Coelacanth

Yeah. There are games out there with worse writing, but honestly that is not saying much. And when your “game” is literally only text, that text better be top fucking quality. And this isn’t really bad enough to be entertaining, it’s mostly just dull.

I have a lot of qualms, but there are two main problems:

1. Protagonist has extremely weak (almost nonexistent) personality and internal motivation
2. The overarching plot has no early hook, no emotional investment and no stakes.

Again if we take the Witcher comparison: imagine The Witcher 3 but you play as a cardboard cutout instead of Geralt, and the whole Ciiri storyline is completely absent. You just ride around doing contracts.

I’ve been playing a bit of Roadwarden this week. Actually, I only played about 6 hours of it, then I gave up and started to listen to this delightful playthrough as an audiobook instead. I think Roadwarden is probably a good game. I think the problem may be that my attention span is just destroyed. But I am not yet sure.

How should I describe this game? How about this: have you ever played Pentiment and thought to yourself “nonono, this is too action packed and too interesting!”. Or what about… have you ever wished there was a game with as much text as Disco Elysium, but without any voice acting, visual art, humour, mind-blowing world building, charm or top quality near-poetic prose?

Roadwarden takes a lot of inspiration from the Witcher setting. It’s a low-magic, low-fantasy world filled with dangerous monsters, and you’re playing as a sort of peacekeeper. But instead of being a magical mutant with superpowers and steeped in centuries of interesting lore, here you’re instead playing as… just a guy. Just some dude meant to scout out an unmapped peninsula, get to know the locals and report back to your superiors in the big city who want to colonise (or at least exploit) it.

And that’s kind of just… the whole game. Granted, I’m not all the way through listening to the playthrough yet. But you’re just riding around, reading mundane descriptions of mundane things, helping locals with mundane tasks.

One thing I want to praise though, is how the game does player-customizable world building. At certain points you’ll get some questions about certain minor aspects of the world, and you can pick an answer out of usually 5-7. And whatever you pick will be the reality in your playthrough. Are people in the capital wearing tunics or furs? Is the capital well off or poverty stricken? What happened to that old inn on a street off the harbour? It’s something I haven’t seen before, and it does make every playthrough a little more unique. I found it neat.

Sometimes you gotta be impatient. Remedy is one of the few developers I would be tempted by as well.

Yeah, I agree, I even mentioned it above. The mobile apps are out in beta now though, I think. At least Android.

I am not surprised Fediverse denizens tend to want to recommend IRC and Mumble and xmpp and whatever, but the truth is as you describe it. There is no one size fits all replacement yet that is viable.

At some point maybe Fluxer will be ready.

Hey, I’m glad to see the return of Anomaly! Looking forward to hearing more about that playthrough, whenever it happens!

On the one hand this doesn’t sound good and echoes some fears I’ve had about Control: Resonant. On the other this reviewer also gave Alan Wake 2 a score of 3/5, so who knows…

Didn’t it just come out? There’s already a Director’s Cut!?

This is the first time I’m wishing I had a Switch 2. But even this is not going to make me buy first party Nintendo products. Maybe a used one in five years.

Agreed.

I mean, there is definitely abuse and exploitation happening in online games. Roblox is a well-documented hellhole of predators. But intrusive age verification can’t be the answer.

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Oh fuck off.

I’m being astronomically un-patient this week. Well, apart from using the “launch week 15% sale” loophole again to adhere to my endeavours to not pay full price for games.

Ever since playing Withering Rooms earlier this year and becoming completely enamored with it, I’ve had the sequel (Withering Realms) as my most anticipated game. So even though I tried to hold off, I simply couldn’t resist getting my hands on it when it entered Early Access.

Now, this is mostly an excuse for me to promote Withering Rooms again. It’s great, you should play it. I’m having a good time with the sequel, but it is definitely in need of more time in the oven. I trust this developer with my life, though, and have every conviction the game will get there come full release.

Most of the things that were great in the first game are here too: the setting, world building, lore, story, characters, art & design, atmosphere, vibes, puzzles, MUSIC (all composed by the solo dev!), build variety… There’s the bones for something great here.

There’s just a lot of polish still required. Some features are missing. Others are undercooked, almost placeholder-y. Combat balance is way off. Many encounters need tweaking. I’ve run into some performance hiccups and bugs. I’m still having a good time, because I love this world and developer so much, but for most sane people I would recommend waiting until full release. This is not a fake “early access” soft launch, this is an actual “open beta” type of early access. Only get in now if you want to participate in giving feedback on the Discord.

What I do recommend, however, is playing Withering Rooms. The first game is in an amazing state, feature complete and wonderful and brimming with character, charm, creativity and atmosphere. And it’s cheap!

BG1 was a very important game, and it has some charm to it, but I personally don’t think it holds up all that well to be honest. The “exploration” involves a lot of just open empty forest zones. The companions are extremely bare bones, both in terms of dialogue/interjections/banter and in terms of quest content. The story is… fine. The whole iron crisis is kind of dry to me, not super compelling. Sarevok was awesome when I was 5, as an adult he’s not really all that compelling. The encounter design is pretty crap overall and yes, involves a lot of kiting or spamming Summon Monster.

Fortunately BG2 fixes almost all of that, and ended up delivering a benchmark CRPG that I think still is worthwhile to play and still (largely - it has some exceptions) holds up great.

Dragonspear made by Beamdog, not the original creators. Beamdog have done a lot of good things when it comes to QoL, bug fixing and compatibility in the Enhanced Editions that helped bring these games to a new audience.

One thing they didn’t do good at, however, was writing.

