26 October

Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little about some of the games we’ve been playing over the last few days. This week we wonder if being a detective might be a sensible career choice, we embrace new technology for driving in space, and we enjoy watching new eyes take on a horror masterpiece for the first time.

What were you playing?

You can find old editions of this column on our website. What We Played archive.

Nobody Wants to Die, Xbox Series X

I was in Lidl earlier this week and was stunned to see the whipped yoghurts. I was so shocked by this sight that I went to EG Slack to see if anyone had actually tried these potential wonders. No one understood, this is not a very good story, I’m sorry, but this curiosity made me think outside the box. Just like yoghurt sellers trying something new, I was emerging by trying a game that I didn’t have much of an appetite for.

Come forward, no one wants to die. Eurogamer (that’s the website if you’re still thinking about whipped yoghurts) called it a “raucous cyberpunk tale” and that’s true. The problem is that this isn’t the kind of game I’m usually interested in. Don’t get me wrong, I love Bladerunner as much as every wannabe movie critic on Twitter, but Nobody Wants to Die is slow, dialogue-heavy, clunky storytelling and I can’t quite lose myself in it.

I like most of what is offered. I’ve just finished watching the clever BBC show Ludwig, so I consider myself a bit of a detective now, and No One Wants to Die is good at that. There’s a lot of putting things together, looking at evidence, and also technology from the far future, but I found myself drifting a bit as I looked at the crime scene, wondering what those whipped yoghurts were like.

-Tom O

Starfield, A Beautiful, Comfortable Bed

You may have noticed a lack of Yours Truly on the Eurogamer YouTube channel lately, as I’ve been bedridden after an absolutely rotten reaction to this year’s seasonal jabs (at least I know they work: take those doses when they’re offered, folks!)

Fortunately, we live in an age where having to stay in bed for a few days is a situation well-compensated with endless entertainment options like browsing Ebay (netflix for bargain hunters), Kindle Unlimited (Netflix for book lovers), and Netflix (Netflix for people who like their shows to be canceled after one season). And Xbox Cloud Gaming, which is Netflix for people who aren’t where their Xbox is right now. A recent upgrade to 1GB internet and the theft of my wife’s Steam Deck on the grounds that I had not prepared the groundwork well for some serious testing Here’s an idea of ​​what cloud gaming is really like: The legendary Eurogamer, where OnLive gives away one of its fancy microconsoles and a press account to anyone with a blog It’s a controversial idea that I’ve been considering since the Expo. At the time, I managed to finish the first Space Marine by playing it in block-o-vision over a 6mb ADSL line, with a full second of control lag. But this was the future, and it was beautiful. And just a few lifetimes later, I’m happy to report that cloud gaming is now mostly fine. Xbox Cloud Gaming, which still seems to be in an endless public beta phase, is very good. All your items are synced between your other Xbox platforms: Now I played the same without any problems star field The character runs semi-officially on PC, console, and Steam Deck in the device’s built-in web browser. It requires a bit of cheating to get it to work, but Microsoft itself has made its own guide for doing so.

On my brand new Hub 5 with my lovely Virgin fiber connection and fast WiFi 6 protocol, there is the slightest whiff of input lag that is barely perceptible. Busy visuals can get a little blurry, with many of Starfield’s beautiful environmental details smeared in real-time encoding, but on a small screen like Deck’s this doesn’t really matter too much. It’s a perfectly playable, perfectly good representation of a great home console game that runs through the technological equivalent of two tin cans and a piece of string, on a device that shouldn’t actually be carrying it. Frankly, I was impressed. Cloud gaming has truly arrived, albeit as a complementary service.

What else? Oh, Starfield? Yes, no problem. I’m a huge Bethesda sucker, but Starfield tested my resolve hard at launch. After many updates and additions, I can safely say that this is one of my favorite space games ever. The addition of a rover, for example, didn’t turn a 7/10 into a 10, but it did fix my biggest bogey of being a game about exploration where exploring is incredibly tedious. At least now you can ski with a small motor and cover great distances between these points of interest in a very short time.

Starfield sucked as a walking game, but it turns out to be much less terrible as a driving game: it serves as another example of human civilization greatly enhanced by the humble automobile.

-Jim

Silent Hill 2 Remake, Twitch

I to say I was playing Silent Hill 2 This week. what do i have Actually I’ve been playing since completing the Bloober remake last weekend, my new favorite is the slightly obsessive ‘watching streamers who’ve never played Silent Hill 2 before engage in emotional struggle in its final hour, only to become a sobbing mess over time’. credits rolling’.

Silent Hill 2 has been one of my absolute favorites since I first played it almost a quarter of a century ago; Since then, he has confidently stepped onto the stage and announced to the world that, yes, video games are, in fact, played. to be Treat your audience like adults. The truth is, after 25 years I Still As I ponder what this all means and wake up at 2am with new theories, the Laura Theme – the perfect encapsulation of the hopeless naiveté of Silent Hill 2 – still gives me chills, which is testament to Team Silent’s outstanding work.

And the remake of Bloober is equally extraordinary in its own way; A wonderful re-imagining of a truly groundbreaking classic that improves, expands, and improves on the original in mostly all the right ways. It remains as chilling, terrifying and emotionally devastating as ever; Arguably even more so, given the superb work from a superb new cast and some masterful refinements to familiar moments, including a surprising new Abstract Dad fight and an expertly choreographed prison scene that’s certainly one of the most unremittingly suffocating, harrowing pieces of horror. I played.

It was a rare pleasure to be able to experience one of my all-time favorites again with fresh eyes and in such a beautifully thought-out new version. But it also provided the perfect opportunity to watch a whole new generation (admittedly distilled to a cross-section of sobbing streamers) discover its secrets for the first time, and to see Silent Hill 2 almost a quarter of a century later. It has lost none of its incredible power.

-Mat