61.
Part Time UFO62.
Hidden my game by mom 263.
Hidden my game by mom 364. The Fidelio Incident
65. Stories Untold
66. The American Dream
67. Subsurface Circular
68. Dishonored: Death of the Outsider
69. The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit
70.
Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice: Celtic revenge story and mental illness simulator.
As Senua you're not only out to get revenge on the Norse god of death Hela, but also looking to pry your dead husband from her clutches. This is made more difficult than you'd usually expect by the fact that Senua suffers from psychosis, causing auditory and visual hallucinations. Aside from the usual tropes of not knowing whether what you're seeing is real or not, this is mostly represented through some sterling audio work. Throughout the entire game, the voices in Senua's head continually whisper and shout at her; sometimes helpfully--telling you when you're about to be attacked from behind in combat--but mostly telling her how useless she is and how she's weak and bound to fail. This initially seems pretty gimmicky, and it is in terms of moment-to-moment chatter, but it has a strong overall impact when you've been playing the game for a few hours. You become weirdly used to the constant voices coming at you from every direction (the game makes a very strong case for surround sound!) and you reach a state where you hear what they're saying but they also become background noise. It's an odd effect and, I suspect, exactly what the developers were shooting for.
The other very strong aspect of the game are the visuals. It's fucking
beautiful. Like properly lovely to look at; well, most of the time anyway. There's a great chunk of it spent in gloomy dungeon-y levels, which is a waste of the art direction, but enough of it in outdoor locations or hellish otherworldly environments that you never forget how good it looks. There's no HUD elements in the game at any point either and this genuinely immerses you in the world. You forget how much difference the modern game design tendency to chuck indicators in your face makes until it's all stripped away.
Also worth noting is the combat which is suitably meaty and responsive, while never letting you forget that you're a lone woman up against a load of berserkers and viking demons. You've got a limited moveset (evade, block, melee, light slash, heavy slash and a rechargeable time slowing 'focus' ability) and there's no upgrade tree or skill points or any of that jazz. It's not difficult per se, but you'll catch a brutal beating if you just go in button mashing so you're always warily circling enemies and baiting them into malking the first move, while trying not to get flanked.
That's all good stuff right? So it's a good game then? Weeeellll, not entirely. It has some nice ideas and is well designed in terms of audio visual stuff, but the actual meat of the game is repetitive and not neccesarily all that interesting. The vast, vast majority of your eight hours will be spent wandering an area solving puzzles to progress. The majority of these are odd 'find the symbol' sort of deals where you need to look around the environment for a feature which visually resembles the glyph you're hunting for in order to unlock a door. So, maybe the arrangement of planks in a broken house wall will look like a 'Z' shape. Or you'll light a couple of torches so that nearby fences throw a usefully M shaped shadow on the wall. 'Focus' on these found characters, door unlocks, off you trot to the next area. I don't mind this as an idea but it's leant on far too heavily throughout the runtime and it's never challenging (especially as the right area to find each character in is very heavily signposted). It basically feels like busy work, and even when these puzzles are varied up a bit (e.g. the Valravn section where going through certain portals subtly alters the environment so you can progress) they never really feel like more than barriers thrown up to slow you down. The game will generally chuck a combat section in between these areas but these are few and far between. It's bonkers that they built a genuinely engaging combat engine and then barely remembered to use it.
So, yeah. A technically well put together experience that's sadly lacking in core gameplay ideas. It's not a long game as my eight hours with it attest and the overall experience (the graphics, sound design, story, voice acting) almost make it worthwhile; but given that I was massively looking forward to this one I have come away disappointed.