Blackthorne (DOS). Basically Prince of Persia but totally metal. You control a Snake Pliskin-looking guy armed with a shotgun who's warped back to his long-lost home planet/dimension to liberate it from an overlord who seems like Blizzard's rough draft version of Diablo and his orc horde. I certainly have no complaints about this. The game has a great pulpy atmosphere.

You have a simple inventory that's mostly handy for picking up keys to unlock forcefields and extend bridges, along with bombs and health potions. The gunfighting is done by ducking into the background and then popping out to hit your enemy before he can take cover, too. What this does to the gameplay is that it turns combat into an exercise in patience and timing. The less antsy you are to just get a fight over with, the more likely you'll be to come out of it with a good amount of health. Things do get easier toward the end of the game, when your gun is upgraded, but then the game is also throwing more enemies at you in more challenging circumstances. As far as everything else goes, it really does play a lot like PoP, and like that game, my biggest challenge was mastering the timing of the running long jump.

I never did find a use for the no-look behind-the-back shooting method. It's just something that looks cool, I guess. I seem to recall that the SNES version allows you to actually free your friends from their chains but for some reason that's not in the DOS version. Using this freeware version downloaded from Blizzard's site, I found it to have a nasty bug - I'm not sure if it's always been there - that can cause inventory items to vanish if you aren't careful about highlighting the right item before unlocking a door. It caused me to get stuck a couple of times by making my bridge key disappear before I realized what was happening.

Citadel by the Sea (NWN:EE)

Review

7 citizen points have been removed from you for bad talking (3 for the words + 4 for doing it in a public forum).

Grim Legends 3: The Dark City

Last of the series of HOG/puzzle games by Artifex Mundi. You were right, the third one was certainly the best, but since it was the best (more streamlined, less non-sense bits), it felt a bit short to me!! ^_^

Oh well, still a very good game if you have 3-5 hours to invest, and you don't need to play the two others, the are not related storywise.

So far in 2020: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_finished_in_2020/post29

Dangonronpa 2: Goodbye Despair (PC)

From what I can tell having played this game, the developers seemed to want to double down on the wackiness, twists and difficulty of the first game, resulting in a fairly different but mechanically similar game. Once again you play a character in a school full of 'Ultimates', people who are the best at a certain field, once again held hostage and told to start killing each other by a deranged teddy bear. The difference's this time are you're trapped on a tropical holiday resort instead of a school, you're joined by a rather annoying rabbit plushie called Umami and the students are a lot more insane. While some new characters are interesting, there are some terrible ones, one character literally walks up to girls he's just met and asks for blowjobs, female characters are often made to 'show off their goods' in their designs and actions as well. One of the worst additions is Umami, who spends the majority of the game crying, acting pathetic and getting beaten up.

Gameplay wise little has changed, you build friendships during free time, investigate during the investigation phase and then solve the mystery in the trial phase. However the trial phase has been changed due to what I can only assume are complaints the last game was 'too easy' or 'too short'. There is a good addition in that you can now show evidence to prove a statement correct as well as prove contradictions wrong. However 2 of the mechanics from the previous game were 'improved' (The game literally calls them improved) which you might have guessed means I'm about to imply they were made worse. In the previous game Hangmans Gambit was a mode where you needed to answer a question by supplying a word, the word would have missing letters and you'd have to provide those letters by shooting down letter tiles that floated towards you, while it wasn't the best, it never really posed any problems. The 'improved' Hangmans gambit changes things: first of all, all the letters in the missing word(s) are missing, making it substantially more difficult, secondly, the letter tiles crawl slowly across the screen making the game much longer, and finally you have to destroy tiles you don't need before they crash into other tiles, something that can happen before they appear on your screen because of poor RNG. When you're asked "What's the difference between two photo's" and are presented with "------- --------" it is incredibly hard to figure out what specific difference you need to enter. Two other modes were added: Rebuttal, a mode which see's you argue with a character over a specific point which is solved by cutting through their words with 'truth swords', and Logic Dive, which consists of 3 multiple choice questions, but you answer them in the form of a snowboard minigame, both of which, while sounding good in concept, just seem to drag the game out.

