What game are you playing?

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8577

I got an Xbox gift card over the holidays and it was on sale, so I picked up Evil West last week. And let me tell you, I can now understand why Giant Bomb created a whole “Best B-Game” category this year for the explicit purpose of giving an award to this game, because holy shit, does it ever slap.

You play as a vampire hunter named Jesse Rentier in the late 1800’s, working for the Rentier Institute, which at this point, is basically a kinda-independent wing of the government that hunts vampires and other monsters, and is run by your character’s father. That’s about all you need to know about the story - Jesse is a nothing character, and so is just about everyone else. What you’re really here for is to kill monsters with a steampunk-y power glove, electric bullets, and old-timey revolvers and rifles. The combat just absolutely sings - you’re just darting around from enemy to enemy, throwing together a mix of character action melee combos and button mashing, along with a healthy portion of unloading revolvers and crossbow bolts, which just recharge over time - no ammo management needed here, only violence.

More than anything, it just harkens back to the Xbox 360/PS3 era, where you’d get these lower budget games like The Darkness, Binary Domain, Bulletstorm, Vanquish, that just funneled you through levels, and you’d have a grand old time just blowing stuff up. There is no open world map with activities to tick off, no crafting systems, no time spent comparing loot stats, no layering on systems upon systems until you the game is collapsing under its own weight. It’s lean, it gets straight to the point, and it’s been polished enough to leave the combat - the main attraction - feeling really fun and satisfying to engage with over and over again, but not enough that you don’t notice the jank of an awkwardly timed cutscene with no transitions, or a weird animation here or there. I miss this type of game, and can’t help but think a lot of other games from the past few years would have been better off if they went with the same “less is more” approach here and just made a fun as hell campaign to spend 10-12 hours in.

I’m probably 2/3 of the way through the game, and I already know I will probably load up New Game+ at the end to keep unlocking more combat abilities and kill more and more vampires with my very dumb power glove and assorted firearms.

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8578

I finished Yakuza 4 – didn’t quite make the New Year’s Eve cut-off so it’s now my first finished game of 2023! I had been debating whether to start Yakuza 5 immediately or hold on for a month until the release of Ishin for my next Yakuza fix. Impatience (or more charitably, my desire to continue making progress on my project to [re]play the whole series) won out and I’m now a few days into the delightful world of Kiryu the taxi driver.

I don’t have tons to say about 5 itself yet. It was an odd release back when we first got it, after the PS4 had already come out and relegated it to a digital only PS3 release, and I remember never quite being sure if I genuinely liked it or if I was just floored by the sheer amount of stuff crammed into it. The opacity of Japanese studios means it’s hard to know how they pulled it off - was it an expanding team? Was it crunch? Was it less work than it appears because of the groundwork the previous four PS3 games (Kenzan, 3, 4, Dead Souls/Of The End) had laid? - but the result is stunning nevertheless. Fukuoka, the starting city, is maybe not as densely packed with life as Kamurocho, but it doesn’t feel like a low budget aside. Everything has such earnest delivery, including Kiryu’s taxi driving minigame. Heat actions! In a taxi! And now, playing 4 and 5 back to back, I’m noticing a lot more QoL improvements to systems and menus that probably passed me by the first time when I played them years apart.

The only thing that strikes me as odd (all over again) is that 5 still feels like it retcons the end of 4. Maybe it’s something the story engages with later and I’m just forgetting, maybe it’s something I built up more in my head given the original gap between releases, but I felt like Yakuza 4 promised a return to the Tojo clan for Kiryu, alongside Saejima and Majima. 5 immediately hits the brakes on that, moving him into his anonymous taxi driver life (as well as sending Saejima back to prison), in a way I’ve always felt was disappointing - even if I really like what they end up doing with the characters anyway!. Perhaps it’s just a side effect of the Yakuza games never quite deciding where they fall on ‘the yakuza’ themselves. Every plot tends to be about saving the concept of the Tojo clan (good, honourable, necessary) from the reality of the Tojo clan (evil, greedy, violent). But I could do a whole other thread on Kiryu being a ninkyo eiga protagonist in a jitsuroku eiga world.

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8579

In a weird way I really hope people check out the demo because maybe I was too hard on it

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8580

Nah, you were spot on. The HDR implementation alone hurt my eyes.

