donutfever

Firewatch is good, but the ending kinda leaves a bad taste. I was really into it when I was playing it, but haven't thought of it much since.

INSIDE is damn near perfect. Tightly designed, beautiful, and ambiguous in all the right ways.

I'm enjoying it. The game, despite being so scaled down, still feels like Fire Emblem. It's decent strategy for a game where missions last 1-2 minutes.

I'm in Chapter 7 but I started to hit a wall there where I had to grind a lot more to get my heroes to be able to do the next mission, would spend orbs on better units, train them from level 1 to 20, get further, hit another wall... The weird thing is that I feel like there are A LOT of times in a single mission where I'll encounter a fight where the enemy is incapable of doing damage to my unit, and then a later encounter will have a different unit of mine unable to do damage to a different enemy. This happens when I'm properly leveled and happens regardless of where the units are on the weapon triangle, so I'm pretty baffled as to what's up with that.

Haven't played Ethan Must Die, don't know what it is. Nightmare and Bedroom are good though.

Bedroom is like the puzzle room content from the main game, but it's nowhere near as good as the Happy Birthday tape.

Nightmare is a survival mode ala Nazi Zombies, and I'm surprised by how great it is. It's a great use of those assets and could do a lot more with the concept if they wanted. If they included it in the main game I think people would be less hesitant to complain about the length of the story, too.

So I guess I'm in the minority. I understand that RE has had these big, crazy, giant monsters before, but what I loved about this game so much was how understated it was the whole time, and finding a way to have an elderly woman in a wheelchair be the ultimate terror of this experienced would have been the ultimate crescendo to that in my head. Tracing the entire infection back to a single creepy girl with long black hair that makes you hallucinate was also just not for me. But I'm glad most of you seemed to enjoy it! I still really love the game, and plan to play it again on Madhouse.

Obviously, spoilers for the entire game.

I kept on hearing that the second half was worst than the first, so when I was almost finished with Lucas' area and was still loving the game, I figured that it was only a gradual step down. But man, as soon as Jack came out in his giant dragon form, I knew I was in for a bad time.

The boat wasn't the worst thing in the world - I was disappointed by all the stuff with Eveline from a story perspective, and they were a little too liberal with that machine gun ammo, but it wasn't a totally linear shooter, there was still a lot of exploration to be done. And while I hated the explanation for the Bakers, talking to a lucid Jack Baker painfully aware of what he, and his family, had become was surprisingly effective. The decision to make them tragic figures and victims of larger fuckery was a smart one, which only makes it sadder that the execution of it all was so dumb.

And man, those salt mines really had nothing going on for them. Just a boring time all around.

But it seemed like the final few minutes would pull out something strong. You return to the Baker Estate, the game's greatest asset. You see a wheelchair, hinting that you're going to get a payoff for one of the game's best teases. They wouldn't play with Grandma for so long unless they had a great idea they were building up to, right? The game's intro and initial trailer both end on a silhouette of her on the first floor of the main hall of the Baker house, where she's never seen in game. So you go in knowing she'll be the last boss at this point, how is that going to do be done? Is she going to roll around after you throughout the entire house with a rifle, testing your knowledge of the house's layout as you try to sneak up on her? Will she have transformed the house somehow, surprising the player with how different this place they had become so familiar with now was? You go into the attic, you give a syringe to Eveline, and she's revealed to be the old lady. Yes. It's happening.

She turns into a kaiju and you shooter her with 6 or 7 magic bullets and the game is over.

Fuck.

Nice write-up! I haven't finished the game yet but I'm really enjoying it, and I hope we see more games like this get made.

The game's shipped 2.5 million copies, which is good, but RE6 shipped 4.5 at launch so worse games in the series have done better. On the other hand, this was probably much cheaper to make and will likely make more off DLC. So I'm not sure how all this reads from a business perspective but from a creative one this game is dynamite, and I hope RE8 follows this format and goes even further in the crazy, intimate direction this RE7 took.

Told myself I'd play just an hour last night and played for 5. The point I'm at seems like it'll be just before some sort of boss fight/encounter with Lucas, and I'm really digging the game so far. I'm guessing that the second half people dislike starts around here though.

Still, the game has had enough awesome moments to be among my favourite Resident Evil games now. That "Happy Birthday" tape in particular was terrific, and I just saved right before where I think it'll become handy.

@ezekiel said:

Huh.

I don't know man, "you're on a spaceship where something went wrong" is a thousand times more boring to me than an old mansion, I loved SOMA and Alien: Isolation but I can't think of the last game that took place in a dilapidated southern plantation. The creatures may not be appealing by I'm pretty excited to be chased around by the Bakers.

The demo isn't part of the rest of the game, so it makes sense that it's a little more streamlined. The main game is obviously much larger and more complicated.

And if you're not interested in the VHS concept, I don't know what to tell you. Being able to make decisions in the past that change the present is a fucking cool hook, and it also lets the game have fun with other characters/time periods/etc. and take away your inventory for brief sections.

@alistercat: I think it just functions like the "antique coins" you find across the game, which open bird cages with items in them like ammo and herbs.

The ending is out there, boss fights are out there, trophies, everything.

On the upside, the game is supposed to be really good! Exactly how they've sold it, survival, puzzles, horror, exploration, all that jazz. About 10-15 hours.

One of the most interesting things from the trophies is that the game can be beat in under 4 hours.