - I'm only describing my personal taste.
Shogo

(probably good I got around to it as I'll be moving off my Win7 machine soon)

It's okay. Kinda charming, almost emotional, at the end with the sisters and Sanjuro, I was kinda getting similar emotions to Futurama flashbacks. And Kura getting horny when you bump into her in certain levels :P And the first 30 seconds of the credits got a big laugh out of me.

In any case, I'm glad it didn't outstay its welcome, although looking at longplays I easily took twice as long as others did. (Par the course, I always seem to take much longer at games than most people.)

(I thought Slave Zero was Win7 only also but it looks like GOG officially supports it on Win10 now)
avatar
teceem: ...
I like both :) Adventures with puzzles blended into a story and also puzzle games in which story is marginal (as this one or e.g. Windosill). I think I don't like when a game fails to be somewhere in between - and forces you to make a lot of walking or unnecessary dialogues when the purpose is to solve a clear puzzle. That's why Samorost is fine — it does not try to be more than it is.
Finished Darksiders 2 and his DLCs. It was fun but too long. The balance between exploration and combat was better in the first one (too much combat in this one). Also the story was a bit disappointing (mostly "fetch this for me so that I can help you a bit further in your quest").

I liked the 3 DLCs as there are better balanced and their duration is just fine (1-2h each).

Full list here.
Post edited June 05, 2021 by sebarnolds
Just beat Control: Ultimate Edition on PS5. I was a bit sceptical of this one since I was disappointed by Remedy's previous two games, Alan Wake and especially Quantum Break (not to mention American Nightmare). Well, I am happy to say that almost the moment I launched the game I was mesmerised by it.

I always knew that I'd play this one eventually so I tried to read and watch as little about it as I could and as a result I was positively surprised in so many ways. For one, I had no idea that the game is weird fiction. The game's universe is just so refreshingly bizarre, it almost instantly made me guess and wonder non-stop. Trying to wrap your head around the laws of Control's universe is just a joy. That is probably also why I ended up carefully reading almost every single one of the crapload of notes that you can find and enjoyed almost each one of them. Secondly, I didn't know that it has a semi-open world where you can freely backtrack and explore which really helps the game sell its universe. There are even hints of a soulslike in there.

I won't go into details concerning the story because frankly the less you know the better. What I can say is that I absolutely loved the writing and almost all of the game's characters. Especially the protagonist, Jesse Faden, has quickly become one of my favourite female video game characters which is largely thanks to the voice of and performance by Courtney Hope. I found the ending a bit underwhelming but it certainly doesn't undo the brilliance of the stuff that leads up to it.

Gameplay-wise Control is also positively refreshing. The combat is often very dynamic and almost reminds me of the new Doom games. There's no cover mechanic here and the loading screen even tells you to move a lot during combat. What seals the deal is that killed enemies are your only source of healing between checkpoints so if you're low on health, usually the only thing you can do is to move your ass out into the open. Admittedly I found the game a bit too challenging and even frustrating at times but once I mastered the combat a bit and invested in some of the skills that I had neglected up until that point, it became very doable and satisfying. And what definitely works well here is the combination of guns and super powers of sorts. Frankly the game does get a bit repetitive, as you'll probably end up mostly throwing shit at enemies like Darth Vader, and the guns aren't particularly interesting (plus I ended up using only two of them throughout the majority of the game) but that doesn't change the fact that combat is for the most part dynamic and fun - and, if nothing else, throwing slabs of concrete at people's faces is a surprisingly satisfying thing to do. And between the intense fighting you get to calmly explore the fascinating place that is the Federal Bureau of Control and solve the occasional puzzle. So all in all it's a very solid and enjoyable game.

I guess my main concern is the pacing. The game is very fun and engaging as long as you're going with the flow and keep exploring new areas non-stop but eventually lots of side quests begin popping up, some of them generated randomly in a loop. Once you start revisiting the same corners and fighting the same enemies in the same rooms, it does tend to get a bit boring and in retrospect I would have done less of that optional stuff before finishing the game's story.

Finally: Control was and perhaps remains the showcase game for raytracing, something you can actually enjoy in the game's PS5 version (albeit at the cost of the game running at 30 FPS - which was okay to me) and its setting is pretty much perfect for this stuff. A building that's almost entirely concrete, marble and glass sounds like a boring mess but it's oddly enough a pretty gorgeous thing to behold, literally an orgy of light and reflections. Briefly put the environments are visually quite stunning. Sadly the same is not true for the characters. At times they look pretty good but somehow usually their models just feel out of place, like they are from an X360 or PS3 game, and especially movement and animations are kinda whack. Oh yeah, and also: the game's sound design is pretty f'n amazing.

