This is a bit of a follow-up to
this post where I try to clear out my backlog. It's been hit or miss doing this on the "daily" because I have the attention span of a goldfish and things just Keep Happening(TM).
So far, these are the items I've tackled:
- Myst IV: Revelations - Ongoing
- 20 Strong (Solar Sentinels) - finished
- Hunter/Hunted - played a bit but got distracted, still in rotation
- Stone & Steel by Eboni Dunbar - finished
Items I've ticked of my backlog (with mini review)
20 Strong (Solar Sentinels)A solo physical game featuring a minor deck building(?) element and dice pool; it plays like a rougelike and is tough as nails. Flavor is that you run a mecha to make a stand against a rush of enemies and take down a boss. The quality of the pieces were very nice. The general mechanics played (mostly) nice. It's a very quick set-up and play, which given it's rougelike gameplay is
very important.
The main reason why I bounced off the game was because of unforgiving the RNG aspects are. In the game, there are a couple of different enemy attributes that you have to contend with: mandatory (which means you have to choose that one enemy for a encounter), swarm (you must add that many extra enemies to an encounter, I'll get to this), and encounter rules. The swarm mechanic is the thing that did me in because for every enemy you choose that has a swarm, you have to add another onto the pile.
This fucking stacks. So you can keep pulling enemies!! You can use as many dice as you want, but if say, you get a mandatory enemy that also includes a unique encounter rule saying you can only use
three fucking dice in an encounter, and say you have
four enemies because of an unlucky series of pulls, you just instantly die. Just to really make it worse, you only have so many hit points, so it's just instant death in one or two rounds if you have ass luck. There are ways you can mitigate the situations (beating enemies gives items and "upgrades"), but you have to beat the enemy in the first place...so...
Yeah. If there were ways you could "upgrade" between rounds (even if it's just limited to a session), I think it'd be a bit more up my alley, I mean, that'd be cool, but...you really don't. Not unless you house rules it. I played a few rounds, kept getting wiped by encounter two. A general not recommended if you're not a fan of the tougher side of roguelikes.
Also, I note that my expectations were a bit different than what I got because this was the first time I've played a rougelike physical game, and had bought it simply because I was desperate to find solo physical games back during my early days of exploring the genre.I've since learned my lesson.Stone & Steel by Eboni DunbarA novella (under 100 pages) about a general who must decide where her loyalties lie after her queen and paramour descends into tyranny. I picked this up just on the concept alone (does love for one's country trump one's love for another) and the toxic yuri. As it is, it's a decent two hour read; I just kinda wish it had more page time to let the worldbuilding and characters arcs breath a bit more. The MC Aaliyah waffles on her decision for much too long for my tastes (she doesn't make her decision to coup the queen for the people until 2/3 into the book). I would have hoped she would have at least done it at the halfway point when the queen calls for her arrest. 3/5 for what there is. I'll see if the author has more stuff that comes out.
Dragon Age: The Last Flight by Liane MercielA tie-in to
Dragon Age, specifically
Inquisition but also informs Davrin's personal quest in
Veilguard. Set in a dual-time line, pre-
Inquisition and during the Fourth Blight (early 500 Exalted). The first timeline focuses on Valya struggling with the image of the Grey Wardens upon reading Isseya's journal and the ultimate fate of the griffons in the Fourth Blight.
Out of all the DA books I've read so far, I would say this one is the top two so far (just under
Asunder). Things I definitely loved about this book was the look into the Anderfels (my kingdom for more content for the Anderfels and Rivain), the
Grey Warden content that's not just lionizing them (Valya and Isseya constantly questions if the Wardens are making the right choice) (P.S. I love the Grey Wardens, my main fanfic 'verse is a Whoops! Wardens-Only Romanced, I just want them to be nuanced gdi), and the most important relationships are between Isseya and her griffon Revas and Valya and a Templar defector. Also, I also appreciate how the book deals with the Blight incredibly grinding and bleak. Life in this is considered valuable yet dangerously fragile; the number of characters that go out in some truly swift and grim ways is staggering, but the prose never makes it all consuming. The flight and battle scenes were also a treat to read. Writing a fight scene from the back of a mount with the added Z-axis always sounds like a nightmare to write, so honestly, kudos to all the dragon riding books who can pull it off.
Not so much a gripe, but only thing I wished we had more of was about the developing distance in Garahel's and Isseya's relationship as the Blight wore on. I'm not implying there
wasn't any showing of it, I just wish there was one or two extra scenes with them together.
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