Évaluations récentes de ellbent

Potionomics is a charmer of a title. It's satisfying, it's interesting, it's compelling. The art and visual design are both utterly delightful, and the fundamental structure of the game is a lovely send-up of other cutesy commerce classics like Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale, combined with some less in-depth yet still crunchy mechanical elements that one might find in their favorite card battler - slash - deckbuilder title.

The issue is that Potionomics is simply is not very user-friendly to play. It is dire need of quality-of-life features to such an extent that it places a very significant burden on the player that really should be provided by the game's UI or documentation.

Firstly, Potionomics is absolutely stuffed to the gills with timers. You only have so many pips to spend throughout your day, and that's fine; the time pressure is one of the principal challenges! This isn't an issue, although someone seeking a leisurely experience will be disappointed, the issue is that for the majority of the time these timers are hidden from you -- more than time management, Potionomics tests your memory.

You've left your shop to visit some friends. Your cauldrons are brewing. It's morning. One of your cauldrons will be ready in two time-pips, one will be ready in three time-pips, and the third won't be done for five time-pips. Tonics are worth more today, so you plan to go home in two time-pips, bottle the tonics from that second cauldron, and sell -- which takes two time-pips. Then you can bottle the ones that are five pips away right now. You keep this all in your head, because there's no way to check the timers on your cauldrons when you're out. You could go back and check the timers to make sure, but that'd lose you time if you had to come back out again.

While buying lumber, you notice -- hey! -- you've got a building material that you know is also an upgrade for a cauldron. You think. You can stop by Muktuk and check, no problem, but then, oh, you can't see what it takes to upgrade anything when it's place in your shop, even if shelves are empty or cauldrons aren't brewing anything. Thinking, well, it's worth it, you go back and unequip the cauldron. But another cauldron finished brewing, so it's time to brew a new potion for that. After you do that, you go back out and ... wait, what were you doing again? Something with Muktuk? Right! Upgrading the cauldron. Oh. You were right about the materials, but you don't enough have gold. So now you're out the time it took to go back to the shop and out again, and the cauldron you took with you was doing nothing while it could have been brewing.

You can upgrade the showcase you haven't been using, though! What does the showcase actually do again? It says +10% sale price for potions, but you can't sell anything on a showcase, so where the +10% figure in? Is that for the whole store? Adding it and removing it doesn't seem to affect prices for anything. Do you need to put a potion, specifically, in it for that to work? Could you put a tonic in there? There's no in-game glossary, guide, etc. that you could reference to get these questions answered and there's no feedback from the game of any kind when you swap things around, so that's a wash.

You come back to the shop after a shopping spree. You expanded your place, let off some stress, and bought a mess of ingredients. Now to brew. You've got some money, so you're planning on sending out a hero or two on a quest. Do you remember what tonic you needed? Sure you did. Fire. What cure did you need, though? Poison? Silence? You only checked on the expedition at the start of your outing. You could go out and check again, but then you're out the time again -- and you were planning to open the shop right after starting to brew; if you don't open the shop and sell these potions you won't have the money for the quests tomorrow morning, or the potions might not be done in time.

Without the money the next morning, you open the shop for some cash and decide to send the expeditions out in the afternoon, wrap up the day, and save and quit. On coming back to the save, you remember that you sent out expeditions, but when? Sometime in the afternoon. Was it right away, or did you lower your stress first? That would have pushed it forward. There's no way to know, because you can't check the time left on a hero's quest while you're at your shop -- or anywhere. The only indication of when a quest is done is when the hero isn't grayed on the town map anymore, but you can't check the town map without leaving your shop, which takes time. You sent out three heroes. Did they all go to the same place? Did any of them get a speed potion? You think you used one ... is it worth going out early just to get those ingredients? If you go out too early and they're not back yet, well, more wasted time.

Next morning comes, and all the potions you left brewing are done. You've got your plans. You've paid the marketing team to make sure tonics to be worth more, so it's going to be a tonic bonanza over at your place. Brew, burn firewood to speed it up, sell while they brew, and repeat. But, oh, ore is on sale today. Wait, wasn't there a really good ore you used for Sight Enhancers before that you ran out of? You've got a custom order for Sight Enhancers. Time to open up the ingredients -- oh, but if you're out of an ingredient, it doesn't show up in your list. The last time you brewed one of those was days ago; what ingredient was it? What color was it? Do you have something you could substitute? You could run out to check, but if you get it wrong, there goes the time again.

