Tag Archives: XBox Series X

A Plague Tale: Requiem

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A couple of years ago [let’s say], I played a game set in medieval France wherein a teen sister and young brother are on the run from deadly swarms of rats and the Church, because of alchemists. The sequel, A Plague Tale: Requiem, picks up some short time later, with the reminder that. yep, younger brother Hugo’s affliction is not resolved.

Except for the plot, this is basically the same game, so don’t come looking for innovations. The sling is still pretty cool as weapons in games go, and the mechanic for creating and removing light as a means of progressing under various circumstances is a clever one that never got old. As far as the plot, though… I guess the best way to look at it is as a fantastical re-imagining of the Black Plague, and to then not be surprised, in either this or the previous game, when just absolutely loads of people die. Inevitably, some of them are people you care about.

The goal of the game is to cure Hugo, whether via alchemist or following his dreams[1] or delving into the history of previous small children who have been afflicted with the Macula, a word which may have some meaning outside of this game that I have not researched, but probably doesn’t[2]. There are, as you might expect, lots of soldiers stalking around, lots of rats, lots of nooks and crannies to find secret story beats for completionist achievements, and a few too many “trapped with multiple waves of enemies” scenarios for my personal tastes, but on the other hand, I did finish the game, so.

It wanted me to play again on highest difficulty but with all my unlocked abilities. I will not be doing that, but I can imagine past me, with access to many fewer games, giving it a go.

[1] I mean, dreams he is having when sleeping, not like dark ages self-actualization.
[2] It turns out to be a part of the retina, which seems completely unrelated to anything in the game. Beats me!

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

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In December, Game Pass got a big Day One release[1], Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. This is a graphics intensive first-person puncher in which Indy races a rival Nazi archaeologist to solve the mystery of why Vatican giants are stealing cat mummies. Aside from the punching and the field archaeology, it’s mostly a puzzle and collections game, which is a style I’ve been enamored of for most of my adult life, and then I’ve been enamored of Indiana Jones for even longer.

So you can imagine how cool it was to see the introductory scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark in a somewhat controllable scenario, before the actual game (set a year later in 1937) kicked off. From there, it’s all a Nazi-punching, globetrotting, graverobbing good time, interspersed with cut scenes that really could have come right out of an unfilmed script.

Plus, there are definitely plots left unresolved enough for a sequel or at least a substantial DLC release. …which they might make me pay for, but I hope not! Especially because I might fall for it, you know? This thing was like catnip, as evidenced by my 100% completion and 970 of 1000 gamerscore points over the course of a month and a half. I basically never finish AAA games anymore, but, here we are.[2]

Downsides: I can only think of one, which is the game started nagging me to move forward / how to move forward, much too early. I like the idea of the helpful voice, whether internal or external, telling you to investigate the thing you might have not been able to find or understand. But wait like 5 minutes, not 30 seconds. (And then the time I really did need help, there was no help forthcoming, which is also sort of a problem when you’re nagging so hard the times I don’t.)

[1] This is to say, for those out of the loop, it arrived on Game Pass the same day it became available to purchase outright.
[2] Continuing to help: DLC = DownLoadable Content, ie expansions instead of sequels; gamerscore is points that mean functionally nothing that you get for completing main or side plots, or doing difficult or implausible things that the designers thought were funny. (Bragging rights, maybe? But functionally, worthless.) AAA = I don’t know what exactly, just big budget big studio or something,

Escape Academy

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This week in “We played it just before it fell off Game Pass, so now you can’t!”, I bring to you Escape Academy. The conceit is, escape rooms, but what if there was a Hogwarts for them? And really… there’s not a lot to talk about here. There is a story, technically, and the graphics are pretty terrible, but what actually matters to your enjoyment of the game is if you want to play escape room puzzles, some of which eventually get pretty tricky.

It has 2 player co-op (nice), 2 player vs (I was not a fan, but it’s not actively bad, and we only tried one mode of many), about 12 levels, and several expansions that weren’t on Game Pass and thus we did not try them, but since now none of it is on Game Pass, arguably the bundle is worthwhile I suppose?

