What Was The Last Game You Played?

[accies1874]

On 07/09/2023 at 15:44, Miguel Sanchez said:

Alan Wake Remastered (PS4, 2021)

Alan Wake is a game about Alan Wake, a writer who goes on holiday with his wife to the secluded town of Bright Falls to get away from a period of writer's block after finishing the last book in a long-running series. You play as Alan Wake, the world's most unfit man. The game starts with Alan and his wife Alice landing at Bright Falls and going to the cabin on the lake they're staying in. While you're there Alice surprises him with a typewriter and a pile of paper. Alan storms off in a huff because he wanted to get away from writing, and the next thing he knows he's outside it's dark he hears screaming and he runs back into the cabin only to see that Alice has seemingly jumped off the deck and into the water, so he jumps in after her. 

I had never played Alan Wake originally and didn't know anything about it. I knew it was a third person horror game but that was about it. My assumption was that I'd like the game, since the premise is largely something that appeals to me. Ultimately, I enjoyed its literary pretensions. Although it seems obvious in a game and story about a writer, there's a lot of narrative depth and complexity. Reality is often subverted in a way which suggests Alan is responsible for all of the things happening to him, which is an interesting premise for a story. You can't argue with that.

The problem is that it doesn't do this well. It does pretty much nothing well. I've played this game from beginning to end twice. I've read the very detailed Wikipedia article. I've read all 144 collectible manuscript pages you find in game. I still don't know what the plot is. I'll try and summarise it.

It turns out the cabin Alan was staying at doesn't exist. Only it does, or did, but there was a writer there some decades before called Thomas Zane who stayed there. He had a girlfriend called Barbara and they disappeared. When Alan turns up, Barbara is actually the one who steals Alice away and holds her to ransom, trying to force Alan to write a book to get her back. She actually is taken hostage, Alan ends up following one of the kidnappers who he later discovers is in cahoots with a psychiatrist who works in Bright Falls. He deals with struggling artists and Alice secretly planned to get him to see Alan to try and help him. But it turns out that Thomas Zane and Barbara are in The Dark Place and The Dark Place turns various objects and people against Alan in the present - it gets dark, swirly, people appear in the woods and in town covered in darkness trying to attack Alan. If you defeat them you get away, but more come. Alan and his agent Barry go to this farmhouse outside of town owned by two old, viking-obsessed former rock stars who brewed their own moonshine and wrote a song about how if you drink the witches brew then you can find out where she is, so Alan and Barry get plastered and this gives them insight into getting Alice back. Thomas Zane pops up periodically too, for some reason he's in an old fashioned diving suit and looks like a Big Daddy from BioShock. Then... I think eventually you get Alice back. I don't even remember how it ends, and I'm writing this much earlier after finishing the game than normal.

In my old age and relative social seclusion there are times I think I can feel my brain deteriorating in real time. Not anything serious that I'm going to go into detail on here but just not getting things. I felt like that when I played Alan Wake the first time. By the end I realised it wasn't my fault. This game's plot is incomprehensible. As I said, it's an interesting premise. That's where it ends though. You end up struggling so hard to follow it you stop caring. By the time it reaches a resolution it's so contrived it's not worth it.

And that's before we get on to the characters. Weirdly, for a game about a writer there are very few characters who react to things the way an actual human does. When Alan arrives in town he goes to the local diner and meets a waitress who's a massive fan. She gushes about how much she loves him, all his books, the usual stuff. Later she gets possessed by The Darkness and she calls him telling him she has the manuscript he's working on to free his wife. Hello, Alan. Yes. I have the. Manu. Script. You should. Come. Over. It's like Smithers' screensaver. When Alan turns up at her house and asks for the manuscript she instead offers him coffee, and he accepts. In the same voice. The coffee is then drugged, because The Darkness which wants him to write a book things making him waste time running around after his wife will help. He wakes up at night and Rose is gone and there's no manuscript. When will his luck turn?!

That's just the lack of logic, there are plenty of characters who are just plain irritating. There's Alan's obnoxious agent, Barry, who manages to do a better job of embodying Alan's self-doubt than all of the possessed people and objects trying to kill him. There's the rogue FBI agent who turns up... in fact I don't think I know why he turns up. Or why he constantly tries to shoot Alan whenever he appears. I do know why he calls Alan by a different writer each time though - someone thought this would be funny, and they're badly wrong. Hey Stephen King! Hey Hemingway! Hey Brett [sic] Easton Ellis! Hey Dan Brown! I'm not kidding, there's tons of these. There are pretty much no sympathetic characters anywhere in this game, and it's because they're all written like people who just don't behave the way people do. 

