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

Lisa: The Painful

 

Last night I finished Lisa: The Painful RPG and if you can't be bothered to read any longer than this first post the the only thing I really want you to know that this game is probably one of the best RPGs I've ever played in my entire goddamn life.

And you know what? You probably shouldn't read any more than that if you've not played the game for yourself, because similar to games such as Undertale, it really is the kind of thing that you just need to experience for yourself knowing as little as possible.  This game is actually incredibly hard to talk about without spoiling a lot of key moments that make it so great but I'll do my best to give you a fast outline.

The game follows a man called Brad during the post apocalypse.  Only this apocalypse wasn't caused by some kind of viral outbreak or nukes falling on the world, it was caused by all the women just sort of up and vanishing and then things falling apart pretty hard as a result.  Brad however, comes across a baby girl in the desert one day and being a man of many emotional burdens, takes it upon himself to raise and protect the girl.  However, pretty much every other man in the immediate area sees that the discovery of a woman in God knows how long means that maybe there can be some.....relief....along with a chance to save humanity and she is promptly swiped from you and you must embark on a journey to rescue her.

While that's what you get in the opening of the game there's A LOT more to Lisa than that.  Each area that you go to has you encounter various groups and individuals, all with their own stories to tell and experiences to share (in the form of spoken word or baseball bat to the head depending).  A lot of what goes on in Lisa is grim, morbid, disgusting, reprehensible stuff but there's a weird sort of humor going through the whole game so when you come upon this stuff it raises more of a nervous chuckle then a feeling of disdain.  

But enough about the plot that I don't want to spoil because the gameplay is also really good.  It's a standard RPG on the surface.  It's made in RPG Maker for fucks sake so on a surface level you don't really get more standard than that.  But don't let the "made in RPG maker" line turn you away because the engine has been tweaked for some real interesting effects.  For example Brad is a karate master so you input his moves with keyboard strokes like a combo system.  Some characters have MP based moves to do damage or inflict ailments and some characters have TP based moves so you have to spend time either doing or taking damage in order to fill a meter before you can let the big guns go.

One thing to note though is that Lisa is not an easy game.  It's not impossibly difficult either but it will attempt to kick you up and down the garden path if you don't try to spend at least a little time learning what everything is and what it all does.  Combat has a sort of Shin Megami Tensei feel to it where a debuff or an unlucky roll (or a lucky one) can turn the tide of a battle extremely quickly.   For example there was one enemy that was absolutely shitting on my party, one shotting them with most of its attacks so in an act of desperation I decided to inflict "pissed" status to the guy.  Pissed makes him crit more often but also gives him a chance to just smack himself in the face for the damage he was about to do to you.  The fight came right down to the wire but in the last turn he crit himself and died from the attack, letting me live to fight on another day.  

But individual encounter difficulty and decent strategy isn't the only thing you have to worry about.  Lisa throws quite a lot of party members at you over the course of your adventure but I think that's to counter-act the fact that the game has perma-death.  If a characters HP is brought to 0 they are KO'd and can be revived with an item or by resting.  However some enemies have attacks that will just flat out kill a guy and when that happens they are gone from the game forever.  These enemies are few and far between but when you know that you could lose a guy for good in one bad turn of a fight, it makes you think quite differently about your approach to the battle.

The one bone the game does throw at you is a difficulty option at the start.  Normal mode lets you just play the game as standard but Pain mode has some different encounters and save points will just explode upon use.  Save points are frequent and nicely placed but the fact that they are a 1 use commodity on the games harder setting really ramps up the tension.  Personally I recommend the games pain mode because there are a few situations that can leave you feeling a bit helpless but a quick reload sort of sucks the impact away from that.  Being a decent distance away from your last save, only to have the cruelty of the wasteland leaving you in a bad spot sparks a certain tension in the player that you just wouldn't get on normal.

 So play Lisa, it's a damn good game and it's a damn shame that I don't hear more people talking about it.  Saying any more than I've already said would start to get into the spoiler zone so I'm going to end here.  

 

The soundtrack is amazing too, by the way.