Topic: Game Pass Club

@LtSarge @ralphdibny Finally finished Tell Me Why! I thought it was solid, but a bit slow for the first two episodes. The final episode was pretty fantastic, though. The scene where Alyson confronts Eddy at the police station and I chose for her to tell the truth got me sobbing like I haven't in a little while with a game! The choices definitely felt impactful, even if by the end I don't think they did all that much. I'm pretty sure the final choice is probably the biggest determinator for the ending, and that your sibling bond where they said they would either stop or not stop using their voice. It was fun to watch the statistics, because I was in the minority for quite a lot of them. I did look up how the whole sibling bond was decided and saw that not forgiving Eddy makes it really hard to still keep the sibling bond to the point where they'll keep using the voice, but I somehow lucked my way ass backwards into still managing it. I never forgave Eddy, but I did forgive Tessa. I also chose to believe the twins' version of events, even though I honestly believed Tom's more. My reasoning? The last thing the twins need is more uncertainty, and believing Tom would mean they got exactly that. Also, just ***** Tom. I felt the ending wasn't as much about what the truth is, but what was best for them to believe. I think not having their entire world turned upside down again at the very end was probably better for them mentally, especially with Alyson's visions earlier in the episode.

All in all, an enjoyable effort from Dontnod even though I didn't quite enjoy it as much as LiS2 or even Before the Storm. Graphically, it's easily the most impressive game from them yet though. The vistas are gorgeous and the character models so detailed. Its slow pace definitely made me take breaks, when normally I play these episodes in one sitting. I do love Tyler and Alyson as characters though, but there weren't many other memorable or likable ones. I did follow the romance with Michael, but I didn't really care for him as a romance option or character. I just couldn't pass up the opportunity for a gay romance! It's funny how even with two less episodes it averages out at about the same length as the five episode Before the Storm. I think I prefer five shorter ones over three longer ones, but that's of course only when you don't have to wait a year for them to come out. Cough.

Now onto Hellblade! Wish me luck!

@Tjuz Congrats mate! Enjoyed reading your thoughts about the game and I'm glad that you enjoyed playing it. I hope Dontnod keeps releasing these kinds of games in the future with vastly different story lines and settings than their previous work. They have some incredibly talented people at their studio!

Hope you'll find Hellblade enjoyable as well! I just got done with the first "major" section of the game (probably 1/3 into it) and it's so freaking good so far. My favourite part of the game is definitely the combat, despite the focus being mostly on the narrative. It just feels so satisfying slashing away at your enemies and there are so many different moves and attacks that you can perform that it never grows old. Not to mention that the game keeps getting challenging as you progress so you'll always have to be on your toes.

I'm curious though, are you guys also finding the combat to be really fun and engaging, or am I the only one who feels like this?

@LtSarge I can honestly say that has been my favorite part of the game as well. I feel really engaged with each parry, swing, and kill! The enemies look awesome as well so that makes it even more satisfying.

@MAC26 Yeah and the fights can be really intense as well. That makes parrying and dodging all the more satisfying when you actually pull it off successfully.

I've also discovered that you can pull off certain combos and finishing blows. For example, I think you can do a finishing blow if you press Y then X then Y again. I really like the fact that the game doesn't tell you these things since it makes discovering stuff more fun.

@LtSarge ah yeah makes sense! (Re: Celtic symbology). I can't say I know enough about Celtic and Norse mythology. My main experience of the latter comes from the Marvel films lol (the gods did travel through space right? 😂) I learned a bit about Boudica in primary school but I'll be damned if I can remember history lessons as a 7 year old!

@Tjuz well done on finishing TMW! I had to go with the actual truth on my run through. For some reason I feel differently and at least for me personally, I like to know what happened and move on from it. Or become a shut in for years but y'know eventually move on with no illusion about my past. Then again, nothing that traumatising has ever happened to me so I guess I don't know how i'd react in real life! Interestingly, I felt the same about Michael but still went the same route. It was one of the main times I felt disconnected from the characters and felt like I should do what's best for them instead of myself.

@LtSarge @MAC26 the combat is definitely good! I found it tedious at first but once I justified it within my interpretation of the narrative I found it really satisfying to be challenged by and slay my own demons. It only gets better as well, the more you journey through the game, the more satisfying it is to overcome the challenges.

I did manage to finish Battletoads last weekend. My brother visited me, and we decided to play it with local co-op while we were drinking beer. I liked it, at least when played co-op. We played it with easiest difficulty, so it was nice, relaxed experience.

Hellblade is next, I start it today or tomorrow.

@Justifier Nice! Sounds like you had a great experience with the game instead of going through it solo like most of us did.