8581

This is how I felt when I sat down with it. At the same time, my partner seemed to get very excited for it when she watched me play through the demo.

I think it does a terrible job of onboarding, which is maybe to be expected of a demo that’s trying to show off the various options you’ll get. But at no point did it feel like it controlled well, the UI was terrible to look at and navigate, and as somebody else pointed out above, the HDR implementation made looking at it hard. The sky was incredibly blown out on my TV and the only way to tame it that I could find made the game way too dark overall.

Add to that the fact that the magic system seemed needlessly complex and hard to understand what I was doing while not giving me enough incentive to figure it out does not bode well for the game overall.

I’m sincerely hoping that this is stuff that has been fixed because the demo is an old build or can be easily fixed. I saw some comments online that seemed to indicate that the UI appearance can be toned down but never bothered to try myself.

I definitely soured on it, but I’m hoping for my partner’s sake that the glaring issues are addressed after feedback from that demo, though I don’t have my hopes up. It’s kind of a shame because the bit of that demo was definitely not as grating as the one trailer that everybody dunked on and it felt like it could be a solid mid-tier adventure game with some tweaks.

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8582

I haven’t played, am not particularly interested in Stray myself -not a cat person and it doesn’t sound like there’s enough else going on to warrant a purchase- but I found your critique interesting and it seemed like a good opportunity to proselytize the true cat game.

Where Untitled Goose Game puts you in the mindset of a mischievous goose in fairly low stakes scenarios, Rain World does an absolutely amazing job of placing you in the role of an animal in the bottom third of the food chain in a fight for its life. As a slugcat you scrounge for food, prey on lower creatures, seek shelter, and try to outsmart and outmaneuver the wide variety of things bigger than you. Your main motivation is simple and animalistic: reunite with your family. But adding to the creature-ness of it all you are falling backwards into a larger story beyond the level of your character’s comprehension. It really does a lot of the things that people seemed to be excited about but were undelivered in Stray.

There’s a fantastic thread about the game here: 2021 is the year of Rain World (and so is this year)

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8583

Some friends start up a Valheim server again, since there was a large (new biome) new update. I don’t really enjoy how grindy it game can be, but the vibes are good and I like the weird assortment of mechanics it has. Some of the crafting/building stuff is pretty temperamental, we just spent way too long building a wall around our base because we kept running out of stone, for example, because the earth wall is indestructible by enemies (whereas if we had built one with structures, they would get knocked down eventually). I’m not sure I’ll come back to it after this go-round unless they do something drastically different for the 1.0 release, but I’m enjoying doing something with friends.

8584

I just rolled credits on Midnight Suns after 60 hours, and damn if this game wasn’t made for me. Turns out becoming best friends with Marvel heroes (and make no mistake, I became best friends with all of them) fused to an engaging tactical layer is the key to making me stay up and play just one more mission, and then another.

An early impression of Midnight Suns one might have is that it’s quite dated graphically. Textures are bland, characters move with canned animations, the frame rate is never quite steady, and the environments are all pretty basic. I expect that this is what indie games will look like in 10 years when Xbox 360-chic comes into style. But those graphics also help to evoke the type of game this is, namely a throwback to BioWare’s heyday. The social system has been compared to Persona or Fire Emblem, but talking to your fellow heroes feels much closer to making your rounds in the Normandy to check on your crew. It’s this design proximity to Mass Effect that really endears the game to me.

I keep going back to the datedness of the game’s presentation and structure, because it takes me back to a time when I couldn’t get enough of filling up friend meters and making paragon/renegade/open palm/closed fist/light side/dark side decisions. These systems are contrived, sure, but they gamify internalizing story and lore effectively. I remember Robbie Reyes’s brother Gabe because the game gave me mechanical incentive to remember his importance, for instance.

Of course, the social systems would not be so engaging without good storytelling to support it. And while Midnight Suns’s main plot is pretty standard comic book fare, the banter between you and your team is absolutely top notch. Firaxis seems to understand that the MCU is at its best when it becomes a hangout for likable actors to riff off one another, and they absolutely keep that vibe here. They also surface some Marvel characters I barely knew anything about, like Magik and Nico. And now I’m dying to see them in more stuff. Even popular characters are given new life with their casting. Brian Bloom in particular is a standout, playing Captain America as an alternative universe boy scout BJ Blazkowicz.

