Category: Video Games

Flawed Crystals

  04/19/2020       illhousen      7 Comments

Flawed Crystal is a Steven Universe fangame made by our very own member of the hivemind, Guest Reviewer Roarke Mini-Farla St. Elmo’s Fire. You can find it here. I finally got around to playing the game, and figured I’d share my thoughts with this blog.

Before I begin, it should be noted that this is very much a fangame in a sense that it doesn’t explain concepts or introduce characters featured in the show. If you aren’t already familiar with the cartoon, it’s impossible to engage with this game. It’s not a flaw per se, one of the greatest strengths of fanfiction is that the core elements were already established for you, so you can skip exposition and focus on things you actually want to talk about. It is, however, something to keep in mind if you think about checking out this game.

With that out of the way, let’s begin.

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   Fanfiction, Recommendations, RPGs, Video Games      , , ,

Christmas Steam Games (2019)

  05/06/2020       St. Elmo's Fire      12 Comments

Another year, another crop. I put this off for a while because I was hoping to be able to rejigger a few games that had trouble playing on my computer, but no such luck. You’ll have to wait for reviews of Fez, Mages of Mystralia, and The Talos Principle when (if) I upgrade my hardware.

Inside: Hexcells, Her Story, Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight, Gravitas, Disoriented, OVIVO.

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   Metroidvania, Platformers, Puzzle, Recommendations, Video Games, Visual Novels      , , , , , ,

Hacknet

  05/13/2020       St. Elmo's Fire      Add Comment

Hacknet is a game I picked up on Steam for cheap. Its premise is that it’s a “hacking simulator”: A prominent hacker has been murdered, and his deadman switch contacts you and gives you a copy of his hacking software. You’re told to investigate the truth behind his murder and the project he was working on. Sounds like a cool cyberpunk romp!

…But unfortunately, only a small part of the game is about that. Most of the campaign requires slowly building up rapport with various hacker groups, which takes the bog-standard form of accepting utterly trite and banal contracts like hacking someone’s video game account to give them more points or modifying a resume. Even for the potentially more interesting ones, you never get any greater context for who’s sending them or why, because you’re just a mercenary and anonymity is sacred.

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   Puzzle, Video Games     

The Talos Principle

  06/07/2020       St. Elmo's Fire      1 Comment

The Talos Principle is a first-person puzzler. You play as a robot who awakens to the voice of someone claiming to be your creator, who tasks you with completing puzzles. He promises you eternal life for your service, but orders you not to ascend the tower at the center of the world.

As a puzzle game, I thought this was quite good. I was initially worried it would become repetitive, but the difficulty curve is excellently paced, with new mechanics doled out at just the right speed to get you used to each. The gameplay is incredibly intuitive, with many levels functioning as tutorials for new mechanics simply through their design and allowing you to poke everything at your leisure. There’s little in the way of explicit tutorial text, but you don’t need it; you learn how the world works by investigating it. I’d even say the game had a bit of a Metroidvania feel in the sense that certain puzzles teach you tricks and tactics that help make others much easier.

I also appreciated a fix for something that bothered me about Portal: held objects will snap to switches and boxes when you place them, so you don’t run into the problem of failing the puzzle because you placed a block a few pixels off-center from the pressure plate and the unnecessarily complicated physics engine took that as an excuse to go crazy. Similarly, the game highlights which areas are reachable by jump, so you don’t have to wonder about that either.

My only complaint is that I felt the addition of actual hazards were unnecessarily frustrating, especially when some puzzles can be quite long and require a lot of finnicky setup (especially the star puzzles that require configuring multiple puzzle areas at once). I think it would have been nicer if dying didn’t force you to reset the entire area, especially when the entire conceit is that you’re in a simulation where death is meaningless.

Also, the star puzzles that required you to use clever manipulation of your tools and environment were good, but the ones that were just “You need to find this switch that’s hidden around a corner behind a tree and in total darkness” were just infuriating. Pixel hunts are not puzzles.

As for the plot, my reaction can be pretty much summed up by this SMBC comic:

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Puzzle, Video Games

Digimon World Re:Digitize

  07/15/2020       St. Elmo's Fire      2 Comments

In 1999, Bandai broke Digimon into the mainstream with the release of its first video game title: Digimon World for the PlayStation. Digimon World was, by any objective measure, a terrible game. The mechanics were incredibly convoluted, punishing, and poorly-explained, glitches abounded, and everything was filtered through a poor translation that just made everything even more confusing. Even with the official strategy guide, we were barely able to muddle our way through to the end.

I loved it anyway, because it was also an incredibly unique game. It was a fascinating blend of open world, town sim, monster-raising sim, and RPG. You were given free reign to explore a huge, fascinating world with tons of secrets and interconnecting parts, and every digimon you recruited contributed to the central city in some way. At the beginning of the story, the city is totally abandoned, with nothing but a sad empty market square; by the end, it is a booming community with a variety of incredible services. Even the digimon that provided only minor or aesthetic additions delighted me; I loved seeing how all of them contributed in their own way.

