Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Beyond Divinity - 5/20 hours

Well, it's hour five and I'm still in hell. By which I mean fantasy knockoff Hell. I'm not sure if it's actually an afterlife-type situation, but I'm also not sure it matters. After I escaped from the demon, Samuel, he ordered his troops to kill me and then bring me back for torture . . . in that order. So the boundary between life and death is still a bit ambiguous. I may technically still be alive, but I'm soul-bonded to something called a "Death Knight," so if I discovered I'd been dead this whole time, I would not be surprised.

But speaking of the Death Knight, this partnership is not working out. He's moderately helpful in combat, but once you account for the tweaked encounter balance (which is generally much better than the original, admittedly) he's more of a liability than an asset. The way the soul-bond works is that if one member of the pair dies, they both die. And since your enemies tend to focus fire, it's less like you have the combined power of two characters and more like you're limited by the health of the weaker character. Keeping both your guys topped up on health is really hard on healing potions. One time, I ran out, and I had to leave my Death Knight behind while my main character fought the enemies solo. They only joined back up once I got the free health recharge from leveling up.

It wouldn't be so bad, if the Death Knight were a better character, but really he's like the token evil party member, except you have to drag him everywhere as part of an escort mission. It's still too early for me to have any serious grudges, but I expect I will grow to hate him.

That being said, I'm still pretty invested in the game. I'm interested in escaping the afterlife, and I want to learn more about this setting's metaphysics. I've got a suspicion that I'll be emerging into a standard Northern-European-esque fantasy world, but I would be delighted if the game was stranger than all that.

I guess the only way to be sure is to keep playing. Hopefully it will be at most another couple of hours before I find out.

Sunday, October 29, 2017

Beyond Divinity - 2/20 hours

The thing about the first 2 hours of this game that is going to stick with me the longest is the Death Knight's voice. I'm a little guilty, because it feels like singling out a single performer's work for ridicule, but I can't just let it pass. There were some seriously questionable artistic choices that went into creating this character. I'm not sure I can adequately describe it. It's equally goofy and gruff, like the villain on a children's cartoon show, but it's also kind of bad. But that description doesn't really do it justice. I'll just let the video speak for itself:


Needless to say, I turned off the sound as soon as possible.

Other than that, I'd say that Beyond Divinity has gotten off to a stronger start than its predecessor. You wake up in hell (or, more precisely a prison dimension operated by a demon) and you and your Death Knight companion have to work together to escape. It's a nifty premise that hooked me right away. It's possible that it might overstay its welcome - two hours is already a long time to spend in an introductory dungeon - but for now, I'm fine with it.

Sadly, I am already predicting that I will end this game as prematurely as I did the original. If the first dungeon is anything to go by, Beyond Divinity is going to continue the series' pattern of taking its time to roll out the central plot. It's really all down to a race right now. Will the story or gameplay get me invested enough before the deadline that my desire to continue outweighs to move on?

Saturday, October 28, 2017

Beyond Divinity - Initial Thoughts

About the Game (From the Steam Store Page)

Beyond Divinity is the follow-up to the award-winning Divine Divinity. Soul-forged with a Death Knight, your fate is to spend the rest of eternity bonded to this creature of evil, unless you can undo his curse...prepare for your greatest adventure!

This new re-mastered version offers support for Windows 7 and higher resolutions.

Key Features:
An RPG of Epic Proportions: Experience an adventure that will last you over 60 hours, filled with tons of non-linear quests and offering an enormous world to explore, spread over 4 story acts. And if that’s not enough for you, you can always enter the Battlefields - a randomly generated universe filled with loot, enemies and new quests.

Classless Character Development: You decide what kind of character you want to be! An open, class-free character development system with over 30 character traits and 290 skills to learn, including advanced alchemy, craftsmanship, trap creation and many others.

Work together to emerge victorious: You can seamlessly switch control between your avatar and the Death Knight. In combat, you can pause the game at will and take your time to issue commands to each party member. Summoning dolls allows you to increase your party size even further.

