Coffee Talk

I spent most of yesterday finishing Coffee Talk, a little...well, I guess slice-of-life is the most accurate description.  A little slice of life game.  It took me ten hours to play through it three times to see all the dialogue and get all the achievements, though I think I still missed the worst outcomes for two of the characters.  This would only change a line or two of text at the end, so I'm not too bothered.  The game cost me £8.24, so each hour of gameplay was about 80p.  Games obviously aren't good or bad based solely on price, I just like to work that out.  In this case, I think 80p per hour was worth it for the enjoyment received.  I can absolutely see myself playing this again, once enough time has gone by to erode the memory of the details.  Plus, I'm considering starting a twitch stream, and since this game is set 5 minutes into the future - starting 22 September 2020 - it would be quite fun to do a real-time replay, one day per day.  

The game play is mostly just sitting and watching people talk.  You're a barista in a late-night coffee shop.  There are no dialogue options - though your character does talk, you just don't get to decide what they'll say - and most of the gameplay is in putting drinks together.  

With the right drinks you can make people feel more or less comfortable, which makes them more or less friendly with you and each other, which affects their relationships and how their story ends.  You can also affect a few other things, for example, one character is writing a novel, and requires endless doses of caffeine, and another is a werewolf whose Fury can be lessened with the right drink.  You can also make latte art, though it doesn't affect anything.

What I like about this game is that I really cared about the characters and I wanted to hear what they had to say, even if I couldn't influence it, and it was, at some times, more like watching a movie.  It compares very favourably with 1bitheart, another game which focused on relationships between characters.  That game introduced 45 characters over about 4 hours of gameplay, and I didn't care about any of them.  This game - like Persona 4, and maybe the others but I haven't played them - spreads out fewer characters over a longer period of time, so you can actually grow to care for them and their stories.

The games set in a world where various fantasy creatures all exist and interact.  Like Discworld, only modern-day Seattle rather than Steampunk Victoriana.  I say modern day Seattle - characters have smartphones, but smoking indoors is absolutely fine.  The barista starts each day with a screen of the newspaper headlines, giving you an insight into the wider world, and many characters are affected by them.  One couple, an Elf and a Succubus, are both fighting against their parents' racial prejudice.  The writer intends to put this in her book, a fantasy about a world where only humans exist.  The characters question how this kind of conflict can be portrayed with only one race, and the writer suggests that people would be prejudiced against one another based on smaller differences, like skin colour or culture.  I really liked that bit because, when phrased like that, it really does sound absurd.

1BitHeart

I bought 1BitHeart for 99p from HumbleBundle a week or so ago.  It's made by the same company who made Alicemare, which I enjoyed, and it was cheap, so I gave it a go.

Gameplay-wise it has a lot in common with the Phoenix Wright games - you can have conversations with people, and, in some of those conversations, you can ask for more information or present other topics to either get more out of them or point out a contradiction.  In some ways, it's a bit too much like Phoenix Wright - you can ask someone to revise their statement even though you're literally just a kid having a conversation with someone and not a lawyer in court.  My biggest issue with the game is that the mysteries and how they are solved are not logical and obvious.  They're nitpicky and require good guessing.  There's not even a logical way to just try all the options.  Quite early on, I just thought "fuck it" and followed a guide to get through because I entirely lost interest in trying to play the game properly.  To be fair, maybe that's on me, maybe my brain just doesn't work the way the designer's does.

There are also elements of Persona 5 (and possibly the others which I haven't played) in that you need to make friends with people.  How many friends you have define which of the three possible endings you see, and whether you unlock the bonus chapter (which contains a better mystery than the actual chapters).  This...is ridiculously overdone.  You can make 44 friends in the main game.  A game that took me about 9 hours to play.  I cannot care about 44 people in 9 hours, so the vast majority just became irritating background noise quite early on. To make friends, you need to make their "friendship points" - which the game doesn't tell you about and which are invisible - 100.  You do this by giving them gifts.  Each has 3 - out of, like, 40 or so (guesstimate) possible items that they like, and there are only vague hints as to which 3 they are.  Luckily, everyone likes chocolate so I just defaulted to handing that over.  When you get their points to 100 you receive an item from them and unlock an achievement, so at least there's some indication of how many total friends there are.  Really, they could have halved - or even quartered - this element of the game.  It's too many to actually be fun.

So, yeah.  The game was fine, I guess.  I'd have liked it better if it were more balanced, for example, better, more interesting mysteries for a longer game to balance the number of friends, or just less friends and a more logical progression through the game.  I got through it, which I guess is not the sentiment you want people to have towards your game.  At least it was only 99p, so about 10p per hour of gameplay.  Which, again, fine, I'd spend that much on a book that I'd read in a third of the time.

I've been wanting to play the .Hack series again.  I couldn't find a copy of the iso online so I just booted my old - as in, 2004 Christmas present - PS2.  Still works great!  The next steam game on my list is the Banner Saga, though I've still not finished FF8.

BAD END and Phoenix Wright

...I bought more games because Steam had a visual novel sale.  I quite liked BAD END.  It's a short horror visual novel, which took me about two hours to play through to get every achievement.  It only cost £1.04, so that seems about right.  Plotwise, it's like a B horror movie, with some translation issues.  It's not anywhere near the scariness level of something like Doki Doki Literature Club and it's not as atmospheric as something like Sunless Sea, Project Zero/Fatal Frame or Koudelka, but it's fun for what it is.

