156 – Elex II: This time it’s Elex 2

You know, I haven’t touched Solasta’s DLC since I wrote about it — what a shame. Maybe I’m just not in the mood for crunchy DND combat, but mostly — I mean, Solasta was a great system with an Okay campaign, but one that had a lot of room for improvement, and in the few hours I spent with the DLC campaign, that just wasn’t there. Okay, fine.

But what do you do when you’re a making a sequel to what is unarguably and objectively the finest open-world Eurojank ever made? Elex, oh, fucking Elex, it just takes everything that Piranha Bytes has been working towards since Gothic, perfects it, and adds a motherfucking jetpack. If Elden Ring is a 9/10 game, it is only because it does not have a jetpack to it.

Well, I’m like 3-4 hours in Elex II, and I am oh so absorbed, but, you know, it’s so far the exact same experience as the first game. This is par for the course — like, that bit about Piranha Bytes working on something since Gothic, that’s absolutely serious: They are perhaps even more iterative than most. Whether we’re talking about Gothic, Risen, or now Elex, you always play a lone dude who looks like a thumb, there are always three factions to join, the world is absolutely littered with thousands of hand-placed items, the monsters are tough and will kill you quickly, you can go to trainers to build your character in whatever direction you please — if you’ve played one of these games, you’ve played them all, and Elex II is just the 2022 version.

Now, I suppose I said some of that when I was first playing Elden Ring; it took a couple of sessions to really appreciate what that game does different from all of its predecessors, and that really didn’t come into play until I got a handle on the world. I’ve not explored very much of Elex II yet, so it can surprise me — but on the other hand, everything really does look the same as the first game, we are in a different corner of the land with a lot of overlap.

I think a lot of it would be hitting stronger if I remembered anything about the plot of Elex which, I’m sorry to say, I do not. The factions are the same, with an additional one that I don’t remember if it existed in the first game or not, but they’ve shuffled their bases around. You keep meeting old friends that I’ve absolutely forgotten about. Look, it’s not a game that you play for the plot, it’s a game you play for the jetpack.

And I must absolutely stress how much fun it is to play around with that jetpack. I am still absolutely absorbed in the Elex II and am rushing through writing this just so I can play some more. Would I have gotten more out of replaying Elex? Should I have replayed Elex before this? These are great questions!

155 – Anathem, Except I’m So Sick Of It And Barely Want To Talk About It, Also I Beat Elden Ring But Later

Well, Anathem first, I guess. I finished the goddamn thing. I more or less liked it. In terms of Stephenson, it was a lot better than Cryptonomicon which, beyond the “Huh, that’s interesting,” of the Turing sections, I genuinely could not tell what story I was being told or why I was being told it. But it wasn’t as good as Reamde which, you know, was a big dumb Tom Clancy kinda thriller that I had a fun if slightly cringey time of– the kind of book where there’s Russian mobsters and Chinese hackers and digressions about running an MMO and they’re stopping terrorists because this is a post-9/11 thriller because we were really afraid at that time of terrorists from the Middle East where now we are afraid of GODDAMN EVERYTHING.

Anathem is also a big globetrotting adventure with a colorful cast of people drawn from all walks of life, except this time it’s a completely constructed world. A good portion of the book is figuring out the nature of the world and its rhythms — the kind of stuff I generally like, which incidentally makes literally everybody around me scratch their heads in disbelief when I say I just can’t get into LeGuin. I don’t know why. I’m going to try Left Hand of Darkness again sometime. I know I’m the weird one here.

Characters are really poor this time around — there are so many of them, and the novel’s somewhat episodic nature means we hang around one cluster, then go to another, then another, then meet up with the first cluster, and then a fourth, and then a blend of people from the second and third as well as some newcomers — it’s a lot. Stephenson is not Dickens, and moreover this is very much a Philosophical Novel. Most of the characters genuinely are mouthpieces of a certain branch of science or philosophy in the world, and there are long stretches of dialogues between them where they not only advance various arguments but also reveal the viewpoints of various political factions and the conflicts between them — it’s all extremely fascinating, and it is stuff that would probably be a lot clearer in a reread, but ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

The last 150 pages or so — so, a lot of the action involves Science Monks using Science and Math to solve various problems. There’s an amount of Star Trek Technobabble to it, except the technobabble is based on Science and Math.