Anyhow, briefly put I pretty much love this game. It's not without flaws, it can get a bit boring at times and the ending is a bit disappointing but it's all in all an amazing ride.
Post edited June 06, 2021 by F4LL0UT
Solasta: Crown of the Magister (PC Game Pass)

Awesome D&D tactical adventure from a very small dev team. Feels just like playing tactical battles with miniatures in the old days, with the obvious exception that it's 5th edition and not 1st edition rules. Probably the closest comparison in modern gaming to Solasta would be Temple of Elemental Evil, but without the bugs and based upon an original setting (most likely to avoid having to pay licensing) instead of of a classic module.

The battle system is as good as it gets in my opinion, for a D&D game simulating the rules. The story is only average and you get the feeling that the developers scaled back their vision near the end to get the game finished. But story is a very distant second consideration for me in these types of tactical games. The only thing about the entire game that annoyed me at times was the way encounters are set up. Almost all encounters are ambushes where you are set up the way the game wants things to kick off. I'd much prefer a system where you can see enemies on the map and use stealth to set up battles to your own advantage- such as scoping out using a rogue and then having the mage lob in a fire ball for example. But as it stands you just have to deal with what your dealt for the each battle start. The battles were still great fun though.

So the game is quite good, but more exciting (potentially) is the in dev version of the dungeon creator. Hopefully this game catches on so that it can develop into a system for people to build their own D&D modules- the thing that Temple of Elemental Evil never became. I really hope this game can become sort of a turn based indie version of Neverwinter Nights. But time will tell.
4th game this year is behind me.

While alternating in-between few other games, I've managed to finish the Main Arc of Tales of Legendia on PS2 for a first time. At the beginning, the combat felt little bit awkward, especially against flying enemies, but after a while, I've got used to it. The game, despite not aging the best, was really enjoyable. The more I've played, the more I wanted to uncover where the storyline goes. It has few unpredictable plot-twists and at one point, it is making fun of predictable story outcomes in other games :) And because of the story, the game is currently my second favourite Tales of game, right behind Xillia. We'll see, if it will stay so high, after I start the post game content.

List of all of my finished games in last few years can be found >>>HERE<<<
Post edited June 07, 2021 by MMLN
Thimbleweed Park, June 8 (GOG)-I enjoyed this game. I particularly liked the puzzles that required either specific characters or multiple characters to solve. In the last third of the game I started getting stuck a lot and my impatience required use of a walkthru for a bit of the game. The plot started out good with a murder mystery and hints of a conspiracy but the conspiracy parts never felt like they really paid off at the end. I do appreciate no dead ends.

Full List
AD 2044, June 9 (GOG)- Ok I just finished the disaster that is AD 2044. First off the plot makes no sense. You seem to be the last human not just the last man because the only other characters are fembots as far as I could tell. So you're not really saving men because there's nothing left of humanity. The last puzzle and the ending show a machine that can create babies. We never see it create female babies but you win the game by setting it to create a male baby which causes a fembot to scream. Apparently this male baby will be the savior of humanity despite a bunch of fembots that will probably kill him on sight. Why did the fembot just scream? Plenty of fembots saw you throughout the game and tried to stop or kill you. Why is this baby the going to save humanity and not you? Don't you need some females for this plan to work? How much did you really save humanity when all you really did was flip a switch on a machine. Anyone could have done this. Anyone could still flip the switch back or even worse destroy the machine. None of the plots have been resolved through this action. All of this may have been better explained in the movie but here it's just weird.

Weird, inconsistent plots can be forgiven here because the worst part of the game is navigating the environment. Every screen is a huge struggle to figure out what you can click on. And say you found something interesting like a desk. Good luck finding the exact sequence of hotspots to click to actually open a drawer or look under the desk. Even using a heavily using a walkthru I still had a difficult time moving around and finding items because I didn't know the exact location I needed to click to get to the correct screen to actually pick something up or use something. I think if it was easier to move around and interact with objects, maybe if this was 2D instead this could have been a bad game instead of a terrible one.

A couple other things to mention that were high points of the game. There didn't seem to be any dead ends so that let me bumble around until I got frustrated enough to have the walkthru open on the side. Your character occasionally offers slight hints about finding or using objects which helps. And lastly the music was good. Several fun, retro tracks throughout the game.

Full List
Icewind Dale 2 Complete

Finally got to finish this. It was in a limbo for me for many months at around chapters 4 and 5 (out of 6 chapters), but yesterday I finished it finally, on the highest, not "Heart of Fury", difficulty level.

