What are you currently playing?

[The Rogue Wolf]

As detailed here, I'm playing the Unity engine port of Daggerfall. As I should have expected, it's even jankier than Morrowind. Attempting to fit pure diceroll combat mechanics into first-person real-time gameplay is tricky enough, but Daggerfall does a terrible job of giving feedback on what your attacks are doing. Also, apparently a majority of the quests you get are randomly generated on the spot, and the randomly designated questgivers can simply stop being questgivers at random- loading a saved game in front of an NPC ten times will get you nine completely different quests and one instance of a normal dialogue tree coming up. (There's also a mechanic where an NPC can suddenly reveal themselves as "your nemesis" and transform into a hostile mob who will try to teleport you to a random dungeon- one managed to send me into a completely submerged castle that I couldn't escape from despite being an Argonian, who are explicitly aquatic reptilians.) And, to the joy of masochists the world over, there's absolutely no telling how dangerous a particular situation will be- the first quest I accepted from one temple sent me to "pacify" a spirit who instantly paralyzed me and then turned me into confetti in three hits.

I mean, I know they were still working out how this kind of game should function, and back in its day this was the best anyone could really get. But I remember how happy I was that Oblivion had largely done away with this stuff- where if you hit something with a sword or arrow, it fucking counted for something no matter what.

 

[BrawlMan]

I finished my Hardcore run of Claire A, Leon B. RE2Remake (XONE). I still have to do vice versa on Hardcore, but I am taking a break for now. I am installing Evil Within 2 on the XONE and will play that later. Probably not tonight, but later in the week.

 

[Specter Von Baren]

I don't know why I decided to try Sifu again, it's too hard and annoying. I just love the style and what the game CAN be for me but I kind of still hate it.
Haven't completely given up, I'll still try to make some headway when I'm in the mood for punishment, but I'm looking for something else.

So I'm gonna try Genshin Impact just to try something new and free.

The first step to getting into hard games is finding one that makes you want to keep trying. I got better at action games because DMC3 kicked my ass but I wanted to keep playing it and my pride wouldn't let me switch to easy mode (even though I learned later that Hard was renamed Normal for the Western release). So I kept at it, because I wanted to do it. Maybe you could look at Sifu as your opportunity to do the same if it keeps calling you back to it?

 

[BrawlMan]

Evil Within 2 I played a little bit of last night. Man is it fun going through this game again! Since I'm playing on an Xbox One X, I get to play at a uncapped frame rate of 60 frames per second. Freaking sweet. I'm probably going to do all the side content in the first go around, I like my very first playthrough when I only did about between 1/2 and 2/3 of it.

 

[laggyteabag]

Played a bit more Frostpunk, and I completed the On The Edge scenario.

Narratively, On The Edge takes place after the A New Home scenario, and you take control of one of New London's outposts, established to provide the city with a supply of steel. Your colony must send off regular shipments of steel, in return for a supply of food. Also, because you are only an outpost, you don't get to decide your own laws - instead, you ask New London for help, and they will respond with what they feel like is the best solution. For example, you could ask them for more workers, at which point they responded with a law allowing you to use your children for labour.

Eventually, the deal takes a turn for the worse, and you need to seek out your own supply of resources, which then leads to establishing relationships with other nearby colonies, where you need to juggle shipments to satisfy each other's needs.

It really is a logistical battle of constant bartering, and it is really a lot of fun.

In the end, I failed, but only by a hair. Then, I reloaded a past save from two minutes prior, and just piled all of my citizens onto the missing resource, and succeeded.

Definitely the most interesting of the scenarios that I have played so far. Next (and last), is The Last Autumn.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

Super Skelemania

It's a mini Metroidvania. Beat it in a little over an hour but apparently you can speedrun in under 17 minutes.

Like Xeodrifter, you crashland in some alien planet and have to escape. But there's no clear theming. The plot is boilerplate sci-fi, but you're a skeleton (ok) and you're running around banging on gongs and bells (ok?) and you fight some vaguely Satanic creature at the end (...ok) and you escape by shooting up into space (fuck it). Also apparently you get a (literal) skin by banging on the gongs in a certain order, not that the skeleton seems to be motivated by the desire to be a "real boy" - or really anything.

The combat is perfunctory - everything dies in one hit, and most enemies act as obstacles more than anything - so the meat and potatoes is in the platforming, which is a lot of fun. Most of the abilities you unlock around the planet add to your mobilitiy and work towards reaching new areas but also get added to the general repertoire of what you'll be dealing with as regular platforming challenges. It's fairly tight, with some twists to the usual moves and a nifty dependence on momemtum and precision that never felt like a burden. Aside from one specific jump near the beginning I don't believe I ever died once, not even to the paltry two bosses along the way.

