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Just in time for the remaster announcement, I've finally unearthed Dark Souls from my backlog. And although I've already given up, it wasn't for the reasons I'd expected!
What I expected was for the game to put me off with punishing, relentless difficulty. And aside from some awkward controls, I'd say that the difficulty ... actually feels right, in a way. The enemy respawn mechanics, the inherent danger of even "easy" enemies, and the gamble of using consumable items, all feel like they work cohesively in the service of the game's design.
Dark Souls makes it clear, early on, that your goal isn't necessarily to fight the undead for experience points; your goal is to get to the next bonfire, dealing with the intermediate obstacles however you can.
Combat is necessarily a part of this, and while it is challenging and strict, I wouldn't call it merciless. You just have to accept that death is part of the game. Enemies will surprise you by appearing from around a corner, or with a long weapon reach, or with devastating damage. You gonna die.
But it makes sense when you look at the game like VVVVVV -- the space between two checkpoints (bonfires) is essentially a discrete unit of challenge, to be tried and retried until you can finally get it right. Then, you move on to the next one.
Granted, that space between bonfires can be pretty large. And that's where some of my disinterest in Dark Souls comes from.
There's no in-game map, and levels are designed in a deliberately confusing, somewhat-labyrinthine way. So part of the challenge of getting to the next bonfire is finding it; and the process of navigation will necessarily entail surprise enemy encounters, in which you're likely to die and get sent back to the last one.
I might have more tolerance for that if the levels were aesthetically fascinating, or if there was some ambient storytelling going on while I wandered around, but it never seemed like I was going anywhere particularly interesting. So what I got out of the game - the sensations I was left with - were feelings of being lost, of not knowing where I was supposed to go, and of probably being about to die.
What put me off of Dark Souls wasn't really a feeling of futility, but a feeling of aimlessness.
I can certainly understand why Dark Souls receives the praise that it does: its mechanics work together, really, really well. The catch is that forward momentum relies on you being interested in its bleak, desolate world. (Or just being super-hyped about the combat, I guess.)
I'll definitely be giving the sequel a try, to see if that changes the balance in a way I find interesting.
Diablo IIIhas changed since 2014. It's not just me! On a lark, I searched for "what happened to diablo 3" and found this Reddit thread:
I one-shot everything. So I bump the difficulty up, not much seems to change. [...]
I ended up starting a new game on the highest possible difficulty (Inferno 1 I think it's called) but it's still easy as hell [...]
Right now the (base) game feels like a joke basically... What happened?
Game starts when you hit level 70 [...] Blizzard has done a lot to streamline the level 1-70 grind, as much of the remaining playerbase is uninterested in redoing that section each time a new Season starts.
So, pretty similar with what happened to World of Warcraft. (Which Blizzard then tried to fix in Cataclysm, and I think a few other times?)
And it's true. On the "Hard" difficulty, my partner and I cleaved through acts 1-4. My monk carved a path through enemies like a hot bullet through melted butter. Bosses fell in seconds, frequently skipping entire phases of the encounter. The enemy abilities I remember being genuinely afraid of - Arcane Enchanted lasers, Molten fire-traps, Frozen stunlocks - have become so insignificant, compared to my health and recovery stats, that I stopped making any effort to avoid them.
The first four acts are trivialized by these balance changes. Which, when combined with the trite story and insipid characters, leaves the whole campaign feeling unfulfilling and empty.
To put it more poignantly: replaying the game from the beginning is pointless. I'm surprised there isn't a WoW-like option to just buy your way up to level 70. Or, even more reasonably, to just skip it. Why is this content even here?
Has this same ethos bled into Act V? We'll find out, but... I'm not getting my hopes up.
Better than: ... man, I don't even know. Not as good as: "Loot 2.0", or even the game at launch. Really stretching: the lower bounds of "Meh" on this one.
Every time Ōkami HD misread my restoration circle as a wind-swoosh, or the camera went nuts as I was trying to land a tricky jump ...
... Issun was always there to soften the blow. It's hard to stay mad at Ōkami, because it's just so gosh-darned charming.
By the end of my 30-35 hour journey, I'd had my fill of Ōkami's awkwardly-paced story and inconvenient-to-navigate world map. So there are plenty of otherwise-promising sidequests I've left unfinished. I could accuse Ōkami's running length of overstaying its welcome, if just barely so.
And, yeah. The drawing isn't very precise. The combat isn't that satisfying. The minigames can be downright infuriating. The upgrade system isn't very meaningful. The storytelling is frequently stilted. Orochi was rehashed too many times.
