Comment on Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week?
Drasglaf@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
I finished Cronos yesterday:
spoiler
I chose to spare the Pathfinder, so I got ending B. I watched the other 2 endings on YouTube and I have to say, I feel the story left me hanging, many things went unexplained. I know they want to make a franchise out of it, but seeing how the DLC is going to be more action-oriented, we’ll see how it goes.
Overall I’d give it an 8 or 8.5, I didn’t find the ending satisfactory.
I played more Alan Wake 2:
I had to lower some settings to medium for it to not crap the bed constantly. It still looks good. Also, Optiscaler was defaulting the upscaler to XESS instead of FSR4, that’s why it looked kinda blurry to me before. Now it looks great as long as it stays on native, even on quality it gives me some upscaling artifacts on things like hair or telephone cords. It’s probably because I’m playing it at 1600x1200.
As for the game:
spoiler
It was nice to see Ahti again, it put a smile on my face, hopefully he will appear again later. Also, that first Night Springs episode was something heh. I find it is more of a survival horror game than its predecessors, which were more action horror IMO. The atmosphere is great, that scene when you cross the subway car full of charred people was really unsettling.
I’ve also been trying to play something that’s not a survival horror for a while, but I keep bouncing off most games. Dread Delusion, Pacific Drive, The Alters, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, Pragmata… They all fail to grab me, but I think they will at some point in the future, they all seem to be great games in their own right. I started playing Tainted Grail yesterday and maaaybee I’ll stick with this one, I’m still in the tutorial zone, but it seems interesting.
I think I agree with that about Cronos. The lore has some interesting implications, especially with the exact nature of the Collective that I hope gets explored further in the future.
I’m glad you fixed the blurriness issue in AW2! One thing I will say is, while the Night Springs episodes are integrated into the campaign I find they kind of break the pacing and sometimes spoil things and work better when played afterwards. But I guess that’s a personal opinion.
Totally agreed about the subway, that whole Alan chapter is absolutely superb I think. Love all the detail like the text on all the signs all over the subway too.
Since you seem to be a big horror gamer, have you tried ROUTINE? I’ve been curious about it since I’ve heard some good things.
Drasglaf@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
That’s the funny part, I’m not a big horror gamer, more like a big coward. But it’s the only genre that seems to be able to hook me at the moment for some reason. I’ve read the name Routine a couple of times but I haven’t even tried it, sorry.
I’ll follow your advice about Night Springs, the 1st chapter did break the pace, especially considering I was ready to stop playing when I started it.
Gotcha. Funny how that is, sometimes we need something outside our comfort zone to shake us up. I was close to buying ROUTINE last Steam Sale, but ultimately opted against it. I’ve heard good things, although I think it’s more psychological horror than survival horror.
Final note about the DLCs, the Lake House is also integrated into the main campaign and that one I didn’t feel break the pace as much. Despite being the reverse release order my preference is playing the Lake House when it appears in the story and then all the Night Springs episodes after finishing the campaign. Lake House still works fine as a post script too though, if you want the main story to be more concise and do all the DLCs after.
Drasglaf@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
I’ll remember the name, I might play Routine at some point. For now my survival horror backlog is long enough with Alan Wake 2, Resident Evil 4 and 9, Silent Hill F and I’d like to replay Silent Hill 2 remake at some point. Judging by how long it took me to play through Cronos, I think I’m going to be playing Alan Wake 2 for a good while. And I don’t usually play 2 games of the same genre simultaneously, I like to mix things up.