Virtually nil. Subscriber count has risen steadily (yay!), but as you can see from the posts the traffic is mainly me. I haven’t had to break up a single fight lol.
Hopefully the community has an active future, but for now it’s a pretty sleepy corner of the site.
The epitome of what I’m trying to refer to is the Playdead games (Limbo and Inside). Dark Souls and BioShock both hit on this idea but not quite so directly. The game BADLAND is also a great example of this, too. The mobile game The Silent Age also did this exceptionally well. Never quite knowing what’s going on, and maybe...
Incidentally I just started Prey about an hour ago after sitting on it in my backlog for a couple years. It’s very good so far, seems to have a good spread of systems with decent depth and the graphics are still 2023-approved.
I’ve been playing a lot of DOOM so the combat feels a bit Lite™, but I felt that way about Dishonored too—blows land like wing chun and not like a rock crusher.
It’s got BioShock’s turrets, F.E.A.R.'s slow-mo and Dishonored’s stealthy parkour, and so far it all comes together nicely.
It feels very much like an Arkane title, too. Maybe a bit too much going on at once, but boy do they know how to throw everything at the wall to see what sticks.
I love them both. I feel like they both need to be played on harder difficulties because they’re built for a pushy playstyle, especially Eternal which requires melee finishers for ammo drops even more than the '16 game already did.
'16 has more of a straightforward plot. The story is fine. The main NPC looks and sounds like James Spader’s Ultron, which thrills me. I love the Mars station design and wish the Hell levels were a bit more creative. Other than some mysterious hints at a connection between Doomguy and all the Hell stuff, '16 doesn’t bother much with lore.
Eternal takes everything good about '16 and gives it an espresso, some laughing gas, and a whole bunch of lore that might have been written by Tenacious D. It’s deeply silly, very hard and has some of the best game design I’ve ever seen. I don’t think one is better than the other; 2016 is more nostalgic, but Eternal is more ambitious. The only catch about Eternal’s ambition is that you really have to be on board, because there aren’t optional play styles — you play Eternal the way the devs tell you it’s supposed to be played.
Certain markets too, perhaps. I’m in the US with an A32 because I’ve just flat-out stopped paying for flagships, and I haven’t seen any junk in the most recent update.
It’s a consequence of retail. Because carriers in the US determine which phones most of us can access, with the exit of LG from the market the Android landscape in the US was effectively reduced to Samsung. Other manufacturers may as well not exist for all the average shopper is led to believe – the brick and mortar store where you pick out your phone gives you two options: iPhone or Samsung.
When going to use Adobe express on Firefox it comes up with the following message, saying that this browser doesn’t play well with others and that I should use Safari, Google Chrome, or Microsoft Edge instead.
For example, I didn’t fall in love with Titanfall 2’s environmental art design—it felt a bit generic to me, like it was meant to be the backdrop for a shooter, as opposed to the Sevastopol in A:I or the station in SOMA that felt like existing locations....
I was 16 when Goldeneye released. The immersion of those locations was off the charts for the time. I’m not sure I played another game that gave me that uncanny feeling of being somewhere else until HL2.
I’ve got about 2k hours in Skyrim so I definitely love a Bethesda game, but what I’m thinking about are simple arcade shooters with less of an RPG structure than TES or Fallout.
Admittedly Borderlands has skill trees and classes, but I feel like it’s safe to call it a shooter first & a roleplayer second. But DOOM, Bioshock, Portal, Metro—if there’s more to your character than their name & their gun, the game barely acknowledges it. :P
I’ve started Black Mesa but haven’t finished it yet. What I’ve played has been fucking impressive.
Valve is sort of the best at what I’m asking about—all of their games have the greatest touches that make the settings feel like existing locations you’ve walked into. It’s what makes me wish they published more.
The insane detail that goes into aging Aperture throughout the second half of Portal 2, the way it starts in the 40s or 50s at the very bottom and has a distinct “era” for each level as you get closer to the surface, including Cave’s progressing illness . . . it’s such good storytelling, and it’s literally just window dressing for the already-great main plot.
Thanks for the really thoughtful comment! You make all three sound extremely intriguing.
I was unaware that any of the Halo games had much of a story at all! I’ve always just imagined them as the present incarnation of Unreal Tournament, i.e. built primarily for competitive multiplayer. I’d have expected the art direction to be, uh, perfunctory. Shame on me.
The thing that I dislike about metroidvanias, which is that I get hopelessly disoriented, could indeed work in favor of a horror game. I’m very interested in this one now, and as a fortysomething gamer I love the idea of a Gameboy title.
I picked up Frostpunk during the Epic giveaway but haven’t dived in yet. Thank you for the specific description—it’ll make it easier to go in with the proper expectation for suspense!
Oh sick, I didn’t realize Deathloop was first-person (I assumed it was over the shoulder 3rd-person like Max Payne & Control).
I almost mentioned Control in my post because it did have great environmental design that felt like a cross between Aperture and The X-Files. I’ll stick Deathloop on the wishlist, thanks for the recommendation!
I’d like to think that our digital traces could compose a sort of self-portrait like those images that describe movies by the average color of every frame. For instance, this is the whole Harry Potter series in one go.
It doesn’t look like much, but if you’re familiar with the movie you can follow the plot just based on your memory of the scenes’ colors. I like the idea of my digital footprint leaving a similar “ghost” that doesn’t mean anything unless you can fill up the negative space with context.
Mod wanted! (sh.itjust.works)
EDIT: /u/southsamurai has picked up the gauntlet. May the sun shine on all their days....
piece of shit (lemm.ee)
Unknown artist but I love this poem so much
Italy begins stripping lesbian mothers of their parental rights (www.lgbtqnation.com)
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/1639718...
What are some good games with a creepy/eerie atmosphere but not outright horror?
The epitome of what I’m trying to refer to is the Playdead games (Limbo and Inside). Dark Souls and BioShock both hit on this idea but not quite so directly. The game BADLAND is also a great example of this, too. The mobile game The Silent Age also did this exceptionally well. Never quite knowing what’s going on, and maybe...
Wtf is going on in Australia (lemmy.world)
POTUS approves mobilization of 3,000 reservists (www.defense.gov)
Updated my Samsung phone and it installed unwanted apps (lemmy.world)
Official Minecraft wiki editors so furious at Fandom's 'degraded' functionality and popups they're overwhelmingly voting to leave the site (www.pcgamer.com)
Here’s hoping they migrate to wiki.gg as Terraria’s contributors have a while ago.
Dumb ways to die (sh.itjust.works)
Adobe Express doesn't work in Firefox (lemmy.ca)
When going to use Adobe express on Firefox it comes up with the following message, saying that this browser doesn’t play well with others and that I should use Safari, Google Chrome, or Microsoft Edge instead.
Part of the Social Security website (ssa.gov) only works during certain hours (sh.itjust.works)
… its a website run by the US Government. Why does it have such large downtimes in this day and age?
FPS titles with great environmental world-building? e.g. Alien: Isolation, Metro, DOOM '16, even Portal 2 counts -- games that feel like real, lived-in places and not just a series of arenas.
For example, I didn’t fall in love with Titanfall 2’s environmental art design—it felt a bit generic to me, like it was meant to be the backdrop for a shooter, as opposed to the Sevastopol in A:I or the station in SOMA that felt like existing locations....
Digital Archive by Jennifer Kwon Dobbs (www.poetryfoundation.org)
How should I index myself so that you can retrieve & cut me . . .
Welcome abaord shipmates! (sh.itjust.works)