Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: indie games

Triple AAA–Zzzzzzzzzzz, part two

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I’m not sure where to put this because I’m going to talk more about AAA v. indie games, but I want to jump of that into talking about how I think about things in general. And why I have felt so deeply while playing Schrödinger’s Call (Acrobatic Chirimenjako). Add to that why I feel like nothing playing most AAA games. Oh, and just to get even spicier, why I don’t like most soulslikes even though I adore most FromSoft games.

While I’m at it, I’ll make the connection between my preference for indie games over AAA games and my preference for indie movies (when I even watch them) over Hollywood movies. To be fair, the last–no, the second-to-last blockbuster movie I’ve seen is–well, no. Let me rephrase that. The last superhero movie I saw in the theater was The Last–er, Guardian sof the Galaxy, and much to my surprise, I really enjoyed it.

After that, I saw Knives Out, which was hyped to an unbelievable degree. And which I was quite looking forward to. Even after seeing the trailer, which I did not like. Look.  I went into the movie excited because I love Agatha Christie. I love huge ensemble whodunnits, and this was supposed to be the next big thing. When I saw the trailer, well, my enthusiasm dipped dramatically. All the cast members were excellent, but there was something amiss. I hated the way the trailer was cut, and I did not enjoy the dialogue at all.

I crashed while writing this, so I’m picking it up today. My sleep has been all over the damn place.

Back to Knives Out. I did not like the first movie by this direction. Rian Johnson. Brick. I found it pretentious, ponderous, and laborious. I did not enjoy one second of it, and I did not understand the hype at all.

I was willing to give him a chance with tihs movie because, well, I’m a slow learner in some ways. I so want a new Poirot (with less British colonialism, please or if it’s another Poirot, an actual Belgian actor), I was willing to overlook my initial doubts about the trailer. I enjoy an ensemble cast, and this one was star-studded. Yes, the trailer had highly-stylized dialogue and hyper-cuts that made me wince, but I tried to put that aside.

More doubts began to creep in when the director made this big deal about pleading with the reviewers not to give ‘the secret’ away. After watching the movie, I have no idea what he meant by that. If he meant the perp, well, I sussed that out the first time I laid eyes on them. I said, “This person did it”–whatever ‘it’ was, and I sincerely hoped it wasn’t the case.

But, alas, two painful hours later, it turned out to be exactly the case.

Look, the cast was fantastic. Jamie Lee Curtis chewing up the scenery gave me so much life. But that was the only thing I liked about the movie. I was so disappointed in the rest of the movie.


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Schrödinger’s Call–and other similar indies

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I want to talk more Schrödinger’s Call (Acrobatic Chirimenjako), other indie games, and why certain ones hit me so hard. Here is my post for the A Quick Review of this game. I ended it by saying I had a feeling that I would have procrastinate before playing the third chapter, and that is the case so far. I mean, it’s only been one day, but still. I find my brain drifting to it over and over again, but then, my brain skitters off again.

I mentioned in the last post that I felt so many feelings as I was playing the game. At the end of the second chapter, Mary was so broken that I broke with her. I don’t know how many chapters the game is, but I have a feeling that I’m going to go through it more and more with each chapter. I will say that I’m a bit worried as to how they are going to end the game.

This is the area where I think there’s so much danger. Because there is usually not as much description in a video game as in a novel or maybe even a movie or TV show.  So a game has to rely more on pure emotion*. I have seen a fair few indie games that were great until the last act, and then they completely fell apart.

Whether it’s that they didn’t have time to finish the game; they had an idea they couldn’t quite manifest; or their ending was, well, misguided, it can ruin an otherwise great game. Or at least bring it down a bit.

Back to Schrödinger’s Call. I just watched the launch trailer so I could include it in this post. And I broke once again. There is something about the game that just pierces any defense I can erect, and I can’t keep a shield up for the life of me.

I think it’s partly because I often feel like the world’s last Confidant. That’s my role in my family, and it’s something I tend to do with other people as well. I hear all the deep, painful secrets, and I’m the one to be compassionate and empathetic. I have unironically called myself my mother’s emotional support human, and she has just as unironically called me her therapist.

This game does have times when you have a choice as to what to say to the person on the other end of the line. I find myself fighting between saying what I really want to say and choosing the more palatable answer. Or rather, the one that will soothe their pain. The funny thing, though, is that they often react badly to the lie. Or rather, they know I’m lying. When I choose the harsh answer that is what I really feel inside, they are comforted.

Most of the time. Sometimes, they want the lie. Or at least to hear it. But then they want the truth. I find it endlessly fascinating to see my mind weasels playing out in a game. The dev has very neatly captured the circles my brain runs around in.


