I do have Game Pass, but I'm a total weirdo and there's some games that I would prefer not to play on the XBox, because they're not very Xboxy. That would include Soulsbourne and their ilk.

I have no doubt. It’s totally a me thing.

Also slightly concerned it’ll drop of the service in the middle of my play through.

To this day, if I were to play a Tomb Raider game, it'd be a PlayStation game in my head - regardless of what platform it's actually on.

b0r1s wrote:

stonechalice wrote:

Lies of P. The souls formula feels stale at this point. I'm so sick of it. Same thing happened with Elden Ring. P looks gorgeous and it's doing everything right, but I've no appetite for any more Souls style gameplay. Feels wooden and clunky.

I can agree with this. There is something about the combat that just feels off. Can't say I felt the same about Elden Ring though.

I just finished Lies of P and I think it’s the best Souls-like made by someone other than From. Absolutely nailed it for me. Interesting premise/world, plenty of variation in how you can tackle combat with a cool mix of Bloodborne/Sekiro in terms of party and posture, plus it looks fantastic too.

Maybe some other badgers had enough of the formula or even this game, but for me it was right up there. Brilliant stuff.

Xbox/GamePass?

I sometimes wonder whether not ‘owning’ a game makes you more likely to drop off, because there’s always another title to try and you’re not as committed to realising value from the purchase.

I’m not saying it’s good to force yourself to like something if you aren’t enjoying yourself, but Souls-like games are supposed to be endured in places - particularly bosses and mini-bosses.

It’s not exclusively a GamePass theory. I suspect some harder to listen to classic concept albums wouldn’t have found the same status if launched on a streaming service like Spotify.

I saw the post-credit stuff and got all excited about a sequel. It’s really good. They definitely ’get’ the format.

My only frustration with it was a personal one really. I loaded into the starter weapon and focused on HP/Strength upgrades so much that I didn’t want to try anything else for too long. The game kept giving me these awesome new weapons and I went back to the sword each time.

It could have been the Sekiro influence though, as it was the most balanced weapon I tried and the use of parrying made it feel like Sekiro to me.

Pacific Drive

I wanted to love this one but it ended being far too punishing and slow. I love the setting and the vibes, but the gameplay is unbelievably laborious. You can spend an age repairing the car after some mishap, then you upgrade all the panels to steel one by one and fill the tank and charge the battery and prepare your survival tools and empty the trunk into the transit trunk so you can move it a few inches to the locker next to the car then you choose your route off the projector then you get in the car and you start the engine and look down a bit more to put it in drive and then you drive down the road to the mission loading screen and then, within minutes of starting the mission you lose the road and send the car down a steep hill or roll the car off a cliff and smash it to pieces or something will drag your car off or something will stick to it and electrocute you and fuck everything up and then you're back at the workshop repairing it again it's fucking painful. It's also a very dark game most of the time, it's hard to see what the hell is going on.

There's also a bit of vagueness about what you're actually supposed to be doing - most of the time when I wasn't crashing into unseen things, rolling down hills and getting harassed, I was stripping wrecked cars, pilfering little sheds and going after yellow dots on the map to get the anchor things then heading to a waypoint you have to be a certain distance away to actually activate before you can get out of the map. It's all a bit jumbled

It's a super immersive game when it's clicking, fucking scary at times, and it definitely got weirder the more I played, but the focus on having to repair the car constantly coupled with disjointed progression and the highly repetitive looting that takes forever is too much of an ask. I liked the hoover though.

6/10

Paul the sparky wrote:

Looked atmospheric as fuck but yeah, the gameplay doesn't look great

This. I was in pain reading your post Chalice.

I really quite like it but yeah it's absolutely not for everyone. There's a fair bit of streamlining they could have done here and there, but I think the intention is for it it to be quite a slow and granular experience which isn't going to work for a lot of people. Also I feel like it's really best as a M&Kb game rather than a controller game given how much rapid back and forth movement you have to make, engaging/disengaging the handbrake etc. Something worth mentioning.

There's a few keyboards that have switches that can put out analogue signals to emulate an analogue stick, using optical or magnets IIRC. One of those would probably be great for this though I think it would still be a pain to set up just right. On balance M&Kb seems best to me but neither option is really optimal.