cyphomandra | Entries tagged with gaming

I'm now on day 90 of Blue Prince and have solved quite a lot of puzzles, but I still have more to go, plus all the trophies that require me to get to room 46 in a certain time/under certain conditions (for those following along, I have done the sanctum, opened one door of a certain colour, and begun the blue tents). I am starting to run out of steam though, and I think it's time for a break.

The problem is what to do next! I do want to get back to FFVII, but I also want something new. I tried Alan Wake II, which I picked up as a free game - it's survival horror, set in another of those terrible small US towns, and I am currently stuck on a boss battle in chapter 2 that had an abrupt difficulty spike. My character moves unbelievably slowly and can only take 2 hits, plus I don't have the resources to upgrade my weapons yet, and while I think I can probably get through this eventually without downgrading the difficulty, it feels less like a game puzzle I can't solve yet and more like bad game design, arrgh. I do like Saga (my current character) but it has been a while since I played horror and I have also so far proven myself to be pretty terrible with jump scares. Typing this up has made me think that maybe I just downgrade the difficulty and see if the story still works for me.

I got Ghost of Yōtei for Christmas, and I also got Cyberpunk 2077 back from the person to whom I'd lent it, so those are both alternate possibilities. BUT. I also got another free game this month, and it's Lego Horizon Adventures, so last night after having my face bitten off in the Overlap for about the fortieth time, I switched gears and sent Lego Aloy out into the world, woo hoo. They have definitely detraumatised the storyline (your first mission is to retrieve some of the Nora who've been kidnapped by cultists, who are cruelly transporting them somewhere in cages and refusing to let them have bathroom breaks; everyone is rescued without casualties) and the fixed camera angles are a bit irritating, but we have already successfully hidden in red grass, shot flaming arrows into shrubbery to clear puzzles, and climbed our first Tallneck, woo hoo. And I say "we" because there is a co-op mode and my son, who's watched me battle through bits of Horizon was very excited to join me. He has put his character (who is supposed to be Rost) in the Sun King Avad skin, tho', which is throwing me a bit :D (most of the voice cast are those from the original game).

I ploughed onward through FFVII Remake and ultimately platinumed it, woo hoo, although it’s definitely thanks to Optinoob’s combat guides. His strategy for the final Sephiroth boss fight (which comes after a series of other fights, so you have to manage your characters very carefully to have enough MP etc left) boiled to down to block, counter stance, block, with Cloud, switch briefly to another character once they show up for heals and barrier etc, then back to Cloud (as Sephiroth will instantly target the character you’re playing) and keep blocking/countering until you can get him with a limit break before he unkindly drops Meteor on you - Optinoob when describing this started imitating Sephiroth going “Cloud, why won’t you attack me?” :D

After that I played chunks of FFVII Intergrade (the Yuffie DLC) on hard mode and I haven’t finished it but I jumped back into FFVII Rebirth. I’m still on chapter 12 of this in hard mode, which is exactly where I was storywise in March, but I have now gone back and done all the side quests I’d missed earlier that you have to repeat on hard mode to unlock more character progression, as well as some of the mini games (aargh the mini games. There are too many and I don’t know if I’m ever going to get through some of them, like the pirate’s gallery shooting one and the gambit & gears hard mode games and, omg, the PIANO). Where I am now, though, I really need to unlock Götterdammerung to be able to make it through the next fights, and it’s locked behind a series of excessively tricky boss fights - the six Brutal Challenges. I have done four, again heavily relying on Optinooob, and they were painful slogs.

As a change of pace from repeated party wipes, I picked up Blue Prince, which is a puzzle-solving rogue-like centred around a mysterious mansion, and not only is it great but I have not yet died even once. You are the presumptive heir to the mansion, but to prove you deserve it, you have to find room 46 - the house is a 9 by 5 grid, every day you start in the entrance hall on the middle of the bottom row, and when you open a door you get a choice of possible floor plans to fill the next space - some of the rooms are dead ends, some have items or hints you need, some require specific resources to select them, some interact with other rooms, and some actively punish you by removing resources or limiting your subsequent choices. When I first got a PC, the game I totally fell for was Myst, a puzzle-solving world-building lore-heavy game with (for the time) amazing graphics, and I spent hours on it, not least because this was largely before the WWW and I had no easy way of finding out puzzle solutions. The creators of Blue Prince credit Cyan (who made Myst), and it brings back that same feeling - there’s a massive amount going on here, with intriguing hints of story as well as fantastic puzzles, and it’s very satisfying when something finally works. Last night I entered room 46 (on day 28 of game time) but there’s a surprising amount left to do! It is a terrible game for the “just one more day” because a day can be over in 20 minutes if you have bad luck drafting rooms or can take nearly two hours if you find a lot of stuff, and I also now have all these notes about hints and clues and possible solutions to pore over. Recommended.

