12
votes
What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
Subnautica
@Adys gifted this to me, and I finally got to dive in (har har!) to it.
Originally, I considered playing it in VR mode because the novelty of my new VR setup still hasn't worn off. That said, I'm still not used to locomotion in VR, and I'm pretty prone to motion sickness in general, so underwater locomotion sounded more nausea-inducing than exciting. Thus, I decided to play it in pancake mode.
After my first encounter with a leviathan, I'm very glad that I did.
Anyway, the game is great. It's a very novel experience with a very cool, well-made world. I recently played through Raft with friends, and this feels like a more polished, single-player focused version of that game. It's also genuinely beautiful. Lots of color, lots of life, great use of lighting. I'm playing on medium settings because that's what my laptop can handle, but I imagine on the highest settings that it's truly a visual treat.
I have a few QoL issues (why are my scanner and flashlight two different items? why are there only five item hotspots? why in EVERY CRAFTING GAME EVER are components only considered available if they are in your on-person inventory?) and a few in-universe issues (why do crush depths only apply to my vehicles and not my squishy human body?). These are minor nitpicks though. Overall the game is well-designed and well-made.
I'm about ten hours in, and I don't know if I'm going to keep playing, simply because I'm getting to the deeper and darker parts of the game and I'm getting massive heebie-jeebies. You know all of those weirdly specific phobias that have their own subreddits? r/thalassophobia, r/submechanophobia, r/megalophobia, etc.? I wouldn't say those are true "phobias" for me, but they definitely do ping in my brain. Early in the game, just approaching the Aurora made me anxious simply due to its size, and then diving down to explore underneath it gave me the willies.
Now, much further in, I'm hitting depths where sunlight doesn't reach, with hostile creatures and confusing cave/wreck layouts that make navigation and oxygen management difficult and threatening. Playing the game is becoming increasingly stressful, and I don't know that I have it in me to tackle all of that head-on for the many more hours it would take to finish the game (HowLongToBeat's estimate is about 30 hours overall).
I'm torn, because I really like the game and want to see what more it has to offer. I also think it's an absolutely brilliant spin of the survival horror genre. Unfortunately, actually playing makes my anxiety go vroom.
I think it might be something I continue to tackle, but only in small doses. Even if I don't make it much further than where I'm at though, I'm very happy with what I've played so far.
If you don't mind spoilers, watch a speedrun of Subnautica (or only watch what you've already seen). When Below Zero came out I went back and replayed the original and while I have the same feelings as you, having seen the depths being brought to its knees by speedrunners helped a lot to alleviate those feelings.
Also you don't have enough titanium, ever.
I actually skipped watching a run of this at AGDQ 2022 because I was interested in playing it and didn't want to spoil it for myself. I'm not done with the game yet, but once I'm done either playing it or watching it, I'm excited to see it speedrun. I'm curious if the run is just really good optimization or something very glitch-heavy. I'm hoping it's the former.
Looks like Any% Glitchless for Subnautica is under an hour. Glitches only save 30 minutes.
Wooo so cool you're playing it! Yes, the anxiety in that game is real. I'll say this much though, the Leviathan is the only "jumpscare" you'll really get. This is definitely a game which is worth seeing to the end. I got about 95 percent through it; the main reason I didn't finish it is because I had watched a full playthrough already.
Oh man I miss that game. I still haven't even watched subzero, because I want to play it spoiler-free...but realistically I don't know if I'll ever get to it. Maybe my next year will be a "year of games" haha.
Because of its plot and casus ludi, I find that Below Zero is way less scarier than vanilla Subnautica.
It's not a question of how scary it is, it's simply my sylvanas side showing up. I don't have time for games :(
I really like the icy environment, so I think I will especially love SBZ. I just need to dedicate time for it. I think when Hades 2 comes out, I will make time for it and H2.
One of the coolest things about the game, I think, is that it's able to create such a sense of dread without jumpscares. Even in my encounter with the leviathan, I knew it was there before it got me. I could see it swimming around, and I tried to push my luck (I wanted to scan it, lol).
Even just diving around in the deep, I'll get scared by like, a landform appearing in my headlights. The game is wonderfully atmospheric.
Also, thanks again for giving it to me! If I fully chicken out of my playthrough, I'll almost certainly watch the rest on YouTube. I'm definitely curious about the plot threads they've set up.
