Misery Stone (NWN 2)

Review here

Heavy Rain, Mar 14 (PS3)-Still catching up on some games I beat a few days ago. I really enjoyed Heavy Rain. It definitely felt janky in a few ways but overall I think I had more fun with it than LA Noire.

The plot was interesting but didn't quite come together for me at the end. Actually I think the ending was forced for a cliched gotcha moment. It's a lot like Indigo Prophecy in that regard with the first half excellent and then a disappointment at the end.

I really liked how the game handled failure especially compared to LA Noire. If I messed up a quick time event, I might fail a trial, get arrested, or have one of my characters die. And if this happened if would noticeably affect the story to the point of potentially locking/skipping some chapters if the character was dead. This was much more interesting to me than LA Noire which let you fail an interview but plodded on like nothing happened. Heavy Rain felt more like I owned the story and the decisions and consequences. And the quick time events didn't really bother me either.

I did think Norman's VR CSI headset thing was a little out of place. There could have been an entire game dedicated to that mechanic but here it felt poorly integrated. The game would have been unchanged if he had just observed clues on his own and analyzed them himself. But its not a big complaint.

One last minor complaint. The movement controls were really awkward and if the camera angle also shifted I would find myself walking in circles sometimes. This wasn't a huge problem but did cause me to get arrested once when I should have been able to escape. The walking animations themselves looked really robotic.

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Dragon Age - Origins (Ultimate Edition)
thanks for GOG for the package

Nice adventure with cool characters and dialogues that you don't want to skip. Quite rarity in RPG genre...

After numerous attempts for almost decade I've managed to start the game and keep playing till the end. Still managed to make bad choices by spending points in the wrong skills, had to use mod for some respec. Morrigan took some respec too because frankly Shapeshifting wasn't great and I've missclick and send Wynn to the tower. It was doable until some quests happened where it become an issue.

Despite the sheer size and scale (40GB back then must be quite significant size?) my game crashed maybe 3 times and got one nasty bug only. When you get captured in the Awakening expansion pack your equipement is lost permamently. After some messing around I've managed to find workaround.
That expansion finally gave me stamina potions, I would trade some things (some DLCs) for them to be included by default via Ultimate Edition update or something. It's weird when you can restore health and mana but not stamina which makes both rogues and warriors useless unless you find some tactic or workaround while mage can just chug things down.

I remember from both Icewind Dale games that mages were primary target for enemies no matter what. In DAO it's the enemey with better armors. Nice change of pace.

Won't touch the sequels - neither that action RPG with heavy recycling (DA2) nor MMORPG offline (DAI).

Tyranny Gold Edition, Mar 17 (GOG)-It doesn't quite achieve the heights of RPGs titles such as Planescape Torment, Baldur's Gate, or Neverwinter Nights but its a solid game with a different take on the genre.

The lore world building was really interesting but oftentimes I felt that the player character's place in the world was awkward or forced. Factional reactions to the player also often seemed strange in that I think if you were a hated member of an invading force you might just be attached on sight. I also felt about the worst alignment you could be was lawful evil unless you wanted to just kill everyone. Generally I just felt like a stranger in this land when I was supposed to be a well known entity.

The writing was generally pretty good but with a few painful typos. Unfortunately in a game with such an emphasis on writing and reading the voice acting was very sparse. The world felt very quiet with a lot of things not voiced or narrated and just a lot of silence. But I did like the voice acting that was there especially Verse and Lantry.

Gameplay was good although there were entire mechanics I mostly ignored. I didn't really mess with spellcraft and I think there was some equipment crafting that I also ignored. And while I liked the idea of acquiring power through the spires I would have preferred if it was more of an abstract idea rather than the micromanagement feeling strategy side of it which I also ignored.

The final act felt a little rushed and was a bit of a let down. I would have liked more intrigue with The Voices of Nerat rather than just combat after combat. Maybe that would have been an option if I had sided with him. The fight felt like more of a final boss than Bleden Mark or Tunon both due to difficulty and because I had such little interaction with the other two.

I liked this game quite a bit. I know I've played objectively better games this year (Uncharted 2 at the very least) but RPGs are my favored genre so I think I still enjoyed this the most. The game is not without its flaws but its still got some good writing and its a fun time if you also like the genre.