I determinedly managed to get through the Master level of Astro Bot, and then after several hundred attempts got the Sephibot from the Megamix Mastery challenge, yay. To get Sephiroth you have to get through three challenges using the dog (which is like a rocket boost), the monkey (plays cymbals that change orientation/direction of various obstacles) and the chicken (launches you upwards), and what I particularly enjoyed was that once you’ve made it to the chicken bit, which is the final one, the bouncy fast-paced Astro Bot music starts to merge with One-Winged Angel, Sephiroth’s iconic theme :D Anyway, he is now mine! I then gritted my teeth and watched some YouTube playthroughs for help and FINALLY got the last two bots from the speed rounds (inflatable octopus my nemesis, I have at last successfully wrangled you) so have now 100%’d everything until more DLC comes out.

Played a bit more of Death Stranding, and I do like it, but it hasn’t really gripped me yet - it wants me to seek out another settlement, but then I keep getting local missions, and I’m not sure how much I’m supposed to level up first and there’s no apparent time tension. I therefore picked up Stardew Valley again, which is probably my worst game every for making me play “just one more day” and am now on summer in year 3, have finally managed to marry a villager (Elliot, who has conveniently added a library wing to my house, why no I am sure my character likes him for his personality) and unlock Qi’s challenges on Ginger Island.

And then I picked up FFVII Remake thinking vaguely about doing a hard mode play through, but couldn’t find that or chapter select as an option so have now played through most of 17 chapters all over again (there are only 18 chapters) and gosh I love everyone in this (almost; obviously I do not love Hojo or most of Shinra, including the Turks). I am significantly better at fighting now as well, although I forgot everyone’s level 2 limit break was locked behind their colosseum fights but you can only see the options for characters in your party, so Tifa and Barrett are still stuck on level 1 because I didn’t take them back there once I had them.

The sheer density of boss fights towards the end and the lack of ability to save in between phases is a pain. In chapter 17 I beat Jenova Lifebringer easily enough as a team battle (now that I know to take out the tentacles), fought Rufus and his blasted alien hound solo on the roof top (I can take out the dog easily enough but getting Rufus means you have to hit him with Braver when he reloads, and he is super fast and keeps shooting me so I end up running in circles around the roof top for AGES self-healing until I can make it work), and then went into a fight against the Arsenal (not the football team) with Barrett and Aerith that I lost in the second to last phase - so I left the game on pause to wrangle children, organise household etc and when I went back I had to fight Rufus and Darkstar all over again, arrgh.

Platinum'd Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and then took a break, although I have picked it up again to do a new game plus playthrough to get the other ending. I love the game and the world and the combat style, and I will play it again, but it's too soon to really sink myself back down into it. The new game plus also keeps all my team's final stats and builds, so I'm one-shotting most of the first and second act mobs, and some of the bosses, and while that's good for speed it means I'm not as involved as I was on the first playthrough. I think I just need more time.

I downloaded Balatro (poker rogue-like deck builder) as it was one of the free monthly games with my PS Plus membership, and then of course then discovered I also have it via Apple Arcade on my phone. I've played it for a bit and beat two decks on basic stakes using the same strategy, then put it down a bit, then accidentally got my nephew hooked on it and so started playing it again myself. I've done all the starting decks on white and the blue deck on red. I like it - it really does have amazing variety - and I am experimenting more with different strategies, but it's not something I throw myself into with reckless abandon.

