Discussion Video games you're playing or might have recently finished.

[Panna]

Trying and failing to beat the final boss of metroid prime 2 hard mode on the game cube, I'm going nuts trying to finish him off.

 

[Imaginos]

Just wanted to mention a little game I finished recently called Mundaun. I really enjoyed it and I just wish there was more stuff like that out there. Solid first person exploration games, with great atmosphere, an organic sense of discovery, and a compelling story. Three other games which quickly come to mind that exemplify this sort of this thing would be Misamata, Betrayer, and The Painscreeek Killings. In addition, there's also games in the survival genre that kind of hit on this sort of thing as well. Stuff like Green Hell, The Forest and Subnautica.

I'll also mention that I've checked out and finished a lot of point and click adventure games recently. Most I don't really have much to say about, but I have to mention how disappointed I was with the Syberia games. They certainly had a cool fairy tale charm to them, but the story was extremely meandering and didn't really have much consistency to it. On top of this, many of the characters were pretty one-dimensional and throwaway. Oscar and Kate were fine and were a likeable duo, but everyone else was just kind of flat. Gameplay-wise getting around anywhere was a massive chore, mostly due to a lack of double clicking to initiate a scene transition, in addition to how the animations were downright excessive a lot of the time. All of the puzzles were mostly enjoyable, but the very last one in the first game (the one where you need to mix the right drink) was just complete crap, with a literal backward ass solution and key items that are placed in such a way where you won't even know they're there, since the prompt to find them is so close to another prompt that otherwise initiates a conversation with an NPC. Really makes me glad that most developers include a highlight objects button in this particular genre these days, since pixel hunting for hours on end absolutely sucks the fun out of these kinds of games.

Spoiler

I just wanted to mention a few story details which bothered me a bit while playing and, in a lot of ways, indicated how lazy the writing was. Firstly, the fact that Hans just shows up out of the blue right at the very end was so frigging jarring. Almost like the game forgot that you were supposed to be looking for him and didn't know how to introduce him in a narratively consistent and natural way, so the writers just said fuck it and have him appear out of nowhere, without any explanation about what the heck he had even been doing all this time. In addition, the cliched villain from the first game is very forgettable and is dispatched pretty much as soon as he's introduced, which is disappointing. I also have to say that the series of events required to get your train started again in that related second area bordered on the absurd in a really dumb way.

For instance, Oscar gets his mechanical hands stolen and instead of just grabbing them back immediately once you spot them, you instead have to go on this really convoluted fetch quest that feels extremely contrived and padded for time. Like, you have to travel to this random location to retrieve a character to sing opera for some shady guy, who's totally not going to betray you at some point, but before that you need to sober up a drunk cosmonaut and get his rocket into space so you can get the key which releases a falcon that shoos away all the birds to get the nearby zeppelin working again that you then use to travel to this other location to find this random character that turns out won't leave until you mix the right drink to get her voice working again. After you do all this, only then, can you get the hands back, which in the end is achieved anyway by using a simple screwdriver after said guy, what a shocker, betrays you, thereby making the whole prior series of events pointless.

I'm fine with adventure games having some ludicrous elements, but this seriously took it to a whole new level, where it was quite hard not to see it for just being a weak attempt to pad out the story with empty bullshit. Also, the phone calls from the first game, while neat at first, were just really annoying after a while and interrupted the flow of the game. I mean, I get that it's supposed to show how Kate's family and friends are really not on her side and spend more time thinking about themselves than her well being, but it still felt very hamfisted. The fiance especially was such a whiny prick, it's like the developers explicitly made him to be as irritating as possible.