The setting doesn't help in this regard either. The game's development actually shifted from an open world to a more linear experience, but with aspects of both making it into the final game. The result is a fundamentally linear experience - you have an objective marker you need to follow (but no minimap) to a place to advance the story. But there are also large open sections which feel like they were designed to be explored, but aren't. Often they'll just be a stretch of road where you can drive a car while Alan's voiceover dumps some exposition if you haven't been following what's going on. The result is the setting and Bright Falls are less impactful than they probably should be. I don't have any investment in the location because I'm just being funnelled through an array of corridors, with nothing detailed or interesting to find.

In addition to the nominally interesting story conceit, there's also potential here with gameplay. You do have guns for stopping the possessed people, but you have to shine light on them first to get rid of the Darkness on them. You have a torch which you need to replace the batteries for, along with things like flares and flashbang grenades in some places. You can also use environmental objects occasionally, like exposed electric cables, to guide your enemies to their death. This aspect of gameplay is about the only thing I can praise the game for, as it's both straight-forward and consistently varied enough to be interesting. It's also undeniably satisfying launching a flaregun into a group of four howling monsters and watching them evaporate. 

Sadly, there are problems here too. Shining your torch at an enemy is fine. Only it doesn't stop the bigger ones from moving towards you. If you then back off you'll end up backing into a wall or an object you can't see, you'll get stuck and they'll catch you and you'll die. If there's more than one enemy then you can't shine your torch on all of them, so you'll back up and you'll die. You need to get rid of the Darkness on them to be able to kill them, so unless you have flares or anything to stop them (and there are occasionally bigger enemies like lumberjacks or bulldozers or combine harvesters), you're going to die. The shooting also doesn't have much weight to it. It's really not a satisfying gameplay loop, apart from those few occasions you get a big group kill.

Speaking of which, this is one of those deeply annoying games which aspires to the cinematic. Frantically backpedalling from three or four guys surrounding you, pulling out your last flare to buy yourself some space? The game will slow down and rotate the camera 360 degrees in slow motion to show you just how dramatic the danger you're in is. Only now you don't know which direction is which and you're probably going to die. Press the dodge button just in time to avoid a clawing hand? Slow mo camera time. And here's another thing that annoys me, you know how in third person games if you press the right stick it swaps shoulders for the aiming view? Alan must be left handed, because if you do this the game just switches you back to the other shoulder a few seconds later. 

In the game's brief tutorial section at the start which explains the combat, you're told that it's often a better option to run into light rather than try and kill every enemy. You'll find streetlights and other things periodically which act as safezones and checkpoints. This is fine, and obviously based on what I've said it would seem preferable to actual combat. The only problem is it's one of those games where your character can sprint for about three seconds then needs an oxygen mask and a cup of tea before they can think about doing it again. It doesn't help that there's no stamina meter (he breathes more heavily but he can't sprint even when this stops) or that it's the same button to dodge and sprint. Why? This isn't a game newly released, it's a game that was 'remastered' ten years after it first came out. Based on what I've looked at it was relatively well-received. How?

The game doesn't look or sound nice either. For a gameplay premise centred around the contrast between light and dark there's very little in the way of style or atmosphere. I actually got quite far in the game before I realised I had the brightness turned up too high. When I was in the woods I could see everything with no problems - trees, rocks, enemies, that sort of thing. When I turned the brightness down it just felt like my TV wasn't working. The sound quickly gets irritating too, with the same music cue every time enemies 'suddenly' appear and the same nondescript swirly noise in the background just before. I also think the PS4 version has an uncapped framerate, because during cutscenes my console was silent, during gameplay it turned into a jet engine. And this wasn't even utilising any HDR settings. I'm not going to tell you I'm the most technically minded enjoyer of video games, but this seems like easy thing to rectify. If everything else didn't annoy me so much I might not have been so bothered, but here we are. 

Quite early on in my time with this game I realised what it reminded me of. It's like Deadly Premonition written by David Cage. A surreal love letter to TV shows like Twin Peaks and the Twilight Zone, only without any of the skill or insight to make something as engaging as those were. There are probably more details about Alan Wake that annoyed me as I was playing but I'm honestly surprised I've been as restrained as I have here. At some point in my time with it I realised this is technically probably one of the worst games I've ever played. And yet, I never really hated it. There were times when I played on the hardest difficulty I really questioned what I was doing with my life, but that was about it. Despite the amount of words I've typed here, it's not going to live long in my memory as a benchmark of anything. It was just a very stupid, unenjoyable period of my life where I ended up feeling quite aggravated in the process of not achieving a lot. If you think it's impressive that it's managed to make me feel so unenthusiastic about video games, then I suppose that's something. It's probably not what anyone was going for though. 

I finished this last night and you've pretty much nailed my thoughts. It's not a good sign when a game suggests you run away rather than engage with its gameplay. However, in a weird way, I'm actually still tempted by the sequel as it reminded me of the original Uncharted games (extremely dated but can almost see why folk liked it back in the day) and Uncharted 4 built on them to become something really great. 

[Gianfranco]

I actually finished Alan Wake 2 yesterday. The story gets even more mental and I still don’t really understand a lot of it. I had to Google the ending explanations. 

