I figured this morning I would talk about a couple of things that I have been doing. I am not entirely certain how I stumbled across this game but I have been playing The Touryst on the Switch. Trying to solve a puzzle or two before bed time has sorta become my new going to sleep ritual. This is from Shin’en which are the folks behind games like the Iridium series on the GBA and Fast MX… so they are a studio that seems to be able to get lower end hardware to do absolutely phenomenal things. The Touryst is no difference in that the executable itself is insanely small and the load times are so snappy that you never feel like you are actually waiting on anything.
The gameplay concept is simple. You are a tourist on vacation on an archipelago of islands, each one containing a shrine that you have to figure out how to unlock. You earn coins by completing tasks and by finding them out in the world. These coins are then spent on upgrading your abilities, to give you access to new areas and perform new abilities like the ability to pull yourself up on a ledge or to dash. These simple abilities combine with visual puzzle solving and some minor platforming in order to craft a world of exploration and discovery that feels like you are always unlocking something interesting around the next turn. I am not terribly far into the game but I am definitely enjoying myself.
What I find the most interesting is that while each shrine ends in a “fight” with its Guardian… none of them actually involve combat. Instead you sorta have to figure out how to deactivate the Guardian through puzzle interactions and moving pieces around in the right way. For example moments after taking the above screenshot the cubes begin to link up and you have to figure out a way to break the lights in order to deactivate them. You can get crushed in the process… at which point the game starts over on the beginning of the screen that you failed on allowing you to rapidly iterate on ideas until you solve the puzzle. It is the perfect sort of bite sized interaction for me and my bedtime gaming, and if you are looking for a fun Switch game to tide you over until Animal Crossing, then I highly suggest checking it out.
The other thing that I partook of last night was finally buckling down and finishing Mars War Logs, another in the line of games by Spiders that I have been exploring. I’ve talked at length about the experience of playing a game by this studio but at this moment I have now played through Greedfall, Technomancer and Mars War Logs and they all have a lot of similarities. The biggest part is that they are a company with really interesting ideas that outstretch the technical and design abilities of the team involved. If you can handle an awful lot of quirk and oddity in your games, then the experience might be extremely enjoyable. I mean playing through Mars War Logs was no more kludgy than playing through Witcher 2 for example and suffered from a lot of the same design problems.
I was actually way closer to the end of the game than I realized in Mars War Logs, because in about an hour of game play I managed to get to the credit roll. I have no interest in playing down an alternate path, because I feel like I made the choices that make sense the most for me. Problems aside I found it an extremely enjoyable play through and the truth is I am going to play anything that Spiders releases in the future after having played through three of their games. They do something really compelling to me and I am not entirely certain I can put my finger on it. The best of these was absolutely Greedfall and there has been a clear improvement in quality between the games as they sorta try and tackle the problems they keep running into. They seem to release a game roughly every two years so since Greedfall was a 2019 release, maybe we will see something new in 2021.
I realized this morning that it has been quite a bit since I made a “state of the cats” post. Since I didn’t have a ton of pressing things that I wanted to talk about this morning now seemed as good as any time to do one. Josie continues to get more and more comfortable in our house, and I am pretty sure she is made out of some form of gelatin. Cats notoriously can sleep happily in some pretty contorted spaces but she more than any other seems to be completely happy in pretty much any shape. She likes to sleep between my wife and I and if for some reason one of us moves she is more than happy to stay in whatever random contortion she winds up in. Her current favorite spot is nestled into the pillow back of the old love seat we have in our loft… where she is effectively upside down which isn’t really something you can tell from the above picture.
Kenzie and Josie are getting along swimmingly, and while rare they do occasionally actually snuggle together. Generally speaking it involves laying on my legs while I am sitting on the sofa messing around on my laptop but I have encountered a few other random occurrences where they were nestled together. This is the relationship I was most concerned about because Kenzie has not really taken to liking another cat in our household ever. They however appear to be buddies and are constantly playing together and I’ve even caught Kenzie grooming Josie. We’ve even been teaching Josie how to play catch, and she does a much better job at actually returning the object than Kenzie ever has. Shockingly Kenzie is also seemingly fine with Josie playing with her hair bands.
While I don’t have a readily available picture of Mollie, the things on her front are not going super well. Mollie does not get along well with either Kenzie or Josie, and I am not sure if it is a jealousy thing or something else. Mollie and Kenzie have NEVER gotten along, and since Josie tends to be pretty passive it seems like Mollie is taking that to her advantage and venting her frustrations on Josie. This however leads to a cycle of events which means we hear once or twice a night a squabble that is largely vocal only. Mollie will attack and corner Josie, and to this Kenzie will come to the rescue and go after Mollie until she gets chased off. Weirdly they can all be in the same vicinity when one of us is involved. There have been several occasions when I have all three snuggled in with me on the sectional.
I don’t really know if it is a situation of Mollie is actually trying to play, but not really understanding what play is? She had a weird upbringing of spending the first months of her life in a dog shelter without access to other cats and I keep blaming that on the fact that she doesn’t quite work like other cats seem to. For the time being however I am just going to be thankful that two of the three cats get along swimmingly. Josie is either following me around or following Kenzie around pretty much all of the time. Kenzie seems to be perfectly fine with this and for that I am counting my blessings because I could have wound up with a three way conflict on my hands. I am still working on Mollie and giving her lots of attention any time I can catch her off by herself, thinking that maybe just maybe eventually we will have a real breakthrough there.