Interaction Galore: Discover the enormous amount of objects that can be investigated, traded, used and combined. Found some empty flasks and picked up some colourful mushrooms? Create potions! Obtained some vile-smelling poison? Daub it on your blade or arrow tips: your foes won't know what hit 'em!

Award-winning Soundtrack Enjoy the dulcet melodies composed by Kirill Pokrovsky, the two-time winner of IGN’s "Outstanding Achievement in Music" award.

Previous Playtime

0 hours

What Was I Thinking When I Bought This

Same story as before - it was part of an impulsive and ill-considered bundle purchase.

Expectations and Prior Experience

Having played the previous game, I've got a pretty good idea about how this is going to go (unless it does a complete swerve and shocks me). The interaction and class development are oversold, but it's still nonetheless a solid action-rpg. Having a Death Knight to help me out should change the feel of the game somewhat, but it could potentially be just another thing to micromanage.

My main hope here is that the sequel is more self-assured than the original. That it will present its strongest ideas earlier and that it will polish of the rough edges of the UI. There was potential in the original that was not quite fulfilled, so they don't have to reinvent the whole game. I just want to spend more time playing the actual game and less time wandering aimlessly looking for the fun parts.

Worst case scenario, it's just another forgettable ARPG. I can live with that.

Divine Divinity - 20/20 hours

As much as I determined to avoid the plot and just mess around, I wound up stumbling ass-backwards into the main story anyway. I wandered into a castle and got tormented by an annoying prince. Then, as I sought revenge for him humiliating me (and being an evil little shit who tortured prisoners), I somehow wound up the only surviving Marked One, with a mission to unite the various fantasy races against a resurrected god of chaos. You know, as often happens in these situations.

It's a decent enough way to end the first act of the game. Giving me seven broad quests allows me a certain amount of freedom to explore at my own pace. It's a trick that has been used very effectively in rpgs for a long time now. So I'm going to go ahead and give the plot a tentative thumbs up. Prince Janus was a fun villain, and while I found Zandalor's shtick a bit tiring, I could appreciate what they were trying to do, and there was a point where I was given vital information by a talking cat. I will admit to being jaded enough that a by-the-numbers fantasy plot, competently executed, is not enough to thrill me any more, but I'm not quite so jaded that I'm going to jump on it as a major flaw.

My main disappointment with this game is that I did not get far enough in the plot to really consider the theological ramifications of the "Marked One" situation, or the political nuances of attempting to fight chaos through assembling a multinational coalition (and the way those nuances would have inevitably been undercut by the action-oriented quests necessary to advance the plot). Divine Divinity is a more thoughtful game than I gave it credit for, but I suspect the store page boast about "an adventure that will last you 100 hours" is accurate, and as pleasant a time as I've had, I'm not really ready for that sort of commitment right now.

So here is where I'm going to call it quits. I've got 8 weeks to play 6 games (assuming I don't break down and buy any in the winter sale), and while I would say, on balance, that I enjoyed this game (level-agnostic orc ambushes or dungeon bosses notwithstanding), it didn't spark an obsession. I do, however, have an unusually powerful sense of unfinished business here. This isn't like The Last Remnant, where I reached the deadline amidst a major gameplay roadblock. I could continue from here, quite easily. I perhaps even should continue, considering I still have two sequels to play, and I might get hopelessly confused about the story as time goes on. Yet I won't, because I am a rootless wanderer among games, my quest to experience each one tantamount to an embrace of dilettantism.

Will I ever come back to Divine Divinity and finish what I started? I wish I could say yes, because I kind of feel like I owe it to the game to see where it's story goes. Yet, I have so many other games I'd rather play that it seems like a real long-shot. I think its best chance is if I play the later games in the Divinity series and come to love them so much that I come back to this one as a sort of prologue.

It's not likely, but it could happen.

