What are you currently playing?

[Bedinsis]

Finished Kathy Rain. It was fine, though I made the mistake of trying to outsmart the game, thinking "Oh, how could this character come back later, with the new information changing how they react?". That did not happen, most characters were rather static. The developers were more interested in developing the titular character, which they did a good job with. And with her grandpa.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Playing Creaks.

It's a puzzle-platformer, mildly reminiscent of Braid (arcady levels, pantomime storytelling, water color paintings, jazzy soundtrack), made by Czech studio Amanita Design. Because it's Czech I'm supposed to consider it Kafkaesque and yeah, broadly speaking, the game feels threatening and darkly surreal. You play a dude (probably asleep at his desk) who crawls through a hole in the bedroom wall and ends up climbing down into a massive, impossibly overgrown underground manor populated by bird people that's being besieged by some kind of beast. You go from one puzzle room to the next and keep descending while catching glimpses of the bird people's struggle with the beast, eventually helping them (or trying to).

The puzzles are single-screen, multi-level labyrinths. You open doors, lower bridges, throw switches. A crucial aspect are the enemies, which work as obstacles as much as key parts of the puzzle. You often have to lead them and trap them, or shepherd them into each other, and turning on lights transforms them into inanimate objects for holding down floor pads or serving as step ladders. Typically you walk into a room, case what's the interactable stuff, what kinds of enemies are in there, study their patrols and come up with a plan. The puzzles grow bigger, the elements more diverse, the order becomes more strict, but you're essentially always doing a variation of the same thing. To compare it again to Braid, which develops its mechanics and expands their possibilities almost scientifically, while the difficulty here curves nicely, Creaks is a bit more stale in terms of evolution.

Having said that my god is the game beautiful. I just want to play to see what the next room looks like.

 

[Ezekiel]

Found a red tunic that further increases defense in the basement of Ganon's Tower. Appreciate all the nonessential equipment that did not appear in the dungeons of Ocarina of Time and later games.

Now I'm stuck again. The blocks down there beyond the invincible pork people don't move. If I've done a puzzle like this before, the playthrough took so long (over a year, because of one roadblock) that I can't remember. Maybe I need to move the statue between one of them. Will try later.

 

[NerfedFalcon]

Now I'm stuck again. The blocks down there beyond the invincible pork people don't move. If I've done a puzzle like this before, the playthrough took so long (over a year, because of one roadblock) that I can't remember. Maybe I need to move the statue between one of them. Will try later.

Tip: By now, 'try every single item in your inventory' should be an ingrained reflex. Slightly stronger tip: The red mimics aren't invincible, they just don't take damage from the sword.

 

[meiam]

Finally finished rogue trader after 102 hours.

Overall enjoyed it, but mixed feeling. The game has a lot of problem.

Gameplay is the biggest issue, it start pretty good, but by mid game you are an absolutely unstoppable monster. There's a lot of way to give flat damage increase to individual attack, and you can pretty easily do burst shoot that hit 20+ time. You can also stack extra turn many time, and you can combine that with the ability to always act first in combat. So what end up happening for every fight is that as soon as the fight start, you give many extra turn to a character that can easily mow everything down. As a results, I'd say about half the fight are over before an enemy even as a turn. You can increase the difficulty, but then you the enemy will pretty much one shoot most character, so it only mean you have to double down on making sure they never act. And the game seems to be build with that in mind, by endgame, enemy will have thousands of hitpoint, so if you haven't been building your character well, you'll hit quite a brick wall.

Story is also not so great, there's not much of an overarching plot, its more a collection of self contained arc. Your character just react to what is happening, pretty much every big action you take was started by someone else. There's some breads crumb laid throughout that end with some big reveal, but it feel very divorced from the rest of the game. The most enjoyable part is the 40K universe, but it often deviate from it, you can ally with xeno a bunch of time and your zealous companion never really say anything about that. Its also pretty limiting in what xeno you do meet, no ork, tyrannid or T'au. The game also, wisely, refrain from having space marine everywhere, but at the same they limit them too much and the space marine that are in the game are not very space marine-ey.

