What Have You Been Playing... IN JANUARY 2025?
Sujet : What Have You Been Playing... IN JANUARY 2025?
De : spallshurgenson (at) *nospam* gmail.com (Spalls Hurgenson)
Groupes : comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.actionDate : 01. Feb 2025, 17:19:33
Autres entêtes
Message-ID : <lrhspjltqo8598jqtg9u3gqsq3dqlu0ii5@4ax.com>
User-Agent : Forte Agent 2.0/32.652
Oy, what a month. It just hasn't been conducive to gaming; in fact,
the few games I played were almost forced just to say I played
SOMETHING this month. But even when I had time, I just had a hard time
deciding what to play; I just didn't want to engage with anything too
long or involved. So I did what I usually did, and picked a game
already long-installed on my hard-drive.
Next month hopefully will be better.
Quick
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* Eurotruck Simulator 2
* Fort Solis
* Backrooms: Escape Together
Whereupon I Present To You An Exceptionally And Unpleasantly Lengthy
And Loquacious Exemplification Of The Myriad Entertainments That
Occupied Both My Diurnal And Nocturnal Hours
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* Eurotruck Simulator 2
When I can't think of anything else to play, I play this. I'll spare
you from a long ramble on the game --I really don't have anything new
to say anyway-- except that the experience was slightly different
thanks to the new additions of "lane keeping" and "adaptive cruise
control", and that I added some very cute kitties to my truck (fully
animated too!) that made the drives less lonely. But otherwise, it's
still the same Truck Driving Sim, and if you haven't been convinced to
try it by any of my past posts, I doubt this one will make you think
any differently.
* Fort Solis
I should have liked this game. An atmospheric sci-fi adventure set on
Mars? It's right up my alley. But this is such an unpleasant game that
-right from the start- it was a struggle for me to keep playing it.
It's as if the developers tried to work in every user-hostile trope of
game mechanics into their game. It's awful.
Even before beginning the game, the game was disagreeable. It was a
simple thing, but annoying all the same: you can't remap your keys.
There's no reason for it; it's a basic feature built into Unreal
Engine, and yet the developers decided that THEIR control scheme was
the only one allowed. It's not a big thing on its own, but it speaks
legions to how the developers thought: we know best.
But once the game starts, it doesn't take long before other flaws
appear. The most obvious, of course, is the slow walking speed of the
protagonist. You move at a crawl. Even holding down the shift key
(which you will be doing for the ENTIRITY of the game), you still move
slower than in any other game. It's aggravating. But /everything/ in
this game is languorous. The pacing is comatose. The game starts with
you watching a two-minute drive through a bland canyon. Just following
your space-buggy as it slowly creeps across the rocky terrain. I'm
guessing it's supposed to be setting the tone and mood for the game,
reminding us we're in a hostile environment far away from everyone.
What it actually did was have me reach for my cell-phone to check my
email until the cutscene ended. And the rest of the game isn't any
different. Pick up an object and watch as the protagonist slowly
fiddles with it. Too much information is related through dull
video-logs that you can skip forward through. _Every_ conversation is
slow and drawn out. Tedium, thine name is "Fort Solis".
The actual gameplay is equally tiresome. It consists of (very slowly)
walking around fairly generic and uninteresting maps, desperately
scanning the room looking for some interactive point that will allow
you to move forward. Most of the points you encounter don't do that;
they're just to add world detail. A lot of the doors are locked.
You'll need to find a key to open them... and then come back and
revisit all the doors you passed by earlier will open now that you
have the appropriate gewgaw.
It all wouldn't be so bad if there were some reward for this tedium.
But the game doesn't do anything novel... or really that interesting.
The aesthetics of the game are all extremely generic space-station
sci-fi industrial grunge. The story goes exactly where you expect it
to. The characters are all unlikable (and extremely stupid. The
protagonist, entering an installation where there are obvious power
problems, takes his space helmet off immediately and leaves it behind,
and even as he traipses past numerous blood puddles remains blindingly
oblivious that maybe Something Bad has happened). The game gives you
absolutely no reason to want to keep pushing forward, to solve the
mystery (as I said, the protagonist barely acknowledges there is a
mystery).
