Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off our weekly open thread for the discussion of gaming plans and recent gaming glories, but of course, the real action is down in the comments, where we invite you to answer our eternal question: What Are You Playing This Weekend?
We come from the water, but we are not meant for it.
Air? Land? These are environments where the human body fuckin’ thrives. We can run. We can breathe! Only on very rare circumstances—earthquakes, Tremors, etc.—do we have to worry about something 20 times the size of us coming up from below to consume our bodies whole, a mere krill in the baleen of madness. Air and land kick ass. Water is the wet hell where the monsters live.
Now, is this very reasonable fear I possess of the Stygian depths entirely formed from traumatic childhood memories of watching Mario be bashed around by an eel and then drowned in Super Mario 64? Who can say. (Fuck that eel, though.) But this phobia of the sea is an elemental part of how I play video games in my adulthood. Ask me to walk into the spooky house full of monsters? Lock and load, baby. Ask me to wade across a kiddy pool where I can’t see what’s lurking six inches beneath my paddling feet? Instantly, my inner Bartleby The Scrivener comes to the forefront, with a hearty and nervous “I would prefer not to.”
But what is October—the very heart of that glorious time of year we know as Spooky Season—all about, if not the facing of various fears? And so, earlier this week, I finally pulled the trigger on a game I’ve been fascinated with for a few years now, but have never actually played, because it seemed to sit at the nexus of literally every single thing that scares the shit out of me in video games: 2018’s Subnautica.
For the unfamiliar: Unknown Worlds Entertainment’s Subnautica is a survival game, one of those very popular breeds of danger-filled first-person simulators where you start by awkwardly tying two sticks together in your inventory, and end up building vast palaces of indestructible wonder. (Or, other people do. I usually end up getting my head bashed in by another player with slightly sharper sticks.) The twist with Subnautica is that you’ve crash-landed on a planet that’s 99% covered in water, which means that, if you want to do anything except float gently in your very safe, only slightly broken escape pod (and then starve to death), you’re going to have to jump into the ocean.
I did not want to do this. In fact, I spent the first minute or so of my time with Subnautica peering out uselessly for any kind of land I could maybe go stand on, instead of dropping myself into the drink. (The exploding spaceship in the distance looked briefly promising, but I quickly determined that I had no way to build a raft to let me go hang out in its on-fire-and-therefore-not-underwater safety.) Even though I knew, intellectually, that the game was not going to start me in Shark City first thing, I still did not want to plunge into that opaque, writhing membrane of wetness. But, seeing no other alternative (and vaguely worried the game might sink my escape pod in order to force my hand), I finally made the jump.
And you know what? All of my fears were unfounded! When I hit the water, I was immediately greeted by a gorgeous coral reef, teeming with abundant resources, non-hostile, beautiful, and delicious lifeforms, plenty of light, and OH SHIT OH SHIT WHAT WAS THAT NOISE. OH SHIT, LOOK AT THAT THING, SHIT, FUCK, IT’S GONNA MURDER ME.
Okay, so as it turns out, that thing—a.k.a the Crashfish, literally the least lethal hostile thing in the entire game—totally did want to kill me. But even more importantly, it made it clear to me that my time with Subnautica was probably not going to be very long. Not just because my cats would probably go into revolt if they heard me make little screams every 10 minutes or so for hours at a time—I was streaming the game, too, which means my high-pitched “Aaaagh!” is now recorded for posterity—but because it highlighted one of my biggest problems with that bastard, water: the way it renders a human being totally helpless, especially in the face of threats that have evolved to operate so smoothly within it. The appearance of this tiny, frankly adorable enemy sent me into an immediate panic because it was in its element, and I was out of mine. All horror games operate in the space of helplessness—it’s why you never have quite as many bullets, or quite as powerful a weapon, as you actually need. But there’s a special kind of powerlessness that comes from being confronted with a creature capable of literally swimming circles around you, and which is pressing that advantage to achieve your destruction. It’s Panic 101.
But despite this sudden tutorial in my own flabby, moist haplessness, I still pressed on with Subnautica. I explored the game’s relatively safe opening area, only drowning a dozen or so times in the process. Eventually, I felt the adrenaline spikes diminish, built up some resources, got a handle on what the game wanted me to do. Then I started exploring a little further afield, pushed by the need for more diverse resources, and that’s when the bottom dropped out from under me. Literally.
