Topic: Games you've recently beat

@ralphdibny I agree. For some reason I enjoy most of the TT games. The Back to the Future game is maybe one that I enjoyed the least. It’s still decent enough and worth a go. I think I ended up being a little less pleased with it because I spent the extra effort to get the platinum (it’s actually not automatic for finishing the game like most of theirs are) and there are a couple tricky parts where you’ve got to do something just right to get a trophy. I had to replay a couple sections and it made it drag a little bit for me. But yeah, the character animations are quite janky. 😅

Have you played any of the Life is Strange games, Until Dawn, or any Quantic Dreams games like Detroit Become Human or Heavy Rain? When the TT library is used up those are some games that can fill the void.

@nessisonett ah fair enough, I think there was one on the DS too but I can't remember if it was telltale or not

Bit random but I have a Dr House game for the DS too. It's really not as good when all the dialog is just text without the actors voices though 😅

@Th3solution is back to the future more point and clicky rather than "narrative adventure" anyway? I think it came out around the time Telltale was transitioning from one genre to the other (even though the two genres are closely linked anyway).

I think the transition came about because they needed to work out a way to make point and click games work on consoles. Their solution was moving the character with the analog stick and using the character to go up to items to interact.

That and the increase of unconventional licenses they acquired meant most of their games became a bit more than just a point and click game until they became interactive stories.

I've played Until Dawn and Tell me why (which I think is by the life is strange people). I haven't played life is strange or the Quantic dreams games yet. The Quantic dreams games are on my to play list for this year though because I have them all from PS Plus!

Funnily enough, the walking dead the final season isn't a straightforward platinum either! I was shocked! Season 1 has a couple in the epilogue that are missable too (this is the more modern release of season 1, not the PS3/360 one which I think has different achievements)

@ralphdibny Yeah, as I recall BttF is kind of a hybrid where they are making the transition from point and click to narrative adventure so has aspects of both. There are a few more sophisticated puzzles to figure out and takes a little more problem solving than most of the more recent games.

Honestly, the Quantic Dream games and Life is Stranges are more effective and more polished evolution of the narrative driven games that TT was trying for. The complaint has always been that the TT games give just an illusion of control and choice, but all roads lead to the same place. You’ll find that especially with Detroit BH the choices matter quite a bit and a protagonist’s entire narrative thread can be cut short by making certain choices that get them killed. It’s the most well-realized attempt at this style of gameplay and storytelling. It might be wise to save Detroit for last though since it might make other games in the genre feel flat; it’s that well done.
Life is Strange and it’s prequel Before the Storm are the closest to a Telltale feeling game I’ve found, but even those have more impactful narrative and dialogue choices than TT’s games. I still need to play LiS2, but it’s very good by all accounts.

@ralphdibny I've just finished the Final Season of The Walking Dead too. Despite some real frustration with some of the fights with zombies where it felt like the game would pick and choose at random if it was going to register my button inputs, I really enjoyed it. Probably only second to the first one in my opinion.

I really liked how the game played with AJ being shaped by the things you teach him. It's up there with Telltales best (First season, Borderlands, Wolf Among Us) but I've generally enjoyed most if not all of them. I think Guardians of the Galaxy is the only one I've not played. It's a shame they were so mismanaged and we never got their Stranger Things game as that sounded like it was going to change up the formula quite a bit. I'd recommend this Noclip doc to anyone interested in the studio.

When I purchased the Final season my PS4 had only downloaded 2 episodes so I quickly checked online as it seemed short and luckily that lead me to discover about trophies being very different with this one. So now I've got a few saves at certain points to help me mop up the other trophies from different choices.

Also I echo that the Quantic Dreams games are a great evolution of these narrative style games and think Detroit Become Human is the best example of making choice actually matter. Subsequently the Platinum can require multiple playthroughs to get but it's in my backlog to do as I genuinely want to play out some different outcomes. Especially as my ending was pretty bad with multiple deaths.

I ve beat control and actualy playing dlcs. My impression is that it is a 90's game with all its successes and mistakes. Its a good game but not a goty one...

@Th3solution if you get your character killed in Detroit, do you restart from the moment you made th decision that gets them killed or do you have to start again from the beginning?

I've always wondered how different Telltale games would be if I made different choices but I've never made the effort to do a second playthrough. I wonder if due to the nature of the walking dead, whether more choice is affordable in those games because it seems like certain characters can die and be absent. I kind of noticed that whatever characters survived the previous game were immediately dispatched at the beginning of the next game which was what initially made me wonder whether each game could end with different survivors that needed to be written out quickly for the narrative of the next game.

