kjorteo | Entries tagged with 2019 abandoned

IFComp continues.

Celine & Sara Kalante, [21.10.19 22:36]
" Your plan for a peaceful day out comes to a halt when you see a person selling cats on the pavement. The cats look sick and require immediate veterinarian help! It’s all legal, but it’s also wrong. You must find a way to save the cats.

The game offers three characters to choose from and a total set of 10 endings.

Content warning: Implied animal abuse (nothing explicit); environmental damage

15 minutes or less • Choice-based • Web-based "

JESUS. No.

Celine & Sara Kalante, [21.10.19 22:40]
" Springtime, 1993. Prom night. A lonely road on the way to the big dance. This should be a magical evening, but your date suddenly seems distant and withdrawn. Is it something you said? Or perhaps something more sinister is going on...

Horror • An hour and a half • Parser-based • Glulx (See guide) "

Looking at the banner, this is very obviously a werewolf story. Looking at the "Horror" tag, this is probably not played for "anyway your boyfriend is fuzzy now and that's hot." She should not click the IF game, run away run away run away, full moon is on the sky and we've other games we should play

Celine & Sara Kalante, [21.10.19 22:41]
" Years ago, orphan Henry Smyth was saved off the streets when he was adopted by Katherine Kellner - only to run away a few years later. Now, he’s finally made a decent life for himself. His world is turned upside down when he finds out that Kellner has been arrested on the charge of being a pedophile. This knowledge brings impulsive decisions and repressed memories along with it.

Play as Henry as he struggles to make sense of his past and come to terms with it. Your decisions throughout the story affect Henry’s confidence and morality – choose wisely.

Content warning: This game is intended for mature audiences only. Contains: strong language, violence, mention of child abuse and suicide.

Drama • Half an hour • Choice-based • Web-based "

See if you can spot the exact word where I noped out of this one.

Celine & Sara Kalante, [21.10.19 22:43]
" Play minigames to get your airship flying, tour the skies, and see what mischief is going on up there.

Parser-based • Glulx (See guide) "

There we go. Yes good we'll take it.

And so, IFComp 2019 pick number four is "Skies Above" by Arthur DiBianca. It's the first-ever IFComp game I wrote off without actually finishing it, yet it still somehow managed to be my favorite one of this year so far.

( Away we go! )

Crossposts: https://teogames.livejournal.com/74065.html

There was a limited time thing where this game was 100% free on the Play store, so I grabbed it because literally why not. "Because it's a mobile port and those never have playable controls" is why not, of course, but it was free and shut up.

Anyway, Downwell is a procedurally-generated pixel action game about trying to make it as far as you can before you die. There are powerups to be earned between levels and in stores, but you start from scratch with every new run.

I tried and kind of bounced off of The Binding of Isaac years ago because this particular formula isn't really to my tastes. In BoI's case, I guess I was expecting a game with checkpoints or saveable progress that could eventually be beaten, and the "do a fresh random run and get as far as you can" approach makes it hard to feel like I'm actually accomplishing anything. This isn't to say these sorts of games are bad or that it's a failing with them; rather, I think the lesson here is just that Roguelikes are not my genre.

So it is with Downwell, which I tried a few times and then got frustrated with the controls, because of course I did, it's a goddamn mobile port. However, unlike games that I might still be interested in if they were presented in a more playable format (I recently re-purchased Anodyne on Switch; we'll see how that goes if I ever get around to it someday) I just... really didn't care about this one enough to want to bother reuniting with it elsewhere. Sorry.

Crossposts: https://teogames.livejournal.com/73256.html

YouTube threw some "Is it possible to clear X in Plants vs. Zombies without doing Y?" videos in my related sidebar, which I watched out of curiosity. That kind of got me into a "Hey I remember playing PvZ, I really enjoyed it" kind of mood, and I considered replaying it. But then I remembered, oh, right, there's a sequel I never tried! If I'm going to get back into that franchise, maybe it'd be a better idea to do the new stuff.

Spoilers: It was not a better idea.