Because the fear of being snacked upon by an apex predator—and every predator is apex, when it’s a fish, and I’m a person, and we are not at the seafood counter at the local WinCo—is only part of the terror of being underwater. The other part, the more fundamental part, is the sense that erupts inside me when I look down into water so deep and so black that I can’t see what’s lurking down in the infinite depths. “There are giants out there in the canyons,” Billy Joel once sang, and the man was as right on this topic as he was about those damnable uptown girls. I don’t know if it makes it better or worse that I’ve read enough about Subnautica to know that there really are things down there, cruel and aggressive and ready to bite. Probably not. It’s not the moment when they actually kill me that’s going to hurt, after all; it’s the seconds right before, when the fear that something could come swimming out of the darkness transitions into the ugly certainty that my worst fears have just come to pass.
We come from the water, but we are not meant for it. I might, at 36, still occasionally cope with a fleeting paranoia about some dark corner of my home, and the unseen monster or killer hiding in it. But my rational mind can always cut in, reminding me that I am safe. It has no such defenses against the depths; indeed, it is just as unmoored as the rest of me by the yawning void of the unknown, this roiling soup of thalassophobia I find myself hovering in. Instead, I’m reduced to the childish cadences of a Pixar hero: “Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming.” It’s not fear I’m fighting now, but something deeper. When I look down into the abyss, it is the cold grip of dread that wraps its way around my heart.
Anyway: 8/10, great graphics, solid survival gameplay, a stark confrontation with the horrors that hide just out of eyesight in the primordial periphery of the human mind. Would not play again.
78 Comments
I friggin’ love Subnautica.
It is also one of the most terrifying games I have ever played.Seriously, there’s nothing else that quite captures the primal fear of staring down into the abyss that is the ocean and knowing that if you want to progress, you have to swim toward the abyss. And then there are literal sea monsters, and they are amazingly terrifying.I would also add that the game has a ton of other merits beyond its scares, and I’m genuinely envious of anyone who gets to play through this thing for the first time.
I have an aversion to deep water and the void (the idea of being in space, physically, gives me a major sense of the wibbles) so Subnautica was agonizing to play. I enjoyed the exploration and base building tremendously but I was always half tensed up whenever I left the safety of the shallows. And the moment that you’d leave the “safety” of your Cyclops or even Seamoth for physically swimming (to gather an item, explore a wreck, what have you) always gave me a jolt.And I legit shouted the first time a Reaper leviathan grabbed me.
I recommend the HELL out of the game.
I have practically a phobia of the ocean (only out past where most people would swim or surf. It’s the unknown creatures and the ginormous creatures that freak me out) and space. I admire your ability to make yourself overcome your aversion and play the game. Just reading this article made me uncomfortable. (I also will never see Gravity.)
I, uh, played it quiet a bit but I’ve never been able to actually beat it. There is a middle-end section that has you taking to the deeeeeps and having to slip past a giant fish dragon monster thing and…I noped the fuck out.Ended up watching some YouTuber finish it since I was invested in the storyline, which may be something you could do if you just want to take a peek at the game without actually diving right in yourself.
I’ve never played it— I’ve never even heard of it— but I generally love deep sea nature documentaries and the like so I am definitely intrigued. On the other hand I can definitely understand the jolt of some shadowy blotch in the corner of the screen suddenly looming out of the depths and turning out to be a 40 foot long, many-toothed finned horror, so… I’m torn. But I’ll look into it.
“Emergency: hull failure imminent! Abandon ship!”
If you like that, the Underzee expansion to Sunless Sea has a lot of moments like that, going underwater and having to deal with sea monsters and more creeping dread that affects your captain and crew and giant underzee eyes!
I love to swim, love the water, and love Subnautica.
But I had the rocket pad built and I can’t complete the game because it requires me to take my sub… faaaar deeper than I am comfortable with.
Fwiw, once you start delving further and deeper…it’s not just about the terrors of the ocean. Follow the alien ruins and, well, it’s pretty amazing what you’ll find.
I mean I’ve found the alien ruins – I’ve gotten quite far in the game. just generally hate trying to drive the sub in the pitch darkness – it’s both mentally distressing and I just find it mechanically frustrating.
I get that. But without giving away too much, it’s not all pitch dark areas and narrow tunnels.
People, I have a problem.The Switch’s Online SNES collection added Mario Super Picross to its lineup, and despite never actually having done picross before, I’m hooked. I am playing WAY too damn much of it. I am seeing grids and possible squares when I close my eyes. It’s insanely addictive. I wanna do some serious Hades runs but first I gotta get this monkey off my back. Also, since it’s the Spooky Season I am starting to think about finding some good horror games. I’m still interested in finding good investigative horror, where it’s less “something’s about to kill you”, more slow paced. Like I think a problem with horror games is that the challenge or “game” part can get frustrating and lead to repetition, which kills the mood. Like I never got very far in Eternal Darkness because of one boss-type fight that I just couldn’t figure out and repeating that section over and over was a pain.
