#oneaday Day 843: Exploring the mundane

One of my favourite things in video games is when a game takes a very small, pretty mundane environment and renders it in a ridiculous level of detail. I'm not generally a "graphics person", but if you give me a game in which I can poke around a tiny, convincingly rendered house in extreme levels of detail I will be very happy indeed. Consequently, I am very excited to check out Silent Hill Townfall when it arrives.

I actually don't know very much about Silent Hill Townfall. I don't even really know how it plays. After not loving how Silent Hill f turned out — or more accurately, how it played — I haven't really been following the new one, but I have seen a few screenshots floating across my feed here and there. And I am finding myself oddly excited by them: specifically, by the fact that the game unfolds in a lovingly recreated depiction of working-class Britain (well, Scotland, but much of the characteristic visual identity is similar) and allows you to… well, poke around in tiny, convincingly rendered houses in extreme levels of detail.

I'm all for this. The idea of Silent Hill being more of an amorphous concept than an actual, physical place is a solid move for the series, I think; for all my grumbling at Silent Hill f's gameplay, its vibes and depiction of 1960s rural Japan was fantastic. The way the setting reflects the protagonist's mental state has always been an important part of the series, and setting it in places other than small-town America allows a lot more scope for this aspect of the storytelling.

I'm not even all that bothered about the inevitable "Otherworld" stuff that will almost certainly be part of Townfall. I don't need spooky scary monsters jumping out of closets at me. I just want a cool little world to wander around.

My attitude towards this sort of interactive experience goes some distance to explaining why, back on its original release, I enjoyed Gone Home so much. There are still people who get absolutely frothing mad about that game, but I was never one of them. For me, it perfectly captured the almost exact same feelings that I felt when I first returned to the place that had once been my home after my first wife left me. You might think that's not exactly something I'd care to be reminded of, but at the point I played Gone Home there was enough distance between that happening and me being able to look back on it and appreciate a piece of work that understood those feelings.

A similar thing for Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, a mostly forgotten PS4 game in which you walk very slowly through an English village and weird things happen with no real explanation or resolution. While I very much understand some people bouncing off that one in particular, I was thoroughly enamoured with just existing in that world.

I think all this goes back even further to Build engine games like Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior and Blood, which at least made an effort to depict convincing, realistic environments and feature interactive elements you could fiddle around with. Of course, the tech was too limited to be able to create environments with the level of detail we expect from our big-budget entertainment today, but there was something oddly… real-feeling about these virtual locales that I never quite got from games that took a more fantastic or sci-fi approach.

So yeah. I'm mostly excited about Silent Hill Townfall to wander into houses that look a bit like where my Nan used to live. And I don't have a problem with that at all. If the game turns out to be good, so much the better. But I'm going to enjoy just exploring that world, I think.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 842: Quick catch-up

I forgot to write something on here yesterday! In my defence, I wrote nearly 4,000 words on Ys VIII over on MoeGamer so I think you can probably cut me a bit of slack. I'm still going to take this post to "catch up" though.

I really enjoyed Ys VIII overall. It still feels a bit odd to play an Ys game that is 50+ hours long, but the game didn't drag at any point. It consistently sends you to new and interesting locales, and the story develops in some thoroughly intriguing directions as you progress. I successfully got the "true" ending, which isn't all that difficult to get (you just need more than 198 reputation points, which are easily acquired through just normal gameplay) and everything wrapped up in a most satisfying manner.

After writing my piece on Ys, I went back to the excellent Nighthawks, which is a spectacularly good game. As you might expect, I will be writing a more substantial piece on this once I've finished it, but suffice to say for now that if you have enjoyed any of the relatively recent crop of what I like to call "storytelling RPGs" (Disco Elysium, Esoteric Ebb), then you will definitely get a kick out of Nighthawks.

