Some of us have a tendency to push emotions in a certain direction. Sometimes when you're feeling sad, you listen to sad music; other times you choose to watch a comedy and laugh it all off. In my case, one of the streams I watched during PAX 2020 Online was about Polish developers and a particular game called This War of Mine: The Little Ones. The game was a free download for PS+ members and I went into it not knowing a thing, but my mood was certainly ready for it.
In terms of gameplay, This War of Mine is a time and resource management game. The goal is to survive as civilians during a war for 20-50 days (that you can set) until a ceasefire. During the day, you construct tools and weapons, cook, filter rainwater and build furniture. Afterall, you need to eat, sleep and protect yourself at night. At night, you (have to) send a member of your 3- or 4-person party out to a neighborhood location to loot or steal resources to keep your party going. While doing so, there's a chance you'll run into looters, hostile armed people, or those that need help and you can react based on what you've brought with you. For your members at the house, you'll often have to guard while the rest sleep and/or recover from various conditions.
The game is intentionally bleak with a minimalist soundtrack and gameplay, which leaves you turning inward to the fact that while protagonists of Call of Duty games are out gunning down baddies to bombastic scores and acting out spy missions, civilians have it much, much worse. One way to provide food is to construct an animal trap, where you can either use one of your morsels to create two, or fertilizer as bait. Ocasionally, a trader visits your house and you can trade cigarettes and medicine for crafting materials or bullets to defend yourself, but the scarcity has you planning. I've put in about 12 hours, having survived one 40-day story, and losing my whole party three times or so partially through. I'm almost done with thr trophies, and would only recommend this game for people ready to reflect on survival during harsh times. It's certainly worth it, but it's not an experience that makes you feel great. That is all intentional, though, and 11-bit Studios did a great job.
Next up, the gorgeous, colorful, yet frustrating Street Fighter V. This was one of September 2020's free PS+ downloads and my first question was, "Where is the game, here?" After you've installed it, you're greeted by a frozen title image for 10 seconds, after which there's a process called the title update. After that, you get to a main menu obscured by challenges with timers and a slew of promotions to buy more stuff. Once you actually get to a character select, over 50% of the characters are locked out, as you need to purchase them or play forever. This game has the poorest presentation I've ever seen for a big budget title, and it's pretty obvious why so many people jumped ship: at every turn, it's trying to sell you something. At the same time, it's got the Street Fighter branding in that if you haven't played the series for the last 30 years, you're not going to ever win online. When you finally figure out how to play vs the CPU, the game is like any other SF, complete with hot, busty femmes and really buff dudes (the only positive of this game). I wish I could get all this without the awful marketing decisions. If you can wait 20 minutes after installing this game to actually control a fighter, this game might be for you. Otherwise, go get Mortal Kombat 11 and don't look back.
Other than that, I finished the second playthrough of Doom Eternal + multiplayer trophies and had a great time doing so.
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