Walking in the Faded Twilight

It seems it’s all games all the time here, at the moment.

I received a copy of To The Moon for my birthday via Steam.  I spent the evening yesterday playing and finishing it. It’s a short game, but probably one of the most poignant and heartrending games I have ever had the pleasure of experiencing.

The game is set in the future, where the ability to traverse and modify memories has been developed. As this can cause severe problems to one’s psyche, this is only done to people who are close to passing away.

The game’s story is about making come true one old, bedridden man’s dream to go to the moon, through this process of memory modification.  But, you see, he doesn’t know why he wants to go to the moon. He just does.  And that is the other part of the mission of the game: to find out why.

There isn’t a whole lot of what you could consider gameplay; it is very adventure/exploration oriented with some game-like things at certain points.

But that’s not the point.

It is not the point at all.  The point is to experience the story as it unfolds before you.

There are only a handful of things media-wise that have totally broken me emotionally (the film Nausicaa, and the ending of Limbo are two examples). This one breaks me even just listening to the (absolutely lovely) soundtrack.

You owe it to yourself to play this game. Please.

So the past weekend I finished up Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning.

Verdict? Too much game.

My save file ended up clocking in at around 96 hours or so, which is considerable. However, so many of the quests were basically the same sort of quest, except with different dialogue.  Also, the last few hours were one heck of a slog.  I could see this being split into two separate games, at least.  The House of Valor faction quest that comes with the “season pass” or whatever felt like a complete tack-on, just to justify the idea of the pass.

But, overall, it was quite an entertaining game. I chose to play some hybrid of all three main types of character you could be, and had a grand time sneaking around and messing up some bad guy’s day.

The lore got better and more interesting as time went on, as well.  They put an awful amount of work into it (although, this makes sense, since they were working on an MMO which, uh, well, we all know what happened there).  They left a few threads sort of hanging, but that’s fine.

All in all, I can say this is worth a play. Just don’t get exhausted playing it.

As it turns out, games don’t stop existing.

So, I was sent a copy of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning recently. It’s been described as Skyrim Light, which, unfortunately, is an absolutely dumb comparison and only slapped on there because they came out around the same time.

I mean, you can’t fill a room full of cabbages. So it’s already not Skyrim Light right there.

This is also probably an unfair “review” since I’m barely two hours into the game, but I’m already noticing some things.

It’s sort of what I’ve wanted: a fun action RPG that does not involve shooting. There is some stiffness in the controls in various odd places, though. I’m not sure what’s so hard about there not being a delay when I hit the button to dodge, either that or I’ve been spoiled by action games with controls like butta’, such as Bayonetta.  Also, for some reason, I’m not interested in most of what the characters have to say, unlike in Mass Effect.  I think part of that is the fact that most of what they have to say could’ve been shunted into a “lore codex”, like Mass Effect.

I suppose I’ll have more significant things to say with more game progress.