The 2022 Backlog Challenge

[Sumez | 2,961]

Update 1/1 part 1

I managed to cross two games off my list before the year even started, but I'll account for them anyway. Whether they count in the overall total doesn't matter to me.

Hades

A seemingly somewhat popular game in the indie "roguelite" subgenre that I hadn't heard of until recently. From the makers of Bastion.
It's an interesting study in the aforementioned genre, as it's a game that truly sees it breaking off into its own whole thing. It has basically nothing in common with the actual Rogue-like games of the past, but at the same time it showcases a very clear lineage from derivative games such as Binding of Isaac and Spelunky, which clearly did somewhat spawn from a subset of the berlin interpretation.

At first I really disliked it, found it almost too derivative in a lot of ways. Felt almost like a parody of what indie games are like nowadays - honestly you can see a couple of screenshots of this game, and you will know almost everything about it, at least on a surface level.

But the core gameplay is still engaging enough that I found myself addicted to juuuust playing one more round of the game, over and over again.

At first beating the eponymous final boss felt like a massive feat, but it doesn't take long before you find yourself in a streak of 20 clears in a row. At that point you gotta ask, what really counts as clearing the game? There is no lack of new milestones and extra challenges you can do after the first clear, although the game never adds new areas or bosses*.

What Hades truly excels at is actually not so much the gameplay, but the amount of world building and dialogue connecting everything in the game. The things that go on outside of each run is actually such a big part of each game that you are kind of playing two games at once. As such this means a death in the "main game" (escape attempt as it calls it) doesn't really feel as much like a defeat, as your overarching story still progresses with the death being a part of that progress, and I'm sure this has played a big part in selling the game as digestible to the same audience that typically sees arcade like games and actual roguelikes as "too unfair" or "fake difficulty".

I eventually played to the point where there is absolutely nothing more to go for story-wise, which is quite a bit longer into the game than you'd think. At this point I'd beaten up to level 8 "heat" on several of the game's weapons, and trying to push it further felt kinda pointless to me. Although it is at its core a skill-based action game, victory honestly comes down to your familiarity with the skills that can be unlocked along the way of a single run, and how different ones work well with eachother. If all you care about is a clear, it is very easy to force a ridiculously powerful build that will melt any boss along the way, and at the end of the day I think that seriously detracts from the game's potential arcade-like qualities. Hades is still a great game, but probably not as good as you'd expect from the stupid amount of hours I ended up spending with it.

Edited April 18, 2022 by Sumez

[fox | 1,667]

Mid April update: Ender Lilies and A Short Hike

[Gloves | 11,783]

I uh... I've been playing Resident Evil 2 (PS1). For some reason I thought it was on my backlog here, but it is not. >_>

[Reed Rothchild | 9,535]

Okami

[Sumez | 2,961]

Update 1/1 part 2

The first of three more titles hastily added based on my christmas acquisitions (the others being Metroid Dread and Ghost of Tsushima). I finished this one right before new years, so it didn't even make it into 2022 either, but I did have it planned for this year.

Disco Elysium

Disco Elysium is often referred to as "an RPG without combat" which is already incredibly appealing to me. Ultimately though I think a more apt description for the game would be an adventure game without puzzles, or an adventure game with stats. The crux of the game is that nearly every single interaction in it, most often in the form of dialogue, depends on a series of stats with confusing names suchs as "shivers", "savoir faire", or "conceptualization". Some times these are checks that will either function as hard barriers, or modifyers affecting the outcome of an action, while more often they affect events of dialogue in more subtle ways without any warning, simply acting as the definition of your character.

Of course this means the game kind of invites a lot of save scumming, especially with the checks that involve an RNG roll, but the game itself encourages you to just go along with whatever happens, because obviously there is no real fail state to the game. Your character can "die", but it goes without saying you can't "talk yourself" into an unsolvable scenario. Now, this kind of mentality doesn't really work that well on me, and I imagine I'm not alone in this. Because oftentimes if you can tell there's some specific outcome you can get and you want to do that, you'll absolutely be reloading the game until you get that, even though it's not really fun for anyone. And man do the loading times in this game suck.