All in all: pretty good if you like co-op games, maybe not much of a much if you don’t?

Close to the Sun

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In the second half of December, right after I started the new Indiana Jones game and got my new PS5 Pro (halfway or more through the 5’s lifecycle), I… played none of those games, because I learned that a Nikola Tesla themed game I had been interested in was leaving Game Pass. Hence, another entry in my ongoing series of timely reviews for games you can no longer just get, as in for “free”.

Close to the Sun tells an extremely alternate history of the 1890s, where Tesla was successful enough with his electricity plans to corner that market worldwide, and then he built an enormous scientific research vessel, to which the main character has been invited by her sister. When the reporter sister arrives (as opposed to the scientist sister, you see), she discovers that nobody is home, but there’s a giant quarantine sign[1] and a lot of damage and weird shimmering images of people walking around.

Thus commences the barely not a walking sim exploration of the ship, to find and rescue her sister, figure out what went wrong, and ultimately escape, one hopes. As a game, it was I think only okay except for my interest in the whole Tesla / Edison thing, which elevated it somewhat. The four characters were all pretty good, the mysteries were mostly compelling, the ending was, I will say, “rushed”. All in all: decent and short enough to not crazy overstay its welcome, but marred by a truly awful save system that meant if for any reason I did not finish a chapter, I would have to start it over. So, be prepared to play for a while at a time whether you like it or not, since the XBox’s quick resume system is a complete failure on this game in particular as well as the lack of good saving I already mentioned.

In further conclusion, maybe it’s better as a game than I’m giving it credit for, and mostly the technical issues are why my estimation rounded downward a bit.

[1] I cannot explain precisely why, but it was particularly affecting to me that the quarantine sign was painted over the exit to the internal docks, in case anyone wanted to leave, but with no hint of any warning to anyone coming in.

Still Wakes the Deep

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Sometime after I learned that there’s a game about Lovecraftian horrors on an oil rig, I learned that there’s a TV show about strange goings on in the all consuming mist (which may or may not be Lovecraftian or for that matter Kingy[1]; I wouldn’t know, as I have tried to avoid spoilers for The Rig since it seems cool enough to look into), and I have no point other than that’s a weird coincidence. Like, even if they aren’t both Lovecraftian, what are the odds that two media regarding oil rigs would both come across my radar at the same time, much less of both tweaking my interest?

None of that is I suppose especially important to Still Wakes the Deep, a game named after a particularly evocative phrase from a Scottish poem and set on Christmas Day 1975 on an oil rig in the North Sea. This is how I learned that oil rigs are not just built in relatively shallow water, but that rather they float. It is horrifying in its own right to be floating on the surface of the ocean, connected to the surface below not by four legs, but just by the drill with which you are penetrating the earth’s sunken crust. Imagine how much more horrifying, then, were the pocket you opened to contain not oil, but instead colors out of space, growing tentacles, and madness.

Caz McLeary is a man on the verge of losing everything, and his new job as electrician on an oil rig is partly effect, partly cause of this imminent loss. At least, that’s what he seems to believe and what all the evidence in the early game shows us, as he reads an angry letter from his wife, and then faces a somehow even angrier boss waving an arrest warrant in his face. But moments after that scene plays out, we and he learn that in fact he was nowhere close to losing everything, at least not then. It’s all a matter of properly defining “everything”. …and for that matter, “lose”.

I wasn’t expecting this to be a walking sim. That did not make it a bad game, but I sometimes wished for a little more control over events. Just a little, you know? Actually, as I think about it, the most proper audience for my plaintive request for more control over the events of December 25, 1975 is one Cameron “Caz”[2] McCleary, innit?

Is it apparent I liked this game? Well, I did. It was both mostly likable and immensely affective. Definitely worth a look.

