These AC spin-offs look great. I played AC Chronicles: India, but didn't finish.

sorry Hulrun, I'm chaotic now xD

I've been working my charms on Wilhelmina and, judging by how she's blushing, it certainly seems to be paying off:

She's perhaps the only character you can romance in the game, the only one I know of for sure. You can befriend just about anybody and get them to really like you and they will act differently toward you, greet you differently, instead of a neutral generic greeting they may say something like "Hey, great seeing you again, I hope you're doing well." It's not a huge deal but I love that kind of reactivity in games. They'll even sometimes give you gifts and if they're shopkeepers they'll give you a discount. You can also go to the brothel and hook up with one of the ladies or gentlemen of the night there and get a really short sexy time cutscene. It will cost you 20K gold, though, so that better be some incredible sex for that kind of money. With Wilhelmina you can have a full-fledged romance, though. There's an entire quest chain for it. I don't know what the quest chain involves I only read up on it as far as knowing when to start the quest chain because there is a narrow window of "time" (in between a couple of specific main story missions) in the game when you can initiate the romance, so once I got that information I stopped reading to avoid spoilers. I haven't quite reached that point yet because I've been doing a lot of side content, but I'm close and in the meantime I worked my charms on her to get her affinity up to maximum. The blushing is this game's indicator of maximum affinity. At the end of the quest chain is presumably some hot steamy sex, eat your heart out @BruceVC 

 

 

^ What game is that? It looks like a metroidvania of some sort.

8 hours ago, Keyrock said:

I've been working my charms on Wilhelmina and, judging by how she's blushing, it certainly seems to be paying off:

She's perhaps the only character you can romance in the game, the only one I know of for sure. You can befriend just about anybody and get them to really like you and they will act differently toward you, greet you differently, instead of a neutral generic greeting they may say something like "Hey, great seeing you again, I hope you're doing well." It's not a huge deal but I love that kind of reactivity in games. They'll even sometimes give you gifts and if they're shopkeepers they'll give you a discount. You can also go to the brothel and hook up with one of the ladies or gentlemen of the night there and get a really short sexy time cutscene. It will cost you 20K gold, though, so that better be some incredible sex for that kind of money. With Wilhelmina you can have a full-fledged romance, though. There's an entire quest chain for it. I don't know what the quest chain involves I only read up on it as far as knowing when to start the quest chain because there is a narrow window of "time" (in between a couple of specific main story missions) in the game when you can initiate the romance, so once I got that information I stopped reading to avoid spoilers. I haven't quite reached that point yet because I've been doing a lot of side content, but I'm close and in the meantime I worked my charms on her to get her affinity up to maximum. The blushing is this game's indicator of maximum affinity. At the end of the quest chain is presumably some hot steamy sex, eat your heart out @BruceVC 

If it is anything like DDDA, you can actually "romance" anyone. Though, as you said, random NPCs have less story content than the main ones. Curious if the issue with the duchess (forgot her name) and the lack of dialogue options was solved.

Spoiler

The thing was that there was an unavoidable fade-to-black sex scene with the duchess which was both poorly timed (you needed to get the unwise teenager out of the castle before she was executed) and pretty much out-of-character, unless you were aiming for the duchess, who was incredibly, ridiculously unwise and looked a bit too young.

Unironically, the best beloved from the gameplay standpoint was

Spoiler

Fournival. Him being at the starting village, right next to the BBI boat and the Ur-Dragon portal, was very convenient. And he had a lot of Conqueror's Periapts.

From the story perspective, there were several options with some quest lines, including the best friend, the travelling merchants, the knights, and the witch.

---

Stray Blade

The companion drags the MC's body to the checkpoints for revival. I have not noticed any negative consequences for dying - only unfinished groups of enemies recover, which is very convenient for upgrading weapons.

The "Enemies Cleared" message means that the foes will remain dead.

Edited April 7, 20241 yr by Hawke64
Used quotes instead of spoiler tags.

4 hours ago, Keyrock said:

^ What game is that? It looks like a metroidvania of some sort.

I asked Duck Duck Go who Siruby is, and it replied she was the cyborg protagonist of this game:

Transiruby, available on Steam, Switch, Xbox, Playstation 

But not GOG?

13 hours ago, Keyrock said:

^ What game is that? It looks like a metroidvania of some sort.

As @melkathi said, this is Transiruby. It's a nice metroidvania, although a simple and easy one. And no, it's not available on GOG.