You might enjoy The Last Door.https://www.gog.com/game/last_door_collectors_edition_theI don’t normally go for straight adventure games, but this one was gripping.
I assume you already played the old Penumbra classics ?
I accidentally beat Mario picross in one sitting last week. It’s extremely addicting and the rewind feature let’s you plow through puzzles without having to start over.
If you’re jonesing for more picross I can’t recommend Murder By Numbers enough.
Second the recommendation of Murder By Numbers to keep the picross addiction going, but if you have a DS or 3DS you also need Picross 3D and the sequel in your life.
Not sure it’s what you’re looking for, but Soma might fit. It presents itself as a kind of straightforward survival horror game, but it’s much more than that (…and also not as scary as it’s obviously trying to be). You only ever run from the threats, and while the “scary” moments of the game can get tiresome, the story and themes it presents will have you more scared and contemplative than any jump scare in most games. The best moments in the game are puzzle-based, and the story is top-notch. Also, there’s a “safe mode” if the monsters are giving you too much grief.
I was doing quite well until I forgot which beacons I’d already done. Oh and the “collect x of shit to make another bit of your base”. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
You can change the colors of your beacons (or even shut them off completely) in your PDA.
A shark can outswim you in the water but you can outrun it on land.So it all comes down to which one of you is better at cycling.
This weekend I shall be finishing off Dragon Age: Awakening. I’ve done all the main quests and now am just mucking around with runecrafting before the final attack on Amarantine/Vigil’s Peak.
I don’t want to be overly critical of what’s basically a free (at this point) mini-sequel expansion pack, especially one which obviously had a lot of work go into it by people who you sense were genuinely invested in what they were doing. And there are definitely things I like about it; like everything about Sigrun, who should have been in more games, and the interplay between Nathaniel and Velanna in the party banter. But oy vey are there some problems with this one.
It’s recockulously easy. With moderately well built characters, even on Nightmare they can be left to their own devices and they’ll walk just about any battle without any thought to positioning or tactics.
Various story beats undercut the sense of any of it mattering. Yeah, I know, it’s a videogame where you fight “darkspawn”. But the worldbuilding and story design of DA:O work so well that I can get past that inherent limitation and into the idea that this is the world the characters inhabit and this stuff really matters to them. The origin stories in DA:O are particularly effective at creating a sense of place for the Warden, and then tearing him or her away from it. And then also early on in the game there’s the Joining ritual scene, where some of Wardens’ terrible secrets are revealed, Daveth dies and Duncan kills Ser-Sadly-Irrelevant-To-The-Larger-Scheme-Of-Things. Pretty intense stuff. So what do we get in Awakening? Well the Wardens have gotten themselves killed again at the start. No betrayal necessary this time, it just turns out they’re really shit at fighting darkspawn. The castle butler somehow knows the secret of the Joining ritual. And Oghren’s joining is basically treated as a joke – one made about thirty seconds after Mhairi just died during hers.
And there’s more examples of this attitude in the game elsewhere. Remember in Origins there’s a wounded dude in the Korcari Wilds you can bandage up and take back to camp? And there’s an elf in the Mirkwood Brec Forest you can do the same thing for (after stealing his boots, if you’re so inclined). And you can patch up Brother Genitivi. You know, people who want to live. Right, well in Awakening we have three (so far) separate trips to the well of meeting a wounded soldier, who lives just long enough to deliver some expository dialogue before rejecting all medical attention and dying manfully.
And fucking Oghren. Again. Oghren just ruins everything. For in-game rolepaying reasons I took him with me to Kal Hirol, where I had to put up with the “banter” of his belching and harassing Sigrun. And what’s most annoying is that there’s a kernel of a good character idea here, if the game devs could only have been bothered with it. You could combine his story from Origins with his alcoholism, tie it in neatly with his berserker specialism, and make a tragic character who the others may not take very seriously but whom the player can see is obviously fuelled through grief and bitterness and pain, and who’s joined the Wardens either as a kind of death wish or out of a desperate need for a sense of belonging. But nope… instead we get a crap comic relief dwarf who drinks too much.
Anyway, I’ll soon have finished it off, then I can move onto resolving the unfinished business between the Warden and Morrigan, which I’m genuinely looking forward to.
This weekend is for finally replacing my scuffed, outdated glasses, and saying goodbye to migraines for another year.Finally I’ll be able to sink my teeth into the Tony Hawk remakes and Crash 4; and if my wrists aren’t destroyed, get some Hades in too.I’ve seen Subnautica talked up a lot over the years, maybe that should be next on my list once I get sick of 7 Days to Die.
