The tradition of horror gaming through October has been something that’s largely passed me by, but I’ve indulged a little this year. My gaming this past week has featured non-horror stalwarts like Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun (unless you consider retro mid-90s FPS graphics to be horror), but I’ve also continued on with my playthrough of Until Dawn, rather appreciating its episodic structure for concise play sessions. There’s also been a little bit of Phasmo in my life, as I try to make head or tail of how the ghost hunting game works.
Joining me for some ghost hunting shenanigans (and similarly perplexed by how uncooperative each spectre is to be figured out) were Nic B and Gamoc. Nic complemented that with some more Metaphor ReFantazio (as a palate cleanser from Unknown 9 last week), while Gamoc wrapped up our review of Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred, had a great time with Vendetta Forever, and a little bit of Baldur’s Gate 3 and some real world D&D, where he was “basically a werewolf”.
Aran has been playing Final Fantasy XVI and will be grabbing the DLC soon before he heads off to do the final boss fight – as a nice bonus, that will be a bit cheaper because he discovered some PlayStation Stars points.
Ade’s been playing the “delightfully ridiculous and bombastic” EDF 6, alongside some Metroid Dread. He’s pretty close to the end of Dread, which is just a little bit shy of Metroid Fusion’s greatness – a stone cold classic, is Fusion.
Heading off to the frontiers of New World: Aeternum, Jim has enjoyed his time with Amazon’s revamped MMO, now that it’s on console – “I’ve had the itch to play an MMORPG for some time now though the options haven’t been all that inviting. I’ve heard good things about the latest expansions for World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2, and Final Fantasy XIV but I wanted to try something a little different and more accessible. New World fit the bill perfectly, and was all the more appealing thanks to its one-time purchase instead of adopting a monthly recurring subscription.”
He’s also got emulators up and running on his Steam Deck for the PS2 nostalgia of The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, while the weekend ahead will feature plenty of Black Ops 6.
And we’ll round out this week with Steve, who’s play the surprise retro horror of Tormenture, the surprisingly enjoyable The Smurfs – Dreams, and Nikoderiko. He also had the chance to play through the Shadows of the Damned Hella Remastered. Keep an eye out for reviews soon!.
TSBonyman
I completed Crimes & Punishments and moved on to The Devils Daughter. The 2nd game improves on a lot, including giving you larger locations to explore and the freedom to explore outside Baker St etc – although this means slower load times. One amusing thing is that a yoga/meditation animation used for a character in the 1st game has been re-used several times already in the 2nd game – really odd seeing a random person in the middle of the street or one of the bowling club players doing yoga. Also some amusement as Sherlock studies parenting instead of his usual reading material.
I also discovered the Welcome hub went live for us this week, initially i wasn’t very impressed but once i figured out how to re-size and move the widgets it became more usable. (widgets at smallest size cannot be moved, so increase size to 2 “blocks” in order to move them, then resize down to 1 “block”). Setting a wallpaper though – you can only choose ‘recent’ images – and only from within the Welcome hub – scrolling through your media collection offers no option to set wallpaper. However, once you have the media player widget on screen, if you select ‘shuffle’, it periodically refreshes with a new selection of 10 consecutive images plucked randomly from your collection, and you can set one of those as wallpaper. Plus i can use the message widget as a short-cut to the browser – great success!