The 2021 Tau Awards

 

At time of writing it has just gone midnight and it has become 2022.  To celebrate the new year lets look at the games I played over the last year and give a bunch of fakey award titles to them.  Only games I beat or games that I am currently playing are eligble for a Tau award and you can see the list of games I beat in 2021 over on Twitter and you can see my now playing list over on Discord

https://twitter.com/Taurinensis/status/1337783858847072257

Game of the Year

 

Obviously it's Shin Megami Tensei 5.  Once again mainline SMT delivers a top quality product and despite some bullshitty day 1 DLC, it's pretty much everything I could have hoped for.  I bought the Switch specifically for this game and before it's release, I was sort of regretting my purchase but this thing made it all worth it.  Do yourself a favor and go play it 

Best First Playthrough 2021

LISA may have come out in 2014 but I was extremely late to this one but I can't think of a game that I played this year that stuck with me quite as strongly as LISA did.  It's dark, its funny, its challenging, its got crows that are save points that explode when you use them, what more could you possibly want?  Also the soundtrack fucking SLAPS.  The game is like, 7 pounds on Steam so go buy it 

Biggest Liar

This game was a massive piece of shit with its uninteresting story and completely idiotic lead character but the worst offence this game pulls is telling you that repeated deaths will result in a deleted save game.  Well guess what? That's not true.  The dev team had to lie to you to create a sense of tension because the game is so poorly written and poorly made that it can't do it by itself.  Fuck this game

Biggest Dissapointment 

I was pretty interested in Everhood when I first saw it.  It's very clearly trying to do an Undertale but the rhythm game based combat looked like something that was right up my alley.  Playing it was also pretty promising at first too but it's trying so hard to be deep (like Undertale) and mysteries (like Yume Nikki et al) and instead just comes off as pretentious crap.  The soundtrack was good and there are some really strong moments but overall the game felt like a total slog.  If games that have their heads shoved so far up their own arse that they can use their own skulls as periscopes appeal to you, then maybe you'll like it, but I shall not be doing a repeat playthrough of this one in a hurry 

Pleasantest Surprise

So if you look through the Twitter thread you'll notice that this game isn't on there because I'm stupid and forgot to add it to the list when I beat it.  I guess that makes its title in this article also rather appropriate.

I got this game for free off the Epic Game Store and wasn't expecting a lot from it and granted, it's not really anything special.  It's a sort of generic hairy dad game with the hairy dad replaced with a teenage girl and the voice acting is a bit weird but it' rather pleasing visually and I found myself getting pretty attatched to the characters by the end.  Also the game climaxes with you having an all out rat war with the catholic church and that's pretty cool.  Not a masterpiece by any stretch but I was expecting a pile of stinky poop garbage and got something pretty playable that I kept wanting to go back to until I beat it and I'm genuinely happy its getting a sequel. 

Worst Game

I played through many a stinker.  Benbo Quest, Summer of 58, Slender the Arrival, The Tape and a bunch more but none of them were quite as putrid and as unplayable as Bendy and the Ink Machine.  An uninteresting, unscary, slow, boring and buggy mess of a game that did nothing but waste my time and piss me off to no end.  Don't buy this, dont play it even if you get it for free, it's an absolute disgrace to the horror genre and the people who put this out into the world should be ashamed of themselves for creating something so irredeemably vile

Well that's it, that's all I can be bothered to write about this late at night.  I'm now going to wrap up under my sheets and play GOTY Shin Megami Tensei 5 until I fall asleep.  

Happy New Year everyone!

https://twitter.com/Taurinensis/status/1337783858847072257?s=20

 https://twitter.com/Taurinensis/status/1337783858847072257?s=20

https://twitter.com/Taurinensis/status/1337783858847072257?s=

https://twitter.com/Taurinensis/status/1337783858847072257?s=20

Bendy and the Ink Machine

 

With horror being easily one of my favorite genres of game, I'm always on the lookout for good horror games to sink my teeth into and with all the rave reviews I saw about Bendy and the Ink Machine, I expected this to be pretty good.  To my dismay, however, it's a collosal piece of garbage.

The game follows some dude whos name I can't remember as he goes back to an old animation studio he used to work for only to find the place in complete disrepair.  He throws a switch, turns on an ink machine and everything goes to shit as he gets stalked and chased by all manner of horrors from the studios past.

The game is your standard modern horror fare where you walk around solving some basic puzzles, finding notes and audio logs and hiding from the enemies.  The big problem with the game play in Bendy is that there is no depth to ANY of it and after about the 2 hour mark the whole thing becomes extremely dull.  The puzzles are extremely simple and usually just involve wandering around an area in order to find an item or push a button.  When it does try something more complex than that it's laughably easy, like one section where you have to fill pressure valves or something but you just hold the E key until the little water level touches the line, the kind of puzzle your children might enjoy when waiting in the dentists office.  The combat is super simple where you just walk up to things and left click until the cease to be.  There are some boss fights that try to give some variety to the combat but they are just a case of slowly strafe around enemy until they become hittable.  The stealth also only comes in two flavors of run away or throw a can for a distraction and the sections are always very short and very easy.  The complete lack of challenge or creativity found in this game means that playing it through to the end feels like an absolute chore.

But boring, cliche and unscary horror games are dime-a-dozen on Steam.  If I was to get mad about every game like that I'd be raging longer than the expected life of the universe, but what really sets Bendy apart is that it also just doesn't fucking work.  The game is EXTREMELY buggy with things constantly not working right.  The one that really sticks out in my mind is where the game completely halted my progression because it wanted me to take an elevator.  What is supposed to happen is there's a cutscene where some woman talks to you, the elevator comes down and then you get it to go to the next bit of the game.  In my game, the elevator was already there and if I pushed the elevator button nothing happened.  I even went to every floor in the level and pushed the call button there too to see if that would fix it but nope, I was just stuck.  I had to quit the game, reload, listen to the cutscene again and THEN it worked.

But that's a minor annoyance compared to the fact that the games save system just doesn't fucking work.  If you aren't planning on finishing Bendy in a single session then don't bother.  I had an issue where I was losing a couple of hours of progress at a time because something would screw up with the auto saving system and then when I loaded my game it would just set me back a whole bunch.  I noticed it was possible to tell when the bug kicked in because the save icon would stay perpetually in the corner but it happened A LOT and I was constantly quitting and reloading in order to not potentially lose an hour or two of progress to a shoddily put together game.

Bendy and the Ink Machine is an embarassing example of game design, an embarassing example of horror and an embarassing example of coding ability.  A bad game is one thing, a bad game that doesn't work and wastes the players time is another.  Do not buy it, you can have the same experience with any free to play Unity build student project for free somewhere else