Finished Any Games Lately?

Axiom Verge is finished at just over 16 hours, 94% map completion & 74% of weapons found.

I initially struggled to get into AV as I didn't like the visual style, the jumping & shooting only felt adequate & I didn't care much for the environments. I pushed on & the creativity within AV started to really shine through.

One of the big factors in this was the address disruptor gadget that changes enemies into a corrupted form. A beam shoots out that alters an enemies physical form & behaviour (usually to your benefit). A laser urchin's deadly red laser becomes a blue passive one. An Armadillo impervious to damage can now be hit, a Scorpiant slows to a third of its speed & fires one projectile instead of 3. This is just the standard stuff, there are some ingenious corrupted forms that are better discovered yourself.

The address disruptor also alters glitches in the environment, it actually plays well into the old school style use of blocks, there are plenty of secrets to be found with new weapons or health/damage upgrades hidden away.

The weapons themselves are a varied bunch. There's spread style ones that I enjoyed like the Voranj that has an insane reach. The reflector is self explanatory, really useful for staying out of damage range & using the environment to your advantage. My favourite though was the Kilver, a high damage, short range burst of green electricity, extra handy because it damages enemies through walls or platforms.

The bosses were visually cool but ultimately you'd find a single tactic that sometimes involved standing in one spot & dodging easily avoidable projectiles. They were usually very easy but felt very one note in most cases.

The little drone upgrade you get deserves a special mention, there's something so cool about going through tiny spaces with a little robot. It can be thrown for good measure & has an absolutely superb ability that you can unlock for it a good bit into the game. The drill Trace gets also hits the spot for gratification in churning through bricks.

The story premise was interesting. You play Trace a scientist who is on the wrong side of an explosion at the lab, the building comes down on top of him & he wakes up in an egg shell shaped machine in another world. He doesn't know what's going on, his only guide an ancient machine that can communicate with him. It ended up being a fascinating story that was even more eye opening reading the Axoim Verge wiki after I'd finished the game. There's some ridiculous alternative theories that are feasible on there.

All in all despite its retro gameplay roots there's a lot to love here, the ideas feel modern & there's something alluring about AV that kept me coming back to explore its world. It's also quite a feat that this was created solely by one man - Tom Happ. Seriously impressive achievement & let's see what his mind can conjure up for the sequel.

Spikeout, your report is most welcome because my son has gone down the demon-rabbit hole of Hollow Knight and wanted me to play it or something similar on PC. Since I own AV, I was going to take that for a spin. Is it at all like HK, or not so much?

Maybe I never got that glitch weapon, or when I did I got stuck still and didn't get back to an area to use it. I remember being a bit lost and frustrated with Axiom and yeah, on top of the aesthetics being weird, I abandoned it long ago.

Natus wrote:

Spikeout, your report is most welcome because my son has gone down the demon-rabbit hole of Hollow Knight and wanted me to play it or something similar on PC. Since I own AV, I was going to take that for a spin. Is it at all like HK, or not so much?

Glad my review has been helpful Natus It plays way more like an old school SNES game so it doesn't have the modern feel of Hollow Knight. That's the biggest difference for me personally, HK feels outstanding to move around in, the combat feels impeccable, that's brilliantly animated. AV has passable platforming, basic animation & the combat is pretty simple to say the least. There's still enjoyment to be had though, especially when the upgrades start arriving.

It has that thing were it feels good to go back to an area & get past something in the environment that you couldn't before, or destroy enemies that took way longer when you first encountered them.

The pixelated graphics are a bit on the ugly side but at the same time its cool when you actually get to manipulate the blocks & glitches you see with the address disruptor. Its more a direct love letter to Super Metroid mimicking it in the little pipes between rooms, finding destructible blocks that lead to secret areas, the style of the map, its little square rooms etc.

Its hard to say if you'd like it, maybe depends if you can get past its somewhat dated feel, although if you loved games like Super Metroid or Castlevania this will likely be right up your alley. The story is arguably superb, It has a lot under the hood & AV does subvert expectations very well with all its creative tricks.

Stele wrote:

Maybe I never got that glitch weapon, or when I did I got stuck still and didn't get back to an area to use it. I remember being a bit lost and frustrated with Axiom and yeah, on top of the aesthetics being weird, I abandoned it long ago.