Spoiler

Mentioning a few more things just about the second game this time, but again the writing felt just as lazy, with lots of absurd conveniences and deus ex machinas. Like, during the middle of the game, when you're about to die, the drunk pilot from the first game crashes his plane out of the blue and saves you. But the last time you saw him you shot him into space, so how exactly did he even get back to earth and test drive another experimental plane that just so happened to crash in the right place at the right time. And of course the game literally doesn't even bother answering any of these questions. Instead, it's just like, "Shut up, here he is, don't think about it, now let's move on.". Not even the main character herself acts like it's any mystery at all, which again just felt really jarring and lazy writing-wise. Also, you again have puzzles that stretch for time and don't really make any sense in the context of the story. Like, at exactly the same point the pilot shows up you need to somehow get back to your stolen train, which otherwise would take about 10 minutes to get to if your character just walked there. Instead, you need to get the ejection seat working in the plane so it can literally shoot you into the air and land you there, even though doing this is totally unnecessary. If there had been a river in the way, or something, then there would've been some small justification for it, but nope you just need to do it for the sake of it because the developers say so.

Again, it just made this whole game seem really dumb and poorly thought out. And just like the first game, the villains that are introduced are just super lazy and lame. All of the obstacles you're faced with just feel so contrived and out of place. And when you're trying to have a semi-serious story going on, this sort of thing really kneecaps it in the worst ways. I mean, honestly, one of the villains literally gets eaten alive/killed by giant penguins. Yes, you read that right, giant penguins. I mean, I'm not sure if that what was supposed to be a joke, or that the lead developer/writer literally thinks that someone could be killed by a fucking group of penguins, giant or not. I also have to say that the ending of the sequel felt just as unsatisfying as the first game. Even worse, since so many of the mysteries set up beforehand have no resolution whatsoever. Turns out that all Hans wanted to do was find mammoths. Once he finds them, that's it. Roll credits. It's like, what the fuck, what about the significance of the doll and what happened to Hans when he was a kid and how it seemed to suggest that there was something else going on, like in terms of time travel and such. Again, talk about cheap and lazy writing. I'm fine with the journey being more important than the destination, but when the journey was so dumb/unsatisfying already, you'd at least hope that the conclusion wouldn't be so dumb/unsatisfying as well. I mean, the main point of the last game was to get Hans to sign over his company for the sake of the firm you work for, yet in the second game it's like that contract never even existed and no one even acknowledges its existence. Even your employer who wouldn't shut up about it before. Honestly, the more I think about the story, the more it annoys me, so I'll just leave it here.

The whole series reminds me of that line from the opening of MST3K, where it tells you to just relax and not overthink the logical inconsistencies in the premise of the show, but MST3K is expressly made not to be taken seriously. The problem with Syberia is that it wants to have its semi-serious story, while also hand waving away all the glaring holes/flaws within said story, which of course doesn't work because the two are basically diametrically opposed to one another, and leads to the final result just being a heap of dumb/lazy writing. Kind of debating with myself whether I should check out Syberia 3 or not, merely for completionist's sake, but I've read it's really bad, which I guess is saying something when I think about how mediocre the first two games are.

As of this moment, I'm actually playing the Edna & Harvey games and am currently on the first one. Just got access to all of the asylum and I'm enjoying it so far. Its off beat style and quirky sense of humour are particularly good and appeal to my sensibilities, for lack of a better word to use. I wonder if the rabbit being named Harvey is a reference to the film Harvey from 1950 with Jimmy Stewart, which also happens to be one of my favourite films.

 

[Cast_Away]

just finished resident evil 7 dlcs, also played re8 before, really good games. Started vampire the masquerade bloodlines few days ago, waiting for the sequel), this game has some unique atmosphere imho, like everything fits - music, characters, dialogues, surroundings, all of that just makes it feel real for me.

 

[Imaginos]

It sucks sometimes not having anyone to talk to, at least when it comes to gaming. All the gaming communities out there feel absolutely impenetrable, or (in the case of reddit) bogged down by way too many bullshit rules, and are otherwise insufferable echo chambers where everyone parrots the same mainstream/authorized opinions back and forth to each other. It's far too late for this sort of thing now (what with gaming being a mere shadow of what it used to be for me), but it would've been cool having a friend, or even a community, to share the hobby with. As it is, I've always been alone in playing anything and, in addition to this, have often just had to make do in regards to talking to myself about these kinds of things inside of my own mind for the lack of anywhere else to do so. Well, at the very least, it's just nice to post about my thoughts/opinions for a change, and I appreciate the ability to do so here.

