Amitte

Progress report: March ‘21 (a.k.a. Oh, Bother…)

This month I felt oddly lazy and unmotivated when it came to writing reviews. Playing seems to be another story though, seeing how many games I’ve completed. I’m getting notably closer to my goal, too, being at 59% never played titles! Woot woot! I even took the plunge and started buying some games from a local online marketplace (a third of this month’s kills are from there!) However… at the end of the month, Sony announced the closure of the PSP, PS3 and PSVita digital stores, which means I’ll be taking my time playing through as many PS3/PSVita games I can get my hands on in the coming months. Although seeing how many games I’ve got here, you’ll still undoubtedly be seeing some progress here, too.
Now, for this month’s kills:

A Mortician’s Tale - I’ve been very interested in what this game is like, seeing that it has to do with working as a mortician, yet has an eye-catching, goth aesthetic (I’ve met people who were interested in working as morticians or had relatives in the field, but I don’t think I’d have enough courage to keep asking about what it’s like), ever since I found it. Then, especially after it got bundled, people seemed to have been praising it highly… but I’m with those who didn’t share the sentiment. While most exposition as to what’s going on is presented through the emails you can read each in-game day, they’re not enough to let you care much about the characters, like a “found phone” game would. Every body preparation sequence you go through, the game holds your hand constantly, even when it repeats (and yes, it does repeat). The minesweeper minigame is randomly generated, and therefore more annoying than standard minesweeper; thankfully you can cheat it, though. It’s not required to progress in the game, but my favorite part was probably reading the newsletter the main character is subscribed to. While it does end in a good place, it’s a shame A Mortician’s Tale doesn’t expand further, giving the player a chance to get more invested in a story from the current ending onwards.

Cibele - This game advertises itself simply by saying it’s “based on a true story about love, sex, and the internet”. However - and I regret having to say this - you can not feel any of those three things in Cibele. While, yes, simply put, it is a story of a girl and guy that meet through an online game and convince themselves that they’re in love with each other, the way it’s all showcased doesn’t translate any feelings. I would be lying if I said I was never in a similar situation - meeting someone nice online, talking to them (semi-)daily and slowly confusing it for love - it happens; yet still, I was convinced that while there was a handful of photos from different periods of the MC’s life being showcased in the game, most of what the main focus of the story was is most likely locked away inside of her. Speaking of which, the note that ends the game is a definite sign that she was able to present this story through Cibele because she’s since moved on from it on an emotional level, or she really thinks what happened wasn’t… bad? Wrong? For her sake, I hope it’s the former. So while her in-game desktop is totes kawaii and the fictional game she plays looks pretty amazing (controling it is a whole another thing), Cibele is not worth its standard price… or even its lowest recorded price. The only reason I don’t regret getting it is because I bought it outside of Steam for peanuts… aaand I kind of knew what I was getting into? Let’s face it, I really wanted to see that fake game in action.

Frog Detective 2: The Case of The Invisible Wizard - puts on a comedic voice I bought the sequel… In all seriousness though, there’s not much change or anything - you just control Frog Detective (yes, that is actually his name) on a whole new case. Oh, and you get to decorate a notebook! This game foreshadows yet another continuation to Frog Detective’s adventures, but… huh, I wonder.

Hentai Hexa Mosaic - This completion marks the end of my collection (at least as it stands currently) of games with a blatant “hentai” in the title. I wasn’t really planning on playing it any time soon, since I thought that given its nature, this game is hard ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°); but as it turned out, multiple players posted screenshots of all the puzzles, which was enough to help me complete the game without any trouble. As expected, there wasn’t anything amazing. It does seem to proud itself in having music composed specifically for itself, but I’d rather listen to some generic Kevin McLeod tunes than that soundtrack… it sounded like being stranded deep in space, which felt alienating. No pun intended.

Indie Game: The Movie - This one was in unfinished hell for quite a while, because I wasn’t willing to cave in and buy the special edition DLC until just recently. I had watched the main movie… three times? before that, to get all achievements fair and square and I enjoyed it. Everyone featured in the movie felt like a friend by the end of it, but different kinds, in a way - Phil Fish is the crazy, overdramatic friend you’re looking to dump, Team Meat are the guys next door who feel like they need a pat on the back, and Jon Blow is the one friend nobody really understands. I’ve never been interested in games from a technical standpoint, since those kinds of things just go way over my head, but as a player, I liked getting a look at what game creation looks like from behind the scenes, with the emphasis on all presented titles being independent. The Special Edition DLC nearly doubles the runtime of the original movie, featuring a series of short vignettes such as Team Meat’s uncomfortable online encounters, Phil Fish’s opinions on the original movie or introductions to other well-known indie titles like Passage or Spelunky. All in all, a decent watch.

