Topic: User Impressions/Reviews Thread

@Pizzamorg "Plus like… I’d like to think I wasn’t a prude, but I feel like sex is rarely handled well in games..?"

I really vibed with this point. I would like more romance in a game, but it's often handled in a way that's uncomfortable to me, that with most games I'd rather see them leave it out completely. I know people love Persona 5 for letting you pick a partner, but I thought it was done in such a weird hentai dating sim way, that it creeps me out - and I'd rather just have the complete cast remain friends (I still picked one of them for the trophy, though). I had the same with the Dragon Age games, in which I really liked the characters, but they become less interesting once you start to date them.

And I'm kind of the same with story. So many games have such uninteresting stories that it gets in the way of my enjoyment, which is why in recent years I'm gravitating more to gameplay heavy games. And I love great stories in games (The Last of Us!), but these are quite rare.

Anyway, that's just highlighting one sentence out of your review. The rest of your review
made me super interested in Midnight Suns, but it does sound like a very long game! Is it 60 hours for a playthrough?

Not to over complicate things @Kidfried but game length is fairly subjective. What I mean, is that the game has a collection of main missions set over three acts, sometimes these missions will require you to do a randomly generated side mission first or complete a research project or something, but really these are the only mandatory activities in the entire game.

While it will make up a bulk of what you are doing, basically everything else is effectively optional. Especially if you are running it on the lowest difficulty, where minmaxing your bonds and stuff may not be quite as important.

An example is that your base of operations, The Abbey, has this Metroidvania style extended quest branch that threads through it, unlocking additional areas which provides lore or character details that feed back into the main questline. It is an ungodly mountain of tedious busywork though, so while I finished this the first time around, I didn't touch any of this the second time (outside of the mandatory introductory missions/cutscenes for this questline) and was never required to, either. I can't imagine how much time that shaved off of my playthrough.

Likewise, there are groups that run social clubs in the Abbey too, they also come with a bunch of busywork side activities which I also skipped the second time around, which again probably saved me so much time.

I think of my 120 hours, probably about 60 to 70 of that was my first playthrough with me being super thorough to try and do everything in the core game (no DLC touched). There is probably another 10 to 20 hours on top where I dabbled in endgame and DLC content. Then the last forty or so hours was my new game plus run with all the DLC included.

No idea what you could possibly mean!

It always struck me as a little weird that you can date your teacher or little sister, but all the guys are off-limits lol.

@Pizzamorg The card game aspect of Midnight Suns baffles me. How does the developer of XCOM develop a card game instead of the polished SRPG gameplay everyone thought we would get? I'll never understand the choice.

It definitely sounds like you tended to enjoy your time with it, though. Will have to give it a try at some point. I also love social simulation gameplay. I just wish it was literally anything other than Marvel superheroes!

Yeah it is weird, because in a lot of ways the best part and absolute worst part about Midnight Suns is its deck building stuff. Like would the game have worked without it? Of course, and it would probably be a lot less frustrating too. But also so much of the loop is built around you building decks and shaping your heroes, the game would lose so much if you took the deck building out. And I guess you could probably replace it with some other system, but off the top of my head I can't really think of anything that would fit nearly as well.

Also, it is probably fine if you don't like Marvel, as few of the Suns really truly embody their characters in other media (at least outside of battle). It is also full of smaller heroes too which maybe you won't have much knowledge of to take in with you, like Magik, who is voiced by Laura Bailey of all people doing a terrible Eastern European accent.

@Pizzamorg That's a shame her performance is bad due to the accent. They should have given her a different role then since she's usually great.

Perhaps subconsciously motivated by @RogerRoger , here’s another review of a walking sim in space!

We now live in a world where Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become an expanding part of daily life. AI are composing poems, creating art, and writing research papers, not to mention chatting with you like a friend or recommending recipes. It’s not too far fetched to imagine a reality 60 years from now where AI moderated space stations exist.

Enter Tacoma, a game made by Fullbright studios, which you may recall made a splash with Gone Home.

When Fullbright began developing Tacoma 10 years ago, ChatGPT wasn’t even a twinkle in Elon Musk’s eye, but the fiction surrounding senescent assistive interactive computer personalities dates way back to Knight Rider’s K.I.T.T., or HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The idea of commercial space travel has also been percolating for many decades. And so it is here that Fullbright selected a setting to tell this story — in the year 2088 we begin our journey of the tragedy of the Tacoma space station.

The game drops you into the role of Amitjyoti "Amy" Ferrier who has been sent to investigate the abandoned Tacoma station and retrieve information from its AI, ODIN. With no remaining crew members and only partial augmented reality (AR) log data and environmental clues left behind, you are tasked with unraveling the circumstances surrounding ODIN and the 6 crew members.