It’s a totally different game to the original which I’d describe as an action game. I actually enjoyed the challenge of the first one once you get used to how the game works. I was pretty good at defeating the taken near the end. 
 

The sequel has a lot of puzzles and features a mind palace/writers room to figure stuff out which I didn’t enjoy as much personally. There is less action but the enemies are harder and it’s still so hard to see where they’re coming from. There are two main characters and two open world maps. You also have to get to a break room to save your progress, a bit like the original RE2 which is annoying as you can go 45 minutes without being near one and have to start again. 

I definitely enjoyed it but I’d probably play the original again before AW2. 
 

Next I’m starting Days Gone for the third time. Hopefully last more than a few hours this time. 

Edited July 5 by Gianfranco

[accies1874]

More open maps and less action sounds up my street, but the mind palace sounds like something I'd hate. May wait for it to go on sale (especially as it's stupidly only available digitally). 

[Miguel Sanchez]

I can excuse a dodgy story or flawed gameplay on their own, but combine the two and I just start resenting what I'm doing. I started off really wanting to like Alan Wake and the more time I spent with it the worse it got.

On an entirely unrelated note, I'm almost finished Metro Exodus.

[Miguel Sanchez]

While I'm here

On 10/05/2023 at 21:05, yoda said:

 

I picked this up the other day after reading your review. I've not touched the PS4 since finishing God Of War: Ragnarok so I'm looking forward to a change of pace away from mammoth open-world games (although GOW:R was a lot less grindy than both Horizon: Forbidden West and Ghost of Tsushima).

 

Did you ever play Shadow of the Colossus?

[Gianfranco]

7 hours ago, Miguel Sanchez said:

I can excuse a dodgy story or flawed gameplay on their own, but combine the two and I just start resenting what I'm doing. I started off really wanting to like Alan Wake and the more time I spent with it the worse it got.

On an entirely unrelated note, I'm almost finished Metro Exodus.

The Metro games are on my to do list. Do you need to start at the first game or could I just dive into one? 

[Miguel Sanchez]

12 hours ago, Gianfranco said:

The Metro games are on my to do list. Do you need to start at the first game or could I just dive into one? 

I wrote about 2033 here and Last Light here. I liked 2033. Last Light wasn't as good. Exodus is terrible. You should play them in that order.

[Miguel Sanchez]

Actually, I'm going to quote myself (sorry) in my 2033 review which I've re-read:

Quote

Although there aren't lots of things you need to do there are just enough to keep you immersed and involved and remind you that the world you're in is difficult. I compare stuff like this to my semi-frequent attempts to play Red Dead Redemption 2, and there's really no contest.

I had already thought of negatively comparing Exodus to RDR 2, but not for the reasons I praised 2033. Am I changing? Is it the games? Get ready for another existential meltdown.

[Theroadlesstravelled]

Far Cry 5 and it's still holds up but I must have played it too recently because I can I remember the missions. Shout out to Boomer the Dog. 

Far Cry New Dawn and Far Cry 6 were a lot of woke shite and I refuse to partake.

[yoda]

On 05/07/2024 at 16:10, Miguel Sanchez said:

While I'm here

Did you ever play Shadow of the Colossus?

Yeah I did and really enjoyed it. At that time I was working in hospitality and would inevitably not get home until the wee hours. It was the perfect game to stick on after a shift and unwind to. The relative simplicity and linearity of it was really refreshing, and trying to work out how to take down the Colossi was quite fun. 

 

Edited July 9 by yoda

[Miguel Sanchez]

14 minutes ago, yoda said:

Yeah I did and really enjoyed it. At that time I was working in hospitality and would inevitably not get home until the wee hours. It was the perfect game to stick on after a shift and unwind to. The relative simplicity and linearity of it was really refreshing, and trying to work out how to take down the Colossi was quite fun. 

 

Good answer.

[Boo Khaki]

Back on Vagrus again. The game has so much potential to be a classic, but they are glacially slow with content updates. Understandable when it's a tiny team, but I'm always left feeling the game is about 25% of what it could be and I wish they'd just get their fingers out a bit. It's possibly a lack of money holding back development, but for some reason the game just isn't advertised anywhere or given any coverage. It's almost like they want to keep it niche and unheard of, even if that means no income.

https://vagrus.com/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/909660/Vagrus__The_Riven_Realms/

[Miguel Sanchez]

Metro Exodus (PS4, 2019)

I have always enjoyed dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction. Whether film, book or video game, seeing how people imagine the world might turn out if catastrophic things were to happen is something I just find interesting. As I get older I realise these works aren't solely about the creator's vision of the future, they exist to challenge the viewer/reader/player. How would I react in a world like this? How would I cope? Could I cope? Could this vision of the future actually come to pass, developing from the society I live in now?

