squidwalk 最近的评测

Playing Eliza in 2024 feels strange.

AI is a bigger issue now than it was in 2019. Programs like ChatGPT have been adopted by megacorps to replace human interactions, at the expense of functionality and basic adherence to the truth. Better Help has produced a working model for low cost mental health care that comes with a dystopian level of drawbacks, and is widely adopted and accepted.

Eliza's themes and topics were on top of this 5 years ago. And it still has good, and bad, things to say about different outlooks towards AI, mental healthcare, and human connection.

It's under 10 hours long. It'll probably make you think about something you haven't thought about yet. The characters are flawed and relatable and compelling. The VA is laid back without being boring, and everything except stage direction/occasional inner monologue is voiced. It's essentially a kinetic novel, and that plays into the themes too.

It's clever. You should play it.

I play a good deal of roguelites and deck builders, and Chrono Ark still feels fresh.

The Good:

• Seamless combination of JRPG and deck builder mechanics.
• Medium complexity battle system with lots of satisfying synergy options.
• Original, varied JRPG class archetypes. All characters feel unique to each other, and many offer unique game play options overall.
• Distinct, fun art style and animations.
• Roguelite progression elements are non-vertical, unlocks are interesting but not better than pre-unlock options. Your runs get easier because you get better at the game.
• Accessible normal difficulty with optional higher difficulties and challenge modes. Challenge modes vastly change the game play in novel, fun ways.
• Solid continued support by the devs. Regular substantial updates.
• Excellent amount of content to explore without feeling repetitive.

The Okay:

• Lots of characters with two versions of each character makes the story a bit confusing at times. But it's a cool high concept at least.
• Story is original in some ways and unoriginal in others.
• Generally okay writing, but story segments feel a bit overlong and aren't voice acted.

Nothing's actually "bad" about this game, and that says a lot.

I bought Chrono Ark in a deck builder themed Humble Bundle, and it's the game I've played/enjoyed the most. And the others were great.

It's only $20 retail. Knowing how much I've enjoyed it over the past 125 hours, I'd have gladly paid $60 for it.

Kind Words is an exercise in curated connection; expertly designed to be a positive experience. It's made me cry more than any scripted game, and I seek out emotionally charged games. It allows for both meaningful expressions of connection and assured safety.

It's a game that's helped make me a better person.

I'm not one to question if something is a game or not, but I can understand when others do so. Kind Words reminded me of the successful mechanics implemented by other games I've enjoyed. Games like Warframe and Guild Wars 2 encourage caring for others during minor encounters by building it into the game design in a way that is directly tied to the identity of the game.

Kind Words carefully creates a space for genuine care. The music, the delivery deer NPC, the privacy of the bedroom, and the limits of the game's communication are all designed to foster and environment where the players are implicitly encouraged to take just one moment to be good to a stranger. And it works.

Kind Words could have been a disaster. I could have hurt people. It could have been a strange indie game you hear about on the news. But it's not. It's what you really wish it could be.

Heaven Will Be Mine is a visual novel for, and from, people that know visual novels. Worst Girl Games is a prime example of how understanding your medium means you came make an exceptional game with comparably few resources.

Their use of metaphor is dense, but at the same time accessible and thematically impeccable. I don't know how I'd describe post-humanism in space as a metaphor for queer-exclusive counterculture, but Worst Girl sure as hell can.

That all sounds pretty high-minded, but the execution is metaphorically down to earth. The characters are real, their motivations are relatable, and their self expression is overwhelmingly endearing. Once I hit my second route, I cared about everyone and wanted everyone to be happy.

Something I often look for in reviews is total play time. I 100%-ed Heaven Will Be Mine, taking my time and enjoying everything, in about 10 hours. Some of my wisest-spent 10 hours.

Firewatch is a short adventure game that uses the implementation of wrote travel as a device for creating surprising encounters. It's some of the best ludonarrative cohesion in adventure gaming. By first familiarizing the player with areas enough to make them feel familiar, then recontexualizing them with new elements or tension, the player is lead to feel less like they've encountered a new event and more like their personal space has been intruded upon.

It has some fantastic character development too. They have about 5 hours to develop characters, so they concentrate on just two, and it pays off.

