Currently Playing

[Snowy]

Tendon injury ain't no joke people.

I am recovering from having my Achilles tendon detached, debrided, bone cut off my heel and then the whole shooting match re-attached. I second this.

[DjchunKfunK]

Tunic

Finished this game off this afternoon. Overall I liked the puzzle stuff and the manual pages is a smart idea but the whole game is marred by some terrible combat. It tries to be a Soulslike in this regard but the combat is not up to snuff with enemies who constantly move just out of reach, mushy attacks and a truly useless dodge. All this combines to make large parts of the game un fun to play. They would have been better sticking with a more Zelda style of combat.

[Sly Boots]

Yeah, the combat killed off any interest I had in continuing with it past the half-hour I played.

[Raid]

Really? I've enjoyed the combat, although I've not finished the game yet so I won't have seen all of the enemies. The ones that run away are a pain, sure, but the magic staff is pretty good at dealing with them.

[DjchunKfunK]

Really? I've enjoyed the combat, although I've not finished the game yet so I won't have seen all of the enemies. The ones that run away are a pain, sure, but the magic staff is pretty good at dealing with them.

Yeah but you soon run out of mana for that. I turned on the invincibility mode for a few sections as it was just a pain, looking at you Quarry.

[Raid]

Tell me Why

I seem to end up playing at least one of these... emotional narrative... adventure? games a year, titles that don't really have much traditional gameplay to them, but allow you to build and break connections between characters. This was probably the weakest of the three I've played in recent years (I'm categorising it with Night in the Woods and Oxenfree), not for the storyline but for the presentation. It's a largely down-to-earth narrative about two twins discovering the truth behind a traumatic event from their childhood, but it relies really heavily on fairly emotional scenes and it's let down by lacklustre facial animation. The game isn't even two years old, but in some scenes characters have those inanimate faces that we used to get in the 2000s. In closeups there are occasions where characters have a generic light-smile expression that feels pretty inappropriate for what's happening. It's a narrative that relies so heavily on empathy, but you need to listen to the voices rather than read their body language.

But it's largely well written and voice acted, and the world building is very well done. It's just a shame the controls are rather clunky; you examine the world by rotating the camera so that points of interest are centred - it would have worked far better as a point-and-click game.

I did sorta force myself to finish this - I wanted to hear the end of Tyler and Alyson's story, but the game itself can be a bit tedious. But the thing about this style of game is that, regardless of how well they play, they tend to stick with me, and this is no exception.

[Animalmother]

7 Days To Die
Just got this off Game Pass on the console and stopped playing after about 20 minutes. The UI has got to be one of the worst I've tried to use in recent memory, it's looks like it was designed by someone whose never played any other game ever. This may just be the console version as it's probably easier to use with a mouse and keyboard but that's no fucking excuse! Neebs Gaming make it look like a really fun game but I'm sure there's hours of frustration that go into making those videos.

Might come back to it later but only after a few updates I think.

[Alan]

Cyberpunk

Finally finished it and it was good. I mainly went Ninjutsu+Swords and it felt really quite easy on the default but fun running around like a nutter swinging wildly. It just feels like the best iteration of a Bethesda RPG and as such it felt like I was playing set content and not really crafting my story like Witcher 3 somehow felt. Keanu is crap, 100% phoning that shit in and all his missions were kind of embarrassing. "OMG, how did you play that basic riff like that, NOBODY CAN PLAY THAT BASIC RIFF LIKE THAT!!!". Yeah overall its a good game, its not great and its not something I'd ever imagine replaying. It didnt feel that long though so bonus points for that! I think I did everything except the taxi, boxing and cybernutter missions.



Evil Dead
Its not great. If anyone remembers ZombiU its kind of an evolution of that multiplayer. The Deadite player is flying around the map as the chase/Kandarian Demon pacmaning up power pellets which give them spirit money to spend on setting traps that possessed leap out of, or take control of a tree to make it go spooky and scary, or set traps to scare the players. The more fear you cause the higher your level becomes and the more baddies you can unleash. You can control any of deadites you summon culminating in summoning Evil Ash or Henrietta etc.. The 4 humans are trying to find pieces of the map to then get the Kandarian dagger and attack the old ones which gets you the Necronomicon which you then have to defend for a few minutes to win. Its a bit repetitive. Its alright but I cant see it having legs.

Oh and the single player missions are crap, kind of long, with no saves and bloody hard!

[Wrathbone]

I think I did everything except the taxi, boxing and cybernutter missions.

The taxi ones start a bit annoying (mostly because of the driving controls) but the end mission is decent. The final boxing match is stupidly difficult and not worth it.

[Raid]

Puddle Knights

It's ages since I bought a puzzle game, but this one was sold to me in about ten minutes of watching Johnny Chiodini struggling to work a level or two out. The premise is, as with most puzzle games, extremely simple:

-You have a noble who does not wish to get their shoes dirty (they've been invited by the Queen to a cleanliness festival).
-You must get the noble to the exit portal.
-On the way there are dirty puddles.
-You have knights with flowing capes.
-The noble can cross the dirty puddles by stepping on the capes.
-You cannot however move a knight or noble into the same square, and the knights can't turn around if their cape is behind them.
-Each cape is segmented, and can be torn by standing a knight on a segment, and then moving the knight the cape is attached to.

It's one of those games which will have you staring at the screen with a gormless look on your face for what feels like forever trying to work out the sequence of movements you need to make, and when you finally crack it you get a sense of real elation. It minimises the frustration as much as possible with the ability to infinitely undo each move, or reset instantly, and there's a lovely little jazz loop playing throughout that somehow never gets irritating. Also, the knights and nobles make adorable little "uh uh" noises if you try to make them move where they can't.

I'm not far into the game (about 20 out of the 127 levels it provides), and while it seems to introduce new mechanics every now and then, none of them yet involve the knights rising up and sticking the clean-shoed nobles in a guillotine.

Plus it's less than three quid until 6pm today.

[Sly Boots]

Also out today is Floppy Knights (behave), a really stylish and fun deckbuilder/card battler with a few unique spins on the genre. The art is by the same person who did Dicey Dungeons, and so it's all pretty cute and quirky with a sense of humour.

It's on Game Pass, so if that kind of thing is up your alley (as it is mine), it's well worth checking out.

[ManBearSquid]

Fantastic name.

[Rusty]

Just reinstalled Kingdom Come Deliverance. Spent a huge amount of time the first area just wreaking havok on everything. Knocking people out. Stealing everything not nailed down. Using my stolen bow on those poor sheep.

I'm really excited to get back out into the 'real world' and just wander around getting into scrapes or just ambling through woods watching nature happen.

[Sly Boots]

I keep debating whether to fire up KCD again, enjoyed it the first time round on release but never gone back to it for some reason.

[Snowy]

It's a game I also really enjoyed on release, and I have a sneaking suspicion that I never actually finished. Might be worth another look.