It’s funny cos if you play the original on easy, it’s exactly as you say. Only combat is the key encounters really.
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Not yet no. I don’t think it runs on OG switch
I feel like that’s how it should be! And also less keys! 
Ah, well as I say it ain’t really very good at all but it’s a definite improvement!
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Meg’s Monster (PC)
It is my week working away from home, so getting through the Steam Deck backlog while I miss my family
This was a nice 3 and a half hour narrative adventure, using JRPG mechanics to tell a cute tale about the relationship between a monster and a young girl. Definitely not a game with deep mechanics - the turn-based fights are more or less rote to complete and just require you reacting appropriately. But the story was much darker and more heartfelt than expected.
It was a lovely few hours to play, not sure it’ll stick with me though (didn’t help it has to compare with and Roger in recency bias).
Definitely feel if I had played it before Christmas would have been my game of the year - just an incredible piece of art.
From what I remember, a lot of Remake is faithful to the original but they just make everything LOONGGGERRRR. For better and for worse, I’d argue.
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I love this and Split Fiction but I’m not sure there’s another developer going that has such a huge difference between gameplay and story. The writing is just terrible, but these games are so much fun!
Worth replaying with you playing as the other character (and skipping as much story stuff as possible, of course)
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I definitely get what you mean but I was so engaged by the story that I still ended up loving all of it.
Tell me a story that wouldn’t be improved without being more like Evangelion! You can’t!
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Could be a bit of recall bias on my part then - for the whole last bit I was thinking, ‘gonna be on the roof any minute now,’ and getting really surly with it for not happening!
I really liked the dialogue in It Takes Two but I FUCKING HATED Split Fiction’s characters.
Yeah, I kind of wish I hadn’t been slightly stressed out by a few things that kept me from getting as immersed as I could have!
- 1000xResist
2. Final Fantasy VII
The latest in my long-running campaign to play through every single Final Fantasy game, and I’d been looking forward to this one for obvious reasons. It’s one of the foundational texts to my personality (at least where my appreciation of art / media / whatever is concerned) and, what with this whole project of mine having been an overblown comfort blanket from the offset, the prospect of playing one of my all-time nostalgic comfort games was a really exciting prospect. As it happens, I’ve struggled quite a bit with various nervous system / mental health complaints / just general life things throughout my playthrough - which meant I wasn’t able to accomplish my original goal of reviewing every single inn in the game. Sorry.
Nonetheless, I really enjoyed playing this again and appreciating it within a lot of new contexts since my last time. I think it stands up alongside the Remake project, for example - having now “seen” other parts of Midgar and other parts of the game’s world in a much more fluid and open presentation, it’s interesting to traverse the beautiful pre-rendered backdrops with a different interpretation on some of the smaller details, for example, to be able to map different things onto the characters’ interactions. You forget how barebones a lot of the writing and characterisation is in this game - it’s kind of ridiculous to think that a one-to-one adaptation would have worked. Obviously one thing I now know is that Red XIII actually has a really shit teenager dickhead cunt voice from after the Cosmo Canyon section, for example.
It’s also really interesting viewing it in relation to the series before it. Final Fantasy VI kind of feels like the endpoint of a gradual deconstruction of tropes and elements from the very first games (placeholder Star Wars rips from FF2 become operatic in their ambition, fantastical magic becomes a warped kind of technology) and then VII is kind of them attempting something new and kind of subversive with the pieces. Imperial fortresses become hulking corporate resource-sucking power stations, magic becomes that finite resource extracted by those corporations, archetypal rebels become a (slightly more) ideologically-driven paramilitary organisation. It’s all barebones (especially in the English translation) but the ambition is like nothing else.
Curiously, I’ll say that nostalgia didn’t hold up quite as much this time round as it has before. There’s so much of the game that still does work - the earnestness, the sense of mystery, the weird sense of humour - but (bear in mind, this was my first time actually completing the game), it definitely sinks a bit in the final part. Like with every other time I’ve played Final Fantasy VII, I’ll remember it as a companion during whatever was going on in my life at the time and it’s fair to say that quite a lot has gone on while I’ve been sneaking back, every so often, to revisit this strange little world and its strange little characters.
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The Séance of Blake Manor
Really enjoyed this. It’s a narrative detective game, set in a haunted house in rural 1900’s Ireland. The plot is part Agatha Christie, part gothic horror.
There is a lot of dialogue, both written and spoken, so not really a puzzler you can play with a podcast in the background.
The first 2 acts are really well designed, there’s always a new corridor to explore and clues to connect. Learning about the characters is fun, they’re quite well acted and I love the graphic style.
I did find that in the latter third of the game it became a bit more disjointed as I spent a lot of time tying up loose ends, and there were a couple of annoying ‘use this specific item with this unconnected but specific person’ bits that I resorted to googling.
9/10
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Chants of Sennaar
A puzzle game which by my reckoning was roughly 70% beautiful and intuitive to 30% aggravating. The essential conceit is that in each level you have to work out the language of its people through context clues and a few scraps to start out with. You can often guess a logograph’s meaning just from its shape comparatively to other logographs, which is nice. Then, once you’ve completed your little dictionary, you move up the tower to the next level and start from scratch. Each language has its own structure (although thankfully they didn’t go as hog wild with this as they easily could have) so it’s not straightforward.
The game is at its best around the halfway point of each level, when you’re just getting the hang of its language and you’re starting to intuit words as they’re flung at you, you feel like a golden path is opening up to you in that special way deciphering a code can make you feel like. Then there are the times where you want to kill whoever was tasked with making sure the visual depictions of things like ‘beauty’, ‘me’, and ‘make’ in the dictionary were clear. There’s also a couple of very opaque puzzles and annoying stealth sections. Shout out in particular to the Artists for their obnoxious Arabic-esque language and their piss sewer maze.
Overall though I had a good time with this. It’s an uncynical and beautiful game (the aesthetics of which are clearly inspired by a historic visual novel I aggravatingly can’t remember the name of), the interpreter angle is thoroughly engaging and at no point was I so frustrated I didn’t want to stick with it and have one more try at saying WE ARE BROTHERS. I WILL MAKE A POTION in Plague Doctorese. Thank you to @1101010 for recommending it.
7/10.
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Classic punk album
Fucking hated this game.
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I really warmed to Little Hope in the end. Much better than House of Sand. It actually had characters I was routing for, which really does make all the difference!
I wouldn’t expect anything different. I again recommend the Talos Principle games to you, I’d sincerely love to read you losing your fucking mind over them.
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Talos Principle 2 is on game.pass next week.
I am sincerely tempted to stream it.
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