Overall, with no other type of gameplay to its name, all the qualities of Disco Elysium of course comes down to the dialogue, and overall writing. And it's generally really brilliant - it's what defines pretty much the entirety of the game and its identity, much more than the (surprisingly elaborate) lore, story, or presentation otherwise does. Though it's also the kind of prose that tries to come across "smarter" than it really is, by using a lot of complex ways to describe straightforward concepts, and tapping massively into familiar concepts from philosophy and psychology. It seems to want to take itself very seriously, but I think the player would be better off not doing so.
It especially starts feeling sloppy when it comes to politics, which is actually a very prominent element to the story. But there's a massive dissonance between the way it's treated as a real-world subject affecting the lives of the people in the game's world, and the extremely cartoonish way it is portrayed as simply a question of two campy extremes. You're either a comically militaristic marxist, or a massively racist and nationalistic fascist, and if you are none of those you are an undecided weakling unable to believe in anything.
While that charicature itself can work for a certain approach, and the game does embrace that in the hilarious way the main character is portrayed as an unstable radical (no matter how you choose to play - even if you attempt a neutral approach, you will be radically neutral), it also clashes with the way much of the game's tone tries to come off as deadly serious, and it's reflected in many other facets of the writing.

Though the game has no shortage of straight up silly moments too. I wonder how many people went through the game completely oblivious to the character whose dialogue is almost entirely made up of Scooter references. Although Disco Elysium is an incredibly text-heavy game with plenty of big words and serious themes, I'd probably still describe it as a largely comedic game, just don't expect any LucasArts style slapstick. And the fact that I subject the game's writing to such scrutiny is still a testament to the fact that this is actually a video game where the writing deserves such criticism. I struggle to think of any other video game where I wouldn't just cut them slack for being a video game.
 

Edited April 20, 2022 by Sumez

[Foochie776 | 1,052]

Kingdom Hearts is coming along slowly. I’m engrossed in the story but the gameplay hasn’t quite grabbed me yet. 
 

I have also been playing Super Mario Land too. As a small side game  

[Floating Platforms | 718]

Finished up the last mission of the Frozen Wilds DLC tonight so Horizon Zero Dawn is finished.

The only thing I didn't do is New Game+, so while I have platinum #36 overall, the trophy percentage for this game will sit at 96%. New Game+ rarely appeals to me as I'd rather spend those extra hours beating something new.  I have the Great Ace Attorney Chronicles on deck for PS4, but I am one puzzle away from Picross S1 and just a couple levels and gems away from Luigi's Mansion Dark Moon. Will likely have both of those done this month.

[Sumez | 2,961]

Update 20/1-ish

Ghost of Tsushima (Director's Cut)

Second of my christmas games, this is a game I'd been anticipating playing for too long. Given the style of game I kinda expected it to drop in price much earlier than it did, but here we are at last.
And, uh, it's exactly the cliche of the subgenre of typical AAA games it represents. I don't know what I was expecting, to be honest. When it comes to this style of games, Spider-Man (PS4) is a much more enjoyable example with qualities of its own to lift it up, while Tsushima just feels like it follows the cookie cutter formula and nothing else. Even the Samurai theme feels tacked on most of the time, as if this game could have easily been a story about American soldiers at some point, appointed a new skin some time during development with only slight alterations to the dialogue.

Let's praise what deserves to be praised, though. Technically, the game is an achievement. It looks amazing, with every single vista being screenshot-worthy, to the point where it's almost worth the price of admission alone. There's a PS5 optimized version of the game, but to be honest, I'm not sure what really can be optimized in this game. They'd have to recreate every asset to push it for anything the PS4 version doesn't already do. The framerate is silky smooth, and the load times are barely there, only giving you a couple of seconds rest whenever you do choose to fasttravel a long distance across the map. Compare Disco Elysium (basically a 2D game) which made you wait forever for exiting a hotel room. Though I did come across the occasional hilarious glitch, there generally wasn't much there compared to the typical standard for these sorts of games (see Assassin's Creed, Elder Scrolls, Red Dead Redemption, etc.). It cannot be understated how pleasant this felt.