Metro Exodus is the third game in the series about the civilisation that grew in the Moscow subway system after a global nuclear war. I can't imagine what it would be like living in a Russian tunnel, but I can just picture pitched battles between Govan and West Street in the Glasgow Subway. The problem there being of course that there's only one line and it's a big circle, so being able to escape anyone in there would probably be quite difficult.

As with the previous Metro games, Exodus is the story of Artyom and his friends. His wife Anna, her dad and a bunch of his army pals. In one of his visits to the surface Artyom and Anna discover trains running on the surface. Stuff happens and the gang end up forced to hijack one of them and set off on a trip across Russia looking for a place to live.

While I was playing Exodus I spent some time thinking about whether or not I was enjoying it. I went back to my write-ups of 2033 and Last Light because I remembered liking 2033 a lot while finding Last Light a disappointment. I went back to them to see how much of the games I actually remembered because it was a few years ago and 21st century media has destroyed my brain to the point I don't remember anything. But I knew I liked something, and I knew the general reasons why. I think the best way to cover Exodus is to simply list the major parts of the game in order, because the sentiment I have towards them is going to be consistent.

Gameplay is the same mixture of optional stealth and FPS the original games were. Only since this game was released in 2019 guess what else it has? A crafting system! Find bottles and ball bearings in the wilderness and achieve anything - make ammo, medkits, fix your mask, you name it. Changing the difficulty changes the prevalence of resources, but my first playthrough was on the second highest setting and I had no trouble finding enough bullets and parts to keep me going.

What else can resources add to the gameplay experience? Dirty weapons! Yes, if you move around with your gun out rather than holstered (a superficial decision which doesn't actually do anything) it'll get dirtier sooner and be more likely to jam. Weapons usually jam when you try to fire them so you'll only realise this when confronted by enemies, so this gets irritating quite quickly. As before there are a range of weapons and customisation options you can find throughout the game, but the assault rifle/silenced shotgun combo remains the best option.

Since Artyom and the gang have escaped the tunnels and are roaming the countryside, Exodus offers a new twist to the series - open world areas. There are three main ones you visit over the course of the game. One on a river, one in a desert and one in a forest. It's like the developers had actually been trapped in tunnels themselves and wanted to be as varied as possible. There are story-advancing sections for you to go to in these areas, along with other points of interest you're free to visit or not.

That development joy at reaching the surface seems to have been shortlived however because the open maps themselves are deeply unpleasant to spend any time in. Not in a ravaged by nuclear winter kind of way, but in an oh god how could you have thought this was a good idea kind of way. The river level, as you might expect, has a lot of water. So you can travel parts of it by rowboat. Only they seem to have tried to make it handle realistically, so it's slow, tedious and impossible to steer. You'll often get stopped by shrimps jumping out of the water on to your boat. They take a surprising amount of ammo to deal with, considering they're exposing their fleshy underbelly to you in the process.

In the desert area you get a car to drive around in. It might be the worst experience I've ever had of driving a vehicle in a game. It's less intuitive to drive here than in Borderlands. There are rough paths for you to drive on and you'll have to, because if you go off them you'll drive off a cliff or get stuck on a rock. There isn't a minimap so you have to press a button to bring up the map, try to figure out which direction you should go in, then put the map down. Only there seems to be a glitch which t-poses your character here, because sometimes the camera moves up your arms disappear and one time I did this I got grabbed out of the air by one of the flying mutated creatures.

The forest area actually isn't open at all, you're sneaking through it on a completely linear path while a bunch of people are hunting you. It also, much like the rest of the game, isn't very colourful or vibrant.

While I didn't remember much detail about the first Metro games, I did remember the atmosphere. A game set in a location like a war-torn underground tunnel system is about as easy as it gets to get the setting right. It works because it's so constrained. Exodus gets to the surface and sort of sprawls everywhere and loses its focus. There are antagonists in charge of these areas but there's very little actual interaction with them. There's even less characterisation, but I'll come to that later. The biggest strength of the Metro series was its location, and in moving on from that Exodus fails to create anywhere near the same kind of memorable experience. Rather than feeling part of a world the game just feels like a sightseeing tour.

The best example of this is on an almost completely linear section near the end. You're on one of those boats again, going down a corridor that's got so much glowing green stuff in it you have to put your mask on or you'll die. Halfway down this corridor there's a door on the left. You stop, wondering if it's worth exploring because you do actually need the resources that might be there. You think you can hear the sound of a monstrous shriek in the distance. You go in, find a bunch of lockers and ammo at the end of the path you take and then there's a much louder noise. You sprint out to the boat, get in and frantically press square trying to get in before rowing off as the noises howl after you, reverberating off the walls. This was good. It was completely standard survival horror game stuff, but it was about the only part of the game that could actually be described as such and one of the few times I felt engaged.

Ironically, the game finishes in city street-level section which the characters even remark is like Moscow. The first time I got to that section I actually felt involved in what was going on, even though it was entirely linear. It was a good metaphor to end the game with.

