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Just finished Cats Organized Neatly, a good example of why presentation matters. Gameplay-wise it's a completely standard tiling puzzle on a grid of squares, but all the pieces you move around are cats that meow when you pick them up or rotate them. Every time you meet a new cat the game shows you a little blurb with the cat's name and a description of its personality. It's very cute. Now to play the sequel, Dogs Organized Neatly.
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Dec 2, 2023 12:02
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 19:42 |
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I finished SOLAS 128, a very good little puzzle game. The core of it is the well-known "beam of light" puzzle where you use mirrors and other tools to guide lightbeams of various colors to predetermined destinations, but two design features make this game stand out. The first is that in SOLAS 128, each beam of light is actually a stream of evenly spaced particles, moving at a steady pace. This becomes important when two beams intersect: if the beams' particles do not collide the beams simply cross each other without interacting, but if they do collide the beams merge into a single beam moving in a new direction. This provides you with a lot of interesting options when you're dealing with more than one beam. The other feature is that when you've solved a puzzle, the beam you've guided out of that room becomes the starting point for the next room. This isn't just a matter of presentation: if you go back to the previous room and break the solution, the beam you need for the current room is no longer there. Very quickly the game introduces situations where a puzzle has multiple solutions, but not all of them make it possible to solve the next room's puzzle. This gradually escalates until you find yourself looking at groups of several rooms that have to be considered as a single interconnected puzzle. If you like this kind of abstract puzzle game, SOLAS 128 is very much worth playing.
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Dec 26, 2023 11:22
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I beat Citizen Sleeper, a light RPG where you play as an android trying to escape from the corporation that legally owns it. The game starts when you arrive on the decaying space station Erlin's Eye, having stowed away in the cargo hold of a transport ship, and the entire game takes place on the Eye. The gameplay is quite simple, but it very much captured the feeling of being in a new, unknown place with very little guidance, and desperately trying to survive from day to day while also planning for the long term. The story is mostly presented as text alongside (very pretty!) illustrations of the major characters, and the writing did a good job of making the characters seem like real people, with their own opinions and goals. There's a few branches in the story, but nothing major; a few of the storylines let you choose between two different options near the end. About halfway through the game I had managed to overcome the initial pressure and gather enough resources that I no longer needed to worry about short-term survival, so at that point the game became more of a visual novel where I could go through the remaining storylines at my leisure (particularly since most of the storylines wait for you to start them). So I could see pretty much everything in one playthrough, but that was fine, the writing remained good all the way through. There's a sequel coming out next year that I'll probably buy.
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Dec 27, 2023 20:10
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Finished replaying The Talos Principle and then playing the DLC Road to Gehenna for the first time. Puzzle-wise the game definitely holds up -- there's a good mix of mechanics to provide variety, although there's a few too many similar late-game puzzles. The secret stars are great because of how they encourage you to break the puzzles by bringing in extra items or connecting lasers between puzzles, which is quite satisfying. The DLC mostly focuses on some of the more obscure interactions between mechanics, so there's actually quite a few new ideas here. Story-wise, the game is okay. It starts you off with a disembodied voice telling you that he is ELOHIM, creator of the world, and he commands you to solve all these puzzles and collect the sigils in them. Many others have tried before you, and you find notes and comments from some of them along the way. You also find audio logs and computer terminals containing a few documents, which quickly reveal that the entire world you're in is a constructed simulation and that ELOHIM is part of it, not its creator. The audio logs are the best part of the story, I'd say. The other use of the computer terminals is to have conversations with Milton Library Assistant, who will ask you philosophical questions and then insult you in different ways depending on your answers. There's a lot of dialogue options but they don't actually matter, because every variation leads towards the same conversation near the end of the game. Depending on your choices this final conversation can conclude in three different ways, which also do not matter. Mostly it feels like Milton was added to fit with the religious imagery -- we need to have a snake in the Garden of Eden, so here he is -- and the dev team never really managed to integrate him with the rest of the game. It's quite telling that the game never gives you the option to stop talking to Milton and just walk away from the terminal -- once he starts talking you must continue the conversation, even if you think talking to him is a waste of time. The DLC has you play as a different character, after the events of the base game. The simulation has served its purpose and is being shut down, so ELOHIM sends you off to the Gehenna, a separate part of the simulation where he imprisoned some of your predecessors for various reasons, so that you can free the prisoners before the final shutdown. The computer terminals are still around, but now they are used to read Gehenna's message board -- since everyone in Gehenna is imprisoned in a small cell with nothing but a terminal for company, they spend their time telling each other stories and writing and playing text adventures. This concept is a big improvement over the base game, as the game's writers are much better at being funny than at being profound. So yeah. Good puzzles, passable writing. The sequel seems to have been positively received, so I'll probably play it at some point.
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Jan 17, 2024 18:25
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Just finished The Case of the Golden Idol (including both DLCs). It's a mystery-solving game, where each case shows you the scene immediately after a person dies and challenges you to determine the identities of everyone involved as well as the sequence of events that led to the victim's death. The cases can be solved separately from each other, but they are connected by some recurring characters and by the mysterious and valuable golden idol that plays a role in several characters' motivations. For the eleventh and final case, the game sets up a larger mystery whose solution requires you to look over all the previous cases to understand the significance and history of the golden idol, and it pulls it off perfectly. Absolutely incredible finale. There's a sequel coming out this year and I'm buying it on release day.
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Jan 28, 2024 15:33
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 19:42 |
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Just finished Sunblaze, a very good little 2D platformer. It's clearly inspired by Celeste, but it does a good job of being its own thing and not just a copy. Every room in the game is exactly one screen large, but there can be a lot of difficulty packed into that one screen. There's an interesting variety of mechanics throughout the game, and some optional collectables for extra challenge. If you pick up all the collectables in a chapter you unlock its hard mode -- these are only 12 screens long, but quite difficult, and they have some extra mechanics not found in the main game. The game also has a cute story about a girl who wants to be a superhero just like her dad. The dad jokes are appropriately terrible. You can pet the cat.
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Feb 25, 2024 22:24
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