It's a game that caught me in whatever it's doing for long enough to actually play it to near completion, long past what the story missions alone required. But to be perfectly honest, I still struggle to call it a "good game". There is barely any actual gameplay in the game - pretty much anything you are tasked with doing amounts to walking to a marker on your map and interacting with whatever is there. The only thing resembling gameplay, repeated throughout the entire thing, is the combat, which is perfectly serviceable but generally also kind of a mess in terms of focused design (or lack thereof).

It does that thing where you continuously unlock a massive number of skills using various different resources, but at their core all *any* of them ever do is really just allowing you to damage an enemy without needing to break through their defense first - or just outright damaging them. As a result every imaginable button combination on the controller is employed to do things like change equipped skills, change secondary weapon, tertiary weapon, or ammo used by those weapons, etc. It's a massive trainwreck, and I really wonder if anyone is actually able to juggle all of them. What I ended up doing was just focusing on a couple of skills I'd rely on the most, and memorize just the abstract button combinations needed to emply only those, ignoring the rest - and I'd wager a lot of people ended up doing the same.
On top of all that, there is also a "stance system", allowing you to switch your sword combat between four different stances, but all these do is basically allowing you to actually deal realistic damage to each of the four basic types of human enemies in the game, switching as dictated by whoever you are facing. It's yet another system that adds even more complexity to the controls, without adding even the slightest bit of extra depth to the combat. If you want to get into a discussion about what "depth" really is in gameplay, Ghost of Tsushima's combat is probably a textbook example of a worst-case scenario of insane breadth with practically zero depth.

Essentially though, taking the combat for what it is, it functionally works for a game designed to be stretched super thin across the classic "Ubisoft-game" style design of repeating the same identical missions throughout a massive open world landscape. I just wish there would be something more to the gameplay - I feel like you could absolutely have that without losing any of what the game still does well.
At the end of the day, I must have liked Tsushima well enough to play through as much content as I did, including the somewhat superfluous DLC island included in this release. But I'd say it feels mostly like pure compulsion, rather than genuine enjoyment, and after playing this I feel like I'm finally ready to say that I'm completely done with this sort of game forever. The next time I come across a game designed entirely around crossing out markers on a map/minimap I'm gonna pass over it right away, and spend my time on something more memorable instead. No matter how enjoyable these sorts of games can arguably be, it's just becoming way too much, and feels like a much too widely accepted ersatz for actual real gameplay and immersion.
 

[Reed Rothchild | 9,535]

Nice writeup.  I plan on finally getting a PS5 at some point this year, after skipping the PS4, and Ghost is one of the first titles I plan on targeting.

I know exactly what you're talking about with the whole enjoyable/compulsion of clearing a map, just to clear it.  And exploring a big expansive world.  For example, Two Worlds is a derided game with no depth, or any real memorable aspects to it.  But damn if I didn't get every little corner of the world "finished."  Is it a good game?  Probably not.  Maybe it doesn't matter.

I think that style of game can be enjoyed in moderation.  Like maybe one a year.

[Sumez | 2,961]

8 minutes ago, Reed Rothchild said:

I think that style of game can be enjoyed in moderation.  Like maybe one a year.

That's usually my approach, but I'm starting to feel fatigue even from that. If you haven't played Spider-Man yet (and it already has a sequel now, though I imagine they are very similar), I think it's a better alternative in terms of how fun the moment-to-moment action is. I actually really liked that game.

[Webhead123 | 676]

4 hours ago, Sumez said:

That's usually my approach, but I'm starting to feel fatigue even from that. If you haven't played Spider-Man yet (and it already has a sequel now, though I imagine they are very similar), I think it's a better alternative in terms of how fun the moment-to-moment action is. I actually really liked that game.

Yes, Spider-Man was quite good, although I may be slightly biased toward the character. I'm very picky about my open-world games but I actually felt compelled to 100% Spider-Man and all 3 parts of the DLC, which were also great. If I ever reclaim my PS4 from the kids (or end up getting a PS5), I will probably go back to replay it. So much fun.

