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TheCog posted:Its me, I'm the demographic for these games. Is Lobotomy Corporation any good? 25$ is pricier than I like to spend on a game I know very little about, but from the description it would be exactly my jam. I like it, but it's kind of light on both the horror and management aspects IMO. I feel like it's more of a puzzle game with occasional combat, and one that's mostly reliant on puzzling out each creature's gimmick- there's some fun in optimizing your run and minimizing casualties, and a good number of missions and external invasions to break up the routine, but there's a lot of repetition in between especially on the 20% of the days where you don't get new monsters. Also, the English translation isn't particularly good. It's usually understandable and fairly atmospheric in places but it's clunky and there's a few places where it's outright wrong.
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Oct 20, 2019 00:15
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Verde Garden was the perfect length for what it was.
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Oct 20, 2019 01:58
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I just wrapped up Blair Witch, and it was a thoroughly bland horror game. The design of the woods felt pretty good, until I kept slamming into the invisible walls. I also disliked how many times I had to figure out if I was missing a trigger to progress, or if I just needed to keep walking around until the game decided to let me keep going. Honestly the worst part is that if they removed the title of the game and the little wooden figures, you wouldn’t be able to tell it had anything to do with Blair Witch. I much preferred Observer, gratuitous stealth sequences aside.
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Oct 20, 2019 03:42
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Gann Jerrod posted:I just wrapped up Blair Witch, and it was a thoroughly bland horror game. The design of the woods felt pretty good, until I kept slamming into the invisible walls. I also disliked how many times I had to figure out if I was missing a trigger to progress, or if I just needed to keep walking around until the game decided to let me keep going. Honestly the worst part is that if they removed the title of the game and the little wooden figures, you wouldn’t be able to tell it had anything to do with Blair Witch. I much preferred Observer, gratuitous stealth sequences aside. I'm starting to think Observer was an anomaly and Bloober Team doesn't understand the "game" part of video game.
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Oct 20, 2019 03:54
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Gann Jerrod posted:I just wrapped up Blair Witch, and it was a thoroughly bland horror game. The design of the woods felt pretty good, until I kept slamming into the invisible walls. I also disliked how many times I had to figure out if I was missing a trigger to progress, or if I just needed to keep walking around until the game decided to let me keep going. Honestly the worst part is that if they removed the title of the game and the little wooden figures, you wouldn’t be able to tell it had anything to do with Blair Witch. I much preferred Observer, gratuitous stealth sequences aside. tbf it does have the house from both movies and the monster/time loop shenanigans from the second movie
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Oct 20, 2019 03:58
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Too Shy Guy posted:This game is entirely free and only an hour long, so honestly instead of reading about it you should just go play it right now. Checking the community announcements for it, the game's been out a few years and the creator changed the price to free only this year after deciding it wasn't going to sell much anymore anyway, that's pretty cool of them to do. I did break something the first time I tried by goofing around with the terminal and system commands too much somehow, so had to restart, but that gave me more time to go back and pay attention to the little details I'd missed. The disks especially can be easy to miss. The game does a great job of using little touches to tell a story.