The Good

It’s not necessarily a novel gameplay idea, but it’s done expertly here. The clues about the events are given thorough AR generated clips that were preserved prior to the partial destruction of the station’s database. As you might guess, the messages and scenes left behind are scattered, disjointed, and cryptic. As you uncover information, it’s like putting a puzzle together one piece at a time.

It sounds like it might be frustrating or boring, but in reality, the unfolding narrative is done in a way that keeps you engaged throughout. You’re never very far from the next piece of story and the game directs you through a relatively linear feed of information so that each reveal builds upon the last. There’s plenty of gaps in information, yet the major events are laid for a foundation. The end result is a satisfying storyline that manages to be both concrete and also open to some interpretation. If you have the patience to explore more thoroughly, environmental storytelling embellishes the experience further.

Surprisingly, you grow emotionally attached to each of the six crew members, despite spending very little time with them. From the first AR scene, each individual’s part in the tale starts to crystallize and uncover its own compelling story in the background of the greater narrative. Much of the success of these personal story hooks come from solid voice acting performances.

Like I say, Tacoma doesn’t pioneer new storytelling territory, but what it does is keep you engaged. It’s aided by a very short runtime — the whole game can easily be completed in under 2 hours. But I’d argue that its brevity is one of the game’s positives. There’s no prolonged exposition about how the world got to this stage or excessive side content to distract from the tight narrative.

The Bad

In the “walking sim” gaming genre, by definition there is little by way of dynamic gameplay, so the extras surrounding a walking sim experience need to be top notch. Things like visual appeal, set piece design, and strength of lore should be compelling and captivating to help sell the experience. Unfortunately Tacoma falls short in a few of these areas. The world building and artistic representation of life on a space station come across as oversimplified. I do think some of this was done for the aforementioned storytelling purposes, however there’s a difference between tactical omission of detail and flat infeasibility of concept. For example, it’s hard to believe that computer interfaces would be this simplistic in 2088. It does keep the gameplay easier to manage, but for me it was immersion breaking at times to see things like smiley faces 🙂 and frowning faces ☹️ to represent mechanical parameters that were either good or bad. It’s difficult to describe, especially without story spoilers, but suffice it to say it wasn’t the most convincing vision of the future I’ve ever seen.

The Ugly

And from a technical aspect, the game is not without flaws. Firstly, the performance was very spotty on my base PS4. In fact, after about 30 minutes the game started to crawl and stutter so badly and eventually froze, so I had to shut down and reboot. I did a database rebuild on my PS4 just in case it was my hardware’s fault and that seemed to help, but the game still slowed down at points and looked like it was about to crash again on a few occasions, although it didn’t recur. I had been heavily using the rewind and fast-forward mechanics of the AR sequences when my crash occurred and so I avoided doing much of that again, but I’m not sure if that’s what the problem was.

The poor performance was surprising, given the game’s visuals were nothing spectacular. In addition to rewind and fast-forward, I think part of the technical strain relates to the interactive items in the environment — you can pick up mugs, pieces of trash, floating rolls of duct tape, etc. Most of the items you can pick up are completely superfluous, but every now and then you pick up a letter or an item that helps tell part of the story. I appreciate that the unnecessary interactivity was included because it motivated me to be thorough with exploration, but it also probably contributed to the chugging frame rate and instability of performance.

Overall

Tacoma was a game I really enjoyed. It was a nice distraction from larger, gameplay heavy action-RPGs and open-world time sinks. In the end, your satisfaction of the experience depends upon your tolerance of walking sims. Additionally, it’s hard not to judge the game in the context of its price. I picked it up on sale for less than $5, so for me that was a good value. Due to the game’s short run time (even the platinum can be obtained within that 2 hours with a little effort) if you’re on the fence then maybe wait and see if it drops on one the the services like PS+ or GamePass.

For me, the game effectively scratched a specific itch.
I give it 7 lunar orbits out of 10.

@Pizzamorg Very interesting and informative write-up about Midnight Suns, thanks for sharing! Despite being something of a "casual-plus" Marvel fan, I've largely ignored this game, and right now I'm having a hard time coming up with a good reason as to why. The strength of its NG+ pull clearly speaks volumes, and I'm real glad that you "got" it because, based on your conclusion about its Marmite status, that means you've found a new favourite, and that's always awesome!

