Games You've Beat 2021 - PXoD's Excellent Adventure

[MetalCaveman]

Senran Kagura Peach Ball used the HD rumble, it was pretty fun, I believe SK Reflexions also used it, but the pinball theme of peach ball made it more noticeable.

[TheMightyEthan]

Maquette

 

This is a puzzle game with a really cool recursive area concept, that could have been used a little better. For the most part the puzzles were manageable to figure out, without being obvious, but there were a few where I got stuck and when I finally looked up the answer I though "I would literally never have figured that out", which isn't a great thing for a puzzle game. The concept mostly makes up for that though, because it really is cool, and makes you feel really smart when you do figure out a puzzle.

 

3/5

[Mister Jack]

The Last Guardian

 

I never played this on the PS4 because I heard it had technical issues, but it's part of the PS Plus Collection on PS5 so I figured by now the performance problems should be a non-issue on the new hardware. The good news is that the game performs just fine on the PS5. The bad news is that it's locked to 30 FPS. Oh well.

 

As far as the game's quality goes, the most impressive thing about it by far is Trico himself, and rightfully so. He moves, acts, and feels like a real animal and the animators obviously spent a lot of time studying real life animals to get the movements and behaviors down just right. Despite how huge Trico is, I never had any immersion breaking moments where he gets stuck on a wall or anything else like that. Whenever he was in motion it always felt totally natural, which is an impressive accomplishment. Trico has a ton of personality and it's very easy to get attached to him (I'm just assuming Trico is male). He helps you solve puzzles and reach higher platforms, defends you from enemies, and can even save you from falling now and then. The bond you forge with this animal feels real and I grew to legitimately love the big guy.

 

Of course, the fact that Trico acts like a real animal and not an AI can also be a bad thing sometimes. Your ability to progress depends completely on Trico listening to your commands. Sometimes he understands what you want him to do right away and sometimes you just want to whap him with a rolled-up newspaper until he gets it through his thick head. I don't know if this was intentional or not but it is a serious problem that leads to frustration fairly often. It especially doesn't help when the puzzle solutions can be pretty cryptic and the in-game hint system is rarely helpful. For example, one puzzle required me to tell Trico to stick his head through a hole so I could use him as a platform to get higher up. I had been playing for about 10 hours at this point and this was something Trico had never done before, nor had the game indicated to me that this was a thing he even COULD do. Even when you know what to do, you might fool yourself into thinking you don't because if Trico doesn't listen to you it's easy to believe you're on the wrong track. I ended up just keeping a walkthrough open on my phone after a while. Unfortunately, the controls are also bad. Anyone who has played a Team Ico game knows that they tend to have awkward, delayed controls. The Last Guardian is no exception. It's the kind of bad you can get used to but it's still bad. I hate using triangle to jump, too. I hate that I can't change it and I really hate that the tutorial pop-ups can't be disabled either, especially because they'll be popping up and reminding you how to climb things all the way to the end of the damn game. This might just be me, but I'm also not fond of how much of the story is left as a mystery. Why was the boy taken? What are those markings on his skin? Who or what is the villain and what exactly is their goal? None of this is ever explained. I know that for a lot of people it's about the journey and not the destination, but I say that's a J.J. Abrams-tier excuse.

 

So yeah, this game is a mixed bag. I don't want to say it's just average because what they accomplished with Trico as a character is really impressive and deserves to be experienced. Just know you'll be having to put up with some bullshit along the way. I liked it and I'm glad I played it but I won't be going for the platinum, especially when this game is pretty stingy with its trophies. I made it all the way to the end with only four trophies to show for it and one of them was because I accidentally spied on Trico taking a dump once.

 

Spoiler

On a side note. I'm really glad Trico didn't die in the end. I was worried for him for hours but the game was merciful enough to not break my heart. I hate it when animal companions die in games.

 

Edited March 5, 2021 by Mister Jack

[TheMightyEthan]

I found that game extremely frustrating (I played it years ago on PS4, but after performance patches so it was mostly fine), mostly for the reasons you say: often I would solve a puzzle, but wouldn't realize it, because I couldn't get Trico to do the thing I needed him to, so I would assume that wasn't what I was supposed to do. Other times I knew 100% what I was supposed to do but couldn't get him to do it anyway. Extremely frustrating.