I'm more than halfway through Hellblade now (probably 70% or so) and I just got the Hellblade and completed the shard trials. There hasn't been a lot of combat during this section of the game, so getting back into it with the Hellblade was amazing. I've really missed the combat and I'm glad that you don't spend too much time without fighting enemies since it's just so much fun. I can't get enough of it!

Is anyone else also trying to find all the runes? I've gotten all of them up until my current point in the game and while they're not that difficult to find, you could easily miss them since there are branches in the path and there's no way of returning to previous areas. Anyway, I really enjoy finding these and listening to the lore is a nice bonus. I really hope that I manage to find them all so that I can get the achievement for it, lol.

@LtSarge I certainly tried to find all the time stones but the achievement didn't pop for me, or even give me a percentage completion to be honest. But what I heard was definitely very interesting!

I think your about right in your progression, I'd say the game is divided up into 3 parts. The first part is the intro, surtr and ravenmr (however you spell it), part 2 is the shard trials and part 3 is...well you will find out!

I must say I enjoyed the shard trials, generally I prefer puzzles and platforming over combat in games, or at least a good balance. I know that bit is puzzle heavy but there is a particularly scary bit in there featuring some awful heathens that reminded me of Blair Witch. Generally this game has a very nice balance between puzzles and combat though.

@Justifier well done on doing battletoads, I imagine it is quite nice to do it in co op! I tried to mess around with the different characters, especially when they split up into groups for act 4 (I think?) And you get to play as non-toads. I did try to play it online with my mate who has game pass for PC but there is no online in this game! Normally I could care less about that but I did lament it's absence in the current pandemic. It's weird they didn't add it as a feature.

@ralphdibny I had to look up online after reading your post and apparently a lot of people have had issues with achievements unlocking in Hellblade. I decided to look up the achievement list and based on the descriptions, I should have unlocked a lot more achievements than what I have right now. And some people are saying it's because of the instant-on/quick resume feature of Xbox One, which I have indeed been using from time to time when playing through Hellblade. That's seriously so freaking annoying, because I remember looking through the achievement list a couple of months ago and seeing the achievement list being fairly straightforward. So I was wondering why I wasn't getting more achievements. This really sucks.

I did read that achievements could pop up after 10 days or so, but I don't know if that's true. Either way, it's stupid that Ninja Theory still hasn't fixed this years after the game's release.

@LtSarge ah lame fair enough, I thought I might have just missed some of the lore stones, not sure if I unlocked all the main story achievements, they were all hidden and I didn't check them after I'd finished the game. There was a section where I didn't see any lore stones (the dark bit I mentioned earlier with the heathenous creatures) and I wondered if I'd have found some there if I was a bit braver and explored more.

Oh well, it's probably not a game I plan to replay any time soon. Maybe if I got a super duper TV and sound system set up in future, this would be one I'd revisit because I think it would be quite immersive due to the high production value of this game. Then again, this game is really heavy and I'd probably want to be of sound frame of mind to even attempt it again.

So I just finished Hellblade and what a wonderful game it was! I've never played anything quite like it, it was interesting to play as a character that constantly hears voices and is tormented by past events throughout the entire game. Not to mention that these aspects were very well incorporated to the gameplay side of things, e.g. Senua's voices telling her what to do and not do. As I've mentioned previously, the combat was phenomenal and easily my favourite aspect of the game. It was so satisfying nailing those parries and dodges against enemies, and the bosses were very intense as well. I also liked how the game warned you from dying too often since it means losing all your progress if you die enough times, so I was always playing as seriously as I could. The puzzles were fun and creative although they felt a bit repetitive towards the end of the game, but nothing that ruined the experience. Overall I highly enjoyed playing this game and I can't wait to see how the developers have improved upon it in Hellblade II.

I missed out on 6 achievements and 380 G because of the instant-on feature that bugged out the achievements. Luckily, I still got the rest of the achievements in the "third part" of the game as well as the one for finding all lorestones (I genuinely can't believe how I managed to get this one but not the story-related non-missable achievements, lol) so I just need to blast through the first half of the game and hopefully get them this time around.

As a side note, I've played a bit of Night in the Woods already and this game is pretty dope. It's like Oxenfree but it doesn't take itself as seriously as that game. Can't wait to delve into it later on!

@LtSarge well done on beating the game! Definitely interesting to read your thoughts on it.

When that permadeath warning came up, I did remember some article about it actually being lie but I couldn't remember if that was the case or not so I did play it much the same as you by attempting to not die. I did notice my "rot" actually improving though, a few times it was up to my shoulder and then it would be back down to my elbow. So I don't know really!

@ralphdibny Yeah I read afterwards that you don't really lose your progress, which is good but for people who don't know that it's still a good incentive to play as well as possible.

