Amnesia Rebirth: A Good Idea Left Unimplemented

 

At time of writing I have just finished Amnesia Rebirth, provided to me for free by the Epic Game Store.  I am also maybe the most frustrated I have ever been with a horror game in my life.

I'm not really here to write a review or anything but I'll quickly cover my thoughts on my playthrough.  Amnesia Rebirth is a game I was expecting very little out of based on the previous entry in the series called A Machine For Pigs.  The first game, The Dark Descent was greatly entertaining but Machine For Pigs was no more than a walking simulator spook-house made by a group of devs so devoid of talent that you could have probably made a better game by giving a new born baby a 1970s IBM and a big stick to hit it with.  Luckily Amnesia Rebirth is a bit more of an actual game and tells the story of a woman called Tasi as she gets stranded in the desert in a plane crash as she goes through caves and some alternate dimension in an attempt to escape and save not just her life, but the life of her unborn child as well.

Gameplay involves exploring areas, solving puzzles and occasionally hiding/running away from a monster.  The sanity management thing from Dark Descent is back where spending too much time in the dark or looking directly at the creature will cause you to freak out and die so managing things like your supply of matches and latern oil is something the game tries to convince you is important.  However Rebirth is also incredibly easy with pathetically easy puzzles and no punishment for failing encounters with the creatures, but I'll talk about that later.  That said though, it was just entertaining enough to keep me playing to the end without getting too angry with it so as far as "run and hide" horror games go you could in fact do a lot worse.  

So why am I so frustrated with it?  Well one of the main things in the game is the main character "controlling her fear" and "not succumbing to anger" and all that bullshit.  It's pretty clear, pretty early on unless you have some kind of brain problem that the events of the game are somehow her fault and she's actually retracing her steps finding out what happned to her and the crew of the plane that went down at the start.  As you play you encounter a monster that will, in certain areas, attempt to chase you down and get you, only if and when it does get you, you don't actually die or game over.  The game throws you a mini cutscene of the main character running through a couple of previous explored areas and then waking up either just before or sometimes just after the area you were just in.  

What I thought was going on was that every time the creature caught you, that was her "succumbing to her fear" and so each failed creature encounter would somehow affect the ending in some way.  What compounded my impression of that happening was the fact that after you are caught and get back to the monster area, the monster is gone from that zone.  Like you are now free to progress the game monster free at the cost of the ending.  Not failing any monster encounters would mean that she managed to stay mentally strong during the whole ordeal and you would get the best ending and failing all or nearly all of them would give you the worst one, maybe with some other factors thrown in as well.  

However none of this actually happened.  As soon as I hit the final cutscene and was given a "do X or Y" choice the rug was pulled from underneath me and I realized that all of that hiding and running away that I did barely mattered at all.  The only monster encounters that actually matter are the spoopy ghosts with the lanterns near the end because they dont actually despawn when you fail but, and I'd have to test thing, they lose the ability to "kill" you after the first time.  

The other reason I thought this was the case is because when you start the game you are given a choice between "normal mode" and "adventure mode".  Adventure mode basically just turns off the monsters and the sanity mechanic and lets you just explore and puzzle solve and is described by the game as "for people that don't want to deal with horror".  

There are two things wrong with this

One is that, like I said before, getting caught by the monster just deletes it from the area anyway so even if you're the worst hide and seek player of ALL TIME you still only need to suffer one minor failiure before you are allowed to progress.  Two is what the fuck do you mean by "dont want to deal with horror"?!  Why in the name of bloody fuck would you buy the THIRD GAME IN A SERIES OF HORROR GAMES if you didn't like horror?  That would be like me going to see a movie called "Love Actually 3" and then getting pissed off at the fact its a romance movie and not a supernatural thiller, what a stupid fucking mode to have in your game.

So what could have been a cool mechanic that encourages repeat playthroughs just wasn't used at all and now if I want to see the other endings all I have to do is load my save and pick the other other thing.  "Push a button on the Ending-tron 3000" is the shittiest, laziest most bullshit way a developer can implement multiple endings and anyone who's used that method deserves to have an entire day spent in wet socks, you're a disgrace.

Despite my griping though, Rebirth is still SIGNIFICANTLY better than A Machine for Pigs which granted, is not a very high bar to pass, but at least there is an attempt at an actual game here.  The most 5/10 horror game you'll ever play in your life

Yurukill Pre-Purchase Impressions: Worryingly Interesting

 

Yurukill is a game that doesn't come out until July this year but after seeing the trailer it's such a weird idea that I have to say a few things about it.

Yurukill is being advertised as an "escape adventure bullet hell" game that is planned to be released for the Switch, PS4/5 and PC.  From watching the trailer it's easy to tell that this means the game is a visual novel combined with a sort of point and click adventure type thing that's ALSO combined with a....bullet hell shooter...of all things.  It's an interesting idea that will either be really good or be the gaming equivalent of chocolate mint ice cream on black pudding.  An idea that's so out there that regardless of what I hear about it from now until release, it's basically guaranteed that I'm going to buy it

Being a cross genre game doesn't inherently make it a bad idea.  Games like Persona 3 and up that combined Tokimeki Memorial style dating sims with RPGs turned out to be a fantastic idea and indie darling Undertale showed that you combine bullet hell "shooting" and RPG mechanics for something really special.  However what a game like Undertale also shows is just how hard it is to make a decent bullet hell shmup.

