The Mental Attic

This is How we Role – Episodes 13-15 – Family Matters

It’s been a while since I’ve given a behind the scenes look at what I had planned during the sessions of my D&D Twitch shnow, This is How We Role. But with the current adventure finished, I thought it would be nice to talk about a few things.

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Good

Puzzling Linguist: The core gameplay in Heaven’s Vault is deciphering the Ancient language one word and symbol at a time and Inkle has crafted a vast and complex language that starts you off easy with simple concepts but quickly ups the complexity until it becomes a matter of pattern recognition, educated guesses and just plain luck! One thing I don’t like though, is how little the script deciphering has to do with the story.

This Belongs in a Museum: In Heaven’s Vault the answers are all over the Nebula and its moons, in artefacts held at the University and those you find in the many ruins you visit. Exploring different locales becomes something of a treasure hunt and you’ll be desperate to find that next hotspot and the answers and questions it’ll provide, but more than anything, you’ll want to find those items that together point the way to a new ruin. If only the travelling wasn’t such a god-awful experience.

Bad

Temperamental Settings: I don’t know who programmed the settings in this game but if you even dare to change the volume levels for the different sounds, Heaven’s Vault will simply go insane. For the longest time, I couldn’t tell you what the music or the voice acting were like, because by lowering the volume to about 50%, the game decided to mute all audio for hours, then at some random point put it back on full blast. Fidgeting with the audio levels after that just made it worse.

Snail Pace: This game is so damn slow! Walking is slow, conversations are slow, travelling across the nebula is slow, and it’s all so boring. There’s no fast travel, an insufferable amount of backtracking, you have to do the same actions over and over to get to the same places and it just drains all the fun out of the experience. Hell, even talking to NPCs to get help from them is slow and inconvenient, with them asking you to return later or going away to “archive” relics and making you wait for about 10 flipping minutes! And let’s not even go into those sections where the character basically limps, taking one step every 5 seconds.

Illusion of Control: I lost count of the times the game decided to take control away from me. I could be walking towards a certain spot in the 3D environments when suddenly the camera and the characters spun in place and started walking somewhere else, disabling my input for minutes at a time.

Sail Away: By far the worst aspect of this game is the awful sailing. It’s by far the most tedious thing I’ve done in a video game in years. In fact, I can’t remember ever doing something as boring as this. It’s slow, takes freaking ages, the currents fully stop too many damn times. The game forces you to do the majority of these sections manually and when you even dare to use the auto-travel option, which is give control to the Robot, it will only do so to NPC hubs. If you want to travel to a ruin, that’s going to be on you.

Pointless Health: In certain situations, you’ll see a health bar pop up and drain over time and it’s primarily an excuse for the character’s movement to become even slower than usual, which I honestly thought was not possible. My only guess is that it’s supposed to make you feel like there’s a chance of failure but there’s not, I spent an entire section of the game with a depleted health bar and the only thing I felt was anger at having to control such a slow character.

Hateful Mates: I really despise the characters in this game, they’re shallow, poorly written and incredibly unlikable. The robot, Six, is inconsistent as hell in its behaviour, the protagonist is a poor attempt at snarky but is really just rude and uncaring and the rest of the cast has about the same personality as a bit of wet cardboard. It’s impossible to care about them and thus it’s very hard to care about the plot, what little there is of it in the end. The only thing I cared about was deciphering more bits of text, nothing else. If the Nebula died, good riddance.

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I wanted to like #HeavensVault but the goddamn sailing made it impossible. My review

And archaeologist with a chip on her shoulder and her trusty new robot race across the nebula to track down a lost colleague, piece together fragments of lost history and hopefully prevent the fall of their civilisation.

Review – Vaporum

What would you do if you shipwrecked, lost your memories, were the only survivor and the first thing you saw was a gigantic steampunk tower? Me, I’d start trying to hitchhike another ship, but in Vaporum’s protagonist’s case, he thought entering the ominous structure would be the best choice. How did it turn out? Play to find out. (more…)

Time for Epísode 12 of #ThisIsHowWeRole, the Telia Campaign, with some nice behind the scenes!