Hypothetical question for you guys if anyone knows or is willing to try:

If I have an Xbox console with multiple users. From what I've read if the main user has GPU everyone gets it. My question is it possible to have the main account play a game like Destiny 2 using xcloud on a tablet while another user plays the same game simultaneously on the console itself?

Hopefully that makes sense, thanks in advance!!

@redd214 It should be the case, but I'm not 100%. Hopefully someone else can give you a confirmation on that!

So I've been playing a lot of Night in the Woods now that I'm done with Hellblade and the game is a very chill experience. It kinda feels like Shenmue in terms of structure; you wake up each day in your house, go out in town and talk to people and complete certain objectives, then you return home and sleep and wake up the next day to do other stuff. It's very relaxing, I actually really like this type of structure in games.

There's also a really fun rogue-like mini-game similar to The Binding of Isaac and it's cool that the developers added something like this into the game. Gives it some variety in between missions.

Anyway, not much has happened story-wise thus far so I don't have much to talk about with regards to that. I'm really looking forward though to see how the story will unfold!

@ralphdibny Just wondering, are we playing through Hellblade this week, then Night in the Woods this week and the next, and then we're starting up Resident Evil 7 in roughly two weeks?

As a side note, I'm so looking forward to playing through another Resident Evil game ever since we played through Resident Evil Remake over at Push Square. It was such a memorable time of Game Club and I hope it will be the same with RE7. Kinda bummed that Microsoft/Capcom didn't add Resident Evil 2 Remake on Game Pass instead of RE7 since we could've played it at the same time as Push Square Game Club, but oh well. I'll just have to play RE2 in my own time!

@LtSarge sounds about right! Maybe give about two weeks for night in the woods (so next week and the week after at least) and we will start resi 7 on either the third or final week of October!

I kinda wish we were doing resi 2 instead of 7 because my playthroughs of resident evil have not been in any kind of reasonable order. In the past I'd only played 4 and revelations and this year I've replayed both of those games, played REmake and now will be playing 7 lol. I am familiar with the general overarching story of the games already though, maybe I'll just play 7 for game club and play it in VR when I eventually get round to it in my sequential play through of the games

@ralphdibny Sounds like a plan! I'll have enough time then to play through other games in the meantime until we start up RE7. Might even play through some other horror games on my own since it's October now. I could give Outlast or something similar a go!

Yeah but at least RE7 isn't really connected to the previous games. I'd say that 1-3 are connected the most and 4-6 are also pretty connected to the overall story. But from what I can tell, 7 is its own thing, until 8 is released that is lol. So at least we'll be prepared for that game!

We could always hope that Microsoft will add RE2 to Game Pass in the future and just hold off on playing it until that day comes. It's not like I'm going to be playing RE2 right now since we're already going to play RE7 soon and playing through one RE game is enough to completely wear me down, lol. There are also lots of upcoming horror games being added to GPU thanks to Bethesda and EA Play, such as The Evil Within and Dead Space, so there won't be a shortage of horror games to play in the meanwhile anytime soon.

@LtSarge yeah that's true, I'm playing doom 3 at the moment and it's scaring the bejeebers out of me. Bout half way through with 7 hours game time, so far it's actually a very long game. I think the expansion packs are about 8 hours long too

I believe 7 has some links to the overall story but I suspect it's more like how 4 connects to the original games but maybe less so. Sort of a new story and in this case new characters but set in the larger RE world.

I probably will join in with 2 over on push square if I can find the game cheap enough on eBay, i.e less than £10 and preferably on Xbox as Im sure it will be better on the X than the base PS4. Do you think you will make an appearance for it over there or is one RE game enough for you on Halloween?

@ralphdibny I mean isn't Push Square going to play through RE2 at about the same time as we're playing through RE7 over here? I don't think I'll be able to play through two RE games at the same time, that's a bit too much for me considering how invested I had to be to get through RE1 alone. Not to mention that after 1, 2 and 7, there won't be that many good RE games left to play. So I definitely want to savour these games as much as possible.

Not to say that 5 and 6 are bad games, they're just not good RE games since they're more action-oriented rather than scary so I wouldn't play them if I were looking for a horror experience.

@LtSarge yeah I believe 2 is the Halloween game so ill be heavily invested in RE over those few weeks if I play both!

Fair enough though, I have a suspicion that the 2 remake won't be quite as obtuse as the original games though so I'm not sweating it as much as I was with REmake.

I don't think anything will knock 4 off the top spot for me though. To be fair it hasn't held up after all this time when I replayed it on Xbox one a while back (though it's still really good) but the GameCube original was just an amazing experience when I was younger, it was in my top 5 games of all time when I used to make such arbitrary lists.