Been chipping away with Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened (the 2023 remake).
For those not in the know, it’s Holmes vs Cthulhu puzzle/adventure game.
I played the original and the remaster ages ago, tried the remaster few weeks back and… apparently it’s the kind of jank I just don’t want to deal with in current day.
A week or two forwarnd and the remake popped up on my promotional emails and instantly picked it up. Gotta say, it feels good to me. Modernized controls, a lot more modern visuals, content has been changed quite a bit, and a DISTINCT LACK OF CREEPY WATSON - HOW DARE THEY!!! (/s)
Among the modern comfort features it seems the game is fairly easy, it allows the player clumsily dummy through the puzzles - though missing some points while doing so (points unlock essentially just clothes/glasses/hats/beards for Holmes and Watson - non-critical but neat stuff). Essentially you can just bruteforce solutions because wrong options get removed from the pool of options when used, until only correct options remain. I guess the higher difficulty levels would fix this, but… eh, sometimes I’m dense. Occasionally you can come to a solution too quickly, which then closes doors to some side-puzzles, eg.
spoilerin New Orleans, I somehow entirely skipped a step due to obtuse ui, later figured out that “the animal who ate the fingers is a raccoon”, but the story had already progressed further, can’t track the darn animal, even if I can visually see the damn nest, but can’t obtain the item anymore. argh.
But I guess I just dummied my way through. OH WELL, not like I’m aiming for 100% completion.
tech-babble about tech:
spoilerI’m playing it on linux and the game runs beautifully. It is a UE4 game, but haven’t seen a single stutter, runs all settings cranked at stable 120 fps, could probably run higher but I don’t see the point for doing so. The native 100% resolution + AA leaves horrid jaggies, but DLSS Quality (+ latest .dll with enforced transformer -model & sharpness) looks better to me. Kinda wish games offered resolution scale settings beyond 100% and/or dlaa (but the game probably pre-dates dlaa?). LOD could allow a bit more distance for the pop-in, some smaller objects switch to low-poly absurdly close (like 2 meters?), in general the lod-pop-in is fairly noticeable on trees and bigger structures. Let me know if there’s some ini-tweak/mod for this, thanks. arch, heroic-launcher, proton-ge, 5800x3d, rtx3090, kde/wayland. 1440p 120Hz.
Overall, it’s been a nice ride, with maybe some nostalgia-goggles. The vibes & visuals the game have are cool & spoopy. Voice acting in general is (imo) fine, though I must admit I do feel like I miss the original voice acting. Puzzless are idiot-passable, as proven by yours truly.
LOL I could have told you that before you spent the money.
Thankfully there’s a lot of good games that really shine on high-end hardware. Like that Indiana Jones game and the Spider-Man games. Also you never have to worry about games being an unoptimized mess, when you can just brute force them with pure processing power.
Absolutely. The original Deus Ex is pretty excellent too. And the turn based Shadowrun games. It’d be cool if 2077 was better though, the tabletop game is sick.
I really liked and the story. But after taking a year break and then playing the dlc phantom liberty. I kinda was over it. Just felt like work. Not really fun.
So idk. Maybe you just have to be in the right mood for it.
My STALKER: Anomaly playthrough is progressing at the typically languid pace. As soon as I find a scoped shotgun for Hip’s quest I can start thinking about migrating my base of operations a bit north. For a Loner run this would be prime time to setup in Rostok, but Mercenaries aren’t on friendly terms with Duty so that’s out. I’ll have to make it to Dead City probably and that will be quite a trek. I probably have to wait until I find and repair a better suit. And also hope my companions don’t die on me as I need them to haul over all my collected shit in my stash.
I’ve also been playing Chaos Zero Nightmare on my phone. Yes it’s a gacha game (don’t buy any currency to gamble) and yes the character designs are unfortunately a bit too gooneriffic, and yes the story is pretty bad and the translation is pure Google Translate level machine-translated slop. But you know what? The actual gameplay of the roguelike deckbuilder portion is actually very fun. Tons of customisation with an incredibly mutable deckbuilder that has tons of variations for every single card. Even the balance is surprisingly good, with such endless possibilities in combos and specific versions of specific cards that you can make pretty much any character shine with enough work on finding just the right decks and setups. Don’t know if it will stick, and I’ll keep an eye on balance going forward to see if they start making it more pay-to-win, but for now I’m having a surprisingly good time with it.