You open up your ingredients list. Maybe you still have one. The list is not sorted, nor can you sort it. You mouse over an Ore. Wait, it's not an Ore, it's a Mineral. Can you sort by ingredient type? No. You mouse over each ingredient that could be an Ore, one by one. Well, it must have A, B, or C in it. Can you sort by magimins? No. Again, you can't sort in any fashion.

Fine, we'll check the brewing menu, that can get sorted. You sort by A. Every ingredient that has any amount of A in it appears, even the ones with a little bit of everything, even the ones that have just a little bit of A and then a bunch of E, which isn't even in the recipe. Can you show ingredients that only have A? No. Can you eliminate ingredients that have D or E? No. Are the ingredients in any kind of order? No.

They're not in order of how much A is in them (8, 6, 4, 64, 18, 40, 18 ... ) or how much total magimin is in them (8, 6, 4, 144, 40, 40, 18 ... ) or what Type they are (Fish, Fruit, Flower, Ore, Mineral, Fish, Slime ... ) or alphabetically (R, F, F, L, G, D, H ... ) or any other way you can discern.

You think you remember it was on Page 3. But Page 3 when viewing what? Everything? Items you're out of just go away, so it might be on Page 2 now. Or if you got things since then, maybe Page 4.

You run out to check. You've already unlocked over sixty ingredients for Quinn. Their stock is not in any way sorted, and you can't sort it. You page through. Ah, there it is! Oh, but it's not an Ore. It's a Gem, and Gems are more expensive today.

I really do love Potionomics. I've been following its development for some time, and it would be fair to assume that my expectations may have been high, but I did not purchase it with starry-eyed hype. I want so very, very badly to recommend this game. It's lovely. But I can't. Look, maybe for people with better memories this isn't an impediment, or people who take notes or open guides in another window -- but these are problems that seem like fundamental issues with design. They make the core gameplay loop of a game that should be delightful an exercise in frustration and anxiety.

I hope, in time, it gets the ingredients it's missing.

You should know this up-front: to put it flatly, this game is over. The last substantive update to its content was, at time of writing, nearly three years ago, and it's very, very unlikely for that to change. It's up to you to decide whether you consider this a 'pro' or a '♥♥♥' toward your interest in playing.

For context, Metal Gear Survive is an entry into the games-as-a-service model that -- for one reason or another -- didn't take off. Whether it was the business model, negative sentiment toward its developer/publisher, or the game's vast departure from its contemporaries is difficult to say. Whatever the cause, it did not do well. All over the internet you can find optimistic customers from 2018 (bless their hearts) just wishing into the ether for some great explosion of popularity or promise to bring a renaissance to a product that showed plentiful evidence of being dead on arrival. What followed was a particularly aggressive focus on monetization that, at one point, even pitted players (and players' wallets) against each other in events where only the highest-ranked would get the shiny new goodies.

The good news is, that is all in the past. It is years later, whatever decision-makers are in charge have long since stopped trying to get blood from a stone, the pressure is off, and you can just play the dang thing.

As to how the game plays, there's two activities in Survive, and they will be the activities you do in perpetuity.

One, you run around in a limited open world similar to Metal Gear Solid V. Stealthin' around, fighting or avoiding enemies, grabbing crafting materials and collectibles, opening crates, et cetera. Two, you protect a target -- a teleporter, a drill, your base -- from waves of zombies and Special Zombies. Place traps, walls, turrets, etc. It's certainly not 'pure' tower defense or anything like that, though; even when automated defenses become available, you're still doing most of the hard work.

Metal Gear Survive's story, such as it is, somehow manages to be both very short and far too long, drip-feeding you game features at a glacial pace that is best handled by just powering through it as quickly as possible. The plot's terrible, but what do you expect; it's a Metal Gear game without Hideo Kojima at the helm, so it doesn't have the benefit of people lining up around the block to tell you -- unprompted -- that it's stupid as hell on purpose, actually. Definitely don't buy Metal Gear Survive out of an interest in its narrative.

The latter activity, defending points from waves of enemies, is the meat of this game. It is a good chunk of the introduction through to the late game, it is the entirety of the endgame, it is the ONLY way you play with friends. When you and your pals are just running around a jungle or a desert village putting out fires, it's great fun. If you have no interest in the co-op, or no friends interested in playing the co-op with you, don't expect to play it long, as none of the multiplayer content balances for the number of players and quick play is a ghost town.

