As anyone who has followed my content for a long time would know, I have a long-standing love affair with the immersive sim genre. Games like Thief, Hitman, and Dishonored all rank among some of my favorite games of all time, so any similar games in the vein tend to grab my attention.

In comes this little indie game called Gloomwood, which has all of those familiar trappings. And… well I can’t just ignore it!

Though the level we played feels more literally than I would want or expect from an immersive sim, it’s difficult at this point to determine if that’s how the game will play from here on out, or if that was only because this is the tutorial stage and it needs to be linear to get the player familiar with how Gloomwood plays.

That said, the atmosphere and setting are pitch perfect, making sure that the player feels like the odds are stacked against them. The guards are eerie and unsettling, with enough power to make us fearful of taking any more than one of them at a time. And yet, there are obvious gaps in their behavior and patrol patterns that allow us a daring, intrepid rogue to slip passed them or take them out silently. The graphics and art style also help recapture the feeling of launching Thief: The Dark Project for the first time.

I’ll be playing this more in my off time, looking forward to seeing how it develops.

We’ve managed to get this far, sneaking our way into the Hackett Estate using tunnels that run underneath them, and avoided killing any of our camp counselors up to this point. The question remains whether or not we can keep them alive, or if things will take a catastrophic turn.

Either way, Acharky and I will finish our time with The Quarry.

Yeah… so that could’ve gone better. Some of it is absolutely my bad for simply making the wrong choices, but I blame the game for what happened to Caitlyn.

I hold to the comments I had during the credits. The Quarry isn’t a bad game, but it is let down by a glacially slow start and a weirdly rushed conclusion that both feel lackluster in comparison to other works by the same development team. Part of what makes The Dark Pictures Anthology so powerful is that those games are all short, paced in accordance with the reduced length to produce tight, concise narratives better fitting their cinematic aspirations.

The Quarry neither puts its best foot forward nor ends on a great note, but that doesn’t stop it from being a good time.

And next week, we continue our PS2 adventures with Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal.

Sam Barlow has become a well-known name in the indie games community after his work on Her Story, and later Telling Lies. Now, he’s back with another entry in that space, called Immortality.

Let’s give it a shot, and see if lives up to its predecessors.

It’s difficult to judge the game based on what we’ve seen in this first hour because these games live and die by their stories. And if this game is like either of his previous works, there will come a dramatic plot twist that recontextualizes everything we’ve seen and heard up to this point when we eventually uncover it.

That said, I like this new system for transitioning between shots. It produces some extremely cool effects and connections from scene to scene, and will likely result in players all taking vastly different routes through the game. The only problem I’m having now is that it’s far more difficult to go back through clips that we wanted to explore other branching-off points from them than it was to just write down the keywords that we wanted to search in a notepad somewhere and come back to them after we finished looking through the footage we wanted to.

I’m curious, and looking forward to diving back in.

Our camp counselors are still alive, at least for now. We’ve at last encountered the many threats that we’ll be confronted with in the woods this night. From monstrous creatures of the night to the people hunting them, our adversaries are out hunting.

As apparently, so are we. Let’s just hope that Acharky and I haven’t led our charges to their doom.

One of the fun aspects of incorporating “standard” movie monsters in your work, like vampires or werewolves, is establishing the “rules” that they’re governed by. There are always subtle differences between how one work handles its monsters compared to another. For example, the werewolves in this world explode out of their human skin and can’t cross stagnant water. The rules themselves don’t matter too much, what matters is that whatever rules get established get adhered to.

This was also a very significant episode as far as establishing those rules go. We know who the werewolves are and how to stop others from transforming into them. All that remains is to capitalize on our newfound knowledge.

And with luck, we’ll finish the adventure next week and get back to our classic platforming pals!

Patch day has once again come to us denizens of Eorzea, and what a stellar patch it has been. The MSQ looks to be heading in an intriguing direction, the Pandaemonium raids are continuing, and a new season of PvP is upon us.

But none of that matters to us today. What does matter is that I’m the proud new owner of a private island off the coast of Vlybrand! It’s going to be my personal getaway, so let’s built it together!

The thing that amuses me most about Island Sanctuary is that despite the fact it’s intended to be relaxing content, Final Fantasy XIV players have approached it in the most hardcore manner they possibly can. I’ve seen a lot of people trying to reach a max-level island as fast as they possibly can.

Meanwhile, I’m just here to relax and do some light gathering for an hour or two at most each day.

The wayward camp councilors of Hackett’s Quarry have been left on their own, with instructions to hide in the cabin and lock the doors until daybreak. Naturally, as they’re all teenagers, they ignored those orders and instead chose to throw a wild party in the middle of the woods.

Hopefully, with Acharky and I as their ever-present guides, their mistake won’t be a fatal one.

Things are starting to get serious, and we’ve finally seen the monsters that will be our adversaries for the duration of this adventure. These are the kind of werewolves you bring home to your mother, these are the more terrifying, horrific variety. And it looks like they injured, without killing, one of our charges.

What I respect most about these games is that the development team doesn’t really make an attempt to pull the wool over your eyes most of the time. If the player knows their way around horror movies, they’ll be able to accurately predict what can and will happen in the story, because these are almost always love letters to the genre. Some might find that tedious, but I’ll always be down for something fun and schlocky.

Something else that I enjoy about Supermassive’s work in this genre is that they always start with the most stereotypical depictions of the kind of awful characters that are common to horror movies, but as the adventure unfolds we see the other depths and traits that they bring to the table beyond that and get a better sense of them as people, more than just the roles they play in the group. If we let them survive, start to see some of the more heroic traits that either make us root for them or feel bad when one of our mistakes inevitably leads them to die.

