Upcoming Horrible Games

Jesus Christ I feel like we blew our load far too early with Resident Evil 7 and now that it's October and I'm actively looking for shit to spook me I don't have anything.  I've been having to go back and replay old horror games.  But not only do I not really have anything to play right now, but it doesn't look like there's much good on the horizon either.

I decided to do something very uncharacteristic of me which is to go and look up the upcoming horror titles to get myself excited for something in the future.  What I got was a great amount of disappointment.  Most of the games I found were you usual "horror" fair.  Walking simulators in first person that thinks horror is dark empty buildings full of jump scares but some titles were so offensively bad I'm going to put them in this blog post

First is The Evil Within 2 (pictured above), a game I think will be so shitty that I can't help but feel that if you saw the trailer and got excited you may want to see a doctor about your mental state.  Did you play the first game?  Did you see that shit?!  The first game was a horribly paced, horribly designed, unscary and clunky piece of shit and from what little I've heard about the new game it's just more of that.  This is the game that thought that they could make their own Pyramid Head by putting a large man in a butcher apron and then placing a SAFE of all fucking things on his head.  Clearly the team behind The Evil Within don't have a fucking clue what they are doing so don't get too excited for this one.

Days Gone is coming second on the list and it's one of those games I just can't figured out why people are getting excited for it.  First of all, it's a fucking zombie survival game so already in belongs on the trash pile along with all the other zombie survival games I found.  The thing that really grinds me about this game is that the only gimmick the game seems to have aside from vaguely ripping off The Last of Us is that they put enough zombies on screen that would make a Warriors game blush.  It doesn't look bad per se but it looks just so fucking by the books boring as fuck "survival" "horror" in an open world that I just don't care.

This one I find particularly offensive to my eyes because it reminds me out Outlast and anything that reminds me of THAT steaming pile of shit needs to be put down immediately.  Judging from the trailer I found on IGN it seems to be the aforementioned walking simulator type game in a dirty building probably filled with jump scares.  What makes this really bad though is the story intro I got was "An abandoned prison, a character with amnesia" which is that kind of line that makes me roll my eyes and scroll down the page.  Why use such a cliche setting and such a cliche plot in an age where you can load up Steam and literally find HUNDREDS of games like that for probably a lot less money and probably about the same quality that this game is offering.  Outlast burnt me once and I'm not falling for your shit Inmates.

I could do this all day but I'm gonna talk about this game last because when I first saw it I thought it may have seemed like a neat idea.  The idea is that you have to escape a house and the guy in the house will try to stop you and then catch you.  The gimmick is that every play you do, the AI learns how you play and will adapt to your style.  Now I saw this game for the first time almost straight after seeing Don't Breathe and I thought this basically sounds like that movie only the villain isn't blind.  Maybe more like The Collector now I think about it.  Anyway when I actually sat down and thought about the concept behind the game I realized that it's probably going to be bullshit.  It may be effective for the first couple of times but once you realize what makes the AI tick you'll just game it so hard that you'll be guaranteed to win every time.  It reminds me of a game called Warning Forever, a free to play shmup boss rush game where the enemy ship changes based on your play style, basically the shmup version of this.  However once you figured out what the game was looking for to make the boss grow a certain way you just did that every time for crazy high scores and after that it just became boring.  Unless this game is like, £5 or you have the brain function of a goldfish then I'd probably wait for a big sale on this one.

Anyway, I know I'm being super negative and the upcoming list of games did have SOME interesting ideas on it so I'll cover those tomorrow.  I'm also secretly hoping that all these games will prove me wrong and just being fucking fantastic once they're released. 

Resident Evil 7

A fair while ago I finished Resident Evil 7 on my PS4 and because I've been so rushed the last month I never actually got around to saying anything about it on here. 

Resident Evil 7 isn't like anything that came before it.  A long while ago there were articles going around the internet that Shinji Mikami wanted to take the series back to its roots.  I think secretly horror fans were hoping that this meant we were going to get a horror game in the classic style but it would look all shiny on the new systems.  Well we didn't get that but what we did get was bloody good.

