Be Excellent To Each Other

Shit horse

Shit horse.

I think I just don't like horses.

Poor horsebot.

Hang about, weren’t you the guy who couldn’t get past the first boss?

That'sa me!

64. Omega Strike: run-and-gun Metroidvania with a look and feel that reminded me massively of the Random Heroes/League of Evil mobile games from back in the day, but slightly more fleshed out. Which from Googling it while writing this I realise isn't surprising because it's made by the same developer and was in fact initially released for iOS. It's still very basic as Metroidvanias go and wouldn't necessarily pass muster if lined up against 'proper' games but it was ideal for pick up and play sessions while bored between tasks at work. And apparently I spent six hours or so playing it since buying it on Monday so that's a recommendation in itself.

65. Three Fourths Home: a 'visual' novel 'game' about a girl driving back to her family during a storm and the phone conversation she has with them. It's barely a game because you just make dialogue choices and the 'visual' aspect is pretty much just an animated background. The actual dialogue is very well written and it's quite surprising how much a set of characters can be rounded out in your mind in such a short space of times but it's barely worth the time it takes to go through.

51) Call of Duty: Modern Warfare: Classic Special Ops (PS4)

All missions complete at 2 stars or above. Very challenging and very fun with some of the missions straight l from the Campaign but now in 2-4 player coop! I’m surprised more people haven’t even played these.

66. Draugen: you and your young ward visit a remote Norwegian fishing village during the 1920s looking for your reporter sister who's gone there investigating a story. When you arrive the town is completely empty with evidence of some kind of rift between the townspeople; very slow shenanigans sort of ensue. The gameplay boils down to looking for items and picking conversation options with your companion so there's not much to it and in practise it feels more like a walking simulator, especially as it's got an atmosphere in common with Dear Esther. The story starts of relatively strong as you investigate what happened in the town but it pretty much falls apart to nothing near the end and one of the major 'twists' was obvious almost right from the very beginning. It reviewed well based on the setting and the characters but the village, while very prettily rendered with a sort of watercolour aesthetic, is bare bones to the point it didn't really capture me and your character's a boring whiny tit so that wasn't helping. There just wasn't really much to it when it ends.

67. Sludge Life: freebie on the Epic store which looked entertainingly batshit enough to grab my attention. It's an open-world exploratory/platforming sort of thing in which your graffiti artist character is trying to tag as many of the allocated spots as possible. The game's set on an island in a sea of sludge and has an unique sharply low-fi looking aesthetic which I really enjoyed, plus a warped hip-hop style soundtrack that's very good indeed. As you move through the world you can pick up interesting and weird gadgets that help you get around and there's an underlying theme of corporate dystopian shenanigans. You can interact with most of the NPCs and while none of them have extensive dialogue it's almost all amusing and/or weird and/or charming which massively helps draw you into proceedings. It's also weird and silly enough to be pretty compelling e.g. the guy in the towerblock who's 'hiding' amusingly in plain site from his aggrieved roomate after redecorating their room with hideous wallpaper. It's only a couple of hours long and wouldn't hold your attention past that because the gameplay is relatively basic but I really enjoyed the time I spent in it's world.

52) Mad Max (PS4)

So the fifty tooth game I completed was a mixed bag. I liked the setting a lot (but it was empty), I liked the characters (although this woman and her kid near the end were undeveloped despite giving the game some actual purpose), I liked the sound and voice (although a few cut scenes didn’t sync up for some buggy reason) and the gameplay was alright but the story campaign was short (although I’d have much preferred they largely ditch the open world habit of shoving a fuckton of repeating icons on a map and give me more missions to complete; don’t make them side missions - make them part of the game and develop the story more so I don’t skip them because, oh look, another pointless mission I can’t be arsed to do). And the combat was a bit shit. And my eyes were struggling to adjust to 30FPS on the on foot sections for some reason. I’ve been a bit worn out lately but it just felt much worst than usual. And when I’d finished I hadn’t done 70% of the stuff on the map because who can be arsed with that shit.

