What I Played Over Break (1/3/2021)

I am very lucky to have had the last week and a half off of work, and spent a decent chunk of that time trying out some new games, most of the games in this list I only played for a handful of hours, all have probably between 2 and 10 hours of playtime each. I also watched a handful of movies, which I started reviewing over on my Letterboxd page.

Bloodborne 

This is my second attempt at getting into a From Software game. I had previously played Dark Souls, and like it enough, I rang the first bell and talked to the weird serpent thing but then couldn’t figure out where to go next and never went back. Bloodborne hasn’t lost me yet, I have beaten Father Gascoigne (thanks to him getting stuck in a wall during this third form, still counts). I’ve been having a great time with it so far. But I actually had a miserable time when i just picked up the game, I spent like 3 hours not even getting to the first boss and then had a warning about my weapon breaking. I felt like I could make no progress and couldn’t accomplish anything, I felt terrible. But when I came back the next day I started a new character with stats that aligned with the weapon I liked, and then a few hours into that session I remembered that I can use the exp currency for things other than leveling (which I still couldn’t actually do) so I used it to stock up on molotov cocktails which I then used to kill all the difficult enemies between me and the first boss. Now that I am able to see more of the game outside of the first area (which I still think is more annoying than it needs to be) I understand why people love this game so much. The world is striking and interesting to explore, the enemies are big, fast, and scary. Beating a boss feels as good as it did in Dark Souls, but now I can actually figure where to go.

Elsinore

A time loop game where you play as Ophelia during a reinterpretation of Hamlet. I really enjoyed my time with it, but I got to a point where the amount of options available to me became overwhelming. I thought I understood a thing I could do for a goal, but it didn’t actually do what I hoped and got deflated, and haven’t been motivated to go back to it. Couple things that stood out as really cool features. The game gives the player a lot of information, the map tints rooms that have events happening in them a different color, the journal shows all the threads you can follow, timeline shows everything that has happened in your loop and allows you to go back and look at everything that happened in previous loops. Going back to look at previous loops isn’t the most smooth UX, since I really wish it would show what the current time in the current loop was. I will hopefully go back to this someday when I have more room in my brain to figure it out.

Fuser

Harmonix’s newest music game, this time meant to create the fantasy of being a music festival DJ, a fantasy I have never had; I’ve never even wanted to go to a music festival. But I do really like this game. The discourse I had heard around it was that “the campaign is whatever, the freestyle mode is where this game is great.” I feel the exact opposite. The constraints that the campaign place on what you need to do to succeed gives me a limit on what is possible and still gives me plenty of room to do fun creative stuff. I think the difference is that if you want to spend your time making one perfect mix of 4 parts then freestyle is the place for that, but the fun I’m finding in the campaign is from constantly changing what is playing and having to balance the requests from the audience and the requests from the manager person. 

Heat Signature

From the designer of Gunpoint, Heat Signature is a spacefaring bounty hunter game where you play as procedurally generated characters who go on procedurally generated missions on procedurally generated ships. I enjoyed the Get Mission > Fly to Ship > Do Mission > Return to Base loop. I also watched Tom play one of the daily challenges on the first, and it was really interesting to see the game’s designer both be really good at the game and find things he would still like to fix with the game. Watching that made me realize there is a lot of depth in the game, definitely might come back to this one, it has meters that I can fill. I love to fill meters.

Roundguard

Peggle meets Rogue, 2 great tastes that taste great together. I heard about this game from the excellent podcast Eggplant: The Secret Lives of Games, formerly known as The Spelunky Showlike, where one of the creators of Roundguard was interviewed. The game works because of the different classes legitimately playing differently, and different spells constantly changing things up during the runs themselves. I’m not sure how many areas there are, but I have reached the boss of the third level twice in my short time with the game. 

Norman’s Great Illusion

A small 2D game about a man working in a capitalist system that gives socialist messages every morning about how workers should rise up. It is very clearly a small team that worked on this game, and it shows. “Driving” is done with a golf swing style minigame, “work” is elementary school math, like 2*(2+3), which penalizes you if you get 5 wrong answers. The loop of the game is waking up > getting some exposition from Wife and Daughter > Drive to work > Do Work (math) > Drive home > More exposition from Wife and Daughter. With occasional additional exposition in between one of those steps. It was cool to see such an overtly socialist/communist game on the Nintendo eShop, but actually playing it wasn’t terribly engaging. But maybe the other endings are interesting enough to go back and try and see.