I didn’t quite get that feeling with Breath of the Wild, but I’ve certainly had those moments where the theme of a ruined world absolutely ruined my emotional stakes, so I can understand it.
The opening lines of Nier Automata are nihilistic and signal 2B’s desire to just get death over with. Nothing in the whole game’s story brought this feeling back in the other direction, and as a result of an adventure spanning a gray and brown “Abandoned city and death” the optimistic ending absolutely didn’t hit with me. Hard to identify why my response was so different from everyone else’s.
The pointlessness of a fight amid a ruined world is also what makes me not care about a lot of uber-dark Soulslike games. I don’t see much of what I’m saving in most of those, and learning the lore behind all of Dark Souls’ endings reinforces that feeling.
If you’re able to get a good internet connection, you could run anything on Geforce Now’s list. Not the most optimal gaming experience, but it can be satisfying enough.
To give something more specific I enjoy, try Backpack Hero. It’s a roguelike on the easier side, built around making absurd combos.
That might be underselling how big the series is - not to mention that many of them have been completely re-done in HD so they’re no longer on GBA graphics.
These are generally pretty big games. A lot of “mystery” games are about one mystery, but every AA game has at least 4, the last of each game being a giant epic journey.
I mean, if digital games were always excluded from this form of preservation, and digital game cards are just a step up in terms of store discoverability, I think it did.
They’re obviously incredibly inferior to full game cards. They’re not much better than digital games, but they’re better than “We’re not releasing on Nintendo Switch because no one will see us in the eshop and since the game sells for $10 we can’t afford game cartridges.”
I might’ve tried out Nikki if it’d been okay with some amount of “sexy” outfits - like, I know not to expect any bikini-model type of garb, but there’s still a midpoint that could feel appealing but also classy.
Either way - still a gacha game with a pretty incomprehensible story.
Honestly, I suppose FF7 is another great example, but I was thinking of the Trails in the Sky remake due out in a month or two.
Sorry if that’s a vague spoiler. It wasn’t even something I knew about the game playing through, but the slow-impact delivery of it worked fantastically.
To clarify, the idea would be to have smaller studios each independently making games. So for half a year, one studio may only have the responsibility of a single 3-hour demo.
Damn man, I love Resident Evil and have never finished an SH game, but we have so many of the former (especially considering the indie scene) this seems like an excessively presumptuous comment.
I definitely want to see more publisher-driven “game experiments”. Imagine a studio putting out a 3-hour vertical slice of a PS2-era-style experimental game idea for $5. Now imagine, a publisher puts out about 20 of these such games a year (and mostly loses money on them - since $5 isn’t a lot and those 3-hour segments need polish) but then, occasionally one of them hits it big - and then the publisher grants them a greenlight to make a trilogy of 14-hour games after figuring out that people enjoy it.
I’m in a perspective of hoping for more romantic subplots of any kind. I never played through any generation of RPGs that made those popular, and when they were there, they were hastily written in, or just optional.
It’s why I’m excited for a certain JRPG remake that puts one such relation (between a guy and a girl) front and center, so much so that it becomes a driving element of the story. Those who know, know I suppose.
One thing that helps in its case is, it doesn’t advertise on the box “Romance 1-1000 characters!!” IMO, a good romantic plot sneaks up on you after you’ve invested in the characters.
I remember when dinoflask did YTPs of Overwatch’s lead designer, he poked fun at how, whenever the game needed a progressive image boost, they would retcon a character to be gay at random. He sentence-mixed something like “Our fans are always wondering who’s going to be gay on our next update.”
The MISSING: J J Macfield and the Island of Memories is a great one.
EndingPsyche. Though much of the dialog and written messages could lead you, like myself, to believe Macfield is a closeted lesbian undergoing community/family abuse for her quiet obsessions with a girl…it’s actually the less common form of LGBT. Macfield is a closet trans woman; much of the game’s horrific bodily mutilation themes take a stand-in for the dysphoria of being uncomfortable in her own masculine body. Of course, many of the same types who’d retch at a gay protagonist would throw up at the idea of being someone they didn’t identify with - which ironically is exactly what the game is teaching you.
While I’m not a furry, Steam has some interesting titles on offer from Anthrocon, even if you just find animals to be a unique aesthetic choice for characters. I’m an Ace Attorney fan, so I got the demo for “Dragon Detective” which just released yesterday.
In other gaming news, the demo for Trails in the Sky’s remake is out. In typical JRPG fashion, reports say the demo covers about 6 hours of content.