Let's be honest here, the combat in Undertale is kind of ass.  With the exception of maybe Sans and Genocide Route Undyne, most of the enemies have boring as shit, dull as dishwater attack patterns and the controls feel sort of "heavy" and the combat generally isn't all that great.  The writing and characters in that game is what makes it so special and the sub-standard combat can be forgiven because it's contextualised probably as part of the story.  As a "shmup" Undertale is a pile of ass but when regarded as an entire piece, it's not bad at all.  The other thing that elevates Undertale is that the set pieces in that game are incredible.  Like sure, the controls are kind of dog water and the patterns are basic and a bit dull for a shmup but the overall vibe of a fight like Metaton or the emotional weight behind the battle with Asgore means that it can get away with it.

But then there's Yurukill 

Just from this game player trailer alone you can see that Yurukill is a boring, generic looking ass shmup that looks like it was pulled from the underside of some doujin game freeware site.  Also it's hard to say for sure given what we know right now but it also looks like it doesn't benefit from having story context to help forgive boring game play.  Like there's a bunch of visual novel shit and then "oop, time for a shmup break" and the impression I get is that it's poorly thought out.  Some proper Triggerheart Excellia lookin-ass garbage.

But these are just my initial impressions from a trailer, who knows the later shmup levels might be crazy intense with fun game play and story context, don't judge a book by it's cover right?  I have another, slightly more personal reason for being wary of this game.  The first thing that this whole thing reminded me of when I first saw it wasn't Daganrompa, like it seems to in most people, but  Deadman Wonderland.  A fucking HORRENDOUS anime about a high school student being framed for a murder and having to serve a prison sentence in a theme park prison where people have to the death duels with their blood-based super powers.  It's fucking awful and I can't look at Yurukill and not get traumatic flashbacks to watching that pile of garbage.

Yurukill is an interesting combination of genres that means that even despite all the shit I just gave it in the above paragraphs I'm going to buy it and therefore I hope to whatever God may be watching down on us all that I'm wrong and the game is actually incredible.  But a dull shmup and a setting reminiscent of one of the worst pieces of fiction ever made means it has some work to do for a good write up.  

Fingers crossed though, I love it when whacky ideas work

Detention Quick Review

 

Detention is a game I've had my eye on for a long time and now I have finally got around to playing and finishing the game so I want to spend just a little time sharing some of my thoughts on it. 

The game starts out with you playing as a high school student called Wei who, during a storm, finds himself trapped in the school with a girl, Rey.  They interact for a while and then Wei ends up hung upside down in the school assembly hall dead and the story then focuses on Rey as she explores the school to try and escape.  I dont want to go into too much of the story after this point because Detention is very much a one and done kind of game where things are best experienced for yourself.  The story isn't anything incredible but its well executed and interesting enough to hold your attention for its fairly short play time

Gameplay is done entirely on a 2D plane using the mouse.  If your familiar with old point and click adventure type games then that's the kind of style it has.  You walk around the environments finding various odd items for various odd puzzles which you solve for various interpretations of keys for various interpretations of doors.  It's actually quite a good job that the story for Detention is interesting because as a game, it's a bit shit.  The puzzles are insultingly easy at pretty much every stage of the game with usually the thing you need to solve a puzzle being either in the room of the puzzle itself or just every so slightly down a hall with few exceptions.  The only time I got "stuck" in Detention was during a puzzle sequence involving tuning a radio to change rooms and I was only stumped because the shadows of one of the rooms was hiding a door.  I fired up a guide, saw the sentence "exit the door on the right" and then closed the guide and did the rest of the game no problem.  The only other element to the gameplay is the "enemies" that occasionally stalk you in the corridors.  They come in two flavors and both are thwarted by pressing the right mouse button to hold your breath.  If for some reason you are killed by one, the game makes you walk up a mountain path for 15 seconds and then drops you off at a checkpoint.  

While Detention sort of sucks shit in the gameplay department it does much MUCH better with it's horror.  Games that look like they could have been made in FlashMX 2004 usually piss me off but the old Newgrounds-y style art coupled with some decent sound design make for a rather unnerving atmosphere.  There was one moment where I had to pause the game and go do something downstairs and the weird noises coming from my room were enough to make me trot back upstairs and close the door to shut them out because they were sort of making me uneasy.  Also, one thing I cannot praise this game for enough is the TOTAL lack of jumpscares.  Not a single one.  A lot of horror games/movies rely heavily one loud noises coupled with an orchestra sting to force a scare out of you but Detention does not do this EVEN ONCE and for that it must be highly commended.  A lot of the fear in Detention comes from its strange, nightmareish visuals and it does this nice thing of occasionally flashing something weird at you for just a frame or two and then never bringing it up again.

Minor spoiler here so if you dont wanna hear it skip the next paragraph 

One of the puzzles involves finding a box cutter and slitting the throat of the strung up body of Wei in the second chapter.  When you do this and get the item or whatever it was you get for the puzzle, as you click out off the screen, Wei opens his eyes for just a moment as the screen fades to black and fades back into the main game.  If you click him again, his eyes are closed, it never happens again.  It's a fantastic way to unnerve a player and it uses this technique sparingly enough to keep you guessing at every turn.

Spoilers over

It's nice to see a horror game take a more subtle approach to scaring the player than the usual loud noises, monsters made of bacon and chase sequences that we've come to know all to often today.  Sure, Detention isn't particuarly great as a game but it's trying to tell you a nice, creepy little tale with some nice creepy imagry and at that it succeeds very well.  If you dont want to take my word for it then consider that it was good enough at what it did to have a movie made of it, which I will be checking out myself at the first possible opportunity.  It's extremely cheap on Steam so go pick it up and give it ago, you proably won't regret it

Breath of the Wild First Impressions

Since about mid December I've been slowly working my way through Breath of the Wild on my Switch.  I've been playing it for a good while now, got a handful of things but I'm sort of teetering on the point where the adventure is really going to get into full swing so before I grab my Master Sword and get in some big ancient robots, I'll post some of my thoughts about this game so far.