I am still looking for another immersive game. I started playing Death Stranding, because the second one came out to good reviews but random internet commenters said I should do the first one first, and it is an oddly intriguing RPG/walking simulator - after an event that disrupts the boundaries between life and death, people live in isolated cities to protect them from horrific things that roam the land as well as timefall, a rain that vastly accelerates time in whatever living thing it touches. Sam, the protagonist, has bucketloads of trauma, a phobia about being touched, and important vulnerable relatives, and works as a Porter, taking shipments between settlements and helping them reconnect to the newly forming chiral network.

The stealth bits around enemies are terrifying - I got too close to one in the opening sequence and triggered a void-out, flooding the landscape with some sort of black liquid filled with things with tentacles - and in addition you have with you BB, a bridge baby, a fetus taken from a brain-dead mother that is attached to you and will signal enemies by crying when they get close. The countryside, when it's not trying to kill you, is great to walk through, and it also has very good music. The plot - hmm. It's a very cinematic style (when new characters show up they get credits, so I know I am not hallucinating that Guillermo del Toro wants to provide me with semi-helpful advice and shove me out in search of certain danger) and it's very atmospheric, and blends well with the gameplay, I'm just not convinced (yet) that it actually makes sense. Still. Clambering across rocky terrain, struggling to balance the body of my dead mother on my back and desperate to reach a crematorium to incinerate her before her corpse explodes is certainly compelling.

(and then Astro Bot put out more DLC, including a Cloud Strife bot! I determinedly played through all the DLC open levels to get him (and then bought him a Buster Sword so he can do his Omnislash animation) and then failed multiple times to get anywhere with the secret DLC level, which has a lurking Sephibot as the reward. I have got so frustrated doing this that I've actually now gone back and done all the other levels I was stuck on (including the horrendous Splashing Sprint - fight lava enemies with a water spraying duck - and To the Beat - everything is precisely timed except my reactions, woe - and am now trying to do the last core game level, the Great Master Challenge. I have managed to get two obstacles away from the end but it is a relentless nightmare of perfection.)

It's been all Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 all the time. I've finished the game and am now XP-hunting post-game to get a character to level 99 (which will get me a trophy), and then I have to start a new game + to get the only other trophy I need for platinum, because I missed it in the prologue in my first playthrough. I've enjoyed it a lot! The gameplay is fantastic - the parry/dodge mechanic holds out the glimmering possibility that you can get through a battle totally undamaged once you know the right timing - and the character mechanics are also great, although I'm still struggling to master Sciel's. The story is gloomy and intriguing and very touching, and the voice acting is amazing.

Are there things I don't like? Hmm. I could have done with clearer signalling about when to do the finale versus explore the rest of the world, because I assumed I needed to beef up a bit and I ended up wildly overlevelled. All the bosses have cut scenes/new attack gimmicks when you reduce their HP by certain amounts, so if you one-shot them you miss out. I should have downgraded my damage but it's tricky - initially you're capped to 9999 max damage, then you lose the cap entirely (I think my highest damage so far is about 7 million), but if you're dealing with a boss who has 5 million HP it's pretty slow if you go back to 9999. There are no manual save files, which fits thematically but is occasionally super unhelpful. And then there's the platforming - I am not a natural platformer, there are some clipping/box issues anyway, but I did grit my teeth and do the Only Up Gestral minigame (in which you have to jump up/climb between bits of structures for AGES, and if you fall it's all over unless you manage to land on a lower bit) over and over again until I finally got it.

But the characters are fantastic. Maelle, especially, and Esquie, and Lune, and Verso, and Gustav, and on, and on. It looks amazing. I love the shrunken overworld (which reminds me of Fantasian's dioramas) and the French bits, and the music. I have many, many thoughts about the ending I got, all of which are spoilers, but I will definitely replay it.

Finished Veilguard. Overall I enjoyed it but I don’t think I’ll play it again - there’s not enough grit there for me to want to try something different. I do think that having Solas as the main antagonist but then having you fight a completely different enemy for most of the game is a tricky set-up to pull off, and for me it felt more like stalling than a natural story development. I did however do all the sidequests etc and ended up platinuming the game as I only had to go back to unlock two altars and jump over a particular ledge.

