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Aug 17th, 2026 at 10:06:26 - Returnal (PS5) |
After working on this for the third time on a PS Plus subscription, I’m gonna give it up. Hours 18-23. Re-familiarize myself with the game. Die, die, die. Make it to the Act 1 boss, Phrike. Die. Quit.
The longer I play, the more I die and start over, the more grindy and repetitive it gets. See, I opened up a path straight to Act 3 after my one excellent run the last time I played (nearly a year ago), but if you go straight to Act 3, you’ll be severely under-powered. You have to at least sprint through Acts 1 and 2 to try and get health upgrades, some good parasites, find a nice weapon, etc. And you so easily die and end your run. Again, I find myself doing this at the end of my PS Plus subscription. It’s got several more days on it. I don’t think I’ll have time to beat this (if I even wanted to anymore), I don’t have time to beat God of War: Ragnarok. So I’m left with just a couple short games.
Update: I’m going to buy this and try to learn it again, and try to play co-op with Joey.
Update: I have purchased a physical disc. I will go slower with it and enlist Joey for assistance! I won't let Returnal defeat me!
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Aug 17th, 2026 at 10:03:12 - Dispatch (PC) |
I was a little unsure about Dispatch because I typically don’t care for superhero media and because I doubted that it would be much different than other Telltale Games games (which had long since peaked). Luckily, my hesitation was unfounded. Dispatch is incredible, the best Telltale Games style game since peak Telltale era, even surpassing The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us in some areas. The writing is smart, funny, and it’s more adult than I imagined, also with more dick jokes than I imagined. I loved the extremely creative characters, their relationships, the voice acting, music, animations, gameplay mechanics, everything. It stumbled a little when some choices didn't seem to matter. For example, sometimes the game really wants to keep alive dialogue options that I didn't choose. Other characters will refer to something I didn’t say, not necessarily as if I said it, but as if I wanted to say it. And I had some issues playing this on Luna (choppy, lagging, freezing, and even crashed on the last boss fight) and with a controller (input lag, which was Luna’s fault, and it kept switching to keyboard input, possibly because of Luna lagging, all of which was very annoying during dispatch, hacking, and QTEs). Luckily, a narrative game is still playable with those issues. Thank goodness it wasn’t a soulslike or something!
The main difference between this and older Telltale games is the addition of the “dispatch” gameplay. The story (basically) goes that you are a superhero forced into a temporary hiatus, and you go to work as a dispatcher for a larger superhero organization. You get a roster of heroes whom you manage, upgrade, and send on missions from your office computer. The heroes have five or six character stats, plus a couple special abilities, and as they level up, you allocate points in character stats in order to have a well-rounded team. So, for some heroes, you’ll want to dump points into strength and vigor, while for others, you might choose intelligence and charisma.
Each stat is useful for a range of scenarios in missions. You don’t necessarily know what stats (and therefore which characters) will be ideal for each mission, so you try to figure it out by interpreting key words in the mission description. For example, a mission might say that there is a hostage situation and that you should send heroes to protect innocent civilians, reason with the attackers, and convince them to release the hostages. “Protect,” “reason,” and “convince” might be bolded in the description, which means they are key words that associate with character stats. If you ever need to “protect” people, keep people safe, defend, withstand an assault, that kind of thing, then you’re looking at the vigor stat. If you need to do anything that requires thinking, logic, reasoning, figuring stuff out, and so on, you are dealing with the intelligence stat. Persuading, convincing, making a good impression, being suave, that kind of stuff is the charisma stat. And so on. It’s not always obvious. Key words sometimes seem like they could be multiple stats. Part of the fun is getting better and better at figuring out which kinds of actions each stat covers. Anyway, you have 1-4 hero slots per mission, and after missions, characters have to return to base and rest. So, you have to use all your characters, and this part of the game really becomes about resource utilization.
Sometimes during dispatch, you have to hack security cameras and stuff. This minigame was pretty fun and has several challenging elements, such as “viruses” that kill you if they touch you, locked ports that require you to find and memorize key codes, etc. Hacking isn’t a really big part of the game, but you will occasionally have to do it. My main critique of the hacking minigame is that I would really like to be able to scroll and see the whole hacking map. Later on though, the game used "not being able to see ahead" as a challenge, which I appreciated, but sometimes it was annoying not to be able to see what was ahead. Also, that was the main part of the game that sucked with Luna’s issues, because you are moving around this grid and there are viruses chasing you and time limits. So the game lagging, or the input switching to keyboard, messed me up a couple times.