Bg3. I think the flaws are glaringly obvious and everyone has heard them already (inventory, everything after act 1, the main characters being generally gross) it’s just whether they’re a deal breaker for you personally. For me they are, especially inventory.
Same. I tried to just ‘go with it’ and ignore the flaws so that I could play multi-player with my SO. Act 2 was a slog. Act 3 is where we gave up completely. The only good part is that the whiny companions started dying on their own.
My favourite part of returning to camp was lying to gale that I’d found no magical items while having 4 characters invs basically overflowing with items I didnt want.
Wyll is the least immediately unlikeable but he’s boring and I hated talking to him
Laezel, shadow - clearly intended to parallel each other but listening to hard-headed morons clash between “we should murder everything” and “those people need medicine and my only medicine is pain” is not entertaining to me. Their “growth” doesn’t ever seem to fix this
Karlach I don’t have real complaints about
Gale never managed to grow out of being pompous and annoying
Dark urge probably the biggest character
There’s plenty of listicles and reddit posts with other complaints if you google “don’t like bg3 characters”.
I had the same feeling, didnt really like the characters they were weird but after modding some custom ones in I enjoyed it a lot more. I did keep astrlas ans shadow heart then put my own two characters to fill the party.
For the Chaz’s coronation day they closed the food banks, and pre-arrested a bunch of peaceful protesters (released without charge afterward the event).
It goes the old telltale way of presenting fake choices that dont really matter because the optional character are being written out of team scenes mostly, one romance option is completely ignored because the devs clearly favoured the other and put her in every scene and the dispatching minigame they advertised the game with has absolutely 0 impact on anything. You could fail every dispatch, only do the mandatory ones and nothing would change.
The new Doom games are all very different from each other. I liked what Doom 2016 was doing (even if it got repetitive) but really didn’t enjoy Eternal because the constant juggling didn’t sit with me. I haven’t tried Dark Ages but it seems like it’s doing something between 2016 and Eternal (not quite use what you want and not quite always juggle) while also adding its own dimension with the mix of melee and guns.
I would never recommend each Doom title based on the last title. But it doesn’t mean I don’t like what they’re doing. I think it’s brave to do its own thing instead of doing what is expected.
Both of your comments are a testament to why I love the new Doom games – they’re different and don’t seem to be meant to be enjoyed by every fan, every release, every time.
Apart from the first two games (and Doom 64 for that matter), each offers different gameplay and feel and it’s so, so beautiful.
I feel lucky having a blast in each one. Doom 3 is my favorite, actually, especially with the vanilla flashlight (for the uninitiated: where you can either have your weapon out or the flashlight).
Yeah. I didn’t really enjoy it, but I got into it and finished it. Once I realized that you’re expected to die and respawn frequently, and you don’t lose anything when you do, playing went a lot better.
I still don’t get that decision, because Doom has never been like that. Even arcade games don’t do that. It just felt trivially cheap at that point.
Yeah, I enjoyed a bit of 2016, but got bored a didn’t finish it. I think Doom Eternal I had from Steam Family Sharing (or other source I didn’t pay for) and just couldn’t get into it. I hate both of them forcing the melee kill thing that takes you out of the action to watch a cutscene, but Eternal just didn’t feel like it worked for some reason.
I love everything about ‘Disco Elysium’ in isolation. Art style? Gorgeous. Grimy noiry mood, right up my alley. I love isometric RPGs, though it’s been a while since I played any. Writing is great, from what I’ve heard. Novel mechanics, probably beautiful.
Only, I get into a couple dialogs and realize I need a second computer on the desk, to type up notes. Ain’t no way I’m remembering any of that, especially since I tend to take long breaks in a playthrough. And I just decided in recent years that I need to pay closer attention to stories in games, which I neglected to do back in my youth.
I’ve put twenty notes into the phone (with swipe-typing, thankfully), and that ended my initial experience.
You’re playing a middle aged detective (though he looks older, or at least more worn down) who just woke up from an alcoholic coma after taking all the drugs, unable to remember anything about himself or the world he lives in, except for the fact that there might have been a woman, which was somehow both the best and the worst, and possibly some trivia about disco.
