• Strange Antiquities
  

  8.1 hours playtime

  22/22 Achievementos

I have completed this video game, it was great.

This is a puzzle game about deduction. The player controls a shop in which there are several mystic items, relics, etc, but what exactly the are is unknown. However, there is a set of books which list all items with a brief description. Sometimes it describes how it looks like, what it’s associated with (rebirth, the sun, protection), what its purpose is, and so on. There are other books which give details about symbols, gemstones, and curses. Each in-game day has an additional puzzle or two which will provide a new item when solved. They work by giving a hint, visual or text, which will point to a location on the map, inside a castle, or the catacombs.

Every day customers come in and ask for an item, usually requesting it by the specific name, but sometimes they only explain what they need help with or what this item is meant to do. Then the player must figure out which item on their shelf is the right one and give it to the customer. On wrong guesses the players’ sense of unease goes up, which can reach its maximum and the player plays a series of games of dice for their life. It’s a very forgiving system, I had to play twice, and won the dice rolls with plenty of life to spare.

I found the game rather straightforward, there were maybe 5-6 items I had to think about for more than a couple of minutes, and ran out of sanity twice for guessing wrong, but never had to resort to a guide or a wiki. That said, it wasn’t too easy - it was satisfying to figure things out, even the ones I picked up on immediately. The variety of deductions is pretty good. Sometimes it’s a bit more on the nose, like “Totem made out of wood, used for protection”, it’s trivial to check the material and look up the symbology book to find the symbol for protection. Other times it’s much more esoteric and I had to follow up references across a couple of books, other items, and use a device to check the object’s “aura”.

I didn’t find the art style very appealing, but it does the job. Every item is completely unique and has a decent amount of detail in it. There’s a couple of shelves which are locked in the beginning, presumably because they’re dangerous or whatnot, and their design is noticeable darker or more morbid than most other items. It is a very static art style though, there are no animations or cutscenes as such, most of the game is set on the same screen of the shop window, the NPCs’ mouth opens and closes when they speak.

The game has a story - something bad is happening in the city, people are becoming mad or end up dying. Later it is found the events are tied to unearthing a mysterious relic, and different NPCs have different plans for it. It wasn’t a gripping tale but good enough to keep the gameplay moving forward. There are several endings, most of which occur on the last day. On some days you have the option of which item to give to an important NPC - this will change what happens to them later, and I think in some cases open/close a possible ending. I did use a guide to figure out how to start the secret ending (Heart of the Shop achievement), it was quite obscure to begin but the rest was easy. Quite an underwhelming ending though, I finished with the hunter ending first and I liked it the most, but my item choices didn’t save everyone.

Overall I recommend it, 8/10.

• Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood
  

  7 hours playtime

  no achievements

I have beaten this video game, Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood. It has no achievements but I’ve beaten all story missions on the Normal difficulty. I have a screenshot of my stats which were shown after the ending:

Summary:
It’s an action shooter set in the wild west with scripted sequences in the vein of the early Call of Duties. Everything except the story has aged quite poorly, even back in 2009 this was not the best looking game out there. The gameplay is just good enough to keep going, some set pieces impressive while others aren’t, not a lot of variety in locations and ways of playing. The story and setting are great with characters that are not cardboard cutouts, most have some depth and motivations which might not be obvious. If it wasn’t for that, it would have been a pain to finish.

Review:
As an action shooter, it does an okay job. There are guns, explosion, and copious amounts of armed men to shoot at. Maybe too many as it feels like I’ve wiped out the population of two or three villages I came through. There is some variety in the guns but nearly all feel the same to play - the main weapons are revolvers, but a rifle is practically a revolver with more range and damage since the rate of fire, accuracy, and handing are nearly the same. Shotguns have a hilarious lethal range of maybe five metres, most encounters occur at 10-20m so giving it more range would turn it into a weird revolver.

There are two brother protagonists, usually one is selected while the other will be an NPC. While playing they’ll exchange comments based on what’s happening, like laughing at bad aim, thanking for killing someone about to shoot them, complimenting on headshots, etc. The comments repeat eventually but I found them entertaining and immersive.

Ray can pick up heavy machine guns (which I only saw once) and throw dynamite, which is cool, while William can use a bow, which is not very cool, and use a grappling hook to climb onto things. Unfortunately this is almost exclusively a plot feature, there’s no free climbing. Each brother has a skill which is generated by kills. Ray can stop time, select enemies to shoot, and empty the revolver cylinder. William enters slow motion automatically aiming at enemies, the player must move the mouse back and click, simulating cocking the revolver hammer and shooting. Both are good and I tried to use them often, but they’re wasted so much. By the time they generate, I’ve gone through many enemies so I’m not going to see 5 or 6 at a time to make the best use of the skill. By the time it’s available again, the situation repeats. It also last for 60 seconds so if I don’t come across another fight quickly it’s gone.