It’s Spring Again - It only makes sense that I would play this one on the first day of spring. It’s Spring Again is a short kids’ game about the four seasons. Through interacting the environment you’re introduced to the defining qualities of each season as it comes and goes. The lowest price point is definitely most appropriate, but I also think I lucked out with getting this game almost for free a while ago. (Although if it strikes your fancy, you could pay for the Collector’s Edition to watch the puppet show this game is based on! I gotta check that out some day.)

Jellyfish Season - Easily better looking (and sounding!) than tons of other indie Russian VNs, but it ends very abruptly and the conclusion is not at all satisfying.

Life is Strange - As it goes, I find I have trouble writing about games I like, so I’ll do my best to repeat what I’ve just gathered and written down somewhere else. I first played Life is Strange on the PS3, back in 2018. Being my first serious exposure to time travel (excluding something like Harry Potter, since it was never the main moving force), it reeled me in. I liked watching the different mechanics it manifested itself through and the consequences of its repeated use. I faintly remember being annoyed by Chloe’s extremely short fuse, yet willing to go along with what she wanted Max to do - perhaps because I could see myself in Max, or perhaps just because I felt Chloe is cool. Upon this replay, however… I realized LiS seems to be to time travel lore what Twilight is to vampire lore. Max’s powers expand for plot convenience as the in-game week progresses and there are a bunch of plot-holes concerning them. By the time I reached the final choice, the answer was a no-brainer to me. Having played Steins;Gate (which makes you more invested in time travel AND the whole main cast) and Amnesia: Memories (a much worse experience, but its story is moved by the same trope as the other two), I’ve learned one thing - if the universe wants someone dead, you have to let it happen to move on from it. Therefore, while the developers have stated that neither of the endings are considered “canon”, as it stands, my opinion is that sacrificing Chloe is the canon ending. Max and Chloe’s friendship, sadly, runs only on nostalgia of what happened years back, and in current time, is being fueled by the fact that Max can travel in time, with Chloe wanting to utilize that for things that are either trivial or potentially dangerous. Chloe (almost) dying multiple times throughout the week is just the cherry on top. If Max does opt to keep her alive and leave Arcadia Bay, who’s to say disaster won’t follow them everywhere they go? That’s one thing Steins;Gate showcases perfectly, in my opinion. While I do respect the developers’ choice to make a game with a female protagonist, who can (barely) romance her best friend, I dare say players might have gotten too wrapped up in that fact, while ignoring how toxic of a person Chloe really is. On the contrary, Warren is a character I really like, even though he didn’t get nearly enough screen time, just like the rest of Max’s class, but the developers decided to have his advances go nowhere, as Max notes that she sees him as a brother figure, being either unaware of how he might feel for her, or “too aware” of it, as players seem to like making him into a creep… guys, it’s not possible to see into a second floor window from outside ground. It’s really not. Moving on from all the spoiler babble - the art style has an unique hand-painted feel to it, but I’ve got no idea how it’s so detailed you’d need a high-spec PC to run it. I really hope it’s not that bad in the following games (or perhaps the remastered versions, whenever those come out). The music is great; while I don’t really listen to indie folk, I enjoy the songs that were licensed for use within the game every now and then; one of the songs struck an even more nostalgic chord with me when I heard it during my first playthrough - turns out my mom had been listening to it a lot, possibly before the game had even come out! The voice acting is on point, especially for Max and Chloe, although there is one thing I have to say - if you have the money for it, don’t hold off on hiring more voice actors. The more characters you get one person to voice - assuming you can tell it is the same person - the less impact they make. Especially when it’s the voice of the antagonist. Why, why, why did you get your antagonist to voice, like, four or five other characters? Sigh. On that note, I was ready to say Life is Strange is going on my Favorites list, but having thought it over, I decided to hold my breath. Now all I can think about is tackling Before the Storm in a few months and seeing whether or not Rachel Amber really was worth the MacGuffin role she took on here.

Lucius - One day some guys from Finland decided to make a game about the son of Satan himself… and now we’re here! Simply put, Lucius is Hitman, except instead of being hired, you are basically destined to kill. Throughout the game, you will learn how and why you’ve been born - and are recognized - as a member of that exact family. As for the gameplay, the first steps are easy, the game introduces you to new mechanics as they get unlocked, but it quickly becomes tougher, or, dare I say, nigh-impossible to figure most of it out without a guide. Where do I go? Why there? What do I have to get? Why do I have to place it in the one spot the game’s designated for me with a floating arrow? So many questions. And on top of that, the game is buggy. Despite having a glaring issue with objects clipping through walls, there is a sequence in one of the chapters where you need to levitate an object and drop it in a specific place. Couple that with a lack of sense for depth perception and you’ll have yourself a bunch of replays. There are also a few things to be said about the achievements. When you get to the end of the game, you have to choose to complete it the “action” way or else the last few story-related achievements won’t pop. There’s also an achievement for riding a bike not unlike Danny in The Shining for 10 miles… except either a part of the controls is inverted or they’re just stupid precise, because it’s a pain in the ass to control and I ended up just cycling in circles out in the courtyard. And last but not least… two playtime achievements… sigh Listen, man. This game takes 10 hours to complete at most, and that’s if you didn’t know what to do somewhere or kept failing in one way or another. You can’t just make me pretend I’m actively playing your game for another 30 hours… I did it, though. Not play, just idle. I’ve completed the game near the start of the month and kept idling it until just a few days ago. It was a passable experience, but I’m not too hot for the sequels; the demake might still be decent though.

