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Journaled 5+ games in a single day

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Favorite Games

The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth
The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth
Bloodborne
Bloodborne
Hollow Knight
Hollow Knight
Borderlands 2
Borderlands 2
Blasphemous
Blasphemous

1997

Total Games Played

018

Played in 2024

000

Games Backloggd


Recently Played See More

The Ascent
The Ascent

Mar 27

Astroneer
Astroneer

Mar 23

Zapling Bygone
Zapling Bygone

Mar 15

Astalon: Tears of the Earth
Astalon: Tears of the Earth

Mar 15

Evil West
Evil West

Mar 12

Recently Reviewed See More

I think I like this game more than it deserves, and because I've loved cyberpunk nearly my whole life. From reading Gibson to watching Johnny Mnemonic a hundred times as a teen. My most-wanted book is an original copy of the original cybperunk anthology, Mirrorshades, and even if it's only kind of tangentially cyberpunk, The Matrix was the first movie that the power of internet piracy allowed me to see before it opened in theatres. I especially love dirty and grimy cyberpunk, like what The Ascent offers, and as such I enjoyed myself even though the game overally isn't really as good as I'd want it to be.

The second big thing about this game is that it's an action RPG centered around dualstick shooter controls, which is something I've wanted for over a decade. The only other similar (kind of) game that I can think of is How to Survive, which had an amusing if janky first game and a terrible sequel that no one should play (as well as a new spiritual successor that looks pretty good). And the shooting in The Ascent is pretty good, even if there's far too much of it.

There's really nothing at all wrong with the core ideas here, and in fact I appreciate them quite a bit, but there is just so much about the execution that felt bothersome nearly the whole way through. This game has your typical RPG structure where you run back and forth in a semi-open little world and perform various tasks and errands, and the writing is at least solid enough that it feels like I'm partaking in some cyberpunk subterfuge as I navigate the various floors and economical classes of this world's acrology, but one of the biggest problems in the game is how slowly your character moves! They're so slow! I suspect that this was out of necessity, as in the game engien can't load assets fast enough if you're allowed to run or for that matter pan and spin the camera, but at the same time, you can move faster by constantly rolling and at least the PS5 version can keep up with that. I never noticed any egregious pop-in when I rolled around the world, but doing that is also exhausting. I don't want to hammer a button to move around quickly and it was a huge relief when I finally found myself economically secure enough that I could start using the taxi service to fast travel around the game (as it allows you to call a taxi from and to any exterior location).

With the taxi and my endless amounts of credits solving the traversal issue, I bounced back and forth. Upon first launch, I immediately loved the game. Then I quickly got sick of the slow running and the large scale of the small world (meaning the world isn't huge, but there are comparatively long and empty travel paths between quest objectives). I liked building my cyberpunk woman with dreads and unreasonable facial implants that don't seem to actually do anything beyond looking cyberpunk. I liked messing around with the various imaginative guns, even though I ended up spending most of my time with the Recoil and the Overwhelmer simply for DPS reasons. I appreciated that there is transmog for the fashion victims, even though I didn't really end up using it and I thought the best armor I found looked pretty cool as it was. And your character is so zoomed out, with no camera options available, that I didn't even really find myself noticing their outfit or gun skin anyway. I was invested in the story and wanted to find out the answer to the mystery. Even though I hated the slow running and felt like a lot of things didn't come together, I didn't hate the game overall and wanted to see it through. And, as I type, I'm only about an hour into the DLC and I still want to see what it has to offer. I especially liked how one part of the DLC changes the camera angle to be very oldschool top-down, like I'm playing Dreamweb or something. Oh, yeah, the game does that and changes camera angles when it has something cool to show you, which I liked. Any time you approach an overlook location, the game knows that you'll want to see the cool stuff and shows you it.