I got it for $0.49 and can definitely recommend it at that price range.

So…you’re definitely on a metroidvania kick I take it? Really though I’m curious if you’re specifically seeking this genre out comprehensively to see what’s what, or what?

If so I’d hope you’re making an excel list or something to rank them, because I’d like to see it.

 

[sXeth]

Still bustling in ye olde Warframe.

Gonna start up a revisit of Dragons Dogma on my Twitch channel. Not sure what vocation to go with. I bopped between Strider and Assassin in my original playthrough

 

[Piscian]

So I got FFVII REmake, birth, interrogation whatever this week on PC. Epic had it onsale for $30.

I'm on chapter two and I'll admit its pretty cool. the port is beautiful cranked to max 4k with surround sound. My only real complaint is that I'm not really understanding why I should be enjoying the combat. It's not intuitive or "fun". It just feels like I'm spinning plates while trying to do my taxes. It's action game, but you gotta constantly stop to activate abilities and switch between characters all while trying to keep track of whats going on it in combat. It's just kinda frustrating. I'm not understanding why this is better than just doing turn based combat. I could be crazy but I feel like FFXV was different and easier to manage. I ended up switching to classic mode and letting the characters do whatever until it tells me its time to do an ability. I'm not sure thats what I'd call classic. Neither system truly makes the combat feel like live action. Feels like an execution failure or maybe I'm just not the target audience.

 

[Specter Von Baren]

Omori finally released on the Switch, so I've started playing that. Not too far in now but I've managed to keep myself spoiler free from anything in this game so let's see how it goes.

 

[Dalisclock]

Omori finally released on the Switch, so I've started playing that. Not too far in now but I've managed to keep myself spoiler free from anything in this game so let's see how it goes.

That's one of those games I hear about every so often and it gets compared to games like undertale. Apparently people have been trying to get yahtzee to play it on stream recently. Please let us know what it's like/about. I'm kinda curious.

 

[Specter Von Baren]

That's one of those games I hear about every so often and it gets compared to games like undertale. Apparently people have been trying to get yahtzee to play it on stream recently. Please let us know what it's like/about. I'm kinda curious.

Hhm... I dunno. I guess you could say it's like Undertale in that it seems very much to be inspired by Earthbound but I get the sense that comparing it to Yume Nikki or Off is a more apt comparison based on what I've seen so far.

 

[Dalisclock]

Hhm... I dunno. I guess you could say it's like Undertale in that it seems very much to be inspired by Earthbound but I get the sense that comparing it to Yume Nikki or Off is a more apt comparison based on what I've seen so far.

I wouldn't be shocked if this was the internet and its small reference pools at work here. Or maybe I'm misremembering what I heard about it.

"It's the Undertale of Dark Souls!"-Probably a real quote for some game

 

[Specter Von Baren]

I wouldn't be shocked if this was the internet and it's small reference pools at work here. Or maybe I'm misremembering what I heard about it.

"It's the Undertale of Dark Souls!"-Probably a real quote for some game

No, I'm pretty sure that's exactly the case. While I find it annoying, it's also understandable that we can only compare things to what we already know.

The area the game starts in reminds me of Yume Nikki, as does to continence of our titular character but the world outside the start has a feel like that of off, in how it feels to move in and the way the characters act, and the darkness I see peeking around the edges reminds me of the darkness from both games.

 

[sXeth]

I wouldn't be shocked if this was the internet and its small reference pools at work here. Or maybe I'm misremembering what I heard about it.

"It's the Undertale of Dark Souls!"-Probably a real quote for some game

Well Undertale presented as a SNES era Square-RPG, but the combat was an arcade bullet hell thing and you were supposed to play it like a text adventure.


So a Souls equivalent would be a gothic third person action game in appearance that you played as a rhythm game but the actual experience was adventure game puzzles or something

 

[Specter Von Baren]

So, trying to pin down and decipher what people probably are trying to say when they say something is like Undertale.

Let us call whatever the nebulous thing is that people think of as Undertale like, Z. So, Z is a kind of game that has a certain tone, it's like how horror games are defined by the emotion they elicit rather than their mechanics.

I would say Cave Story is an example of a Z game. It has a goofy, fluffy, bright tone that also has a dark, hard, brittle side that pokes through in places. Even older than that is Earthbound with how silly and nonsensical so much of the game is yet still has serious and darker parts sprinkled throughout it, especially the end.

I would argue that a Z game takes it's ques from anime. It's like how certain anime shows will have the light and goofy to endear you to characters and the world but then wrench your heart and mind with serious and dark aspects (Higurashi being an example).