I'm not big on replaying medium/long games for different outcomes if the build up is largely similar or the same so I do wonder how much mileage I'll get out of the QD games after an initial playthrough. Obviously I do replay some games, my favouritest of all my favourite games like MGS and Uncharted etc! But if it's a good game but not my favourite then I will finish it and move on

@BearsEatBeets ahh nice one! Yeah I had some trouble with a zombie stuck under a door near the beginning of the game. I did some experimenting and eventually realised I was approaching it from the wrong direction which was getting me killed

I think my favourite was actually season 2 it was a bit slow to start but once I met up with Kenny again, it became really good. I guess he was one of my favourite characters in the first game and I liked how I had a relationship with him as a friend in series 1 which changed to a father figure relationship in series 2. I think because of my fondness for him, his story was the most engrossing. From lopping off his new girlfriends arm, to finding the spark of hope in AJ to everyone turning on him. Despite his erratic behaviour, I did my best to keep him alive and managed to do so and stayed with him even after that town at the end offered to let me stay. So I was a bit gutted (but unsurprised) they Michael Biehn'd him in a flashback in the third game.

In the final season, it was really difficult to raise AJ! It was hard to prep him for the world while also keeping him human. I think I managed it though after a couple of slip ups where he killed Marlon. I had to explain why it was ok to kill Lily but not Marlon (one was evil and the other was just stupid and scared). Unfortunately my firm hand at that point resulted in Violet being killed later on which kind of sucked but I'm guessing the alternative would have been AJ killing Tenn to allow Violet to escape which I couldn't allow AJ to have on his conscience. In terms of the last bit, I was kind of expecting Clem to survive because of how the axe in the barn scene played out. I was sort of waiting for the whole epilogue for her to show up but it went on for so long that I actually thought it might end as they all walk up to the gate without showing Clem. But then we see inside and she's alive and legless!

@ralphdibny It was definitely tricky to balance teaching AJ how to survive and defend himself whilst maintaining kindness and empathy for others. I found that really enjoyable though and something new for the series.
Yeah I got the other outcome on the bridge because despite his shocking confession of enjoying killing, the discussion choices after played out so that I felt it was just his limited way of expressing his relief in removing her threat. So I trusted him and yeah it results in him shooting the naive Tenn so Violet can escape. He handles it really well though so I was happy with my choice and figured it must be the other way round if you don't. Although the way it played out it looked like they both should have died if he didn't shoot. I might look up what happens if you don't tell AJ to shoot Lily as it looked like she was inching towards him. Also with the ending it's kinda far-fetched that she survived having her leg cut off without bleeding to death but I was so happy they made that choice I let it slide.

I mopped up some of the alternate trophies with my other saves last night but I messed up the final one I needed. I still need to kill bunnies without missing on the hunting trip. I loaded up that earlier save but missed one so restarted that save but missed again but unfortunately let the game carry on for a second or two too long and it autosaved after it. so now I have to play from the start to that point again for that trophy. It's probably only about an hour into the first episode but I'll have to make sure I make another duplicate save file when I get there incase I miss again. I prefer the previous games trophy system

@ralphdibny So yeah in Detroit if you get a character killed, then you just keep going, you don’t get to go back, unless you utilize a prior save. But sometimes the decision you made that cooked their goose was made a couple hours before and so it might be hard to go back there. Regardless, the game continues to its conclusion without the character. You do have more than one protagonist in the game so you have other storylines you’re playing (which may or may not intertwine... again, depending on your decisions). You might not even meet certain major characters if your decisions are off.

The good news is the game as a really, really well done decision tree / map thing that lets you look back and see where your decisions branch off toward alternative outcomes, so going back to mop up trophies is much more tolerable that way. It’s finely executed. Personally, I didn’t go back and replay sections or arcs to see the different outcomes and endings, but I was tempted to do so and to get the platinum you’d have to do some of that. Supposedly it’s very reasonably obtainable though. It’s not an enormously long game, but replaying the whole thing would be a sizable commitment, but being able to jump into sections on the map makes it much more realistic.

The structure reminds me of Virtue’s Last Reward from the Nonary Series, if you’ve played that. The pathway map is roughly similar, but a little more fleshed out in Detroit.

“Also I echo that the Quantic Dreams games are a great evolution of these narrative style games and think Detroit Become Human is the best example of making choice actually matter. Subsequently the Platinum can require multiple playthroughs to get but it's in my backlog to do as I genuinely want to play out some different outcomes. Especially as my ending was pretty bad with multiple deaths.”

I could not agree more. I loved this game and played it twice. I’m ready to play it again actually.

@BearsEatBeets nice one on mopping up (most of) the rest of the trophies! haha yeah i kind of like the one playthrough for a platinum trophy model too!

@Th3solution oh that sounds really decent actually! I'd definitely be more inclined to see the other paths if you could go back to the exact point you diverged and go again from there. Sounds like they implemented a perfect solution for it!

can you remember if the decision tree rejoins itself at any point? Like can you diverge from a path and rejoin it through decisions later on. That sounds overly complex so I am guessing probably not lol. Did Heavy Rain and Beyond Two Souls have a similar feature in them?

I've just reread your post and Im a bit confused actually, your saying you cant go back on your initial playthrough but once you have completed it you get to see this decision tree? and from there you can jump back into the story at any point a decision was made and make a different decision?

@ralphdibny I don’t know if any decision tree branches off and then rejoins... it might actually. So in other words there may be two (or more) routes to get to the same ending. Not sure.

I think I read there is something like 80 different endings, although many of them are very similar with shared features so it’s probably closer to 40 endings.

