#Loop hero

[beansnale]

the dark priest

[anchimayen]

I consumed all of your reality. Its every element now rests in a separate pocket dimension.

Spaces, living beings, information, even memories. They shall remain there until entropy does its work, turning everything into a uniform static mass.

Along with you, of course!

[itsbenedict]

Games I Played In 2024 And Whether Or Not I Thought They Were Good (Part 3/4)

[1] - [2] - 3 - [4]

More of them! I've been doing these roughly in chronological order so I'm going to have more to say about these ones probably.

Another Crab's Treasure

Haaaaaah. Mixed feelings on this one!

The idea is that it's a Dark Souls game, only, like, vibrant and colorful and ocean-themed. You're a hermit crab who's trying to get his shell back! Cute!

First off: if you get this game, do not get it on the Switch. It is broken on Switch. Like, crashes regularly, freezes up on simple object interactions, drops frames all the time... it's rough. I've seen LPs of people playing the PC version, where it looks and plays much better, so that's probably what you want to do instead. I'm shocked Nintendo let them release it on their store in this state.

And... that kind of colors my perception of the gameplay, too, because it turns out soulslike difficulty gets way more frustrating if you're usually dying to the game freezing up during an enemy attack, or the camera getting stuck where you couldn't see the tell animation, or some other technical issue that completely wasn't your fault. I was fighting the game every step of the way.

That said, I can easily see the version of the game that works, and the gameplay's pretty fun! The various shell powers, the rolling mechanics, and the smart enemy design make it really smooth to play when it's actually running at full FPS. The environment design is also really good, and overall it's very well-executed.

Hated the story, though. What a mess. It's... totally thoughtless doomer nonsense, whose primary message is "capitalism bad!" while completely failing to depict any capitalism and instead having the government be bad. It's all half-formed ideas from people with no model of how the world actually works- just a vague sense of anger at powerlessness and disenfranchisement, directed at incoherent strawmen. The speech where the evil corrupt mayor tells you that laws exist to make it legal for him to kill anyone who defies him is especially eye-rolling- as is the strawman of techno-optimism who shows up as the surprise final boss. Just idiotic stuff.

None of its metaphors even work on its own terms- like the thing where pollution is a nebulous force of corruption caused by greed in the hearts of the crabs who hoard trash, except that the greedy trash hoarders live in the clean colorful heights and the poors with no trash live in the polluted undercity with too much trash. Wait, what? Yeah.

Fun though.

Loop Hero

This one was really cool! It feels like there's some potential it had that it didn't realize, but I enjoyed it as a smaller experience anyway.

The idea is... the world's been destroyed, and you can sort of bring it back by remembering. As you walk along this desolate looped path autobattling enemies in search of a boss, you can put down tiles that change it- biomes that spawn different types of monsters, buildings that give you buffs, and terrain with global effects. As you progress, you unlock more types of tiles, and learn synergies between different types of tiles that create new effects.

There's a lot of these, and they're really cool. Like, put down nine mountains or hills in a square, and bam, you get a tall peak that spawns harpies to fight. Or put forests next to a lightning tower, and get burning forests that, uh, I think lower everyone's HP or something? Place a light source next to a field, and it blooms with flowers, doubling its XP bonus or whatever it is those do.

My problem I think is just that there's not enough of them. Each type of tile has between two and four different kinds of interactions with other tiles, and you don't really get too many elaborate combos. Most types of tiles ignore each other. I kind of wish there'd been a little more depth to these systems, with more surprising interactions with older terrain types as you unlocked new ones. Let me run a river past a spider nest and get diving bell spiders, or put a storm tower next to a vampire castle to spawn frankensteins! The surprise tile synergies were the most exciting part, and there was definitely room to include more of them.

The story had some kind of cool things to say about, like, the weight of creation, passing judgment on the world, deciding what has the right to exist. I don't know that it really explores it fully, but there's something there!

Hades II

Yep, this thing's in early access! And no surprise: it's good as hell. I've wasted far too much time in it.