The tactical layer holds up its end of the bargain, becoming quite complex as the game progressed. Rarely are you able to kill enemies by simply spamming your cards, and so positioning, triaging of threats, and leveraging the environment become critical to survival. It’s not quite XCOM levels of complexity, but it’s also not as fiddly as those games, either. I particularly enjoyed the hero challenge missions, where you have to maximize your damage output in such a way that you can kill all enemies in a single turn. It reminds me of old Magic the Gathering puzzle scenarios as seen in Duelist magazine or the Duels of the Planeswalkers games. Firaxis could put out a DLC pack that’s just more of these missions and I’d buy it immediately.

I knew I’d like Midnight Suns just from knowing it’s a Firaxis game, but I am delighted to have it seep into my bones in a way few games have. It transported me to my university days when I’d wring out every drop of CRPG goodness on my OG Xbox. Not many games scratch that itch for me these days, and I am grateful that the XCOM team chose to roll the dice on this weird little throwback.

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8585

Fortnite Save The World is a full game now and is quite fun? Also the writing in this winter event thing is okay and kinda funny? Some of it is a bit too talky but it’s fine. The loot llama talk is still very good dad joke level humor IMO.

Also I guess because I bought into this way back when it very first launched I have access to a lot of quests and login rewards that just keep dumping vbucks and other premium currency. That’s kinda cool and gives me something to grind out for an hour every night while listening to a podcast.

Can we also just talk about the skins in this game? I’m seriously impressed with how consistent the art style is and yet some of these skins are incredibly creative. That said it’s really weird that they gave obi-wan a knife and not a lightsaber lol

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8586

@robot Thanks for the recommendation! I’ve heard nothing but good things about Rain World, particularly on the forum, but never considered that angle before. I’ll definitely try to grab it on sale and give it a go this year!

I have a couple big games cued up but before diving into Dragon’s Dogma or Guardians of the Galaxy I wanted a few more short game experiences and so have been playing Chicory! I was really taken with the Wandersong when I played it on 2019 so Chicory has been on my radar since announced, and while there were a couple bumps early on I’m really enjoying now that I’m in the midgame! I’m playing on PS5 (my only gaming platform) and I’d definitely suggest anyone interested to consider a different platform. The core mechanic of the game involves painting with an on screen cursor and its very clumsy on an analogue stick. It was actually so bad in the opening hour or so that I was worried I wasn’t going to be able to enjoy the game at all but thankfully (small mechanical spoiler) I happened upon the paint bucket tool that allows for much quicker yet still creative coloring. The way it works is really wonderful. When used on an entirely blank section of the screen it will color in the entire thing and any objects or characters on it. But when then used again with a different color the ground will change but any objects or characters will remain that same initial color. Because of this its very quick to create a two-four tone pallet for each screen that looks beautiful. I’ve been having a blast since.

I have some thoughts on the writing of the game as well, but I’m going to play a bit further before posting on it. Overall though I’ve just been loving it so far and am always surprised when I realize how long I’ve been playing in a given day.

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8587

I’m holding off on setting goals for how I want to approach gaming this year, but there are a few games I’ve wanted to play for a long time, and I want to make sure that, unlike last year, I at least feel like I made some progress on that front! So, after six months of using it pretty much exclusively for old Pokémon games, I threw something relatively contemporary on my Steam Deck and played through the first in-game day of notorious narrative banger, Disco Elysium.

And I like it! The thing I like most about it — which I was not expecting — is probably the soundtrack, which is moody and atmospheric and reminds me a bit strangely of the town themes from Night in the Woods of all things. It’s dreary and melancholic in a way that always gets me, and the way the art style sort of looks like someone spilled a drink on a watercolor painting really works for what it’s trying to do. I think the writing is… interesting. Sorta Delillo-ish, style-wise? Sometimes it flows perfectly and sometimes it feels like it’s trying very hard to be what, if it were straight up fiction, I would call literary in a mildly pejorative sense. It’s the skill voices, really — sometimes they work well, but most of them time it ends up losing me and I just kinda skim until I get to something meaninfgul. Still, I should probably say that, contextually, the fact that I can have that minor qualm about its writing already puts it in a pretty rare echelon for games, because damn even if I don’t think it always works, the prose is definitely trying for something. And when Harry(?) actually engages to other characters, it all gets pretty splendid. The actual dialogue in this game is excellent, and I get why everyone is so enamored with Kim Kitsuragi. Would die for that guy.

