ABC Plan Update #2

It’s a unique little experience that smoothly accomplishes what it set out to do. The acting is convincing and the story interesting enough to be worth mulling over after the credits roll. I did happen to find one of the more revealing videos early on, which dampened the mystery a bit.

My only real nitpick is that the interface is very limited when it comes to saving and organizing videos for later viewing. Fortunately this is justified by the story's setting.

Jotun certainly gains a lot of points for presentation. Its visual style is unique, the characters look amazing in motion, and an epic soundtrack is the cherry on top.

While it’s primarily a boss battler, unlocking each boss room first requires you to traverse through several exploration zones in search of runes. These environments display a great sense of scale but are light on combat and puzzle solving, resulting in a feeling of emptiness. Optional health and skill powerups are hidden throughout each one and running around trying to find them all can feel tedious.

The bosses are suitably grandiose, and fortunately the combat controls smoothly. I’d say that the game is suited toward speedrunners in that merely defeating the bosses isn’t all that tough—the true challenge is to do so while adhering to time or skill restraints. I’m not a completionist in the slightest so this type of difficulty doesn’t appeal to me. Still, Jotun was fun and pretty to look at while it lasted.

I was curious to see how the devs would manage to integrate a complex story into a boxing management simulator. Unfortunately they opted to go the easy route and make both aspects as shallow as possible. The story doesn’t take itself at all seriously and has little to offer beyond pop culture references, while the gameplay is simple and repetitive. Train your stats, eat and/or sleep then work jobs to afford more training and eating. Punch Club’s sole unique feature is stat decay. Your fighter loses a portion of his stats at the end of each day, necessitating a continuous grind just to retain his progress. At first, my pitifully slow progression felt like a nice complement to the story’s underdog vibe. Once I gained a better understanding of the game and how to manage my time efficiently, maintaining my stats started to feel like busywork. There were few opportunities to break away from the same daily routine, and no upgrades to work toward except skill points which, naturally, required their own grind. That said, the game’s overall simplicity would have been tolerable had the actual fights been interesting.

Instead they’re also very basic: select a number of skills in advance for your fighter to use then watch the AI take over. Success isn’t determined by strategy—there are few options in that regard—but by how efficient you are at grinding for stat and skill points. About halfway through my playtime I unlocked the best skills, crammed them into my build, and began beating all my fights without changing it once. All that remained was a repetitive slog to the story’s conclusion.

Punch Club was also quite buggy and crashed several times for no apparent reason.

A solid but unmemorable experience. In hindsight, my expectations were unfairly high going in. I loved the cyberpunk aesthetic and was eager to get fully immersed into its universe. It’s just such a cool and attractive setting. The environments are detailed and make excellent use of colour, while the lore is an interesting blend of cyberpunk and high fantasy. What eventually killed my enjoyment of this game was its extreme linearity. There’s a dearth of side content and, aside from a few key characters, the NPCs have little to say. Very few choices matter. The writing quality never rises above average and even seems a bit sloppy at times. I noticed more than a few glaringly obvious typos and grammatical errors. The story itself didn’t do much for me. What started out as a gritty murder mystery eventually went down a silly, cartoonish path. At least some of the characters seemed interesting, if only on a surface level. The game just doesn’t last long enough to give them any meaningful development, instead opting to devote most of its roughly 12 hour runtime to combat missions.

The combat uses a fairly standard turn-based tactical system with guns, action points, and cover. The cover system is just sort of… there. Cover is bountiful enough to have minimal impact on your positioning, so at best it’s just a mild inconvenience. I wouldn’t say that its inclusion makes the battles in any way more enjoyable or difficult. If anything does stand out about the combat, it has to be the skill variety. The class archetypes are nicely diversified and the addition of magic spices things up. I genuinely enjoyed creating and leveling my character. Admittedly I ended up relying on guns most of the time, but it’s nice to have options.

Despite my complaining, I feel that the game had a lot of potential and I’m still looking forward to the other entries in this series.

The Walking Dead did a poor job of making me feel like my choices mattered but made up for it with a tense, unpredictable story. This was my first Telltale game and I was quite impressed by how cinematic they managed to make it. The voice acting’s on point, and the camera angles and dramatic lighting boost the suspense level. I rarely enjoy quicktime events, but here they were integrated nicely into the gameplay. The characters stood out as another high point. They’re written to be heavily flawed, realistic and often unlikable; that’s exactly the sort of characterization I want to see from a zombie apocalypse story.