• Dredge (I just started a couple of minutes ago) first impressions:

I'm impressed, it's cosy, intuitive, I really like the fishing mechanic (so far) it's a simple press square when the rotating (clockwise) hand passes the green marker (none of that awful button mashing that ruins fishing mini-games) the ambience is lovely, it feels fresh, a little salty (I'm at sea) and I really like the inventory system where you can rotate the fish in storage (like Day-Z) another win is that pausing the game doesn't kill the ambient sound, I can hear the sea/seagulls and the movement of my vessel as it sits frozen in time. A pet peeve is when a pause screen or an inventory screen has no sound, Crimson Desert being a recent example. It handles well on the Portal and feels right, I can see this being a great experience. It counts as a Spooky season game too making it # 2 so far.

Edit: This next fish Cod, makes the game's storage/hull feel like Tetris, he's oddly shaped. So that puzzle storage side seems like a fun element too. There's to be a kind of existential dread permeating the game, which going by the theme makes sense. I think I might listen to some H.P. Lovecraft audiobooks as I get further into the heavier farming side of the game, I'm hoping it has a loop similar to Moonlighter. The boat itself is fun to control, I like the funky little extra mechanics like turning lights on and off, blowing on that fog horn, the story art/aesthetic is really nice too. The only thing I had to adjust was the music, it was deafening. There seem to be a lot of upgrades to purchase too, and that system seems straight forward enough too. There's a research tree too, for rods, engines, pots and nets, I just tried it and when the research is complete the item shows up for sale in the Shipwright's store (with the other upgrades) all in all a fun little little title and I'm already hooked (pun intended)

I've captured quite a few fish and can now live out two of my favorite fisherpeople songs.

@GirlVersusGame
Enjoy and embrace life on the open seas, it really is a unique game.
Disney should do a Steamboat Willie and Dredge crossover as it would be a great addition for the Spooky Season.

I’m just finishing off F1 25 and will start the Until Dawn remake tomorrow.

@GirlVersusGame I really enjoyed my time with Dredge and it has so many little layers to it to keep things interesting. The platinum was a bit of a chore, especially catching every type of fish, but the base game is really great. I hope you enjoy it!

@CaptD There are many Steamboat Wllie movies but they are Horror, Screamboat is the newest and the worst. He looks like the early Sonic movie design with the creepy hairy legs. Hairy legs are fine when the man has meat on his bones, Sonic did not nor did Willie. Mouseboat Massacre was a little better, I still have to watch I Heart Willie and Steamboat Willie: Blood on the Water. I watched the Popeye Horror too. Until Dawn is a brave choice, I did play/finish Silent Hill 2 but I'll never try that series. Right now I'm listening to Christopher Lee's BBC Fireside Tales while I play, I'm doing it through the USB port on the console, it really fits the game/loop. After him will be Lee reading Dracula and then Vincent Price. So it's fishing with classic ghost stories, sticking to Spooky season's theme.

@GirlVersusGame
Christopher Lee and Vincent Price were great as was Peter Cushing. I do recall the BBC Christopher Lee fireside tales, superb format for an easy listening show.
As for Vincent Price, the Dr Phibes ones (plus Theatre of Blood) were probably my favourites. One of which has just popped up on Tubi streaming service.
In my tv backlog I have the Hammer House of Horror series which I’ve seen before but always good to watch again. You can’t beat the old 70s and 80s horrors especially Hammer House of Horror.

Still chipping away at WRATH: Aeon of Ruin for PSVR2. It basically feels like you've descended into the world of Quake. You're there, the creatures are life sized/full scale, in full-on Stereoscopic 3D, and because of the latter it's miles more easier to gage incoming projectiles, discerning the actual distance between environmental objects, WALLS(etc), everything feels far more natural, immersive, visceral and enjoyable in VR. Boomer shooters Excell on this platform, ten fold.

When i bounced back to play Quake 1&2, and DOOM Eternal on my 65" OLED, all running at 120fps on base PS5, including the former two using the Dualsense's fine-tuned Gyro aiming. They all felt like nothing. Zero depth perception(which made it look and feel far less natural), Scale-wise, everything including enemies were unrealistic & minature(a 77" OLED would of helped), Tethered Gyro aiming feels constrained as hell, and nowhere near as natural or intuitive, nor does it give you the leeway of aiming properly while simultaneously moving your-in game character around with a thumb stick compare to the VR Sense controllers, or even when back peddling to the Wii remote & nunchuck.