Yeah I got stuck multiple times in where to go next, I ended up looking up a guide quite a bit so I wasn't just wandering around aimlessly. There's a lot of gated parts of the map that you'll run into at the start. Once you get better traversal abilities you can start looking for squares on the map that haven't been filled out yet or the doors that you've not entered through. There's quite a lot of backtracking but that's par for the course in Metroidvania's.

You do get the address disruptor fairly early but it can be upgraded a couple more times to be effective in bigger, harsher or different coloured glitchy bits of the environment.

After picking at it here or there for quite awhile I finished all the pixeljunk monsters 2 levels on tricky last night. I really enjoyed it but maybe not as much as the first one, which is one of my favourite games ever. The admittedly beautiful 3D just isn’t as functional for tower defence as the equally as pretty 2d maps of the original. That said the dlc was on sale so I have bought that and will probably work through getting perfects on all the levels and I would always recommend either game.

Spikeout wrote:

The weapons themselves are a varied bunch. There's spread style ones that I enjoyed like the Voranj that has an insane reach. The reflector is self explanatory, really useful for staying out of damage range & using the environment to your advantage. My favourite though was the Kilver, a high damage, short range burst of green electricity, extra handy because it damages enemies through walls or platforms.

This is one of the things I really liked about Axiom Verge. Unlike most metroidvanias, your weapons are just weapons. They aren't strictly tied to level progression, so you have a much wider variety of options and are free to use whatever you prefer. A lot of them were quite interesting/unique too.

I finished The Last of Us Part II yesterday, and I thought it was incredible. The only thing I didn't like was

Spoiler:

having to kill some dogs

but other than that, I thought it was amazing and flawlessly executed from beginning to end. I know it's only March, but this already is a serious contender for my game of the year 2021!

Last night I wrapped up a week of nights spent playing Telling Lies, and what a crazy rabbit hole it was.

Telling Lies is really more of an experimental film than a game (and I don't say that pejoratively) - while there's a minuscule frame that you're an FBI analyst surveying 6 hours of video snippets, really what you're presented with is simply a search engine to sift through that footage. Most are FaceTime-like video calls, some are surveillance footage, because we live in The Age Of The Panopticon, and there's a couple YouTube-like snippets thrown in. You also "upload" a collection of bookmarked and tagged segments at the end, but really Telling Lies consists of watching watching 6 hours of video snippets, piecing together the almost-two-year story they tell. And it's...kind of incredible.

I can't really wrap my head around the amount of detail work that went into creating this story - just the background things like home decoration, clothing, locations, hair styles, etc., that all change as time goes on is staggering. It's all acted by recognizable film and TV actors, and clearly it was a chance for them to sink their teeth deeply into their characters, with a daunting amount of material all told in one-takes. As you uncover more and more, the depth of information you learn about everyone is really unlike anything else I've ever experienced; this is a shockingly intimate (and, obviously, voyeuristic) experience. People fall in love, have affairs, get pregnant, tell lies both innocent and self-serving, spy on and betray each other (one of these characters is an undercover agent), violence and subterfuge digs itself deeper and deeper, and you also watch them read bedtime stories to their children. Like a tightly-plotted thriller (and, given the wealth of footage and the fact that the order in which it's revealed is controlled by your search strategy, this is the opposite of "tightly plotted"), I was continually served up bombshells that made me gasp out loud and re-evaluate how I viewed the people I was creepily spying on.

There are a couple issues with it - some are simply interface issues, and some are I think more fundamental choices that can only be chalked up to "that's the game Sam Barlow wanted to make". I played this on console, and there's a tremendous amount of scrubbing back and forth through videos, with only one fixed speed for fast forward and rewind. I suspect if I'd played this on a computer I could have used the mouse to instantly go to a particular point - and the DualShock's/DualSense's touchpad could have done the same thing - but there isn't even a skip-to-end-or-beginning button. Whenever you search for a word in a video, it brings up the the top five videos with that term, and in each video you can only go right to wherever that word appears. But very quickly I realized that what I had to do was rewind to the beginning of any video I'd turned up and watch it through to the end, bookmarking any section that seemed relevant for further investigation. All told, I easily spent more time laboriously scrubbing through footage than watching it, and that's an interface problem.

