You create a team of three, load them up with primary and secondary weapons (which you purchase with coins), put points in their individual skill trees (you find skill points throughout the maps, either hidden in boxes or given as a reward), and then travel through the different worlds, fighting battles and solving puzzles along the way. After you beat the boss of a world, you unlock a new move which is used in previously encountered and future puzzles, and you also unlock ten challenges of varying difficulty for that world. Each world contains a secret level as well. It's not as deep as X-COM, but it's not trying to be, either.

Pretty frustrating to read you're just blazing through this game.

I played all the Dark Souls games (sucked at all of them) and now shockingly, I suck at Bloodborne, also.

I dunno, I felt like I sucked at the beginning but after a few hours I guess it "clicked." Honestly, it felt like the game's difficulty peaked earlier on. It's definitely challenging throughout, but I died way more in the first half than in the second. I basically made a close-combat tank, dumping all of my blood echoes into strength, endurance, and vitality (in that order); hit hard and often, is my tactic, but also have enough health to be able to take a few blows without dying. This kind of build is probably seen as noob, but that's exactly what I am - never played any souls games before and this is my first BB run. If I play a NG+, which I probably will at some point, I'll definitely switch things up and try to take more advantage of the intricate combat and leveling system.

By the way, I think I'm at the very end of the game!

Sounds like a plan to me. I am and will always be a n00b at these games. I think I spread the points out to much on my builds without ever having a clear plan in mind of what to do with them, so I just end up with an average character who doesn't excel at anything and from what I've read it seems like nobody who plays this game goes about it this way.

Razakel, do you have the DLC? Fair warning, beating the last boss will automatically take you to NG+. So if you want to play the DLC and don't want to play it in NG+, keep a save backup. If you don't care about that, then no biggie. The DLC is amazing by the way. Best DLC content in any game I've seen.


Yes, spreading your points thin is never a good idea in those games (except in Dark Souls 2 for a very specific purpose, but you have to know what you're doing, which a new player certainly won't). Focusing on raising your HP and stamina (especially HP in Bloodborne, since the game is fairly generous with stamina use compared to Souls games) and one damage-boosting stat (usually Skill or Strength, sometimes both) is the way to go.

That admittedly made for quite the learning curve for me since I always go for the jack-of-all-trades builds in similarly-styled games. Once I figured out how the souls gameplay works though I went for a str/stamina build and never looked back.

New Scorn gameplay footage:


As one comment wisely put it, this is basically Increasingly Distressing: The Game. Everything just looks meaty and throbbing and wrong. Your main enemies seem to be wretched, misshapen things, sometimes only dimly aware of your presence. Even your own gun is made up of living tissue. It's basically an FPS set inside the nightmares of H.R. Giger and Zdzisław Beksínski put together, and I fucking love that.

It also has a healthy dose of (earlier) Cronenberg; in fact, the gun is almost a replica of the 'bone gun' in Existenz.

Definitely cannot wait for this. Looks jaw-dropping.

Damn, I guess the disc I'm using doesn't have the DLC. Oh well, more incentive for a replay.

And yeah wow Scorn looks insane.

What similarly-styled games would those be exactly...?

Okay i bought it and played two hours and it's great so far. Very focused, colorful and if you want good solutions to situations also decently challenging. A great ubi soft title for once? Looks like it

For the past few months I have been playing Evil Genius and now I am very excited, because I heard they are going to finally do a part 2 http://www.rebellion.com/blog/2017/6/30/it-s-time-to-talk-about-evil-genius-2

So Infamous: Second Son was free for PlayStation Plus members this month. I didn't get a PS4 until a year and-a-half to two years of being out, so I missed out on all of the early-year games like Infamous: Second Son, KillZone: Shadows Fall and the Grand Theft Auto V port. Second Son is super fun! It reminds me a bunch of Saints Row IV what with all of the building scaling (which might be a backwards comparison considering two Infamous games were released on the PlayStation 3). I love the smoke powers and traversing through the vents, popping up and blasting through the air is super-fun. I'm not a huge fan of the Light or Video powers, honestly. I actually kind of hate Light's traversal mechanic. You can run up buildings, but unless you can gap it by floating you literally go downwards when you activate the run in-air.

