Games

The main game I played this week was Yakuza 0 — I had tried playing it a couple times before but had only gotten as far as Chapter 2, and it always felt very hard to come back to after some time ago because the controls early on were fairly complex, with a bunch of combos to remember, and one of the early Chapter 2 quests is very vague and doesn’t actually tell you what to do, so I never had any clue where I was when I loaded up the game again. I did want to properly get into the franchise though, and this week I managed to break through the brick wall and put some significant progress into it, getting to Chapter 10 or so out of around 17. The game writing is goofy and insane and that’s one of its best parts, although it has a couple of real downsides too, like a propensity for item inventory glitches that lead to crashing, and terrible camera controls. Overall I still like it, but I doubt I like it enough to 100% it, since that requires a second playthrough as well.

Outside of that, other full games that got playtime this week include Palworld and Hades, as well as a bit of The Room Two because one of the streamers I watched was playing a similar sort of game involving opening intricately locked boxes, and I remembered that I had finished the prequel, The Room, several years ago but never did play its sequel. I finished it this week in time for this blog entry. This brings my number of 100% achievement games on Steam to (back to? some games fluctuate) 100. I also completed the main story in Hades, which came on the 10th victory, on my 69th run (about half of them with the god mode buff on). That was a nice ending. There’s still more in the game to do though, apparently.

Satinel and I also got to Chapter 3 in SWTOR this week, so we’re about 2/3 of the way through the class stories that we have been trying to complete. We play twice a week now, on Mondays and Thursdays, and we’re level 57-58 on a level 41 planet as Preferred Status players thanks to the double xp wave that we caught early on despite skipping all side quests since the third planet or so.

In addition, this week was the biannual (I believe) Steam Next Fest week on Steam, which means that there were a whole bunch of demos for random games available to play. As I also have been actively keeping an eye on Twitch for a couple of weeks now, I realized that a lot of streamers were spending the week playing random games from this Next Fest, so I ended up watching many, many demos rather than playing them since I was busy with Yakuza 0 and other projects. I still did play a few though, including:

• Breachway, which was a decent deckbuilder but I ran into a major bug that ruined my run and soured the game for me. Watching other people play it felt a lot more fun though. Whether a game like this is “good” or not depends on the later parts of the game that are not showcased in the demo. (Score: 7/10)
• Pacific Drive, which I am supposed to like because it involves a moving mobile base and scavenging, which are mechanics that I like a lot, but I found the looting portion to be extremely generic, the vehicle to be a bit headachey to drive, and the UI to be problematic. Still, I like scavenging. (6/10)
• Star Trucker, which seems to have nice ambience and music but I’m not convinced works very well in practice as space is so big even with stargates, and in which I suffocated a couple times due to poor tutorials and didn’t want to start over again. I like the cozy feel of the inside of the truck though, which doubles as a bunk bed and scavenging hold. (5/10)
• Magical Delicacy, which is a witch-themed cooking platformer but whose demo was far too short, lasting only about 20-30 minutes, and didn’t really show off much about the game. The jumping did not feel fluid and the cooking felt generic as well. It dropped a story nugget and then immediately ended the demo. (5/10)
• Dream Tactics, a blend between a tactical JRPG and a deck-builder, the art and writing was super cute and I liked it very much. The major downside with this game was that it didn’t have as many shortcut buttons as I’d expect, so controls felt janky at first, but it did have some nice QoL features that I wish every game had, like the ability to rewind cutscenes. It also has a terribly generic name. I tried to recall it four times in the two days directly after playing the game demo, and I failed four times. (8/10)
• Yohane the Parhelion – NUMAZU in the MIRAGE –, based on the Love Live! anime spinoff show that I have watched and did like, so I was pretty obligated to play this, especially since it’s a deckbuilder, a genre that I do like as well. The art was pretty, however the animations were repetitive, the gameplay was shallow, the fights were all really easy, the level map layout design was poor, there were a few translation issues (not a ton, but enough to furrow a brow over), voice overs were lazy and basically nonexistent (each character does an “Ahh!” noise or something similar at the start of each of their lines), and there were some weird UI bugs like awarded cards sometimes popping up and then disappearing before you can view them. It had a very “doujin circle with low budget” feel to it, despite the graphics being pretty. It did have some sort of story though, so that part might be interesting. (4/10)
• Cryptmaster, a mix between a party RPG where you start as a group of four undead and have to break your way out to the surface or something, and a typing game like Epistory. I’m not sure if I liked it overall but it was an interesting concept. Chests spawn a guessing game for an item that you’d normally find in a fantasy world chest, and your reward for guessing the item is the word itself — or rather, the letters that make up the word, which give you clues as to what your skills are, and you can type words out at any point to guess the skill itself and unlock it. Then in combat, you type words out to attack enemies with the skills you have unlocked already. Also each of your party members’ names are their health bar. A character with a 3-letter name has a maximum of 3 health, and enemy attacks can knock off letters from their name. It sounded like a game that I’d need a separate sheet of paper in front of my PC to play, but it was novel. Didn’t like the graphics, lack of mouse support, and the unresponsiveness in parts though. (6.5/10)
• Cividle, a mix of an incremental idle game and a Civlization-style 4X game. It’s weird because you can only explore the map by building buildings that expand out your fog of war radius, so I ended up building worker huts here and there just to expand my kingdom’s vision range, but I did need tons and tons of workers anyway since they both work on resource and production buildings as well as produce science, so that worked out. I didn’t play far enough to build wonders or find other players to trade with, especially since building wonders supposedly takes many hours of real time and the demo save file would not sync to the Steam Cloud and thus would probably not carry over to the full game, but I did more or less get the gist of it. Tutorial needs a bit of work, but I liked the in-game global chat system that lets people chat to anyone else playing the game despite it being a single-player game, similar to games like Oafmatch and Tales of Maj’eyal.

I absolutely have to write these down though, because I found myself looking back at old screenshots and blog posts several times over the past year looking for the name of a game demo or two that I played in previous Steam Next Fests.

I also started hanging out at a nice, evening-time secondary Twitch channel called SeriouslyClara, when the primary night-time channel that I lurk on is offline, and she participates in a Twitch-integrated browser game called Stream Raiders (local) in between games that she plays. It reminds me of the Streetpass Mii Plaza games that I used to play on the 3DS. There is absolutely no way I’ll remember that generic game name after a couple of weeks though, especially since she left this week for a two week holiday, so here it is written down for future me.