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Haven Park

I bought it very cheaply during the GOG sale since I was not sure what to expect from it. It looked like it might be too simple to be fun. I mean, simple was good in A Short Hike, but I feared this game might offer less. But it was much better than I thought it would be, totally worth the asking price, especially if you consider playing it with younger kids. Very cute and relaxing and quite a bit to explore. It even has quests and minor puzzles, plus some simple resource management and "build your own campsite" gameplay. I've seen complaints that it is very short, but personally I spent almost 7 hours with it, spread over several sittings whenever I needed something less stressful. And that was just my own playthrough, I may well replay it in German with the kids in the family some time, as I think they would enjoy it, too (kudos for the existence of translations in several languages, btw!)

I have a couple of nitpicks; nothing that really speaks against the game, just aspects where it could have been even better still. The fixed camera angles can become problematic in a few spots so that you can't quite see where you going anymore because the view is obstructed by mountains in the foreground. It rarely lead to falls in my playthrough, but it comes with this risk (no fall damage btw, but you might have to backtrack a bit as a consequence). Some of the hunting for collectables kind of loses its point after a while, because the resources respawn and it doesn't matter whether you get them from secret or obvious places. Half of the skills you can acquire by spending points are affected by this too and are therefor not all that attractive. On the other hand, hunting for the spots to repair in order to maintain all campsites can become a little frustrating in the end, as they are easy to overlook (especially broken torches that look very similar to wood resources/twigs or just smaller trees), and there is no skill to help tracking these down more easily during the endgame. The solution to the puzzle in one of the final quests could have had clearer hints; I overlooked something in it and kids not used to solving typical game puzzles like this likely would, too. Also, I felt for the amount of campsites you have to build, the game was lacking a bit in creativity and variety concerning the props. Especially considering that e.g. the few activities you could install on a campsite included not one but two only slightly different pools (although plenty of campsites already had beaches nearby), or a gigantic ferris wheel that would look out of place in many of the smaller sites. The props were also quite touristic for a park about nature, like burger stands, ice cream vendors, tiki bars, and not all parents and grandparents might appreciate the capitalistic touch of it (you can harvest coins that the campers spend on these food stands, and one time MILD SPOILER, when you help a nature spirit in restoring a mountain that greedy miners had hurt in their quest for profit, your rewards are ... coins again! /SPOILER) Not that I think every cute-looking game for kids has to be pedagogic, it just didn't feel very self-aware in this regard, rather gamey.

And the elephant in the room, of course, is that it's so similar to A Short Hike that it would be hard to believe it's not heavily influenced by it; and be that as it may, while it could be a good thing for people looking for more of the same, the originality factor is not quite there anymore. It also has a bit of a similar theme in the narrative framework, with the grandma story, but while in A Short Hike's frame, there is some tension right from the start and then an open ending, conveying that despite all the fun, kids also have to deal with serious issues and incertainties in their life already, like the threat of loss, in Haven Park the frame is both more vague and more explicit in this, meaning that at first the grandma just tells the kid to take over her work, and at the end MILD SPOILER the grandma sits close to a chapel, when the kid asks "why does it have to end here" and then the grandma says "goodbye", disappearing without a true explanation, but the context possibly alluding to her passing away eventually. If you accept that this is the theme of the frame (and I can see it from the one-man dev's perspective, as something personal, since he dedicated the game to his own grandma), it still ends on an optimistic note somewhat, but if you just go in there expecting everything to be cute and happy and harmless - which it felt like all the time except for this ending, especially if you haven't played A Short Hike or do not expect this game to imitate everything about it - then it will at the very least catch children players by surprise and might provoke sadness and worried questions.

That being said, while all in all I still think A Short Hike is the better game - despite being shorter and having fewer features than Haven Park -, it's nice to see more games like this which are accessible to kids, relaxing, non-violent and occasionally quite funny, too.

I am Setsuna (2016, Switch).

People who created this game wanted I am Setsuna to be an homage to Chrono Trigger. So, indeed, the game looks like the typical jrpg from back in the days: world map, village, world map, dungeon, etc. All in isometric top view.
The story line has a couple interesting twists and the entire journey takes place in a snowy environment.

After a few hours played, I thought I would recommend it to whoever has a Switch and never played a jrpg. Then I realized that this game is pretty hardcore and requires a lot of grinding. Bosses (and special monsters that you encounter here and there) are tough and as if that weren't enough, the fighting system is not easy to comprehend (thanks to the vague in-game explanations).

I enjoyed the game. If you like twisted magic/skill structure, post FF6 style, you might enjoy I am Setsuna a lot.