However, the game was also very tiresome due to the aforementioned slowness and how can't you solve things like running between the elevators with a taxi ride (since the taxi just takes you to the middle of that are anyway and you still have to hoof it), and above all, the absolutely incessant spawning of enemies really took a lot of fun away, since this game doesn't do hostile and neutral zones. Just any time an enemy sees you, you'll get attacked, and aggroing a gang member means that 25 more of them will spawn immediately. And they're everywhere. I like the shooting and I think the cover system, where you can crouch down behind cover and press a button to aim over it, was pretty cool, but because enemies spawn from everywhere and the game absolutely adores spawning enemies behind you, it felt simply boring that I couldn't get anywhere without being accosted like 5000 times by 5000 dudes who I've already defeated 5000 times, and the absolutely non-stop surprise spawns from behind, coupled with various mortars and other attacks meant to force you out of cover, ultimately meant that the cover system ended up being useless. There's one piece of cover in this arena, and there's both attackers from behind and grenades being lobbed at me, and the mortar enemies launch a new grenade the same frame as the previous one explodes, so there was no time to ever sit behind cover and be safe. I get that this is the idea, but then why even bother with the cover system if I can basically never use it?

There's also the lore and story, which seems to have had a lot of work put into it with a rather expansive codex and many ideas seemingly inspired by both Gibson (like referring to the city as "the sprawl" and such) and Shadowrun (various aliens and possible hinting at supernatural things), but still doesn't feel like it quite comes together. This is a big spoiler, but I felt like it was kind of a whatever plot point so I'm going to spoil it and say that it just felt weird that the fallen "Ascent Group" megacorp had a backup routine where the AGI created another AGI and a whole other corporation in case the original corp fell, but then...why are there diehard corporate loyals for this new made-up corporation? Did the AGI just materialize them too? Also, why is there japanese everywhere? I know "because cyberpunk", but nothing aside from neon signs is japanese in this game. No japanese culture, no asian characters from what I remember (everyone's white or an alien), just neon signs in japanese because that's what you do in cyberpunk. I also felt like the story of you constantly being some form of lackey felt unsatisfying. At first, you're a corporate slave working under the "stackboss" (basically the local mayor) and then you "graduate" to being a corporate lackey instead of just a slave. At the very end, you're granted freedom, but that's not really the plot I wanted to play? I want to be a rebel or some kind of criminal that takes down the megacorps, not an assassin for hire for one, and I feel like that's not the story this game sells with its advertising and art direction. Like why are slaves even allowed cyberware, a "netdeck" for hacking and guns? Those should probably be highly outlawed for slaves in this world for it to make sense. It also has to be mentioned that it's just plain odd that the entire script was written and even had the voices recorded for it before they decided to add a gender choice to the character selector. At first, the dialogue is neutral and I even noticed one line where the text said something like "Good to see you, my boy", but the audio engineer had cut out the "my boy" from the voice lines. But they just stop doing that partway through the game, and by the end, my female character kept being referred to as a man by literally everyone. That'd be fine if this was intentional gender politics, but it's clearly not and they obviously just tossed in female characters close to the end of development without going through all of the dialogue to clean it up.

Oh, and maybe this should've gone in another paragraph, but the weapon system really stops making sense after the first 5 or so hours. In the beginning, you can experiment and mess around with various weapons, like I did, but once you and the enemies level up (note: they don't scale, the game thankfully uses classic "high level enemies in high level areas" logic) and it becomes necessary to start using components to add to your firepower, the choices become more narrow with each upgrade you pick until you are left with just a few choices viable for endgame. Basically, I can't use this new Mk1 gun I found because it's so inferior to my Mk10 I've spent the whole game upgrading. It doesn't help that you have to either run around aimlessly and hope to run into bounties, or go to a specific area (Scrapland), to farm components and that they forgot that maybe you should be allowed to purchase basic components since you need so many of those in order to experiment with guns. The fact that superior components, the ones you use to max out an already highly upgraded weapon, are rare and permanently limited (as in you can only upgrade a few guns per lap of NG+) is fine and makes sense, but basic components really should've been super common to allow for more experimentation. It would also have meant that we'd have something to spend leftover credits on, since I ended up finishing the game with like 500k I couldn't spend on anything.