Then I played The Outer Wilds, which I’d tried previously and given up on after dismally failing to pilot my spaceship. In some ways this is the total antithesis of Veilguard - in Veilguard you can do all the sidequests and pick the right dialogue options and unlock the secret ending and you save the world, yay!! In The Outer Wilds, you’re stuck in a 22 minute time loop, and the more you find out about what’s going on, the more you realise you can't "win". It is a fantastic game for evoking existential dread as well as having a lot of nerve-wracking game play - there was a bit where I was rapidly running out of oxygen while navigating a rapidly changing underground maze that was filling up with sand that managed to target a significant number of my personal terrifying scenarios - and haunting imagery. I am also now much better at piloting in zero gee but I still wouldn’t employ me to land anything expensive anytime soon. It was unnerving and frustrating and emotional, and I will go back to it (there’s a DLC but there are also other endings and things I didn’t find).

It is very much a puzzle game and it reminds me of playing Myst. However, I did use walkthroughs for bits of The Outer Wilds, because I am older and have less free time and also because the loop/gameplay mechanic meant it was often hard enough for me to get to the place where the puzzle was, whereas when I played Myst I was young and pre-children and I could leave my PC on an Age for months (in one case) before I finally solved the puzzle. I also ended up re-reading Ted Chiang’s The Story of Your Life while playing this for unrelated reasons, but actually it is very similar in feel.

I then played a tiny chunk of Stardew Valley because I haven’t seen all the new 1.6 update features (I play on mobile) and *then* I picked up Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which is the new French turn-based RPG currently sweeping the internet, and it is indeed both very good and very French. You play as the members of Expedition 33, sent out to destroy a powerful malevolent being called the Paintress, who every year eradicates all people above a certain age, counting down from 100 (she has just killed off all the 34 year olds; you’re next). The combat has rhythm game elements and you can jump/dodge/parry during enemy attacks, but again timing is everything - successful dodges get you more actions and successful parries get a counter attack - and I’m enjoying it a lot. It looks great and it definitely feels French, from the city centre with all the memorial statues and the cafés with outside chairs and blackboards to the secret mini boss I have just defeated who is an evil mime (one of many!).

What I really want to do is either play a new Horizon game or a new FFVII game, and the world has yet to cater to my whims. (Horizon III Nemesis does have a trailer but no release date, and part 3 of FFVII is another two years away at least). In the meantime I am doing a hard mode playthrough of FFVII Rebirth, which is indeed hard (no items for healing, tougher enemies etc). I’m up to chapter 12 and I can actually feel myself getting better at playing it - especially blocking, which in most fighting games I neglect in favour of stuffing myself with food/healing items to regain HP - and I do love everybody in the game. Do I love them enough to attempt platinum? Hmm. It is less a question of my undying affection and more my doubt in my ability to conquer ALL of the minigames. I am still traumatised by the piano and I have yet to get better than a B on Two Legs, plus I am avoiding that Shinra Party Animal sidequest at the Saucer that is All Minigames.

For contrast, I then played through Thank Goodness You’re Here!, which is a totally barmy surrealist dark comedy where you play as a (literally) tiny junior salesman, sent to the northern English town of Barnsworth to solve all their problems. It is disturbingly brilliant and very funny (and very, very, localised). Then I played The Stanley Parable, which is also disturbingly brilliant and about agency in gaming, and then I decided to go for something slightly less disturbing and played Astro Bot.

This cheerful platformer won GOTY last year and it is, indeed, fantastically well-designed (the haptic feedback is incredible) and a lot of fun to play. You are a tiny Sony bot who has crashlanded on a planet with your damaged PS5 spaceship, and you need to gather up your scattered bot colleagues from various other worlds and repair your spaceship. It is a love letter to Sony games, with bots and souvenirs taken from their extensive back catalogue. After each system boss, you get a world based on a franchise (Uncharted, God of War etc) and the last one I unlocked was Horizon, where I play as an AloyBot with bow & arrows, clambering up a Tallneck, zooming through cauldrons, and battling giant robots, with intermittent clusters of focal ghosts and even what I think is a skeletal bot Sobeck on a bench with flowers at the end.

