#oneaday Day 482: Catching Up

I seem to have inadvertently missed a couple of days; hearty apologies for that! I've been keeping myself busy what with doing the day job from home and getting stuck right in to Atelier Iris 3: Grand Phantasm in the evenings, so evidently I got distracted somewhere along the line.

I've also got a new assignment for Nintendo Life: Disaster Report 4, which has no embargo so I can talk about it! Woo.

I'll do a proper writeup on Disaster Report 4 on MoeGamer alongside my Nintendo Life review as usual, but two things have become very apparent during my first play session this evening: 1) this game runs like crap on Switch — and like, actual crap, not "boo, it's 30fps on Switch when it's 60fps on PS4 — and 2) it doesn't matter, because I sat and played this for 4 hours solid without realising, I was having such an interesting time with it.

I've never played a Disaster Report game before so I didn't really know what to expect at all. I don't know how representative this one is of the series as a whole, but it's a fascinating blend of sort of survival horror without the "horror" bit — at least, without the "scary monsters and gore" bit, anyway; there are still genuinely horrifying moments — with adventure game. I've never seen a game with quite so many different dialogue options at critical story junctures. Or a game with quite as many toilets, for that matter, since there's a bit of lightweight "needs management" going on as you play, though not to an obtrusive degree.

It's one of those games that leaves you wondering "what if…?" when you reach the conclusion to a particular section, so I'll be interested to replay it. I'm probably going to pick up a boxed copy of this at some point; whether it's on Switch (so I can continue from the save I'm using at the moment) or on PS4 (where it'll run better… hopefully, anyway) remains to be seen. As I say, after a while the dodgy frame rate simply ceased to matter to me because the general experience was so enjoyable.

Anyway. I'll be getting stuck into that some more over the weekend. I hear about 15-20 hours for a playthrough, so hopefully I can bash that out reasonably quickly and be able to get back to Atelier Iris 3, which I am loving. But more on that another time!