 

[Sprite_Geist]

343 Industries has just released (or re-released?) the Halo Mod Tools for Halo: MCC, so I have been trying them out. This has caused me to take a short hiatus from playing Mass Effect Legendary Edition. Also some other video games were purchased on Steam; they are on discount because of the Steam Summer Sale.

 

[nerve]

Mass Effect 3 is better than I remembered! It gets cute and fan service-y sometimes (love that Citadel DLC) but there's this overall atmosphere of dread and overwhelm that I love. Woefully overshadowed by its ending.

 

[Imaginos]

On a whim I decided to replay Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs and while overall I still didn't really care for it very much and still consider it my least favorite of the Amnesia games, but I'll admit that the story, which I essentially could barely even recollect from way back when I first played it (almost like I myself was suffering from amnesia, har har) was actually a lot better than I remember it being. A lot of the events of the game are mired in the protagonist's own confused madness, which unfortunately makes the plot pretty confusing to follow as well, and is also probably part of the reason why I forgot about it so quickly after I finished it for the first time years ago, what with most of it kind of being flushed out my brain for being such a largely jumbled mess. Upon this revisit however, it struck me just how much of the game's themes had actually kind of flown right over my head from before. Again, mostly on account of how confusing piecing together the whole story can be.

Having said that, I could certainly sympathize with Mandus (the protagonist) for regarding this world as the rotten pile of shit that it is. If you ask me, his goal was actually an extremely admirable, if not downright necessary one (bringing the pain/suffering of humanity to an end once and for all), but the way he went about trying to achieve it, of course, only exacerbated the misery he originally sought to eradicate. Actually reminds me a lot of King Allant from Demon Souls in that sense, since both had somewhat similar ambitions which backfired on them. It's a little irritating though how most people tend to backhandedly dismiss these kinds of characters for being villainous or mentally ill, simply on the basis of them regarding life as a whole as being irredeemably awful, which it is. Only on this madhouse planet can people who see things plainly without dreams or delusions obfuscating the facts be regarded as the "ill" ones.

Spoiler

I'm still not really sure if Mandus was trying to turn everyone into manpigs, or was simply only turning a required amount of people into them so as to serve as the arms and legs of the machine to go out and draw/harvest as many people into said machine as possible in order to end their lives, and thus their suffering as well. In this sense, the machine was basically just a giant self-sustaining killing instrument designed to cull all of humanity. Originally it was intended as an act of mercy to spare everyone from experiencing the horrors of the 20th century (most notably both world wars), but over time it seemed to become more driven from Mandus' outright hate and disgust for mankind as being one massive pile of degenerate filth that demanded to be purged from this earth. From the scummiest hobo, to the most decadent bourgeoisie snob. All people were equally worthy of contempt and extermination.

Even in spite of all this, the primary function of the machine, while atrocious and abominable, still basically provided the only remedy possible for ridding the world of suffering. That frankly being death. If the machine had been more geared towards straight out euthanasia, the kind that delivered a painless death to everyone, then why wouldn't you just let it devour everything? I mean, seriously, this whole world is nothing, but useless agony perpetuating itself in a reiterative cycle. Each of us forced to bear with a nasty, unfulfilling, and utterly futile existence. Mandus' omnicidal machinations might have been over the top, and ultimately ended up getting away from him only to amount to yet another atrocity for this planet to reel from, but what is one horrific, yet totally final, atrocity to spare everyone the countless others that would've otherwise happened one after the other, after the other, after the other. All I'm saying is that Mandus had the right idea, he just went about it in the wrong way.

A lot of people would dismiss it as burning down the village to save the village, but a deeply imperfect world, calls for a deeply imperfect solution, since any sort of other that seeks to preserve or "improve" said village will always lead to more of the same miseries taking place. As it is though, we live within a world that is bound to burn itself down to the ground anyway, and is essentially accomplishing unintentionally the same thing that many would decry Mandus for having attempted to do. In other words, the extinction of humanity, and quite possibly all life on this earth. The people who defend life and see it as being worthwhile, will inevitably bring about the same universal devastation, just with far more pain and misery involved. At least one can take relief in the inevitable conclusion to it all, although the hypocrisy/irony from the pro-lifers is quite staggering nonetheless.