I like romance when it's kept PG-13 (make a few bad innuendo-laden puns, raise an eyebrow, pan the camera out the window and fade to black) but I think that the idea of romance with pre-established licenced characters is kinda weird, and so I can totally see why it's been left out here. I liked getting to know the original characters in Mass Effect and Dragon Age and could therefore naturally "fall" for some of them, but I doubt I'd feel the same way about someone like Spidey (even if it were a fresh take, with a new design and voice actor). It's the same with my favourite characters from other material; they feel too much like old friends, so it'd be icky to roleplay a romantic entanglement with any of them. This is just my two cents, of course, but I reckon it's a rare example of the positive power licencing rules and restrictions can have.

Besides, you can't please everybody, as your point about the writing's interpretation of these characters proves, so I think any and all grumbles would've been x10 worse if you threw romance into the mix.

I appreciate how detailed you've gotten about the gameplay aspects which you didn't like. It's tough to do when you've largely enjoyed an experience, so your honesty coming from a "I had a great time, but..." perspective is a lot of help, particularly when weighing up whether to invest in a game of this size. Honestly, after reading your description of the deck-building combat system and its RNG flaws, I'd learned enough to know that I doubt I'll ever wanna play the game for myself, and that's brilliant. I reckon my endgame frustration would far outweigh the charm of the concept and the early fun of the system itself, so you've saved me money and time. I'm real grateful, thank you!

But again, the fact that you "got" the game in spite of those flaws says a lot about how effective it must've been for you, and so I hope you continue to enjoy your return sessions!

***

@Th3solution The genre's baaack!!

I'll admit, I don't think I've ever even heard of Tacoma before, but its premise sounds eerily similar to ADR1FT (another indie space-based walking simul... well, no, more like floating simulator, which I've played and enjoyed before). Whereas that game leant on the novelty of its gorgeous zero-gravity environment to unravel a supremely average mystery, it sounds like Tacoma does the opposite, and tells a great story in spite of its mediocre gameplay. It's a shame that nobody's managed to get the balance right yet, at least in space! The next time you're in the market for one of these brief stopgap experiences, take a look at ADR1FT. At the very least, it runs a whole lot better than Tacoma would appear to, but it'd make for an interesting comparison. Likewise, if I see Tacoma going cheap, I'll give it a go (maybe playing it on a PS5 might power through its poor performance?).

It's always a pleasure to read your contributions to this archive, buddy. Whatever secret ingredient makes a good writer, you've definitely got it. Thanks for sharing, and for the tag!

@RogerRoger Thanks so much for the feedback and also for reading. 😄 And I now I do remember reading your ADR1FT review a couple years ago. I’ll have to keep that game in mind too for when the mood strikes. I read someplace else that Tacoma was also comparable to Deliver Us the Moon which is encouraging because I already had that in my backlog and if I enjoy it, it’s sequel Deliver Us Mars also reviewed well.

I feel like you’d like Tacoma but after I wrote the review I realized that I probably subconsciously gave it a small bump, maybe 0.5-1 points worth, just for the sheer welcome change it was from the longer games I’ve been playing. As much as I’m loving Jedi Survivor I can’t help but feel a little overwhelmed that I’m 25 hours into it and I’m still closer to the beginning than I am to the end. 😅

@Th3solution great review! I actually think I have owned this for years and just never played it. Think I got it for free for some reason because someone said its like BioShock which is one of my favourite games ever. Based on your review I dunno why those two games are similar, I guess I need to play it.

Thank you for your kind words @RogerRoger! I must have done something right, given I sold it to some and put you off 😂

Interestingly they actually got Yuri back to voice Spider-Man here (same actor as the PS4 game), the game actually has a lot of name value cast members when I looked them up on IMDB, so it kinda surprised me the acting wasn't better, but that probably speaks more at the quality of the writing.

@Th3solution nice write up sol! Had never even heard of the game but you experience with it has definitely put it on my radar. Added to the wishlist, so the moment it hits a sale I’ll pull the trigger 👊

@Pizzamorg Thanks! Likewise I really enjoyed reading your Midnight Suns breakdown. It was entertaining as well as very informative. I feel like I’ve got a much clearer picture into the game. Midnight Suns seems quite unique. I can’t think of another game that sounds anything like it. For that reason I continue to be tempted. I usually try to support games that innovate. Honestly I’m intrigued by the social sim aspects more than the combat. The gameplay I’ve watched and the explanations in your review haven’t really inspired me with any confidence that I’d like it. The only deck building game I’ve tried was Slay the Spire, which I did get some enjoyment from but I fell off it pretty quickly. I dunno, there wasn’t enough of a hook to keep me engaged, I guess. And that’s where Midnight Suns should have a edge with the Marvel theme, which I like, and the social sim / relationship building, which I also usually like. It’s almost as if Firaxis Games has planned for these preference contingencies by throwing several genres into the mix, just to cover their bases. I imagine the board room pitch going something like this:

“Alright people, we have the Marvel license secured. What do we do with it? People are at the saturation point with this superhero stuff. We can’t possibly churn out a competitor to Insomniac or Rocksteady’s games here. We could never improve on NetherRealm in the fighting genre. Square-Enix is flailing with the multiplayer action venture. How can we give gamers something different and a reason to stand out?”

