Some Quick Mini-Reviews of Stuff I’ve Been Playing

Conception II: Children of the Seven Stars (Demo)– Played through the demo after seeing a deep discount on the Nintendo eShop, but missed the window to actually get it at that price. A 3D dungeon crawler with socialization elements, probably superficially similar to Persona (Which I’ve never played, honestly). The method of party member creation is basically sex in all but name, right down to the main character and their lady acting all awkward and nervous about it. The actual dungeon-crawling is fun enough, and the battle system is neat. Would probably have picked up the full game if I beat the demo quickly enough to get it at the sale price (The game retails for $29.99 US, but was on sale for something like $5.85).

Haunt the House: Terrortown– Got this as part of Indie Gamer Chick‘s Indieween event. You play as a ghost who possesses objects to try and scare people out of various locales. The game is fun, when it works, though I’m not sure there’s actually any coherent strategy to scaring people out as quickly as possible. I’ve played it for a little less than an hour (47 minutes according to Steam), and in that time the game softlocked on me twice, and one of the victims I was supposed to scare simply disappeared, preventing me from completing the level. Still, fun enough in short bursts, and the game saves constantly, so it’s great for killing 10-20 minutes at a time.

Torchlight– Finally started this after hearing about the developer shutting down, and wonder why I didn’t do this sooner. It’s basically Diablo with a ton of little quality-of-life improvements (Most notably in my first five hours of playing according to Steam, you have a pet you can send back to town to sell the tons of crap items you’ll inevitably pick up and continue exploring the dungeon while they do that). This makes sense, since the studio was formed by ex-Blizzard employees. I also have Torchlight II on GOG, and I’m looking forward to that once I finish up this one. I’m playing on the Normal (second-lowest) difficulty, which is pretty tame and good if this is your first Diablo-esque.

-EE