As the owner of a grievously inadequate 861GB Playstation 4, I’m regularly forced to delete old games to make room for new ones. These are their stories. Someday I may go back to them, but, probably not.
Risk of Rain 2
I played this game after finishing both Outer Wilds and Subnautica and when I booted it up I saw an image of a spaceman sitting on top of an escape pod playing a guitar. Was this a beautiful mashup a those two great games?? Could this be my new favorite game evarrrr??? It wasn’t either of those things. Risk of Rain 2 is a very cool looking and sounding roguelike I absolutely hated playing.
You start with only one character class, the commando, who has a couple different kinds of attacks. The primary is the double tap, which sounds cool but it’s just firing your gun. It sounds like this, bangbang, bangbang, bangbang. There are a lot of enemies so you end up holding the fire button down the whole time, bangbang, bangbang, bangbang all day long. The enemies also respawn so you’re never quite rid of them and I got sick of shooting as I searched for the teleporter so I just ran past them. This seemed to work pretty well, no enemies, no bangbang, just running. After a while, I could still hear them making noise behind me so I took a look. They were all there, the bugs, and lizards, and shit I’d ignored and sprinted past, following me in a giant mob, like the townsfolk coming to burn Frankenstein’s monster.
I found the teleporter a few times. It releases a boss. The boss killed me right away. The game suggested I change the difficulty setting. I did. The boss killed me right away. I quit after the third try on easy. Maybe I suck. Whatever. No more bangbang.
Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2
I have a headache just thinking about this game. The screen is very bright and very busy. You’ve got multiple characters to control, everything is breakable and drops coins, so when you’re fighting your smashing into furniture and various bits of scenery and the coins are bouncing everywhere and She-Hulk just fell off a cliff and I don’t care enough to put up with this.
Also, because of the kind of gamer that I am, I wanted to collect all the coins so I just got drawn down into this merciless smash and collect cycle. I’m sure veteran Lego gamers would tell me to ignore the coins. Maybe I’ll try Lego Indiana Jones or something. Oh and you can’t manipulate the camera. It’s maddening.
The heroes and their powers are well designed, and there are a lot of them. Pretty much any Marvel person you can think of is in there. Some levels have pieces to them that can only be unlocked by specific characters you don’t have when you’re first starting out. All I could think was, “I have to come back here?” Throwing Captain America’s shield is fun at first, but shooting is awkward and during encounters I usually defaulted to just mashing the attack button. I’m sure there are intricacies to the combat I didn’t stay long enough to learn. Which reminds me of…
Bloodbourne
I keep periodically running into fans of this game so I had to give it a shot. It’s hard as hell, they say, and they’re right, it is hard. It is also depressing. The world, what I saw of it anyway, is dark and smokey and filled with trash. You move through the streets with the certain knowledge you’re about to be killed and forced to do the whole thing all over again. Every time I got to a checkpoint it was like a gift from a nonexistent god.
Because there is no god in Bloodbourne, that much is clear. This is a place that has never known kindness, or succor. There’s no tutorial to help you fight. All you get is simple button functions scrawled on filthy gravestones, and two awkward weapons. Good luck!
Bloodbourne had been sitting on my hard drive for over a year, and I was convinced I would never play this game again, but then TODAY, the day after I deleted it, I read this article on Kotaku essentially crediting it for making the writer a better person. Oh for fucks sake, alright! I’ll give it another shot. 10 hours to get good. I can do that. I’m googling tips though.
Little Nightmares
This is the one success story of the bunch. I downloaded this game to play with my girlfriend, but she ended up getting hooked on it and played the whole thing without me! She loved it. I can tell you from sitting there watching and NOT PLAYING that it is gorgeous. The world is very creepy and the bad guys are gross and funny and mostly gross.
A side-scroller with a shallow third dimension, the puzzles are mostly solved through exploration and stealth. The action mechanics look great and work well. The whole thing takes place on a dank, creaky ship, a great setting for anything, in my opinion. There are some unexpected, gut wrenching moments in this simple game, and the ending is befitting any good horror story. A treat.
criticalmush.com 
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