Sounds like Sony finally has their very own Mario game! I hope Sony leans into this side of their portfolio in the future. And more selfishly, I REALLLY hope this one comes to PC
The Painscreek Killings sounds like the open ended deduction that you're describing. You play as a journalist who goes to an abandoned town to try to solve a cold case murder. The game doesn't tell you where or what to do next, or how to do it. I liked it because it was just me trying to figure the story out and what to do, not the game telling me "Put x and y together. Oh, look, it leads you to z!" (Also it's currently on sale on Steam for like 5 bucks.)
A new shooter that Sony launched a couple weeks ago and have subsequently cancelled and is offering refunds. So basically an astronomical waste of money.
Sony released a more realistic looking big budget Overwatch clone. It was fine, but nobody cared, because nobody wants a $40 live service Overwatch clone where all the characters have similar silhouettes. They spent 8 years making an okay game for nobody. If they’d done something different with the same basic characters and gunplay it could have maybe been good. They didn’t though, so estimates suggested they sold about 25,000 copies worldwide before pulling it from their store and refunding everyone.
Ontop of all of that, it was also just clearly a corporate cash grab where the people who made it either didn’t feel strongly about it or they didn’t get to put their soul into it as much as they wanted.
It’s not just bland, it’s a cold and calculating kind of bland. Like being served nutrient paste, but it’s not even flavourless instead they added artificial banana flavour so now it’s both depressing and makes you feel sick.
Supermassive games like Until Dawn, The Quarry, and the Dark Pictures are great for this, especially since later iterations have built-in “pass the controller” modes that are great for sharing a game with your spouse.
They’re all the same format, but The Dark Pictures is an anthology of games that are about half the size of Until Dawn. There are 5 or 6 of them at this point.
I still really enjoy Phasmophobia and all the games which came out after that have similar mechanics/gameplay. The Dark Pictures games are all really great experiences. There’s also indie games like Little Nightmares and Dredge! Alan Wake, Outlast, Still Wakes the Deep… Honestly there’s been so many amazing ones which have come out. For days/nights where you want a lighter experience, the Observation Duty type games can be fun!
Little Nightmares 1 & 2 get my vote. Also, Alan Wake 2 is a lot of fun and not exactly a horror game since it doesn’t take itself seriously, but it has a fantastic spooky vibe.
Horror comedies are definitely a thing, but tbh I’d still consider Alan Wake 2 an outright horror even with the lighter stuff! Very spooky elements, with great writing and story crafting. Bonus points if you play Remedy’s other games for the Easter eggs
Starfield had a crippling issue that they made the wrong decision at the very start of development — thousands of procedural generated planets instead of a dozen hand-crafted planets.
If they hadn’t made that mistake than Starfield would have been a hit.
Having a space game where every planet and every place in space is a super interesting stage feels so fake and wrong because space is not like that. If we go out into space and to other planets we will find way more boring then interesting (for the normal person) planets and locations between the planets out there then anything else. I love that Starfield is brave enough to show space more realistic even if that means boring.
That’s why I don’t really get into No Man’s Sky, the space and planets feels manufactured.
If the game had a proper navigation between planets and less loadings I think the game would not receive so much criticism. The procedural generated content is not good but is not awful.
The game has proper navigation between planets, you gravjump because space even between planets are huge and nobody wants to travel multiple hours, days, weeks or months (depending how close to the limit of C your story allows) in empty interplanetary space from planet A to planet B in the same system.
And the loading screens well that is the price to have a engine that allows for large numbers of manipulatable and change objects. All other engines have less loading screens yes but their worlds and places are full of statics that look good but can’t be taken or manipulated in any way. And I am very happy to pay that price.
The game has proper navigation between planets, you gravjump because space even between planets are huge and nobody wants to travel multiple hours, days, weeks or months (depending how close to the limit of C your story allows) in empty interplanetary space from planet A to planet B in the same system.
The problem is how is presented, the loading screen play a role here too. If the gravjump was only the animation starting then you exiting without the black screen, or a more lengthy jump put you can move in your ship while the jump is happening the amount of loadings would not be so noticiable.
Gravjumps are Instant, there is literally no time to move on the ship. And the loading screen for gravjumps takes a second or two on my very middle class system, yes it short fades to black but why should I care?
Maybe I am way more tolerant to loading screens because I am old and my first experience were with C64 and Amiga 500. Or maybe I just like the game so much that the loading screens doesn’t bother me.
if they turned the procedural generator at people, food, supplies and weapons instead of the landscapes… game would have been amazing
the other problem was traveling, they needed to make travel a painful burden… because when it became a quick loading screen and you are there… omfg it ruins the stories the npc’s are trying to tell
wtf you left your crew out here to die?! it took me 5 minutes to get here…
Just what I came here for! Not spooky, but entirely Halloween themed. I beat the first, but never got around to playing much of the second. A pretty simple turn based RPG, but the costumes you put on your party become the actual thing they are in battle. Very cute and fun games
This is exactly it. The game seemed fine, but it wasn’t doing anything to steal you away from your other games. On top of that it is $40, so there is barrier to entry. I feel bad for the developers, but the marketing team did not do enough research.
From what I read it was over 8 years in development, it should’ve been well beyond a rework, or maybe even a couple, already.
I’m almost certain that Sony, as any boss, was quite done with the whole fiasco and just said “fuck it, let’s go” and just see what happens. It probably wasn’t worth the time and effort to keep putting resources into a project going nowhere.
Yes there was one but the Tories didn’t have anything to do with it closing, at least not directly. If an election happens all open petitions are closed as a matter of process, because “it’s a new parliament”. And then you need to resubmit.
Also, the petitions committee told the Tories that their response was bullshit and they needed to give a proper one. But that doesn’t really matter because of the whole new government thing.
I think they’re falling into the same trap Bioware fell into, whereby they have a couple of critically acclaimed franchises under their belt and are universally praised and all is well, but then obviously that can’t last forever so as soon as the wheels start to wobble a bit, they start over-thinking, over-developing and over-managing their games because the next one needs to be a massive hit, but then what inevitably happens is they end up sabotaging development as they keep throwing out ideas and polishing all the rough edges off. So you actually end up with something that feels under-developed and bland because it’s all designed by committees and middle-managers, and built by underpaid devs on a crunch who just want to be done with it.
Also Microsoft bought them in the meantime, which can’t be helpful.
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