Wednesday, October 25, 2017

Divine Divinity - 10/20 hours

My main complaint with Divine Divinity is that saving or loading a game takes a surprisingly long amount of time. I'd have thought that a fifteen year old game like this would have been lightning-quick about it. It makes me wonder what it was like to play the game back when it was new. If it takes 25 seconds to load a game on a 2015 computer, did it take several minutes to load on a 2002 computer? And did you have to go through that every time you died?

Because 25 seconds isn't that bad in isolation, but when you have to do it three times in ten minutes, it starts to add up. Which is to say that, even on easy mode, this game is kind of tough.

I think it comes as a consequence of two different factors - the first is that there does not appear to be significant level-gating. Once I left the safety of the starting town, it became all too easy to wander into an area where the enemies were too powerful for me. The first warning about such areas tends to be me dying and having to reload. The second issue is that your fights do not seem to be designed encounters.

In other words, sometimes you'll be wandering through orc country and you'll come across an orc. As a single foe, they're barely worth worrying about. But in maybe one out of every three encounters or so, it won't just be that single orc. As you're fighting the first one, a bunch of additional ones keep wandering out of the fog of war. Before you know it, you're fighting a half-dozen or more, complete with elites, archers, and the occasional spellcaster. It's rare that such a nasty surprise has failed to kill me.

My guess is that it's reflective of a particular design philosophy, one where the world is not necessarily designed with the player in mind. So the orcs ae wherever the orcs are, and you can either fight them or learn to accept it. Issues like line-of-sight and attracting aggro aren't even considerations, because you're not really having an encounter, you're making a discovery.

There are advantages to doing things this way. The world itself feels a tinier bit more real. The enemies aren't merely a challenge to be overcome, but participants in the world, with their own needs and agendas. You can't assume that just because something exists, the hero is going to find it, loot it, or make it their own.

The downside is that the player doesn't get to see it if they're dead, and if the player never sees it, then including it is kind of a waste of time. I guess the hope is that the player manages to successfully navigate the level curve with no help, and then admires your craftsmanship at the appropriate time.

I'm not quite there yet. The game is fun enough that I might stick around long enough to get there, but in the meantime, I once accidentally walked into a cave with a hostile Troll King I could barely hit, and repeatedly found myself near an orc encampments that ate me alive. So far, in all but one occasion, I've managed to survive, but always at a terrible cost in potions.

I wish there were a better story to keep me going. So far, I've learned that I'm something called a "marked one," and that there are forces at work that want to either kill me (as represented by John the Dragon Rider) or protect me (Zandalor the wizard, though I could not tell you a second thing about him). And I know that I am usually pretty useless in following these kind of stories, but in this case, there's nothing to worry about because this is literally all I know. In order to unlock more of the plot, I have to help the military defeat a bunch of orcs, even though, as I already said, they manage to eat me alive nearly every single time.

I think I'm going to make a conscious decision not to pursue Divine Divinity's plot any farther than I have to. At the rate things are going, it would take me forever to get to the end, and I'd rather just use my remaining ten hours to hang out and bop level-appropriate monsters on the head.


Saturday, October 21, 2017

Divine Divinity - 5/20 hours

I did the thing where I play an rpg for two hours and then start over from scratch to test out a new character build. So I am only a little bit past where I was before. Down at the bottom of a dungeon, facing the undead hordes of a repentant necoromancer.

I'll admit, I was taken by surprise when the death-obsessed mage who engineered his own resurrection told me that he regretted his decisions and wanted to die. That, at least, was a novel twist on what had hitherto been a by-the-numbers fantasy plot.

The biggest change in my second go-round, though, is that I'm now playing on Easy difficulty. It's not that different, though I do notice that my healing potions tend to go a longer way, and that, in turn, lets me spend more time down in the dungeon. That's something that eases the stress involved in directionless exploration.

So far I'm having a good time. I wish there were more of a "hook," like Fallout's irradiated wasteland or Planescape: Torment's fantastic city at the center of the multiverse, but I can work with what I've got. I'm not sure I'll ever make a genuine connection with the world or its characters, but I can at least enjoy the mechanics of the game, hacking and slashing my way through dungeons and slowly developing my character into the ultimate killing machine.

