Everyone's Gone to the Rapture (PS4) has been an interesting experience and a hard game to describe without getting into parts of the story, so a slight spoiler warning before I start.
Set in the early 1980s, rural England it's filled with visual references and nostalgia which could be lost on players not from Britain, but I found it refreshing to play a game set in a familiar world. The plot places you as an unnamed voyeur on this world, slowly gliding through it listening in to balls of lights dialogue which sounds a bit like the Archers goes Sci-Fi. The movement is slow (even when pressing the run button) but I thought this added to the mysterious nature of your role in the game, it feels floaty, almost ghostlike only annoying me a couple of times, when tracing back footsteps to work out where I was going, there is a holiday camp section about two thirds in which this was particularly irritating. On the whole though your guided by the lights floating about, and you can see the from a distance pointing you in the right direction. Story can be stumbled upon by lesser characters talking between themselves and discovering these chance encounters helped make the game more alive whilst making my play-through seem unique, a great example of this was with the fate of the mechanic and the people who discover him. The opening of the game, following a vicar as he deals with the events was fascinating, ambiguous on how long a timeline your dealing with as the village descends into chaos building up to him alone questioning his faith it was distressing, aided by some fantastic acting, then I departed to the next part of the story where the mystery of what happened starts to take centre stage, graffiti on doors, discarded star charts and other clues such as crutches laying in the street could point to what happened and it builds up to the two lead characters taking centre stage. The major plot points are almost unavoidable, playing out on radios when interacted with and that takes a little bit of the chance elements of the story out of the game but there can be some detective work to find where the radio is hidden (you can hear a loop of numbers when your near). It looks good, but not spectacular bar a few scenes when night passes to day and as I mention earlier the acting throughout is fantastic. If I hadn't played Her Story earlier in the year I may have felt a lot better about this game, the comparison between the two is a bit tenuous but for a slow methodical journey through a mystery in a nostalgic Great Britain, Her Story just does it that bit better. I liked Everyone's Gone to the Rapture, just don't know if I loved it.
In my downtime I played a bit of Kung Fury: Street Rage (PS4) Two buttons, punch left and right, fighting through nazis, ninjas, dominatrix's an robots as a dinosaur watches on, perfect respite from walking slowly through the countryside. Could easily be a mobile game, but it's cool and cheap on the PS4.
Finally I played some of the reimagining of Gauntlet (PS4) from the makers of Helldivers, a game I really enjoyed. Given an arcade game most people know they've got a bit less freedom with objectives it seems, and the levels seem larger for it. There is a satisfaction to killing waves of monsters still, piles of bones still dispatch pesky ghosts and it all feels very familiar even being too sword happy can still destroy a turkey and all the health that goes with it. Looks fine, not too different from the Tomb Raider game I played a few weeks back. It's a game I'm not going to pass judgement on until playing it coop as that's where Gauntlet has always been at it's finest, it all felt a bit lonely in the dungeon on my own.
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