Topic: Games you've recently beat

@Th3solution Oh thank you I can see why Death Stranding doesn't fit into it now, I've played both versions of the first one and I thought because I walked so much it was a walking simulator but of course there was all of the navigating and slogging up and down mountains. I really enjoyed it but there was definitely an element of stress when it came to the logistics of carrying half of an Amazon warehouse down a sheer cliff. It sounds like Death Stranding was labelled a walking simulator by the folks who were never going to play it to begin with. I'll try What Remains of Edith Finch after this game, I've heard of The Stanley Parable too.

All I have left for platinum now is to finish this one dungeon and max bonds with a certain character. I think if I drop one million dollars on strippers they'll shoot right up in friendship. I cheated the last fifteen levels to get to seventy, it was either use the PSN store for a booster or buy the other DLC for another dungeon that I don't want to run. One step closer to a walking simulator.

Edit: That's the dungeon stuff done, now it's off to the strip club and hopefully it works.
Edit: The strip club worked, the journey is over.

@GirlVersusGame Yeah, categorizing Death Stranding as a walking sim is a bit reductive. It’s like calling Spider-Man a swinging sim.

Good luck with What Remains of Edith Finch. I really loved it. It might ruin future walking sims for you, but it’s a good one to try and see if you like the idea of walking around and uncovering a story. And it can be finished in one or two sittings, probably like 2-4 hours is all. A big break from a marathon like a Yakuza/LAD game. Edith Finch has one of my top 10 gaming moments in it. See if you can figure out what it is.

Congrats on your progress with Infinite Wealth, by the way. Finishing one of those games is a true accomplishment, especially if you secure the platinum.

@Th3solution Thank you, I didn't want to cheat those last fifteen levels but there was no way I was going to run through the same corridors for days, I'd feel eyes on me offline and I can't justify that kind of mindless repetition to myself let alone another Person.

I'm playing it now, it's just gone six in the AM and I should be asleep but my mind and body are still on GMT/English time so Edith Finch is happening. I spent ten minutes trying to open a book, we're off to a great start. I already like this character. It's such a change from walking through the streets of Honolulu and getting pulled into a fight by anything with a pulse. I can already see why people play these kinds of games, it sort of feels like being in a novel or a journal.

@GirlVersusGame Yes, it’s a really creative and well crafted experience in my opinion. Really glad that you seem to like it. It’s such a tragic but meditative experience. Touching and sad, artistic and moving.

And it’s quite short, so hopefully you didn’t stay up too late. 😂

@Th3solution Well, despite your misgivings, I'm glad The Invincible was able to leave at least some kind of impact with you! One of the reasons I'd not given it the look it probably deserved before was the whole walking-sim of it all, which I realise I've become gradually more impatient with over time. That's why your opinions on that front haven't exactly excited me after all, but I'll keep it in mind if ever I need a palate cleanser with at least a solid sci-fi narrative. Will you be prioritising reading the book at all, or is this more so one of those dusty bookshelf scenarios? 😜

And for what it's worth, I entirely agree with your categorisation of walking sims. The term is widely overused. Plus, the calling Spider-Man a swinging sim got a good chuckle out of me!

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@GirlVersusGame Congratulations on rolling the credits on Infinite Wealth! From the posts I've seen around and my general knowledge of the series, I have no doubts it was a massive undertaking. I hope polishing it up for that platinum won't add dozens of more hours on top! And on a side note... "farm the man who sells pee" is undoubtedly the first time I have ever seen this specific combination of words. 'twas a good laugh.

@Tjuz “Will you be prioritising reading the book at all, or is this more so one of those dusty bookshelf scenarios?”
Um, if I’m honest it’ll be a dusty bookshelf scenario. 😅 My reading backlog is almost as bad as my gaming backlog, which is almost as bad as my TV backlog.

