Category: video games

#REVIEW: Chants of Sennaar (PS5)

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, video gamesLeave a comment

This game made me, for the first time in quite a while, want to turn my YouTube channel back on.

I’m still not quite done with Khazan, thus the lack of a review yet. I’ve beaten it, and I want to get through New Game+ before I put it away, but I wanted a palate cleanser, something that wasn’t combat-focused and that didn’t brag about being difficult. Something chill, for lack of a better word.

How about a puzzle game about translation? How much more directly up my God damn alley could a puzzle game about linguistics possibly be? It’s unimaginable.

Here’s the premise of Chants of Sennaar: you’re the … person, of indeterminate gender and no name, in the faceless hood up there. You’re exploring what is effectively the Tower of Babel, which is occupied by five different groups of people, each of whom speak a different language. Your job is to 1) get to the top of the tower, 2) learn everybody’s languages on the way up there, and 3) get everybody to talk to each other. There’s a bit more of a story to it than that, but it’s a little on the obscure side, and gets downright weird towards the end of the game. That’s good enough as a gist.

Each language has 42 glyphs associated with it, and follows different rules as far as subject-verb order, plural marking, and other things like that. Sometimes the meaning of a glyph can be intuited by what it looks like, and one language lays glyphs on top of one another in a really neat way that, once you figure out what’s going on, lets you create glyphs correctly that you’ve never seen. Your avatar keeps pretty good notes, and glyphs are marked in your journal as you discover them while you explore. You can add your own notes to any glyph, and if you think you know what something means but haven’t proven it yet, your assumed translation will show up in a different font when you’re trying to read something, so that you can see what you’re still guessing at versus what you’ve definitely successfully translated.

(What will happen is every so often your notebook will have a page that will have three to five pictures on it, and if you match glyphs successfully to the pictures, it’ll confirm the meaning and translate that glyph automatically from then on. This will happen even if your guess at the meaning was wildly wrong. It does mean that it’s possible to brute-force your way through some translations, and there were definitely times where I was certain I knew three of the four glyphs and wasn’t sure about the remaining one, and just worked through my unknown glyphs until I got the right one.)

You will also occasionally find Rosetta Stone-style texts that will have the same thing written in more than one language, which can help you figure out new glyphs if you’ve already completed one of the two languages. This is where different word orders and different pluralization rules can really mess with your head, though, and there are two languages that use markers to make an entire sentence negative, which can also be fun. I loved this shit, y’all.

There are some non-language-related puzzles here and there, but they’re rare and generally not hugely challenging and the occasional very light stealth section; they weren’t difficult (and not very punitive when you screwed up) but I found myself kind of resenting them after a while just because they kept me from the stuff I was interested in. You’ll eventually unlock teleporters between the different levels, and you’ll be able to translate entire conversations between different groups that will cause the residents to start cooperating with each other and sometimes change things about some of the areas. These were my favorite parts, honestly.

Graphics and audio do their job; my wife commented at one point that she found the sound of my character walking around to be really satisfying, for whatever that might be worth, and the different areas are really visually distinct from one another, from a forbidding fortress area to a science lab to mines to a really futuristic area toward the very top of the tower. This took me nine hours to play through for $15, and I got a Platinum trophy out of it. I did have to consult a guide once, where I couldn’t figure out how to move forward and it turned out that I’d been meant to pick up an object that I didn’t realize I could interact with. That was it, so it really hit that sweet spot where some careful thinking could always get me past whatever obstacle had been thrown in my way.

This isn’t for everyone, I realize, but for me at least it was a hell of a game, and at just $15 you should definitely grab it if puzzlers are your thing.

Oh no

On By Luther M. SilerIn video gamesLeave a comment

You were supposed to get a review of a book series today, but my PS5 ate my entire afternoon and it’s about to eat the rest of my evening and possibly the next couple of weeks– I was playing Chants of Sennar all afternoon, which is a puzzle game based on translating glyphs, and now they’ve gone and released a surprise demo for Nioh 3.

The game doesn’t come out until 2026, and this is an alpha build, supposedly, but … I’m gonna go away now. For a while. Maybe I’ll finish that third book tonight and maybe I won’t. The boy’s on me to play Nightreign with him and I officially don’t have time for anygoddamnthing now other than Nioh 3.

So, yeah. Nice knowing y’all. I’m going to go abandon all my earthly responsibilities for a while.

