I tend to play one or two big games which I periodically break up by playing smaller things you can finish in a week. Since a full accounting of all the really small stuff would be murder, here are a few semi-substantial games I’ve recently played and haven’t finished…
Pseudoregalia! You hear some good things about this one, and I figured it would at least offer some interesting pointers for the level design of a 3D Metroid-y game. It leaves me pretty wanting, though. The maps are barren and don’t really have any orienting landmarks or interesting geometry; there’s nothing to explore and nothing to find. The game is 80% movement polish and 20% everything else, so unless you’re looking for an obstacle course in the shape of a maze, there’s not a lot here. Not for me! Probably gonna move on.
Anodyne 2! It’s a sequel to the first one, which is a 2D game, but this one is a 3D game where you run around a low-fi overworld doing the Psychonauts thing of resolving problems by jumping into people’s heads, wherein the original 2D game starts playing out. This idea alone makes it a winner, but all the other stuff around it happens to be quite great. Big fan. You’ll probably hear more about it.
Planescape: Torment! I need to pick this one up again soon — I find wordy games are really hard to consistently play when I’m concurrently reading any kind of book. It’s cool and I like it and I intend to finish it. I reached the Lower Ward recently and remain mostly enthralled. Not sure why everyone tells you to avoid thinking about the combat while simultaneously suggesting that you play as a Wizard, whose ability to hit things can only recharge by going to bed. I feel like somebody punked me.
It’s hard to approach Planescape without being prefigured in some way by the game’s reputation. Mostly I think it’s well-written but also clumsy and bloviated in a way that combines the weaknesses of the writing — overstressed, gaudy, kind of Gaiman-esque in a way that could never possibly survive the 800,000~ words it has to cover — with the worst tendencies of the format. It doesn’t help that I have a pretty low opinion of Avellone as a writer; he produces in volume and appears to come across meaning by chance, like a guy slowly making fifty dollars by picking up pennies on a long sidewalk. Even if he gets there eventually, you start to wish they were quarters. Still not bad! Ideally it does not funnel you into a discussion about what gamers think is comparable to whatever Shakespeare they were forced to read in high school.
Pandora Tomorrow! Noticing that “PT” is an oddly prolific abbreviation in games. It’s good! I like Splinter Cell and even if I didn’t you would never hear about it here, where bad things can happen to people. I mentioned this on the ‘cord but it reminds me a lot of Thief 3, which is shockingly good and interesting for how compromised you’d expect it to be. These games are similar in their specific vibe, but also in terms of how much I expect to like them versus how much I actually end up liking them. It should be impossible for me to enjoy a game depicting American interventionism at this juncture, but stranger things have happened.
The whole linear level stealth game shtick has really grown on me — corridors and atriums and quiet little vignettes laid across a strictly narrow path, which is really good for when you want to see a bunch of tiny interesting things without working too hard for ‘em. So much ambience to chew on. I can tell that if I played these games as a kid I’d be posting all sorts of screenshots in the weird little places thread.
Shadow Tower Abyss! I could write loads about this one, but that would be favoritism and all children are equal in The Land. Funnily enough, I don’t think I’ll actually pick it up again; I got through all the parts that people really like and was feeling sorta fatigued by everything I was hearing about the remaining fourth of it. Sometimes a game gives you everything it has and you’ve gotta know when to bail.
The below image depicts probably the saddest creature I've ever seen. I don't know if I want to hug him or punt him like a football.