It was overall ok, pretty standard Infinity Engine RPG stuff. I didn't like much how the enemies would yield less or even no experience points if you were "too powerful" (and more experience points if you were lower level), and the way this rewarded the tactic that you try to postpone levelling up your party members as long as you can, as then they will get more experience points out of enemies.

And because the way the game calculates that, you just have to make sure that you don't level up all your party members, as the game makes those decisions (how much XP you get) based on the average level of your party, always rounded down.

So, if your party members are currently at level 5 and ready to level up to 6, you can level up all but one, because if five of your party members are at level 6 and one is at level 5, the game apparently calculates that your overall party level average is 5, because the actual average is a bit below 6.

Also I didn't care much of the final battle. Why do the RPG makers insist on making final battles divided into two or several parts, without ability to save or even sleep between the encounters? Does that make it seem more epic or what?

Also, I didn't like how there were a couple of tricks you needed to do and had to know to make the end fight more manageable. There is a certain subquest you must finish in chapter 6 to prevent the end bosses from being able to heal themselves for the second round of the end battle, and you must concentrate on trying to kill only one, and apparently certain one, of the bosses (when his health goes to critical level, the battle ends).

At least when I tried to fight the other boss instead, it seemed they were able to heal themselves from near-critical to full health without a problem. I took that as a hint that that particular boss is in practice invincible, and it is the other boss you should only concentrate to. Trial and error.

Oh and one complaint also about Infinity engine RPGs, or is it mainly for their AD&D system? In higher level encounters like these bosses, it increasingly feels that most if not all combat magic against the bosses is useless. They never harm the bosses in any way, either to their stats or health. I can try the highest combat spells I have, and they still seem totally useless against bosses.

The only way to harm e.g. the end boss(es) in IWD2 was to buff up your party with high level protective spells, and attack the bosses with melee, or high-end ranged, combat. That was really the only way to deal damage to them.

So that just meant that my cleric and druid, as spellcasters, were only good for summoning monsters to distract the bosses a bit and heal the party members, while the wizard was only good for summoning monsters (as he has no healing spells, some protective spells though).

No matter what high-level attack spells I used, the bosses just brushed it off, even in the second part of the end fight where most of their protective spells had worn off.

That just makes the magic in these Infinity Engine games less interesting and less useful... Magic doesn't appear to be a viable way to fight the bosses in these games, the best way is melee tanks with high-end +4 and +5 melee weapons. Attack spells are mainly useful against generic hoards of generic monsters, especially the area of effect spells.
Post edited June 10, 2021 by timppu
It seems the last Infinity Engine RPG I am yet to play and finish, is:

*TADAA*

Planescape: Torment

So maybe i should try that next. Other RPGs that I figured I should play next might be:

Arcanum
Temple of Elemental Evil
Neverwinter Nights
The Witcher (yes, the first one)
Morrowind (I think I've already given up the idea of trying to finish Daggerfall before it, Daggerfall is just too all over the place, and buggy, and not-fun to play... even more so than TES: Arena, which I did finish)

So much catching-up to do... the good news about all this is that I can keep postponing the buying of my next gaming PC (laptop), as I have so much yet to play on my current older PCs. GPU and chip shortage? Psah, I'll just wait it out.
Post edited June 10, 2021 by timppu
Just beat Bugsnax on PS5. I went in knowing literally nothing about this game other than that it's about collecting bugs that look like food. I thought it was going to be some cute top-down puzzle game with pretty Pixar-style graphics or something. Nothing could have prepared me for what I got.

Turns out that it's a new game by Young Horses, the creators of Octodad, and it's similarly bizarre. In the game some anthropomorphic creatures called grumpuses have moved to an island paradise inhabited by the delicious bugsnax. At first glance the setup is kinda like Pokemon: There are 100 different kinds of these cute creatures that all constantly say their own name in a silly voice while minding their own business and the first-person gameplay is generally about catching them.

The core gameplay is actually pretty fun. The bugsnax all have different characteristics and catching them is often a bit of a puzzle involving a number of different devices or interactions between different bugsnax. It starts out super simple: place a trap, hide and wait until a bugsnak walks in. Soon enough that doesn't cut it. Some bugsnax are out of reach, some are too quick, large or small for the trap, some are constantly on fire etc. and you need to use more complicated devices, combinations of them or even provoke interactions between different bugsnax. Scanning them with your camera reveals some hints and e.g. what lures they react to or what species they fear. It's honestly a pretty fun and satisfying premise, though it soon turns out to be a lot simpler than you may have hoped for.

