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Just beat Under the Waves, a nice and chill story-driven game about a guy who tries to escape his troubles by taking an assignment living on the bottom of the ocean. It's pretty short, but you get a good-sized underwater map that you can freely explore in a little submersible. No combat of any kind, just driving or swimming around doing routine tasks, taking pictures of wildlife, exploring caves and old wrecks, and occasionally trying to untangle the corporate malfeasance of the shady oil company you work for. I liked it quite a bit.
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Jan 15, 2024 04:31
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 13:10 |
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Just beat Deliver Us Mars. This one had been on my list for a while, since Deliver Us the Moon was a surprise hit with me a year or two ago. I enjoyed the sequel well enough, but I was really struck by just how different the two games are. There's plenty of connective tissue there - both games involve piecing together the story of what happened in an abandoned place through environmental clues and hologram recordings - but the presentation is vastly different. While Moon had you silently moving through the facility relying entirely on the holograms to fill in the gaps and provide a narrative, Mars is a much more traditional game with plenty of dialogue and cutscenes. The holograms almost feel like an afterthought, and the focus is much more on the actual characters interacting with each other. I think on the whole I preferred Moon, just because it was something different than my usual fare and Mars felt like a solid if unspectacular iteration on a game I've played many times. Still, I did enjoy my time with it.
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Jan 23, 2024 06:31
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Just beat Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora I've never seen the movies so I was basically coming into the world blind, but they seem to have done a really great job recreating the environment. Everything looks incredible, with distinct day/night looks and few different biomes. The traversal is fun too, though the map is gigantic and very obviously balanced around your flying mount. As big as the map is though it's jam-packed with stuff to do, whether it's resource gathering, hunting, or interacting with NPCs in camps or just scattered around the environment doing things. Generally speaking I had a good time exploring the world and moving through the story and side content. There were some frustrating bits though. The main story itself never really grabbed me, and I wonder if that's mostly because I had no prior attachment to the source material. On a pure gameplay level there are probably too many collectibles, which is a rare thing for me to complain about, and your inventory space limitations aren't really robust enough to keep up with the sheer tonnage of resources you'll pick up along the way (even your stash has a 200-item limit, which I ran into toward the end of my run). I'd say if you enjoy big open world games with beautiful environments it's worth checking out. If you're a fan of the Avatar movies then I think there's probably even more there for you to dig into, as I'm sure a lot of references went over my head.
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Feb 7, 2024 01:29
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Morpheus posted:To be fair, it is because (huge spoilers, do not read this if you haven't beaten the game but plan to) typically when you grow a clone in a vat they don't come with clothes My only problem with this is why do some of them still have glasses then?
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Feb 15, 2024 15:17
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Decided to knock out a few smaller games while waiting for FF7 Rebirth to come out. The Expanse: A Telltale Series - This was a game I was interested in as both a fan of The Expanse and of the old Telltale games, and it really delivered on both fronts. It felt a bit shorter than the other Telltale games I remember, but it had a good story and plenty of good old-fashioned Telltale choice-based gameplay. If you're a fan of those older games then this is a pretty easy recommend. South of the Circle - Intrigued me with its art style, and finally went on a deep enough sale that I went for it. Ultimately I'd say it was a competent walking simulator, but the story was only okay and the game kind of presents itself as a "choices matter" kind of game and that's not really the case. In fact I was kind of insulted at the way they handled your choices after asking you to make them constantly throughout. Very short game as well. Worth trying for the right (very low) price, but hardly a strong recommend. Eternights - I'm not knowledgeable enough about JRPGs to know how common the Persona formula of "you have x number of days to accomplish this task, and all other time will be spent hanging out with your friends" is, but Eternights is essentially that on a much smaller scale than the one Persona game I've played. It wasn't bad, but it mostly just made me want to play Persona 5 again. Haven - Free on PS+ and I played it on a goon recommendation, really loved it. Mostly a game where you fly around exploring the world, engaging in light combat, and enjoying some surprisingly well-done vignettes about the relationship of the two main characters. The vibe is extremely chill, the performances are very good, and the story is engaging. Strong recommend for this one. Fort Solis - This is basically just an interactive movie, but I have to say it's an interesting one. I laughed when I read that the major update they patched in was to increase the walking speed, because yeah you're basically just doing a lot of walking. There are some QTE sections that are honestly pretty tricky, but they don't really seem to affect anything so it's mostly just annoying to have a random button pop up on the screen for half a second before you've failed it. Another very short game, but one I'd recommend for the right price (much cheaper than what it's currently selling for).
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Feb 24, 2024 19:11
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Speaking of puzzle games, I just finished the plat for Superliminal, a fun little game where the puzzles are mostly based on perception and optical illusions. The game itself isn't very hard, but the 35-minute speedrun is pretty tough (I ended up clearing it by 7 seconds).