Sherlock Holmes: The Mystery of The Mummy - Remembering that Chapter One’s release might as well be right around the corner good god young Holmes has no business being that hot, I decided to get started with the franchise properly. And as life would have it, the first installment is… this. The Mystery of The Mummy had been released all the way back in 2002 and is now completely free to play on Steam. Why don’t people really check it out, then? The answer is simple: it sucks. One might say it contains multiple layers of suck. I don’t know what the gaming standard was like back in 2002, but something tells me this game isn’t up to it. The game launches in an 800x600 window by default (although I hear it looks better in the 640x480 resolution?), the cutscenes and character models presented in them are ugly, and frankly I can’t say I was invested in the story at any point of the game because of the thickest and most intrusive layer of shit - this game is, at its base, unplayable. It launches in a window to the left of your screen (which you can’t even move, because the cursor gets locked within), with your mouse going apeshit, rendering you unable to progress in any way; and even if you did manage to start the game and watch the opening cutscene, then unless you’re using a computer that’s half your age, the speed at which the screen moves would give you vertigo before you could do anything. What you have to do to run the game right is actually detailed in a discussion topic created by a fellow Steam user, and while it’s nothing intrusive or impossible to wrap one’s head around… it’s not something that should have to be done if you just want to play a game. I was willing to try for myself and try I did. If you’re thinking about playing it, but can’t quite make up your mind, feel free to skip this one.

SIMULACRA 2 - Finally! It’s been on my mind for days, if not weeks before I got it, so I figured it was time that I play it, seeing as I’ve already tackled the two other games from the franchise. While the first game talked about online dating and Pipe Dreams covered mobile games, this one is all about… cue dramatic inflection influencing. Your victim and potential suspects are all different types of influencers - you’ve got a fitness freak (might as well call her that) who greets her fans with “namaste” and claims vegetable smoothies are all you need to cleanse your body; you’ve got a fashion/beauty guru who’s bold enough to claim she’s affiliated with a popular, rich-people brand yet petty enough to bitch about having her “photoshoot wall” stolen from her (spoiler alert: it’s a public wall); an “entrepreneur” who runs a Ponzi scheme so obvious he has to correct his instinct to call its work plan a “pyramid” and can’t even be bothered to lip-sync properly; and last, but not least, a musician who claims she wouldn’t have fans if not for the image she built on lies and emotional manipulation, yet also insists on believing that deep underneath all of that she’s still herself. Simply put, they’re all different flavors of shitty… but then again, that makes it much easier for you to go straight down the road to a bad ending. Speaking of which, getting to the good ending is crazy contrived. I mean, sure, as you play the game again and again to get all the endings, you’re gonna know exactly where to get all the information… but then again, I feel like talking to everyone the right way and getting whatever you need out of them is kinda tricky. And as for the replayability… sure, there are different responses you can experience and other things to see, but at the end of the day, this is supposed to be a horror game and it’s not exactly scary to repeatedly go through the motions of scheduled jumpscares, unless you’re particularly jumpy. For me, the scariest jumpscare had still been the ringtone… and while I still don’t get the idea of the victim having a photo of themselves set as the phone wallpaper, the ominous Kubrick Stare™ that appears on Maya’s face as you get on the path to a bad ending is single-handedly the scariest thing in the game to me, and really helps imagine what the simulacra’s done to her. Kind of funny when I think back to being creeped out by Anna from the first game, since she turns out to be good and innocent all across the board. The encounter with the new simulacra is also chilling, with distorted pleas of its victims resounding in its being as it talks to you. I wanted to talk about how campy the acting is, but honestly, this has been a thing with the previous games as well and it’s exactly why I like them so much. Maya’s occasional Miranda Sings-style inflection does wonders to lower the scare factor. Verdict: unless Kaigan Games somehow find another aspect of today’s culture to base a sequel/new spin-off on, perhaps it’s time to step away from found phone horror and venture out into something different. I did notice that they’ve recently made a Doctor Who found phone game, but as I know nothing about the show, I will not be picking it up.