Otherwise, I’m enjoying the detective aspect of the game too. It scratches the itch, at least slightly, that I have for the genre of 3D mystery/exploration games that the last few years have really developed out. It also understands how to make itself palatable for someone like me, who just doesn’t have whatever brain area or concentration is needed to hang with all the technical aspects of a TTRPG, by kinda just letting you coast through its systems on vibes. I know there are skills, and thoughts, and checks, and all this stuff happening under the surface… but I’m kinda just doing what feels right, exhausting every conversation tree, and that seems to be moving things along. I like that. Looking forward to where this all goes.

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8588

My 2022 was mostly playing the humongous amount of games I bought in Itch.io’s bundles. Lately, I played a surprisingly entertaining FPS called ADACA. A sci-fi shooter with a low-poly look about being sent to a prison labor planet (for being Non-binary!) and waking up with the power to pick up objects telepathically and fight evil soldiers and cult monsters, or watch them fight each other. There’s also a cliffhanger. If you’re looking for a very Half-Life like game with good quality of life features, I whole heartily recommend it.

Some bosses are awful, and the levels are vast yet the enmeis got kind of dull to fight. So I tried an FPS famous for good enemy AI: FEAR. Despite the horror elements feeling hack and the storytelling largely unremarkable. The enemies in this game are insanely satisfying to defeat. I don’t know why, but having enemies seek and destroy me before I even reach a set-piece, despite triggering it, makes me so giddy.

There’s also Pale Cachexia. A kinetic(non-interactive) visual novel that. It engrossed me so much, it felt like a drug that I didn’t want to stop. A mystery that kept me guessing of the small cast of characters motivations till the end, and still kept me guessing and yet was so satisfying. Is it a game about embracing an escape from the anxieties of society? Is one character a DM colluding with vampires?

Hopefully there’s more amazing games to discover next year.

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8589

Continuing my adventures in Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition, currently on chapter 9 which according to a brief google search puts me about…halfway through the game. Still having a generally great time, though as the open-world “zones” the game takes place in continue to grow in size I am starting to wish for more fast-travel points. Particularly when trying to complete a lot of side quests, having to traverse the same areas over and over again can become grating. Nothing too egregious; the travel nodes aren’t that far apart, but a few more dotted around the map would go a long way to smooth things out.

Also, I’ve officially been joined by the requisite “mascot” party-member, and as generally happens in JRPGs, I find them incredibly irritating. Not quite “Teddy in Persona 4” levels of bad, but still a general annoyance.

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8590

Playing Trek to Yomi via Xbox Game Pass because I have officially hit my “the refrigerator is full and I want pizza” phase again. It looks gorgeous but the audio is weird and the parry window is inscrutable.

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8591

Three days into Disco Elysium, still quite enamored with it all. I had a conversation with a friend who had played most of it about how it had been a bad game for them to pick up in the midst of a bad mental health period — weirdly, it’s been extremely soothing for me, in the same way Bojack Horseman was the only thing that worked on my major depression for a solid seven months a couple years ago. There’s something about the sheer bleakness of its setting, the cloud of hopelessness that hangs over much of everything, that I just can’t get enough of. And it’s a perfect game for the post-holidays dead of winter.

I’m curious how it’s going to develop, though I feel like I know at least thematically where it’ll end up. It’s weird — in particular, I’ve read Austin’s criticism of it in the past (long enough ago that I don’t remember any spoilers, just the overall conclusion), but I think games that actually accept the hopelessness of a deeply flawed protagonist in the face of a billion broken systems are rare, raw, and precious things. It’s why I’ve held so closely on to Deus Ex: Invisible War for so long — playing that as a teenager, it felt so strange for a game to not even contain the option of a good ending. (And Disco certainly feels like Deus Ex’s spiritual grandchild at lots of points). Anyway, I can understand wanting more from a piece of art this singular, but I think it’s giving me exactly what I want. Very excited to really get into the thick of it over the coming week.

