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.
I absolutely love the no-nonsense approach of gamefaqs (and the likes). <3
if I’m stuck in a game (usually some 90’s point&click adventure), more often than not I just want an easily ctrl+f searchable walkthrough, and does the site ever provide.
I loved this game, up until the difficulty ramped up quite hard and I just couldn’t proceed. Could be a classic issue of gidgud, but the shift was quite sudden, iirc. It’s been quite a while since I last played (early 2021, around ~13 hours, according to steam).
The game looks absolutely lovely, that style is absolute peak.
I have played Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous, and ran out of motivation with both. I don’t remember either that well, it’s been quite a while since I played them, but I feel like Rogue Trader does share similarities with them. Overall… I do like the game, but man if it doesn’t require me to force myself to play it occasionally. 40k vibes are great, dunno if I’d care about the game if it wasn’t 40k.
I got to admit the warping between systems and exploring planets does get a bit old. I’m sure not all of it nescessary, but if it’s there, I gotta explore it, damnit. Most planets are just there to be scanned and they might have a spot where you plant a moneymaker. Some planets have some small area to walk around and do some skillchecks and most likely have some skirmish for small-ish rewards.
Plot areas are pretty big and have (usually) several moral compass tests, which are basically: “nah, let’s not kill everyone, everyone has good in them”, “I’m gonna burn you alive because religious reasons”, “give me your possessions and you might live”.
One that really makes my head explode is when your group spots a floor trap. If you don’t carefully walk each member around it, literally everyone will step into it otherwise. And there’s A LOT of these traps, though admittedly vast majority of them can be directly defused.
I take there’s permanent unlocks/stat improvements/etc? Is gear permanent or per run? Surely the dwarves don’t enter the levels unprepared? :D
To me Vampire Survivors started to get a bit obtuse with some unlock requirements (have skills x, y, z, survive this certain level this long, be at this exact place, possibly with a character C, have the hand towel on second hook… etc). I’d assume DRG:S is a bit more straightforward?
Have you perhaps played Soulstone Survivors - it’s the one I’ve played the most, unlocked everything apart from some hidden/masked achivements? If you have, how does DRG compare?
Unnamed Space Idle, kinda seems like I’m pretty much at the end of currently available content. Haven’t maxed out all the things, but it doesn’t seem like there’s much left after this. Though I do suspect that unlocking/maxing out the thingies I’m working on might take quite a while, could be the game gets some content update before that happens.
Rogue Trader. No idea really how far I’m into the game, I enjoy the setting, story… it’s just that the gameplay is maybe a bit tedious-ish. At first it seemed awesome when I got my ship and was let loose in the nearby systems, but I can’t help but to feel it’s the “Mass Effect’s planet scanning” again… at least there’s no Mako. I am playing on pretty much baby-mode just to get around the combat, as I’ve felt that’s been pretty tedious in other games from the same company.
…and I might even have the hardware to run the average Unity 5 game.
Unreal Engine 5, surely? As that’s what it is. Unity 5 was apparently released back in 2015.
But, yea, BL4 is a “wait for ~20 €/$ sale for the ultimatebundle with all the dlc”. Haven’t really felt the need for BL since Pre-sequel killed it for me. Got BL3 on sale and… eh, it was kinda stuttery mess as well, when I played it.
could be my tinfoil hat receiving thoughts via radio waves: maybe it’s by design? the coating will get grimy eventually, so the user is more likely to buy a new device.
fair enough, youtube probably wasn’t a good comparison, but GOG should be. They have written text alongside the 1-5 star review. Now, there are grades 2-4, but in general 1 and 5 seem to be the most used ones.
I dunno how useful that would be. Way back in the day eg. youtube had a star rating system for videos, and users gave 0-5 stars… except they found out that overwhelmingly vast majority of users only used 0 and 5, nothing in between.
While a more granular review system would be nice, it’s just the users that don’t and won’t use it properly. Even if some users would use scores other than [min] and [max], they would be such a droplet in an ocean.
Even with the current thumbs up/down people get it wrong. Give it a thumbs up but write a scathing review.