Gameplay-wise, it's going to be pretty familiar if you've played Hades, but there's a few major changes. The most impactful, I've found, is that you only get one dash. No upgrading it with the mirror or getting more from Hermes- you get one, and then can hold down the button to run slightly faster if you gotta move fast. This makes Melinoe play very differently from Zagreus, who favored getting in close and overwhelming foes with a flurry of blows before zipping back out with dashes when things get hairy. Melinoe needs to stay safe a lot more than Zag does, and relies on her ranged options to do so.

(There's also a few other tweaks- every attack comes with a charged version that costs mana from a mana bar, olympian calls are replaced with "moon blessings", and of course all the weapons are new and take some getting used to- but the dash is the biggest thing.)

The story, this time, is fascinatingly weird. It concerns a war between the gods and the titan Chronos, and... it's not entirely clear if you're on the right side of it. They play up how callous and evil the gods are with respect to mortal life, and have multiple supporting characters who put this concern front and center where Hades 1 kind of sidelined it. But Melinoe is this weird, uptight honor student type of character with a strong sense of propriety and familial loyalty, and kind of doesn't care about that compared to her quest to rescue her family.

It keeps, like... dropping hints that you're not really on the right side, here? Chronos is personally unpleasant and loathsome, but you keep getting little hints that what he's actually doing is an improvement over how the gods were running things. Various character arcs seem to be headed in a "the gods suck and you should stick up for your non-god friends" direction, but...

...I mean, they can't actually do that, can they? Just, structurally! It's a roguelike, meant to be infinitely replayable! Hades 1 had a pretty elegant resolution to that problem, reframing the gameplay as something that can fit without the central conflict, but I can't imagine how Hades 2 could possibly do that. An entire section of the world takes place on a fleet of ghost ships sailing to join the war effort! Even Melinoe failing to grow and just winning seems incompatible with the game continuing. A good chunk of the game doesn't exist without the conflict! I don't see how they can possibly put a bow on all this, and I'm excited to see how they try.

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

My favorite game from my childhood has received an updated rerelease on Switch... and they did it right. You gotta check this out.

I've talked about why TTYD is great before- I think one of the first posts on this blog, waaaaaay back in the day when my posts were bad and you shouldn't go looking for them? But the upshot is: the battle system uses small numbers, and you can figure out exactly what kind of damage you can dish out and take in a given turn, and plan your risk-taking and resource management around it precisely- in a way you can't really do when you've got big damage numbers with RNG ranges of outcomes. All the risk is in the execution of your guards and special moves, which let you attempt harder inputs in exchange for more favorable outcomes, with a chance that you'll fail because you fucked up,

Going back to it after so long... honestly, with fresh eyes, the writing isn't quite as lively as I remember? Like, I remember a big reason I was disappointed by later PM games was that there were no partners, or that the partners didn't really talk or figure into the story. But... honestly, TTYD does have that same problem, outside of the chapters where those characters are introduced. Once someone's In Your Party, their relevance is kind of over, and they all deliver pretty similar filler lines while out. That's something they could maybe improve on in a proper sequel.

Still, the writing generally remains sharp and very funny, and the variety of scenarios it throws at you are great. And the remake adds a few things that really enhance the experience- like new remixes of the battle theme for every chapter, and extra animations for every character, even the random background nobodies. You can hit NPCs with your hammer and they'll play a little "hey, ow!" animation now! Different characters get different dialogue bleep sounds! And they added a warp hub for backtracking, so the General White quest isn't so tedious! And a warp pipe between Creepy Steeple and Twilight Town, to cut out like an hour of pointless backtracking! All the changes they made were really smart.

(Including: putting Vivian's trans stuff back in the script, after it was cut in the original localization. Good on you, Nintendo!)

Pokérogue

I was weak. I held out two months, and then gave in. And I regret everything.

