The appeal of stagnation is a sort of anti-Sisyphus - the delusion that if I can just stay put atop my hill with my boulder then none of the three of us will be worn away by time. But our God is a consuming fire, Time is the Concept, and no substantial thing may pass through the alembic untransformed.
The Red Pearls of Borneo
A fun little "fill in the blanks" style puzzle/detective game, like the Return of the Obra Piece of Shit (I didn't like that game at all, pure overhype) or The Roottrees are Dead, recommended to me personally (he posted the recommendation publicly on the GLOG server but I've learned to read the secret signs) by friend of the blog Phlox. I saw a guy claiming to be Bornean (Borneoian?) say that the game is well-researched, so I choose to believe it.
Puzzle games for me must navigate the razor's edge between so easy they're trivial and unfair bullshit that makes me rage-quit. Blue Prince managed to walk that edge for quite some time, not helped at all by the random draw stuff. Red Pearls managed it just about the whole way through, with a system where you can read the psychic impressions off objects to get partial viewpoints of a scene even when you don't have the whole picture yet.
The story was compelling enough with its writing and ironic twists and so on to keep me playing the whole way through. The much-maligned epilogue even got me to care about some of the characters, and I appreciate that one of the binary choices at the end lets you just fuck up these people's lives and trust in each other for no reason. Psychics should be kind of sociopathic, just by virtue of what they're capable of and you're not - that new Spiderman movie did this well.
Decade
Speaking of sociopathy lol - Decade is a eurogame (Finnish I think?) about children with a time machine in a post-apocalyptic future with very bad rain, the very worst rain. You play as the child-commander, who uses the machine to send your child-soldiers back in time in ten-year segments along with whatever you've managed to scrounge and learn from the past, aiming to create a better future but sometimes fucking things up and creating a Logan's Run world of body-fascists.
Decade does not thread the puzzle game needle that Red Pearls did - it is at many points obtuse and European. Still - cool idea, good writing, and interesting ideas almost make up for that, and it's very funny to be like a twelve year old ordering eighty year olds with decades of combat experience into yet another useless and this time likely fatal mission.
Saints Row IV
Part of an at least semi-popular trend of those superhero sandbox games... you know what I'm talking about? Like Infamous 1 & 2, Prototype 1 & 2, Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, and so on and so on. I never played the other Saints Row games, but you don't really have to for this one.
Repetitive and at times very tedious - there is one sort of mission where you have to throw yourself into traffic to build up an insurance payout, which should be fun, but I swear I was in this one mission for like twenty minutes trying to rack up enough points, it suuucked - however the moment-to-moment power fantasy stuff is well put-together. Aggressively Xillennial humour. Could've been gorier, and overall for this genre I prefer the Prototype series.
Also, I really hate games set in a simulation - No Man's Sky I'm looking at you - I am already aware the game is fake, you don't need to rub my nose in it like I'm a dog that shit on your carpet. Saints Row IV is slightly better because there is a "real" outside the simulation, but still, my jouissance is greater if it's real-fake people I'm fucking with than fake-fake people.
Peak
One of those trendy multiplayerslop games (is that the term for them?) which me and my boys were playing like a month or two ago. It has its moments, but is too hard, and kind of lame with multiplayer stuff - e.g. in some areas the only real way up is some item that maybe only one player has and can use, like the rescue claw, and maybe that could work into some cool moment where that one player (me, I'm the best at this game among my boys >:^)) makes it to the top and resurrects the rest, but no, you can't have fun and overcome adversity, there's a monster guy who hunts you down if you get too far from the other players and kills you, and he can only really be evaded if you've got another specific item (the piton), and even if you do manage your way to the top and resurrect your friends there's a permanent curse debuff to their stamina bar so hope you enjoy death spirals.
I think there's some menu where you can fiddle around with these specifics but we never bothered with that.
Easy Red 2
The new, much better game that me and my boys are playing now. It's a World War II FPS with big armies and tanks and planes and artillery and whatnot going at each other. It's fun to try and win as the underdog with shitty weapons like the Japanese or Romanians, and aerial dogfighting is a highlight. Fuckin anti-tank guns are bullshit though. When we play as the Nazis I make sure to shake my head every now and again so people know I don't support their politics.
The Sapling and Planetary Life
Both essentially the same game so they get the same entry - fun little evolution-simulators that almost come close to mending a fraction of the hole left behind my ribs by the disappointment of Spore. I think they took out the graphics in my copy of Planetary Life and I can't figure out how to fix it.
Half Sword
Damn do I ever love Half Sword.
Alright so you know how in most videogames guys have HP? Abstract health points that get dinged every time you take a hit? An UTTER WASTE of the potential of the medium.
Half Sword doesn't do HP - instead, it models characters' tissues, the force and angle of strikes, and so on and so on, so that you don't "do 1d6 damage" or whatever, you graze the guy or chop his head smoove off, based on how you actually swing at him, because it's a physics simulator thing, and armour doesn't just reduce damage or whatever, it's also simulated, you can't chop through steel plate so you have to get tricky, try to get the point of your sword into a joint and drive it in.
Nigh-endlessly replayable, tactical infinity, you can go back to the little leagues where you're a bigass juggernaut knight and bully the scrawny peasants, you can beat their heads in with a washbasin or pimp slap them into next week, you can beat a man's friend to death with his severed leg, still regularly getting updates, ooowee what a game.
