whatchu playing now

first 7-8 levels were pretty easy and then all of a sudden it got HARD

Yeah it’s pretty hard

yep it gets hard fast. it's one of those games where there's a lot of emergent secret tricks to the ruleset and the levels that teach them can feel impossible until you figure out what they are

Stephens sausage roll was like that too i think but i didn't get very far in that

anyone here played Hypnospace Outlaw?

at pax today, any upcoming indie games i should get impressions of?

Christine Love's Get in the car, loser!

I looked at the indie megabooth lineup and that's the only thing there I've been following so plz just mention anything that seems real good

i ended up waiting in line for more than an hour to play bloodstained and didn't get to try much else whoops. will write up some stuff later when i get home

OK a pax capsule report:

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night - this is basically SotN given the Tropical Freeze "spectacle-platformer" treatment (i'm coining this term now that i have 2 games to use it with), i was worried going in because the movement in the preview footage looked kinda stiff but nope it put me right into the Castlevania Zone from the get-go, no friction there.

(aside: the same publisher also has Indivisible which is the valkyrie profile style sidescrolling RPG from the skullgirls devs. i watched a bunch of it while i was waiting in line for bloodstained and the character designs and combat look great as you would expect given the dev, but the out of combat / platforming part of the game looks kinda bland. this game's been in development for like 5 years and its flavor of hand-drawn backgrounds has kinda aged into normalcy i think)

Samurai Shodown - i only played one match of this but it felt just right and i'm on board and excited to learn it

Creature in the Well - the pinball hack and slash game from the nindies direct, this seems legit. the artstyle is really sharp and the controls are a lot simpler than i expected, i was fearing twin stick which i'm awful at but it's not.

Industries of Titan - sci-fi city builder/real-time-with-pause strategy game from the necrodancer devs. had my eye on this some years back because i liked how the city scenes looked so i'm glad it seems to be coming out. hard to get a handle on how well this sort of game plays in the expo setting though i kinda wish it was more sim city and less RTS

Sayonara Wild Hearts - finally got to see exactly what this is, which is basically just an extremely stylish 'endless runner' or 3d sonic type game. there's a bunch of different scenes/perspectives but you're mostly just zooming along a track and/or dodging stuff to music. i'm fine with this but it's not something i'm super psyched about

Super Crush K.O. - nice little warm-colored sidescroller beat-em-up with really good feeling moves/combos.

Evergate - nice looking puzzle platformer with some sort of line up crystals with stuff to zap them and catapult yourself around mechanic i dunno i didn't actually play this one but it looked good enough in motion when i walked by it that i snapped a pic of the otherwise unmemorable name

Keen - cute puzzle-tactics game that puts the 'when you move you keep going until you hit a wall' mechanic through a workout, turning it into almost like a turn-based combat system. this seems to have 0 buzz compared to all the other stuff i looked at today and is ungoogleable thanks to commander keen but i was really digging what it's trying to do.

thx for the report ciderpress

add this to the this looks good give us a switch port pile
https://www.kotaku.co.uk/2019/04/10/pathway-is-an-indiana-jones-inspired-tactics-game-thats-hard-to-put-down

Aw man for a second there I thought there was a new Commander Keen game

can't help but be intrigued by that one since i was someone who for some reason really liked Indiana Jones and his Desktop Adventures and Yoda Stories

me2

Replaying Skyrim for the 1st time since 2012.

The overworld is still gorgeous but showing its age, the faction questlines and individual dungeons are still way too linear. What I want for Elder Scrolls VI is the sense of freedom from the overworld extend to these, and that means it will be possible that I won't experience every faction or every room in each dungeon every playthrough.

Everything about Skyrim except loot weights seems designed for "solo" exploration, with companions more likely to congest narrow corridors or get lost than to contribute. I still like the idea of "conducting" engagements, debuffing enemies, buffing allies, forcing the enemies to commit, sneaking to their rear for the coup de grace. I believe it could work in a 1st person open world RPG, and wouldn't mind if VI borrowed some ideas from Dragon Age: Origins in giving players scripting options for their NPC companions.

Replaying Skyrim for the 1st time since 2012.

Me too! I had to go through the start section 3 times (for various reasons). Boy does that drag.

playing Hypnospace Outlaw, this is overwhelming and amazing

lol there's a parody of ishkur's guide they really thought of everything

ok wow this is goty

ok i finished it. really good! i wish the second half was a bit more intricate though, it's pretty easy to infer what happened so i thought it was going to be more of a drawn out or contested process to prove it than it was.

I like to revisit Myst every so often--so I just finished that up. Every time I play through, I forget how absolutely obnoxious the underground sound spaceship is to play--it's long and unnecessary, especially considering you have to do it twice if you want to get both pages.

