Only vaguely related, but: The Forgotten City (also on GamePass) does a fantastic job of getting around this very issue. It’s another ‘time loop’ game, but the very first person you meet at the beginning of the loop is this incredibly credulous guy whom you can direct to achieve... basically anything you’ve previously…

Yeah, I absolutely get why they did it; it’s just that, well, I’m not actually an astronaut (or a pilot, for that matter), so wrapping my head around that control scheme - and physics model - takes a lot longer than your ‘typical’ video game spaceship controls.

I feel like it’s the sort of game that creates kind of a skewed perspective on its reception: it’s easy to think that everybody really loves it, just because it’s the sort of game that really, really appeals to the sort of people who review video games, basically. (Which isn’t inherently a good or bad thing; it’s just…

Enjoy!

I always felt like I could almost see the game that was getting such rave reviews, but I could never quite get to it.

I could see how that would track, for sure. For me, I think it’s one of those where I can handle the ‘muddle around until the narrative clicks’ approach... if your gameplay is immediately engaging and intuitive. Or I can handle ‘your gameplay is complex and a bit cumbersome until it comes together’... if your…

Yeah, I was a bit confused by that as well. I could see the argument that one might skip Arrival when Mass Effect 3 wasn’t out yet - as in, ‘you’ll want to play this closer to Mass Effect 3 than Mass Effect 2' - but out of all the DLCs, it’s probably the one that ties in closest to the ‘main narrative’.

And I still feel weirdly guilty about it, because man, the people who managed to get past the stuff I didn’t like really seemed to enjoy it - like, ‘it was their favorite game of the year’ level enjoyment - but I just couldn’t get there. 

It really is. And there are games I quite enjoy that employ similar openings - your various From Software games come to mind, as well as FailBetter’s Sunless games, just off the top of my head - but those are also games that are much simpler to control. The two factors combined, I think, to make an obstacle in Outer…

I feel like it’s one of those that’s almost a litmus test: ‘how long are you willing to play a game while it’s not fun in order to get to the fun stuff?’ Because that was always the impression I had: the fun stuff was there, just buried under several layers of ‘master purposefully difficult controls’, ‘sort out…

Man, Outer Wilds is one of those games that everybody seems to rave about, and I just could not get into when it was originally on GamePass. It was everything I disliked about Majora’s Mask, plus physics-based controls that I just could not get a handle on. Like, it’s one of those games that I feel bad I didn’t…

That’s kind of my point, though: it’s there for those domestic audiences first and foremost, and other audiences are a secondary concern, at best - and honestly, probably just an afterthought, if anything at all. (As opposed to the idea of either China or Hollywood making films with the express purpose of influencing…

You’re not wrong, but that’s a risk even if it’s just a rise in the export of material meant for Chinese consumption: look at the level of American flag-waving jingoism in your average Michael Bay film, for example. Those sequences are in those films for American audiences, rather than foreign ones... but they’re…

That’s part of why I find this purchase so interesting; it would certainly seem to go against everything else coming out of China these days, in that Tencent would, frankly, have to be stupid to go forward with this purchase given the prevailing mood, and Xi’s fondness for the ‘good old days’ (of, you know, the…

I think that’s more or less it, yeah: video games may ‘weaken the moral fibre’ of the people who play them, so the PRC doesn’t want to encourage their usage within China... but they don’t give a damn about the ‘moral fibre’ of Americans (or Brits, or Brazilians, or Thais, or anyone else), so they’re perfectly happy…

What’s interesting about this one (to me, at least) is I believe this is Tencent’s first major acquisition since the PRC took the official ‘video games are bad, m’kay?’ stance... which basically implies Tencent are viewing these acquisitions mostly as a way to profit off of foreign markets, rather than as something to…

I totally get how that could happen. Update on the dungeon, by the way: I gave solo-ing it a shot, and it’s... probably doable, but it would be a stretch to call it ‘fun’, for me, at least. The enemies aren’t too bad, in terms of ‘how fast they go down/how fast they kill you’, but there are loads of one-hit-kill…

As much as I’m enjoying this one’s ‘everything cranked to eleven’ silliness - for now, at least; you’re not wrong at all that the fun’ll wear off well before the event is finished - I do kind of hope that this represents Bungie realizing this is the inevitable endpoint of their current seasonal approach. It does feel…

Have they, though? My understanding was that was true for ‘two dungeons to be released in 2022, post the Witch Queen’, which obviously wouldn’t include the 30th Anniversary stuff that’s out now. I’d honestly be more likely to assume that the opposite was true: they’re going to be looking at reactions to this price…

Same; I tried, and the randos I paired up with from a LFG site were perfectly nice people, not an asshole in the lot - it just wasn’t fun for me, because spending roughly an hour with utter strangers talking directly into my ear during high-stress situations... just isn’t my idea of fun, regardless of how nice the…