I think one of the things that always impresses me the most about a good quality game like this is how it can truly create a sense of a world without having an actual 3D space you can freely wander around. For me, the primarily text-based world of Nighthawks is considerably more compelling than a fully 3D modelled but ultimately bland and personality-free "open world", particularly because of the colourful characters that inhabit that world. It's funny, because this is exactly what the capital-A "Adventure" snobs were talking about in the early days of the medium; if you have a suitably compatible brain, the imagery conjured up by your mind from reading text will always be more vivid than anything even a powerful video card can render. (Of course, the fact that Nighthawks has beautiful art and excellent voice acting also helps a lot.)

Once I've finished Nighthawks, I'm going to play Silent Hill Townfall, which looks like it's going to be thoroughly interesting. I'm oddly excited to play a game with such accurate-looking renditions of a British (well, Scottish) town, and I'm intrigued to see how the game differentiates itself from other Silent Hill games. I didn't love Silent Hill f, although I didn't hate it either; from what I understand, Silent Hill Townfall is quite a different beast anyway, so I'm excited to explore it.

After that, I think it's going to have to be Ace Combat 8. I love Ace Combat, and this new one has been getting excellent reviews. I'm happy about that. The series deserves to do well, and it's nice to have a game like this on modern hardware. I mean, the PS2 Ace Combat games still look surprisingly great, but it's even better to have something in full HD-o-vision.

There we go, all caught up. Now watch me forget to write something later today.

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#oneaday Day 840: The deluge has started

The deluge of amazing games coming out in the latter half of this year has started. I've already noted that I've been playing the excellent Nighthawks from Wadjet Eye Games, and that is very much occupying my immediate attention, but also on my radar for the immediate-ish future are Silent Hill Townfall and Ace Combat 8, both of which seem to be going down well with reviewers so far.

I also still need to finish Ys VIII, which I set aside while I started Nighthawks, but I think I'm going to devote tomorrow to. I was enjoying it a lot, and I think I'm getting near the end, so I would like to finish it properly. Ys VIII is not a recent release, though. It came out ten years ago and has had two sequels since then, both of which I would like to play at some point.

Not only that, but I've been having a steady stream of stuff I preordered months ago finally coming around — just this week I've had Chained Echoes and Trails in the Sky Second Chapter come in, Little Goody Two-Shoes is on the way and I'm sure there are others to look forward to.

Situations like we've got here are why I'm not immediately worried for the crash that the top end of the industry appears to be careening towards. I have enough unplayed (or "want to replay") games on my shelves to last me for many, many years at this point, so if there comes a day where, for one reason or another, I just can't buy any new games? I think I'm probably going to be fine.

It will be a sad day when it's no longer possible to buy boxed copies of games, of course — and I'm sure once Sony successfully pushes for this with their abandonment of discs in 2027, at the very least Microsoft will follow — but I'm well-stocked in my little bunker for such an eventuality. Only question is: will I actually be able to finish all these RPGs before I die? I reckon I can… assuming the world itself lasts that long, of course.

My wife often takes the piss out of me for the number of games I have that are still shrinkwrapped, but I've always bought stuff with this sort of eventuality in mind. I mean, I was hoping it would never actually come to a day where physical media would no longer be a thing — and I guess it still might not, as much can change even in the space of a year — but I've basically been investing in the future enjoyment of my hobby, and in the meantime, I've been wanting to just support the games that I would like to see more of. As frustrating as it is to know that "Day One" sales count for almost more than anything for a lot of developers and publishers, it is, unfortunately, a fact. And while I'm in a position where I'm comfortable enough to be able to support the stuff I like, I'm happy to do so — even if I don't get around to actually playing the games in question until, at times, a year or two (or ten) later.

Anyway, I'm not buying anything else until payday next week. But I will probably be picking up Silent Hill Townfall and Ace Combat 8. I do genuinely want to beat Ys VIII though! Really! I want to write about it and everything!

For this evening, though, Nighthawks is calling, so if you need me, I'll be stalking in the shadows of Cradlebridge.

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