veebs-hates-video-games

[veebs-hates-video-games]

I played a decent amount of Soulstone Survivors last year, and I mostly had pretty nice things to say about it. Then this week when it finally hit 1.0 I went back to check out all the other stuff that had been added since then.

I have opinions.

They aren't so good anymore.

I do still like plenty of things about it. It has a lot more interactions between different skills and effects than most similar games do, which can be fun for a while to figure out. The art and music and overall presentation is generally quite good. There's good consistent progression constantly unlocking new stuff to try out. For the most part I had a pretty good time until somewhere in the midgame.

Unfortunately it got increasingly less fun and interesting from then on.

You know all those different skill and status effect interactions? They don't change how the game actually plays at all once you know how to combine them, and every run with every character built around every weapon or type of damage feels identical except for some of them being bad and taking forever to kill stuff.

All the fun visual effects they made for the dozens of different skills? I hope you don't like actually being able to see any of it, because at some point the game becomes unplayable without turning the opacity of it down well below 50%, or in some cases all the way to 0%.

The progression and unlocks? Eventually those get pretty pointless and tedious too. There's basically zero creativity in the achievements or the unlock conditions for new stuff, and they just become grinding after a while. Not as bad as Nordic Ashes, but when Halls of Torment exists I expect at least a little better at this point.

In the end, over the course of a year it went from one of my favorite games in the genre to just kind of disappointing. Part of that is because I've played games since then that handled a lot of those things better (particularly Halls of Torment), and part of it is some fundamental design decisions they made that pushed the game in this direction as they tried to keep scaling stuff up.

I don't think it's bad or anything. The first half is still pretty good. It just falls apart for me after that, and there are other games that have avoided making those same mistakes.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

Ok, what about going back to games I did actually play after all that stuff about ones I haven't yet?

Saints Row 2: Ironically the Windows version runs better on Linux these days than it ever did on Windows (without any tweaking or mods, at least). It's still pretty janky compared to 3 and 4 though, so I didn't stick with it too long. I'm amazed how many modern games this many years later still don't have some of the seemingly obvious character customization options Saints Row had as far back as at least 2 and 3 a decade and a half ago, which were super flexible in terms of body types and mixing and matching gender stuff.

KUUKIYOMI 3: Consider It More and More!! - Father to Son: It's still fun and silly in the same "WarioWare but make it about being either considerate of others or an over the top jerk in various social situations" way, but something about it didn't quite do it for me as much as the first two. I don't know if it was the choice of situations for the minigames or I was just in a different mood when I played the others before. I'll still probably get the fourth one if it's on sale cheap enough some day though.

Hidden Capybaras with Orange in the Whimsical Library: I continue to be unable to resist things with silly names or premises when they're super cheap. As they say, I'd buy that for a dollar. Assuming "they" are in the 1980s. And part of the cast of RoboCop. Anyway, it's hidden object in the style of the Full of Cats series, which works for me. Less stuff to do than one of those, but it's also cheaper, and the artwork and way they hide some of the stuff is fun. The night versions of the levels are definitely the star of the show.

OPUS: The Day We Found Earth and OPUS: Rocket of Whispers: Just gonna combine these two since they're related and took me basically a single sitting each (not counting brief hummus breaks). The short version is that neither one is anywhere near on the same level of OPUS: Echo of Starsong, which was genuinely pretty great, but they're still interesting, and you can see the progression in their approach to making games and telling stories. They've generally kept the strongest parts, like the way they focus on characters and emotions, or the sci-fi-adjacent settings but leaning away from grounding the world and story in science and more toward humanity and spirituality/mysticism, while trying different increasingly ambitious things with the gameplay (which is always the weakest part of their games but still generally fine). I would strongly recommend Echo of Starsong over either of these, but for anyone who's already played that and wants to check out Sigono's previous work I thought these were both interesting enough to have been worth it, and neither one is very much of a commitment unless you want to 100% them.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

different person roaming the drawn to life tag here, because the autism hit about it recently and won't let me go! if you're looking for an uncensored copy of dtl:tnc, my understanding is that you'll want to avoid the compilation cartridges, and look for copies of the standalone game whose serial number on the back of the cart has a sequence of BDREN0J## - The N0 should typically indicate that it's the original, unedited version of the game, whereas N1 would indicate a "patched" version with the censored ending. I will note the dtl wiki suggests that on PAL carts N0 releases can sometimes have the censored version regardless, and doesn't even make note of my particular serial number (BDREN0J22), but assuming they're accurate about the PAL carts being less consistent, NTSC copies are probably a safer bet :p