And sorry for the confusion about how it works — partly it’s my fault because I didn’t go back and replay sections to make different decisions. I got a pretty good ending for all characters, and although I kind of regret one of the watershed decisions late game, I feel like I played it to my emotions at the time. But ...I’m pretty sure that you can jump into the map after you’ve completed a chapter and start from any specific decision you want. What makes the most sense though is to play the game all the way without changing decisions and just keep going based on your gut instinct and then go back to individual chapters to pull out new decisions after you’ve seen your ending. But yes, I don’t think you see each chapter’s decision tree until at the end of the chapter and if I recall, and the branches you didn’t follow are redacted so you don’t see spoilers until you experience the events. Like you see the path but don’t know what events and further decisions it leads to until after you finish that path. Also like TT games, it has a feature and shows what percentage of players took that path and made that decision. All I remember was that my final ending was only arrived to by 2% of players.
When you do go back into a chapter decision tree map to jump to a point of divergence and make a separate decision, it lets you proceed with or without saving, I think. So in other words, you can watch what happens without saving your core story and so it won’t affect later chapters, or you can chose to save and it’s like you start over from that point forward and overwrite your save. I think that’s how it works...

Heavy Rain is like Detroit ‘Lite’. It’s is not nearly as complex, but there is a bunch of endings. I’m too lazy to look it up but I’ll say like maybe 10-12 maybe. The game is basically a mystery and so some endings you get to the correct solution and some you don’t. It does not have a decision tree map. You have to go back and replay larger sections of the game and really I think have to replay the whole game a few times basically to get all the trophies and major endings. Maybe someone else on here can remember more, but I only played through it once and unfortunately didn’t solve the mystery correctly and so it wasn’t a great ending but it was a fun ride. I just never really got around to trying another playthrough. It’s not good enough to want to play it again right away. But it is really worth your time if you like these choice-and-consequence games. Again, it’s probably best to play before Detroit as a warm-up because Detroit blows it out of the water in narrative complexity and overall polish so it would be a letdown to play it afterward.

Now Beyond Two Souls I’ve not played yet. I hear it’s the weakest of the bunch and it’s not set up the same way. I think choice has less of a role, but the narrative is delivered in a bit of a jumbled timeline and, well it’s just wasn’t received as well so I’ve not taken the time.

Sorry if this is all confusing. It’s been a while since I played HR and DBH and I’m a little fuzzy on how it works.

@Th3solution cheers, I think you've explained it well! I think I understand it all now. Sounds like the decision tree was definitely a good feature to implement for time conscious gamers

I think these sorts of games are best played to your own emotions the first time around. I guess you will kind of get the experience you would get if you actually existed in the game. Then you are free to replay it as a d*** or a paragon on subsequent playthroughs - though I am assuming here that everyone plays it as a moderate person the first time around and doesn't act like a total knob or a holier than thou person 😅.

Of course your own mood changes day by day anyway, even as a moderate person you may feel a bit cheeky on some days and choose to make some more questionable decisions and likewise you may feel more charitable on other days and make more altruistic decisions. I know in real life I can go from a cheeky trouble maker to a kind and caring person at the drop of a hat. It's just the way humans are.

Anyway, I look forward to playing these games at some point during this year! I've put it off for too long but I will get to them soon.

So just beat the story on Dying Light, still got quite a bit to do for the plat but really solid game that I’d recommend to anyone looking for a different take on the zombie game... it’s real cheap on the PSN store right now too.

@Arugula I’ve heard Odyssey just kinda ends too. Which is strange because Origins absolutely nailed the main story.

@nessisonett in fairness the one dlc pack is a very nice epilogue to Odyssey’s main story, can’t remember the name of it. The other (better) dlc, think it had Atlantis in the title was probably the best part of the whole game.

Beat Yakuza 4 this week.

While I liked the gameplay and the new characters, the story was probably the weakest of the games I've played. It's not terrible, but it feels like someone tried to write a parody that somehow became a serious script. It still has it's moments, it's just that at times it becomes too ridiculous even for this series.

@colonelkilgore Not sure if i would be happy having to pay for dlc so that I could experience a proper ending to a game I've potentially spent over 50 hours in.

@JohnnyShoulder I get it, I picked AC: Odyssey up for £20 and the season pass was about £15 so I didn’t feel to ‘had’ but as I said, I get what you’re saying.

@DerMeister More ridiculous than Yakuza 3??

I quite liked Y4 as the different stories mixed things up and the different combat styles also kept it fresh. The different stories came together pretty well and the last fight is good using all the characters.

I will admit that the rubber bullet explanation got rather silly and overused but Yakuza has history with that with Y2 and every other character ending up being Korean mafia.

Did you complete the dojo/fight club side story with Saejima? One of the guys you have to train is utterly useless and it’s basically luck to win the final tournament with him.

Just finished my little space saga with Space Crew. If you like a bit of real time strategy you can't go wrong with this game. Especially after they updated it to add some new features and some things you can adjust the difficulty with. With one back-up save in the middle it's an easy Plat too. This is my ship and crew that saw me through it.

I will be giving their earlier game Bomber Crew another go after playing some other stuff.