Conarium is basically short atmospheric walking simulator. There are a few easy riddles, exceptionally there is necessary do something without clear need to do exactly only this one thing like to go to particular place which is not special in any way. It took me about 5 hours what is appropriate, because in this time game is still tempting. Personally I consider Conarium better than SOMA, but worse than Dark Corners of the Earth (first parts) or Silent Hill 4. Generally I enjoyed it and I can recommend it for one time experience.

A few weeks ago I managed to snatch an Xbox Series X for a normal price and I finally got around to setting it up a week ago. The first game I decided to play on it was of course Halo Infinite which I've just finished.

I've actually been quite a fan of the series since I beat all previous games on Xbox One a few years ago. It's not only a fun and epic space opera, the games are also amazingly well-designed and have easily the best aim controls on controllers. To top it off the series has consistently had amazing music, continuing the style that Martin O'Donnell defined in the early games to this day.

Halo Infinite's singleplayer portion differs substantially from all previous Halo games in that it offers an "open world". Personally I hate the industry's obsession with turning everything into sandbox games and slapping on RPG mechanics everywhere but in this case I was optimistically intrigued. I think the result can be summarised as "it works despite the open world". 343 Industries approached this shift very carefully and it's basically just a typical Halo game on a single large map (plus a few "dungeons" that you visit during story missions). Sure, there are a few optional activities that allow you to unlock new fast travel points, improve Masterchief's abilities (such as his new grappling hook) and unlock more guns and vehicles but the stuff is surprisingly basic and not at all a terrible time sink - I had most of it done well before beating the campaign and without having to spend dozens of hours doing the same thing over and over. Most importantly, none of this messes with the foundations of the series, there are no RPG mechanics or anything. It's the same old super satisfying Halo combat with its excellent gunplay, fun enemy behaviour and so on. And since the series has always had combat in large outdoor areas, the large map doesn't really affect the gameplay all that much. So, they played it so safe, that ironically ultimately nothing about the game's design even quite justifies an open world. The main campaign is at 10 hours about as long as the original game's, and doing enough of the optional stuff to max out everything adds maybe another 6-8 hours. This is very preferable to me over the monotonous nightmares that modern Ubigames are but, honestly, it is a bit absurd.

But! While I am saying that the open world didn't really change anything, that is not entirely correct - you can feel some additional consequences of this all over the place. The game has probably fewer story beats than any previous Halo game and, most importantly, it utterly lacks the spectacular set pieces that have been common in the series since Halo 2. Even worse, somehow this massive world has only a single biome - even the first game sent you through four or five of them. Here it's all mountainous woodlands (like the most iconic outdoor areas in the first game) with very few recognisable places - you do get a few longer sections in alien structures but they feel very much like the unnecessarily long and monotonous indoor levels of the first game rather than the handcrafted spectacles in the later ones. Also, there are very few characters in this game and none of them, excluding Masterchief, are really physically present in the world outside of boss battles. You also generally encounter very few UNSC soldiers and when they do appear it's usually in smaller squads than even in the first game - and there isn't a single character among them, they are just an infinitely spawning resource. And there are basically just two factions, the UNSC and the bad guys (where the original Halo had FOUR of them!). The result of all of this is that Infinite, which I thought was supposed to be the "biggest" Halo game to date, actually feels very small!

That said: I do kinda like the story in this one and it's where making things "small" kinda helped. Some reviewer suggested that with Infinite, 343 Industries is trying contain the escalation that occurred particularly in Halo 5 in terms of grandeur - as if Infinite were an attempt to salvage things by telling a smaller, simpler and more personal story and wrapping up all the insane stuff from the last game. I rather agree with that notion but I think they kinda even overshot here in this regard, almost forgetting that Halo is still a sci-fi wargame, not dealing enough with the war effort itself in the narrative. The facelessness of the UNSC (or mankind in general) also undermines the main villain, Escharum, in my opinion. He's supposed to be a threat to all of mankind but I just don't feel it, since all I see is Masterchief, his sidekicks and a bunch of anonymous soldiers - and an evil plot so cryptic that it means nothing to me. However, for all my complaints, the story is pretty good and resonated far more with me than the stuff that happened in Halo 5. And while the ending is a little bit of a letdown to me, leaving many things quite open, I'm really looking forward to more Halo singleplayer content now.