“Let’s do a deck building strategy game.”

“Hmmm… ok. That’s a pretty small gaming niche.”

“We can add in a social sim part. Don’t people want to see what it would be like if Wolverine were to hang out with Dr. Strange and have pint?”

“Sounds good. Let’s throw in some Metroidvania components because people need a familiar loop to hold on to.”

“Perfect. Something for everyone.”

[Two weeks later…]
“Uh, scratch that Ghost Rider-Magik sex scene. Disney says no.”

😂 Anyways, I’ll continue to keep Midnight Suns in the back of my mind. If I didn’t have so many games in the backlog I’d be more inclined to pull the trigger on it.

As for Tacoma, yeah, it’s way different from BioShock. More like Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture on a space station. I suppose it’s like BioShock in the way that there’s a lot of narrative told through collectibles, environmental clues, and recordings, but not nearly as fleshed out as BioShock and it has absolutely no combat.

@colonelkilgore Thanks, colonel. Worst case scenario, it’s half of an afternoon and a couple pounds wasted. And even then there’s the platinum at the end, so it’s not all in vain. Have you played the likes of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, Gone Home, What Remains of Edith Finch, or Dear Esther? I think I recall you did Edith Finch but can’t be sure. Either way Tacoma would be a reasonable entry point into the genre, although Edith Finch remains my favorite of the bunch.

@Th3solution yeah I played two of those - Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture and What Remains of Edith Finch. I really liked the former but was left a bit unsatisfied by the latter… so guess that there’s a 50/50 chance that Tacoma will land for me.

@colonelkilgore As far as “piecing together a narrative of past events by reviewing historical accounts of people who are no longer present” goes, Tacoma is definitely more like EGttR, so that bodes well.

@Th3solution Nice, tightly written review. I enjoyed how you established context for the game's exploration of AI in the introduction. And, yes, the almost overnight explosion in commercial and popular adoption of AI tech recently is another one of those things that has made me realize I'm living in the midst of the sort of science-fiction settings I used to read about as a kid.

It reminds me way back in the 00s when people asked William Gibson (early titan in the cyberpunk subgenre) why his novels stopped adopting explicitly futuristic settings, and he said that contemporary reality was sufficiently filled with science-fiction potential for him. I feel that more than ever.

I used to be intolerant of the 'walking sim' genre, but I've since come to appreciate what good ones can offer in terms of immersion and atmosphere. Sometimes adding gameplay elements actively detracts from the effectiveness of a genre, too (SOMA is a good example of what should have been a walking sim, but had a bunch of standard horror game mechanics stuffed in that didn't do any favors to the pacing or ultimate experience with the game). But you're right: sans real gameplay, the writing and presentation need to be top-notch, so it's too bad that the game fails somewhat in this respect, even if it did ultimately end up winning you over.

@Th3solution Morning friend! Just got round to reading your excellent review of Tacoma. I picked the game up a while back and you’ve brought it back to the forefront of my mind. I’m a big fan of the potential of immersion and world building in games so ‘walking sims’ definitely scratch an itch, though I too would/will be annoyed by simplistic interfaces. It is highly plausible that interfaces in the future could be understood by toddlers mind. Thanks for posting 👍

@Ralizah I’m fascinated (and at times horrified) by Artificial Intelligence and evolving computer technology. AI is a well-worn science fiction fodder, but is becoming more and more relatable by the day. We are living in a world dominated by unchanged ethical dogma which is thousands of years old and how it interfaces with technology that has literally cropped up within the last 25 years is going to be interesting.

@AgentCooper Cheers for reading and for the positive feedback and comments. It’s a little game nestled to the side so I thought it would be nice to shine a little light on it.

@Th3solution see that Tacoma just went on a pretty deep reduction within the Days of Play sale, nice one for drawing my attention to it at just the right time 😉

@colonelkilgore Fullbright should give me a cut! 😅 But yeah, if you utilize the sale price it’s relatively low risk. $20 is way too much for as short as it is, but $7 is a reasonable cost, imo.

@Th3solution yeah it was already on the wishlist thanks to your review, so I thought it’d be rude not to. Picked up a few bargains tbh… the backlog is a monster