So yeah, 5/10.

53) SOMA (PS4) - 7/10

Insofar as walking simulators that have minor gameplay elements (which include a bit of stealth and mini games on computers) are concerned, this is the best I’ve played. It’s got decent graphics, reasonable (for a video game) voice acting and a compelling story that I actually wanted to see through to the end. And it was a great end too.

It’s probably a bit reductive to say it’s Bioshock as a walking simulator, but that’ll give you an idea of what you’ll be playing. It probably starts off a bit too slow but once the water starts pouring in had me hooked. You’ve probably already got this if you’ve been keeping your PS+ for a while so give it a whirl.

The story of SOMA is brilliant, there's a couple of moments of proper existential horror.

68. Great Escapes: another pointy-clicky-escapey game from Glitch but instead of their usual longer form games it's a collection of shorter experiences. This makes it easier as it reduces the mental load but they're still generally as fun and well designed.

I'm giving SOMA a go. Sounds like the sort of thing I'd like.

Note that it's got a bit of the usual "run/hide/stealth your way around an unkillable monster" which is as boring as these things (almost) always were. The devs capitulated to everyone moaning about it and added an option to do away with all that shit. It's up to you which way you go on it but having played through it the original way I'd have been happy to see the back of it all.

Can you change part-way through?

Not sure, the option didn't exist at all when I played it so I've no personal experience.

1. Trine 4 (PC)
2. The Witness (PC)
3. Sunless Skies (PC)
4. Turmoil (PC)
5. Demon Crawl (PC)
6. Resident Evil 6 (PC)
7. Nier: Automata (PC)
8. Sekiro (PS4)
9. God of War (PS4)
10. Celeste (PC)
11. Hitman 2 (PC)
12. Overcooked 2 (PC)
13. Her Story (PC)
14. Finding Paradise (PC)
15. Dishonoured 2 (PC)
16. Outer Wilds(PC)
17. A Bird Story (PC)
18. Minit (PC)
19. Yokus Island Express (PC)
20. Beneath a steel sky (PC)
21. Escape Quest (PC)
22. Beyond a Steel Sky (PC)
23. Shapez.io (PC)
24. Elsinore (PC)
25. Hades (PC)

fun "roguelike" game by the people of bastion (and others)

progression could go something like this:
how on earth am I supposed to get past more than a few rooms.
Oh thats easy, however this boss seems ridiculous
Oh, I can beat her, and the entire second area seems easy.
what the hell is the boss of the third area? He's impossible.
He's still impossible.
Oh, these items work well together, and finally beat him.
Ooh final boss on this run too, these item are god like.
I beat him too. Close, but still did it.
HE HAS A SECOND PHASE?
*Dead*
*Rage quit*
Eventually return and die to him a couple more times before...
Victory
"Ok, now complete the quest 9 more times before I'll allow you to complete it."
$*&£
Actually, I can take him out fairly reliably, even with a few extra difficulty modifiers.
And.... done

It's got a rather awful amount of "just one more go"ness to it.

23. Halo 3: ODST - Awesome. My second favourite in the Halo series.

After..?

Halo Reach. That was ace!

Indeed it was, past-DavPaz, indeed it was.

54) Halo 4 (Xbox)

Completed in coop on Legendary. This is pretty underrated but quite a bit of fun. The gameplay that is, not the story, that’s a bag of wank. Unfortunately this is the easiest legendary playthrough of a Halo game I’ve ever done and we were wading through guys even by the end game. The graphics still stand up though; not sure if it’s got the 4K treatment but it looked damn good for a 360 game.

55) Double Dragon Neon (Xbox)

Really jumped the shark on this one, didn’t they?

It’s mechanically dull with boring, languid combat, and a dodge button that’s largely irresponsive unless you foresee a need to dodge 5 seconds before you need to do it.