This fucking thing ate multiple months of my life. It's... infuriatingly addictive. It boils the Pokémon experience down to this ultra-tuned flow state, with accelerated levelups and mechanics to streamline the game into a roguelike form factor, and it's so goddamn tight. Every moment of it is setting you up with a thing you can do next, so there's no stopping points- just new goal after new goal after new goal. It totally hijacked my brain until I beat the damn thing into submission, doing absolutely everything it's possible to do in it.

Except "ever voluntarily using Skwovet", because fuck that thing.

Don't play this. It's bad for you.

Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree

Technically not a new game, but the DLC is basically an entire new game, with a map about the size of the base game and its own progression system and story.

I don't have too much to say about the DLC itself! It's More Elden Ring. Miquella's story is cool and tragic, the final boss was a terrifying surprise, and the new environments and enemy designs were sick as hell. If you liked Elden Ring for those things, there's more of it here! 'Nuff said.

What stuck out to me was... I started a new character and a whole fresh playthrough of the game, because I didn't know what the entry point to the DLC was. And while last time, I built a strength-focused warrior with tons of HP, this time I decided to try out a totally different build and play a squishy wizard with ranged attacks. And the game was so different like that! Still balanced, still fun, but completely a different game.

Instead of being about getting in close, staying in close, and sticking around for a long time while finding openings to attack, it became about staying at a safe distance, dodging projectiles, and retaliating with nuke spells to end fights before bosses could get much of a chance to hit me. Some areas that were a huge problem for me before were trivialized by my reusable ranged blasts, and some areas that were no trouble were suddenly a difficulty cliff because there was no way to be effective at range. I'm surprised at how much of a transformation it was! Impressive feat of design.

WEBFISHING

This is a cute little multiplayer fishing game based off Animal Crossing's fishing system. It's a relaxing little second-screen game without too much going on! Not too much to say about it- it does what it sets out to do. Kinda wish they'd tried a little harder for some of the fish "jokes", though- a lot of them are anti-humor about not having a joke for this one. I will retaliate by... not having much of a review for this one.

DEATHLOOP

This thing was fuckin' cool. You're an amnesiac trapped in a time loop- but not just any time loop. The people on this island came here specifically to trap themselves in a time loop, where they could kill each other and live out hedonistic fantasies with no consequences, but something fucked up and now only you and a crazy lady who's trying to kill you are actually experiencing the loop. For everyone else, it's their first day, and they don't take kindly to you trying to break the loop and ruin their fun.

In order to break the loop, you have to kill a bunch of important assholes (called "Visionaries") who've somehow anchored the loop to themselves. But you've got to do it in a single day, and they're scattered all over this huge island- so you've got to come up with a plan. Find ways to manipulate where they'll be at what times, when they'll be vulnerable, and line up that perfect killstreak.

It's fun stuff. Initially, it seems impossible- they're too spread out, too inaccessible, too heavily-defended. But as you work on figuring them out one at a time, you learn lots of little details about gaps in their defenses, ways to fuck with their routines, and traps you can set for them so they'll die without you needing to be present. It's like a mystery game, even though the minute-to-minute gameplay is a pretty standard stealth action shooter.

(Said gameplay's pretty fun on its own- though weirdly, the starting pistol pretty much kills everything in the game in one headshot and has perfect accuracy, so I'm not sure why they bother giving you other guns. I upgraded to Frank's SMG which is basically the same gun but it reloads instantly, and basically never needed to use anything else.)

The story's... a little weird. It tries to focus on the relationship between Colt and Julianna (your also-looping nemesis trying to stop you from breaking the loop), but like... she's not... there, except as an annoying random superboss encounter that sometimes spawns in the middle of you trying to do other shit. She's just a voice over the radio that snarks at you and doesn't have any relationships with any of the other characters.

So like, ultimately you learn a twist about who she was to you before you lost your memory, and she explicates her reasons for wanting to protect the loop, and there's like, some decent character work being done there?