The verdict on Dispatch is that it’s a must-play. I’ve been recommending it to everyone. If you’re an Amazon Prime member, it’s available for free on Luna right now. Take advantage of it!
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Aug 17th, 2026 at 09:57:28 - The Exit 8 (PS5) |
A new genre for me! The “backrooms” / “anomaly” genre. Do I like it after this first foray? Sort of. I’m not sure how representative The Exit 8 is, but let’s dissect it. Your goal is to walk through a hallway in a subway to get to “exit 8” and leave. The hallway is haunted or something. There are anomalies, ways in which the hallway changes. If you don’t see an anomaly, you should proceed through the hallway. If you see an anomaly, you should turn around. Either way, you are presented with another version of the hallway. If you are correct (you correctly identified an anomaly and turned around, or you correctly noted that there were no anomalies and continued onward), then you’ll proceed to the next version of the hallway (these are numbered 0-8). If you mess up, you start back at the beginning, at hallway 0. Each version of the hallway is randomized, and apparently anomalies won’t repeat themselves in your save file, so I guess eventually you will see (or miss) all of them.
Anyway, in this hallway, there are six posters, one sign, some security cameras, overhead lights, a yellow tile path, three doors, two vents, and a man who walks past you. This is all normal. The anomalies, the things that can change, vary from super obvious to super subtle. For example, various obvious things can happen with the man. He might smile (he’s normally not smiling), he might be very tall, he might follow you around (creepy), he might never show up. The lights might be bright yellow (normally white), they might flicker or go out. Subtler things might be a pair of eyes on a poster that follows you, a red light on a security camera (normally no light), an image of a face on the ceiling, and however many others that I didn’t notice during my play through.
In other words, it’s like a hidden object game. You’re presented with a normal room and then have to find the hidden anomalies in subsequent variants of the room. You scan posters, walls, doors, floors, looking for anything amiss. I think that’s where the suspense of these types of games comes in. It is unnerving trying to find some change in the environment. You start to get paranoid, questioning what is normal and what is not. I was looking for changes in dates, in text, on the posters, tiny, tiny things. Changes in individual tiles on the walls. Changes in the man’s hair or pants length. I was looking way too closely. Yet at the same time not close enough, given how much I missed.
I would be interested in playing one of these with a larger story, perhaps, and some other gameplay elements. This, The Exit 8, alone was a brief, simple experience, but it did hold my attention, I did feel a little creeped out, I did jump one or two times, I did get frustrated when I turned the corner and saw I was back at 0 (meaning I had missed an anomaly).
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Aug 17th, 2026 at 09:51:40 - Neva (PS5) |
Neva, from the developer of Gris, is in the same vein. It’s another 2d platformer, this time with light combat and a companion, the titular Neva, a cool wolf. I definitely enjoyed it, and it got better as it went on, as the combat and platforming became more complex. The first half of the game felt very much like “I’ve seen all this before.” It takes place in four seasons (chapters) over a year, and in each season, Neva grows and develops some new ability that you can use. I liked when I could launch Neva at enemies! I think that was chapter 3. Anyway, the game definitely stands out for its beautiful audiovisual style. It’s gorgeous to look at, and it plays with scale, zooming in and out to show you and Neva in relation to the environment. Combat is pretty easy. Bosses have 3 or 4 attacks with clear tells. None of them took me more than 5 tries. And they’re quick fights. Platforming is also pretty easy and fairly basic, though there are some cool elements introduced later. The mirror part is a highlight. The game itself is linear, and the story is whatever. Bad vibes turn the forest black and corrupt all the animals (very Studio Ghibli) and you need to kill the bad vibes and restore life to the forest. I mean, if you’ve played Gris and Limbo and Journey and all the other pretty/moody/atmospheric indie platformer hits of the past 10 or 15 years, you might not find much new here. But it does what it does well, and it was nice for an afternoon.
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