Oh God I’m just typing and getting exhausted.

The last 150 pages or so, the characters are using Science and Math and I just utterly stopped being able to picture what was going on. They are in space, in some kind of craft, and Disasters keep nearly happening, and then they use Science and Math to solve them. Page after page that boiled down to, “A Disaster nearly occurred. We used Science and Math to solve it. Then a Disaster nearly occurred. We used Science and Math to solve it. And then a Disaster nearly occurred…”

In the end, all of the Disasters are averted using Science and Math, and in the grand tradition of Neal Stephenson endings, it is an anticlimax. But such is life, is it not? This is the story of Y2K. In the end, a bunch of people used Science and Math to aver a near Disaster, and what did we, a bunch of 17-year-old idiots, see of it? Nothing. All of that hullaballoo — almost 1,000 pages of hullaballoo! — and in the end, everybody calms down and things go okay.

I mean, hell, it would be great if everybody calmed down and things went okay. Isn’t that what we really hope happens over the next few years?

I guess I don’t have the ambition to engage seriously with the plot of Anathem at all. Would I recommend it to you? I guess not!

154 – Lucifer Within Us

I played the demo for Lucifer Within Us a few years ago, and it’s funny, because Lucifer Within Us itself feels like a demo. The real demo I played comprised the entire first case — it’s a mystery game — and there are three total. I think I spent about 90 minutes on the experience. It was great! I got it in that Ukraine Bundle, and I might have had different opinions if I had paid full price. I know that we are supposed to not balk about the price of games because Experiences like that are priceless, but the people who say that have never been poor and have never known the joy of a welfare Christmas, so I’d say Lucifer Within Us, at this point, is worth a cool $5.

There’s a lot of worldbuilding here, most of which the game doesn’t really have the time to show us. Humans have cybernetic enhancements, demons sometimes run around and possess people, you’re an exorcist for a technocybercomputery church, I’m not necessarily saying it’s the most original set of ideas out there but it’s done stylishly and I’m left with a lot of — not necessarily questions, but we see very small glimpses of the kinds of tech and the rituals surrounding them, and it could have doubled its length just riffing on the world. The ending is basically, “Okay, and now that I know what’s going on I’m off to journey through the world,” and if the team wanted, they very easily could just, you know, slap together a couple of case packs.

The cases themselves, you get to interview the suspects and they give an Ace Attorney-style testimony; you see a recreation of the events and can scrub the timeline forward and backward and present evidence for particular parts of the testimony and cross reference the witness’s statements together. In practice, there’s a lot of asking everyone about everything until things flash saying you’ve got it right. You’re encouraged to do as much of this as you want — there’s no penalties — so maybe there’s a bit less detective work than it is typical Adventure Game stuff, but, like —

Perhaps this is a good reason why it is pretty nice that it’s such a short story experience — I think the game could have certainly handled another case or two, but any more and the seams might start to show. If the detectiving isn’t particularly challenging, well, the novelty and elegance of the interface haven’t even begun to lose their shine, the edges of the world don’t even begin to show. It is very much a leave-them-wanting-more experience. Look, I still have another 5,000 hours left before I fucking finish Elden Ring. Lucifer Within us was probably the perfect length.

153 – Solasta’s DLC Sure Is Solasta DLC

Oh — yes, sure, the new Solasta DLC, The Hidden Mountain or The Mysterious Kingdom or The Land Of The Tyrant or — The Lost Valley, you say? Oh, cool, it takes place in a valley. Sounds cool, so is it like pulp adventure, Savage Empire kind of — no, it’s just their normal fantasy world, you say? Was that called Solasta? It was? Oh, good. I got one right. Well, yes. I suppose I do remember all the things that went on in the land of Solasta. (Is the land called Solasta?) And there sure were characters and twists and turns. More of the same, you say? More of, like, the exact same?