WRATH is just a decent 'flatscreen' boomer shooter, but VR completely elevates it to the point of eclipsing even some of the best boomer shooters on NS1/NS2 & PS5. That's the power of VR while gaining the best in-class motion controls period which feel like an extension of your own arms & hands.

WRATH's biggest sin is it's weaksauce OST. it's always just low key ambience, which ultimately fails at capturing the level of exhilration you feel when mowing down swarms of enemies. it's abmysal in that regard, plus the levels are too large for their own good, it's easy to get lost(Thanks to the repetitious environments & terrible Guide-Arrow tool), and some of the stages just drag on too long for their own good.

But when it lands, it LANDS. The motion based gun play, and weapons at your disposal and being face to face with some of the larger more ferocious enemies can never be replicated on a TV screen. This game has so many many high's and low's trickled throughout. I'm just over half way through it now, having sunk in maybe about 20 hours in the past two weeks.

And i really need to replace my PSVR2's terrible front forehead padding...And flimsy thin rubbered interface. most people will agree that the PSVR2 hurts your forehead in just under an hour, and you can experience pressure and discomfort around your face or bridge of your nose. The Globular Cluster mod set has a really good leather based forehead pad replacement that bypasses the pain, and i hear Amazon sells higher end 3rd party quality interface/gasket replacements that prevent facial discomfort.

Anyways, blah blah. Compound is still PSVR2's boomer shooter(God i hate that term. lol) magnum opus, but when WRATH shines it shines. You just have to be willing to sift through some of the wreckage to get to the treasure. Where as Compound is a steady consistent win from start to finish(Using the Vending Machines Orange Syringe = OldSkooler Mode, which gives you that much needed verticality!)

There's already a PCVR mod for Turok 1 now. I hope Duke Nukem 3D World Tour, Killing Time Ressurrected, Power Slave & DOOM 64 get VR-ified next.

@GirlVersusGame Sounds like a good plan. As you work through Dredge, maybe I can get through Cocoon and then we both can be playing SWtD around the same time and can compare notes (my notes are usually rather meager by comparison though). I read the Push Square review for SWtD and it might be quite a bit scarier than I expected. I was thinking it was probably ‘light horror’ but it sounds like it’s more than that. Right scary at parts, it seems. But you’ve made it through Silent Hill so I think it can’t be scarier than that.

I’ve not really had interest in Dredge (nor Dave the Diver, for that matter) as the concept of fishing games doesn’t excite me. I will be curious to read about how you like it and perhaps it will be a game I develop an interest for. People have really liked it, so maybe I’m missing something.

@Th3solution I can recommend Dredge, I found it a nice palate cleanser in between larger games. It was also a good game to play when the weather was hot, as it didn't make me more sweaty when playing it.

My only negative is that some of the trophies are down to rng, and were a ball ache to get.

@CaptD I have a big thing for Hammer and wish there was a Retro game (this generation) made about the games, some kind of Indie effort.

I got quite far into The Price of Fear while playing Dredge, the last story was the one where the man feeds his wife's want to be suitor to some sharks (it fit Dredge too because it focused on fishing) He's such a good performer and that audio cast in general are all fantastic. The set I'm listening to is the original BBC recording republished by Penguin, it's on quite a few sites/vendors. Some of my favorite radio-plays are the Original Shadow ones from the thirties to the fifties. I tend to convert cassette tapes and CDs from Ebay/etc and run them through the PS5, some I'll rip from Youtube (even easier) I already got through both Christopher Lee sets and I'll finish Vincent Price today. It's quite easy once you pop a USB key into the PS5 with a 'Music' folder the console pulls it up through the Music tab, today might be the excellent BBC radio-play of An American Werewolf in London or BBC's The Exorcist, The Devil Ride's Out is tempting too, it's probably my favorite Hammer and it's also read by Christopher Lee (he starred in the movie too) the tape/novel is much longer than the movie, over six-hours.

@Th3solution I’ve not really had interest in Dredge (nor Dave the Diver, for that matter) as the concept of fishing games doesn’t excite me. I will be curious to read about how you like it and perhaps it will be a game I develop an interest for. People have really liked it, so maybe I’m missing something.

