noboners

I'm in the middle of playing Forbidden West from the backlog and I'm really worried about how I'm gonna react when I first encounter Sylens again.

Lance Reddick was one of those actors that instantly elevated anything I saw him in. Glad we'll still get a few more projects of his post mortem, but just fucking gutted that he won't be around to see people enjoy his work anymore. Love to all his family and friends.

I met Rorie at a Screaming Females show ~6 years ago. I didn't tell him I knew he was from Giant Bomb, but he just turned around and started chopping it up with me and my buddy. I bought him a drink when we got in and moved on. It was cool to see him as the exact same person I had watched online for so long.

Thanks for just being a good dude, Rorie. Maybe I'll run into you around Oakland.

@bigsocrates: I can see yellow just fine, luckily, since every major video game release uses yellow as the universal signpost since Uncharted 2. You mentioned there have just been some items to interact with that haven't been yellow, and so for those, I assumed I was just missing whatever the color marking was.

I agree about the signposting though. Every puzzle has just ended up with me walking around with double clenched fists trying to find something I can grab onto. Just trial and error puzzle solving, as opposed to really thinking about how to solve the puzzle.

I'm about half way through this I think (just exited the mines where you learn the second ability). I felt the opening was pretty strong and way spookier than I expected it to be, but was surprised at how nonchalant the character is towards everything. I was excited to have my dog follow me for a bit, but realized that the dog mostly feels shoehorned in to signpost the gamer during some of the early moments and also does not provide much character.

My biggest issue comes with the fact that it is really hard for me to gauge the depth of the character on the landscape. There have been a number of instances where I forgot I was not running on a 2d plane (like Inside & Limbo were) and was confused as to why the character was not interacting with something right in front of him. I am colorblind, so maybe that had something to do with it, but either way, it ended up creating instances of thinking I was stuck.

I do plan on going back in and finishing it because when I was sitting down and playing, I was enjoying my time. I just haven't been compelled to go back in and see it through. But I am gonna be jobless after Friday, so I could definitely see myself popping back in and finishing this soon.

For now, it is a tentative 3/5. It's fine.

Thank you to the person that actually nominated more games, since I did not.

1. Turnip Boy

2. Shadow Warrior 3

For me, the only time I notice how fast the ps5 can load is when I "resume activity" on a game. Like I'm playing Horizon Forbidden West right now, and choosing the Resume Activity function loads my most recent save almost instantly, even off a clean boot. It's not quite Quick Resume on Xbox, but it's pretty dang close.

But unfortunately, most games don't feature that natively it seems. This is honestly the first time since Ratchet & Clank where I've chosen to resume and have it not just go to a normal boot screen.

I watched my partner play this over the weekend and I'm feeling about the same as the rest of the group. It's not that I found it bad, but every thing it does, I think is done better in other games. Like, for a game that is mostly writing, it's writing just doesn't hit me like I would like it too. And the drink making was fine, but not as in depth as I was expecting.

This is on me and my expectations, but I definitely expected this to be more like Strange Horticulture where you have to be doing specific puzzle things to advance the conversations forward.

I am curious to see if any of this is updated for the part 2 coming down the road. I would give this a 5/10 and would have a hard time recommending it to people.

1. Somerville

2. Return to Monkey Island

I might go through and try and find some other games to add to the nominees. No promises though.

@borgmaster: I always hate calling a game boring, but this game definitely felt boring. Nothing really wrong with any of it, just nothing to make me want to continue playing.

I love this franchise, and from reading your review, it sounds like you do as well. I picked it up on Switch last year and it works so well as a pick up and play game. The ego system works surprisingly well, and as you talked about, the customization options help you have fun however you want. I've made teams that focus solely on power to play against friends with teams that only focus on pitching fastballs. Just fun stuff. But I also found the way it handles franchise mode to be a bit of a letdown. I was really excited by that addition, and I think it does work well when not importing teams, but as you mentioned- losing players at the height of their career just doesn't make sense, and can be frustrating when you spent time to create them. Hopefully SMB4 can fix some of that stuff (or at least let me control it a bit more).