 

The reason I came in here:

 

Sackboy: A Big Adventure

 

I played this with my wife, and it was a lot of fun. Way better than any of the Little Big Planet games, and much less frustrating too. I've heard people compare it to Super Mario 3D world, and I wouldn't put it quite that high, there were a few too many times I died that I weren't because I messed up but because the game screwed me, but it's still really good overall.

 

4/5

[Mister Jack]

Bugsnax

 

Yeah, another free PS+ download. I do appreciate Sony letting me redeem this even before I owned a PS5. Anyway, this game is cute and silly. You can't die or fail a quest so it's pretty laid back. The challenge comes in figuring out how to capture each species of Bugsnax. Some of them you can just lay down a trap and wait for them to walk into it, but plenty of others will require you to get more creative. It's neat and the bugsnax themselves can be kind of adorable, walking around saying their names like they're Pokemon or something. Look at this damn silly talking burger and tell me it isn't just precious.

 

The muppet-like Grumpus characters you interact with are also taken a bit more seriously than I expected from a game like this. As you get to know them you end up learning all about their depression or existential crises or even their issues with their sexuality. It was honestly a little jarring at times, but it also made the characters more memorable so I guess I can't say it was a bad thing. Anyway, it's a cute game. Not terribly long and a not very difficult platinum so I'll probably go for it.

[TheMightyEthan]

Yeah, I liked that game way more than I expected to. Quite a lot of fun.

[Thursday Next]

Same. Surprised me in a good way.

[TheMightyEthan]

Maneater

 

As I said in the currently playing thread, this game is a lot of stupid fun, which is what I wanted. It's not quite as ridiculous as I was hoping, but it's close. It's not an amazing game by any means, and the objectives are extremely repetitive, but if you got it through PS+ or can get it cheap I recommend it for some brainless silliness.

 

3/5

[Mister Jack]

Demon's Souls Remake

 

Okay, so I liked this game. I didn't love it, but I liked it. The lightning fast load times, buttery smooth performance, and quality of life improvements went a long way toward warming me up to Demon's Souls, but I have to say that there is still some stupid bullcrap that is intrinsic to the game itself and was never going to be changed. I don't like the world tendency system. It just cuts you off from content if you're not in the right tendency. It also makes the game harder if you're doing poorly, which is the opposite of how it should be. In fact, I really can't think of anything positive or interesting that this whole system adds. Being blocked off from paths or having extra enemy spawns because you're in the wrong tendency is dumb. It wouldn't bother me so much if getting white tendency didn't require killing other players in PVP, which can be easier said than done in a Souls game. I also REALLY hate that your health bar is cut in half when you die. Is it not enough that I get sent all the way back to the beginning of the level and lose all my souls in the process? You have to take off 50% of my life bar too? Granted, you can get your life bar back by doing co-op, pvp, or using a certain consumable item, but if you die as a human then it fucks up your world tendency so you're really just better off staying in soul form the whole time. See why I hate the tendency system? The humanity in Dark Souls was much more fair, and even then I thought it was a dumb system. That's why I'm glad Bloodborne just gives you the bells to summon or be summoned with and you don't have to worry about all that bullcrap.

 

Those things irritate me just as much now as they did back on the PS3. However, the changes made in the remake are just enough for me to say that my time with Demon's Souls was more positive than negative. If I discount the shiny new graphics and next-gen performance I'd probably still call it my second to least favorite game in the Souls series after Dark Souls 2. I didn't hate it though, so I call that progress.

[Thursday Next]

16 hours ago, Mister Jack said:

Demon's Souls Remake

 

I agree that WT punishment for dying in body form is daft. If only because it adds a pointless trip to the nexus after every boss. My biggest issue with it is that going to PBWT is easy, just use an ephemeral stone and die lots. Going to white is so much harder since you need to either beat a boss, of which there are a limited number, or beat an invader which requires you to be in body form, which means that if you get ganked, you've done the opposite of what you were trying to achieve. If using stones to regain body form gave you WWT then that would be ok. You could use a stone, go to nexus, die, go back, use stone etc.

 

As it is, I played through the whole game in soul form with the cling ring. *shrug*

 

On 3/5/2021 at 5:08 PM, TheMightyEthan said:

Maquette

 

It doesn't do a great job of explaining how things work, like you can use a key on a door in the 1:1 scale world, but you can also use that key in 1:2 scale world as well.

