Topic: What PS5 Games Are You Currently Playing?

@Jecht_Ultima It’s either largely easy or brutally difficult at varying moments. I honestly have more problem with the mobs than the bosses. The balancing is basically non-existent.

@nessisonett I bought it for the graphics, it looked really pretty. Played the first level and eventually gave up on the game. I hate games that are "open worldish" with no real sense of where to go. I need a clear objective to follow.

About the story, let's not pretend Dark Souls has a good story, at least the way it's presented is utter crap. Nioh is way better in that sense

@Jecht_Ultima great tip, this is the way! Decent spot to grind souls too after tower knight is out the way. I I summoned for false idol and whilst I was pretty sparing with summons in bloodborne and dark souls 3, I can see me summoning in this game a fair bit. I can't be ar$#d slogging through these.

@AFCC Oh you’re preaching to the choir about Dark Souls’ story. Metroid Prime already nailed what Dark Souls was going for because all its lore was neatly presented in an optional scan mechanic. Not by NPCs spouting stuff like “Ho ho ho, the cleansing of the blood moon led poor Ser Bumfluff to madness”.

Yooo Ratchet & Clank just got that update it was supposed to get next month lol

Just finished The Pedestrian - cool chill game to beat over a couple nights. I liked the ending.

@Voltan The ending was brilliant, I thought. Totally came out of nowhere and figuring out the final main puzzle felt so satisfying.

@nessisonett Definitely a nice way to mix up the formula a little. I can definitely say I enjoyed the whole thing.

Playing The Pedestrian right now, after reading some praise of it here on this very site. I love puzzle games and great soundtracks, so I'm definitely the target audience for this type of game.

I've been playing it for a bit last night and I probably completed half of this game. About half of my time was spent figuring out the puzzles and the other half was being in awe of the world that was created and how your character moves through it. Some impressions:

• I found the puzzles all really simple so far. For none of those I had to think longer than a minute, before executing my plan. The difficulty might ramp up in upcoming puzzles, of course. But so far the lack of difficulty hasn't really affected my enjoyment negatively or something. It has some benefits, for instance that without any text the game is very succesful at teaching you each new mechanic, by just slowly introducing them to you. It works very well; way better than any puzzle in Maquette did.
• This game looks amazing. I found the way how every puzzle connects to the next really jaw dropping, and the environments felt very real. I don't want to set the bar too high for anyone who's about to play this game: it's still an indie game, it's still a puzzle game, but it took the genre to the next level for me.
• The game doesn't have a story or a plot, but it has a concept that works very well and it's set in a very believeable world. That last thing might sound strange, seeing as the game is set in a very average urban environment. What makes this game so great is that every step of the way it felt like I was in that city, instead of sitting in front of my tv. For a puzzle game to succeed in transporting you to a different place is quite rare.
• The game sounds amazing. I love the variety on display and beautiful melodies. I am not rusing to buy the soundtrack, but they complement the game just really well, and that's perfection too.
• There's something I really need to get off my chest, regarding the reception of the haptic feedback all over the internet. I read that it was supposed to be good, so I came in with some expectations. I wanna lower those for everyone who's considering this game. The haptic feedback is not that great; I'd say it's lazy, compared to what could have been done. The small vibrations when running or picking stuff up are nice, but they should have extended the use of the DualSense to the 'puzzle mode' as well. When you're moving objects/levels around there is no feedback at all. And that may seem minor, but it hurt the experience. The game should have done rumble when you were trying to move a section, but you hit a wall. The lack of any haptic feedback in that department sometimes even made it unclear that I could not do a certain thing. Really dropped the ball there.
  And also they should have changed the interact buttons to the shoulder buttons of the controller, so they could give you immediate feedback whenever you're hitting a switch, trying to lift something. A wasted opportunity.

A puzzle game doesn't need all those bells and whistles. I might argue no game does. But before my purchase I read quite a few reviews and all of them were gushing about the DualSense features. Example from PushSquare: " Each footstep made, object picked up, and trampoline bounced upon is reflected in the PlayStation 5 DualSense controller, which provides a level of immersion unseen in most platformers."
I came in with some expectations regarding the use of the DualSense and I just want to temper those for anyone who is thinking about picking the game up. The vibrations are basic and nothing special. "Don't believe the lies. Copeland, out."