Skyscrapers Puzzle: Airi’s Tale - An unique blend of Exactly What It Says On The Tin™ - the so-called “skyscraper puzzles”, which, while sort of similar to sudoku, aren’t derived from it, I don’t think (?) and the tale of Airi, who also happens to be the face of the whole game. I went only through the tutorial on my own and while I was filling in all the solutions using a guide, I realized that either I still don’t understand the principle of how those puzzles work or that the puzzles conflict themselves… The whole VN mode contributed nothing to the game in my opinion, it was some random story about how Airi is actually an android and such… I barely even read it, just doing the things outlined in the guide for the sake of getting achievements. Quoting one of the commenters on said guide, “How do you even figure any of this stuff out…”

The Francy Droo and Friends Collection - Oh, a Rock! Studios, coming in with five of their VNs for the price of one! This collection contains the two Francy Droo (a name you can’t mistake) games, which were easily my favorites, Who Am I? The Let’s Play Disaster (a meta commentary on let’s playing and online presence), My Nigerian Prince and TRAPPED! In a Soap Opera, which are Exactly What It Says on The Tin™. I’m not good at describing humor, but while the kind contained in those VNs isn’t one to make you keel over laughing, I found it appealing. The minimalistic, MSPaint art style only serves it further and… you know what, just… if you have five bucks lying around and don’t know what to spend it on, get this.

Thing-in-Itself - A short experience (“not a game in a traditional sense”, as the devs will have you know!) based on Immanuel Kant’s philosophy of the same name. I’m not big on philosophy, but, uhh… I suppose this illustrated what it is? The hero saw everything there was to see in different ways depending on his state of mind… and even that is kind of a spoiler for what this is. I bought it for cheap and don’t regret it, but I’d never buy it for its standard asking price.

Unhack 2 - Checking back to see what I thought about the first game, I’ve realized that I completed it back in my most productive Steam gaming month - March of 2019! How cool is that?! Unhack 2 picks up where the prequel left off, with the main character still at work as an unhacker, this time accompanied by a whole new AI partner - Neonya. The sequel is a full-fledged VN, accompanied by puzzles alike the ones from the first game, which are spread evenly throughout the story and fully skippable without locking the player out of related achievements. As opposed to the prequel, Unhack 2 lacks voice acting, which could be said to be a con, but I think the graphical improvements all over the place make up for it. I’m glad to have finally seen this series through to the end and will be picking up InvertMouse’s other VNs in the future.

See you next month! :)

Adelion

Yea, playtime achievements are silly. Especially if the content keeps you busy for a few hours and it needs 50 hours just for the achievement. Another reason against Lucius. At one point it interested me but I have this strange case with video games that I don’t like playing the bad ones or being morally questionable. Nonetheless, an impressive haul for just March O.o

I will refrain from a rant about my disdain for most timetravel stories :P There are very very few examples where I don’t mind them. In most cases I get heart strokes mainly due to the Grandfather paradox.

Amitte

Yomawari is another game like that, from what I’ve been seeing. Not too hot about playing it, but whenever I do… eh, sure. Don’t hurt me or my machine, really. In fact, I would idle the game exactly when I knew I was going to watch a movie or play on my PS4 - almost done with Until Dawn on there.
About the kill count… first of all, thank you >_<; second of all… I am a student who doesn’t… really… study… outside of class… >.> so apparently I have enough time to knock all those out. On the other hand, don’t count on any of the RPGs I own or Yakuza 0 showing up in my posts any soon, those are real time sinks!

See, I thought the time travel motive was cool when introduced in Harry Potter; although short and not that important in the grand scheme of things, it adhered to the rules it established. Life is Strange, though… I felt so good when the “it’s like Twilight, but for time travel lore” crept up, that’s how on point it is (lol) - just like Twilight vampires glisten in the sunlight, in Life is Strange Max can tell her college dropout friend she just traveled X units of time back and her friend will not only not question it, but be amazed, always. Like, hello? Time travel isn’t a normal thing? I’d also be pointing out the fact that if she picks something up and then travels back to before she got said thing, it should go back to where it was, yet it doesn’t; that’s to let you progress through the game, though.
In Steins;Gate, which I will keep mentioning like a broken record when it comes to talking about time travel in fiction, the cast being clueless about the possibility of time travel goes hand in hand with them not retaining memories of other worldlines. So while technically it could be stupid and/or dangerous to talk about it, there’s always someone competent enough who’s willing to listen to the whole story (skipped for the player’s convenience) all over again and believe it.
And from what I gather, there is no grandfather paradox in any of the stories I mentioned. If anything, Steins;Gate has a character doing their best not to have their birth be undone in the past :’D