I was actually literally just looking at that page to see what the deal was. Luckily it took all of like five minutes to find a copy with the same product code as yours in good condition and super cheap. It's anyone's guess when I'll actually get around to it, but at least the hard part is out of the way already.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

The Drawn to Life games have surprisingly good stories, which is why I feel like having an uncensored copy of The Next Chapter is so important

Noted 📝

[veebs-hates-video-games]

To elaborate on the favorite game series thing, idk how easy it'd be to find them (especially an uncensored cartridge of the second game, which is a very important distinction to me) but I absolutely love the old Nintendo DS games "Drawn to Life" and "Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter"!

The art is amazing, the sprites are cute, and the music is just something else. There are a couple (three) songs in the soundtracks with lyrics and two of them have actually made me cry.

They released in September of 2007 and October of 2009 respectively. The best (and most unique imo) part of the games is that, as the name implies, you draw a lot. You draw your player character, your weapons, platforms, modes of transport, and forms you can take (in one of them). (Note: if you aren't much of an artist, but you still want it to look decent, both games have templates for a majority of the drawn stuff that you can use instead!)

There was also a third game in December of 2020 on the Nintendo Switch, but nobody likes it. It's genuinely awful gameplay wise compared to the previous ones and is full of glitches apparently. Not enough pros to outweigh the huge glaring cons of the game.

Sorry about the rambling lol

Oh I totally remember those. I never got a chance to play them because I didn't have my own DS until I got a 3DS as a gift way more recently at the end of its life, but they looked interesting.

I did like the other series 5th Cell is better known for though: Scribblenauts. I kinda felt like I'd seen enough of it after just one of them (Unlimited, I think?), but it's neat that it worked as well as it did and recognized and responded to so much stuff.

These days the kinds of games they made would just be AI slop instead of having so much stuff the devs had to think to include themselves, which is kinda sad to think about. The whole thing that made them interesting in the first place was that you could draw/write whatever you wanted into them, and an actual person had anticipated what you might want to do and figured out how to make it work ahead of time, and then they built an entire actual game on top of that and made everything else about it good too.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

I wonder if you'd hate my favorite game series from my childhood

I mean, I hate my own favorite game series from my childhood, so it's entirely possible.

Or more specifically I think the newest games in it are some of the most impressive things I've ever seen on a technical level and have a lot of great artwork and clever mechanics, but I actively dislike playing them and didn't get much enjoyment out of trying (if you guessed that's the Zelda games from BotW onward you win).

But you never know. I also sometimes have a great time with stuff that's deeply flawed, because people are just weird like that.

And if it's something I've never played I usually like trying stuff out anyway just to see what its deal is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[veebs-hates-video-games]

Still working my way through a few more demos:

Absolum: I really wanted to like this one more than I do. The presentation is great, and the world and initial story hook are immediately compelling. I just don't usually click with most 2.5D brawlers like this and haven't since the NES. I keep trying anyway because occasionally I do really like them, but this probably won't be one of them for me. I do like the fairly generous parry window when you dodge directly toward an attack though, which feels a lot better to me than the really oldschool games like this that don't have anything like that.

Consume Me: This one has been on my wishlist since as soon as it was wishlistable, and from the demo it seems just as good as what all the awards it's won have been saying about it. It perfectly captures the awkwardness and stress of being a teenager while still managing to abstract it enough to turn it into actual fun gameplay. They aren't kidding about the content warnings about disordered eating though. It was pretty uncomfortable. I'd like to play the full thing when it comes out in a few months, but we'll see if I'm doing any better at the time.

Whimsical Heroes: Kind of like a slightly streamlined/simplified King's Bounty/HoMM-type SRPG but with a cuter art style and composed entirely of talking vegetables and animals. Hard to say yet whether the full game will have enough substance, but it at least has potential. It does live up to the whimsical name. The battle music also stood out as particularly good for setting the tone and making things more exciting. The scene transitions could be sped up 3x and might still be too slow though, so hopefully that gets changed for the full release.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

Some brief thoughts on Audiosurf 1 and 2 copied from Discord:

