I'll admit all the praise I've heard for Celeste before yours is typically "best game evarrrrrr" which just seems to rub me the wrong way nowadays after all the hype I've heard for various games over the years that I didn't end up enjoying... So it's nice to hear yours being much more reserved but still very positive too.
Also that pixel artwork is rather naff... All over to me but the characters do look especially rough
The tracks you chose from the soundtrack are quite nice on the other hand!
@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: The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy (PC)
@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: The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy (PC)
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: The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy (PC)
... I leave you boys alone for ten minutes and look at how quickly this topic has gone south 😂
Though I'd probably be just as juvenile... My artisitic skills are limited to stick figures (My time as a teacher has not improved it at all) and with that touch pad I'd probably conjure up a monstrosity even Picasso would find perplexing
@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
@Ralizah I enjoyed reading your thoughts, and some of them gave me a chuckle. I didn’t find the game particularly engaging either, and although I probably liked it a little better than you, I’m glad that it was over quick and that I didn’t pay anything for it (other than my PS Plus subscription and an hour of my time). It’s unfortunate that such a serious and potentially meaningful subject such as clinical depression and suicide is given such a lackluster treatment. Sometimes I think games and other media (movies, books, articles, social media posts, etc) get “credit” or a boost in public opinion just because they are dealing with an edgy social issue, even if the effort is horribly executed and doesn’t produce any meaningful dialog about said issue or any progress in increasing awareness of a fringe social problem. I give credit for producers and writers of socially conscious media for having the guts to talk about difficult subjects or taboo issues, but when the product is not well thought out then it certainly comes across as disingenuous and then paradoxically undermines what progress they may have been hoping to achieve. Unfortunately I feel like sometimes the motivation for taking on the hard subjects is actually more for social praise and an easy cash grab by taking advantage of society’s guilty conscience as we often subconsciously fall victim to moral licensing and feel if we don’t support a politically correct or socially conscious effort then we are somehow part of the problem. For example, the Oscar Academy Awards is a good example - if a movie has a socially conscious theme then it will get much more consideration for best picture nominations. It happens every year. In the case of Actual Sunlight, the game has a 75 Metacritic score. Many outlets gave it 8/10 scores and Digitally Downloaded even gave it 5/5, calling it a “must play.” The fact that the game is a serious attempt at presenting depression into the gaming sphere seems to have been enough for a lot of reviewers to ignore the lack of any depth the game takes in tackling the subject matter, as you state in your review. Not to mention the inaccuracy of the content, as you pointed out as well.
Anyways, sorry to divert off on a philosophical tangent, and I’m definitely not saying that Actual Sunlight is guilty of using the subject of depression to sell this game, but I do appreciate your willingness to call a spade a spade when a game is just poorly developed. And like I said, I might not go all the way to a 2.5/10 even though I agree with most of your criticism of the game. The game did make me ponder things for a short time and for me it was a unique experience, so I give it some credit there. Since it’s so different from the kind of game I usually enjoy, I can’t say I necessarily regretted playing it. And if it serves as a springboard for other developers to take on mental illness in a legitimate way, then maybe that’s something. (Even though Hellblade did a much better attempt at this than Actual Sunlight.)
Having set the kids to read quietly in class I took a cheeky look at Push Square whilst I had the chance @Ralizah .
Wish I'd read the book now for them out aloud instead 😂
Not that your writing was bad or anything. Your review was amazing as always... Just the topic at hand and the barebones, lacklustre presentation of the game made for incredibly dry reading.
I can't imagine actually playing it even if it was a brief 2 hours!
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