Shall I continue? It's so easy to hate on this game, but it deserves
it all. Your character's walk animation is weird. The camera is often
frustrating. There's this weird screen-tearing effect that no amount
of v-sync or frame generation could fix. When reading emails in-game,
the screen is shown at an angle making everything difficult to make
out. Your in-game wrist-computer reflects ambient light, again making
it hard to see what's on the screen due to the glare. The quick-time
events come out of nowhere, are often randomized, and seem to have no
real effect on the outcome anyway; they're just annoying
interruptions.
There's nothing to like about this game. Even the visuals --which
aren't too bad-- can't be attributed to the talent of the team; it's
Unreal Engine 5; of course it looks good (and even then, it doesn't
really stand out against any of its peers). I'd like to say all these
problems are due to the inexperience of the developers, except they
don't seem accidental or unwitting. It seems to be all part and parcel
of the developer's vision for the game. "Fort Solis' is a bad game,
with awful characters, boring story, absolutely terrible gameplay
mechanics and uninteresting aesthetics. It was a chore to play and
completely unrewarding in the end. What a waste of time and effort,
both on my part and the developers.
* Backrooms: Escape Together
There's nothing really wrong with "Backrooms". I just don't like it.
"Backrooms" is what I call a meme-game; a game built around a popular
meme found on the Internet. These pop-up occasionally, a reaction to
some developers hearing the meme and thinking, 'Wouldn't it be cool if
there was a game based on that?' These usually involve vaguely
supernatural topics; that SCP game, for instance, or the one about
Slenderman.
And there's nothing really wrong with these games; I've found they're
usually projects made with a lot of passion and surprising amount of
talent... but they're almost entirely made for people the community
who revolves around those memes, and don't work well with people
outside it. To outsiders, the games tend to feel sort of pointless and
shallow.
"Backrooms" is based on the liminal-spaces-are-scary 'backrooms' meme,
that hypothesizes a reality of stacked dimensions, each one a
creepypasta array of empty rooms and corridors of varying spookiness.
The game itself has you exploring these levels, finding the hidden
gate to the next one, avoiding the various environmental traps and
monsters, whilst maintaining your sanity and health meters. There
levels themselves are actually fairly imaginative... albeit within the
liminal spaces tropes, which means they are all basically just dull
boring hallways. But if you buy into the meme and find liminal spaces
creepy, you'll dig this game's vibe.
Not me, though. An empty room is just an empty room for me, and an
empty hallway just what I pass through to get to the next room.
There's nary a frisson of terror going up my spine as I walk through
these places, so the overall effect of the game to me is boredom as I
walk past through identical looking , procedurally generated corridors
whose main difference from the level above is the texturing. And the
sudden deaths --when I plummet down some unseen shaft, or a monster
suddenly and unavoidably leaps at me-- feel more cheap than scary.
But, like I said, I'm not really the targeted audience for these
games. I'm not in the community that finds liminal spaces creepy,
jump-scares interesting; the ones who watch Twitchers stream their
games and scream in joyous terror when their run is suddenly cut
short. I'm not condemning these players; I can intellectually
understand the appeal. I just don't feel it personally.
Which is sort of a shame, because I think the Backroom mythos actually
is sort of interesting, and if the game was a bit deeper, and a bit
less focused on satisfying the immediate audience that helped create
it, the game probably would have legs. Heck, Remedy's 2020 game,
"Control", shares a lot of its DNA with "Backrooms" and it found a
much wider audience. So I think there is potential for a game like
"Backrooms" to have much wider appeal and -in fairness- the game
itself is still in Early Access. But as it stands now, unless you are
really into the backrooms meme-mythos, "Backrooms" isn't that much fun
to play.
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Alright, that's it for me. Not much, but we can't every month be
playing the bestest-and-greatest. Sometimes it's just a slow month,
and that's January for me.
But what about you? Was this a hot month of gaming for you, or as slow
as mine? See, I guess what I really want to know is:
What Have You Been Playing... IN JANUARY 2025?
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