Except Jacob though. Screw that guy. XD

As many of you know, I enjoy a good round of Magic: The Gathering. And once upon a time, I was invested in Hearthstone, praising many of its creative foundations despite leaving the game due to disagreements with its card design philosophy.

Wizards of the Coast released a new game on PC and mobile a short time ago, asking the question: “What if we combined Magic: The Gathering with Hearthstone to create something new that bridges them together?” That game is Magic: Spellslingers.

Let’s give it a shot. We might end up liking it.

We won’t truly know, for another several weeks or months, whether or not this is a good game. Not only do players still need time to test the balance of each planeswalker spellslinger, and the cards they each have access to, but we need to understand the long-term support plan for the game. How often do they plan to add new cards, tweak each character’s abilities and stats, and what approach do they take to doing so? These are all pertinent questions that we simply do not have the capacity to answer. I’m hopeful, but WotC has a spotty track record in this area, so there’s reason to be cautious.

That said, the foundation they’ve built out here is a solid one. The most famous problem that players of Magic experience to this day is mana flood/mana screw, where despite building a balanced deck, they lose simply because they could not draw the land necessary to play their cards. By adopting the Hearthstone approach, this problem practically solves itself by ensuring a steady and consistent increase in mana as the game progresses. And by choosing a land other than the default, players can trade in that consistency for a chance to proc effects that further assist them over the course of the game.

Further, this hybrid appears to have addressed, at least so far, a big problem I’ve long held with Hearthstone: Its overreliance on randomness. While Spellslingers certainly has cards and effects that hit or proc randomly, by and large, most cards do require players to declare targets and think about the proper sequence of their plays. The tactical depth that I associate with the brand is maintained, even as they borrow heavily from Blizzard’s example.

I intend to stick with it for a time, to see if it has the staying power I want from it. Time will tell, but for now I’m happy with the game.

It’s not even October yet, and we’re already graced with yet another adventure from the wizards of horror over at Supermassive Games. Only, instead of another one of their Dark Pictures Anthology games, they’ve produced an experience on the scale of the work that first put them on the map: Until Dawn.

And of course, I couldn’t play one of these without inviting my good buddy Acharky to join me for the adventure. The Dark Duo rises once more.

I am tired of licensed music getting in the way of me and my stream fun. Both Twitch and YouTube hit me with different copyright violations over the music used in the opening segment. Playing this game every time I want to stream something with licensed music just isn’t fun. It never will be.

Having said that, I’m surprised how long this introduction section has been, but that might be because I’ve grown used to the abridged pacing that we experience with The Dark Pictures Anthology games, the tighter and more focused experiences that they are. I’m not entirely sure that the extra length does any favors for games like this, but we only just began and I’m open to being wrong.

I do appreciate some of the new options we’re given in the accessibility menu, like the ability to automatically pass QTEs. It gives me more freedom to enjoy the game by focusing on the aspects I enjoy, like the decision-making and uncovering the clues/evidence to piece together the story behind the monsters we’re certainly about to face.

We’re in for a long night.

Our improvised plans against Jean Bison have backfired. Though we’ve technically defeated him, it was a pyrrhic victory. After locating our safe house, the old relic managed to steal and sell off all of the Clockwerk parts to Arpeggio, the final member of the Klaww Gang.

Unless we stop him, it’s only a matter of time before Clockwerk is reassembled, and his hatred of the Cooper line is reborn anew to terrorize the world as he once did. That can’t happen, not at any cost.

Thanks to CooperCurse for his compilation of all the bonus movies we used at the end of the stream. You can find it here for your own viewing pleasure.

To this day, it impresses me that this game visited true consequences and heaps of pain upon the central cast, which they carry with them into the next game. While this was certainly the era where platforms were starting to grow darker and edgier, Sly manages to tow a balance between light-hearted cartoon antics and those more emotionally mature themes, that gives weight to them without miring so deeply in them that it grows tonally dissonant. It avoids the trap of being darker-and-edgier than franchises like Jak and Daxter fell into, staying kid-friendly while giving a more mature audience food for thought.

Combined with the shift to more open, sandbox levels, and a cinematic approach reminiscent of Ocean’s Eleven and other heist movies, this sequel did so much to cement Sly’s identity among a sea of other 3D platformers and is largely the reason the franchise has such a dedicated following that persists to this day.

When next we stream, I’ll be joined by my good friend Acharky. The Dark Duo shall regroup once more to play Supermassive’s latest work: The Quarry.

Whenever another set gets added to Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel, it’s accompanies by a couple of key archetypes, usually more powerful than the ones that came before and this set is no different. So what monsters are fit to take on the wyrms, beasts, and Eldlich zombies that make up the current meta?

Migratory birds, of course. We’re playing with Floowandereeze and friends. It’s time to Floowandereeze Nu… No… No, that joke is too easy.

It’s almost shocking how effective the deck can be for how easy it is to play. As long as we can go first, and get the right cards in our hand, we can win most matchups by virtue of completely locking our opponents out of the game.

Since so many modern Yu-Gi-Oh decks rely on special summoning a ton of monsters, especially link monsters, and using their effects to chain into bigger, deadlier threats, our core strategy is adept at kicking out their knees before they have a chance to even started. And if we’re lucky enough to draw into a Dimension Shifter, we can also incapacitate any deck that relies heavily on its graveyard.

And in a format where everyone is playing three copies of Maxx C, it feels great to be able to completely ignore it.

I can see myself playing this one for a while, or at least until the next big archetype takes my interest.