Now, the weird thing that is also often criticised in reviews is that the game is surprisingly dark. When you arrive on the island the grumpus community is in ruins, everyone hates each other and their former leader is missing. When you feed a grumpus their first bugsnak, one of their limbs turns into food and they say "no worries, that's normal!" but it's hard to shake the feeling that it's not. The music is often ominous, the bugsnax' background is a mystery that is debated among some of the more sceptical grumpuses. And that's besides the fact that it's a game about cute and fairly intelligent creatures that exist only to be consumed by more intelligent cute creatures. Personally I actually enjoyed the mood and style. The grumpuses all have unique personalities and fantastic voice acting like in a really good cartoon. The game is for the most part child-friendly but there's a good part of black humour and a tiny bit of innuendo. But I see why some players don't like this combo. There's a substantial dissonance for sure.

To me the game has some fundamental problems, though. On one hand it's - like Pokemon - about collecting the creatures. There's even a trophy for catching each type of bugsnak called "gotta catch 'em all". But WHY do you catch them? It's not like you're building a collection, it's just an arbitrary checklist of bugsnax you've captured at least once. Once you have captured bugsnax you can feed grumpuses with them but there is no real reason to do it other than making the grumpuses look like food and obviously it's instantly questionable if that's a good thing. Speaking of which, even though the grumpuses have been living on the island and eating bugsnax for a long time they ONLY begin looking like food once you feed them... permanently. It makes no sense and only amplifies the feeling that they developers didn't think this through. You can also donate bugsnax to a "sanctuary" but the sanctuary doesn't care about the type of bugsnax you donate, only the amount, so it does not support the collecting theme either. Luckily there's a whole bunch of quests and sidequests that usually require you to capture specific bugsnax but again, it feels more like any other quest in any RPG than a game about collecting creatures.

There's also the thing that the game fails to sensibly communicate conditions and unlocks. As you progress through the game you gain access to new areas but for entirely arbitrary reasons - it's the next day and for some reason a draw bridge has been lowered. You often have a quest to capture a certain bugsnak but you spend a long time looking for it or trying to capture it, only to eventually give up and later discover that you just hadn't been far enough in the story yet.

Finally there's the matter of the presentation and tech / optimisation for PS5. The game is heavily stylised and weird all around but to me stylised does not instantly mean pretty. It honestly looks like a mildly refurbished PS2 game, like Jak and Dexter or something. Well, only Jak and Dexter had better art direction, animations and much larger locations than this one. To top it off, while the load times aren't very long on PS5 (I think a bit below 10 seconds) they are pathetically long in the context of this game where the locations are tiny and don't have all that much detail. For comparison: Terminator Resistance's load times have been reduced from over a minute on PS4 to less than two seconds on PS5. Also the audio isn't very good here - as a matter of fact the sound design is very mediocre and the music is hit or miss. Some tracks are really great but some are just random retro beeping for reasons I cannot begin to understand. Bugsnax also has the worst implementation of the DualSense's haptic feedback I have seen yet: it rarely feels right and some of its use is utterly annoying. Why does the trigger go batshit when I use a laser pointer? Also the UI is utterly unhelpful. For instance, when you get a quest that tells you to get a specific bugsnak and you don't remember if and where you've seen it: have fun scrolling through the full list of 100 bugsnax.

THAT SAID... I've enjoyed the game a lot, actually. Exploring the world and catching bugsnax is pretty fun. And while the premise and story may be a bit too silly to be taken seriously, the characters and the dialogue are of high quality and have made the game worth playing. Just don't expect too much and most definitely not a game that showcases the PS5 in any way.
avatar
timppu: ...
Planescape: Torment

...
Prepare for LOTS of reading, even for an infinity engine game! ;) Thankfully it's all excellent though (possibly the best I've ever seen in a game), and it's against a background of some incredible tunes.
avatar
Matewis: Prepare for LOTS of reading, even for an infinity engine game! ;) Thankfully it's all excellent though (possibly the best I've ever seen in a game), and it's against a background of some incredible tunes.
Yeah, so I've heard... Let's see if I will like that (lots of reading) because generally I prefer my RPGs like how Minsc in Baldur's Gate put it: "Less talk, more fight.". Which is why I generally liked the Icewind Dale RPGs.

At the same time though, I did enjoy the characters and NPCs in e.g. Baldur's Gate 2, so...

Once in the past, many years ago, I did install and run Planescape: Torment, so at least I know the protagonist apparently wakes up (from dead?) in some kind of mortuary. The setting did feel quite different from Icewind Dale and Baldur's Gate...
Post edited June 10, 2021 by timppu