 

[western_heart]

America Truck Simulator

It is the only computer/3D game I really play. I have a steering wheel and everything else I need besides a trucker cap.

I like the scenery/locations; the game is entirely set in the western US, which I love (see my username).

I just started playing it again after a break of not using my PC at all due to flashbacks. I'm trying to practice driving, as it's been over a month since I've been behind the wheel of a car IRL and I need to get used to it again.

 

[MindFrog]

I don't know if it counts but I've been playing some dating sims/visual novels here and there.. Just finished Monster Sweethearts (sounds cheesy, I know).

I never really enjoyed them before cos they felt boring, turns out I was just playing the ones that don't cater my demographic. It's really fun trying all the routes and finding secrets.

I never really had the energy to play more time consuming games nowadays even when I miss Stardew. At least i can play vn's without writing a planner on what crops to grow for the next season haha.

 

[Imaginos]

It seems that basically the only kinds of games I play/finish these days are those found in the point and click genre. I'm getting a bit sick of them at this point, but I honestly don't much have wherewithal to play anything else. For the longest time, I've also been pretty deep into the horror genre, since my life has been so much of a malignantly noxious nightmare for so long now that nothing can really scare me anymore. Chronic depression has essentially rendered me completely inert to that kind of stuff, but that doesn't stop me from trying to find something that can evoke a response from me, even if it's only a microscopic one.

Anyway, I finished both Edna & Harvey games. They were okay, but overall I preferred the second one, since the interface was greatly improved and the general flow of the game felt way better designed, with much less stuff cluttering up the environment and nowhere as many useless interactions or dialogue. Puzzle-wise the first game could get pretty hare brained and frustrating at times, whereas the second game hit just the right balance of keeping its puzzles fun to solve, yet not too dependent on random environment interactions or wacky inventory combinations that would only end up grinding everything to a halt in an aimless search to discover just what in the hell it was you needed to do, as was sometimes the case in the first game. Have to say that I didn't expect these games to dabble with such dark subject matter, but it definitely helped balance out the corny, and after a while kind of grating, sense of humour it beats you over the head with. It got to such a point where I didn't even bother examining new items in the environment or my inventory because I had just had enough of being bombarded with the developers many dumb/annoying jokes. Too bad there isn't a third game since even despite the incessant, and often lame, goofiness, there's a good amount of macabre charm to this series and the stories are good. From what I gather, the developer moved on to making the Deponia games, which I know very little about, but I imagine I'll get around to checking them out at some point.

Spoiler

Can't help, but wonder just where it was Edna went off to after the events of the first game (assuming she truly wasn't actually there in the second game), or why she decided to throw Harvey away. Then again, since Harvey was probably the most annoying character in the entire series and really only got on my nerves by the end of the first game, I guess it makes perfect sense. I'm actually glad he's relatively absent from the second game, since I much preferred the disembodied narrator over having to listen to anymore of Harvey's raspy voice and tedious jokes. The third ending of the second game was definitely my favourite, but one wonders whether anything that happened was ever even real to begin with. Were Edna and Gerret really just figments of Lili's imagination, or was that just a last ditch misdirection by Dr. Marcel to confuse her? Only a third game could answer that question and, like I said, hopefully someday this series will be revisited.

 

[lowres]

Just finished Lisa: The Painful and now going through Lisa: The Joyful. The last few hours of painful fucked with my head man. Joyful is also pretty god damn brutal in the story department.

Edit: also cruelty squad, please play cruelty squad its good

 

[MindFrog]

Just finished Lisa: The Painful and now going through Lisa: The Joyful.

Haha playing that made me double depressed.. The story's so good though.