@Th3solution I went to sleep around six AM after the Lewis segment and then something brilliant happened that has to be related to the game. I dreamed (dream'nt?) I was a cat, it started by talking to a lobster (a big red one) and I'm assuming he was there because I'd had some for dinner the previous day. Then I climbed up a really high ladder, but more like ran up it because again I was a cat. When I got to the top I realized it was a cathedral and then ran across the flying buttresses but they weren't straight they were all curved and when I reached the end I found a birds nest with four kittens inside, I looked right at them and woke up. I tend to remember all of my dreams vividly because I keep dream journals and that's a technique for reinforcing lucid dreaming. If you can do that when you have bad dreams you can then carefully take control and remove yourself from the situation. I've been doing it for years. Gamers by nature are more likely to lucid dream because their minds already remotely controls an avatar.

That same system is what you use to manually take control of dreams too. Another technique would be asking yourself during the day if you are awake or asleep, then over time that same thinking makes it's way into your sleep state and when your mind realizes 'I'm asleep' you then have the freedom to operate in that wakeful state (even while asleep) It helps me with bad dreams and rarely fails. I've read lots of studies about it (boring stuff) and had plenty of animal dreams before but that one was entirely linked to the game.

@Tjuz Thanks! I can't judge time to save my life but it felt like I started three weeks ago, if so it continued through three time-zones. I'd wait for everyone to go to sleep then either stay up or sneak out of bed to get some more hours in. I think the biggest weight if you could even call it that, I have no other word for it, would be the six hours of cut-scenes. Mainly because it was a kind of emotional musical chairs, I wasn't sure what I was supposed to be feeling and I didn't expect a human approach to the characters, I'd played so many simulators that I'd forgotten what a non wooden character even was. I hadn't noticed but one of the only games I played last year with other characters was Cyberpunk, the rest were simulators and survival games, they are all thoroughly singular experiences

It seems like the year before the only other one with characters was Dragon's Dogma 2, so two games in two years. I'd forgotten stories and characters exist in games, I've played maybe one hundred simulators but very few story based games. Right now I see Tavern Manager Simulator and there is a pull to play it, but not Tobacco Market Simulator. The other pull is pointing me towards finishing Edith Finch and possibly trying another walking simulator. All of the trending games look huge, Ghosts of Tsushuma, Spiderman, Last of Us, God of War, Harry Potter (I never finished it but got far) I've always looked at gaming as task completion and a system of priority points, I can definitely apply that to Infinite Wealth but not to the characters and not to the story, which is rare. With Edith Finch I do want one hundred percent but part of me is just grateful for the experience, if that even makes sense.

I noticed something too, where I'd seen the name before. I'd been reading about exposure therapy and cognitive deconstruction in children and young adults. It explains the importance of activated scheduling etc to combat apathy and preserve empathy along with the basics like breathing techniques. So I looked at my Kindle today and sure enough there was the name. A coincidence most likely, I don't see either names that often, or rather not at all.

Edit: The end of that game was rough but I liked the line 'If we lived forever, maybe we'd have time to understand things. But as it is, I think the best we can do is try to open our eyes, and appreciate how strange and brief all of this is'.

@GirlVersusGame Whoah! That’s so interesting. Maybe it is a coincidence, but who knows, maybe one of the game’s writers had been reading that book too.

And your dreaming experience was fascinating too. I have read a little about lucid dreaming and never found much success with it. I’m one of those people who rarely remembers their dreams. Maybe once every couple weeks I might recall vague impressions I had through dreaming. But I have noticed that when I do have a vivid recollection of one, often it has to do with something I’d been watching, playing, or thinking about right before going to sleep.

As another incidental side note, I was reviewing the game’s Wikipedia page (which I recommend you to avoid for now until you’re done with it due to spoilers it contains), and saw in the development history that the game’s initial title was “The Nightmares of Edith Finch” and the game was planned to be more spooky. Fortunately they made a course correction and went a different direction, more mysterious and tragic but not scary.

@GirlVersusGame Oh I notice now that you finished it 😄
Hopefully you liked it and it was a good exposure to walking sims. If you liked the way walking sims work, with the simple chill gameplay, walking from place to place and getting a story told, then you should try The Stanley Parable at some point. It’s a stark contrast to WRoEF, much more lighthearted, and also very clever.

@Zuljaras The open world AC games are my favourite in the series! Odyssey is my favourite one out of Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla. I just love warm settings, which is why Valhalla wasn't as memorable as the other two for me.

Glad to hear that you enjoyed Origins! Would love to start up another open world game like that soon and just get immersed into its world. It's just so much fun exploring massive worlds.

