Another Zachtronics game beaten, and i must admit Shenzhen I/O is the hardest one i've played (so far). I needed a guide for the last few puzzles, and i will forever hang my head in shame

It started about halfway through, when i just needed a guide for the circuit designs, which i found i was overcomplicating. Once i had that, i could write the code to finish the puzzle. However, this slowly morphed into not knowing how to code the solution anymore, or more specifically, i struggled with creating a solution that fit into fourteen (14!) lines of code. There's an interesting language twist with the test conditions, followed by the + - statements, that do well to reduce the lines of code (at the cost of mental load, at least for me), but it often wasn't enough. And if a component needed more lines than available, you need to add another component, which means you need even more code lines to manage the info passing between them, and so my solutions easily cascaded into an overcomplicated nightmare

To be fair to Shenzhen's difficulty though, i haven't completed all the puzzles in Infinifactory and TIS-100, so maybe they become as hard as this, but it didn't seem that way from what i have seen. SpaceChem was pretty hard, and i'm sure i used a guide at the end (so long ago), but Opus Magnum and Molek-Syntez were definitely not like this - and i enjoyed them more for it

If you enjoyed Deus Ex: Human Revolution, you'll enjoy Mankind Divided. It's basically the same game, just improved slightly in a few areas. Augmentations are touched up slightly, with some "experimental" augs added in. The energy system for aug use is better overall, with a dynamic max recharge point. World design is still open-linear (small but dense open-worlds to explore, in sequence), but is more believable, while still being fun to sandbox around

Mechanically the game is built on four core pillars: stealth, combat, hacking, and conversation - conversation is the simplest pillar, including a single augmentation (this game's upgrades/super-powers) and is mostly a way to bypass a section, or achieve a particular outcome, by choosing the correct dialogue options. There are some moments where finding a key piece of evidence is required, which is a nice way to tie the other pillars back in, and one of this game's improvements. The aug for this is a bit improved as well, giving more understandable hints to the most effective choice, and some "interrupts" at key points

Stealth is largely unchanged, but the improved map design makes it that much more fun to sneak a route through a level. I went for an MGS-style no deaths, no alarms playthrough, so this was the whole game for me, and so i didn't touch the combat much, if at all. What i did touch seems fun to toy with, although enemies were a bit too easy to remove with the stun gun/tranquilizer - perhaps more resistant baddies spawn when the alarm goes off..

Hacking is also the same (unbalanced) mini-game, but they've given you a few more virus softwares to apply to it. There's also been more effort to not make hacking mandatory in a playthrough, but considering how useful it is - to every play-style - you'll almost certainly end up doing it at some point.
Side note: i'm starting to really hate random chance in video games - you just end up save-scumming, it's so silly. Every time i had to perform some hacking i would be imagining a more determinant, puzzle-like minigame. Maybe i'll sketch up something on some future rainy day…

Narratively, the game is kinda weird. Apparently, after the augmented went crazy near the end of the last game, augs have now become second-class citizens in society. Which makes no sense, when these are the people that can do nearly everything better than "normal" people (a major theme in the previous game). It also means the story has to jump around to justify the main character's existence at his position of power. A major plot point is a proposed bill to relocate augs to their own state, apartheid-style, which is being engineered by the Illuminati, because.. reasons. The story just tapers off at a certain point, leaving much unresolved. Possible development issues ?

The DLC consists of three self-contained stories, which were fun as relatively short romps through smaller levels, making more calculated augmentation choices because of the limited length. The first two are mostly just snapshots of the main game, and while the third can technically be that too, there's an option (and achievement) to play the whole thing without any augs - just a regular human. Playing with this limitation, i found myself having to be more creative in finding ways around obstacles, or else just resigning to never get past certain ones, which was a refreshing change.

