Divinity: Original Sin 2

Like its predecessor, Divinity: Original Sin 2 took over a year to finish due to playing it in co-op and the difficulty of coordinating sessions. Looking at the first post I made about it, it even took slightly over two years, which is a frightening amount of time. As I remarked some time after first starting it, it is much like the original.

I think the main difference is the amount of content and the quality of it. While both games are very lengthy, DOS2 should still span a longer time, offer more alternative story paths and sidequests, and some out-of-campaign activities like an arena mode or a GM mode to make your own multiplayer experiences or something using the existing assets? I don't fully know, I didn't try them out. But in addition, there is the quality, seen, for example, in better graphics, more voice acting (although I must say the narrator narrated far too much for my tastes - some characters filling that role would have been better at times), better balance, better AI, and some other smaller things. Somewhat surprisingly, there weren't any major modifications from the previous game. It was very much just more of the same. Then again, improving on something so well made is a difficult task, and I can't say it got repetitive.

I'm not sure I want to just copy what I said about DOS(1), because the description of the game really isn't any different. It's a really well-made RPG with turn-based combat that has free movement, 3D positioning, and lots of interactions between different spells. If you care about RPGs, you almost certainly already know about Divinity: Original Sin 2, but in case you don't, go play it. It's great, and that's coming from someone who usually doesn't like RPGs. Once again, top spot on my list of RPGs, absolutely amazing game.

Open Sorcery

I first played Open Sorcery almost 3 years ago. I can't believe how time flies. It was a fun little choice-laden text-adventure with many, many branching paths and options and outcomes. Kind of like Long Live the Queen. I liked to play both of those games with two of my friends, acting as a sort of council of three, making democratic decisions on what course of action to take. It was fun, it was also slow, and it has been increasingly infrequent, as people seem to be more busy. So it sat in my library for quite a while until I decided to finish it alone today.

Open Sorcery is basically a multiple choice text game. You are an elemental firewall in a sort of techno-magical world (The setting wasn't explored very much, but I loved what glimpses I got.), tasked with guarding some places of importance. Your decisions can increase your relationships with people, make you learn new things, and somewhat shape the world around you. A single playthrough may take at most an hour if you're reading through everything and don't lose early. Of course you don't limit yourself to one playthrough with these kinds of games - you explore all the different paths and options. Subsequent playthroughs might be closer to a couple dozen minutes each, or if running on speed mode (which skips most text and choices in favor of only the important ones), even just a few minutes each.

Overall, it's a short game which can be systematically explored in a few of hours, but might provide entertainment for closer to a dozen, if going slow. It's very bare-bones, having almost no artwork, no background music whatsoever, and only a handful of small sound effects. On the upside, usage of text is masterful. I'd say the story is decent, but it's really, very short, being more of some preparatory events followed by the main event you must then resolve with the preparation you've had.
In a sentence: Too short, too bare, but otherwise lovely. I'd recommend it but not very strongly. It will go on my list, below the line.

Heroes of Hammerwatch

I tried Hammerwatch quite a long while, possibly years, ago. Today I tried it's sequel, Heroes of Hammerwatch. I found the latter to have more content as well as being slightly better overall, but for the most part, it's more of the same so I'll speak of them together as just "Hammerwatch".

Hammerwatch is a randomly generated dungeon crawler / action rogue-like. It has a few different classes to choose from, which each come with their own abilities and playstyle. The game revolves around entering a dungeon, killing stuff in there, leveling up, finding items and gold and eventually dying to do it all over again, but this time with extra power from the levels you've gained and the power-ups you've bought with your gold. There's an end too, after which point you can do the whole thing over again at a harder difficulty. Maybe use a different class, whatever suits you.

It didn't suit me much though. The beginning was slow and combat didn't feel particularly impactful. I tried out a couple ranged classes and as such, my gameplay was limited to running backwards and shooting whatever I had available at the monsters who were generally beelining at me. Some also had ranged attacks or charges I had to dodge.
Most progression (levels and items) was just upping numbers so I could kill monsters faster and survive stronger hits against me while the enemies did the same. In essence, not much changed. Okay, in truth, the item system was pretty cool in that they all stacked and had some set bonuses, making it all a bit like an incremental game, the elements of which I always enjoy in my other games. I had no choice in which items I got though, so any strategic element was lost there.