• Secrets. I found a few secrets hidden in the game. The in-game reward for them is nice, it's a cosmetic that unfortunately I don't know how to put off (!), and you won't get any trophy for it. The puzzles leading to them were in no way interesting, nor is there an in-game way to track whether I found all of them. So far, that's been something of a bummer. I really like it when puzzle games have some extra challenges added to them. It kind of hurts the value of the game that I'm at 50% already and know there won't be any reason for me to replay the game anytime soon after I finish it.

Anyway, I'm enjoying my time with this game! And it's an easy recommendation at its price point.

@Kidfried Good to hear another “+1” for the game as I picked it up last night (and within a minute couldn’t find the game so assume it was being put into the sale at that point 😑)

I’ve already got a nice PS5 backlog building up!

@Kidfried About the haptics: it's not anything special most of the time (but still better than it would be without it) but I thought all the train rides, lifts etc between levels felt really good.

Also I don't think I found any secrets, I might have to play again.

@nessisonett lol yeah it's terrible! It's like it requires you to read the wiki to even understand something

@Voltan Yea, it's better with it than without it for sure. Just wanted to set the expectations right of anyone who'll buy the game.

The secrets are pretty simple: there are a few hard to see ladders in a few levels.

@AFCC i heard from software made the souls games so hard in everything because they thought that games back then had way to much "handholding" urgh i hate that term.

it just has this smell of arrogance to it all imo.

even though i'm trying demon's souls out atm,i can't see myself sticking with it much longer. atleast some of the player messages are helpfull altough still cryptic.
and having to go to an external source as a wiki to understand the story other than the very basics is just bad story telling. i don't care if it's done on purpose and part of the charm,it's bad story telling.

i just don't like games that don't give you any direction or are very cryptic with their objectives. where from softwares thinks there's to much "handholding" in games i think souls games are on the other end of the extreme. coming across as arrogant,and being cumbersome just for the sake of it. it also created this mentality for some players that playing games in general on anything other than hard are for casuals.

@jdv95 same! Don't like having no objectives, but I do enjoy souls games mostly for the bosses designs tbh!
Also the storytelling is AWFUL. There is just no other way to describe it lol

@AFCC Awful? I personally think it's great. You, as the character, know what you would know, which is to say you have to kill something for a certain purpose, in Demon's Souls and Bloodborne. I've only finished Bloodborne, but I've read a lot of the story and tried to piece it together and it's brilliant. It's done in a way only a game could do, and you can feel the atmosphere and work even if you don't pick up on what's gong on. I mean think about it, why would you know more easily in a game like that? What would tell your character aside from convenience? I don't think anyone really would, so it puts you in those shoes. You don't have a knowledge or guide to gain as the character, and as such they could have just said, "it's a game," but everything is thoroughly thought out and has a reason anyway, which is why it's so brilliant and it shows in just how thought the level design is from a gameplay standpoint too.

@Kidfried I somehow managed to get zero cosmetics from secrets so I didn’t even know they existed! I quite liked the haptics though, they weren’t too in your face which I found a bit more relaxing given the genre of the game. Just the footsteps still feel like magic to me.

Also, for anyone playing Disco Elysium on PS5, I finally recreated the frame drops that Liam was talking about. After about 8 hours of play, I think? If you zoom out to the max distance while in Whirling-in-Rags at night time with the Union dudes’ booth open then the game goes to about 20FPS. It’s playable but it does look a bit silly. If you zoom even a bit in then it’s sorted. I also got a hard crash luckily a few minutes after a save. I wasn’t happy about a hard crash but at the same time, I’ve had Astro’s Playroom, FIFA 21, Tony Hawk and The Pedestrian all hard crash on me. Which might speak more to system software maybe?

@nessisonett Hard crash as in the console makes a scary noise and turns itself off? I only had one of those since launch and it was in MK11.

Speaking of which - I made it to Grand Master rank in Kombat League last night. There's 5 days to go in the season and 3 of them are the Easter weekend - I'm not visiting family this year so maybe I can attempt reaching Demigod... would probably have to win 20+ sets to do it.

@Jaz007 Well said! I think it is just a different way of telling a story. Fair enough people are fine to not like it, but there is a difference between that and something being outright poorly implemented or written.

@nessisonett I've only had some soft crashes, and most of the with Cyberpunk 2077. Think the last time I had one was when I was playing Concrete Genie. Is it in a well ventilated area?