Overall I feel like they've gone quantity over quality in terms of design here, you can't go 5 minutes during a trial without another 'twist' popping up, the increased difficulty and new gamemode's slow the pace down and the sheer amount of perverted dialogue and bullying of other characters (Which they've doubled down on since the first game) makes me wonder how the students are all friends with each other. While it is a good game, I feel that fan service played a part in some of the design choices, and quite a few staples of the story I'm not a big fan of. Oh yeah, because of major spoilers you should only play this after playing the first one.

UK5 - Eye of the Serpent (NWN:EE)

Review

It always reminded me a lot of Flashback

Beat Wolfenstein: The New Order on PS4 yesterday. I had avoided reading or watching too much about the game since I always knew that I'd play it eventually and honestly, when I finally played the game it surprised me A LOT. Usually in a positive way.

The biggest surprise was probably that The New Order is a pretty old-school narrative-driven shooter with stealth. I was expecting Call of Duty meets Doom but got something more like Metro 2033 / Last Light or even No One Lives Forever with semi-open maps, lots of hidden corners and many occasions to choose one's approach. After having finished CoD WWII recently that was certainly a welcome change of pace and play style (although to be fair: the latter also had a few decent semi-open stealth sections). However, while this format makes The New Order seem more sophisticated on paper it's in my opinion ironically not as deep as, say, Doom 2016 or even Serious Sam where you really have to grasp the mechanics and patterns and feel the space. By comparison The New Order is actually pretty casual. Follow corridors, gun down a few Nazis, once in a while the map opens up a bit and there's "commanders" nearby whom you should kill stealthily (so they won't call for reinforcements) so you sneak around a little bit until you've knifed them or shot them with a suppressed pistol. When the coast is clear you check the area for collectables. Also, it kinda boggles my mind that the developers claimed to be going for a tougher and more hardcore experience than in most modern shooters as all in all the game felt very easy on "Bring'em On!" difficulty (which would be the game's "Normal") compared to most shooters I've played.

Anyway, the game is quite satisfying to play but it's also pretty mundane and simplistic. Enemies don't demonstrate any interesting behaviour, there are no enemy types that require particularly special tactics. Also the selection of weapons is pretty traditional - the one thing that apparently should have mixed things up a bit is the "LKW" rifle which fires laser stuff and can be used to cut holes in certain metal surfaces but that cutting is ultimately a pretty trivial feature that doesn't contribute much. The biggest difference over other shooters is probably that you can dual-wield most guns and set different firing modes for each one, allowing for some decent tactical decisions in tougher moments - oh yeah, and they handled health pretty well here: you have regeneration but only up to certain thresholds + armor which does not regenerate but is very effective. It gives the game a somewhat different feel from other modern shooters. Anyway, I'm a bit torn here. I undoubtedly had fun but I guess I was counting on a bit more. Oh yeah, and there were perks thrown in here that unlock for achieving certain things ("kill X enemies while shooting out of cover", "kill a commander with a grenade" etc.) which were IMO entirely unnecessary. The "challenges" were banal and the unlocks didn't affect the game in a particularly interesting manner.

Anyway, that leaves the other thing about the game that surprised me positively: the narrative and its presentation. I was counting on a pretty dumb shooter with a story attached for lulz, I figured Blazkowicz would be your dime-a-dozen brutish action hero. As it turns out the game has a pretty serious tone and surprisingly sophisticated narrative (at least compared to what I expected). Blazkowicz is ridiculously badass but he has a surprisingly high amount of personality. He has emotional baggage, he has dreams, he comments on the shit going on in a manner that gives it gravity, he his personal motivation for fighting the Nazis, he has lots of empathy, once in a while he you have moments that are just "human" like him getting excited by going on an adventure - there's even a decent love story here. I honestly find it amazing how the developers carried this bland guy over into the 2010s. The same amount of attention also went into many other characters and the developers didn't shy away from using this sci-fi scenario to explain Nazi ideology a bit, albeit with a certain dose of humour of course. I certainly wasn't counting on them daring to make a level inside a hi-tech concentration camp. And there's really a lot more diversity in the locations than I thought there would be. Ultimately the story, the characters and places were what kept me going here and put the game well above an average war shooter.

So while mechanically the game wasn't outstanding I enjoyed it a lot. Also, there's apparently two timelines based on a decision you make early on in the game. I don't yet know how big the differences are (presumably not that big) but given how much I enjoyed the game I'm considering to give it another go on a higher difficulty setting in the other timeline. I guess I might even try to go for a platinum trophy with this one if "Über" difficulty doesn't turn out to be too agonising.

