What games are you playing?

Recently I played What Remains of Edith Finch and Virginia. The former was a pretty straight up exploration of a really nicely designed house with an emphasis on the individual stories of the family members who used to live there. The latter had a very strong story involving a missing boy, the FBI and some alien stuff, but the execution of it left me a bit confused.

Also, I did something I rarely do and bought a blockbuster title, Horizon Zero Dawn. There's the usual unoriginal back story about a young heroine with questionable parentage on a voyage of self discovery, featuring weary high priestesses and grizzled warriors with trendy beards and dreadlocks, but it's a lot of fun and the large mechanical dinosaurs in an open world exploration situation is a fascinating one. It also has probably the finest scenery, lighting and weather effects I've ever seen in a game, truly incredible in places.
 
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Re: Horizon Zero Dawn - there is a fantastic feature whereby you can pause the game at any point to control the camera position, depth of field, focal length, even the time of day and Aloy's pose, to create amazing annotated screen captures. Here are a couple I made:

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Ropie said:
Also, I did something I rarely do and bought a blockbuster title, Horizon Zero Dawn. There's the usual unoriginal back story about a young heroine with questionable parentage on a voyage of self discovery, featuring weary high priestesses and grizzled warriors with trendy beards and dreadlocks
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I'm going to have to take back what I wrote about the story to HZD. Apparently it was written by John Gonzalez, who I'd not heard of before, but after a slow start the plot has developed into something better than most SF films I've seen recently. It has shades of A Canticle for Leibowitz, but with massive flesh eating robotic creatures.
 
I started (and need to finish) Until Dawn, one of the free games on PS+ this month. Worked out nicely because it's been on my Amazon wishlist for some time. Pretty creepy game.
 
I see from browsing through some of the posts on this thread that there's some retro-gamers out there!
Going through some old (ancient) backup discs lately, and I found a load of old games that I used to play on my first PC, including Doom, Heretic and Hexen. Subsequently I investigated whether I could play them on my current system, and I found some excellent tutorials on YouTube which explained the process. I downloaded a free program called 'Doomsday Engine' and followed the instructions. I've spent the whole morning playing Ultimate Doom, what memories that brought back!
I've also got the original discs for Doom3 and Quake4, which I bought on special offer around the turn of the century, only to discover when I got them home that my system at that time couldn't support them (they needed Windows 2000/XP and I was still using Windows 95, and I think that the RAM requirements exceeded my capacity as well). They're still in the original cellophane!
Anyone else still playing these or similar?
 
I'm playing Champions of the Shengha, an epic fantasy CCG on mobile which you have to control with your body and mind by breathing slowly to be more powerful in the game.
 
Ropie said:
Recently I played What Remains of Edith Finch and Virginia. The former was a pretty straight up exploration of a really nicely designed house with an emphasis on the individual stories of the family members who used to live there. The latter had a very strong story involving a missing boy, the FBI and some alien stuff, but the execution of it left me a bit confused.

Also, I did something I rarely do and bought a blockbuster title, Horizon Zero Dawn. There's the usual unoriginal back story about a young heroine with questionable parentage on a voyage of self discovery, featuring weary high priestesses and grizzled warriors with trendy beards and dreadlocks, but it's a lot of fun and the large mechanical dinosaurs in an open world exploration situation is a fascinating one. It also has probably the finest scenery, lighting and weather effects I've ever seen in a game, truly incredible in places.
Click to expand...
I saw What Remains of Edith Finch on Twitch and seems like a really good game, though perhaps grim.
Right now I am revisiting The Division and playing some matches of PlayerUnknown's Battleground.
 
I accidentaly rammed into 1979 Revolution: Black Friday. While it is a bland Telltale game clone it is also impressive piece of directing. Besides the obvious documentary value I found it deeply impressive and worth a second run.
 
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Planescape: Torment remake and I'm loving it as much as back in the day when it was first released. The best crpg in my books hands down. Also Banner Saga 2, I loved the first episode - it was one of the few games that actually made me cry. So intense.
 
