PEGBRJE: Technically Not a Blog
Sometimes you remember things for too long and then write about them.
I had someone ask me why all of the blogs always sounded so chipper, even after I stated the reasoning behind their existence. It did get me thinking, however, about all of the random technical moments I ran into while playing across all of these games. While I’m not here to review, I did realize I would get a little hung up on some moments that either broke my experience, or completely threw me off. At that moment I knew that I’d been keeping them locked away in my brain for no reason, so I decided that today I would just spill them onto a page and see what came out of it. Honestly, the content comprises mostly of errors, bugs or design decisions that I came across that I got hung up on, but didn’t make the cut of their blog due to either not fitting with the overall tone or didn’t make sense to include.
Most of these were from page 3, and I just kept collecting the data as I went; before I knew it, I was on page 4 and this was still here. This won’t be a constantly occurring thing, as if I have nothing to say about a game I won’t be recording it. There will be no schedule — I ain’t writing about stuff if there’s only 2 lines to say, or if nothing grabbed my attention for long enough to irk me.
So without further ado…
Far From Noise
Minor issues with some of the conversation texts sounding really off, with phrases feeling somewhat spliced together — sounds vague because it is, couldn’t go back to find the conversations that suddenly started going a different direction. Not much else to write home about though, couldn’t find any other technical issues. Granted, the polish can also be attributed to the overall lack of varying mechanics within, which didn’t bother me at all. Game’s still fun.
Codemancer
Same problem as above, the voice acting was fine and the writing matched up with the VAs, but the non-acted parts would occasionally read like a bullet point. Could’ve been a minor error on my part not reading correctly however, as I was more engrossed in solving the puzzles.
Wakamarina Valley, New Zealand
Fast travelled back to the cave of glowing wonders to look at it again as I adored that location. After pressing escape to close out of the camera (it’s brought up immediately upon fast travelling), I realized I had made a grave mistake. I was now in the floor, and rotating violently. Any attempts I made at escaping were futile, especially since the fast travel menu now became black. Only way out was force quitting the game, which ended my playthrough.
I also experienced an absurdly large amount of motion and visual blur. I assume it is because of the specs of my graphics card (970, we’re outdated now I guess) but lowering the graphical fidelity didn’t help. Increasing the fidelity just caused the frames to drop, which made me a little nauseous when I went to rotate. In both of these instances, I’d have taken a picture for record keeping, but both made my screen distorted to the point of nauseum, so I decided against it.
Vilmonic
Mostly just weird UI interactions I ran into. I wasn’t a fan of the inventory interface to begin with, added more complexity to an already complicated game, but the constant clicking on some items not working was very awkward.
Tamashii
Thank god for the epileptic warning, because even with my young eyes I had to turn off features. The scanlines felt odd to include and didn’t really add to the experience, so I turned those off as they uncomfortably meshed with the glitching to the point of everything becoming fuzzy. The added fuzz for every clone spawned also caused vision problems, as all three being out just made it super hard to fight. Which leads to the first boss fight: using 3 clones plus the constant flashes of the boss in my virtual face made it nearly impossible to tell what was going on. I understand the aesthetic and it certainly gave the glitchfest that it wanted, but I also am very glad that there was the ability to soften these.
Intelligent Design: An Evolutionary Sandbox
My only complaint with this game was the lack of context to some of the sliders. I couldn’t figure out what exactly the max of either slider really meant for some of the options, mostly revolving around the plants. Some of the things, such as roots and metabolism, made sense for their extremities but behaved in ways I couldn’t really understand within any given time frame. A bit more explanation would’ve served the game well I think.
As We Know It
Besides my different opinions on the writing style, the only issue I came across was the formatting in the history submenu. The mayor text was off centre by a large margin for some odd reason, which lead to his name bleeding into the text and being hidden by it. Not gamebreaking really, just distracting.
Signs of the Sojourner
Unlike the previous, my gripe was with an active mechanics decision, rather than a bug or oversight. At least I think it was, I can’t tell as I’m not part of the design team. Anyway, the forced requirement to change a card was either something unintentional and I just couldn’t figure out how to skip, or it was intentional and I didn’t like it at all. Many times conversations would give me just straight downgrades to already existing cards, but I had to take one because it said I did. Having to take downgrades because of randomness isn’t fun. At all. It’s also the weakest of the narrative reasonings as well — I did not like the fatigue cards, but I could at least understand their narrative necessity. Not every conversation that I have with strangers leads to me learning a new perspective, sometimes the opposite, yet SotS requires me to believe that I should regardless of the possibly negative connotations.
