It’s very rare for me to finish any AAA game these days, completing any twice (at least any without Halo in the title) is unheard of, so the fact that I’m now watching GTAV’s credits for the second time probably says more about the quality of the game than anything I can type will manage to convey. I never did do DS’s desert island games list, but if I had, this would have earned a slot.

It's a lot quicker when you don't read between the lines

The mechanics really aren’t great, but that world is so damn good with so many things to see and do that I can put up with them.

Second completion of Cultist Simulator and that's my yearly budget of being an evil abducting bastard (so I can drink their inner light and and tear off my skin and bones so I can transition to bathing in The Glory).

I really need to stop playing in light of Dead Cells also being good and Pillars of the Earth having a story about building a cathedral to finish.

I played it for an hour, it seemed decent enough but lacking something. Bit floaty and 2010ish.

Cosby wrote:

Gone Home Pretty far behind on this one obviously and doubt I've got anything new to add to the conversation but I bloody loved it. It really grabbed me from the start and the way details of the family are slowly uncovered through various mediums was wonderfully done, then gradually the real story starts to shine through but still providing more background and resolutions to other stories. Even an hour in, I was still waiting for some kind of jump scare or twist such was the atmosphere that pervades the house. Thoroughly impressed and not sure why I put it off for so long. [9]

I’d second all this.  The only thing really wrong with it is a lot of the house is too squat and thick.  The doors especially, they look like they been made for grotesquely obese dwarves to pass through.

It's the kind of game that Bob would hate

RiME. Thoroughly enjoyed that. I haven't had that urge to just keep playing a game much recently so that in itself was quite refreshing. Loved the setting and the style, and thought the puzzle design was pretty great overall. A few that were a tad too easy but only a couple where I was bordering on frustration. I'm sure that's personal preference but whilst I thought The Witness was very clever, some of those solutions were beyond me. I'm sure that says something about me.

Anyway, my only other slight niggle was an occasionally annoying camera when it's locked in at certain angles. Pretty minor though.

Bloody good stuff all round. [8]

Oxenfree

I bounced off this the first time I tried it. And, to be honest, the gripes that I had against it stand: the dialogue is inconsistently implemented, leading to frustrations; it’s never clear whether selecting a dialogue option will cut off the person speaking, or wait until they finish. So, at times, I’d wait, wanting to hear what was being said but, with no idea how long my dialogue options would be available. And they could disappear rapidly, leaving me unable to say what I wanted to say. And, given how the audio is handled, there should have been options for what was subtitled and what wasn’t; I find subtitles distracting when I can clearly understand the characters, but a lot of the radio speech was to broken up to follow. When some of it is nonsense and some isn’t, that’s annoying. In a game about communicating, these are really problematic issues, in my opinion.

However, getting past those annoyances, I thought it was well told. To the extent that, I have to say, it’s one of the most disturbing games I’ve ever played. I broke it up over a few nights (not ideal, I know) but it still left me discombobulated each night. Particularly last night, when it ended.

I don’t know if it was luck, the order I found the letters, but I only found out what happened (in the past) right at the very end. I’m still not sure what was happening in the game, there are a few possibilities, but that’s good.

@Tempy, you were right, but also wrong.

Yoku's Island Express

Well that was a let down. Can't have played more than 5 hours and the credits have rolled. Only at 59% completion rate, but there's not a lot of incentive to carry on.

Travelling around the island is just so slow because of the way you move, with the fast travel option that unlocks being too limited. Early on especially, when a lot of stuff is gated off, you find yourself wandering into dead ends and then having a trek back. The map is confusing as well - so you think you're heading the right way only to find there's no path through there.

And then when you get to the pinball bits there's just not much to them. They never develop beyond basic hitting targets and picking up explosives before hitting targets. When you consider what can be done with pinball in game form (even something like Devil Crash, which is over 25 years old) it's not good enough. If there were some interesting mechanics that looked like they could be combined and developed further it would be worth continuing. But there aren't.

To be fair, most of it is perfectly pleasant. It's got a chilled vibe which makes it easy to pass a few hours on. It just never gets exciting or interesting in any way. Coming to it off the back of Guac 2 didn't help either.

It's my only relevant reference.

But really, even though it's quite simple it could teach Yoku a thing or two. Would a few moving targets have been too much to ask? It's actually quite weird how little they did with the idea, because it has so much obvious potential.

Even at £8 I feel slightly shortchanged.

Donut (Dough?) County
A super cute, super short and super linear game where you control a literal growing hole and swallow the entirety of Animal Crossing. Everything about it from trailers screamed Katamari Damacy but it can't be that because there's no one to impress. Apart from one instance, levels can't be failed and figuring things out is mostly just ticking off a checklist till everything in the level is swallowed then you progress to the next part of town. It's slick looking af with a pretty good ost but I'm still left thinking while it's no means a bad game, it's more throwaway then what I was expecting. Like a Gregg's jammy.

Guacamelee

Like Oxenfree, the last game I played, this is another one that I bounced off the first time I played it. Perhaps I was in too cynical a mood, because my main feeling was that the less-than-serious tone was a little try-too-hard. I clearly didn’t give it very long, either, because my other gripe was, “Where’s the challenge in swatting these enemies away? Boy, did I learn the answer to that.

I rather enjoyed it. I had a quibble with how easily I would dash instead of rising uppercut (or rising uppercut instead of dash) when trying to navigate some of the frantic mid-air platforming, and it has literally just occurred to me that perhaps using the d-pad would’ve been more accurate. What a donkey. Anyway, I liked that many of the challenge-screens of enemies and tricky-to-manoeuvre sections weren’t generally overlong; I usually found that the waves/enemies/obstacles that were causing me to start over (and over (and over)) were the last one before clearing the screen or hitting a checkpoint.

I know I’m late to the fiesta, but it’s good.

I found Guacamelee to be sub-Ori, and I didn’t rate Ori that highly, neither were a patch on Shadow Complex, IMHO.

It was OK, there’s just much better out there.