Read Only Memories, Emperor, Chicory

Been playing through games at a quick pace recently, it seems.  Most of that is due to the holiday season, and the fact that I'm truly taking a break from work -- of almost all sorts.  Part of it is also due to the fact that I seem to have gotten ill more than usual...first with the booster shot side effects, then more recently with some sort of cold/other bug.  Bleh.  Well if there was any doubt left in my mind whether I should be trying to work on something or other, that's more or less gone now since I've no energy in my system to do anything like that.

2064: Read Only Memories

This is a game that I picked up and played through recently -- part of the itch.io racial justice bundle from a while ago (insane how much stuff is packed into that).  This is a game released back in 2015, though you might not guess it from the 2d pixeled graphics.  So, not actually that old, especially by the standards of games that I tend to play.  This is also set in a similar (same?) universe as VA-11 Hall-A, which came out a year later and had a handful of tie-ins/references.

Read Only Memories is an adventure game, I guess you could call it a point and click (?), but whatever, one look at the game and it'll become clear how it plays out.  I was a bit skeptical on how exactly it would be at first, since the very first moments of the game are pretty lacking in terms of any sort of excitement/etc.  But you delve into the actual thick of things soon enough, and then you start proceeding through the plot line, which consists more or less of unraveling a mystery of sorts.

I really enjoyed Read Only Memories, probably just because I thought the writing was great.  I felt like it did an excellent job of making a linear storyline =feel= less linear than it actually was, specifically and especially with regards to dialogue choices.  Read Only Memories has a few points where it seems to really try to let you know that you shouldn't expect the story and dialogue to just run on rails, as some other generic-adventure game would.  In the first segment of the story, the deuteragonist AI Turing serves as a sort of crutch for worldbuilding exposition -- you constantly get briefed by them on the sci-fi elements of the game as they come up.  But at one point when you ask Turing, they stop and express frustration, asking why you don't just look it up yourself / why you didn't already know that.  This moment subtly calls into question these sorts of genre conventions where NPCs are, ahem, "robotic" and subservient to whatever needs to happen in the dialogue to lead you to the next thing.

In the end there are a lot of choices in Read Only Memories that don't end up affecting the overall narrative, but there's enough mention given to your choices that you feel like they =could= or =could have=.  Even though rationally in the final chapter of the game I sort of already figured out that this is just a linear narrative without major branch divergence, the way that this is executed made me feel as though my decisions still bore weight, regardless of whether or not they actually did (in truth, some do, some don't).

Overall I really liked it.

Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom

I mentioned that I had started this one, and I'm really enjoying it thus far!  The systems are similar to those of Caesar/Pharoah, but different enough to present new challenges.  Like with Zeus, there's a global labor pool, which is a huge difference and allows you to concentrate on creating nicer housing blocks without having to worry about providing labor access to industries.  The widescreen/increased resolution patch for Emperor works without a hitch, and overall the game works really well, though I guess it's not quite as good as the Caesar III Julius/Augustus port.

I've been playing on Very Hard, as it seems like that's actually a manageable -- yet difficult -- level of challenge for me.  My main struggles so far have been trying to establish a city quickly enough and set up profitable trade routes (which must be negotiated in this game, not just purchased) before I run into debt and lose all my money.  I'm starting to get a good handle on how I like to build my housing blocks already!

The cities in Emperor are definitely more aesthetically pleasing than those of the other games, and I think that's one of the draws of this particular game.  Being able to section off your housing blocks using residential walls is cool, and there are less requirements on how farms work as well (because of seasonal crops), so those are easier to just lay out wherever.  Trade is a little different, as there are dedicated trading stations as opposed to caravans/ships taking directly from warehouses.  Food distribution is a little different too, as generally the idea is to only have one granary (called a "mill" here) and really centralize your housing block resources.  This of course is possible because the positioning of housing blocks compared to industry is more lax because of the global worker pool.

There's also a "feng shui" system which can be annoying if you're a perfectionist, but also provides an interesting sort of challenge / planning if you're trying to account for buildings which for example need rocks nearby to be auspicious in feng shui.  So far I haven't really been focusing on it too much.

Anyways, I'm really enjoying it!  Probably my only complaint so far is that there are missions which make you revisit old cities which you have already built up and try to reach new goals with that existing city.  That can be disorienting especially if there are one or more other missions in between -- I'd probably rather just have a new map for every mission and start fresh, as part of the fun in these missions is really setting everything up well from scratch, rather than trying to cobble together an existing thing and repurposing it to be better.  In theory the city that you won the previous mission with was good and well-functioning, but potentially having to deal with your previous mistakes is worrying.

Chicory: A Colorful Tale

I started this one up just recently while down with my latest sickness.  This one was released less than a year ago, so definitely one of the more recent ones.  I had the chance to play a short demo of this a while back, and was intrigued, but the game has gotten way better as I've gotten into the later chapters (now at chapter...4 I think?).  Sure, the first chapter was kinda fun, but I feel like if things had just continued on at that same level / pace, it would have really gotten boring.  But the next few chapters introduce all sorts of really fun activities and toys and such for you to play around with.  I've been playing using my Wacom Tablet and that has been working amazingly well; feels like it's really the ideal way to play the game for sure.

Not only am I liking all of the fun drawing stuff that has been introduced, but I'm liking where the story is going (so far) as well.  I have pretty high hopes for this one, but I guess I shouldn't expect anything too grand -- that's a recipe for disappointment no matter how good the thing is.  But I'm certain that whatever Chicory has in store for me, I'm going to enjoy it.

Maybe I'll do a year in review post later, but for now, that'll do it.