Celeste is one of many games on my radar that I'm sure I'd enjoy but don't think I'll ever get around to playing but that does make me want to add it to the ever expanded backlog..
Thanks It'll be a challenge for games on older consoles, but for PS4/Switch/PC/Vita games, there's no real reason not to include them. It's always fun to actually physically see what the game in question that is being reviewed looks like.
Honestly, even a month ago, I wasn't planning on playing Celeste any time soon either. It was just one of those "one day" sorta games. But it won't on sale for a price I've been holding out for since launch ($10), so I thought: "Why the heck not!" and bought it. Initially, I was intending to wait and make this the first game I played on my Switch Lite, but my curiosity got the better of me, and that clearly didn't happen.
I don't think it's some sort of modern classic of the genre like some people do, but it's well worth picking up, on sale or at the normal asking price.
@Ralizah Wonderful and entertaining review to read, as always. I don’t really have much interest in Celeste since I’m not much of a platformer fan, but I’ll bank it in my memory in case I get the urge.
➖➖➖➖➖➖➖
I finally put Marvel’s Spider-Man out of its misery. Completed the story and 100%’ed the map. So much has been said about it I really won’t report more. @mookysam said it all the other day much better than I could have.
Interestingly, although I’m glad to have finished the game, and I feel like the length was just about right, I find that I am craving more open world icon chasing. My plan had been to continue to work on my Valkyria Chronicles 4 playthrough (I’m finishing up chapter 7, at about 20 hours in - I figure I’m about 1/3 of the way through the game), and then add a completely different type of game as my other game to rotate in with it. But I find myself considering another open world game to replace Spider-Man. I’ll let the dust settle a little bit and see what strikes my fancy.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
@Ralizah yeah issun's busty lady routine completely wore thin, and I don't think I would have thought differently of I had played it at launch! Also wearing how he spells somethings out to the nth degree, leave some player agency. I've only ever played botw so would love to give an older zelda game a go sometime. I played mostly in handheld, though there are sections where the touchscreen didn't feel precise enough (like the susano power slash sections) and I used my pro controller in table top mode. @Gremio108 great analogy!! I remember reading the book and being like, they've thrown the ring in the bloody volcano, why is there still a 150 pages left?!
@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy Yeah, I usually steer clear of almost anything that's generating such ridiculous levels of (usually undeserved) hype and praise. Humans are herd animals by nature, so they're more likely to exalt or pile on a game when they see a lot of their peers doing the same. And, to be honest, the sprite work put me off the game for a long time.
The artwork for the environments on a pure design level isn't great, but the fantastic use of color helps to redeem them to some degree. But, yeah, the character sprites are pure garbo. I initially wasn't a huge fan of the artstyle employed in the character portraits, either, as it struck me as a bit Tumblr-ish, but it grew on me.
Yeah, the music is uncharacteristically good for the type of game it is.
The music in the B-sides is often, unfortunately, much more chiptuney and can get a bit grating due to the fact that those levels get quite long (up to an hour for some of them, in my case) and the music tends to stay the same throughout.
Currently Playing: Resident Evil Village: Gold Edition
@Ralizah I find that especially with Metroidvania type games, that the music begins to grate when you are stuck in any one area, as the ones I've played that all have the same music that play for the different areas. I loved Axiom Verge but hated the music by the end!
Life is more fun when you help people succeed, instead of wishing them to fail.
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.
I finally got around to finishing Tearaway Unfolded. The final couple of levels are completely bonkers, and I would hugely recommend this game to anyone who has any affinity with the Playstation. You'll see what I mean when you get near the end of the game.
Good job, Parappa. You can go on to the next stage now.
@Gremio108 I didn't really care for the drawing on the touch pad, I found it too fiddly. I got quite far but could never get past a section when you had to draw something (it escapes me what thst was). Apart from that it is a really fun game. I liked how your drawings appear in the game such as flags and trees, which no thought was a nice touch.
Life is more fun when you help people succeed, instead of wishing them to fail.
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.
@RogerRoger Wow, that is jarring. 😅 Yeah the newer one is spot on.
I have been lukewarm (no pun intended) toward any new Star Wars games, but I’m liking Titanfall 2 so much, I’m now kind of excited to see what Respawn has done with Jedi Fallen Order. ....I’ve got a good feeling about it [said with a smirk 😏 ] Not sure if I’ll buy it day 1 with my backlog being as crushing as it is, but we’ll see. I might not be able to wait. Not to mention it may depend if I decide to pick up Death Stranding or not. I also want to play Concrete Genie. I can’t see myself buying more than one new release the rest of the year, but I’ve foolishly said that before. That’s how my backlog got this big in the first place!
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
@JohnnyShoulder Ha, I thought the reason I struggled with the drawing bits was because I had no artistic talent to speak of. You've made me feel better, cheers
Good job, Parappa. You can go on to the next stage now.
@Gremio108 No worries, that was not my intention though lol. I'm the same I have very little artistic talent. And of course me being me, all my drawings were of boobies and willies. You imagine my surprise when the sky filled up with clouds of boobies.
Life is more fun when you help people succeed, instead of wishing them to fail.
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.
You imagine my surprise when the sky filled up with clouds of boobies.
Sounds like the sort of weather I'd expect in the Senran Kagura universe, where even the laws of nature reveal an implicit fixation on the female form.
Currently Playing: Resident Evil Village: Gold Edition
One level in particular, a taxing sniper-riddled alley on Nar Shaddaa, is constructed so poorly from random off-cuts of geometry that stumbling through it felt as though I were glitching my way to victory... but no, apparently balancing on edges barely a pixel wide is the correct route.