Overall, I feel Hammerwatch is another of those games which prioritizes quantity of content over quality of content. Many people have over 50, some even over 200 hours of playtime, but as they admit, it's mostly just a grind. Because I have no shortage of games to play, it's not important to me that I could pour so much time into this game - I'd rather enjoy myself more over a shorter time. If anything, I feel it's kind of like a worse-but-longer-lasting version of Risk of Rain or just a not-so-good version of Realm of the Mad God. Maybe if the multiplayer was working properly I could have at least had more fun playing with my friends, but as it is, the gameplay is just too dull for me to recommend.

A Hat in Time

A Hat in Time is, as of the time of writing and according to my formula, the 13th best game on Steam. Considering that, I'd imagine most people who would want to play it have already played it and my opinion on it isn't all too relevant. And in a way, I'm glad that this is the case, as I must now tell you how I dislike one of the most liked games on Steam. In foresight, maybe this is not so much the fault of the game as it's just the fact that all people don't like all kinds of games. But maybe my opinion at least matters for people like myself. You decide.

Fair warning: I didn't make it to the end, so I might be slightly off in some things, but I'm not making any of it up.
A Hat in Time is a very cutesy 3D platformer with a focus on collecting stuff. It has maybe 20 hours worth of content, which could be seen as not overly much, but the content itself is, as far as I know, very compact, i.e. avoiding repetition. You got 40 levels to complete and some hats and other platforming tools to help you.

In my somewhat brief experience, I found all the platforming and running around collecting stuff an absolute snoozefest. I felt no incentive or joy whatsoever doing it. That's all the excuse I need, but then again, I've never liked platformers I guess.
My best subjective-objective comments about it would be that they've put a ton of work in so very many little details and that the cute and happy art style and atmosphere could be appealing to some people. The game is on the short side and caters more towards the casual (or "relaxed", if you prefer) audience, having easy and/or forgiving gameplay.

As I said in the beginning - if you like this game, you've probably already played it, or at least know about it. If not, and if platformers seem like really your thing, don't let my opinion keep you from it. I'm sure there's a reason it's the 13th highest rated game on Steam. On the other hand, if you feel your taste in games maybe aligns more with mine, then there's really nothing about this game I can recommend. It was dead boring.

Evergarden

I tried a little puzzle game by the name of Evergarden today. If you're familiar with the briefly insanely popular mobile game 2048, then it's basically that but on a hex grid. If you're not familiar with that, then Evergarden is a game about combining plants. Two adjacent plants of the same size can be combined into a larger plant, or any plant can be used to spawn a new plant next to it instead. Once all plants have been used once, you take the next turn and repeat the process until you run out of turns.
There's a scoring mechanic and some story thrown in there as well.

This is another one of these games, where I'm not sure what prompted me to add it to my backlog. Yet there it was, and I played it. As you might expect from a game that is essentially 2048, it's super basic. There's really not much to do. I sometimes wonder if these games are even worth writing about, or if I should just silently remove them. But I did spend my time playing it, might as well spend some time writing about it, gives me a reason to post. But in case it wasn't obvious yet, I wouldn't recommend you play the game.

Death's Gambit

To think I almost didn't give this game a chance. To think Death's Gambit was one of the lowest rated games in my backlog.
I loved this game. But I can understand some people's frustrations.

Death's Gambit is another game cementing the idea that a "souls-like" is a valid game genre. It's again so similar that you could call it a rip-off, but I don't personally feel like the (sub)genre is saturated enough to not allow for more good games, even if they play so much alike. Being 2D, it reminded me more of Salt and Sanctuary than Dark Souls, but the ideas are not so dependent on the dimensions of the game, I believe.

If you've played Dark Souls or a souls-like, you already know the gist of what the game is like. I won't explain it all again, so go look at the first two paragraphs of my Salt and Sanctuary post. It's basically more of the same, but there's less platforming.
There's actually less of a lot of things, which is where the game starts to suffer. Death's Gambit is only 10-15 hours long for the first playthrough. There's NG+, and some secrets/easter eggs, and an optional increased difficulty boss fight for every boss, but aside from NG+, they don't add too much extra time to the game. With less content, of course the map is smaller, there are fewer enemies, etc...
Most noticeably, however, there were just not enough items. With the exception of ranged weapons, there was one of each weapon type. Only a handful of various armors (of which only shields had any meaningful variety). They had an ability system, but that was underused - 2-3 abilities for each weapon, none really found in the world, just bought at the start from a vendor.
And finally, what a lot of people complain about - less polish. Animations not working, falling through platforms, the occasional bug that actually made you have to redo a significant part of previous content, and a lot more things that were just very rough around the edges, if not outright broken.