Buuuuuut, in attempting to foreground this character dynamic and make it the main resolution to the game, they kind of forgot to give a satisfying resolution to anything else. Like, these seven people you spend the whole game obsessively stalking and learning everything about so you can efficiently murder them in one go... don't really get a resolution other than being anticlimactically murdered. And there's like no resolution to like, what is the loop and how does it work and why did it get fucked up and what are the stakes here. It's all so meticulously done that I get the impression some writer somewhere answered these questions while plotting it, but they just either didn't put any of it in the game, or I missed something huge.

One negative I will say is: this thing made my old computer overheat like instantly. I had to build a proper gaming PC before I could run this thing- and that was in fact my main motivation for building it, was because I wanted to play this game without my laptop melting. Not really playable on smaller machines, even on minimum settings.

-

One more coming down the line, for the games I played but didn't beat this year, and that should do it!

[1] - [2] - 3 - [4]

[charliearlet]

Multifaceted

[psych3box]

Yota from Loop Hero

[videogamepolls]

Requested by anon

[ridl]

loop hero is so good and funny

[moxpunk]

Moxie's Big-Ass Retrospective on Games She Played This Year

There's going to be a lot of games under the break, and I'm going full-hog on spoilers. Honestly, I'm going stream-of-consciousness with these, so there's not going to be a clear point made for some of them. Just how I remember them and how I feel now looking back.

Final Fantasy XIV This is my current MMO of choice, and it's been this massive part of how I spent my time this year. The patches and content continue to be great, even if I breeze through it all in a few days after the patch when plugins/mods are back up. I've definitely noticed a dip in my interest lately. I think it's because we've hit a good stopping-point for the plot and junk, so most of us are just waiting until the pre-patch of the new expansion next year. RP continues to get fucking worse and worse for someone that plays a lalafell, since the community at-large (especially the modding community) is actively hostile towards lalafells and their players. Having to check every single venue to see if my middle-aged potato is going to be treated like a child by the hosts gets exhausting after the umpteenth time. Still love the game and I poke at it on a regular basis.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom One of my favorite games I've played this year, but also one of the most frustrating in hindsight. There was a ton of lost opportunity in multiple aspects in this game, and it's sorta the thing I keep coming back to in my head. I loved the exploration and fucking around with physics and just getting to play around in Hyrule. It's a magical experience that I think transcends the fact that 2/3rds of the map is essentially re-used. The Underground was a missed opportunity to shove lore of ancient civilizations in there, Ganondorf was a missed opportunity to finally depict him as a tragic hero with Hyrule being the villains for once, and no plans for DLC or even a Hero Mode is a massive miss for me wanting to return to the world.

Baldur's Gate 3 Hands-down my favorite game of the year by a massive margin, but like TOTK, an immensely frustrating experience. The game is half-cooked in so many areas, and the bugs are plentiful to the extent that they can't really be ignored. The pathing system continues to be the Larian Special of being jank as all hell, with my characters running in the opposite direction of the path it lays out for them. I played this one on stream, and I cannot remember a single stream where I didn't have at least a handful of frustrations with the combat system. Hell, I had to completely restart my file in the middle of Act 2 because Karlach's romance bugged out. I continue to be very upset and frustrated at how goblins are treated, doubly so since in order to pursue the Good Route with Halsin, you have to attack fucking children. I don't care if they're goblins, they're kids. Also very disappointing we don't get a single short-race origin character, meanwhile half of the cast is some form of elf. At least it's nice letting me be full-on cock-out trans. Despite that, the writing and characterizations in this game are unparalleled. It's immensely refreshing to finally have a RPG where you fucking roleplay, after years of it being dialogue that doesn't matter in the slightest other than "points towards the good/evil ending". I love the Brain Slug Squad immensely. This game is probably going to become part of my "play this every year" list because there's just so many different ways to play through this game.

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk Been waiting for this game (or a game like it) for fuckin' years, and it's everything I wanted and expected. I know a lot of people went into the game expecting some massive thing that lasted hours and hours, but my memories of JSR/JSRF was a game that I could reasonably beat in an afternoon or two because I just get into the flow and know what I'm doing. Cyberfunk is the purest successor to JSF that I can thing of where it just adds to the fun formula of the past. Incredible game, love seeing the mods coming out for it, hope we get another game in the universe since Team Reptile said they aren't doing DLC.

