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Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered (PS5): COMPLETED!

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With the Lego game complete I had a renewed interest in playing the game it was based on. First I had a struggle trying to actually obtain it, as it wasn’t on the Playstation Store because it turns out I already had it on the PS4 when Sony gave it away a while back. So I thought I’d pay for the £10 PS5 upgrade for it but then it kept giving an error when I tried to buy it. Eventually I gave up and decided to just play the PS4 version but when I tried to load it it updated and became the PS5 version anyway. I’m sure my PS5 is haunted.

Anyway, it took a few hours to get into it because I was trying to play it like the game so many people said it was a clone of – Breath of the Wild. It isn’t. Well, superficially it is, I suppose, but actually what Zero Dawn is really like, is Assassin’s Creed. Only with big metal dinosaurs. You got all the sneaking about and using distractions and exploring weird underground bunkers with relics of an older but more technologically advanced civilisation, and you’ve got the creeping up behind people and stabbing them in the neck stuff. It’s Assassin’s Creed in Far Cry Blood Dragon World. And that’s fine.

With the majority of the plot spoiled because of Lego, albeit that was a simplified version, I sort of already knew where the reveals were going. Luckily, the path to them was fun and there were still surprises, plus it’s all just a bit more adult.

Exploring the world was enjoyable, and once I’d got used to the combat and slightly complicated weapon system, I was well into setting traps for the big robot animals and then picking off their armour before blowing up their faces. Or, even better, you get the ability to control them later in the game so you can make them fight each other and just stand nearby and watch. The Borgia Towers – sorry, bandit camps – where you have to take down loads of humans ideally without them seeing you was peak Assassin’s Creed and perhaps my favourite bit of the game. I also like the JJ Abrams blue lens flare effect you get when enemies are nearby.

My only real gripes with Horizon are the inventory management (I never had enough space for everything, so kept having to dump or sell things) and some of the world traversal (you can’t climb except in specific places), but they didn’t affect me too much. Except when I was trying to jump up a mountain because there didn’t seem to be any other way up and fell through it and died.

It Takes Two (PS5): COMPLETED!

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Seems these days that games I’m interested in playing end up free somewhere if I just wait a while. It Takes Two is one of those titles, as there it is, on PS+++++ (I forget how many +).

It’s a two player co-op title, with players each taking control of a heading-for-divorce couple who, because of magic or something prompted by their young child being upset with Mummy and Daddy arguing, have been turned into toys. You know, standard stuff. Each level they’re individually given different abilities, and you use these together to navigate a very Honey I Shrunk The Kids world, from a garden shed to a greenhouse and a tree.

Guiding you (and, clearly, hindering your progress) is a sentient Book of Love who explains that the obstacles and challenges you face are allegories for the relationship issues you’re having and overcoming them will bring you closer together again. There’s platforming, puzzling, spider-riding, shooting, and a wide variety of situations to deal with along the way, and none of the gimmicks last long enough to become stale. Despite the happy colours and generally upbeat and humorous events, there are some pretty dark places the game goes to, with a level where your “mission” is to set out and “kill” your daughter’s favourite stuffed toy (trigger warning: you cut off a limb and horribly maim a cute elephant who is screaming pleas for you to stop) just to make your girl cry. Horrible.

It’s a very pretty game, but I did find some issues in with the audio. Cut scenes suffered from silence (but only the voices), or sound and video went out of sync. Reading up, some others with the same problems suggested changing the PS5’s audio format from (or to) PCM or other possible options, but no matter the setting it made no difference. Seems it affects other platforms too. Jarring, but I have subtitles on so that helped a bit.

Other than that, it was a great, varied, and sometimes clever game, which works really well as a co-op title.

Lego Horizon Adventures (PS5): COMPLETED!

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Had some time off ill (yay crippling Covid!) with my daughter so found this cheap to play through together whilst exhaustion drained my life force. It’s a Lego reimagining of the PlayStation Horizon Zero Dawn game, only isn’t really like all the many other Lego games by TT Games perhaps because it isn’t by TT Games. You still go through levels, smashing some Lego stuff and sometimes building Lego stuff, but really it’s more about the combat sections and story.

