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chuckroWoolfe - The Red Hood Diaries - This was a pleasant surprise given the mess it could have been: A steampunk pastiche of Red Riding Hood, as she takes her axe to the city to destroy B.B. Woolfe’s clockwork army and avenge the death of her parents. It’s very pretty and plays mostly like a 2.5D platformer, though there are also two chase sequences, some stealth bits and several boss battles. (And some dick-move platforming challenges, especially in the forest level.) It feels a bit incomplete, like they planned a bigger story and this was only part one. That said, I got it on sale and it was worth a couple of bucks.
Deponia is a puzzle adventure game in the King’s Quest vein, featuring a plucky jerk on a backwaters junk planet in a comedy sci-fi adventure. It’s more clever than most others that I’ve tried, but ultimately, I just don’t really like this style of game. I don’t have the patience for endless exploration and dialogue trees that inevitably ends up with missing a pixel to click on or an event flag to trip. Even when these are witty, they’re still much slower with it than books or TV shows, which makes it hard to engage me. I gave this a try, and I’m culling it and the sequel Chaos on Deponia.
(Aside: I think part of the reason point-and-click puzzles adventurers work for me and this style doesn’t is because what grates on me is the constant delays and pointless commentary. In a point-and-click game, if you click on the wrong thing, nothing happens and you move on. If you send your hero in Deponia to investigate the wrong thing, he’ll walk over and make snarky comments indicating you’ve messed up. It’s the one time I really like first-person perspective!)
Magicka - I got this from Fanatical’s All Stars Bundle, and it seemed likely to appeal to me, as a puzzle-heavily semi-rpg starring wizards and requiring you to mix your own magic. The problem is, it’s very action-heavy, it strongly suggests playing multiplayer, and the control scheme is atrocious. You hold the left mouse button to move, and the right mouse button to use magic, while using the keyboard only to choose element types. This is a top-down view game where WASD and mouse would be vaguely tolerable, so you could run-and-gun with your various magic streams and projectiles. Not so! The control scheme forces you to be a move-or-fire weapon. I wanted to like this; the tone was tongue-in-cheek entertaining and the puzzles seemed appealing. But the controls were just too painful.
Chronicles of a Dark Lord: Episode 1 Tides of Fate Complete – An RPGMaker game, with many of the rough edges that implies. The creator clearly had big dreams, stuffing a lot of worldbuilding into the intro cutscenes and the prologue and then the post-prologue exposition dump. (And in the process, rushing past what might have been some interesting parts of the story to actually play.) Nothing here is actively bad, but the combination of “not good enough” factors dooms it: The main character is a whiny asshole and then a no-nonsense tyrant and neither is compelling. The dialogue is functional; the other characters are flat and repetitive. The battles are too slow and have no auto-battle option; but you definitely need to grind and there aren’t many battle tactics. Enemies use lots of status effects from the very beginning; Magus has status effect attacks that never seem to work. The dungeon design might improve later, but for the first few hours of play it’s simplistic. The graphics are fine but they’re stock RPGMaker used in typical ways. If I was really interested in the plot OR I didn’t have to grind OR the dungeon design was really neat OR the play experience was just really smooth and comfortable I might have continued. Oh, well.
Steamy Sextet - Another H-game visual novel from Belgerum games. Clocking in at half an hour, this is even shorter than Elf Enchanter and abandons the pretense of being a game (there aren’t even choices, much less puzzles/battles) and just tells a single story straight through. I give them credit for clearly focusing on what their audience wants, but I think the games that were actually games offered better bang for the buck.
The Bard's Tale – This has been in my queue for years and I had, for some reason, thought this was a remake of the original games (complete with first-person exploration, parties of warriors, etc.). It’s at best a “reimagining”, with a top-down view, action controls, and a single player character who can summon monsters to fight for him. I give them credit that there’s a lot of snarky dialogue built up in this (all fully voiced) and the action-rpg system isn’t bad. But it’s not quite amusing enough that I wanted to keep playing after the first hour, and I don’t have the nostalgia value to appreciate nods to the originals. (The original trilogy, in all of their Apple II glory, are included with the game. They…aren’t very playable by modern standards. There’s a remastered/rebuilt “Bard’s Tale Trilogy” also on Steam, and I may pick that up if I see it on sale for a couple of bucks.)
