Since I seem to be playing games and then feeling too lazy to review them, here’s a master-post of short and sweet reviews! The overall theme of this round seems to be point-and-click games, with one exception. What can I say? I like games where I can happily hold a drink in one hand and play the game with the other.
I’ve just been playing Black Desert Online like a fiend, really.
All links on titles go to their respective Steam store pages. After the title, I’ve provided links I could find for the developer and producer (if there is one) in that order.
Right off the bat, I think Oxenfree is one of the best games that I have ever played. It’s not perfect, but it’s very close to it. I really enjoyed the themes this game used in its narrative and the execution is very stylish. It uses mechanics that I haven’t seen in a game thus far, which made it exciting. The replay value is VERY good and the way the developers encouraged players to start a new game was one that had me speechless for a few minutes. I can’t go too much into that last bit without giving away some spoilers, but here’s a general overview of the story:
Our protagonist is a girl named Alex, going on a weekend getaway with a bunch of friends—including her new stepbrother, Jonas. The teens have decided to go to a local historic landmark and hang out on the beach, drinking beer and enjoying campfires. The cool thing about this island is that it served as a radio communications hub back in the day and some kids say that if you walk around with a radio, you can find hidden signals that contain secret messages. Being the adventurous type, you decide to try it out for yourself. Needless to say, the results are nothing short of disastrous. Continue reading “Mini-reviews for the Lazy Soul”
Royals—a game in which the objective is to remain optimistic and attempt to rule the realm.
Last week, someone in my Facebook group recommended Royals (link to its page on itch.io – Mac and Windows compatible), a game by Asher Vollmer (link to website). Like its subtitle suggests, Royals is a game that places you in the role of a very optimistic peasant. You are given no instruction other than the basic controls (arrow keys, z to accept, x to cancel). The idea for this game in terms of its format is that it is supposed to be like finding a floppy disk with a game on it and discovering that you no longer have the manual. Because I will be talking about the mechanics of the game in a way that would likely spoil the intention of the creator, I highly encourage you to try the game for yourself first (it is free unless you choose to make a donation).
The game window is very small.
The game starts out by asking what your goal is. This functions as a way to determine the identity of your character. You are presented with three choices: becoming queen/king/royal. I appreciated how the game included a gender neutral option, considering how many games still revolve around a female/male binary when creating a character. Additionally, not much changes between each choice aside from the name and title of the current monarch of the realm. Your avatar does not look different and you are not given different stats based on your choice. Little things like this can do a lot for players who are outside of the gender/sex binary and looking for things that are inclusive of them.
That said, let’s talk about the mechanics of the game itself.
Here is an example of what the UI looks like.
You are given a small, randomly generated map with a variety of small icons representing forests, farms, mountains, and other landmarks that you can interact with. In my screenshot, there is a row of various images with numbers underneath them that represent different items that you can gain or lose.
The heart represents your health. Each turn, your health is lowered by at least one point. Once you reach a more advanced age, you begin to lose two points of health each turn. Health can be regained by resting in a building or grasslands. Aside from aging, health can be lost by partaking in risky activities such as joining the army, brawling, or any other violent activity.
The fist represents your strength or physical hardiness. As you can see, my strength in that particular session was quite low, meaning that I did not have the capability to gain anything by choosing violent action over peaceful ones. Strength is useful for a wide variety of things and can be gained most easily by hunting in the forest—an activity than cannot fail.
The music note is a bit harder to define, but if I had to label it as anything specific, it would probably be your charisma. It can be gained by befriending locals, meditating in the mountains, or other charismatic ventures (such as shmoozing at inns). It is a very good stat to build as it is the primary stat in persuading others to join your kingdom.
The next two icons (the pile of logs and the coin) are pretty self-explanatory. In the game, anything you want to build requires wood (gained by chopping down trees—an action that will remove a forest square). Many other actions involving independent or foreign buildings require you to have some spending money. Money can be acquired by working at various places or by selling lumber. Earning money is quite difficult, but I’ll get to that in a moment.
The trio of people is how many followers you currently have. Followers are people loyal to you that are not tied to specific places in your very small kingdom. They can be sent on errands for you and are generally very useful. However, some errands have a significant chance of your follower not returning, so it is important to make sure that you are using them wisely.
Lastly, the house represents how many plots of land are currently in your possession. When you build something, it is empty until you send someone to live in it. Plowing a field is all well and good, but unless you have someone there to act as its owner and caretaker, it is useless.
Each turn ends when you choose to make an action for yourself. The time span between turns is exactly one year, meaning that if you choose to shmooze at an inn, the owners have to put up with you for an entire year of your respective existences. Once you gain followers, you can send them to do various things, but the turn will be over once you choose what you, yourself, are going to do. It’s very important to decide carefully what each turn will consist of because you cannot cancel an action once you have committed to it.
Of course, the game includes consequences for actions such as building or loitering in the lands of the neighbouring monarch. Constructing a building is considered an offense and you will be notified when guards from the nearest monarch are on their way. You can evade them, but they will eventually catch up to your location if you do not move around frequently. Likewise, hanging around inside the neighbouring land’s borders also draws the attention of guards and they will pursue you (even after you have gone back into unclaimed/your land).
Earning money is something I found to be immensely difficult. As you can see, the cost of doing certain actions is not cheap. A 5 gold-coin drink may not seem like much, but when an entire year’s worth of labour is only worth 1 gold coin, you start to seriously begin to reconsider many actions. Followers can be sent off to do labour for you, but they will not earn more than you would if you were working.