Mankind Divided unfortunately inherits a lot of the contradicting design decisions of Human Revolution, although i still had fun exploring all the secret tricks and passageways in each area. Someone really needs to remake the very first Deus Ex…

Calm down, it's not the hyper-popular sequel, just the original. Although i probably have that one to thank for the surge in players patriots recently

Anyway Helldivers is great. I won't go on too much about it because almost everything carries over between games, so anything you've read/heard about number 2, just mentally transplant across, adjust the perspective to a top down view, and you'll have a pretty good idea

Just a few things though; mechanically, the game is skewed towards co-op play so well it's frightening. Simple things like reloads, ammo supplies, and friendly-fire do so much to keep this together. Your team even shares a camera viewpoint (yes, even when playing online), which forces everyone to stick together

And then there's the Starship Troopers space fascist satire (American foreign policy simulator, as one review quipped). Much smarter (and much stupider) people than myself have already said more than enough about it, but i remember being very struck with how the language of liberal democracy is warped so effectively towards these fascist ends…. machine gun go brrrrrr…

About a year after buying this game for my sister she's finally getting into it, which has helped me progress to the beaten stage - and will likely mean we play even more just for "fun" (whatever that is)

So i finally summoned enough courage to play Alien: Isolation. This one's been sitting on the shelf for a while..
Let me tell you, i am shocked that this game didn't come out like, last year or something. It is gorgeous

A big part of that gorgeousness is the environment design. Along with lovely lighting and effects, the Sevastopol space station (and docked vessels) are crafted with an amazing attention to detail. Also impressive is that they very much keep to the style of "future tech, as presented by the 70s" - monitors are chunky and monochrome; hacking tools look like Gameboys; everything has knobs and dials, and beeps and scans like something made back then

The sound of the game is as impressively well-designed as the environment. Along with the clicks and whirs of machinery, there's beeps from various devices, hisses and clanks from the ventilation (is there something in there?), the vaguely threatening mutterings of a Working Joe android, and then suddenly the thump of something large dropping from above, followed by stomping as it searches for you; it seems to be getting closer..

As an audio-visual piece Alien: Isolation is lovely - as a game, it is terrifying. The Alien is constantly hunting you, and gets better at it as the game progresses; you're fairly fragile, even on lower difficulties, and you're almost always under-equipped. It's part of the challenge (and fun, i guess), to find creative uses for what you do have, to get out of whatever bad situation you're in this time. Even scrounging for ammo and parts presents a risk

Lastly, something i didn't exactly expect was the Metroid influence. I'm not sure how much was intentional, and how much was "just neat game design", but instead of being a fully linear narrative game (it still mostly is), different parts of the station become available as you acquire the tools to unlock them. Also, the whole vibe and basic setup gave me flashbacks of Metroid: Fusion. Of course with Metroid being influenced by Alien (the movie), i could very easily be reading into things

I usually play games in the evening, after work, and with the Deck it's more common that i play in bed. I'll just say; very bad idea to play this game before bed. The last few chapters were particularly sleep-stopping, where the intensity cranks up to eleven. Although to be honest, i'm a bit of a baby when it comes to horror, so your personal terror may vary.
Fully recommend this game*

*if you can handle it

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is a game that attempts to emulate the famous bomb defusing scenes, in movies and TV. Once again, an ingenious idea for a game, and executed neatly as well

It's an exclusively co-op game, where one player has the Bomb Defusal Manual in front of them, and the other has the bomb itself. Player one must then guide player two through defusing the bomb, without mistakes, and before the bomb goes off

Each bomb is helpfully divided into modules that need to be individually defused, and the arcane rules of correctly doing this leads to a back-and-forth between the two players that quite accurately emulates the scenes it's based on. Take a look if you're interested

Playing this on the Deck made it much easier to rope in my (non game-playing) partner, and we ended up having a lot of fun. We've made it to the end of the "Challenging" section, which is enough for beaten purposes, but we may play more - and i might try get other friends/family into a round or two