The game starts out with the main character getting a message from his wife who he thought was dead to come and save her.  Upon arrival he manages to find her but then starts getting attacked by the absolute batshit insane family that live in the house and from there all sorts of insanity goes down.  I don't want to go into the story too much in this piece because its really the best thing if you experience it without knowing anything.

The whole game is done in a first person perspective which at first sounds really lame but actually works quite well.  It was obviously done in order to make the VR thing worth it but it doesn't detract from the overall experience if you don't have it.  If anything Resident Evil is the first game that has made me think that I want to buy a VR set at all which is a pretty good indicator of just how the general atmosphere was done in this game.

What makes Resident Evil 7 so enjoyable is that all the ingredients of classic survival horror are in the game but with the first person perspective it's like they've just put a new twist on it.  Usually these kind of first person horror games involve simply hiding from the baddies but in this one we have all sorts of weapons and items that we have to manage.  The combat, which I'll talk about in just a second is actually fun and it feels like the character is decently capable of dealing with whatever is being thrown at him.

The most important question that most people will be asking though is "is it scary?" and the answer is somewhat.  If you're not the kind of person that is super used to horror like I am then there's probably going to be a great deal of moments that will have you shitting yourself.  However if you're a bit hardened on the genre then while it probably wont scare you as much it's still sort of stressful.  The atmosphere never lets up and while it's predictable in certain places it just adds to that feeling of stress because usually it'll be a situation where it's the only way to progress.  There have been so many shitty horror games in recent memory that maybe I'm being nice to it but it was definitely a nice feeling to be made a little uneasy by some sections.

Of course, the game isn't perfect and while the problems don't detract from the experience so much it's hard to just ignore these glaring faults.  First the movement just feels a bit weird overall.  Of course, you adapt to the games weird movement but there are plenty of times that I took a hit from and enemy or boss and got a little frustrated because if the character just walked or ran like a normal human being instead of like one of those crazy huge movie cameras on legs then avoiding damage would be a bit easier.  Second the AI on regular enemies is laughably bad and once you figure out how to bait out certain attacks then each encounter becomes a trivial inconvenience.  This is a shame because the first time you fight the regular enemies it's genuinely intimidating but then you realize that they all behave like morons and they lose their impact.

The enemy variety is also shockingly bad.  The encounters with the family are extremely fun and varied but the regular characters that stalk the corridors are lacking to say the least.  Just think, Resident Evil 1 had zombies, spiders, snakes, hunters, crows, dogs and the remake brought in the famous crimson heads.  Resident Evil 7 on the other hand has black thing with teeth, fat black thing with teeth and spidery black thing and that's IT.  Finally without spoiling anything the final section of the game is just pathetically easy because the game gives you so much of a certain weapon that the enemies blocking your path have no chance of stopping you because not only is the weapon so powerful but the enemies make 0 effort to avoid it.

Still, generally speaking Resident Evil 7 is a really good game so if you need a good horror fix then play this.  At time of writing I'm not really aware of anything even remotely entertaining in the genre coming out aside from We Happy Few so while Resident Evil 7 is MAYBE a little on the short side you'll be happy you decided to play it by the end.

Happy New Year! Reasons to Be Excited

God damn well I've seemed to have taken a long absence haven't I?  Well while maybe a part of it is due to a little bit of laziness there has been a winter school at my work that makes me come home wanting to die and a family trip from my family that ate all my blogging and streaming time but those things are pretty much over and now I can get right back into the swing of things again.

2016 was a bit of a shit year for gaming I feel.  At the time of writing the only game that got released this year that I can actually remember being any good was Persona 5 and the same can't be said if you live in the west because you aren't getting that shit until April.  I'm sure there was some other good shit but I either didn't play it or don't remember it right now so whatever.  But instead of looking back let us look forward so I would like share with you a few of the games that I am most excited for in 2017

After playing the demo on the PS4 and being stumped by the wooden finger thing for a few hours Resident Evil 7 seems to be a bit of return to form for the series.  Assuming the the demo is it's own sort of stand alone thing and the game isn't just going to be some shitty walking simulator with no combat and simplistic puzzles then I think we are in for a bit of a treat with the new entry.  Hopefully gone will be the awful action game experiences that 5 and 6 gave us and maybe we can get some proper next gen survival horror for once.