But unlike Wind Waker HD (and that barren Great Sea), revisiting Ōkami hasn't really changed my opinion of it. Its strengths remain strong.
Ōkami isn't perfect, but its character and (now, high-definition) aesthetics feel timeless in a way that rivals Nintendo's own stable. If it keeps being remade, I wonder if it might even become more legendary than that green-capped elf kid.
... that aside, it's a hefty picross game. At 240 regular picture puzzles, and 184 more puzzles that form the larger "mosaics," it easily has more pre-baked puzzles than any picross game I've played before.
In terms of puzzle size, it falls a bit short of Paint it Back's 40x30 figure -- maxing out at 35 tiles wide. (The majority of its puzzles seem to be around 20x20 or so.) And like many of its contemporaries, I'd bet that it could go bigger if only it had figured out a good "zoom" mechanic; i.e., puzzle size appears restricted mainly by the screen resolution.
It hurts a tiny bit that Pepper's Puzzles is Windows-only; I really would have liked to churn out some pictures on the couch, with my Powerbook.
Pepper has some cool things going for her: the time trials are a neat (though short-lived) feature, and a puzzle creator plus Steam Workshop integration is something I've previously referred to as "pretty dope." ... but it still feels slightly inferior, to me, largely because of its maximum puzzle bounds.
As impressed as I was by how many puzzles Pepper threw at me, only one or two of its puzzles ever felt individually challenging (like Paint it Back's did). And as neat as its new features are, they didn't have much of an impact on my gameplay experience (compared with Picrozelda's number-grouping mechanic).
So I wouldn't call it a bar-raising picross package. But, if you want an absolute fuckload of puzzles, Pepper's got you covered.
But enough boring talk about numbers; let's see the boring numbers!
That's 78 games for 2017, up from 45 in 2016. Not too bad! Although there is the statistical caveat that 2017 included record-setting counts of both game demos, and replays of games I'd played before -- at 10 (12.8%) and 18 (23.1%), respectively.
The highlight of those was definitely Borderlands 2 and its DLCs, which have held up pretty well (for the most part; more on this later). Ōkami's new HD update (still in-progress) has been quite pleasant, too -- it has the same flaws as the original, but with beauty and lightheartedness that really make up for them. And Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was a joy to revisit; its storytelling is still fun and riveting, more than a decade later.
In contrast, the remasters of BioShock 2 and especially Infinite weren't nearly as good the second time 'round. I think because their plots and environments relied heavily on the "wow" factor of seeing them for the first time; absent that, there isn't much memorable substance.
Similarly, revisiting Diablo III (still in-progress) and the remasters of Darksiders and Majora's Mask reminded me more of what those games lack, than what they had originally gotten right. Time hasn't been friendly to Majora, in particular.
Let's look at more numbers! Counting up IGDB metadata on "game type" e.g. expansions and downloadable content:
Last year I played a record high number of DLCs, at 15 (19.2%) -- the majority (9 of them) thanks to Borderlands 2. Past replaying the main four story packs, this was my first time with the five "Headhunter" DLCs, which were, uh, mixed. Wattle Gobbler was a fun excuse to revisit Mr. Torgue, and Son of Crawmerax was very pretty, but the rest felt generally janky and missable.
Three more DLCs came from Phoenix Wright: one real one with a fun story, and two that were absolutelyasinine. I'm going to be much more wary of Capcom's DLC menu, next time.
And the other three DLCs were also replays, via BioShock. It wasn't quite so obvious back in 2011, but the ending of Minerva's Den really does feel like a seminal step toward today's "Walking Simulator" genre (which makes sense, since its developers went on to create Gone Home). As for bothepisodes of Burial at Sea... like BioShock Infinite itself, stripped of its first-time "wow" moments, it just wasn't very impactful.
More numbers: what platforms did I play on? Actually -- since I know PC dominates every year; what other platforms did I play on?
I made a pretty big dent in my 3DS backlog, too -- one more to go, maybe two if someone talks me into playing Samus Returns.
My PS4 activity has certainly declined, ... since there was only one new Uncharted game last year. But I'm not done with it yet, at least not until I can try out Horizon and The Last Guardian.
The Switch is a new entry, via Super Mario Odyssey. Other than a probable replay of Zelda, it's hard to guess how much activity this might see in the future. (Metroid, please?)
Now for something I haven't really tracked before: how much did I actually like what I played?
