This demo has been fun!

But of course it is, given this team.

Edit: I will say that there is one thing that’s kind of weird with the audio in this demo. Every works and sounds great. BUT some sounds come out of my rear speakers when I don’t really think they should. For example, the foot step sounds and some vocalizations are always in the rears while walking around, but main dialog and environment sounds are all correct. It’s weird. I don’t have this issue with any other game, so I don’t think this my setup.

We talkin’ ‘bout Bugsnax?

Astro Bot.

The market is so saturated with these type of shooters — especially ones with generic army dudes.

I’m not really surprised.

This game got me good. The atmosphere and way it drips out puzzle after puzzle is so rewarding. I drew maps. I wrote down a litany of notes on my iPad to keep track of. I tried to solve everything I could on my own until I just couldn’t any more. It felt like playing games as a kid where you had to have paper handy and wrote down passcodes.

Pouring over every inch of the map was so fun, and while I do think there will be copy cats to this game pop up in the next year, I don’t think anyone will be able to capture the magic of this again. It’s like its own singular entity that no one else has ever done. Not in this way.

For that, it’s my game of the year. Astro Bot is my second, since it’s a technically near perfect game. But it’s also simply peak platformer. Animal Well is novel. It’s just built different.

Astro Bot (PS5)

Since my personal GOTY is already taken (Animal Well), let’s just add a lot of peoples’ here — it’s also my second favorite game of the year.

Do you like 3D platforming? Why not try the best platformer since Mario Odyssey‽ Help save your friend bots with a dozen or so hours of the purest platforming fun in…a long time, honestly. People have really hyped this game, and they really aren’t wrong. It’s pure fun the entire time. Everything is beautiful and interesting. No notes, really. Good job Team Asobi.

I have this feeling that once it starts going on more sales and more people play it the general consensus will be that’s it’s a pretty solid game. I also imagine like a lot of these games there will be a patch in the next month that fixes a litany of issues.

You’re right it’s kind of interesting that the factions don’t really add a lot of meaningful gameplay mechanics, but oh well. At first I was like, “I’m not working with the Pykes AT ALL because I know what happens in your spice mines.” But you end up just being friends with all of them as needed (to get their rewards).

Just having this big coat of Star Wars paint over this otherwise fairly standard action/shooter/open world game really does make it more fun, though. I still have a bit to go in the story, but I’m just basting around cleaning up side quests right now because it’s fun to do.

For sure.

But the nerds around here put him on a GIIIANT pedestal.

It’s OK to make fun of Gabe, guys, he doesn’t care about you as he tries to figure out which of his six or seven yachts to ride around on this weekend.

Yeah! I’m enjoying it quite a bit.

“Gabe was quoted as saying, ‘Yesss, another yacht for me!’”

Edit: Oh sorry, when he’s our billionaire he’s cool, right?

Maannn, a new Solomon’s Key game would be so cool.

Honestly, Outlaws has flaws, BUUUUT it’s fun as hell. It’s a 7/10 game, but it’s fun. I enjoy my time with it even though I see some glitches here or there, or that the lip sync is a little jank.

It’s a big ass Star Wars game (with no AC towers hooray!) where you get to rub shoulders with scoundrels and play Sabacc and visit honestly cool locations that are visually impressive.

I feel like most of the issues it has is probably a function of “we need this game out by X date” versus the devs’ ability.

Great time for anyone with gamepass to go through FF 1-6. You can set the XP gain to 4x, so the grind is effectively gone letting you just enjoy the stories.

Overall I enjoyed it, but I’d say it’s probably a mid-tier FF if you we are taking them all as a whole. So, to me, it’s a solid RPG and a solid game, but it doesn’t redefine anything, necessarily.

But I definitely enjoyed it.

I had seen some complaints that you “only get one sword! It’s dumb!” And I don’t know where that came from: you craft lots of swords. Maybe they are upset you only use a sword as your primary melee weapon? To which I might point out Cloud, Squall, Tidus, Lightning, most FF protagonists in games without job systems. It’s a sword plus magic like most FF games.

Maybe the complaint is that you don’t get to use other characters since they mostly just do their own thing. OK, sure. But also, that’s the game. If they’d have just lifted the FF7 combat people would bitch about that, too. It’s like a no-win situation.

Yeah other than this weird thing where the quest made landing the ship weird, I have had anything totally break the game — though it did crash on me once. But the autosave got me maybe ten seconds before that so I loaded right back where I was.

Mostly I’ve just seen little graphical bugs. Like when you fly off world and the “loading clouds” show up. Sometimes there will be a flash of a big, black chunk of the screen that shows up for a split second. Stuff like that.

I wouldn’t mind if Kay got her own little series out this. She’s cool, and Nix is cool. I like them both.

I’m right in the middle of this game currently, and I do fully see some of the jank that shows up in this game. And it does have some issues (I couldn’t land my ship on the starting planet until I finished a specific quest, but the game doesn’t tell you this).

However, I’m finding the game pretty fun overall and kinda hope they iterate on this scoundrel idea and make sequel. I’m having fun sneaking in and looting all these places.

Hell yeah, banger month. I wanted to play The Plucky Squire, and now it’s right there to play. Just have to get through all these other games first.

Technology sure is great, isn’t it?

It also is nice for that random night where you have a physical DVD to watch.

My friends wanted to do a Saw movie marathon, and one of them had all the discs. The PS5 was the only device I had that could play them.

I’ve used the disc drive exactly twice for games in the last four years, but I’m happy it was there.

The second time, in fact, was just this last week because I was able to get Star Wars: Outlaws on disc for half off (some weird QVC deal a couple weeks ago).