Oh yeah, and I said that the gameplay is "same old" but there are few decent additions. I'm surely not enough of a Halo aficionado to recognise and appreciate all of the tweaks (especially since it's been years since I've played a Halo game) but there's a few nice new guns and, perhaps most importantly, the grappling hook. This one not only allows the Chief to freely traverse the open world, it also makes for a very cool addition during combat. You can stun enemies, quickly move towards them and deliver a punch on their noses, grab explosive containers in order to throw them or just quickly move around. I can't count how many times I've managed to escape from a situation that would have been hopeless in any previous Halo game by quickly moving behind cover or onto a platform and so on using the grappling hook. Replaying earlier Halo games will be pretty painful now! There are a few more abilities, specifically a deployable shield, a dash move and a sensor thingy that reveals enemies through walls as well as invisible ones, but I barely used those because switching abilities mid-combat is a bit of a hassle and the grappling hook is the most powerful tool anyway. There are also a couple of new enemies but as far as I'm concerned they aren't worth writing home about.

Finally: the presentation. Infinite has been ridiculed for its graphics even long before its release and well... I wouldn't say that the graphics are bad but frankly there weren't any genuinely jaw-dropping sights for me here. You do get a few nice vistas but as far as I'm concerned nothing that gets even close to, say, Horizon: Zero Dawn or God of War. And nothing in particular looks great here except maybe some of the structures (though they are traditionally rather minimalistic in their design) - everything kinda just looks only okay, even by last gen standards, and frankly I think it's to some degree once again because of the unnecessary open world - well, that and Halo's sterile trademark aesthetics and perhaps due to this being a crossgen title (though that didn't hold back Horizon: Forbidden West, did it). Don't get me wrong, the game looks really nice, but it doesn't look like a modern system seller to me. And I think even Halo 4 and 5 had prettier moments due to the sheer fact that the artists could squeeze a lot more out of every inch of the (by comparison) smaller levels and since they could create actual backgrounds there while here almost every part of the world has to be traversable. As for audio, though: no complaints here at all. The music, sound design and voice acting just kick ass and are about as good as it gets.

Anyway, I've been criticising the game a lot here but all in all I enjoyed it a ton and actually I like it more than 343's previous Halo games. Infinite just focuses on doing what Halo is good at while avoiding some of the pitfalls that 343 has stepped into in the past and adding just enough new stuff for it to feel fresh. It's a solid 8/10 to me in its current state.

Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion

Neat little Zelda-style game, at the same time cute and spiced with mischievous humour, so a bit reminiscent of Ittle Dew, but much easier and shorter (~ 4 hours). There is few actual challenge, so it's kind of relaxing, too. I played it over the course of three days, around the turn of the year, with keyboard controls on my laptop, but then left the ultimate boss battle for another time, since I was struggling with it a bit at first, and the biggest dent to motivation was the savegame system which does not let you continue at the exact spot where you quit and forces you to backtrack quite a bit. There is a checkpoint before the last boss battle, but if you leave the game, it is erased and you have to repeat some sections leading up to it - unnecessarily annoying. Tonight I picked up a gamepad on my PC and tried again, with patience, and eventually found out that the last boss battle was easy, too. It was mostly just controls and the savegame system that got into the way of me finishing the game earlier. Oh well. Probably not the most memorable game, but it was entertaining for as long as it lasted.

No Longer Home
Although this is listed as an adventure game, it really does feel like a visual novel where you can walk around the apartment that it takes place in. Like with visual novels, there are things that you can completely miss doing depending on what rooms you go into and what you interact with.

For example - I completely missed the scene that is shown on the store page as a screen shot where the cat is being pet. This happened because I did something in another room that caused the story to advance forward. https://www.gog.com/game/no_longer_home

The one thing that is different than most traditional visual novel besides the point of view is that in conversations, you control the dialogue for all characters involved. If there is anything negative to say about this game, it is that it is short and can be finished in only a few hours.

MMM: Murder Most Misfortunate, Mar 28 (Itch)-A little visual novel murder mystery. It has some dialogue puzzles at the end when you accuse a character of the crime and a time limit feature for added tension that I turned off. I thought it was really well done for a smaller indie game. Its very well written and fully voice acted. The voice acting ranges from excellent (Miss Fortune, Prince Titanico, Horatio) to good (Comtessa, Sherice, Lia) to passable (Clops). I'm just really impressed with its quality for a smaller indie game.

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Titan Quest on XB1X working on expansions now

Just beat Rune Factory (the original DS game). I had seen people talk about how bad the performance in 5 on the Switch was, which brought the series back to mind. This was the first game in the series I owned (I received it as a present back in 2009) and I think it is for the best. You see, the game I asked for was actually Rune Factory Frontier on the Wii, but in a fortunate case of parental confusion my dad picked up the first one instead. Honestly, I think it was for the best. I have always liked the design of the characters in this one more. Not sure how to explain it, the designs back then were more...wholesome? Innocent? With greater mystique? Je ne sais quois? At any rate, I liked the game and played it a goodly bit back then. Then by the time my birthday rolled around the next year I purchased the Wii game. Then the year after that I got the third game and Tides of Destiny on the Wii for Christmas. Then in 2016 or 2017 I bought 4 on the 3DS.