As a result, I purchased Riven (the sequel to Myst). I am having a lot of trouble getting into it--it seems a lot more contrived than Myst does, and quite a bit more confusing in a maze-like sort of way. The original Myst is simple: you're in a hub, from which you can access multiple worlds with contained sets of puzzles. With everything more interconnected in Riven, I have a really hard time understanding how to get between places, what puzzles affect what areas, and so on. I kind of gave up without putting more than like an hour or two into the game.

Aside from that, I've had a Vive for a bit--I love VR, and wish I had more space in my 1br apartment for it. I bought Skyrim a while back and modded it out, but didn't feel super great about it in VR. Might have to pick it up and give it another go. Still waiting on that triple-A VR title to come out that's going to absolutely blow me out of the water.

Still waiting on that triple-A VR title to come out that's going to absolutely blow me out of the water.

i think a lot of people are waiting on that. unfortunately for me i don't think i'll ever be able to play VR because my dog and cat are very present in my life, and i would definitely trip over them within 5 minutes of my VR-at-home experience

I don't think most people will ever want to have VR goggles on for very long. That limits the sorts of games that can be successful until the experience becomes less cumbersome.

Tilt Brush by Google is still the only VR app I've tried that really made me want to keep the headset on for a while. Design software in VR makes much more sense to me than AAA games do.

i got Prey as part of a cheap bundle with Dishonored 2 (which was fine). Prey was ok! clever-enough plot twists in the story, great location, loved the retro-future 60s space age design of everything. zero-g exterior stuff was scary and fun. the first half, when you're powerless and it's much more of a sneak/monster horror/mystery type game, is better than the finale.

riven is the genre's single masterpiece imo, worth sticking to next time you feel like giving it a shot. otm that it is more interconnected, its puzzle environments no longer sealed off from each other, and probably harder for this; but it strikes me as the opposite of less contrived-- puzzles arise from the always semi-plausibly-imagined machinery and systems of the archipelago all having broken down just so, and from your initial lack of comprehension of the inhabitants' numerals and symbols. myst is a game where a guy has hidden his password in the constellations on a planetarium roof. in case he forgets it?

riven lives up to channelwood.

excellent use of fauna.

i played a little riven at the time but found it too hard-- years later in college i turned to it as procrastination tool and will never forget once being stuck for days until dreaming the solution

sorry-- the opposite of more contrived obv.

riven is way better than myst imo

i think i started the 3rd game at a friends house once but didn't get very far so idk if they ever hit those highs again

do not feed the monkeys feels like some kind of bizarro forgotten scummvm engine voyeur sim. it's puzzle / pseudo-narrative adventure esque w/ a quirky sense of humor.

riven is my #3 game of all time, behind super metroid and another world. stick with it, it's worth it.

riven ... super metroid

not unrelated!

those are both among my childhood favs too

Started running dead cells again, been a long time. Haven’t played it all since full release at least. Can get by the first boss but can’t live much longer past that. Game’s tough boys.

finally playing 999 for real, i did one route a couple years ago and then never finished it for some reason

it's a great experience! play vlr too. skip the third one.

i liked the 3rd too! (second was better tho i agree)

speaking of which, I just beat the zanki zero demo last night and uhhhh i ordered the game right after, so i guess i'm looking fwd to that!

I picked up Shadow of the Colossus and the Last Guardian in the last sale, started the former. The controls are not as terrible as if heard.

Also trying to finish Edith Finch, I'm going to be pretty strict about playing it in 20-30 minute intervals to try to mitigate my motion sickness.

Also started A Case of Distrust, quite enjoying the noir dialogue and the atmosphere.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GadL-6wpp3U

999 and vlr were very cool

playing atelier lulua now, the first major release of 2019 afaic

ooh, what is the alchemy system in Lulua like? I hated the more recent tetris shape ones.

its not the tetris grid, its got a 4-element system. i haven't played the dusk games but i think it might be similar to one of those?

ive only plyaed the first hour though so maybe it gets more confusing

ok that sounds better at least. I'm just waiting for the original Trilogy to get an eshop sale tbh.
trying to wean myself off a dangerous Lumines addiction atm, was starting to see blocks dropping when falling asleep etc.

ive still never cleared the standard mode in lumines though i got into the 90s recently for the first time. the song that starts at level 80 kills me on a good chunk of runs

My last Lumines run was my best, I forget where I got to though. Closer.

I've only cleared standard once, countless other runs got in the 90s and fallen apart. Now I just stick to the Endless mode that unlocked.

Shake yr body down to the ground