The fundamental "working as intended" issue, though, is that while most of this is conversations between people, each conversation consists of two separate videos, and there's no way to watch them both synced up - you can only watch one video at a time. I get that the essential "gameplay" is paying close attention to what's being said, hypothesizing what that's a reaction to, and then searching for things that might fit that imagined other half of the conversation - and you become really adept at that, this game really teaches you how much of our conversations are simply mirroring the other person - but I can't believe the software designer who came up with this interface for the FBI didn't include a "play both videos simultaneously" mode. I'm sure that's an essential part of the message here, that these people are always telling each other their own stories, walling themselves off from each other, but I was hoping so hard that once I was done there would be a new option to re-watch everything I'd seen, all synced up and in proper timeline order. No dice. What you find and how you piece it together in your head is the story.

Even with those essential annoyances, though - my god, this game had me hooked like a junkie on a bender. There's a nominal endpoint of the game, where you "upload" your annotated collection of videos and receive a report summarizing what you'd done, and that's where I learned that there was about 6 hours of footage to view - I'd spent nine hours doing that, but the kicker was that the report said I'd watched "almost half" of the available footage (there's no master list of fragments - the only things you can see are things that you've turned up in a text search). So I immediately went back into the new "Continue" option that had popped up, and continued searching for all the rest of the footage I hadn't seen yet. By the time I finished up last night, my total play time was at 17 hours, I had exhaustively searched though everything I could, nothing new was turning up, new bombshells and surprises had continued to come out, but the revised final report said I'd viewed "almost all" of the available footage.

The OCD completist in me still would like to see the footage I couldn't unearth but...man, I really feel like I've lived two years with these incredibly detailed and complicated people. This was a fascinating, compelling, unique (because Sam Barlow's previous game, Her Story, is still in my Pile O Shame) experience that's going to stick with me for a very long time, and my hat's off to everyone who clearly put their hearts and souls into it.

Evan E wrote:

There are a couple issues with it - some are simply interface issues, and some are I think more fundamental choices that can only be chalked up to "that's the game Sam Barlow wanted to make". I played this on console, and there's a tremendous amount of scrubbing back and forth through videos, with only one fixed speed for fast forward and rewind. I suspect if I'd played this on a computer I could have used the mouse to instantly go to a particular point - and the DualShock's/DualSense's touchpad could have done the same thing - but there isn't even a skip-to-end-or-beginning button.

Nope, it's like that on PC as well and it sucks. I think he did it to try to prevent people from automatically start watching every video from the beginning but it just doesn't work and it's incredibly annoying. I really enjoyed the game except for that UI design choice.

Oh yes I “finished” some games. It was time to try out some of those Epic Store freebies that are just hanging around.

Moonlighter.

So many pixels, and you move from screen to screen like it’s a ZX spectrum game, and I can’t tell what’s going on and blah. Finished! (3 minutes 53 seconds played).

Axiom Verge.

More pixels, a cheesy story and everything looks weird. Got killed by I don’t know what in the first few minutes. Finished (5 minutes 51 seconds).

The Stanley Parable.

Funny, then repetitive, good for almost a couple of hours though. Finished! (1h 33 minutes).

The Escapists.

More pixels again, full screen isn’t even 16x9, it’s stretched, I have to pick up a desk and put it down, can’t figure out how to put it down. And no controller support. Finished! (1 minute 51 seconds)

The Bridge.

After an age waiting for the level to load - wow, this must be spectacular.... no. Here’s a monochrome hand drawn background with a little man walking very very slowly across it. Now turn the landscape excruciatingly slowly and the slow man will slowly move a different way until finally he edges towards the exit and another inexplicably long loading screen. Finished! (26 minutes, 44 seconds, most of which was spent watching loading screens).

Celeste

Died 17 times in the 3rd screen trying to pick up an unexplained strawberry. Finished! (6 minutes 35 seconds).

Into the Breach.

More pixels, and turn based strategy. Nice. A couple of tutorial levels and then I’m on my own! This is going to be great...
Dead in two turns. Finished! (20 minutes 35 seconds, but I might come back for more maybe).

Everything.

Oooh like everything?

I am a beam of light.
Then a sort of ox thing.
I move in three dimensions by rolling? but the movement is jarring, like rotating a photo in MS Paint. I start to feel motion sickness after about a minute. I jar my way across the landscape towards a glowing hint thingy. It advises me to sing to the other animals. Finished. (3 minutes, 8 seconds)

Abzu.

I swim through a beautiful ocean. I sit on the head of a shark statue and meditate. I ride fish. I open gates and meet floating torches and awaken dead lands. I also lull myself to sleep. Not finished! Time to go meditate on some more shark statue heads.

Man, who knew that you could finish games that fast!