Commenting on the visual design is essentially unneccessary at this point. It's been lauded as a gold standard. If you follow PC desktop design communities, you're sick of the Firewatch wallpapers.

I've found myself thinking about moments in this game months after playing it. Things I would have done different, and how much it mattered or didn't matter.

It was a good way to spend an afternoon.

This isn't a negative review bashing Republique. I definitely enjoyed a great deal of the game. But I couldn't recommend it in good faith.

First, let me talk about reasons I'm not giving it a negative review:

I'm not giving it a negative review because of the Kickstarter/release schedule. I got Republique during a Steam sale, and waited until it was all released to play it. I don't mind being patient.

I'm not giving it a negative review because of technical issues. It performed well enough for me, and the controls were almost always responsive.

I'm not giving it a negative review because I didn't like the ending. While this is true, I'm willing to discount a bad ending in favor of a good journey to the end.

Now for things I liked about it:

The high concept/aesthetic were always on point. The whole "control cameras directly, control the character indirectly" gimmick never failed to capture me. I even liked the part 4 "fewer options/different gameplay" idea. It was a big change, but I thought it fit well within the universe.

The voice acting/character development/writing was good overall. There's room for improvement, but I liked how many characters saw focus, and now they were developed through direct interaction and indirect snooping. I enjoyed the voice actors/actresses casted, they did an excellent job bringing their characters to life.

What keeps Republique from getting my recommendation:

There wasn't enough pay-off. I'm not the sort of person that needs details spelled out for me, or that minds some dangling plot threads. But there are a lot of ideas presented that either fade into the background, or at best vaguely support other ideas.

Republique mismanaged audio-only character/plot development. This is a device used effectively since System Shock, but Republique required players to stop the game to listen to audio-only segments very frequently, without being able to keep the audio playing while you continued doing other gameplay-oriented things. I found myself playing 3DS games on mute while listening to long audio clips, especially while listening to tapes in the hideouts. Republique has gameplay where you sit in one place and watch guards for patrol routes. It should have been a given that you can listen to long audio clips while memorizing patrols.

Episode 5 was textbook rushed. It's about half as long as other episodes. It ties up loose ends in unfulfilling, sometimes anti-climactic ways. And it's at least half cut scene. I can stomach an unsatisfying ending, but episode 5 was supposed to be 20% of the game.

There's definitely good to be found in Republique. But there's too many annoying rough edges, and too little satisfaction.

I wanted to like Actual Sunlight. I play depressing games, and I like other depressing media. I'm a rather depressed person in general, and have been for my medium-length life. I share several life situations with the main character. I play and enjoy many RPG Maker games, and I'm not the type to split hairs over shared assets. I don't mind if a story game doesn't have choices, and just wants to tell me a story.

But despite my best efforts, I couldn't appreciate Actual Sunlight. I thought about it for several weeks before sitting down to write this. And it think it's because the main character/perspective is conceited. Evan's self-absorption is ostracizing in a way that kept me from having the empathy with him that the game seems to crave. My depression is heralded by the knowledge that those doing societally better than myself are likely more capable than I am. But Evan is so self-assured in his superiority that he comes off as more of a poser archetype than a depressive. His condemning introspectiveness always has a tinge of self-congratulation. Like he's ostracized himself from society not because he lacks the capacity to take part in it, but because he's just too great for everything.

I didn't see myself in Evan. I saw people I share interests and situations with that I often find hurtful. People that go out of their way to harm others because of their depression, instead of expressing it inwardly. Evan wasn't me, he was people that've abused me my whole life. I didn't want him to be in pain because I have human empathy for him. But part of me didn't mind seeing Evan devolve, because it was an assurance that he might not hurt the people around him anymore.

I’d consider this a success if it seemed like the authorial intent. This was part of the authorial intent for the first part of LISA, and Dingaling pulled it off spectacularly. But the authorial intent in Actual Sunlight seems to be audience empathy, and that came into direct conflict with the situation the game portrayed.

Narrative-wise, Actual Sunlight somewhat falls on its face. We spend more than enough time with Evan, but he's the tip of the cast-iceberg. There's an unnecessarily large cast of characters, and they get one or two plot points per person. Perhaps because of this, the characters are dramatically overblown. This could work as an unreliable narrator device if it they had more than two scenes each. But because of the combination of large cast and little time spent with them, the viewer can't draw conclusions about narrator influence on viewer perception. And since Evan's interactions with non-cast objects don't seem to have such a filter, it's likely just poor writing. Other, older games like Once Chance have established a working paradigm for this sort of interaction, where repetition establishing the mundane scenario enough to meaningfully damage it later. Actual Sunlight comes off as too self-assured to take the time needed to keeps its relationships from coming off as tawdry.