Anyway, it took me a full decade to get around to trying Audiosurf 2 after everyone said it wasn't as fun as the original, especially if you mostly played the mono characters And wow, they sure were right I did a couple songs in the original just to double check because I haven't played that in years, and it looks and feels so much better than any of the half a dozen different modes I tried in 2 I like some of the ideas, but it's just so much harder to tell what's going on, and it doesn't feel as good either I did have to disable like half the controls in the first game when I went back to it though Because the official layout for the Steam Deck is criminal And has stuff mapped to all the back grip buttons, both trackpads, and the gyro active by default too, so stuff is constantly happening that I don't want it to Which is kind of funny because the normal controller support was good enough that I spent like 95%+ of my time playing it with a 360 controller instead of the mouse It's fine once I changed it to match up with how that worked again though

I do still think the original is pretty great. There's a reason it was my default way to listen to new albums for a few years way back in the day. It gave me just enough to do to keep my hands occupied and help me focus without being too distracting and taking away from the music.

Also for some reason I've typoed it as Audiosuft like three times writing and tagging this.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

Oops all demos:

Öoo: Surprisingly polished and fun little puzzle platformer. It claims to also be a metroidvania, but the demo is too short to really see how much of that is also in there. The presentation is very simple but cute and satisfying, and it does a good job teaching you what to do with zero text, just by gradually building up what you need to do from one room to the next. The menus are a little incomprehensible because of the lack of text there too, but that doesn't really impact the game itself. Also it doesn't work with the default version of Proton on the Steam Deck, so until the dev manually sets it to use a working version you have to set it to use 8 by yourself.

Sp(L/R)ite: I grabbed this one completely on impulse because the name was confusing in an interesting way. I'm still not sure whether it'll end up being good or not, but it does at least have potential to be. I wouldn't have minded slightly more info on what's going on to make me a little more curious about what happens after the first chapter though. Not even that actually reveals anything, just that hints at more stuff to keep wondering about. I wasn't sure how I felt about the commentary character following you around at first, but her very enthusiastically speaking in slightly dated slang from several years ago eventually won me over in a way it wouldn't have if it weren't just slightly the wrong time period. Also I can't think of where I know the music from, but it's definitely not original, and it's still bugging me even after I finished the demo.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

Back to non-demos!

Ants Took My Eyeball: I went in not really expecting much beyond it having a silly name and premise, and it was definitely better than I thought it would be. Everything feels pretty good to control, it's visually clear, and the different weapons and upgrades actually feel distinct and like they have different uses or suit different playstyles. I didn't finish a run and probably won't go back to try to again, but not because it did anything wrong, just because it's not really my thing right now beyond appreciating that it's pretty well put together.

Haste: I like a whole lot of things about this one. I'm a big fan of a lot of the art, especially the 2D character art, but a lot of the other stuff looks good too. A lot of the music really suits it well too. The controls also feel really solid and responsive, which is important for a high speed runner/platformer. And I genuinely enjoyed a lot of the little character moments, especially when everything started coming together in the last third of the game, particularly the final shard.

I didn't actually finish it though, because the difficulty feels pretty weird at times. By the time I got to about the midpoint of the game it felt like it was being really punishing for even the smallest mistake, and the stage collapsing behind me was right up my butt at all times. But when I turned the difficulty down slightly it became completely trivial and I went from getting D and E ranks to S on 80% of them without even trying.

And yet despite the normal levels being effortlessly easy the bosses at the end felt waaaaay overtuned and drastically harder than anything else on the way to them. And I could live with that if screwing up the boss fights didn't require going through like half an hour of normal levels just to get back there and try again. I fiddled with custom difficulty settings a bit trying to balance the normal levels and boss fights and didn't really come up with anything I was happy with, but it was good enough to make it to the final boss without either getting bored or throwing myself at a wall over and over until I got sick of it.

But the final boss fight is kinda miserable if your vision is kinda iffy like mine is, and while I did figure out pretty quickly what I had to do, successfully navigating it didn't work out like I hoped, and I had zero interest in spending an entire hour going through the double-length stage before that to try again. So I uninstalled it and watched the ending on YouTube instead.

I feel like this probably comes across as really negative, but overall I did really like a lot more about it than I disliked and had enough fun to actually stick with it until like three minutes away from the actual ending. And the custom difficulty settings were much appreciated for that.

Oh while I'm complaining though, the UI is serviceable at best but not great. A lot of stuff really does not need to be that small, and why can't I use the d-pad to navigate menus or the B button to exit out of them? Nothing bad enough about it to prevent playing the game, but it's not good either.