I am not a natural platformer but I played this determinedly until I had the 300 bots needed to get all the achievements. I still have three levels I haven’t done in the main game (there are speed levels coming out as DLC), but they are unforgiving ones where you have to get every single move right, with no checkpoints, and the amount of actual enjoyment I get out of them diminishes. But it’s such an easy game to pick up, and so enjoyable.

I had planned to replay Horizon Forbidden West after that (especially due to the AloyBot!) but then Playstation Plus put out Dragon Age: The Veilguard as their March free game. This is a game that was in development for a long time, initially intended as a multiplayer before switching to solo RPG, and it’s been hit heavily by culture warriors on release aggrieved mainly by the nonbinary companion and the character customiser, all of which makes it a little difficult to judge. And my background with the series is patchy; I played Origins once and liked it a lot, despite feeling burnt out on conventional western fantasy (Mass Effect was more appealing on that front), I played DAII for a bit (maybe until the first major timeskip?) and then put it down for too long, and then I played quite a bit of Inquisition but could not get the hang of the combat when it came to fighting bosses and left it unfinished.

I am now in the final few act of Veilguard and I do like it but it definitely has issues. ( Discussion, no major plot spoilers but includes details of character selection and companions. )

I do think it's taken an unfair battering online, but I don't think I'm going to do much with it once I finish other than look up all the possible endings. It does make me want to go back and finish one of the others, though.

I loved FFVII Rebirth so much I wasn't sure what to play after that, and indulged in extensive dithering. I started on a replay of Remake with the Japanese VAs, but I miss the open world and the party synergy of Rebirth, and stalled. I then replayed the original game and am now at the start of disk 3 and waiting outside the Northern Crater. Gosh there is an awful lot of game after the end of Rebirth and I am wondering just what they will do with it all for the next game - I don't want it broken into 2 parts but I also don't want them to leave stuff out! And although the graphics are of their time, the game itself still breaks my heart.

Rather than finish it I then tried Crisis Core (prequel to FFVII, made after the original game, recent redo of graphics) and it is like seeing the oft-pillaged source material for all that fanfic I've ploughed through come to life, which is a bit unnerving. I do like that Zack's intro is Cloud's, train-jumping and all - it underscores just how lost Cloud is at the start of the original game and how much his sense of self is eroded. I am though having world-building issues with Zack being about to promote to First Class BUT totally clueless about how things work so that the player can be given a game guide (in the OG you, as Cloud, train other people, which is a great way round this). Also there is a weird game-play thing where while you're fighting slot machine reels with the faces of key people you've met revolve constantly, and when you get a line-up you get some sort of bonus, which I find distracting.

Rather than actually finish any of these I then downloaded a bunch of demos on the PS5 and tried them out. Prince of Persia: the Lost Crown is too much of a platformer for me. Granblue Fantasy: Relink had rather irritating party banter and didn't provide me with enough of a story to keep going. FFXVI's dual timelines are intriguing and I'm most likely to go back to this one, but I'm a hard sell on standard fantasy settings - I like the weirder sf/f crossover FFs. Stellar Blade - hmm. This RPG has become a focus point for GamerGate types complaining bitterly about how woke means not enough sexy female protagonists to oggle, with massive protests from them when the final versions of some of Eve's costumes weren't quite as skimpy as those in the trailer (note, however, that there's still plenty of Eve on display in those and other costumes, including the ability to play in a skin suit). It is very pretty and the gameplay would make me much better at blocking attacks but the trailer has a complete lack of characterisation and reviews don't suggest this improves.

Dredge - loved the trailer and bought the game. The creators are NZers (apparently DOC helped provide bird noises) where you are a fisherman rescued from your wrecked boat by the township of Greater Marrow, who provide you with a new boat and send you out to fish. The inherent peaceful serenity of a fishing sim with no combat is however overshadowed by the fact that you are in a Lovecraftian world with strange figures, mutated fish, and unnervingly odd people, plus a gameplay mechanic that means after dark - and the longer you stay awake - the more reality twists on you. Rocks appear that weren't there before (and, at the start, your boat can only handle a few hits before it's game over), strange colours swirl in the darkness, things slither into your hold to corrupt your catch, and monsters with far too many tentacles attack. It is highly effective and totally compelling. I played through the whole thing in a week or so, and I'll go back to it again at some point (there are a few DLCs I could also acquire).