There’s none of the thing from the other games where you gradually unlock characters that in turn allow you to access new areas or collect things or whatever. You get four characters which can all access everything but have a different weapon each. There’s really no reason to play it through more than once, and we managed to complete it in under 4 hours and then mop up all the achievements and challenges and 100% everything in under 8 in total, so it’s really, really short for a Lego game – even the shortest of the others are over 15 and most are over 30. Still, it was cheap and fun. And now I want to play the Big Boy Horizon Zero Dawn game. Hmm.

Lies of P (PS5)

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It isn’t often that I play a game and decide to just put it down never to go back. Especially after playing it for a few hours. There’s something in me that makes that time seem like a waste, if I don’t submit to more time with the game in order to finish it off. But here we are.

On paper, there was no way I was going to enjoy Lies of P. It’s ostensibly a Soulslike, and I have never enjoyed any of that genre. A combination of the grimdark settings and rock-hard gameplay and trying to beat the same area or baddie over and over and over again with slow combat and precision blocking and parrying just doesn’t feel fun. I’m a little jealous of all those people who do find it fun, and yes, I understand the satisfaction they must get for completing sections of the game or taking down an impossible boss. After all, I find the same in 2D Castlevania games, which are, in many ways, also soulslikes.

Lies of P made me want to try this sort of game again. Toby off of the ugvm Podcast (yes, that’s still going, somehow) mentioned he also hadn’t been a fan of soulslikes in the past but Lies turned him. I was also intrigued by the premise – you’re Pinocchio and all the other puppets have gone mad and you have to fight them. It definitely sounded a lot less grimdark and dirty and rainy and miserable.

Sadly, it is just as grimdark and dirty and miserable.

That in itself isn’t the end of the world (unlike other games in the genre which are the end of the world, ah ho ho), but the gameplay feels just like Demon’s Souls does only with marionettes instead of skellingtons and undead soldiers and stuff. Perhaps if this were more like Toy Story or Clockwork Knight or Pikmin instead I could pretend it was something different but it isn’t.

A few hours in, after meeting Geppetto and beating a boss and progressing through a few areas, I just wasn’t enjoying it. I hate how all the baddies respawn when you save the game and how there are loads of baddies that spring out of nowhere meaning you die and have to remember them next time. The world doesn’t have enough landmarks to stop me getting lost and going round in circles, and the slow (albeit quicker than Demon’s Souls) combat just isn’t for me. On the plus side, it isn’t as punishingly hard as other games like this I’ve played, and the plot is really interesting, but no – I’m out.

Night in the Woods (PS5): COMPLETED!

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After finishing Xenoblade Chronicles X, I was at a loss as to what to play next. I didn’t fancy another 125+ hour epic, so had a flick through what I had installed, and came across Night in the Woods. I’d looked at it before but hadn’t realised I owned it (well, PS+ rented it anyway), and I found it was only a few hours long, so here we are.

It starts with you, an anthropomorphic cat coming back to her home town after dropped out of “school”. I say “school” because it’s a university, and it irks me when people refer to university as school. Anyhoo, Mae turns up at her parents’ house and the first few days involve her reintegrating back into her family and the friends she’d left behind, rejoining her band and hanging out and doing things she used to do as a young teen even though she’s now 20 years old.

Soon it is clear there’s something very wrong with her. She gets headaches, but she’s also constantly tired, has bad dreams, doesn’t want to talk about her reasons for ditching uni and for some reason is happy to jump on rooftops and balance on power lines. Because of course. At the same time, you get to know more about Possum Springs, her run-down town which used to be a thriving and prosperous mining town but now all the work as dried up, the shops are closed or closing, some folk have gone missing, and there’s just nothing to do and everyone is a bit miserable. Oh, and sinkholes keep opening up.

Then Mae sees a ghost kidnap a child.

Or did she? Or is she just going a bit mad and it’s a symptom of everything else she’s struggling with? Things aren’t clear until they are and even then it isn’t entirely.

As a sort of platforming puzzle visual novel, Night in the Woods somehow manages to feel laid back but full of existential dread at the same time. Light hearted banter belies the truly horrific things happening in the town, and the feeling that summat just int right. It’s a great story with some great characters. And a Guitar Hero mini game because why not?