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Picked this up as it was discounted on Steam and I’m feeling very intelligent after playing Blue Prince. I thought there was a thread but I guess not. Anyway, I booted it up to try it out and 90 minutes disappeared very quickly. Artistically, the game is a knockout. The mysterious animal theme is a very nice. Now that I’m thinking about it, the mysterious atmosphere of the game reminds me of Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP, even though they have nothing else in common (I haven’t thought about that game in over 10 years). The subtle visual and sound effects are very well done too. Gameplay wise, it’s kind of like a compact metroidvania with a focus on puzzles.

This game has been undergoing a bit of a renaissance recently cause of the unity fanport and I figure I've played enough that I feel I want to type words at the internet about it. It's a version of the game which fixes tons of bugs with the earlier DOS version and allows you to run it at a high framerate, and in typical TES fashion supports tons and tons of mods which drastically change the experience. Version 1.0 came out just last year. https://www.dfworkshop.net/ It takes place in the kingdoms of High Rock and Hammerfell (the latter I've not seen yet). You're on this quest for Emperor Uriel Septim VII, the same guy who gets murdered in the opening to Oblivion. You're solving a problem for him, something to do with a letter to some queen with some private matters in it, and the ghost of a vengeful king. None of that matters too much cause it's more about navigating this huge unyielding world (larger than Great Britain in its scale). This is a very different Elder Scrolls than the ones after it cause it's this procedurally generated universe, maybe less than 0.1 percent of the world is authored content. So cause of that it means that they can have thousands of towns, but they are all populated by the same looking buildings and NPCs, just laid out differently. Which is a fairly repetitive, but it is designed as a sort of abstract RPG framework rather than an open world game with RPG elements. Like the world is all there, you can spend years of your real life exploring it but it's not the point (and is insane)*. The point is way more on how you build a character to tackle dungeons, and how the different reputation and skill systems in the game interlock to allow you progress through the world's regions, main quest and factions/dungeons. The sort of 'RPG framework' thing comes into play with the character creator, which is the part that impressed me when I first tried and failed to get into it after Morrowind. There's so many skills in this, beyond the ones that later TES games have. You have all that restoration and blades stuff and you also have the cool levitation skills from Morrowind. But then there's 'climbing', which rolls a dice anytime you push against a wall and does a sort of BOTW style climb against it, and you will slip if your stats are bad at it. This has obvious potential for immersive sim solutions in some dungeons and you can use it to climb over the walls of gated towns at night. Which you might want to do cause you will get arrested if you try to camp outside or will get attacked by ghosts if you loiter. There's languages in it, like the Orc language or Dragonish. I don't really know what they do yet. There's things in it like 'ettiquette' and 'streetwise' which do dice-rolls in your interactions with NPCs, which you have to rely on to find directions to the guilds and churches or specific quest NPCs. My speech skills are really low so a significant amount of time is spent trying to extract the most basic of directions from NPCs. Which is pretty grating, but in a sort of immersive way. When I get enough magicka to cast charm it will be way easier I guess. Stuff like faction and regional reputation seems to play a part in this also, which could have the side effect of pushing you to stick to certain regions and make questing more frictionless cause people might have heard of you and be more willing to help you out. The meat of the game is in this questing, whether it's main quests or sidequests for factions or oddjobs or whatever. There's a timing mechanic to them, go to this dungeon, kill this cunt and come back within 28 days. Or go to some guys house in the town a couple days over and kill the tiger in his bedroom (???) and come back in 14 days. The world is not designed to be traveled in real time so you open a map, type in the area they tell you and it will tell you it took you 5 days to get there, or maybe less if you travel 'recklessly' (which seems to mean you will be unrested on arrival). Then when you're in the dungeon, the dungeons are huge, you mainly seem to rely on using the rest mechanic to heal health, fatigue and magic. Which also counts into that timer. So it's about time management and having ways to save that time really help, like the recall spell or restoration magic. I guess potions could help later but I haven't been able to tell how to get them or make them, they seem incredibly rate in this. Also the dungeons can have locked doors which might be blocking your objective, so not having alteration or lockpicking could cause issues. In terms of deep stories and lore there's not a lot there, it's more about this systemic approach to difficult problem solving in a role-playing context, I think. It's a really difficult game and the tutorial dungeon is designed to kick your ass with a combination of enemies and obstacles in a way to make you reconsider your build, or your approach, or just even playing the game at all. I don't know much about this particular youtuber but he was apparently one of the most popular TES content creators and disappeared for ages, anyway he came back with this vid which maybe explains the game a bit where he does a weird challenge run showcasing the game's systems *That hasn't stopped modders from trying to turn it into that kind of game tho, the mods on nexus are really interesting

I think everyone knows what this is and what it's about by now... I've played around with it for three or four hours so far and to be honest I think I'm a little bit in love... Up front, so far I'm pretty bloody awful at dodging and parrying but apart from a couple of (I presume) optional bosses things haven't been too bad and it's not punished me too badly. There's a couple of mechanics that I'm not to sure on, mainly Lune and her "stain" system... she absorbs different coloured stains to power up her spells... but I'm sure it'll fall in to place. There's also something in here that reminds me of Lost Odyssey a whole lot which is nice. It looks lovely after turning off all the usual bullshit such as movie grain and motion blur (seriously do people play games with this stuff on?)... another game that doesn't have hdr though. The voice work is top notch unsurprisingly given the talent involved, music has been wonderful and I'm loving just how somber the whole thing is and given the subject matter I wouldn't want it any other way... can't wait to get my teeth in to this properly with more party members and more combat options.