The game is also pretty buggy, no big bug, but plenty of small one, corpse often T pose, ability don't always works how they're supposed to. Only crashed once so its not that bad, but it often take you out.

The game has an alignment system, roughly good, evil and religious zealot (ie lawful evil), but annoyingly if you deviate even a little bit from just taking the same choice everytime, you end up in a situation where you fall behind on your alignment and so can't pick some option, which prevent you gaining more alignement point. Its also pretty arbitrary when choice will give you point.

I kinda wish the game had been smaller in scope and more focused, I kinda was done playing at 80 hours mark and just kinda drudge along.

 

[Ezekiel]

Tip: By now, 'try every single item in your inventory' should be an ingrained reflex. Slightly stronger tip: The red mimics aren't invincible, they just don't take damage from the sword.

I looked it up. If I hadn't been blocked off from the northwest of the dark world for a year, I would have remembered that they are vulnerable to arrows. The obstacle was the skull rocks that you need to hook to from the gap on the other side of the river, the rocks that you can't see from the far side. So much time had passed that I could not remember what I used the hookshot on in maiden dungeon 2. Someone here mentioned the rocks and hookshot. I searched for the hookshot bridge that day, got bored again and, only months later, tried shooting from that gap.

Thought I would beat the game a few minutes ago. I stunned Ganon for the final blow several times, but Link was informed that he needs a silver arrow. Not in the mood to go scouring the entire map right now.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Found a red tunic that further increases defense in the basement of Ganon's Tower. Appreciate all the nonessential equipment that did not appear in the dungeons of Ocarina of Time and later games.

There was a nonessential red tunic on OoT. A blue one too.

 

[BrawlMan]

I've been playing more MvCEX and labbing like crazy. I did some more arcade runs in this version as well.

 

[Worgen]

Beat Path of Exile 2. Well, not really, just beat all the current content, it goes up to act 3. Its quite good, although the story... exists. Second act seems the strongest, its got some really cool stages... and some really dull ones, the pitfall of being a desert, but the cool stages are really damn cool. 3rd act is the longest and does have some neat moments, but for some reason jungles don't do it for me, plus clearing the maps takes a long time since some are huge and enemies are more.. spongy then the other acts. After you beat the 3rd act the game just starts over, it just puts you back at the start with all your gear on a new cruel difficulty to do it again. In the cruel difficulty, you really need to figure out your build since enemies are much spongier so you want that damage.

 

[Ezekiel]

There was a nonessential red tunic on OoT. A blue one too.

Not inside the Fire and Water temples, and not there alone like these items. I said, "that did not appear IN THE DUNGEONS of Ocarina of Time and later games." The mirror shield in Link to the Past is another that you have to go off the dungeon's main path to find.

 

[NerfedFalcon]

Not inside the Fire and Water temples, and not there alone like these items. I said, "that did not appear IN THE DUNGEONS of Ocarina of Time and later games." The mirror shield in Link to the Past is another that you have to go off the dungeon's main path to find.

And if you're not a speedrunner, you 99% still need the Mirror Shield in order to finish the dungeon and the game, so it's technically still part of the intended path. Besides, you're also ignoring all the Heart Pieces that appear in dungeons in the later games, and (in Ocarina specifically) the Gold Skulltulas too. Maybe they're not on the same level as equipment items like the Blue and Red Mail, but they're still side content worth exploring the dungeon fully to track down.

Anyway, I was gonna give you a hint for Ganon too, but since you're skipping ahead to reading the guide anyway, I won't bother.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Not inside the Fire and Water temples, and not there alone like these items. I said, "that did not appear IN THE DUNGEONS of Ocarina of Time and later games." The mirror shield in Link to the Past is another that you have to go off the dungeon's main path to find.

I mean, if you are being that particular that they have to be in the dungeon, ok, but there were a bunch of optional items in OoT that you'd get for side quests or world exploration so I'm not really sure what the difference is. Fire arrows, ice arrows, Din's fire, Nayru's love, Farore's wind, all the bottles, the eye of truth (which is in a dungeon), the gold scale, the giant's knife.

 

[Ezekiel]

Aw, man, I didn't think A Link to the Past recorded my deaths.