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The state of gaming and me, part two

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So, amid all the wild shenanigans that Xbox and PlayStation have been wading through creating, EA decided that they had been quiet for far too long. EA, once voted the worst company in America for two years running in the tens. Watching PS and Xbox get so much pub f or self-imploding must have really gotten on their nerves. “I got to get me some of that!”–some muckety-muck at EA, probably.

Why do I say that? Because they did something so bonehead and unfathomable (well, it’s fathomable when you remember that companies are souless entities who only care about making a profit and not at all about people or their customers), people are calling for a…boycott of sorts.

In a nutshell, they released their new college football game and took out the “easy mode”. I have included a video down below from SnowBike Mike who works at Kinda Funny Games in which he explains what the issue is. As I understand it, there was a slider that allowed you to adjust to how much experience points you earned in two of the offline modes. Andy Cortez read from an article written by Lewis Parker at Kotaku that outlines the problem. Spoiler–microtransactions. It’s microtransactions. Actual, there’s nothing micro about it. It’s just transactions, really.  There’s more to it, but basically, they’re saying you have to pay actual real life money to get the XP rather than use the slider–which no longer exists (at least the easier side of it).

Now, you gotta pay a hundo to get your coach leveled up properly. Someone calculated that you would have to win something like a hundred championships to do it ‘naturally’.

Well, well, well. Reading through the article, it seems that EA has backed down. I don’t know if it’s enough for the people who want to buy the game/bought the game, but at least understood that what they did was not cool. So very not cool.

Some content creators were really upset, too, because they promoted the game and played a demo of it that did not have microtransactions in it. In other words, EA knew what they were doing was shady, and they deliberately hid it forom the very people they were depending on to promote their game.

Which is astoundingly short-sighted. Content creators can generate so much good will for your game–or, by contrast, call for their followers to ‘play, not pay’–which one content creator did in response to the news of the microtransactions. Also, it wasn’t as if EA could have hidden it for very long–and, indeed, the outcry was swift and vicious. The reviews on Steam are mostly negative (we’ll see how that changes with the new news from EA), and all of them are clear about the fact that it’s because of the greed and not the gameplay. Most people think the actual gameplay is great.


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Indie games, physical discs, and why I should care (as a PC gamer)

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I have spontaneously added a new tag–gaming hell. That’s because gaming is hell right now. Not literally, of course, but metaphorically. Some of it is out of the control of anyone in the industry–such as AI driving up the prices of RAM (long story, don’t want to talk about it) so that new consolse/PCs are going to be absolutely ridiculous in prices. I was thinking of buying a new PC a year ago, but I decided to wait it out beacuse graphic cards were already outrageous (because of tariffs), and I was hoping things would calm down.

Oh wait. At the end of the last post, I was talking about a game that came out yesterday that I so wanted to like (after talking about it in a previous post). I don’t know why I’m being so coy about it. It’s Moonlight Peaks (Little Chicken Game Company). I had my eye on it from when I first heard of it–when was that? Was it the Wholesome Games Direct in February? Was there even one in February? Anyway, it was a vampire farming sim. Yeah, you heard that right. OK, it’s not exactly a farming sim, but there is farming in it. And romance. And other life sim stuff.

You will forgive me if I was reminded of another game that was similar to it. One that I played the shit out of, had a chibi-ish style to it, too (well, more cartoony than chibi, but reminiscent of), and was a farming sim. It’s called, Wylde Flowers (Studio Drydock), and I enjoyed it so much, I platated it. Here is the post I wrote about it for my game of the year awards last year.

I played it for several dozes hours, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I have written many posts about what I loved and didn’tt like about the game, so I won’t belabor the point. I will say that I really loved the heart of the game, the fact that it incorporated magic into it, and how much diversity was in it.

Quite frankly, I was looking for something to replicate that feeling. I like a good sim, but I’m quite picky about what works and doesn’t work for me. I was really hoping this game would scratch that itch because on paper, it should be right up my alley. You’re a vamp who runs away from home and into a community filled with discord and strife? And you have to find a way to make the warring factions make nice (I’m assuming). There are werewolves, vampires, and other manners of fae (I think), which is great for me. I love that shit.

What I’m trying to say is that there was everything that I liked in this game. A farming/life sim. Magic and fantastical creatures. Not the chibi look, but I can grit my teeth and deal with that. Benig a vamp! I love vampires. I should have been all over that. But I just wasn’t.


