If the intent here is to discuss games that are actually doing something new and different, Space Marine 2 really needs to be in this conversation.

At first glance it’s just a very, very polished third person action game, but the more you pay attention the more you’ll notice the excellent mechanical design of the combat. There are some very smart, very subtle choices that have been made in the gameplay mechanics that affect the dramatic flow and tension of combat in surprising ways. Someone designing this game actually thought about the pacing of fights, and that’s something you just don’t see in games all that often.

Also on a purely technical level there’s the extremely smart bit of coding that allows them to render ungodly numbers of enemies in screen at once, behaving as coherent swarms that move and flow together, and dear God is it incredible to watch.

The first game was a great Warhammer game (for the time). This one is just a great game, no qualification needed.

Yeah, hit up YouTube, look for tutorials. There are some great guides to things you really should know (the game’s tutorial is minimal at best) and handy tips for crime solving. Some of this stuff you can figure out in game with some intuitive leaps, like looking for security footage, or checking sales ledgers in stores to find out who bought a murder weapon. Other stuff is a little more obscure.

The game is still early access (or only just recently left it) so you also probably ran into some bugs. There are/were some missions that just spawned wrong and couldn’t be completed.

Disco Elysium: The Final Cut adds full voice over, so no reading required. Also the voice work for the inner thoughts is done by Lenval Brown and it is incredible. Like, seriously, go look up some gameplay footage on this. That man has a voice that you can listen to all day.

Also, Mike Goodman now voices the Horrific Necktie in the final cut and its the best thing ever.

If you’re liking the feeling of solving a mystery with no handholding, give Shadows of Doubt a look. 1920s detective noir set in an alt-history retro cyberpunk 1970s where the Coca-Cola corporation is the president of the USA. Yeah, that’s a mouthful, but what you get is a proper hard-boiled detective story where you are in total control of how you pursue every case. The game gives you an honest to God murder board with string and sticky notes. There’s no “detective mode” bullshit where you scan for clues and then the game solves the mystery for you. It’s completely on you to find the evidence, follow leads, canvas witnesses, scrub through security footage, stake out a suspect’s apartment or place of work, and finally make an arrest (and hope like hell you didn’t finger the wrong person). This all plays out in a fully simulated city district. Every room in every building can be entered. Every NPC has a complete life; a partner (maybe), a home (usually), a job, a medical history, a shoe size, fingerprints, the works.

The voxel graphics aren’t for everyone, and there’s some areas where it’s less complete than others, but those only really stand out because of how shockingly complete the world is in so many other ways. All in all, it’s a brilliant game, and like nothing else out there.

This. Go into Outer Wilds knowing as little as possible. It’s an incredible experience if you go in blind.

To paraphrase a description I gave in another thread about this game, at first it will feel like you’re just fumbling around with no clear idea of what you’re doing and why. The game presents itself as just this sort of open ended sandbox with no real purpose. That’s OK, just explore and have fun for about the first half hour or so.

Because about half an hour in, more or less, is when The Event will happen. Do not ask what The Event is. You will know when it happens. It will be, clearly and unambiguously, The Event. And once it happens everything will click, and you’ll go “Oh, that’s what this game is about.”

After The Event, go look at the computer in the back of your space ship. That will become your most important tool throughout the rest of the game.

The reasonable way to approach this problem would have been to ask a follow up question, rather than bitching at someone for not answer in the exact format you required. You’re the beggar here, you get zero fucking say in how much or how little people choose to help you.

A failure this monumental will almost certainly result in Sony taking the entire studio out back and shooting it, just to placate investors.

Edit: For context, Sony owns Firewalk - the studio - outright, they’re not just the publisher.

Yeah it’ll do that. The little rascal.

Eh, if you made it that far then you made it far enough to know that the game just isn’t for you.

At first, the game will not make sense. But somewhere around the 20 minute mark (it varies depending on what you do) you will encounter The Event. It will happen. You will know it has happened. It will be, unmistakably, The Event. Nothing else could be The Event. Nothing else could possibly be as momentous as The Event. And then you will have your first real understanding of what the game is about, and it will be very, very exciting.

After that happens, look at the computer in the back of your ship (to the right as you enter). For the rest of the game this will be your most important tool. You’ll understand why. Once it happens.

Have fun.

When you do, please leave yourself a note reminding you to send me the mind eraser afterwards.

Read a walkthrough if you have to. The ending is 10,000% worth experiencing, even if you need a little help to get there.

In fact, getting to the end with help from strangers actually feels more in keeping with the themes of the game.

In your ship there is a computer at the back (to the right when you enter). That computer contains a digital investigation board - y’know, with the photos connected by string and stuff.

Once you find that, the game really starts to make sense. It’s not a walking simulator, it’s an active crime scene. I won’t say what “crime” (and I’m being somewhat metaphorical here), in case you didn’t play long enough (about 12 minutes after you encounter the statue in the museum) for The Event to happen (The Event will make you think very differently about what this game is, but I can’t talk about that. We don’t talk about The Event). But that’s basically what’s happening. There’s a problem, and you have to solve it, but to do that you’ll have to unearth years of lost history, piecing together the story of an alien civilization that has visited your star system. The gameplay is primarily about exploration, trying to figure out where to find and how to get to the clues you need to put everything together. Slowly, the murder board fills in, the pieces connect, the list of suspects narrows, and you spiral in towards a genuinely shocking and heart wrenching conclusion.

Does it get good? My friend, it gets EPIC. The sheer scale the plot operates on is mind blowing. The ending destroyed me; easily one of the best stories I’ve ever encountered in a video game.

The flight mechanics are intentionally fiddly. You will get used to them eventually. The gameplay is exciting, sometimes terrifying, but don’t expect them to like give you a gun or anything. It’s a puzzle game, but the puzzles are never a fucking Sudoku. If you can handle that, it’s one of the best games ever made.

This is the first game to truly solve the problem of “criminal investigation” as a game mechanic. There’s no detective vision, and the character doesn’t automatically spout off conclusions when you scan enough clues. When you find a fingerprint on the murder weapon, it’s just that; a fingerprint. It’s up to you to figure out how to connect that to a suspect. You have to actually think about what you’re doing, there’s no handholding. You can peruse security cameras footage, canvas for witnesses, follow leads that will dead end sometimes, stake out a person’s home or job, track down the sales records for a murder weapon, identify a suspect by their footprints… The array of tools at your disposal is incredible. And the murder board is just the best thing ever; you even get to scribble your own notes and make connections with different colours of string, and it’s not some game mechanic, it’s literally just a tool for you to assemble the evidence like a real detective would, so that you can figure out your next move.

There’s no backend server to do the transcoding in this case. Kodi can access raw NFS/SMB file shares the same as accessing local storage, so it’s just reading the file over the network, the same as if you were playing it in VLC on your PC.

Yeah, player counts have been healthy for the last year. I’ve never had to queue more than a few seconds for a game in any mode.

Yeah, multiplayer works perfectly out of the box now, no more need for Northstar.

It’s OK, I made myself cry a little writing it.

BT is goodest boi. 😭

You have to use their launcher, but you don’t have to get any kind of subscription.

“Protocol 3: Protect the pilot.”