@LtSarge Origins, Odyssey and Unity are the only AC games I have ever finished (Unity last month), and I have to agree with you. Origins and Odyssey are special!

I am scared that I might not be able to enjoy AC1, 2, 3, Black Flag and Syndicate after that Unity was fantastic even with the cut content from it (some storylines) and the MOST accurate depiction of the real world locations from ALL AC games.

I now replay Odyssey and it is like a comfort game. You can relax while playing it!

Thief 2014
What to say. If anything it feel very much like a proper Theif game plus exploration options. You have very much ground to cover the game.
Well I think tbh that Thief 2014 might be one of the better stealth games around . And again it very much feel like Thief, plus exploration options And I guess that Theif 2014 must very much have pushed the graphical capabilities of the Ps4/Xbox One generations of consoles.

Its also likely one of maybe not to many PS4 /Xbox One games where light and darkness plays a very, very central role. It feels very cool how Eidos Montréal played with light and Darkness.
One other aspect of the game that I found kind of cool is that it’s also likely a clear statement or showcase for the talent that must have been present in Montreal around the time for the Theif 2014 release. A time period where arguably lots of money and well talent must have been present around the Montreal area . Kind of ironic I guess that it was likely also just a year or so after the talent and money drain begun to happen (or rather companies push towards live service games).

@Zuljaras I don't think you need to worry about the older AC games as long as you go in with the right expectations. Smaller worlds, more focus on story and definitely not as lengthy. My favourite of the older ones is Black Flag, again probably because of the warm setting. It's also akin to Odyssey in that you do a lot of sailing.

I've missed playing a game just to relax. I'm currently playing Lost Judgment and some parts of it are just stressing me out! I still have a completionist mentality deep down, so I need to let go of it and just do the parts that I enjoy, regardless of how much I finish.

Unity is a great one as well! I just love exploring historical settings, which is something Ubisoft excels at with AC.

@Th3solution I had a proper reply for this and then my virtual machine dropped followed by my VPN followed by this site. Which was odd because I've always been able to reach it. Either way my reply was wiped, maybe I'll write it again another day. I'll just say lucid dreaming works when you put about six months work into it, one of the earliest tricks I used was to ask myself during the day 'am I awake or asleep?', soon enough your dreaming state recognizes that same question as routine and you wake up in that dream and can control how you react. It's helped me with bad dreams, I can react objectively and not have to sit through it so to speak. I've collected up years worth of dream journals too, it helps to reinforce that ability to recall and replay it all very vividly. I've never not been able to recall dreams, anyone can do it with practice. Especially gamers, the last study I read concerned gamers specifically. I couldn't game yet since finishing Edith Finch, now I can and I think I'll got for platinum. I'll look into The Stanley Parable too. It's been a long weird day, I sort of blinked and now it's already an hour after midnight. It probably doesn't help that I went to sleep at six in the AM, but even then I don't know where the rest of the day went. It's hard to believe my game was paused for twelve hours, but maybe. It's almost like jet-lag skipped me for the first couple of days and instead hit today, I thought it was Monday, it's Wednesday. This trophy guide seems straight forward enough, I just have to wake up and do it. I shouldn't be this tired, very strange.

What does Molly mean when she says she'll be gone soon? Does she mean the Family curse or is she ill? Also I managed to catch those two rabbits first try, I thought that trophy would hold me up for a while

@GirlVersusGame It’s been a while since I played, so based on my memory Molly was pretty ill, and hallucinating, with the added effect of all the stuff she was eating, namely the poison berries and so maybe she was just referring to the hallucinations, which involved animals eating others, so she figured she would be eaten soon also…? Something like that.

@Th3solution

@GirlVersusGame Hmm… note to self: bubble bath is not a good thirst quencher. Got it. 😄

But yeah, I think a lot of WRoEF is left open to interpretation. The weird family curse in the background, but the how’s and why’s of some of their actions can be unknown. I relate to eating weird stuff as a kid too though. Berries and mushrooms growing outside look perfectly edible. One gross thing I always thought looked edible as a kid was the big air freshener disc at the bottom of the public urinals. They look like a big candy mint! 😂 You all may not have seen those and nowadays they aren’t as common, probably because little kids try to eat them.

