Adventure Gamers - Forums

Danganronpa S: Ultimate Summer Camp is not canon. It’s an expanded, stand-alone installment of the board game minigame Ultimate Talent Development Plan (UTDP) and is free if bought as part of Dangaronpa Decandance.

It has gotten poor reviews. It is avaliable as a download on the Nintendo eshop. But why? It’s NOT Dangaronpa 4 or anything like that:

https://www.nintendolife.com/reviews/switch-eshop/danganronpa-s-ultimate-summer-camp

Backbone,i was very reluctant to try, Side-Scrolling, Direct control, No voice Acting; all the things that would keep me away, but the graphics and art style had me to give it a goo.

i fell in love with detailed pixeled art and animations right away, but the design of the game and the puzzle at the end of chapter one had me thinking, wow i am having the best time i had with an adventure for a while, a classic hit.

played two chapters, but reviews say it’s short about 4-5 hours only, but thats ok, the good thing also that there is a sequel coming this year.

Add: very disappointed with the saving system; i played a big portion of chapter3 and for some reason, the game crashed and when restarted it i had to play that poration again but i decided against it and uninstalled the game, fuck, what year are we in that there is no extra saving points but from almost from chapter to the other, plus the game has a lot of dialouge choices and stuff that replaying a part is a big waste of time.

So definitely a recommendation?
It sounds like something out of the ordinary for most of us, at least.

I think I’m near the end of The Painscreek Killings and I am terrified. I can’t say what I know now without spoilers and if anyone decides to give this a try, I hope they get to experience it with similar awe. And other feelings: this game cuts deep. My desk is starting to look like the room of a suspect in one of these games: scrambled notes, pictures, seemingly frantic connections, some crossed out, others underlined.. and a rather scary conclusion.

People are frail beings and they get hurt a lot. We try to forget, when looking at each other, we all have roles to play, we all curate our public and private spheres, once we’ve outgrown that awkward phase of child-like expression. If we ever do. As long as there’s a general structure, some social organisation that keeps us playing our parts, giving us a narrative for our lives, things only slowly fall apart. Slow enough not to pay attention. The house still stands, out of the window we think we see a familiar view.

Until a rock shatters the glass. Which turns out to be a lie. But where’s the lie? The rock, the shattered glass, or the idea this window was the first? What set the rock in motion? If this is a statement, what does it say?

One thing I love about this game is that the plot is not a row of dominoes. There’s not a simple cause and effect, guilt and blame that leads to some redemption/some accusation. Peoples lives just run together with, into or over one another, most people are just involuntarily catalysts of carnage. Hiding it or slowing it down does nothing to prevent it.

Even though the actors are not present, I got a good sense of their characters throughout the game. I felt for them.

Now I need to finish the game. Take a deep breath. Make myself a cup of tea.

Tex Murphy - Overseer. I’ve been looking forward to playing this for a while (a prize/gift from Lady Kestrel), but it took some tweaking of settings to make it less of an unstable ordnance.

It’s a welcome change from the sadness and horror of my previous two night-shift games. It’s not going to hit me over the head with my own sense of alienation.

That is not to say this isn’t a masochist’s choice in some way: I’ve already found this game hits you over the head with puzzles. It also has very little patience for the confusion that follows: you should’ve put on your thinking fedora before you started up the game.

Some people fault recent adventure games for being too accommodating, scared to pose too much challenge, or an impasse for players. This is definitely cut from a different cloth; were the stakes different then?

Oh yes, Overseer has some great challenges to offer. Started it twice, never got far for this particular reason despite really enjoying it. I think I’ll play Overseer again soon.

Meanwhile I’ve been secretly playing moon: Remix RPG Adventure. It was released 25 years ago as a Japanese Playstation exclusive and ported to PC only this past December with the first ever English translation attached. And not remade or even slightly updated - it’s a straight-up port of an early PS game! Take it or leave it. The way I discovered it was also not an easy one: now I’ve been messing with Buddy Simulator 1984, got really-really frustrated fighting the final boss - QTE in that game is pure evil - and decided to watch a walkthrough instead (no regrets here). Anyway, in the comments I read about a cult Undertale indie game that predated Buddy Sim, watched a bit of it on Youtube (indeed, another retro meta parody) and from the comments learned about moon that supposedly started this whole sub-subgenre of “anti-RPG” - that’s the official name, how the devs originally called it. And what do you know, the game was lying there on Steam, freshly re-released!

Moon was developed by former Square employees who had worked on Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger among other things, as a revenge or a friendly joke - who knows. It doesn’t simply pay tribute to JRPGs of the past, but deconstructs them, to the point it gets rid of all RPG elements and basically turns into an adventure game (which is why I’m writing about it on this forum).

Now I’m no expert in JRPGs - in fact I only played those two titles mentioned above, and yet I almost died of laughter during the interactive intro sequence where some unnamed hero rushes through a fictional RPG killing everything on his away. After that the boy who was playing the game is getting sucked into his TV set, finds himself in the world of this particular RPG and discovers that the hero is in fact not much of a hero, more of a madman who terrorises the town and nearby territories by breaking into houses, stealing things and killing innocent animals. Our job is to help people as well as dead creatures.