First lets get some good things out of the way.  The game is HUGE, and I don't just mean in terms of actual game world but there's also a ton of stuff to do.  I've not even seen close to all of it but I'm constantly finding quests, big enemies, shrines, interesting looking landmarks, towns etc.  There is definitely a ton of fun to be had just running around and looking for things which, in fairness, is what I've spent the vast majority of my time doing with the game up to this point.  With a lot of these open world type games its easy for the world to be big but sort of barren of anything interesting (New Fallout for example) but Zelda just constantly has stuff popping up every which way.  You'll set a goal for some quest or to get to some shrine and then on the way there about 7 different things will distract you, but in a good way.

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But after you get over the vast and varied world, things tend to go downhill a little bit.  Zelda doesn't have your usual set of dungeons to explore and conquer.  In this game you have 4 divine beasts that you must go inside and defeat the boss of and then go hit up Hyrule Castle to go slap Ganons shit in.  Conventional dungeons have been replaced with Shrines which are sort of short puzzle or combat sequences which will net you a spirit orb.  4 spirit orbs give you either an extra heart or extra stamina, that choice is up to you.  Since exploring the world is so fun, the act of hunting around and finding these shrines are cool but the only thing that awaits you on the inside is pure disappointment.  Every single shrine is some kind of brain dead puzzle to solve or some shit, non threatening, easy as hell enemy to defeat.  This wouldn't be a problem if the shrines were not such a big part of the game but doing a number of shrines is VITAL to success.  For example getting the master sword requires you to have a certain number of hearts in order to pull it from its stone and so you have to do a button of shrines to get enough orbs to get those hearts.  Health in general is a problem in this game because of my next big gripe which is the combat.

The combat in Breath of the Wild is shit.  There's no if, ands or buts about it, it's just shit.  Partly it's shit because of the breakable weapons thing that the games decided to use and it seems that there isn't a weapon in the game that doesn't just shatter after about 7 or 8 hits.  This problem however is more of an annoyance than a real deal breaker but the deal is indeed broken when you consider the difficulty of combat.  A combat encounter will only really go one of two ways.  The first is that you fight the enemy for a bit and then it lands a hit on you and you die instantly, this is basically the only way to game over.  The second is that you will fight the enemy for a bit and he lands a hit on you and doesn't kill you instantly.  In this situation the enemy has literally no chance of winning the encounter because if your health becomes critically low, you can just chow down on one of the hundreds of steak skewers in your pockets or just spam apples until you are full HP again.  All this challenge (or lack thereof) means is that there exist little pockets of Hyrule that you can't go to yet until you find either enough shrines to get enough hearts or until you get armor strong enough to make sure you don't die in a single blow, after that, every single combat encounter in this game is free.

The tedium of the shrines and the atrocious combat are my two BIG gripes with this game but I'm fully aware I'm only scratching the surface.  I've not done any of the divine beasts yet and there seems to be plenty of stuff dotted around the world that might make up for these two glaring problems by the time I get to the end.  I don't hate this game, but I think that all the hype I encountered before getting my Switch made me think I was in for something really special when all I seem to be getting right now is a mediocre open world action adventure.

I'll do another post after I finish it to see if my opinion changes at all

My First 12 Hours With Death Stranding

At time of writing this post I've just finished a mini marathon session of Death Stranding that was 12 hours over the course of Saturday/Sunday and I'm going to share a few of my thoughts while it's fresh in my mind.  I'm only going to scratch the surface with what I'm saying though since 1) I want to avoid spoilers as much as possible and 2) There is A LOT going on and talking about all of it in one written post would take way longer than I'm willing to sit in front of my computer for at this time.

If you read the back of the box for Death Stranding it'll tell you it's "a new genre of game, the Strand game" and even after an extended session I'm not entirely sure what they mean by this.  If you go on Twitter you'll see a number of people complaining it's a walking simulator which also isn't fair or accurate.  What Hideo Kojima has done with Death Stranding is ask an extremely important question within gaming which is "What if we took Euro Truck Simulator 2, filled it with enemies and gave it a bonkers plot?" which is a question I'm glad he asked because the result is REALLY good.

At it's core, Death Stranding is about delivering the mail.  You are treated with a pretty dramatic opening sequence and then once it dumps a bunch of intrigue in your lap you are free to collect cargo and deliver them, mainly on foot, around various locations on the map.  As you deliver cargo you connect people to the "Chiral Network" which is the games 1st main objective.  The main premise of the game is that an apocalyptic event known as the Death Stranding took place some time in the games past and after that an expedition went out in order to reconnect the people of North America.  The woman in charge of the expedition has sort of being "kidnapped" by a militant group known as the homo-demons and it's your job as Norman Reedus to reconnect the country and get your sister back, the games second objective.

After you get people on the network, you can do jobs for them or find their lost cargo and deliver it which nets you "likes" and the more likes you get, the more tools and resources are available to you in order to make your courier life easier.  Standing between you and your deliveries though are two groups, the BTs and the MULES.  BTs are basically spooky ghosts and I have no idea what they do to you if they catch you because it's not happened yet and the MULES hang out in little pockets of the map and if you try to go through they will hunt you down, beat you up and steal your shit.  While the gameplay can be a little repetitive, the game is constantly dangling the mystery of what actually is going on in the plot in front of you and finishing a delivery for another tidbit of story is a surprisingly satisfying reward.