Ouch.
And given your probably higher tolerance for nonsense from this game given your love for the I.P. as a whole than I would have, I have to imagine these problems would irritate me even more than they did you.
It's good to know I can happily pass on this when it inevitably goes on sale.
Currently Playing: Resident Evil Village: Gold Edition
@RogerRoger That was a fantastic review! I love the Star Wars franchise, but will probably pass on this. I will continue to hope in vain for a remake of KOTOR!
Disclaimer: I spoiler-tagged my discussion of the game's ending. I don't think it matters, because anyone with a lick of sense will see where this game is going after five minutes, but if you're especially sensitive to spoilers, there you go.
Actual Sunlight
WHAT IS IT?
A two-hour long RPGMaker game where you play as an overweight, middle-aged man struggling with depression.
PLATFORM
PS Vita
LEVEL OF COMPLETION
Everything. All the trophies. Actually had to replay half the game to snag the last one, but considering the game's length, it wasn't a massive sacrifice.
PRO
There... aren't any real bugs that I encountered.
The game is almost entirely devoid of typos and grammatical mistakes.
In general, my issues with... almost everything aside, it's fairly well-written.
It's mercifully short.
The occasional CG that shows what the characters look like aren't too bad. Character portaits in text boxes aren't the worst thing in the world, either.
CON
Have you ever been trapped in a conversation with a deeply unpleasant and negative person, but feel like you're sort of obliged to listen and just want to get the conversation over with? That's what playing this game feels like. The bitter rantings of the main character feel like they were probably derived from a first-hand experience with depression, and I've had some similar thoughts myself at various points in my life (I think everyone has), but the authenticity, or lack thereof, of the main character's self-negativity doesn't make it any more entertaining or enlightening to read. You can very easily go on a random social media website and find someone crying about how fat, stupid, and ugly they are without having to pay $5 to experience it (unless you were lucky like me and got it via PS+ one month). There's no grace, art, humor, or insight gleaned from this game. It's just a day in the headspace of a deeply emotionally unwell human being. And, frankly, anyone can vomit out the nastiness supplied by one's inner critic into a short script and call it a day.
Please don't keep mentioning the main character's tendency to pleasure himself while swallowed by feelings of self-remorse, game. It's gross.
I was tempted to call this a visual novel, but it doesn't really deserve that distinction. It's a plain-jane, ugly RPGMaker game with reams of text that scroll by anytime you click on anything in the environment, except that text often has nothing to do with the thing you clicked on.
The irritating, fax machine-esque noises that issue every time text scrolls by in this game is truly appreciated. On the other hand, there's no voice acting, and basically no music, so there's no real reason to keep the sound up, either. But I didn't want to miss audio cues or something important, either. Joke's on me, I guess.
There's a bizarre message that scrolls by at one point when you examine a couple of people outside (as I said before, the text that appears often has no relation to the object you chose to examine) that basically tells the player that, unless they're 25 or older, their problems aren't real or significant. But once you hit your 30's, like the guy in this game and (presumably) the main developer, well, it's too late to turn things around. That's the implication, at least. Might as well jump off of the roof if you don't have a good thing going for you by then.
Oh, the roof. So, there's a grand total of, like, five different environments in this game. One of them is the roof of your apartment building. Its inclusion here is obvious: at some point, the player character is meant to throw themselves off of it. Sensing this early on, and quickly developing a headache from the irritating noises and cloying self-pity in all of the game's monologues (90% of the text in this game, as mentioned, is the main character talking bitterly about himself and his life), I was hoping this game might be the Breath of the Wild of suicide sims, and let me jump straight to the end once I felt like it, but that didn't turn out to be the case. You have to go through the motions and endure the requisite amount of mental self-abuse before it finally sends you up to the roof: and, of course, once it does, it won't let you reconsider or go back.
EDIT: I genuinely hope that the developer's portrayal of mental health professionals isn't derived from personal experience. With that said, I do find the complete absence of competent psychologists in this story to be somewhat irritating.
My biggest issue with all of this is probably that there's no real narrative here. No movement. No evolution. The main character begins as a deeply depressed man who apparently has no interests in life (he buys new video games, but doesn't appear to enjoy them), and ends as... a deeply depressed man who apparently has no interests in life, only, after a five year or so timeskip, he's finally ready to end it all. He has no character arc; no revelations; nothing to connect A to B aside from the necessity of the game needing to be sold as a finished product, I suppose.
There are other characters in this game, during the middle section when it briefly decides it wants to be a satire about corporate alienation or something, but they're introduced, get a few lines of dialogue, and... that's it, really. They're never developed enough for you to care what happens to them. The main character apparently develops a loveless relationship with one of them, but this is hardly even touched on. Nobody here gets an arc or evolves or is ever anything interesting, either.
The words from the title do crop up in the game at one point, but it's part of some off-hand phrase, and it's a bit weird that it became the title of the game. My guess? "Depression Quest" was already taken, and the developer(s) hunted through the script to find some combination of words they thought sounded good together, and settled on "Actual Sunlight."
CONCLUSION
I feel a little bad ragging on this, as I suspect this game is deeply personal for the person or people who made it. This is pathetically low-effort, though. This is the sort of game you might make as the final in an "Introduction to Game Design" course. It is certainly not something the developer should have been selling for actual money. I've played numerous free games that felt like more engaging, complete experiences. This fails as a game; fails as narrative; it reads like a series of blog posts from a teenager who is unable to process their emotions
Forums
Topic: Games you've recently beat
Posts 1,281 to 1,300 of 5,419
Please login or sign up to reply to this topic