Its bugging me now but there was a game last gen iirc could have been late 360 that had horrendous bump into wall animations. It was designed for larger areas but every now and again you had to go into a smaller room.
Being in said small room had you pinballing around like a Talking Heads video.

Probably far too vague to figure out but it sticks in my mind.

I like AA stuff, I think it's a missing gap in the market. Hellblade proved you could do this stuff, but that was an experiment that they geared heavily towards, and it was a bit of a marketing stunt "we made this with 20 people and it rivals AAA" is a little bit further from the truth of the matter I imagine.

It's interesting to me that Bloober are a studio that's bigger than Bethesda at the time of Skyrim, but I imagine much of Bloober's staff is on art and technical art duty - the game is technically pretty impressive (outside the character) and rendering two things at once the way it does is really interesting. I imagine the character model took a hit cos it was less important to them than the two locales at once  .

I don't think £40 is the right price-point for a player though. It clearly cost them a lot of money, and I think they changed the price from a lower price-point quite late down the line on Steam because there were a lot of complaints.

If I had paid for the game, I would have felt short-changed for £40, not because there's anything wrong with an experiential style game costing that much, just that there's no substance to it really. There's scope for them to do interesting stuff and they just don't do that.

Game Pass is definitely a boon for it, cos it lets more people take a punt on it, and I think everyone should get to Siwa and see the dual world stuff in action cos it's excellent, but I wouldn't expect much more than that overall.

Microsoft and Epic being able to bring money to bear on these more commercially risky projects is good and healthy for the industry IMO, but it doesn't mean every game made this way is gonna be a winner.

Imagine you're sitting there about to release a game called "Bang Average"

Trouble is, if you try and sell a game for £30 (that’s not a remaster), I sense that the market would say “what’s wrong with it?” and move on. There’s only a handful of examples of games being pitched at a deliberately lower price point and being a success. I’m thinking Carnival Games and the most recent Ratchett and Clank, but there may be others.

I wrongly assumed this was also a physical release.

No idea, but surely The Medium is getting downloaded like hotcakes at the moment, given that most people with an S or X will be keen to play something they couldn't on an older machine.

The jump scare was good, but if that's the only one, and the rest of it is the same stuff, it's uninstall time. Hello sadness, I'm boredom

i was playing GTA5 online last night and found if you want jump scares, switch to first person view while driving fast cars, then the lack of peripheral vision means turning round corners leads to lots of head on collison jump scares!

In the general games news thread.

Paul the sparky wrote:

Played the Medium for a while. Definitely not my cup of tea. Clunky as fuck, but worse than that, boring

Ahead of you there, better use of hard drive space.

It has some really nice stuff after the halfway mark. One area is very red and it’s a standout

How many writers went for Unhappy Medium?

stonechalice wrote:

Ooh great red

easiest way of highlighting which area i’m taking about without spoiling it for Franny.

Finished The Medium. I'm gonna go with the Eurogamer Recommended.....if you like walking sims/interactive stories. I like binging on these occasionally and thoroughly enjoyed it start to finish.

I don't think ot has any less gameplay than any other games like Gone Home, Edith, Firewatch etc. The story is interesting, there's some interesting mechanics and uses of the dual world thing and it's absolutely stunning visually (character models aside).

The puzzles are a bit easy, but there's a few decent ones in there. They could have expanded on the dual world stuff and included more, that's probably my main criticism. Other than that I've had a great time with it and it doesn't outstay it's welcome.

It's absolutely ideal for Gamepass but yeh, £40 is a bit steep.

Good stuff.