Amitte

Progress report: Fourth week of July ‘19 (a.k.a. Life is Hard, Man…)

Speaking of life… renovations still aren’t done, but they’ve come along nicely so far - a week or two more, and I should finally be able to start unpacking all my things and putting it on my new furniture. A few other things happened as well, but those are too private to disclose, I should say. And I mean, hey, at least they’re not taking games away from me! Haha. Okay, so here’s what I’ve done this week.

Draw Puzzle - I still remember seeing this game on some stranger’s profile while aimlessly browsing Steam and thinking it looked interesting enough for myself to wishlist… and during this Steam Summer Sale, I finally bought it. Draw Puzzle is, to put it simply, a cross between connecting dots and coloring - the task is to connect dots of the same color and number to color certain boxes on the grid. You can do so in three main modes - Classic, which contains dozens of random pictures, Jigsaw, which, as the name states, features bigger images you can reveal box-by-box to see them in their full glory and Challenge, which is essentially the same as Classic, but the faster you are, the higher score you end up with. Browsing Workshop creations is also possible, but I didn’t really bother. The game is really simple and incredibly fun, it teaches you to play itself over the many levels it throws at you. Considering it took me close to 20 hours (!) to complete it, I’m not even surprised at how savvy I got in relation to how this game works. The fact that you have to connect all the dots perfectly to ensure level completion alone makes it harder than just simple coloring, but I very often managed to complete levels in less than half the time the game estimates level completion to take (I suppose that should be taken with a grain of salt though, it’s not personalised or anything). Since it was a sale, I obviously got Draw Puzzle for cheaper, but having completed it now, I absolutely recommend it for full price. Especially if you’re into coloring games that aren’t necessarily designed with children in mind.

Girls Free - A game so simple you require 1 (one) brain cell to play it. Relatively short 100%, as they say, although the ambient BGM might not suit your taste.

NALOGI - This, ah… is another achievement fountain game. However, if that’s the only thing you want, twenty minutes at the very best and you’re out. I decided to play the whole game through and I can say… it’s nothing special. It is much better than Hanae Novels’ whole catalogue, but it could still use some more polish. It’s just your average, run-of-the-mill indie RPG game, but for some reason it ran poorly, especially in bigger areas. It also tended to crash, which is probably the main reason why it took me longer than it should have to complete it in the first place. The art was a total mix of everything - the main characters are cute anime-style girls (which goes along with the dev’s name, I guess), but there are also two men (who I assume are real-life political figures in Russia) that are drawn in a more realistic style, and generic enemies who look no better than the cliparts you’ve been using since the 90s. The translation of the game is bad and unfinished, too. Enemy names are plain ridiculous. Like, who the heck is “DED”? Does his name mean that he’s already dead? If so, why is he fighting me? So many questions! Speaking of which, the whole point of the RPG is to help out two Russian girls, Sophia and Anna, on the quest of escaping Russia… so I guess the fact that nearly everyone they ever encounter tries to kill them off is because escape is illegal… or just extremely hard, at least in real life. Here, the fights are balanced enough to make you feel worried about the characters’ stats a little bit, but always win the fight. And last but not least, I still don’t know what the title means. I know what the word stands for, but there’s no explanation as to why the game has been titled that. Well, this one is done and dusted, so maybe I’ll learn in the second one…?

NALOGI 2 - So I did get all the achievements, but I didn’t complete this installment. After the little I’ve played, I can hardly grasp what the plot or main objective is here. There is now an option to recruit a members to your party, including the protagonists of the first game, but you can only recruit characters other than them at the very start because of how little money you have. Then you have to pick a quest to embark on… and that’s where I failed. I picked the first quest from the list, but you can’t return from the quest until you’re done with it, and I guess I didn’t have enough items to use; sure doesn’t help when nearly everyone wants to fight you (including chickens!). So yeah, I just give up on this one. Maybe one day.