I'm not saying Actual Sunlight isn't worth $5. It's like a bottle of soda from another country; it looks good, you drink it, it's not really that great, but you don't mind that you paid for it because now you know. But it's not worth the 90 minutes to play it. There are better ways to spend 90 minutes.

This game is too charming to not recommend. It has a lot of major faults, it's clearly a freshman endeavor. But giving it a thumbs down would feel like criticizing a poem a loved one wrote for you. It's earnest and charming. You noticed it uses a slant rhyme, but you don't want to make the author feel bad about it. They did something nice.

The good points of the game:

• The high concept/theme works well. The "cube people" concept is used just enough to be fun, but not overbearing. Sentient animals in a noir setting has precident in books like Gun, With Occasional Music. Hot Tin Roof does an excellent job making the idea its own, while still using the background metaphor of interspecies classism.
  
  
• The soundtrack combines jazz with chiptunes. After listening to it for a while, I began to appreciate how difficult that must have been. It clearly required a bit to thought to put the two genres together in such a coherent way. Easy, early accessibility to a sound test NPC suggests the devs knew how well the soundtrack turned out.
  
  
• The revolver tool felt extremely satisfying to use. It's is your main form of puzzle interface, and the animation/SFX never stops being rewarding. Literally chambering the solution to a puzzle provided a sense of anticipation to your now-inevitable small victory. The inclusion of the self-propelling knockback bullets helped mitigate a lot of my gripes about having to re-tread areas do to unclear objectives. If there's one thing that makes retreads feel less bothersome, it's satisfying active movement acceleration.
  
  
• Major characters don't get a lot of development time, but manage to feel colorful and noir-thematic without being too trope-dependant. The writing does a good job using tropes to circumvent the need for characterization without making characters feel flat. It subverts tropes in places where nior can seem mean or rough, making for a charmingly "noir nice" overall aesthetic. In particular, it portrayed the "noir foreigner" trope with humor and even-handedness.

The okay:

• Franky, the tag-along character, was a high point. Her writing is fun, noirish, and cute, and she doesn't get in the way of area interaction. I liked Franky. But the game allows you to shoot her, and she makes a sad meowing sound when you do. I really didn't want to shoot Franky. But the game requires a good amount of aimless exploration, and it provides you with a bullet type that propels you forward quickly when shot behind you. So I ended up shooting the heck out of Franky. I even got a shame-achievement for shooting her a lot called "Franky Hater". I wish I couldn't shoot my friend by accident.
  
  
• The writing is a mixed bag. Franky manages to be a funny sidekick without being annoying, which is a seldom accomplished feat. But Jones is a little too plain, and doesn't have a Detective Flaw. Most NPCs, particularly street-level ones you interact with for a single plot point, are surprisingly compelling. But NPCs that you don't interact with for plot seemed rather dry.
  
  
• It was a fun idea to play as a female detective in a setting where visual sexualization is essentially impossible. But that necessitates more dialogue-based gender representation, and Jones' dialogue was usually a bit too straightforward to address her gender identity. This could easily have been a failing point though, with a "too much to prove" character, so it's not necessarily a bad thing.
  
  
• Every puzzle area has a puzzle that makes good use of your combined abilities. But there are usually areas between these that merely require you to use your abilities to traverse them. This could function as conveyance. But the game's unclear objectives means you'll end up re-treading these areas frequently, and that transforms the teaching mini-puzzles into a chore.
  
  
• The lack of flavor/landmarks in the background of traversal areas means that it's easy to get lost in them, extending the chore of re-traversal as you walk around hoping you're going in the direction of your objective. Some sections have great background art, like posters for the cat-mayor done in both block-cat and realistic cat art types. They clearly had a capable art team. It'd would have helped navigation if more flavor was included.