Most characters have depth. They have their own motivations which are not telegraphed to the player and other characters, and what they actually say or do might not be as it seems. This is what the plot is largely driven by, character want something, shitty things happen to them, and they work around it. It doesn’t feel forced and I is what I liked most about the game, it along with the overall setting in the wild west. The music and world design are great, although repetitive as it’s mostly the classic wild west town or a bunch of rocks in a desert. Ray’s voice actor is great, was even in some Hollywood films, but nearly everyone else really falls flat, especially the two other main characters, they made it difficult for me to not imagine a guy standing in a sound booth talking to a microphone.

I have many nitpicks to do with the gameplay. For one, map design is very lazy. Walk a bit, find an area with lots of cover, kill enemies, repeat. Almost all time played was made up of that, the scripted sequences were not enough to relieve the monotony. There is a cover system, where if we approach a wall or a crate the camera will hide. Moving the mouse moves both the crosshair and the camera out of cover which is disorienting, and not reliable. Some walls don’t work, sometimes the wall/crate is very small and I have to keep my mouse in just the right spot not to peek out. Most of my deaths were caused by the cover system being finicky to use. There is a copious amount of camera shake which also moves the crosshair. With post-processing enabled, there’s motion blur on top which makes it literally impossible to know what is happening. The last level of the game had the shake on nearly the entire time, took place underground with brown walls and brown sand falling from the ceiling, and all enemies were dressed in brown. And all the cover were small rocks barely larger than a crouching man. Not fun.

I’d recommend this game to someone who adores wild-west and eurojank. Probably not to anyone else. I give it a 5 out of 10.

• Beyond a Steel Sky
  

  10 hours playtime

  31 of 32 achievements

I have beaten this video game, Beyond a Steel Sky. Got all achievements except for one which requires another playthrough.

Summary:
Overall I enjoyed it, it was a simple point & click adventure in a 3D format. There were many references to the first game in the series which I didn’t play, but I think all of them were explained in some way in dialogue or the environment so I’m not missing much. Puzzles made sense and were very easy so I was never stuck, the characters were likeable (maybe too much) and I understood everyone’s motivation. Except at the end of the game, where the reason and explanation for the plot’s existence fell flat in my opinion.

Review (I am not good at writing reviews):
The world was basic but likeable, a post-apocalypse where people live out in the wasteland or inside giant walled cities, where most of the game takes place. The city is a classic utopia where everyone has what they want, there’s no money, crime, and so on. Like always this isn’t entirely true, but I don’t think the game did a great job in showing it, the disillusion of the utopia was never handled fully and it’s all very tame.

Voice acting was good, with some clever or humorous dialogues, but I think most were quite dry. The main character has a permanent state of mundane interest, where he won’t express much shock, surprise, or true inquisitiveness, simply ask questions and give an expected response, apart from pivotal story moments.

Visuals were also good. It’s heavily stylised to look like a comic book, so a lot of flat textures and lighting, but it is pretty. World design was decent too, quite basic but not boring to look at.

The meat of the game are puzzles, which fortunately were enjoyable. I was backtracking very little and I never had to do any trial and error. Maybe they were a bit too easy, the only ones that had me stumped for a couple of minutes were a couple where I had to stand in a very specific spot for the character to be able to interact with something. Felt a bit like a hidden object game in 3D, not a mental challenge.

As for the story, it started out well with a mystery that needs solving. As we progress we get more clues that slowly reveal that mystery, which until the end of the game kept me interested and was believable. This is entering spoilers territory but not entirely: it is discovered the utopia requires a sacrifice of sorts to keep it going, this is fully revealed in the last hour of the game. But the game provides absolutely no reason why the sacrifice exists, it all boils down to “We have to do this evil thing to keep the city going. What for? Because we have to!”. All the characters, including the protagonist, simply take it as fact without ever asking for an explanation or reason. I didn’t like that, it strongly felt like the writers had no idea how to turn the initial mystery into something that made sense for the larger plot. It has practically no connection to what happened in the rest of the game, and just doesn’t make sense that everyone goes with it.

I give it a 6 out of 10, might play in a few years for the last achievement.