Lots of Oblivion chat so figure I'd post it here I played about 4 hours or so, picked an Acrobat Orc. Lots of jumping, punching and arrow shooting. I have alteration as a major skill, I guess I can use that for shield magic so I don't have to block. It's interesting to revisit as you can imo still sort of feel how BGS generated this sort of inertia with their games that led to them stagnating a lot with Starfield, it kinda starts with this game. But I do think Oblivion is cool in spite of its flaws, it has some of the most interesting one-off questlines. Like the guy who you have to rescue out of a watercolour painting, which I did the other day. I always like the sort of weird episodic style of its storytelling, even if the over-arching narrative is a bit derivative. I don't think I'll be spending too long in Cyrodil this time tho, it's really hard to overlook the level scaling. That you can be at your wits end cracking a hard safe and your reward is another lockpick to replace the 8 you broke and 3 Septims. This is just the kind of thing that when you notice it it can destroy the feeling of exploration, to the point it makes Oblivion the hardest one to return to I think (apparently Skyrim fixed this? I don't know). I'm probably going to just use this as a zone out game now and then when I want a distraction rather than take it too seriously. It got me to install Daggerfall again so I might do the two simultaneously, one for relaxing one for stressing out cause of screaming skeletons. Here's a screenshot with the hardware lumen stuff maxed out, tho I'm keeping it turned off cause it runs badly. It mainly adds/improves self-shadowing to foliage and other things. There's a few minor changes I notice like how when you go up a steep incline, your character's walk animation changes. When you level up, you get these ten 'virtues' to spread across at most three different stats and the amount you spend seems connected with the things you did to gain the level up. So you are still tailoring your character in such a way that their actions govern their attributes, but they don't have this same min-max issue which causes problems in the 2006 game if you get paltry bonuses each level (caused by not leveling minor skills or ignoring the largest bonuses) and falling behind the level scaled enemies. Theoretically that's not an issue here but you won't know until you're at like level 14 or whatever Your health regens out of combat, I don't actually like this change tbh. Hope they let you toggle it off cause I like making potions to do that instead, for the role playing experience and so that mistakes matter more in combat (not that they matter that much or anything, but still) The game looks good enough, but it's got a beige-pink colour grading on everything. It doesn't have the same artstyle as 2006

Picked this up as it's on sale at the moment and I've really just been looking for an excuse to give it a shot (and I need a break from Xenoblade). Today being a holiday and all I managed to get about 4 hours of playtime with it. It starts off relatively linear and scripted before dumping you into its main world, which is a seemingly abandoned piece of land cut off from the rest of the world via a magical dome surrounding it. From a story perspective you and your team are stranded inside, so the main narrative thread is exploring it and also looking for a way to escape. I was surprised at how talkative it is and I can see some people disliking that, but on my end I have no issues with it. It is, however, strictly split, as in you can only really talk with your comrades and move the story forward in camp whereas out and about it's purely about gameplay, except for some (rare) chatter via a magical comm device. The thing that made people pay attention to this is its playfulness with physics that loosely was reminiscent of BotW, but at least in the beginning that aspect is rather under-developed. There's telekinesis, which works a bit like in Control, though less snappy, and ice powers, which can cool down the area or freeze enemies in place. The third power you unlock is summoning a Vortex that traps enemies, but it's so weak early on that you kind of have to throw enemies back in again after wacking them with your sword, though that also highlights an early and simple way to combine powers. I'd imagine this aspect growing more prevalent as you progress (especially with a larger mana pool and fire powers), but right now I tend to dispatch smaller enemies with parries and sword swings, which works well enough and is fun, but there's no progression for melee combat in the sense of unlockable combos and such, hence why I assume it wants to slowly nudge you towards being experimental will the element powers in the long run. You also have a bow but I find it not particularly useful – though again, that might change. Some gameplay aspects are a bit 'wonky', especially if you combine multiple features like freezing a big enemy in place, climbing on top of them and trying to aim for a weak spot. It's a sign of a smaller game without month-long AAA Q&A testing and polishing, but relative to its ambitions I think it does a fairly good job glueing everything together. The gameplay 'loop' of leaving camp, exploring the outside (which is divided into large, open-ish hubs) and then coming back to improve your equipment with collected resources is a bit basic but it works. I previously had some reservations about the fact that you lose the majority of your collected resources if you die, but right around the time when it opens up a bit and throws stronger enemies at you, you also receive an items to teleport back to camp without any kind of penalty. So if things go south, you can always just jump away, maybe improve your amour and weapons, and go back. Whether it becomes grindy or not I can't say yet of course, but at least it doesn't seem overly punishing. First impressions are really positive, and for an indie project I think this looks quite fabulous, and very cleverly hides its budgetary shortcoming by (2D stills of the characters during most conversations for example). It's also refreshing to play a game that is just fully optimised for the system you're playing it on. I get that the usual quality and performance modes have their uses, but here there's nothing – just press start and play it as intended (60fps). Also nice soundtrack and really solid voice acting – depending on your dialogue choices the main character is also quite likeable and thankfully not even remotely the kind of girlboss archetype I was expecting after some trailers.

the gaming definition of Look Outside starts with a simple request, take a look outside of your window It seems that everyone who does turns in to some Cronenberg style monster, who then stalk the halls of your apartment building as you hunt around looking for items to, presumably, escape, I don't actually know yet. It's a very strange game, which in some ways is to its detriment. It looks like an rpg maker game, it plays like an old style jrpg, in that you can choose to attack, defend, use items, use a special attack, or maybe escape. Some times you can use an item or talk to a monster that will get a certain outcome. I got a kiss off one 😄 and seemingly he's going to be useful later. There's another I can eventually recruit to my party apparently, although it doesn't half feel like you could easily miss some of these characters. At night there's often a knock at your door, so far it's just been traders, but it can be people to recruit, I've not seen that yet. I'm kind of enjoying it, I love the look of it, and it has made me laugh with how horrible it is, but at the same time it leaves you unsure of if you're doing the right thing. Lisa The Brave had the same thing for me, I understand the Jrpg structure, I've played enough of them, but when you alter it a bit it just leaves me 2nd guessing, and as such it can feel weirdly difficult. Like, I don't have a ton of healing items currently, I needed them for a particular area, now I'm a bit stuck. The game will give you some as you hunt around, but I've no idea if they're finite Anyway, it's horrible and strange and I kind of love it, but I wish it was a bit clearer or easier as I think then I'd love it. Just a character with a heal spell would do