Anyway, I was gonna give you a hint for Ganon too, but since you're skipping ahead to reading the guide anyway, I won't bother.

Think I used guides four times in the playthrough. I never "skipped ahead." Made a thread about the use of guides, thought about duplicating it here, but too dead.

 

[Silvanus]

Finished Nine Sols yesterday (true ending). That final boss is bloody hard but exhilarating to fight. Excellent game in both combat and aesthetic.

 

[BrawlMan]

Made a thread about the use of guides, thought about duplicating it here, but too dead.

Your opinion on hints and guides

So I've been going back through my backlog of Giant Bombcast as I stopped listening to a lot of podcasts because of the year we've been through. Anyway, point is, I came on an episode where they got into a debate about some kind of hint system that, I think it was Sony, would be baked into the...

forums.escapistmagazine.com

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I played Nine Sols which I loved but the game was stressing me out towards the end so I wanted to chase it with something relaxing.

So I played Creaks which is a very nice retro style puzzle platformer that stumps you just long enough but since every room is single screen (ie. all the info you ever need is in plain sight) and there are no softlocks and the game auto saves whenever you make any headway, it never gets frustrating.

And now I barely have a few days left before going away for he holidays so I'm going down my backlog of short games because I don't want to leave anything half done. I'm thinking flOw.

 

[Worgen]

9 Years of Shadows. I got it with a few other metroidvanias from humblebundle a few months ago. Its good, but not great. Has some really nice pixel art, but its done in this certain detailed style which I saw in a lot of indie games awhile back so I really wonder if there was some tool or something that made it easy to make a detailed yet similar style. Gameplay is what you expect, explore a big map, find upgrades, explore more, fight or avoid enemies. The overall story is... so forgettable that I have already forgotten it, but its got some interesting characters. There is a lot of musical theming in the game, and all the supporting characters are based on artists. Usually musical, but a couple painting artists also, I'm not sure how necessary it was to do that, but its a neat touch that made me look up the name and instrument used for pretty much every new side character just to see who they are based on. You will find new armor that is elemental based and each one has a new type of traversal that it unlocks. These mostly work, but they can also feel awkward to use. I would give this a soft recommend if you like metroidvanias.

 

[BrawlMan]

I've been addicted to Marvel vs. Capcom EX like crazy. I've tried the 10* difficulty and the game is still mostly easy compared to the arcade. Having the EX options help after beating the game first time. I'll mainly use it to get level 3 bars at the start. Makes doing and creating combos more fun. Capcom should have bundled this version as a small bonus in their MvC Collection. I got a new high score and now War Machine is my selected character for my score. I had him paired with Akuma Mode/Evil Ryu. Spamming beam or fireball supers breaking the scoring system on these games. I nearly have 2 million points.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Well no shit flOw is a short game. I already "beat" it since my last post 90 minutes ago.

It's part screensaver, part art piece, part tech demo for the Sixaxis. You tilt the controller in the direction you want to guide a spermatozoon as it floats on a 2D nether. Eat red pellets to move deeper into the nether, get bullied by bigger spermatozoon and you go back up a 2D plane. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.

Get to the final pellet and you win the campaign. Win the six campaigns with the six different shapes of spermatozoon and you win the game. And that's it.

So this is basically where the GAMES ARE ART indie battlecry began, right? Before Fez, before Braid, before Limbo, before Journey.

 

[laggyteabag]

So, for my last 80 hours, I have been playing Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and I have since completed a 100% playthrough, and earned all the achievements. And I feel compelled to talk about this game.

For some backstory on my relationship with Dragon Age: I’ve played every single Dragon Age game multiple times. I think Origins is great. I really love 2, despite its obvious flaws. And I think that Inquisition has good moments but is really held back by its sheer bloat.

Going into The Veilguard, I tried hard to not go in with any preconceptions of what a Dragon Age game should be, because realistically, this franchise has always been unsure of itself. As Dragon Age games have been released, each one has progressively moved the dial more and more towards being more action-oriented, and being lighter in tone from the dark fantasy established in Origins. Going into a Dragon Age games with expectations for what it should look and play like is, in my opinion, a recipe for disaster. So, in terms of gameplay and tone, I let Dragon Age: The Veilguard speak for itself, and I judged it on its own merits.