If I were to give Z type games a proper name then maybe "Growing Up" or "Graduation" games would be a good fit. That darkness peeking around the corners I brought up is like how we start seeing all the difficult problems and challenges we're going to have to deal with as adults while we're still kids in school. The moment when you have to fight your Ballos or Giygas is the moment you leave home and go out on your own into the world. It's hard, scary, and you'll have to struggle, but once you overcome it you'll be able to find that those light and happy times aren't gone for good, you just have to fight for them now.

And there ya go. That's why I speak dryly al the time, so I can keep myself from rambling on into flowery, purple speech.

 

[sXeth]

So, trying to pin down and decipher what people probably are trying to say when they say something is like Undertale.

Let us call whatever the nebulous thing is that people think of as Undertale like, Z. So, Z is a kind of game that has a certain tone, it's like how horror games are defined by the emotion they elicit rather than their mechanics.

I would say Cave Story is an example of a Z game. It has a goofy, fluffy, bright tone that also has a dark, hard, brittle side that pokes through in places. Even older than that is Earthbound with how silly and nonsensical so much of the game is yet still has serious and darker parts sprinkled throughout it, especially the end.

I would argue that a Z game takes it's ques from anime. It's like how certain anime shows will have the light and goofy to endear you to characters and the world but then wrench your heart and mind with serious and dark aspects (Higurashi being an example).

If I were to give Z type games a proper name then maybe "Growing Up" or "Graduation" games would be a good fit. That darkness peeking around the corners I brought up is like how we start seeing all the difficult problems and challenges we're going to have to deal with as adults while we're still kids in school. The moment when you have to fight your Ballos or Giygas is the moment you leave home and go out on your own into the world. It's hard, scary, and you'll have to struggle, but once you overcome it you'll be able to find that those light and happy times aren't gone for good, you just have to fight for them now.

And there ya go. That's why I speak dryly al the time, so I can keep myself from rambling on into flowery, purple speech.

Its generally thrown in a pile thats considered Earthbound likes. (generally Western) RPGs that utilize JRPG mechanics from the 90s, but the combat and presentation is largely secondary or sometimes bypassed entirely, and tend to deal with emotional or adult topics behind the veneer of a cartoonish fantasy settings. (Also usually have some odder music choices). Often veering more into a horror elements (psychological or otherwise) as the game goes on.


Undertale and Lisa are usually the two cited examples, although Lisa doesn't really keep the horror subtextual, at all.


The more general "Cartoony game with a face-value premise is actually about deeper issue" (IE: Dust an Elysian Tale with its Link and Faory expies and lighthearted banter being about Ethnic Cleansing and the Escalating patterns of War), is probably too broad to eve quantify as a single genre at this point.

 

[Specter Von Baren]

Its generally thrown in a pile thats considered Earthbound likes. (generally Western) RPGs that utilize JRPG mechanics from the 90s, but the combat and presentation is largely secondary or sometimes bypassed entirely, and tend to deal with emotional or adult topics behind the veneer of a cartoonish fantasy settings. (Also usually have some odder music choices). Often veering more into a horror elements (psychological or otherwise) as the game goes on.


Undertale and Lisa are usually the two cited examples, although Lisa doesn't really keep the horror subtextual, at all.

The games by Deep Sea Prisoner fit this to a tee. The RPG mechanics in The Gray Garden and Wadenohara are entirely there for flavor. Yes, you've much more succinctly described it.

 

[meiam]

Still bustling in ye olde Warframe.

Gonna start up a revisit of Dragons Dogma on my Twitch channel. Not sure what vocation to go with. I bopped between Strider and Assassin in my original playthrough

Magick archer is super fun, set yourself on fire then climb on the enemy or using bouncing arrow in cramp space

 

[Old_Hunter_77]

The first step to getting into hard games is finding one that makes you want to keep trying. I got better at action games because DMC3 kicked my ass but I wanted to keep playing it and my pride wouldn't let me switch to easy mode (even though I learned later that Hard was renamed Normal for the Western release). So I kept at it, because I wanted to do it. Maybe you could look at Sifu as your opportunity to do the same if it keeps calling you back to it?

Well yeah you're basically describing my experience with Bloodborne, which was my entry point to the Souls thing.

I think the reason I can play those games is that once you beat a boss, you beat that boss.

I think my issue is the rogue-like thing. I was happy to finally beat Sean. I was less happy to beat him again... less to do it again... I don't want to beat him any more.

 

[Specter Von Baren]

The more general "Cartoony game with a face-value premise is actually about deeper issue" (IE: Dust an Elysian Tale with its Link and Faory expies and lighthearted banter being about Ethnic Cleansing and the Escalating patterns of War), is probably too broad to eve quantify as a single genre at this point.

Also, perhaps if we were to name this genre, we could call it "Catfishing"?