 

[Ironweed]

For no reason I can honestly offer I've been farting around with Bedrock Minecraft a/k/a the version that sucks. Especially when you don't have Xbox Live Gold and can only play solo, at least that's what I think is going on. Especially when you haven't looked at the game in something like three years and have no clue about most of the new stuff. (I'm not even sure how I got the Bedrock version on my PC at this point. I think I did something with the old XBox version, maybe? When I try to log into my profile I get this weird message...guess it is b/c I didn't renew Gold, but that's not what it says)

​

The most amusing thing about the game at this point is the fact that my right mouse button is going, so I need multiple attempts to eat anything and shooting an arrow is kind of a maybe, maybe not thing. The second most amusing thing about the game is that I think I picked the absolute worst seed in Minecraft history. Been all over the place and have yet to find a single spawner, abandoned mine shaft or village that actually has villagers in it. Hours of mining and only 19 diamonds. I've already found four of those stupid towers, which of course I have no clue how to work for better drops. I clear out the little grey dudes, light the towers up with torches and move on.

Just about ready to go to the Nether and probably get wrecked. Sorry for probably boring others as much as I'm boring myself.

 

[narval]

Past saturday i bought slay the spire, now i've 80 hours there. Good and adicting shit that has several things i like:
Roguelike style, you have to play various times to unlock the chance of looting better/different things.
Turn-based combats.
Badass bosses.
Attacks, magics and things you throw in each battles comes in a deck.


PD: Those who played hearthstone or MTG can can realize more or less how it works the deck mechanic. But slay the spire HAS NOT shitty pay-to-wyn also is single player.

 

[lowres]

Haha playing that made me double depressed.. The story's so good though.

It really is. The reveal with buzzo and lisa at the end, especially if you get the marty ending for going to the joy lab. Really made me feel bad for brad after hating him for being almost as terrible of a father as marty.

 

[narval]

Starting a new playthrough on divinity: original sin 2

 

[shush]

currently trying to 100% breath of the wild.

 

[ShadowsFall]

Not a very well known old DOS game, but Realms of the Haunting. It's been over a year since I played, and haven't played anything since then for various reasons.

 

[Imaginos]

Just finished a game called OMORI, which I'd actually never even heard of until about a week ago, despite all the buzz/attention that it seems to have gotten everywhere, but personally it left me feeling pretty disappointed. Although this game claims to tackle tough subject matter like depression, anxiety and suicide, it really bungles its handling of them, largely due to the poor structure of the story, especially as it develops late game. Also, maybe it's just me never having any deep friendly bonds with others growing up, but the whole emphasis on friendship was something I just couldn't relate or connect with in any way, shape or form. That would be fine assuming it wasn't such a huge part of the story, but given that it is, it just prevented me from really identifying with what was going on, and left most of what transpires between the player character and his friends as either slogging through their tedious interpersonal drama or being forced to watch their shallow/childish fun and games.

Having said that, I think the worst thing about OMORI, for me anyway, was how godawful the pacing is. It takes at least 20-25 hours to complete, which is just way too damn long for a game like this, and it's crammed with so much meaningless filler. It would've been way, WAY better as just a 4-6 hour game instead. As it stands, the most compelling stuff only really happens in the last hour anyway, and pretty much everything before that point, outside of some of the interactions you experience in the real world, is just meaningless crap to keep you busy. As an RPG, it's very bare bones and nothing about the combat is all that exciting or interesting. This game really should've been a primarily narrative experience similar to something like To The Moon, since the RPG elements just bog down and obstruct the flow of the story.

For what it's worth, I actually consider myself a fan of the RPGMaker genre of games. I've enjoyed stuff like Ib, The Witch's House, Yume Nikki, Stray Cat Crossing, OFF, and the LISA series, just to name a few. The thing about all those games is that they're tight with their pacing and don't bloat themselves with tons of unnecessary content like OMORI does. Even when it comes to the story/atmosphere, I felt way more moved and in tune with stuff like LISA: The Painful or OneShot, whereas OMORI mostly just left me feeling frustrated and disappointed, especially given the fact that it had so much potential in regards to exploring mental health related subject matter, which it otherwise largely squandered.