Well, the Awesome count is on the low side - at 6 (7.7%) - with Breath of the Wild being the standout of the year. But plenty of Goods, at 26 (33.3%). That's, uh... that's good. 👍
Those Good games ended up including a lot of memorable, if imperfect, experiences:
Rebel Galaxy captured a sense of freedom that can only come from truckin' around space,
Oxenfree told a thrilling virtual-campfire sci-fi story,
Pitfall Planet really charmed my co-op partner and I, and we barely killed each other at all!,
Child of Light reminded me just how fun turn-based RPGs can be,
and as above, Ōkami HD is more gorgeous than ever.
While I still rated them positively, I'm let down by last year's trajectory for Zachtronics games. Infinifactory was great, ... up until the last few levels became way too much. And both Shenzhen I/O and Opus Magnum (still in-progress) - while fun - felt like steps backwards.
There was plenty of Meh to go around in 2017, which isn't generally worth mentioning -- but Ori and the Blind Forest was definitely a disappointment. Chalk another one up to excessive internet fervor.
Oh yeah, and Yooka-Laylee happened. Just a shame, that one.
So, that was 2017. What's on the docket for 2018? Well, it doesn't look like there's a whole hell of a lot "upcoming," other than some Kickstarter games that always seem at least a year away.
In 2014, when I wrote that Finn and Jake's Epic Quest had "pretty much annihilated" my hopes for an open-world, wacky-zany Adventure Time game -- this is kind of what I was talking about.
At least, the info teased so far for Pirates of the Enchiridion sounds like just the thing I want. It isn't being made by WayForward. It's "An original Adventure Time story, all voiced by the show’s cast." It has pirates. BMO is playable?
When Champions' Ballad was released earlier this month, I downloaded and tried it (on Wii U) almost immediately. And abruptly ran into a small, but critical flaw in this DLC: it came out about six months too late.
Breath of the Wild was a dense, complicated game with lots of mastery to build. And I hadn't played it since March. So to call my aptitude "rusty" would be an understatement.
Champions' Ballad starts with a series of challenges using a new weapon, the One-Hit Obliterator. While wielding it, Link will die in a single hit.
There's just no fucking way that I can pull this off.
I'd need to sink significant time back into rebuilding my atrophied Zelda muscles, before I'd be comfortable tackling the challenges in this DLC. And there seems to be some critical consensus that the rewards here, on their own, wouldn't really be worth that much effort.
I'm actually more inclined to start over from scratch, and attempt the Champions' Ballad challenges more organically as part of Breath of the Wild's vast world of content. I'd been planning on - eventually - doing a fresh playthrough on Switch, anyway.
Which is a roundabout way of saying: so long, Wii U. It's been nice knowing you.
It's kind-of amazing just how up-to-date Ōkami HD feels, despite the original game's age. It still has some flaws, but is nevertheless distinctly refreshing.
[...] intricately woven into the fabric of ancient tales. This manner of storytelling, combined with the game's infamous and extremely distinctive aesthetics, make for a really unique experience.
The Celestial Brush is a really cool gameplay mechanic - but controlling it is still a pain.
[...] a very big part of the game (I don't hesitate to say a majority of it) is in "optional" content.
This seems like an intentional choice on the part of the game's director to give the player a godlike feeling: you've got to take care of the little things, too.
[...] while combat and dungeon play isn't nearly as good as an actual Zelda, there is a lot of fun to be had in Ōkami.
A decade later, this is still how I'd sum the game up: the narrative and aesthetics are unique and breathtaking, the brush controls are fairly imperfect, the optional activities make the world feel alive, and the combat and puzzles are a little on the meh side.
And most of the time, the strengths more than make up for the shortcomings. It's all just so charming, from the beautiful art style to Issun's irreverent attitude.
Pepper's Puzzles is a humble little picross game, perhaps even humbler than Paint it Back. It pays some welcome attention toward subtle quality-of-life features, like a randomized soundtrack and a "dynamic background" to prevent the brain equivalent of burn-in.
It's also got a very-slightly quirky sense of humor, which is neat.
But what really attracted to me to Pepper's Puzzles, over some other picross games currently on Super-Steam-Sale, is its "200+" puzzles.
The Mosaic mode (like other picross games' assemble-a-bigger-picture puzzles), and the surprisingly-stressful Time Trial challenges, are nifty distractions. But I've bet on Pepper to give me plenty of hours of picture-puzzle solving, and it's looking pretty good so far.