The multiplayer aspect is sort of similar to Dark Souls in a way but you can't invade other people and steal their cargo unfortunately.  Once you get an area on the Chiral Network you are connected to other players and you can see the structures they have placed down on the map.  These include ropes, ladders and bridges for easier traversal or things like generators and watch towers along with other things for utility.  There's a ton of other multiplayer systems going on as well though such as entrusting lost cargo from depots or finding other cargo that a more careless player has dropped so you can claim the likes of yourself but I've not really been engaging with it too much.  My gripe with the multiplayer is that it makes things a bit too easy.  Clearly the game wants you to carry ladders, ropes and the building item in order to help yourself get around but player have already put shit in the best places so you don't NEED to do any of that yourself because it's already been done for you.

When I finish it I'm going to be sure to finish it and write a spoilerific post about my thoughts on the plot and other things but for now I'll leave it there.  There is A LOT I've not mentioned but all I can say is that if you were on the fence about Death Stranding, you should absolutely try it out.  I'd not disagree with you if you said on paper it sounds a bit dull but there's something about it that just grabs you and doesn't let go, it's sort of hard to put down really.

Severed

So when I was on the plane to the USA for my summer holiday I decided to pick one of the random Vita games I got for free as part of PS+ and the first choice my finger went to was a game called Severed.  I didn't have any expectation for this game but what I got was actually really good. 

The first thing I noticed right off the bat was the art style.  I thought I'd seen it before somewhere and it wasn't until I got off the plane, hit Wi-Fi and was able to Google it that I discovered that Severed is made by a developer called Drinkbox Studios who also made another great game called Guacamelee! Just as an aside, if you haven't played that you should also go check it out because it's fantastic.

So the game starts out and you find yourself in the role of a young girl who's family has been taken away by monsters and your arm has been cut off.  You walk through her destroyed house and an evil thing in a mirror gives you a sword and then you go on an adventure to get them back.  The story is a bit bare bones but it's got everything you need to make you want to press on.  A missing family and a world full of weird monsters and places to kill and explore.

Game play wise the game plays sort of like Zelda had a baby with one of those weird first person horror dungeon crawlers on the Amiga or something.  You have to explore dungeons and each dungeon gives you a piece of gear that will not only solve the puzzles in that dungeon but open up extra bits of the world for you to go and find secrets and whatnot.  There are three "worlds" let say with one hub area that connects them and as you gain gear and skills you'll want to back track for heart pieces (for more health of course) and brain pieces (for mana)

It's the combat however where this game really shines.  You use the touch screen to swipe enemies with your sword and each enemy has different patterns that you have to work out in order to deal damage and to block their oncoming attacks.  At first you just work out how to kill them and then kill them but as you progress through the game it starts throwing multiple enemies at you which surround you.  This puts you in situations where your having to manage not only attacks and blocks but doling out the occasional smack to the enemy behind you or to your side so that their attack meter doesn't fill up and slaps a bunch of your life away.  If you deal out enough hits without being attacked or blocked you fill up a bonus meter and when the meter is full it allows you to....SEVER!....enemy body parts which you collect and use to power up your characters skills.

I have two complaints about this game, the first being that it felt a bit short.  I don't know if it's ACTUALLY short but I managed to finish it after spending only a couple hours on the plane and then a couple more on a bus tour ride but it could just be that I'm really good.  Also the upgrade system is broken and you can basically get all the upgrades you need even if you suck at the game.  Sometimes in pots and things you find "giblets" and one of the first skills you learn is how to transmute giblets into upgrade items.  Even if you somehow manage to go the entire game not being able to sever a single body part (impossible) you could still power up enough for the final boss to be a complete cakewalk.

Still, despite these complaints I had a great time with Severed, it's a fun game with a lot of personality.  I played the Vita version but apparently it's on mobile, Wii U and Switch so go check it out.

Excited For Sekiro

Usually when there's a big upcoming release I try to not get myself too excited for it.  Call me elitist or snobby or whatever but big AAA games, while enjoyable, don't usually live too long in my memory after all the release hype has died down.  However if there's one thing that does consistently impress me with every release it's From Software and it's Souls games.  Now from what I gather Sekiro isn't STRICTLY Souls, but it plays close enough for me.

Just straight off the bat I love the setting and the general look of the game.  Not because it's all Samurai and I'm a huge weeb (that much is only partly true) but I kind of like the idea of having a From Software covering as many thematic bases as possible.  We've got the high fantasy setting of the Souls games, the Euro-Horror feel of Bloodborne and in Sekiro we get a nice eastern touch, it's pretty cool.  Ni-Oh was great and all but now we have an ACTUAL Souls type game in an eastern setting rather than just a souls flavored action game from another company.

Setting aside though, I heard that this game has no real kind of leveling system which excites me greatly.  Some might lament the loss of this but as much as you might hate to admit, stats play a HUGE role in the way a Souls game progresses.  Sure, you CAN go fight those skeletons at the start of Dark Souls 1 but you're going to die in 1 hit and deal no damage in return just because your stats aren't there.  With Sekiro it sounds like it really is a true test of skill.  No more complaining about "artificial difficulty" if that's even still a thing, if you suck at Sekiro it sounds like it'll be because you ACTUALLY suck and now you have no excuse.

The feature that seems to have replaced straight up leveling is the prosthetic thing where you can equip different arms that do different things like a sort of grim-dark samurai Megaman.  I've been avoiding stuff because I want to experience as much of it for myself as possible but there seems to be one item in particular that acts like a grappling hook.  That alone is interesting because Souls have never really had much verticality so how the level design changes to suit this new found mobility is really exciting. 

