A few of the things that have us hooked this week.
Here’s another question: do you remember what you were playing last week? You don’t have to! The What We’ve Been Playing archive has you covered.
The first few days of playing any fighting game is about finding a character, and I’ve been hunkered down and going through the roster doing exactly that. At the moment it’s Star Lord; something about swapping elemental shots mid-combo is really fun to me. Green Goblin is too big-brain for me; I can’t wrap my head around the glider.
Playing online has been good fun. Granted, I’ve turned off crossplay so PC players don’t get matched up with me. But I’m excited to go outside and play it at a somewhat local hangout soon!
I’ve wanted to play this for a while; I’ve wanted to go to demon school for a while. I’ve long had a hunch I’ll have a – wait for it – fiendishly good time there. Grin.
Demonschool is a tactics role-playing game that came out late last year. What’s impressed me so far is how easy it’s been to get along with. I bounce off games pretty quickly. I’m horrendously un-sticky when it comes to, well, sticking with things, but I got straight into this. And I’ve been trying to work out why.
A large part of it comes from the game’s upbeat nature, I think. You’re an endearingly fighty student called Faye who’s off to Demonschool, which it turns out is a bad place to be, but at every chance you’re delighted and ready to throw down. There’s a lesson for life there. The dialogue isn’t voiced but it’s rammed with charisma and energy, and it’s helped along by colourful and expressive talking-head artwork.
Another part comes from the grid-based combat system, which reminds me a lot of Fights in Tight Spaces, which I heart. That is to say that it’s a game about positioning and moving the other enemies around so that you can chain combo-attacks together and wreck them big style, as the children say (no one says this, Bertie). Those things taken together plus the general clarity and pace of the game make it enormously easy to get into. So far, so good.
Also I’ve been chipping away at Slay the Spire 2 and Hades 2, as ever, and making incremental progress, and I installed Grand Theft Auto 5 on PC and made myself feel horrendously sick. It’s the motion. Still, nauseous or not, there’s no denying how impactful that game is even all these years later. There’s no other game that does what GTA does.
After years of spamming attacks on my Xbox controller in an array of games, my dominant arm has decided to fight back and has been griefing me a lot lately, which means I’ve not been able to do as much gaming outside of work as I’d like. That said, my medical record now says ‘gamer’ on it, and nothing, not even the doctor’s orders to chill the fuck out, will stop me from playing one of my most anticipated games of the year: Big Walk. What I will do is play it in short bursts, because if I can do anything well, it’s compromising.
Fortunately, Big Walk isn’t an intense game that has me aggressively spamming my controller buttons in fear of my life (and my Runes!), and has actually been the perfect game to play while feeling a little sorry for myself. It’s cosy, focuses on communication between friends (and the chaos that ensues when you can’t efficiently communicate), and has a lovely, twinkly soundtrack that makes all the neurons in my brain start dancing in delight. My group hasn’t made it too far on our big walk just yet (as I said, short bursts are the way to go right now!), but I am looking forward to solving more tactile puzzles and being carried around the wilderness by my friends.
