Finished Any Games Lately?

After considerable life getting in the way, I got the platinum in God of War: Ragnarok. My opinion is unchanged: if you like those games—pseudo open world with a linear story— it is a very good one of those. If not, it offers little novel. But I do like those, and it had enough fun and spectacle to see me through.

I am planning on playing Kingmaker next as well and have spent the last month reading up on the different classes, abilities, etc. Still no clue what to pick.

I'm currently playing a sorceress because I have fond memories of stumbling through Icewind Dale as one when I was very young.

I've played some tabletop DnD and even DMd some games, but they've always been far more narrative-driven. There is just so much to character-building and combat.

I'm struggling to wrap my head around some of the rolls because they automatically calculate all of the modifiers before outputting the number. E.g, you might see "5 v 10: MISS", but the 5 is actually a 3 with your +2 modifier, and the 10 is actually a 12 with a -2 from being in combat. That layer of abstraction is making my head spin. I know I can check it all in the combat log, but you have to click through to a separate window to see all of the math.

I'm starting to think I should play something like Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny etc. instead while I'm still learning the intricacies of cRPGs.

Finished the DLC for the 2018 Spider-Man game. It's definitely one of those games that doesn't quiiiiite hold up to the difficulty being cranked up high. The controls aren't quite tight enough, and I found myself saying, "no, dammit, Spidey, not that way, THAT way!" more often than when things were more forgiving.

Still, it never stopped being a world that I loved spending time in. I voiced my complaints about the game's uncritical use of the "hero cop" trope elsewhere, and that never quite goes away despite the main cop character switching to the equally tired and problematic "loose cannon badass cop who doesn't go by the book but dammit, she gets the job done " by the end.

Still, I love that Spider-Man has become Marvel's moral and social conscience, and I think this game does a good job of capturing that side of him. He doesn't fight for vengeance or some abstract ideal like justice; at the end of the day, he's motivated by helping people and no matter how bad he screws up, he never loses sight of that for long.

Forcing myself to take a break before jumping into Miles Morales. I think it might be time for another playthrough of X-Com Enemy Within. Played the tiniest bit of Midnight Sun during that game's free weekend and all it really did was remind me how much I love X-Com.

Finished South of the Circle. It was a good little palate cleanser, but for a story-based game claiming to incorporate my choices, the ending did not reflect my choices, in fact it was the opposite of them. So much so that it may have been a bug!?

Finished Ixion. Its a sci-fi city builder on the inside of a donut of a space station. It was very challenging as the story puts a lot of morale and food supply pressure on you with limited space to solve these problems. I restarted the first 3 chapters 4 times, but each time I had an idea of what to do better so I ended up enjoying these restarts.

You're a mobile space station so each chapter involves exploring a star system, gathering up resources, and sending your science ship around Stellaris-style to resolve choose-your-own-adventure encounters.

I was very much not expecting this city building game to include a boss fight, but it did, and it was brilliant. In the end I loved the experience and I think it was priced correctly for the amount of content. I hope they will do some kind of sandbox mode or fast standalone expansions to extend the replayability, because the core concepts are great but there's not a lot of reason to want to do the story again.

I finished The Order 1886 on Sunday.

Summary? Poorly executed. Full of ultimately wasted potential.

I finished Ori and the Blind Forest yesterday. Took me 11 hours on hard mode. It was definitely hard. I hated the two speed challenges. And I found the story incomprehensible. But other than that I did enjoy it. Gorgeous presentation and great gameplay.

Finished up Yakuza: Like A Dragon over the weekend. Very much enjoyed it, though I don't have any intention of rerunning it in NG+ mode or even spending more than nominal time cleaning up uncompleted stories. I'd like to learn the stories of the party members I didn't max out relationships with, but it's not worth grinding the combat system for hours; I'll check youtube.

I think next I'm going to get back into the second Pathfinder game, or maybe Old World since I haven't really played that post-release.

Returnal. It took me a year, on and off. Probably the hardest game I've ever finished. And yet, by the end I was starting to think, "you know I might actually be getting good at this."

Superliminal. Short (4hrs) but amazing puzzle game where perspective plays a big part of how you solve puzzles. It initially has Portal vibes as you go through a bunch of training rooms. But then becomes its own thing. And ends rather nicely.

Some of the puzzles are very creative. There was only one time I got really stuck. And a few I had to do a bunch of trial and error. But loved the look of it throughout.

Think I had gotten this via a Humble Bundle but never tried it till now. Worth checking out.