Sound of Drop fall into poison - Wow! I can’t believe it took me two months (and 16 hours of playtime) to finish this! Seriously though, 16 hours? I must have fallen asleep at some point, because most of the completion times I see around the net are less than 10 hours. Anyway! Sound of Drop is the story of Mayumi, an average middleschooler who is, one day, persuaded by her best friend Himeno to visit Manten Aquarium with the purpose of confirming whether the scary rumors concerning it are true or not. Mayumi agrees reluctantly, however… there is one important thing she forgot to mention beforehand - and that becomes the main plot point. Saying what it is will be spoiling the story, so I’ll stop myself here. Quality-wise, Sound of Drop is a really good, yet possibly still niche title. The character art is pleasant to the eye, each and every character stands out in their own way; CGs are no worse. The soundtrack is, for the most part, so good I unironically want to buy it and listen to it. I really liked the high amount of bad endings, but I wish some of them didn’t repeat (cause in the end they didn’t differ from each other and yet they inflated the ending list). And I wish the horror was more scary than it was disgusting. While I get that it was all happening at an aquarium, mysteriously appearing rotten fish aren’t scary, they’re just repulsive. But maybe I’m nitpicking. What I also didn’t like were the late-game “infodumps” about how the Red Manten Aquarium works. I wasn’t too interested in them and they were so convoluted I read them and I still don’t think I understood them. Additionally, the translation looked like it could use just a little more polish. In the end, I reccommend Sound of Drop if you’re really into VNs, prefer them short and are a horror fan.

The Invisible Hours - Ladies and gentlemen… tonight, I present to you - The Invisible Hours! Here, as a nondescript entity, you wind up on the island accommodating the mansion of a man who need not be introduced - the one and only Nikola Tesla. A murder mystery is afoot! But nothing is like it seems. Only if you follow each and every character closely, you’ll be able to get the complete story. Tequila Works are right in saying that this is not really a game (you cannot influence any part of the story), but exaggerating when they claim it not to be a movie - it’s all semantics, really; The Invisible Hours is the closest to being a movie and that’s what I’d prefer to call it. Gameplay-wise, it allows you to rewind, fast-forward and pause, which is very handy (I swear, my play time is this high only because I refused to skip some of the scenes I’ve seen before, for whatever reason). The object models you can interact with look very detailed, but as long as they’re not collectibles, they’re pointless, unless they were meant to attract VR players. The crouching mechanic is a joke, you only get a centimeter lower; half-crouching in real life would let me get lower than that, seriously. Quality-wise, the graphics look really good (although I don’t know much about that), the voice-acting is superb (the English one, at least) and I found the script very immersive. However, this game-movie isn’t without fault. While the subtitles are big and color-coded, they seem to show up however they want - you won’t see a line from the scene you’re engaged in, but you will see a line from another scene happening nearby. The mansion is huge, but all the characters seem to hear each other just fine from opposite ends of it, no matter if they shout or speak softly; unless it’s about intruding on each other. I mean, wouldn’t it be natural to want to check if everything’s alright in the next room when you hear people loudly arguing, even if you’re busy conversing with someone else? Then again, I have never been a murder suspect in a huge mansion, so I would never know. Looking at the reviews, I can also conclude that the game could use more graphic-related options and the VR functionality is messed up (even though the game was made for VR in the first place?). The latter might have been solved, but I can’t confirm as I played the non-VR version. All in all, The Invisible Hours is… just okay. I’m glad I got it in a bundle, because now that I know how short it is, I would have never gotten it for the normal price anyway. If you like murder mysteries, wait until this one goes on sale or winds up in another bundle.

Now the end of July is definitely coming sooner and sooner… See you all next week!

Trent

Thank you for the review of The Invisible Hours. I’ve added it to my trade wishlist.

When I think of, “run-of-the-mill indie RPG game” I think of one of the mediocre Legend of Grimrock or Torchlight knockoffs, not achievement spam, 1-3 hour, “cute naked anime girls,” RPG maker games. But from a sheer volume perspective, your definition is much more appropriate! :D

Amitte

So wait… are the knockoffs you mentioned somehow worse or better than NALOGI? I can’t really tell :D

Trent

Well, I suppose I can’t say for sure since I’ve never played a NALOGI-like game. And of course it’s just a matter of personal preference anyway…no absolutes on what’s “better” or “worse.”

Amitte

I suppose you’re right about that :)