New players, new adventure, how exciting! The goal for this session was to bring the new party together and I think it went swimmingly! (more…)

This is How we Role – Episode 11b – Fragments

Ando finished his downtime session and now it’s time for Venadikt, the Dwarven Cleric of Astreina to pursue his own objectives. (more…)

It’s time for a sidestory! After the last major session, we kinda lost a couple of players so the downtime episode had to go away while we hunted for replacement players. We’ve found them and we’re getting things ready to resume the campaign. In the meantime, here’s the first of two downtime side-stories. First up it’s Ando. (more…)

It’s taken some time to upload this but here it is, episode 11 of This is How we Role, the Telia Campaign, episode 11, Gate Crashers, where the party fights a strangely clumsy and slow Gold Dragon. (more…)

New #DnD session and an explanation of where I am and will be for a while!

So, I know I’ve kinda been missing in action, with no new posts for most if not all of January. There’s a reason for it. (more…)

#ThisisHowweRole - Episode 9 - Almun Confidential

After last session’s romp down under the city, in the Almun Sewers, this time around our party of adventurers head topside to find the answers to the mystery of the magical ring that petrified one of their earlier clients. The investigation leads somewhere they didn’t expect. (more…)

Things have changed in the way I feel about and play #WorldOfWarcraft lately.

It’s been a few months since the start of the latest World of Warcraft expansion, Battle for Azeroth and I have to say things have changed in the way I view and consume the game since the last time I wrote. (more…)

I've really come to despise videogame romance options!

Over the past decade I’ve lost count of the number of RPGs I’ve played, both from western and Japanese developers. I’ve saved countless worlds and faced down a myriad of gods, and though my love for the genre has not changed, there is one aspect of these titles I’ve come to loathe: romance. (more…)

Days ago I heard @matthewmercer and @HollyConrad speak of their mental health. It's given me the courage to talk about my own, so here it is, what I deal with, for better or ill.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve seen many people I follow or listen to speak on the subject of mental health, specifically their own and it’s gotten me to think about my own issues. (more…)

I am a sucker for a good puzzle game. Point & Click adventures are, of course, my favourite but it only takes some clever puzzle design to have me hooked and grinning like an idiot. And I have to admit a fascination with light and darkness puzzles, particularly the clever use of shadows. So, even with Iris.Fall being something of a hybrid between 3D WASD exploration and a point & click adventure, it was the puzzle design that ultimately hooked me and kept me playing all the way to the end in one sitting.

The Good

Just the right amount: Iris.Fall is rather minimalistic when it comes to music, but what it does have it uses quite well, often the melodies consisting of short sombre melodies, almost hums, accentuated by a single chime. I’ve been a fan of this sort of ambient music ever since I played The Room, and Iris.Fall sets its dark and mysterious tone as that other series of adventures.

Great Décor: I love the colour palette chosen for Iris.Fall’s adventure: black and white. I find that nothing better expresses light and darkness and puzzles using shadows than simple monochromatic art styles, and it fits the dark themes of this game perfectly. What I like the most is that the adventure begins in colour, but as soon as you take your first steps the colours fade dramatically, ripped from the environment by an unseen force, trapping you in a colourless world.

Darkly Awesome: Iris. Fall is has some dark themes along with its puzzling, as you uncover the truth about our protagonist and her relationship to an old woman who ran a marionette theatre. The adventure through the game is incredibly surreal and while joy is not really part of the game, I could not hide my sheer awe at the spectacle before my eyes. It was black and white, using shadows and light and still, it evoked a sense of pure innocent wonder.

The Bad

Too many training wheels: Iris.Fall feels like it keeps the introduction level puzzles for too long. It’s not a long game in itself so I would have liked a spike in the puzzle complexity from the second room onwards. Sadly, the difficulty curve is far too gentle and the developers played it safe, rather than really push their puzzle design to the limit.

