I've been spending most of my game time the last week working on Disco Elysium - which has opened up and turned into a much bigger game than I expected it to be.
On top of all the crazy, interesting, and funny stuff this game has to offer, it's also quite beautiful. Each area is painted with a smattering of colors, in a rough stroke that fits nicely with the grittiness of the game's world.
There's a fair amount of washed out browns and grays in the main areas, but they are accented by dashes of color here and there that help make the more important points of interest stand out.
I've been admiring these massive paintings as I play. It's just really nice.
I mentioned this the other day: I've been playing through Disco Elysium on Xbox, and really enjoying it. With the added narration of The Final Cut edition, it's almost like listening to an audiobook. A really strange audiobook.
That's the thing about this game, though... it's so weird! It reminds me of books like Neuromancer or other William Gibson novels. It draws you in with its foreignness. The world is there, and it definitely exists - whether or not you understand it.
Oftentimes in games like this, I get turned off by too much world-building. I want to see the game through, and not live in its world for a moment.
Disco Elysium is not that, though. It's just all very interesting and connected, and so far, I love it.
I finished Mass Effect: Andromeda last night, so now I'm putting in some time with Disco Elysium, a game I've been meaning to play for a while, and which I was excited to see make its way to Xbox recently. I feel like I don't know what I'm doing in this game, but it's fun nonetheless. And the full narration/dialog is excellent.
I still need to finish up The Artful Escape, which I started a few weeks ago, when it came out.
My game backlog is ridiculous, and Game Pass isn't helping.
After yesterday's post, I sat down and played through the final mission of Mass Effect: Andromeda. I expected the last mission to be a massive affair that would take an hour or two to complete, but 40 minutes later, I was zipping through the credits and playing through the epilogue.
In a way, I was sort of relieved. I like an epic ending, but it can feel like a slog if you're not ready for it. When I played through the remastered Mass Effect trilogy a few months ago, the final run at the end of the series felt like it went on forever - and towards the end, I wanted to take a break, but I didn't want to leave the game in a state where I couldn't save my progress, so I had to power through it.
As with my other game reviews, there are spoilers below!
So four years after this game was released - and I played it first, right when it launched - I came back, started anew, and played through just about every part of the game.
And honestly, it was a lot of fun! I kind of wish I hadn't waited so long to play it now.
The game's story starts off pretty dry, and it did not hold my attention initially in either playthrough. I didn't make it all that far in my first attempt to play this game however, so this time I pushed on - and as the adventure unfolded, I found things got more interesting.
The movement and combat in Andromeda feels a bit squirrely compared to the original games, and it took a lot of time for me to get used to it. The first hour of the game wasn't enough to make it feel natural, and I had to turn aim-assist on to get it to feel right. Once I had grown my arsenal of weapons and powers enough to experiment though, it all just clicked. Instead of feeling tedious, combat felt fun. And I appreciate all the modern touches BioWare added to the formula to help progress things, like fast-travel, compass waypoints, an aggressive auto-save system, etc.
I hated the Angara in the early part of the game. They felt shallow compared the alien races in the original Mass Effect trilogy, and their character design just rubbed me the wrong way. But as with the story, the Angara also grew on me as I played. When it was revealed that the Kett were turning Angara into other Kett via genetic mutations, I felt empathy for their horror. When it was revealed that the Angara were created by an alien AI to inhabit the cluster, I felt sorry for them. It was a long journey for me, but... I sort of like them now. Even though I still don't like how they look.
Andromeda is a big game, and it took me over 70 hours to finish it. Towards the end, there was a lot of back-and-forth going on, where I had to visit and revisit Elaaden and Kadara in particular, and that got annoying. I'm glad that BioWare made it so you can skip the animations zooming around each local part of the cluster, which I don't think was in the game originally. It's cool to watch some of them all the way through, but you have to do way too much of this to not be able to skip it at some point.
I liked that the game had a diverse set of characters throughout. The people around the Nexus and the Initiative outposts look like all types of people. I wish the same work had been put into differentiating the alien races, like the Asari, who - aside from Peebee, who looks like a blue Ninja Turtle - all inexplicably look exactly the same. This was not true in the original Mass Effect trilogy.
My original Andromeda run was started with a dopey looking white guy as my Ryder, and this time I picked a character who looked very different from that, to see how it might affect the way I play or how it might impact the story. It did make things more interesting to me, I think, because the character didn't feel as generic to me. Some of the voicework for Sara Ryder was funky, but overall it was a great experience.
