demagogue on 4/12/2022 at 12:24
I'm playing Stray these days. It more or less deserves the hype. The vibes I'm getting are close to the ones I was getting when I played Mirror's Edge, I mean in feeling it's a special game right off, and it holding that feeling as it went on. The visuals, story, flow, and cat stuff are all great.
There's some wonk, and I wish they would have had more parkour kind of gameplay in it, or made it a little more open in which ways you can go for the running parts like ME. But what it does makes sense for what the game is, so I can understand it. And I like the open storytelling and puzzle parts.
Anarchic Fox on 4/12/2022 at 18:30
FixFox ended up disappointing. While the story and presentation remained charming throughout, the gameplay developed no complexity or difficulty over the course of its ~10-hour span. A distressingly large chunk of my enjoyment came from organizing my inventory.
I'm also about two-thirds through Super Panda Adventure, a dollar-cheap metroidvania with RPG elements. The art is a tad weak, and the gameplay is mostly conventional, but everything is solidly designed. Some interesting things about it are its blocking mechanic (with an entire resource dedicated to blocking), its lack of convenient healing, and its bonus-XP mechanic based on dealing continuous damage. It's worth a look if, like me, you're running dry on metroidvanias.
Sulphur on 5/12/2022 at 05:12
I played through Beacon Pines recently, and it was a pretty good experience. It's a story that's tilted into that exact zone of 'creepy Halloween-inflected adventure starring kid protagonist' from your childhood, but everyone's a cute animal person. There's a fun branching narrative to navigate, with the conceit of it all being an illustrated story in a book that the narrator's reading. There's a somewhat ingenious (I thought) mechanic of playing through each available path to pick up something called a charm, which is essentially a word you can slot into the various branching decision points in the story, and each charm lets you move to a different branch on the narrative tree, usually. It incentivises exploring all the available paths instead of committing to a single outcome, which you have to do anyway because while there's a few endings, there's only one true ending. In essence, it looks non-linear, but it's actually a very linear game, which is a neat trick as long as you're not the sort to feel shortchanged by linearity.
I liked it all: the art's gorgeous, all hand-drawn and kissed with warm colour and loving detail, the music's lovely, and the characters are fun. Luka, the kid you play, even learns a thing or two about loss and friendship by the end, just like in the good stories from your childhood. As it's fairly short - about 4 to 5 hours - there are some threads and characters that are crimped off towards the end instead of fleshed out, which was disappointing but not in a way that significantly impacted my overall opinion of the game. It's a creepy but warm and fuzzy little tale, the kind of story you'd save for the childhood summers when you scraped the skin off your knees and shins while climbing a tree so you could spend an afternoon reading in the sun.
Edit: oh, and the narrator's VO is impressive as all heck. She's incredibly talented and brings almost all of the life and charm to the narrative with the way she handles each emotional beat and character, just like someone would reading out a story to you.
Thirith on 5/12/2022 at 08:09
After finishing Sekiro, I'm pretty much playing a game at the opposite end of the spectrum: Spider-Man: Miles Morales, a shorter spin-off of the main Spider-Man game. It's exactly what I need right now: it's charming, fun, the combat is exciting but not too difficult, and webswinging across NYC is greatly enjoyable. While it is shallow the way that most open-world games are, it doesn't waste your time like many of them do. Getting from A to B is fast and fun, the individual activities don't take all that much time, and they're wrapped in nice bite-sized bits of characterisation and lore. You can also go about combat encounters in a systematic way, picking off one enemy at a time, which will take a few minutes - or you can just swing into the fray and use the combat system. Also, while it took me a while to get the settings right, I'm enjoying playing this with most of the ray-traced bells and whistles. In a city where most of the surfaces are reflective, it's cool that things reflect in them even when these things aren't on the screen.
Aja on 6/12/2022 at 05:05
Obligatory congratulations/hell yeah for beating Sekiro.:thumb:
Man, Death Stranding is wild. I'm about 70 hours in, still on chapter 8, and I could've probably finished it by now, but I've been spellbound with the minutiae of being a courier and doing side-mission deliveries. This game, Eva will be pleased/infuriated to know, is absolutely one hundred percent a genuine walking simulator in that its main accomplishment is simulating how it feels to walk over rough terrain. And when you're in the mindset to enjoy it on that level, it's addicting.
It's almost got an immersive-sim-like quality in that it provides enough tools and systems to allow for emergent gameplay. Any time I find myself in dangerous territory without the proper equipment, interesting things happen as I scramble to improvise and stay alive. The flipside is when you have a clear mission in mind, you plan it out step by step, and execute it perfectly. Both scenarios can be so satisfying.
That said, times when I find myself slogging back and forth between deliveries, paging absent-mindedly through the menus, skipping the dialogue, it can get tedious. But that's a signal to stop playing and come back later, when I'm in the mood for it. If you're not willing to play it slowly and carefully, it's not as good.
The story is insane and nonsensical, there's way too much dialogue, the carefully-curated music is corny, and the cutscenes are all like 400 percent too long, but it's hard to deny that the immersion that stems from all this worldbuilding. And some of the story beats, particularly the ones with Heartman, are delightful and captivating.
My PSPlus subscription is expiring soon, and I don't plan to renew it at least at the mid tier, but I'm enjoying this so much I snagged an eBay copy that should hopefully arrive right in time to keep playing.
Pyrian on 6/12/2022 at 05:43
It's kind of funny, but Death Stranding's actual walking simulation mechanics arguably disqualify it from being a "Walking Simulator" in the traditional sense.
henke on 6/12/2022 at 07:22
Quote Posted by Aja
paging absent-mindedly through the menus
This. I must've seen those "delivery completed" screens which are packed with text hundreds of times in my last playthrough and I still have no idea what they say because all I was focused on was trying to skip through them as fast as possible. Really feels like a lot of the UI could've been streamlined. Buuuut hey it's Kojima so I'm sure there's some very clever reason behind it all like bombarding the player with
the tedium of bureaucracy!Anyway, loved my replay of DS. Stopped playing in the post-credits chapter, which I think might be new to the Director's Cut?
Aja on 6/12/2022 at 22:54
Quote Posted by henke
This. I must've seen those "delivery completed" screens which are packed with text hundreds of times in my last playthrough and I still have no idea what they say because all I was focused on was trying to skip through them as fast as possible. Really feels like a lot of the UI could've been streamlined. Buuuut hey it's Kojima so I'm sure there's some very clever reason behind it all like bombarding the player with
the tedium of bureaucracy!Anyway, loved my replay of DS. Stopped playing in the post-credits chapter, which I think might be new to the Director's Cut?
They just tell you how many points you get in each of the delivery categories: speed, weight carried, damage, and distance, I think. My feeling is that yes, Kojima is trying to evoke the tedium of bureaucracy, but I also think he just likes absurd amounts of pointless detail and probably finds it funny to bombard the player with a constant stream of it. I think of it as an aesthetic choice, and I'm mostly fine with it. At least we get an auto-skip button. Also it makes me wish that giving people a thumbs-up in real life would confer a like.
nicked on 7/12/2022 at 07:44
Quote Posted by Aja
Also it makes me wish that giving people a thumbs-up in real life would confer a like.