If you've never played a Souls game before then you should go try one.  If you can't be bothered trying to get into a series 3 games deep then Sekiro (or Bloodborne really) might be a good place to start.  Fingers crossed that From really knock this one out of the park.

Tau Plays Ruin Demo

The Last Guardian

So recently I just finished The Last Guardian and considering that we all waiting about 10 years for the bloody thing to actually get released I feel it would be rude to not say a few words about it.  I'll keep it as spoiler free as possible so don't worry if you've not played it.

So if you've been living under a rock and you don't know what the fuck you're looking at, The Last Guardian (Also known as The Man Eating Giant Eagle Trico in Japanese) is an action adventure/puzzle type affair created by the same guys that brought us Ico and Shadow of the Colossus.  Considering how good those games were, if you weren't running outside of your house to pick this shit up on release day then I feel like you might need to see a doctor for your severe brain problems and I don't say that lightly considering I usually hate buying shit day 1.

The game starts out with a nameless young boy stuck in a pit with a big dog, bird, griffin type thing all chained up and hurt and after you help it recover a little bit and free it from it's shackles you go on a grand adventure to escape the shit pit that you find yourself stuck in.  Escaping involves riding Trico around the environment, platforming and puzzle solving.  To hinder your escape there are sentient suits of armor trying to carry you off into blue doors and unless Trico is directly by your side encounters with these things should generally be feared. 

From a game play stand point I really enjoyed it but I can see why people would get frustrated with it.  The boy controls a little strange which will very occasionally cause you to fuck up platforming sections but if you aren't complete trash at playing games you'll adapt fairly quickly.  The real problem comes with controlling Trico who has been painstakingly programmed in order to act like a real animal.  That means that sometimes you'll know what to do in a given situation and you'll be using your gestures to try and make him do it but he'll just wander of and scratch his balls or stare at wood for a while instead.  While it is a sort of annoying aspect it does make it feel like your companion is an actual animal rather than just some AI helper than helps you scale large gaps.

I'm really glad a game like this game out now though because this is finally the thing that you can point to and be like "THIS is how you make a proper interactive "experience"".  Whenever anyone starts talking about these shitty walking simulators and they start raving about how good they are as "storytelling experiences" you can officially tell them to shut the fuck up and point to a nice modern game to rub their face in it.  The Last Guardian provides and experience far more powerful from anything in that genre and still manages to function as a game, it's brilliant. 

So with that said, you should just go and play The Last Guardian.  While it's a bit of a draining experience it's one you'll never forget and if you happen to be scared of heights like I am it'll probably be the best horror game of 2017.

Bloodborne

I know I've been very slow in finishing this game, I started playing it last December and I only finished it, at time of writing, 3 days ago.  Don't worry though, it's not because Bloodborne is bad, it's actually fantastic but this kind of comes with the territory when you have a huge backlog like this.

So this is where I would usually talk about the story in Bloodborne but if I did that on here I feel like I would be cheating.  I played the game in Japanese and while I don't usually have much trouble playing games in Japanese the language used in Bloodborne is impenetrable and I had no idea what the fuck was going on for most of the game.  I realized that there was a hunt and I had to put a stop to it somehow but almost everything about  the story managed to escape me.   Once I beat the game I had to go to YouTube to get an explanation of what was going on so I'll just point you in the direction of that video if you want to know the story.

Game play wise it's pretty similar to a Souls game and I'm pretty sure everyone knows how they work by now since they are famously hard.  However if you're a Souls fan going into Bloodborne I feel like there's a lot you have to unlearn and relearn in order to become proficient at this title.  The combat is a lot faster now, there's no standing around with a big shield up and looking for an opening.  It's all about dodging and dashing and knowing how to use your transforming weapons really well and all that kind of thing.  On the surface it's just a standard Souls game but once you start to get into the combat a little bit the game is very VERY different. 

As far as complaints go, I only have 2.  One is the Japanese and that's really more my fault than the games fault and it's not even an issue that a native English speaker playing in English would have.  Second are the chalice dungeons which are optional side areas that you can play through for certain bits of special loot.  The problem with chalice dungeons is that they are all so fucking BORING.  You start to glaze over as you play them and they start to feel more like a chore than anything else so unless you're going for that 100% playthrough then I'd recommend skipping them.

At the end of the day though, Bloodborne is a great addition to the Souls series and if you're a fan then you'd be doing yourself a disservice by not playing it.  It's also a great place to start for a new player since it's very fast and actually quite forgiving in the opening moments although the difficulty very quickly ramps up.  Check it out, I'd say it's worth buying a PS4 for. 

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

Thanks to region locking bullshit on the 3DS it's taken me a fair while to get around to playing this game but it was worth the wait because it's rather good.

It's hard to talk about Zelda really, everyone already knows whats up.  You play as Link and for some reason Hyrule gets fucked and princess Zelda goes missing.  Go around a bunch of dungeons, get a bunch of items, fight a bunch of bosses and save the world.  At this point we've done it a million times and despite things being a bit predictable at this point, it's a tried and tested formula that works and these adventures are fun to go on. 

However, Link Between Worlds tries to mix things up a little bit when it comes to dungeon progression and items.  In previous Zelda games you would go to a dungeon, do some puzzles and get an item, then use that item to do the second half of the dungeon and kill a boss with it.  However in this game all the items are available from the get go pretty much and you pay to rent them out.  Dungeons are still based around the use of a core item but it means that when you find that big chest with the secret thing in it, it's not something predictable and you end up receiving something actually useful and worth the effort of all that puzzle solving.  The games core mechanic of turning into a wall painting to move around the world is also easy to understand and used in a number of interesting ways that keep things entertaining.

