Just finished The Forgotten City (standalone version, not the original Skyrim mod version).
Pretty impressive effort for a three-person dev studio. Only encountered one game breaking bug and that was when the vote for mayor came up someone had a pathing error and it effectively prevented the vote from occurring. I either reloaded or triggered the loop to get out of the problem. It was no big deal and it only happened once. All the other votes went fine.
It’s basically a quest-solving game where you are a person from the present day who gets pulled back in time and trapped in a seemingly endless looping day in a city in the Roman empire during Nero’s reign and you are trying to get out. There are four possible endings, each one better than the previous one. (The hardest to achieve is the best ending and also considered canon.) The puzzles are about what you’d expect difficulty-wise from something that came out of a CRPG mod. It’s more about exploration and conversation then the puzzles themselves. Combat is minimal and straightforward. The story and writing is really good. The game is short, though. You can easily accomplish all four endings in under 20 hours and that’s going in blind without any external help. (You don’t need external help. There is nothing that is not readily solvable with enough exploration.)
So, I don’t know if it’s worth the $25 full price, but it’s certainly worth the $5.24 it’s going for on Fanatical or the $6.24 it’s going for on Steam and GOG.
It was not mind-blowing, and it was a little frustrating (perhaps not up to modern game-balance standards), but it was OK. It was certainly a unique game. I am not sure I would play it straight through now, but there is no reason for you not to fire it up, try playing for a bit, and see for yourself!
I watched a Youtuber play through it and the story was a lot of fun (like the show Invincible, say). Have you tried playing it more than once to see what difference your choices make?
I don’t know. I hear vague Obra Dinn comparisons because you are starting with no knowledge and as you learn more…you begin to realize what things are connected and in what way. You are basically rebuilding a database and as you do…you learn some big truths.
It was terrific.
I was going to watch Cory Kenshin play it. Do you have a better recommendation?
As a kid in the 80s I really enjoyed Goonies II. It mixed platforming, exploration, and puzzles, and there was a sort of progression from tools you gather along the way. And it helped that I liked the movie (although the game only very loosely resembled the movie in any way).
It was sort of like Bionic Commando or Clash at Demonhead in gameplay. If you played and liked either of those games, you might like this one.
It’s only a Demo now, but it is the start of the game and will carry over when the game itself drops on Thursday.
I’ve not played Dragon Quest VII in any previous form. I’m looking at it with fresh eyes and hope it is a good one. I have played Dragon Quest XI, V(on my phone), and VI(I think an SNES rom translated).
Dragon Quest IV is one of my favorite games of all time. I was obsessed with it as a teenager. I now see they’ve remade it twice, most recently for the Nintendo DS. I have to see if it’s possible to do that via emulator, wow.
Oh, maybe wait a bit. They just released 1, 2, and 3 redone for modern computers and consoles. I bet 4 is getting a full HD remake release pretty soon.
Now why they went and did 7 again is somewhat of a mystery. I guess they felt it needed another chance.
Can’t say I’m surprised. Both it and Avowed felt like generic, soulless me-too copycats. They played like some executive going down a 2010s RPG checklist and using AI to tick the boxes… their writing, in particular, was quite weak. I cringed a few times in the first hour or two of OW2 and put it down after that, not wanting it to tarnish my memory of the first game.
Obsidian has long since jumped the shark by this point. So sad. I miss the old one.
The Bloomberg article on Obsidian has more context. Makes it sound like a studio stretched thin, with absentee remote leadership and outsourced teams, struggling to release three games in one year all while parent company Microsoft is aggressively cutting costs and pivoting to AI.
I finished a replay of BioShock. I thought I remembered it fairly well since the last time I played (years ago), but I had completely forgotten some of the aspects that weren’t in BioShock: Infinite (like the chemical thrower and the U-Invent crafting stations). It starts out pretty tough, but by the end you’re getting so much money that you don’t really have to worry about healing kits or ammo.
I’m planning to move on to BioShock 2. I remember only the vaguest bits of the premise, but I think it mostly felt like more of the same (almost like a stand-alone DLC).