Combat is against the usual mixture of humans and mutated creatures. Humans are pretty standardised, but I need to spend some time talking about the mutants. These pop up in various places, indoors and out. They're given various names, with "fuglies" being the eventual most common one. You go into a room or are moving across one of the open maps and suddenly there are four hunched, beige coloured things doing the standard tortured zombie moan. They all move in the exact same crude animation pattern. They can all take a surprising amount of damage from your guns despite being mutants who must subside on little besides each other, or bugs. My first encounter fending off a pack of these things was when I first realised Exodus might not be any good because the whole experience was so laughable. They were so badly animated, making such a stupid noise and being so irritatingly simple yet spongey they just felt like a badly implemented enemy in a PS2 shovelware game. If you leave them alive long enough they'll throw rocks at you.

You can argue that there are different ways to tackle different enemies and it's up to the player to experiment and find this out. Fire takes out these mutants easily, so molotovs and explosive ammo are key. But even then, the frequency with which these things appear renders the whole thing moot. There are hundreds of the f***ing things. The level where you go to an underground station and just shoot cannibals is less gratuitous than these mutants.

While the gameplay hasn't changed much, on a technical level the game is often infuriating. Almost any hits from enemies will damage your gas mask if you're wearing it, so if you're in a radiated area you're probably going to die. Only as it turns out I looked it up and if you press the "wipe visor" button Artyom magics up a piece of duct tape to cover a hole in the glass. This technically falls under gameplay rather than technical since this is presumably intended, but the game does such a terrible job of communicating to the player what's expected of them that I need to include it as a fundamental failure of its creation.

Movement is a chore, with Artyom being able to sprint for about five yards at a time. You'll need to dodge vegetation too, he'll get slowed down by random bushes you don't even notice as you walk through them. Every now and then you'll get stuck on an object like the top of a staircase moving on to a new floor. In a game which encourages stealth, this is quite unhelpful. In a few places the sound would cut out. On a graphical level, for a game six years deep into a generation on a PS4 Pro, it's unremarkable. I don't think it looks any different to the previous games. People and landscapes are equally ordinary. This didn't stop my console from turning into a jet engine frequently, and I don't know what all the racket is for.

Characterisation is arguably the game's biggest weakness. Artyom is a silent protagonist. Except from loading screens, there he never shuts up. I told you there were other characters so I'm going to have an experiment right now. I played this game through three and a half times. I played both DLC episodes. I finished with it less than a week ago. I'm going to list the characters and how much I remember of them.

Artyom: You
Anna: Your wife. Russian accent occasionally drifts and becomes American. Suddenly develops a cough early in the game. I wonder what that might mean!
Colonel Miller: Her dad. I don't know why he's called Miller, he has a Russian name too. Has metal legs. I don't know why.
Duke: A guy.
Damir: A guy who looks a bit Asiatic and empathises with the slaves in the Caspian level.
Sam: An American with a top knot.
Alyosha: A guy.
Tokarev: A guy with guns.
Katya and Nastya: A woman and her daughter you rescue from the river. I didn't realise Nastya was a girl until we were leaving.
Idiot: Named by a big Dostoyevsky fan.

In between the actual gameplay levels the game has little interludes on the train showing you how much the gang all like each other and get on. Here it turns out Artyom is the group diarist and there are reams of pages he's written about everything they encounter - characters, weapons, enemies, the story, the lot. You have to sit down and read these if you want to know anything since the game does such a terrible job of making the player - either new or returning to the series - aware of any of it.

I'm reminded of the Zero Punctuation review of Final Fantasy XIII here, which had a similar approach to telling the player anything. "I only have a vague idea of what's going on because I made myself read all that ancillary text log bullshit. This is not good story telling! You're supposed to weave exposition into the narrative, not hand the audience a f***ing glossary!"

Why do I not know more about these people, you wonder? Am I not paying attention? Is the game bad? No, I had another epiphany about halfway through. Although I didn't write about it, I spent the best part of two years playing and platinuming Red Dead Redemption 2. Despite spending around 250 hours with the game I could not honestly say I enjoyed any part of it. One of my biggest problems with the story and characterisation was the contrast between gameplay and actual character interactions. You'd go off on an adventure on your own, the fate of all your friends entirely dependent on your actions, then you'd come back and everyone would be talking with and around you as if you were all familiar with one another.

Exodus does the same thing. Whenever you go off into the wilderness and kill some mutants or bandits you'll come back and be met with this cast of clowns (who all look exactly the same - grey, brown, shaven heads and ludicrously proportioned) all congratulating you like you're best mates. To me this is an absolute failure of writing, characters, narrative, use whatever words you want but pretty much every part of it doesn't work. I'm not invested in any of these people, so I don't care if they treat me like a lifelong friend when they pop up from time to time.