I did notice that sometimes - as in real life! - the game's camera seemed to be calibrated to lighter skin tones, and so in cutscenes with a dark background, my Ryder would occasionally get lost in darkness.
There are a lot of little problems like that in this game, when you really start looking. People clipping through objects, animations that jump, the occasional repeated audio cue. But as I noted above, this is a big game, and it's hard to ferret out all of those issues, so I get it. None of them, save for one weird bug very early on, ever stopped me from progressing.
Having played through this game now and enjoyed it, I'm sad it was in such a bad state at launch. BioWare did a good job fixing things, but the damage was done, and many probably remember this only as a bad game/experience, which is a shame.
Mass Effect: Andromeda is a good entry to the Mass Effect universe. I wish things had gone differently so that we might have seen what adventures the Ryder siblings were off to next.
With Inktober behind me, I'm back to chronicling my adventures in games, game development, and other art. This time, I'm reporting in on my progress with Mass Effect: Andromeda, which I've been chipping away at each night.
I'm happy to say that I'm about done with the game - the mission I'm about to start has informed me that I can continue exploring the Heleus cluster once I've finished it, which I assume means it's the final conflict. I've put in a little over 70 hours at this point, diligently completing every side mission and exploring every location, sometimes to the point where a night's session is spent almost entirely running around the Nexus, talking to various NPC's and closing out quests.
I'll write about this more soon, but I've enjoyed most of my time with Andromeda. It took a long time for me to really warm up to it, but I've had fun with the missions, and the story turned out to be pretty interesting. I've gone from hating the Angara to feeling sorry for them, though the final mission may add a further twist to their plight - we shall see, I guess.
I'm going to go try to finish things up. It feels good to be free of my daily illustrations for a moment!
Since I can't seem to just play a single game at a time anymore, I've begun working through The Artful Escape in between sessions of Mass Effect Andromeda.
And why not? It's on Game Pass, and it's new, interesting, and fun. It was right there, waiting for me to try!
Anyway, it's something a little outside my normal type of game - although so far, it's very minimally like a traditional music/rhythm game. I'm hoping that the "Simon Says" portions don't get too difficult, because I'd like to see it through.
The visuals are trippy. The story is silly and light. The music is loud. I'm into it!
This is sort of a little thing (pun intended) but I find the scale in Mass Effect Andromeda to be much more appreciable than in the original trilogy.
Once you establish Podromos on the first explorable planet, Eos, you get a really good sense of the sheer size of things with your ship touched down next to the newly bustling colony. The ship is huge, but is still dwarfed by the collection of portable structures and equipment around it. And that's all settled in a small valley in one section of Eos.
It's cool to see/hear the shuttles coming and going, and each pod is packed with all sorts of tech doodads that really lend the world a believability that Mass Effect 1-3, having been made for older hardware, didn't often achieve. Especially the first game, where outposts on alien worlds were almost always just one or two simple, boxy buildings that were devoid of nearly all decoration.
There is, perhaps, a little more intimacy in the previous games because of this limitation - even the camera hugs Shepard closer, and with a tighter FOV - so the grand views of Andromeda aren't without their faults.
I have to give credit where credit is due, though. Mass Effect Andromeda is often a pretty game, if nothing else.
With Psychonauts 2 and Life Is Strange: True Colors finished, I'm back on Mass Effect Andromeda again.
I'm settling into a rhythm with this game now, and I don't hate it at all - running around planets and clearing out tasks to improve their viability is a bit mindless, but still fun. The lore of this game isn't as exciting as the original Mass Effect trilogy because all of those games is conveniently swept under the rug with this one.
There are definitely some things that bother me about this game though, particularly the graphics. I know I touched on this before, but I can't get over how weird some of the alien races look. Even the Asari (aside from Peebee) all seem to have this weird, dopey/sleepy look to them that grates on me.
Why do they all look like this? It's such a strange, pointless departure from the original games.
I still hate the Angara more, though. They look like the result of a bad plastic surgery.
So I'm a little on the fence about Starfield, but this trailer gives me hope.
I don't know a lot about Starfield (does anyone, really?). I guess it's going to be an RPG in space. I expect it'll feel a little like Fallout, but I don't have any good reason to think that, other than that Bethesda is making it.
This trailer though... it's short and it doesn't show gameplay. But it's in-engine footage, and the score sounds hopeful/aspirational. I sorta like it.
And now I'm sitting here waiting to see how Starfield will turn out.