You complete co-op defenses, you get boxes of goodies, and you see if any of the weapons and armor that dropped have the potential to be good. If they do, you pour your winnings into making them good, so that you can tackle harder challenges. Repeat.

I bought this game for seven American dollars. I don't really buy into the "cost per hour played" hangup some folks have, but even going by that dubious metric it's a great deal. I've had a nice time killing monsters with my friends, rearranging my base camp, sorting through my rescued goons for ones that don't suck at their job, and wandering the wilderness. I probably will continue to do all of these things, at least for a little while, before the grind settles in and I move on.

Whether you have an enormous hate-on for Konami or have no dog in the fight whatsoever, that's the whole situation. Maybe Metal Gear Survive would have done better as its own intellectual property, as an original series made in the Fox Engine with even less connection to Metal Gear than it already has. Who knows. Either way, what remains is a pretty okay, pretty unique game. Is it on sale? Give it a shot. Just don't expect love to bloom.

The effort it takes to enjoy Cyberpunk 2077 is monumental.

Nothing in Cyberpunk 2077 stands up to anything but the most cursory scrutiny. You wind your way through lively city streets packed with vendors, but the one ramen shop that is functional sells you the same equivalent of Capri-Sun and Hot Pockets that you can get from vending machines. Night City has no taxis, mass transit, or public transportation of any kind available to the player, despite a mission (and an incredibly annoying side job) prominently featuring the most luxurious taxi service Eurodollars can buy.

At best, there's a conspicious hole where any player would expect a function or feature. At worst, it becomes unclear why some systems were implemented at all. The only mystery is whether it was poorly conceived or poorly implemented -- whether the feature was too ambitious to include from the start, or whether out of sunk-cost fallacy it was abandoned instead of removed altogether as it should have been, and these strangenesses blend into oneanother.

For instance, every single drink can be turned into crafting components, but not any food, and to do so means selecting each functionally identical soda and recycling them; a harrowing idea when you first open the easily-ignored Backpack icon tucked away in the corner of the inventory screen and realize you're carrying varying amounts of sixty different beverages with no way to do this in bulk. The game does offer you the ability to sell all your junk items en masse, but not the ability to mark anything as junk -- a feature that's been offered in every other game to come before it where a stream of slightly higher numbers cycles its way through your equipment. Furthermore, an early perk automatically disassembles any junk items you pick up, permanently obselescing the "sell all junk" feature anyway. Is this two half-baked ideas, or one attempt at user-friendliness rendered inconsequential by a hasty later addition? Which one is which?

The game and setting are highly concerned with appearances, but yours isn't customizable in the least outside of character creation. Not hair, not makeup, and certainly not clothing. Clothing is the entirety of V's protection, and comprised almost entirely of what you gather from the corpses of the gang members that the police pay you to summarily execute -- an act that gives you street cred, somehow? -- which understandably vary wildly in quality and character. If you find a particular article of clothing that you really like the look of then you can upgrade it with components, but at higher and higher amounts that quickly outstrip the cost of buying better equipment altogether. It's hard to find what Armor does or tell a meaningful difference, so maybe the point is moot anyhow.

The key for "Reload" and "Pick up the weapon I'm looking at it" are the same, meaning no less than once every other fight does my mercenary decide in the middle of combat to trade their favorite shotgun for a revolver lying on the ground that he has absolutely no perks for. Annoying for sure, but insufferable when I have to go to my inventory and re-equip that shotgun every time. It could be worse; they could have had V drop it instead, a dangerous proposition when a gun can be plainly visible but unable to be picked up except from a specific position or angle, or until giving up on what amounts to just one more assault rifle to sell to the nearest food stand that also buys secondhand firearms.

As for the story, Cyberpunk 2077's narrative has a inconsistency of tone only exacerbated by its structure. Depending on which jobs you take and in what order you complete them, events pivot at a moment's notice between comedy and tragedy, invoking unremarkable primetime TV action (which unresponsive naked woman will V carry today, the murder victim or the rape victim?), surface-level vignettes about life in Night City, and the rare glimpse of a science-fiction story that might live up to the genre invoked in Cyberpunk 2077's title if only it was explored. Every opportunity for a truly compelling interrogation of alienation, or identity, or the power of that odious machine that is not stopped but only further lubricated by the application of bodies to its gears and wheels, ends neither with a satisfying conclusion or introspection but an abrupt "pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up, huh?" before V recieves another phone call.