I dunno, go watch the gameplay trailer, and if it looks at all interesting try the demo. I'm still glad I did.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

Demo time again:

Crescent County: Good news! It has a native Linux build specifically for the Steam Deck. Bad news! It just displays a black screen while blasting the fans at full speed to apparently do nothing. Running the Windows build through Proton gets low single digit FPS at the absolute lowest settings, so this one is currently not a viable option.

Dispatch: Really well put together demo that starts in a point that gives you just enough context to know what's going on and reel you in right away without wasting any time, and it ends after just enough time to get invested and want to know what happens next. I still don't love the timed dialogue choices like I usually don't since The Walking Dead popularized them years ago, and they're extra annoying here with how the choices pop up before the dialogue ends and the timer has almost run out by the time the voice acting finishes, which I've also seen people complain about as an accessibility issue. It's also baffling to release the demo without controller support when the full game will have it.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

Today in demos:

MIO: Memories in Orbit: I actively disliked my brief time with this one. I remember the trailer I saw a while back being more visually interesting, and it feels ok but not great to play to me. Also I'm someone who thinks Super Metroid is still the platonic ideal of Metroidvanias, so these extremely unforgiving "three hits and you're dead" ones are not my jam.

Bubblegum Galaxy: Very cute and colorful and whimsical, but I feel like I'm constantly fighting the camera in the office sections. The tile placing planet building sections feel more polished, but I'm not really vibing with the actual gameplay. Nothing wrong with it though, just personal preference, and it seems like it could be fun if you're into that sort of thing.

Altheia: The Wrath of Aferi: Steam Deck performance is pretty dire, which probably contributes to why it feels so unresponsive. Maybe it's fine otherwise? I wouldn't know, because dropping people into the game halfway through the tutorial without showing them the start of it is an absolutely terrible idea. Also please never subject me to navigating menus by using an analog stick to move a mouse cursor ever again.

Voxelgram 2: This one is actually good, but I expected as much because I liked the first one too. It took a bit to rewire my brain to get used to the two color system, but once I did I enjoyed it. I was already planning to buy/play this one though, so that's not really new information for me.

Morsels: It looks amazing. Not just the pixel art or art style in general, but even things like the dithering stand out as being particularly well done. Unfortunately I don't really enjoy playing it much at all. I got three different weapons across a couple different runs, and they all felt kinda terrible to use to me. I want to say it's inspired by Binding of Isaac in terms of general gameplay based on my hazy memories of it from over a decade ago, but I don't remember being so bothered by how that felt and stuck around for like a dozen hours in that one even if it wasn't my favorite.

Gales of Nayeli: This is another one I'm hopeful about and looking forward to. Not surprised it's giving me older Fire Emblem vibes considering I heard about it from a FE YouTuber (thank you ActualLizard for being one of the few normal people on there). Unfortunately it seems to run absolutely terribly on the Steam Deck at the moment like everything is in slow motion, and the default choice of buttons for the controls is kinda wack. Hopefully that's sorted out in the full game or someone comes up with a solution.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

Oops more demos. And there will be more after this, because I had finally gotten the number I had downloaded down to 4 after the past Next Fest or two, but then another just happened and I went up to 21. It's down to 17 again now though, so that's something.

Word Play: Pretty straightforward but polished and satisfying Scrabble-like roguelite. Doesn't have the bigger framing device or additional layers of something like Words Can Kill, but it feels pretty good to play as it is.

Starlight Re:Volver: Straight up doesn't load past a black screen with "Development Build" in the corner on the Steam Deck.

Under the Island: Very charming, delightful pixel art, and feels more like a traditional Zelda game than any Zelda game has in years, at least from the little bit I played. The characters I met are enjoyably quirky too.

Loki's Revenge: I tried the original demo when it was much newer when I saw the post from the dev, and at the time it wasn't in a great place, especially with a controller. It seems to have been updated since then, and it's feeling a lot better, especially with a controller. It's somewhere halfway between Vampire Survivors and 20 Minutes Till Dawn, but without really capturing what makes each of them great. Has potential, but it's not quite there yet.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

More stuff I tried briefly but didn't stick with:

Emily Is Away: Maybe it's fine. I wouldn't know because I gave up pretty quickly. Mashing buttons on a controller to "type" sucks. I probably wouldn't have loved mashing keys on my keyboard much more though, to be fair. Also started off on the wrong foot by greeting me with Windows XP, as someone who thinks Microsoft has only made one decent consumer-grade OS ever, and it wasn't that one.