But fuck me there’s some WTF moments that just come out of nowhere. When the Skeleton guy kept yelling nonsense I laughed, when the helicopter just turned upside down I laughed, when you’re fighting the Little Shop of Horrors monster and you punch an hand off and underneath the hand is a sharks head I laughed, when Marianna punches the end boss right in the fucking dick I laughed. And that was after a sing-a-long for some reason.

So yeah, immensely boring to play, takes a shit all over DD1 & 2, is only couch coop... but despite all that it’s memorable.

69 (dude!). Outer Wilds: you're a newly qualified astronaut sent out to explore your (fairly small) galaxy. 22 minutes later the sun goes supernova and everything dies, but you're mysteriously brought back to life right where you started. Your mission then becomes to explore and work out what the hell's going while these 22 minute loops plays out.

So it's essentially a mystery game with each planet containing part of the story and clues as to where you should go next and what to do. The game's almost entirely stateless with only two pieces of information retained by your character that are required to progress and literally everything else resets with every loop. You don't get any new abilities or gadgets so everything is open to you right from the start and you can go anywhere in any order. As such the galaxy and it's planets are brilliantly coherent and it's just such a tightly wound piece of clockwork machinery.

The joy of the game is discovery. You find a new location or a secret entrance or just a new clue that sends you racing to uncover something else and those instances never get old. Your investment in the universe and it's mythology is high because you become so familiar with everything due to the detailed exploration you absolutely are required to do. The game doesn't hold your hand in the slightest, all knowledge is hard-won and useful. And each planet is an intriguing, even sometimes frightening, playground.

The downsides are the corollaries to everything I've already mentioned:

• The loop is often frustrating because you'll be in the midst of doing stuff when you're killed. It never takes long to get back to where you were but it quickly begins to feel like needless busy work just slowing you down. By the end of the game that run to the ship and then the navigation to where ever you needed to be was absolutely grinding me down.
• Some of the planets change in various ways as the loop progresses and you need them in certain states to accomplish certain tasks. This means that at some points you're literally sitting for like ten minutes doing nothing just waiting for shit before you can advance, which is balls. This is made worse when that wait can be followed by a fucking instakill sending you back to the start again.
• There were definitely things you were required to do that I would never in a million years have worked out for myself. This is the nature of a game like this of course, but the lack of hand-holding can definitely tip into frustration when you're stuck.

So, an absolutely unique little thing with a genuinely incredible amount of craft baked into it. I think it would be worth anyone having a go at it because if it grabs you it'll grip hard; but just be aware of the potential frustrations baked into it's very fibre.

Did you not
?

At least three people I know (including me) managed to finish it with no guides at all. So it’s not impossible, perhaps it’s just not the way your brain works. I cannot do point and click adventures without hints, for example. But even when absolutely stuck I always had something else to do here, and when I came back fresh I usually cracked it.

Sure, though you can accomplish the same thing by just . I'm not sure how that addresses anything I said though?



I realise it's not impossible or anything, just didn't work for me and might not for other people.

I realise it’s not I was thinking of, but

You don’t have to sit around waiting for ten mins at any point, I just thought I’d challenge that.

I always had a rough idea of when stuff happened. Granted you don’t the first time it happens, but I would say 99% of my loops were full of doing stuff. I did not do much sitting around at all.

Anyway I’m glad you persevered as it looked like you were going to bin it off at one point.

In fairness I probably only had to do it a handful of times for specific stuff but it was still annoying; and the fact that in my playthrough all those occasions were at the end around the same time possibly means they loom larger in my memory.



Aye, I'm not a fan of the inertia-heavy spaceflight stuff and don't generally play 'space' games so it was a steep and annoying learning curve just to nail the general traversal. It makes up so much of the game of course so that wasn't brilliant for me initially. I also had a couple of bad early experiences which were just bad luck but came at a point when I hadn't got to grips with it all so they were more off-putting and punishing than they normally would be.