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Birdigo, indies, and when a game just misses, part four

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I have one last post in me for the 100%ing  of Birdigo (John August, Corey Martin), and then it’s time to move on. I’m so relieved that I got the plat so that I don’t have to play the game again. That is no diss against the game, but a diss against my obsessive nature.

Side note (yes, this soon into the post): In the Discord I’m in, there’s a joke that me and a woman who is very similar to me are the same person. She recently moved to Minnesota, too, so that makes it even funnier. Separately, there is another woman who I’ve become quite close to offline (meaning in DMs). We like to joke that we are the same person as well. Shes’ the one who alerted me to the fact that I might be neurospicy, and I’ll be forever grateful to her.

Today, in the Discord, they were cracking wise about being neurospicy (ADHD for one and ADHD/autistic for the other) and how they had to pay the neurospicy tax. One penalty was the result of getting interested in an activity, being passionate for about ten seconds, and then losing all desire in it. They both commented earsier than I did, so when I wake up, I get a bunch of fun posts to read and respond to.

The two I mentioned above were commiserating about all the things they had stored in their closets because of this neurodivergency trait. They joked that this is how it was for children, obviously, as they were adults and most definitely did not do that. I laughed in rueful recognition when I read their comments because I most definitely did not do that, either. I was a grown-ass adult who most definitely did not have closets filled with jigsaw puzzles I’d never even opened (which I posted).

Anyway, this is the reason why once I go past a certain point in an activity, I have to keep going until I do it. It didn’t matter if I was happy about it or enjoyed it; I just had to do it.

Let’s talk about that final achievement. It was winning one run for the last route (Short-Tailed Shearwater). This route had 22 stops with the last stop being 20,000 flaps (points). This is middling when it comes to number of stops and number of flaps. I don’t know why this was the last to unlock as it wasn’t special in any way. In fact, I think that’s part of the reason I struggled with it. It was just meh–and a grind. Oh, here’s my post from yesterday in which I talk about the second achievement and indie games in general.

It’s funny because in looking up the name of the last route, I ran across a guide as to how to win. The first tip was to stick to one strategy. I laughed ruefully because I learned that way too late. I would say this is probably the most important tip as it’s too easy to get swayed–especially for me and my neurodivergent brain. But it really benefits you to establish your strategy early and stick with it.

It also benefits you to try to find the synergies that will boost your strategy. Of course that’s where RNG plays a part in that you have to decide which strategy you want to use and stick with it. That means that you have to pass on oter legit strategies even if they show up later.


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What matters to me in gaming (and what doesn’t), part two

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Let’s talk more about everything that is wrong with gaming. It’s been a shit week, and it just seems to be getting worse. Plus, the weather is so gross. It’s been in the eighties to ‘feels like’ in the hundreds–which suuuuuuucks. It’s definitely summer, which means sticky slimy. And insects coming out to play. Bah. Let me get back to winter, please. I’m doubly mad that we skipped spring because I hate summer so much.

My brother taught me a really cool trick to help with CPU. I usually have about fifty tabs open–up to a hundred or more. (He has over a hundred). You can group together tabs and then ‘shrink’ the group so all of the tabs are hidden. All you see are the the tab group names. It really celars up space, and then you can click on the group tag to let the tabs come out to play.

I was so excited when my brother taught me this, which made him laugh. It was the coolest thing, and it makes my life so much easier. It brought down my CPU usage by around 30%! I joked with my brother that I would be doing this for the  next following hour or two. Onrce you put a bunch of tabs in a group, you can name it and give it a color. It’s seriously the coolest thing I’ve learned in quite some time.

Back to games. We, the consumers, are part of the problem . We are not the cause of the problem, and there isn’t much we can do to stem the problem–but we are definitely part of the problem. Meaning, we’re going to buy the games no matter how expensive they get. There was talk about how expensive  Grand Theft Auto VI (Rockstar Games) would have to get before people wouldn’t buy it. $80 for the base game hasn’t stopped it from selling pre-orders like crazy. The fifth game sold roughly 230 million copies world wide. It came out in September of 2013, so that’s nearly 13 years ago.

This is mind-boggling, but, honestly, it’s not as many copies as I thought it would be. A content creator I watch sometimes said to guess how many copies the game had sold. I thought it would be over a billion, quite frankly. But a quarter-billion is still an astounding number.

I’m sure this game will match if not exceed the number. Or maybe do slightly less, but it’sll be around the same number. People are not NOT going to buy the game. I think the only glitch is that there is no physical copy being produced (which, just, sigh). I said in my post yesterday why I personally don’t care about physical copies, but I do think it’s a shame that there won’t be any. Why? Because a lot of people may not be able to afford the game at full price, and without any second-hand copies, they will have to do without.