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Played the dark and fun adventure #IrisFall. Here’s our review!

A girl wakes up just in time to see a black cat leave her room, only to stop at the threshold and beckon her to follow.

Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is a tactical RPG, starring a group of mutants from the Ark. Some of them are anthropomorphised animals, a Hog, a Fox and a Duck, and the others are mostly human but with horns or psychic abilities. These characters set out first to recover materials for their home and then on a long rescue mission, discovering a dangerous plot by a mad cult along the way. The game is based on the tabletop RPG of the same name, published by Modiphius.

Now to the review.

The Good

Stalker’s Creed: A straight up firefight is never a good idea in Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden. Enemies are tough, they have lots of health and most importantly, they tend to severely outnumber your small group. Stealth is key for Stalkers, and taking out enemies one by one by intercepting their patrols and thinning their numbers. This means all maps in Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden are full of tense situations where if you’re not careful and stealthy, you’ll bite off more than you can chew, especially once robots and psychics come into play.

Party Chat: The best part of Mutant Year Zero’s characters is that they talk to one another. They don’t have long and meaningful conversations about their hopes and dreams but they will discuss current events and warn one another of impending danger. For the most part these are just notifications to the player but they do add a bit of charm to the Stalkers under your controls.

Air Miles: One thing I discovered early on in my Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden playthrough for this review is that once you’ve reached a zone for the first time, you can travel to and from as you please, which is incredibly helpful to level your characters up if you need to and to acquire upgrades to make some of your ambushes easier to pull off.

Irradiated Comedians: Ghouls are hilarious, at least they were to me. They’re savage, cruel and cannibalistic but they’re both so earnest in their speech and so over the top that it’s impossible not to love them. It gets even better when the Cult comes into play, as the psychic members have some hilarious conversations with the regular Ghouls, especially around the proper use of the “sacred mushrooms.” Hearing a Ghoul describe a mushroom trip was phenomenal.

The Bad

The Few, the Outnumbered: Your party size maximum is 3…out of 5 characters. In a game where you’re constantly surrounded by enemies and always outnumbered and outgunned, the decision to leave the party at such a small size is baffling. Even more when there are large segments of content between meeting new members. It ends up making more sense to take the three members you know how to play with instead of the others. With only 5 characters, I would’ve made the party that size. Would have made the Forbidden City level feel a little less unfair.

Useless Levelling: As you fight enemies and finish encounters you level up and gain skill points to spend on mutations, but unlike your enemies, which tend to have higher amounts of health with higher levels (and nothing else, really), your characters gain no other benefit to levelling up beyond the skill point and the mutations themselves, which, with some clear exceptions, don’t make that much of a difference and characters have too many of them in common, robbing them of their uniqueness. Upgrading guns has a greater effect, especially with the silent ones.

Economy Woes: Everything in Mutant Year Zero is incredibly expensive. Upgrades require weapon parts but it takes an inordinate amount of grinding—clearing out entire maps of enemies—to have enough of these to improve a gun once. And it’s nearly impossible to buy weapons and armour with scrap. Worse still is that the store never really sells anything you don’t already have, so it’s good for restocking on med-kits and grenades but not to acquire something new, fun or engaging, something worth the scrap investment.

The Short Road to Eden: Even considering map grinding, for resources or levels—especially with the sudden level jumps the maps experience between objectives—this is a very short campaign, with only a couple of main missions across maps where you can pretty much skip all encounters other than those required to advance.

Tactical Noob: You can pick off enemies with stealth ambushes but you have no way of creating new opportunities, no way of being proactive about your stalking. If enemies don’t have patrols, you can’t create distractions to make them split the party. Armor is extremely powerful and robot enemies tend to have it in spades, yet there are no options to shred or pierce it. So even with EMP grenades to disable robots, defeating them takes ages. Also, you fail to stealth ambush kill an enemy and everyone and their uncles will know where you are, no matter how far away from the main group the stragglers are.

