Whatcha Been Playing?

[Rhaegyr]

Another one here who thought it got better at the halfway point.

Adored the game, particularly the music.

[Alex79]

Really enjoying Inscryption at the moment. Only a couple of hours in, and I'm not a big fan of card games (aside from Gwent and Marvel Snap, never got in to Slay The Spire or Hearthstone or any of that) but this is great so far. Making incremental progress along the path each time, and the boss fights are fun too, bringing new mechanics and puzzles to the table to beat them. So far, so good.

[Truk_Kurt]

Blasphemous 2 abandoned.
Afraid I’ve lost patience with it. I can’t get past the whole mechanic of going back to the shrine every time you die and having to keep doing the run up to where you keep dying. Maybe I’ll go back, I don’t know. I just hate that mechanic, it’s ruined so many games for me. The problem is I’m not good enough at games that I often will be dying at the same point multiple times so to have to keep doing the run up to it, whether it’s a sub boss or main boss, I just lose patience after a while. A great shame as I’ve put 10 hours into it. Rant over

[Alex79]

Aaaah. Souls.

I'm afraid there's only one answer to this.

Git gu..... no, I can't do it. Sorry.

[MattL]

Been working on Star Wars Jedi Survivor on PS5. I bought it on release based on how much I loved Jedi Fallen Order. However the birth of my first child kind of put a hamper on my game time. Lol. I've been able to get a few hours in the last week as the baby is sleeping better now. Thankfully I also have the benefit of the latest patch which made the performance mode actually, you know, perform by removing the completely unnecessary ray tracing and some code optimization.

My initial reaction upon arriving at Koboh when I first started playing months ago was "oh no, did they go full on Assassin's Creed Open world checklist?" After getting further into the game, I'm happy to say it's not. The hub section of Koboh is as close as it gets to an open world. Everything else is just wonderful Metroidvania/Dark Souls interconnected levels. And those levels are just wonderful from all perspectives; art, puzzles, enemy encounters, collectables, etc.

As to the combat, if you were turned off by the Souls/Sekiro-like attack, parry, counterattack, dodge loop, I'm happy to say force powers have been expanded upon and play a much larger role in regular combat. Lift and slam have been added to push and pull and the remaining powers, all of which have new upgrades.

Highly recommended.

[Kez86]

Completed The Messenger today. An excellent platformer which I can highly recommend to any who enjoy a challenging but fair game. Some nice twists and turns along the way with some well implemented platforming mechanics.

Started the DLC for it as well and so far so good, with some subtle changes to enemies and gameplay mechanics that make it familiar but not repetitive.

Oh, and the music is superb.

[Jobobonobo]

Been going through Soul Bubbles for the DS which is a really lovely little hidden gem for the platform I feel. It utilises the features of the DS perfectly and its gameplay of navigating a bubble through mostly short but hazard filled levels while collecting fruit to unlock the final world makes for a compelling and tightly designed package. Been finishing a world per day at this point and am very near the end. Each world introduces a new mechanic which is more unexpected than the last such as mixing gases to make bombs, combining your bubble with fruits to enable shooting enemies down and having your bubble freeze in the cold so you have to build up speed so it can be blown upwards. Just a lot of creativity put into this game and I really recommend it to anyone who has a DS/3DS.

[ratsoalbion]

I have fond memories of playing this. Didn't finish it though.

[Jobobonobo]

I would say give it another go. It is not too long and is one of those games you can play while chilling to a podcast as the soundtrack is mostly atmospheric noises.

[Scrustle]

I've been playing The Last Story recently. Not exactly sure what spurred me to start it up, but it has always been something of a curio to me. One of the coveted "Project Rainfall" games, and the only one I actually bought on release, but which barely ever gets talked about. It seemed like it could potentially big a big deal initially, having many of the original developers of Final Fantasy on board, and with a name that screams "this is the successor to FF". I did play it around launch, but I never finished it and it's just sat on my shelf untouched until now.

So far I'm liking it. It has really strong art design. It's got a really nice mix of muted earthy tones mixed with soft blues that looks really nice, and it also has character design from the guy who did the Drakengard games and original Nier. It's quick to lay on the cosy RPG town vibes as well. The game seems to be structured around this central town that you repeatedly come back to between excursions out to dungeons, and you can tell the developers knew how important it was to make that town a nice play to be. It's not huge, but it has a nice bustling yet relaxed feel to it, with lots of activity and background characters going about their business, and lots of little nooks and crannies to explore. It's a nice experience to roam around and soak in the aesthetic while you do sidequests.

The characters in the game are very British, which adds an interesting quirk to the experience. Like the other Rainfall games, the English dub was done by fairly unknown British actors, as it was originally localised specifically for Europe. I was a bit unsure how I would react to it coming back now, but so far I'm finding it rather charming. There's a lot of British-isms to the dialogue, and the characters have a somewhat laid back feel to them as they are a bunch of rowdy mercenaries, which helps to make them feel a bit more natural. The game has a sense of humour to it that feels in line with the attitude of the characters as well.

