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For those who don't know, forums.penny-arcade.com will be closing soon. However, we're doing the same kind of stuff over at coin-return.org with (almost) all the same faces! Please do feel welcome to join us.
Posts
Re: Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass:
*googles*
I liked the game a lot, but I have no idea who I could recommend it to because I don't know how to know who's crazy enough. It's especially hard when you consider the fact that I very early on made the frankly deranged decision to (pretty early spoiler, probably)
Wow, I bought this on gog a while ago but haven’t played it yet. I’ll take a look in galaxy and see if it’s still there.
For progressing, you prolly made the more efficient choice
But it also means you missed out on one of the coolest sequences in the game
http://www.audioentropy.com/
I'm actually not sure how close or far I got to fully finishing, I got to
Definitely felt like there was at least one more ending to find, and I'm pretty sure i never did figure out one or two of the glyphs
http://www.audioentropy.com/
it did in fact seem too insane for me, person who loves games where i take 15 pages of incomprehensible notes
i was reminded that i forgot about In Stars and Time, an incredibly good indie timeloop RPG. i don't know how much it qualifies as obscure -apparently it has sold 100k copies? which is a lot! but also it feels like the game should be doing UNDERTALE numbers.
the big problem for me was that I didn't realize that you could back out to
So after doing the entire Lillie campaign without any items (I couldn't even get them the hard way because Gray had taken all of them already), I was just kind of drained. Cif's campaign is easier so that was a big relief but I just didn't have it in me at the time to keep going
http://www.audioentropy.com/
"Find All" is a hidden object game which is much more charming than those usually are, is cheap, will take you maybe 20 minutes to complete, and is great.
And for older console games, "Attack of the Friday Monsters" is a story about being a kid in a small japanese town where surprising things will happen, but it is very relaxed and chill and pleasant about it, it's not a secret horror game or anything.
Oh yeah, the game is not subtle about that at all despite still having the restraint of everything taking place within Jimmy's dreamworld.
E: To gush about the game a bit more, the soundtrack is phenomenal, with some of the best bright, cheery tracks:
to ambient nightmare tracks:
to rollicking boss fight tracks:
To... whatever the hell you'd classify the math dungeon as:
One thing that I've noticed about VNs, especially dating VNs, that get any sort of memetic success/break into wider discourse (Very, very broad high level overview of Hatoful Boyfriend, but still spoilers and "ruining" the thing I'm going to praise about HB):
Hatoful Boyfriend is kind of brilliant because has both of those marketing criteria, and the fact that it's the bird dating game is enough to generate a ton of attention on its own, so the fact it's also a game with a left-field dark twist halfway through isn't usually part of the marketing for it (or wasn't back in the day), making it even more impactful than a lot of other twist games.
I think the best thing about Hatoful Boyfriend is that you think it's just gonna be a joke, ha ha they're birds, but then it actually takes itself somewhat seriously and is, well, an actual game. Some joke indie VNs are just short one-off laughs to be beaten in a handful of hours, I think, but Hatoful Boyfriend has a 100% completion time of 9½ hours on How Long To Beat.
Also there's a spin-off slice-of-life comic and a sequel game (Holiday Star) and really I'm just happy that it was the hit it was.
...Also, of course, note that there's third category for VNs in general: ones that are so big in Japan that they get anime adaptations, the adaptations get popular over in the US, and then eventually they decide to actually localize the damn games. So e.g. STEINS;GATE, Umineko, Fate/Stay Night. Or they're games that just happen to have Visual Novel elements grafted to another genre, like Persona or Ace Attorney.
Actual Dating Sims with game mechanics trying to simulate dating never really kick off much in the west, though, for whatever reason. Tokimeki Memorial kicked off an entire genre in Japan but the closest we get here is generally just the ones where it's full VN with dialogue choices deciding everything. (Maybe because they're way more approachable than something like Tokimeki.)
And hey, speaking of subgenres that never really kicked off here, Long Live the Queen is a wonderful little raising sim.
It's a fun VN where you train up Elodie to, well, not die.