Spoiler: And just as a random aside, even though it's extremely spoiler heavy, all the problems I have with the development/conclusion to the story are summed up perfectly by the person in the below links.

Spoiler: And here's just my own random thoughts about it.

The fact is that OMORI isn't really about depression. It's about guilt. Sunny (the player character) is just suffering from the crushing guilt of having accidentally murdered his sister, which is a lot different from developing depression due to not having any clue how to participate in life and being painfully estranged from everything and everyone in it. Before the incident with his sister, he (Sunny) is shown as not really having any mental health issues whatsoever, and his stony expressions and flat demeanour are portrayed as more being quirky character traits of his instead of anything that would indicate he was depressed or unhappy.

The whole quest of finding Basil also proves to be a pointless runaround to pad for time, and I also think it's very bizarre how Basil just showed right up out of the blue almost immediately after the murder happened and then concocted this ghoulish scheme to stage Mari's death as a suicide, even though both Basil and Sunny are just kids. Their deception also should've been seen through immediately by even a cursory forensic glance of the body, thereby revealing the true cause of death being due to Mari falling down the stairs and suffering a head fracture of some kind and not death by asphyxiation via hanging.

When it comes down to it, the story would've been a thousand times better without the murder twist nonsense, and it basically ruins the payoff and potential to a game which was otherwise a pretty bland and dull experience. I know there's an alternate path to take in this game, which most people have dubbed the "Hikikomori route", but having to trudge through all the tedious pacing and boring gameplay elements a second time is a total deal breaker for me. Reading up about it on the wiki, it doesn't really change or alter anything about the core plot beats of the game, at least in regards to what Sunny did to Mari, and instead basically just amounts to a couple extra bad endings, a little bit of extra endgame content in the dreamworld, and next to nothing else. It's too bad because I'd love an alternate version of this game (a true hikikomori route, if you will) where Sunny has to overcome his agoraphobia, depression, and fear of other people, minus the dumb accidental murder nonsense and all the saccharine power of friendship crap.

 

[MellowAvenue]

Finished playing the Mass Effect trilogy recently. Still think the first game is my favorite because of the story but I think 3 was my favorite to revisit overall. Story feels more focused than 2's and it has the most well-refined gameplay overall. Only thing I think they did wrong was seriously downgrade the dialogue choices and I still don't care for the ending.

Considered replaying Andromeda but I very much wasn't into it the first 2 times I completed it. Might still do it and just treat it as an alien shooting gallery type of game and turn my brain off for the story since I did enjoy the gameplay at least, just very little else.

 

[usernamerequired]

I have recently stopped playing Games after losing my best friend, as we have always played all kinds of games together. Gaming without him is hard but i really want to get back into it... i cant just stop playing because of him.
I am planning on picking Bloodborne back up tomorrow. I finished it on my own a few months ago and maybe it is time to go for the Platinum trophy.

 

[UseItOrLoseIt]

I played Valhalla but at the middle of the game I got bored. It gets repetitive, the skill tree looks more awesome than it actually is, and mysteryes are straigh up boring.
To mend that, I bought Mass Effect: Legendary Edition. Haven't played it yet cause I'm too tired the last couple of days. But I can't wait. A blast from the past. Bioware games hold a special place in my heart.

 

[usernamerequired]

I played Valhalla but at the middle of the game I got bored. It gets repetitive and the skill tree looks more awesome than it actually is.
To mend that, I bought Mass Effect: Legendary Edition. Haven't played it yet cause I'm too tired the last couple of days. But I can't wait. A blast from the past. Bioware games hold a special place in my heart.

Oof, i felt the same way about Valhalla. The collectibles are just TOO much, theres so many and they are incredibly repetitive. Also, they completely ruined the stealth in that game imo but... yeah. Was very disappointed by that game

 

[UseItOrLoseIt]

Oof, i felt the same way about Valhalla. The collectibles are just TOO much, theres so many and they are incredibly repetitive. Also, they completely ruined the stealth in that game imo but... yeah. Was very disappointed by that game

The collectibles are a thorn in the side of every AC game. Stealth was good on the hardest setting. At least satisfactory. I liked the story very much. Maybe the best written AC game until now. Too bad I won't see the end of it because of tedious gameplay.