Plants vs. Zombies 2 is, on the surface, Plants vs. Zombies but more. More Plants! More Zombies! Even more vs., probably! In theory, this should be fantastic, and exactly what I was looking for. Unfortunately, as you probably already know, EA.

By which I mean, PvZ2 is literally what you would expect if you take PvZ1 and make it aggressively Free to Play. The difficulty is cranked to the point where it almost doesn't seem possible to clear a stage just by planting plants and letting them take care of it anymore, and I'm still in the first zone, but oh hey that's fine did you know that you the player basically get Gil Toss? 950 coins at any time to just manually Fruit Ninja away as many zombies as you can hit in five seconds. Good news is that it's not like you really had anything better to do with those coins, since all the new plants and seeds and level-ups (plants have levels now) instead take other freemium currencies like Gems and/or just enter your credit card number right here and cut the middleman. Get seedlings that sprout in 5-10 hours for miniscule rewards (usually more coins or something like that) but of course you can pay to make them sprout faster. Daily missions, they're impossible but you can try again if you watch an ad first. Etc.

This game is whalebait, is what I'm saying.

I did and do still like PvZ1, which is saying something because I normally detest Tower Defense as a genre so strongly that I used to have it blacklisted when going through my Steam Discovery Queue. PvZ1 is charming enough that even I enjoyed it, despite that bias. PvZ2, by contrast, is what happens when EA takes that franchise, kills it, then digs it back up from the grave and sends it shambling after me to mindlessly devour my wallet, like some sort of... of... hmm, if only we had a clever simile here.

I try to stay positive in my game reviews because there's more enough AVGN/Zero Punctuation shit out there already, but I just... playing this just felt icky. I can't put a wholesome spin on such an unwholesome experience. I'm sorry.

Crossposts: https://teogames.livejournal.com/71315.html

I completely forgot to write about this one! Because

davidn has VR in his home, I played and wrote about Moss while I was there. But he also has Robo Recall, and I got to try that one too! So this would be from around the same time; I just forgot to make this post.

That said, anything I could say is honestly covered better and more enthusiastically by David himself here. Go read that instead. Any notes I have about how the game itself actually runs or plays or looks or feels like are... basically just that. He covered it already.

I only have one thing to add to personalize my experience with it, which has nothing at all to do with the quality of the game itself. The game itself is very well done and exactly as awesome as David makes it out to be! However, I personally struggled with the... "ethics" is the wrong word, but I'm not sure what the right one would be. But the robots in that intro all seemed cute and happy and friendly until whatever weird glitch turned them evil, and now your job is to exterminate the fuck out of every last one of them you see, and I just... I'm an impossible weenie, I know, but I was too distracted by feeling bad for the poor robots to feel awesome about my newfound ninja moves. (The game has a very GLaDOS dark humor way of laughing this off, an approach that has never once succeeded in making me feel better.) The tutorial has a deactivated robot in your hub office HQ and teaches you about the VR mechanics by having you physically grab it at any two different points and then rip it apart with your bare hands, and I almost couldn't bring myself to do it. I mean, I did do it, and I even played the first actual stage too, because I didn't want to cause a scene or anything (and I was admittedly curious about the technical capabilities and how cool the VR was and etc.) But it kind of felt like the Milgram experiment.

It is a really awesome experience for people who aren't me, though, which is the main reason you really should be reading David's review instead for max awesomeness. I am a crouton petter and a statistical outlier who should not be counted.

Crossposts: https://teogames.livejournal.com/70729.html

Not entirely sure how to classify this one. Bugs and Kisses was an in development visual novel that put out a demo, which I went through some time ago. And I loved it, and I would have been on board with playing the full thing, but... alas.

So, I went through the demo one more time just to refresh my memory, then set about writing this to officially lay the game to rest and cross it off my list, I guess.