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Indie games, Dark Souls III, and me

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Let’s talk more about indie games and Dark Souls III (FromSoft, definitely not an indie game). Here is my post from yesterday in which I talked a bit about both. Well, I talk about indie games and FromSoft (if not specifically the FromSoft I’m currently playing) I’m in The Ringed City DLC, and I have finally attained my beloved Black Witch Set, which is after the first boss of the DLC. The armor is also in the second Souls game, but it’s harder to get in that game. Or rather, there’s a chance that the game will glitch and not give it to you after killing an NPC invader. And that invader only shows up in the Scholar of the First Sin edition after you light up all the torches in the area (there’s something like 20 of them? Oh, wow. There are 49 of them. So more than double what I estimated.

Because the level is very vertical with many ladders, the drop can get hung up on a ladder in a way that you can’t reach it. Quitting out and logging back in (something that usually works for drops you can’t reach/didn’t get as the NPC falls to their death) doesn’t do anything. This happened to me once, and I was so mad that I had taken the time to do all the torches, kill the invader, and I got nothing for my efforts.

In this game, you just have to get to the mid-point of The Ringed City DLC (well, not quit mid) and defeat a different NPC invader to get the armor. There’s a veil that you can get a bit later that you can wear instead of the hat. I don’t wear either, though, because I’m wedded to my ridiculously big hat. It’s my favorite piece of armor in any From game, bar none. And it’s not even close.

Anyway, I want to sing the praises of Dorhy’s Gnawing once again. It’s a miracle that sends out little bugs to chew away at the enemy, and it procks bleed really easily. That means that after a certain amount of damage, there’s a burst, and the enemy takes a big chunk of damage.

It takes 25 Faith, which is quite a lot in this game. I tend to spread my points, and my beloved Chaos Bed Vestiges takes 20 Int (and 10 Faith). Plus, I need 18 Strength for the Executioner’s Greatsword (my early-to-mid game sword) and 26 Strength for my beloved Lorian’s Greatsword (my late-game sword). It takes 30 (!!) in Attunement to get 5 spell slots. I knew it was a lot, but I didn’t realize it cost THAT much.

One of the best QOL changes Elden Ring had was that the number of spell slots was not depnedent upon any stat. You started with two regardless of class, and then you had to find Memory Stones around the map. Each one gave you a slot, and there were a total of 10 of them in the game. Plus a talisman (ring) that gives you two extra slots. So you can have a  total of 12 slots! Luxury.

I need to find an indie game to play now that I’m done with Creature Kitchen (The Rat Zone). I’ve tried several word game demos, but none of them have quite hit the spot. I’m still playing Birdigo (John August, Corey Martin), but I’m hitting that “I want to quit but I can’t” space. I have two achievements left, and I’m going to get them done if it kills me. It won’t, but it’s killing my joy for the game.


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Indie games are (often) my jam

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Let’s talk about indie games. As AAA games are getting more and more bloated, and more and more expensive, indie games are holding the line as far as scope and cost. And yet, they are still innovating and creating experiences that are thrilling, charming, chill AF, engrossing, etc. They continue to delight me even as there are many indie games that are, to put it politely, hot garbage.

I think one of the reasons I have such a good time with indies is because I am much more open when I try an indie game than a triple A. Or rather, I go in with less preconceived notions than I do when I play a triple A game. In addition, I have different expectations when I’m buying a triple A versus an indie game.

Side note: I rarely buy triple A games. I mentioned this in the post yesterday how the last one I reviewed was Ghost of Tsushima (Sucker Punch Productions) in December of 2024. Again, we are not talking about FromSoft as they are in their own category. The last game I reviewed from them was–well, it was Elden Ring Nightreign, but that doesn’t count. The last real FromSoft game I reviewed was Shadow of the Erdtree, which was released in June of 2024. Wait a minute. I did review Nightreign, and it came out in May of last year. So that’s the last AAA game I reviewed. I’ll be honst with you. If it wasn’t a From game, I wouldn’t have bought it.

(Restrains from going down the FromSoft path.)

I don’t do multiplayer games, either. I don’t do shooters, sci-fi, or  strategy games. I do do RPGs, adventure games, action-adventure games, and cozy games. Within the cozy genre, I like story-driven games, games about death, and cooking sims. Cooking sims and other kinds of sims.

We have to talk about price point as well. I rarely pay more than twenty dollars for an indie game. There are a few that were twenty-five or so, and even that made me hesitate. But, I still forked over the money, and I was glad I did. I don’t usually do the money per hour conversion, but one particular game I’m thinking of that was twenty-five bucks, I put over 250 hours into it. That’s 10 cents an hour.