• It feels like less work than Dave The Diver, in that game there is the preparation/getting drink consistencies right/etc. In Dredge it's more about the casual fishing and the upgrades (of which there are many) make it all the more fun, I'm mostly focusing on upgrading the boat and getting better rods and nets. It doesn't seem like a big game and I don't think it needs to be, I'm really enjoying the game's loop. There's a story too and most of the local coastal towns/etc have little quests.

Looks like I'll be getting my Control Resonant disc today, a day early (aka only 20 days late) so I guess I'll finally be playing that

@Voltan Enjoy! I get peeps issues with the game, but I am loving it. You might actually beat it before I do!

@Werehog Platinum is one of those developers I really want to dive deep into over the coming years. I've loved playing the Bayonetta trilogy, so their involvement is enough at this point to interest me in anything they do. I just struggle with the fact that much of their back catalogue makes me feel the need to play other games before trying their entries! Like with Metal Gear Rising, I know that I should have ideally played the fourth game before getting into this spin-off. With how I bounced off of Snake Eater earlier this year... we'll see if and when that ends up happening. Something like Nier Automata as well I know is largely stand-alone, but the completionist in me feels the need to play Replicant before ever touching that one. I do still have the Bayonetta Origins spin-off to go and scheduled for next year, and I purchased Astral Chain as that one intrigues me and is entirely new IP from them, so that'll be my next elaboration into them as a studio I presume.

I've honestly never given Vanquish a proper look for no reason other than it didn't instantly speak to me... but knowing that you had a good time with it, I suppose I should give it a bit more time of day to see if I can get myself excited about it! At least I won't feel the need to consume all of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' history when that game eventually comes out, so I should be good to go on that one! I do find it interesting that this'll be their second attempt at tackling that franchise, especially after the last one was released to critical dismay. I think they've probably grown much as a studio since though, so I'm largely optimistic that this one will end up landing better.

As for Galactic Racer, I'm sorry to hear that it has ended up not entirely being your cup of tea after how excited you were for it! I had no clue it had some roguelike DNA flowing through it, so that added context is appreciated. In a way that marriage of the racing genre with this approach interests me, but I'm similarly put off as you by roguelike mechanics in games. I did see that there's a race for example that you simply cannot win on the first attempt no matter how skilled you are (presumably for narrative reasons), so am I right to assume that that's where the roguelike nature comes into play? Or is that one the exception to the rule?

I totally agree with you on the criticism in regards to difficulties. It's rather ridiculous to include them if even the lowest difficulty level is meant to give you grief. At that point, you might as well just go the Souls-like route and stick to one pre-decided, unchangeable difficulty. Not that that would be my personal preference, but it'd feel more like author intent than the slap in the face this must feel like! I'm glad that despite its mechanics and difficulty woes, you were at least still able to finish it on a higher difficulty and come out mostly unscathed. The fact that you still highly praise the game but acknowledge that not every part of it was for you is a sign of a great game nonetheless! Even if it's a great game where less would've been more.

@GirlVersusGame
Thanks for the info and I will have a look for the BBC recordings.
Ever since the PS3 I’ve always used a USB device to play music (and video on PS3) and it is very handy when you have a grind or a game lacks decent music/ambience, in fact one of my favourite VR games Puzzling Places lacks music and just has generic background noise so spending hours completing virtual jigsaw puzzles needed some tunes.
American Werewolf in London is such a good film and it is a shame the sequel couldn’t match it. I hadn’t heard of the radio-play so I might have a lookout for that as I’m sure audio only would quite suit it.

@CaptD It's on Youtube, there's a link in the Book Thread, I would have shared it around the same time as The Exorcist. I might actually prefer the radio-drama to the movie which sounds like sacrilege. It's a really good recording, if you do want to convert it for your PS5 then cnvmp3 dot com is the best and safest site to convert/download Youtube audio. The creator is well known and respected, it's fast too.

@GirlVersusGame
Thanks for the info, I will take a look.
Just found Devil Rides Out on Internet Archive so I will watch that though I’m sure I’ve seen it before but the name escapes me.

Anyway back on topic. Started Until Dawn remake today and it looks great, such a good fun time ensuring that everyone comes a cropper.