Pizza Tower Love this game, adore the movement and the music, absolutely fell off at about the halfway mark. I think it's because a lot of stuff was coming out at the time, and I just kinda played those instead. One of these days, I'll beat it and be very satisfied, but for now my gremlin-brain that demands collecting every single collectable and getting at least an A-rank on every stage gets exhausted just thinking about it.

Elden Ring Opened the game up after upgrading to a new PC, marveled that I could run it on Ultra with the game keeping a smooth framerate, killed a few enemies, remembered about the fucking giant ants in this game and how there are zero mods to remove/change them, and then turned the game off and uninstalled. Begging someone to make a mod that gets rid of the fucking ants. Please. I've already gotten every trophy in the game last year, so any incentive I have to return is predicated on that.

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty So, I'm going to give my thoughts about the base game and the DLC, since I played both. The base game continues to be this utter fascination to me where my brain adores just existing in the cyberhell future of nonstop advertising (if I have to hear YO YO YO MY CHEWERS SHROOMERS AND FUMERS! one more time I'm going to fucking strangle someone to death) and ultraviolence. The game continues to ride that weird line of "might as well do every side-quest because they're quick enough to get to and there's hardly any compared to Witcher 3" and "oh my god I do not care about these fucking sidequests other than I have gremlin-brain". Doing anything with sniper rifles or heavy machine guns is an exercise in frustration thanks to there being zero silenced sniper rifle until late-game and there being no unique HMGs.The DLC is... fine. It's fun antagonizing Idris Alba, it's not fun that the DLC is based around a stealth build, it's extremely not fun that the changed ending is deeply unsatisfying from a narrative standpoint.

Pseudoregalia An adorable little game that I enjoyed quite a bit for the very short time I got to fool around with it. Love the movement, love the style of the graphics, love the little pieces of story. Game doesn't get enough love, so here's me giving it some more.

Potionomics I fucking adore this game. I think what helped endear me was getting to do all the voices on-stream, but who cares this is my retrospective and I get to be biased. Loved the romances and characters in there. I absolutely headcanon Xid as being trans, Roxanne turns me into a babbling idiot, and I relate to Luna so hard it almost hurts. I enjoy that characters remain your friend if you already picked a partner, and you have to have a conversation about "hey, you were kinda flirty for a while and I feel a little weird about that now" for each of them. Breaking the economy by the third competition was immensely satisfying.

Paradise Killer I slammed through this game over the course of a single sleepless night thanks to Super Depression. Love the character designs and how bold they are, love the lore behind the world, got kinda sick of it taking so long to travel from place to place, gremlin-brain refused to let me part with the game until I collected everything. Hope to see a prequel/sequel of some sort, because Lady Love Dies is such an interesting character and I liked the bugfuck-weird world.

Peglin It's Peggle, you're a goblin, you get funky ball powerups, adore playing this game on my phone in short bursts. Not much more to say, it's my potato-chip game.

Rimworld Friend gifted this to me and I got horribly obsessed for like a week. It's a lot easier to grok than Dwarf Fortress thanks to the UI and information being easier to comprehend. I never know how to do the crazy shit in these games, I usually peak at having a little self-sustaining settlement with like 4 characters that live their little lives until a plague or bandit raid sweep through and kill everyone.

Halo: Master Chief Collection Another series of games I got obsessed with and pounded out before dropping it. Halo 1 is like twice as long as I remember, Halo 2's remastered cutscenes are fucking gorgeous and it continues to be my favorite out of the series, Halo 3 I'm lukewarm on it's whatever, Halo Reach is... eh I don't care, ODST I petered out of thanks to playing it with an ex that does not understand videogames, Halo 4 is a slog. Didn't do any multiplayer.

Helltaker Finally played it, beat it in like 2 hours, thought the puzzles were fun and the art continues to rattle around in my noggin.