Into the Breach is definitely worth more time. There's several pilots and other mechs to unlock that give the combat and strategy a lot of variety.

So all recommendations is what your saying Redherring?

Stele wrote:

Into the Beach is definitely worth more time.

Into the Beach was Abzu's working title.

No one tell Redherring that hi-def games are also pixels, okay?

Redherring wrote:

Abzu.
I swim through a beautiful ocean. I sit on the head of a shark statue and meditate. I ride fish. I open gates and meet floating torches and awaken dead lands. I also lull myself to sleep. Not finished! Time to go meditate on some more shark statue heads.

Huh; my playthrough of Abzu was more typical for you - saw some fishes, swam some, saw some more fishes, quit in less than 30 minutes. I've been meaning to get back to it, but now I guess I'll...well, I guess I'll mean slightly more.

Stele wrote:

Into the Breach is definitely worth more time. There's several pilots and other mechs to unlock that give the combat and strategy a lot of variety.

So I started Into the Breach, played a few scenarios, then for some reason didn't get back to it for months, and now I can't reset and go back to the start. I can only play "advanced" scenarios where I don't remember what anything does. It's really quite frustrating. I just want to start over.

Stele wrote:

Into the Breach is definitely worth more time. There's several pilots and other mechs to unlock that give the combat and strategy a lot of variety.

I didn’t uninstall it right away, so there’s hope that I’ll go back and try again.

Spikeout wrote:

So all recommendations is what your saying Redherring? :D

Um.. the Stanley Parable was pretty neat, but short. Worth a spin if you have it in the library.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

No one tell Redherring that hi-def games are also pixels, okay? ;)

No one tell ClockworkHouse I can read her posts

Evan E wrote:
Redherring wrote:

Abzu.
I swim through a beautiful ocean. I sit on the head of a shark statue and meditate. I ride fish. I open gates and meet floating torches and awaken dead lands. I also lull myself to sleep. Not finished! Time to go meditate on some more shark statue heads.

Huh; my playthrough of Abzu was more typical for you - saw some fishes, swam some, saw some more fishes, quit in less than 30 minutes. I've been meaning to get back to it, but now I guess I'll...well, I guess I'll mean slightly more.

Well on that note, I started to fall asleep after the first half hour, but I went back the following night and finished! (1 hour 35 minutes). Very pretty game, it’s high definition so there aren’t any pixels! But not much else going on.

Redherring wrote:
ClockworkHouse wrote:

No one tell Redherring that hi-def games are also pixels, okay? ;)

No one tell ClockworkHouse I can read her posts

...

Well on that note, I started to fall asleep after the first half hour, but I went back the following night and finished! (1 hour 35 minutes). Very pretty game, it’s high definition so there aren’t any pixels! But not much else going on.

I've tried Destiny 2 three separate times, and I've never been so confused by a AAA title. I finished the tutorial and then...find your own way, peon! I just updated and was sent on a mission, which just...stops. The combat isn't even very interesting. No idea why I'd play this rather than one of the Battlefield games or Overwatch. Genuinely puzzled because some people love it.

I don't know if you can really beat Deep Rock Galactic, but I've gotten all four classes to Level 25, plus I've done a Deep Mine and a Deep Mine Elite.

So, I'll mark it "beat", even though I keep playing it since it's an addictive loop of a game.

ROCK. AND. STONE.

Redherring wrote:
ClockworkHouse wrote:

No one tell Redherring that hi-def games are also pixels, okay? ;)

No one tell ClockworkHouse I can read her posts :)

Hey y'all, I found the sucker who hasn't added me to their block extension yet!

Picked up Days Gone as a PS5 Collection freebie a couple months ago and finally put it to bed this past weekend; 100% on the story front - not the collectibles - and I'm fine with that. Story wise, I found it to be much deeper than most games I typically play these days i.e., primarily looter shooters with second and third helpings of survival sandboxes ala ARK, Valheim, etc.

Anyway, it was a welcome change of pace and I really enjoyed the emotional tones. I won't go off on a deep tangent, but suffice to say it touched me on a personal level for various reasons and I'm highly looking forward to the sequel.

IMAGE(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/16/Days_Gone_cover_art.jpg)

Yeah, I was really surprised by how good a story it told, in terms of the writing and acting. It also was just plain a better game than I expected; I think there may have been technical issues when it came out, but I gather it got a continuous stream of patches that gradually improved it, and on the PS5 it ran buttery-smooth.

