Tag: soulslikes

#REVIEW: Enotria: The Last Song (PS5, 2024)

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

I wasn’t expecting to actually beat Enotria: The Last Song last night when I posted about needing to play video games, but beat it I did; I had beaten a late-game pair of bosses before putting the controller down the last time I had played, and the game made it clear quickly that the next place I was headed was going to be the game’s last destination. I’m going to jump straight to the chase and say this is a solid 7/10 as a game, with the caveat that a couple of the problems I had with it are potentially fixable.

The basics: Enotria is a Soulslike, which remains my current favorite genre of video game; these types of games are apparently never going to get old for me. The conceits with this one are as follows: 1) It’s sunny sometimes, and in fact one of the first things you’ll do is wander through a field of sunflowers, so it’s not quite as bleak as the genre usually gets; and 2) your builds are controlled by wearing different masks; the whole game is built around acting, and you’ll collect masks from boss enemies and mask shards from basic enemies that can eventually be built into masks. They basically take the place of your armor; if you put on a particular mask you take on the entire appearance of whatever you’re wearing the mask of. It’s pretty, there’s a lot of different weapons and magic to play with, the combat is solid; no complaints of any kind there, really.

Here’s the problem: the game starts by asking you to pick a difficulty level, which is the least-Soulslikey part of the whole thing– these games pick a difficulty, usually “brutal,” and you learn to adapt to it or you don’t. The two difficulty levels are “Story” and “Soulslike,” which … okay, “Story” difficulty is usually a shorthand for baby mode, but “Soulslike” sounds like hard mode, and the game doesn’t really give you any details, but a quick Google search made me think that “Story” was the base difficulty, so I went with that.(*)

Y’all, Story difficulty is crazy easy. There is a particular bridge at about the 2/3 part of the game that is broken in two places, and the jump is just a little bit harder than it looks like it should be– in a game with really no platforming to speak of, I almost wonder if the devs just missed how on-point you had to be to make the jump. I died more on those two bits of bridge than the entire rest of the game put together. No boss beat me more than twice, and I never once in the entire game died before recovering my stuff. I beat the final boss on my first try. There were bosses that I ran into by accident and low on heals and beat on my first try. Now, an easy Soulslike isn’t automatically a bad thing! The game’s still fun; there’s something to say about being a badass, obviously, and not every game has to involve beating your head against a wall. But I’d suggest if you’re used to these games, go with Soulslike mode to start.

Second, the game has a sort of paper-rock-scissors thing going with the elements. Enemies can be linked with certain elements, and if they are, they’re supposed to be immune to their element and weak to another. I say supposed to be because I never once found myself unable to hurt an enemy, no matter what weapons I was using. The elements all have Italian names and each element can proc a different effect if you get hit with enough of it, and those have different names too. Unlike most games, where, just for example, poison might slowly kill you and freeze might slow you down, the elemental effects have positive and negative side effects that, to be honest, I never bothered to memorize. The paper-rock-scissors thing is on the screen at all times and I never paid any attention to it. The game goes so far as to provide you with three different roles– effectively different builds that you can hot-swap between at will– with the idea that you might use each one to specialize in different elements. I never kept more than one active. There was no reason to.

It is, of course, entirely possible that this was because of Story mode, but … are you really gonna take out this big of a part of your gameplay for the kiddo mode in your game? Because it really seems like that’s what they did unless the whole thing is just broken from the jump. All I know is, I never paid attention to half of the subsystems the game uses. The game does have a New Game + mode, but I don’t know if that bumps you up to Soulslike difficulty or is just Story with spongier enemies or what. I might do a second run at some point to see what the other difficulty is like. I’d like to eventually platinum this, and I missed a bunch of story-related trophies on the first pass.

It’s probably worth pointing out that this is currently free through Playstation Plus, and it’s definitely worth recommending as a free game. Just start it at Soulslike, and hope that it forces you to learn the game’s systems a little bit better and doesn’t let you just go Big Hammer Goes Bonk or Fast Sword Goes Brrrrrr through the whole game. Or do that! Like I said, easy is fun sometimes.

(*) Do not allow yourself to be fooled; just because they called the difficulty “Story” does not mean that the story is going to make any sense(**). But you’re not playing these games for the story, are you? I hope not.

(**) Another missed opportunity; the game has a ton of little lore things you pick up all over the place, but unless you decide to invest the time to stop playing the game and read them– and I mean it when I say there are a ton of them– you’re not going to have any idea at all what the hell is going on.

#REVIEW: Pragmata (PS5)

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

Ooooofffffff.