And overall, I had a fine time with the game. There is some stuff that I enjoyed quite a bit, and other stuff that I didn’t enjoy much at all.

The biggest win in my eyes for this game is the combat. I played as a mage on the highest difficulty, and I thought that there was a lot of fun to be had here. I was initially quite concerned about the lack of mappable abilities. Going from Dragon Age: Origins where you could map as many abilities as you had access to, to The Veilguard’s three(?!) plus an ultimate ability, seemed like a blasphemous simplification, but as it turns out there is a lot more to do than just your activatable abilities. Dragon Age: The Veilguard allows you to activate your companion’s abilities on the fly, much like you can in the Mass Effect games, which instantly brings your list of activatable abilities to nine (plus your ultimate), which all apply different effects like taunts, heals, knock-downs, damage over time, and the ability to combine two abilities to cause a detonation, which is a huge AOE splash. Additionally, you can now perform light and heavy attacks, a ranged attack, and dodges, blocks, and parries, which allow you to unlock and perform a variety of God of War (2018)-style button combos like jump attacks, sprint attacks to increase your damage, and the skill ceiling. Combined with each class having two distinct weapon types, I found that there was quite a lot to do in combat, which is a far-cry from the previous game’s simple auto attacks. Admittedly it isn’t quite as crunchy as God of War – though me playing as a mage does make this quite an apples/oranges comparison – but I do genuinely feel like this is the best combat in the series.

The build craft is quite a lot of fun too. There are three classes, and each has an expansive skill tree of dozens of nodes of minor and major abilities to unlock, and three specialisations that you can choose to spec into, with each unlocking a new ultimate ability, and leaning into one particular playstyle. Between all of your abilities, all of the different gear and their stat bonuses and passives, it really does feel like there are loads of build possibilities to explore for each class, and there are three classes to choose from. There is a lot of replayability to be found here.

One consequence of this new combat, however, is that you no longer can take direct control of your companions, like you could in the previous game. Though honestly, didn’t care about this this being gone as much as I thought I would have. Whilst it was great that you could assume direct control of one of your companions in a fight in the previous game, If I’m being honest, I never really used this feature all that often, other than to just move a companion out of a hazard. In the previous games, all I ever did was amend their Tactics so that they would use their abilities when I wanted them to, and then let their AI do the rest. I really don’t think this was as big of a blow as I initially thought it would be. The benefits of this change allow your companions to be more distinct and unique in combat, where previously they had access to the exact same list of abilities as you. For example, Davrin’s unique abilities include his griffon in combat, Bellara is a mage who can uniquely use a bow, and Taash dual-wields axes. Additionally, they are also now invincible, and are a lot more responsive with their ability activations, as they just teleport to where they need to be to use that ability – and this never actually bothered me, or looked distracting.

But whilst I have gushed about the combat, that is sadly really the most positive thing that I have to say about Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

This is an RPG, and the real meat of this genre is the story, and this is where the game kind of falters for me.

The tone of this game is honestly quite bizarre. I knew going into this game that this would have a lighter tone, though again, Dragon Age has been slowly pushing in this direction for years, so this wasn’t much of a surprise to me. What kind of shocked me though, was that this was pushing even further into the territory of Young Adult fantasy, or something that wouldn’t be too out of place in a Disney movie. The world is ending, and yet everybody is just so pleasant and happy to be here. The rough edges of the world have been sanded back or pushed out of sight. Its quite a stark contrast to the Dragon Age of the past. But honestly, I don’t think it would be quite so bothersome, if it wasn’t constantly contradicting itself. You are summoned to have a meaningless conversation with some of your companions about how many books they should or shouldn’t bring on a lovely camping trip that they are about to have (that you never see), or you frolic through the woods looking for truffles to feed to your pet griffon, and then the next minute you’re on a quest where a blood mage is controlling hostages through their blood, which visually looks like a puppet’s marionette strings, or you’ll shock someone to death in combat and they will literally explode in a shower of blood. The main theme doesn’t even sound like it was made for this game, and was intended for something much darker, with its sinister strings and loud horns.

