Recent reviews by chowr

Fun game!

Disco Elysium is chock full of words that seem to spiral around themselves without any meaningful conclusion, perhaps that is the point, but it's hard to reckon with the amount of text written and write it off. How it presents its text is unattractive and difficult to engage with, both for the verbosity of the simplest dialogues and for how much it bombards you with at once on screen.

For all the world-changing ideas and psychological turmoil it wants to tackle and engage with, it instead seems to flounder and drown in itself. As if the writers of the game could not fathom that people's minds do not all secretly harbor some extremist belief as a coping mechanism or whatever the ubiquity of extreme rhetoric was supposed to mean. Something makes me think that all of it was supposed to all be some sort of comedy, that I was "supposed" to engage with the game by picking the most humorous choice at every chance.

Or maybe I am the exception, and the people of society really do think that way and identify themselves strongly with the characters in this game. How disco that would be.

Someone who imagines the people of society as NPCs who think and breathe in categorical terms might find this game refreshing. Or someone who finds the kind of political circus presented in the game funny. But it's hard for me to give anything but a cursory thought to my time with Disco Elysium, and how awfully uninterested I felt, and move on.

The DLC in a few words is, surprisingly, more Elden Ring, though especially mid-late game Elden Ring.

Performance first:
Yes, I've experienced the game stuttering, just as I did back when it launched. What I suspect is either they did not implement the solution in time for the DLC, or that the problem has never truly gone away (it just resolves itself after multiple playthroughs). Annoying, yes, but if you persisted in playing the base game with those problems present, it won't be any different here.

The DLC has some serious and damning performance issues compared to the base game, especially when it comes to the bosses that demand tighter execution during their explosive moments. It turns an otherwise difficult but still learnable fight into an inconsistent purgatory. So long as you have means to keep your FPS stable you can have a great experience with all the bosses, but if you can't it's going to be way way harder. And unfortunately I fear it's going to be very common for people who don't have the machine to do it.

First Impressions (12-ish hr):
I've been taking my time exploring, and not faced many bosses, but here are some thoughts.

It feels as though I've taken a midgame character with +12 weapons to Leyndell in the DLC, even though she's fairly high level (lvl 170+, not NG+). Honestly, the bosses feel the same as the base game, they dance around your hits, have long combo chains, extreme punishes, endless pressure, and you have miniscule windows of opportunity. Part of the pain people are having (I suspect) is that your damage feels small if you don't prioritize the the exclusive progression system they've added for this area. It does help tremendously (+5% increase to base dmg per level, and some extra damage resist), which suggests to me they really want you to take your time to look around before fighting any bosses.

There's some really cool new equipment, new weapon types, new movesets, new talisman, etc. The environments are gorgeous and enemies terrifying. If you loved Elden Ring for its combat, even or especially at end game, you'll find plenty of it here. If you loved it more for its exploration and roleplaying aspects, I think it's a bit overshadowed by the difficulty, but there's still plenty of it with many nooks and crannies like in Stormveil and Leyndell.

There isn't a multiplayer game that has captured the eclectic mish mash of mythological and fantastical people and creature team vs team game quite the way that Dota 2 has, from the vast range of its abilities, the vivid and unforgettable qualities of its sounds and visual effects, to the uniqueness and charm they have achieved with each and every character. And despite the many changes the game has experienced during its lifespan, it has maintained a firm integrity to these elements (though on some of the recent changes I am admittedly a bit put off).

Many games have come and gone with the concept of nerdfight with a team of strangers against another team of strangers. Yet few have persisted, whether it was because they were not as well-supported, not as complex, not as imaginative, or not as fun. Something is to be said about the tenacity of Dota 2 despite the many games it has inspired. Perhaps, deep within the human psyche, there is a primordial urge to farm creeps, destroy towers, and siege the enemy fortress. Or it's just plain addiction.

Regardless, it can be said that for some Dota 2 is more than just a pastime, more than just a competition, more than just a game. Dota 2 is life.