IMAGE(https://thumbs.gfycat.com/WhimsicalSpryKestrel-size_restricted.gif)

I finished Submerged: Hidden Depths last night, a simple, relaxing collect-a-thon where a brother/sister duo explore a city covered by water, cleansing some kind of corruption as you go. It's intended to be a non-stressful experience without fail states, and I appreciated that about it. It's also quite short. Now that the story is finished, I'll be going after the collectables I missed before moving on to something else.

I played that last summer and had a very relaxing, enjoyable time as well. I'm glad you liked it!

Still plugging along on Assassin's Creed: Valhalla. Not done yet, but definitely have completed the bulk of the game.

Here's the preview of my review:

It's good.

It's very good.

It's not AC: Odyssey good.

But it's good!

Red Matter

In efforts to get my money's worth out of my Quest 2, I thought I should play something other than Walkabout Mini-Golf at some point. But what? I didn't feel in the mood for a 10-hour-plus commitment through Alyx or RE4, yet I also wanted something with a bit more meat than the silly, sandboxy Job Simulator-type stuff.

So enter Red Matter - an immersive puzzler set in an alternate reality. The main character is an American astronaut who lands at an abandoned Russian moon base to steal research secrets (okay, the nations have fictious names, but the Cold War allusions are clear). There are challenges to solve to progress through the base, and the story slowly unfolds about what happened to the people stationed there.

I expected a VR walking simulator with some fairly easy puzzles, and.... that's pretty much what I got, although I was pleasantly surprised by how much the game leans into horror; there are some seriously unsettling set pieces. These are rendered all the more effective by how immersive the game is. It's a gorgeous spectacle and difficult to believe that this is running natively on what is, let's face it, a weak headset.

All in all, a fun and interesting four hours or so that makes good use of the medium. A nice break from golfing...

Finally beat Inscryption over my days off! Overall, a game I enjoyed quite a lot, though the ending definitely left me scanning a wiki for an hour after the fact. I'm not sure if that impacted my overall enjoyment of the game in a positive or negative way, though the scanning around for answers definitely muted the impact at least a little bit. I wish I had a PC back in 2021 so that I could've played this alongside the folks who were singing its praises on release and actually been a part of those conversations. Now I find myself in a place where everyone else who's played it has moved on, and those who haven't shouldn't be subjected to my thoughts so as to not lose the impact of going through the game blind

I enjoyed the way the card game adapted throughout the Acts of the game, and every little variation made me grin. The game carries a delectable sense of humor with a lot of well-timed goofs that got real laughs out of me. I don't know what else to say that's spoiler-free, so I'll end it by saying: If you like rogue-like deckbuilders and somehow haven't played Inscryption yet, go give it a shot! It's on PS4 & Switch at this point, so you probably have something you can play it on by now.

Wrapped up a week of playing Horizon: Call Of The Mountain, the Horizon: Zero Dawn spinoff in VR last night. It's a bit of a bait-and-switch, in that about 85% of it is really a Horizon-themed version of Crytek's two The Climb: VR games. Turns out, though, that it's exactly what I wanted from a VR game, rather than "Horizon, but in VR!".

Because my VR experience up until now was just with the previous generation of PSVR, I haven't played either of the Climb games. Small bits of climbing have been a part of many of the VR games I've played, but traversal via climbing is really the meat of this game. There's some combat with bow and slingcaster, too, and I enjoyed it more than I expected to, but it didn't really change my belief that pretty much every game would be more fun for me if combat was removed; for me, combat (other than stealth, which is a fun puzzle) is something I have to get through to get to the parts of a game I like.

The sense of scale VR brings to everything really works well for climbing. I have mild acrophobia (or as I think of it, a perfectly reasonable trepidation about doing something that can kill you with a slight misstep), and there were definitely times I stood on a ledge or hung from a precarious handhold and had a really hard time convincing my body that I was actually just standing like a dork in my media room rather than about to plunge 1,000 feet to my doom. They do a really nice job of adding more and more climbing techniques throughout the game: you graduate from simple handholds and ladders to rope climbing, pickaxes, and zip lines, and eventually you're leaping across a crevasse, grabbing pickaxes from behind your back in midair, and slamming them into an ice wall to keep from plummeting to your death. Or, on a few occasions, failing to do so, in which case I recommend closing your eyes as you fall, in the Wile E. Coyote conviction that what you can't see won't kill you.

