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« on: January 08, 2017, 08:07:41 AM »
Some games I finished playing in 2016 but didn't get around to writing up in the previous thread:
PONCHO - played through
The central conceit of this game is that you can jump back and forth between layers. That is, say you might have a background layer and a foreground layer, and there's a wall in the middle of the foreground layer, you might just to the background layer and walk past it, then return to the foreground layer. Which is a fine enough thing to base a game around.
Except the people making the game don't seem to have really had anything in mind to put around it?
In each level, you have an exit to reach, which is sometimes blocked off by locked doors which require keys. (And sometimes the doors aren't actually blocking the exit.) Some keys can be collected in the wilderness (it's not clear whether there are enough for every door), and some keys can be purchased from a shady fellow (it feels like there are more available there than there are doors in the game). To purchase keys you need gems, which are strewn about the place. This is the only use for them. Keys essentially go up in price as you buy them and I'm not sure if you can actually get enough gems to buy all of them.
Early on, you pick up a skill to do a ground-pound style manoeuvre, so you get the impression that you're going to have an ever-expanding skillset. But this is actually essentially the only skill in the game. There's another one somewhere I didn't find, but apparently all it's used for is repairing NPC characters for an achievement. Incidentally, there are no enemies and the only use for the ground-pound skill is to open secret passages.
To complain about something different, the final level is a dramatic step up in difficulty from the preceding levels, and is very aggravating. There are two different endings but I have no desire to replay the final level to see the other one.
Zenge - played through
Slide pieces on rails around and use various abilities on them in order to form them into a particular pattern without them getting in the way of each other.
It's short enough and doesn't get complicated enough to overstay its welcome, although it was getting close to verging on the latter.
Dragon Quest VII: Fragments Of The Forgotten Past - played through
Most of the time, it was pretty enjoyable.
I had started losing interest during the final sections of the game, however, so it could have done with being a bit shorter. I was going to say that maybe everything related to Orgodemir masquerading as the Almighty could've been cut but that would've led to the loss of Villa Priores among other things, so probably not the best solution.
Game does suffer from the seemingly general DQ issue of ignoring dangling plot points, assuming I didn't miss anything. How did the Roamers get tricked into living for the sake of freeing Orgodemir? What's the point in saving Dan D. Lion if the city is still going to die anyway? Game never really does anything with what it sets up for the pirate captain's wife - I mean, I'm pretty sure she appears at one point in the present but she doesn't say anything there. I would've at least expected to have been able to talk to her in Scoober's area or something. In some cases the issues are more tolerable due to the vignettisode style the game is in, such as the dropping of the story of the siblings and the guard captain in past Alltrades, but not every case.
I went through a few traveller's tablets but ultimately that system is a pain to deal with. Never bothered creating any of my own.
Got to the bottom of the (first?) postgame dungeon, but didn't have any interest in fighting the boss there. Golf clap for how in lieu of fighting it you're forced to be teleported somewhere outside the dungeon.
Epistory - Typing Chronicles - played through
Ultimately it gets more complicated and frantic than I'd prefer at times, but it's still fairly good. Story isn't great though.
I feel like it could probably have had more varied level endings than monster gauntlets, although I don't have any ideas for that offhand.
Fortix 2 - played through
Not a lot to say about it, apparently it's somewhat based on a game called Qix which I haven't played.
It's mostly pleasant when I'm not overestimating how far I can walk before something catches up to me or hits me, which is more often than ideal.
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