#games

Nimona feels too real. I don’t want to spoil anything, but the wall is mentioned almost at the beginning, and you can guess that this is more of a contemporary story than it seems at first. Well, at first it seems like a mix of near future and medieval, but you know what I mean. It is also a personal story of a couple of misfits. I was expecting to write something like “and the book is better that the movie because of this and that”, but that is not the case. Some things have been moved around, the adaptation loses in some areas but gains in others. So I can’t recommend one over the other, but I can recommend both.

Remember Dragon Age? Do you think we will get another one? Too sad? Okay.

• Redemption is only interesting as a live-action adaptation. Not bad, but just unremarkable.
• Dawn of the Seeker is so dull, I’m sure it was done on purpose.
• The first season of Absolution is pretty great. It’s colorful, there’s action and comedy, but it’s also dark in some places. Dragon Age by and large never goes completely grim dark, but it doesn’t shy away from heavy themes.

It’s hard not to be cynical about movies like The Sea Beast and Strange World, or even Nimona. They all tend to ignore the systemic nature of the problems, offer simple solutions that will not work, and overall do not stray far from the status quo. But there has been a slow shift toward something resembling an actual stance. And they are all still quite entertaining, with at least a clear improvement in the area of representation.

I also decided to finish Into the Badlands. I can’t vouch for the whole thing (I stopped, what, 5 years ago), but the last half of the last season and the show as a whole wasn’t bad, wasn’t bad at all. It’s a dark, post-apocalyptic story where everyone’s kind of bad and yada yada yada. But there’s still a lot of good stuff: complex and diverse characters, the story makes sense if you squint a bit and/or ignore the parts you don’t like, it looks good in a bleak sort of way, and of course the thing it was sold on, the fighting is great.

It seems that “dungeon crawler” has become more of a theme. Are you in a dungeon most of the time? Dungeon crawler! But it was a subgenre at one point. And one I barely touched, so I decided to correct that. Of all the options, I started with something modern, with quality of life improvements and all that.

Operencia: The Stolen Sun is somewhere between high fantasy and fairy tale. It is also somewhere between epic – as the title suggests, the sun is stolen – and small and cozy. The maps are not too big, but can feel grand, you’re never dealing with big numbers, the puzzles have a storybook feel to them. Overall, it is like a good tabletop RPG campaign, one that would not challenge you, but would entertain you nonetheless.

I would call Soul Searching a walking simulator with light survival elements, but you are on a boat most of the time, so it is a sailing simulator with light survival elements. There is not much to add, just to mention that there are heavy themes, the name does not lie.

Skye is a pleasant, very painterly and completely free arcade flight game. Except for a few races that can be challenging, everything is quite relaxing.

The Tartarus Key is not particularly scary – it is not a survival horror, there are no monsters, hardly any jump scares, and no existential stuff either – more atmospheric. A haunted house attraction, more or less. Puzzles are all contained, escape room style, so you always know that you can solve them. Good characters, not a bad story.

Iron Lung is brilliance in minimalism. You basically stare at three numbers (X, Y, angle) and four buttons (2 for angle and 2 for movement) all the time, but the pressure (pun intended) of being in a barely holding metal apparatus in the depths of an alien ocean is palpable. It is also quite short.

Signalis is an interesting example of two things. First, it takes gameplay from old survival horror games and uses it with very little modernization. This means that if you want that kind of thing (I apparently did), it’s great, but if you don’t want to deal with very limited inventory, respawning enemies, and a lack of clear direction, there’s not much to mitigate that. There is some mitigation, on the level of, say, the Resident Evil 1 remake, but that’s about it (the map is good, for example, but is also missing for a chunk of the game). Second, it is clearly influenced by a lot of things – movies, books, games – that are, to put it politely, problematic. But unless I missed something, which is possible, it doesn’t bring bad elements from those inspirations.

Wretched Depths is a free little fishing game with Twin Peaks-style weirdness and some eldritch horror. You catch fish with your upgradeable fishing rod and lure, and some strange things out of the corner of your eye.

Afterdream was not bad, but disappointing. Gameplay is okay, just a simple point and click. The addition of a camera was kind of meh. The biggest flaw is the story. Some time ago, I played the first Distraint, which was made by the same person, at least it had something to say.

I was throwing away my old computers – not into a landfill, people took them, who do you think I am – and one of the things I found on one of the hard drives was a Minecraft server I was running back then. Unfortunately, it seems to be an old iteration before I moved it to a real server and actually built the thing I want to talk about. Oh well.

You can click on the image above to see the whole map, but there is not much to see except for this central part. We were in the resource gathering phase, if I remember correctly.

At some point on this server, I built my first mob farm. And while figuring out how to do it – how mobs spawn, how to transport them to a place where you could easily and safely whack them with a sword, that sort of thing – was fun in itself, the fact that it was being used by everyone on the server (which is just 3 or 4 people, but still) was much more satisfying.