 

[Mendex]

Just finished a game called OMORI, which I'd actually never even heard of until about a week ago, despite all the buzz/attention that it seems to have gotten everywhere, but personally it left me feeling pretty disappointed. Although this game claims to tackle tough subject matter like depression, anxiety and suicide, it really bungles its handling of them, largely due to the poor structure of the story, especially as it develops late game. Also, maybe it's just me never having any deep friendly bonds with others growing up, but the whole emphasis on friendship was something I just couldn't relate or connect with in any way, shape or form. That would be fine assuming it wasn't such a huge part of the story, but given that it is, it just prevented me from really identifying with what was going on, and left most of what transpires between the player character and his friends as either slogging through their tedious interpersonal drama or being forced to watch their shallow/childish fun and games.

Having said that, I think the worst thing about OMORI, for me anyway, was how godawful the pacing is. It takes at least 20-25 hours to complete, which is just way too damn long for a game like this, and it's crammed with so much meaningless filler. It would've been way, WAY better as just a 4-6 hour game instead. As it stands, the most compelling stuff only really happens in the last hour anyway, and pretty much everything before that point, outside of some of the interactions you experience in the real world, is just meaningless crap to keep you busy. As an RPG, it's very bare bones and nothing about the combat is all that exciting or interesting. This game really should've been a primarily narrative experience similar to something like To The Moon, since the RPG elements just bog down and obstruct the flow of the story.

For what it's worth, I actually consider myself a fan of the RPGMaker genre of games. I've enjoyed stuff like Ib, The Witch's House, Yume Nikki, Stray Cat Crossing, OFF, and the LISA series, just to name a few. The thing about all those games is that they're tight with their pacing and don't bloat themselves with tons of unnecessary content like OMORI does. Even when it comes to the story/atmosphere, I felt way more moved and in tune with stuff like LISA: The Painful or OneShot, whereas OMORI mostly just left me feeling frustrated and disappointed, especially given the fact that it had so much potential in regards to exploring mental health related subject matter, which it otherwise largely squandered.

Spoiler: And just as a random aside, even though it's extremely spoiler heavy, all the problems I have with the development/conclusion to the story are summed up perfectly by the person in the below links.

Spoiler: And here's just my own random thoughts about it.

The fact is that OMORI isn't really about depression. It's about guilt. Sunny (the player character) is just suffering from the crushing guilt of having accidentally murdered his sister, which is a lot different from developing depression due to not having any clue how to participate in life and being painfully estranged from everything and everyone in it. Before the incident with his sister, he (Sunny) is shown as not really having any mental health issues whatsoever, and his stony expressions and flat demeanour are portrayed as more being quirky character traits of his instead of anything that would indicate he was depressed or unhappy.

The whole quest of finding Basil also proves to be a pointless runaround to pad for time, and I also think it's very bizarre how Basil just showed right up out of the blue almost immediately after the murder happened and then concocted this ghoulish scheme to stage Mari's death as a suicide, even though both Basil and Sunny are just kids. Their deception also should've been seen through immediately by even a cursory forensic glance of the body, thereby revealing the true cause of death being due to Mari falling down the stairs and suffering a head fracture of some kind and not death by asphyxiation via hanging.

When it comes down to it, the story would've been a thousand times better without the murder twist nonsense, and it basically ruins the payoff and potential to a game which was otherwise a pretty bland and dull experience. I know there's an alternate path to take in this game, which most people have dubbed the "Hikikomori route", but having to trudge through all the tedious pacing and boring gameplay elements a second time is a total deal breaker for me. Reading up about it on the wiki, it doesn't really change or alter anything about the core plot beats of the game, at least in regards to what Sunny did to Mari, and instead basically just amounts to a couple extra bad endings, a little bit of extra endgame content in the dreamworld, and next to nothing else. It's too bad because I'd love an alternate version of this game (a true hikikomori route, if you will) where Sunny has to overcome his agoraphobia, depression, and fear of other people, minus the dumb accidental murder nonsense and all the saccharine power of friendship crap.