[1] Why don’t we have a proper adjective for the way King writes? Probably because he doesn’t mostly write in a specific way, other than when it’s about the human horror of small towns. But it still feels like he deserves one, is all.
[2] British (in the imperial sense) people are really bad at name-shortening. Cameron = Caz? Jeremy = Jez? Come on, chaps, get it together.

Little Kitty, Big City

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I’ve been playing Jedi Survivor, but then I saw that the game I recommended for my wife looked a little more low key and fun for the week, and thusly I instead invested a few nights into Little Kitty, Big City. See, you’re this cat living a highrise life, when suddenly disaster strikes!, in the form of gravity. Now you’re on the ground, surrounded by people and dogs and birds and, by far worst of all, by puddles of water. How will you get home?!

Well, by completing quests[1], and collecting various bits and bobs, and avoiding all the beings who wish to do you, if not harm, at least a series of unpleasant wettings and/or barkings at and/or chasings away. And by knocking things over, let us not ever forget.

It’s basically Untitled Goose Game, but with more of a plot, and a lot more teleportation and reverse causality. At six or eight hours[2], it does not wear out its welcome, and if the graphics are a little below top of the line, and if the controls for some of the jumps can be a little janky, well, that’s how indie games go, y’know? Nothing that drove me away, although it’s fair to say a little less jank might have resulted in me chasing a few more achievements,

[1] Sample quests including jumping in all five boxes, or sleeping in all five A+ nap spots, or taking the ducklings home
[2] and then only if you’re trying pretty hard to do a lot of the things; I spent hours after I reached the point of “you can go finish now if you like” before I actually proceeded to try to finish.

The Quarry

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Did you ever want to take the movie Friday the 13th, put it in a blender with a choose your own adventure novel, and put the resulting mash into a not-quite walking sim video game? I mean, I hope you wanted to. Who even are you, if you didn’t?!

The Quarry documents the events of the night after the last night of summer camp at Hackett’s Quarry in upstate New York, in the summer of 2021[1]. All of the kids have returned home, and the counselors are cleaning and packing up to vacate the premises themselves (other than the two counselors who never showed up for the summer, after vanishing ominously in the prologue). Of course, nothing ever goes quite as planned when you’re high school on the cusp of college-aged summer camp counselors in a horror movie, does it?

The gameplay is a mixture of walking sim while looking for clues and things and the choose your own adventure interludes I mentioned, either interrupted occasionally by fairly forgiving quicktime events[2], timed CYOA decisions, wildly infrequent gunplay, and occasional exercises in hiding and trying to decide when to stop holding your breath. Oh, and also interrupted by chapter breaks when a creepy fortune teller attempts to influence your path. If this all sounds like mostly minimalist play in which the actual story is the real star, well, there’s a mode where you can have it just show you the movie with randomly determined outcomes, if that gives you an idea of what you’re in for.

All that said, I’m leaving out the piece of the game (aside from the actual story) that I found the most compelling. You can’t just go back and fix the decisions you regret. No take backs! I’m not sure why I’ve never envisioned such a possibility in interactive fiction before, but I haven’t, and it seems nobody else had either, since this is the first time I’m finding such a thing. It’s especially well suited to a horror movie, where people that you wanted to survive die tragically all the time, and there’s not a damned thing you can do about it.

I need to let some time pass, but I very much want to play this again, and that is not something you will catch me saying very often, anymore. Strongly recommended, unless you hate horror movies on the face of it or will feel really bad when the characters die and it’s your fault. But honestly it’s not very scary, even though it is occasionally shocking and definitely violent as all get out.

[1] Or 2022, I forget. Like it matters. This is not a game world that experienced COVID, y’all.
[2] Example: I think I managed to catch multiple of them even though I had set the controller down for a moment

It Takes Two

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Over the past month or so, Mary and I have been playing It Takes Two, from the same people who made A Way Out. This time, we actually played on the same couch together, which was fairly successful. What’s weird is, aside from the structural premise that the games are meant to be played together and do not support physical distance, from a screen real estate perspective, these two games could not be farther apart.