I liked this game and I'll be buying the sequel, if we get one, since the end of this game promises one by having a sequel hook after the credits. I also just now read an article that claims that this game sold well and that the company sold for something like €30 million, which should mean that they have more than enough time and budget to make a bigger, badder and better sequel. Wikipedia claims that the original investment for this game was only about €100k and there's no way that's true, because even though this game is remarkable in that it's extremely pretty and was made surprisingly quickly considering the core team credits are only 12 people (with a bunch of outsourcing of various things raising the total number of people who worked on it), that amount of money only covers one year of salary for one person in Sweden, including taxes and fees. What I mean is that this team can do very impressive work and even though this game was uneven and had some major flaws, I do hope that the claims of influx of more money is true and that they have a chance to develop a sequel that delivers on the promise of this game. There is something here, and cyberpunk fanatics will probably find much to love, but this game also just ain't quite it. If you don't love cyberpunk as much as I do, you should probably deduct at least a star from my score.

I really enjoyed this one. It's not perfect, it can get annoying, but it's also such an obvious labor of love with many charming little design ideas and quirks that I couldn't help but love my almost 100 hours with it.

The big thing is how you interact with the game and the world. Astroneer has a quirky and unique interface where you interact with the world with your character's backpack in a way that's going to sound very complicated in text, but is actually quite elegant and clever in practice. On a controller, you can move around and pan the camera as you'd expect with the sticks, but you can also press a button to not only bring up your backpack, but also summon a cursor for precise controls, which allows you to more exactly interact with mineral stacks you've mined or machines you've built. You can bring up the backpack to enter precise mode, grab something, click down the backpack and get a clearer view as you move the item you picked up. You also have a terrain deformation tool, which is reqally just a videogamey magic mining tool that lets you erase the world voxel by voxel and if said rock voxel happens to have malachite in it, you'll obtain some you can smelt into copper. The tool also has elegant and ismple mechanics for not only destroying the world, but building it so that you can shape the ground as you please.

Related to the controls is that everything has a little plug on the back, even natural resources you find in the wild, which clearly communicates that you can stick tihs red plug into red holes in your various machines and storage units. The controls and the visual communication just click together, even if they might take a moment to figure out, and the elegance and intuitiveness really doesn't translate well to text, I realize, but in practice it's often a joy to control and I'm not sure I've ever seen anything quite like it.

The game itself bills itself a survival game, but really, you don't have to care about eating and sleeping and you'll only die from lack of oxygen (and a few pesky plants that can attack you), so I consider it to be more of a My First Factory Game. Like Factorio for Dummies, such as myself, who have never played one of the more hardcore factory sims. You start by mining composite and resin, with which you build simple things that allow you to build more advanced things so you can mine more advanced ore and so on. The game's got a pretty steady and obvious progression curve that feels so good that I didn't mind completely rebuilding my base with my new gear a whole three times. At first, my base was chaos with just whatever I had just unlocked placed down, and then I rebuilt it with some flattened ground as I had both unlocked new machines and figured out how to sculpt the world a little better. Then I managed to unlock the large shredder, destroyed everything with that and erbuilt it with some endgame machines and platforms (which are used for all of your devices as the platforms have some mild automation to them, meaning things like how a smelter will automatically grab any unsmelted ore that's placed on the same platform as the smelter). I never do that, and it's a testament to how much I like the game that I not only rebuilt my home base three times, but I also built some fairly respectable bases on about half of the seven planets (while also not really feeling like adding another 100+ hours building full bases on all of them).

That's really about all there is to say about this game, honestly. It's basically No Man's Sky, except with a much more reasonable ambition level for a small team and that works much better out of the box with less crashing and other issues. Instead of the entire universe, Astroneer "only" offers a solar system with I think five planets and two moons you can visit, and that all have different ore and such so that you have to fly between various places to expand your home base and for example set up an iron mining operation on the glacial planet so that you can bring huge stacks of iron back to home base and build more advanced things with it (or smelt it into steel to build even more advanced stuff). It's a hardcore tinkering game where there's always something to do, tons of running back and forth to fill up on aluminium while your soil centrifuge creates resin that you can use to build even more things. And then you remember that you also had to jet to that moon real quick to further effectivize your mining operations there, which ends up with you accidently spending two hours there moving things around, driving your various mining vehicles and just joyriding on the hoverboard because that thing is tons of fun. It's basically a nightmare for ADHD players, but in a mostly good way, because I found myself being sidetracked constantly, and needing to bust out a notepad to remember what I needed to bring to where, but I was always entertained by the mechanics, the visuals and the atmosphere.

