The 2023 what are we playing thread

Adventure/Lucasfilm Games
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The end isn’t that far off now, so I guess I can safely say it’s a great game overall, if not entirely flawless. The one thing it gets near perfect, and which keeps me hooked, is the way it handles exploration: each area is designed as a more or less complex puzzle of sorts, where traversal to reach your destination is usually fairly straightforward, but finding every treasure and secret takes determination, and multiple visits over the course of the game.

At one point I was convinced that a future party member must bring the ability to destroy certain obstacles, like crates or rock formations that were inconveniently blocking access to multiple spots. But turns out all of them had been reachable from the get-go, just not in an obvious way. Figuring that out felt similar to cracking a particularly demanding adventure game puzzle.

So even if the main story is a bit of a meandering mess, there’s always something else to do, in order to keep (my) motivation up. That’s further reinforced by the achievement system, which offers in-game rewards for completing specific tasks in each area, some of them simple, others pretty challenging.

May sound tedious, but at least it feels rewarding, unlike some other aspects of the game: fights for one take more turns than necessary, and cannot always be avoided. Given that regular mobs do not even contribute to levelling up, it’s also not quite explicable why they have to respawn (hint: it’s so you can farm the random crap they drop), Oh, and levelling up is also the least fun in any RPG I remember playing: skills are arranged in tiers, and you have to unlock a certain number before the next tier opens up, meaning you will have to pick up plenty uninteresting ones before getting to something desirable again. This is further exacerbated by the fact that the number of skills that can be active in combat is strictly limited. So not only do you have to unlock subpar skills, you will not even be able to use them in the rare situation where they might help, unless constantly juggling skill loadouts is something you enjoy.

In summary: great level design, which for the most part is absolutely pleasant to look at, too, but the RPG systems are a bit convoluted and the plot seems over the top even by JRPG standards. Tons of fun if you like exploring every nook and cranny.

1 Like
22

Speaking of JRPG, I just purchased NieR Automata in the Steam sale and for the first hour it definitely seems like it could be an interesting game.

23

Played Kentucky Route Zero, which had been on my radar ever since I played a demo of Act I. Not quite sure what to make of it, though. Act I was pleasantly weird, Act II through IV seemed to share a common theme centered around debt, guilt, regret, seasoned with socioeconomic problems of the day. Act V felt like something completely different, neither offering any real explanation of what came before, nor bringing real closure. All in all a bit like a critically acclaimed piece of literature: not easily digestible and leaves you wondering what it all really meant.

Loved the low-poly look, though. Gameplay-wise, it reminded me more of a text-adventure (it certainly seemed to pay homage to those) than anything else, though it involved very little effort to progress. Plenty of choices to make, but hard to say whether they made much difference.

On the technical side, the Linux version hangs just before the end of Act II, with no fix in sight. All that’s left is to skip ahead and watch the missed cutscene on YouTube instead. Also, the game seems to save on scene changes only, not on quit. Quite a nasty surprise the first time I noticed, and a nuisance ever after.

Play it if you’d like to feel remorse about fateful decisions and missed opportunities. And perhaps avoid clicking on that “Play Act V” icon. That’s my biggest regret right now …

4 Likes
24

I’ve had an interesting couple of months catching up on some new games but also a lot of older games I was out of the loop for when they came out.

One of my favorite deep dives was finding the “CHZO Mythos” quadrillogy of indie, MSpaint-drawn graphical adventures with an awesome backstory created by Ben “Yahtzee” Crowshaw: 5 Days a Stranger, 7 Days a Skeptic, Trilby’s Notes, and 6 Days a Sacrifice Fully Ramblomatic.com - Come and play with us. For ever. And ever. And ever.. There’s also 3 text adventures that have a place in the mythos timeline. Possibly many of you already know about these, the creator is apparantly the most decorated dev in the Adventure Game Studio awards. But for those like me who were living under a rock, I highly recommend downloading them and giving them a spin.

I’ve completely fallen in love with Psychonauts 2. It’s so good and I think makes better use of the psychic powers than the original Psychonauts. They’re both so great.

I played a game called Mage’s Initiation that was awesome. Really loved it, there was even a lot of humor, from all the characters except the main character lol. I read that it drew a lot of inspiration from the Heros Quest / Quest for Glory games. I immediately replayed it with 3 of the 4 element classes. I can’t remember the last time I immediately replayed a game.

Averse to text parsers I’d kind of avoided early Sierra games, apart from the AGD remakes of Kings Quest III IV and V, but fresh off the heels of really enjoying Mage’s Initiation, I installed Quest for Glory 1-5 and just finished #2 last night. I’m really like them, the world is huge and full of impressive art and stories to explore in. The text parser has grown on me but it’s kind of frustrating when you’re not sure what object you’re looking at. I like the skill grinding and the stories so far, but boy does it require a lot of saves. I like that the game is totally different based on whether you choose to be a fighter, magician, or thief, but there doesn’t appear to be much preventing you from accidently selecting the path of a thief if you’re a fighter, for example, and getting stuck.

