What we've been playing - space mysteries, From's kind game, and Bertie's Gate 3
A few of the things that have us hooked this week.
19th July 2024
Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing over the past few days. This week, we've taken a strip to space to touch some appealing machinery; we've been revelling in FromSoftware's much kinder gaming series; and Bertie has been being horrible to everyone in Baldur's Gate 3.
What have you been playing?
Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We've Been Playing archive.
Bertie's Gate 3, PC
What never fails to amaze me about Larian's role-playing epic - I'm quite confident calling it that now - is how much extra there always is. You think you're tying off a loose end quickly, only to find that five hours later you're still doing it. You dig down through a layer only to find more layers beneath it.
Act 3 exemplifies this. It's the tying-off chapter, I like to think. Last night I was tying off Shadowheart's companion quest - I'll be honest, I thought she was already done, but no, apparently there's more. Last night I met the leader of her holy order who felt betrayed by Shadowheart, so wanted me to hand her over for punishment. Fat chance! She's my only spellcaster. I killed all the others; I can't give her away.
I said no and a fight ensued, and eventually - as is the course of things in games - I won. But not before the game's ever-mounting pile of choice and consequence wobbled a bit. Characters started behaving strangely. That definitive "no" I'd given at the beginning, and which kicked off the fight, didn't seem to matter at the end of the fight. The leader approached me again and demanded I hand over Shadowheart. It was as if we'd never spoken - maybe they took too many bumps on the head. Not only that, my real-life partner tells me the same leader demanded she hand over Shadowheart too, despite the fact Shadowheart was dead in her game - she'd pushed her off a ledge ages ago (we're an evil pair - some might say we're destined for one another).
But what do we expect from a game with such reactivity and choice? I shudder to think what the flow-chart of decisions and their branching outcomes looks like. I bet Larian designers still have nightmares about it.
-Bertie
The Invincible, PC
Continuing my walking sim-themed Elden Ring detox, I finished The Invincible this week, which I missed in the flurry of very good video games that came out last November. Based on the Stanislaw Lem novel of the same name (which I have not read, but was told by the developers it's not a 1:1 re-telling of anyway), the game puts you in the spacesuit of a biologist called Yasna, who's woken up on the surface of a planet called Regis III, unsure where the rest of her crew is and how she's ended up here. The only person you have for company is the voice of your commanding officer, Astrogator Novik, who you're in constant radio contact with throughout the story as you try and work out what happened and why.
To say The Invincible is just "Firewatch in space", though, does it a slight disservice, I think. While the storytelling is quite slow-paced (made slower by Yasna's occasionally out-of-breath and wonky-feeling running speed), there's a level of tactility to The Invincible that I really quite enjoyed. To activate the various gizmos and control panels you occasionally come across in your search for your missing crew, buttons must be pressed, dials turned and levers rotated and pulled with appropriate button presses, trigger squeezes and thumbstick twists. It gives each action a pleasingly analogue kind of physicality to it, helping to ground you in this strange and unknowable place as you continue your investigation. Sure, there are still plenty of moments where you're effectively standing still while you wait for the story to get poured down your lug holes before you can carry on, but for me at least, the plight of Yasna's expedition (and its growing sense of mystery and conspiracy) was enough to keep me hooked.
The intergalactic vistas of Regis III are frequently gorgeous to look at, too, with huge moons and satellite rocks looming large on the horizon with striking and contrasting colour palettes to the sandy husks beneath your feet. There may not be much to 'do' in the game, per se, but at roughly six hours, it was certainly a more engaging and fascinating story to ponder through than the actual book I've got on the go right now (no offence, David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks, but holy heck would you please get a move on, because now I want to go and read Lem's proper The Invincible to see how it stacks up).
-Katharine
Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon, PC
Having 'finished' MechWarrior 5 and its DLC earlier this month, I thought the next game to tackle from my to-do list ought to be the thematically similar Armored Core 6. Both games have you piloting a massive mechanical person - a mech or AC as they're known - and while they're customisable in terms of speed and strength, they couldn't be more different in terms of feel.
MechWarrior is slow-paced. You lumber across the battlefield in the chunky mechs required in most missions, and you trudge across the galaxy, taking on jobs to pay for your exorbitant operating costs. You deliberate over every weapon or equipment upgrade, or rely on a winning combination of SRMs, AC20s and PPCs to get you through the game. It's deeply satisfying but it's slow.
By contrast, Armored Core 6 is like dancing. Missions can blow by in a minute or two. Duels between two ACs take 30 seconds of frantic machine-gun fire, and throughout it all your AC is constantly emitting brightly coloured jets of thruster fire, sparking off the ground and launching into the air at the slightest provocation. Upgrades come quick and fast, and with the ability to sell back equipment for the price you bought it, there's no reason to play safe or hoard things. You're constantly mixing and matching and adapting to the demands of the mission, and the famously unrelenting Dark Souls developer From Software gives you carte blanche to retry bosses without penalty.
It doesn't make for a long game - I'm entering the final chapter after a relaxed 19 hours - but what's here is genuine gold dust. I'm having a wonderful time.
-Will