I mean… that’s kind of a hard question. Alan Wake 2 is the culmination point of everything Remedy has done up to that point. You’ll get paid off for having played all of:

• Max Payne 1
• Alan Wake
• Alan Wake’s American Nightmare
• Quantum Break
• Control
• Control’s AWE DLC

AW2 is a direct sequel to Alan Wake, so that is of course the single most important previous game to play. The story is directly built on top of AW1. But at the same time I will say… Alan Wake 2 is such a good game that if you are absolutely certain you have no interest and never will have an interest in playing the other Remedy games first, you should probably just play Alan Wake 2 then, because it’s really just fantastic.

I would still recommend watching some kind of recap of the previous games on YouTube, it might be better than nothing.

I’m a big Remedy-head, so I’m very biased here. But I will argue it’s worth pushing through it. The story is interesting and the payoff is worth it. AW2 is an incredible game. The first game definitely haven’t aged well though, even though I like the story and characters and think it has some charm.

I mean, I am a firm believer in Art Direction>Fidelity, but there is no reason you can’t have both, too. Anyone who’s played Alan Wake and then Alan Wake 2 directly after will probably agree that yeah, better graphics can have a pretty damn big impact.

No is like the definition of an old forgotten gem. Although I haven’t played it since it came out so I guess I can’t vouch for the veracity of the “gem” part of the statement. But it certainly is old and forgotten!

Good review. PS5 exclusives continue to leave me wanting. So far I’ve successfully avoided 100% of the FOMO for not owning one.

This was also very much on point:

If you’re much like me you might feel this sort of thing is starting to get a bit overdone - especially within PlayStation’s first-party offerings, which, as I’ve written before, have all started to merge into one. Count how many Sony-developed games in the past five years have grapple hooks, climbable ledges, parries, gliders, RPG-lite skill trees, waist-high grass, ultra-simple environmental puzzles, and a form of rage meter that fills up until you can press L3+R3 or L2+R2 for an ultimate of some kind, and the formula doesn’t so much reveal itself as it does write it on your forehead in yellow paint.

It’s also a good patient gaming example, actually, because it was completely unplayable at launch and is only in a decent state now thanks to the Unofficial Patch.

Cyberpunk and No Man’s Sky have already been mentioned, and honestly there aren’t going to be any real better examples than those two. They are the poster children for patient gaming for me.

My favourite patient game is probably Withering Rooms, which benefitted a lot from a long Early Access period. With the sequel entering early access yesterday it’s the perfect time to check it out!

It’s finally out!? It’s been stuck in Steam Approval Review Hell for a couple of days. Holy hell, this may be my most anticipated game of the year. If anyone hasn’t played the first game (Withering Rooms) yet then you should get on it immediately. It’s amazingly good, especially for a solo dev game(!).

I fucking hate it here.

I only spent much time with the crane game, as that is the source of thousands of skill points and I wanted to unlock the skill tree faster. It’s weird that the rest of the minigames don’t give much in terms of rewards, but I’m not complaining.

Grenades are definitely important, and in an attempt to copy Ninja Gaiden it feels like those long gauntlets are meant to test routing and planning. You’re often punished for using grenades early, as there will come a later encounter before the checkpoint that almost require them, and sometimes it feels like it’s intentional to force you to redo these a couple of time until you’ve seen enough to make a plan.

There is some stuff you can do in the combat, even gun cancelling and alternating between the two combo trees, and the slide slash is pretty good for staggering, as is the running kick. But I don’t know, it doesn’t feel like there is enough juice here to make me want to do a second playthrough. I’d rather fire up any of the 4 Ninja Gaidens. Well, maybe not NG3.

I can’t believe you completely ignored the main quest of playing cards with everyone in favour of the RPG minigame they put in as a side activity.

Seriously though I love Gwent hahaha.

Brother, there is no suspension of disbelief that can hold this shit together hahaha. It’s a shame because it’s sometimes managing to hit that “so bad it’s good” vibe, but too often it’s held back by the voice acting. It’s quite literally the worst I’ve ever heard and it fucks up the whole thing. It isn’t even bad in a hammy way to match the B-Movie vibe, it’s just… absolute garbage. Like people who have never acted before doing roles in their second language while cold reading their lines off the page over Skype bad.

I’m at the end of the Police HQ stage. I can’t tell if it’s a learning curve or just a fucked up progression, though. The first level was by far the hardest, but there’s just way too much shit locked behind the skill tree I think. Like, when I got to the 5 shield guy ambush after the miniboss in the first level I hadn’t yet unlocked any of the tools to deal with shield guys. Almost quit then and there.

I also kind of hate the sequences of huge gauntlets with no checkpoints. It’s not the kind of challenge I enjoy that much. I’m sure some do, and there are some elements of strategy and planning it requires of you that I’m sure some love. I don’t, really, though.

I’m also glad the game isn’t that long. I think this is the penultimate level. The lack of variety in melee and the combos and attacks you have is starting to feel noticeable.

Have barely played any games this week, a few hours total if that.

I started on Roadwarden, and so far it looks promising. It’s very slow though. It is pretty much just a choose-your-own-adventure book. I’m liking the writing and the world building and setting, but it’s just walls of text upon walls of text. Not at all bad text (in fact it’s quite good), but I have to be in the mood for reading to sit down with it, not gaming.

I also played a bit more Wanted: Dead. Still not in love with it but I want to finish it before moving on to a new game. Let’s hope I can. The combat does get a bit better after you unlock most of the skill tree, but I would still not claim it to be good, even though it has its moments. And there are loads of questionable design decisions in there. It’s a very bizarre game in every way.