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8592

Yeah, I think this is one of the thematic strengths of Disco Elysium too (and your comparison to DX:IW is actually something I’d never really thought of before - although possibly because I don’t consider all of its endings to be bad! - but I do see your point.), but as I said when I played through it, it’s the kind of viewpoint that you get more often from (say) Eastern European developers in general, because it resonates with a worldview more common there. And I still think that DE is, fundamentally, one of the most “Baltic States” games I have ever played as a result of that.

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8593

My spouse and I were watching TV the other day and saw a commercial for the new The Last of Us show coming on HBO. She never played the games, but is aware of them, and said, “hey, we should watch that,” and that led me to think “hey, it’s been a few years since I played through the first one, this is probably a good as time as any to do a replay”. Well, apparently Sony agreed, as they had The Last of Us Part I (the remake/remaster from this year) on sale on PSN, so I downloaded it, knocked it out in two days, and I have some thoughts!

  • Gameplay-wise, it’s sublime. It really hit me that the blend of stealth-action, bits of survival-horror, and scavenging for resources just massages my brain in just the right way. I think it really does a great job of dealing with the age-old struggle of stealth-oriented games, where getting caught often feels like a fail-state in and of itself. Instead, it just gets more frantic - all of a sudden, you have to improvise, and it just feels really good to drop a smoke bomb at just the right time to disorient opponents, maybe throw a bottle to distract or stun them, and then quick line up a headshot before running into cover elsewhere. Before you know it, they’ve lost you and you’re back to a stealth state. It all just works incredibly well, even if the clickers sometimes get a bit frustrating with their auto-kill if they get too close.

  • Narratively, I think it’s still largely well-done, though there are warts. The whole section with David and his band of cannibals is still a low-point, as it was when I first played it. It’s just such a boring, played-out apocalypse trope that isn’t interesting. It does lead to a fun gameplay moment though with the tense showdown between Ellie and David playing cat and mouse, though.

  • I knew it was coming, but the conclusion of the Henry/Sam arc still left me misty-eyed. It’s such a tragic moment, but incredibly well-executed.

  • Left Behind is the best part of the whole package. It’s a tragic story, but laced with hope - it leaves the message that through the bleakest times, there are still things worth fighting, living, surviving, and enduring for. For as cynical as the sequel felt at times, there’s a sincerity throughout this first game that leaves me feeling so positive about the whole thing.

So, I’m left with myself looking forward to seeing what they do with the TV show, and also contemplating a Part II replay. I remember Part II leaving me feeling exhausted and burned out on how cynical it was, but I think it would be interesting to see how it might be in conversation with the themes of the first game with it still fresh in my mind.

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8594

I’m still in the thick of The Evil Within. I will write something in this thread at some point about this game is Mikami’s moratorium on his Resident Evil games, but for now I will just say that game is both very cruel and very funny. There was a moment in Chapter 3 where a headshot blew a perfect circle the size of a baseball through both sides of my target’s dome and I realised how much Bad Taste/Dead Alive this game is. I think it brings the pressure and stress enough to make the game consistently threatening, but they 100% knew the first thing you’d do with an explosive crossbow bolt was blow yourself up and they kept that.

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8595

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. After thinking a bit more, I think one of the things that really gets me about Disco Elysium is just that it’s so explicitly set in the aftermath of a failed revolution. I feel like I rarely find that kind of setting in art from the US and Western Europe (for obvious reasons). The game also definitely speaks to some of the (sometimes overly cynical) skepticism I feel whenever I hear leftists around me treat revolution as an end-goal, as if everything would follow naturally after that, or to the idea of an end of history in any sense. (It’s funny, because that actually is what the end writ-large of DX:IW is — since the choice there is basically “to whom do I give absolute power over the entire world’s communications protocols,” my read of that ending has always been, “choose which end of history you think is best.”)

Anyway, at least so far, ~12ish hours in, it does feel like the things I’ve heard about the game not offering a tangible path forward or some kind of tangible action towards the future are… not missing the point, but asking for something that these developers clearly weren’t interested in making by virtue of their own experiences and conditions. It’s a game about the “post-” that comes before all those other words and what it actually means to live through that, and it does so as well as the best stuff of its kind that at least I’ve found.

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8596

You’ve made me want to return to Disco Elysium and DX:IW, surprisingly. I just reread what the endings of Invisible War were and for all its flaws, that game was really interesting. I’d take a remake of it over a continuation of the have-you-heard-of-this-transhumanism-idea? reboots any day.

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