I really enjoyed this game. Production values are through the roof, there's all kinds of fun VR toys scattered through out (musical instruments to play, bowls of paint next to walls you can decorate, plates you can smash and throw like frisbees), the adaptive triggers and haptics of both the controllers and headset are put to good use, and despite putting over 200 hours into both of the previous Horizon games I only now really feel like I've been in that world. The story's just a way to take you from mission to mission, but it's not as cringe-inducingly bad as I find many game stories are, and to be honest because VR really can't give you a feeling of weight (although the haptics do a better job of that than any previous VR I've experienced) you're not so much pulling yourself up a mountain as pulling down the entire world, handhold by handhold. But wow, what a fantastic adventure I found this to be! Horizon: Zero Dawn was one of my favorite games of the PS4 generation, and unfortunately the firehose of grindy content that was its sequel wound up being one of my biggest disappointments of the current generation, so I really had no idea where this would land with me. To my shock, I'd rate it pretty close to the first one, while being a completely different kind of game.

Prey - the 2017 version. I think I picked this up as a free Epic Game Store giveaway at some point over the last year or three. It's certainly not a game I think I would have paid for!

I had no idea about this game to be honest, apart from vague memories of people being cross it wasn't the original game while at the same time thinking it was quite good. I have never played the 'original' game so had no vested interested coming into this, I think I was just looking for a palete cleanser from all the RPGs, tactical Turn based games and Colony / Survival management sims I've been playing lately.

Made by Arkane Studios this feels like an amalgamation of different FPS / RPG games that appeared to take bits of Dishonoured, Bioshock, System Shock and a dab of Mass Effect. You find yourself waking up and running some sort of scientific tests for your Family (Who make Elon Musk look like playschooler - although maybe he doesn't need that much help with that these days) and then something odd happens and you start to explore your environment to work out what's really going on.

As a story it's rather generic, but really well done, so in the end it's really quite good. There are plenty of RPG upgrades you can give yourself as you progress (think Bioshock style Plasmids) and a plethora of moral choices to make that really impact how the game plays out. There were clearly multiple endings

Spoiler:

In the end I decided to blow up the station

and also got another hidden ending I wasn't expecting due to another choice I had made while playing.

It was occasionally quite hard even on "normal" difficulty - as you explore from location to location there were some natural chokepoints on each level, and the game had a habit to placing some circumstantial ,but very tough enemies at those chokepoints occasionally making progression quite difficult. It also seemed to be that I frequently ran out of resources and was really limiting what I could use in combat situations and making you ration your ammo and other weapons. I actually thought this was to the games benefit to be honest, even if it really didn't help with the difficulty of some of the fights.

Towards the end of the game some of the enemies however were supremely annoying, especially where combat was occurring in microgravity environments. That let it down a little and I rushed through the final sections as it - and the story - began to just drag things out a little.

Overall though I was really quite impressed. It was just as much fun as the likes of Bioshock and Dishonoured I thought, it does feel a shame that it got so overlooked at launch.

Love seeing folks discover Prey (2017), quickly became one of my favorite games of all time when I checked it out during Year 1 of the pandemic. Be sure to play the rogue-like-adjacent DLC Mooncrash if you haven't already - more of that Transtar-timeline worldbuilding paired w/ great gameplay to boot.

My only beef w/ Arkane Austin's next upcoming project, Redfall, is that it isn't Prey 2. But a homie can dream.

hbi2k wrote:

Finished the DLC for the 2018 Spider-Man game. It's definitely one of those games that doesn't quiiiiite hold up to the difficulty being cranked up high. The controls aren't quite tight enough, and I found myself saying, "no, dammit, Spidey, not that way, THAT way!" more often than when things were more forgiving.

I remember coming to the same conclusion in the DLC, and even some of the later side stuff in the original game. Sometimes it felt like you basically have to dodge over and over again for nearly a full minute until there was actually a time you could get away with hitting one person without someone else hitting you, which started to make things either frustrating or tedious. Miles Morales fixes this problem by giving you a lot more moves that allow you to manage crowds of baddies better.

In a marathon 4 hour session, I finished Yakuza Like a Dragon last night! I was shedding tears of emotion and fatigue by the end of it. And relief - like all Yakuza games I've played, I had a great time but it was a slog by the end. I don't need to play another for a good long while.

Although this was supposed to be JRPG Yakuza, I found it to be basically a classic Yakuza game with turn based party combat. All the best bits are the things that have always been great about Yakuza: the endearing characters, the melodramatic plot, the detailed open world and so on. And here they are better than ever, particularly the main cast of middle aged losers. I maxed out all the character bonds, and did almost all the side quests, skits etc, just to spend more time with them, which is pretty unusual for me. The combat was merely OK, but I'm glad they decided to stick with it for the next game, since there is such a rich vein of ways they could enhance it based on other RPGs. I should be just about ready for another one by late 2024 or whenever it comes out.

