Coelacanth

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.

How did you enjoy Metro Exodus? I’m going to get to it soonish, and I’m very curious after loving 2033 and having very mixed feelings about Last Light.

Lost Judgement wasn’t on my radar but it looks interesting. Might wishlist for later. I should probably work on the Yakuza collection I already own but haven’t played yet before buying more games in its vein, though…

I wonder how much reactivity, interjections and party banter they were able to put together out of repurposed lines from the game files. Those things are the primary reason to take someone with you in an RPG.

Still, would much rather have a silent Mizora with me than a speaking Wyll.

They’re really selling me on this, you know. Man, that sounds fucking enticing.

The Witcher 3 definitely does have some very questionable and misleading dialogue choices where it’s very hard to guess what Geralt will say and how (and consequently the outcome) based on what’s written.

Ah, I’m so sorry you got laid off! Take a digital hug, if you want it.

I definitely feel the decision fatigue. I do like a choice based game or an RPG at times, but it can definitely be exhausting. Sometimes you just need a linear and concise story that’s cinematic and well told and that you can just follow.

Well, I’m interested.

I’ll keep it in mind, although platformers are typically not my wheelhouse. This was an exception because my little sister loves Rayman and got me to play that with her back then. Does Origins have those side scrolling musical levels where you need to time your inputs to the music? Those were the best part.

I did both, and definitely recommend doing so. It’s a very rewarding game for note taking, and also writing things down with pen and paper helps you remember better. And it’s just kind of pleasant to write physical notes, as well as flipping through notebook pages to check something. It definitely enhanced the experience for me.

I finished The Séance of Blake Manor, which I’ve been playing on weekends with my sister and brother-in-law for the past few months. On the whole I must say I was disappointed, especially given the hugely impressive reviews it has garnered.

We can start with what the game does well: it’s a very well-researched game about mythology, particularly Irish mythology but also some 19th century occultism and mysticism. This is by far the most interesting part of the game. If you view it as a glorified few hours of stumbling through Wikipedia pages about Irish folklore and mythology then maybe you’ll enjoy it.

Unfortunately it’s an absolutely lousy deduction/detective game. Actually maybe that’s too weak a word. I found it to be complete garbage. I’ll go into more detail, but the short version is this: at every single step of the way the game fundamentally fails at the central principle of a deduction style game - making the player feel smart.

Now, I do concede that constructing a detective game is very difficult. A central challenge is the interface with and verification of knowledge: how does the game know you’ve figured something out? Obra Dinn had an elegant way of solving this, Blake Manor does not. You will constantly be frustrated, shouting expletives at the moronic protagonist as you’re clicking on every interactible object you can find in the hopes of the game finally accepting that you know the thing you as a player figured out three hours ago. The “hypothesis” mechanic is terrible. 90% of the time you already know the hypothesis long before you’re allowed to actually input it by the game, and the rest of the time there is usually only one word in each slot that makes grammatical sense. Again, never making you feel smart. Also the protagonist farcically exclaims ‘Wait! I know what happened here!’ every time, which is less euphoric when you’ve known what happened for hours as a player.

And this poorly implemented mechanic of what “clues” unlock the state of something being known leads to further problems, too. You have a myriad of discussion topics available to you, but there is no real throughline or logic about which topic leads to actually unlocking new “clues” or “evidence”. If there was a sound logic here, this would be an opportunity to make the player feel smart: “Wait… I need to talk with this person about that subject!”. That would be good design. Unfortunately Blake Manor does not have good design. Sometimes a completely random person-topic combination gives you the clue, sometimes a very clearly important person-topic combination gives you nothing. The end result is that you’re just kind of talking about everything with everyone, exhausting every available topic until you finally talk about the one random thing with the one random person that the game decides will give you the next piece of “evidence”. It doesn’t make you feel like a detective. And that is the central defining trait of Blake Manor mechanically: it fundamentally fails at the raison d’être of the genre. You’re never really investigating or deducing, you’re just walking around clicking on things until the game gives you the next thing to click on, which gives you the next thing to click on, etc etc.

The only actual deduction in the whole game is related to who the central “culprit” is, and that is so laughably easy I hesitate to call it a puzzle even.

I also had a lot of issues with the writing. Especially the “character arcs” of each NPC are bizarrely written, with almost all of them doing a complete 180 after you simply confront them with their own plan. Like imagine you have someone plotting to consume the soul of another person to obtain magic powers, which they’ve desired their whole life. This would be actual dialogue in game:

Protagonist: You plan on murdering Johanna and consuming her soul to obtain her magic powers! Previously magic-obsessed woman: Oh no! I see the error of my ways! How horrible! I must give up on this, and never again pursue the allure of magic!

Also the voice acting wasn’t great either, or at least very uneven. Especially one climactic moment in the endgame was let down by poor delivery. And it felt like most of the cast struggled with the Irish accents?

Anyway, I could go on but I’ve probably ranted enough.

Blue Prince definitely takes a while to hook you. I can think of a couple of somewhat early “wow” moments that tend to do it for people. Are you taking physical notes? Note taking was like half the fun for me, haha.

What an amazing game it is, duking it out with Disco Elysium for my favourite of all time.

My only exposure to Rayman was Rayman Legends and that was absolutely dope, especially the musical levels.

The amount of work they’re putting in post-launch is making me more and more comfortable with my decision to pre-order out of support and solidarity. I really hope they pull everything off.

Let’s hope this is “Wanted: Dead but actually good”, because a gun fu game like this has a lot of promise.

I have never met someone who lost their saves back-to-back before, hahaha. What nefarious spirit did you anger to call this curse upon you? Also that sounds like a remarkably bad save system in Routine, unfortunately.

I’m glad you enjoyed it! I’ll definitely keep an eye out for it during future sales. I’ve heard others praise the setting too, that’s definitely one of the things I’m attracted too. Especially the interior and clutter design, which very few games get right.

Glad you’re enjoying Routine! I was so close to buying it on the last sale, too. Looking forward to hearing your final verdict once you’re finished.

Looks cool, I almost considered buying it, but I am put off by the long runbacks.

Doesn’t Nvidia have Prime for their Linux drivers built in now? I remember you used to have to fuck around with Bumblebee, now that was a hassle.

I guess if you don’t have an Nvidia GPU it’s still a hassle.

Man, I would love to go some day. Thank you for sharing!

EVE has underrated combat mechanics to be honest, so I’m surprised there haven’t been more attempts to make games inspired by them. Managing your transversal and tracking of yours and the enemy’s weapons is quite fun.

I knew there was something off about the writing in that game from the trailer.

Damn, losing your saved games like that absolutely sucks. I’m so sorry. I’m glad you got to experience most of it, at least. The lost film in the cinema is so good too, almost more audacious than the We Sing chapter is shoving a whole ass European art house short film in there haha.