Of the games that have been released recently, not that many are of interest to me. I want to play Returnal, but I don't have a PS5 yet and have no idea as to when that's gonna be available. I have never played a Resident Evil game and don't plan to start now, horror is just not my jam. The Mass Effect re-release is something I might have been interested in, but I don't know that I'm ready to put 100 hours into something I played when it came out. It kind of speaks to the strength of its worldbuilding that when I started reading about particulars of that universe again, I was still able to recall little details that under normal circumstances would have been completely forgotten. I did dip my toe into Knockout City after watching it on last friday's UPF, and I'll try some more of it once its ranked season starts.

What I've actually been playing this week is a little all over the place. I keep chipping away at AC: Valhalla - SOME day I'm gonna be done with that. I played through Little Nightmares with the thought of maybe trying out Little Nightmares II that came out this year. I played some more of Persona 5 Strikers, but that made me want to play Final Fantasy XV... As I said, it's been a little all over the place. I think I need to get a little more focused for next week when it comes to gaming time.

Little Nightmares

Every year, I like to try my hand at some new game genres that I traditionally have not liked to see if maybe my tastes have changed. Maybe I can find specific reasons why certain things don’t resonate with me. With Little Nightmares II having been released this year, I thought I’d check out the first game in this little series. Little Nightmares checks two genre boxes for me - horror and stealth. I think the combination of these might be something I’m just never going to get into.

There are certainly things about Little Nightmares that I enjoyed. The aesthetic, the design of each area’s baddies, some of the puzzles, the at-first small story beat where the player character gets hungry once a level which leads to some really cool things. When the game showed the first signs of where this little tidbit might go, I was on board for that plot point.

Other things were hit and miss for me. The platforming was sometimes good, sometimes a little finicky. The stealth sections were the epitome of what I don’t enjoy when it comes to gameplay of the sneaky variety. Oftentimes, you’re presented with a path you’re pretty sure you know how to navigate to get to the next checkpoint. Only thing is, a big bad is standing in your way. So you hang back, hiding, observing the enemy’s routine. Once you know what to do, the tension of the moment eases off and you set about trying to perform the scenario you’ve envisioned. But when something goes wrong (and it will go wrong quite a few times), you’re often set back quite a ways back and you have to replay the same section over and over, until you’ve figured out that last detail. Any suspense the moment initially had is long gone, replaced by frustration.

I asked myself why I felt frustrated at times like these. Dying and replaying sections where you failed is a common enough occurrence in games, why does this process irk me so much when it comes to this game? I think it might be the passive nature of stealth games. I get restless, and sitting idly waiting for your window to sneak by an enemy is just something that I don’t find particularly fun, especially if I’ve already done it a few times.

The last 2 levels were for me the best part. They were quick and heavily de-emphasized stealth, letting you see the sights without having to replay the same sections over and over. There were some cool set pieces as well, and the final minutes leading up to the ending were genuinely great.

Having played through it, I don’t know that I’m clamoring for more of Little Nightmares straight away. For me, the thing that stood out here were the visuals and the last level in particular. And stuff like that is readily found in other genres I’m more comfortable in.

Persona 5 Strikers

Contrary to popular belief, this isn't a Persona soccer game. It's actually an Omega Force/Koei Tecmo kind-of-musou-but-not-really spin on the Persona 5 universe. I didn't expect much when it came to the gameplay portions of this game, but there is more to the combat than you would think. Rather than the traditional turn-based combat of the Persona games, it's more of a Kingdom Hears-style active combat with free-flowing Persona/spell-usage. It has its moments, but more often than not it's just really messy and visually cluttered. After about 10 hours, I turned the difficulty down to easy just go breeze through the combat sections that tend to drag on for a little too long to get back to the good parts, which are the talky bits.

At this point, at the 10-hour mark, it's been about half visual novel and half dungeon crawler/jail infiltrator. I almost wish it went completely in the visual novel direction, 'cause that's the part I enjoy the most about this. Which definitely is rough, the reward for completing a dungeon being that you don't have to play the game anymore for maybe an hour. I think I might stick with it a little bit longer to see if it'll get its hooks in me a little more, cause I'm really enjoying revisiting these characters on a brand new road-trip adventure in a condensed time frame (this takes place over the course of a summer rather than a whole school year), but a lot of the things about Persona 5 that made it amazing are kind of missing here. So far there's no time management aspect in deciding who or what you spend your time with, the story just kind of chugs along at its own pace.

You don't get to spend as much time with the supporting cast one-on-one either, but so far it definitely feels like everyone gets their time in the spotlight during the main story. The new characters, Sophia and Zenkichi have been good so far as well, fitting right at home with Ryuji, Ann, Makoto and the others.

Final Fantasy XV

What Persona 5 Strikers managed to do though was that it made me want to clear Final Fantasy XV from my backlog. Back when this came out, in November 2016, I think I played about 2 hours before I put it down for the night and just never came back to it. I started up a fresh save on the PC this time and so far it looks a LOT better and playing at 120 fps instead of 30 definitely is helping me enjoy the sheer fidelity of this game. I don't know why I started this right now though, 'cause now I'm kind of playing 3 big games concurrently: Assasssin's Creed: Valhalla, Persona 5 Strikers and this.

This time around, I've played for about 2 hours again but hopefully I'm not gonna abandon it again only to pick it up nearly 5 years later. Early impressions are that it looks really cool. Combat so far hasn't been amazing but at least it looks really good. The friendship of the 4 main characters is a big draw here, even at the onset these relationships feel lived-in, like their lives have been going on and you just happen to peek in to see what they're up to. Of course, you play as the blandest of the four, but that just feels like a standard JRPG trope at this point.

I'm no Final Fantasy die-hard, the only entries I've played previously are Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy XIII, but I'm very curious to dive deeper into a franchise that a lot of people seem to love.