 

Spoiler

I'm currently stuck having just unlocked the church. No idea what the game wants me to do now.

 

[Mister Jack]

@Thursday Next It almost feels like the cling ring is mandatory unless you're a total god at the game, which I am not. That's a pet peeve of mine in general with some games, not just Demon's Souls. I hate it when I feel like I'm required to play a certain way to get anywhere, like when Hollow Knight doesn't even show where you are on the map unless you use up some accessory slots for the privilege of a map marker.

[Thursday Next]

Yeah, it's definitely soft-mandatory, and that 100% sucks.

Edited March 11, 2021 by Thursday Next

[TheMightyEthan]

@Thursday Next Maquette solution to the puzzle you're stuck on:

 

Spoiler

Take the regular-sized staircase and put it on the small-scale model leading up to the church bell, then walk up it (still in the small-scale model) and interact with the bell.

 

That was one I had to look up, and when I did I realized I would literally never have figured it out.

[Mister Jack]

Spider-Man: Miles Morales

 

Well that was short. There's an okay amount of side content but I still think this is about 10 dollars too expensive. Putting the price aside, this is a good expansion that does a decent job establishing Miles as a character. I'm glad they set Miles up in a spin-off game so that we won't have to waste a bunch of time doing his spider training in the sequel and the plot can just focus on the main story. The venom powers and invisibility are pretty cool additions. Other than that it's pretty much just more of Insomniac's Spider-Man so it's as good as you would expect.

 

Spoiler

They did a pretty good job making The Tinkerer feel like an actual threat.

 

[TheMightyEthan]

I actually thought it was the perfect size, and would have liked it less if there had been more stuff.

[Thursday Next]

On 3/11/2021 at 7:07 PM, TheMightyEthan said:

That was one I had to look up, and when I did I realized I would literally never have figured it out.

 

Came across a really annoying bug where a switch that was supposed to open a door that closes on a timer would "switch" but not actually *do* anything. Spent about an hour reposition stuff to see if I was supposed to put the the dome in different places before I gave up and googled the solution, then after seeing that I was doing what I was supposed to be doing, googled the bug. Had to restart the level and finally finished the game. That's the real problem with puzzle games that don't give you the remotest clue of what you are supposed to be doing, there is no way to know if the thing is actually broken.

 

Anyway, it's done now. Not doing the time trial trophies, so it has been deleted from the hard-drive.

[TheMightyEthan]

I did the time trial trophies, they actually weren't hard once you know the solutions. Honestly the one I had the most trouble with was the very first one, where you're just walking through the garden with no "puzzles".

 

Pro-tip for if you ever decide to go back and do them: if you reload a save earlier in the level it voids the trophy, so if you mess up you have to restart the whole level.

[TheMightyEthan]

Super Mario 3D World: Bowser's Fury

 

This game is pretty good by Mario standards (so really good by overall standards), and is a great experiment in an open-world Mario game, but it definitely has some rough edges that show it's just a first attempt. The most obvious thing is that since there aren't "levels", there isn't really a hard break when you get a shine, it's more like any other collectible, you just grab it and keep playing, but they still used the classic 3D Mario mechanic of each shine changing the level in some way to set up the next one. However, since there's no break and reload, it doesn't happen immediately, you have to leave the area and come back for the island to reload, which can get kind of tedious if you're working on a specific island.

 

The bigger thing, though it's not as obvious at the beginning, are the Bowser fury attacks. They gradually get more and more common as the game goes on, so at first they're not too bad, but later on they get frequent enough that their disruption can make it much harder than it should be to get certain shines. It's not a huge issue, but it's the kind of thing that starts to get pretty irritating over time, and needs to be fixed in any follow-up.

 

Really though, on the whole it's great, and the little niggles are just that, the kind of thing any first entry in a new series (or in this case new take on an old series) is going to have, and I'm sure can be fixed in future games. I look forward to a full-sized game in this style.

 

5/5

[toxicitizen]

Call of Cthulhu

 

That would be the 2018 one. It's... fine. It's alright. It was good enough for me to finish it (although it did take me like two months of playing on and off despite its fairly short length).