[Floating Platforms | 718]

20 hours ago, Sumez said:

No matter how enjoyable these sorts of games can arguably be, it's just becoming way too much, and feels like a much too widely accepted ersatz for actual real gameplay and immersion.

Interesting to hear your thoughts about Ghosts. This is on my list to tackle later in the year. I actually really enjoy open world games because of the repetition and the map clearing. I find that methodical approach relaxing.  Horizon did a pretty good job of keeping the variety in the tasks and not loading too many of the same type. Spider-Man; same thing (plus the map was small).  I've heard nothing but good things about Ghosts of Tsushima so far, and honestly if the combat is a bit more involved than the newer Assassin's Creed games (which I also enjoy for the ability to mindlessly clear objectives), then it might be alright.

[Sumez | 2,961]

1 hour ago, Floating Platforms said:

honestly if the combat is a bit more involved than the newer Assassin's Creed games (which I also enjoy for the ability to mindlessly clear objectives), then it might be alright.

The combat is about as non-involved as it can possibly get. It's basically entirely a question of waiting for attacks and countering it, nothing real execution-wise to it. Of course, the old Assassin's Creed games were the same, so I couldn't say if they improved that for the newer ones. I didn't mention the (halfway optional) stealth sections which go along with the combat most of the time, and they definitely feel a lot more involving, even if it's mostly just abusing the same approach over and over.

If you actually enjoy the repetitive map clearing nature of open world games, Ghost of Tsushima will definitely be up your alley.

[Sumez | 2,961]

Metroid Dread - Beaten 13/1

Being the first real new 2D Metroid since Zero Mission, Dread understandably got a lot of attention. It feels wrong to ignore Samus Returns though - while I haven't played that yet, this game clearly seems like a clear cut follow-up to that one, employing many of the same mechanics and ideas.
I'm not sure it's a game that really deserves that much attention though. I've discussed the game with a lot of people, and although some people really love it a lot, most seem to largely agree with me, that Metroid Dread just isn't anything special, and if it wasn't for said attention there probably wouldn't be much to say about it in the first place. It's not a bad game, it's a fine game that just doesn't really manage to stand out at all in the sea of other metroidvanias that have been released across the past decade or more.

Keep in mind though, that I'm a very big Metroid fan. Or, at least, I'm a very big Super Metroid fan. That game is a fantastic masterpiece, a feat of video game design, and a lightning in a bottle, if not a straight up fluke, that seems unlikely to ever happen again - a notion that Metroid Dread seems to only enforce.

Now Metroid Dread is still a really well made game, it just completely misses the mark from what you'd exp... from what I expect from a Metroid game. From start to finish, the game basically never lets the player off the hook to allow them to go out and explore locations and see what they find - arguably the core of metroidvania design, and the entire reason to even make a game open-ended in the first place. You will never feel lost, and you will never feel that you found something on your own accord. Two feelings that from my perspective are completely integral to Metroid.
Metroid Dread instead guides the player along a completely set path throughout the entire game. It continues to do things like close the path behind you to prevent backtracking, while constantly gently hinting at where you need to go without straight up putting arrows in your path. At the same time, the upgrades you acquire along the way allow you to open up previous areas and go back to explore those to find things you missed. In a way, it's actually quite brilliantly designed the way they did this. The thing is, however, for me as the player it's not really satisfying in any way. You have absolutely zero agency, and are just running the obstacle course the game set up for you.
Admitted, you can actually sequence-break the game, in both intended and unintended ways, but these methods are always so incredibly obscure that the only way you'd expect to ever be able do so is by knowing exactly what you are doing, and has no real effect on a blind first playthrough.