Get your thumbs warmed up for THPS. The cramps the first day or so were a STARK reminder that im 34, not 14
I adored Subnautica for a while, and then got too annoyed by a specific thing. I don’t like its feeding pace. You could either switch of the need for food and water (which cuts out an important gameplay mechanic), or switch it on, and then it takes all your time. The time you catch a fish for food or water, your stomach growls for another. It’s too disruptive. I would have got back to Subnautica if there was a slider in the options, an inbetween, making food a part of the game but not invasive to that extent.It’s sad. I have a passion for seas in videogames. Hence (get used to it) Cold Waters, Cold Waters, Cold Waters. A constant on my HD. There’s also a new Uboat beta, but waiting for the stable version.I finished Arkham Vroom Vroom. The gameplay was as great as the others Arkham, and the much feared batmobile didn’t detract from that at all. But oh boy. That must be the stupidest Batman story ever (or at least a tough competition for Nolan’s Rises), and yeah, I mean it by superhero standards. It doesn’t matter. It’s a beat’em up, it doesn’t require more plot than space invaders. It doesn’t need to be Telltale. But yeah, it’s played with a grin, and sarcastic side glances.But here’s my current issue. Batman, the adventures of pointy-eared-masked-zorro, even when successfully involving and dramatic (basically Telltale and not much else), is still openly imaginary and fantasist. Burton can go gloomy but it’s still fairy tale gloomy. They are not pseudo-realistic gritty settings. Those are more problematic. Sniper 3 ghost warrior is. Its narrative videogamey stupidity (a SiN-level of constant admiring praise for the player character) and its dubious politics (evil Georgian separatists, but frankly, I’d rather understand and side with whoever wants to split from Putin’s Russia at this time) are a bit unsettling, because this isn’t old cartoon WW2, neither joyous Just Cause fantasy land. It’s Clancy-type shit. Not such a big deal, it’s still open world sneakathon with a bit of a technical pseudo-realistic bend for a change, and I can enjoy a gameplay with a certain distance towards the uninvolving narrative. But what bothers me, psychologically, is the quality of the soundtrack. This gets me, annoyingly. This pulls me in, and I don’t want to. I want a stupidly bombastic fanfare going “hello hello hello we are the stupid let’s go”. I don’t want anything humane or emotional painted over the creepy political murder sim. Yet :I protest.
Food and water will only be a concern for the first few hours of the game. I’m trying not to be too spoilery but there are things you can build in your base that will make them a non-issue.
I will have to rediscover Subnautica. I was playing it ages ago, in its very early stages.Another thing I’ll have to do is looking more closely to the politics of Georgia, it may lift my unease towards Sniper 3’s setting.
What I’m saying is that my lengthy opinionated post may not be as super marvellously grounded as it felt like when typing it.
I need to get to that point then, because it was too all-consuming (no pun intended) on my initial play throughs.
This week, I have only played a couple of games. If you recall last week’s thread, you might recall that I was trying to play World of Tanksand while I could get into the game and was rewarded with a bunch of anniversary stuff but couldn’t get into the actual random battles, which I blamed on my potato laptop. As it turns out, a restart after the most recent patch/update meant I could get in. So, I played two random battles.
Only two, because the tank I’m currently grinding, the Churchill I (http://wiki.wargaming.net/en/Tank:GB08_Churchill_I) is kind of crap. It does have a decent amount of HP, but crappy gun, low mobility, and surprisingly thin armor for what’s considered a Heavy tank. This, combined with it’s footprint makes it a tasty, tasty target for enemy artillery. Indeed in the second game, I was basically instantly killed by an artillery shot the millisecond the game loaded. My team did lose that one.
In the first battle, not only did my team win, I actually survived to the end of the battle, which is a rarity in the fire magnet that is a Churchill. I even got to capture the enemy base for a few points to seal the victory, which was surprisingly satisfying. I didn’t get to damage much, but was able to track a couple of Soviet medium tanks on my journey.
The other game I played was seasonably appropriate for October, the 2010(ish) Double Fine game Costume Quest, where you pay a kid trick-or-treating whose sibling has been kidnapped by monsters. there’s a lot of little side quests, but the thing I like is that your costumes, such as this robot, made from a couple of cardboard boxes:Turn into the actual item during the battle sequences, so I get to control this sweet-ass mech:
(I’m fighting alongside my buddy who’s in a Knight costume here)
Granted the battle controls are basically QTEs, which I suck at, but it’s a fairly small and low key game so I don’t mind the frustration as much.