I started Pragmata a little under a month ago, and when I did I called it the biggest Dad game since The Last of Us. I beat it tonight, and that opinion remains true; the basic plot of the game is that you end up stranded on the Moon (roll with it) and you end up rapidly adopting, more or less, an android girl who you name Diana. All of the enemies on the moon are robotic in nature (AI GONE WILD is a good-enough description of the wider plot) and Diana helps you throughout your mission by hacking your robot enemies so that you can blow them to pieces with guns. The basic game structure is not quite a Soulslike (die, and you just reappear at the hub) but it’s definitely Soulslike-adjacent; lots of customization of your equipment (no ability scores, though) which gives you a ton of flexibility for how you approach combat throughout the game. Mods can be applied to your suit, all of your guns can be upgraded, Diana’s hacks can be upgraded, and so on. There’s a hub you can return to that acts similar to the bonfires you find in Soulslikes, although it’s more of a hub base than anything else.

This hits right in my sweet spot, honestly; the different zones you can reach are separate and you can’t go in between them without going to the hub in between, but there’s hidden stuff to find everywhere and your inability to travel from zone A directly to zone D doesn’t end up being annoying at all. The exploration is great, and the combat is not like anything I’ve seen before. You’re essentially fighting as two characters as once; Hugh (the guy) controls like any main character in any shooter you’ve ever played, but Diana’s hacks require you to open up a grid and then navigate though it using the face buttons, hitting various nodes that power up the hack as you’re moving through. Successfully completing the hack does damage on its own and also opens the enemy’s armor up, allowing you to do damage with your guns.

I feel like that description’s unclear. Here’s what the hack interface looks like:

It’s important to realize that while time is slowed down, it’s still happening, so you will sometimes have to interrupt your hack to dodge away from an enemy attack, and there are mods that will allow you to start from where you left off if you get interrupted, by losing connection or getting hit. This makes combat really frenetic and super satisfying, especially once you gain the ability to overheat your enemies, which allows you to do critical attacks. And there’s another mod that makes critical attacks also damage nearby enemies, and … man, combat is fun in this game.

The technical aspects are all solid; graphics are pretty stellar and I didn’t encounter any bugs. I’ve talked about this before; so long as I can tell what I’m doing, I don’t really worry about graphics in video games any longer. Diana and Hugh’s animations and facial expressions are great and while the environments are kinda samey (you’re on a moon base, after all) they do manage to work in a forest level via some nanotech-related shenanigans. Certain items have audio cues that help you find them and the game doesn’t actually tell you to listen for the audio cues, which was a nice touch. Voice acting is great– any time a game has a little kid in it (Diana’s not human, but comes off as being eight or so) you could be in some serious trouble with voice acting, but it’s really solid here, even in the more heavy emotional scenes.

And … yeah. About that. The game didn’t make me cry, but it bloody well could have. I’m not spoiling anything; the ending doesn’t exactly come out of nowhere but it still managed to take me by surprise, if only because holy shit, I didn’t think they were really gonna do that.

My tendency toward heavy exploration and trying to find everything led to about a 20-hour play through on this one; you need two of them to platinum the game, which I don’t think I’m going to do, but I might. You could probably get done in 10-12 hours if you weren’t poking your head into every nook and cranny. Definitely check it out.

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.

Two reviewlets

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

I have two things I want to review, but I don’t have the patience to do a full-length review of either of them, so you should fully expect that the actual writing in this post will take up less space than the pictures. Short version: buy both of these things!

The Fury of the Gods, by John Gwynne, is the third and concluding volume of his Bloodsworn trilogy, and as luck would have it I finished the book I was reading the day it showed up so I was able to dive right into it. I have ten of Gwynne’s books, all read over the last couple of years, and Bloodsworn is definitely his best series, but I’d need to reread the whole trilogy to tell you for sure if Fury of the Gods is my favorite of his books or not. One way or another, this showcases everything Gwynne is best at: a deeply Norse-inflected world, with very cool magic and absolutely brutal action, that starts off with all of the gods dead and gone and ends with them very much neither of those two things. The last hundred and fifty pages of Fury is one long battle scene. It’s amazing. His character work remains exceptional and the way this series swaps POVs between both sides of the major conflict in the book is great; I think it’s fair to say that there’s a bad-guy side but everyone’s reasons for fighting the way they do make sense and damn near everyone was interesting.

Also, my God, the covers for these books are remarkable.

He’s also doing this thing in this series where men and women exist in a society of complete equality and yet he never bothers to draw attention to it. There’s a lot of stuff in The Bloodsworn that is drawn from Norse/Viking culture, including the alphabet, but he sets aside historical accuracy whenever he feels like it, and gender differences are one of those places. If you’re looking for woman warrior characters (and everyone in these books is a warrior), you need look no further.