Of course, a completely linear action game can still be fun, and it's not that Metroid Dread just isn't. In terms of the immediate controls, this game generally plays better than the standard for 2D Metroid games, which is commendable even if the analog stick can act up every now and then. But at the end of the day, the controls are still optimized for creative exploration moreso than action oriented combat. You have a flash counter skill which involves pushing a button when an enemy gives a certain visible hint in order to deal massive damage to them. On its own, that is fun to do, but effectively it reduces fighting pretty much any enemy in the game to this stupid game of waiting for the hint to press the reaction button - as opposed to enemies with actual different behaviors that you need to learn and react to in order to fight them effectively. It's such a massive oversight that it's almost baffling to me they left the game this way.

The boss fights admittedly are also better than the standard for a Metroid game, if nothing else because bosses usually are not the highlights of the series. Even then though, they mostly fail to be as satisfying as they could. Nearly every boss in the game has attacks that, as long as you keep shooting them, will shower you in healing items and weapon ammo. So many that most bosses can often be beaten mostly by just tanking everything and getting the healing along the way. This means that, like the enemies using the flash-counter mechanic, they never really require learning the boss fight and how to avoid their attacks, which is once again a huge missed opportunity. The most notable exceptions to this rule is parts of the final boss, as well as a notorious repeated boss fight against a chozo-like warrior that gets incredibly tedious simply due to how many times you need to fight it. The fight itself is already repetitive, consisting mostly of a rhythm of air-dashing over it, hitting it, and repeating until it's dead, and the little variations you get in some of the refights do nothing to remedy this.

Overall Metroid Dread just comes too short in pretty much everything it appears to set out to do, and it's really hard to recommend it in an age where you could play things like Hollow Knight or Momodora 4 instead. Even otherwise "unremarkable" indie-metroidvanias such as Blasphemous, Rabi-Ribi, or Iconoclasts are IMO more fun to spend time with than Dread, which I think is generally unacceptable for a game that should have been a successor to Super Metroid.

[Sumez | 2,961]

Yakuza 6 - Beaten 30/1

Gonna cover this one a bit faster than the others so far. I have a lot to say about the Yakuza series in general, but as for Yakuza 6, I'll just say that it's probably the most superfluous of them I've played so far.
I knew going into it that it would be a lot less stuffed with things to do, and that is absolutely true. Especially coming hot off the heels of both 5 and 0 which are the absolute opposite ballpark. The game does very little to entice you to go out and waste your time doing stuff other than the main story, and the main story generally isn't exciting. And that's kind of an issue, because what the Yakuza series lacks in satisfying gameplay is typically made up by entertaining characters, tons of absurd wackiness, and ridiculous ways to just waste your time. Something this game does little to fulfill. But at least it's nice that you no longer need to go through a loading zone to enter/exit buildings.

I've heard people say that even though 6 isn't generally a great game, it is at least a very satisfying sendoff to Kazuma Kiryu, the primary protagonist of the series up until this point. And Yakuza 5 ended on a real cliffhanger, so I really wanted to finish this off before moving on to Like A Dragon (Yakuza 7) which features a brand new protagonist.
The thing is though, that it really isn't. First off, the cliffhanger from the previous game is quickly brushed aside at the start, and the story that drives most of the game is kinda centered around Haruka (Kiryu's adoptive daughter) rather than Kiryu himself. And even Haruka is out for the count most of the game, leaving a completely new cast of characters unique to this game to carry the plot. Worth noting is this game is Beat Takeshi's first video game appearance since... Takeshi's Challenge way back on the NES

Kiryu is mostly a visitor and not really relevant to the plot outside of a turn at the very end of the game, after the final boss fight, where it finally focuses on what happens to him after his story ends.
So anyone else who's been considering playing the game only to tie together the storyline between Yakuza 5 and Like a Dragon - You can just stick to watching the ending cutscene, and it'll tell you everything you need to know.

[Renmauzo | 1,201]

Just completed Suikoden with all 108 characters recruited and Gremio brought back!

I really like this game a lot. I constantly hear II get all the love, but this game is great, with plenty of character and pacing that keeps the player invested. I wasn't nearly as put off by the inventory system as I thought I'd be, but it was actually the Tir's (main character) lack of emoting that is my only gripe. Several scenes in the game would have had the desired impact if the main character...reacted. Because of it, all of the more emotional scenes centered around Tir fall flat.