TheMostRad wrote:

Love seeing folks discover Prey (2017), quickly became one of my favorite games of all time when I checked it out during Year 1 of the pandemic.

I plan to revisit it. I didn't give it a fair shake at the time because I was wanting more Deus Ex HR.

Baldurs Gate 1: Enhanced Edition - 25 hours (perfect length btw!)

I posted previously about trying to play Baldur's Gate 2 but struggling with the age of the game. I found BG2 slow, confusing, dated, and did I mention confusing? I put it down for some time but decided to start reading up on the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2 rules during my commute to and from work. This gave me the foundation I needed to understand what was happening under the hood. I started a beginner-friendly fighter/cleric as advised by Reddit and the Beamdog forums. I tried again...and it was better. I tried the next night, and oh my god, it clicked! It's still an outdated, confusing system, but it made sense!

Let me explain how unintuitive the systems can be briefly...

THAC0 is your chance to hit against an enemy with 0 armour class. THAC0 = 10 therefor means you roll a d20 dice and will hit on 10+ (50% chance). You subtract the enemy AC from this, so THAC0 = 10 rolling to hit AC = 5 means you hit on 10 - 5 = 5. This means that a lower AC is better than a higher one which is unintuitive for people familiar with modern RPG design. Armour isn't additive, so wearing a full plate armour sets your AC to 1 (but this differs based on piercing, crushing etc. damage which isn't immediately obvious).

Now for the absurd part. If that plate armour is enchanted with a +2 to AC, you'd expect it to be worse. We want a lower AC, right? Well...The +2 to AC indicates that it's a buff, so it actually means it's a -2 to AC. Okay, so +(stat) on our gear is lowering our stats, which is great! But what about the +5 HP on that same piece? Well, that doesn't count and it is just a pure addition. Our 20 HP fighter now has -2 to AC, but +5 to HP which is actually very strong at early levels. It's just communicated so poorly and does not help onboard new players at all.

With all of that (mostly) understood, I quickly poured 25 hours into BG2 and started to need more. Realising that this was such a special gaming experience, I decided to put my playthrough on hold and start at the beginning with Baldurs Gate 1; I wanted to do it the right way, and understand all of the back story and characters.

Knowing arcane magic was giving me trouble in BG2, I decided to throw caution to the wind and roll a mage. Best way to learn is by doing, right? I was immediately confronted by the age of the game. Despite it being "enhanced", it still felt considerably more dated than BG2. However, it's shocking how quickly those feelings melt away when you start playing. There is SO much to discover, and it's essentially a zone-based open-world game. There were way more recruitable companions than I expected, and the pool of spells I could find, try to learn, and eventually kill my party casting was incredible! Build diversity is through the roof, party composition feels limitless (I ended up choosing to forgo the 6-person max and focus on a smaller team which would earn more EXP, totally viable!).

The story was fine, maybe a little predictable but it had some nice layers. Party members were far less fleshed out than BG2, but it was the mechanical depth that I was playing for so I did not mind. I played through on "core" settings, which are 1 step up from normal (normal toning down the default DnD rules to better fit a videogame). It felt like a good difficulty with the occasional death-by-dice. Because you start at level 1, there is a lot more variance in how fights play out - sometimes it just takes one lucky hit for you or an enemy to be killed, and both of you will be missing a lot until endgame. I actually think I prefer this over BG2, because little upgrades matter so much more; you scour each area for resources, and a simple +1 sword can be a huge upgrade because you can actually hit things with it. Now imagine how I felt when I reached my higher tiers of spellcasting and was getting 3-4 100% accurate magic missiles per cast!

My only real issue now is how these games don't let you view enemy stats/buffs/spells. I'd love to know exactly what I need to roll to hit (for now I just have to make a guess based on my rolls). I'd also like to be able to see exactly which buff the pesky mage has cast so I can learn how to debuff it. There's a certain charm in fighting the unknown and learning as you go, but I think this can still be done while being a tad more transparent about the game mechanics and not requiring me to keep a wiki open while I play. But with that being said, I'll take this intelligent, mechanically deep system over modern Bioware simplicity any day of the week.

