I actually completed Ara Fell, and it was mostly the story that kept me going. Not that it was terribly sophisticated or anything, but it was nicely paced and wasn’t lacking in twists and turns either. There was even a bit of the characters’ personal affairs mixed in, making them just so much more relatable and grounded. The ending wasn’t quite what I had expected, though. At least it is accompanied by a short playable epilogue showing how things evolved since then. That’s actually a feature I’d like to see in more RPGs.
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Finished Beyond a Steel Sky. I thought it started out pretty good, and looked pretty good too, but soon enough it peaked, held its level for a bit and went downhill from there. And that’s true for both gameplay and plot, so it’s not like a weakness in one area would be offset by greatness in the other.
The biggest disappointment, perhaps, were the one-dimensional and caricatural characters. It’s the same thing I noticed with Encodya. I guess NPCs in other games have evolved to a point where writing them like it’s 1990 just doesn’t cut it any more. Heck, even Ara Fell with its minimalist plot and dialogue managed to give more nuance and depth to its (main) characters!
All in all another one of those games that are okay to spend some rainy days with, but nothing one absolutely has to play.
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I remember liking it but I think also feeling it went a bit more overboard with its humour than the original did(which seemed more subtle to a point at least). Also some elements somehow seemed to build up something but ultimately miss a payoff (“That´s odd, Mr Grundy…you´re daaaaaata…”).
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I’ve never played the original past the first couple screens, so I can’t really draw any comparison (I guess I really was totally sold on the humorous offerings of LFG/LucasArts at that time). But on it’s own, I think it really was on to something interesting with the investigation into Graham, but starting with the visit to the museum, what could have been a first-class thriller derailed into a fairly mediocre comedy. I’m not opposed to presenting serious themes in a lighthearted way, but it felt like there would have been an opportunity for some real great detective work and instead I had to scoop up bird-shit and deal with droid-poets.
And yeah, the whole sub-plot with Alonso felt pretty anticlimactic. Why would he even be there in the end, and drag Songbird along?
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I’ve been playing Horizon Zero Dawn. So far it’s
quite good as a game, pity it took an eternity to get to the game though.
We just got one of them newfangled Xboxes with the really dumb name. I love it, playing a lot of stuff but mostly Slay the Spire.
Playing Carto, which is more puzzle than adventure game, but a quite clever one. Basically the world is made up of tiles that need to be arranged in specific configurations in order to clear paths, trigger events or open up new locations. It’s almost always the same mechanic, but used in so many different ways that it never gets boring.
Couple that with the pretty painterly art style and a cast of quirky characters and you have a neat little gem.
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I started playing Carto a few days ago on Game Pass. Very cool idea and execution.
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Coming up next for me:
Yeah, that game that everybody knows for very specific memes, but I´m looking foward to it for the gothic atmosphere and the puzzles and item/resource management the series is famous for! 
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There may even be a slight Thimbleweed Park connection! Apparently they used the same visual reference for the vestibule of the Castle in that game as @OctaviNavarro did for the Mansion Mansion!
Though obviously the designers for Capcom took more liberties.
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I’m still on Horizon Zero Dawn, finishing up my remaining quests and errands before starting the finale.
Hmmm, first person…lady of the castle with an enormous cleavage…werewolves, vampires…I know what this game reminds me of!
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Speaking of modern 1st person titles, I’ve been actually considering Control, which is currently 60% off on GOG. I saw it mentioned in a video about non-euclidean spaces in video games and it looked really intriguing. The one thing that’s holding me back (aside from the fact that I’ll suck at playing these types of games) is that my GTX 950 will likely have a hard time running it as it is, and more so with the overhead of Wine. Having postponed a planned GPU upgrade for obvious reasons, I think I’ll have to pass for now.
I recently played the Tukoni demo with my 4 year old son:
It takes about 15 to 30 minutes. The hand-drawn graphics are beautiful and there is no written dialog to read. It was a good experience. The puzzles are simple, the only difficult part was explaining to a 4 year old child how to dial using a phone with a rotary dial.
It’s a little funny having a rotary dial in a modern game aimed at children.
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You’d have to check if it’s one of the relevant games, but with the new Vulkan 3D stuff some games literally run as if they were native.
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That remind me of…
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Finished Mutropolis. With the help of a walkthrough. It’s not exactly easy to begin with, and the section where you control Max was finally too much for me.
Contrary to many recent P&C adventures It has a fairly high puzzle density. There’s just so much to do within a fairly small set of rooms, it actually quite amazed me how well designed that was. On the flipside, one only gets to visit 3 distinct areas, so the part of me that likes exploring new sights ended up a bit underwhelmed.
My biggest issue, however, is that for a game set in the year 5000AD, it didn’t even try to be excitingly futuristic. Sure, it had some Sci-Fi gizmos, but in parts the tech was worse than what we have available today. Not to mention that stuff on Earth, seemingly abandoned for 2800 years, looked all a bit too well preserved. I understand that it is hard to come up with convincing far-future concepts that still feel familiar enough to be recognizable, but given the premise of the game, I would have expected something a bit more imaginative.
All in all it’s okay if you fancy challenging puzzles and a bit of humor and can overlook that the future isn’t quite what it used to be.
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Finished Resident Evil 8 now. It´s been really fun 10 hours. Some great parts, some silly story and over the top boss fights, cool puzzles and great locations. Maybe got a bit tad to actiony near the end, but it´s been all around well balanced really. Great game!
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I recently happened across a funny summary of all the previous Resident Evil parts (in German). But the new one doesn’t really seem to tie in with the former ones anyway, does it? Not that I’d ever want to play it myself …
I did, however, finally play Oxenfree, which had been sitting in my library for a long time. It reminded me a bit of Firewatch, in how natural the conversations flowed, except that I didn’t really manage to connect with and embrace Alex in the same way I could with the protagonist of Firewatch. So I didn’t take the events all too seriously and was probably a bit of an annoyance to the other kids. Still got the same outcome as the majority of players, but it’s hard to tell if that depended on a few decisive actions or if it weights all the dialogue choices. I definitely will not play another loop to find out.
And while I enjoyed the character interaction, I thought the plot somewhat diminished the genuine drama and potential that could have been drawn from the setup alone. I’d have been happier if in the end everything out of the ordinary could have been explained away by a few cookies too many on the boat ride to the island 
.
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