Other than my one gripe, I really enjoyed this game and the experience felt like it flew by. I'm looking forward to trying number II at some point but want to let this breathe a bit; I didn't do that with Lunar SSS and Eternal Blue, and I had to stop EB after an hour or so as I just couldn't get into it since I'd just been on a grand adventure in SSS that I grew to care about.

Likely going to move to some Mega Man next.

[Floating Platforms | 718]

Picross S1 is done

For whatever reason, I don't play my Switch all that much. It's been good to boot up casual games where I don't have to worry about running into a cutscene or quest that takes 30-60 minutes.  Picross is my favorite type of puzzle, so that accounts for about 50% of what I play on there. It's perfect to knock out however much time I have left in my night.

I'm not sure if other titles in this "S" series will change this, but my biggest complaint here is that there aren't enough larger puzzles. The vast majority don't go beyond 15x15 and those aren't all that challenging.  Maybe I'll find out next year with S2.

I also started up Golf Story from scratch again today. I had played for less than an hour a few years back, and it's the first Switch game I bought for myself through Limited Run (before I had the system), so it's about time I actually play the thing for real.  Won my first 3-hole challenge ("Mega Eagle" on the first hole) and did a bunch of side quests to level up.  It'll be good to split time between this and Great Ace Attorney Chronicles 

[Gloves | 11,783]

Resides Evil 2.

Despite not being listed here, and despite having beaten it many times before, the rule for my overall backlog is that if I buy a game, I have to beat THAT copy to consider it beaten. 

So, I played through as Leon. Please ignore my ranking lol, it's been a while. 

 

[ScaryD | 237]

Knocked one game off the list: Mega Man

[peg | 372]

Dangun Feveron cleared:

 

[Gloves | 11,783]

13 minutes ago, peg said:

Dangun Feveron cleared:

 

I noticed before (and here) that you use a PS3 controller for a lot of these; is that your preferred controller, or a necessity of your setup?

[peg | 372]

11 minutes ago, Gloves said:

I noticed before (and here) that you use a PS3 controller for a lot of these; is that your preferred controller, or a necessity of your setup?

Preferred.  However, I am very picky about them, I use the ones that ONLY have "sixaxis" markings on them.  The ones with dualshock 3 markings seem to have awful dpads, at least all the ones I have.  Alternatively I could use a Saturn controller, which I also have an adapter for.

 

I'm still not great using the stick although I have done a bunch of clears with the stick too (DonPachi probably the hardest one).

 

Edited April 25, 2022 by peg

[Gloves | 11,783]

20 minutes ago, peg said:

Preferred.  However, I am very picky about them, I use the ones that ONLY have "sixaxis" markings on them.  The ones with dualshock 3 markings seem to have awful dpads, at least all the ones I have.  Alternatively I could use a Saturn controller, which I also have an adapter for.

 

I'm still not great using the stick although I have done a bunch of clears with the stick too (DonPachi probably the hardest one).

 

It's interesting to see, I also prefer exactly the same which is what made me curious (though I've not used a Saturn controller before). I bought a fight stick years ago to get a taste of arcade-like controls and found it took some getting used to.

Do you mostly play arcade versions specifically or do you have a PS3/4/Xbox to play the games released exclusively on console? e.g. Gundemonium.

[peg | 372]

39 minutes ago, Gloves said:

It's interesting to see, I also prefer exactly the same which is what made me curious (though I've not used a Saturn controller before). I bought a fight stick years ago to get a taste of arcade-like controls and found it took some getting used to.

Do you mostly play arcade versions specifically or do you have a PS3/4/Xbox to play the games released exclusively on console? e.g. Gundemonium.

Mostly arcade stuff right now although I do have a ps3 and Japanese 360 although not very many games.

[Gloves | 11,783]

6 minutes ago, peg said:

Mostly arcade stuff right now although I do have a ps3 and Japanese 360 although not very many games.

I wish I had the space for an arcade machine and PCBs, that's gotta be pretty cool.