So many games still to play

Fallen Angel: Sacred 2 Gold Edition

Please watch the opening cutscene before reading any further. Starts out very generic, but stick with it. About a minute in the music shifts up a gear and suddenly there's a robot with a laser-gun arm in this middle of this fantasy battle. When the lyrics started at about two minutes, that was just icing on the cake. Got to admit, I was intrigued.

I guess you get a little demon to carry stuff for you later on.

Once I started playing, the first "quest" the game gave me was to murder a couple of people. For basically no reason? And no one seems to notice or care. I did choose the "shadow" side, so I was expecting to be a bad guy, but I'm mostly not, aside from that one thing. Otherwise I'm still helping random NPCs with whatever they ask me to do.

My starting equipment and abilities were pretty basic. A shitty dagger and a fireball that killed just about any of the starting enemies in one or two hits. And then I picked up a gun. What is this game? The gun was way better than the dagger, obviously.

I murdered two people about 100m from here and not even stealthily.

Still, I got bored fairly quickly because the core gameplay is basically just clicking on bad guys till they die. It gets repetitive fast. The story may be insane and absolutely worth seeing, but there's no way I can make it through the game to find out.

Primal Fears

Speaking of games in which you just click on the bad guys till they die. That's what you do in this one as well. I wasn't exactly bored playing it, but when I died for the first time I didn't really feel like trying again. It wasn't even an issue of difficulty - I'd died because I got distracted looking at the keyboard instead of the screen because I wanted to throw a grenade and the default controls aren't very good - it was just "sure, I could play more. Or I could not." You know?

Risen 2: Dark Waters

I thought this was going to be a pirate game but they clearly didn't have faith in the appeal of a pure pirate game so you're an inquisitor pretending to be a pirate to find a magical superweapon to defeat the kraken in an apocalyptic fantasy world while maybe helping your sort of friend find her father's treasure. There's just way more going on than there needs to be, and the gameplay didn't seem great to me. No tutorial and I didn't feel like I really understood when to parry, when to attack, etc. Plus most of the enemies seem to be monsters and not humans with swords, which is what I was hoping for.

Everything is on fire and no one seems to care.

The Stanley Parable

I don't get it. What is the point of this? It's very boring. You can do what the narrator says, or not, and a thing will happen, but it doesn't go anywhere or mean anything and it's all very choose-your-own-adventure. Almost nothing is interactive and in many cases you simply have no choice but to do what the narrator says. Even the passive resistance of doing nothing isn't really an option because the game doesn't seem to react. It just waits for you. The narrator says to go through a particular door and you can either do that or go through the other door that the narrator has apparently deliberately left open for you even though he claims to not want you to go that way and obviously has the power to make you do whatever he wants.

Like, what are the stakes here? Your disobedience is clearly entirely constrained and planned for. There's no actual choice to make, other than what order to watch the various bits of the game. Exactly like a choose-your-own-adventure. It's all written and the outcome doesn't really have much to do with what you choose. It's just turn to 13 to read one game over or turn to 28 to read a different one. There's no video game here. It doesn't react to what you do, it just plays a different bit of narration. What do you get from playing it that you wouldn't get from a let's play?

This, for me, was where the game ended.

Also I'm pretty sure the game broke when I played it. I got stuck in a room with no prompts, nothing interactive, and no further dialogue from the narrator. And the wiki says that wasn't supposed to happen. There was supposed to be an actual ending there, not just an eternity of one room you can't get out of. But I'd had more than enough by that point, so I just quit.

Bouncy Cat

Pretty fun in a mildly frustrating way. I'm not sure I'll get very far into it as it seems to rely a lot on repetition: specifically, memorising levels in order to complete them more efficiently. Most levels are fun to beat once; many are fun to beat a second time to get the (optional) yarn; few are fun to play over and over again to get your time down.

Bouncy Cat is hungry for fish. He also likes to play with yarn.

Plus the overworld is kind of a pain to navigate. I'd much rather a simple menu so I could just play the levels I want to play instead of having to find them.

Babble Royale

Real neat idea: kind of like playing Bananagrams, or Scrabble with times turns. But not exactly like either of those things. I played a bit of it a while back and there seemed to be a lot more players then; I'd get thrown into games with a dozen opponents and it was really fun. Now I'm getting matched up with two other people and they've both put way more time into the game than I have and it's not really fun any more.

Seconds before I was killed in one move.

If this game gets out of Early Access and picks up a much bigger player base so you can play against a large group of people of about your own skill level it could be really fun. Otherwise it's probably doomed to be a great concept that goes nowhere. It's free to play though, so you can try it out if it sounds appealing.

Safecracker: The Ultimate Puzzle Adventure

I like the puzzles in this game, but I ended up opening up a walkthrough just to tell me which order to do them in, because (much like with Bouncy Cat) navigating the house to find the next one is a huge pain in the arse. Like, you pick up a small gold key or whatever and you're like "ok, which puzzle does that unlock, where is it in the house, and how do I get there?"

You move from screen to screen like in Myst, but you can freely rotate the camera.

The only other issue I have with it is that I wish it was clearer whether, for each puzzle, it needs outside information that you should go find, or it has all the information contained within it. There are some that seem really opaque, but if you play with them a bit you see the patterns and start figuring it out, and there are others where you're just not going to get anywhere till you find the clue you need.

It's hard to know if I'll get anywhere by fiddling with this or if there's a clue somewhere.

Oh, and the narrator is really fucking annoying. Absolutely shits me up the wall. I hate him so much. "Hmm. There must be some kind of pattern to it." Oh, really? No way. Thanks, brain genius. I hadn't thought of that. I'm just pressing buttons at random, not trying to figure out the pattern or anything. Why don't you take over here, you've obviously cracked it.

Iji

Retro platformer that, even by the standards of the genre, looks bad and doesn't seem to have anything to recommend it. It feels fine to play, it's just that there are so many similar games and many of them are much better. I don't really see a reason for this one to exist, to be honest. The game was apparently made by one person who spent four years on it, and you can get it for free, so... cool, I guess? It's still not worth playing.

 

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