Honestly, this is one of, if not the most satisfying gaming experience I have ever had. But as I said, I use games as a lens to talk about other things, so draw your own conclusions about the collaborative nature of human beings :)

Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts is awesome! All the main characters are people of color, voiced by actors of color (fuck Avatar, btw). The only romance in the show is between two gay boys. How rare is that?! It is also just a very fun cartoon in itself, with great animation, an amazing soundtrack, goofy characters, and, maybe a bit simplistic, but overall good message. It got all the important parts right, for sure!

In contrast to its sequel, I have even less to say about the first Quake. But I finished it and all the official mission packs, including the new ones from MachineGames.

Point of Mew is a little silly free game about a cat that helps its human. No, really helps. Sure, there is some destruction along the way, but who cares! Ahem.

I played Chasm: The Rift back in the day, but never finished it (probably got stuck in one of the maze-like levels). It was a sort of an answer to Quake. It has a similar hodgepodge of levels and enemies, tied together by a more coherent story, puzzle bosses that were dropped in Q2 and even enemy dismemberment and some destructible environmental elements. On the other hand, it has flat, Doom I/II-like levels. Is it worth checking out? As a piece of first-person shooter history, sure.

Zombie Hill Race seems very similar to Earn to Die games, to the point of confusion. Drive a little, earn some money, upgrade your car, drive a little more, repeat. Turn your brain off kind of game.

I think we as a society – at least that part that uses social media – lost a collective remote and every issue now is at the same, very high, volume.

It’s hard for me to take any publication, video blog, whatever else, seriously when at the same level of intensity there are, for example, a piece about how representation is still lacking and after that another one about how achievements are bad, comma, actually.

By the way, in case it wasn’t obvious, I have a habit of using video games as an example to talk about anything and everything. I know enough about them to feel confident, but even if I make a mistake, it is no big deal. So this is not just about video games.

Maybe it’s just me, but we kind of lost our pet peeves. Issues that are there, but, you know, less important. That have less of an impact on the final score, so to speak. But instead of writing examples of my video game pet peeves, I decided to share some of my, for lack of a better term, pet joys.

I like it when games treat their worlds like real places. Instead of a marker on a map, the NPC tells you to leave through the southern gate, get to the river, and follow the right bank until you see three dead trees.

I like it when games take some basic mechanics and wrap them up in an interesting way. Instead of just upgrading your characters, you build a settlement that attracts new people, which can then help your character grow and get better equipment.

I like it when games are open about their puzzle design. Tell me up front if I can solve it now, or if I don’t have the right thing yet. Give me hints when I’m struggling (subtly, please, otherwise it’s annoying). And at the end of the day, do not be afraid to just give me tools to help me find, solve, whatever.

Luna’s Fishing Garden is a short, chill farming sim. You fish, plant, gather, and so on. There is no pressure whatsoever and that is great.

In the never-ending search for what I call a podcast game, I tried a few of these roguelite, movement-only games: I played and liked Vampire Survivors before, and now there are a lot of similar games out there. Army of Ruin is probably the most accessible, it doesn’t hide anything. There are a lot of things to do and I have done them all. No, really, I did everything and I have proof :)

For more tricky stuff, this spreadsheet was very helpful.

Remedium: Sentinels is just an okay one, kind of in a why not category.

The re-release of Quake II is great. You get the original campaign, two mission packs (DLC of the time), an all new mission pack from MachineGames and a Nintendo 64 version.

If I remember correctly, while the N64 version is unique, the PlayStation version is a modified version of the original, so the fact that it is missing is okay. And it is avaliable as a mod on PC.

There are improvements from lighting to accessibility, gamepad support on PC and keyboard/mouse support on consoles, and also small changes to some levels and an AI, oddly enough. I don’t want this to sound like an ad, so here are the release notes.

I don’t think I can judge the game properly. The fact that I write “2” as “][” is an indication that I spent too much time playing solo and with friends. In a computer club! Do people even remember/know about those? I also recognize something like this right away.

But I still have it in me to point out its flaws. I even hinted at them in a previous post with a picture of two achievements:

The portrayal of women is kind of bad. While yes, technically you can play as a female character because the game will take your model from your multiplayer config, and, hey, for the time that was something, all the cutscenes will still show a story of a dude – three different dudes for three original campaigns. Other than that, you only have one female enemy, and she is depicted… as she is depicted.

The portrayal of prisoners of war is shallow at best. “At best” does a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. What to expect from the company that used to write game stories in a glorified and sometimes actual .txt file. Also, while you can change skin color in multiplayer, everyone in the game is white. Or at least they all have the same skin color, it is hard to tell with Borg-like creatures.