March Progress Picks: CHUCHEL, Dishonored 2 and The Walking Dead

• CHUCHEL
  

  3 hours playtime

  7 of 7 achievements

• Dishonored 2
  

  39 hours playtime

  38 of 50 achievements

• The Walking Dead: A New Frontier
  

  12 hours playtime

  30 of 30 achievements

Just a quick update as I only have the three games to report, hopefully my progress will be better in April!

CHUCHEL - Very rarely do I buy games near their release date as with my backlog it makes sense to wait for prices to drop, but I was in the mood for some childish silly fun and Amanita Design games, especially Botanicula, have provided me that in the past, just seeing the trailer was enough for me to think yes this is what I need! That black and orange monster thing you can see on the game’s thumbnail is what you “control” for the game, CHUCHEL reminded me a lot of the Squirrel and the acorn from the Ice Age films, with the obsession to protect in this case a cherry, I’m sure they drew heavy inspiration from that! The game itself is good, and despite being so short I think it would have lost its charm if there were any more levels. I just love how unpredictable everything is, first you have to try to decipher what the interaction options might mean, then you need to see how they might be useful in progressing the level, and then you witness the chaos that unfolds and laugh at all the unexpected outcomes from how things suddenly escalate.

Dishonored 2 - I originally booked a week off work for Easter with the idea of playing a big game from my backlog, most likely being Witcher 3, however having put 100 hours into Dragon Age Inquisition I wasn’t feeling like jumping into another open world just yet, so Dishonored 2 felt like a good choice for something different. In short, this was just as incredible as I found the first game which I also strongly recommend, please don’t skip it! The level design is impressive with so many routes to take to objectives that make exploration so much fun. I played as Corvo, non-lethal, with no detections, which made travelling around quite difficult with that added challenge, thankfully not too much to the point of being frustrating, though I’m relieved I didn’t try a no-powers run on my first playthrough! It’s absolutely worth spending plenty of time on every level, of which there are 9, just looking for bonecharms, runes and paintings as a good indicator of some hidden rooms you can find, I averaged about 3-4 hours for each of them. The difficulty can be punishing at times for this playstyle, I found the final confrontation with Delilah especially challenging and I’m sure I just got lucky in the end, however for most of the game guards patrol and look for you exactly how might expect, they look underneath tables, they follow noises, they often don’t patrol alone and so get spooked if their friend goes missing, and their vision to detect you seems fair enough that it’s hard to be mad at the game when you mess up and have to reload again, later on the witches and clockwork soldiers make things a bit more interesting too. I have to give special mentions to the Clockwork mansion, which was kind of showcased a bit in the E3 2015 trailer (which happens to be one of the coolest trailers ever!) and of course using the Timepiece in A Crack in the Slab to switch between the present and the past to navigate your way around a once luxurious mansion now in decay and I absolutely loved seeing the differences in detail between them, as well as just how clever the whole mission is with ways you can change history, this level actually reminded me of Bioshock 2 with that section where you play as a Little Sister and see the world through their eyes when Rapture was at its finest, there’s something about seeing places in two dramatically different states that is especially awesome. The game looks great and Karnaca was a nice change to the gloomy Dunwall, I couldn’t stop myself from taking loads of screenshots. And there’s a lethal playthrough to look forward to in the future which can be more relaxed now I don’t have to worry about detections. Dishonored 2 is easily one of the best games I’ve ever played and I genuinely can’t find a fault in it, even the story which I read some complaints about was fine for me, there’s something about knowing the key targets early on and working your way through them, building up to the most important, that fits really well in a game where you basically play as an assassin, perhaps one criticism would be the early resolution to the Crown Killer, I think they could have spent more time with that character and I never thought I’d say this but the Addermire Institute deserved to be a lot scarier than it was.

The Walking Dead: A New Frontier - It seems to be popular at the moment to be critical of Telltale, or at least it was prior to Guardians of the Galaxy and the second season of Batman, however I don’t think the game deserves too much hate despite having plenty of complaints of my own. So for starters I couldn’t form attachments to any of the new characters (a massive highlight of the first season which made the deaths so hard to take) and I didn’t really feel anything from the ending, the terrible writing at the worst possible times (I never found you that candy bar), how the ending in the second season I replayed twice for barely made a difference, and of course the big one that the story demands all your paths to meet regardless of the choices you make so it inevitably makes them feel worthless! Clementine returns but not as the main protagonist, instead we are introduced to Javi and his family who ends up crossing paths with her, I didn’t mind this but it put me in an awkward situation due to how familiar we the players are of Clementine that I was being trustful and siding with her, when Javi would surely if he wasn’t being controlled would have stuck more with the people he himself knows. I still think it was worth playing for sure and I’ve yet to feel like Telltale have ever wasted my time - Game of Thrones came very close. They’re perfect to play over a weekend once all the episodes are out, and there was plenty of drama in this one, just a shame how forced some of it felt.