The Last of Us - it's the time of the season

It's the feel bad game of the summer!

thing is, death stranding was also supposedly a "feel bad" game, but it's actually really fun (imo)

xposts Green Room was bracing af but fun is not the descriptor I'd use. Like riding a rollercoaster where survival is maybe a 50/50 proposition at best.

i would never play it but i appreciate the concept of a miserablist hyper-violent video game that is philosophically anti-violence. you love killing enemies in video games? well here, experience the full range of sights and sounds involved in murdering this cute dog. you like that?

So many horror games veer explicit torture porn, there's something to be said for the experience being bad vs fun or "escapist, " though don't know if it makes for a better game.

thing is, death stranding was also supposedly a "feel bad" game, but it's actually really fun (imo)

would never play it but i appreciate the concept of a miserablist hyper-violent video game that is philosophically anti-violence. you love killing enemies in video games? well here, experience the full range of sights and sounds involved in murdering this cute dog. you like that?

― na (NA), Friday, June 12, 2020 11:56 AM

haha, yeah, that reminds me of (something someone said here?) the idea of a game where you spend the first 5 minutes killing something and then spend the rest of the game in a panic about what happened, trying to cover it up, and/or coming to terms with it and trying to forgive yourself

that was some kind of adult swim web game, i forget the name

i liked the first one if this got raves across the board maybe i'd bite but it feels like it'll be $30 soon and the reviews seem inconsistent and don't make me excited to play. "misery simulator" sounds like fun but i think i just want a sequel to afterlife

I haven't played the first one yet, so I figure by the time I do this one will be, like, $20.

skimming the reviews, making me reconsider. i love the first one, so i was going to get this for release day...

mainstream reviews are almost universally positive, but the sites I generally trust have much more mixed reactions (Polygon, Ars, Eurogamer)

Didn’t eurogamer give it an essential?

Overall positive yes

Are the problems reviewers have with the gameplay, or are objections related to thematic aspects of the story and presentation? The last high profile games I can think of that got some very mixed reviews were Rage 2 and Days Gone, and I guess Death Stranding, but fans really seem to have grown to like those second two, if not the first.

when the gameplay consists of brutally murdering people i don't think you can disentangle that from the thematic aspects in this case!

I guess, but plenty of games consist of brutally murdering people. Like, I remember hearing good things about Far Cry 3, so I watched a couple of videos and it seemed massively unpleasant, like, referring to women as bitches before stabbing them in the neck sort of stuff.

the kids can’t go to bed quick enough to suit me

idly mulling whether to start on “hard” once i get down to brass tacks later on

Yeah I thought about it but went with normal.

FWIW a few minutes and I murdered a bunch of kids, in a snowball fight.

A few minutes IN.

reading the reviews it sounds like this game spawned from the violence-in-videogames-what's-it-all-mean discourse that popped up every once in a while for a decade but the world has moved past that by now. maybe the world's also moved past naughty dog style cinematic experience games. in any case it takes a really long time to make a game

I caved and bought it. See you guys in a week or two.

that’s going to be the cleanest fucking fretboard in zombieland

lol Leee

in the walking bits i keep unconsciously trying to keep 6 feet away from everyone

i'm waiting to hear y'all's reports back b4 i buy this new but yr excitement is infectious

The first one is sitting in a drawer. Have to Finish death stranding first

i love everything about this so far.

Same. Not a whole lot different from the first game so far, except the narrative has been slacker, and the combat encounters seem more dynamic.

Oh and the trick of sitting on your upgrade vitamins until you're low on health to save on a health kit doesn't work quite as well because the health upgrade is the third level on a skill tree now.

Yeah i think i was expecting it to be a really different game somehow given various things i’ve read so i’m very pleasantly surprised that i still get to creep around and shiv monsters and snap fools’ necks. There’s a nice emphasis on scrambling and exploring. it feels more open somehow. and good god the first time you realise that your only move is to run? fuuuuuuuck

been watching some playthroughs. this looks incredible

Is expecting to binge the game this weekend, and after putting in about 8 cumulative hours yesterday, my hand started to hurt. 😟

I'm not sure why I like TLOU so much when I hated playing the Uncharted games.

cause it’s got heart? but also gameplay-wise it’s more MGS than uncharted imo

Hah, that sounds reasonable on both counts!

It’s also got heavy horror energy. Christ almighty. I’d sooner let my kids watch Alien than play this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tero0sRNi8U

I watched a full stream of Part 2. I don’t really want to pick at the flaws right now. This game takes big risks, and I think I need to sit on it for a while. I can appreciate what the Kotaku and Polygon reviewers are saying, but “misery simulator” is also (deliberately) glib. There’s a lot more going on than that. Themes that could seem trite on paper turn out to be far more absorbing when given time and a world in which to develop. A lot probably depends on how far you can buy into the depiction of violence, as well as the verisimilitude of the crazy lengths these characters are willing to go to. But it must have essentially worked on me since I was just really sad at the end.

wait.... isn’t it like 25 hours or something??

Yeah, I was stuck inside this weekend.

Oh I see what you meant. I meant a full playthrough, over a few separate streams.

Is there a stream you preferred? I don't think I could invest in the time to play it but I could have it on in the background while doing other things.

just a little light evisceration over dinner

Yeah the thing that strikes me as myopic (though I've been studiously avoiding reading reviews as a stringent anti-spoiler policy, so I may be missing some of the current context) is that the critics are forgetting about the first game. The gameplay loop is fairly basic, and resources are deliberately scarce. In other words, the not-fun qualities aren't new to Part 2, on top of which is overlaid a story that, on paper, is trite. But you get into the game, the polish and care and overall execution given to the conventions are notable.

I didn’t realise til yesterday that you can tweak a million individual difficulty settings using the “accessibility” menu. I’m considering slightly reducing the amount of resources I get but keeping everything else the same. Still haven’t come across my first roll of tape yet though!

Same here re: tape and blades!

The narrative slackness I mentioned earlier is, I think, caused by the semi-open worldness of some stages, with optional areas for you to clear, which don't really advance the main story and only offer some modest character building.

I’m super fine with it. Love taking down WLFs.

Hoo boy the stage before the movie theater is INTENSE.

man whenever you have to descend into some flooded basement it’s like “oh fuck”

but yeah I really enjoyed that whole pre-theatre set of sequences - partic the TV tower