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Gaming Tuesday
Apr. 15th, 2025 10:51 pmWhat I really want to do is either play a new Horizon game or a new FFVII game, and the world has yet to cater to my whims. (Horizon III Nemesis does have a trailer but no release date, and part 3 of FFVII is another two years away at least). In the meantime I am doing a hard mode playthrough of FFVII Rebirth, which is indeed hard (no items for healing, tougher enemies etc). I’m up to chapter 12 and I can actually feel myself getting better at playing it - especially blocking, which in most fighting games I neglect in favour of stuffing myself with food/healing items to regain HP - and I do love everybody in the game. Do I love them enough to attempt platinum? Hmm. It is less a question of my undying affection and more my doubt in my ability to conquer ALL of the minigames. I am still traumatised by the piano and I have yet to get better than a B on Two Legs, plus I am avoiding that Shinra Party Animal sidequest at the Saucer that is All Minigames.
For contrast, I then played through Thank Goodness You’re Here!, which is a totally barmy surrealist dark comedy where you play as a (literally) tiny junior salesman, sent to the northern English town of Barnsworth to solve all their problems. It is disturbingly brilliant and very funny (and very, very, localised). Then I played The Stanley Parable, which is also disturbingly brilliant and about agency in gaming, and then I decided to go for something slightly less disturbing and played Astro Bot.
This cheerful platformer won GOTY last year and it is, indeed, fantastically well-designed (the haptic feedback is incredible) and a lot of fun to play. You are a tiny Sony bot who has crashlanded on a planet with your damaged PS5 spaceship, and you need to gather up your scattered bot colleagues from various other worlds and repair your spaceship. It is a love letter to Sony games, with bots and souvenirs taken from their extensive back catalogue. After each system boss, you get a world based on a franchise (Uncharted, God of War etc) and the last one I unlocked was Horizon, where I play as an AloyBot with bow & arrows, clambering up a Tallneck, zooming through cauldrons, and battling giant robots, with intermittent clusters of focal ghosts and even what I think is a skeletal bot Sobeck on a bench with flowers at the end.
I am not a natural platformer but I played this determinedly until I had the 300 bots needed to get all the achievements. I still have three levels I haven’t done in the main game (there are speed levels coming out as DLC), but they are unforgiving ones where you have to get every single move right, with no checkpoints, and the amount of actual enjoyment I get out of them diminishes. But it’s such an easy game to pick up, and so enjoyable.
I had planned to replay Horizon Forbidden West after that (especially due to the AloyBot!) but then Playstation Plus put out Dragon Age: The Veilguard as their March free game. This is a game that was in development for a long time, initially intended as a multiplayer before switching to solo RPG, and it’s been hit heavily by culture warriors on release aggrieved mainly by the nonbinary companion and the character customiser, all of which makes it a little difficult to judge. And my background with the series is patchy; I played Origins once and liked it a lot, despite feeling burnt out on conventional western fantasy (Mass Effect was more appealing on that front), I played DAII for a bit (maybe until the first major timeskip?) and then put it down for too long, and then I played quite a bit of Inquisition but could not get the hang of the combat when it came to fighting bosses and left it unfinished.
I am now in the final few act of Veilguard and I do like it but it definitely has issues. ( Discussion, no major plot spoilers but includes details of character selection and companions. )
I do think it's taken an unfair battering online, but I don't think I'm going to do much with it once I finish other than look up all the possible endings. It does make me want to go back and finish one of the others, though.
For contrast, I then played through Thank Goodness You’re Here!, which is a totally barmy surrealist dark comedy where you play as a (literally) tiny junior salesman, sent to the northern English town of Barnsworth to solve all their problems. It is disturbingly brilliant and very funny (and very, very, localised). Then I played The Stanley Parable, which is also disturbingly brilliant and about agency in gaming, and then I decided to go for something slightly less disturbing and played Astro Bot.
This cheerful platformer won GOTY last year and it is, indeed, fantastically well-designed (the haptic feedback is incredible) and a lot of fun to play. You are a tiny Sony bot who has crashlanded on a planet with your damaged PS5 spaceship, and you need to gather up your scattered bot colleagues from various other worlds and repair your spaceship. It is a love letter to Sony games, with bots and souvenirs taken from their extensive back catalogue. After each system boss, you get a world based on a franchise (Uncharted, God of War etc) and the last one I unlocked was Horizon, where I play as an AloyBot with bow & arrows, clambering up a Tallneck, zooming through cauldrons, and battling giant robots, with intermittent clusters of focal ghosts and even what I think is a skeletal bot Sobeck on a bench with flowers at the end.
I am not a natural platformer but I played this determinedly until I had the 300 bots needed to get all the achievements. I still have three levels I haven’t done in the main game (there are speed levels coming out as DLC), but they are unforgiving ones where you have to get every single move right, with no checkpoints, and the amount of actual enjoyment I get out of them diminishes. But it’s such an easy game to pick up, and so enjoyable.
I had planned to replay Horizon Forbidden West after that (especially due to the AloyBot!) but then Playstation Plus put out Dragon Age: The Veilguard as their March free game. This is a game that was in development for a long time, initially intended as a multiplayer before switching to solo RPG, and it’s been hit heavily by culture warriors on release aggrieved mainly by the nonbinary companion and the character customiser, all of which makes it a little difficult to judge. And my background with the series is patchy; I played Origins once and liked it a lot, despite feeling burnt out on conventional western fantasy (Mass Effect was more appealing on that front), I played DAII for a bit (maybe until the first major timeskip?) and then put it down for too long, and then I played quite a bit of Inquisition but could not get the hang of the combat when it came to fighting bosses and left it unfinished.
I am now in the final few act of Veilguard and I do like it but it definitely has issues. ( Discussion, no major plot spoilers but includes details of character selection and companions. )
I do think it's taken an unfair battering online, but I don't think I'm going to do much with it once I finish other than look up all the possible endings. It does make me want to go back and finish one of the others, though.
