It’s the Freakin’ Weekend! What are You Playing?

With another work week in the books, what are you folks doing this weekend to simmer down?

I finished up Alone With You the other night, which is an adventure game on PS4 and Vita about a colony of space pioneers that mostly perish after a nasty storm hits. You play as the sole survivor, working with the local AI in hopes of scavenging materials and data in order to escape a similar fate.

What’s neat about it is that the AI uses data from four prominent figures within the colony, and rebuilds them as sentient holograms to help out. One focuses on natural resources, another on agriculture, and so on. You know going in that all four of these people died in the storm, but you engage in some pretty dark and personal conversations about life, death, and everything in between.

I really liked the retro aesthetic, which has an old school Sierra feel to it. In the gamey portions of Alone With You you go to different sectors of the planet in search of blueprints, plant samples, and salvage, but you’ll also stumble across personal artifacts belonging to the four holograms back at home base — along with the corpses of each of the fallen members of the once thriving colony.

Scanning corpses triggers the AI to provide you with information on who you’ve found, what their role was, and more personal information, like relationship partners or colonists they may have had a falling out with.

The corpses also look just like the NES version of Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th, which is one of my obsessions. Brownie points to the developer for this likely coincidence.

There’s a lot of story to digest in the five hour adventure, which is exactly what I wanted, but the exploration moments (no matter how interesting the narrative was) became a little stale after a few hours. Go here, walk around until you find X amount of this thing we need, solve elementary-level puzzles, head back home, repeat.

In between adventures you can spend time with one of the four holograms, build relationships, learn more about their life in the colony, and uncover dark truths, like one’s battle with depression and loneliness, or another’s lack of confidence in their leadership abilities.

All in all, I really loved it.

The girlfriend and I have been slowly leveling a pair of World of Warcraft characters in the new Legion expansion. I plan on writing a detailed impressions post, so I’ll save you the wall of text, but I’ll say right now that I haven’t enjoyed the deep lore and class focused quests this much in nearly 12 years. I’m not just saying that as someone who was bored to tears in Warlords of Draenor either. The quests, the drama, the class halls, I love all of it so far.

I’m about to start the 2D horror title Claire: Extended Cut on PS4, which just came out this week. It’s been available on PC for a while now, maybe two years, but it looks right up my alley. It’s a review key, so once I’ve seen it through to the end you can expect a full rundown here in the next few days.

I picked up Kholat, The Park, The Witness, and Beyond Eyes on PS4 while they’re on sale this week. I don’t think I’ll jump in to any of them this weekend though, since my plate is already full with the games mentioned above.

I’ve heard a lot of great stuff about The Witness, but a 20 hour game about solving line puzzles was never much of a draw for me. Especially at $40. The $23 sale price seemed like a good gambling price, so here’s hoping it grabs my attention. I know it’s more than simple line puzzles, since there’s an entire island to explore and some kind of story to decipher, but that’s what I gathered when the game launched earlier this year.

Kholat and The Park are both horror games, which I love unconditionally. Kholat is based on actual events where a group of nine hikers died in strange ways deep within the Ural Mountains. Something must have startled the university students so bad in the middle of the night, as evidence indicated they literally tore their way through their tents and ran off in to the snow wearing next to nothing. The game itself has you exploring the same area, being chased down by some sort of mystical creature, all while being narrated by the one and only Sean Bean.

The Park is about a mother who searches an abandoned amusement park for her lost son. That alone is creepy enough.

Beyond Eyes is a game that’s intrigued me since it was shown on stage a few E3’s ago by Xbox. It’s a very small indie title developed by an even smaller team, where you control a blind girl in search of her best friend (a cat). Given that she’s blind, the visuals change depending on what she thinks she hears around her — a menacing murder of crows becoming simple chickens as she draws nearer, for instance.

That about does it for me, folks. What about you? What are you getting in to?