This Week I Played...Week 15
Apr. 15th, 2023 06:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
windjammHey! It's the 15th week of the Year! I'm starting a new thing! Listing out the games I played this week and giving a little thing about how I felt. Let's go!
Merge & Blade
I needed something idle to take my time as I listened/watched things and this game on gamepass looked like it might be fun. Essentially, it's one of those matching games where you combine units of a kind into stronger units and combine those into-- etc etc. You can upgrade things like you can in a roguelite, spending money you earn on things like, "make the archer stronger" or "add a new unit at the end of the merge tree."
However, the method for getting units on the board kind of grated on me after awhile. The board is a grid, however when you place units you're given two bound together at random like Puyo Puyo (or Dr. Mario) and you drop them in from the top of the screen. You only have hard drops available. The result, in my experience, is a deeply cluttered board. Maybe I'm just bad at puyo puyo (true) but I could never get enough matches. And then I ran out of turns, the actual game started, and my units would die to the enemies down to a tenth (decimated, hey) and I'd have to match the scraps. Which, sure, the horrors of war, but it really didn't make it fun to play.
American Truck Simulator
I've owned this game since 2017 but I've never managed to see the mid-game. I drove a bus on a resort property for several years and driving has always been pretty calming for me. ATS is able to simulate the road and environment in a way that gets my brain saying, "yeah this is driving."
The problem is that hauling freight across the country will invariably feel like work? Which is a weird thing to say as a big fan of simulation games! I love hauling freight conceptually. I played a lot of Elite Dangerous, which is ATS in space. (Alien Truck Spaceulator) and I think the thing is appealing. But once again I got decently far into the opening of the game and was on my 20th trip or so and just went, "God I need to not be driving anymore."
I was also very tired at the time. Something in my bones is telling me to come back to this, so maybe I will. Or maybe this is the last time you see me talk about this.
Ghostwire: Tokyo
So, I have been circling this game and sniffing it like an animal for awhile now. It's on gamepass! It could be neat! And conceptually there's a lot to like here. The Ghost and the Wire in this title are both pretty literal. There's a heavy intersection of Digital and Ghost themes in this game, things like saving ghosts from an evil entity and then sending them over the phone line like it's the Matrix. Things like exorcising a ghost by doing what looks like sick yoyo tricks with a string from its "core." The magic is a lot of hand symbols and every so often they humor you by letting you draw one yourself.
However, I just couldn't feel satisfied. The skill trees aren't interesting, which is the major thing that got me to download it. I looked up "games with good skill trees 2023" and found all the links purple because it's the third time I've done this. Ghostwire: Tokyo was on this list, however. But, all the stuff on the trees is either numeric "hold 3 extra arrows" or gated behind a currency you can only get by progressing through the city and doing side quests.
The combat is kind of neat. You charge your magic attack and you do a bunch of hand signs in the air to amp up the magic, then you launch a stronger version (the default magic's strong version is, "you shoot two at once" and I think they're more powerful but??). I got an upgrade that lets me basically perfect guard with parry timing to knock enemies down, then I got a quick exorcise on downed enemies. It's fun to execute! It does get weighed down by the fact that enemies sometimes just don't fall, sometimes they get knocked far enough away that you can't reach them in time, etc.
It's a neat game conceptually, but the loop just doesn't give me a lot. And, after six hours, I think I have enough of an understanding to say it might just not be for me. I may come back to it if I really need to scratch an open world itch, but I can't be sure.
Oh, the story also just washed over me, honestly. The tutorial takes way too long, the protagonist is insufferable to me personally. I could ignore all of that if the gameplay felt good though.
Cultist Simulator
So, I finally looked at how this game is played and realized it's a card game in the way one of my favorite games this year, Stacklands, plays. You have cards performing intense functions and in this game you have slots to put cards into like, "work" where you can put a job or a ritual, perhaps.
The themes of the game are pretty interesting in that occult space. The concept of making a cult, gaining followers, upgrading them, sending them on missions. That was all kind of fun, but honestly I think I'm more interested in trying Cult of the Lamb.
My favorite thing this game did was let me go to the auction house to buy books, then when those books were invariably in Latin or Greek, find a way to become a scholar, either by tutor or by teaching myself with another book). I could then translate them! And then read them after. This loop generates Knowledge Fragments, which are the main currency of the game. Though, as I'm saying all of this I am realizing that maybe I could just do a knowledge only run, at least until I've ammassed a great deal of it...
See, the problem I have with this game is that the things it wants me to do aren't so far satisfying to me. It wants me to start a cult and then to use that cult to recruit followers. All the methods of doing this gain suspicion by the police and I have neither dealt with the police or hit a loss condition for not dealing with them, but I'm sure bad things happen. Then to upgrade followers or do anything of note I need to provide more esoteric fragments, which are hard to accrue when things get rolling. Mostly because advancing your knowledge is a matching game and the pieces are random. They interact with one another in upgrading, which I haven't done much of, but it's a lot to manage when you're also trying to get followers etc.
okay. I might try that run. Maybe now. It sounds interesting. OH I was going to watch something though, shit. hm. my problem with subbed anime is multitasking (T_T)
anyway, that's me for this last week!