On the shorter but cheerier side, what the game did well in was immersion. Pretty much full voice acting, lovely attention to details and a plethora of non-gameplay events that made the world feel more alive. And when the game decided it was time to throw some insanity at you as a result of your death and undeath, it was downright unsettling at moments. It's all this that sold the game to me. I feel like the people who made it had everything they needed for not just a good game, but a great or an exceptional one, just... not enough time, willpower, resources, or I don't know what, to make more content and to polish it to really shine. Were they to make a sequel some day, I would without a doubt play it.

Despite it's relative shortcomings in playtime, build variety, and the overall production quality, I feel the core of Death's Gambit was outstanding. If you like souls-likes, I believe you'll like this one as well, and I would definitely recommend it. It has also earned a place on my more permanent favorite games list. If you play it, try to look past the rough edges and instead into the gleaming soul of it.

The Disappearing of Gensokyo

The second of the fan-made Touhou games I gave a try to was The Disappearing of Gensokyo. It was somewhat similar to the last one I played in that it's kind of like an action-RPG combined with a bullet hell game, except that here you're also shooting at the enemy instead of mostly using short-range attacks. So it's actually just like a regular bullet hell game, except it's not top-down, and you move around the levels on your own instead of just having it all scroll past.

To jump straight to my opinion - I don't think it was a conceptually bad game. There wasn't any single huge problem that drove me away but rather it was the combination of lots and lots of smaller problems and a general lack of polish. I'd highlight some of these issues and explore some of what the game offered in the progress.

To start off with something minor, I noticed the translation wasn't exactly stellar. Some mismatching pickup descriptions aside, it didn't bother me. A more annoying aspect relating to text was that half the story was given as dialogue right in the middle of the action. I missed that half because I couldn't look away from the game to read the dialogue. No one could. Some voice acting would've worked here, but alas, there was none.
Continuing on the topic of bad text or the lack of it - there were a bunch of different characters with 2 attacks, a bomb, and a dash each. These were varied and enjoyable (some characters were maybe definitely better than others, but with the ammo system forcing you to swap, that was mostly okay), but there was no description of what their abilities did or how strong they were. Sure, through trial and error I noticed some attacks had stuns or slowing effects, and some maybe had more damage in exchange for their poor range, or that some dashes were longer but slower, but it was all guesswork.
The upgrade UI was terrible, giving almost no feedback or hint as to what upgrades were selected, bought, or how to even buy them. (Double click to buy, BTW.)

From the gameplay side, the first thing I noticed was that there weren't enough checkpoints. The easy parts of the game that I didn't feel like playing over and over took most of my time as I failed some difficult part later on. Could've just turned down the difficulty, but I enjoyed overcoming a difficult fight. Some games justify this repetition by forcing you to ration better, saving your consumables, health, or whatever for the difficult parts - do better in the easy parts and the hard parts will be easier. Not this game. You have one recharging health bar and enough ammo and bombs, so you're always topped up between encounters. There's almost no reason to put the checkpoints so far from each other.
What else... There was an escort mission with an escortee who liked to run in and die. That was a good design choice, for sure. Also leaving the main character with no long-range attacks in a game were getting close could mean an instadeath. None of the characters really had a sufficient attack range like the enemies did. Maybe if dashing made you invulnerable and was available more often it could be considered some high-skill element, but it wasn't. Oh, and half the bosses I fought glitched out after death causing me to re-do the level from the beginning. Also not fun.
Saving the worst for last: The camera angle. Instead of top-down, it was tilted about 30 degrees, and ho-boy was that a burden. Couldn't see to the south of me - any ranged or dashing attacks, while properly telegraphed, were just outside my field of view, yet could reach me. That's bad. Nothing you can't see should be able to hit you faster than you can react. Further, any projectiles coming from the sides were inconsistently placed in the air. I couldn't tell where exactly my hitbox was and where I should stand for the projectiles not to hit me. Some seemed to hit my head, some my legs... Only when the enemy was to my north was the game like a proper bullet hell.

Phew, quite a long post this one, but I believe I was thorough. So yeah, as I said, it was mostly the combination of all these little design problems that caused the game to ultimately be unlikable. Better UI and a top-down view would have made this a much, much better game, but as it stands, I can't recommend it.

Soul Searching

Two in a row - another old game from the depths of my backlog - it's Soul Searching.
Soul Searching is part survival game, part the-thing-it's-called game. I remember initially wanting to skip it, but was convinced to give it a try due to the positive reviews it had gotten. I see now that these reviews were mostly by people to whom the second (and maybe the first, who knows) part of the game appealed - to people with whom it resonated. And there's nothing wrong with that. But it didn't resonate with me, and so I can only tell you about the objective qualities of this game, as well as my own opinion on it.