The first two Metro games - 2033 moreso - contained the only functioning, logical moral choice system I've experienced in games. Where your incidental and considered actions ultimately affect the way the story goes, and how other characters react to what you do. In 2033 this was implemented naturally. In Last Light it was clunkier, but still logical. In Exodus it's just sort of there. Any bad choice you might make is gratuitous and often more work than the good option. Killing enemies rather than using stealth, for instance.

What really annoys me though is your friends talk about effectively following your example. This is fine, but there are huge stretches of the game where they can't possibly know what you're doing. It's possible this could be the point, morality is what we do when nobody's watching, that sort of thing. It's also a bit odd that the moral choices fall completely on the player, since Artyom doesn't actually react or interact with anyone since he's mute. But with no way of interacting with anyone and no real consequence to anything you do, it's hard to be invested in this the way I was in previous games. That I definitely remember. The choices here are badly tied up in the ending in a way that doesn't really fit. The bad ending is so ludicrously dark that it feels like it comes from a different game, while the good ending is like comically over the top Soviet propaganda. Neither ending feels like the result of any of the choices you've made, so the ultimate fate of the moral choice system is left meaningless.

There are three DLC additions. The Two Colonels is a short post-script to the last area you visit in the main game. It's fine. Sam's Story is about the American in your group which makes up for the poor moral choice stuff earlier, finishing with the option between blowing up a nuclear submarine or hitching a ride on it to go back to California. In the third game of a series about nuclear war, how obvious does it have to be that a random guy roaming the seas with a nuke is a bad idea?

The New Game Plus option lets you play the game with more variety if you're a complete masochist. One nice feature is a few gameplay modifiers like tougher enemies, a realistic day/night cycle, permadeath. These are interesting and things that people who like the game would actually appreciate, so that's a good thing.

When it was released, Exodus averaged review scores in the 8/10 range. This, to me, seems like a good score. I don't understand why. Since playing and finishing it I've had youtube suggestions with titles like WHY METRO EXODUS IS SO GOOD. I realised when I went back to my 2033 review that things which I praised there annoyed me here - tiny details like your watch having a visibility indicator, that thing with wiping the gas mask, stuff like that. I liked the immersion. Here, I found it irritating from the start. Have I changed? My overwhelming sensation for all of Exodus - as I dealt with the clunky gameplay, the ordinary graphics, the non-existent characterisation - was that I simply wasn't having fun. I was not enjoying what I was doing. I didn't appreciate the moral, thematic or stylistic choices presented to me. I didn't want to spend any more time with the game, or discover what else it had in store for me.

Despite being certain I didn't like any of it, I don't know if Metro Exodus is any good or not. I'm inclined to think it isn't. What I do know is that it's made me wonder if I actually enjoy playing video games any more. Is it me, or have the games changed? Are there still things I can play where I just have fun? Have I finished everything I might enjoy?

[Miguel Sanchez]

Daxter (PS4, 2024 - originally PSP, 2006)

Remember a few weeks ago when I played Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier and I said I hoped Daxter got the PS4/5 treatment next? Someone must have been listening. 

Daxter is set between The Precursor Legacy and Jak II, covering what Daxter did in Haven City after he and Jak got separated. It turns out Daxter spent his time doing much the same as what Jak usually does - platforming and killing Metal Heads. With the occasional floating vehicle level thrown in. 

I'm going to throw the inevitable caveat in early, once, and get it out of the way. For a PSP game, this is still perfectly enjoyable. On a technical level it's fine. There's some pop-in as you move close to certain parts of the environment in the hub areas. The close-up details of characters and enemies is good, and the close-up environment you can actually see is still rich and detailed too. The fine details on Daxter himself are great as well, like seeing him with paws when he runs or seeing his ears flop about. For the complaints I have, the game was clearly made by people who wanted to do the series justice. 

Sound is probably the most notable area where the game is lacking. Literally. Several times during levels I noticed there wasn't any ambient noise or background music. I'm not sure if this is because the moments where it was completely absent stood out, or I was startled into realisation when it did come in and felt generic and out of place. It's a strange experience I don't think I've noticed very often, so it feels especially jarring here. 

And on that note, the game has one thousand Precursor Orbs for you to find and it doesn't even have the right sound effect for when you pick them up. Did nobody realise this? Doesn't everyone who's ever played a video game know and expect that sound?

The level design is an odd mixture of linear areas connected by the mirage of an open world. Daxter nominally finds work as a bug exterminator and gets sent around the city on jobs. In practice however these are areas that may as well lead straight into one another, as there's little to no detail or interstitial stuff between them. The levels themselves are varied and engaging enough, but after a while you'll notice how little connection there is between what you're doing and why you're apparently doing it. 

This sensation isn't helped by the characterisation. Daxter works with a guy named Osmo who sends him out on these jobs. There's an inevitable girl who Daxter likes and I don't remember what her name is or what context she appears in. She comes and goes. The background to the story of Jak II pops up every now and then along with a few more established characters from that time, but these moments feel like they happen just because they have to, rather than because this is a genuine extension of an existing story. I really like Jak and Daxter so maybe I'm judging unfairly, but the occasional flashes of people you recognise just reinforces where this game is lacking. 