Back in the tabletop world, I had another session of the Rime of the Frostmaiden Dungeons & Dragons 5E campaign. I tried to make my character on heroforge.com, but can’t get the pose, colors or a key detail (he’s missing part of his left leg), but here’s the proto Stor Windrivver – “The Wolf-Touched” my barbarian character: I’m probably going to iterate him to something…
Anyway, I think our DM has modified the adventure enough that I won’t be spoiling things, but just in case you are playing that official WOTC campaign, there may be some spoilers here.
Our session started off with us (a 2nd-level party) preparing to clear out a gem mine next to one of the Ten Towns, Termalaine. The mine had developed something of a kobold infestation in the last few days, and the recently-elected Speaker hired us as mercenaries.
My Barbarian, who explicitly spent time living underground as a hermit immediately surrenders an element of surprise by tripping over on the steps down into the main mineshaft. The booming echo did attract the kobolds, who didn’t give us options to negotiate, instead attacking us with javelins. A quick combat and shoving a kobold down a bucket elevator later we descended a few levels. We came across a kobold leader who had something “off” about him.
A quick Detect Evil and Good from lost_wifey’s Paladin revealed that the Kobold leader was pinging
as Undead for some reason. Some investigative work and a few conversations later, we discovered that the Kobold leader was possessed by the ghost of a human wizard of less-than-moral character, who had some inexplicable tie to his spell-book/journal.
Anyhow after more combat, the ghost ended up possessing our gnomish wizard (who was refusing to let the party just burn the aforementioned book in his first for knowledge). My barbarian went with his first instinct and punched the possessed gnome in the face. It didn’t really work. That’s when things descended into shenanigans.
Basically every member of the party attempted to grapple the gnome before the ghost possessing his body could toss him off a ledge and escape. First up, our Ranger tries. The gnome wriggles out of the grapple. Next up, our Paladin. The gnome wriggles out of the grapple, The same thing happens to my Barbarian’s grapple attempt. Apparently the gnome must grease himself every dang morning because the second attempt from both the Paladin and Ranger gave the same result.
Finally, as a desperation play, my Barbarian, who was too far away to grapple again, used his climbing hempen rope as a lasso, managed to capture the gnome and just drag him away from the very edge of the pit. It was enough to incapacitate the gnome, drive the possessing ghost out, and we were able to destroy the book and hopefully end the ghost threat for now.
Our next session will probably be kobold mop-up, healing the gnome and hopefully getting paid before trying to track down a murderer on one of the trade caravans…
I, um, just beat Alduin in Skyrim. Anyone? Skyrim?
Never heard of it.
Yeah, I was thinking I might get around to playing that sometime. Is it any good?
Ooo did you find that game at a tag sale? I love antiquing.
I was going to comment on this, but then I…*snrk* Then I *chortle* Then I *teehee* But then I took an *guffaw*
I recently just went back to it after a few years. I did a zero kills run, where you are never directly responsible for anything’s death except Alduin. Lots of illusion spells (Muffle, Invisibility, Calm, Frenzy). It enjoyed it.
(This is completely off topic, but I just finished binge-watching Halt and Catch Fire and wanted to thank you for your thoughtful reviews! I really enjoyed reading them as I went along.)
It was such a great show. I still watch it now and again and post comments on Perkins’ reviews.
they get that running on smartwatches yet?
I played it in my TI-85
Slightly on hold at the mo’, but I’ve been playing this, and… is it me or is it buggy as hell? I’m on PS4, and the maps and textures can take forever to pop-in. I wouldn’t mind so much, but it really takes you out of the game.
Backlogged: Glowing Moss, Spinners and Pitfalls, Oh My! EditionThis week in my ongoing quest to experience all the games I’ve missed out on over the years, I ventured into the Labyrinth to find out what, exactly, is Shining in the Darkness. (Turns out it’s a pretty good RPG! Wordplay!)
