just some bullet points on some games I've been playing lately

[ourtinymoments]

... because summer decided to show up after all and it's entirely too hot and I moved around entirely too much and now I don't want to do anything but slowly melt into my keyboard.

• I'm playing Ori and the Blind Forest again! I'm not sure when I started my original playthrough but it was a couple months before the "definitive edition" came out, with its new areas and skills and difficulty settings and stuff. And since I could upgrade for a fraction of the original price, I figured, hey, might as well. And I love this game so much. It's beautiful, of course, and I find myself staring at the environment a lot, or just listening to the music.
  But I also love how it plays; the controls are super responsive and despite me not being amazing at platformers/metroidvaias/etc. I really like the challenge level? (I'm playing on Normal) Being able to set my own save points helps keep the frustration down, and I still remember my original reaction to the Ginso Tree escape sequence. That's where a lot of people quit, apparently, but between the surprisingly calming music and the sheer fluidity of Ori's movements, I spent the entire time being very relaxed. It's such a well-designed thing? You get a new skill halfway up the tree, and the game makes sure you get plenty of practice with it, and then it throws you into the escape sequence where you need to use what you've just learned or die. And I did die! repeatedly! But I had a lot of fun dong it, and that's not always a given with me and games. Well, now on this new save in the new version of the game, I'm approaching the top of the tree again and I can't wait to do it all over again.
  And really, why wouldn't I enjoy playing as an ambiguously-gendered adorable leaf spirit of light and cuteness?


• I'm also back to Stardew Valley, although I'm not quite sure how long I'll stick with it. There's a grindiness to it that can be relaxing or it can lead to me going "wait, why am I even doing this? There's more fun stuff to do than repeating these farming/mining/etc. actions over and over!" It doesn't help that I sort of... ignore the villagers... With my favourites, I'll talk to them when I run into them but since they all have their own schedules that I don't really want to keep track of and I can't be bothered to track them down either, well... I'm apparently that weird farming neighbour who wanders off towards the mines in the middle of a conversation and who hangs out with spirits and their cat. <.< I'm probably missing a lot of cutscenes because I'm not really raising people's affection levels but oh well.


• I've just started Tales of Zestiria! Seriously, I'm not even out of the prologue yet but it seems adorable. I like the three characters introduced so far (Sorey, Mikleo and Alisha) and have been honing my button mashing skills on some prickleboars. Why are they so cute... But anyway, it's been a while since I played a Tales of game so I hope I'll get a chance to properly dive in soon. (It's the kind of game where I prefer to play uninterrupted for an hour or two at least, which isn't always possible.)


• I'm also apparently playing my first-ever Hidden Object game? I've been curious about the genre for a while but never really got around to it. I'm enjoying Grim Legends: The Forsaken Bride so far, even though the occasional cgi models (which are already not the prettiest) clash pretty badly with the really nicely-drawn backgrounds. also, why does the protagonist of medieval fairytale land wear pink nailpolish? Shallowness aside ;) I've already fond out that I'm... possibly not very good at finding hidden objects. I also want to make friends with the bear who kidnapped the protagonist's twin sister because of course I do. I'll have to find it first though! It, and more hidden object puzzles, of which there are surprisingly few compared to the other point&click puzzles. That surprised me.


• still slooooowly making my way through Bravely Default. Maybe this would go quicker if I didn't only play it for an hour or two every month. <.<

Comments

[lassarina]

I liked Grim Legends: Forsaken Bride. HIdden object puzzles for me took a little bit of time to get used to, and some of them are still really hard for me.

I am having that kind of problem with Bravely Second. I want to play it, I'm just doing so really poorly.

[ourtinymoments]

!!!!! It's my very first comment on this shin new journal! :D Wheeeeee~

Anyway! I think part of what threw me off at first was that it was a different sort of hidden object puzzle than what I had expected. I'd only ever seen the ones that my mum played on facebook for a while and those seem to be more like a randomised "Where's Wally?" image where the difficulty comes from finding the objects in question in a sea of other bright colourful objects. But in Grim Legends they're sometimes seen from a different angle, or they seem to be part of a different object, or they're partially hidden etc. But hey, at least I did better on my second HO puzzle than on the first. \o/

I wouldn't say we're playing the BD games poorly, really, we're just playing them... leisurely. That sounds much better. ;)

[lassarina]

Yeah, hidden object games come in a couple of flavors - I've also seen some (though generally not any published by Artifex Mundi, who does the Grim Legends series) where some of the challenge is figuring out what kind of object is being sought. One game I played - I think it was Escape from Rosecliff Island - the connection between the word in the list and the thing that one sought in the image was not always clear. (Also, occasionally there's a clear case of "translation didn't quite do what was intended here" since a lot of these games are made in Eastern Europe and while the word in the list may be a literal translation of the word used in the original language, it doesn't convert well to English because we use a different kind of word for the same object.) Guess who spends too much time on hidden-object games!

Yes. Leisurely. I like that. I would like to be less leisurely, though, on account of wanting to finish before SMT4 Apocalypse comes out XD So that I may then play that just as leisurely!

[ourtinymoments]

Ooooh, interesting! I might dig through your HO game collection on steam for more inspiration sometime. It sounds like there's interesting varity in there! (And probably on android/iOS as ell, I'd guess.)

just pretend you have until Apocalypse's EU release and you'll be fiiiine

[lassarina]

Yes! You can probably shortcut that process with my backloggery - I do actual ratings there, whereas I've been super lazy about reviewing stuff on Steam. Generally speaking, anything published by Artifex Mundi is usually pretty competent. (And I have a fair number of things under "Mac" or "PC" on my backlog that may be available on Steam but I first got them on other platforms, too.)