I only wish the melee chain attacks were faster and snappier. They move too slow for how little damage it does. All-in-all, I'm enjoying the story beats and will more than likely keep playing.

Poor choice of words on my part, I actually meant action rpg games in general that let you customize character builds from a blank slate.

Funny thing is I could never get into Witcher 3, even though on paper it's absolutely everything that I like...

Tried playing Painkiller recently. That game is the most flawless testament to how thoroughly good fundamental gameplay can be ruined by bad encounter design. I love the feel of the game and the weapons, but every encounter is "you're locked in an arena and waves of 1-2 different enemy types spawn in massive quantities." I haven't gotten super far into it, so maybe it gets better, but so far it's a real letdown.

I also just got into Quake, which is very good. Only played for a couple hours, but the level design is *kisses fingertips* good. I was worried that with Quake I’d get something similar to Doom where you’re fighting 3 enemy types for most of the first episode, but I’m on the 3rd level of Quake and almost immediately there’s a fight with 2 shamblers, 2 scrags and a pack of zombies on a narrow bridge over water, id was absolutely not fucking around with enemy pacing when they made this game.

Yeah dude, Quake is one of my favorite games ever. The weapons function beautifully, the enemy design is really unique and terrifying, the sound is perfect, and the level design is brilliant. Just an all around amazing gaming experience. Painkiller is sort of a different beast since it's clearly a "throwback" - combining the monster arena sort of fights that Serious Sam had made popular just before it with a darker atmosphere to bring it closer to that DooM grimness (even if it's a pretty different horror vibe). I like it, but it wasn't an ambitious game encounter design-wise by any means.

lol

Kind of a weird noobish question: But is the PlayStation 4 worth getting at this point? It's $300 and going on four years old at this point? It seems like a waste of money to me at this point. If it had a proper 4K player, I was going to double it up as my 4K player, while allowing me to play some console only games, but since PlayStation decided not to support 4K, it discouraged me from buying it earlier this year (instead I just got a 4K/Blu-ray player for my UHD TV).

Funny you mention that since I'm about to get one myself for the sole purpose of playing Bloodborne, Horizon ZD and Nioh. You can normally find one with a controller for 170-200 on craigslist, which seems like a fair deal to me.

That feeling when I got mine for over twice that price roughly two years ago.

Worth it for Bloodborne alone

Pretty much my thoughts. Still salty that Demons Souls is PS3 only though. For all nintendo's faults, the backward compatibility from the Wii U>Wii was pretty nice.

Beat Bloodborne last night! Whoooaaaaaaaaa I'm going to be thinking about the ending and story for a long time. I made sure I got the "true" ending.

As a huge fan of cosmic horror, I'm really fascinated by the story and how it's conveyed. It's not as though I scrounged through every single item description, but I did get the gist of what was going on by the end of the game and the ending I got was pretty mind blowing. I'm having a lot of fun reading up on theories etc. What a masterful game.

I don't know if I'm going to jump right into another PS4 game but some of the other ones my friend lent me are Witcher 3, THe Last of Us, Dark Souls 3, Metal Gear Solid 5.

I know everyone will tell me to play Dark Souls 3 but I think I'd feel a bit exhausted going into it right after Bloodborne. I might lean towards Last of Us since I remember all the glowing reviews when it came out and everyone talking about it. Can anyone other than darkeningday tell me a bit about Witcher 3? Looks pretty cool but I also recently dumped many, many hours into Breath of the Wild so I dunno if another big open world is what I'm in the mood for right now.

If you recently played through Breath of the Wild then I'd advise against going into The Witcher 3. It's an incredibly long, intricate game with tons upon tons of content. It's rather easy to get tired of it if you're not in the mood for sinking hundreds of hours into a single game.

Yeah, that's exactly why I was thinking that one wouldn't be a good call right now. I usually don't even game a whole lot these days, a couple evenings a week for the most part. I did fall really hard for Bloodborne, though lol.

I'm also thinking of grabbing the new Metroid for my 3DS. Anyone else interested in that one? Looks pretty sweet.

Well, as much as I curse your name for blowing through the game so easily, you have breathed new life into this game for me. I had reached a point where I felt it was becoming overwhelming (the frenzy death where I was picked up by some invisible force and dropped was total bullshit) and I put this game aside, but after reading your comments and going back to the game I'm making steady progress again (Just killed the hunter on the machine gun).