Friday, October 20, 2017

Divine Divinity - 2/20 hours

Sometimes, when I'm playing a new game, I'm tempted to wonder if the tutorial level is really worth all the trouble. They tend to be uninteresting and overly simple. And then I play a game that doesn't have one, and I remember - not having one really sucks.

I think I've figured out the basics of Divine Divinity, but I also have the feeling that there's a lot I'm missing out on. I had to look up online how to harvest the various herbs you find around the map. I also had a tough (or at least tougher than it ought to be) time figuring out how to use items and fight in combat.

To top it off, this is one of those old style games that seems to think that not telling me where to go somehow builds character. Call me a wimp if you must, but I love quest markers. I can see how some might think they might diminish the thrill of unguided exploration, but I hate knowing there's somewhere I'm supposed to be and being unable to find it.

But that's just a risk I have to take with older games. If the game itself proves to be fun, it's something that can be overlooked. However, it is still too early for me to make that call. I'm still in the first village and so it's still ambiguous whether any frustration I might have comes from the game itself or the fact that I'm low level and unknowledgeable.

The story itself is nothing special. I woke up with amnesia in a mysterious village of healers, and it's likely that their leader has been driven mad by demonic possession. It's a good setup for a game, but I'm not anticipating any special payoff here. I will heal the leader and then move on and probably never think of this place again.

Divine Divinity - Initial Thoughts

About the Game (From the Steam Store Page)

 Listed among the "Top 100 PC Games Of All Time" by PC GAMER (2012), Divine Divinity is an epic role-playing game with hack-and-slash action, offering a huge world to explore and thousands of items to investigate, trade and use.

The game chronicles the never-ending battle between valiant heroes and the destructive powers of Chaos harnessed by the Black Ring, a cult of enduring evil. You play the role of the prophesised Chosen One who under the guidance of the wizard Zandalor must unite the seven races of Rivellon so that you may become the Divine One and stop the birth of the Lord of Chaos.


Previous Playtime

0 hours

What Was I Thinking When I Bought This

Well, I had heard good things about Divinity: Original Sin, but it was both the fourth game in a series and a little bit more expensive than I was willing to pay for, so I bought the first three games as part of a heavily discounted bundle.

Expectations and Prior Experience

First, I have get something off my chest: "Divine Divinity" is a terrible title. I mean, as opposed to what, non-divine divinity? It's been bugging me for years and may well be a contributing factor to why I waited so long to play it.

I'll probably like the game, though. It's an isomorphic action-rpg, and apparently one of the top 100 games of all time, at that. So unless it has some hidden offensiveness or unnecessary difficulty, it should be fine.

Other than the basic genre staples, I don't really know what to expect. A lot of items, apparently. Which can be good. I like futzing with items. But will it be enough? That plot looks as generic as generic can be. The worst case scenario is that it will be merely bland, but it's possible that it might hook me nonetheless.

Overall, I'm pretty optimistic.

Thursday, October 19, 2017

Offworld Trading Company - 20/20 hours

I'm in a difficult position in regards Offworld Trading Company. My only complaint about it is that I wish it was an entirely different game. By that I mean that I enjoyed playing it, and I found the mechanics to be both interesting and apt for what the game was trying to accomplish, but at its root, it is something I am not particularly interested in - a quick and simple multiplayer game of cutthroat economics.

Or, to be more precise, this is the sort of game that's fun to play with friends, because it's competitive without being violent and it's tactically complex enough that no two matches are going to be exactly the same. But as a solitary activity . . . I have other things I'd rather do.

So that leaves me trying to put a vague and nameless feeling into words. I guess my experience with this game was one of "practice." I had to play it deliberately, and with my mind not on the present, but on the future. I was playing the game not for itself, but for what I might learn from it. Which, you know, is fine, but it had the unfortunate side effect of making it feel more like work than play.

