I only commute once a week, so I played Breath of the Wild almost entirely on the train every Tuesday, for 40 minutes in the morning and evening. It is a staggering game to experience in a handheld machine: a whole world lives inside that tiny cartridge. I am not a huge open world fan, so my opinion might not mean much here, but I’ve never played anything that feels so much like a living, breathing world.
Sorry for the unusual look, I’m tweaking things in the background. Some of it, as you can see, has bled into the foreground.
I posted nothing last year, apparently.
2018 was a very busy year, but somehow I found time to play some games. Here they are, in no real order. Overall this has been a year of trying to figure out what genres I really like: I’ve put some time into games I didn’t get on with to try to push myself, and I’ve tried games that I think I’d otherwise have ignored. I’ve paid more attention to where I’m having fun and where I’m not.
I started 2017 with a 4 week old child. I took the first 3 months off to look after her, and the games I played were fever dreams, played at all hours with a child asleep on my chest or while my family slept in another room and I struggled with sleep deprivation. I played bits and pieces of lots of things. Here is a list.
I’m terrible at fighting games, but I did really enjoy learning how to play them with SFV. It’s a good game for playing just a few minutes of, although the load times are rather long on the ps4. This version of street fighter is wonderful, a beautiful implementation, and I hope to play it more in future.
Following on from Cibelle in my reviews, here’s another game that doesn’t offer much of a challenge and chooses to focus on story. It seems unfair to put the two together though: while Cibelle offers almost no gameplay, Firewatch is built on it. Campo Santo use the first person view coupled with some chunky animations to put you into the headspace of the character in a way that few games achieve. I’ve been a huge fan of Idle Thumbs, the podcast produced by Campo Santo members, for a long time, so I’m quite biased towards them, and it’s no surprise that I loved this game.