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Oct 20, 2019 05:54
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hey what a coincidence i just bought evil within 2 and even though i’m only on chapter 4 lemme tell you, this poo poo is fun
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Oct 20, 2019 07:37
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 SPOOKY GAMES 6: Hellseeker 1. Apsulov: End of Gods 2. Conarium 3. TAMASHII 4. Apparition 5. Secrets of the Maw (DLC) 6. Bad Dream: Coma 7. They Breathe 8. The Final Station 9. Love, Sam 10. Pacify 11. Return of the Obra Dinn 12. Silver Chains 13. Bad Dream: Fever 14. DISTRAINT 2 15. Pamali: Indonesian Folklore Horror 16. Tormentum - Dark Sorrow 17. The Light Keeps Us Safe 18. Kalaban 19. Verde Station 20. Evil    I spend most of my time playing horror games made with some degree of thought or attention, which ignores a fairly large swath of the genre. Of the many irredeemable titles that spawn onto Steam, shoddy, insipid indie horror walking sims make up a large portion. Among them you will find titles like Evil, devoid of meaningful gameplay, any sort of logical flow, immersive polish, or fun. The true challenge of Evil is divining what exactly the developer thought they were accomplishing when they called this festering sore of a game done, because there is literally nothing here to appeal to anyone in any way. You are a young girl, left to spend the night alone in her palatial mansion by her parents. In the middle of the night she awakens to see someone scurry past her door, which kicks off a nonsensical scavenger hunt throughout the house to do things that the developer thinks a human would do in this situation. That includes checking security cameras, rummaging through their parent’s room, and drinking pills. Luckily your character tells herself what it is she needs to do next, but unluckily all the house’s features are shoddily designed to the point where its impossible to tell what to interact with to accomplish your nebulous goal. I guess at some point a ghost lady starts appearing on the monitors and wandering the halls but I never got there, for reasons I will now painfully drag you through. How do we know our character is a girl? Are women’s clothes hanging up in her closet? Is there a diary opened to pages about her crushes? No, if you look down, you can see her mostly bare breasts. For whatever reason our hero is traipsing around the house hunting ghosts in her slinkiest black bra and panties. And that’s if you would even call these mostly-featureless halls a house. Rooms contain the barest essentials to establish their purpose, except when they don’t, like the bathrooms with no sinks and the large, empty room that contains only a bicycle. The lighting throughout the house is completely uniform, too, cast by copy-pasted ceiling fans in every hall, room, and closet. One room has a dragon head over it. There’s a metal samurai statue in the dining room. Your parents have a (spoiler alert) occult book in their room that’s just the same misaligned pentagram pattern on every page. It doesn’t even fall into so-bad-its-funny territory because there’s no music, hardly any sound effects, and nothing happens. I did get my eardrums blown out by a jumpscare that was just static on a TV, so there’s that, I suppose. Apparently later in the game there’s a torso strung up in the bathroom, and the lady maybe starts chasing you? I don’t know why you’d care, though, because there are nigh infinite bad indie horror games better than this travesty, to say nothing of the actual good ones.
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Oct 20, 2019 17:11
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You can always tell when you're a woman in an fps because when you're a man, you look down and see your legs. When you're a woman, you look down and see your chest.
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Oct 20, 2019 19:22
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Manhunt 2 uncut is gross. I love it. Try hard as gently caress.
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Oct 20, 2019 21:03
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doesn't even have a heart tattoo to indicate your health, learning the wrong lessons from seminal classic game Jurassic Park: Trespasser
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Oct 21, 2019 03:39
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Oh, I didn't know they were making a sequel to Tres... The Saddest Rhino posted:doesn't even have a heart tattoo to indicate your health, learning the wrong lessons from seminal classic game Jurassic Park: Trespasser gently caress. Yeah, that.
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Oct 21, 2019 03:47
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I like the bathroom style sink in the gigantic, mostly empty kitchen.