I played 4 hours of this last night. Premise is you inherit this mansion, I think from your grandfather or something, I forget. You 'draft' rooms randomly and create a floorplan which can lead to different things. Some rooms have several exits, or none. They might have currency you can use to open doors, buy things and so on. They might also contain some lore in them. Some rooms have debuffs, eg you might spend more steps going into them. You might have ways to workaround this though, either in the floorplan or in some other strategy. What's more interesting is the ways in which certain rooms can be combined with each other, like the security room has specific interactions with other rooms. There's no reason to go into detail on this cause the game is about accumulating these details yourself and learning how to combine them to unlock secrets, solve puzzles and figure out how to progress to the antechamber. At first anyway, maybe the game changes later but I've no idea Being real about it, I feel like the 'eureka' moments have been spread rather sparsely across the playtime so far and I'm not loving it, I'm sort of giving it the benefit of the doubt. But due to the nature of it it's guaranteed to be one of those delayed gratification type of experiences cause you need to learn lots of tricks and gimmicks before you can really synthesise it into something clever, and I'm not quite there yet, tho I did figure out something rather cool about the security card system which I won't spoil. But from what I see lots of the rooms and unlocks have multiple applications so it's probably a game about rewiring your brain to these multiple possibilities. You should definitely take notes, I have notes saved in a text editor. Best analogy I can use to describe is that it's like starting off a 1000 piece jigsaw, you're just kinda feeling a bit aimless. I'm sure it turns into something else entirely eventually though. Its pace is definitely an issue so far though

After saying I wasn't going to I went ahead and started this today... only managed maybe 1.5 hours due to adulthood being crap again but I've liked what I've seen so far... In my time with it so far Hazel has watched her house get washed away with her mum still inside thanks to a huge Hurricane and set out to try and find her... we've discovered she's a Weaver (she hasn't yet) who can basically see and manipulate strands to help in combat and with traversal... the look of the game reminds me of The Nightmare before Christmas even though it's not really anything like it... it just has this really nice animated look with the character models in cutscenes looking really good to me. Combat boils down to pretty much what you'd imagine for a third person game, admittedly I've hardly opened up the levelling tree and I suspect I'll be getting new abilities and fighting different types of enemies in due course. The voice work and music has been really good so far and I'm betting this story is going to get fairly dark fairly quickly... knowing this isn't the biggest game in terms of size and that I'm already liking what I've seen of the story/characters means I'll probably stick with this now until I hit the end... just wish I had more time to play the damn thing.

The glow up for Suikoden 1 is almost immediately apparent. The script has been tweaked IE better translated. The sprites have QoL improvements and the overworld & town maps have been given a modern facelift. I capped off my first session with acquiring your base. Roughly six hours in. It reminds me there is a reason I hold this series in very high regard. Even the "bad" one (Suikoden IV) isn't terrible. Hopefully if this remaster is a financial success, Konami might even revive the series proper. Or at least give a collection with the other three games (and maybe DS spin-off).

Broke my gaming fast with some jankcore immersive sim. This is a weird game, it's a Soulslike immersive sim. Why don't we have more of those? It's like the most obviously great idea in the world alongside first person survival horror. Like Cruelty Squad it's very postmodern and feels like a 4chan shitpost but critically the game doesn't feel like it's just being stupid and random with how ironic it is all the time. You're either into this type of thing or you find it unbearable, this is why Steam has a 2 hour refund window. It's a bit Deus Ex in its setup, you're in a HQ and your handler sets you off on a mission to investigate carcinogenic shampoo or something. I'm not going to attempt to explain the story part cause it's very dense in strange lingos and terminology, which is where it gets a bit Soulslike cause its story and world feels a bit broken and hard to understand. But it's also soulslike in that Euros are your souls for upgrading, and you can pick them up on death or lose them forever. I tried a recruit first and got really fucked up with debt, started over as a detective who can seem to do things like look at the company intranet but it shows you a bunch of hexadecimal and I've no idea what to do with it. Nothing in the game is explained, you have stats like Vitality and Perception and Luck, you also have Bioenergy and 'Lack'. You sort of have to stumble your way through and figure it out via context, I suppose. NPCs can help you out with that and if you bribe them they can tell you things about the state of the world, politics, cocaine task forces, celibacy, energy drinks and investment opportunities, the last of which is very important cause if you don't have a diverse portfolio you will lose money every single day. You want to get time in the market quick, NPCs will help you there. They also give you sidequests which give you more things to do Outside of the NPC stuff, it turns into Deus Ex meets Armored Core. You have a big mech which you can upgrade and change the properties of. It's not as in depth as AC or anything like that but it is very difficult and you can't just yolo it. In terms of how to infiltrate combat areas I've just not figured it out yet, I'm still at the 'accumulating knowledge' part of all of this. One thing I did figure out is how to kick in my next door neighbour's apartment and murder him for a cool 15Gs, but then I got killed after only spending some of it and didn't recover it quickly It's early access so the purposeful jank is going to also have a lot of accidental development jank I swear I'm not trying to big up a strange game to seem cool, I do like immersive sims a lot and this seems to go really hard in a way I've not being able to find with a game for a while. It seems super crunchy, both in its systems and in how it looks. I expect this thing to bubble into a really weird cult thing this year, off the back of Cruelty Squad being that already but I think this will be more interesting to people cause of the RPG elements

