Topic: What PS4 Games Are You Currently Playing?

@CaptD yeah I made a start on my solo grim playthrough and found it so much easier… that multiplayer scaling is insane!

Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town

I have reached Spring season Year 2.
Still working on getting more money and raise the Heart level of the dudes.

As part of my mini gaming funk, I took a left turn from games I’ve been playing and decided to just start Life is Strange 2. I’m knee deep now, and might just plough through to finish it today. I was going to do an episode every week or so, but I’ve binged through 4 already.

More detailed impressions to follow.

@RogerRoger I had the best of intentions to finish it the other day, but I ended up having to postpone and now I’m probably looking at the weekend before time will allow. I want to give myself the proper time and mood to really invest in the last episode. I’m not only sad for Sean and Daniel to be out of my life, but I’m also anticipating some emotional processing that will need to be had. And the way my week is going it would have to be rushed if I don’t wait until Saturday.

As a side thought, the last play session before finishing a game is always a tough one for me. Some games do really need a lot more time to digest the ending, especially if a really emotional tale is being told. I struggle with how to approach a game’s final stretch sometimes because of the attention it needs for a proper send off. I’ve went into the last section of a game and thought to myself “okay, I have two or three uninterrupted hours, let’s finish this game”, only to find that the developers have pulled a surprise twist at the end and it draws out for another entire story beat or epilogue. Sometimes that works in the game’s favor, and sometimes it doesn’t. There’s a certain crescendo of emotional investment that I often feel and if a game tries to be too cute and drags things out, oftentimes it loses the moment and then it becomes anticlimactic. Of course occasionally the opposite happens too — I’m popping along with a game and it unceremoniously just ends. No fanfare, no emotional peak, no lasting takeaway.

Anyways, with LiS2, because of the games episodic format, it’s very predictable as to the timeline of the concluding chapter so I know with some confidence I’m somewhere between 2-4 hours away from finishing, plus whatever additional personal processing time. But still, I want the final play session to be something of an event rather than a rushed, stress induced afterthought whilst nodding off to sleep.

But as a preview to what is sure to be a long post later this week about my final thoughts on the game, I did go back and read your excellent review of the game from a couple years ago and really enjoyed it (again). A lot of what you said in that review rings true to my feelings so far and I like how you broke it down. Anyways, more on that later. 😄

Making my way through Call of Cthulhu. I was quite liking it at the start when it was more of an adventure game, but now it’s leaning more and more into horror, which I’m not enjoying as much. I’m not a massive fan of horror games that involve a lot of running and hiding.

I've been playing a lot of Hunt: Showdown given the newest event has been going on for the last few weeks. No other first-person shooter comes close, in my opinion. It's not perfect by any means but it's in a league of its own.

@Kidfried Both that and The Sinking City have caught my attention.

Going to continue with Final Fantasy VI. Not played it in a couple of months.

It’s weird going from Final Fantasy XVI to this. There’s still something special about it though.

@Kidfried The PS5 version of The Sinking City is only £7.99 at the moment. Recommend it for that price? I feel like I can forgive a lot of problems a game has if it’s cheap enough.

@Bentleyma Weirdly, I’ve never finished FF6. I’ve made it to the very last section a couple of times but never completed it.

Maybe I need to pick it up again and third time’s the charm!

@Thrillho Funnily enough I did the same thing. I got to the final dungeon back in the PS1 days, but never finished it for some reason.

Coming back to Until Dawn after so many years away was a... weird experience. Firstly, this really came out in 2015? Jesus, I am so old. It is weirder too, because while there is some definite weirdness to the visuals at times, especially with the animations. Between the the textures, micro details, lighting and uncanny valley facial capture this game still looks really, really, good.

What is weirder is that it sounds like a huge portion of the audio was recorded on the same headset mics people used to call me bad words on when playing on Xbox Live like twenty years ago. Like I genuinely don't think I've ever experienced this before in a game where the audio quality is so bad it just ripped me out of the experience. I don't remember this ever being a problem when I played it the first time so I dunno if it is something to do with playing it on PS5 and there being no native version? I dunno, but blimey.

@Pizzamorg That is really weird. I do remember the game looked really fetching back in the day, although the facial capture I do recall as being slightly off. I think when games have used well known actors like Rami Malek that it runs the risk of looking even more uncanny than it would have otherwise if they just used an unknown. Especially back in the early PS4 days.

But as far as audio, I don’t recall any obvious problems with it back on PS4. That is strange. And to date I’ve not have any PS4 games played via backwards compatibility that had issues on PS5 like that.

Booted up Bloodborne for the first time in a few months. It's as glorious as ever. 😍

I also redownloaded Hollow Knight in what will probably be an unsuccessful bid to attempt the Pantheons again. Maybe I'll need to hit up the Hall of Gods to get some practise in. Not going anywhere near those Radiant bosses though. Blimey.

@KAIRU I like to think I got pretty good at Hollow Knight but those pantheons were beyond me. It took me long enough to beat the final colosseum level!

@Thrillho Yeah, the final colosseum challenge took me quite a while too. Not sure how long it was as it was a while ago but it was probably a lot longer than I'd like to admit.

@KAIRU It was such satisfying combat in that game though. Defeating Nightmare King Grimm felt like such an achievement!

Did you ever manage the Path of Pain?

@Thrillho I did do the Path of Pain! It took me around two hours, I think! Almost fumbled it fighting those two enemies at the end too. 😅

@KAIRU Ha, the enemies at the end were just evil seeing as you had to do the whole thing (although with a slight shortcut) if they killed you.

I really hope Silksong can live up to it after all this time.

@Thrillho I'm confident Silksong will deliver. It can't bloody come soon enough though!

Life is Strange 2

I'm only about 2 hours in and still on Episode 1, so the jury is still very much out on where this will land for me amongst the rest of the series. I'm enjoying it so far though.