Deponia is a puzzle adventure game in the King’s Quest vein, featuring a plucky jerk on a backwaters junk planet in a comedy sci-fi adventure. It’s more clever than most others that I’ve tried, but ultimately, I just don’t really like this style of game. I don’t have the patience for endless exploration and dialogue trees that inevitably ends up with missing a pixel to click on or an event flag to trip. Even when these are witty, they’re still much slower with it than books or TV shows, which makes it hard to engage me. I gave this a try, and I’m culling it and the sequel Chaos on Deponia.
(Aside: I think part of the reason point-and-click puzzles adventurers work for me and this style doesn’t is because what grates on me is the constant delays and pointless commentary. In a point-and-click game, if you click on the wrong thing, nothing happens and you move on. If you send your hero in Deponia to investigate the wrong thing, he’ll walk over and make snarky comments indicating you’ve messed up. It’s the one time I really like first-person perspective!)
Magicka - I got this from Fanatical’s All Stars Bundle, and it seemed likely to appeal to me, as a puzzle-heavily semi-rpg starring wizards and requiring you to mix your own magic. The problem is, it’s very action-heavy, it strongly suggests playing multiplayer, and the control scheme is atrocious. You hold the left mouse button to move, and the right mouse button to use magic, while using the keyboard only to choose element types. This is a top-down view game where WASD and mouse would be vaguely tolerable, so you could run-and-gun with your various magic streams and projectiles. Not so! The control scheme forces you to be a move-or-fire weapon. I wanted to like this; the tone was tongue-in-cheek entertaining and the puzzles seemed appealing. But the controls were just too painful.
Chronicles of a Dark Lord: Episode 1 Tides of Fate Complete – An RPGMaker game, with many of the rough edges that implies. The creator clearly had big dreams, stuffing a lot of worldbuilding into the intro cutscenes and the prologue and then the post-prologue exposition dump. (And in the process, rushing past what might have been some interesting parts of the story to actually play.) Nothing here is actively bad, but the combination of “not good enough” factors dooms it: The main character is a whiny asshole and then a no-nonsense tyrant and neither is compelling. The dialogue is functional; the other characters are flat and repetitive. The battles are too slow and have no auto-battle option; but you definitely need to grind and there aren’t many battle tactics. Enemies use lots of status effects from the very beginning; Magus has status effect attacks that never seem to work. The dungeon design might improve later, but for the first few hours of play it’s simplistic. The graphics are fine but they’re stock RPGMaker used in typical ways. If I was really interested in the plot OR I didn’t have to grind OR the dungeon design was really neat OR the play experience was just really smooth and comfortable I might have continued. Oh, well.
Steamy Sextet - Another H-game visual novel from Belgerum games. Clocking in at half an hour, this is even shorter than Elf Enchanter and abandons the pretense of being a game (there aren’t even choices, much less puzzles/battles) and just tells a single story straight through. I give them credit for clearly focusing on what their audience wants, but I think the games that were actually games offered better bang for the buck.
The Bard's Tale – This has been in my queue for years and I had, for some reason, thought this was a remake of the original games (complete with first-person exploration, parties of warriors, etc.). It’s at best a “reimagining”, with a top-down view, action controls, and a single player character who can summon monsters to fight for him. I give them credit that there’s a lot of snarky dialogue built up in this (all fully voiced) and the action-rpg system isn’t bad. But it’s not quite amusing enough that I wanted to keep playing after the first hour, and I don’t have the nostalgia value to appreciate nods to the originals. (The original trilogy, in all of their Apple II glory, are included with the game. They…aren’t very playable by modern standards. There’s a remastered/rebuilt “Bard’s Tale Trilogy” also on Steam, and I may pick that up if I see it on sale for a couple of bucks.)