If you want a rec for a playthrough, Anne Munition's is the one that got me into it. I was so looking forward to Day9 playing it, and he did... until he got INCREDIBLY scared by it and never touched it again. Ah well...
I think there was another playthrough I loved, I will try to find it.
Hi-Fi Rush was one of my 10/10 games and I could see it being my GOTY until I slammed headfirst into the stupid parry tutorial area final? room (R&D test chamber 3). This room has the following sequence, roughly, from memory:
Cutscene
Fight (one enemy)
Dialogue and parry sequence
Fight (harder)
Two parry sequences
Fight (even harder)
Dialogue
Boss fight (boss moves quickly)
Boss fight phase 2: Boss can only be hit by an exact button press immediately after a successful five button parry sequence.
Because it's the parry tutorial, every single enemy has combo breaker attacks. The parry sequences and boss fight phase 2 require quickly pressing a button on time to a rhythm immediately after the rhythm is presented. If not done perfectly, you lose some HP and get to try again. If you miss a few times you lose all your HP and die. Not parrying enemy attacks also means you lose HP. There's a little HP recovery from loot piñata enemies, but not much.
There are no checkpoints.
Yup, if you die in the boss you get to repeat the WHOLE thing, including the same dialogue, over and over and over. You have to defeat the boss with whatever HP you manage to salvage from the other fights and parry sequences. This area is not skippable and cannot be sequence broken AFAIK (I'm sure some speedrunner will figure something out someday).
This is bad, horrible, offensively awful game design. I thought we'd moved past this twenty years ago, yet here we are.
I don't know why I'm so bad at the parry sequences. I've played like twenty rhythm games before, I have (as previously mentioned in this community) hundreds of hours in Beat Saber - I'm in the top 10k, which is not world class I'm sure, but I should be fine playing a rhythm game in normal mode when it has two higher difficulties? In fact, I was doing great attacking on the beat? I'm not sure what's up with this garbage. I read a post somewhere that said parrying might be bugged when not playing at exactly 60fps, which I haven't been able to test yet: I broke my gamepad and have to wait for amazon to deliver a new one (totally unrelated I swear).
Anyway! Now that that's out of the way. I'm loving the rest of this stupid game. Tight graphic design, good voice actors, likeable characters, fun gameplay, incredible music (as in, famous bands, like NIN), amusing story, and, uh... about ten different combat mechanics all mashed together which can be a lot to keep track of, but still. I hope to keep playing it later this week.
I have no problem playing songs in expert in various rhythm game (Beat Saber, Rock Band, Taiko no Tatsujin, Dance Dance Revolution) and yet I couldn't get more than a B rating on the rhythm assessment on any of the combat during the whole game. So maybe its not you ?
Those parry sequence are super similar in design to many mini games in Rhythm Heaven (listen to a rhythm, then repeat it). You should give it a try sometimes.
But yeah, as an aficionado of both rhythm game and character action game (à la Devil May Cry), this game is an excellent surprise.
Astroneer: A Twitch streamer I watch started it, I played on his server for a bit and was lost, but the other players were having fun. I felt self-conscious and like I wasn't contributing, so I bounced and went solo to play with all the cool stuff they were doing without feeling like I was mooching.
It's fucking awesome. This was already probably one of the best games in the genre ("survival"/exploration/resource management), but they've got extensive automation features, and what feels like an implied game loop to explore: Develop then explore. To explain:
I finished the "story" once, and just went to all the main objectives which was cool as a sprint, but boring in the long run. You can do all sorts of stuff to reach the planetary cores like digging a tunnel, using rails, or having a buggy with a drill and paver on it. I'm trying to find ways to do big things that make sense, rather than an astroneer digging with the technological equivalent of a well-sharpened shovel. I'm also trying to do huge projects, like connect all the planetary nodes with rails, so I can have any part of the planet within relatively close reach of a major travel network. Astroneer is definitely not the same game it was when it launched six years ago, but it's also for the best, and only ever improvements on an already great game.
The Outer Worlds: I've got a huge fight to think my way past, and keep getting rocked. I'll get it eventually, but it feels kinda Dark Souls running in, fighting, dying, and trying to re-figure out what to do.
Fun timing, I recently just finished the first SR and am playing through SR2 again at the moment. I've played 3 and 4 too. Really, I like all of them. I think the sentiments around 3 and 4 have died down since they're now remembered as some of the better entries in the overall series.