Gameplay so far is okay. It's not blowing me away but it's entertaining enough. It's mostly a realtime action combat system, but it has a few quirks. By default you attack enemies simply by running in to them, but you can change it to a manual attack mode. The main character has a magic ability that makes enemies focus on you, and so far most of the combat abilities for him are themed around whether enemies are paying attention to you. You can hide behind cover and leap out at enemies that don't see you, stuff like that. It's kind of weird to play a melee action game with third-person shooter style cover mechanics.

I also started off playing this with my original physical copy on the Wii U, but after a couple of hours I switched over to emulation. The resolution, frame rate, and slowdown are just so bad on the original version, and playing on the Wii U doesn't account for overscan so there's an annoying green bar at the bottom of the screen constantly. Playing on Dolphin has a few small issues, but overall it's a massively improved experience.

I'm also still playing Kurohyou/Like a Dragon: Black Panther but I'm close to the end now so I think I'll save my thoughts for when I finish it off.

[Jobobonobo]

Going through Puyo Puyo Tetris at the moment for the 3DS and I am really enjoying it. I am more familiar with Tetris than Puyo Puyo but both games play very nicely in this and have that lovely one more go flavour that the best puzzle games pull off so easily. There is an adventure mode with an absolutely pointless and asinine story in which the majority of the narrative can be summed up as:
Person A - Argh, I'm upset!!!
Person B - Why are you upset?
Person A - AARRRRGH, I'm even angrier now, lets battle!
Person B - Alright then
Battle
Battle is over
Person A - Sorry I had not had breakfast yet, you know how I get without food
Person B - Yes you get quite grumpy alright, let's go see what our other friend is up to
Person A - Alright then

Rinse and repeat. But the gameplay itself is so good that I can easily forgive the nonsense story. Puzzle games really are perfect for handheld consoles so nice little break form my Yakuza 6 playthrough.

[Alex79]

I bought myself Metroid Dread with some Christmas money at the end of last year and only just getting around to playing it now. First impressions are that it controls really nicely, it looks great and Samus' animations are really quite brilliant. I've only played Super Metroid before though, and whilst I'm only about an hour in to Dread I just seem to be sort of wandering about aimlessly. I'm not really paying attention to the map and just exploring around, wherever I can go, and running away when I see those big EMMI robot things. Should I be heading for anything or does the game explain objectives and stuff the more you play?

[Truk_Kurt]

I bought myself Metroid Dread with some Christmas money at the end of last year and only just getting around to playing it now. First impressions are that it controls really nicely, it looks great and Samus' animations are really quite brilliant. I've only played Super Metroid before though, and whilst I'm only about an hour in to Dread I just seem to be sort of wandering about aimlessly. I'm not really paying attention to the map and just exploring around, wherever I can go, and running away when I see those big EMMI robot things. Should I be heading for anything or does the game explain objectives and stuff the more you play?

It does explain where you're supposed to be heading but it's all done through the map, so if I were you I would start paying a lot more attention to the map as it's pretty critical to the whole game, knowing where you have been, which doors are locked and unlocked and which are now available for you to go through once you have unlocked a new ability etc.

[Alex79]

Ah ok thanks. I don't think I've unlocked any abilities yet aside from the charge beam. I read that the only way to unlock abilities is by killing the EMMIs?

[Truk_Kurt]

Sorry I can't remember now

[Truk_Kurt]

Played a few races on Forza Motorsport last night. A bit too early to give any definitive impressions yet other than to say it looks gorgeous at 60fps and that I was impressed with the onboarding for the car upgrade system, something which I think has been lacking from the Gran Turismo games which just expect you to know what you're doing.

[Alex79]

Really looking forward to playing this next week. It's been ages since I played a new track racer.

[Tolkientaters]

I started playing Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous after Baldur's Gate 3 after getting a taste for some classic CRPGs, and it's fantastic. The interesting thing I realized after reading up on it a little is that almost all the big modern CRPGs aside from the ones made by Larian have been crowdfunded.

Both Pillars 1 & 2, Wasteland 2 & 3, Pathfinder 1 & 2, Torment, Solasta, the Shadowrun are all crowdfunded to some extent, so hopefully the success of BG3 and Disco Elysium means publishers are more willing to invest in the genre going foward.

[Angry_Kurt]

Really looking forward to playing this next week. It's been ages since I played a new track racer.

By all means try it out when it’s fully out, but I’ve already requested a refund on my early access vip pass thingy which surprisingly Xbox gave me back despite having played a few hours. It looks great and the driving model is good if you’re not looking for an arcade racer, this is not Forza horizon style driving model, definitely more akin to Gran Turismo. But the main reason I got it refunded was that the career is a total grind fest. You get points from racing which you need to upgrade your car but any points you earn are specific to that car, no sharing. It’s like how in pokemon you only get the do fir that one pokemon. And there’s no xp share here. Plus literally every race has a practice session which you can technically skip, however that means you miss out on a lot of car points which makes the grind even worse if you just stuck to racing alone.

So in the end I did what I should have done a couple weeks back and used my refunded money to buy the crew motorsport

[Alex79]

Ah, see, all your negatives are positives for me, haha. I've loved that grindy career progress system since the first Gran Turismo. Part of the reason I never got more in to Project Cars was the total lack of that, despite the on track racing being great.