Soul Searching is a very "light" survival game indeed. You're on a boat, searching for souls that teach you magic (but also for yourself, I guess?) You have to manage your hunger, thirst, sleep, and deal with the occasional random encounter such as a thunderstorm or some birds. It's all very basic, and unless you're struck by bad luck, all very easy as well. The sea is also loitered with coins and magic nodes, but each individual one is not worth very much, causing you to spend a lot of time getting off your slow boat and swimming to the coin/node by your even slower self if you want to eventually afford to buy something. (Although buying/upgrading anything is not strictly required.)
As for the story... Like I said, it didn't resonate with me. I couldn't care about the supposed sadness and troubles of these pixelated figures, vague and unrelatable as they were.

Overall, from a game perspective, Soul Searching doesn't have much anything going for it. A lot of work has been put into the atmosphere and beauty of the world, and that's the part I respected most. But the gameplay is not just dull, but incredibly slow if you don't want to skip it. (At which point, why play at all?) While the story is supposed to be the highlight here, the bits of it were few and far between and left me cold. So unless you want to try if you can relate to it like some others say they have, I wouldn't recommend playing it.

Desync

Desync was probably one of the older games in my backlog, and I finally got around to playing it. It's a fast-paced, level-based action FPS that focuses on twitchy movement and aim, and rewards you for executing "cool" combos called Sequences such as dashing up close to an enemy to shoot them in the face and kill them, killing multiple enemies in quick succession, shooting an enemy into a trap that kills them, killing an enemy from above, and many others. Sequences are an essential part in performing well, as they reward you with points and various drops from enemies, such as health and ammo packs. Consequently, the game encourages you to not just win, but to win fast and in the more elaborate way possible. The visuals reflect this as well, being incredibly colorful, and there's an upgrade system between levels that I honestly didn't get to explore too much.

Now, aside from maybe not being all that deep or challenging (running for a highscore aside) gameplay wise, I have bigger problems with the game.
The first thing I noticed were the... obnoxious colors and post-processing effects. I don't usually complain about game visuals, as I tend not to care, but the glowing neon lights made it difficult to tell things apart at times. Further, some screen "glitch" effects made text nigh-unreadable for multiple seconds in a row and, of course, made it even more difficult to get a good idea what was going on around you at a glimpse. There was also no way to turn these effects off.
Secondly, and most aggravatingly, the game was clearly not designed for a KB/M. Sure, aiming worked and even the scroll wheel was in use, but my left hand would need 6-7 fingers so that I wouldn't have to stop moving left or right to fire my secondary weapon.

In a game all about skill and speed, the lack of proper game interaction support and the focus on visuals over gameplay, to the point they are harmful to the gameplay, are just not acceptable to me. As such, my experience with Desync was brief, and even without these problems, I can't imagine I am missing out on all that much. I wouldn't recommend it.

Happy New Year?

Happy new year and decade, everyone!

I've been absent for multiple months after finishing school and getting my degree, and then taking a couple of months to rest. Reason being, I was looking for a job. As that proved unexpectedly difficult, I put some rules into place for myself to better help focus my efforts. Among those rules: "No new games until I find a job." So I spent a lot of time applying to places and doing other relevant work necessary for finding a job.
Recently though, I felt it was just out of my hands for a large part and putting in more work wasn't going to produce any better results - I just had to wait. That also freed up some time I could use for some programming projects I've had and I finally decided that I might as well get back to playing some games as I wait. I don't want to jinx it, but I feel like I've made good progress with one job application and could land that job early January. So I've been a bit more lax in my search lately and have quite a few reviews scheduled over the next days.

On another topic I've been thinking about for quite a while now... I think 2020 is the year I'm going to finally make my own website. I've wanted one to showcase some smaller and larger projects I've made as well as anything I'll make in the future that's worth showing. I would of course also migrate my blog there, and perhaps add some nice features Blogger doesn't quite allow for (or at least they aren't easy to make/use here). I've completed enough on my list of programming projects that my own site is starting to surface as something I would want to do soon. It would be a large undertaking, as I like making things from (mostly) scratch, and that requires me to learn quite a few new technologies, but I believe the end result will be worth it.
What projects I might have before that are to learn Rust, fiddle with Tensorflow some, and maybe develop my image viewer/editor some more, but I doubt those would last me even close to the whole year.

So, in brief: I am back for now and hope to have enough time to continue after I get a job. I'm also going to start working on my own website, and will port the blog over there once it's finished. For the next week or few you can enjoy a game review I've queued up for every day. Maybe you'll find something you'll like. I know I already did.