When I say I don’t expect the same things from AAA games versus indie games, I don’t mean that I expect less from one or the other–I just mean I expect different things. With a non-From AAA game, I expect great graphics, sweeping narratives, thrilling action, and just everything to be epic. I swear to god, I am not being snide or snarky when I say that this is a good thing.


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Let’s talk about demos in general

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Before I talk about more demos I’ve played, I want to talk about demos in general. Steam Next Fest is happening right now, and while it used to be a gerat way to see what is new and coming out, now, it’s just way too massive. There are thousands of games on Steam, and, let’s be real. They’re having sales all the time, so it’s nothing special. Here is my post from yesterday on a few demos I really enjoyed.

What it does mean, however, is that there are tons of new demos. I have been adding them like they’re going out of style, and I think I added six or seven. The thing about–ok, I forgot what I was going to say here. But I will say that there were a few games I didn’t like, a few I did like, but not any today that I really like.

I’m going to analyze what catches my eye when I’m playing a demo and what turns me off.

First of all, if it’s first person, chances are I’m going to turn it off rigcht away. That’s just because first person almost always makes me nauseous. I don’t know why Cerature Kitchen (The Rat Zone) from yesterday didn’t, but my theory is beacuse it’s not trying to be photo-realstic, so my brain can accept it as not real.

Another thing that irritates me is if there’s no tutorial. Look. I can figure most shit out, but if there’s not a basic tutorial, I’m going to be frustrated. I played a game that I really wanted to like, but I was lost as to what to do. And it’s a type of game I play often. There are certain tropse that it did not follow, much to its detriment. People like to give tropes a bad rap, but there are times when they are needed .

Once again, I’d like to say that since I mostly try the demos for indie games, I give them as much benefit of the doubt as possible. However, at the end of the day, if I can’t actually play a game, then there’s no point to it.

Here’s something I hate in any game–timed mini-games. One game I quite liked had a mini game for when you were catching bugs (part of the story). It’s the old ‘hit the button when the bar is in the green zone’ except in this case you have to hold down the LMB (no controller) and let go when it’s in the middle of the green bar.


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A quick look at some indie games

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I cannot believe it’s June already. How the hell did this year go by so quickly? In part it’s because it’s been mostly winterlike that it doesn’t feel as if time has advanced. or rather, we were stuck in one day for months. *Stridently ignoring world around me*

Summer Game Fest was on Friday, and there were some decent games. Nothing for me, though, as the ones I was most interested in were first-person. which I can’t play because I get nauseous. I also watched the XBox Direct yesterday. It was really good for the first half (if you care about the big games), but then it draaaaaagged in the second half. Plus, ending on COD was so ugh. Didn’t they learned from last year that the people who like that game doesn’t watch the show and vice-versa?

The big show was solid if you like Triple A games. I’m not a huge fan, but Geoff kept things moving. Hm. I’m trying to remember any game that really hit me hard. I’m looking at a list of the trailers, and there really wasn’t much for me. There was one game that intrigued me and it had the prologue on Steam. It’s called 1666 Amesterdam (Panache Digital Games), and it looked to be about witches in Amsterdam. I will admit that having black cats in it sold me on it, and I eagerly downloaded the prologue.

I will say, that the twenty minutes (slight exaggeration) of installing the sliders was not a good start. The graphics were rough, and I’m not someone who cares much about that sort of thing. When I’m looking at/playing an indie game, I’m very forgiving of flaws. I know it’s a small team of, say, under twenty people. So, yeah, it’s not going to look like a Triple A game.

The man who founded this studio was the creator of the original Assassin’s Creed. Even though I don’t vibe with those games, I have to show respect to the man who came up with the idea. Or not. But my point is that he’s a luminary in the industry. The tralier for his new game was interesting, even though the graphics were, ah, janky, at best. Plus, as I mentioned, black cats.

This game was coded for me. Witches, magic, and black cats? Hell to the fucking yes! I was interested in all those things, and once the shaders did their things, and I was finally in the game, I was eager to see what was going on. I did not love the graphics as I mentioned, but I was willing to overlook it. For now.

The controls were shonky and just did not feel good. Also, the game starts with you as the female protag walking around. Slowly. You can use your magicks to do wondrous things like light torches. I mean, really? And from what I remembered, it was very slow going. Meaning, it wasn’t just light up the torches simultaneously. You had to hold down the LT to ignite your wand or whatever and then use RT to actually light. I’m not sure those are the actual  controls, but they were something similar. And it was so awkward.


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