• Yet Another Zombie Survivors

I briefly mentioned this one before, it's as you'd guess a survivors game and has all of the expected bells and whistles. The big thing with this one is guns, and lots of them. It's a darker kind of survivors game with some really satisfying upgrades, and of course loot. The game-loop is as expected but one big thing the game has going for it that makes it more unique is that the SOS system in the game allows you to add more characters to that same run. For example right now I'm running with three at once. SWAT guy is blasting away with an Uzi, Tank man is shotgunning the hordes (and throwing landmines) and the Engineer is dropping electric turrets while blasting them with a tazer rifle. The danger increases as the hordes level up, and your power increases as you level up (obviously) I finished Dredge, quite quickly too. This is a fun little game to compliment both Spooky season and more of my Spooky radio-dramas. I still might try Boltgun, I watched some Doom reviews too, I'm not sure that I'm the demographic for that one.

@CaptD It's one of my favorite movies of all time, and my favorite role for Christopher Lee too. Also I don't know how you can handle Until Dawn, that game looks like heart attack simulator.

@GirlVersusGame
Until Dawn is great, sure there are jump scares but it is more of a walking simulator, around a very dark wintry mountain.
I recently played Alan Wake 2 and in particular chapters it was jump scare after jump scare, they ceased to be scary and were just annoying in the end.
Until Dawn does have quite a few accessibility options to lessen certain aspects if required.

@I recently played Alan Wake 2 and in particular chapters it was jump scare after jump scare, they ceased to be scary and were just annoying in the end.
Until Dawn does have quite a few accessibility options to lessen certain aspects if required.

• Alan Wake was the game that kicked off my 'perhaps I'll try/finish a Horror game', it was going to be the one I was going to go with then I had a moment of madness and decided to go with Silent Hill 2 instead. My thinking at the time was 'if I can make it through Silent Hill I can make it through anywhere', I still might try it eventually. You kind of (a tiny percent) make me almost consider trying Until Dawn, just not today. Actually @Th3solution how is Cocoon coming along? I woke feeling like death again, I can't tell if it's cold meds/cough meds or the cold/flu itself but once again I've been sequestered to bed rest which means more gaming. I pondered starting Still Wakes The Deep then decided against it, I don't want to frame it around a headache/etc so survivors it is.

• My best run yet, it's harder than others in the genre. I've also gotten through (checks) thirteen Spooky audiobooks/radio-plays, currently it's BBC's Sleepy Hollow by of course Washington Irving.

I still can't get through a Hardcore run, but this current infinite run is going really well. My team Leader is the SWAT man and he has currently: a grenade launcher with a very soothing poof noise as a grenade shoots out and it's funny watching zombies cartwheel away and explode, grenades, ricochet rounds and he often calls down an attack helicopter. My second is the Tank and they have: a super shotgun (hopefully soon a rocket launcher for more cartwheels) berserk mode, mines, and he can call down airstrikes. My third is Lara Croft (seriously it looks just like her) and she has an explosive bow, bear-traps and raining arrows. The horde is evolving fast but so far so good, it's absolute chaos when all of these abilities/etc are triggering at once. I'd like to try something a little less head empty bang bang, but I feel absolutely dreadful and if it weren't for these little brilliant bite-sized games I'd probably just sleep. The sickness I had a couple of weeks ago crashed my immune system and I'm still feeling the affects of it today, it's a minor miracle that I made it through Silent Hill 2 when I did.

@GirlVersusGame Sorry for the delayed response but I hope you’re feeling a lot better by now with your cold/flu. I know sometimes how I’m feeling physically determines how much I game and how much I enjoy it. In fact, the past week I was feeling poorly (not sick, just exhausted and busy) and so didn’t accomplish much in the gaming sphere. I didn’t play any Cocoon and spent the few gaming moments I had to peck away at Death Stranding 2 (which I continue to really enjoy). I’m not really feeling a drive to play Cocoon so whenever a few minutes popped up I always seemed to choose to do something else instead, almost as if I’m purposely avoiding it. Perhaps that’s telling. I think one possible explanation is not necessarily a problem with the game itself, but rather my own mental fatigue after working on cognitively taxing projects all day and so when I game I would rather shut my brain off instead of playing a game designed around solving mind-bending puzzles. I’m starting to lean towards just abandoning it for now and moving on to Still Wakes the Deep before spooky season is over. From what I’ve read it’s relatively linear and so it might be a good ‘turn my brain off’ game and just have all the scary moments burn off all my pent up fatigue through surges of adrenaline release. 😅