So, like, Solasta: Crown of the Magister, right? I eagerly awaited it, got it right when it came out, really enjoyed it! As I’ve always said, under the hood of DND is a really great tactical RPG but few DMs bother to do it, especially when you’re in the kind of woo-woo circles that want to do Character Work but aren’t very good at it and so your sessions devolve into bad amateur theatre in someone’s stifling apartment, with that one dude, you know the one, who just sucks the energy out of the room, who is clearly miserable, who is literally wearing a shirt that says Sorry I Was Late, I Don’t Want To Be Here — yeah, I’m fucking talking about you, R—–, why the hell did you come over every goddamn week if you were so miserable. (But can I fault him that much? He wasn’t even the worst one in that group.)

And Solasta is that crunchy tactical RPG, and I really enjoyed it. There’s a lot of variants in the classes as is the case with the current edition of DND, and taken as a series of Dungeons and Dragons battles, it’s excellent. There’s as much micromanagement as you like, although I find myself dialing it back with the nice options that the game gives (like, it’s nice that the game makes my dual-wielding ranger put one of his weapons away so he has a free hand to perform the somatic components of Goodberry because otherwise we can’t do a long rest because we’re out of rations, but it’s also great that it lets me cut all that shit out if I want to).

But hot damn was the writing, the story presentation, all of that terrible. The graphics, oh I am sorry but when there are people on screen it is terrible. When those people try to emote it is terrible. The words these people are saying are terrible. It is a game where you skip through everything just to get rid of it because the battles were really good, except maybe towards the end it got tiring.

There’s an element, while I played, where I said, okay, so if this is them showing their engine and learning how to make it, I’m ready to see their follow-up, and I thought Lost Valley would be that follow-up. But so far it is literally just more of the same. It’s a great series of tactical battles connected with a bunch of bad fantasy stuff — and it looks like they’re trying to get us to choose between factions and make choices and stuff this time around. And the seams of the engine are showing a bit — like, there hasn’t been anything I’ve done so far that’s as interesting as some of the levels in the original campaign — even though something like the library tower was tedious to go through, it at least tried to look cool. So far has been bog-standard forests, swamps, caves — and honestly, the graphical style doesn’t really look like anything. The magical effects are really nice,I’ll say. The inventory shows its clutter — remember, it’s the very hardcore DND so you have all of this crafting you can and probably should do, and so everyone has tons of reagents and materials and shit and I’m only a couple hours in.

Like, I really want to like Solasta and say all great things about it because there is something really lovely about the project — I mean, they have enemies crawling on walls which I don’t think I’ve really seen in a tactical game before and it does SO MUCH.

I am told that there’s some good community crafted dungeons — when I first played it there hadn’t been much but in the year since there have been some fun ones, so I shall check those out because maybe that’s where the real interesting adventures are. Look, Solasta is an excellent engine, and it’s not like Lost Valley is bad. It’s just so far a bland campaign that doesn’t really improve on the bland original campaign.

152 – I Made A Very Similar Post About Two Months Ago And This Consistency Is Alarming

Oh but what is there to say? I am still Elden Ringing. At least two of my friends have beaten it, with a finish time of around 150 hours, and I’m at the 100 hour mark and god damn, I’m going to be playing this thing for another month. It is essentially all I have been playing. I have ducked into the Solasta DLC campaign, and boy is it a Solasta DLC campaign, at least through the first two hours, by which I mean it’s some beautiful chunky hardcore tough-ass DND tactical combat chained together with just this blugh of a storyline, and I’ll write more about that when I play more about that, but Elden Ring in the meantime —

And also Synergism, still — currently in a section that’s just about a specific set of numbers veeeeeeeeeeery slowly going up (Wow! Hypercubes, if you must know, at my corruption score somewhere around 366 bazillion when it should be 2,600 bazillion) that I have been promised, by some of the people on the Discord, will be where I’m at for the better part of a month. Were you worried that the early stages of Synergism had too much active play? Oh, will you be in luck somewhere around the two-month mark!

