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Just watched (rewatched?) The Fountain.

Even zennier than Journey. I admit I did a lot of eye-rolling. Honestly, I'm not an insensitive cad. I just dislike generic "spirituality" that borrows from anywhere it wants to in an effort to seem deep. Sure, it was pretty, but... the main storyline itself was obvious and the spirituality was not the kind of thing I care for.

So... is Journey ALL desert then?

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I'll play that one but right now I'm playing Doom II Hell on Earth, Ultra-Violence mode

rofl, you're KILLING me!!!! ;P

The intro is desert and is annoying, I totally admit.


Can someone else check the reply here? Am I overselling it?

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"My Dionne Warwick understanding of your dream indicates that you are ambivalent on how you want life to eventually screw you." - Joel

"Ever try to forcibly pin down a house cat? It's not easy." - Captain Steel

"I just can't get pass sticking a finger up a dog's butt." - John Dumbear

Okay okay... seriously, I have taken advice on all sorts of entertainment from you, Seds, and Yoda over the years. Nobody's steered me wrong yet (well, except for The Wire--jury's still out on that one for me).

I'll keep plugging away at Journey. After all, I disliked the first few episodes of Battlestar Galactica (and I don't even like space stories) before it completely hooked me. Same with The Expanse. And other stuff, I'm sure. I'll try again.

Just tell me nobody sits mantra-style and shaves their head, right? RIGHT?

So far I'm not very invested in Manifold Garden. I've only passed through maybe 10 rooms so I know I am missing quite a lot. Going by the trailer, I believe there is a LOT to visually enjoy if I can push through. Alas, Austruck has corrupted me and I too, now, have difficulty moving forward in my own game. le sigh.

I should love this game as it plays very much like Portal (funny that game was referenced earlier!), what with progressively difficult puzzles in finding ways to get Block A to Slot B so that Door C opens. And it's all with what should be a really fascinating gimmick of climbing along walls, changing my field of view to access said blocks, slots, and doors that would otherwise be out of reach. I really have to pay attention to most everything around, below, and above me.

Part of my problem so far is the extreme perspective. It's like looking through a very wide-angle camera lens, and it does a number on my vision. That, combined with the very flat "Flash" style rendering, I nearly experience vertigo just walking through hallways. While the idea of walking along walls is interesting in how it could push the Portal type of puzzle to new complexities, I find getting up and around those wall shifts difficult and non-intuitive. That could be another side effect of the perspective tilt and flat shader rendering, I'm not sure. But it's distracting.

I feel like this is a BETA stage game that needs one or two more rounds of QA to smooth things out just a bit more. I'm going to have to step away and hope that I come back to it before I forget I have it. I feel bad for saying that too =\

So uh . .. hm. How do I say this this without sounding like I'm bragging? I uh... I got one trophy left in Journey.


o.O




But it's gonna take a week to earn it now.

Been playing There is no game, wrong dimension.

I'm impressed. I found it much less funny than the original web game. The original was purely meta, a very amusing game that pit you against the program(mer), breaking the interface by clicking on all the wrong places while the game's voice kept insulting you. This sequel of sorts is a bit different : The humor doesn't hit as well, the voice isn't very convincing (it tries to be funny, but it ends up forced like a reaction video, it's clearly no Portal-level acting). But also, the game's "meta" aspect feels less free, more contrived, and more channeled into actual gameplay and narrative puzzles (during long phases of the game, you simply feel you're following the vaguely original rules of a regular puzzle game, except they are framed as "cheating"). It's also a very easy game for most of the parts, as you don't think out of the box as much as you follow step by step the implicit instructions of the narrator (but phrased in a negative way : "don't do this", "don't pay attention to that"). The original made you feel like you were outsmarting and infuriating an AI. This game just make you feel handheld by a "reverse psychology" tutor. Less satisfactory, less funny. Feels like a game for little children most of times. And it has a large section parodying "free to play" games, which fails a bit at being less tedious than the actual ones (although it's hard to mock frustrating gameplay without inducing any frustration).

But.

I still consider it a brilliant game. It keeps being surprising, unpredictable, well made. It tries to be a bit moving, a bit emotional at times, and while it doesn't exactly succeed, it still demonstrates great aesthetic quality. It's a pleasure. And, unlike most games that start strong and end up a drag, this one gets more and more phenomenal towards the end. I hadn't checked many screenshot, I guess, so I was completely taken by surprise by some radical stylistic and narrative turns, and this was just simply brilliant. Plus, there's a little clever section in it that will delight cinephiles. As I was playing these parts, I was feeling sorry for those who would have abandoned the game during its earlier sections. It's not a rewarding game in the sense that it would make you feel clever, or make you laugh a lot, but it is in terms of spectacle and display of ideas. Seriously, the last parts are fantastic.

So yes, it's a game that I recommend. Especially with its current discount. It's a game worth playing, and an author worth rewarding.

I agree! I am still mid-game on this one after I kinda binged it and then felt overloaded with its silliness. I think I'm actually stuck on one of the puzzles because it involves not smarts but mechanics and I'll have to redo something that's annoying to redo. But maybe it's time to get back into it.

I assumed the voice sounds like this because English isn't its first language. No?

I don't think it's the language. The acting feels as heavy-handed as the writing, and as a french speaker myself, I found his tone off. Clumsy like a dad reading a child book with too much emphasis. It's very forgivable, but it sounded "familiar wrong".

Anyway, i did play it in one go (it was long but I didn't want to break that odd narrative by getting out and back in). I can think of only one bit where the gameplay presents a fail-retry possibility, and I had felt a whiff of discouragement before actually retrying it, and it was faster, easier, more relaxed and more puzzle-y than I expected. So I assume you're talking of
?

