This would have been helpful back then!
Finished the game over the weekend. The atmosphere and story are beautifully done. Some of the puzzles were extremely frustrating and I nearly gave up a few times. I don’t think I’ve ever died this much in a game before. In some cases I brute-forced my way through an area only to realize afterward that there was a simple, obvious solution.
So I have a love/hate relationship with this game lol. Overall I’m glad I played it, and it looks great on the PS5.
I’ve been playing this recently too! On PC. It is frustrating at times, but I always seem to manage to make progress right before I get too frustrated. I have no idea how far from the end I am, but it keeps giving you new tools, which is great.
Also, man, they really put these kids through the wringer in this game.
I have a love/like relationship with the game that seems to keep me from completing it. I get going on it, really into it, then quickly fade away to something else. Part of the problem, despite loving the atmosphere, story, characters, & setting, is that I’ve gotten motion sick a couple times during running sequences, and I also find the tense sneaking situations a bit overwhelming when I’m not quite sure what I’m supposed to be doing, and the dying frustrates me (I really don’t like repeating stuff over and over when I’m mostly engaged by the story, not the difficulty of puzzling out the next moves).
It’s a very well done game, and I’d love to see more like it, but it can’t keep me glued to it. Same thing happened with The Last of Us on the PS4 and now PS5, in almost the identical manner. It’s a weird problem.
10/18/22. Noice.
Slightly off topic, but the sequel to this game went gold! Almost time for a thread!
Two and a half years later, I finished Chapter 2 last night, and made some progress in Chapter 3. Since it’s leaving game pass in less than a week, I can’t do my usual thing of only playing a stealth game until I get found out, or I get to the next big milestone. Instead, I have to suppress that instinct and just keep playing and playing and playing and playing.
I have to tell you, it felt so bizarre. Instead of playing one scenario, quitting, thinking about it, basking in it, I just move to the next encounter, and then the next, and then the next. What a strange way to play games. But I’m doing it! It feels less like experiencing the game than just robotically going through a checklist, kind of.
I say “kind of”, because thinking about it today, a lot of the strong moments really stuck with me, even though there were so freaking many of them.
Per Xbox, I finished it about 19 hours. Some of that was surely idling.
I almost finished the game, got to the final battle, tried about 6 times. Thought ‘I think this is it, ill take a look at youtube.’ Watched a guy beat the battle, and the ending and that was that. Good enough for me. Didnt feel the need to push thru and was pretty satisfied. And uninstalled it. There was a couple boss battles in the game that just seemed out of place to me, since they had mechanics that never repeated.
Looking forward to the follow up to fill in more of the history of the family.
I ran into trouble in Chapter 4 last night. First there was a choice on where to go. I got killed in one direction, so I went the other way. This was the “correct” way, it turns out, which means I missed out on the glowy loot that I could have gotten if I’d gone the other way.
I was immediately bothered by this because I got to a workbench and was one ingredient short on two separate items from upgrading.
Gah!
And then right after that, the game gave me two ways to go in a field. Noooooo! Stop giving me choices!
I hope they tone down the brother a bit. My son was watching me play, and kept asking me ‘why do you have to save him? Cant you just leave him?’ And i’d go ‘I dont know, she doesnt even know him…it wont let me leave him.’
In Chapter 8 or 9 now. I’m just loving this so much.
I don’t know why it never occurred to me until today but the gameplay in this game is totally from The Last of Us. I think the reason it didn’t occur to me until now is because both games are so reliant on narrative and the narrative for the two games is so different.
But the moment to moment gameplay of scrounging for resources, travelling with (a) companion(s), make-shift weapons created on the fly, stealthing some of the time, really intense fights some other times, it’s TOTALLY Last of Us. And it fits really well here too.
Unfortunately my son’s breakfast didn’t agree with him and he threw up partially on my computer chair, partially on the carpet and computers. I cleaned up as best as I could, but there’s towels and baking soda doing their work now, and it still smells of throw-up around there.
So I’m not going back in today. The smell could have been more immersive for the game if it smelled more like rotting corpses, but not throw-up.
Chapter IX was the first chapter in which our protagonist didn’t have a companion, and I didn’t enjoy it as much as the other chapters. The game definitely works better with the interplay between characters going on constantly. Hopefully this is the only Chapter without companions.
2 Days left until this leaves Game Pass (including today). I definitely will not be able to finish the game, but I did find out where the save game is on my hard drive. Hopefully I can install the giveaway version from Epic Game Store and transfer my save and finish the game that way.
Last day on Game Pass. I got the achievement for finishing Chapter IX. And then I installed the version I have from the Epic Games Store.
And it just worked! My save slot was already there. I guess both versions look at the same location in the documents folder for the save file. I uninstalled the Game Pass version and was able to continue on Epic. Nice.
Awesome.
Just finished it ahead of Game Pass removal. (I do own it on Epic, but I started the game on Xbox, so the crunch was on)
Enjoyed it. The story was OK, I liked the characters and didn’t feel like we spent enough time with them. But any longer and the game play would have gotten monotonous, so.
Plus I always enjoy it when characters acknowledge the ridiculous body count in games,
I hope you guys like rats
The first major visual impact is the number of rats appearing on screen. It’s increased from 5,000 to 300,000.
Oh no, that’s too many rats
I also managed to finish this game. Only in my game the kids died trying to push a fucking cart and that was the end of that.