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I'm pretty conflicted about the game's length. On the one hand I didn't mind the pacing or the repetitive serving up of mechanics. I felt it made that ending feel more earned. I felt utterly exhausted at the game's climax; it felt like a huge journey - which I don't think would have been possible if it was a six hour game. On the other hand the last few acts up to and including the ending are really, really good. This happens so rarely in games that it's a bummer that you guys (probably) won't experience it.

I'm excited enough by the aesthetic that I'm sure I'll buy it regardless. (And fearquit very soon after, as with Amnesia)

I've played through the first two Mass Effects more times than I care to admit. While the central narrative does not change, I love playing with the conversational choices that subtly alter my overall experience enough to keep me coming back. I just finished my second playthrough of Dishonored (violent asshole mode) and was astonished at how different the game is when you approach it as a violent asshole. You're basically a superhero. Windblasting fools, freezing time, spawning rats and shooting everyone, it's an utterly different game. Now I'm going for ghost/no kills/no powers, which is also a pretty different game than merely playing it stealthily. I'm forced to run along rooftops and try and find alternative routes where there are less guards (and also totally ignoring side quests and runes and trying to find the quickest route to the target). I also think with both these examples the worlds they exist in are so compelling that I don't mind seeing them as backdrops as I explore the boundaries of the mechanics.

Yeah I didn't mind the pacing. But I also found the enemy encounters tense and interesting. If you don't like the gameplay I'm sure it's gonna feel long as hell. I think the stealth is brilliant. It's so very easy to fuck up but it doesn't feel like you need to restart when you do. Even Dishonored, with its emphasis on moral binaries, kind of enforced a dichotomy in playstyle that made me restart many botched encounters (despite them having designed the game to allow you to fight your way out ). In Last of Us the environment and tone supports freaking the hell out and murdering everyone the minute you get caught. I dunno, it didn't feel dissonant at all to play it in this way. And it didn't feel like padding or a slog for that matter.

Reminds me of this David Cross bit:

They're actually my favorite next-week promos ever. They spell out the tone without revealing content. Some of my favorite movie trailers do the same. It's an awesome technique.

Interesting and relavent: http://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2013/06/press-f-to-intervene-brief-history-of.html

Witcher 2 let's you make some pretty sweeping choices that drastically alter your storyline. So it's a good example of the 'interesting' end of the spectrum. That being said, I think Heavy Rain allows you to make some pretty interesting and intense choices. And some of those choices may lead to the death of your character at worst. So I don't think it's only about cooking eggs or calming babies. I'd argue Heavy Rain was cursed by its own flexibility: why give you some choices and not all? Linear narrative driven games like Last of Us give you no choice and is not the worst for it. Yet in Walking Dead for example, a game which had plethora of choice, so many complained that the second act forced them to go hang out with the cannibals when they knew very well that it was a bad idea from the get-go. It's a tightrope game designers must walk but I'll definitely applaud a game like Heavy Rain for attempting to give you a many different choices: those both mundane and life-threatening - even if the mundane one's grated more than they should have.

Yeah reminds me of the frantic real-time inventory scrambling in Stalker. Too bad they didn't have the act of opening your bag/inventory make noise that the enemy would respond to like in Stalker. Makes for great stories like the one Chris told many podcasts ago wherein he was stuck in a basement with a sleeping beast, afraid to bring up his shotgun lest he wake it.

It's weird, I was expecting to try and play this game as non-violently as I could (cleared Deus Ex and Dishonored with no kills - ok no non stairway induced kills). But owing to the fact that melee auto-kills, and encounters are so tense and difficult it just felt right to be as brutal as I needed to be. It was them or me, it's the explicit and mechanically implicit narrative. By a certain point I stopped caring about it. I recognized I was being a kind of shitty dude but lo and behold: Joel was acting like kind of a shitty dude in the cutscenes! A shitty dude who will do anything to keep Ellie alive. This game does owe a tremendous amount to The Road and the father in that story would never have tried to reason or nonviolently dispatch the bandits he encountered. It made sense while still being shocking to brutally render human beings inert.

There's a cabin in a swamp somewhere on the map. You need the charm to talk to the guy who lives there. Unfortunately by that point I had lost all of my charms and never found any more. The exploration mode is pretty fun, very dwarf fortressy. This game feels like a more fleshed out candy box. Only problem is candy box is a tough act to follow: it benefited from the ambiguity of its tone. A Dark Room feels fairly straightforward and is therefore less interesting tonally. Still definitely enjoyable, though.