They did it just to spite me: :-)

Considering what my opinion of GOG is, I am not going to accept them as authority on this matter.
Al lI have to say about the sale is: Dead in Vinland. I reckon you are pointing at Octodad with your last comment and you'd agree with you.
I personally put even thing like Layers of Fear into it'S own genre, FPP horror and distinguish them from FPP adventures.
It's just GOG being GOG, so I am going to take it as it actually supports me, not you. :-p

Yeah, they are not that different. To play them only to get the difference I find a bit too much but if you enjoy the game then it can be good excuse to play it again.
I fell about the game in very similar way as you. That is great storytelling side when one realizes what it is born from but only decent gameplay but certainly overall worth it.

To be more on topic, I finally completed Lara Croft GO. I am not much of phone player and it took me several months to complete it. It looked well, it was decent time waster and while I don't think most puzzle were really ingenious they were mostly not stupid or too hard.
As filler while waiting it fulfilled its role but it almost never made me sit and play it on purpose.

"Über" difficulty is not that hard in this game. I played on a PS4 and used that difficulty for my first playthrough and completed it with no big problems. (There were only a couple of areas which were challenging, but not frustratingly difficult or anything like that).

Yes, Dead in Vinland was the one I meant that has no place in this list whatsoever, and Octodad is the actual "walking simulator". ;)

Had been months since I actually finished any game, but I "finished" Warstone TD (gift from Damon18 in the non-GOG GA thread).

On the whole I liked it quite a bit, though with some reservations.

The game scales pretty well for the first half, and then it starts going off the rails a bit. For one thing, the battle selection map is a discombobulated mess. I mean it's ok that it's presented in nonlinear even if the battles themselves are mostly linear.

But the UI means you have to visually search around for the battle you're looking for. Similar with the town building/upgrade system. You will be swimming in gold, ore, and mana, but at times desperately short on wood and mithril (both rare and also needed for some of the best items in the store), which will serve to gate a number of upgrades, and clicking around on the map to find a mission that gives those rewards is pretty annoying.

It also took me surprisingly to figure out the star system - like, I'd played nearly all the way through to the end before realizing I'd spent a bunch of wood on stuff I didn't need at all, so I restarted from scratch, and I was almost halfway through the 2nd playthrough before realizing there are 4 difficulty settings for each map controlled by a tiny gray button presented on a gray background.

So....the UI was really not my favorite thing.

The story was ok. There are co-op and pvp missions (and quests to complete some of them), but ...good luck with that. I never saw more than about 25 people online at once, and it's not like you can queue up and then go start a mission, you seemingly have to hang out in the lobby waiting for someone else to post a game you can join, or to join your pending game while you twiddle your thumbs. So I can't review that other than to say that it's annoying to have quests that are basically unachievable unless you bring your own friend.

But I will say, other than some balance issues, the pve combat design was generally quite good. If they were to do a sequel I'd at least check it out to see if they sorted those things out.

Will I replay it? Maybe. I'd consider buying the DLC on deep discount and playing those maps. Will I exhaustively clear all the achievements? Def. not. Not least because it would probably take a mighty long wait to get the ones for pvp & co-op.

Yeah, no kidding. I actually just started another playthrough in the Fergus timeline on Über difficulty and I barely even feel that it's harder. If anything I just feel that somehow it's a lot more fun now - it probably also helps that I already have all the perks and most collectables and that stuff doesn't distract from the action anymore. :)

Honestly, it feels like on Über the game is getting about as hard as most Call of Duty games are on normal difficulty. Admittedly I'm not that far into the campaign yet but I already got to kill two of those heavily armored super soldiers and it was a walk in the park, lol.

Also, I'm actually positively surprised by the differences between the two timelines so far. It really caught me off-guard that in this timeline you get a hot-wire mini-game instead of the lock-picking and that it opens up different paths and areas on the same levels. Reminds me of how they did the different characters in the original Killzone. Can't wait to meet Fergus and see how he changed over the years. :)

Oh yeah, and I sure as hell wasn't expecting that in this timeline I get to collect health upgrades. Those should make it even easier, lol.