Games and comics: Many Fingers, Octopus Pie, Don't Go Without Me, and Sylvie

[roadrunnertwice]

Bonus Level: A Hand With Many Fingers

July 6, 2024

A short and satisfying card-catalogue-em-up about a real-world CIA conspiracy. Only takes a couple hours to play. I think the gameplay is fundamentally the same concept as Her Story, except walking around to fetch print fragments from file boxes instead of driving a search box to find video fragments in a computer.

Meredeth Gran — Octopus Pie Eternal (comics)

July 15

Read it online

A SECOND unexpected Octopus Pie epilogue, also dropped all in one go!!! God, we’re too lucky. Anyway, this was funny, touching, and at times hair-raising. Outlandishly good shit.

Rosemary Valero-O’Connell — Don’t Go Without Me (comics)

Aug. 2

If you can obtain this book, do so. Three short stories with exquisite pacing, expressive environment design, precise character work, and prophetic narrative voice.

Every once in a while there’s a book where you put it down and just say: “Damn! Comics!!!!!”

(The middle story in this collection, “What is Left,” was previously published as a standalone, which I might have previously reviewed.)

Martha Wells — System Collapse (Murderbot 7) (re-read))

July 23

This is still good, but I reviewed it just recently.

Bonus Level: Sylvie RPG: 7 Elf Apocalypse

Aug 3

First thing I said when I heard about this game was “wow, I bet I’m gonna learn a bunch of new shit about the theory of bump combat.” Reader, my gift of prophesy remains unmatched. Also I think I'm a Sylvie fan now.

Play this! It's free and fun and interesting. And kind of hard. And extremely silly.

Anyway, the thing about "bump combat" is that it requires some form of asymmetry. Early Ys did wonky things with hitbox centering that I found more intriguing than satisfying. Sylvie cracked the code more thoroughly: only the player deals mêlée damage on contact, and enemies use telegraphed projectiles instead. This works great! It doesn't serve the same goals as Ys had, because it actually clamps down on momentum quite a bit — instead of efficiently bulldozing, you're trying to dodge, parry, and riposte to protect your scarce HP. It really amplifies the flavor of being the one two-fisted meathead going up against a world of ethereal elves and fairies!

The cramped arenas and the asymmetric threats make maneuvers very challenging, but the resulting combat feels very fair and highly tuned. Bonus points for a highly abstract but very clever and effective "active defense" mechanic.

Bonus Level: 13 Sentinels (re-play)

July 28

DAMN this game is still so good. I was sick with covid and wanted to just re-experience something nice (ideally on Switch so I had the option to play horizontally on the couch lol), so I fired it up and blazed through it in four or five days.

Although the first-time experience of the story's twists and turns is unparalleled, I think it also really rewards a re-read! It was fun to look for early clues of things I knew were coming, and actually it still took a lot of mental work to establish the ordering and causation of certain events, even with all my pre-loaded context.

Also, you know that semi-endless sequence of postgame battle missions with the unfair difficulty level? Well, I played an amount of them that I am unwilling to admit to, and I'm here to report that it eventually hits a degenerate state. Remember how some kaiju units get "ceramic armor" that rejects all sub-300-HP hits, and it disables your best damage sources? Well, you can upgrade your G1s enough that their demolisher blade crosses that 300-per-hit mark (this happens earlier than you'd think, if you're taking their limiters off), and the game's basically solved. You just send two gorillas sprinting around the map with angle grinders, and have one or two other teens hang back at the terminal with a shield matrix and some area weapons for the riff-raff. Maybe if you get bored you can have Fuyusaka stick some guys in the microwave.

Comments

[bzedan]

Haha, so glad you played Hand With Many Fingers (I can’t remember if you were the one to rec it originally), but boy I’ve been thinking about this kind of gameplay and how it interplays with the world of archives since. Also I made Chase play it like last week or so, so I’m not th only one with it in their head.

[roadrunnertwice]

It was really enjoyable! The initial banker suicide clues you started off with were so fucking sketchy, I was hooked immediately. 😝