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Oct 21, 2019 03:52
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I know folks have been interested in this particular take on Lovecraft, and I'm happy to report it's quite good, just limited a bit by its indie origins. SPOOKY GAMES 6: Hellseeker 1. Apsulov: End of Gods 2. Conarium 3. TAMASHII 4. Apparition 5. Secrets of the Maw (DLC) 6. Bad Dream: Coma 7. They Breathe 8. The Final Station 9. Love, Sam 10. Pacify 11. Return of the Obra Dinn 12. Silver Chains 13. Bad Dream: Fever 14. DISTRAINT 2 15. Pamali: Indonesian Folklore Horror 16. Tormentum - Dark Sorrow 17. The Light Keeps Us Safe 18. Kalaban 19. Verde Station 20. Evil 21. Stygian: Reign of the Old Ones    More and more, developers are finding ways to capture the key elements of cosmic horror in Lovecraft’s work. The creeping dread, the inescapable doom, the unknowable terror, all these notions are finding their ways into more games, and in more novel ways. Stygian proposes to tackle the subject of Lovecraft in one of the most ambitious ways, by allowing you to be your own character in a role-playing game thick with eldritch horrors. It’s an interesting challenge, merging the open nature of western RPGs with the deeply personal terrors of Lovecraft, but Stygian makes it work. It does so with some very broad strokes, and some questionable designs, but the dark satisfaction I get from the result is unquestionable. The roaring 20s have come to an end in the doomed town of Kingsport, giving way to a roar of unearthly origin. The city has been ripped from the known universe and deposited in a realm of unspeakable creatures and grim tidings. Those residents who survived the transition are simply waiting to die, whether lorded over by the mob that runs the remains of society or whisked away in the night by the deranged cultists across the river. In this terrible place you find yourself haunted by dreams of the Dismal Man as he ushers you towards an unknown but inescapable fate. With no hope of salvation, you must follow the strange, twisting trail through the secrets of Kingsport, Arkham, and the awful world that is now your home. Right away, I was impressed with how Stygian pulls absolutely no punches with its setting. Other horror games like to play coy with their Lovecraftian roots but this one drops you right into a world where the monsters are real, and kicking around in the warehouse across the street. You get to see how people cope with the unmanageable weight of old gods and forgotten beasts bearing down on them, and as you can imagine, it’s not pretty. Between the murderous gangsters and bloodthirsty cultists, death can come at a moment’s notice for anyone. And those who are spared their attentions are never far from plunging into madness themselves. So what hope do you have in this living hell? Well, character creation gives you plenty of options that offer a window into what the game expects of you. Aside from the standard RPG conventions of picking your gender, attributes, and skills, there are a number of key features you can customize. Your age determines whether your attributes or skills are more advanced, and your background can provide all kinds of unique gameplay options like being an ex-criminal who knows how to talk to mobsters, or faculty from the Miskatonic University who will have special insight into the more unusual happenings. But by far the most interesting choice is your values, which encourage you to roleplay certain goals for the sake of your sanity. Sanity is not easy to restore, but making dialog and quest choices that fit with your values like Materialistic or Righteous will restore sanity on the spot. You can even be a Nihilist, who doesn’t get sanity back from any choices, but is more resistant to losing it in the first place. Managing your health and sanity will be a primary concern throughout the game, because the mechanics of threats and combat are just as unforgiving as the setting would imply. You don’t have very deep pools of either and items to restore them, like laudanum, liquor, or opium, obviously have dire side effects. Resting can restore quite a bit, as you get rest activities like studying or socializing at these times, but it’s always going to be an uphill battle to keep your grip. Many enemies damage your sanity just by existing, and chance encounters with the occult or other horrific scenes can sap sanity very quickly. Playing to your strengths will be key, whether that be through dialog options, bartering for goods you need, or avoiding trouble in the first place. Stygian offers you an impressive number of approaches to most situations, and the skill system is focused enough that it’s hard to completely mess up a character. Speechcraft and Investigation have obvious applications, while experience with occult or academic topics can provide special edges in certain situations. If you’re skilled in combat you’ll have the option to fight it out, though the turn-based tactical battles can drag a bit and tend to be very costly in terms of life and sanity. Stealth is another option, as well as turning up specific items or evidence for the right situation. Dialog is where I’ve been doing most of my work, and it’s a great mix of solid writing, interesting options, and sudden interjections by some madness I’m suffering where I’ll start ranting like a madman. Your background can influence dialog heavily as well, so there’s just as little telling what you’re going to say as the troubled folks you’re grilling. The first few hours of the game are sure to feel like a cosmic horror playground thanks to this broad approach to game design, and you’ll soon slip into the niche that’s right for your character. Eventually though, you’re bound to reach a sticking point in your quests. The main thrust of the game basically comes down to four key quests, and there are points in all of them that can hang players up either from the next step being unclear, or the next challenge seeming insurmountable. It’s generally true that the solution is just in a place you haven’t looked or down to a