The joys of being sick. I am sitting down to write this while taking a breathing treatment, though admittedly the sound of the nebulizer does sorta serve as a calming white noise. I am returning back to work today and while my asthma is still engaged, the actual influenza should be long gone apart from this damned cough given that it all started on leap day. During my periods of recuperation I have been trying to find various low key ways of enjoying myself while gaming, because my reflexes and ability to do anything that involves a lot of momentum went out the window. I wrote a lot last week about my adventures in the EZ Everquest Server, and I have not quite finished that but I did feel like I needed to venture out a bit more and do other things.
In my travels I stumbled across some patch notes for a game I had never heard of before. Atom RPG is an admittedly poorly named game, but it represents a nostalgic journey back into the era of Fallout 1 and Fallout 2. I’m not sure if you have attempted to play those games recently, but they are a bit of a struggle to get into. They are way more sluggish than your memory of them would indicate, and I struggled quite a bit a few years back in attempting to get started once more in the first game. Atom on the other hand is the sweet spot for Nostalgia gaming… it plays like you remember Fallout playing with all of the modern trappings that make it tolerable for long play periods.
Fallout was a post nuclear war game focused on what happened to America after the bombs fell, and ATOM is very similar except it instead is placed in the civilization that came after Soviet era Russia. This serves to give a really interesting glimpse in how the other faction viewed the inevitability of nuclear conflict and what might occur to society after a great fall plunges us back into the dark ages. Interestingly enough the picture painted is one way less bleak than that of the Metro series. You play as a member of A.T.O.M. a pre-war military organization that more or less plays the same role as that of the Brotherhood of Steel does in the Fallout games. You are sent out into the wastes in search of what happened to a General of your order who was on a mission to recover some ancient tech.
During your journey you will cross a waste dotted with small settlements and all manner of curiosities presented very much in a similar fashion to which you might remember Fallout. There are random encounters as you cross the waste either on foot or later through driving one of a handful of automobiles that are available and that require a constant supply of fuel for which you need to scavenge. The game as a whole feels a little harder than I remember Fallout being, or at least the availability of weapons seems a little harder to come by for a long time. The first handful of weapons you come across break easily, but thankfully the game has a reasonable crafting system and I was able to keep making improvised shivs until I came across better options.
The part that I find most intriguing is all of the soviet era nostalgia that is included in the game given that it is built by a team of Russian developers. I love seeing this familiar genre through a different set of eyes, and a lot of the same tropes playing out in a completely different manner. As far as your party composition goes, you encounter a whole bunch of random characters in your journey. The first for me was a dog that you can in fact pet and befriend and later equip with some nifty armor. After that I encountered a writer that had been exiled to the Gulag before the war and was living a life of isolation walled up on a farm trapped in by giant spiders. After clearing out the spiders he announces that he is joining your party and provides a certain bit of comic relief.
Other companions you can pick up for an indefinite amount of time. One girl for example I saved from a bunch of slavers and she wanted to follow me for safety. You can continue adventuring with her for as long as you like, but I escorted her to the main city in the game and “released” her where she then becomes an NPC working in a bar run by another party member you meet along the way. You can keep checking back in on her to make sure things are going okay which feels nice. The writing is extremely good which is important given this is a game without voice narration and you have to be drawn into the text in order to stay engaged.
I am not sure how long this journey is going to last, but for now I am deeply engaged. It is a game with some rich factions that will be recognizable when viewed through the lens of Fallout, but with a decidedly soviet spin on them. The game also gives you some interesting examples of raiders that are not just madness induced murder machines, but are instead a sort of organized crime syndicate that you can opt to join. I am more or less playing the life of the wasteland hero, helping the downtrodden like I almost always do in a game like this. However there have been more than a few situations where things went south and I wound up having to fight an entire settlement. I am just going to hope those were bad guys, because they didn’t exactly give me much in the way of friendly options.
If you too are prone to fits of nostalgia, then I highly suggest checking out this game. Fair warning however, that if you do get stuck you are going to find yourself wading through a lot of Russian language pages trying to find some of your answers. Additionally the game supports mods but I am finding them prone to the same problem of needing copious amounts of google translate to understand, and as such I have not gone down that rabbit hole. The base game is less than $9 right now and the “supporter” edition with extra goodies is less than $13. Definitely worth checking out if you too have ever tried to go back and play the original Fallout games.
Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra and Tamrielo
Another week of sick Bel trying to get through a show without going into a coughing fit and more or less succeeding. Tonight we talk about The Touryst a wonderful but misspelled visual puzzle exploration game for the Nintendo Switch. From there Bel talks about a poorly named game called Atom RPG that he stumbled across which plays like you remember Fallout 1 and 2 playing. Ash talks about playing Pokemon Mystery Dungeon DX and his enjoyment of the game in spite of the poor reviews. Tam talks about a project that he is taking on to convert the Star Wars roleplaying systems to Pathfinder 2.0. Bel talks a bit about the Halo Combat Evolved shadow drop and a really brief discussion about Final Fantasy 7 Remake Demo.