I think I’ve said it before that I’m not a huge fan of the endless, interchangeable first-person corridors found in games like Wizardry and Eye of the Beholder; I can totally see the appeal of being your own mapmaker, but in an age when ready-made maps are just a click away, it’s hard to justify the extra time and effort, and with map-in-hand, the twisting tunnels tend to feel merely tedious. SitD doesn’t really solve this fundamental problem (which is mostly a ‘me’ problem, mind you), but the game’s charms and polish are more than enough to make the journey through the darkness, well, shine.From its opening scenes, SitD sets itself apart from earlier dungeon crawlers like Wizardry by bringing the first-person perspective out of the dungeons and into the game’s hub areas. From a king’s throne room to a bustling tavern, the game presents a cast of colourful, animated NPCs who help bring life and detail to its world. Shopkeepers respond to the player’s nods and shakes of the head as though holding actual conversations, and interrupt with last-ditch pitches on special deals when the player tries to leave. (Shop UI could probably be streamlined a bit, to be honest, but at least the clunkiness is endearing.)Combat is relatively straightforward, but the evolution of your two companions’ spell lists as they level up (through both the addition of new spells and the enhancement of old ones) feels both elegant and satisfying. The game also feels very well-paced so far; aside from the initial bout of grinding necessary to prepare fledgling knight Marak for life in the labyrinth, my progress has been steady and my new equipment purchases plentiful. (And as is often the case with RPGs, my emulator’s fast forward function is invaluable when button-mashing my way through random encounters grow tiresome.)Anyway, that’s it from me this week. I believe I’m roughly halfway through SitD at this point (just finished the last of the four trials standing between me and the remainder of the labyrinth), so I may not have any new games to talk about next week. But if I do reach the end ahead of schedule, next up is a trip back to the ‘80s for King’s Quest II: Romancing the Throne. See you folks next time!
Glad to hear you’re enjoying Shining in the Darkness. It’s a real gem.Fair warning on King’s Quest II: only cross a bridge in that game when you ABSOLUTELY have to. One of the worst dead player walking puzzles of all time is associated with it. You’ll know what I’m talking about when you get to it. /comfort x 1000 in advance. Thankfully, King’s Quest III is much better.
Yeah, I remember you warning me about that bridge after I beat the first King’s Quest (thanks again for the heads up), so I’m planning to keep a walkthrough close at hand for my playthrough. Ain’t nobody got time for poor game design.
yeah i’m never going to play this.It’s October, so I’ve been trying to play even more spooky games than usual. Been making my way slowly through Lost In Vivo for the past month or so, and at first, it was fine; you spend a lot of time walking through dingy areas, good sound design, interesting choice to make a Silent Hill homage into a first person game. But it wasn’t particularly scary. Then last night I got to an area where you were exploring a mine for doohickeys to open a door, and it was one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever experienced in a game. It felt literally like a nightmare, to the point where I shouted once and my girlfriend thought I was having a night terror. I can’t even really explain why it scared me so much—there’s just one enemy in the mine, you absolutely know when it’s coming after you, you shoot it a bunch of times and it leaves you alone for a while. But something about the murky visuals, the superb sound design, the way the thing moved, and the way the structure of the level meant having to repeatedly go into situations where you knew the bastard was going to pop up and come for you, really got to me.Anyway, I recommend it.
I don’t really do scary games or movies because I’m a massive coward, so the nearest I’ve gotten to anything even vaguely disorienting lately is the opening bit of Alan Wake back when that was Epic’s freebie of the week.
Hey, I’m sorry this is unrelated, but I haaaaaave to ask whether you’re going to do Expanse Season 5 reviews this year. It’s going weekly again! AND I REALLY MISSED YOUR REVIEWS IN SEASON 4. I’m honestly totally serious. Will it happen?
Subnautica is easily the best game I’ve played this last decade. I’m an avid gamer who’s played a ton of games in that time period. This game beats em all: Skyrim, Dark Souls, Stardew Valley – just to name a few near flawless titles that it has as competition in my mind. If your PC or console can handle it the graphics maxed out are amazing. The music is perfect for the moods of the various biomes you explore. The story is a great mystery that’s fed to you bit by bit through radio distress calls and recovered PDAs. The best part is the scare factor though. The adrenaline rush you get when first encountering the dangerous fauna (especially leviathans) of the planet is comparable to the first time you encounter a boss in a Souls game. It’s not a drawn out harrowing experience like a Souls’ boss battle, but the same shock at the badass thing in front of you still exists. I’ve played through Subnautica FOUR times now, and have literally done everything possible; yet, I find myself yearning to go back through it again just to experience the wonder that the game is. On a scale of 1 to 10 this game is a 15 for me.
I’ve been in kind of a gaming rut as of late. I’m trying to not buy any new games until black friday but I also don’t have much to finish in my backlog. I’ll probably play the CoD Black Ops beta this weekend a bunch and I still need to finish Luigi’s Mansion, but after that I might take a quick break.
I’ve discovered the Friday the 13th game and I’m in love.Aside from that, prolly more Dead Cells. Can’t ever have too much Dead Cells.
I returned to Dead Cells after a long hiatus and damn it’s good. Unfortunately, *I* am not good at it. I can only get one boss cell (or whatever they’re called). Not sure how to get better to beat it three more times.