I was then feeling depressed about politics and the world and so have been replaying Horizon Zero Dawn, which I find oddly soothing when thinking about climate change and other terrible problems. In HZD they largely fix climate change in the Clawback of the 2030s, following wars, land loss, refugees etc, and then all of humanity gets destroyed anyway thanks to a tech bro with a bright idea and no off switch (I did say "oddly"). I like Aloy a lot and I'm significantly better at using a controller than I was when I first played through this. Also, there appears to be an expansion for HFW that I haven't played, so I can look forward to that - I'm about 2/3rds through the main story and have done almost all of the Frozen Wilds.

The ending actually made me cry. Brilliant game.

I have finished Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch and have a half-drafted post about it somewhere, but basically a) looks gorgeous, with visuals by Studio Ghibli and b) unfortunately nowhere near as much work has gone into the characters. I started playing Final Fantasy VI and within three hours had more feelings about most of the playable characters than I did at the end of Ni no Kuni, not to mention that so far there are two playable female characters who are interesting and complex people (as opposed to, um, none).

Anyway. I will get back to FFVI, but I have actually mainly been playing Ghost Trick (on the iPad), which is fabulous. Fascinating gimmick, great story, nifty plotting that I don't see coming, neatly dry sense of humour, and I care far too much about everybody, especially Missile (who is a tiny apartment Pomeranian with big dreams). Basically, I am dead and am investigating (initially) my own murder, aided by being able to manipulate certain objects in a limited fashion and, when I find other dead bodies, being able to rewind time back to four minutes before their death. The sheer amount of story the game designers get out of this is just brilliant, and I am currently doing that thing where I really want to find out what happens next, but I don't want it to be over.

... my friends and I have just given a comedy duo back the energy they need to be successful, in order to get them to make the Fairy Godmother (the fairies' giant matriarch) laugh so loudly that we can be launched inside her open mouth via canon to the Faycare Centre somewhere in her intestines, where all the developing fairies are learning about the world, as apparently they are currently refusing to come out and need to be (somehow) extracted. The artwork is all pastels and chalk drawings and is Deeply Disturbing.

(I am also fond of the line about the seagull carrying a page with a levitation spell on it... because it likes "light reading")

I hadn't realised that Dragon Age Awakenings existed as a more immediate sequel! I am now playing that, as one evening of Silent Hill was enough to give me Silent Hill-related nightmares (I will go back to it. Probably). Anyway, I am currently enjoying being me again, although my arms seem to have stuck. I have just done a bunch of cut scenes and am running around a keep with my arms held out as if I'm waltzing with someone completely invisible.

I am now attempting to defeat the archdemon and failing miserably, mainly because I have been coasting on easy difficulty rather than developing actual team-using strategies, and it is now coming back to bite me. Also, I was feverish while playing last night, and it didn't occur to me until after my party had been wiped out half a dozen times that I could call up the armies to help. Anyway, persistence will no doubt get me through eventually. For those of you concerned about my romantic life, I have hooked up with Zevran in a tasteful campfire sequence, and then despite Wynne suddenly lecturing me on getting attached to unsuitable people, have managed to have slightly more deep and meaningful conversations, to the extent that he has now given me my very own earring (disappointingly, I don't seem to be wearing it).

I have given up on Alistair (honestly, we wrestled a guard together in our underwear, and he still didn't appear remotely interested) and have metaphorically slapped him about a bit, told him to toughen up and marry himself off to the King's widow in order to secure the throne. I feel that my character is probably doing this for noble self-sacrificing reasons in order to make Alistair "happy", although as a player who is not that fond of Anora (the queen) I suspect I'm a bit more petty.

I now have the Mass Effect 3 DLC extended ending, but what I don't seem to have is a convenient save that doesn't involve me having to shoot ALL THE THINGS again. So in a fit of pique, this evening I downloaded Silent Hill, and have now creeped myself out completely and died twice. Man. I remember watching my flatmate play this, and having it creep us all out then, and it hasn't lost any of that effect. Amplified by having really, really annoying controls, so I can see an awful lot of deaths in my future as I fail to run in anything like the right direction.