Deep love to Yoko Taro for being as willfully unhelpful as possible, dude rules.

Just finished this last night (though I was somehow closer to 32 hours lol), and man this game is wonderful. As a big fan of 90s style JRPGs, it was really cool seeing them take the big three flavor dials (combat/cutscenes/exploration) and turn them to weird angles just to see what would happen.

Yeah that... was my point

?? It has an 89 on metacritic right now

I could be thinking of another studio but I was under the impression that Monolith is actually a pretty good place to work.

Ah that makes more sense. I guess it’s probably cheaper than building a custom chess arm, though maybe a piece of industrial machinery isn’t something you want near a seven year old lol

Maybe my chessbot ignorance is showing here, but my biggest takeaway is that a robot designed to lift a chess piece is somehow strong enough to fracture a finger.

Just off the top my head I believe the big summer State of Play trailer from last year detailed the “combat” (using that term very lightly), and the recent trailer from last month’s State of Play showed of a little of the stealth section as well has some hints at the “creepier” stuff (again, using that lightly lol).

This is fundamentally not what Stray is like lmao, there’s no core genre shift. At one point the flashlight you’ve had since the beginning gains the ability to kill bugs for a section, and then it doesn’t anymore. During this section there’s a bit of a horror vibe that feels like a natural extension of what came…

It doesn’t change into anything, it’s been advertised as a scifi adventure game from the start. Literally everything mentioned in this article was shown clearly in trailers.

The “shooting” part, which admittedly isn’t the strongest point, ends up being such a small percentage of the game it seems weird to focus on it at all.

Well no, I don’t really agree with that. In fact I kind of wish we could one day move beyond terms like “game” and “play” because really these are just interactive experiences and there’s near limitless possibility for human expression in a medium where both the creator and the person experiencing it can express some…

Not to get too in the weeds here but I think “it should be fun” is an extremely limiting and weird way of processing art, games included. It’s very obvious from the review that Ari enjoyed the game, whether or not the word “fun” popped into his brain at any point.

Wait are you saying a game probably isn’t enjoyable unless the reviewer specifically uses the word “fun” in the review? Because that’s a really bizarre way to navigate the world.

I can't even begin to guess how much of my 11th year of life I spent on this bullshit game (I say that with love).

Not to mention Hitler never had to deal with one of his speeches being mocked by tens of thousands of people on a global network. Bit of a different social climate there.

Remember when Richard Spencer was becoming a thing and then a single punch that got memed into oblivion completely ended any momentum he was building? These dudes should always be mocked, constantly and aggressively.

Literally everyone is dunking on this weird creep, and they’re only spreading a single clip containing the most vague and toothless threat in recorded history as dictated by a muppet. I promise you it’s going to be okay.

One of the best pieces of character trivia ever put in a video game, I still laugh whenever I think about it. Thirteen kinds of perfume!!

That’s sort of the vibe I got but it doesn’t seem like he really thought this through at all lol.