Since I don’t want to spoil too much of the fun, I’ll leave my discussion of mechanics and format at that. Again, I encourage you to try the game out for yourself!
I am not sure if it is possible to win this game.
After going through a number of sessions, each one with a different approach, I was left very stumped. There may be something to the subtitle that kind of hints at victory being impossible, but it may be that the game is just very difficult. With a fairly limited lifespan and such a small rate of resource acquisition, it is nothing to underestimate. Your end goal is, I suppose, building a castle. Castles are very costly to build when it comes to acquiring lumber—even when you have a number of followers collecting lumber with you. It still takes time to find more wood to use and you are forced to steal wood from the forests of the neighbouring monarch (which is punishable).
I went into my first session grossly underestimating the difficulty of the game and, subsequently, didn’t make it very far. In my latest session, I managed to build a castle after doing nothing but scouring the map for forests, but I was well into my forties and had spent so much time and effort on collecting lumber that I was old and had very little strength or charisma. So, after a failed attempt at charming the realm, I died.
That being said, I would love to hear of your experience with the game. Did you manage to become the monarch of the realm? Let me know in a comment!
As for where I’ve been in the last few months, work has really kept me busy and I haven’t had much time to try new games. If I have, I’ve lacked the motivation to sit down and play them. It’s disheartening for me when I look at the promises I made in December/early January of reviews that never came.
For that reason, I didn’t feel compelled to write anything celebrating the second anniversary of this blog’s creation (May 4th, by the way). So much has happened in my life over the two years I’ve been running this blog. I graduated, moved into an apartment, got a job, and now I’m just trying to stay afloat and keep my life balanced. I’ve been watching a lot of Star Trek: The Next Generation lately and most of the game time I’ve had has been dedicated to Sims or Mass Effect Andromeda (which I had decided would be something I wouldn’t review). So, I don’t know if all of this rambling is to say that I’m back or that I’m making a “grand return,” but I’m going to try to get back into this now that I’m more settled at my job.
Thank you for reading this if you made it this far!
I decided to kick off my Steam sale reviews by playing fault – milestone one. fault – milestone one is a visual/cinematic novel set in a fantastical world full of magic and intrigue. I was immediately impressed by the beautiful artwork that perfectly set the tone, especially extensive character reactions and backgrounds. I could really see the amount of love and effort put into it by the development team, ALICE IN DISSONANCE.
The way the game laid out the foundations of explaining the magic (manakravte – “mana-craft”) of the world. It felt like a unique take on magic that I hadn’t quite experienced before – at least, not in this way. On the game’s page on the publisher’s website (Sekai Project), they describe the genre influences that the fault series uses:
“It is also not purely Fantasy as much of the tone is heavily influenced by Science Fiction and focuses more on human drama rather than flashy battles and wizardry. It’s[sic] methodical narrative is a homage to the Science Fiction Genre of the 70~80’s.”
After playing Rusty Lake Hotel (link to my review) over the summer, I fell in love with the quirky and mysterious world of Rusty Lake and binge-played the other Cube Escapegames on the Rusty Lake website. When I heard that they were adding a second premium game to their lineup of free-to-play games, I was really excited. It didn’t disappoint.
I actually played this a month or so ago, but didn’t get a chance to organize my thoughts until now. It’s a bit odd, considering the brevity of this game, but it took me a long time to decide on how I wanted to approach writing this. There are so many things I liked about Projector Face, but for each thing I like, there’s a considerable flaw.
I have finally returned after a very long hiatus and I am very excited to bring you more reviews in the next few weeks. I was busy with a work contract that ate up a lot of my time, but now that I am all done, I can resume gaming and reviewing (as well as binge-watching Naruto Shippuden).
Recently, I was contacted by Afterthought Studios, who you might remember from my previous review of Forgotten, Not Lost. I was very touched that they reached out to me and I’m thrilled to bring you my review of the demo version of A More Beautiful World (Act I), which exceeded its Kickstarter goal earlier this year.
The story is centered around an old man who lives with his wife, Madalene, in a small house in the village of Memoria (symbolism!). Right off the bat, we are treated to a short series of depressing revelations and events in the same vein as Up and The Notebook. The old man has immense difficulty remembering aspects of his life that are so significant that even he feels awful not having the ability to recall them. Heck, the story opens with his inability to recognize his wife’s face. Yeah, that’s an immediate hit to the feels. Continue reading “Recently Played: Forgotten, Not Lost – A Kinetic Novel (Summer Sale)”
Do you like bartending? Do you like visual novels? Well, I’ve got a game for you.
VA-11 HALL-A: Cyberpunk Bartending Action is a game that combines mixing drinks with all of the cute anime girl cyberpunk aesthetic you need alongside some infuriating minigame cruelty.
If you’re curious about the “Holy shit” surtitle, it’s because the game spent a long time in development and was only *just* released this past June (2016). The prologue version, which came first, will supposedly be released for free on Steam at some point.
In VA-11 HALL-A (“Valhalla” being the pronunciation/”actual name”), you step into the shoes of Jill, a relatively lonely and depressed bartender working at one of many franchise bars in Glitch City. The year is sometime after 2070 CE (AD in-game, but I like to keep with the times).
This game was purrrrrchased for me by a very kind friend who shamelessly encourages my love of visual novels and dating sims. Thanks, friend!
A game like this couldn’t have come at a better time. Hot of the presses (released on Steam just yesterday), Cat President ~A Purrfect Union~(by Oh, a Rock! Studios) contains both playful political parody and adorable cat pictures.
juliameadows 