What we’ve been playing – mental mindsets, fond farewells, and untapped potential
10th May
Hello and welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we’ve been playing. This week, Jessica writes a last entry before casting off into the world of freelance journalism – you are a star, Jessica, and we’ll miss you – Bertie ponders his variable states of mind, and Tom O ponders the untapped potential of PlayStation VR2.
What have you been playing?
Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We’ve Been Playing archive.
Clair Obscur, PS5
The frame of mind we approach a game with, or a movie or a work of some kind of creative act, has slowly started to fascinate me. How much of our reaction to something depends on how we feel at the time? And if the answer is ‘a lot’, how precarious that then is for the authors of those works, to have the reception depend literally upon our whims.
I felt this in Clair Obscur this week. I fired the game up on bank holiday Monday, excited by the enthusiastic reactions it was getting in the Eurogamer Discord, and from watching my partner play it, and I was really impressed. It looked great, the set-up was refreshingly original, and the combat was strong. I very reluctantly stopped playing that night in order to go to bed.
But later in the week when I fired the game up again, I came away feeling different. This time I found the game narrow and awkward, the scenery overly bloomy and garish, and combat frustrating. I focused on negative things more readily, like the lack of player freedom and choice. And whereas before I thought the exaggerated cinematic emotion of the game was endearing, this time it felt cloying and in the way.
A very different impression, I think you’ll agree. But the game hadn’t changed. I had continued directly from where I’d left off, playing the same game on the same console from the same sofa in the same flat. The only variable was me – my frame of mind. And as it turns out, I had been irritable that day, so I filtered everything through a mental cheesegrater instead.
How unfair. How vulnerable and variable our mindsets are.
-Bertie
Zenless Zone Zero, PS5
I bid a fond farewell to Zenless Zone Zero in the autumn of last year. With Silent Hill 2 and Dragon Age: The Veilguard on the horizon, I just couldn’t justify adding yet another live service game to my list of already precariously balanced dailies. Plus, I had lost every single one of my 50/50 chances to get the character I wanted. If you’re stuck here in gacha hell with me, you’ll understand how that magically makes you A-okay with abandoning a game you’re supposed to love.
With the big 2.0 update only a few weeks away, and the complete removal of the controversial ‘TV mode’ gameplay, I decided to return to the urban streets of New Eridu to see just how much the game had changed in half a year. I expected to be a little annoyed that it completely removed the TV mode, something that made it stand out in a sea of action-focused gachas out there, but then I remembered just how spectacular Zenless Zone Zero’s combat is and all was forgiven.
Instead of breaking up the story with slow grid exploration, you now get to blast through waves of enemies and challenge tough and beautifully designed bosses more often. Maybe that will eventually get stale over time too, but right now, it feels incredibly satisfying to make story progress by experimenting with the best combat developer miHoYo has cooked up yet – and they’ve had some blinders.
I still haven’t won a 50/50 (Koleda is haunting me), but the shiny appeal of its fast-paced chain attacks and unique character mechanics are a wonderful distraction from my terrible, terrible luck.
-Jessica
The Midnight Walk, PS5 and PSVR2
It’s such a shame that VR is still not really ready for the mainstream. Some people may well argue that it is, but it simply isn’t – not at a level that really makes it a fixture in most homes, like a games console is.
PSVR2 is sort of the perfect example of this. It’s a great bit of kit that truly immerses you in the worlds on offer, but it, like VR in general, is caught being too expensive and without enough ‘big’ games to tempt people to spend, and also too cheap to be as good as it could be. With PSVR2 my main issue is the fact it needs to be physically connected to my PS5, which is a pain having come from using a Meta Quest 2 previously. Sony has also seemingly done what it did with the original PS VR and essentially left it for others to support.
The Midnight Walk is the kind of game that we get on VR. It’s lovely, not perfect by any means, but a real delight to play through, but is it going to push people to buy a VR headset? Probably not. That’s not the game’s fault, and I hope it finds a solid audience (it helps that this can also be played on a normal TV without VR), but it feels like there’s so much potential in VR that may never be realised.
-Tom O
