While we here at Operation Rainfall love covering the latest in gaming news and sharing our reviews of titles new and classic, we also just enjoy playing games in our downtime. So with that, sit back, relax, and check out what the oprainfall gaming crew have been up to this week!
Having completed Laeticia’s route in Star Ocean: The Divine Force, I decided to take a break from running Raymond’s story sequence and check out a couple new games that came out recently. The first is Pentiment from the folks at Obsidian, and it’s one I’ve had my eye on since I first saw it previewed last year. You play as Andreas Maler, an artist working on his masterpiece in the Alpine village of Tassing at the local abbey. You can choose what type of character Andreas will be through a series of conversations where you decide what languages he’s familiar with, the studies he undertook at university, and what his general hobbies are, and dialogue options open up depending on those choices. Characters will also remember certain choices you make during conversation and reference them later. I found the language and study options particularly neat, since they actively helped me figure out a puzzle a couple hours after I chose them. The game starts off a bit slow, but I’m very much enjoying the bits of mystery and intrigue peppered throughout conversation, as well as the way the characters approach complicated topics such as religion, faith, culture and class. I also really like what it has to say about making art and the fine line between doing so for yourself and doing so for others when that line determines if you get to eat or not. The art style is incredibly striking, with the world rendered in the fashion of a medieval manuscript. Even the dialogue is “written” out, and I love every time it corrects a typo. It’s just a neat touch. I’m playing on Game Pass and it’s definitely worth checking out if you’re able.
The other title I checked out was Netflix’s Android version of Immortality, in which you piece together the life of actress Marissa Marcel by recreating movies she starred in but were never released. It’s a disjointed narrative with an interesting hook – Marcel has gone missing, and clues exist in her movies and behind-the-scene footage – but it’s also a bit on the slow side and I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it. I like the mystery aspect; piecing together this woman’s life is honestly interesting, and the movies she was in are sort of weird, which makes it fun to watch the clips. I also like the way the interactivity works of going back and forth through the reels, zooming in on people and objects to find match cuts to other media, etc. It just feels a bit too self-directed for my particular tastes. I’m gonna keep at it a bit more to see where it all goes, but if nothing else it’s a novel game to check out if you’ve got time. It’s also available on Xbox, iOS and PC. – Leah
I started off the week playing Absolute Tactics: Daughters of Mercy for the PlayStation 4. The gameplay here is pretty good, but this game’s story is just absolutely bad. I’ll have a full review of this up later on this week. I also started reading Gore Screaming Show from Black Cyc. I figured this would be just a straight up Guro-Fest, but so far the story is really good. I can see why folks say this is one of the best horror Visual Novels out there, and I look forward to finishing it up soon. Lastly, I was sent a controller for review. It’s a Brook Vivid Wireless Controller for the Nintendo Switch, but this controller will work on PC and Android or iOS as well. It’s pretty solid so far and will even wake the Switch up from a sleep state, which is a good thing for any third party controller. I’ll have more on this up on the site later in the week as well. -Steve
This week I pretty much only played more Tactics Ogre: Reborn. When I initially started the game, I found that story wise, Tactics Ogre wasn’t pulling me in as quickly as Triangle Strategy did earlier this year. But having gotten to Chapter 2 this week, past what was apparently the first big story split, I’m finding myself slowly getting more into it. I was honestly kinda glad to lose Vyce, with the way he was constantly dying and losing out on experience points. His sudden personality change seemed pretty out of the blue and had me questioning an earlier choice I made, but I didn’t feel bad losing him whatsoever. I’d much rather have more useful guest characters who don’t incessantly look for ways to die. Thus far in Chapter 2, I’ve gotten some new classes, I made Denam into a Dragoon for now; which seems like it could be a wise choice, I hired a new character to turn into a Ninja and I also changed my two generic Archers into other classes, since they weren’t really working out too well. One of them, I turned into a Beast Tamer and I just acquired my very first beast unit last night, a cyclops with some water magic already equipped.
I’m realizing it’s not at all easy to get new characters via theft from your opponents. It’s kind of annoying wasting all these turns slowly lowering their HP and blowing through attempts at convincing them to turn, hoping to get lucky at only a 30% chance or whatever. I missed out on a decent looking fairy character of some sort earlier. Also, I recently looked up the amount of chapters in the game, seeing as I’ve never played before now, and that always seems to bother me. Well finding out something is way less chapters than I was expecting has me start to doubt the length of a game. I had this problem when I was playing Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and realized it didn’t feel as massive as I was expecting a new Xenoblade to feel. I need to start enjoying my games for what they are and stop looking up how “long” they are. Anyways, I’m having more fun now and I think I just got to the point where Tactics Ogre really starts to open up with more classes, optional stages and various things to keep an eye out for during battles. I also just got Arycelle as an actual playable party character, rather than a mere guest. I almost lost her a couple stages ago, when this guy went after her with some fire ninjutsu that took out over 300 HP at once. I believe that was the stage I got my cyclops on, so I was a bit distracted trying to recruit characters to my side. I ended up rewinding back a few turns to keep her from dying. I was expecting her to teleport out, but she went and died on me instead. – Jenae
What games have you been playing this week? Let us know in the comments!
You can read previous Week in Gaming entries here!