Merge & Blade
I needed something idle to take my time as I listened/watched things and this game on gamepass looked like it might be fun. Essentially, it's one of those matching games where you combine units of a kind into stronger units and combine those into-- etc etc. You can upgrade things like you can in a roguelite, spending money you earn on things like, "make the archer stronger" or "add a new unit at the end of the merge tree."
However, the method for getting units on the board kind of grated on me after awhile. The board is a grid, however when you place units you're given two bound together at random like Puyo Puyo (or Dr. Mario) and you drop them in from the top of the screen. You only have hard drops available. The result, in my experience, is a deeply cluttered board. Maybe I'm just bad at puyo puyo (true) but I could never get enough matches. And then I ran out of turns, the actual game started, and my units would die to the enemies down to a tenth (decimated, hey) and I'd have to match the scraps. Which, sure, the horrors of war, but it really didn't make it fun to play.
American Truck Simulator
I've owned this game since 2017 but I've never managed to see the mid-game. I drove a bus on a resort property for several years and driving has always been pretty calming for me. ATS is able to simulate the road and environment in a way that gets my brain saying, "yeah this is driving."
The problem is that hauling freight across the country will invariably feel like work? Which is a weird thing to say as a big fan of simulation games! I love hauling freight conceptually. I played a lot of Elite Dangerous, which is ATS in space. (Alien Truck Spaceulator) and I think the thing is appealing. But once again I got decently far into the opening of the game and was on my 20th trip or so and just went, "God I need to not be driving anymore."
I was also very tired at the time. Something in my bones is telling me to come back to this, so maybe I will. Or maybe this is the last time you see me talk about this.
Ghostwire: Tokyo
So, I have been circling this game and sniffing it like an animal for awhile now. It's on gamepass! It could be neat! And conceptually there's a lot to like here. The Ghost and the Wire in this title are both pretty literal. There's a heavy intersection of Digital and Ghost themes in this game, things like saving ghosts from an evil entity and then sending them over the phone line like it's the Matrix. Things like exorcising a ghost by doing what looks like sick yoyo tricks with a string from its "core." The magic is a lot of hand symbols and every so often they humor you by letting you draw one yourself.
However, I just couldn't feel satisfied. The skill trees aren't interesting, which is the major thing that got me to download it. I looked up "games with good skill trees 2023" and found all the links purple because it's the third time I've done this. Ghostwire: Tokyo was on this list, however. But, all the stuff on the trees is either numeric "hold 3 extra arrows" or gated behind a currency you can only get by progressing through the city and doing side quests.
The combat is kind of neat. You charge your magic attack and you do a bunch of hand signs in the air to amp up the magic, then you launch a stronger version (the default magic's strong version is, "you shoot two at once" and I think they're more powerful but??). I got an upgrade that lets me basically perfect guard with parry timing to knock enemies down, then I got a quick exorcise on downed enemies. It's fun to execute! It does get weighed down by the fact that enemies sometimes just don't fall, sometimes they get knocked far enough away that you can't reach them in time, etc.
It's a neat game conceptually, but the loop just doesn't give me a lot. And, after six hours, I think I have enough of an understanding to say it might just not be for me. I may come back to it if I really need to scratch an open world itch, but I can't be sure.
Oh, the story also just washed over me, honestly. The tutorial takes way too long, the protagonist is insufferable to me personally. I could ignore all of that if the gameplay felt good though.
Cultist Simulator
So, I finally looked at how this game is played and realized it's a card game in the way one of my favorite games this year, Stacklands, plays. You have cards performing intense functions and in this game you have slots to put cards into like, "work" where you can put a job or a ritual, perhaps.
The themes of the game are pretty interesting in that occult space. The concept of making a cult, gaining followers, upgrading them, sending them on missions. That was all kind of fun, but honestly I think I'm more interested in trying Cult of the Lamb.
My favorite thing this game did was let me go to the auction house to buy books, then when those books were invariably in Latin or Greek, find a way to become a scholar, either by tutor or by teaching myself with another book). I could then translate them! And then read them after. This loop generates Knowledge Fragments, which are the main currency of the game. Though, as I'm saying all of this I am realizing that maybe I could just do a knowledge only run, at least until I've ammassed a great deal of it...
See, the problem I have with this game is that the things it wants me to do aren't so far satisfying to me. It wants me to start a cult and then to use that cult to recruit followers. All the methods of doing this gain suspicion by the police and I have neither dealt with the police or hit a loss condition for not dealing with them, but I'm sure bad things happen. Then to upgrade followers or do anything of note I need to provide more esoteric fragments, which are hard to accrue when things get rolling. Mostly because advancing your knowledge is a matching game and the pieces are random. They interact with one another in upgrading, which I haven't done much of, but it's a lot to manage when you're also trying to get followers etc.
okay. I might try that run. Maybe now. It sounds interesting. OH I was going to watch something though, shit. hm. my problem with subbed anime is multitasking (T_T)
anyway, that's me for this last week!
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