Ooh, awesome that you’re giving Invincible a try. It’s a much slower burn, but if you enjoy the first couple hours that’s good because I feel like it only gets better as the plot starts to make a little more sense. I’m impressed that the book it’s based on is from the 1960’s. It’s held up quite well.

Need for Speed Most Wanted 2012. It’s Burnout Paradise 2. It has literally zero progression. It has literally zero reason to keep playing. The end cutscene might as well just say ‘You’re Winner’. A hollow shell of a game, with admittedly decent graphics and a soundtrack that absolutely transports me back to the summer before I started High School, it’s got Bonkers by Dizzee Rascal, Galvanise by the Chemical Brothers, I Love It by Icona Pop/Charli XCX etc. Also it has weird remixes of Baba O’Riley and Won’t Get Fooled Again by The Who because it was 2012. There’s even a truly heinous Doors remix by Skrillex.

The music is genuinely the most interesting part of the game. Handling is brake to drift and if you don’t drift then you smash into the barriers. The crash camera is so annoyingly slow and long winded that I installed a mod to disable it. There’s no point using 99% of the car list because you gain access to way faster ones just wandering around the map, you find them and they’re yours. Each car has its own race list to unlock their own parts which is a decent idea, except progression then feels extremely scattergun. At milestones you unlock Most Wanted races, a 1v1 race against a supercar and then you smash them into the barriers to gain access to the car yourself. After a million points are gained from doing races and tedious open world schlock like smashing billboards and the world’s worst police chases, you unlock the race against a Koenigsegg, which I beat first time and the game was won. The end. That’s it.

I can imagine the devs in meetings throwing around ideas like ‘the game never ends, because you try and beat your friend’s times and scores’ and then high diving each other. The issue is that 1, the servers are down and 2, that just blatantly isn’t a very fun thing to do. I can’t imagine multiplayer was much fun either with that crash camera combined with sociopathic opponents bumping into you every 5 seconds. Just a truly odd game that I really should have enjoyed more. One of the clearest examples of that late PS3 into PS4 thing of ‘it’s not a game, it’s a platform’. I actually view The Run way more positively now, it tried something new and interesting which was hokey as sh*t but it tried. Onto Rivals now, a game I genuinely know nothing about.

@Th3solution I did it, I just finished The Invincible and I'm not sure what to say. It wasn't at all like I expected, cinematic fits as does unique. I really think anyone who likes good Sci-fi owes it to themselves to give it at least one playthrough. I can see why you liked it, they did a really good job with the ambience and in portraying the reality of the situation. I'm definitely going to play through it again for one hundred percent. I don't know what I was expecting from the game, a casual walk across some planetary landscape perhaps. It definitely deserves more recognition, I haven't seen many people talk about it. One of the parts that really stood out was when you launch the nukes at the flies and the score starts to build until just like piano keys each nuke hits. Then 'It's unbelievable, they're really just ... invincible!' I was thinking the same line and then the game said it, very memorable. Now I want to see it made into a movie, there's the seven hour audiobook by Stanisław Lem too. Very tempting.

It's gone right onto my playlist, there was no way I'd not add it. I wish that composer had more work, I see only four other games to his name.

@GirlVersusGame Oh fantastic! I’m glad we’re two for two on the recommendations. These Walking sims can really be a nice reprieve after pouring a lot of hours into a really long game. They’re nice little snack-sized morsels. I’m pleased The Invincible struck a note with you (pun only partially intended 😅) as yes, the music really does add to the atmosphere and accentuates some great moments. It has a chaotic yet empty, space-like feel to it.

The narrative does have some legit elements to ponder too. I’m a fan of moral and ethical dilemma in my games.

What kind of ending do you get? I’m unlikely to play it again anytime soon so I had already gone ahead and looked up the alternate endings, so you won’t be spoiling anything for me.

I was also exceedingly curious to find out how well the game represented the book, so my internet searches were also motivated by my desire to research that information too. Turns out there’s some definite differences, but one compliments the other, in many people’s view. I’m awaiting our resident expert of written word FuriousMachine to play the game so I can get the legitimate comparison.