Talking about the music for a second, it is in a word: weird. Synths are an odd choice for a fantasy game, but it does admittedly occasionally work, and there are a few decent tracks to be found. But overall, I feel as though the music is quite a big step back from Inquisition, which is pretty evident by that often when I was thinking to myself "wow, the music is really good in this scene", it ended up being a song from Inquisition. But alas, Trevor Morris was not brought back, and was instead replaced by Hanz Zimmer(?!) and Lorne Balfe for their 10 billionth project.

As for the story and the companions, it’s a bit rough. The game is structured basically exactly like Mass Effect 2, which is likely great news for most people, but it is a game that I have soured on somewhat over the years. This is to say that the game has the occasional and impactful story mission, but the majority of the game is running around recruiting companions, or progressing their companion quest. But unlike Mass Effect 2, these quests are a lot longer and a lot more involved than just a few chats on the Normandy, and then a singular loyalty mission. Unfortunately, just like Mass Effect 2, these quests are often only tangentially related to the main story, so the main plot often takes a back seat, as you go for another round of the previously mentioned truffle hunting in the woods.

Unlike Mass Effect 2, though, the companions themselves are not the highlight of the game, and are honestly a career-low for BioWare (at least of the games that I have played). Not a single one of them left much of an impression of me, and I was never excited about bringing any of them out with me – unlike Dragon Age 2 where three slots was agonisingly small! I just didn’t really care about any of these people, which made me not care about their personal quests, which made a majority of the game quite a bit of a slog. Most bizarrely, often these characters indicated no real preference for how their personal quests would end either, with them often deferring major decisions about their lives to you for some reason. I get that RPGs are all about choice, but too much choice in what should be very personal decisions for these characters just makes them feel very unconvincing. I think one of reasons why I never quite gelled with these companions, is that (with one exception) each one is tied to one of the 6 major factions in the game, so aside from one or two extraneous "personality" traits (Lucianis loves coffee, and wont shut up about the city he comes from) they mostly just act as ambassadors for the faction that they come from rather than actual people.

As an aside, your character seems like the least special person of the bunch; you aren't the chosen one, there is nothing special about you. You might hail from the same background as one of your companions, but they are inherently more special than you - you might be a Grey Warden, but Davrin is a Grey Warden with a Griffon. You might be an Antivan Crow, but Lucianis is a Crow possessed by a demon. Your character's backstory is always one-upped by someone standing next to you.

I think my biggest surprise for The Veilguard is how few of your choices from the previous games are imported. There are a grand total of four(?!) decisions that can be imported, and these are: your Inquisitor’s race and appearance (which you do get to customise), who they romanced, whether or not you pledged to stop Solas by any means necessary, and whether or not the Inquisition was disbanded. And as far as I could tell, the latter two choices barely made any impact at all. Its quite shocking to me that this was cut down in such a way. BioWare game’s special sauce in my view has always been that your previous choices would impact future games. Importing your decisions from one game into the next is and always will be cool as shit, and it is a crying shame that this was mostly removed here. I'm not expecting a meaningful payoff from the outcome of sidequest number 47 of Dragon Age 2 here, but even bigger picture stuff like “Is the Hero of Ferelden still alive?” or “Is Hawke still alive?” are nowhere to be seen, and their absence is really felt. You can’t even pick your Inquisitor’s class, so they just run around in their pyjamas for the whole game.

As for the plot itself, I didn’t think that it was anything exceptional. Solas, who was built up to be the next big-bad by the end of Inquisition, is immediately sidelined in favour of two mustache-twirling villains. Solas’ occasional appearances are a highlight, but they only ever make me yearn for what could have been. But sadly, just like in Mass Effect 2, the whole plot is unfortunately sidelined so that you can deal with your companion’s personal drama, instead of saving the world. So maybe that name change from Dragon Age: Dreadwolf to Dragon Age: The Veilguard, was more fitting than I had originally expected.

Overall, I think it is a decent game. A solid 6/10. I have no idea what the reviewers were injecting into their veins when they were scoring this game a 9’s and 10’s, but similarly, calling this game Dragon Age: Failguard is being a bit overdramatic. This certainly wasn’t what BioWare needed to stage their big comeback.