Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster

This was the first game in the Dead Rising franchise and the reason I kind of stuck with Xbox 360 in the console wars.   I never actually finished this first one, so when the Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster came out I was excited to play it.

The way they use Psycho's for the main villains of the game as you are rescuing survivors in a mall is fantastic, though this one does feel a bit raw - like a bands first album, it felt like wearing an old comfortable sweater getting back in and swinging a katana.

A lot of people seemed to be upset that the remaster didn't add anything new, even though they re-recorded voices, they left the awkwardness of the dialog in -- to me that's just original charm sauce.

Voidtrain

Voidtrain is a game that has a lot of promise but not a lot of direction.

It was an early access game that hasn't been touched in a few years, presumably abandoned by the developers?  "Something happens" and you find yourself sucked through a portal on a train going through the void with creatures that can attack you.

The gameplay loop is pretty similar to Raft, you spear things from the train until you make it to the next station and upgrade.   There are creatures that can help gather and automate some train management tasks, but all in all it was a bit .. boring? until they add purpose and a quest other than upgrading.

The Quarry

The Quarry is a game that has you play as a team of camp counselors who get stranded at camp one extra day after locking up and it's a full moon ....

The gameplay was similar to a Telltale game that had quick-time events interspersed to handle any dramatic scenes.  The character acting was fantastic, but honestly having a whole scene set around me choosing decisions in a campfire truth-or-dare episode felt a little corny and boring.

The game has a lot of endings, and there are ways to save everybody, but you would have to do counterintuitive things at times and  I felt like I played it as the characters would and not as "gamer who knows it's a horror game", which helped.   I don't think I'd play again though just to see what else they came up with on alternate paths

Pacific Drive

 Pacific Drive is a game about about exploring and upgrading with a car in a chaotic world gone wrong.

The map you drive through gets progressively more chaotic as anomalies and storms interfere with your exploration, eventually resulting in a radiation storm to force you out one way or another.  

The nugget of idea it is very solid, and this could probably have been a great game if they had figured out a decent story to tell with it, and made the map a little ... more ... meaningful?  The story delivery was all through the radio and various tapes you would find somewhere in the world, and honestly was a bit ham fisted - drive to these places and flip some switches to stabilize something.    I'm being both sarcastically vague and 100% accurate.

I didn't have anything more to unlock or a reason to play beyond the credits rolling when they did.  Because .. I drove somewhere and flipped the switch to stabilize something.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Expedition 33 is art.  Quite literally.

67 years ago the people of Lumiere found themselves cut off from the world where a mysterious god, a Paintress paints an ever decreasing number of a cliff.  Everyone of that age or lower turns to dust - and each year an expedition sets off to try and stop the Paintress.  You are Expedition 33.

The story is truly a masterwork of fiction, the world you are in and beyond is both beautiful and intriguing and the Paintress is just a small part of the story.  The tragedy, the heroism - it was alldone amazingly well, I felt for these characters - I despaired when they did.

In the end you are presented with a sort of moral dilemma in how to resolve the ultimate conflict.  I feel like I made the right decision, but it felt like a punch in the gut doing it.  So good!

Fallout 76

There is a sweet spot when to play a game.  I missed that sweet spot with Fallout 76.

The game was fairly buggy and sparse on release, but at least the story made a bit of sense.  Since that time, there have been multiple expansions and content patches, so that now in addition to the main story quest you have NPCs giving you all of the additional content quests they've added.   

For an efficiency gamer this is fantastic, I can go to one area of the map and knock out 5 quests.  But doing that is akin to binge watching multiple shows simultaneously.  I have only a general idea what's going on -- I'm not "on" any of those quests, I'm doing the tasks of them.

I'm not going to say it's bad ... there are people still playing who are level 791 and such, obviously people are enjoying the silent world of reading decrepit old computer terminals for log entries.  It's a well crafted world ... I'm just bored exploring.

Star Trek: Resurgence

The Telltale engine works pretty well to help emulate the pressure situations you might face as a captain of a Star Fleet vessel - you're put into critical situations and forced to make snap decisions before a timer expires and chooses for you.  Oftentimes there is no clear "right or wrong" as well.

In between is a bit of tediousness that is common to Telltale titles as well, and even a fan of the show will eventually tire of "press 'w' to lift hatch".  Towards the end, some of those events felt tedious as I was just looking for the right thing to click.

Great experience.