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Here’s our review of #MutantYearZero #RoadToEden!

The world ended somewhere between a plague and many nukes. Pockets of civilisation still exist but mostly it’s all one giant irradiated wasteland.

New episode of #ThisIsHowWeRole #DnD 5E, in my campaign setting, Telia. Episode 8 - Down the Drain! Come meet Bobrith!

Took a couple of weeks to get this episode done, due to some last-minute illnesses among the group but here we are, episode 8 of the ongoing Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Campaign on my world of Telia. (more…)

When I first saw the game, many moons ago, I felt excited, I wanted to play as Fury and meet another fun Horseman of the Apocalypse. I had enjoyed my time with War, watching him grow as a person, becoming wiser. I loved Death’s crusade to restore the souls of humanity and his fight against the corruption born from his own race, the Nephilim.

And then I met Fury and said, for the first time, “what the hell happened?” Where did the compelling characterisation go? Where did the humanity of these creatures vanish to? Fury is profoundly unlikable, and she kicks things off in a bad way by being a complete ass to a chained War. She’s arrogant, proud and pretty much embodies each one of the Deadly Sins she’s pursuing, but instead of weaving that into the game’s story and progress, the writers decided she would have an epiphany near the end of the game where she turns her personality, motives and goals around completely, so she becomes a better person, just not one with a defined personality.

There are glimpses of personal growth throughout the journey, but the writing is so inconsistent that she goes from contemplative and wondering about personality changes to reverting to the same traits she’s supposedly left only a few minutes later in a boss cutscene.

It’s wasted potential in storytelling. With every Sin forcing her to view her own desires and vices and confronting them, you could have had Fury become progressively more introspective and even weary, losing her namesake fury along the way or diminishing it, as she begins figuring out who she is and what she’s supposed to do, and perhaps the relationship with her brothers. It would have made that epiphany at the end at least a bit believable.

But Darksiders 3 wastes too much time on the Charred Council and Apocalypse conspiracy from the first game, a conspiracy we know all about and the game’s writers failed at giving us anything new about it. There aren’t any new revelations, something we hadn’t considered or even greater implications. It’s a complete re-tread. In trying to play it safe, I suppose, the writers failed to give us anything compelling in the plot. And of course, there’s a twist with the final boss but it falls flat because it’s something you expect to happen the moment you meet the character in question.

But my bewilderment with what the hell they did with Darksiders III extends beyond the narrative and characterisation into the gameplay.

Darksiders has always been a series that proudly wears its inspirations and even the most blatant adaptation is paid careful homage and used in a way that fits the game, gives it a unique spin and most importantly, feels amazing, engaging and fun. It’s why the first Darksiders mashed together Devil May Cry styled gameplay and The Legend of Zelda and gave us a portal gun without feeling like a complete ripoff, because it pulled the strange combination off so brilliantly that it became a completely new identity, something original despite the obvious sources of inspiration. Darksiders II continued the trend and even brought in loot systems and RPG levelling and talent trees to the mix to add gameplay variety.

Darksiders III’s two predecessors also opened the world to you. Darksiders II in particular features sprawling locales. This release, however, keeps the claustrophobic hallway infested places. Tunnels, caverns, underground crypts, etc. All enclosed, all quite short and severely lacking in the awe department, with the Maker Tree being the only thing even remotely astonishing. Worse still is how many times you go back to the same locales and fight the same enemies. Also, no horse, sacrificed for the sake of the plot. A wasted sacrifice, if there ever was one.

Speaking of enemies, combat can become a hassle. Most enemies are punishment sponges, the camera is a mess, even the lock-on is spotty, losing its target with surprising frequency. Darksiders III is a game where you’ll spend most of the time fighting against things you can’t see, from enemies attacking you just outside the camera’s range. Meaning that dodging attacks is often a matter of educated guesswork, especially when the arrows that notify you of enemy presence and attacks only tell you of the attack after the enemy has already carved their name on your back.