And, like, still with the Anathem! I’m somewhere around less than 200 pages from the end, if you can believe it. I know who maybe two of the characters are, and I’ve lost track of about half of the philosophical threads that are running throughout the book, and I’m worried that it expects me to reread it. Oh, I am sticking to the end, and oh, I will probably say I more or less enjoyed the experience, certainly better than Cryptonomicon — but, I dunno, I really had a hell of a fun time with Reamde.

Anyway there’s probably some astrological event coming up in which I’ll complete all of these plus the story I’m working on in the same week — I’m a late December Capricorn if anyone knows this sort of stuff. Perhaps I am learning to attain discipline. In all of this, though, I feel bad for Elex 2. I’m coming, buddy. I just want to be able to give you my full attention.

Pfft, I’ve been off twitter for a couple years now. Right now the only moral use of Twitter is to exercise your free speech directly to Elon fucking Musk.

151 – Cris Tales

In the original Dragon Quest — no, you know, what, this is my goddamn blog and I can call things what I want to. In the original Dragon Warrior, in one of the towns, there’s a fellow at the edge of town, and when you TALK to him, he says, “I’m waiting for my girlfriend at the edge of town!” Way the hell across town, there’s a lady who, when you TALK to her, says, “My boyfriend said to meet him at the edge of town!” What a miscommunication! I don’t remember if their story is resolved in the ending sequence when you get to TALK to everybody in the game and they congratulate you, but man, I played this game something like 33 years ago and it’s stuck with me.

That vignetting is what’s always been the greatest about the Dragon Warrior series, and frankly an area where I’ve always found Final Fantasy has slipped — hell, I remember when Final Fantasy XII came out and it made very clear that most of the people milling around were just for show and that not only do you not need to TALK to them, you cannot. Only a very few people are allowed to TALK to you, and for the most part, they do not have much to say. The side characters are not important, and that tends to be the case in at least a lot of the poorer-written JRPGs. Can YOU tell me the side story of any character from any of the Tales games?

Cris Tales’s’s main gimmick is that the main character is able to glimpse into the past and future. The screen is divided into three panels; on the left shows the past, in the center is the present, and to the right is the future; as you walk along the environment, you get a window into the characters future. When they’re scrolled onto the left side, you see them in their youth; in the center, as they appear now; on the right, in old age. In the case of children, they don’t appear in the past because they haven’t been born yet; in the case of the elderly, they’ve passed by the time it’s the future.

Sometimes this is used for puzzles — a set of documents has been destroyed by the time of the present, but you can make a quick hop into the past when the ink was still fresh. But a lot of this is used to very subtly give the arc of characters. We glimpse a woman who’s married into wealth and power, in the past as an idealistic activist. A violinist playing a beautiful melody in the present screeches out his first few notes as a child. In my favorite, we meet a girl magician with a bird familiar that’s the size of a large dog. In the past, we see her summoning it as a chick, and in the future, it’s grown large enough that she can ride it. And sometimes it’s used to devastating effect — in the future, where you haven’t solved the town’s problem yet, you see wealthy citizens wearing rags, the poor district absolutely flooded and its buildings destroyed, and many people just not there — they’ve presumably died in the chaos.

(Also there is this one idiot kid who, when you first encounter him, is playing in the sewers because “it’s the only fun thing to do around here” and you inevitably have to save him and then he and his mother spend some time wondering why he’s suddenly sick as hell. I haven’t resolved this arc yet, but there is something just so precious about this child’s absolute idiocy. I only played the section last night but I resolve to remember it forever.)

