~The Game Pass Thread~

Yeah, enjoying the first little bit.

The ship breaker game is pretty cool.

I’m finally getting around to trying As Dusk Falls and it’s pretty interesting in a Telltale kind of way. But they got the fellow who voices Adam Jensen in the recent Deus Ex games to do one of the main characters. And it’s fine but a bit distracting to hear his voice coming out of this schlubby, self-doubting character.

I finished As Dusk Falls yesterday and absolutely loved it, game of the year so far for me. Very happy that they ditched the boring bits from the Tell Tale style games and just got on with the story.

Oops! My PC Game Pass subscription just ran out after three years. I forgot to turn off auto-renew so now I’ve [GASP] paid full price for October. But I turned off the recurring payment so I’ll do the Xbox Gold conversion in a month.

I have been playing Unsighted as it will go out of gamepass and the end of the month, and it got in the top 10 of some people in 2021. It’s a good action/metroidavania, the combat is decent, with emphasis on parries and stamina management (gos I’m so bad at parrying in games), the player progression is very interesting as you have to use the same currency for everything (new slots for chips, weapon upgrades, buying stuff, etc) but the main dish here is the exploration.
It feels old school in the sense that just reaching the area you have to go is hard, and it has well integrated puzzles in this world progression. You never know if you are missing something obvious in an area to be able to pass, or you are supposed to find a roundabout path, or you are supposed to find a key in some other place to use before, or you are supposed to do another section in the world map before that will give you a new traversal ability. You alao find lots of closed doors or blocked on passages that are really shortcuts you can open from the other side.

Of course there is a tradeoff,this lack of handholding that be frustrating sometimes.

The other big thing the game does is related to the story, as every npc is… dying and you have limited resources for you and for everyone to extend their lives until a solution is found, so you have to be choosy in who lives.

Deathloop seems actually pretty cool, but unfortunately I keep getting crashes, which is super annoying.

So does that mean you have to keep replaying the same areas? #metadeathloop

An update on Tinykin: I’ve been playing it with my son since the release, which has been on the one hand a delight, and on the other hand absolute torture because the things that grab his interest are not the things that grab mine (Oh look water! I can blow myself up!), but finally, FINALLY, we finished the first level yesterday because I got the controller away from him long enough to actually complete some objectives. But then I wanted to finish up the level before moving on, but he just wanted to move on, so we moved on. Hopefully I can go back later to the first level to get the rest of the golden popcorn.

The game says we’re only 5 hours into the game, but I swear it feels like a LOT more than that.

I don’t think I felt quite that strongly about it. I do agree it was a very well put together game, with strong characters and an interesting story. But I felt the QTEs, which were basically the only gameplay in the darn thing, got pretty aggravating. I do think they did a really good version of a Telltale game, probably better than Telltale ever did. I liked the little branching narrative the gave you, with the option to jump in and try alternate options at varying points along the way - some of them allowed you to diverge quite a bit, though of course they always ended up looping back to the same plot points eventually. Glad I played it.

I probably would turn QTEs off if they made a sequel, they definitely didn’t add anything to it. Quite happy for that kind of game to just be a story that I nudge in certain directions.

Scorn, which will release day one on Game Pass, is actually getting its release date bumped up one week to October 14. Still looking pretty freaky.

Scorn is the perfect GP game, it’s something that I’m mildly interested in but would never consider buying anywhere near full price. And yet I get it day one.

I played through the intro last night and had zero problems on my XSX.

I couldn’t finish any of my leaving backlog other than Calvary (so weird!), but I’ll be buying AI Somnium. The “smell it harder” scene made me drop my controller. :D I hope next week’s goodbyes aren’t as overwhelming. There’s a spreadsheet that says it’ll probably be these:

  • Back 4 Blood
  • Marvel Avengers
  • Riftbreaker
  • Ring of Pain
  • Sable
  • Scarlet Nexus
  • Superliminal
  • Tainted Grail
  • the Good Life

Vampire Survivors’ll have an update later this month with the 1.0 content & achievements.

I wanted to try Riftbreaker but never got around to it. I did play Sable though, it’s pretty good.

Same- I should give it a spin before it leaves. Wondering how it plays with a controller.

Tainted Grail I could have seen myself dropping tons of hours into, tried it on Xbox, but it played much better on kb + m for me. I’ve just put so much time into slay the spire, and I like the couch + Tv so much more than the pc now. I’ve turned into a console pleb.

Tainted Grail is a wonderful game. I’m really looking forward to the next in that series (which has gone from being a digital conversion of the board game into some kind of 3D rpg, but I don’t care)

I installed it and now it says leaving soon under the program.

Ring of Pain is also marked leaving. That’s a fun little one to fire up every now and then on the cloud. Only takes a few minutes to play, unless you’re trying to win. :)