When you’re one-on-one, it’s not that bad, and it’s where the combat shines, as much as it can, really. But add more than one enemy to the mix, as this game loves to do, and it becomes a slog. And boss fights are all identical and uninspired. You versus a dude with a weapon. Nothing creative like the Darksiders 1 and 2 bosses. Where are the giant bats, the sand worms? Nothing.

I mentioned before that the Darksiders series had a knack for reusing and polishing other series’ core mechanics and for some reason, Gunfire Games decided it was time for Darksiders to become Dark Souls. You lose your collected souls when you die, pick them up from where you left them, and bank them at the reserved checkpoint spot for levels and the ability to improve on attributes. Only in this case, Vulgrim becomes the bonfire and you have three highly ineffectual attributes: Physical damage, Arcane Damage and Health. Even at high levels of each of these attributes I never felt stronger. It was only when I maxed out the weapon using the watered-down version of Dark Souls Titanite that I felt something change.

It also means that when you die, you go back to Vulgrim, forcing you to trek through the same area again and again if you die, which is fairly often when you consider the above combat issues and the worst offender of all, the fact that the dodge and counter mechanic is super finicky and dodging has no invincibility frames. I dodged out of a boss’s attack and then lost health because another creature’s attack hit me while I was in the dodge’s slow-motion animation.

The weapon enhancements you find, to socket into items are far too few in number, too damn hard to get and upgrading them is a thorough pain in the rear for very little gain. Also, what the hell happened to the Chaos Form? In the other games it was a devastating move but here it’s wildly ineffectual and barely deals any damage! And who decided that Wrath powers costing the entire bar was a good idea? especially with how slowly it builds up and how rare Wrath-recharging souls are. Also, if you don’t have a Stamina bar, a dedicate sprint button is unnecessary. Just enable it by default, anything else is poor design.

For a game that goes on and on about balance, Gunfire Games has no idea what the concept means. I spent most of the game playing on Challenging until I reached a spot so thoroughly unbalanced, where enemies I couldn’t see stun-locked me and took out chunks of my health and bosses one-shot me with attacks that happen right after a cutscene—which is another issue, too many cutscenes mid-boss—that I had to bring the difficulty down to the standard one, here called “Balanced.”

In essence, Darksiders III tries to do the Souls-like thing without an understanding of what makes those games work properly. So instead of taking those concepts and making them its own and creating a new identity for them as the predecessors did, Darksiders III feels like a bad ripoff, one so astonishingly poor that it reminds me of the first game I played in the Souls-like genre, Lords of the Fallen, which also missed the mark.

I wanted to like Darksiders III, I wanted this to be the game I’ve been waiting for ages on, but it has so many issues—including crashes—and faulty design choices and some intensely frustrating gameplay that just drained the fun out of me. Hell, the game doesn’t even have fun things to unlock like the Abyssal armour, only humans to find for a rather flimsy reward. And the small world means it’s a rather short game.

The only thing I got out of Darksiders III that I found worthwhile was Strife, the last Horseman, who makes a small appearance and makes me hope there might be a game with him. I only wish they would give the reigns back to Joe Mad and his people. At least they knew what the hell they were doing!

Also, nit-picking point, but Fury’s design doesn’t quite match the one we saw in the Darksiders comic from when the first game released and her character model makes her look plastic, literally.

Now excuse me while I go play Darksiders II as a palate cleanser.

I finished #Darksiders3 and I keep asking myself, WTF happened?

Last night I finsihed Darksiders III and instead of whooping and feeling excited across the playthrough, as I did with its predecessors, I could only ask myself: What the hell happened?

I watched #RebootGuardianCode and I thoroughly despise it. I feel nothing but seething hatred for it

I loved ReBoot, the original series, I fell in love with its characters and followed them on their adventures as they tackled virus and games. As worried as I was about the live action elements of ReBoot: The Guardian Code, I decided to give it a fair shot. Having watched it, I can only say…I absolutely detest it. (more…)