rRootage

Legendary bullet hell from 2003. Thank you Kenta Cho

With hindsight, I view this generation of the Pokémon series as an awkward transition to 3D. It’s pretty apparent in the graphics and UI that Diamond/Pearl/Platinum are essentially upgraded GBA games. 3D effects occur only sparingly, and I remember the backpack UI bizarrely having an iPod-style scroll wheel on the touchscreen.

The following generation got more adventurous with the 3D and started using the DS touchscreen more effectively. The “sprite puppet” effect in Black/White looked janky as heck but I honestly loved it anyway. The character sprites in Cassette Beasts worked similarly, which I guess is another reason I liked that game.

Also, man, the pacing of battle animations and UI is so slow in this generation.

Path of Exile has you clearing out the entire pantheon. Then the main campaign is over and you begin the post-game part, which is what actually matters.

We are always allowed to admire oddly hi-fi graphics. I love shaking the vodka bottles in Half-Life Alyx. The liquid inside waves and bubbles and if you hold it up to a light source, the light glows through!

My build for Settlers league was the most fun map blaster I’ve ever made. I made a melee witch (occultist) with Viper Strike that could one-shot entire packs and some map bosses! Just running up to a pack and slapping it and running off.

It was absolute garbage at bossing, though. The survivability was softcore/10.

I played the demo during Next Fest. I found it fun. It reminds me of games like (1) Keep Talking and (2) Papers Please.

My friend kept pestering me to try the game in 2009. The first thing I did in Alpha was die in overworld lava.

This is hardly news. Path of Exile has server queues at the start of every major launch. I think it’ll be great news if absolutely nothing goes wrong with the launch.

Back to you, Steve.

I’m not familiar with the games you mentioned, so I went to check them out. And look what we have on the Steam store page!

Reviews

“It shares some of the feeling of Her Story, albeit featuring today’s technology and with less of a focus on the crime angle. But it has the same small moments of revelation, all of which come together to form a story in its own neat yet meandering way.” Rock Paper Shotgun

Guess that means you have to play it now.

I left my computer to go out with friends to have wings. I was thinking about the puzzle I left behind on the trip there. I was trying to draw the patterns on my phone while we waited. This game gets into your head.

Her Story is a detective game that starts with you sitting at a computer, not even knowing what mystery you’re supposed to investigate. You have to search through the computer’s database for police interview footage to figure that out. Then you have to figure out the answer to the mystery you think you need to solve. The interview clips have a lot of details for you to track and link together. I had to make a big chunky note for this game and even had to implement a system to keep track of the likelihood of the statements.

If you want more point and click adventures, try the Submachine series, which was originally in Flash but now remastered as a ten-game compilation called Submachine: Legacy. The developer trained as an architect, so you get to admire intricate, hand-drawn architecture porn. It starts off as a typical 00s Flash room escape, until you realize it was all a… hallucination. You realize that you’re actually going to explore a vast, utterly lonely underground world as you try to track down the only person who seems to know how to get out. Teleportation and parallel universe travel come up a lot in the series, so keeping notes will be useful. Incredible dark ambient soundtrack, too.

About that blood. Valve forgot to remove it before submitting the game for age ratings, and despite multiple updates over the years, they’ve never bothered to address this. Also, I wish Portal 2 had hard-mode remix chambers like 1 did.

I’ll suggest Vertigo 2 as a worthy followup.

It really impressed me with its detail and scope as a mainly solo effort, by a developer who worked at Valve for a while. It’s a big, cinematic shooting adventure, like Half-Life, so the game calls itself a half-like! There are cool bosses, memorable characters, and wildly varied environments. The story is pretty much a flipped Half-Life: you’re the alien who got teleported in after a big science disaster and you’re fighting your way back home. Compared to Alyx, which takes places around a handful of city blocks, Vertigo 2 throws you around a much larger-scale setting, so it’s more like the Half-Life 2 kind of linear gallery of wild shit.

In the years since I finished Antichamber, my opinion of it has cooled somewhat with hindsight. The early game and some of the mid-game are full of dazzling, logic-defying spectacles, which is what draws you in, but the magic fades later on and you get a lot of puzzles with the block gun until the ending. The teaching style mostly works.

I hate the name “immersive sim”. What is being “simmed”? Why is it immerisve? Isn’t Halo immersive? I was immersed AF. And it’s simming at least as much stuff as Dishonored, I assure you. It’s such a dumb name, just words mashed together. Ditto for “character action game”. Unless your action game features exclusively rocks, it’s “character action”, that means nothing.

Genre names also annoy me. But there’s no authority to define a taxonomy of gameplay styles, so the vocabulary is built informally. I likewise dislike MOBA, metroidvania, roguelike, and soulslike. In the end, we just need the right sequences of letters to accurately represent the gameplay.

In the case of immersive sim, I believe it came from Warren Spector trying to portray how Deus Ex was different from pure action, RPG, and stealth games.

More action and environmental storytelling:

• If you want to play more Portal, try community-made campaigns! I recommend in particular Portal: Revolution, a prequel to Portal 2 that features a few new mechanics, and Portal Stories: Mel, which has basically no new mechanics but turns up the difficulty by making you combine mechanics in clever ways.
• Bastion — Action RPG with a rich story and lush art. A humble narrator tells the story of a place literally torn apart by war, and you play the kid trying to rebuild. This was the debut game from Supergiant Games, which later made Hades.
• Tunic — Mysterious, exploration-focused adventure. A little guy in a green tunic picks up a sword and goes on an adventure, but the game is in an unknown language and you only have a few pages of the manual. It’s like a metroidvania but your progress is based on knowledge.

More “genre pushers”:

• Puzzle games
  • Mosa Lina — It calls itself “a hostile interpretation of the immersive sim”. It’s an aggressively random puzzle platformer where the levels are random and the tools you have to solve them are also random. Mosa Lina is a puzzle game that wants you to be clever, not smart.
  • Viewfinder — First-person “photography” puzzles. The featured mechanic has a “wow” factor that rivals Portal’s: Take a picture of the level, then hold up the photo and click to copy the photo back into the level. The plot is pretty meh, but like the original Portal, it’s pretty damn short.
  • Baba is You — Push blocks and break rules. Blocks with words written on them define the rules of the game: Baba is you, wall is stop, flag is win. The rules themselves are puzzle pieces. If you can’t solve the puzzle, change the rules!
• Inscryption — You find an old, abandoned video game and load it up. It’s an atmospheric, spooky card game, hiding layers of secrets for you to discover. The less you know before starting the game, the better your experience will be. You want one-of-a-kind experiences? This is one of them.
• The Stanley Parable — Comedy walking simulator. You enter a room with two doors in front of you. The narrator says, “Stanley entered the door on his left.” What will you do? The Stanley Parable has many endings and it questions what video game narratives are really for.

The audio in the game is bonkers. Distant footsteps or floor creaking can really get you.

There are high-polish VR shooters, like Half-Life Alyx, Boneworks, and Vertigo 2, which obviously care about where your hands and other body parts are. Boneworks attempts melee combat, but it’s pretty janky. In Half-Life Alyx, you use your hands to rummage around junk to find resources. In Vertigo 2, if you get hit by arrows or thrown spears, you have to pull them out of your body, and there’s a section where you steer a boat.

FMVs? What a treat.