A source of joy and a source of misery all at once.

Kenshi is worth putting in a few hours.

Dungeon of the Endless is best characterized by its long moments of contemplation, and short bursts of high attention and action. Preparing chokepoints, which rooms should be activated to prevent spawning, what to build, if to build, if you should book it for the exit, etc.

Fundamentally, it is most similar to a tower defense, but you can't just set up your stuff and wait for the round to end. Keeping a close eye on your heroes is crucial to not losing, and it's here where I think everyone will, at some point or another, lose someone to a horde of mobs flooding through the door in a nanosecond.

It's not easy, and the game somewhat mocks you for your failures by misnaming the difficulties "Very Easy" and "Easy" respectively. But sink some time into it, understand the game's mechanics more and you'll find that you can develop strategies and tactics to make the going easier. Dungeon of the Endless is not a roguelike that prides itself on screwing your run by never giving you what you need. Rather, it challenges you to shift your plans on the fly and make decisions based on each room you encounter.

The blend of genres doesn't really add up to the most amazing game ever, but it is unique. And coupled with Amplitude's incredible worldbuilding and character writing, you'll find yourself intimately familiar with your rag tag group of plucky survivors, as once again, you lose one of them to a horde of chimeras.

This game may be a bit overpriced for some. It's very short for its runtime and is, in essence a virtual escape room. There is some story, but it's mostly abstract.

I do have a problem with this game, in that the puzzles are not really linked meaningfully to each other. It's interesting how the early ones come together, but later puzzles all but require you to have previous puzzle solving experience and to take large leaps in logic. There is a hint system for many of them, but in some ways it feels like it defeats the purpose. Suffice to say, I'm not really sure this game is meant for people who don't aren't interested in puzzles and do brain teasers regularly.

Again, I bring up price for such a short experience. There isn't much story to get immersed with, it's for better or worse a pure puzzle solving game.

Battle Brothers is a brutal experience, but it's one of the best party management games out there, a much more interesting hardcore game than most, and in the genre of tactics games it stands out for reminding you constantly that your band of mercenaries are fleshy and mortal.

A common sin of "hardcore" games is mistaking RNG as the sole arbiter of difficulty and intrigue, and a common sin of "tactics" games is making your troops effectively gods among sheep letting you disregard terrain and other factors in your plans. But Battle Brothers forces you to embrace the terrain and understand the enemy's behavior and the game systems on a deeper level. You can't just consider the attack with the best chance of hitting, you need to consider who you're attacking, where you're hitting from, what the next few turns might look like, etc.

When a game has made it so that your decisions divert from "choose the highest chance of hitting," or "highest damage move," and make it so that those decisions are the ones that could lead to success more than not, then it's successfully avoided the tendency of being a glorified slot machine, and become something more interesting because of it. RNG in Battle Brothers doesn't highlight your best option as the highest hit chance, it remains true to what probability is at its core, a gamble, and while you have means to improve your odds, you will be forced eventually to take a chance based on your decisions.

All that said, Battle Brothers has lots of unusual ways for you to lose. Morale checks are a constant threat, it's very common to have a unit get flanked, hit once, and have their morale plummet to zero, increasing the chance they get hit further, and causing them to flee, which the attempt is likely to get them killed. Your enemies are also have access to more abilities than you, like being able to resurrect allies as the undead, or trapping groups of your units in vines. It's very easy to walk into a difficult encounter, or have one forced upon you, that causes you to lose a few members, or even your entire company.

But it's the presence of such a tangible threat that makes this game much more immersive than most, a better battle plan, better armor, different weapons, different decisions might have made all the difference. There have been more than a few "hardcore" games that fail to live up to their promises of delivering an interesting experience about embracing and overcoming hardship. Battle Brothers is not one of them.

The Looker, while clearly a parody of The Witness, is a puzzle game in its own right. Its comical nature actually took me off guard when the puzzles became harder than drawing a straight line on a board.

