erikavonkaiser wrote: ↑Fri Jun 02, 2023 2:45 amIf you have the brain for it I would love to hear some recommendations from your Steam library, I feel like you've played a lot of PC games and would have Opinions on some hidden gems
Also just out of sheer curiosity, again if you have the brain, what is the worst game in your Steam library that you've played
I could definitely go through and pick out some ones I really liked to talk about a bit!
erikavonkaiser wrote: ↑Fri Jun 02, 2023 2:47 amAlso just out of sheer curiosity, again if you have the brain, what is the worst game in your Steam library that you've played
I am positive there are games that have frustrated me enough that I refunded them, but I don't remember offhand what they were and also that would disqualify them as being the 'worst game in my library' anyway.
(Out of curiosity I searched my emails, and I have asked for refunds for six games in my entire time on steam)
Anyway, obviously Evoland is a contender -- it's rare I give up on a game completely.
SudoKats is a poorly done sudoku puzzle game with awful controls (which is, weird, for a sudoku game, like how do you fuck that up? But its 3D isometric with camera controls, all of which is completely unnecessary for sudoku; you're filling in cats instead of numbers and several of the cats look really similar; and the controls are 'click square, click which cat you want to put in the square', which is really unintuitive and clunky), so that one is probably the worst game in my library on a purely technical level, but it doesn't inspire any passion, you know? I don't hate it
Find Yourself and Fingerbones are really uninspired horror affairs, the former disappointing because it looked promising and the latter disappointing because so many people love it. Similarly, a lot of people love Fran Bow, and it also has promise that it, in my opinion, doesn't live up to. Hackmud is disappointing because it's a massively multiplayer game that the developers didn't do much to prevent the top 1% from owning everything in; Jalopy looked so cool and I keep hoping it'll get better, but it's a buggy mess and seems abandoned.
But my vote is going to go to Unforgiving: a Northern Hymn. It's... I'm going to call it an amnesia-alike -- like a walking simulator, but there are monsters to avoid/run away from. It has some interesting mythology-inspired elements, but it otherwise doesn't really stand out -- except for the beginning. Watch the beginning of this game:
You come to tied up in the back of a car looking beat to all hell while the guy driving talks on the phone so you kick him in the head, causing him to crash the car, and after you both miraculously survive it turns out he's your brother taking you to an intervention
What the actual fuck? What the actual fuck? I actually misremembered it and thought you didn't recognise him until after the accident but it's even worse that you know he's your brother so you kick him in the head while he's operating a motor vehicle
Anyway the writing in that one is, bad.
It probably doesn't deserve to be called the worst game, but it's another one that I just don't really feel like picking back up ever, and also the beginning baffles me. I love some bad writing in games, but that one just. It's so transparently trying to bamboozle the player, and it does it so badly, I can't help but feel insulted by it
Also, you've seen what the game looks like, now look at the header image for it:
There's a lot of promotional art like that, in that same style, that you'll note looks nothing at all like the game itself. And I'm not against that, per se, but the way it's used does seem really misleading to me! Like, I'm scrolling through my library and I see that art, I'm expecting something different from what I'm going to end up getting, you know?
There's a game in my wishlist that was on sale recently, and I was considering buying it until I saw it was by the same people who made this one, and that put me off enough that I just didn't
And speaking of video games -- Nick got me Bramble for my birthday and I just played it. It was fun, very classic fairy story type stuff (think the Grimm brothers), a couple of extremely frustrating parts, and also
Holy shit that's just cruel
But the final boss is fought to The Hall of the Mountain King, and that's bitchin' as hell
Absolutely Do Not play it if you don't like watching kids get hurt, because this game is all about a small boy having an extraordinarily bad day -- he gets impaled. A lot. Unless you get that above achievement, I guess, but even then he does not have a good time.
And I will not be getting that achievement, I can tell you, because these boss fights are ruthless.
It did contain some of the most unsettling imagery I've ever seen in a video game, though (and I don't mean the kid getting killed in a bunch of different ways), so that's something! It's the woman with the rake, if you know you know.
Anyway, it's four AM now and I shouldn't have stayed up so late playing video games but I could tell I was close to finishing it, and then took a while on that final boss fight. I'd probably recommend it to Dave, but I don't think I'd recommend it to anyone else who would be reading this -- this is a game for people in the weird venn diagram of tryhards with an interest in weird and dark folklore. Not like, a super niche overlap, but I do know that no one on the forums right now is a tryhard but me
mek wrote: ↑Fri Jun 02, 2023 5:09 amYou come to tied up in the back of a car looking beat to all hell while the guy driving talks on the phone so you kick him in the head, causing him to crash the car, and after you both miraculously survive it turns out he's your brother taking you to an intervention
Mags energy
re: video game false advertising, I noticed something similar with Gone Home and Superliminal! A lot of the images and trailers made them seem like genuine horror games when I would describe them as having moments of dramatic tension or moments of thriller-like suspense. Superliminal even makes a point to later out the bloody levels as being faked by showing red paint and whatnot. I feel like some of the issue is probably the marketing team and the actual development team being completely disconnected entities, but it does make me raise an eyebrow. In Unforgiving's case it's more just a different art style, but .............. why????? why not just make the game look like the game?????
With all these cherries I've been eating, I keep getting 'Life is a Bowl of Cherries' from Clue: the Musical stuck in my head
The path duolingo has so fucking much more katakana. Luckily I figured out how to skip those, too -- you can't skip dots, you have to skip entire chunks. I think skipping two of those will catch me up with where I am on the app, though
Peeking ahead there's still two more dots for katakana in this unit, so. Great.
Might jump ahead one more, we'll see if this is also going to be a review for me or if it has stuff I'm unfamiliar with in it still
The plan is no videogames today, in the hopes of encouraging myself to go to bed at a reasonable hour, but I did go into the deck and install a few neat plugins, like one that will pick a random game from my library, one that puts How Long To Beat information on the game pages, and one that will automatically back-up saves as I'm playing! I also installed and then uninstalled one that lets me customise colours, because it turned out to just be a hue slider which was fun but very silly. So like, I could make everything look more red, but everything looks more red, like I put a filter over the screen.
In other news, today I took the walk around the pool, sat in the computer room not doing very much for a while, and took a shower. I also watered plants. Later, ash and I are going to play the weird fish game Erika found, and then we'll go from there
I'm honing in on what I want the style of the ket cooking game to be like. I think tomorrow-ish I'll start working on a minimum viable prototype