Many years ago I pulled the plug on Colonel’s Bequest after an hour of wandering around and not knowing what I was doing. A little more experience with the text parser and I thought I’d give it another try, and I’m glad I did. It’s fun and weird and hard and kind of all the things you want in an adventure game.

I played Return to Monkey Island and Lucy Dreaming at the end of 2022. I liked both, found RtMI disappointingly short but a nice game. I started Deponia and Discworld II and will probably finish eventually but got bored.

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25

Wow, that’s quite a list there. I know of most of the game but haven’t gotten around to playing or acquiring them. Although I recently downloaded the ADG remakes- to find out they were already in my download folder from years back :sweat_smile:

I’m currently playing Sam & Max 302: the Tomb of Sammun Mak and having a blast.

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26

The Discworld games are fun, except one of them has a giant bug at the end. Discworld Noir is great but you need Win 9x or a nocd crack to run it.

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Which one? The first game? As far as I remember, there was a patch available… :thinking:

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I see we’re dealing a rich fellow who doesn’t just have a modem but who’s also not afraid of racking up massive phone bills. :stuck_out_tongue:

But seriously though, since when? Anyway, it’s not a reason to avoid the game or anything, if there is a reason to it’d be some of the, ahem, logic. Probably still worth it. Discworld Noir was easily my favorite though.

I don’t think I even considered patches until the early 2000s really. Like I implicitly stated above, after switching to XP I needed a nocd patch. I don’t think there was any official one though.

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I finished playing Machinarium with my children (9 and 6 years old). We really enjoyed it, it is a beatiful game. Except for all those annoying mini-games, my kids hated those even more than I. They wanted to progress the story and uncover the gorgeous backgrounds, not to play tic-tac-toe variants against very clever oponents. Overall it was a good experience.

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30

Haha yes, I remember that. That style gameplay was done better a few years later in Chuchel.

I played Sonic is Dead a few weeks ago. It’s an amusing Phoenix Wright light investigation style game.

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31

Good tip. We will probably play that one soon, specially if they improved/ removed the annoying mini-games part.

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Luckly there is the book of hints. Which you can access only after completing a loooong mini game :slight_smile:

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Machinarium is a fan favourite with the children over here too. I only regret explaining them how to get hints, because ever since they’ll just do the flying shooter mini-game without even trying to solve the puzzles. Even after having completed the game :roll_eyes:

So when asked for hints for Curse of Monkey Island, I pretend to have forgotten all the puzzles and solutions :sweat_smile:

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34

:rofl:
I avoided telling them that part. They’ll find out anyway, sooner or later.

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There are mini-games in Chuchel, but they are much easier than the ones in Machinarium (and you don’t need much time to solve them). But depending on the age of your kids they might need some little help/advice.

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36

Recently finished Not Another Weekend which I’ve had on my wishlist for a while. It was actually very good, I’m not sure why it seemed to gain no traction. I haven’t even seen it mentioned on this forum.

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37

I finished Beyond the Edge of Owlsgard and got myself a good ending, so I looked up the bad ending on YT here since I didn’t really feel like replaying possibly up to half an hour just to see the bad ending.[1] The video also includes a couple of amusing deaths I missed.

The game was excellent. It clearly received a lot of care and attention. My only gripe was right near the end I needed an item in the background (er, foreground) that I didn’t realize could be interacted with. But basically if you like this general style of game (which if you’re here, you probably do) I figure it’s definitely worth a try.

[1] There was a pretty obvious hint that there was a bad ending too.

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38

I too, entirely coincidentally, have just finished “Beyond the Edge of Owlsgard” (thanks to @seguso for recommending it a while back).

I really enjoyed it - great art, nicely voiced, well-balanced puzzles, cool story. Really excellent game.

I played it in “Modern mode”, which makes the pixel-hunting easier (occasionally things have a little “glow” animation) and it made timed-events easier.
I’m not a big fan of pixel-hunting or timed-events, so it was cool they included this.
It is possible to die in the game, but it’s always telegraphed clearly, so it’s more to get Sierra-esque joke in, and easy to avoid.

It was very faithful to the ealy 90s aesthetic, if I didn’t know, I would have easily believed it was a game from back then. It drew on some of the best bits of other games, got a bit of a “Beneath a Steel Sky” vibe at times, and it was kinda like “Toonstruck” in that it went from a more kid’s vibe to pretty dark by the end of it.

Hope for more games from same developer - it’s seems like it’s mainly one guy doing the the writing, art, and music? Insane how polished it is, it feels like a pretty big budget 90s game.

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39

I don’t think so since I bought it due to seeing Just released adventure games - #919 by Paul :wink:

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40

Oh right, I forgot about that, but I played in classic. The only timing that gave me some trouble was the final ship navigation, but the game offered up a skip button. The next day I reloaded the save and did it anyway but I wasn’t rewarded with an achievement. :sob: But more seriously, the number of achievements in the game is quite insane. I suppose it allows the developer to track player progress quite precisely.

1 Like