Anyway, Bugs and Kisses is, or was shaping up to be, a visual novel dating sim type game only with bugs. The art looked fantastic. The cast was charming and endearing. I totally had a the hots for Hazel, the spooky grasshopper/mantis from the Occult Club. The author was "don't get them started"-level into entomology to the point that this demo almost felt like a vehicle for exploring their passion for bug knowledge, the same way Tolkien made books just so he could showcase his conlangs. (I'm sure if they were here, they would respond with a gigantic explanation about the difference between grasshoppers and mantises so I know exactly how to tell which one Hazel was.) All in all, I really liked where this was going! But then it wasn't going, after all. That's too bad.

Without a full game to come, the demo ends up kind of in the same spot as The Raccoon Who Lost Their Shape: "Well, that was a neat free way to be entertained for 20-30 minutes." Knowing that I won't get to lock mandibles with Hazel after all made the experience a little sad in retrospect, but, you know. Enjoy what's there.

(Sara adds: Psst, Celine, you still have options for mantis-smooching.)

... This is an excellent point. Also, Bug Fables is still coming.

Crossposts: https://teogames.livejournal.com/70482.html

Do not be alarmed by this being an abandoned entry; this was a foregone conclusion from a long string of technicalities:

Any "real" game I play for more than about ten minutes is officially on my radar.
Once on the radar, it gets a complete entry when I complete it or an abandoned entry when I either give up on it or I'm no longer in a position to keep playing it. The two "ongoing" exceptions were both because they're MMOs. The only games I've played and haven't written about yet are ones that are still actively (even if occasionally) being pecked at here and there, and therefore I have neither completed nor stopped playing them.
We are currently out of town visiting our friend davidn. He has an Oculus Rift (and Moss) and we do not.
Therefore, it was inevitable before we even left on this trip that I would be writing an Abandoned entry for Moss, because of course I'm going to try it while we're here, and of course I'm not going to beat it while I'm here, and of course I can't exactly keep playing it once we get back home.

All that said, the game itself is fantastic so far, I'm completely sold. Look for us to acquire it someday if we're ever fortunate enough to get a VR headset (and a big enough apartment to effectively use it.)

Moss is a VR game about an adorable mouse named Quill. There's a strong storybook motif, wherein the cutscenes are represented by physically turning pages of a book set up in a big cathedral-looking room (VR!) and most major characters are aware of you, the capital-R Reader, an apparent figure of legend. You have a floating cursor with which you can drag blocks around for platform puzzle purposes. Or to pet Quill. You will spend at least half the time petting Quill.

It's a really neat experience, at least so far. The fourth wall "Reader as an actual character" mechanic is a great way to make the VR interface work, Quill is the cutest thing ever, and the scenery is almost as gorgeous as Ori and the Blind Forest only now it's in VR where you can physically look around at it. There are a few "behind the black" secret tunnels and such in actual gameplay, and those are a perfect use of the medium, too: if you want to see what's in that hole over there, just physically crane your head, bend over, and look into it.

So yeah, this was fantastic so far and look for it in Extra Life contention, considering the only reason we stopped is lack of system and physical living space availability once this trip is over.

Crossposts: https://teogames.livejournal.com/70058.html

"Well," I told myself, "I just finished Chocolate Castle. I feel like I'm in the mood for Lexaloffle Games to continue hurting me, but I don't want to spend another eight years on a massive project. What do they have that's bite-sized? Oh, an entire community of PICO-8 games, of course."

GET OUT of this Dungeon is a decently competent Metroidvania, which is pretty impressive when one considers that someone made this in PICO-8. You are Santa, for some reason. You must get out of this dungeon, also for some reason.

It's all well and good, and I did dink around with it long enough to satisfy the "have I actually attempted to play this game" baseline for writing a post. Buuuuut it's a masocore spike hell game with finite lives (100, a decent supply, but still,) the controls are kind of fiddly which is not a good quality to have in a masocore spike hell game with finite lives, and it's just short enough not to have a save feature yet long enough that people are posting their completed screens in the comments with times ranging from 45 minutes to 2 hours.

Nnnnnnnah. If I'm feeling an itch for Metroidvanias, I, uh. I have other options.