I’ve decided to post one game at a time instead of waiting until I have played five of them, at least for the longer games. But everything else is the same – it’s basically just my hidden personal notes about the game.
Developer: Obsidian Entertainment | Released: 2019 | Genre: RPG, First Person
A sci-fi RPG much akin to the popular RPG games by Bethesda. Lots of planets to visit, with my own space ship and a small crew of companions. Planets were confined – it was not a true open world game.
Spoiler: Notes
I was this close to abandoning the game before getting my own space ship and leaving the first planet. It felt bland and mediocre. I found lots of forum threads on the internet agreeing with that impression.
Also, the planetary areas were surprisingly small and didn’t warrant much exploration.
But when I did get a space ship and landed on Monarch, I had to fight through hordes of difficult monsters trying to reach Stellar Bay, and that’s where the game grabbed me. I did have to lower the difficulty level as it was rough. Later I learned that I wasn’t really supposed to fight my way through that. I should have started a quest elsewhere to skip it, or alternatively have run all the way.
But it didn’t take long until combat was a walk in the park. Especially after being hardened on Monarch. So in this game you really could find some truth in the old adage, “That which doesn’t kill you…”
Tim Cain called this game “Fallout meets Firefly” – I could clearly see the Fallout inspiration, but other than that I felt it owed the rest of the style to BioShock. Especially when using the vending machines.
The colors were all over the place, but instead of making the game distinct and look dazzling, it somehow contributed to the feeling of blandness. Some of the armor looked like it was bought in Toys “R” Us.
There was way too much loot in this game. I couldn’t walk three meters without finding more containers and objects to pick up. And since I’m OCD when it comes to loot, I just had to get it all.
Apart from perks, the game sometimes offered a flaw for an extra perk. I only took two, for more plasma and corrosive damage. All the other flaws were about lowering attributes, and I didn’t want that.
My two favorite companions were Parvati and Nyoka.
I hated how 90% of all women in this game had short hair. You can call me everything from misogynistic to chauvinistic, I don’t care. Beautiful women should never have short hair. Period.
I liked that tapping the hotkey for sprinting kept it on until I released a direction key.
The buff feature was weird. Extra buff items could be placed in slots to be activated together with healing myself. That didn’t make sense to me. Why not activate the buffs by themselves before a fight?
The companion abilities reminded me of the cut scene powers in Final Fantasy VII.
Byzantium, the great capital of Terra 2, somehow reminded me of Dishonored. It was another example of uninspired design in this game. Bland and uninteresting, in spite of the prosperous setting.
This is a blog series about the latest video games I’ve played recently, with my hidden personal notes. I decided to stop my balanced reviews, since I couldn’t escape the feeling that almost no one was reading them.
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.
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.
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.