I only have two complaints about this game but neither of these ruin the overall experience.  First, the game feels short.  I played it almost exclusively during my work lunch breaks and train rides and I've managed to beat it in what feels like a very short time.  Granted I didn't get EVERYTHING in the game but scouring for little crab things for unnecessary upgrades to my items and raising enough rupees to buy a golden bee didn't tickle my fancy really. My second complaint is that I feel like the game is too easy, I played through the entire thing, had 0 deaths on my death count on the end screen and didn't even come close to dying even once.  There IS a Hero Mode that unlocks when you beat the game which I've yet to try so I'm hoping that a second playthrough may yield a more challenging experience.

Either way, it's a great little game on the 3DS and you should give it a whirl if you haven't done so already.  Just classic, fun adventuring.   

Tau Plays Discworld Part 10

Nearly finished Chapter 2!

Tau Plays Discworld Part 4

The uploads have been slow because I've been extremely busy!  Part 4 is kind of short but I hope you enjoy!

Ori and the Blind Forest

This is another one of those games that I knew absolutely nothing about upon purchase but I'm very happy that I took a chance and gave this game a shot.  Despite it's quality, there isn't actually all that much to say about it, but here I go.

Ori and the Blind forest starts out with a story about a little white cat thing born from some Elder Tree getting separated from said tree.  He is found and raised by a fat brown thing and together they live a happy and idyllic life together until the forest starts to die and their food supplies run out.  When the fat brown thing dies of hunger and Ori himself comes close to death, he is saved by a spirit and is then tasked with recovering the forest.

From here, Ori and the Blind forest opens itself up and you find yourself in a "metroidvania" type of game.  I hate using that term but it's the best word to use for games like this because then everyone knows what you mean.  In case there are people who live under a rock and don't know what I mean by "metroidvania" then it's the kind of game where you have a big 2D map and you have to explore and find power ups in order to progress.  These kind of games are filled with lots of pickups that are often unattainable at the start but as you collect more skills then you can backtrack in order to pick up all the goodies you missed with your new found skills.

Ori and the Blind forest doesn't really boast anything unique apart from it's check pointing system where you spend mana to create a save spot.  That said, it does boast a hell of a lot of polish and the team that put it together obviously know what's up when it comes to making games like this.  The game play is smooth, the platforming is fun and the puzzles while a little on the simple side aren't completely brain dead.  There's also a decent amount of stuff to find in the dying forest but the game allows you to upgrade Ori to sense them out so you aren't left completely in the dark about where certain secrets lay.  That said, getting 100% in Ori is no easy task with certain items being missable and the sensing skills being locked way up your skill tree so you're still going to need to keep your wits about you if you want all the goodies the game has to offer.

The one thing that struck me the most about this game is the graphics and music.  There's a really nice atmosphere to this game that helps you immerse yourself in the game pretty easy which is something I've not been able to do with any title for a long time.  Also the music is really well done with nice ambient themes as you explore and stuff that really gets the player going when shit is hitting the fan.

I feel that Ori and the Blind Forest is one of those great games that people will remember for a good while.  It's nothing new or original but it knows what it wants to be and does it really well.  It's fun, immersive and looks great, y'all should give it a shot.

Tau Plays Discworld Part 2

Wow, I've not put anything out in a while thanks to Golden Week in Japan.  So, let's kick it off with a new Discworld part!  Enjoy!

Oblitus

Usually I only talk about games after I've beaten them and despite the fact I've not beaten Oblitus it might be a while before I do so here we go.

Oblitus is a game 2D adventure game available on Steam developed by Connor Ullmann.  You play as a short masked dude with a spear tasked to save the world from some kind of great evil.  They story is a little thin on the ground but that's OK as "save the world" is quite frankly good enough for a game like this.

You, as the little guy, have to run, jump, roll and stab your way through a number of different settings in order to reach a boss.  Your ultimate goal (I think) is to kill "The Harbinger" and save the world or something, I dunno.  As you play you gain upgrades and abilities that make your life a little easier but none of these upgrades are over powered enough to ever ruin the challenge of the game.  The big thing is that every time you play the game is a little different.  The level layout and the locations of certain items and enemies will always be constant but what those items or enemies are may change.  For example, an ability scroll will always spawn in the same spot but on one run it will be a high jump and on the next run you might get a health boost or a double stab or something.

One thing that becomes very clear almost straight away is that the game takes a lot of inspiration from Dark Souls.  It plays almost as if someone took Dark Souls and made it considerably shorter in 2D yet ramped up the difficulty to 11.  Oblitus itself is actually that hard but the game features permanent death so every time you mess up a run you have to start from scratch.  Also, the healing that you get from defeated enemies is VERY small so one fight that went slightly wrong can throw up huge blockades for you later on.  The game is quite short but extremely tough and will require a good few runs before you can learn the lay of the land and make some decent progress.  Even with knowledge of the game though, your execution has to be pretty spot on to do well and since I'm a bit of a clumsy bugger the games ending eludes me so far.

The game features some nice graphics and some great music that really set a nice mood.  In general the atmosphere of  the game does a very good job at making you feel small and insignificant in it's world.  The world might not be very big but you are still nothing more than a shitty under equipped gnat trying to kill a deity. 

As for complaints I don't have many but the perma-death thing does kind of piss me off.  Also the fact that there is no save feature for mid-way runs means that I'm not able to play all that much because I fear of not being able to finish due to time.   Finally, it might be because I'm shit but sometimes the hit detection feels a bit iffy.  Like an attack that I'm sure I rolled past connects and takes off a good chunk of my health is frustrating enough to make me want to put my fist through the screen but luckily I enjoy the game enough to not do it and try again.

