Every time you jump into a new game, you have to learn how to play it, not just the controls, but the rules of the world in which you are playing — and that has been especially true for me with Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar Games).
Because it’s an older game, the controls are a bit less smooth than I’ve become accustomed to, and that was mildly annoying at first, but I figured out the flow fairly quickly. And now I really love my horsie, who is a good boy and always there for me — and I enjoy most of the gun battles and can wade my way through a number of dudes without getting totally obliterated.
Slay the Princess (Black Tabby Games) is a visual novel about a hero that needs to slay the princess locked in a basement in order to prevent the world from ending. The dark fantasy/horror visual novel features a branching narrative with phenomenal voice acting from Jonathan Sims and Nichole Goodnight. As you play, there are options to slay the princess, attempt to save her, and occasionally to leave.
The way this story branches out, twists back in on itself, and expands into a stunning cosmic horror story is absolutely fantastic. There are so many surprising and interesting places this story goes. I’ve done a single play through so far, and I’m fully planning to play it through again to see more of the pathways. Apparently, an update is coming called the “Pristine Cut,” a free director’s cut with additional pathways and options, so I might wait for that.
My progress towards finishing The Outer Worlds (Obsidian Entertainment) has slowed significantly since I started taking a game writing class several weeks ago. I meant to be done with the game by now, but here we are.
I did, however, complete the Murder on Eridanos DLC, in which the player is invited to the Eridanos resort to look into the murder of a famous film star. While investigating, the player discovers a greater mystery involving people seeming to be possessed by strange worms, which either make them uncomfortably happy or turns them frenzied.
The DLC is fun with a solid amount of area to explore and plenty of side quests. It was definitely worth playing.
If you’d also like to know about the books, movies, and TV that I enjoyed recently, you can check out my Culture Consumption for June: https://andrea-blythe.beehiiv.com/p/culture-consumption-june-2024.
A friend described The Outer Worlds (Obsidian Entertainment) as a summer-beach-read kind of experience, and I think that’s a fairly accurate description. The game is a fun, fast-paced action RPG set in a future in which humanity has colonized distant planets and moons. The combat and RPG character building is fairly streamlined and straightforward. For example, the guns utilize one of three bullets (heavy, light, or energy), making it easy to build up ammo and jump into using any cool weapon that comes along. The maps are also rather small, which means there’s less exploration but it’s easy to work through the quests quickly (perfect for my present mood).
Owned and operated by corporations, the people who live in these communities are beholden to the corporations, forced to spout ads as greetings and entirely dependent on their good will. While there are some counter factions, they have less access to resources and struggle to stay alive on these alien worlds populated with hostile flora and fauna. That said, no one is really doing all that well, as resources are slim and the buildings and operations are all running down.
Over the past couple of months, I’ve continued to love playing games on my phone using my backbone controller. The controller works great. and there are so many fantastic games available through Gamepass Cloud Streaming — this, combined with the fact that using my PS5 means I have to sit in an office chair in another room, rather than curled up comfortably on my couch, means that I’ve been opting for playing games on my phone.
Anyway, here are all the games I played over the last two months.
Signalis start screen, showing some of the anime style art.
Signalis is a survival horror game developed by rose-engine. In the game, you play as Elster, a Replika technician of a small scouting starship. When the ship crashes on an unknown planet, Elster awakes from her cryochamber (at least that’s what I assume it is) and begins to look for her missing Gestalt partner, Ariane.
I was gifted a Backbone for Christmas, which is essentially a controller that attaches to your phone. Along with providing better controls when playing on my phone, the Backbone also came with a month of Xbox Gamepass, which has provided me access to a number of indie and small games that I might not have been able to play otherwise. It’s been a great month of games.
Pentiment is a narrative-driven adventure game from Obsidian Entertainment. Set in 16th century in the fictional town of Tassing, Bavaria, the game centers on Andreas Maler, an illuminator (artist) working at the local Abbey. When a murder of a prominent noble occurs, Andreas begins an investigation in the name of helping a friend. The player is able to wander around the town, interviewing various characters in an attempt to get at the truth — despite the fact that there never seems to be enough time and the answers seem hard to unravel.
Pentiment (2022, Obsidian Entertainment)
One of the many things that makes this game so compelling to me is how it presents various perspectives on the truth (eliminating any clear objectivity) and how it deals with the passage of time. As the title hints at (a pentiment is an underlying image or forms that have been painted over), the “truth” is often a layering of stories and time.