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Mar 25, 2024 18:04
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Just beat Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden I was interested in this one basically since it was first announced, since it felt like my particular kind of narrative-driven game in a novel setting. I wasn't expecting it to grab me quite as much as it did, though, and it may end up placing a lot higher on my end-of-year list than I would've guessed. The basic summary is that you play Red and Antea, two professional ghost-hunters in 1695 New England, come at the request of a friend to help lift the curse afflicting a town called New Eden. Things go sideways, and what follows is a thorough exploration of what caused the curse, a fight to finally lift it, and a major decision to be made about your future. Along the way there are side quests called "haunting cases" where you investigate and resolve standalone mysteries and either banish the ghost or blame the living person. There's also an element of choice and consequence here, where the decisions you make in the main story can affect the nature of the region's haunting cases. For example, one choice leads to a case where an rear end in a top hat hunter is haunted by the ghost of a more talented hunter he murdered out of spite, while the other choice reverses the roles and has the more talented hunter being haunted by the rear end in a top hat's ghost. There are a few that are constant regardless of choice, but I came across several that had variations like this which made replaying them for the plat a far more enjoyable experience than expected. The gameplay is fairly straightforward Witcher-style stuff, where you analyze clues, follow spirit trails, and slash at things with a sword and torch, but for someone like me who isn't a video game combat afficionado it was perfectly serviceable on Normal difficulty. If the game has a major flaw it's the performance, which was often legitimately terrible. Opening the map or the menu would lead to a solid second or two of freezing every time, and there were frequent stutters and frame drops throughout. It's worth noting that I was playing a physical copy that took several tries to fully install for some reason, so it's possible that the performance issues were tied to that, but either way they were significant enough to have impacted my experience. I had intended to use Banishers as a smaller bridge game between FF7 Rebirth and whatever my next huge RPG was, but I enjoyed exploring the world and seeing what it had to offer enough that I was happy to take my time with it. If you're into story-driven games in the vein of Witcher this is one that I can recommend.
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Apr 4, 2024 15:24
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 13:10 |
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Just beat Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League I went into this game with basically no expectations of quality. Everything I had heard was that it was a Frankenstein's monster of an undercooked single-player narrative and the worst elements of live service game development, but I was interested in the story and needed a game rental that would fill a short gap between other releases, so I rented it. And to my surprise, I had a lot of fun with this game. Don't get me wrong, the live service stuff is bad, but it's also something that you can completely ignore until the post-game. The actual structure of the game is much more traditional open world fare: you have side characters for whom you do quests in order to gain access to their higher-tier offerings (Penguin crafts and upgrades gear, Toyman lets you add modifiers, Poison Ivy gives you access to elemental attacks, that kind of thing), and then you have main story quests that you can do at your leisure. You can switch characters at any time, and while there was much criticism around how all four characters are functionally identical in combat, they are quite different in terms of how they move around the map. I played almost exclusively as Deadshot just because his jetpack felt the most comfortable to me, but looking online there are a lot of people who prefer Boomerang's traversal method which I could absolutely never get the hang of. And the traversal really takes center stage because Metropolis is a huge, beautifully-realized city, and with no real fast travel options you'll be criss-crossing it many many times. The characters are all written pretty well, and the performances are really good, in service of a story that kept me interested throughout. And as samey as it might feel between characters at times, the combat is also genuinely pretty fun, especially once you unlock all the tools at your disposal. The loot element is pretty mild and on par with just about any RPG you'll play. Complete a mission or kill a big enemy, you get some new gear oriented for the character you're playing as, which may or may not be an improvement over what you already have. I got a pretty great sniper rifle early on and it literally carried me through the endgame with no upgrades or anything, just from doing side quests. Unfortunately it's the endgame and post-game where the worst of the live service elements appear. The story is generally quite good throughout and it does give you an ending, but it really feels like they were told late in the process that they needed to make this a "play forever" kind of game and so they just added a bit at the end to justify it. And once you're past the main story it really does just turn into a grind loop of gameplay (with a hilariously-optimistic roadmap built into the game that seems to indicate plans for 12 seasons of additional content). Even so, I found myself having a pretty good time running that loop for a while in the vain hope of getting more trophies, before ultimately burning out for the time being. I am not someone who plays online multiplayer games. I'm a single-player game type of guy through and through, so I wasn't really sure what I would get from Suicide Squad. That being said, you can (and I did) very easily play this game as a completely single-player experience. On that scale it's much more logically structured than the Avengers game, and probably even more than Gotham Knights. It's not a game I can recommend for full price, but if it ever comes to PS+ I'll happily claim it and probably dip back in to try for some of those remaining trophies.
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Apr 20, 2024 19:33
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