Well, it's been quite a while since my last post here - i've been playing Tyranny (and some other games here and there, but mostly Tyranny). A game where "sometimes, evil wins", as the advertising tagline said back then. Tyranny is a game from Obsidian, who have explored similar themes of power and the nature of evil in Knights of the Old Republic 2 and Fallout: New Vegas (with similar levels of quality writing). Here they dive straight in though; evil is not just a path you can choose in your fantasy role-play, it's the baseline state of the world. Your choices here are ones of compromise and negotiation, of choosing the "lesser evil" - whatever that is to you

Gameplay-wise, it has the same backbone as their game before this one, Pillars of Eternity, which itself was largely a recreation of the Infinity Engine games (Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale) - an isometric party RPG roughly based on Dungeons & Dragons' rules, that opts for real-time play (with tactical pause), rather than fully turn-based. Where Pillars was explicitly modelled after D & D and its character class system, Tyranny goes for a skill-based system instead: every character can use any skill, and doing so gives some experience in that skill; enough experience and it ranks up, which then contributes to overall character experience (and levels there). If you've played Skyrim (who hasn't) you'll know what i'm talking about. The six fundamental character attributes will give inherent bonuses to different skills, along with their usual bonuses to health, defense, damage, etc

There are skill trees though, with passive and active abilities, and since each playable character has a unique set, this ends up mostly defining their "class". As the MC, you have a bit more leeway in how you want to define your play-style though. Along with abilities, we have a fairly unique spell system, which everyone can make use of, provided they've trained the appropriate skills. It's worth mentioning because of its interesting implementation; all spells need a core sigil, which defines the type of magic (fire, frost, emotion, etc), and an expression sigil which defines the form of the spell (touch, ranged bolt, cone blast, area, aura, etc), along with some optional accents, which modify aspects of the spell (damage, range, duration, etc). Besides being genuinely fun to explore all the spell constructions, the use of linguistic terms draws parallels to the real source of power in this world (we'll get to that in a bit)

Game mechanics are all well and good, but the reason we're here is for the masterful writing and narrative. The game starts (after character creation, naturally) with a conquest phase, where you choose the actions that your character made during the Conquest of the Tiers, the last corner of the world unconquered by Kyros the Overlord. This section is a great snapshot of the decisions you'll make during the game, because there is no option to save the people of the Tiers - it will be dominated; you only get to decide how that domination is carried out. After that, you are sent to administer Kyros' Peace to the final remaining rebellion in the Tiers (and the whole world), where two of Kyros' armies, the Disfavored and the Scarlet Chorus, are struggling to cooperate enough to squash the rebels

And so the stage is set for an exploration of evil, and all the tiny compromises we make with ourselves to protect what we have, but which ultimately enable the spread of tyranny. There are three major factions you can join up with (Disfavored, Scarlet Chorus, and Rebels), and each of them explore different aspects of this negotiation with yourself, and with the people hoping to exert their power on you. The storyline sends you and your party to a couple of areas, with their own factions, and their own disputes, so you can explore these questions even more. You play as a Fatebinder of Tunon the Adjudicator, which means most of the game involves arbitrating disputes, interpreting Kyros' laws into a suitable resolution

Along the way, you start to realise that it's these judgements and resolutions, and the reputation that they generate among the people, is the source of Kyros' overwhelming power. To me, this is simply a supernatural skew of the power structures of this world, the real one, where power generates reputation, and is rewarded with more power. Just that idea on its own would be impressive, but the fact that it's conveyed through a video-game - an interactive medium - where you can actively make choices and exert your will, is simply amazing

So i finally played Titanfall 2, and yeah, it's a lot better than what i'd expect from a military shooter single-player campaign. Of course i knew this going in, having heard about it before, but what can i say? Good game is good

