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Hallo zusammen!

Was habt ihr in der letzten Woche so an tollen Büchern gelesen, Filme geguckt, Spiele gezockt, Musik entdeckt, Museen oder Veranstaltungen besucht, ... ?

cross-posted from: https://ani.social/post/20300664

Source: Xhitter

The Banner Saga trilogy should be seen as one big game in an episodic format, because it tells one continuous story and the gameplay isn't different between the episodes, it just gets new characters with new abilities and items. And it doesn't make sense to play it in any other order than publication order, since your characters, choices and items carry over from each game to the next.

Now what is Banner Saga? It is an epic tale in a Nordic inspired world about hardship, survivors and what you do in order to survive. You play in a world where the sun stopped moving, the gods stopped responding (and were very much present in the past) and now there are stories about long thought defeated demons from the past coming up from underground and invading the known world. Some people fear it's the end of the world.

But for the moment you are still living in this world and need to somehow survive. You are elected to lead your village to a safer place, wherever that may be. And so you start your long journey in a caravan, where you meet a wide variety of people, some helpful, some malignant, but everybody desperate and you need to decide what to do. Do you search for berries in easily observable terrain or hunt in deeper woods where you might be ambushed by aforementioned demons ... or other desperate survivors less scrupulous than you? Because you also need to keep in mind to have enough supplies for your people, which very quickly makes the decision to take even more poor refugees in without any supplies themselves a lot harder than you might think now. In that regard it is similar in atmosphere to Frostpunk. How far are you going in order to survive? Do you leave behind your humanity? Not all of the characters following you will agree to abandon everybody else and so you have an ongoing dynamic during the whole story.

The second big gameplay part of this game series are turnbased tactical fights of your group against others. It has a unique HP situation: your characters have Strength, which is HP and Attack Strength in one as well as armor which reduces the damage from enemy attacks. So you need to find out how to reduce enemy armor in order to kill your enemies before they do the same to you. You're named characters are either small humans or bigger Varls, a giant race with lots of strength behind their hits. You get fame from fights, which acts as currency and XP here.

Playing this game means accepting that you could fail 6 hours in because you don't have any supplies anymore and your people are abandoning you and then restarting. If you are fine with that (or save scumming/cheating, I don't judge) then a very beautifully depicted world, rich with stories and world building awaits you. Each game roughly takes 10 h and while the main locations are pre determined, the story that happens is very much depending on your prior decisions and it's not just Telltales "only optics of important decision making". And without spoilers: I was surprised how many variations of the finale there are, depending on your way to get there.

Oh and I completely forget to mention the music: it's epic in the literal sense of the word. The islandish, I think, lyrics really portrays the 'epic tale told by bards' feeling. It's by Austin Wintory, so of course it's awesome.

If you like taking artistic screenshots in games, then Eastshade is exactly the game for you.

You are an artist who fell into a creativity blockade and to get out again, you visit the island of Eastshade, birth place of your mother, to get new inspiration. The main game consists of you painting pictures by freely choosing the size and orientation of the frame, aligning your view & then taking the picture. These pictures are then used to solve most of the quests in this game. People request that you paint their business for advertisement or somebody wants a picture of their hometown before they leave it. It feels a bit like a pacifistic Elder Scrolls game, because every corner had some quest for you and you want to explore more. I took more than a few pictures just for myself because I liked the composition.

In order to paint you need a canvas and inspiration, which is a resource you get from finding beautiful views, hearing interesting stories or drinking a nice relaxing cup of tea. In this way the game play loop is nicely interwoven with the players desire to explore without making it possible to simply spam the "create picture" button.

The whole game was around 12 h for me and I enjoyed every minute of it. The wholesome atmosphere is a nice contrast to the all to common violence in so many other games. It is the only pacifistic Open World game that comes to my mind. And the music is also really great.

And they even included the possibility of accessing your in game pictures, they are in a special folder on your PC (but only those currently in your possession, if you give one away, it's not in there any more). While this is a wonderful feature, it also contains my only criticism: the resolution of the pictures is sadly really low. So while you can access your pictures in a folder on your PC, it's not high enough quality to use as background or anything similar.

Rime is a very melancholic game by the sadly now defunct Tequila Works. You play a child that is stranded alone on an island but soon gets support by a fox spirit. Together you must solve the puzzles of the island and reach and climb the only landmark of this place, the huge central tower. The puzzles are not overly complicated or hard, but there was enough variety in them to entertain me over the whole play time of roughly 7 hours without feeling bored or it being repetitive. The levels are each unique in setting, theme and atmosphere to each other, highlighting the developers craft. Each level is a big open world, where you need to explore in order to find new ways to progress.

The highest strength of this game is its atmosphere and the music. Both are fantastic and similar to Ico, since you also explore a strange fortress together with a lone companion and wonder together at the vistas.

It's available on GoG, Steam, XBox One & PS4 but the price of 35 € really hurt the game in my opinion. <15-20 € is a fairer price range for the amount of content.