The year is 1482, and in a remote monastery, a murder has taken place. As the resident Achorness, you are the only person who the Mother Superior can trust is not the culprit, and so she implores you to exit your cell and assist her in trying to determine who killed Sister Catherine.
(If you've played Pentiment... you need to play this as well.)
This is a visual novel with a linear story, but it's incredibly compelling and constantly engaging, with wonderful writing, art, and music (the soundtrack is more than 100 tracks and five hours long!) all done by the solo developer.
The first game is about a seven or eight hour experience. I took my time with it, going through a chapter or two a day.
The motivation for me to make this post is that Miseriecorde Volume Two: White Wool & Snow, just came out today, much sooner than I was expecting since it's a solo project.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Twitch | Blizzard: Ianator#1479 | 3DS: Ianator - 1779 2336 5317 | FFXIV: Iana Ateliere (NA Sarg)
Backlog Challenge List
https://archive.org/details/JonesInTheFastLaneDOSEN
4 Welcome to Monolith Burger. Our food is untouched by human hands, only by teenagers.
10 Welcome to Monolith Burger. Our soup today is Cream of Taco.
14 Welcome to Monolith Burgers, where our Food(TM) is patented!
15 Welcome to Monolith Burgers. Our buns are the softest!
21 Would you like fries with that?
28 Would you like some Thousand Isla...I mean, Secret Sauce, with that?
31 Our pure beef burgers have half the soybeans of the other leading brands!
37 Is that 'to go,' to eat here, or neither?
39 Would you like a Prepubescent Irradiated Kung Fu Tortise statuette with that?
40 Our Manager would like you to sign a petition to abolish the Minimum Wage.
42 Next to disposable diapers, we're the most familiar sight on the highways!
51 Would you like to take home some complimentary advertising on a placemat?
And a weird FPS that I enjoyed probably more than it deserves, Bedlam. About a real person being transplanted into the brain of an enemy npc from a 90s FPS game.
twitch.tv/Taramoor
@TaramoorPlays
Taramoor on Youtube
Whoops, posted a lot, so gonna hide em in the spoilers
Lock's Quest (Nintendo DS)
A 2008 real-time Tower Defense game by 5th Cell (of Drawn to Life and Scribblenauts fame). You play as Lock and you have to fend off waves of bots until time ran out. In a twist, you got to actively engage in the battles, choosing to repair your structures or fight the enemy yourself. Money earned allowed you to upgrade stuff over time. For it's time, it was a surprisingly good game, using the DS touchscreen to move/activate stuff. Could be a bit janky from time to time, but hey, it was 2008.
They re-released it on Steam/PS4/XBOne back in 2017, but it was a very poor port. The controls are pretty bad, but if you want to try it out, it's only $1.49 (90% off), so not a big loss.
Soulcaster: Part 1 and 2
Another Tower Defense game (noticing a pattern), this time you control a Wizard you can summon 3 allies to protect you; an Archer, a Warrior, and a Bomber. Each has their own abilities that you'll have to use to defeat all the enemies on a stage to proceed. They can also be upgraded for better stats. The Wizard can deploy and recall them to reposition on the fly.
The game is pretty short, with about 50 stages and can be finished in about 3-4 hours. The game is on Steam right now for only $1.67 (67% off), and trust me, it's well worth your time.
Mark of the Ninja
OK, I'm guessing most of us played this, but if you happened to miss it, MotN is hands-down the best stealth/Ninja game ever made. Amazing visuals, great music, surprisingly solid story, and multiple ways to proceed through the levels.
Still not convinced? This is the only game in the past 20 years that I actively played through to completion twice! The first was a normal experience, and the second run I did a 100% non-lethal run (which there's achievements for).
Seriously, if you don't own this game and have never heard of it, go to Steam and buy it now. It's only $8 ($6 for the base game and $2 for the HD/DLC upgrade).
Annalynn
I was so infatuated with this game that I gifted it to a ton of people in the Steam thread. Annalynn is a throwback 80s arcade game straight out of the Namco era. It's a fun little romp that can be finished in a few hours and offers a randomizer mode for extra replayability.