Assemble with Care: It seems like it might've been ok if it weren't for the controls, which I did not enjoy. It's very fiddly about you clicking the right thing in the exact right place, and doing really basic stuff like rotating objects does not need to be that difficult. Just let me grab it with the other mouse button or something instead of groping around for the specific handful of pixels that trigger the "rotate" action. I only made it through the first couple levels before I was tired of dealing with it. It's much funnier if you pretend the whole thing takes place in DC's Belle Reve instead of Bellariva though.

Lollipop Chainsaw: I was really expecting more from the intersection of Suda51 and James Gunn, and I did not get it. Controls feel kinda janky for an action game, and I don't remember PS3 games usually being this ugly. I was specifically emulating the PS3 version because the remaster seems to have lost all the licensed music, and it wasn't worth the effort to set it up and get it working.

Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor: I think I would've appreciated this one more if I'd played it like a decade ago like I originally intended to. I have a much lower tolerance for that kind of wonkiness these days though, even if I still appreciate that kind of weirdness, and something about it was giving me a headache. Oh well, guess I missed my window with that one.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

Ooh, here's one I have mostly nice things to say about: The Forgotten City. I very nearly gave up on it almost immediately because the very starting section wasn't very interesting to me, and I'm always annoyed when something makes me name a character and doesn't provide a default (I was so uninvested that I didn't bother being serious about it and went with Wet Rat because they'd just been pulled out of a river, which actually ended up being kinda funny later on).

I stuck with it a little longer though, and that turned out to be a good idea. Almost everything after that was much better and more interesting. The real strong point is probably the characters and their writing/performances. Their different backgrounds and perspectives on the situation are the main thing driving the story forward, so it's important that they're well done, and luckily they actually are.

The way the mystery unfolds is pretty satisfying too, and it's definitely one of the better time loops I've seen recently. Huge bonus points for being able to get someone else to do all the repetitive stuff for you on subsequent loops instead of having to do it all yourself, and a few more bonus points for even managing to work that into the narrative too. That one feature solved my biggest problem with stuff like Majora's Mask or Outer Wilds, where I inevitably get sick of having to repeat stuff before I finish the game.

The one thing I'm not totally on board with is the final true ending. It was probably my least favorite part of the whole thing, and I was worried it would be even worse. Like I saw the start of that section and was like oh no I remember when Assassin's Creed did stuff like this and had Concerns, but thankfully they at least handled it a lot better. It still kinda tainted the rest of the story a bit for me, but overall it was alright in the end. I can only hold that against it so much when there's plenty of other stuff where I thought the ending was the weakest part but I still liked the journey, like 13 Sentinels or SeaBed.

Also it's very funny how many people's Steam reviews of it compare it to Skyrim just because it was originally a Skyrim mod. Aside from that they have just about nothing in common other than both being first person. Please get more cultural reference points.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

Before I forget, I also didn't really get along with Superliminal. Not sure why it got such a positive reception. Like it seems...fine? Nothing egregiously wrong with it or anything, aside from being a little janky with the interactions with objects sometimes, but also it wasn't really doing a whole lot for me in the first half hour or so. It feels like someone tried to combine Portal and Perspective and made something that's less than the sum of its parts.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

I'm just going to dump my grumbling about Dice & Fold from Discord into a post and call it a day:

Anyway, Dice and Fold seems ok, but it has possibly the worst controller support I've seen in anything in the past five years aside from games that explicitly don't have controller support at all Almost definitely the worst for anything that managed to get a Steam Deck Verified label Like depending on which menu or part of the UI you're in the d-pad might be totally responsive or you might have to push a direction 3-7 times to get it to register And even when it's working it's anyone's guess whether you have to push up or right to move to the next thing up and to the right (spoiler: it's probably neither and you have to loop around from the other side) For bonus points you have to deal with that while holding the button to pick up a die to move it to play it in whatever slot you want to put it in, because it doesn't just toggle pick up/set down when you push the button Game's decent aside from that though Managed to suffer through the controls and figure out what I was doing quick enough to win my first run Although not before my bard companion got exploded by a hydra Probably for the best though, because that might end up being my only run Because I can't stress enough how bad the controls are Which should barely even be possible for what's effectively a 2D turn-based board game, so nothing fancy needs to be going on at all

Game's ok, but the controller support is exploring uncharted territory in wonkiness ¯\_(ツ)_/¯