The bad:

• There are almost always unclear objectives. The investigation process is obtuse, and entirely necessary. Players only vaguely know what they should be doing at any time. Sometimes the game helps by restricting player access to areas in purposeful ways. But expect to consult a message board or a Let's Play. I actually consulted a Let's Play, looked on message boards for help, and found the Let's Play-er on a message board looking for help.
  
  
• Unintentional sequence breaks can really mess you up. Not understanding your objectives will lead to exploration, and exploration will lead to sequence breaks that you can't entirely recover from. I somehow missed a section where you question suspects in an interrogation room. Hours later the plot had moved on, and I was in a random cave, and I got a one-sided cut scene about questioning the suspects. It lead to a warp to the interrogation room, which I couldn't use because the suspects were already in jail at that point. I missed a clue that would help with the game's ending. I believe said ending got a work-around in a patch just to compensate for people missing clues due to unintentional sequence breaks.

I'd recommend Hot Tin Roof to someone I know would like the themes, and would be able to work past the rough patches. But it's not polished, and it's not for everyone.

Obscenity is hard. Obscenity can get bogged down in being too stupid, too shocking, too crass. In order to make obscenity into something meaningful, it needs coherence. Enough coherence to counterbalance the revulsion of the content. LISA, remarkably, navigates this balance beam.

It offers plenty of strange, dirty, cruel content, but all with context. The comedy's juxtaposition with the tragedy isn't just for contrast, it's works thematically as well. The lighthearted fantasy alongside cutthroat survival, both in world building and in gameplay, mesh entirely with the narrative's ultimate goals.

But this isn't a visual novel or something, it's a game too. And it's a fun, surprisingly balanced game, especially considering the single-man production. There are a ton of party members, and most of them feel distinct in theme as well as in gameplay. You can set up a team with lots of fun, powerful combinations, and there aren't too many ways to go wrong. Equipment upgrades are infrequent and expensive enough to feel meaningful. Resources both feel tight because of scarcity, and loose because of anticipated demise. Other than the occasional dark cave or grassy field, all battles are satisfyingly non-random. This kind of gameplay balance is tough for bigger games to manage, so it's a bit wondrous how well it works in LISA.

I waited to buy LISA on sale, because we all have a backlog of games now. But I put it at the top of my que, and it was worth the favoritism. LISA was well developed enough, meaningful enough, and satisfying enough that I'd freely recommend it at the full $10 price tag. I have spent $10 more poorly many, many times.

After a good 80 hours or so, I'm seriously discouraged from continuing to play. A combination of no clip using hackers and arbitrarily unforgiving/non-working game mechanics drags the whole experience down quite a bit.

I'll start small. If you want to pick up an object in the world, you need to approach it and press "e". When you're close enough, it highlights. Sometimes. Sometimes you're close enough and it doesn't highlight, but pressing "e" still allows you to pick the object up. Sometimes it does highlight, but pressing "e" doesn't pick the object up. Sometimes you're literally on top of the object, frantically pressing "e" over and over, and you can't pick up the object.

If you want to build a base, there's more fun. Some base components, like decks, can be removed within 30 seconds after being placed. Getting close to them triggers text that tells the player that pressing "e" will reclaim the deck. Some base components, like walls, cannot be removed. Getting close to a wall that you've placed within 30 seconds triggers text that tells the player that pressing "e" will reclaim the wall. But you can't reclaim the wall.

If you build deck extentions, and want to place walls along the outside of them, the game makes it so you need to place the right wall in the internal corners before the left wall. If you don't, the game disables placement of the left wall until you destroy the right wall, destroying all resources used to make said wall. Same if you want to make second story walls.

If you want to place two decks next to each other, and one slightly overlaps the other, you now have a base with an unfillable hole in your wall at the point of overlap. If your overlapping deck is more than 30 seconds old, get ready to find a new place to build your deck. You can't destroy your deck and re-place it somewhere useful. It's there until a server wipe, a grim reminder of your audacity to slightly overlap while placing decks.

Lucky for everything, these building/gathering bugs don't really matter. If you build an excellent base, hackers can (and will) no clip through your defenses, break your gathering structures, and clean out your chests. So the bugged-out building process and gathering doesn't matter much, since your base structure doesn't make any difference and your gathered goods will soon be gone anyway.

I kind of want my 80 hours back. I got the game to play with friends, and I don't regret the time spent playing with them. But I wish it was in a better game.