I don’t think you’re supposed to be able to remember or understand everything the game throws at you, at least on a first playthrough. That’s what Kim is for.
Just go with the flow, and remember that in this game failure often leads to more enjoyable outcomes than success.
But he’s a professional detective, presumably with the skill to gather information and put it together. Meanwhile I’m a professional scatterbrain who writes down notes for programming projects that take more than a day. It would be unrealistic for me to roleplay as him, especially if I step away from the game for a couple weeks and forget most of the details. If I can code while hungover, he probably can do detective stuff while hungover.
He was a professional detective. You know, before he erased his brain with massive quantities of alcohol and drugs.
It’s up to you to decide who he is now.
Raphaël Ambrosius Costeau, reincarnation of Kras Mazov and art cop, is one of the many possibilities where gathering and putting information together would be… secondary, to say the least.
Just put your points in Drama or Inland Empire, and dull concepts like “reality” will be quite irrelevant for our good detective (much to Kim’s stoic chagrin). 🤷♂️
Stuff about the setting that I learn from the characters. Perhaps you have better memory than me.
Steam has notes built in
This is great to know. I need to see if Steam accepts my copy of the game, for which I didn’t pay to the company after what they did to the developers.
You can add any game to Steam and play it through it. Just add the exe as a non steam game.
You must have a better memory than me
I wouldn’t be so sure lol… The game has some built in “mission” stuff, and I’m sure I probably accidentally went to the same place a couple of times when trying to figure out how to progress, but never felt the need to write anything down. I found that the dialogue itself was usually good enough to remind me of anything important I might need to know for the current conversation
It’s just that I made a resolve recently-ish that I need to properly get into stories in games. Unlike back in the day, when I played through ‘Half-Life’ 1 and 2 and gathered pretty much nothing about the plot. ‘Disco Elysium’ seems to be the type of a game where a lot of the story is in the details dropped by the characters, reading materials, etc.
I’ve been recently replaying the original ‘Deus Ex’, and had Denton crawl around every level for hours, reading each newspaper and poster he comes across. The papers do in fact frame the main story, clarifying the relations between factions and such.
An extreme case of this is apparently the ‘Elder Scrolls’ universe, with which the community gathered sizeable lore and history that goes several layers deep. I’ve never played the games (perhaps for the best), and only happened upon a tangential discussion about this, but the impression was that they’re deciphering it like ‘Ulysses’.
I kept dying. And I couldn’t figure out how anyone dies in a narrative game. I couldn’t really figure out how to play the game and gave up after dying 2x in the same conversation.
I’m still so confused how one dies from conversation.
Instead I watched a video about the game.
I play a lot of games but nothing like this one. I wanted to like it but I’m too dumb to figure out the mechanics. And I even tried watching videos and found them convoluted and confusing.
The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy - the disrespect for player’s time is actually insane, never seen anything like that before or since. Hundred endings which should have been like 30 tops with a decent quality control. 100 days which should also be 30 tops for each ending.
I really wanted to get to that one cool ending, but you have to play through who knows how many stupid filler routes to unlock it - I just couldn’t do it.
Don’t get me started on the day-to-day in the game: the repetitive slow-ass animations for every day, you having to go through motions to skip every day. And battles… Even when “skipping” them you spend literal minutes. Like why… And so many times you can’t even skip them.
But what really soured everything for me is the final battle in that one ending.
spoilerThat one super climactic battle, where your entire team stands together against the strongest foe yet, without the respawn ability or the healer. By juggling my squad, I avoided any deaths before accomplishing the goal for the battle. I thought that I would get a cool ending due to me trying hard to keep everyone alive. But then enemies (which constantly respawn) receive a power-up which makes them one shot my guys. Well, ok, I thought, maybe I can save some of them. By using placeable tools and overpowered protagonist, I kept some of my team alive while the timer for the battle went down steadily. Enemies kept spawning, but I kept some of my guys alive. The timer went down to zero, I was relieved, but then apparently that was a lose timer? Apparently, to win you HAVE to get your entire team dead? If you struggle as hard as you can to keep even some of them alive - you insta lose? But then if you win like you were supposed to (by killing your entire squad), the place blows up anyway killing everyone including the protagonist? That is actually insane. How did anyone come up with something like that…
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Aktywne