Ah that's interesting. I guess it was more a matter of finding resources. Which usually coincided with finding that item, which was why I was confused. Incidentally, any clue on how this game saves?

I don't believe you can upgrade your weapons. But you can find new kinds of more powerful weapons. Once you find that weapon you can craft it in your village (providing you have the necessary resources)

Oh my problem wasn't survival it was not finding enough iron. But I just cleared out an iron mine so shit is ON!

I'm having trouble gathering enough iron, exploration is kicking my ass too. I pretty much duck out, raid a cave then run back to the village.

Have you gotten to the ascii forest exploration section yet?

I don't give a shit about collectibles, but I also don't think its terribly immersion breaking to have random salvage that your character picks through that serve the stated purpose of the game: you're a scavenger (as is every surviving human) and you must make your way across the country. The stuff you pick up (generally) helps the odds that you'll survive your journey. Shivs are worth more than their weight in gold so I get giddy when I find a pair of scissors. I'm thinking "this'll be great - now I can take out enough zombies to clear a path comfortably rather than rely purely on distraction and stealth hoping that I don't aggro a runner on my way" Rather than "i don't know why i'm eating all these hotdogs cookies and cigarettes but games?!" So it's not like Bioshock Infinite, where you weren't a scavenger, you were a kidnapper rushing to escape the scene of the crime. It didn't make sense in that case to stop constantly and search trashcans. This is also why I think this style of horder gameplay serves games like Fallout because once again it's a game where you play a scavenger, all other motives aside.

I think that's what makes roguelikes so compelling though (at least, the idea of them). Isn't it more interesting to keep being that guy who got shot on the boat until through a mix of skill and luck you were the guy who made it through and survived the beach landing? As opposed to run forward and die > foggy screen > run forward a little further and die > foggy screen > congratulations you won this level through sheer attrition!

I agree with horsebaggins, the mechanics and narrative in TLOU really serve each other quite well. This is elucidated no more clearly than at the very end. What a fucking ending.

Agreed, it's a fantastic game. I too would like to finish it. I'm a bit worried that I can even get back into it as I haven't played for a year and need to dig up my notes. I'm not sure I'd want to start afresh.

I think that's just the angle of her face. Also: why does it matter? You won't even be looking at her during most of this first-person video game. This is the same type of over-hyped fan nitpicking of Booker and Elizabeth that went down prior to Bioshock Infinite. In the end, it didn't matter in the slightest.

While I agree there are plenty of games that are derivative in their aesthetics, it's as simple as paying attention to the margins to get that novel look you crave. It's the same with graphic design, most artists just look at the past work of other artists in the same field for reference, which results in an overwhelmingly homogenous mainstream look to things. But there are and will always be those artists that exist at the margins (just like there will always be artists that ride with the trend). It does sound a bit like you're burnt out from video games. Disparaging Last of Us based on a few video clips seems kneejerk reactionary against AAA. I have a bit more hope for it especially after reading the Tom Bissell piece mentioned in the relavent thread. http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9366466/tom-bissell-naughty-dog-latest-game-last-us As for indie games, you don't even have to look very hard to find fresh new aesthetics. We are in the best possible time ever for cool original art direction in games since the barrier of entry has been dropped so low. Memory of a broken dimension stands out as a game I have trouble comparing to anything. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=xxvrRXoUjJA And in the same sitting you can play Lake of Roaches, untold number of Twine games, Candy Box, and then you can always play games that use a pixel aesthetic but have dynamic fascinating mechanics like Papers Please and Cart Life.

I didn't suggest that it should be a stealth game. I do think it would be interesting to be able to get to the same point through a variety of different paths. There was really only ever one path in Mirror's Edge, which kind of took away some of your agency. It was more about following the red markers as opposed to figuring out your way through an environment based on architectural queues.

That could just mean more open spaces separated by choke points (like Dishonored). In fact, ME2 will hopefully take quite a few queues from Dishonored in terms of mantling tech. (Not so much in terms of magic power obviously)

Thirty minutes of commentary from the developer in this video program: They also talk about it in this week's PC Gamer UK podcast. (Tom is one of the guests and is an ex-editor at PC Gamer)