I went from a year of being unemployed to working a very physical job mid-August and suddenly have many demands!
After my Spring stint this year of back pain that kept me on my bed with my Switch, I played a ton of Hades. Right in the middle of August, the game finally came to Game Pass and PS5 . Hades rules especially because you can beat a session in 45 minutes and make permanent progress for your next runs.
You play as Zagreus, the son of Hades, and try to escape the underworld through a series of death loops. Along the way, you're helped and hindered by various Olympian and Cthonic (underworld) gods and immortals. The Olympians give you various tweaks to your main 5 combat skills: dashing, two kinds of attack, a magic projectile, and an ultimate spell. For example, Zeus can empower Zag to strike enemies with lightning every time he dashes, while Demeter can change the magic projectile to a tower that shoots a freezing beam at enemies. If you survive to the end boss, you'll likely have 16-20 of these boons, hardly resembling the Zag that started 45 minutes prior. One thing is that the overall plot develops pretty much every time you reach the end of a run, so your first dozen hours or so of dying over and over in a few minutes as you learn controls and figure out the game aren't also marred by trying to figure out what's happening. I like this approach to narration.
Hades plays very quickly, and is the only game I've played on my DualSense that has me mashing face buttons frenetically as Zag shield bashes, cestus punches, spear jabs and slices his way through the layers of the underworld. Considering how much of a fan of SuperGiant Games (this link is my old blog that I have yet to import here) I am, a recommendation for this is a no-brainer. Better news: it's currently on GamePass, so it's almost free for Xboxers.
Horizon Zero Dawn got a framerate boost to 60fps on the PS5 at the beginning of September, and I figured I'd give it another...shot. I know there are people who insist higher framerates should be standard for all games and that they never be coded in cinematic (24-30) framerates. What I've experienced so far is that if the cutscenes are planned to be 60fps, it's fine. Forcing 24 or 30fps into 60 can look janky, though. The prerendered 30fps scenes don't have audio for me, while the 60fps ones look a bit floaty. I'm guessing that when animators design something for one framerate, it doesn't always translate to the other, but this is not a researched statement: I just know I don't like it. I thought the same thing about Spiderman Remastered.
There were two additional issues that I solved: HZD had a lot of texture pop-in and a lot of the time when cutscenes changed angles, the characters would jump a few frames. That has been solved by copying the game over to the PS5's internal ssd. This is the first game where I've needed to do that, and I wonder if the concessions for updating a 4.5-year-old game meant that data streaming was less efficient. No idea, but try this if you have pop-in problems!
Onto the actual game: I'm playing through on Hard and dying a whole bunch. I thought I could just dash through the main story again, but I was wrong: in Hard, you need the XP from sidequests. The other thing I'm trying is to use more weapons than just arrows. I'm using traps and tripwires and luring the big monsters into them, though occasionally the AI will be smarter than chasing me into a trap and show hesitation. HZD is still an amazing game and looks as good as ever with the latest update.
I finally started The Last of Us 2, which looks as good as any PS5 game available right now. I played through on Normal, which was only a challenge on a few sections where I wasn't sure whether to run or kill something. It's the first game I've played in a while that leans so heavily on cutscenes: I want to say almost 40%. However, the cinematics are the best-looking I've ever seen and really enthralling, which is usual for Naughty Dog. The gameplay is pretty much the same as the first game, though all the scripted action sequences are more like Uncharted and adrenaline-pumping. The other main thing that sets this game on the top shelf is the details in animation: facial expressions, gestures, animations for where your hands go when picking things up, accessing your backpack (the Options menu) in different body positions. It all tells you that Naughty Dog thought of everything and then animated it.
The game takes place in a long-abandoned Seattle. Seeing greened over streets and buildings I recognize is one thing. Seeing zombies limp around and mutter to themselves in the game, and then commuting downtown in real life and seeing drug addicts on 2nd and 3rd Ave behave similarly is uncanny to players who have visited pandemic/abandoned Downtown Seattle lately (and are as cynical as me.)
The main detractor of TLoU 2 for me is the amount of jump scares: there were at least a dozen of them in the first half of the game and tensing up my body for so many moments after coming home from a labor job sucks ass. However, that is the only negative I can dig up in an experience that plays with emotions so well.
I feel like this game is the antithesis of the Uncharted games: slower-paced action with much more focus on meaningful dialogue, fewer resources make combat less about charging in and Rambo-ing the enemies, and--ohh, one of the running themes is humanizing everybody. The violence and sound design is gruesome like a Mortal Kombat game, but when you're killing different factions who are hunting for you, they'll emotionally shout out names of their fallen comrades. One theme that powers the plot is revenge and its connection with death and relationship boundaries. The climaxes don't come out of nowhere: they're all pretty logical consequences to your characters' actions. TLOU 2 still manages to be exciting, and the story's structure was the unpredictable part for me.
The Last of Us 2, like the majority of reviews have long-ago said, is a must-play if you're interested in single player narrative games, and it also happens to have the absolute best technical specs of the PS4 generation and some top-tier writing and directing. It's better in a dark, private setting where you can take in some of the atmosphere (and jump scares), make note of the detailed motions and body language, and really listen to the story.
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