Oh, how great is meeting people who can address that mediocre game.
I bought it in 24 December before Christmas and wait all night (This because I was one of those who saw the trailer back then in 2014). And I thought that the developing of more than 5 years of the game. Than they create a "masterpiece" like Undertale/Lisa.
I never finished even paying for 20 USD in Steam. I leave it if I remember in the part that you come back in the dream-world after acquiring your ability of swimming. And your left you only with Mari. I don't care after that and I just put myself to do something else.
It was a great disappointment. And make me feel that people doesn't have "good" taste for video games as before, And never going to buy another game again after possibly after that.
PD: I recommend play Pathologic (Is not a game to have "fun" more like a russian suffering and depression simulator But you could like it at the end).
If you play Yume Nikki, Tried .Flow (or DotFlow by lolrust). Is a good fangame of the original even better in some aspects (like story).

 

[RockBot]

I play Onward and Beat Saber on VR.

 

[MagentaScorpio]

I'm playing The Sims 4, but I also play old browser games like lioden or howrse... Yeah... I used to play osu! game

 

[ketchup sandwich]

Playing Bloodborne again for the umpteenth time, and on mobile for years I've been playing Downwell

 

[nex]

Finished playing the Mass Effect trilogy recently. Still think the first game is my favorite because of the story but I think 3 was my favorite to revisit overall. Story feels more focused than 2's and it has the most well-refined gameplay overall. Only thing I think they did wrong was seriously downgrade the dialogue choices and I still don't care for the ending.

Considered replaying Andromeda but I very much wasn't into it the first 2 times I completed it. Might still do it and just treat it as an alien shooting gallery type of game and turn my brain off for the story since I did enjoy the gameplay at least, just very little else.

Pretty much agree with most of this. ME1 was fantastic grand sci-fi, with sublime storytelling and world-building. Its antagonist was also by far the most interesting in the franchise. I found the main story more fascinating than any Star Trek or Star Wars. It is a little rough around the edges, combat is a little clunky, but I can forgive that because of how much the game does so well.

I do appreciate ME2 for what it did well, mostly some of its characters are really interesting and complex. What I found disappointing was that combat--while more slick--was too cover-heavy and too repetitive. More significantly though, the whole main story about the Reapers is almost completely ignored, what little "main" story there is feels like a tacked-on afterthought. I'm also not a fan of how it shifts tone from the more sci-fi novel feel of ME1 to more comic book style, where it's more about badass characters than about a big sci-fi story.

ME3 was a big improvement in terms of combat but I found it very unsatisfying in the story parts. While ME2 at least had some great character depth, ME3 generally feels very shallow to me. I detest when something tries to make me feel emotional by showing me a child with sad large eyes dying (again and again), that's so cheap and dumb. Also there are ninjas now, and a master ninja who may be one of the worst antagonists I've ever seen. There's also zombie asaris with zombie nipples now. Eugh, the list goes on. The whole thing just feels so flat and stupid compared to ME1.

I do appreciate Andromeda for trying to be sci-fi again, with actual exploration and player agency and all. Combat is a massive improvement, by far the best in the series. But the whole story/character part I find just so frustratingly bland, I never know if I'm actually supposed to care about anyone or anything, and the new species it introduces are just completely uninteresting as far as I'm concerned. There's no antagonist I give the slightest shit about. And then there's the massive overload of random stuff to deal with, there's so much going on with strike teams and research and development and profiles and favourites and... God I wish it was more focussed. People complain about ME1's inventory system, but the labyrinth of thousands of sub-menus in ME:A is on a whole other level.

Long story short, ME1 was the good one.

 

[Sprite_Geist]

I have just bought Max Payne and Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, and am currently playing through the first game. I have always wanted to get into this video game series but never got around to it until now.