The bike form was an interesting idea, but they should've made large horizontal areas to truly make use of it.

11 hours ago, Hawke64 said:

If it is anything like DDDA, you can actually "romance" anyone. Though, as you said, random NPCs have less story content than the main ones. 

Yeah, I interpret my relationships with random minor characters I've raised to maximum affinity as we're really good friends because there's no kiss or sexy time scene. However they do blush and they act really really friendly toward you at max affinity so interpreting that as a romance is not unreasonable, you can read as much or as little into it as you like. With Wilhelmina there is no ambiguity, it's absolutely a romance that ends with a steamy night of passion. 

Edited April 7, 20241 yr by Keyrock

Seriously, you people could have warned me that this was THAT kind of game

1 hour ago, melkathi said:

Seriously, you people could have warned me that this was THAT kind of game

What kind of mod did you install?

I've never seen that, but I don't capture many prisoners.

No mod. You can buy a barber set to give to prisoners to increase loyalty. It basically let's you alter their appearance a bit (hair, facial hair).

The concept is that you have male prisoners and you let them shave, showing them you trust them with a small blade.

@melkathi's Stockholm Syndrome Simulator 2024 

Wartales can apparently be very dark even in situations it doesn't actively try to

 

So now I have a Phalanx Soldier. Also in the process of converting a Foot Soldier. Same skillset but sword&board instead of spear.

The new Momodora looks gorgeous. I really like the colour design.

(If there are no posts made here in the next few hours, I will add my Stray Blade screenshots to this post).

Lore entries:

Spoiler

Well, this was actually sad.

 

Bosses:

Spoiler

The 2D art looks very nice.

Not quite "Ring two bells, gather four Lord Souls", but close.

That's exactly what we have been doing.

Got the full assassin-like armour and dual daggers. The daggers did not quite work with the combat system.

The halberd, though, was a marvel.

Found one Green faction mini-boss in the Blue faction area.

Ironically, these regular foes felt more challenging than the bosses. Too few too short openings.

Here my FPS dropped to 20. Which is odd, considering the number of polygons I was seeing.

This can be said about pretty much any old ruins.

Edited April 13, 20241 yr by Hawke64

Patron - "My CPU might tank at 2000 total population."
I was wrong. It's getting close to 3k now with close to half of the map covered and if fully zoomed out it's at 28-30fps (still very playable, a little sluggish if scrolling quickly), at middleish zoom it's 45-50fps. So maybe at ... 4.5-5K then? 😛 I can't get any good pictures of whole thing tho because even with photomode, the draw distance is so limited that if you fly upward to try to include more than 1/4 of current spread, everything undraws/disappears.

Should be noted that I use a small Steam workshop mod that massively  increases warehouse storage. Otherwise you'd end up covering half the map just with stupid warehouses. Pfft. The gold mines/mints are broken if you make tons of them - at this point I could delete all the farms for more houses and just buy all food and stuff.

Edited April 14, 20241 yr by LadyCrimson

Stray Blade

Lore:

Spoiler

Bosses (including the final one):

Spoiler

The arena was quite lovely.

The boss, with almost all attacks sending me flying, was not.

Attempt #1.

Several tries after I noticed that I needed to hit her once again after this, which was not used anywhere else in the game and was not obvious.

The sword had the best hyper armour - I could just stand and swing without being interrupted.

In terms of navigation, the companion and the wall marks proved to be more reliable for the main quest. The map and the compass were less helpful.

The end-game and the ending:

Spoiler

This one was actually funny. Primarily due to its irrelevance to the MC's objective. If we had to slaughter every last descendant of the local population in order to save the valley from these invading descendants, so be it.

I have not explored the previously-visited areas after this point, but the locations might have changed.

The half-transparent figures hurt.

I expected him to be the final boss, but was not sure about the context.

The health bar was huge. Which meant that trading hits was not a good option.

Fortunately, the difficulty settings ensured that even if I was inclined to be done with the game one way or the other, I got to see the ending (decreased the HP of all foes by 50%, their damage output or poise were unchanged).

Well, at least the warning was clear.

 

I would guess average modern town/colony builders end things/want to start over somewhere around here. Maybe more tightly packed houses. I've been kinda all over the place building those.

 

And then there's the people like me. Sadly I don't think PC will allow filling map entire. That's still only maybe 2/3. At around 3300population now.

Edited April 16, 20241 yr by LadyCrimson