I just recently bought Last of Us and that's actually the game I started playing once I put Bloodborne aside. I like the game and think the story is very in-depth. I think I may need to turn the difficulty up on it though, because once you get going I feel like it just turns into a shooter and a lot of the horror aspect of the game is gone.

Yeah... that invisible force you speak of... it's not invisible if you got enough Insight.

Morri surely knows what I'm talking about

Indeed! Give us eyes to see what cannot be seen...

And now for something completely different... I will play my first Switch game ever! Well, only a demo. It came out today, announced at Nintendo direct: that Project Octopath Traveler thing (still can't get over that title ). It looks really cool, the demo is slooooowly downloading (thank you, Nintendo server infrastructure + wifi) and I'm looking forward to trying it out.

Updated Ninty Direct trailer:

Spent many hours on the demo and still not done. It's really really good guys. Everything I want from a modern-yet-classic JRPG. Bravely Default and Setsuna can fuck off, this is the real deal!

I can definitely see how Painkiller would've been a fresh of breath air for many people in the era of Halo and during the rise of iron-sights shooters. For somebody who's playing it alongside the games it's a throwback to, it really just doesn't stand up.

I got past the double shambler encounter, but I still haven't managed to finish the 3rd level of Quake. I started over after figuring out how to unlock Nightmare difficulty. IDK about Nightmare, it seems like the only difference is that everything attacks much faster than on Hard, which makes the game feel rather spammy. On Hard, there were few enough projectiles that even with large amounts of enemies, I could manage dodging everything if I was attentive. It was a deliberate gameplay where I was making decisions on how to deal with each enemy I was fighting. On Nightmare, it feels like a much more vague exercise. I'm weaving and dodging and, yeah, moving in certain ways will reduce the number of things I get hit by, and that's very important, but I can't possibly pay attention to everything. After a certain point, adding more things that a player needs to pay attention to will actually reduce the amount of decision-making involved, because it's too overwhelming. It's sort of like the difference between playing something like Ninety-Nine Nights vs. Demon's Souls.

So I'll probably go back to playing Hard, and then if I can't get enough of the game and need more of a challenge after finishing Hard, I'll try out Nightmare. Maybe once I'm more acclimated to the game, Nightmare won't feel so overwhelming.

EDIT: Octopath looks really cool, shame I don't have a Switch. Might have to pick one up for that, Splatoon, and BotW, though.

Oh shit, Octopath Traveler looked awesome from its initial trailer so I'll have to dust off my Switch and check out that demo. What have you been doing with your Switch, Morrigan, if this is the first time you've played it?

Also bummed we still don't have any word on a Virtual Console after that new Nintendo Direct.

I don't have a Switch. HellBlazer does.

You should check out Mario + Rabbids, if you've any interest in turn-based strategy games.

Both Doom and TitanFall 2 has very literally ruined FPSs for me. I decided to dig into an oldie, KillZone: Shadow Fall, and fucking hell is the movement slow and clunky. But, there's a sale on the PlayStation Store for a few games I'm trying to get into, that Yakuza Zero game which was one of 'em.

You mean the old/new Metroid? I played it originally when it was called Metroid II back on the Game Boy. But, despite my loathing of remakes, Metroid II is one game that deserved a remake. Since it was an first-gen Game Boy game, it's extremely rough and has not aged particularly well, but had a cool story concept with the evolving Metroids.

My copy of the collector's edition (the sad American collector's edition) should be here Monday. Dust off the 3DS for it.

After churning through FFX-2 and San Andreas, I'm thinking I'll try to pick Dark Souls II back up. I hated it when it first came out; maybe I just needed a few more years of separation from Demon's/Dark Souls to enjoy it.

Been playing Divinity: Original Sin 2. Pretty sweet so far. I hope I can get some friends together and try out the dungeon master mode as well at some point.

I will forever maintain that FFX-2 is one of the finest turn-based JRPGs around, mechanically, but it just so happens to be excruciatingly painful in every other way.

Funny, I agree with that statement except for the obvious fact that it's not at all turn based and is 100% ATB with none of the deliberate planning and strategy that its predecessor contained. That said, it is still fun in terms of how the battle system works, it's just every single solitary thing outside of the battle system in that game is an absolute fucking travesty.