JRPGs aren’t necessarily about Saving the World anymore — I mean, hell, in Elden Ring the world is already destroyed and, in true Soulsborne fashion, you’re just kind of figuring out the fate of its last meaningless scraps. But — and this may simply be the fault of lazy writing on the games I’ve been playing of late — a lot of them really don’t explain to you why, exactly, you want to be saving this world. There are plenty of faux-medieval worlds filled with anime graphics and you can really swap one for the other. I’m digging Cris Tales (a JRPG from Columbia, I believe!) because it gives the townspeople little arcs and show the stakes. We get to see how they got to be who they are, and the tragedies that will befall them if we don’t intervene.

150 – The Emerald Flame

“Hi. I’m the asshole who made the block editor instead of the nice old editor for WordPress. Think this image would look so much better with the text of the article wrapped around it? So does Richard. I however, think that it should be impossible to do without a lot of wrangling! What do you mean, blogs are for writing? Writing won’t sell shit! Writing won’t SEO optimize! Block editor forever!”

I don’t like to pre-order stuff and I don’t really Kickstart because, frankly, I usually don’t have the money to, but at some point in 2020 a perfect storm of stimulus money and a Facebook ad led me to back The Emerald Flame, and then pandemic-based supply chain bullshit and other stuff led it to be delayed until the other week, when it finally came, and hot damn, was it worth the wait.

The Emerald Flame consists of three packages — all together in a box, but you can pretend they’re getting mailed to you one a month if you like — from a mysterious society who has apparently read my incoherent blog or dug my album or something, and decided that means I’m a historical expert and the right person to help them decode a bunch of ancient manuscripts and help them create the Elixir of Life.

The art on all of the puzzles is beautiful — I knew it would be from screenshots, of course, but it’s all gorgeous. A bunch of little knickknacks are included to help you solve the puzzles — an amulet, a star chart, a rosary, a bunch of other stuff and they were all delightful and used in surprising ways — the final puzzle, involving some stuff in a box, is a standout.

Like, this kind of thing is so tough for me because I absolutely love puzzles, but oh my god I am so bad at most puzzles. Cryptograms are particularly difficult to hit the sweet spot for me — there’s of course that level for kids that’s way too easy, but then there’s the level of puzzle where they expect you to do actual cryptography, where you just go to the internet and have them solve it to you because *you* aren’t actually intended to solve this yourself, where you’re just supposed to go to the forum — okay, I’m not talking about Emerald Flame anymore, I’m really talking about THAT FUCKING ARG THAT WAS ASSOCIATED WITH INSCRYPTION, THE ONE WHICH WAS FUCKING BULLSHIT AND WHICH INVALIDATED THE ENTIRE EXPERIENCE AND MADE IT POINTLESS but I have been unable to write about that because of all of the flames which appear on the side of my face when I try to write about it. (YOU TAKE A BEAUTIFUL GAME WITH A VERY STRONG AND SOLID MESSAGE ABOUT CRUNCH THAT YOU DIDN’T EVEN REALIZE WAS IN THERE AND YOU TURN IN INTO JUST BULLSHIT ABOUT OCCULT SHIT AND HITLER. MOTHERFUCKING HITLER. DID YOU REALLY NOT HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT YOUR OWN GAME WAS ABOUT?)

Honestly this is a big reason that I made The Knot at a fairly easy difficulty level — particularly because the puzzle was more “recognizing there is a puzzle” than actually manipulating information, but partially because, like, solving a puzzle represents mystical enlightenment. It certainly does in Emerald Flame — you’re making the Elixir of Life, and throughout there’s the notion that solving the puzzles represents the steps of enlightenment one must attain in order to be worthy of immortality.

Well, the difficulty level was at the exact right spot for me. I played it with a friend, and we were well paired for it — he’s better at the art and color stuff, I’m better at the word stuff. (This is not an experience for the colorblind, alas.) We needed no hints, which was awesome and made us feel smart. There were a bunch of spots we got stuck at — mushroom and longitude puzzles, I’m looking at you! — but they simply required us walking away for a bit, thinking it over, and then returning only to see the equivalent of the gigantic flashing neon sign giving the clue.