My day in two images

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, video gamesLeave a comment

This is kind of an #iykyk image, I suppose, but I finally polished off The First Berserker: Khazan tonight after 78 hours, which is absolutely outlandish for an action game. This is a remarkable achievement in game design, even if it has a really stupid name(*), and everyone who likes video games should play it, but God damn is it difficult, to the point where I had to (not “decided to,” had to) turn down the difficulty for the final boss and even then it took a couple more hours. Got the true ending, though, so yay me. I’m actually planning on playing through it one more time to scoop up the couple of trophies I missed. Possibly not immediately, mind you, but it’s definitely happening.

(*) This game features no berserking and no berserkers, in case you were wondering, and in fact has no mention of berserkers in any way. I mean, Khazan’s pretty angry, but it’s a revenge story, so … he sorta has a reason for it? The really interesting thing is that this game is a combination of two of my other all-time favorites– it’s Nioh 2 with Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice‘s combat system bolted on to it, and Sekiro also has a deeply stupid-sounding name that does not match up to anything in the game. Weird, right?

My wife and I went to this local consignment place today, just for the sheer hell of it. The place was 90% junk with a few interesting items scattered here and there– nothing to get us to spend any money, mind you, but some interesting crap– and this caught my eye.

This is the ACABiest ACAB that ever ACABbed, and fuck the semiliterate person who created it (I can only assume that “congol” means “cajole,” which is exceptionally shit spelling), fuck the person who decided to put it up for sale, and fuck anybody who eventually buys it. This is a supremely fucked-up thing to decide to hang on your wall as decor, and thinking of the police this way and approving of it borders on mental illness.

Done-ish

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching, video gamesLeave a comment

The problem is that there are zombies at the end of the tunnel.

I have just completed my final exam notes for my 8th grade Math classes, which means that other than maybe creating some meaningless game-type worksheets– Sudokus and word finds and the like– I am done with any lesson planning for the 2024-25 school year. I’m certainly done with anything that matters. We’re doing final exam review through Wednesday, the final is Thursday. I’m going to do two hour long after-school sessions to do additional review for anyone who wants it on Tuesday and Wednesday. I expect them to be sparsely attended. The four days of school that remain are for nothing.

(Weird teacher pet peeve: occasionally people will hear things like that and say “Well, then they should make the year shorter, if you can be done early!” This would make sense except for the part where there would still be last days of the year. The point is that we have to get done before the kids go home, and there’s actually a ton of non-academic crap to happen at the end of the year!)

Anyway, I pretty much just have to get through the next four days without going to jail, which should be manageable. Should. We are probably going to have some students going to jail over the next few days, as the office has been pretty militant about the whole “start a fight and your ass is getting arrested” thing lately. But I should be able to manage. I hope.

In other news, I’m at the final boss for The First Berserker: Khazan, a game with a dumb name that I have put about 75 hours into over the last couple of months, and while I’ve enjoyed the game tremendously the thought of learning the moves for a three-phase final boss is proving to be so exhausting that I’m not sure I even want to do it. This game has been militant about the fact that there is never any way to cheese anything; you’re going to learn the bosses or you’re going to die. Most of the time the learning curve has actually been pretty fun, but three fucking health bars just feels like punishment and not fun. On the other hand, I can probably anticipate coming home wanting to blow off steam a lot in the next couple of weeks? I dunno, we’ll see. Maybe I’ll play something else and come back to it. There’s gotta be a fun game on the five to ten hours range out there somewhere, right? Anybody wanna recommend anything?

A ridiculous statement that is 100% true

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching, video gamesLeave a comment

Someone threw a condom at me at work today, and now I’m gonna go kill a dragon.

EDIT: 8:05 PM. Dragon’s dead.

Thoughts and questions

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, video games5 Comments

I’ve got a few things rattling around in my brain, none enough for a whole post, so let’s just toss all three of them together. Why not, right?

FIRST: That game up there? Was crafted deep in the bowels of Hell, on the lower foothills of Mount Sonofabitch. I just beat the game’s third major boss tonight, after, no shit, probably five or six hours of attempts and farming over the last few days. The recommended level for his area? Seventeen. My level when I finally took him down about half an hour ago? Forty-five. And the next area promptly beat the shit out of me again.