It's worth passing it. Much less of a hassle than it looked like, and the great parts are still ahead. And if you're talking of immediate the next section, yes, it's the most boring part, but it's


For me, what "makes" the game is its second half. I admit it's well hidden by the first.

Okay! I'll get back into it. Yup, that was the part where I just said, "I'm done for a while. I'm not redoing this AGAIN."

Just in case, the bit that got me were the

Who else is gonna be buying Diablo 2: Resurrected? I’m pretty excited for it.

Probably, yes. I got into ARPGs quite a bit later than D2 so I've never really played it (even though I played D1 when it came out). Not sure if I'll buy it on release, though, as New World is released (or should I say, is released unless it's delayed again) only five days later and it'll be a priority #1 for a while.

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I can't imagine NOT playing this. I was addicted to D2 some time after they released the battle chest expansion set. Waaay after it released. For like $19.99. A friend got me hooked running me through levels. I'm pretty sure it was the cow level that hooked me. Great stuff. D3 just didn't have that same magic and I felt pretty OP at a certain point.

I revisited Manifold Garden and found that it opens up nicely once I left the original rooms and hallways. However, I've managed to get myself stuck on the side of a building-looking structure and can't find my way back out of this particular view without falling back onto it with the gravity shifts. Oh well. I will return.

I gave Outer Wilds two attempts as well. The first was short in that I just was not in the mood to read through interaction conversations. I just didn't want to do that! My second effort, last night, went a little better. I spoke with everyone, played with the demo remote control rocket ship, and ran through the anti-gravity cave to make those satellite repairs. That was actually fun and interesting. I got my launch code and managed to get myself locked up in the tree line with messages to set my flight path target AND to exit the ship to make repairs. I didn't know what I was supposed to do first in that I couldn't make out if I was supposed to make repairs randomly bouncing around in a tree, space, or wait until I was on solid ground first. Instructions were non-intuitive there. Instead, I just forced my thrusters and banged around a good bit like a pinball until I broke free. I set course for the large blue planet nearby (has a name, but I forgot... something crater?). I didn't know it's scale because so far it's difficult to measure that, and atmosphere layers are hard to read because there's no transparency. It seems to be just one spherical form (atmosphere?) around another spherical form (ocean??), around another (ground???). Anyway, I thought I was landing on solid surface but apparently fell through to another, lower layer with weird looking hurricanes. Cool environment that I was enjoying while I tried to find my footing and contexts of wtf it was that I'm supposed to do at that point. Then I guess my hull collapsed and the screen went black.

Waking up back on my home world was a real turn off. At least I had the launch code still and didn't have to repeat that process, but the not knowing wtf is going on and what I'm supposed to do in response was off-putting. Controls felt very similar to the old Second Life minigames you found throughout that world. Those games like surfing waves, riding dirt bikes, etc., where the controls are pretty loose and follow some wonky rules in physics and it's all nonintuitive and you just kinda stumble around until you finally figure how to make a lap around the course but realize you're going backwards so nothing counts and you can't figure out how to right yourself, or how to just get OFF the bike to leave the game? Yeah, kinda feels like that.

I know a lot of that is me and my lack of experience in the game (which has become my default response, I think, to new games). I know I've been spoiled with very intuitive interfaces and gameplay this last year or two. I know that, likely, I will probably enjoy it once "I figure it out." In the meantime, I'll just have to wait patiently for my one week return to Journey! for that last trophy prize. Hopefully, after that, I'll feel more curious to goof around in either of those two new titles again. Even Journey! was frustrating at first and that turned out to be one of the better gaming experiences I've had. I'm aware. I guess I'm just impatient and getting old.

You would have anyway. It's a "groundhog day" game, with time-limited sessions, where your progress is mostly knowledge (not just as a player, but also as a character : your ship's database doesn't get erased after a run). I think it's a bit similar to Minit in that respect (but I haven't played that one yet).

It's a very very strange game. I grant you that.

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ooooooh I'm glad you noted that. I did not realize and probably would have flipped out after discovering it. Time limits?? I need to read up on this more.

Ok, on quick review that makes sense and I've stopped reading more for concerns of spoilerishy stuff. Thanks for the heads-up there. I would have found that discovery frustrating on my own.

I'm not sure on the control looseness / confusion, as I'm playing via motion controllers, but it might partially be due to the space flight being kinda 'Newtonian'. (IE if you thrusted in one direction for a bit, you're gonna just keep barrelling in that direction forever, unless you counter-act it by thrusting the other way. Or figure out the autopilot control )

It's a game that came alive for me once I got out of the training village and started pulling on the some of the weird loose story strings poking out from the different alien earths.

(If it really doesn't make any sense on your next try, the second semi-tutorial of sorts is on the Moon orbiting your home planet. And you should go there at some point. But the fun really starts in the more alien lands )

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Yeah, I know nothing about this game except what I've found on my own : I've been careful about spoilers.

But the "reset" is required. It's a very time-based game, in the sense that the universe changes irreversibly in the short course of each run, only to be brought back to its starting conditions after each one. So there are things you can only access at given times (early or late), and they would have been missed for good without that game mechanic.

I don't like timed puzzles (or timed anything), generally speaking. But I like the fact that this game is structured around such short sessions. It gives it a paradoxically relaxed aspect, as everything is known to be doomed in the short term each time you take off. It makes your journeys pleasantly detached.

Except when you try to this before that. And then argh. But again, as it's a short cycle, you don't lose much time re-trying. It's a bit like Hotline Miami in that respect.