The game is only $3 (40% off) on Steam right now. Just go buy it.
Record of Lodoss War - Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth
This was another great title that might have flown under your radar. It's a Metroidvania that is heavily inspired by Castlevania Symphony of the Night. It adds a color swapping mechanic (blue/red) to fight enemies and solve puzzles. Another short and sweet experience, maybe a dozen hours or so.
It's only $10 on Steam right now (50% off). Again, go buy it.
The Hotel
Do you like the first Resident Evil? Do you love hard camera angles, tank controls, bizarre puzzles, and collecting seemingly strange objects to unlock doors? Oh yeah, zombies! The Hotel is a love-letter to the original Resident Evil, warts and all.
BUT WAIT! You need another reason to buy it? Did you know that I voiced 80% of the characters in the game?! I also did playtesting and made tons of UI suggestions to smooth out the final experience (adding flashes to items to make them visible, coins [how you save] coming in packs of 3 instead of singles, etc). Being a fan of the original RE, I played up the corny voice acting from that game ("You were almost a Jill sandwich!"). So if nothing else, you're supporting my work.
The game's only $9 on Steam (55% off).
That's it for now. I can't recommend the above games enough (ok, maybe pass on the remaster of Lock's Quest). They're all inexpensive, bite-sized experiences that don't overstay their welcome. As a bonus, they don't gobble up hard drive space (except Mark of the Ninja and The Hotel).
Switch ID: MNC Dover SW-1154-3107-1051
Steam ID
majesty 2 didn't
Outer Wilds is an fun lesson in how physics does not care about you at all. I've watched so many LPs and one of my favourite things is seeing people discover what zero friction environments are.
This is from my favourite, the guy did an episode for every loop, so it was always fun to see when he uploaded one with like a 1 minute runtime.
(minimal spoilers but obviously don't click if you want to go in totally blind)
Technically a forum memory, but we had a Let's Play where we blindly played through it and just on account of everyone's choices, she became the God-Empress of the kingdom, ruling over a tyrannical reign with an iron... er, lace glove.
But it's fun to swing around with the grappling hook arm, so none of that matters.
I have at times described this game as "Spider-Man with guns", so I was pretty excited when I heard that Insomniac's Spider-Man game actually had functional web swinging, as opposed to other Spider-Man games where the webs can just shoot up into the air without connecting to anything. Unfortunately I ended up not liking that game very much.
Battle for Wesnoth
This game got started in 2003, and it's now a fantastic sort of fantasy-tactics RPG platform. Just hundreds of fan-made mods of admittedly varying quality, but it's also got over a dozen "official" campaigns that are all pretty great. It's got a combat system that's interesting and in over two decades people have really explored all the nooks and crannies of how you can make it sing. Also I kind of love how you can see it being a patchwork. I guess it's probably more or less settled into an artstyle now but at least when I was playing it you'd get regular updates of like "we've added two frames of animation to the Elf Archer to make them look cooler", because it was a community trying to get really good at pixel art and animation.
and
Starsector
That trailer's from almost a decade ago! It's an overly-ambitious systems-heavy game about being a Spaceship Captain, and it tries to give you a chance to do basically anything you associate with that. It is still relatively combat-focused, but that can mean anything from you getting very good at flying your personal vessel well enough to make a living off piracy to you heading up a massive fleet that does all the hard work for you. It's very much like Mount and Blade but space, I think. Like the fights will wind up being the most frequent interaction you have with the world but all the extra sim stuff makes it sing.
Also want to echo the love for A Short Hike and Kentucky Route Zero.
You head to a recently abandoned space station to get the onboard AI and use the AR hologram interface to investigate moments in time and figure out what happened
I wasn't sure if that was obscure enough but i really loved it as well.
PSN:Furlion
The toughest part is how the game checks whether you got the right answer without giving you the right answer. Obra Dinn has been covered in basically every design essay about this subject, but Tacoma's "approach" is worth considering too.