About the biggest criticism I have is that everything — both the trinkets and the clue sheets — generally gets used exactly once. Once you’ve solved a puzzle or figured out how to use the item, you can generally put it away in the box and never look at it again. One of the final puzzles — the one used to determine a length of time — requires a *little* bit of information from earlier, and it’s actually one of the standouts of the piece.

But every puzzle is excellent, and again, the art is gorgeous — it has a really nice sense of mystery throughout, and it’s just fucking fun to do alchemy stuff. I’m so happy I picked this one up! The designer’s upcoming game, The Light in the Mist, is tarot themed and I’m so excited for that one. I’m springing for the deluxe wooden box edition. Look how pretty it is!

(I’m trying to make my blog less ugly. This will be a work in progress for a bit. I’m not great at this stuff.)

149 — TRY FINGER MARKER SWITCH

There’s an old — I don’t know whether to call it speculation or rumor or legend or what — about Myst that, okay, so at the time it was graphically beyond anything that had been seen at the time — hell, the art direction was strong enough that Cyan has gotten away with about 68 rereleases, upping the polygon count and making it free-roaming but otherwise hewing really closely to the original design. (I’m looking at this comparison video, and it seems that the 2021 rerelease made the most changes, and also it looks extremely ugly. The hologram of Achenar spitting out the language of Channelwood scared the FUCK out of me when I played it as a kid, and even now it’s creepy as fuck…unless it’s in CG and looking suspiciously like Tidus attempting to laugh.)

So Myst was one of those system sellers — it was the killer app of its time for CD-ROM drives; you could only play this game if you had a state-of-the-art PC. But the legend goes that, of everyone who bought a PC for Myst, how many of them actually got off the first island? How many of them managed to solve any major puzzles? Even the hilarious parody Pyst restricts itself to the first island, likely because the developers didn’t even know there was anything beyond it. (And who can blame them? When you have such tightly-honed comedy that you get Oscar winning actor John Goodman to star in your production, it’s okay if you don’t have time to solve puzzles.)

So one of the quests in Elden Ring requires you to go online and invade some people. I’ve been playing offline pretty much this entire time after the first few rooms had a little too much TRY TOUCHING BUT HOLE, HERE’S A SECRET MESSAGE HA HA HA YOU FUCKING IDIOT bullshit. I’m still terrible at invading and do not miss the PVP, but it was really nice to help out on some bosses. I still don’t really enjoy the phantoms and the bloodstains, but a lot of the worst messages seem to have sorted themselves out. I haven’t seen a single BUT HOLE message, and honestly in the areas where I’m at they’ve petered out in general.

I guess if you just want to draw your dick on an ancient ruin, you’re probably not going to make it to the 70 hour mark like I have. It’s been over a month since Elden Ring has come out. They’ve moved on to — what, exactly, I’m not sure, but it’s nice they’ve moved on. (Really at this point we’re all just waiting for Lies of P to fulfill our lives.) I still wish that you could customize the multiplayer elements — as in, I really would love to be able to turn off bloodstains and phantoms, and honestly even the messages that were there didn’t really tell me anything i wasn’t able to figure out on my own.

And honestly I still do wish the multiplayer were a more standard MMO setup. I don’t want to do the fits-and-starts and fleeting contact, I would love to be able to bop around this world with my friend. Anyway, I invaded someone’s world and he’d summoned another fellow to help, and they both killed me and immediately started teabagging me. It’s nice, I suppose, that some traditions are still alive, but these constant reminders that I am playing this game with middle schoolers really kills any pretensions that I might be interact with Art.

But in general, my friends think I’m kind of a badass for soloing the game so far — I don’t think I’m particularly good at Soulsbornes, but I am good at picking apart a thread and any time I’ve hit a wall I’ve usually just pivoted right to one of the other dozen areas I have access to. I’ve just found it pretty easy to tell whether or not I’m right for a particular area or whether it’s time to move on. Sometimes you just need to get out of the Hinterlands.