The gameplay is standard third person platforming and combat. Daxter graduates from basic physical attacks to a bug sprayer, then a flame thrower and a 'bug bomb' grenade launcher. There's not that much value to this development since the enemies don't really scale with your improved destruction capacity, but it adds a sense of progression and there are a few environmental interactions to be had so it's not totally to waste. Your sprayer also adds to the platforming, with sections where you have to use it to briefly hover and move in the air. I don't think I played a lot of PSP games so I might be completely wrong here, but I'd guess developers had to economical with the amount of content and mechanics they included. Multiple uses for a single mechanic is a good way of expanding the content in a game, so this is very well done. 

Daxter's dream sequences need mentioning too. As you play and collect enough orbs you can unlock mini-games where Daxter dreams he's an action movie star. You play a little quick time event/rhythm game sequence where Neo repels Agents, or William Wallace throws rocks at the English, or Indiana Jones whips snakes and spiders and dodges boulders. These are fun and in keeping with Daxter's classic, irreverent sense of humour. If you hit a certain target of kills you can increase your health or unlock new combo moves. My biggest question though is what this means for the universe these games take place in. Are these dreams canon? Has Daxter seen The Matrix and The Lord of The Rings? Do regular humans exist somewhere in this world? Has he completely imagined the worlds he's dreaming about, and what does that mean? Is his consciousness slipping into a (our?) parallel universe?

I almost certainly got this game when I got the PSP at launch. I was surprised at how unfamiliar almost all of it was. I remembered the dream sequences and one level near the end, which looked so familiar compared to the rest of the game I found it a bit unsettling. Playing it, effectively, unseen in 2024 and with the caveat that I'm a big fan of the source material, I think I can judge Daxter fairly. It's good. It's worthwhile. It's a constantly engaging game that will last you about ten hours and never bore you, though you might find some of the historical shortcomings a bit frustrating. I'm still glad I got the chance to play it again, along with a new generation of players. Hey look, maybe there is a reason to maintain the back catalogue of video games.

[Theroadlesstravelled]

I've been playing the classic Papers, Please in anticipation of Trump possibly winning the election.

 

[BFTD]

16 minutes ago, Theroadlesstravelled said:

I've been playing the classic Papers, Please in anticipation of Trump possibly winning the election.

If the US is soon to become Arstotzka, does that make Kolechia Mexico?

I'm currently using my new raytracing games PC to play through the thirteen-year-old LA Noire again. Always a lot of fun, and I'm still remarkably poor at the interviews.

[Miguel Sanchez]

Gone Home: Console Edition (PS4, 2016)

Some time ago, Gone Home was featured as free monthly game on PlayStation Plus. This happened so long ago in fact that not only did I not own a PS4, I had decided I wasn't going to redeem the free PS4 games on offer because by the time I made the switch to that generation I wasn't going to be playing quite as many games. Whoops. It seems Gone Home was included on PS+ in June 2016. Being vaguely aware it was something I might be interested in I kept an eye out to see if it ever went on sale. Looking further at the list it seems the first PS4 game I redeemed was Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, so you can see my interests were consistent. 

That was 2016. I made the switch to PS4 as my full time console at some point near the end of 2018. Gone Home was on sale in February 2018 and then wasn't on sale again until April of this year, 2024. It also saw its normal price drop this year, going from £15.99 to £11.99. I promise I'll get to actually talking about the game eventually, but even its current normal price needs to be looked at. Gone Home is a walking simulator which offers, at best, four hours of content. That's one blind playthrough doing your best to take in everything naturally, then another one looking for all the creator commentary bubbles to interact with. It's a game with virtually no replay value, as once you know the story you know the story. As I'm thinking about it I realise I don't actually know what goes into pricing games, but considering the cost of other similar games (about a tenth of this when they're on sale every other month), Gone Home seems ludicrous.

Gone Home is a walking simulator where you play as Kaitlin, a 20 year old girl who's been off travelling in Europe and returns home to Oregon and an empty house. Through environmental clues and a journal left by her sister Sam, Kaitlin and the player find out what happened to her family. 

It's a walking simulator so there's no gameplay besides walking around looking at things. The walking is quite slow. Even 5% faster would have been fine, but it's slow enough that I was getting frustrated on my first playthrough where I'm just wandering about exploring. That's a bad thing. Interacting with objects is tactile and oddly thoughtful. In one of the commentary bubbles one of the developers explains that during playtesting people said they felt bad about picking stuff up and then doing the usual video game thing of throwing it on the floor, so there's a 'put back' option where you can replace things where you got them. This is nice, and the sort of mechanic which makes games like this more immersive. You're more likely to treat the premise seriously if you can interact with things the way you would in reality. Probably. Would you go into a stranger's house and throw their ornaments around? Don't answer that, you'll disappoint yourself. 

