Lies of P
I’m sort of enjoying this now, I feel about half way through. I enjoy the simplified hero loadout and singular character. I think the weapon assembly mechanic is conceptually neat but not something I’ve really enjoyed engaging with.
Boss and enemy design is fun, it really manages to do something different in the genre. However the writing, voice acting, and general world building all feel extremely sub par to me.
Combat is an interesting mix all the “from soft” formulas. Mixing some of the parry ideas and the secondary arm from Sekiro, health regain mechanics from blood borne and a general shared mechanical base with Dark Souls. I find this kitchen sink approach often feels sort of aimless but has produced some pretty entertaining boss battles! I really enjoyed the King of Puppets!
I imagine I’ll finish this up next month…
Chants of Sennaar
Finishing up the final area and ending here. The final area and “linking” puzzles where probably the weakest in the game. The translation puzzles leading to them where actually really fun.
This is a really fun game about learning and understanding languages that feels thematically in the vein of Obra Dinn. The core of what’s done here is excellent. Sometimes it tries to break up those segments with traditional gameplay, this is bad. I would really recommend the game in general!
1000x Resist – Hekki Almo!
This is real Sci Fi! I love a lot of the writing in this game. I had a great time in this visual novel. It challenges ideas and rarely gameplay (although some horrible level design it it’s own challenge).
This is an incredible story told with amazing economy by clearly new game developers. The story of the rise and fall of authoritarian governments over time and the stories that exist within that framework was some of the best I’ve seen. this probably represents a storytelling high point for the medium of video games in many ways. This is honestly real 60’s or 70’s sci fi!
I think my one criticism is that the game doesn’t really justify it’s existence as an interactive object strongly. Additionally like many “anime” style stories I think it’s internal mechanical logic sort of breaks down as the story accelerates to it’s conclusion (in this way it is very much not “real” sci fi). However I think it does this in service of it’s core theme’s and that ultimately makes it okay.
Animal Well
I started in on Animal well in my theme of “mystery games” after beating chants of sennaar. So far this has been a really fun sort of classical item based metroidvania. The item interaction appear to be extremely rich. I have played maybe 2-3 hours this month of this guy.
On the couch I’m playing ; Rogue Prince of Persia (Still), Windblown (Still)