skill you haven’t thought to make use of, but in my case I had to leave town and wander in the wilderness a bit for my answer and that’s not exactly intuitive game design. Stygian isn’t a particularly hard game but it definitely feels hard when you’re still learning about the world, and especially when your options seem to narrow too much, even though they haven’t really. There are other technical issues that might impact your enjoyment of this grim adventure. Chief among them is that there’s no manual saving. None. You save when you quit, and the game usually auto-saves at scene transitions. This introduces a whole host of problems, not the least of which being that you can only play one character at a time, but fortunately the developers are aware of how inadvisable this is and are working on a real save system. The interface itself can be pretty touchy as well, with interaction points for NPCs and enemies especially being a bit out of whack and requiring a little pixel-hunting to find the right spot to click on. Also, without spoiling anything, I can tell you that the ending doesn’t resolve a whole lot of what’s going on here and is clearly setting up for a series, which hopefully gets made. Despite these concerns, I’m finding Stygian to be remarkably engrossing as both an RPG and a Lovecraft tale. It borrows a lot of the stories wholesale and shoves them together into the world, but the setting is creative and open enough to allow for plenty of cosmic horror’s greatest hits to coexist. The art sells it really well, with the rather gross and gribbley style bringing the dingy streets and crumbling buildings to life around your characters. Sound design is a little hit-or-miss, especially with the inconsistent soundtrack, but it mostly does what is needed. It’s an indie game through and through, but an ambitious one that makes good on a lot of that ambition. Stygian gives you a wide array of tools to battle the inevitable with, and while your fate may be sealed, it’s going to be a wild ride reaching it.
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Oct 21, 2019 16:28
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Not sure if you have, like, a list of games all prepared to go for the rest of the month, but have you checked out/will you be checking out The Beast Inside? I'm going to be downloading the demo for my game night with my friends, was wondering if you've seen mention of it.
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Oct 21, 2019 17:41
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The Beast Inside is weird. Half of it is a typical indie horror game, the other half is "we just played Firewatch" adventure game. Both elements are well done but it really feels like two different games smashed together.
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Oct 21, 2019 17:59
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Morpheus posted:Not sure if you have, like, a list of games all prepared to go for the rest of the month, but have you checked out/will you be checking out The Beast Inside? I'm going to be downloading the demo for my game night with my friends, was wondering if you've seen mention of it. I'm probably not going to get to it this month, but I might sometime in the future. Seems to be reviewing better than average.
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Oct 21, 2019 23:21
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Interested in The Beast Inside too if anyone plays it. It looks like a good quick horror game.
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Oct 22, 2019 02:36
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Verde station was a decent way to burn an hour, the main thrust of what's going on is too obvious; space madness, it's ALWAYS space madness but there's at least a wrinkle or two
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Oct 22, 2019 02:57
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Ren & Stimpy perfected space madness with one horrific episode
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Oct 22, 2019 03:02
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I remember someone saying that by “fixing” everything wonky from TEW1, they also took away the most interesting and best stuff It was me. I said it.
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Oct 22, 2019 03:17
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My impression of Evil 1 is that it had an incredible aesthetic and idea of setting, but total dogshit lows and irregular heights for actual level gameplay design and clarity of systems - compare to the raw churn smooth butter of something like RE4, it felt unwieldy and spoiled a lot of the well-played surreal fever mood of being in a waking memory nightmare.
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Oct 22, 2019 03:20
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the only thing TEW1 did better than 2 was dialogue, and that was only because the first game had less of it
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Oct 22, 2019 03:21
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Like let me repeat the motherfucking miracle that is RE4 level design, in an era that loathed the brown and gray aesthetic, it made you eat UP brown and gray, and rarely with any confusion of direction or location. The colors, for once, served to build the dread mood.
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Oct 22, 2019 03:24
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If TEW2’s open maps were in the nightmarish style of TEW1’s settings I’d probably end up liking it more than the original game. I like them both a lot though.
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Oct 22, 2019 03:35
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I feel like the two or three times TEW1 leaned into the nightmare aesthetic doesn't make up for the amount of areas that are just "ruined castle", "ruined city", "ruined factory", etc etc. Like everyone wants to remember that one big room from towards the end of the game but most of TEW1 is...not that.