I finished Black Myth Wukong yesterday, finally, and I’m playing at least partially through it again because this is one of those games where I feel like I need the Platinum trophy and there’s no way to do that in one play through. This game is Chinese the same way that The Bloodsworn is Norse; it’s more inspired by myth and legend than historical reality, and frankly if you’re not already a student of Chinese culture (and I’m very much not) there’s a lot in this story that’s going to leave you behind. It’s apparently a video game version of Journey to the West, one of the five Classical Chinese novels, and … uh, that’s all I know about the five Classical Chinese novels? All I know is the story in lots of places makes no sense at all to my American ass but that doesn’t matter even a tiny bit because monkey man hit monster with stick.

Seriously, outside of the Nioh series this may be my favorite non-Fromsoft Soulslike (and anyone who claims it’s not a Soulslike but an “action RPG” should be shunned; this is absolutely a Soulslike) and I think I might like it more than I liked Nioh 1 anyway. There are some technical issues; I’m still hoping for an optimization patch, and there’s a stuttering issue that gets worse the longer you go without either restarting your PS5 or actually closing the game out and reopening it, but beyond that? No gripes. You’d think that build variation would be a problem given that you’re limited to the staff as your weapon, but 1) it doesn’t matter because the staff is hugely fun and 2) there are enough different stances and other ways to set up your build that there are going to be a million ways to approach any situation anyway. I talked about the difficulty yesterday; I’d say this hits the sweet spot of being difficult but fair pretty precisely, but people who haven’t been mainlining Souls games for years like I have may want to gird their loins. I hear there’s a big DLC coming eventually and I’m going to buy it the second I hear about it.

Next!

On By Luther M. SilerIn video gamesLeave a comment

All right, FromSoft. I just strapped on my heavy shield and my bleedin’ stick and absolutely melted Promised Consort Radahn. What else you got?

#REVIEW: The Surge 2 (PS4)

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

The PS5 hasn’t made an appearance yet, and I did a test drive by Best Buy earlier to see if it was reasonable to get the new TV brought out, and it … was not. I might take another shot at it after dinner, but I’ll probably just wait until tomorrow at this point. I did put The Surge 2 to bed last night, and it has the distinction of almost certainly being the last game I’ll beat on my PS4, since the PS5’s backwards compatibility is pretty universal so there won’t be a need to pull this console out of mothballs if I decide I want to go back to something.

Short version: 8/10, solid but occasionally garbagey. The Surge 2 takes the Soulslike tradition of losing resources on death, mild RPG elements, and punishing difficulty and sets it in a cyberpunk/nanotech future sort of world. As basically everything I play nowadays is a Soulslike of some sort (and the first game that graces the PS5 is going to be the Demon’s Souls remake) this was more or less right up my alley.

Strengths: weapon and armor variety is awesome, and the armor pieces in particular are interesting; each set has six pieces (two arms, two legs, body and head) and they can be mixed and matched, and each set also has a bonus if you’re wearing three pieces of it and a bigger bonus if you’re wearing six pieces, and the bonuses are different between sets– so you find yourself wearing three pieces of one set and three of another a lot. Weapons are varied enough that I never kept one for very long, although I definitely found myself gravitating toward the spear- and staff-class weapons by the end of the game, which both had good range and were fast. Nothing really looks like anything else, though, which is great.

The combat in general was one of the game’s strengths, although there’s a directional block mechanism built in that I never really got the hang of, and timing on blocks in particular felt sluggish a lot of the time. That may just be me, though as timed-parry mechanisms almost always give me fits, but I swear a lot of the time I’d hit block and my dude just wouldn’t. Sometimes that was due to being out of stamina, but by the end of the game my stamina pool was so huge that that was rarely an issue and I still had a hell of a time with timings.

The story is … fine. I never played The Surge and I never got the impression that I needed to; the sequel is completely standalone.

Less good: boss fights are challenging but repetitive, the game was buggy (I don’t remember the last time I had a game hard crash to the desktop, and this game did it six times) and level design was kinda samey and I had a hell of a time finding my way around. They did a good job of different levels wrapping around and connecting to each other in lots of places, with lots of shortcuts and secret passages and such, but the game’s color palette and overall look just didn’t really vary all that much from place to place, and there’s an event partway through the game that rips up the old map and throws it away, and after spending as much time as I had exploring and trying to figure out where everything was, having all that knowledge stripped away from me was really annoying. The trophies also seemed sort of buggy, and I’m convinced that I earned one of them that never popped for me at all.

The game also does a sort of cool thing after the credits roll where it shows you a bunch of stats that compare you to how other players did, both in terms of how many deaths and playtime in levels and to bosses. This was neat but I’d rather have had access to it in the game. There’s also a new piece at the beginning of New Game + where you pay through something that happened offscreen in the first playthrough, which was kind of neat.

This has been out for a while (every game I review has been out for a while) but if it slipped your radar and you are into this kind of game, it’s worth checking out.