Spent around 5 or 6 hours with this over the last couple of days... and so far so decent I'd say... For those who don't know the game is set in an alternate 1950's version of the Lake District where the Windscale disaster has covered much of the area in radioactive fallout. You have the age old condition of amnesia and wake up in a bunker with no recollection of how or why you're there... there's no character creation to start you off (I've no idea if you'll ever see the character, so far I haven't) and there's also no character voice over, which I don't have problem with tbh. Upon leaving the bunker (which in reality is about 3 rooms) you set foot in to the first of around 4 open areas you're free to explore and find leads which are how this game handles missions. Usually these are in the form of collectable journal entries or through conversations with characters you'll meet along the way... and the way these work is you'll never be able to do them all as completion of one characters leads will more than likely cancel someone else's in some way or another. I'm aiming to try and suss out who seems decent, I'm not feeling the General of the Protocol at the minute (the Army) he seems a little on the heavy handed side. Combat, so far, isn't anything to write home about... I'm mostly hitting things with a cricket bat at the minute, I have a shotgun and rifle but as they're single shot they're only so much use in a fight... and taking on more than two armed people head on in this is virtually suicide too. The other thing is there's no XP system in place so there's no real reason to go looking for trouble... getting stronger happens through finding skill books and crafting blueprints. I think the mystery of the story might be the main pull of the game for me. It looks nice enough to me, I think you can tell the game is cross generation but it's far from ugly. I think as I feel now, thanks to the more real world setting, I'll be getting more out of this than I did Avowed but I guess I'll have to keep playing to see.

I'm cheating a bit here because I only played the demo, but this came and went without any kind of exposure but I think it might interest some people here. It's cheap to compare a game to others in an effort of explaining it but I like doing it because it's also quick and easy to get the message across – so this is basically the indie baby of classic Resident Evil and Killer7. At least as far as its gameplay foundations are concerned, the overall tone and setting is somewhere between SMT and Paradise Killer with very weird, supernatural characters that float somewhere between being human and godlike entities. You're playing as some normie girl working a boring late-shift job but suddenly stuff happens and you receive the boon of being able to perceive an alternate dimension where demons live. Gameplay is presented from a bird's eye view reminiscent of the aforementioned RE classics (there's even an option to toggle between direct and tank controls) and mostly consists of figuring out classic adventure puzzles. An early example is that you come across a computer that doesn't have a keyboard attached and is locked, so you need to find a keyboard and a passcode. It's basic, but it works in the sense that it shuffles you through its claustrophobic levels to force you to combat the demons. Combat then is where it morphs into Killer7 because holding the trigger to ready your weapon switches to first person while activating your demon-sensing ability highlights weak points on enemies. Smaller enemies die from one critical attack (melee or ranged are available), bigger ones might need multiple shots. Landing multiple of those critical hits in succession fills up a special gauge for a an extremely powerful shot that discards any normal enemy and is necessary to defeat bosses (at least as far as I can tell – there's only one boss in the demo). You can also attack enemies 'normally', ie. without first scanning for their weak points, but it's suboptimal and kind of a waste of ammo. The risk-reward here is that your scan has rather short range, so while enemies are easier to dispatch, they're also more likely to counterattack. I quite liked the demo, just quickly glanced at metacritic and it's around the 80% mark, so it seems the full version is pretty good. Might pick this up sometime this year. Quick note as well, despite the RE inspirations I wouldn't call this a horror game, it's more of a surreal, slightly spooky atmosphere it conjures.

Kinda surprised there's no thread on this yet, but anyway. I've tried to get into the Yakuza series over and over again. I love the juxtaposition of serious gangster shit and nutty stuff like collecting softcore porn and helping a Michael Jackson ripoff remake Thriller. For whatever reason, though, it's just never quite managed to get its claws into me. After 15 hours, I think this might have changed that mindset. It's like Black Flag through the lens of a JP developer, and I'm having a blast with it. Collecting crewmates, making friends, just being a pirate in general, it's just fun. I'll post more a bit later, but I wanted to open the conversation, because this is dumb in all the best ways.

I've got 4 hours in on this since launch, including an unusual day session today because I've (half) blagged the wife that I'm feeling under the weather and need to take it easy for a busy weekend's work.🤧😃. Will look to get to level 5 tonight. I'm really liking it. It's looking and playing really well on PC, with a saturated graphical style similar to the Outer Worlds, but very much refined. It's very early, and I don't want to end up with egg on my face by over-enthusing, but it's far better than I was actually expecting. What I want from an open world RPG is, just now and then, to happen upon an NPC just through exploration, who draws you into a quest that branches into numerous paths and lasts for ages, offering lore and moral dilemmas along the way. That's happened already. Great. But it happened rather early in Starfield, and never happed again. So, here's hoping. I'm working on a one handed shield bearer on this first play thru. I've heard there are easier builds, but the combat is so fast, brutal and well put together that I'm having a whale of a time. I'd say it's one of the best first person mêlée games I've ever experienced. You're character really does what you want her to, and you know instantly if you've run out of steam in a fight, with a very well put together UI for things like stamina and special move cooldowns. I'm loving it up to now.