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Oct 22, 2019 04:46
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Oxxidation posted:the only thing TEW1 did better than 2 was dialogue, and that was only because the first game had less of it "the evil... Within... Too!"
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Oct 22, 2019 04:51
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tew1 had like 3 awesome environments/chapters, a batshit story and also a bunch of reaaaally janky poo poo between the good bits tew2 felt a bit too polished i agree. but i still liked it quite a bit.
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Oct 22, 2019 06:16
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I'm one of the people who liked the difficulty in TEW1. You had to be pretty creative at times to make the most out your limited supplies. The crossbow is a really fun weapon to use.
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Oct 22, 2019 06:27
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Idk which reviewer summarized it as "tew1 requires a level of discipline from its players that it doesn't have for itself" but it describes it pretty well. I enjoyed 1 and 2 plenty. I wouldn't mind a third!
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Oct 22, 2019 07:04
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you all ready for more of the agony devs? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pae3JCyFgLs
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Oct 22, 2019 09:12
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megalodong posted:you all ready for more of the agony devs? That's kinda hilarious how different the tone is compared to Agony just based on the combat bit I skimmed through
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Oct 22, 2019 10:09
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Blockhouse posted:I feel like the two or three times TEW1 leaned into the nightmare aesthetic doesn't make up for the amount of areas that are just "ruined castle", "ruined city", "ruined factory", etc etc. Replace factory with industrial tunnels and I guess you have the sequel.
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Oct 22, 2019 10:11
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Is Agony the one by the dev who tried to court reactionary gamers by claiming they were censored for demon tits? Also the new rpg Disco Elysium , which pretends to be a period hard boiled detective piece, has some genuine horror stuff hidden within the narrative and the lore. It's close to season 1 of True Detective weird but goes into even stranger places that tells you that the world the game inhabits is just wrong. It takes several hours to get there though, but I'd heartily recommend the game to anyone who enjoys reading, game reactivity and the interesting mechanics they employ for the skills / perks system
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Oct 22, 2019 10:38
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FirstAidKite posted:That's kinda hilarious how different the tone is compared to Agony just based on the combat bit I skimmed through I dunno i clicked through and at around the five minute mark there's a part where you're (i'm gonna spoiler this because its gross as gently caress) stomping on demon babies, then you punch a strung up pregnant woman in the stomach until her legs are covered in blood. Then you rip out the demon baby by inserting your arm into her It's the same edgy devs, for sure
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Oct 22, 2019 11:06
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The Saddest Rhino posted:Is Agony the one by the dev who tried to court reactionary gamers by claiming they were censored for demon tits? Anyway, I watched an hour or two of someone streaming Agony and the worst thing I can actually say about is that it is very reddish-brown and looked incredibly boring. There's nothing offensive about it, it's just uninteresting. VVV Alright, I'll take your word for it. Cardiovorax fucked around with this message at 12:22 on Oct 22, 2019 |
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Oct 22, 2019 11:08
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Cardiovorax posted:You don't have to be reactionary to dislike that. They were really wording it in the way that they knew what type of people they were trying to get.
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Oct 22, 2019 11:57
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It's really frustrating that a spiritual successor to Dark Messiah of KICK ORCS IN THE DICK is such an ugly and distasteful game. I am not a prude but when everything is bloody disgusting it just becomes boring which is what Agony was and what that game will be. Anyone remember the name of that Cronenberg game with the organic weapons and Prey (2006) like levels?
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Oct 22, 2019 12:27
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al-azad posted:It's really frustrating that a spiritual successor to Dark Messiah of KICK ORCS IN THE DICK is such an ugly and distasteful game. I am not a prude but when everything is bloody disgusting it just becomes boring which is what Agony was and what that game will be.
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Oct 22, 2019 12:57
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al-azad posted:It's really frustrating that a spiritual successor to Dark Messiah of KICK ORCS IN THE DICK is such an ugly and distasteful game. I am not a prude but when everything is bloody disgusting it just becomes boring which is what Agony was and what that game will be.
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Oct 22, 2019 13:07
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