This is definitely a game that I would play again, if I ever need a low time-commitment multiplayer game. I like that it is mostly pacifist (although the Black Market was kind of bullshit) and that you win by building yourself up rather than tearing your opponents down.

That said, I'm not sure when that situation will come up, so it is likely that it will take me years of owning this game before I get to my second twenty hours. I guess that's fine, though. Not every game has to become an obsession. If they did, how would it be possible to own two hundred of them . . .

(Oh, wow, I think I just had an epiphany that would have saved me a lot of trouble if I'd had it 4 years ago.)

Wednesday, October 18, 2017

Offworld Trading Company - 14/20 hours

My main takeaway, after 14 hours of playing this game, is that the people of future Mars are idiots. As near as I can tell, the various offworld trading companies are about as well-regulated as 19th century corporations. The way you win the game is by purchasing stock in all your rivals until you get a complete monopoly. And during all this, the space-SEC is nowhere to be found.

Maybe it's just a frontier mentality. There's something about having wide-open spaces, not yet developed by industry, that triggers a flaw in the human brain - "we don't have to worry about responsible stewardship of the land, there's plenty more where that came from." You'd think that after the Earth was ruined by reckless capitalism, people would be more diffident about exporting that system into space, but Offworld Trading Company doesn't seem to even acknowledge the irony (though, to be fair, it doesn't have much of a story, generally).

It's probably just a gameplay thing. You've got these businesses and you want one to be a winner and the others to be the losers. How do you bring it about? Just eliminate any player who spends too long in the red? That would probably not be tenable, given the particulars of the game's economy. There's a lot of time, especially at the beginning, where you have to borrow money to keep your business growing, and with the market as volatile as it is, this could lead to you being eliminated by accident. Having the elimination mechanic be a stock buyout puts your fate entirely in the hands of your opponents.

You just have to gloss over the worldbuilding implications, though. Like, the whole game revolves around colonies granting you land claims, but they don't seem to worry about the dangers of consolidation, of one corporation gaining overwhelming control over a significant portion of their economy, including their food, water, and air. When you add in the "black market" mechanic, where you can hire mercenaries to sabotage your rivals, it suggests a weak and feckless government that is incapable of enforcing the law.

I mean, it's not a pleasant thought, the idea that for all your infrastructure building, Mars will develop itself into the same sort of ecological dead-end that Earth has become, or that the future of the colonists will be one of exploitation at the hands of an unquestionable corporate monopoly. How does one even shop around for air, anyway?

I don't think Offworld Trading Company is meant to be an incisive critique of capitalism. Yet there are times it feels that way, when I ask myself "why am I doing this" and the only answer I can come up with is "I must acquire and consume and have more than all my rivals. I must be the only business left standing. Nothing must stand in the way of my wealth." And it is easy to get lost in this rapacity and jealousy, to forget the purpose of your building and development - to create a new life for the human race on Mars. It raises the uncomfortable question - would you hinder the enterprise, if there were greater profit in it for you?

It's likely not intentional ideology, though. It comes from being a multiplayer game at heart. Some games are cooperative, but very rarely so in the strategy genre. So if multiple people are going to play the same game, there have to be winners and losers. And if there are losers in a game primarily about economics, than there has to be (at least implied) misery on the story-layer. It is possible to imagine a world of universally improving material conditions, but if you have wealth as a win-state, than the lose-state almost has to be poverty. The grim implied story of the game comes from a combination of losing-as-poverty and the winner-take-all nature of multiplayer competition.

There's not really anything you can do but take the game at face value, though. If you want to make inferences about the broader world of Offworld Trading Company, you have to extrapolate from the game mechanics. Unfortunately, it looks like humanity took its greed and its short-sightedness with it into the stars. And I guess there's no remembering the mistakes of the past when it's much more profitable to forget.

Bleak. . .

At least I'll have my money to distract me.

Sunday, October 15, 2017

Offworld Trading Company - 8/20 hours

I thought for sure that I would breeze through this one. It has everything I like - infrastructure, build orders, pacifism, space ships, the whole deal. And while much of my delay has been about unrelated life stuff, I have to admit that part of it is, indeed due to the game itself.