I think I'm finally petering out on Hades. I beat it on try 47 and I'm still playing. I beat it with every weapon and I'm still playing. I rolled the credits and I'm still playing, still opening new things for combat, weapons, and more. I think I'm in the 70s now and finally slowing down.

End game, non-story spoilers in the tag:

Spoiler:

I'm not sure if the end game stuff mentioned lightly above is a spoiler or not but it sure does show off just how special and deep the game is. Each weapon is unique. Keepsakes give you powers and new things to attempt. Companions add new mechanics. Weapon aspects completely change how they are used. I'm just really, really impressed with how much game there is to this game.

While I wouldn't have listed it as my game of the year when the community voting happened (even after buying it in early access when it was first released because of the developer alone), I would now. What an amazing, incredibly deep game. You can read much more about it in our community GOTY lists, deservedly so.

Thank you, Spikeout, for the reminder to finish Axiom Verge. I too was at just over 16 hours, but only at 64% of the items (I missed a few notes and a weapon or two) and 87% of the map.

I agree with you that the controls were a little clunky at times; I failed SO MANY ceiling crawls with the grappling gun that I completely gave up on 100% the map. And the bosses definitely were "one note". Once you found the pattern they were pretty easy to defeat. Interestingly enough, the boss that caused me to give up on the game last year I defeated with almost no effort this time around. I don't know if it was because I had more powerups this time or I grokked the pattern of attacks better, but I remember thinking "didn't I want to break a controller over this boss last time? This is the boss that got me so frustrated?!"

Finished up Journey to the Savage Planet last night. It’s being removed from Game Pass today so wanted to finish before then. Overall I super enjoyed the game. I loved the smaller scope and tight game. It had very satisfying exploring, upgrades, and gameplay. The humor is not going to land with everyone, but I really loved it. The snarky AI was a highlight for me and the irreverent space explorer vibe really clicked with me. The videos were a little cringey to me, but that’s about the only part that didn’t quite work for me. Overall great shorter experience and recommended.

Finished Spiderman Remastered as my first PS5 game the other day.

It's weird. It's not really remarkable or crazy innovative. The traversal and combat sequences are basically slightly remixed versions of the Batman games (with a bit of Prototype mixed in). You have to unlock towers to see parts of the map better. You occasionally have to do a simplistic stealth sequence that feels kinda dated.

Yet it's one of the few open-world action games I've ever completed so I guess the gameplay hook is entertaining enough for me. Story is alright for what it is. The recreation of New York city, even though done in games many times before, certainly felt more impressive than ever before. I maxed out the level and almost the skill tree before finishing with plenty of side stuff completely untouched. Some people might find that to be a minus, but I love games that do that because I don't feel like I'm severely underpowered if I don't grind on content I don't want to do.

I'll say by the end I kind of burnt out on the combat system. To up the difficulty they just keep adding more and more enemies that take off more and more of your health if you get in their attack patterns, so a system that already was very heavy on dodging just required it even more. I actually peaced out of the DLC because I realized the combat encounters were periodically frustrating but mostly just incredibly tedious. Might wait a while before getting to Miles Morales.

Trachalio wrote:

Thank you, Spikeout, for the reminder to finish Axiom Verge. I too was at just over 16 hours, but only at 64% of the items (I missed a few notes and a weapon or two) and 87% of the map.

I agree with you that the controls were a little clunky at times; I failed SO MANY ceiling crawls with the grappling gun that I completely gave up on 100% the map. And the bosses definitely were "one note". Once you found the pattern they were pretty easy to defeat. Interestingly enough, the boss that caused me to give up on the game last year I defeated with almost no effort this time around. I don't know if it was because I had more powerups this time or I grokked the pattern of attacks better, but I remember thinking "didn't I want to break a controller over this boss last time? This is the boss that got me so frustrated?!"

Yeah the ceiling crawls were a pain in the arse, I fell so many times from those that I lost count. The mid air dash I also had trouble with getting it on time or accurate. If there was a section of walls (that you could pass through) your jump just about got you upto, in a split second you need to quickly hit a quick double press on a diagonal upper left - or whichever corresponding direction you need to press - that left very little room for error. If it was on a one of the face buttons + the direction you wanted to dash to it would have been a lot more effortless getting around.

As a counterpoint though it wouldn't have felt as cool initially being able to initially go through a single tile of wall. There's something satisfying about tapping left then quickly hitting it again & holding it so that Trace glitches through to the other side.