There are negatives, of course. Towards the end of the game, I was fantasizing and wishing for a button to "dump all backpack minerals into smelter" or some such, since even though the control scheme is unique and charming, it gets real old to manually move 50 stacks of malachite or whatever. I'm sure this is much better on a mouse, because the game offered little to no sensitivity options for people who had gotten used the controls but wanetd fasted movement. I think, maybe, that one of the mouse sensitivity controls (since even the PS5 version of this game offers mouse and keyboard options) slightly sped up the cursor even with a controller, but that's only slightly and the cursor ends up feeling painfully slow once you're 50 hours in. I also thought that the skill tree and the 3D printer menus really needed a overhaul, as they're very horizontal and it's quite difficult to get an overview of what's available. IF you want to use the small printer to make a medium storage silo, but you've previously used it to create a drill for your rover, the best move is to put the required materials in your backpack, interact with the printer and then just hold right on the d-pad until you notice the "required resources" box light up (because you have the materials in your pack). I would've preferred a regular, vertical list or a box full of icons or something, because it gets real messy when you have everything unlocked and the creation of things isn't anywhere near as elegant as the interaction with them is.

The biggest negative, however, is that you can't truly automate your assembly line. You can move materials around automatically, but in a way that's kind of cumbersome, and I decided that no way was I going to try to build an automated line for the chemical, uh, thing that converts for example graphite and hydrogen (or whatever gas it was) into graphene. That means you have to automatically feed multiple ores AND gasses and setting that up is possible, but also a major pain. The huge issue, however, is that you can't infinitely mine ore and I think it's a big mistake that the ore extractor doesn't simply cheat. By that, I mean that you have to actually place the extractor on a real deposit, which runs out, so you have to move it when it's done, and I think the extractor should've just magically created ore out of thin air, as in you can place one in your base, tell it to create malachite and now you have the possibility for true automation of the whole line. Instead, you have to move the enormous and cumbersome extractor around with your buggy, fill up huge resource containers and then automate from the container on. There never is an unlock that lets you mass mine huge amounts at the same time, and there never is one that lets you automatically collect ore either, which feels like a bummer ending to a very engaging and entertaining game. I wanted to end as a space mining god, but instead the game just kind of fizzles out as you realize that automation is either impossible or a huge pain to set up and even though I enjoyed the game enough to completely rebuild three times, I wasn't into the idea of doing it a fourth time.

Speaking of endings, there is a story that emerges as you play, and I have to spoil it to tell you how bad and disappointing it is. So stop reading if you don't want spoilers! You see, the plot, as it is revealed in an endgame quest that was patched into the game in one of its many updates, is... "It was all a dream." Yes, the universally most-hated ending in any story is the ending here. Technically, they tell you that you've been playing a simulation, but really, that's just the scifi nerd verison of "it was all a dream" and it sucks. So everything I did was for nothing? It was all just make-believe as my consciousness lives in a simulated solar system? Why would you write that? Thankfully, the plot is a very minimal part of this game and it's really a wonderful and entertaining busywork game.

In short, I really recommend this game to anyone who thinks it looks interesting and I might even come back to this game in a year and see what major updates its had, as it's still getting content and new features even after all this time. I realized the other day that the game has been out, including early access, for over seven years, so it's nice to see that it's still being updated. I had quests added to the game as I played in march of 2024. If you're even reading this review, you should probably just go buy it! It's so cheap on sale and I think you'll have so much fun. I did!

Zapling Bygone does some cool things, like the otherworldly atmosphere and lore and how it's always cool to play a tentacle monster that can walk on walls or punch as it walks (since it has many tentacles!), but this is not a gaming experience for me. Confusing level layouts, unfun upgrades and, worst of all, blind navigation where you only unlock the map after beating an area and the game does nothing to help you figure out what you've already explored or not. That's a nightmare for my ADHD brain so I'm out after just an hour or two. I do believe that this developer has a great game in them, though, so I don't feel great about hating this game, but I do. Next game!