I've imported my mage and cool gear into BG2 and am excited to start fresh. I've already noticed some very cool references to the first game, some of which hit me a hell of a lot harder than my first time through the intro. However, I need a little break before soldering on.

I can see why this series is so highly regarded, BG1EE was one of the best RPG gaming experiences I've ever had.

ComfortZone wrote:

In a marathon 4 hour session, I finished Yakuza Like a Dragon last night! I was shedding tears of emotion and fatigue by the end of it. And relief - like all Yakuza games I've played, I had a great time but it was a slog by the end. I don't need to play another for a good long while.

This is the same experience I had with Zero

An incredible story, maybe one of the best videogame stories I've played through. The story requires a pretty long game to really dig into what it's trying to do...But the gameplay feels like it would better serve a 10-hour game. It got a bit too repetitive to me, but I pushed through and I'm glad I did.

I wish I enjoyed Like a Dragon more than I do. The JRPG stuff is just far too easy for 90% of the game, and information is obscured (weaknesses etc) which makes the later fights more frustrating than strategic (even then, the hard fights are few and few between). You can get by with satisfying beat-em-up stuff when it's easy, but unengaging turn-based combat feels like you're physically being stopped from playing every time you get bothered by a random encounter.

I hope I can finish LAD one day, because the story was incredible. I just wanted more from the JRPG side of it.

Midnight Suns is done. had a blast to start but in the end I just wanted it over with.

Sorbicol wrote:

Prey - the 2017 version. I think I picked this up as a free Epic Game Store giveaway at some point over the last year or three. It's certainly not a game I think I would have paid for!

I had no idea about this game to be honest, apart from vague memories of people being cross it wasn't the original game while at the same time thinking it was quite good. I have never played the 'original' game so had no vested interested coming into this, I think I was just looking for a palete cleanser from all the RPGs, tactical Turn based games and Colony / Survival management sims I've been playing lately.

Made by Arkane Studios this feels like an amalgamation of different FPS / RPG games that appeared to take bits of Dishonoured, Bioshock, System Shock and a dab of Mass Effect. You find yourself waking up and running some sort of scientific tests for your Family (Who make Elon Musk look like playschooler - although maybe he doesn't need that much help with that these days) and then something odd happens and you start to explore your environment to work out what's really going on.

As a story it's rather generic, but really well done, so in the end it's really quite good. There are plenty of RPG upgrades you can give yourself as you progress (think Bioshock style Plasmids) and a plethora of moral choices to make that really impact how the game plays out. There were clearly multiple endings

Spoiler:

In the end I decided to blow up the station

and also got another hidden ending I wasn't expecting due to another choice I had made while playing.

It was occasionally quite hard even on "normal" difficulty - as you explore from location to location there were some natural chokepoints on each level, and the game had a habit to placing some circumstantial ,but very tough enemies at those chokepoints occasionally making progression quite difficult. It also seemed to be that I frequently ran out of resources and was really limiting what I could use in combat situations and making you ration your ammo and other weapons. I actually thought this was to the games benefit to be honest, even if it really didn't help with the difficulty of some of the fights.

Towards the end of the game some of the enemies however were supremely annoying, especially where combat was occurring in microgravity environments. That let it down a little and I rushed through the final sections as it - and the story - began to just drag things out a little.

Overall though I was really quite impressed. It was just as much fun as the likes of Bioshock and Dishonoured I thought, it does feel a shame that it got so overlooked at launch.

PREY - 51 hours aprox

Came here to post about finishing PREY (2017) as well, I played the original way back early 00's I think? for the time it was really good, but I came to this new version with zero expectations regarding it being actually inspired by or trying to pick the same storyline.

I had started my play-through last year but due to my APU's limitations decided to hold on on it till I could find a decent GPU, which I did back in january. Dived back in and I had pretty much forgotten all the intro by then but didn't want to go back and replay it, so I endured and eventually remembered what was supposed to be happening. I liked this game overall, there were moments I felt a bit lost with all the side missions pulling me up and down the station but once I decided to focus on the main mission it picked up the pace and I managed to finish it today. It took me about 51 hours apparently and I was about to go on my way once the credits started but then the post-credit scene appeared and I can honestly say that, even thou one could expect something like it given the nature of the plot, I was caught completely off-guard by it and made me appreciate it a lot more once the proverbial marbles fell. Nice unexpected twist there, Arcane.

I finished the remastered Destroy All Humans... or I should say I played through the whole game, did everything I could do, got to the final boss, hit my head against that particular wall for about a week, and then decided I had had enough and watched the last cutscene on YouTube and called it a day. All in all, I had a very good time with the game and enjoyed the humor quite a bit.