 

This is one of those games that sounds fantastic on paper but completely fails to deliver on its promise. It looks weird and low budget, it plays weird and low budget, and whatever interesting mechanics it has are half-baked or ultimately pointless. At first, it seems like it's a borderline immersive-sim with semi-open levels, RPG mechanics, and multiple ways to tackle objectives! But it becomes obvious very quickly that it's all pretty shallow and way too limited to qualify as any of those things. You can basically see the seams where ambition clashed with reality. This could've been a pretty damn good horror game had it had a real budget (and perhaps been in the hands of a more skilled developer.)

 

Also, for a game called "Call of Cthulhu: The Official Video Game", it sure has sweet fuck all to do with the Call of Cthulhu short story, or even Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos in general. As it is, it's really more of a heavily-inspired-by kinda deal and it feels like they only slapped the name on it for brand recognition and because it was in the public domain and, presumably, free.

 

If you're in the mood for a Lovecraftian detective game and can look past severely lacking production values, it's honestly not that bad. Like I said, it was good enough for me to finish it and I'm glad I gave it a shot. And if you got it from a bundle like me, then there's really no reason not to give it a shot. But I'm not sure I could recommend buying it on its own unless it was dirt cheap, like less than 10 dollars. Probably closer to 5...

Edited March 20, 2021 by toxicitizen

[TheMightyEthan]

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim

 

This game deserves its hype. I've never been so captivated by what is essentially a visual novel (with an ATB strategy game bolted onto it). But holy shit, this thing is amazing. I'm in awe of the writers, developing this absurdly complicated timeline with interacting stories of 13+ characters. It's nuts, and so good.

 

5/5

[Mister Jack]

Doom Eternal: The Ancient Gods - Part Two

 

The absolutely insane, ball breaking difficulty of part one has been dialed back for part two. It's still pretty challenging, but it's not the hardest shooter I've ever played in my life. In fact, I've heard rumors that they patched part one to be less punishing but I haven't gone back to verify this myself. While you don't have any bullshit like huge battles in heavy fog in part two to make your life miserable, I think the main reason part two is easier than part one is because you're given a really powerful new weapon that not only does respectable AOE damage around you but also dazes enemies AND makes them drop pickups. You can't spam it endlessly but refilling the charge for it isn't hard to do so you'll probably be using it at least 3-5 times in every major battle which really helps in keeping you alive. I know it saved my bacon more than a handful of times. There are new enemies that are only vulnerable to certain weapons to keep you from being totally overpowered, but you're still in a pretty good position thanks to that weapon. The final boss fight is easier than the part one boss too, mostly because the arena isn't full of lasers and buffed enemies and other bullshit like that. It feels more like a proper duel, although the ending is a little anticlimactic after pretty much the entire Doom franchise was building up to this battle. Oh well. Still a kickass shooter and a worthy expansion to Doom Eternal.

[Mister Jack]

Call of Duty: Black Ops III

 

It was free to PS5 owners with PS+. Yeah, that sure was a Call of Duty game. It's fine but the futuristic cybersoldier mechanics don't really all all that much to the gameplay except for an enhanced HUD and hacking enemy drones. Plot was kind of creative, I suppose. You know, for a Call of Duty game.

 

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Thursday Next]

On 3/26/2021 at 8:26 PM, Mister Jack said:

Call of Duty: Black Ops III

 

It was free to PS5 owners with PS+. Yeah, that sure was a Call of Duty game. It's fine but the futuristic cybersoldier mechanics don't really all all that much to the gameplay except for an enhanced HUD and hacking enemy drones. Plot was kind of creative, I suppose. You know, for a Call of Duty game.

 

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

I don't get why people liked that game (the plot was utterly impenetrable) and yet hated Infinite Warfare which actually had a decent story (even if I feel like it borrowed rather heavily from Killzone, Helghast politics stuff).

[TheMightyEthan]

Infinite Warfare was the first Call of Duty I really liked since the original Modern Warfare, but sadly no one else seemed to agree.

[Thursday Next]

It's weird, on paper it should have been well received. Solid story, some new mechanics (flying jackals and that), Jon Snow as the antagonist (when he was a thing). I just think that we got unlucky that the anti-space thing became the favoured opinion to have and it snowballed from there.