July Progress Picks: Alan Wake, L.A. Noire and Night in the Woods

I could have included any of the games as my highlighted progress pick, quality wise it has been that good of a month!

• Alan Wake
  

  19 hours playtime

  38 of 67 achievements

• L.A. Noire
  

  48 hours playtime

  60 of 60 achievements

• The Long Dark
  

  22 hours playtime

  18 of 22 achievements

• Night in the Woods
  

  12 hours playtime

  18 of 31 achievements

• OneShot
  

  12 hours playtime

  11 of 11 achievements

Alan Wake - My first impressions were mixed. The weird camera angle of being positioned to the side of the character made me feel like I was moving diagonally, making some of the platforming sections a pain until I got used to it. The enemy encounters became an early nuisance too, having to direct your light on them before being to damage while avoiding getting flanked, rushed or an axe thrown in your face made the combat really feel like a challenge on normal mode with a lot of movement, awareness and dodging required. Oh one of the worst parts of the game for me was early on you’re forced to make a last stand without any weapons… I had to rely on a temporary ally to shoot whilst I directed the light on them, for several waves, that wasn’t fun!

Yet after finishing the first couple of chapters and getting access to more powerful weapons and stronger torches (yes that’s how important light is!) I began to start finding the game more enjoyable. In fact I’d recommend normal mode having completed the game as I feel like if I’d have just one shot my way through the game it would have got quite boring, the little bit of challenge made the chapters more tense and a rush to a checkpoint feel a lot more thrilling knowing I had half a dozen axe wielding shadow men chasing after me that could kill me in seconds if I got trapped. Mercifully it wasn’t a scary game, I absolutely hate jump scares, there were just a few instances where you might enter a building and be ambushed by someone hiding behind some crates but it’s usually quite obvious and they tend to get a slow mo intro to let your heart calm down.

There were plenty of cool set-piece moments that usually involve you running away from something or fighting off some possessed machinery. The cut-scenes take a more cinematic style and were a nice transition from the gameplay. The surrounding mountains and forests were beautiful to look at. The story itself was interesting and mysterious, although some parts like where you have to drive to one place during day time only to find you now need to head somewhere at night made my eyes roll. One of the characters initially really irritated me yet by the end of the game (the Christmas lights helped) I had started to like him. The replayability I think is limited, there are quite a lot of collectibles hidden away in each chapter, some quite useful to the story like the manuscripts, others like the coffee thermoses absolutely pointless, I don’t have any intention to find them all. But as a one playthrough game, without worrying about 100% completing it, I highly recommend it. I’m looking forward to playing Quantum Break in the future. Oh and it was a nice surprise having David Bowie’s Space Oddity in the end credits too!

L.A. Noire - This was kindly recommended to me by Lenor and was the game I chose for the monthly theme. Unlike Alan Wake I actually wanted to 100% it too as although it shared similarities with pointless collectibles, finding all those golden film reels wasn’t fun, I felt much more motivated to spend more time playing it. Each case never felt too monotonous even though they usually played out the same way. Trying to piece together the evidence and tell who was lying made sure I couldn’t just rush through it and not pay attention. If I were to have one complaint with the cases it would be that I never knew how the detective, Cole Phelps, was going to act during the questioning, it took away from the seriousness of the game I think when he starts shouting and threatening to try to make the suspect uneasy by being as direct as possible, I just wish there were different approaches you could take to get the truth out, scaring people with the prospect of a gas chamber is not going to make your character very likeable.

It was surprising to me how many shootouts there were, I really thought this was solely going to be a detective game, maybe with some chasing and shooting at the end of a case but not having to deal with bank robberies or hostage situations. It also felt like an Assassin’s Creed game at times with platforming of sorts during action sequences where wooden structures were collapsing, and I was jumping across rooftops in other sections. I guess they were trying to widen the appeal of the game. But I did really enjoy the other side of it, the detective stuff was great. The partners that accompany you and change as the game progresses were all good characters, Bekowsky being my favourite of course! The little reunion towards the end of the game with everyone was sweet. All the interiors of the buildings you can go in were fantastic, the amount of detail was phenomenal, I don’t think I’ve played a game that offered this level of quality, and there were lots of homes I had to visit, there was no copy pasting noticeable at all. Unfortunately I am going to have to mention that the ending of the story was equally one of the worst I’ve encountered.