I also started and finished a game called Papetura. It's a puzzle-adventure game you can play in one sitting in about an hour. It is short, not too difficult, and absolutely gorgeous. It is all made physically with paper by one single guy who created the whole thing, digitized it, animated it, and then got two other guys to complete the game: one did the score, and the other one, the visual effects. It is quite impressive to think it was done by such a small team! I thought the game was delightful, and I absolutely recommend it!

I finished the single player DLC for Resident Evil 8. For the most part it was a solid but unremarkable 'more of the same' experience, save for a middle section which was one of the most genuinely terrifying things I've ever experienced in a video game.

Spoiler:

I can't believe it took this long for someone to implement the Doctor Who 'weeping angels' mechanic in a game.

My 3 most recent game finishes are, in order of completion: Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Spiderman Remastered, and Hi-Fi Rush. By far the most enjoyment per hour was Hi-Fi Rush. The most visually impressive, most interesting gameplay, and the one that left me wanting more was Hi-Fi Rush.

I loved quite a bit of Xenoblade, and put in an astronomical 185 hours, but there's just too much fluff. The main cast was great, most of the supporting cast was good, with a couple stand out greats that didn't get enough screen time in my opinion. Especially colony 11's commander. Almost every aspect of the game that I wanted more of, they never dug super deep into it, and they spent tons of time on meaningless sidequests blocking your way to the extra hero stories. Man, I hope their next effort trims a lot of the fat as so much more was quite fun. I generally enjoyed combat and trying to get smash and, more often, burst combos. It was nice that fast travel between spots in the current region were snappy and took only as long as a fade to black akin to entering a town shop in most games. It was an interesting conclusion to the last 3 games, but it looks like the DLC may be the story wrap up I was hoping to get here. I might actually buy it, but I didn't go back for XC2, so we shall see.

Spiderman was good, but just didn't scream Amazing like it should have. The visuals were technically good but nothing I'll ever remember and found uninspired, unlike both the other games here, and by the time I was half way through the story I was already tired of being in New York city, yet again, which made getting around a boring chore only made interesting by me purposefully trying to utilize the full combination of mobility techniques. I really want to see Mile's story, but it'll be a while before I want to swing back into action with that setting.

And of course, the surprise release hit, Hi-Fi Rush came screaming to the end with just the right timing to hit me upside the head and make me want more. Fantastic visual style, nailing the cel-shaded look throughout the whole package as opposed to many games where they make the characters cel-shaded and the backgrounds end up looking drab and stuck in this weird in-between realistic and cartoony place. This game nailed the visuals, pacing, delivery, ramp-up to the end, combat, and integration of it all with the music. But if you've been paying attention, you already knew all of that, or most. The one thing I was not impressed with was the navigation. It was generally ok, but could have used more elements that played to the game's strong suit including changing stationary quick time events to something more dynamic and in-motion. Still a great game and released with expert timing to land a smash hit.

I started and finished AER Memories of Old this weekend. This is a small game where you explore a bunch of floating islands in the sky by transforming into an eagle. There are some very light puzzles to solve, and after exploring in the sky you delve underground in the islands to explore more and unlock more of the story and lore. It's a wonderfully easy breezy game, took perhaps 3 hours to finish, and didn't outstay its welcome. I'd love a longer, more expanded sequel with some deeper mechanics, but at the same time I'm happy to play a game that knows what it is and doesn't pretend it's something more.

Finished Control. I quite enjoyed it- a rare game nowadays that I was almost sad to finish it. It was such a major step up from the Alan Wake games I had just played. This gives me some hope for Alan Wake 2. That said, I found myself rolling my eyes a bit when Wake came back for the DLC and did his patented typing and reading from his novel/autobiography. That had gotten pretty old by the end of the American Nightmare. For fleshing out the world, I much preferred Control's variety of classified documents, educational videos, and supernatural messages.

The combat was fun. Definitely a step up from shining flashlights with defectively low battery life, then shooting. Nothing beats telekinetically throwing a forklift into a group of baddies. Why wasn't the combat in Jedi: Fallen Order more like this?

It may not count as an immersive sim, but Control had the detailed non-linear levels of an immersive sim. Exploration was rewarded. I appreciate that everything seemed like a functional office complex with logically placed hallways, break areas, bathrooms, labs, maintenance areas, etc. Failing at this is becoming a pet peeve of mine. I feel especially let down by Bioware in this regard.