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The Quarry The folks who made Until Dawn are back with what is largely their first 'traditional' offering in years. No weird multi-screen gaming experiences, or 6-monthly released anthology's here, just a bunch of dumb-but-sexy-teens making typical dumb-but-sexy-teen like errors in judgement, only this time we're away at summer camp. I'm only a few hours in, but what I've played so far has been a welcome return to a formula I really enjoy, with a tiny bit more work thrown into the overall look and feel of the game; the teens have emotions and the camp has god-rays and soft lighting. To be fair, they've clearly been working on their facial tech. The Quarry is a noticeable improvement on their previous offerings. They've still not got the eyes or the teeth quite right, but everything else looks absolutely incredible.

Ozzy + Jeff Beck HELL YEAH!! \m/ \m/

Fate Grand Order NGL, This one hurts. Been playing for five years, since launch, but I think it's time to drop it. Started a couple months ago when I lost access to my account for a couple of days, realized not only that I was OK with not getting it back, but how stupid the system is. All other games I play let you bind your account to Google/Twitter/FB/Whatever and you can even easily move from one device to another, FGO on the other hand requires that you generate a transfer code and password, which are one-use every time you change devices you must generate a new one. Told myself I'd make it to the summer event, but then the anniversary quests were released (yup, I'm dropping this game during its anniversary lol) and they were a reminder of how much the gameplay has stagnated, specially when compared to recently released games like Counterside and Artery Gear, not to mention other games that have much better gameplay. How do we deal with really strong servants and strong team comps? Make it so enemies have multiple health bars, each with more HP than before, and they get massive buffs after each bar break. Some enemies have HP in the millions, while some of the highest HP player servants barely make it past 20K, plus enemies can spam evade, invincible, AND HP restore buffs. Oh and they can also remove all buffs and lower your defence, once again, without any cooldown. That, or force the player to bring story specific servants that are underleveled, or don't have access to all their skills. Clearing certain chapters became a matter of either having VERY specific servants, which meant getting lucky in the gacha (or throwing $1000s into it), having friends that had those specific servants, spend a ton of time trying to beat a boss using stall teams or use premium currency to respawn your team after being defeated. The grind was insane, having to grind items to get the thing you need to unlock the grind for another item that allowed you to grind for the thing you actually wanted. Grind is a common thing in gacha games, but at least other games have some sort of auto function that automatically clears stages or a skip function that allows you to quickly clear maps, making the grind easier/faster. In general, the gameplay and QoL systems have NOT aged well and are severely lacking when compared to other games. The gacha is one of the worst in any game I've played, though I managed to stay F2P, it wasn't rare to see people drop $100s or even $1000s and not get the character they were looking for. Even the story started to lose me after a while, not that it's bad, on the contrary, it's quite good, but the writing style has become a bit too bloated for me, there's a good story there, it's just buried under characters repeating themselves multiple times, other characters repeating the same thing several times (Shimousa was the worst in this regard) and other bloat. TL;DR: Recent releases made me realize that I wasn't having fun with this any more, the stagnated gameplay, bloated story and terrible gacha didn't help. Five years is a hell of a run though, specially as F2P.