At it's core it's still a military shooter, but it adds a bunch of extra mechanics to shake things up and differentiate itself. For starters you can double-jump and wall-run, and i'm not sure, but it felt like a proper momentum-based system, rather than the controlled animations i'd expected. The guns are pretty traditional in design, with a few energy weapons sprinkled in, but grenades seem a bit more inventive. From the start of the game, you have an active-camo ability, which adds that one extra layer of tactical choice around firefights

Then of course, there's the Titans. During the campaign, your character only interacts with the one - and his AI character is arguably the star of the show - but you can change load-outs to your liking. Battles inside a Titan are different beasts - it's slower and more deliberate, and they each have a set of abilities on cool-downs, as well as an ultimate that charges through damage. A little bit more of a back and forth, push and pull, when battling titan vs. titan. You are also free (in most cases), to simply exit the titan and take your chances on foot, but i found no reason to do that besides for achievements. A slight missed opportunity there, i think

All these mechanics, used in spectacular set-pieces during the campaign, is what made the game stand out back in the day - of particular note is the level Effect & Cause, which uses a time-travel mechanic to great effect (heh). I'm glad i finally played it, and it's a shame it didn't last longer

Aragami is a stealth game in the classic sense: sneaking around with a character that has very slight combat skill, but does have some choice tools for staying undetected. In this case, the tools are shadow-based powers, as well as some traditional ninja tools

The game starts with your player character summoned through some dark ritual as a spirit of vengeance. Soon after, you are introduced to the first two (fundamental) powers: the ability to teleport to any shadow within range; and the ability to "paint" an area in temporary shadow, for use with the previous warping power. These powers are funded by a "mana" gauge on your character's back (nice touch), which automatically refills in when in shadow, but also empties when in light. There's also a third "twilight" zone that does neither. The light system also (naturally) affects your detect-ability by patrols, so you're highly incentivised to blink from shadow to shadow across an area, timing blinks to avoid guards' sight-lines.

There's also your trusty sword you can use to stab a guard from behind, or quickly silence one that's found you. Finding scrolls in each level lets you unlock (and upgrade) some helpful stealthy abilities, grouped into defensive, aggressive, and passive techniques. Passives are things like hiding bodies with shadow; ledge & ceiling kill abilities; and marking the location of collectibles. These abilities cost nothing except time, and i found were almost always useful. Defensive abilities include seeing enemies through walls, dropping decoys, and temporary invisibility. For the aggressive we have kunai to kill from range; an area blind; and a shadow trap to remove guards from this world. Defensive and aggressive powers don't use your shadow meter, but are on a usage system (two uses for most, if not all). It's kind of weird to have a separate resource for this, but it feels like a way to limit over-reliance - otherwise we could just infinite kunai everything, i guess..

Story-wise, as said before we've been summoned to wreak bloody vengeance on the invading forces of light. It seems to be a young girl who's brought you into being, and she tasks you with freeing the imprisoned empress as your primary goal. The game follows a mission structure, with a different narrative objective each time, but mechanically boils down to "get from point A to B" - the environments you travel through are nice to look at though, and the game has a good overall art-style. You get a mission rating at the end, and bonus emblems for being undetected; killing all enemies; and killing no-one. Over the course of these missions, you slowly find out more about the history of this land, and the main players involved - a decent tale of heroes and revenge, but nothing world-shaking

The DLC campaign, Nightfall, was an interesting one. To start, i was a bit tired of the gameplay by the end of the main campaign, so i came into this with a less-than-receptive attitude. To counteract this, i could clearly see that the devs were conscious of this tiredness, because Nightfall shakes up the mission structure a fair bit. It's still generally A to B, but instead of blindly following a mission marker, they'll have you search an area for intel first, or tail a messenger through village streets. This adjustment, combined with the fact that all shadow powers are unlocked at the start, made the game's objectives feel a little more open to my own planning and experimentation. The entire DLC campaign can be played in co-op as well, for extra stealthy shenanigans

Overall, a decent stealth game, if a little bit too traditional to really transform the genre. Shadow-blinking does feel real good though...