I was warned beforehand of the tedious achievements required to 100% it, the car one especially which I started early and thankfully didn’t have many remaining by the end of the game, however it was the destruction achievement that really annoyed me the most. I think in an early case when I was careless with my driving I was penalised maybe around $1000, and that was with a fair amount of damage, well this one calls for $47,000, there is no way that anyone could possibly be that careless during a single case. I had to find the most expensive car in the game, completely destroy it, wait for respawns, and repeat for seven times. Achievements like that really bug me! And this is in a game that tells you not to run over pedestrians if you start driving on the pavement and reduces your case rating if you have too many penalties. However I am glad to have fully completed it, I’m more than happy to go the extra mile if they’re not too difficult and I had fun during the main story.

The Long Dark - So this has been in early access since September 2014 and will be fully released on August 1st. I won this on Steamgifts and wasn’t sure about whether to play it or not before its story mode came out but the highly rated sandbox that the game currently offers and how close the game was to completion I decided I couldn’t wait any longer. It was so much fun! I’ve never been fond of all the multiplayer survival games that keep getting released but how this was focused on the single player experience meant I was hopeful, and correct, that it was going to be less about aimlessly running around trying to avoid being killed and more about exploration and actual survival.

As I was using the sandbox to get to grips with the game I played it on the lowest difficulty setting so I didn’t have to worry about being hunted by wolves. Just trying to keep warm proved enough of a challenge early on. After a few failed early attempts I began to learn not venture out too far at a time, and I gradually began to map the area and find shelter from the elements long enough to move on to the next place for the hope of warmer clothing and more food. I guess it shares some similarity with This War of Mine, which I really enjoyed too, with that day by day survival and making sure you know what you’re lacking and what to look to scavenge on your expeditions. Perhaps story mode will add something like this but I wish that the abandoned buildings you find or long frozen corpses had some sort of note of their past or way of telling mini-stories about the place you’re inhabiting. I think Bethesda pull this off very well with the letters and diaries you can read usually giving some sort of background. The skill system was a nice surprise and actually fitting, you start of being wasteful with your resources, less successful being able to light a fire, and by experience or finding special skill books, you become more efficient. The storms that the game throws at you makes each time you leave your shelter unpredictable and keeps you from growing overconfident and careless. Any plans you may have go right out the window as you can barely see a metre in front of you if you get caught in one, which makes navigation impossible and getting lost very easy.

I can really see the appeal of taking the hardest difficulty and really having to think about the optimum way to find food and where to travel to next. Eventually after reaching day 50 I decided I’d stop, the only ending is death… I was living comfortably with a huge stockpile of canned food in a little abandoned fishing village and was not finding any better equipment or clothing to what I was currently wearing, I’d also explored the two beginner maps fully. I’m looking forward to revisiting it for the story mode however and I will say sandbox is very much worth your time too.

Night in the Woods and OneShot - These two games are perfect without knowing too much about them. So… I won’t write three paragraphs each about these! They are both filled with genuine laugh out loud moments while also having plenty of emotional sections too, Night in the Woods covers a lot of issues. If I were to pick one thing I liked most about them, Night in the Woods has an amazing soundtrack and OneShot (make sure you play the Solstice update too) has a lot of fourth wall breaking that I guarantee will impress you! I can’t recommend them both enough, the story and characters make sure you won’t be able to forget about them, and you won’t want to. It was heartbreaking when OneShot ended and knowing there is nothing else left. I do have another playthrough needed to spent time with another character in Night in the Woods so I’m happy to have an excuse to go back to do that.

August plans: Challenge Me 2, Furi and maybe something else

Whoo another Challenge Me event! It’s great to hear this is going to be a monthly thing that runs alongside the monthly theme. This time I was challenged by kiseli who picked the games below. If you haven’t signed up to this before then I highly recommend it to get some backlog assassinating done based on others’ own experiences. So I’m going to be giving these a play as well as trying my best to progress as far as I can with Furi, I think that game is going to take a while to beat and small sessions are ideal to avoid too much frustration, it has been a real thrill so far though, even if I have only managed to defeat the jailer!

• Democracy 3
  

  3 hours playtime

  0 of 42 achievements

• Dwarfs!?
  

  0 minutes playtime

  0 of 29 achievements

• Layers of Fear
  

  2 hours playtime

  0 of 27 achievements

• The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition
  

  0 minutes playtime

  no achievements

• Unepic
  

  4 hours playtime

  0 of 57 achievements