I'm still playing through Phoenix Wright.  It's a very satisfying trilogy.  Each one only has a few - I think 4-6 - mysteries, but they're kind of intense and you feel a real sense of accomplishment for solving the puzzle.

I'm still aiming to play through all the games on my Steam account this year.  The next one is The Banner Saga, but one of the games I've bought recently - 1bitHeart - is higher up in the list because it's earlier alphabetically.  My intention was to play through the list alphabetically, unless there was something else I felt like playing first.  The goal is to play through all of them and to enjoy the process, so as long as I keep moving down the list it's fine.  So, I think I'm going to keep going alphabetically - again, unless I really want to play something else first - and do a second pass through the list for any that have snuck in above the point of the alphabet I've reached.

Aveyond: Lord of Twilight, Final Fantasy VIII, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, .Hack//

I've finished Aveyond: Lord of Twilight.  It's the first 'chapter' in the third Aveyond game.  There are four 'chapters' each of which cost £6.99.  The first game in the series, Ahriman's Prophecy, is available for free, but the quality is terrible.  I downloaded it, but the font used is illegible, so I gave up on it fairly quickly.

According to Steam I spent around 20 hours playing this game, although my final save file was just under ten hours, so while some of those 20 hours were me dying and reloading the game, some of them were just me leaving it open while I did something else.  There were many elements of it that I liked.  I liked the characters and I like that the plot feels almost Shakespearean.  I also liked the 'realism' - the environments in the game felt realistically large, there were loads of cities, and, after killing something, you had to search its corpse for loot.  However, there was one big flaw and that's the fact that this isn't a complete game.  There are subquests you can start in this game but not finish until the sequels.  There are chests you can find which you can't open until the sequels.  Finally, the plot just doesn't advance well.  It doesn't feel like a satisfying character journey or ending.  Honestly, I resent the fact that I'll need to pay another £20.97 to finish the story.  I can't remember how much I paid for this first one, but since I probably got it off Humble Bundle it was probably between £1 to £3.  For 20 hours of gameplay, assuming I paid £1, that's 5p per hour, which is 10x as much as Final Fantasy X and X-2 (400 hours to finish the first, second, and third games, all of which cost me £19.99 on Steam).  This game is pretty good, but this first chapter wasn't worth 10x as much to me as Final Fantasy X, and then they want another £21 for the rest of the story?  Fuck right off.  If they pop up on Humble Bundle at a discount, I might spring for them, but I am not paying £6.99 for a 20-hour segment of a game that doesn't even feel like a full game in its own right, and I am definitely not doing that three times in a row.  Knowing that that was what I'd need to do to finish the story just made me resent playing this one.  Oh, also there's only one achievement.  Since there's no indication of which side quests you can finish in this game and which ones need to wait for the sequel, the achievements could have been a way of giving you a hint.  The game just does not reward exploring, because you don't know which blocks you can breach during this game - for example, you do gain a way of blowing through doors blocked with planks, but you don't learn how to pick locks - and which subquests you can finish in this game, or which need to wait.  After the first hour or so I just followed a guide.  Oh, that reminds me - I did like that the puzzles had an element of randomness, so even if you followed a guide there were still some things you had to work out yourself.  That was a nice touch.

The description of the game also claims that "laughing is not optional".  It absolutely is.  The dialogue is human and realistic, but it's not particularly funny.

I've played - and enjoyed - the .Hack// series, which had a similar set-up.  Four chapters, each sold separately, adding up to a complete story.  I enjoyed those games a lot more, and I think a big part of it is that they did feel like complete games, with satisfying story arcs.  I paid more - about £10 for each if I recall correctly - for each one, and I didn't resent that.  I've replayed the series multiple times, and each one came with an episode of an anime series, telling another story that happened alongside the events in the game.  I also enjoyed a sequel manga and the longer anime series, but the biggest difference between .hack// and Aveyond is that each of those things felt like seperate stories.  They were all sparked by the same event, but each had their own events and character arcs.  Plus, my ending save files generally had about 20 hours on them, so they offered approximately twice as much gameplay.

Anyway, in summary, Aveyond: Lord of Twilight is an enjoyable game, but it is not worth £27.96 - the price for all four games without any discounts - and while, theoretically, you could just pay the £6.99 - still way too much - to enjoy just one game, the game is not designed for you to do that.

The next game on my list is actually The Banner Saga, but I just bought several more games from Humble Bundle; 1bitHeart (99p), Désiré (£2.15), Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy (£14.99), PSYCHO-PASS: Mandatory Happiness (£9.99), and The Sacred Tears TRUE. (£3.24).  I've noted down the prices because I quite like "cost per hours of enjoyment" as a way to compare games.  I'm going to play the Phoenix Wright games next, because I have been waiting for them to arrive on Steam for just the longest time.  The whole point of trying to play through all the games I own is to make sure I'm actually, you know, getting value out of the things I buy, so it would just be silly to avoid playing the game I just bought.  I've also been replaying Final Fantasy VIII (and reviewing my guide) and I'm in the end stages of that, so I'll probably finish that as well before starting on The Banner Saga.