So yeah, you should try Oblitus, especially so if you are looking for a decent challenge because this game will keep you occupied for a good while.

Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin

This is a game that has been part of my collection for a very long time and beaten on multiple occasions but very recently I just went and beat it again so I thought I'd talk about it a little bit.

Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin is a DS game that, like most Castlevania games post Symphony of the Night uses the Metroid style rather than original Castlevania style.  I'm not saying that as a bad thing, I like metroidvania a lot but it just is what it is.

Portrait of Ruin being on the DS had to have some kind of gimmick that set it apart from other titles in the franchise.  For example Dawn of Sorrow had you drawing seals on the screen to finish bosses and other things but the gimmick here doesn't involve the touch screen of the system at all.  Portrait of Ruins thing was that you had two characters that you could freely switch between.  These two characters where Johnathon and Charlotte and they both have their own strengths and weaknesses that you must use in order to overcome Dracula's castle.

Except the vast majority of the game isn't spent dealing with Dracula at all, oh no.  At some point some tosser called Brauner came along and sealed Dracula away using magic evil paintings.  Actually, I'm not actually sure he was trying to seal him away, I beat it last month and I didn't really give a crap about the story but it's something to that effect.  What this means in terms of game play is that you not only have to deal with Dracula's castle but with the insides of Brauner's paintings.  Of course, once you deal with him Dracula comes along to try and ruin your day but that's only at the very end of the game when you're on course for the best ending.

The rest is standard metroidvania fair of finding weapons, levelling up, exploring the castle and gaining abilities that help you get through all the walled off bits.  There is also a ghost sitting in a room near the castle entrance who will give you quests and completing these quests will yield various rewards.  There are also a few online features I never used and extra characters you can use once you beat the game so there is quite a lot of content here.

That said, this one is far from perfect and for some reason the little niggles in this one get to me a lot more than any other Castlevania game.  For example, Johnathon spends the whole game carrying around the Vampire Killer, the legendary whip that's been used since the series began.  However, because he's not a Belmont they make a big deal about how he can't use it without special help and if he does use it it'll consume his soul or some shit.  However, once you do unlock the vampire killer's power it has absolutely no adverse effects and is probably the best weapon in the game.  It's such a major plot point but the games lets you swing that shit around like any other weapon with no repercussions, it seems a little silly.

The double character thing also seems like a bit of a waste since my last through consisted of using Johnathon and nothing but unless I needed magic for something specific or she had to help me push something.  Charlotte is pretty much weaker in every way and while I'm sure there's some hardcore player out there who could argue the benefits of Charlotte, for a guy like me she's fairly useless.

The worst thing about this game though is that it goes and pulls a Silent Hill 4 but repeating the same 4 or 5 levels twice just with slightly stronger enemies the second time round.  It's fine because unlike SH4 the core game play is really fun but I do wish that they had a bunch unique portraits to go through rather than just 4 or 5 repeated.

While I personally think Portrait of Ruin is a really good game I'd find it hard to recommend it to someone who wasn't a Castlevania fan.  If you were looking to get into the whole metroidvania thing or you came off Symphony and wanted to try something else, go play Aria of Sorrow or Order of Ecclesia, it's like this one but way better.  Not that this is bad, just go enjoy the REALLY good ones first.

Murdered: Soul Suspect

A long long time ago on the DS there was a game called Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective.  It was a puzzle game about a guy who had been killed but remained in the real world as a ghost and the player had to solve his own murder.  Murdered: Soul Suspect, despite its silly name has a similar premise and that got me excited and while I personally enjoyed the game, I feel that it was lacking.

The story follows a detective called Ronan who in his younger years was a bit of a criminal.  Thanks to some forging of paperwork from his brother he managed to get a job with the police and put his life back on track.  Ronan is working the case of a serial killer in the city of Salem (yeah, I know) and at the very start of the game he is thrown out of a 3 story window and then shot to death by the killer himself.  Ronan however lingers in the real world as a ghost which pisses him off because he was hoping to join his dead wife but he can't do that until he resolves his business with the serial killer he's been after for so long.

Gameplay in Murdered: Soul Suspect has you exploring environments, looking for clues and picking up other collectable crap that fleshes out the back story as well as Ronan's character.  Every area is about the same.  You watch a cutscene, find a bunch of clues, watch another cutscene and then progress to the next area.  Between areas there are a few side quests to do but they feel a bit pointless and don't really reward you with anything.  As you look for clues there's some kind of badge ranking system but as far as I'm aware it doesn't actually have any bearing on anything.  I've not looked it up but I'm pretty sure there aren't a multitude of endings you can get by playing the game in certain ways.

The one part of this game that pissed me off was the demons.  Demons are these sausage looking things that spawn usually when you're trying to escape an area or progress to some key plot element.  The idea is that if they see you they will chase you and suck your soul until you die.  You can hide inside these spirit things if you get caught and escaping the demons is not hard at all.  If you can sneak up behind them you can execute them and most of the demons are so easy to execute that they serve as nothing more than a minor annoyance rather than anything else.  I guess they were put in to build tension but the effect falls flat.

There are many aspects to this game like the demons and the aforementioned badge system that makes the game feel like a lot of shit was cut.  Like they had plans to do some much more with various parts of the designed but had to drop it for time constraints or whatever.