It would be against the spirit of the game to read too deeply into hidden meanings behind the set pieces, but the technology and setting up the situations must've taken no small effort. In essence, the game makes light of how simple it is to draw a line between two things in random contexts, but also makes light of how we can contrive context to make it seem more meaningful. For example, through a video game.

We can extend this to other games as well, clicking a point on a screen, making the snake reach a pixel on a board, going through a correct sequence of shapes in order, making a checkmate. What is the point of it all? Not particularly meaningful, but not exactly meaningless either (we are active participants in drawing the lines after all). Maybe it's just because it's fun.

All of that is to say, that making something that has pretensions about something as trivial as drawing a line as some insight into deeper truth, may be making a abstract mountain of a mole hill. And, perhaps, deserves to be mocked for it.

Anyways, this game is worth taking a look at.

Library of Ruina made me love dice rolls, and it is the most intense single player turn-based game I have ever played. Where many games have you consider one turn and one or two actions from an enemy at a time, Library of Ruina quickly scales to 3-5 actions per enemy, and asks you to rig and predict possibilities of how it will go, in a flux of offense acting as defense and vice versa.

All actions are decided by dice rolls, but they're very rigged dice rolls. Typically in favor of the enemy. However, you get the benefit of foresight, and can see what each enemy plans to do and who they plan to attack (and some of the dice you've got can tip the game in your favor considerably). So you can plan out how to best respond with the options you have available.

What LoR manages to achieve where many games do not, is give you effective options to respond to each and every action, while still putting you in an underdog position that will take serious preparation to overcome. There is a tangible sense of both overall strategy and individual tactics you can consider from turn to turn, and despite the inherent random elements of the game, with good planning you are rarely completely ruined by rng (except when it comes to farming key pages).

Where the game falters however, is achieving that transition from learning to strategizing and playing. Most fundamentally, LoR works as a card game. Knowing aspects like tempo, and how to effectively manage your resources (card advantage isn't really a thing), will become necessary to understand in order to make meaningful progress and strong decks. You will (eventually) effectively control up to 5 players, each with their own individual resource bar, health pool, and unique 9-card deck with unique game plans. But it doesn't stop there. As you progress, you'll unlock more teams of players, which means another 5 players will need their own deck, and their own game plan. The game will rarely ask you to use more than 3 of these teams, but if you plan on fully unlocking every floor, you'll eventually need to plan out decks and strategies for 9 floors. What's more each floor has unique powers unique to them, which can make or break certain deck archetypes, and making heavy use of what they offer is key to winning later fights. That means, at minimum, you'll need 3, 5-deck blocks, uniquely suited to take advantage of the powers of those floors. Though over the course of making those decks, you will have to experiment with other floors, upgrade older decks, and invent new ones, meaning you aren't really making just 15 decks.

There's some nice things about this, no single player must hold one deck at all times, so you can easily transfer one deck and strategy to another. And many cards from early stages (for better or for worse) end up becoming useless in the long run, meaning that you will only be considering a selection of a few at a time. But overall if it sounds like a lot to think about, that's because it is. LoR demands a lot of preparation and thinking before you get into each stage. And for every stage you pass, you will unlock more cards or new powers, which means more options for that floor, and more things to consider.

That said, it's not really possible to give a fullsome recommendation because there is no game that plays quite like LoR, and you don't really get entrenched into the mechanics until you are well past the point of refunding.

Past the difficulty however, the setting is quite original. Taking place in a sci fi future that isn't characterized by technology, but instead otherworldly phenomena that people attempt to control and pass off as technology. People are irreparably changed into monstrosities, killed for petty reasons, or made to do horrific things, but beyond the horror and mentions of gore, there is an underlying optimism at the heart of the actions of the characters in this world, and it implicitly justifies the need for everything to be so difficult. The world has become full of monsters; so we must become them to fight them.