It's just too fast-paced. You have to make a lot of decisions very quickly, and by the time you see the consequences of those decisions, the match is very nearly over. I never really get to the point where I start to feel an attachment to my business empire. So there's this moment, after the end of each match, where I have to decide whether I feel like starting everything from scratch. And more often than not, I don't.

Which isn't to say that I dislike this game. In fact, the opposite is true. I think it would be easier for me to play it if I liked it less. As paradoxical as that sounds, it comes down to the constantly resetting nature of long-term gameplay. If I'm enjoying myself at minute 30, I'd rather move on to minute 31, rather than go back to minute 0. If I disliked the game, it would all be the same.


I think this is another case where it all boils down to mastering my emotions. I have no terrible pressing need to keep playing this game, but I also don't have any particular aversion to doing so. I could probably do a half hour a day more or less indefinitely. The main problem is my self-imposed schedule. I'm not letting my actions be guided by my natural and spontaneous desires, and so even something I enjoy can seem like a chore.

You'd think that, having done this for three years now, I'd have a cure for that malaise, but the truth is, I feel like it's been getting worse. My life has been very unsettled recently, and I've been more vulnerable to the temptation to turn off my brain and consume more passive entertainment. Binge-watching Archer is not as satisfying as finishing a new game and writing a blog post about it, but it does take less of my mental energy.

Which isn't the fault of the game, I suppose. But its structure definitely doesn't help. It's too easy to wrongly feel like I've accomplished something significant. Winning a match is just a drop in the bucket, in terms of my blog project. It's repeating the process another 39 times that will get me across the finish line.

Sunday, October 8, 2017

Offworld Trading Company - 2/20 hours

So far, I've played the tutorial, a skirmish, and a couple of campaign missions. It's all been on the easiest difficulty, so there hasn't been any great stress or trouble. It's mostly just been a relaxing exercise in build order optimization, of the sort that I tend to really enjoy.

But I also get the feeling that this is the sort of game that is difficult to comment on at 2 hours. Eithr I've already seen most of what Offworld Trading Company has to offer, or there is a profound level of depth that will take me hours to appreciate. Possibly both. It certainly doesn't hide mechanics from you. There is a fairly shallow chain of infrastructure and most of the challenge in any individual mission appears to be adapting to the map. I'm sure that there are nuances to using the more advanced buildings, but individual matches tend to be over before that's necessary.

My guess is that this game is optimized for short multiplayer matches, and the intent is that you experience the whole of your company's arc - founding to expansion followed by either bankruptcy or monopoly - in about 30-60 minutes. It's something that doesn't take a lot of commitment, and which you're supposed to find interesting enough that you don't mind repeating it over and over again.

I think I'll have to take a "wait and see" approach here. I like manipulating the economy and seeing my company grow, but I dislike the way the game forces an eliminationist conflict so quickly. I think the main takeaway here is . . . that I like grinding?

That seems plausible. Which means that the main theme I'm going to be thinking of, going forward, is the difference between drawing out a process in order to pad the game's running time versus allowing for an ever-expanding player ambition by including open-ended high-tier content. It will probably take me a few hours to get a handle on it, though.

Friday, October 6, 2017

Offworld Trading Company - Initial Thoughts

About the Game (From the Steam Store Page)
 
Mars has been colonized. Now, Earth's greatest corporate titans have been invited to build companies to support it. The competition to dominate the market is fierce in this fast-paced economic RTS from Civilization IV lead Designer, Soren Johnson.

Venture to Mars to Earn Your Fortune
With space travel becoming a reality and the easy-to-reach resources on Earth dwindling, hopeful people seeking their fortune are rushing to the next great frontier: Mars. Rekindle humanity’s adventurous spirit by leaving Earth behind and make a new name for yourself as a titan of industry on the red planet.