Ghost Recon, and probably will be for the rest of my life
 
Playing the test server of the next DLC for The Elder Scrolls Online Clockwork City
and enjoying it a lot it takes its mythos from the ES III Morowind (its Tribunal expansion) and is sort of fantasy via steampunk high fantasy

they published an overview sort of guide to the six areas in the new zone, Sotha Sil’s creepy steampunk lair “filled with mysterious automatons, fantastic sights, and hidden dangers.” Those would be:
  • The Brass Fortress, the residential area where you can craft and gather in relative safety;
  • The Mechanical Fundament, a “dangerous labyrinth is crawling with fabricants and single-minded factotums that won’t hesitate to sanitize the area of organic infestation (read: people)”;
  • The Halls of Regulation, which ought to be a mundane water-and-air utility monitoring station but instead is a Delve for adventurers;
  • The Shadow Cleft, a shadowy Daedric realm to Nocturnal that happens to have a portal inside the city;
  • The Sanctuary of Verification, Sotha Sil’s lab and factory, which plays host to a world boss;
  • and the Asylum Sanctorium, the sanitarium where you’ll end up if you go mad, plus the DLC’s new group dungeon.
The DLC is slated for later this year; while you don’t technically need to have purchased Morrowind to buy and play this DLC, it’d probably make a lot of sense to do so, as the plots are linked.
 
CelestialAeon said:
Planescape: Torment remake and I'm loving it as much as back in the day when it was first released. The best crpg in my books hands down. Also Banner Saga 2, I loved the first episode - it was one of the few games that actually made me cry. So intense.
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Can't wait to see Banner Saga 3. For me it was the only crowd-funded project worth the hype.
 
Ropie said:
Also, I did something I rarely do and bought a blockbuster title, Horizon Zero Dawn. There's the usual unoriginal back story about a young heroine with questionable parentage on a voyage of self discovery, featuring weary high priestesses and grizzled warriors with trendy beards and dreadlocks, but it's a lot of fun and the large mechanical dinosaurs in an open world exploration situation is a fascinating one. It also has probably the finest scenery, lighting and weather effects I've ever seen in a game, truly incredible in places.
Click to expand...

I think I put 70 to 80hrs into Horizon Zero Dawn when I picked up a PS4 earlier in the year. I quite liked the hunter aspect and the planning needed to take down various beasts/ groups of beasts. Many different approaches can be used depending on your equipment. Had to get inventive when I hit the first cauldron (dungeon) far too early and got stuck against the boss with hardly any equipment or health. Ended up turning that lair into a death trap with multiple blast wires and ran for it. Apparently it borrows a lot of mechanics from a number of more recent titles, but not personally having experience of Unchartered, recent Tomb Raider or Assassin's creed at the time, the game was fresh for me.

The game I'm enjoying at the moment is Sunless Sea on the PC. It's a story driven game in the same way as FTL is but there's some exploration between encounters (also the game's biggest flaw as it makes each play through last 5x as long with downtime). The actual writing and scenarios on land are top notch though. I've been smuggling human souls, partaking in the illegal sunlight trade, taken sides in wars between the rats and the guinea pig, had dalliances with my officers, tried smuggling zombies only to have them inconveniently wake up and eat the food, leaving my crew starving and insane. Don't get me wrong- this is a heavily flawed game given the length of a play though and some downtime. However the story shines though if you stick with it.
If you havent played it, pick up FTL instead (it'll run on most tablets and crappy laptops/PC) for random scenarios and experience of being captain of a star trek type vessel.
 
I get in the mood for old style adventure games in the winter months. I'm trying The Colonel's Bequest (Sierra 1989 murder mystery set in the 1920s) for the first time - it's not bad, but it's a bit glitchy. I played Kathy Rain, a modern point and click adventure, with my daughter earlier this year and we loved it.
 
Just completed Day of the Tentacle :) I never played this one back in the day and always heard about how amazing it is, but to be honest the look of it never appealed to me. I did find the characters and humour a bit testing at times but the puzzles involving the time differences were excellent. I finished it 95% under my own steam (just needed a few pointers from online hints), it's not terribly difficult.

7/10
 
Elex. No joke, this game is Risen 1 with a new face. The sheer scale of the world, options for styles, choices you can make within the gameworld, and setup are refreshing. The game is unforgiving. You will die repeatedly if you play dumb or try to mob five to six enemies at once. It's not for everyone. It can be clunky, the graphics look like a 2009/2010 PS3 game, and the combat is hit or miss. Still, I was a huge fan of Risen as a kid and Elex is a pulpy science-fantasy game with a solid world, some decent characters, and a huge amount of roleplaying in a budget AA style ARPG.
 
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