At any rate, I checked my file in the game this week and I was only in the second of like eight dungeons and around level 22 or so. I just thought I'd play around for a few minutes but got into the groove and earlier today beat the game at level 73. I thought I sunk a good bit of time in the game before, but I am considering that I probably just sucked at it back then. The game is not that hard for what it's worth, but the last dungeon I thought represented a bit of a difficulty spike (Not an unbearable one). Then again, when I started it up last week I only was using the second weapon available at the shop (I think you are supposed to have bought the wind sword by that point, but I had not). I ended up using the same crappy sword until about the second to last dungeon. I got the forge and started making my own weapons because I was getting me arse handed to me in the last dungeon. (If I were to give any pro-tips to my younger self it would be to upgrade your farming equipment as soon as you can.)

Anyway, it's always interesting revisiting a game that holds so much meaning to you and finishing it off. The Rune Factory games were some of my most played games in my adolescence (although I played Frontier the most) and it is good to finish the first one after so long. (The first game in the series I beat was 3 back in 2012 or so.) Also, for what it's worth, muh waifu was Bianca.

Having beaten Halo Infinite I figured that I would continue my run through that other big series of Xbox shooters and finally beat Gears of War: Judgment.

I actually started playing this one right after beating the first three Gears games on Xbox One but kinda rage quit quite early into the campaign. It's a competently made third-party Gears game but, like many other third-party spin-offs, it just can't live up to the games that it's imitating. People Can Fly (the developers of Painkiller and Bulletstorm) did a great job in many regards and on a basic level it does feel like the real thing but in the big picture something's missing. It undoubtedly feels smaller by default: the story is a rather meaningless chapter in the Gears universe, the levels lack truly impressive set pieces and the game never quite breaks the basic flow of walking from one arena to the next and killing everything in it. And I have a feeling that the combat is kinda less organised, that you just get swarmed by enemies and things devolve into chaos very quickly - you know, almost as if the Painkiller creators made a Gears game. ;>

Also, instead of genuinely building upon the earlier games, the way Gears 2 and 3 did it, gradually perfecting the formula, this one rather just remixes what was already there and slaps on some stuff that makes it a bit different but not necessarily better. What I didn't know before I started playing this one is that narratively the game is about the four protagonists (Baird, Cole and two entirely new characters, I think) being put on trial. You play most of the game in the form of flashbacks narrated by the testimony. I was very intrigued by the premise at first but I don't think the game utilised it well. For one, you play as each of the four characters in order but each one just tells a different part of the same story and they play the same so it doesn't really do anything.

Where the game actually differs somewhat from other Gears titles is that here you have a rating system which rewards executions and gibbing and not getting downed but also: you get to "declassify" certain information. Basically that means that the level receives a modifier which makes it a bit harder but also improves your rating (which in turn contributes to unlocking some cosmetic stuff). It was promising at first: e.g. Baird says that the Locust were smarter than intelligence suggested and they deployed smoke screens so you have limited visibility on the level. A more common modifier is one that restricts what weapons you can use "because we had no ammo". But, you know, Gears always tried to mix things up, especially starting with Gears 2, and these little modifiers in Judgment don't get close to the stuff the main series did - on the contrary, they are comparably humble and mundane and this "declassify" feature actually highlights that fact. And narratively the feature makes no sense at all, it's not like the heroes are making a better case for themselves nor does the game utilise the format for really crazy stuff that wouldn't be possible in a regular Gears game. And bizarrely that feature even persists in levels that take place outside of the trial where it makes no sense whatsoever.

It's an okay game and admittedly I did enjoy it more than the first game in the series. It's just nowhere near as good as Gears 2 and 3 as far as I'm concerned. I found the story to be not particularly engaging and especially the level desgn is kinda underwhelming compared to what its predecessors delivered. But I suppose it's good enough if you love the original trilogy and just want more classic Gears and are okay with a simpler and more arcadey format.

Oh yeah: unlike all the other Gears games it sadly doesn't have any "X enhancements" and looks exactly like on the Xbox 360, though from what I can tell it has had its frame rate unlocked and runs at a smooth 60 FPS.