With people (and other more or less intelligent things) fetch quests usually work. Now with deceased animals you have to find and catch their souls scattered around the land. There are many ways to do so, including simple “run and grab”, but in most cases you have to learn about creatures from short descriptions and come up with a strategy. There are around 50 (!) of them, all unique and like something you’ve never seen before. For example, Koma-chan: “A popular pet-creature covered in bushy body hair. Popular with young girls. However, prefers young men with sloping shoulders.” 🤷 The body is then taken away by some claymation (for no particular reason) UFO, leaving a small reward behind.

There is no fighting, looting, skills or skill points. On the contrary, it’s a humanistic game. For performing good deeds you gain love points which extend player’s “life cycle”, so to speak. Time flies quickly in moon, at the beginning you can’t even live a full day without falling asleep in your bed (if you fall asleep elsewhere, the game ends). An in-game day lasts maybe 10 real-life minutes (minus talking), there are day/night cycles and days of the week, which is also important as characters follow their routines while certain events happen during certain days, so there’s plenty to discover. This could get really frustrating at first, but once you learn where and how to hunt the lost souls, you’ll quickly increase your love level/playtime.

The game is open-world and plays like your fully legal adventure game, only a really zany one, to the point that we don’t have a proper protagonist - the boy becomes invisible as soon as he falls into the kingdom, with only clothes from a local missing boy indicating his presence. You’ll be guided by a talking duck, visit a haunted mansion with wandering clock spirits, a disco with dancing robots and a stereotypical American family living around the forest corner. Completely random sounds are used to indicate speech (grandma of the missing boy, for example, uses speech samples from some French movie or show), and you can change background music by finding and playing CDs (also used to solve some puzzles).

Now I should mention that I’m not a huge fan of such “meta” games, and not everything works for me in moon, including some of the writing, puzzles, graphics and animation (really hit-and-miss, in an early Playstation way). But it’s certainly very unique and very influential. For example, I can clearly see where the Dropsy and There Is No Game devs took their inspiration from - maybe even without realising it, because those ideas were put into good use by other people, even including ex-employees of Love-de-Lic, the company that made moon. The game is long, I’m maybe only half-way through it, but I can already see how much love was put into making of it - literally, it’s a game about love

Playing Dangaronpa Trigger Happy Havok again……..just love this game, so crazy and fun. Love to see another game of any kind added to the series.

I’d even buy an Ultra Dispair Girls 2, the first one was pretty good, but not an adventure game.

@SamandMax: Nice! I really liked the amount of thought that went into the writing and design of the game.

@Doom: that whole post has my brain bouncing between “tell me more..” and “..what did I just read?”

danigar - 21 January 2022 04:24 PM

Adv_Lvr - 21 January 2022 09:54 AM

Playing Dangaronpa Trigger Happy Havok again……..just love this game, so crazy and fun. Love to see another game of any kind added to the series.

I’d even buy an Ultra Dispair Girls 2, the first one was pretty good, but not an adventure game.

I was about to start Danganronpa V3 but I keep hesitating because I wasn’t sure I wanted to invest the time if it’s not as good as the first 2, plus I’ve also read that it doesn’t really continues the story from 1 and 2, that it’s its own thing (plus a controversial ending). Would you say it’s still worth playing? If the characters/story/cases are still fun and on par with the others?

I loved V3 - sure, it’s a little strange, but that’s to be expected isn’t it? Everything you mentioned are true about V3, but it’s different from the first 2 and well worth playing. Highly recommended.

Review wise, it’s scored as highly as the first 2:

https://www.nintendolife.com/reviews/switch-eshop/danganronpa-v3-killing-harmony-anniversary-edition

Vegetable Party - 21 January 2022 09:59 AM

@Doom: that whole post has my brain bouncing between “tell me more..” and “..what did I just read?”

There is also one level where you have to eat hallucinogenic mushrooms to find your way)) But all in all it’s a very innocent game that doesn’t take itself seriously, one of the few proper adventures for consoles. Since it’s not even in the adventuregamers’ database and could be easily confused for a JRPG, I felt like writing some sort of review to “legalize” it.

I’ve started playing the Cube Escape games. Got the Collection on Steam, mostly based on Karlok’s many recommendations for the Rusty Lake games.

Played Seasons and The Lake so far. I like it. It’s surreal and I don’t get what’s really going on (it’s like David Lynch made some adventure games), but I like the style and the puzzles, and the games are genuinely unsettling at times.
Plus, I was in the mood for some short “one sitting” games, so this works out nicely…

deleted

I got carried away bc I love Rusty Lake. Shouldn’t have posted, that was stupid of me.

I am playing Broken Sword 2 again, it’s an excellent game. I’m playing the remake on IOS that actually got great reviews.

No, it’s not the best Broken Sword game, but is a good Broken Sword game. Well worth my time to replay.

Highly recommended.