The game's ambient soundtrack is very good. The.... I don't remember their last name. The family have recently moved into a large, old, gothic house filled with lots of large, old, gothic house noises and sounds. As you're walking around, it feels like a real building. The game takes place at night in the rain, and the sound and occasional flash of weather through windows adds to the atmosphere. It feels real, and it feels equal parts comforting and mysterious. 

Gone Home is set in 1995 and is, largely, about the life of a 17 year old girl. As a result, the social period and interests espoused within are right up my alley. Sam listens to riot grrrl music. The game uses real music from that time. Corin Tucker from Sleater-Kinney adds a few thoughts in the commentary mode. 

I'm not actually sure how well the game does as a period piece. It features real music from the time. There are fake magazines with pictures of Kurt Cobain and Gillian Anderson on them. Sam has an original Nintendo. There are VHS tapes lying around with X-FILES SEASON 1 18-21 written on them, but I never really escaped from the feeling that I'm in 2024, playing a video game from 2013 that's set in 1995. I'm honestly not sure why. The game does a very good job of creating an immersive and real environment and the characterisation is very real even though you don't interact with them directly, but something about the time period feels like a reproduction rather than authentic.

While I was thinking about what I'd say when I was writing this game up I thought about walking simulators as a genre, how many I've played and what traits they share. I ended up realising I've actually played more games like this than I thought. I also realised that as a format they will almost always have to struggle with telling a story with multiple characters and viewpoints from a single perspective, usually discovering the story after it's happened. Can, then, a game feature (in this case) four meaningful characters who all feel legitimate? Asking questions and then answering them is very annoying so I apologise, but I think Gone Home manages it. 

In addition to the journal pages you can find there are subtle clues dotted around the house which when pieced together explain more clearly what was going on in the family. You can get the gist of things with just a few bits of information, but the game strikes a fine balance of giving you information which rewards you enough to want to keep exploring to find as much of it as you can. I don't think your path for uncovering this blind is technically linear, but you can probably find 90% of this stuff just from following one clue after another, which is a good amount. 

It might seem silly being at pains to avoid spoilers for something more than ten years old, but I had managed to go that length of time knowing absolutely nothing about this game, so you might too. The story is different. It's normal yet something you might not necessarily have seen in a game, or even that often in other formats. It's told well, with emotion and empathy in a way which never really becomes too preachy. It's a story about the young told from the perspective of the young which always carries a potential to be insufferable, but I don't think it ever is. 

I liked the commentary mode you can activate as well. Since the game is short the commentary isn't that much longer than a regular playthrough, and it's just as interesting learning about how the game is the way it is if you're interested and enjoyed it. I remember playing Dear Esther and having no desire to listen to the commentary there even though the game is a similar length, so either I'm growing or Gone Home is miles better than at least one of its comparables. 

All in all I must have waited the best part of eight years to be able to play Gone Home. I ended up engaging with it in a way I wasn't expecting and in a way I haven't done with just about everything I've played so far in 2024. I can't really say anything other than that I enjoyed this and would recommend it to everyone, and that I'm going to actively seek out similar games to it. 

[Mark Connolly]

On 20/08/2024 at 22:21, BFTD said:

If the US is soon to become Arstotzka, does that make Kolechia Mexico?

I'm currently using my new raytracing games PC to play through the thirteen-year-old LA Noire again. Always a lot of fun, and I'm still remarkably poor at the interviews.

[GNU_Linux]

Mirror's Edge
2008
DICE
PC



Member the 2000's when parkour was all the rage, people wore jobby catcher troosers & EA weren't the spawn of Satan yet?

[accies1874]

Recently finished the story of God of War Ragnarok which has definitely been my favourite PS5 game so far. I recall quite liking the original, but I realised while playing this that I remembered pretty much none of the specifics so I probably spent more time in the codex of this game than every other game I've played put together. 

What I do remember appreciating about 2018 was that I could play it as an entirely contained story-driven game by easily ignoring all of the outside stuff (not a given in a lot of other stuff), however, five years older, I decided to take in a lot of the side stuff. My conclusion from that is that it's just so damn great to play. The simplicity of bashing folk with the axe or slicing them with the blades never got old, partly because it spreads out its introductions of new elements that made me go from "what's the point in this" to me switching between all of its mechanics within a single fight. I think that it began to tail off in the final 'task', especially as the end bosses were essentially just scaled up versions of normal enemies, as opposed to the wonderful Heimdall boss maybe about ¾ of the way through. 

The Kratos-Atreus relationship is easily the strongest part of the game's story, but the time the spend apart is all in service of that relationship, even if I did find the time spent with different companions more of a slog narratively. 

It's also by far the best looking game I've ever played. I took a wee break from playing it at one point and when I got back I still couldn't believe how good it looked.