You know what, I don’t feel like doing bimonthly reports. I’ll just write one as soon as I have enough things to say.
REPORT 3: Mostly artsy
First of all, I’ve completed the rest of achievements for Criminal Girls and Simulacra as I’ve set out to do in my previous post, which was pretty easy.
I’ve tried Simulacra: Pipe Dreams, but flappy bird clone-centered gameplay and the requirement of actually gitting gud in it to progress and earn achievements threw me off. I’ll get to it eventually, I guess, but not now.
(EP2: Requiem Aeternam Deo)
Okay, now that was the best entry in the series so far. The first episode’s structure felt like a weird one-off parallel world journey and Delirium was clearly filler, but the second one is where the story and characters really start to shine. The plot felt much more personal and started to take form and get just a tiny bit more coherent to really get the enjoyment out of it. The hand-drawn art is great and the world is super-imaginative.
I’ve yet to play the third episode, but I can already tell that if you like quirky RPGMaker games, these series is a must. You can play the first episode for free on Steam, it’s listed as a demo for Episode 2.
I’ve tried this one to see if it’s any better than The Lady by the same devs. Surprisingly, it was. This game is a sort of a physics (I’m using this term very loosely here) puzzle, where each puzzle takes place in only one room. It’s not difficult at all, although it does demand some abstract thinking of you. Thus, my biggest problem with The Lady - frustrating gameplay getting in the way of appreciating the game’s artistic merit - is gone now. I wouldn’t call the plot coherent (it’s not like it’s supposed to be), but it’s there. The art is nice. This game is also just right about it’s length and it didn’t bore me while it lasted.
If I had to choose something I didn’t like, I’d say the narrator’s voiceover could use some better recording quality and mixing, since I couldn’t make out what she was saying sometimes. Maybe it’s my crappy speakers though. Her lines also felt kinda pretentious and cheesy at the same time, but I’ll give it a pass.
Just a small Zelda clone with a pretty simple plot, puzzle-solving, monster-fighting. It’s too short for a player to fully take notice how bare-bones it is. This game could use some variety and have some more personality to it. But it’s pretty good if you want to kill some time by completing it (all of the achievements are pretty easy to get).
This is a very small game by the guy who made Stranded, a slow borefest which I hated with a passion. Murder is better than that, but not by a large margin.
It’s still essentially barely a game, but at least now it’s more like an interactive story that holds your hand all the way through instead of being a sluggish walking simulator pretending to be poin-and-‘click with the gameplay core being visiting points of interest randomly.
The art is actually pretty nice, but I wouldn’t say the same about the story. The plot manages to jump from being oversimplistic to being confusing, while kinda never going anywhere. Author is a promising artist, but he barely puts anything worthwhile in scriptwriting. “Tolerable” is a key word for this game, since despite it’s shortcomings, it’s still a game that literally points you to the things you’re supposed to click to move the story forward and only lasts for 15 minutes max.
Overall, it didn’t turn out to be a torturous experience like the previous game, but it’s still far from something I’d call good.