SECOND: You may have heard the godawful fucking story about the people Trump effectively sold as slaves to El Salvador, including a number of them who were accused of no crime at all other than being brown. Now, before I ask this, I want to be crystal fucking clear that this is horrible and the people responsible should rot in Hell. Okay? We’ve got that? Everybody understand? Good. Because while I’m having some trouble untangling the court cases, what with not being a lawyer and all, it looks like a judge ordered the government to produce one of the men involved by midnight tonight? And there may or may not be a temporary stay on that order, or maybe SCOTUS just overturned it, I dunno, it looks like things changed while I was playing video games. But here’s my question: Does the court, any court, have the ability to order other entities to do literally impossible things? Because part of the whole point of selling these men to El Salvador was to put them beyond the reach of US courts. Short of invasion, which Trump obviously isn’t going to do, we don’t really have a way to compel El Salvador to return any of these people, and certainly not to do so in the next three hours and eighteen minutes. The judge has no jurisdiction. Again, yes, I recognize that there’s something horrible about taking the situation these human beings are in and reducing it to a legal hypothetical, which is part of why I’m doing it on my blog and not, say, BlueSky– but does anyone actually have any authority to compel this to happen right now? The courts can order the government to do shit all they want. What happens if they just … can’t?

THIRD: I don’t remember the goddamn third thing. Fuck. I’ve had this post in the back of my head all day and now that it’s time to write it Thing Three is gone.

…

Right, shit, the economy went to hell today too. So I, personally, with very modest investments in, until yesterday, the low (very low) five figures, have lost about a thousand bucks in the last few days. I do not expect things to get better anytime soon, for obvious reasons. I have been contributing a couple hundred a month to an account managed through MetLife that I deliberately rarely look at, and $100 a week to an Acorns account that I monitor perhaps more carefully than I ought to. Yesterday I reset a bunch of stuff on Acorns so that now that $100 a week goes directly to my savings account and is not invested in anything. My understanding of how this works is even if the value of individual shares of a given stock are falling, buying more of them means a faster theoretical recovery later on, since I’ll own more stock, assuming that the companies I’m investing in don’t go under, in which case that money is just gone. But if I think it might be years before the market recovers– and I do– isn’t there more value in socking that money away into a savings account, where it’s not going to just vanish? Or at least is much less likely? The interest rate is going to be a lot lower but at least it’ll be positive.

Help me out if you know anything about investments. I’m sure there are better ideas than the binary I’ve set up here, but if you’re going to give advice at least tell me which of those two is a better idea right now before telling me about your third thing, okay? Thanks.

Today has been garbage

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, video games2 Comments

One of those lingering bad mood, stressed out, all for no particular reason sorts of days. I feel like I left work on Friday feeling like I had a bunch of stuff I wanted to do this weekend, and right now I can’t remember a bit of it. Making things worse, I finally got around to starting Tails of Iron 2 on the PS5 after really enjoying the original game and so far I am not having any fun. I remember the first one being difficult as hell but I don’t remember losing every single fight three or four times before I got through it, so either I’ve gotten worse at video games, this game is a lot harder, or shit’s gotten wildly unfair, which might be what I’m leaning towards.

Anyway, arglebargle whine complain whine cry. Tell me about something fun you did recently.

In which it’s weird that I enjoy this so much

On By Luther M. SilerIn video gamesLeave a comment

Okay, so this time it’s really-really the first day of spring, the calendar says so, so instead of 70 degrees and beautiful like it’s been who knows how many days recently, we had fucking snow. Again. And there’s more expected later this week.

That said? This wasn’t a bad day at all. Work was productive– actual teaching happened in all of my classes, which is always nice, especially after how messy yesterday was. I bought tickets to a Counting Crows show in June, meaning that I’ll be seeing both the Counting Crows and Weird Al Yankovic at the same facility within three weeks this summer, and to be honest I can’t decide which show I’m more excited about. I’m seeing Weird Al with my family and the Crows with one of my oldest friends, which is going to be super cool.

And then I came home and since I got tomorrow’s planning done at work (!!!) I had time to shoot some Nazis. This poor bastard up here got killed with a grenade, dropped neatly at his feet from a bush a dozen meters away, and blew up both him and his friend. He ragdolled into the barbed wire, which I find incredibly hilarious for some reason. I never found the other dude’s body, which I assume was blown directly to Hell.

There’s probably something really creepy about how relaxing I find WWII-based sniper games; there is something incredibly cathartic about blowing a Nazi’s face off (in high-definition, bullet-cam, slow-motion detail) from 300 meters away with no one the wiser about where you were or where the bullet came from. It’s okay, see, not because it’s a video game, but because Nazis aren’t human beings.

I really shoulda booby-trapped that guy’s body, though. Maybe I’ll go back. I left a trail of destruction behind me so who knows if there’s even anyone alive to find him (no one heard the grenade) but they’d cut back to it if something happened. It would be worth it. There are always more grenades, right?