That said, I did enjoy Soul Suspect but I'd find it hard to recommend to another person.  It's story, while predictable and a bit silly kept me interested enough for me to play it through to the end and I did like Ronan as a character.  There are a number of little niggles regarding the plot and the mechanics of the ghost world but that's just a case of me reading way too much into things.  If you can grab it on a sale, I'd say go for it, it's not that long and it'll kill a few lazy afternoons.  It doesn't quite stack up to Ghost Trick but good enough for now.

Evil Quest

Evil Quest is one of those games that sits in the Steam store that costs barely anything but no one will ever really play or know about.  Quite frankly it's not very good, but I want to be nice to it because while a little crappy there seems to have been some genuine effort put into it by what must be a very small number of people.

Evil Quest follows the adventures of a bloke called Galvis.  Galvis hears the stories of the Chaos Axe, a weapon so powerful that it was hidden away in the land of humans by God himself and now he wants to take it for himself to destroy the world.  He must travel across the lands breaking the 4 seals that keep the Axe of out his reach and then venture to the Astral Plane to slay God and bring an end to humanity.

Before even starting the game I had a problem because I can't think of any game off the top of my head where you play the bad guy that doesn't suck complete shit.  Maybe Dungeon Keeper but I've not played that in such a long time I can't remember if you're really the bad guy in that one, feel free to remind me or tell me of a title if such a thing exists.

Despite its stupid story, Evil Quest actually plays OK.  It's a little basic and a little clunky but it works and the hacking and slashing of enemies is pretty fun.  The game falls short in a lot of areas such as getting items that you use only once and then never again or 2 of the 4 stats being COMPLETELY fucking useless but these don't ruin it enough to make me want to shut it off.  Despite the flaws in it's design I managed to get to the end since they did a good job of pacing the game and not making it drag out too long.

My big problem with Evil Quest comes with the characters, dialogue and artwork.  The art for the games few brief cut scenes looks like something from some adolescents Deviantart page where he keeps all his Sonic fan art, it just had that kind of vibe to it for me.  The designs of the enemies aren't all that bad but there's a lot of palette swapping going on and that's just lazy and bullshit.  The characters are pretty terrible with Galvis being the worst because he doesn't really have a reason for doing anything.  He's a dick to absolutely everybody just because he can be and it makes the whole thing feel very shallow.  Finally the dialogue is extremely cringe worthy with lines written as if a very angsty 15 year old boy had been allowed head writer position on the development team.

But that last line sums up all of Evil Quests problems really.  It plays and feels as if a 15 year old boy who gets bullied a little bit at school and listens to too much Slipknot was given a copy of game maker and told to create something.  The boy isn't an idiot, so he makes something mildly fun to pass the time but by God is it one of the most cringe worthy things in all of gaming.

Despite my harsh words I can sort of recommend Evil Quest since it costs basically no money and it wouldn't take enough of your time to be offensive.  Hell, when everyone shut up and just let me run around the map killing monsters and collecting treasure, I had a good time.  So if you're on some kind of extreme budget and you want something new to play, give Evil Quest ago.  There's enough love and talent on display here to give your support to and hopefully in the future Chaosoft Games will better themselves and produce something really epic in due time.

Betrayer

I feel a little bit betrayed by Betrayer.  I bought it during a Steam sale for nearly no money and I thought I was getting some kind of horror game.  I didn't get a horror game but I'll forgive this betrayal because what I got was a really good adventure game.

Betrayer starts out with your nameless protagonist washed up on a beach of colonial America.  After walking down a linear path for a while some chick in red shows up and sends you a message which I can't remember the contents of right now.  Then you are let out into another map which is much wider and more open where you come across an abandoned settlement.  It's at this point in the game where the main part of the adventure becomes clear.  After some exploring you hook up with the woman in red and you agree to help her regain her memory and look for her missing sister.  While doing this you must switch between the normal world and a light world exploring the land and talking to ghosts.  Each ghost has their own story and as figure out the fates of all the souls that died in each area, the mystery with the woman in red becomes clearer.

Gameplay is first person and while you explore you are attacked by things such as Spanish soldiers, weird on fire tribesmen, spiders, ghosts, skeletons and all sorts of other stuff.  At the start of the game you are given a longbow but later you have access to things such as crossbows, muskets and pistols.  Since bows aren't particularly strong and guns take a long time to reload there is a focus on stealth game play where you receive bonuses to damage for catching and enemy unaware.

The thing that really sticks out about this game though is the art style.  The whole game uses the same kind of colour scheme as Madworld on the Wii, which is black, white and red.  It games the game a unique feel since the red is used not for blood or gore but to highlight things of interest in the world.  Of course if you don't like this feel you can mess with a slider and turn the main world into a fully coloured thing but the dark world will always be black and white.

My complaints with this game are that it is a bit repetitive.  Once you get a feel for how the game works then you end up doing every map the same way and things can become a little boring.  I got round this by doing 1 area per day rather than playing for long periods of time all at once but people shouldn't have to do that just to enjoy a game.  Also the enemy variety is a little lacking since almost every enemy in the dark world is JUST a skeleton.  Not even a fucked up weird skeleton, just a bog standard skeleton that shoots a thing at you.  There is some variety later on, but quite frankly it's not enough.  Also the final section of the game is pretty much just busywork which is unforgivable.  However it doesn't last too long so I suppose it doesn't tarnish the overall experience

That said, Betrayer is pretty cheap on Steam and for what it's worth I enjoyed it a lot.  I found the stories of each of the spirits to be pretty interesting and that in turn made searching for all the clues a bit more fun since I'd try to piece it together in my head before reaching the wraith and having it told to me.  Not quite the next big horror gem I was hoping for, but an enjoyable few days nonetheless