Wow. Definitely a game that landed for some. I avoided it as the demo put me off but I always love to see someone go all the way to a 10.

Loved what I played

Oh god yeah, you could speed run that in less than an hour easily. But “get lost” is not an insult here, it’s genuinely the best way to play.

[10]

It's a definite [9], for what it sets out to do it's probably even a [10], I just think a UGC element would be amazing and so I've deducted a point for the lack of.

Recommendation Dog (Playdate) - You play a dog that runs a temping agency, using the crank to turn through your rolodex to find a suitable candidate. Your roster of temps grows after each level, making the game progressively more frantic as you attempt to find the perfect candidate before the timer runs out. About five levels on a first playthrough the game provides a narrative ending and thereafter runs in endless mode. Very simple but quite fun - not bad for a freebie. [6]

Finished Wreckfest on Switch. Third completion for me after PS4 and Series X. It's a really good port. Everything is there and it runs really well and the graphics (presumably from it's PC origin) scale really nicely.

I love everything about this game. Best new racing franchise in ages and I hope it gets a sequel. Love the handling (with all assists off) and the tracks and the collection of cars.

The last of us part 1 still as 10 as it gets

Ah don’t. I got all of the achievements in the original and am sorely tempted, but I’ve got a billion other things on the go.

It's on the list of things to do, for sure.

But then Final Fantasy VII and 'learn Chinese' are also on that list.

Stupid limited human lifespans.

I've only played those two. Thought the PS4 game edged it but Rift Apart is still worth a look. I've got the disc if anyone fancies a go btw.

Days Gone on PS5. Mostly enjoyed it very much. Liked the characters, the scenery is lovely, and the bike is great for travelling around. It's mostly the same throughout so I started to lose a bit of interest a couple of times and has the odd bit of jank but the overall atmosphere won me over.

The one upside of having had an operation this week, is I suddenly had lots of gaming time. So I played and finished two games - Horizon: Forbidden West and Tchia. (If you can't be bothered to read any of my spiel, go read Tilly's review of Tchia in the 52 games thread. It's more informative and less pretentious than mine. @Moot_Geeza you should give her a review site of her own.)

Superficially there's quite a bit in common between them - both are open worlds with a strong female lead, optional side quests and a Zelda-esque glider you don't really need once you reach a certain point in the story. On the flip side though, Horizon's a AAA, doubtless focus grouped to death, bit of precision game making, whereas Tchia's the product of a small dedicated studio. So how do they hold up individually?

Horizon then is pretty much what you'd expect. I actually finished it this time (unlike the first game), but it still struggles under the weight of an enormous world. The gameplay is...fine.  It got more entertaining once I realised I needed to play with the vast array of weapons rather than leaning on the regular bow, and got better at figuring out what bits to cleave off my enemies. None the less, by the end it had pulled off the not insignificant feat of leaving me bored of robot dinosaurs - a sentence I never thought I would write. 

Aloy, the lead, is a slightly weird character, a warrior and tech genius who is simultaneously laser focussed on saving the world and more than happy to piss about doing whatever errand the locals fancy. I think there's supposed to be a character arc in which she learns to work with others rather than act alone, but if that's the intent it never quite lands. Despite the fact that Things Happen throughout the game, she never really seems all that bothered by any of it - though she's clearly going to be incredibly depressed if the world ever stops needing to be saved as that seems to be her only defining characteristic.

She's surrounded by a whole host of characters, all of whom are equally sketchily drawn. The untrustworthy genius, the well meaning packhorse, the wide eyed scholar, the other untrustworthy genius etc etc. When one character's entire religious and social concept of the world is ripped apart, they accept it with barely a shrug.

Still, I played through the whole thing - because it's absolutely bloody beautiful, and because despite my grumbling, it took a very long time before I got bored of killing robot dinosaurs. Some of the side quests are a bit more involved than usual (though most ultimately boil down to "go to place X, climb a bit, fight dinosaurs") and there's some genuine ingenuity around how to make the multiple tall neck ascents individually unique. The story is pretty by the numbers though and it commits my most hated video game sin... ...but if I'm honest, to my surprise, I think I enjoyed it more than God of War: Ragnarok. It's stunning, incredibly impressive, but ultimately kind of empty.

On to Tchia then...  like I say, there are some superficial similarities, but ultimately the two games couldn't be more different. Whereas Horizon is (to my eyes at least) a technical triumph, Tchia has quite a few edges that need filing down. (A highlight was the "making dinner" mini game where the food completely disappeared.)

Coming from one to the other was a bit of a bump, and made me realise how carefully Horizon holds your hand, and how clearly everything in the world is labelled for you. Despite looking like a kids game, Tchia is much more inclined to treat me like an adult - when you ask it where you are on the map it gives you a broad area, and Tchia says "we're somewhere around here, near to (whatever)" and that's about it. It was an embarrassingly long time before I realised it was possible to bring up a compass that tells me where to go. Early on I spent a lot of time wondering around, not sure what exactly I was supposed to do - despite a literal list on the left side of the screen. It was only when I decided to simply enjoy wandering around, and playing, that I realised what I was supposed to be doing. (Which, I suspect, was wander around and play.)

The pacing, and the tone, is all over the shop. This is a cute cell shaded game about love and friendship, but it's also a game where the villain... Horizon contains one tragic event, whereas Tchia opens with an orphanage, and that turns out to be a statement of intent.

Meanwhile there are loads of game changing skills and abilities that you could easily never discover at all buried on the map. I pity anyone trying to do some of the later sequences who had dismissed the stone balancing challenges as boring. (Not least because the stone balancing challenges are boring. But the rewards...)

Worse still, whilst the first half of the game has you mostly exploring a very beautiful island, the latter half increasingly has you wondering around a significantly more industrialised island. Whilst it's effective in making you appreciate the former, it's still hard to appreciate spending hours in dull factories, when you want to get back to swooping over trees and hillsides.

And yet...

Tchia is wonderful. It's wonderful precisely because of all the messiness. It is clearly a labour of love, and presumably it's precisely the thing its makers wanted to create. It is a love letter to a place and a people. It contains what is, I think, my favourite moment in a video game ever, and it comes right after I thought "bloody hell, why are we doing the bloody song about the parakeet again?" It is brave, and silly, and sometimes broken, but always sincere, in a way that something like Horizon can never hope to be. 

I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have played it had it not been "free" on PS+ and, if I'm honest, if I hadn't been stuck on the sofa unable to do anything else, I'm not sure I would have stayed with it long enough to discover how ultimately charming it is. I'm glad I did.

Glad you're on the mend, Tin. Tilly's been working on some things over the past couple of days. Not sure she'll see them through, but she has put a surprising amount of effort in so far, so watch this space.