Ninchilla

Horizon Forbidden West: The Burning Shore

Shadow of the Tomb Raider - Still far from 100%, but credits rolled. The story is nonsense and combat isn't much fun, but this honesty might outdo everything else going in terms of exploration. You get a great set of tools to play with, and if there's one complaint, it's that the use cases are too specific - if/when they go back to Tomb Raider, I'd love to see them take a leaf out of Zelda's book, and give you more of a sandbox approach to traversal and puzzle-solving.

I've had En Garde! wishlisted for what feels like ages, but keep not buying it in the (futile?) hopes of a console version.

Oh, and I finished the story in Shadow of the Tomb Raider! Alas, I also hit an apparently-common bug that prevents a key upgrade-item merchant from spawning. So, of course, I did the reasonable thing and immediately started the whole thing again on New Game +.

I've not bumped the difficulty up - combat is kinda frustrating even on the default - but the exploration is pretty peerless in this; the puzzle tombs are exceptionally well-varied and clever, and at times it almost hits the vast, lonely emptiness that I was so fond of back in the original Tomb Raider in 1996.

Alas, the only way to stop Lara's repeated "hints" also disables the Instinct vision for interactables, and the lighting is occasionally so bad I don't trust myself not to miss everything important without it. Ho hum.

Don't know if I'll platinum the thing - if I do go through on the highest difficulty, it'll be after I've unlocked all the upgrades and best gear - but I'm not ready to be done with it yet.

I keep signing up for betas of random games, so over the last couple of days I've played a few rounds of Wildgate, a new multiplayer shooter that was pitched in the article I read as "Sea of Thieves in space".

It's not entirely inaccurate; 5 teams of 4 are spawned in a massive area of open space, dotted with derelict ships, and alien planetoids, and the nominal goal is to find and escape with an artifact of great value. The catch is that you can only escape once the titular Wildgate opens, about 10 minutes into the match - so most of the time is spent exploring the aforementioned derelicts and planetoids, killing NPC monsters, completing mini-objectives to open a vault containing ammo and upgrades for your ship, so you can (hopefully) survive the shooting gallery that things descend into once the artifact is found. Alternatively, you can just gear up and try to be the last ship floating.

Where it really differs from SoT (beyond ship upgrades) is in the characters. It's halfway to a hero shooter, with each character getting their own passive effects that make them slightly stronger at ship defence, boarding, or repairs. Each character also has their own progress track (or "Adventure") that unlocks cosmetics, weapons, and ship types, although you can activate and level up any Adventure (and equip any of the unlocks) with any character. I don't know if these will be locked behind a paywall in the final version; I hope not.

I think it's good, though like a lot of these slightly more thoughtful multiplayer games, the quality of the experience varies wildly depending on the competence of your crew. A group who ignores the mini-objectives will very quickly find itself outgunned, but even if you do explore several locations, the random nature of the loot might not set you up particularly well, and the longer the game goes on, the higher your risk of being boarded while everyone's trying to kill the slime-monsters infesting an ancient obelisk.

The current beta ends tomorrow, and I don't know what the plans are for future playtesting; I'd recommend checking it out, if you think it sounds interesting, but whether or not I ended up making the jump at launch would depend greatly on the price and how many of my friends list were also likely to grab it.

Yeah, it's the Definitive Edition.

After someone here (Gar?) mentioned it a week or so ago, I've picked Shadow of the Tomb Raider back up. Took me about a half hour of repeated plunges to my death to remember the controls, but at least it reloads quickly. The story is nonsense, but it's pretty good at the puzzle/traversal stuff! I just wish Lara would shut up during puzzles instead of screaming "hints" at me every 15 seconds.