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Blogging about PC Games

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This is my third post in a series about blogging and playing PC games.

My first blog saw the light of day in 2011. I had developed my own crude WordPress theme and had some moderate success blogging mostly about MMORPG. I actually had a few visitors and even some comments to begin with. Then it fizzled out – and half a year later, I finally killed my blog.

Four years later, I had another look at my old blog posts. I thought they were written well enough for me to revive the blog and continue. I spent half a year developing the WordPress theme you see here. I wanted it to not only look good, but also have a lot of features – many of which I don’t even use myself.

But as I relaunched in 2015, I also made a vow to myself. Don’t ever give up on the blog again.

During the years since 2015, the audience for this blog has been so limited that I would probably have killed it several times over, had I not made that vow. And it wasn’t for lack of trying to keep it going. I have written tons of impressions post about PC games, a little bit about Commodore 64 music, and some science stuff too. I also announced some of the blogs posts in various social media.

You would think that kind of persistence would have garnered an audience over time.

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Submerged: Hidden Depths

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7/10Developer: Uppercut Games | Released: 2022 | Genre: 3PS, Adventure

This will be the last entry in my blog series with balanced reviews.

This sequel to Submerged is essentially more of the same. The goal is different – put a big seed in an enormous flower located in large buildings – and it has more collections as well as a few more features, including the brother now joining in on the adventure. But other than that, it’s still relaxed climbing, jumping and sailing, and again it often feels a little bit too easy.

With the brother now steering the boat, the two siblings sail between buildings to climb them for various objectives. The main one is lifting a beach ball of a seed into a big flower to change the organic flow of the building, but there are also other objectives such as finding relics, collections, books with the history of the city, boat boosters, light a fire in towers, discovering landmarks and animals, etc.

The most noticeable new features are mostly related to the boat. It can now drag bridges and platforms out with a rope, and it’s also where you see the brother raise relics with an anchor. The siblings are randomly in control when going on a climbing adventure in a building. That was a really cute feature, although the main story buildings with the seeds are for the sister only, as that part relates directly to her.

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Chants of Sennaar

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8/10Developer: Rundisc | Released: 2023 | Genre: Adventure, Point & Click

This game received an overwhelmingly positive user rating on Steam. Although I agree it was very well done, with a amazing drawn style that reminded me of both Sable and the graphical novel art by Moebius, and an intriguing climb of the tower of babel while deciphering glyphs to understand the languages of the people living there, it did have a few things that dragged it down ever so slightly for me.

As a true point-and-click adventure with a minimal inventory, I had to walk around and collect more glyphs from people and objects. After watching some of them used in situations that could give a hint about what they mean, a notebook is opened with about 3-6 glyphs and a few drawings. Time to guess what that set means. The more glyphs guessed, the easier it is to understand what you need to do on that level.

There are about five levels to climb in the enormous tower, and each level have several interconnected locations like in oldskool adventure games. It’s not just clicking objects to pick up and use, sometimes there are genuine stealth sequences too. Typically a ghostly destination figure is shown that, when clicked, makes your characters sneak over there – hopefully without being spotted.

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Game Tropes: Lighthouses

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This is a the first in a new series of gallery blog posts showcasing how a particular object or theme was shown in the many PC games I’ve completed.

A few years ago, I was dumb enough to embark on a new project which I called game tropes. I’ve always taken a lot of screenshots of the hundreds of PC games I’ve played the past couple of decades, and the goal was to go through these thousands of screenshots and sort them into categories. It could be anything. Bridges, goblins, fountains, floating rocks, keyholes, tents – the sky was the limit.

I’ve always been incredibly disciplined and stubborn when it comes to finishing really big and monotonous projects, but this time I had really bitten off more than I could chew. Since I had folders with sometimes more than a hundred screenshots for more than 500 PC games, the amount of work multiplied into truly astronomically big proportions.

Still, I kept at it for many months collecting and sorting screenshots in various folders before finally burning out. Then I set the project aside for some years only to take another look at it again. Why did I abandon this project? It was such as good idea! And yet again, I started collecting and sorting even more screenshots before burning out for the second time. And again the project just collected dust for years.

I’ve always wondered how it would feel like being Sisyphus. Now I knew.

But I still think the original idea is really good, so I’ve decided I’m going to start publishing gallery blog posts with the material I managed to collect before giving up. There is still a ton of screenshots to be shared, and there’s a lot of good stuff there.

The benefit from publishing these galleries is twofold. First, it could be interesting for game designers to have a look at how various game developers showed a certain type of object in older games. It could serve as inspiration. And second, it’s just plain entertaining to see how the same object or theme works across games of different styles and genres. At least I think it is.

Yes, you could just google this, but it’s my hope that my images may offer something in an easy way that may actually be useful to someone. Also, it would be a shame to let all of my work go to waste.

So here we go with the first one – lighthouses.

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The Invincible

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8/10Developer: Starward Industries | Released: 2023 | Genre: Adventure, Facile

Take the excellent Firewatch, throw it in a blender together with Lifeless Moon, maintain the first person perspective, hit the blender button – and you’ll end up with something much like The Invincible.

The game is based on a science fiction novel by Stanisław Lem.

As Yasna, a female astronaut originally party of a small team landing on a barren planet, you wake up in the sand much like Matt Damon did in The Martian – albeit with amnesia. Thankfully the amnesia part is not a significant part of the game. Soon she remembers most of what she needs to remember, except for the main purpose of the game – where to find the other astronaut team members.

It doesn’t take long until she has another person on the radio that she talks to throughout most of the game. Commander Novik is in orbit and can only hear what she is doing – she has to describe the things she finds. Often this evolves into interesting discussions, and sometimes they even get mad at each other. If you have played Firewatch, this is the part that reminded me so much of that game.