Discover the Origin of the Major Martian Businesses
Determine the fate of the Martian colonization effort in the dynamic single-player campaign mode. Multiple types of CEOs, each with unique traits and abilities, deliver many hours of discovery into their motivations and how they intend to dominate the future of Mars.

Experience New Adventure in Multiplayer
Turn your friends into frenemies! With a robust and exciting multiplayer mode that can support up to eight players, no two games of Offworld Trading Company are the same! The market fluctuates depending on which of the four starting corporations you and your opponents choose and what resources you accumulate. Strategy is key, and tenuous alliances between rivals are easily broken when the opportunity arises.

Control the Market before your Competition Controls You
In Offworld Trading Company, market forces are your weapons, not guns or bombs. The real-time player driven market is your sword and your shield here. In order to win, you will need to make tough choices on what resources to acquire, what goods to build and sell, how to interact with the planet's thriving underworld, and what stocks to acquire and when. With over a dozen different resources available and a constantly changing market economy, no two paths of victory are alike -- each game holds a different “key” to dominating your competition.

Previous Playtime

6 hours

Expectations and Prior Experience

My friend Daniel bought this for me as a gift awhile back, and we've played multiplayer maybe a dozen times since then. Aside from the tutorial, this will be my first time going solo and I basically have only one agenda - learn enough about the game to beat the AI. Most of the time, when we play, it was on a team against the computer, and every time we get spanked. One of these days, I'd really like to avenge myself and my friend.

That is also, ironically, my main worry about the game. It is intensely competitive, almost off-puttingly so. I like that it is a (mostly) pacifist game, but am somewhat discombobulated by the idea that the goal is to non-violently destroy your rivals. It will be interesting to see which of my tendencies wins out - my love for peacefully building things or my dislike of absolutist victory conditions.

I think the outlook is favorable, though, especially if there is an option to disable the black market. This is an RTS that focuses on base building and economy and dispenses with all that tedious military conflict and associated battlefield tactics. The worst case scenario is that I turn out to be so bad at it that my matches don't last long enough for me to enjoy the game's central premise. But that's what easy mode is for.

Monaco - 20/20 hours

I'm finally done with Monaco. I think the main thing holding me back from finishing this game was the fact that I didn't want to. For most of the last week, I've been playing Starbound instead.  It was primarily embarrassment at the thought of taking more than two weeks to finish a game that got me through it. Last night, I just sat down and did a seven hour marathon session.

Sort of. I actually just set the game on God Mode and ground for achievements. I feel a little bad about that, because I didn't actually earn things like the "Unscathed" achievement for finishing every mission without dying, and thus my Steam profile will seem deceptive to anyone who might take a look at it, but it gave me a goal and a direction. Without that, I'd have had to spend all that time sneaking around, and that's basically a non-starter.

I did play a couple of honest co-op games, and those were interesting. I could see how this game could be a lot of fun with four players, communicating over voice chat, and using their individual characters' unique abilities to execute a complex plan. However, that's not really the experience you get with random matches. All the times I tried it, I had only one teammate and we each did our separate thing in absolute silence. I'd rank that as slightly better than single-player stealth, but not by so much that I was willing to give up invisibility.

In the end, Monaco is another one of those games I respect rather than enjoy. It has a very simple presentation, but the intricate levels allowed for multiple approaches that could take advantage of a wide variety of character abilities, constrained be a tense fog-of-war mechanic that rewards observation, memory, and careful planning. It's impressive that so much of the game's complexity lies in the meta-game, and I think if I were an obsessive stealth game fan I would be able to get a lot of mileage out of it.

But I'm not, so I won't. Before cheating my way through and making it a sub-par shooter, I was mostly frustrated by its difficulty. And it wasn't the sort of uplifting frustration that made me want to excel. It was the sort dull frustration that edges me towards despair. I didn't care enough about the game's core challenge to want to develop the game's core skills. I'm fully willing to admit that it's a personal failing, and not something that's wrong with the game itself. But there you have it. Another game that wound up as an endurance test.

Although, I suppose the god thing about being so far down my list is that I surely have only a couple of those left . . .