(mild spoiler for Tacoma's basic premise, not for anything in the story. And no spoiler for Obra Dinn, which I actually haven't gotten to yet)
The Roottrees are Dead is another Obra Dinn esque game, previously a game jam project and available in browser, but an updated version is coming out on Steam in 2 weeks and I'm super hype.
I have bought this game 12 times.
African dev team makes 2d brawler rpg like castlevania 2 or LoZ2. Overworld and 2d battle realms. Game wasn't for a lot of people with the framerate and the art and the tropes being used differently but obviously my black ass liked it.
Mainly because the writing tried to embody the tropes of FFVI but also go places that shonen and wuxia explored before. The choice to have the game follow a husband and wife rather than a prince chasing a waifu put some folks off and by the end of the game, Enzo and Erine feel like real people with complex motivations who move through the plot organically. The side characters and side quests also feel fleshed out. Enzo and Erine are the king and queen of the isolated southern Kingdom of Zama. You've lived peacefully until the queen's brother arrives from their walkabout and overthrows the crown in a violent coupe. You spend the rest of the game with Enzo confronting the fact he needs to get better in all the ways that he sucked, and that he needs Erine to do that. She confronts the loss of her homeland and wanting to save her people with the fact that this means facing her brother while both she and her husband form a better union.
Gameplay is wandering a 2d game world with lovely art and mechanics that are written for them and not to blindly copy other more established series. Platform your overworld, copy some level quests, you'll pick it up. The fighting slips between two stages. You start out with basic taijutsu, basic even through you fought with a bad ass mentor for the last few years. So you're a prodigy, like your daddy. Erine unlocks flight, shield, some healing and offensive magic. But then Enzo has second type of combat you unlock the early in the game and refine. Basically, Ancestor magic called
Aurion, where you draw on traits of your ancestor to do magic martial arts. Enzo embraces his ancestor's honor as a king, a character they meet embraces their ancestor's perversion misogyny.
This plays out with the player using Enzo's taijutsu to control the battlefield and work in tandem with Erine, building stamina then unleashing his Aurion for higher damage. All this plays out with full usage of buttons and would be great on a controller but dang would it be hard for the uninitiated. But I had so much fun.
There's another system that pops in the endgame that makes it still fun but added another layer to it.
The world
I traveled from island to island on the back of a giant turtle. I journeyed to new continents and cultures with their own cultures, traditions, and broken social contracts. Conspiracies, and endless chains of wickedness. I watched Enzo and Erine grow as a team, as a couple, and individuals. It was a great story. I loved every part. The art matched the story beats and every culture and faction hurt you when you witnessed people live and die for what they believed in.
The story
You know when everyone says, this is not your daddy's jrpg, but then the story follows the same trapping anyway? This isn't it. It actually went places I didn't see coming and ended on a note that I'm note sure anyone would have appreciated another series. But it actually carried through on the themes built up earlier in the game and pressed the characters and the audience to think about it.
Real talk
Flaws
Some translation glitches
The turtorial sections were pretty fucky.
The framerate of the cutscenes definately burned a lot of poeple
Ah, this is how it started.
twitch.tv/Taramoor
@TaramoorPlays
Taramoor on Youtube
Deliver Us the Moon is kind of a mix of walking sim and detective story. You're sent to the Moon to get a power station back up and running. Along the way, you review audio diaries and other recordings that reveal why things stopped working.
Deliver Us Mars came out in.....2023? but I haven't had the chance to play it.
Afro-fantasy mandalorians yo.
I bought the physical collectors edition of Paradise Killer after loving the digital version so much. Got some neat little models and a very busty mouse pad of Crimson Acid that i actually use at home.
I am curious which evidence you are talking about? I managed to find them all organically although i spent as much time as i could with the game before i started the trial.
PSN:Furlion
TCA is an homage to mid-90's era flight sims. I think the game is still early access but I found it to be tons of fun, and it's had a steady stream of updates from the developer. Even if you only have 30 mins to game you can still fire it up, top gun some migs, take out some T-72's, and bring your Harrier back home to the airfield. It's realistic enough to not be arcade madness like Ace Combat without taking over your life.