Any game you’re still enjoying at that point (as opposed to, say, collecting the last few achievements for 100%) is genuine bottled magic. No human being should reasonably expect to still be enjoying a typical game 50 hours in. On paper it’s totally my jam, in practice I’ve played it far too much and as a result I am also far too aware of its great many flaws to enjoy even a few minutes. I would call that burning out, which is largely how I feel about Civ nowadays. Fortunately, youtube is full of obsessives and I have no doubt I can see full storyline completion videos for the threads I’m missing. When those dried up, so did my enthusiasm. For everyone who LOVES the game, story is dessert and the meat and potatoes are the moment-to-moment gameplay, but I wasn’t loving the moment-to-moment, I was motivated only by the increasingly-sparse rewards. The process of slogging through maps wasn’t appealing to me. I saw others complaining about much the same as me, on this, how randomness can prevent you from progressing your remaining storylines and how the only thing you can do is, “Just do more runs!”Īnd that’s where I realized I was bouncing off. It’s smart, it’s funny, it’s relatively easy-going, unlocking things is always radical… but the drip-feed was too slow for my tastes, the unlocks too grindy to obtain, the stories that unlock other stories were too random to unlock, leaving me with a handful of utterly exhausted dialogues that were entirely depending on me getting to even SEE Than or Hypnos, let alone get the right dialogue to progress their lines before I can get into others. The drip-fed story, the fact that failure is actually a great way to move the sub-stories forward (if not necessarily the main story). Probably the most popular thing I’ve unexpectedly bounced off recently is Hades.ĭon’t get me wrong: there’s a lot I like about it. The best part of it really is the music, art, and overall theme. That, and buying stuff for your apartment. And very, very occasionally influence outcomes. They’re more like little engagement/skill-gates you participate in to read more story. It’s very much a read-a-thon first, drink-mixer second. VA-11 Hall-A is similar in that mechanically, you don’t really have a huge amount of input. It’s really getting by on its atmosphere and writing. If it helps, re: Shadowrun Returns, it’s not quite as RPG’ish as I expected it to be. Still, I guess some folks are looking for that classic ‘mega monkey’ adventure game dev-logic head-scratching. What games have you picked up, only to find it absolutely wasn’t your cup of tea? I’ll happily smash my head against a wall for a tough puzzle - I’m looking at you, The Witness - but not if it’s pared with a complete asshole of a main character. But my degree of patience for obtuse point-and-click logic just isn’t what it used to be. And since I never got around to Shadowrun Hong Kong, I should probably be looking there if I’m after that gritty, cyberpunk itch with more layered characters.ĭon’t get me wrong: there are plenty of should and will enjoy VirtuaVerse. Ultimately, what I think I probably need to do is just bite the bullet on VA-11 Hall-A, which I’ve wanted to play for ages but never really gotten around to. I loved The Red Strings Club, which hits a lot of the same vibes. They’re rarely perfect, but their best elements carry you through the sourer parts. Neo Cab didn’t offer as much agency as I would have wanted, but I wanted resolution for some of the passengers I encountered. It reminded me of what I liked about Neo Cab, the visual novel adventure from Chance Agency back in 2019. His solution to just about every problem puts his friends, loves ones and complete strangers in harm’s way, if not outright death. VirtuaVerse puts you in charge of a titanic asshole. You had protagonists you wanted to root for, or enemies who desperately needed justice. Image: Neo CabĪs frustrating as that design is, what made a lot of those old classic games click was the charm of their characters and story. If you grew up with a lot of those adventures, you’re accustomed to inevitably finding yourself in a frame of mind where you’re just repeatedly rubbing every item in your inventory up against any interactable object just to progress. There’s a lot of puzzles that are strangely finnicky like that. The bouncer figures, hey I didn’t order anything, maybe the boss did, so he just leaves his post and wanders in with the drone. You’ve gotta send the pizza to yourself first, drive all the way home, pick it up, drive back to the merchant, order a second pizza, and send that pizza to the bouncer. So the solution? Find a nearby terminal, and order a pizza.
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