It Takes Two is a family drama about parents of a young daughter who have begun to resent each other and are on the verge of divorce. Only the daughter overhears this decision, and using a weird couples’ counseling book accidentally puts them under a curse where they are body-swapped into instantly regenerating clay and twiggy fabric bodies of insectile proportions, and the personified book leads them through fantastical versions of their home and their past, trying to teach them how to reconnect and start working as a team again.

Will it work? Depends among other things on how good you are at combat platformers.

But honestly, it was a sweet, heartfelt game about a plan that would almost certainly fail in real life, and I have to recommend it to anyone who likes to play a game with other people. It’s too bad it isn’t easier to curse people on the verge of divorce into having no choice but to trust each other and work together and have the kinds of experiences that form lifelong bonds, and find out whether that would work or not.

Beacon Pines

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So walking simulators are a thing, right? Although I’m always leery of using the terminology, because am I trying to say “it’s like a game, but you don’t have to have any gaming skills to play it,” and more importantly, is that extra judgy / gatekeepery? I think I’m overthinking it, especially since I like both kinds of games, and others for that matter. Anyway, all of this to say that Beacon Pines is sort of that kind of game[1], but with a choose your own adventure twist.

See, you play as a tween elk/llama-looking semi-orphan in the titular town, with a best friend and a treehouse and a mysterious corporation and a dark past. Well, I got mixed up a bit; the kid has the first two, the town has the latter two. …although there’s some bleedover. Only, all of that is not exactly right, because what you actually play as is the reader of a book, except the book has a personality and is in search of a satisfying ending. Maybe even a happy one?

Anyway, easily recommendable way to spend 8 or 10 hours, unless you are allergic to anthropomorphic animals or implausible pseudoscience.

[1] which Wikipedia Pete helpfully calls a “narrative adventure”, which is probably a better name anyway

Immortals Fenyx Rising

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This review is seriously overdue, but in my defense I didn’t decide until I started the third game of the Season Pass[1] that I was going to review it separately instead of all together in one giant go.

Anyway, the thing about Immortals Fenyx Rising is that you have to get past the terrible name. You just have to. Imagine, if you will, that one of the titans has come back, and the fate of both humanity and the gods rests on the back of a lone mortal. Imagine further that the entire story is being told in recap by Prometheus to Zeus, in high snark, while Prometheus has as a fully visible “ulterior” motive to get Zeus to see just how awful of a parent he is. And that story is performed by you, Fenyx, the shield-bearer to (and story-teller for) a boatful of heroes who were all just turned to stone, along with most everyone else in the world.

Handling that little problem involves fighting infinite waves of monsters, leveling up your gear and powers, solving various and sundry puzzles scattered across the land, learning a great deal about Greek mythology[2], and constantly snickering at the narration.

People compare it to Breath of the Wild, the (for now) most recent Zelda game from a few years back. I will say a) that it’s easier, b) that it’s funnier, c) that it’s easier to get a handle on what’s going on, d) that it’s a smaller game, and e) that it’s probably not as good. That a) piece is honestly the only problem with this game. I am a completionist, and I tried to do most of the puzzles and things in advance of the main plot. The result was that for the last quarter or so of the game, I already had all my powers and whatnot maxed out, so other than puzzle-solving it was a little boring trying to get to the conclusion.

I mean, not when Prometheus and Zeus were talking, or any of the other characters. Just when I was fighting pushover monsters on my way to a chest with yet another reskinning of my fourth-favorite set of armor. But that means that I was meh on like 15 hours out of a 90 hour game. That’s not so bad. (Don’t check my math.)

[1] I still don’t entirely understand what a season pass even is. Does it mean that you get to play all future expansions (but not sequels, one presumes) ever? Just for this “season”? And if the latter, this brings me back around to having no idea what that means. What decides a season, other than the people who are charging you for its pass? I have a lot of questions about modern gaming, I guess.
[2] Mostly not the big obvious bits. I would say easily a third of the references, and maybe more than, were things I’ve never heard of (but that I have no reason to believe were made up, given how much I did recognize as accurate).