A Hat In Time Another game that I finally beat after owning it for like the better part of a decade. Cute little game, I don't have a clue what any of the updates and junk do these days. The big mountain level is a fucking nightmare to navigate and explore and that's why I fell off last time.

Puzzle Agent Played this one on-stream because I'm Minnesotan as all fuck and I enjoy Professor Layton puzzles. It's just as good as I remember, even if it's incredibly short.

Kingsway Love the premise, adore that it takes me back to the Windows XP era of using my parents' computer. I had like one good run that died in the middle of things, and I never really went back. I should do this game again at some point.

Loop Hero Another procedural game where progress is usually bottlenecked by gathering base resources in each run so you have a fighting chance. All my runs sorta ended up the same by a certain point and I wasn't really having much fun anymore.

Lethal Company Game scares the absolute shit out of me, I cannot play this game for extended periods because I get heartburn from fear. Excellent experience with friends.

Super Mario RPG I didn't have a SNES growing up, so I never got a chance to play the original. So far, I've been greatly enjoying the remake! I don't have much to say because I've only played like four hours of it on stream.

Katamari Reroll Just beat this game again on stream last week. Extremely fun, extremely short, Lonely Rolling Star continues to make me get emotional and cry, my memories get mixed-up with We ♥️ Katamari when it comes to the final sequence of levels.

World of Warcraft I made the return, and holy shit have things changed in-game. The UI actually looks like it's part of a cohesive artstyle, catching up with the story and questlines after bouncing in the middle of Shadowlands is honestly kind of exhausting, and the RP community is still splintered and fractured between Retail and Epsilon. Controller-support has been my biggest gripe since XIV's is fucking stellar and I do not have the wrists/hands for putting my abilities on the keyboard anymore, I either have to use my janked-out mouse buttons or a controller using ConsolePort which is... serviceable but nowhere near good. Uh, I don't particularly care for the dragon-stuff in WoW's lore, and I still haven't done a single dungeon since I play Brewmaster and I'm so out of whack with WoW tanking that I just don't bother. I'm usually doing RP on my endless ranks of characters if I'm not playing with my girlfriend. Season of Discovery has been a fun thing to do with my friend and our guild, it's sorta what I wanted out of Classic when they announced it. The "No Changes" thing was stupid because we'll never get back the lack of information and endless time we had back then, so I'm very happy to have World Of Warcraft Chopped And Screwed Edition. As much as I still have massive, major gripes with Blizzard and ABK in general... Azeroth is still home for me. It's been important to me as a person. Wouldn't have realized I was trans or poly without it.

SO THERE YOU HAVE IT My thinks and feelings on all the games I played this year in 2023. I guess to sum up the year in general? It's been a real shit year for me. Went through like three big breakups, my art output's been dogshit in quantity thanks to mental-health issues, and for the first half of the year people just sorta generally treated me poorly which exaserbated a lot of problems. I'm recovering, but I've noticed it's been a lot slower than it has been in the past. Games are a huge hobby of mine, so I'm glad I've gotten to play some bangers this year. Being more active on Tumblr's been good for my mental health, since I finally feel like I've got a community again after not really feeling like I've had one in forever. Love you guys, stay weird. 💖💖💖

Sorry not sorry for this being so long.

[angel-oftheday]

The Angel of the Day is...

Angel

From Loop Hero

Requested by @falsecrustacean39

[retalic]

The Lich

[neloxy]

I forgot about this sketch for a month💀

[krazy-kc]

"You should not be here"

[hardcoregamer]

The 15 Best Devolver Digital Games

Devolver select and treat every game they publish with the utmost care and professionalism, seeing them as some of the most interesting games possible that need to be shared with the world. And so, for their 15th anniversary (and Volvy's 15th birthday party), it only seems fitting to highlight fifteen of their best games, ones that resulted from all of that care. Cheers, you delightful maniacs!

Check them out!

[coboldpatrool]

Art by Winomas

[ningyousaiban]

The Priestess

[oimodaisuki05]