Backlog time! Through pure coincidence I picked the right timing though, because this game takes place during Valentine's Day (I always enjoy playing games 'seasonally correct'). A rather quick and accurate way to describe this is Hotel Dusk through the lens of Life is Strange. With the former it shares the setting (hotel) and the sort-of detective gameplay, while the latter clearly influenced the overall tone and presentation style, with it being a slow-paced 3rd person adventure and every interaction prompting a short commentary from the protagonist. Unlike HD's Kyle Hyde, Sophie isn't a detective, but a young cleaning lady who likes to balance out her uneventful and sheltered life by snooping around the rooms she's tidying up. In a sort of meta-context, I found this rather interesting, because as gamers we're no strangers to walking into an NPC's house and stealing everything the game allows us to, but add a bit of narrative context and it suddenly feels quite wrong. Though what starts as a questionable, but in context also understandable hobby then evolves into a mystery thriller and it's here where it becomes difficult to talk about the game because it's entirely built on the premise of being this emergent choice-driven adventure. I can't really give many examples without spoiling anything, but there are a lot of variables that are considered here, and not all of them lead to the outcomes you might expect. But at the same the writers don't throw any far-fetched curveballs at you, every outcome feels organic and logical in the context of the people involved with dealing with it. This is all super vague but again, examples would spoil the fun, because even some minor details are impactful here. I think one I can give is that early on after finding out something mildly disturbing in a room, you get the option of calling one of two co-workers, and that person will then become your confidant and have an impact on proceedings. So that's the first of a lot of branches the narrative can split into. I did go over the achievements (which aren't hidden, fair warning) after I saw the credits and there is a surprising amount of different outcomes. Some are more positive than others, but the developers seem to go out of their way to not proclaim any of them 'good' or other 'bad' endings. They are, again, just very organic conclusions to the actions you took. 'My' Sophie, for example, might not have had the most fulfilling job experience in the hotel, but at least she found love. Others might not, but might climb up the career ladder instead. Others might do neither, or both. But it's never the 'pick upper-right option for best outcome' kind of design. In terms of production values I think this is a beautiful example of what you can pull off when you align your goals with your financial means. Both the setting and protagonist choices are very clever in that regard, because as a cleaning lady on duty, you're not supposed to wander off (= smaller game world) while the guests are obviously all out and about (= fewer NPCs). It never feels arbitrarily restricted though, except maybe for a trolley blocking a way at a certain point. The way its cutscenes are shot, with fixed angles and little movement, is probably also a byproduct of its budget, but gives its cinematography a very classic movie feel. Through some strong art direction and good usage of colour this is a very attractive game I think that doesn't even want to punch above its weight class. It's only the rather stiff body and facial animations that can sometimes make scenes feel a bit lifeless, but the really good voice acting (English and French are done by the same Canadian voice actors) usually manages to make up for that. If I had to point out one thing I disliked it would be the somewhat fiddly interaction with items. There's no highlight feature à la Life is Strange, so you have to align your tiny cursor with the object and if the latter is something small, like a key, it's particularly easy to just miss it and mistake it for a non-interactable decor item and run around in circles until you desperately try again (personal anecdote). This is all a very roundabout way of me saying that I really enjoyed this. At about 5 hours for one playthrough it's both a nice palette cleanser but also a very fulfilling and interesting game in its own right. While the branching narrative will probably lead some players to replay it multiple times, I usually tend to stick with 'my' story in these games and move away after the credits roll. Though with its relatively compact playtime in mind I could see myself coming back to it maybe in a year or so. But very much recommended if you like narrative games and/or either one of those other titles I mentioned in the beginning.

I bloody love this weird little game. Thanks for listening. Seriously though I’m obsessed with the multiplayer, specifically ‘No Cross’. I only dabbled with it previously but for some reason I’m absolutely hooked this time round. Basically it’s 10v10 (or so) on a largish map. The middle of the map is a wide inaccessible gauge and on each side there are various buildings, huts, vehicles and such. Some high points, some low. So you’re forced to use sniper rifles and your binoculars to spot people on the other side. After 10 minutes you swap sides. As you can imagine it’s really slow paced with dollops of tension. I’m pretty poor at it tbh but I have a blast every game regardless of how well I’m doing or if I’m on the winning side or not. Seeing a glint of someone’s scope that gives away their location and doing your best to take them down is exhilarating as fuck. The campaign I have played some of but not much. It is as great as the others in the series and the invasion mechanic works brilliantly and adds so much more to it. Getting invaded proper puts you on edge. Playing as the invader too is remarkable. You feel like a right cheeky cunt sneaking around and ruining someone’s day. It doesn’t ruin their campaign tho and when they die they can either start at last save or before the invasion and of course being invaded can be turned off completely. The only mad thing here is the lack of maps. ‘No Cross’ literally has only one map. Don’t get me wrong it’s pretty perfect for the game type but it is a bit odd to release with only one map. Anyway if you have gamepass I highly recommend No Cross or the invading part. Excellent experiences.

The writing is great, it looks wonderful but I’m stuck on the first dice game to get the ring to feed mutt 😭 I just don’t understand the bloody game despite all of its instructions. My dog is hungry I must work it out! Stop saying I’m bust!

What I'm about to say here is either going to reaffirm why you want to play this, or it's going to reaffirm why you don't. There's no in between, and it's because, at the root of it, Dynasty Warriors is much like war - it never changes. You still slash, stab, swipe and scream your way through hundreds, if not thousands of enemies on any given level. You still play out the Yellow Turban war. You still run into Lu Bu, Cao Cao, and all the other DW staples that have been a part of the series since at least the second entry. All of these things are entirely unsurprising. What is surprising, at least to me, is the way this is all presented. Instead of picking a war general and playing (insert number) levels, then picking a new one and doing it again, you play as The Wanderer - a nameless grunt who fights with and against the different characters from Romance of The Three Kingdoms. This is good. It gives you more choice over weapons. You have control over your special moves. You can pour points into upgrading skills and strengths. In a small but effective way, it shakes up the Dynasty Warriors formula. Is it deep? God no. Does it make a difference to your motives? Weirdly, yes. The gameplay loop is presented differently here, too. Like I said, the set up used to be choosing a character, playing the story, then picking a new one and doing it again. Dynasty Warriors 9 tried to mess with this and introduced an open world aspect, but it was TOO open world and felt fucking awful. This game drops you into an overworld, Final Fantasy-style, and has you traipsing from village to village. Small fights will appear from time to time, where you drop into a small cut-out section of a level and need to fight 400 enemies, or a couple of generals, or whatever else. Once done, you'll go back to the overworld and continue your business. You then have medium-scale battles - same again but with a bigger section. Finally, you have the big ass battles. The ones we've been seeing since DW2 on PS2. These come with battle prep, information on win and loss conditions, and all the other stuff we know and love. Each village on the overworld has an inn, where you can read letters, pick up bonuses, or create gems to pour into your stats. You can also mess with your moveset and weapons here. Like I said, none of this is a massive change from what the series has done in the past, but the QoL improvements have made it an exponentially more enjoyable experience than these games have been in years. The small battles for example, there's barely any loading going from the overworld to the fight. It means it's worth taking the small detour to get into a kick off, because you don't wait around too much. I've just got access to a horse, so running around the overworld is quicker now, too. Honestly, if you have a passing interest in this series, give it a go, but only once it goes on sale. I got it free, and I know I'd have felt ripped off paying full price for such a basic, PS2-era feel. If you're not into the hack and slash these games have always offered, there's literally nothing here that's gonna convince you otherwise.