Same. But I’ve found that it’s the sort of game I *want* to get better at, and it can put me in a zone not unlike bullet hell games.Still trying for that second cell! 😀
Oh yeah, and very fair — like, when I die it’s definitely my fault.
If you can/haven;t, Hades is an ABSOLUTE must dude.
Are people still playing Friday The 13th? If I had a core of 8 people to play stuff like that, it’d probably be in the regular rotation; I just had a not-great time with randos online.
It hit PSNow, so I’m going through it on single player. Fun game for quick bursts.
There’s a single player mode? I had no idea.
What do you think of Dead by Daylight?
Haves you tried Hades yet? It has replaces Dead Cells as my favorite Rogue like. It’s a lot of fun and their is a ton of variety in builds per run
Soon as it hits PS4, I’m in.
I have played a little bit of Subnautica, since I don’t share Hughes’ hydrophobia. Unfortunately, I haven’t gotten much further than he has, because I’m apparently too slow to actually catch any fish to cook, and therefore survive. So I’m mostly tootling around the opening area(s) trying to figure out how to make flippers or a jetpack or literally anything that means I can actually eat the fish around. I did attempt to swim towards the exploded fiery ship, but apparently that water is radioactive. I know there’s stuff you can do to counteract that because son_limey, who’s a better gamer than I, has done so. He’s also playing the sub zero spin-off of Subnautica, which is more about ice and sadly not Mortal Kombat ninjas.
I never got too far in Subnautica. I always seem to hit a wall in crafting/survival games where I just can’t seem to find a way forward. Subnautica didn’t scare me too much (until I tried it in VR!), but I just couldn’t figure out how to do much of anything besides barely survive. It’s something I’ve come back to often, just never gotten very far. What did scare me very recently is Anatomy. I just heard about, even though it was released in 2016, and was excited to give it a try. I only heard the first 2 or 3 tapes before I was told to enter the garage for the next tape. I think since I just moved a couple weeks ago, and the tapes are all about the anatomy of a house, and I knew exactly where the garage was without having to try a bunch of doors first, made it just a little too real for me, and I quit out as soon as I walked in. Might give it another go soon, but the fear, even though nothing really happened yet, was quite real.This weekend, I’ll be continuing through Baldur’s Gate III’s early access. I haven’t encountered too many of the bugs I’ve heard are present, but the cutscenes seem unfinished, which I hope is true and they’ll make them more dynamic and polished by the time of the actual release. Other than that, though, I’m really enjoying it so far. The battles allow for some cool innovation, and since I love both Baldur’s Gate games and both Divinity: Original Sin games, it’s exactly what I wanted. Since it’s in EA, it also gives me the permission to play classes and attitudes I wouldn’t normally play. In my multiplayer session with my brother, I created an Eldritch Warlock, which is something I would flippantly pass over if I knew I’d be stuck with him for an entire adventure. But for one act? It’s pretty fun.Also going to try to get a couple friends into Gloomhaven online. Now that it has online multiplayer, I hope we can rekindle our actual board games nights that happened frequently before COVID. Gloomhaven was something we really enjoyed, so we’ll see if the PC version holds up.We were also about halfway through a Charterstone campaign and I saw they just released a PC version of that game. Anyone tried it?
Subnautica has the option to turn off the eating/drinking part which is the only way i was able to get through it, as I truly suuuuck at Survival games. If Fallout 76 would remove that aspect, id probably be able to get through all the Wastelanders stuff but alas.
Kudos on playing Subnautica, Will – it’s the scariest game I’ve ever played, and I say that as someone who’s played plenty of traditional horror. It’s just so big and unknowable and speaks directly to my fear of the IRL ocean. I played for about ten hours but just couldn’t past that. I never even saw most of the game’s scariest beasts!As for me, I’m playing Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War on my SNES Classic. What a great game! It’s a real slow burn though; stages are a good four to five times larger than standard Fire Emblem maps and often contain shifting objectives as you take castles. It feels more like a traditional strategy game than later titles.Also Hades. Always playing Hades.
Look I love Subnautica. It may be in my top 3 all time favorite games. I’ve played hundreds of hours of it.
So HOW DARE you put a picture of a crabsquid on the front page without any kind of trigger warning. Holy shit those things are easily the most terrifying things in the whole game. Just the memory of their weird chirps makes my skin crawl.
I’m playing the Trials of Mana remake right now. Like the original, it’s frustrating at times if you’re not playing an optimized party (i.e. with Kevin and Reisz). I do like that they changed the maps from a series of tiny screens into large areas. It adds a nice exploration element to a game that previously lacked it.