Hallo zusammen!

Was habt ihr in der letzten Woche so an tollen Büchern gelesen, Filme geguckt, Spiele gezockt, Musik entdeckt, Museen oder Veranstaltungen besucht, ... ?

My relationship with P&C adventures is... strained. I often like the stories they tell, but their moon logic is too often too strong for my poor brain & patience, so I start using a walk through. With this game it was the same, but it was better than many other offenders, as i only used it a few times, so I consider it one of the better designed P&C games.

You play as the android Horatio Nullbuilt (voiced by non other than Logan Cunningham, the voice actor from Supergiant Games, voicing all those old gruff ones like Dad Hades or the narrator in Bastion), the last name is one of the great points of world building in this game. It describes by which other robot this unit was built. Some ancient robots are even called humanbuilt, after the semi mythical creator beings that apparently lived once in the ancient past on this planet. But Horatio doesn't know his creator, hence Nullbuilt. He lives with his own creation and side kick Crispin Horatiobuilt in the airship UNNIIC and they try to repair it. Somerobot steals their power core though and so they take on the journey of retrieving it or finding a new one. This ultimately leads them to a city of robots, which shortly does away with silly questions like "oh no, does this robot have a soul?"and instead asks you the important questions like determining the parental naming rights between bickering robot creators.

While that last one is one of the few moments that lie more on the humorous side, the story of Primordia is in general on the serious side and in my opinion in the tradition of Isaac Asimov's AI: it has a premise about how the robots work and tells a story around that. The melancholic atmosphere of this game is one part I especially enjoyed.

If you like a well told story about a society of robots more on the serious side, give it a try! It's available on GoG, Steam and apparently also on iOS & Switch.

The first Psychonauts is a true Tim Schafer game: unconventional and a bit absurd, but funny and entertaining nonetheless. And make no mistake, this game is old, as is obvious by the graphics and certain game designs. And while the art style is unique, is grotesqueness is also not for everybody, sure. But I first played it a few years ago and so can say: even without nostalgia googles, it is a fun collectathon in today's age, if you can forgive some old school jank.

You play as Raz, a kid with psychic abilities that sneaks into a training camp for psychic secret agents, the titular Psychonauts. He wants to be one as well, but his family of circus artists forbid it. Psychonauts can enter the minds of other people and can access memories or help with psychical problems in this way. And the mind levels of all the different characters are the highlight of the game. Every single mindscape is unique for each character with different objectives and mechanics. You have one mind stuck in a 70s disco party, where you mostly have to use a bouncing ball to float around. One from a small guy with Napoleon complex, where everything is set up like a wargame or another from a failed actress where you have to literally set the stage and tell her life story and thereby help her come to term with it.

If you like unconventional designs, collectathons and can forgive some old school control and game design issues & somehow haven't played this game yet, I highly recommend it! The creativity in its characters and their mind levels is pretty unique. The sequel Psychonauts 2 is also a great game and modernise the formula without losing it's charm. Between those two games is also a plot relevant VR game "Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin". It is a fun little VR game, but if you can't play it, just watch a let's play or read a story summary, it's not a long game and only the setup for the beginning of the second main game.

It's available on GoG & Steam.

So spoilers for endgame Silksong, beware, ye who enters!

The first Evoland was mostly just a one-joke game that was funny for half an hour. Not so it's successor, Evoland 2. That one is a full game in it's own right telling an overarching story and integrating it's greatest selling point, the constant change of gameplay mechanics, into that story.

You mostly play in an Action Adventure way similar to Zelda, but there are different time eras, which all have a different graphical style: the past with it's 8 bit and the present with 16 bit pixel art, as well as the future which has 3D graphics. You jump back and forth between the times to follow the plot and find out why you can do that in the first place. At certain points of the mostly linear game story you have scenes with special game play mechanics. From fighting game or Bejeweled to Prof.Layton puzzles, there is a lot of variety. And while no mechanic is really deep, it's only there for at max. 30 minutes, so nothing overstays it's welcome in my eyes.

The story is nothing overly philosophical, but it worked for me to endear the characters (well, except the MC, because its literally a blank state, maybe as reference to those older games, maybe because they didn't knew what to do with him) to me and move the game forward. Sadly it did get tangled up a bit in it's own time shenanigans story, but nearly every story with time travel does, so I'm not holding it against them.

While it is not a must play, I felt well entertained during my play through and was fascinated about the world they created.

Hallo zusammen!

Was habt ihr in der letzten Woche so an tollen Büchern gelesen, Filme geguckt, Spiele gezockt, Musik entdeckt, Museen oder Veranstaltungen besucht, ... ?

Hallo zusammen!

Was habt ihr in der letzten Woche so an tollen Büchern gelesen, Filme geguckt, Spiele gezockt, Musik entdeckt, Museen oder Veranstaltungen besucht, ... ?