I decided to carry on with
Bioshock 2 instead of Infinite after all. I felt like keeping the ball rolling after finishing the first game, but Infinite was no longer on sale, so this game it is. This game is an odd one. Playing through the previous game reminded me of how this one is pretty much mechanically better in every way. I think it even does some narrative stuff better, with how it structures the way it presents its major characters and how you interact with them. But this game was never able to illicit the same kind of feeling as the first game, for reasons that still hold true.
The biggest one is how strangely lacking the audio design is. The balance of things feels way off. The loudest sounds by far are your own character's grunts of pain, followed by all the sound effects of enemies, with voices seeming to be the focus. And then drowned out by everything else is the sound of your own weapons firing. It makes them feel kind of weak, which is a shame because you use some really cool heavy industrial weapons in this game. It creates this odd feeling of disconnect where using a weapon ends up being much less satisfying than you expect it should. The game also lacks a lot of ambient sound effects, which really hurts the atmosphere of the game too. All the echos and creaks of the empty, crumbling halls of Rapture gave such a rich sense of place in the original, which is kind of gone here. I was hoping this stuff was just exaggerated in my memory, but it's still as prominent as ever. I've always liked the game in spite of those issues, but it's just disappointing that they're still very noticeable. And this is on the original version of the game too. I haven't tried the remaster, since I heard this one is a mess of a port too. As such I didn't expect these problems to be fixed either. If only there was some mod out there that could have fixed this.
(EDIT: Turns out there is a mod that helps this problem, to an extent at least. Apparently there was a patch at some point which changed the audio balancing for some reason, and earlier versions were much better. I'm not sure it fixes the problem completely, as I'm pretty sure I had this same issue when I first played the game when it originally came out. Also haven't tried this mod yet. But hopefully it will improve things a bit.
Link to mod )
On a lighter note, I found out that this Classic version from GOG does include the DLC with it too, so that means I'll get to play Minerva's Den again as well. I have played it before, and while I liked it, I wasn't as impressed by it as some others. I remember it being good, but essentially Bioshock 2 in microcosm, and not really being significantly better than the main game, as I've heard some people praise it as. But I'm interested in playing it again, and hopefully I'll get some more out of it this time.
Also played a bit of
Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight, and I don't think this game is for me. I found Medium was too hard and not very fun for me, while Easy is too easy. Among other things it starts you off with loads of health and an item that recharges your health over time. Un-equipping that helped even things out a bit, but it still feels like it's a bit below the threshold of enjoyably challenging. Aside from that the game also has a load of instant kill death pits, and no checkpoints. You have to go back to your previous save when you die. So I'm struggling to get invested on any level. I guess the pixel art and animation is pretty nice, but I'm not feeling it in general.