You can't steer the course of any of these various stories short of simply not doing them, and characters that openly hate and distrust V in one segment will share a friendly beer or offer romance two jobs later, even if the player has made every attempt to make it clear they'd rather this person ♥♥♥♥ off. Story outcomes result in a single line of dialogue, or a slightly more annoyed text message. The most signficiant change I've experienced is that if V murders a character's friend, that character won't ♥♥♥♥ V. Be warned!

Johnny Silverhand, flatly, sucks. I'm sure Keanu Reeves is trying, and some of the more somber moments do allow him to pack some performance into a one-sentence rejoinder. However, Johnny's not an extremist, he's a contrarian, and the script certainly doesn't help. When V is serious, Johnny is irreverent. When Johnny tries to get real, it's V who cracks wise. Johnny's attempts to "get along" with V amount to blackmail, ultimatums, and repeated attempts to violate V's bodily autonomy. Early on, you're given medication to suppress Johnny and to extend V's lifespan. In 40 hours of play, I was only given the option to take these pills once, despite Johnny's unbearable presence and V's worsening condition. If I could have, V would have been popping them like candy.

It's the kind of thing where you try to put yourself in the head of Cyberpunk 2077's decision-makers. There are cars in the game, but they're not customizable because that would mean more development. There's no store to buy these cars from, so they're sold to you via text message by your many fixers, presumably because they couldn't get the voice actors back into the booth last-minute. There are races in the game, for no better reason than that there are cars, with the races arranged by a bartender for some reason, but you'll never be outraced in the story no matter how slow your truck is. You can steal cars if you're strong enough to rip out the driver, but your car is summonable and fast-travel points are plentiful, so why? Because the game has crime and cars? Would it have been a disservice for V to have his or her one car? How many man-hours could have been saved, how much better of an experience would have been delivered in the end if only a few of these seemingly automatic inclusions and the ever-expanding checklist of ultimately needless features had been pruned? As the player you can barely control the pants V puts on in the morning or get V a haircut despite being able to buy new arms or a second heart, so an inability to choose between a compact or a van a seems inconsequential in comparison to that kind of rigidity.

Johnny and V's situation is presented early on as a crossroads. Will Johnny change V, or will V change Johnny? The reality is that the latter never happens, and the former is presented as something that you the player should encourage and pursue. You'd think that an anti-establishment figure like Johnny would understand more than anyone that compromising your identity is just death of another kind.

Cyberpunk 2077, with all its attempts to be anything but a game of its own -- it has shooting, it has RPG elements, it has open-world, it has wanted levels and hacking minigames and skill trees and origins and street races and item qualities and everything else you could ever want from a AAA game! -- should have learned that lesson, because the only thing Cyberpunk 2077 doesn't have is a good reason to play it.

There is much to say about Disco Elysium's innovations, about its canny navigation of genre conventions and the way its mechanics alternatively eschew and elevate what a player might expect to find in mysteries, in role-playing games, or in interactive fiction, et al. Part of me considers, on writing this review, that it might be negligent not to devote a great deal of time and space to that architecture, excoriating or exalting the game's mechanical underpinnings until an unspoken criteria of critical rigor is met. I mean no disrespect in any way, shape, or form when I say that these are not important, if only because the whole far surpasses the sum of its parts.

Disco Elysium is the closest a video game has ever come to recreating the experience of role-playing around a table. It is the farthest a video game has ever gone in giving you, the player, a say in just who the character you are portraying really is. It is the truest a video game has ever been in conveying the melancholy realities of this world and the people living in it: Not all truth is kind, not all lies are unjust, identity is more elemental than it is factual, and if forgiveness could ever be deserved -- if it might be earned or rightful or owed -- then it would not be forgiveness. It is a game that is at times outstandingly funny, if only because it is profoundly sad, and vice versa; any two given people could experience the same turn of phrase or twist of circumstance among the text of Disco Elysium and be brought, with equally natural compulsion, either to laughter, to tears, or to silence.

I will be thinking about Disco Elysium for a long time. I will be thinking about what it means to games as a medium for storytelling and the personal ownership we can take of those stories. I will be thinking about what it means to me.

I will be thinking about what it could mean to you.

For a lot of people, Darkest Dungeon is going to feel like the game they've been waiting for. The team behind it has done a great job.

It's impossible to discuss Darkest Dungeon without praising the beautifully stark art direction; it channels the deep shadows of Mike Mignola (of "Hellboy") perfectly, and the colors shift and suppurate everywhere from the doomed hamlet at the foot of the Darkest Dungeon to the deepest and most Godforsaken pit you'll chuck adventurers into like a wood chipper. The music deftly changes between ominous, somber, and stirring as the situation demands, and the narrator keeps the tone set wonderfully, commenting (though not annoyingly so) on every turn of fate in a Tony Jay timbre.