At the same time, going back to SR2, I understand why people long for a tonal followup to it. There really is something special about the tight line 2 rode that made it feel like the spiritual successor to the PS2 GTA games. I'm not sure if people want a sequel to SR2 or if they want a PS2-era GTA style game again.
One thing I will say about the writing is that while SR2 was still rooted in a rather cartoonish idea of American street crime and gangs and was comedic, the story had some wild, very serious moments that the goofiness of SR3 and on just could not get away with because they pivoted into pure comedy. SR2 went to some lengths to make the main character and the Saints immoral and extreme in many ways, with some of the most shocking acts of revenge I've seen in a game, whereas they are all relatively whitewashed and cartoonishly idolized in the future games.
Still playing FFXIV post-Stormblood content. Just doing alliance raiding and playing some catch-up on sidequests and dungeons I missed.
I did pick up my PSP again, which had Valkyria Chronicles 2 loaded up. My last save was in 2014! I've played a handful of missions to try to get back in the swing of it all and I've remembered why I enjoyed the game. But...
I really dislike the individual character progression system. My characters are all students at a military academy. As such, to change to more advanced classes, they need to earn various credits and amounts of them through participation in missions. Makes sense, I guess.
Except that there are 18(!) different types of credits. And my main squad has 20 characters (there are supposedly more than 50 characters in game, total). And in each fight, I can only have a max of 6 characters of the 20 on field at any time. So there's a LOT of grinding in this game in order to advance individual characters. I literally had to make a spreadsheet to keep track of who needs what credits and how many! Thought I was playing Eve Online again...
In addition, it's not immediately obvious what actions in battle by a character are needed to get credits. Is it most kills? But some characters are primarily support units who are weaker, so I largely keep them out of harm's way. So for them, is it tank repairs? Rebuilding fortifications? Healing? Idk. I know what credits a specific mission will award for successful completion, but I just don't know what actions individuals are needed for a character to get some of those awarded credits. Other players says it might even be random!
Luckily, I don't think it's not absolutely necessary to use advanced classes. But it sure does help, especially when going up against enemy advanced units! Idk. It's a poorly thought out system, IMO. Either way, we'll see how much progress I make on this playthrough. Hopefully I'll finish it.
If not, maybe I put it down for another 9yrs. Wouldn't be the first time for me with a JRPG and it won't be the last.
As someone who loved Valkyria Chronicles and Valkyria Chronicles 4, I never bothered with 2 and 3. The move to PSP signaled to me that they had absolutely zero confidence in the game but wanted to try it out on a different audience, and I didn't have a PSP at the time anyways. It wasn't too much of a loss for me at the time because I figured that it would have to be scaled down way too much and it would lose much of the aesthetic features I loved about the first game.
Absolutely correct on the loss of aesthetic. That artistic, sketch "filter" in the first game was amazing. VC2 doesn't have that. And of course there's very little animation.
I picked up VC4 I think last year, but I wanted to get through VC2 before starting it up. I know VC3 never released in the West (though there's some kinda fan translation I think?). Was there anything referenced in VC4 from the previous 2 games? Or is it fine as a standalone game?
VC4 Stands up by itself for the most part. Full disclosure, I still haven't completed the story yet because life keeps happening (bought it new for PS4, had to move things around and the PS4 is shelved, bought it again for PC and just haven't had the time for it yet), but I did get far enough that I'm pretty confident there won't be a undecipherable reference-laden third act.
(I'll also say that Sega may have been right to bring it to portable systems because it feels very "right" playing it on the Steam Deck. The Episodic nature of the game makes it great for pick up, put down style playing.)
That's exactly what I'm planning to play VC4 on =) JRPGs of any kind are perfectly suited for handhelds, IMO.
Thanks for your insights!
The Outer Wilds is deeply unnerving. The Vessel's grave (and its deadly approach), and the core of Giant's Deep, really gave me the wibblies. And the game started off so cheery and calm.
It makes me want to unbalance myself further by playing more Subnautica, but I think I might need a guide to help me get through - I got stuck pretty early on, though I forget how.
Yeah, The Outer Wilds creeped me out too. Cosmic horror, but done with deft subtlety.
Funnily enough, the little egg-helmeted fellow on Ember Twin playing his drum was very soothing and reassuring, even though by the time I met him he was ironically I the grips of an existential crisis. But still bopping on his little drum.