Randomly decided to fire this up yesterday, maybe finally a topic other people will join in at some point. Anyway, after a solid 40 minutes in the character creator, which is simultaneously very good but also oddly lacking in some areas, I went through the tutorial area they showed in that gameplay clip a few months ago and then did the first proper mission afterwards. Decided to play an elven mage which resulted in a couple of not-important lines during dialogue so far, so I guess the times during which elves were this universe's slaves are over. Combat wise the mage can choose between flinging ranged attacks from a staff or using a magically infused short sword in close combat, in addition to your usual skills you unlock via (a very convoluted) skill tree. My mana pool is very low at the moment so I can barely use those right now, so I hope that changes, because the basic stuff feels a bit dull I think. Not bad, but ... pedestrian? But then again I've barely started and haven't really used the command wheel for my party members either, so I'm not going to judge it on that front yet. Visually this is probably the most impressive game I've played all year and a far cry from BioWare's usual output and an excellent showcase for Frostbite. I'm playing performance mode and it's basically a flawless visual experience, really smooth, really clear, barely any noticeable pop-ins or other distracting graphical scratches and such, while also maintaining all the visual flourishes you'd expect from a current-gen AAA product. I only very briefly switched over to quality but didn't see any noteworthy improvements that would warrant the more sluggish framerate. Annoyingly, while there are a ton of accessibility options, you can't turn of the quest marker for the main quest, so you permanently have some weird snowflake on the screen. Hopefully they patch that out before I'm done with it. The only other gripe I have with its visual presentation is the artstyle, or rather character proportions, as everyone's head is simply too big. We're used to this for dwarven races, but it looks really weird on slim builds like elven characters. But I do enjoy the overall experience so far. Feels good to play a high-end RPG again, even if this falls into a very streamlined action RPG territory that's very far removed from its Origins, eh, origins. Very linear so far, more reminiscent of the earlier games than Inquisition in that sense. So far I like that aspect but that might shift after a couple of hours.

I got my first match nerves out of the way so I'll start the thread up, but also as a way to encourage others to download it 👀. I ran online with Luna Snow, I think her name is. Did 2 matches and won both 2-0 (best of 3). Chucks healing ice at people and wears booty shorts. I think I did reasonably well with 0 experience in the genre and no idea of how to strategise. I just chucked ice at things if they looked like they were dying, if I even noticed them, and other healers did the same for me. In the second match I did here it looked like there was one Wolverine who clearly got the memo "kill the fucking healers first". Brains and brawn that guy Seems fun but chaotic and hard to get a handle of the UI you're supposed to be looking at. Luna has a move on the shift key which increases her DPS and HPS, I think. She has a move on right click which delivers a freeze on a target and heals her, so that's her self sustain. Her ultimate gives HPS and DPS depending on pressing Q to toggle. E is a sort of tethered heal between you and another character, to give them a passive defensive buff. Very straightforward with Luna, easy to get to grips with in a game that's sort of overwhelming. Healers have always been my preference. That said I don't think she'll be a long term pick, once I get comfortable. I'm interested in the more complicated ones eventually, and I'd like to try a tank as well so I have an alt if the strat role is taken, leaning towards Steven Strange because he's voiced by Grimoire Weiss and thinks with portals, so his match chatter actually sounds good I've also played Cloak and Dagger, who's harder to heal with but the stance swap thing seems interesting. Can't quite figure out the shadow powers, apparently they blind and hide people but I feel like I have to be on the receiving end of this in a match first before I even know what this means and how it impacts strategy. You can shoot a rectangle line AOE heal at people and a little healing bubble which if FFXIV has taught me anything, fucking nobody will be standing in that thing Anyway two people on the first match had 0 percent accuracy on some rounds, it was hard and I was sad. But I got MVP in my 2nd match with her tho, maybe she's cool I'm liking what I'm seeing with Iron Fist, for DPS. He has a defensive stance which procs a stinger attack and can triple jump, all his attacks reduce the cooldown of his defense stance. He also has self sustain with E. He's really agile, just seems like the goto for that role and I don't think I'll be changing my mind

The Half Life 2 documentary made me start up a new save on that game, but then I decided why not play the original. I've played it before but it was on PS2, which has huge auto aim and kinda comes from a point in time where this genre wasn't well served at all on console (arguably, I'd still say this is the case, but PS2 was so much worse). I put it on hard mode, cause I beat Doom Eternal like that so surely I'll be fine. Anyway this game is a dick, it comes from a school of design that feels so odd to return to cause it's really unfair but also that is the point. Not in a Dark Souls way, it's more like it's trying to be an action horror comedy or something. Black Mesa is out to kill Gordon all the time, walk down a hallway and shit is blowing up. They hide things out of sight and then jump you with vortigaunts on both sides and you die. You quick save a lot. There's a lot of 'ffs, how was I supposed to know the platform would crumble beneath me into a room of headcrabs for guaranteed damage or that the elevator would break and drown me in radioactive piss'. But you just continue on anyway I think it's cool though cause it makes Black Mesa feel so dangerous. It helps an old game like this still feel immersive cause the place is trying to fucking kill you all the time, whether it's the extra terrestrials you imported via the bit of cheese you pushed into the laser or cause of the facility's in built security systems. Sometimes when talking about stuff that's old and influential it's easy to file it away as 'important, but not worth going back to'. But a lot of the time the reason that something is influential is cause it was super fucking good and that quality isn't always something which fades over time, even as other things build upon it. The approach to set pieces in Half Life is a lot purer than modern games cause it's always happening around you and you are always in control, you have to react to what's going on and adapt. It doesn't feel like it's awkwardly pausing the bit where you play the game for an interactive cutscene or anything like that. The way it combines combat, exploration, platforming, environment hazards, horror, it reminds me of RE4 in how it constantly introduces new gimmicks and knows when to retire them just in time for something new and fresh. Constant forward progression that always feels satisfying It also still plays really well, far faster than Half Life 2 and a billion times faster than Alyx. I think once they started fucking around with physics in 2 it slowed the pace of gameplay by like a third, at least. Became more about interactivity and puzzling than run and gun violence and explosions. I like how you have to chuck grenades into unknown areas to smoke out enemies, it's more a strategic weapon than it is a damaging one cause of the potential to get sucked punched by some bullshit you don't see. The trap mines are also fun to play with. I'm at the Surface Tension level and will probably beat it over the weekend, then onto HL2. I'll have to play Portal 2 at some point cause that's one I've never completed on any platform. I do remember the final chapter or two being a pile of shit on PS2 so I hopefully it's less of a hassle here, probably not.