1. Star Wars : Squadrons.

Finished the main story. A good selection on missions and ships.

Very x wing vs tie fighter, where you play both sides at different stages.

I thought it was a great challenge 9/10

Pew pew in space what is not to love

Only 51 more to go in two months, Kov!

I need to play more games.

I did this one in a day

24. Part time UFO - This is a mobile game that came out on the Switch yesterday. Its made by the same people that make the Kirby games and you play as a UFO with a giant claw that has to do various jobs like put museum exhibits back together, load cows into trucks and line up sumo wrestlers in the ring. Its great.

56) Risk of Rain 2 (PS4)

The most fun coop game I’ve played all year. It’s a rogue-lite third person space fantasy shooter that has you battle through 6 worlds to reach the big boss; fuck him up and then escape. It’s fun, challenging, packed with items that do all sorts, specials that do all sorts, characters that also do all sorts and have various playstyles, and liquorish ... etc.

60 FPS, lovely graphics, nice music, simple UI, runs smooth as silk and is generally a good time all round.

Can’t fault this one. Well, single player would be a bit empty.

Oh and it’s 4 player coop too although I played with just two of us. 4 might be a bit much trying to coordinate who needs what unless you want a free for all. You might like that though.

10/10

70. Layers of Fear 2: the original Layers of Fear was a pretty haunted-house of a game, weighed down massively by repetition and a narrative with ideas way above it's station. Sadly the sequel goes in hard on all the worse parts; so the story is a barely conceived and irritating pile of confusing pretentious bollocks which does nothing to compel you through the levels and the game itself is just boring to trudge through. Only the very last level gets anything like an interesting visual twist while the rest of it is 99% the same mindless fucking corridors. But this time it's on a ship! Christ, who gives a fuck.

57) Alan Wake (Xbox) - 3/10

Y’know how you miss a game but it always seems to come in conversation? Well I had a go at this and it’s undeserved of its reputation as underrated cause it’s not very good. I played it on hard and didn’t have much difficulty with the, um, difficulty and when I got fed up of running out flashlight batteries I just walked off leaving a flare every few steps until the next checkpoint. So fed up of playing it at the end I was basically just dropping flares and walking past every single enemy except the sodding birds and wobbly boxes that don’t give two fucks about the light. Urgh, the birds. Just constantly attacking cunts that can’t really be defeated and slow the game to a crawl as you follow them with your flashlight and get attacked by another flock that somehow manifests immediately behind you. They’re not even that harmful, just fucking irritating. That about sums up the whole game, nothing too bad about it but it’s just irritating.

And its consistently grey and washed out colours are so bland and the environments are so samey that there’s nothing memorable about it. Yes, I picked up a load of thermos flasks, watched a couple of telly bits and even read a few of the manuscript pages (who doesn’t love doing that in the middle of a shooter) but it was all so hackneyed and uninteresting. And then it ended and I’ve little clue what was supposed to be going on. Not because it’s particularly complex but because I just don’t give a fuck.

American Nightmare next

It’s not on Game Pass.

Giphy "big sad face":
https://media4.giphy.com/media/1g0NvvLSFiBjZEqYny/giphy-loop.mp4

71. Mutazione: decades before the beginning of the game an asteriod struck a holiday resort; those that didn't instantly die were slowly mutated by its effects. Fast forward to present day and your character arrives on the island to visit her estranged and ailing grandfather who, as a member of a visiting science team years previous, had stayed on the island to help the inhabitants.

So, an intriguing setup but what follows is, by it's own admission, focussed more on the day-to-day lives of the denizens fo Mutazione than it is on the wider mysteries. I mean you do end up getting briefly into that stuff but it's done as a slightly confusing rush right at the finale with mimial hints or discussion of it during the rest of your playtime.