Unfortunately, this was to be a one-off. The sequels in the series were completely different genres, adopting much more standard RPG mechanics. I’m not sure what they were thinking, because this is Digimon, so it’s not like it has anything going for it but the monster-raising aspect.

So imagine my surprise when I heard there was a spiritual successor to the original Digimon World, using the same mechanics! It was called Digimon World Re:Digitize and though it was never released outside of Japan, a fan translation was made. I decided to try it out on a whim.

I discovered they made Digimon World into a functional game — but at what cost?

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   Monster Collector, RPGs, Sim, Video Games      , ,

Games For Racial Justice and Equality (Part 1)

  08/31/2020       St. Elmo's Fire      4 Comments

So, itch.io ran a bundle to fundraise for Black Lives Matter, offering over a thousand games for only $5. As a fundraiser, I found the ethos… questionable (“Give us money so we can do actual activism while you play video games”), but it was a good deal, so I got it.

A good chunk of the items included aren’t actual games; they are either assets or tabletop RPGs. There are still a ton, though. Here are my thoughts on the games I’ve gotten through in the first half of the year:

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   Platformers, Precision Platformer, Puzzle, Puzzle Platformer, Recommendations, RPGs, Sim, Video Games      , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Yo-Kai Watch

  11/11/2020       St. Elmo's Fire      6 Comments

I recently tried out the first Yo-Kai Watch game, out of curiosity for what the rest of the mons scene is doing.

My most important takeaway is that anyone who says Yo-Kai Watch is trying to copy or replace Pokemon has clearly not only never played the game but never played any other mons game either and probably thinks Pokemon has a copyright on the genre. The two franchises share a target audience, but otherwise they could not be more different. Yokai talk and are presented as distinct characters, yokai cannot be commanded, and most shockingly of all, the protagonist isn’t silent!

As for the game itself, it is a godawful grindy mess that can barely be called a game. But it has some interesting ideas, and I enjoyed the creature designs.

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   Monster Collector, RPGs, Video Games     

Games for Racial Justice and Equality (Part 2)

  11/30/2020       St. Elmo's Fire      Add Comment

Continuing where we left off. A much weaker showing this time, with a lot of games I couldn’t even finish.

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   Adventure, Horror, Metroidvania, Platformers, Puzzle, Puzzle Platformer, Recommendations, Roguelike, RPGmaker, RPGs, Sim, Strategy, Survival, Video Games      , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Darkest Dungeon

  01/13/2021       St. Elmo's Fire      4 Comments

Yes, I finally got around to this one! I’m… rather ambivalent towards it.

Darkest Dungeon is a party-based RPG roguelike where you compile a party of 4 from 17 different classes and send them on expeditions into Lovecraftian nightmare dungeons. The key mechanic is that mental health is just as important as physical: Events like low light, critical hits, and certain enemy attacks will degrade your characters’ sanity, and when it gets to be too much they will go insane, followed by dying of a heart attack if pushed even farther. (Permadeath is, of course, a feature.) Insane characters create a death spiral where they will stress out the rest of the party with every action, as well as randomly disobeying orders or skipping turns. It’s very easy for even a well-balanced party to be completely destroyed if too many characters start going insane.

I found it to be an interesting idea, but the actual gameplay I found very grindy and frustrating, and I’m left feeling that the designers did not succeed in conveying their intended message at all.

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   RPGs, Video Games     

Digimon World Re:Digitize Decode

  01/31/2021       St. Elmo's Fire      Add Comment

So, a while back I reviewed Digimon World Re:Digitize. The fan translation for the 3DS port, “Decode”, was recently finished. I decided to give it a whirl at the behest of the Digimon community’s insistence that its new features fixed all my complaints about Re:Digitize.

In general, I found it an improvement — it follows up on a lot of dropped plot threads from the original, adds lots more NPC dialogue with genuinely helpful tips, and adds several new side quests that provide useful features. But it still doesn’t fix any of the fundamental problems I had with the original.

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   Monster Collector, RPGs, Sim, Video Games      , ,

HEARTBEAT

  02/09/2021       St. Elmo's Fire      15 Comments

I heard a lot of people praising this game as a unique twist on the jRPG formula with a lot of UnderTale inspiration and great female characters. Then I heard that the developers were TERFs, which just made me even more curious while also killing my desire to give these people any money. So I pirated it.

The game is. Bad. So, so bad. Trying to understand it sends me into a brain-killing fever. But let’s try.

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   RPGmaker, RPGs, Video Games     

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

  04/11/2021       St. Elmo's Fire      2 Comments

Finally got around to this, 4 years late. It’s good!

I think my most important takeaway from this game is that it’s very different from other Zelda games. It’s good at what it is, but it scratches a different itch. I wouldn’t want all Zelda games to be like this one going forward.

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   Action, Recommendations, Survival, Video Games      , ,