Even putting aside the excellent and cohesive creative vision on display, the core mechanics of Darkest Dungeon are brutally satisfying. You'll begin the game tentatively sending small, untested and largely unfamiliar adventurers (I really suggest you not bother naming the poor souls yet) on short jaunts through nightmarish corridors -- keep the torch brightly lit in these beginning forays! -- in the hopes that some of them will back come out the other end with cash and relics to upgrade your town, relax and medicate your mercenaries, and keep the gears (the pulping, threshing gears) of your little dungeon-centric industry going.

The dungeons themselves are hesitant strolls punctuated by combat where every single point of health and stress counts. Darkest Dungeon keeps its numbers small: it'll be exciting when the Leper smacks a bandit for 11 damage, whether or not the Crusader heals for 4 points will be a matter or life and death, and the first time the Bounty Hunter gets a critical hit on a Marked target with Collect Bounty, 40 damage will seem miraculous. The first three-digit enemy will be more than a little worrisome. The RNG is still as fickle as ever though, so be prepared for even the best-laid plans to get ruined by bad luck.

Those tools at your disposal -- the mercenaries -- are a really great puzzle in themselves, too. Where should each fighter stand? What skills can even be used where they're standing? Is it too risky to have a mercenary who's useless if he's knocked out of position by a spell or an ambush? Is having a mercenary who can act in every position going to leave him spread thin? If you put two skills on an adventurer that can only be used in the very back row, what happens if someone in the party dies and there IS no back row? Should you send a very stressed Occultist with a fresh group of mercenaries and risk him driving them ALL mad? Is it safe to send a half-useless and untested Jester with three experienced pigstickers if it means his death will ruin their morale?

This decision-making only gets worse (better) as the game goes on, and opens you up to a really great obligation to constantly shift, rearrange, retrain and reassess your bands of brethren. Missions will get longer, necessitating that your heroes stop to camp and comfort each other with incense, mockery, medicine, or prayer. As you start to get a few of your hires to a higher level of skill and bravery, sometimes so high that they'll refuse some missions as being beneath their abilities, the management of the town transforms from a largely between-dungeons concern to a much greater part of the metagame.

You'll swap afflicted but useful madmen in and out of the sanitarium and make decisions on whether it's more pertinent to cure your Bounty Hunter's accuracy-ruining case of The Yips or purge him of Deviant Tastes apparently so unspeakable he's not allowed at the brothel.

You'll wish a million painful deaths on the Caretaker because he took the last seat at the bar and your Hellion who's psychologically coming apart at the seams -- the Hellion that you NEED for the next outing -- can't relax with anything but a tall tankard.

You'll stare at the weekly report that tells you than your Crusader, who you sent to meditate his cares away, decided to leave the hamlet on a vision quest and take his holy wrath with him when otherwise your whole 'A-team' skeleton demolition crew is ready to go.

The town influences your quests into the subterranean meat grinders and vice versa. Parties that before seemed perfect will be split up because the Grave Digger needs her Rabies cured and the Plague Doctor's medicines seem more appealing when faced with the Blight-dripping porcine residents of the Warrens. It keeps the player out of complacency in a really satisfying way; fans of X-COM or other high-stakes strategy will love the feeling of having to scramble in the face of disaster or cut their losses and tell the veteran Vestal and Leper to abandon the quest as well as the bodies of their compatriots.

Darkest Dungeons is a satisfying, strategic game about risk, reward, and reanimation. The dungeon crawls revitalize a task that's otherwise become almost a joke; there's no hazardous smashing through pinata baddies filled with loot here, and each time you hit 'Embark' you'll never really be sure what will be left of your party, if anything at all. The town management is a compelling game of its own, echoing "worker placement" board games and charming you as you hone blades, upgrade skills, and wrangle holy alcoholics into their barstools.

There's still some rough edges from Early Access here and there. Placeholder dialogue pops up occasionally and the central story has been held off until it's done, but even unfinished and in a mostly sandbox state both halves of Darkest Dungeon interact with other in a way that'll have you coming back for more. More, and more, and more, until in the folly of your hubris, the keening susurrations within the deepest abominable chambers beneath your lineage's empty-eyed manse ring out across the blighted land in an unendurable cacophony of gibbering and most terrible doom.