The meat of the gameplay then is talking to the people in the community, forming bonds with them and getting into their stories. Each conversation does give you dialogue choices which help to bind you to the experience but I get the feeling nothing of consequence would change no matter what you picked.

There's also some time spent gardening. Which is to say picking seeds of a specific type from your inventory, sticking them where the game tells you they can go, then playing a song a few times until everything blooms. The marketing blurn and the reviews made a big deal of this aspect but mechanically there's pratically nothing to it. I initially assumed a level of depth would be introduced by requiring you to mix different plants while balancing all their requirements to meet certain goals but nope; there's never anything more to it than the very first time you plant stuff.

From the above you'd probably think I came away with a negative opinion but I actually really enjoyed my time in Mutazione. Mechanically there's no real meat on its bones for sure but it's all about the characters which are well-drawn, engaging and often quite funny. Admittedly it came along at the right time for me, my brain was being somewhat of a dick last week so something gently compelling like this was probably exactly what I needed. Oh, and it's also fucking lovely in places. The graphical style doesn't get enough room to breathe in the crowded environs of the main town, but during some of your sojourns to the outskirts it's genuinely very pretty indeed.

1. Streets of Rage 4
2. Firewatch
3. Hotshot Racing
4. Bloodstained - Ritual of the Night
5. Submerged
6. Tetris Effect: Connected - finished Journey mode on Normal

A pretty game that seems to hate you for playing it. Distracting visuals, overuse of controller vibration, tiny play area, jarring gameplay speed-ups and slowdowns. Only completed it out of stubbornness and of course, the end credits are unskippable. And then the new mode you unlock is Theater Mode where you just watch stuff... great.

I'm sure it's a better game in multiplayer or VR, but single player on the Xbox isn't great. Seems like it wants to be Chime or Rez but isn't as good as either.

72. The Gardens Between: lovely little time manipulation puzzler that I played on the Switch, but is available for seemingly every platform under the sun. Each level sees you controlling two friends as they wind their way around and generally up an island, with the victory condition that you arrive at the top in posession of a ball of light which allows you to activate the exit.

You can move the characters forwards and backwards and as this happens various other aspects of the landscape move/reverse accordingly. One of the characters can sometimes change the state of specific aspects of the level while the other character can pick/place down the light balls which, in addition to be being required to exist, also change the state of the levels. From that small set of interactions each level is built; it mostly comes down to observing the movement of level furniture to work our how you can manipulate it to your advantage.

As always these are beautifully simple and elegant mechanics in action but are impossible to describe without making it sound awful. So, to give one example, I was stuck once on a level themed around tools. My characters could only move so far through the level before hitting up against a plank of wood that was raised in a way which rendered it inaccessible. As I moved time forward and backwards there was a saw blade which moved against the plank, but nothing seemed to actually change as this happened. The solution, as is probably obvious now, was to move time forward and backwards enough that the blade sawed fully through the plank thus dropping it down for the characters to walk up. Even that doesn't seem like a great example when described so plainly but at the time it was a lovely 'aha' moment.

Most of the levels have a theme or gimmick that sets them apart from each other and the visual design, animation, etc is top notch stuff so it's lovely even just to watch these vignettes play out as you move through them. It's not the most challenging game in the world depending on your prospensity for puzzles--the odd instance of required 'outside the box' thinking notwithstanding--but it's something that can be picked up and put down in nice bite sized chunks. After the first couple of levels I was concerned it would end up being simplistic and relatively boring but it ended up being one of the most charming and enjoyable things I've played in a while.

And he's off!

1) Far Cry 5. As mentioned in the Far Cry 5 thread, there were definitely diminishing returns towards the end. Writing was largely pants, it's so on the nose. But I enjoyed rampaging around 'Montana' for the majority of my stay there. Switched on Bloodborne last night for my annual "attempt to play a Soulsborne game", so fully expect to be added a second game to this list come December 31st. (I keep doing the opening bit around the bonfire in Central Yharnam, seemingly unable to get any further).