If you have not played the first Nier game then you owe it to yourself to go give it a spin before the new one comes out.  Fantastic setting, plot and soundtrack and while the game play was a little.....lacking, the overall experience was phenomenal.  Now we have a sequel that's developed by Platinum games so hopefully we will get the fantastic setting, plot and soundtrack but with equally fantastic game play this time too.  I've been ignoring a lot of the news because I want to go in as blind as possible for my first playthrough but trust me, it's going to be good.  If it's not I'll eat my own shoes.

 A game that originally began development in 2004 and after a lot of shit happening with it is finally getting released now, Nioh is essentially your next Souls game but just not produced by From Software and even Team Ninja have no problem admitting their inspiration from those guys.  That said, it's looking pretty fucking fantastic and while I personally missed the demo I have it on good word from one of the few people who's opinion I trust that the game is pretty fucking good.  Then again if you don't know already just how great Nioh is gearing up to be then you've probably been living under a rock.

Finally one more game that I didn't know about until I wrote this post and decided to quickly google some other upcoming games that I didn't know about and this one caught my interest pretty hard.  What looks to be some kind of RPG where you play as a vampire doing vampire things but your character is also a doctor so you have to keep your cover.  Sort of like Vampire: The Masquerade but without thousands of books of lore you have to understand before you can play.  Looks interesting, I'll absolutely be checking it out as soon as I can.

So 2017 is already gearing up to be a pretty good year and this is just the shit that's being widely reported on.  Who knows what kind of Japan only niche shit will come out for things like the Vita or doujin games you can only get in nerd stores?!  Only time will tell, let's hope its a good one

Happy New Year and as usual, thanks to all for the continued support and donations, hopefully we can raise even more money for Alzheimer's this year than we have ever done before!

Resident Evil 7 Demo

So recently I streamed the Resident Evil 7 demo so I thought I'd take a moment to talk about it here since I was too sleepy on stream to really sum up how I felt about it.

The Resident Evil 7 demo feels like it suffers from the same problems that PT did.  The idea being to give us an idea of the plot while trying to freak us out rather than being a demo indicative of the final game.  Or at least I hope that's the case because if the final game plays like this it's going to be a fucking mess.  The Resident Evil 7 demo plays a lot more like one of those walking simulator type games that I fucking hate and while it is somewhat more enjoyable than your average walking simulator, if the final game ends up as a creepy, first person "stealth" horror game, I'm going to be rather miffed.

The demo tries insanely hard to be creepy and scary but fails mainly because we've seen this kind of horror a million times before.  It does look rather nice on PS4 hardware and creates a good atmosphere but ultimately falls flat because you very quickly realize that the scary dude teleports behind you based on certain flags you hit rather than stalking you around the house.  Aside from scary dude the general imagery is too overt for it to be scary and ends up being almost funny instead.

Interestingly enough, the demo has multiple endings which you can discover by taking slightly different paths through the game.  However this has led to something particularly frustrating and thanks to this one item the demo is more of a time vampire than an enjoyable demo of the latest Resident Evil.  The dummy finger, which I pictured above, is an item you can find while exploring and NO ONE can find a use for it.  The devs are also being intentionally douchy about it and not giving us any hints as to why it was included.

My personal theory is that it doesn't actually have a use but the demo will be changed nearer to release and then we will be able to do something with it.  The demo is ultimately a forgettable experience but this mystery gives the devs an excuse to reignite the hype near launch when we are allowed to solve it.

Hopefully the final game will be good and judging from the direction the demo has taken its gearing up to be leagues better than the hot mess that was Resi 6.  Hopefully it'll be more survival horror than walking simulator and we can go back to taking about this series with a sense of excitement and joy rather than disgust.