Somehow I was convinced radiofloyd played this when it came out in Japan and made a topic. I played it for about five hours over the weekend, which is roughly the length of the tutorial/prologue. Origins and VIII are the only Ys games I've played, so I'm not an expert on the matter. Chronologically this seems to take place almost at the very beginning of Adol's adventures (after 1 & 2 to be exact), but in classic fashion it's not really necessary to be aware of those other games. Characters hint at certain things early on, but it's very much self-contained otherwise. So in Nordics you end up in a very cartoonish, pop-culture version of northern Europe with Vikings Normans who have claimed the northern seas for their own. After some exposition and the game introducing major NPCs, stuff happens, magic happens, and you then sail around the archipelago with a young Norman princess, Karja, in tow. While the whole Norse/Viking theme has been a bit overdone in the west in recent years, it's nonetheless interesting and refreshing to see it through the anime/Japanese lens for a change. I'm definitely quite enjoying the setting, and Karja is a surprisingly likeable sidekick, a bit of a tsundere voiced in a very bratty tone, but with a reasonable side to her as well. I remember some people, myself included, being a bit disappointed when they announced it would only feature a party of two, but after experiencing the battle system for a bit I can see that any more would easily have overwhelmed the player. There's a couple of ways in which you can fight: the basic one is just running around as either Adol or Karja, attacking by yourself and letting the AI take over the other character. I find this relatively useful when engaging groups of smaller enemies, in a 'divide and conquer' kind of way, as the AI draws some aggro, too. While playing like that, however, you can always change to the other character by pressing a button, which happens instantly and also works mid-combo. There's not much use for that early on, but I can see maybe casting special attacks with longer durations and then immediately switching to keep the pressure on as an option when unlocked. There's a second Duo mode for combat which activates while holding the right trigger and it's here where it becomes a bit much to wrap your head around early on. In this mode, both characters are linked by a magic chain and can't move, but they can block and parry (with very forgiving timing) and attack in unison while also having access to a different set of special attacks fueled by their combined Mana pools (in a funny twist, you can also use these if one character can make up the cost with their mana bar in case the other doesn't have enough – no idea how the developers expect you to properly gauge all that mid fight while parrying and dodging). But all this is only the very baseline as the game keeps giving you tools upon tools in rather quick succession. Early on you unlock a grappling hook for traversal, but it can also be attached to enemies, you unlock launchers for air combos or a unique move activated by holding the attack button which lets Adol cast a burst of fire and Karja a pillar of ice, affecting certain elements in the area (plants, water etc.). And that's just the feature handed to you in the first 5 hours. I find it a bit overwhelming at the moment, but it's cool to see so much depth and potential – I did really liked VIII, but combat in that game mostly revolved around last-minute dodges and not much more. The other big part of the gameplay, outside the usual traversal and exploration, is naval combat, which I think is a first for the series. So far this feels like its weakest link, as the ship is rather unwieldy – but not in a physically realistic, but rather a 'that's an odd control scheme' kind of way. In the early game you have two options to attack, a long-range cannonball to slightly damage and stun ships, and a short-range barrage which does enormous amounts of damage. So you use A until you get close, use B to finish them off, rinse repeat. It does suggest a lot of upgrades to you ship which I'm hopeful will make these encounters more fun and engaging the further along you get, so I don't want to judge that aspect too harshly as of yet. It's not as immediately gripping as the ship combat in AC Black Flag for example though, just to set expectations. I'm playing it on Switch, and compared to VIII, which suffered from severe aliasing or IX with its wonky framerate (at least going by its demo), this feels like a more polished product all-around, with clean visuals and an almost rock-solid 30fps with good frame-timing. The downside of this is that a lot of objects and NPCs pop in very close to the character, which I'm not too bothered about, but not everyone is as forgiving. I suspect the PS5, or I guess even the PS4 version, to have none of these issues, but in any case there's a demo on every platform to check for yourself. As always, can't do screenshots on Switch anymore, so here's a Karja plushie:

That is '1000 times resist', according to one of the creators I think. I put this on hiatus a week or so back, but wanted to write down my thoughts on the first half anyway. I think some of us have this on our backlog It is a sort of 'walking sim' type deal set in a very Yoko Taro-coded version of the future. A mass extinction event occurred, aliens invaded and spread a virus. The game jumps back and forth through time via a sort of memory technology called 'communion'. You're playing as this character called 'Watcher' and you live in this enclosed, somewhat infantilised sisterhood where everyone's names is their role. Nobody can ever take off their mask. There's a sort of COVID allegory to some of it, but also as the name suggests there's a theme of resistance and cycles which gets into slightly more interesting real world allegories, which I'll leave out here but they're mentioned in reviews if you're curious. Put in simple terms, it's an interesting sci fi story with lots of overlapping layers that develop its themes in interesting ways and are successful at generating empathy for their characters. Playing the game is a real struggle though, which is why I put it on break. You just talk to people in it, and you navigate these really confusing environments. It all sort of looks a bit like a second life level, or a custom map from VR chat or something like that. In a way the aesthetic is kinda refreshing or maybe nostalgic if you've ever played F2P MMOs from the noughties or something. The game does find some neat tricks with perspective, how it changes camera angles from third person free form to first person to fixed angles, trying to inject things with a cinematic flair. But it is a bit like doing the fetch quests in FFXIV or FFXVI and having being a bit traumatised by that design it makes it very hard to recommend. You'll see a few articles on some gaming sites praising the story, like massive praise calling it the greatest of all time. I'm not on that level with it, but I do think it's doing something interesting but in a way that's kind of draining to interact with, personally speaking. So I'm very mixed on it, but I'll probably try to see through the second half over Christmas. It seems like the kind of story where you can take an intermission cause of how it's structured

I thought there might be a thread for this, but there isn't. So I'll be the one to make one for the weird indie game Premise is you've got 50 games which are emulative of the style of 8bit to early 16bit era, all released by this fake company called 'Ufosoft' which shut down in the 90s. Games which are dungeon explorers, side scrolling beat em ups, weird puzzlers where you're a chameleon blending into tiles, a kinda horse betting game. Game where you hop around platforms kicking soccerballs at things. A platformer all about suiciding yourself. Apparently there's a full 20 hour classic FF style turn based RPG in there, and an Ultima style first person dungeon crawler. Lots of weird shit The games are hard. You have to actually learn them, it ain't Warioware. Naturally, as an impatient person, I'm full of salt and rage at some of it. But it is interesting, the games get more sophisticated and better to control over the 'years'. Eg, pick up the final game they released, Cyber Owls, which is a beat-em-up that 'released' in 1989, and compare it to Fist Hell from 1987. Similar mechanics but more intuitive movement and faster gameplay. Also some of the games have couch multiplayer. Some of the games are good, some seem crap though like the weird egg dungeon crawler at the beginning where they kill you for walking right. I don't have much history with this era of gaming but it's been talked up a whole lot this year so after enjoying Balatro so much that it's potential GOTY for me I thought I'd try to expand my horizons on here. So maybe I bump this later way more keen on it, or someone else might find it interesting. I did find this one potentially interesting title, Bug Hunter (1984), which is this strategic kinda turn based bomberman game you see below where you have to kill bugs. I think the idea is to find your niche and get comfortable with a few familiar games first before branching out into the more scary ones (which for me, are platformers. Fuck man, great way to get me tilted 😠) Very original idea for a game, but fuck I bet it took a shitload of work to get 50 of them. Some are a bit more throaway like the camoflague gecko game though so maybe there's some sensible overlap that they achieve when implementing them This seems to just be Windows currently, but you could probably play it on any old machine. Definitely expect to see it on Switch eventually

I picked up the early access version of this, but made the fatal mistake of starting Balatro at the same time which has taken all my attention span and locked it away and thrown away the key. So I only played maybe 2 hours of this. I'm at the apartments It's familiar and different, I was struck by how the VA and framing of scenes feels like a pretty close take of the original without it feeling like an overt homage or anything. The original has very unvarnished vocal performances, I think the main VA was an amateur, so that sort of enhanced the uncanniness of some of it. This isn't quite the same but close enough It looks very good but also incredibly unpolished. It's a very sharp looking game on PC, they seem to have went very hyperreal with it. Not saying it looks realistic just that the high res visuals, the lighting and fog give it this sort of dreamy, heightened kind of look that I'm not really able to explain. Maybe screenshots do it better, I dunno. But it has lots of visual glitches, things like turning the camera causes the culling to not work correctly and objects and lighting activate in front of you. There's some weird occlusion glitch where there's this ghosting all the time, not the spooky kind. Everything between the camera, James and the area in front of James has this visually buggy look when moving the camera. That might be caused by some setting I can turn off, but I don't know what. I only mention the boring technical stuff cause it's a game primarily about immersion in a slow moving narrative, so disruptions like that do stick out a lot more. There's some black crush in these screenshots cause they were converted from jxr, which is a HDR format, and badly compressed to jpg I think it's really impressive what they've done here though. It seems to understand the original well enough and makes sensible changes to not make it too much of a rethread. Example being you walk past the point in the original where you expect to get the radio, but you don't, you get it later and in a different way. Everything takes maybe twice as long, unsure whether or not that will be something I enjoy more or less as it goes on. It has the same town layout, I think, but the distance has been increased and there's more in between areas. So if you haven't played the original in a long time, like me, then it exists in this strange foggy realm of forgotten memory yet also familiarity, like you've been here before. But I'm struggling to have a good time with it. The technical issues are really hard for me to overlook, which is why I mention them so much. I'm usually able to sort of push past stuff like this, but I've not played a lot of UE5 games so I don't think I quite realised how much this game will keep skipping and jumping forward a few frames like it's an old film with a bunch of damage on it. The VRR causes constant flicker in the apartment area on OLED, I guess cause the frame variance is so high. So you can turn that off, or play on a different screen. I also find the combat a bit too much, it's very aggressive and seems to be about spacing, attack patterns, recognising stun animations from attack leadups, knowing when to use your limited ammo or combo into the stick. It reminds me how Homecoming looked. It's not a bad system they've designed, but it goes harder than what I was personally looking for and I'm finding that just to be a bit of a hassle. I'm dying a lot and getting filtered by combat I'll admit, but I was expecting that side to be more basic. So objectively speaking it seems like a good game marred by really bad technical issues, subjectively I'm much more mixed tho. I'll take my time and maybe I'll come around, I'm not coming at it looking to hate it or anything. As mentioned I'm really impressed by the specific changes Bloober have made to some things