73. Journey to the Savage Planet: you're an explorer working for the sort of company that would happen if VaultTec did spaceships, and the allegedly uninhabited planet you were assigned turns out to have a gigantic tower architected on it. Your bosses are unsurprisingly excited at this turn of your events and you're instructed to get to the bottom of it all and return to tell the tale.

The core gamplay is basically '3D Metroidvania with light crafting'. You harvest common elements from local flora and fauna which--in addition to one-off formulas generally hidden behind boss fights or other challenges--allow you to 3D print new equipment. The new equipment lets you access new areas, and round we go again. The entire planet is also stuffed to the brim with secrets to find and areas to explore, to the point that I finished the final boss fight without even finding some of the teleport points which generally represent a specific area of the gameworld.

The look of the thing is a fairly lurid cartoon-ish visual design which isn't my preference but suits the light-hearted tone of the piece very well. That tone is set in general by the verging-on-juvenile humour of both the world itself and your video interactions with your boss. For example, the first alien creature you encounter is a harmlessly hopping bird thing which can be shot instantly to death for a small amount of carbon. However, if you throw out some of the bait you carry then wait until a few seconds after one of them has gulped it down it will noisily fart out a much bigger portion of carbon than you'd get just from killing it. Also, from visiting your home base you build up a collection of videos adverts which are almost certainly trying to put one in mind of Rick and Morty's inter-dimensional cable segments. It's nowhere near as funny as it thinks it is of course, but it's also not so far off that it's actually offensive or boring.

I generally enjoyed my time with the game a lot, and it's combination of exploration, combat and platforming puts in generally in my wheelhouse. The only real issue with it is that it's a bit average at the individual things it does:

• There's only a handful of proper combat encounters, and your character isn't neccesarily nimble or quick enough to make them into what was intended. I ended up more or less tanking my way through them due to have found enough hidden upgrades that my health and stamina were decent.
• The crafting is basic. You generally require a single element which is gated behind proper progression + a random spattering of common elements. Picking up the latter just seems like pointless busy work and because the former comes from proper required progression it feels like they'd be better of just handing you the upgrade outright at that point. There are optional upgrades for your abilities and your gun which I'm fine with because they are genuinely optional, but they're built using a generic 'alien element' you earn from optional challenges + the random spattering of common stuff so again it's not really crafting so much as 'spending upgrade points with some pointless shit tacked on'. Don't get me wrong, none of this really gets in your away at all, but it's not adding anything either.
• There's almost too much stuff crammed into the game. Or, more accurately, there's so much more stuff than you need that it becomes sort of pointless. The weapon upgrades just serve to un-handicap the fairly shit gun or extend the rangs of bombs or whatever, but you never really need any of that. There are ability upgrades that sound awesome (e.g. triple and even quadruple jump) but the only thing they'd be useful for is to get to more secrets so you could unlock more abilities. The gameworld is also swimming in these hidden orange orbs that upgrade your health/stamina, but I was able to tank my way through everything to the very end whilst picking up less than half of these.

All of that said, it's specific combination of stuff is still very fun when it's brought together and I was thoroughly entertained during my time with it. Had they restrained themselves a bit with the design, or given you more of a reason to care about/need the stuff they crammed in there, it would be a total winner. As it stands, it was a very welcome 10 hours or so exploring an imaginitive and ridiculous world while abusing it's all-too-trusting wildlife for personal gain.

Yeah I was stuck there the first two times I tried playing it too. Third time was the charm and then I became obsessed! Only needed some co-op help for some of the bosses.

That bonfire section always seemed particularly punishing for new players because (a) there's no small amount of enemies both at the bonfire and patrolling around it and (b) it's such an open area that it's hard to control aggro properly past a certain point. Yeah, yeah, 'git gud' and all that, but there's a surprisingly accessible game hidden behind that initial spike.