This is a fantastic game and UTTERLY terrifying even though I play it constantly and know how to escape the leviathans if i come across them.
but man there is nothing like that feeling of abyssal terror heading out to the edges of the maps, surrounded by UTTER blackness, and suddenly a ghost leviathan spawns. Or, ya know, THREE OF THEM
Probably be getting in LOTS of Dead by Daylight. I’m finally getting the hang of playing as the Killer, and i went full Tom Haverford and bought myself 3 of the killer packs so I can play as Michael, Leatherface and Ghost Face
Also Vampyr was free on PS+ so I’m giving it a go, im not great at RPGs as a rule.
Genshin Impact is dominating all my free time right now. Im about 20 hours in and I’ve yet to hit any kind of paywall.
I played that first-person Pac-Man add-on to Minecraft and my friends love how I would literally shriek every time I turned a corner and the green zombie ghost was right there. It was really fun but frankly SO startling EVERY time it happened, and you’re literally running away and not entirely certain if it’s still chasing you and right behind you. If you look straight up you might be able to see the full game board reflected and whether you are being followed, but you might accidentally turn the controller, run into a wall, and get eaten if you check, so just run!Love it
When it comes to water related terror, Sunless Sea has a pretty good Conrad quote to set off the game. Something like “the sea has never been an ally to man, at best an accomplice to his recklessness” I think that’s how it goes.
Probably going to continue to ignore my backlog, get through FF 7 Remake and finish Kingdom’s of Amalur Re-Reckoning (after beating the original more than once.)Also, I refuse to play Subnautica for the same reason. I am an excellent swimmer but it’s the fear of the depths and not being able to see that far that gets me. Put me in a pool and I’d out race flipper.
I’ve introduced a monthly competition to my Shivers speedrunning community. The game is randomized by default, and someone in the community has created a program that can fix the seed we get so we can all play the same iteration of the game when we do races. Normally you’re getting new information on the fly as you figure out where all your items are, but I’ve posted a seed number for all of us to race across the entire month of October, so we can learn that configuration and figure out who can get the best time through fully informed routing and grinding down our times.So far I’m in first, but I’ve had some really fortunate RNG in a couple of my runs, and I’m waiting to see if the person with a significantly different route can overtake me. It’s an interesting experiment so far. There are more people who are interested in the idea than there are people actually doing the run, but even with just one other competitor, it’s fun playfully talking shit while also legitimately helping each other fine-tune our routes.I’ve also been going through the classic Mega Man series this week. I’m up through Mega Man 8, which means the rest of the series is essentially dessert. I’ve long considered MM7 the series’s low point, but I’ve come around on MM8. There are some weird levels that don’t feel like a Mega Man game, but overall, I enjoy it as the series oddball that tried to do something new, even if I prefer the back-to-basics streamlined gameplay of 9 and 10 – which I have to look forward to tonight!And in board game news, I tried to play Robinson Crusoe again over the weekend. On my first turn, as my second action in the game, I sent Friday out exploring alone. I rolled two wounds and explored a tile that gave him two wounds. Friday only has 4 HP. He’s dead, Jim. This is the Robinson Crusoe experience. I’m about ready to throw it on a bonfire. I hate knowing I’ve spent money on things that actually make me more miserable in 2020. Twenty minutes of setup just to be told, “OK, you died,” before the end of the first turn. I’m going to try to two-hand a game to see if it changes the balance and, like, makes it possible to win, ever. If not, I’ll probably resell it on Amazon.
Since I just finished the 2nd DLC for Control yesterday (which was as fantastic as the rest of the game, by the way), I really don’t know what I’ll be playing this weekend. Maybe I’ll go back and replay Alan Wake. It’s been a few years, and my memories of it are a little fuzzy.
Ever since Civ VI came out for consoles, all I do is play it. I no longer have an xbox one. I have a Civ box.
Did you play it in vr?
I finally beat Spider-man PS4 the other day. The person who dies at the end really surprised me. I also didn’t realize they did the whole Miles origin stuff in it as well. My plan was to do the DLC and finish the map tasks but then I met Hades and I’m in love and obsessed with it. Also trying to get more Star Wars Squadron in but I’m really trying to get a hold of a HOTAS for my PS4 to really get into it.
I do/do not recommend playing this on acid.
I’m late to the Subnautica party, but I am loving all this game’s subtle terrors. There is a perfect tension in this game between the wonder of discovery and the fear of what you might (and often do) discover. I also appreciate a game that let’s you explore at your own pace, and where you aren’t given the end-game goal right at the beginning. For most of Subnautica survival is enough.