you weren’t supposed to respond seriously, it was a dumb joke reply, all I know about P5 is the battle music
none of this is going right
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why did P5 suck again? (i haven’t played it … yet)
hypocritical misogyny and queer panic so the same problems post-3 persona has always had.
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Ah yeah now i remember.
That + it bit off way more than it could chew trying to tackle abuse thematically 
Honestly, the biggest problem with P5 is just that the game world is too fucking big. I talked to everyone in P3 and P4 every day, but with 5 I can’t imagine a single person who played it did so, judging from completion times. I beat it in about 90 hours and I stopped walking around the overworld past maybe the second or third dungeon. That’s what ended up making me quit at the end, because it wanted me to do a goodbye lap and I couldn’t decide if walking past all the NPCs I had never talked to once or teleporting to all the social link people to say goodbye was a more pathetic use of my time.
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so I tried 4 of these free games and I can say for certain that they’re pretty bad.
2000:1: A SPACE FELONY
Of the ones I played, this was actually the best. The game itself is alright. You’re a detective, tasked with boarding an AI-controlled space station that Ground Control lost contact with a couple years ago to investigate what happened. You float around in zero-G and look for clues, and each time you find one, there’s a neat little cut to what is ostensibly the Present Day, where Ground Control is reading your report back to you in a sort of interview. “You said that when you entered the hallway, you noticed that the Emergency Hatch Release lever had been pulled, which would have opened the airlock hatch, aborting standard safety protocols.” sort of thing. At the end you have to play a sort of stripped-down Phoenix Wright statement/contradiction game with the station’s AI to unravel the mystery of what had happened (double spoiler, the AI killed everyone, surprise surprise). There’s a bit of a twist at the end that garnered a mild “Huh.” out of me, so there’s that.
All in all, I mostly enjoyed playing it and would love to see a more fleshed-out sequel. The visuals have a sort of low-poly glowing-primary-colors look that I can’t say I mind, and it had some partially-self-aware humor in certain parts that was kinda fun.
However, the one thing that made it a pain to play was the controls, which were bad enough to nearly ruin the whole thing, at least for me. It seriously took me like 15 minutes to figure out what the hell was even going on, because it seemed like moving the mouse more than a 16th of an inch would make the camera do a perfect 180. Changing the mouse sensitivity didn’t do anything about this, so for a long time I was at a loss. Turns out, the game only ever expects you to move the mouse left or right. If you move it up or down more than enough to shift the view by about 10 degrees, for some reason the game interprets this as you wanting to look in the exact opposite direction of where you were, so the camera does this bewildering 180-degree flip and roll maneuver that’s just intensely disorienting. And it’s very, very easy to do, which meant that in practice, playing the game was more about wrestling with the controls to do otherwise simple tasks like “look to the left”, rather than anything involving navigation or gameplay.
It’s a shame, too, because if it weren’t for that, it would have been a bit of a gem.
HITCH HIKER
This one immediately drops you, in medias res, right into the passenger seat of an old boat of a car. You are, ostensibly, a hitch hiker, who has been picked up by a member of the local flavor. Right away, I thought “Okay so he’s going to kill me and I have to either figure out how to get out of it or make meaningless pokes at the world while waiting for it to happen regardless.”
Turns out that’s NOT what happens, but I’d be lying if I said I was relieved. After what DID end up happening, I actually kinda wish it DID go with the tired cliche.
As for the moment-to-moment ‘gameplay’ as it were, you can look around, and you can touch stuff, but the bulk of your interaction with the game is in responding to whatever the driver occasionally says as you drive down some back-country road. He starts out with small talk about how he picks up hitch hikers often, and how most of them are hipsters who think taking a trip like this will give them the authenticity they’re trying so hard to fake, but eventually he starts getting philosophical, and you can either choose to respond… well, receptively, or you can choose to reject his musings. I don’t know if the choices you make have any real effect on what happens, because the way my playthrough went left me with absolutely no desire to go through it again.
IMO it was just an unskillful attempt at being “deep” and/or “mysterious”. It obviously wanted to be the sort of thing people talk about to try and find the “meaning” behind, which is ironic because it’s clear from the get-go that the impetus for making the game in the first place was “to make a game people try to find a ‘meaning’ in”, rather than starting WITH a meaning and building from there.
If you want more detail then here’s a spoileriffic rundown of how my playthrough went:
Summary
Upon starting the game, I find myself loaded into a car with a redneck and set off driving down the road. After a period of silence, he asks “so where are you headed?” and I shrug, because it’s the only response option it gives me. “Not the talkative type, huh? Most people I pick up are just waiting for their turn to talk”, he says, and then offers me some raisins from a big box on the seat between us. I eat one and the screen went crazy for a second like I was supposed to think they were drugged or something. “You don’t look so good. I guess they don’t agree with you yet.” he muses. More silence.
“You wanna know the clearest evidence that reality isn’t real?”, he says. “Hoo boy, here it comes”, I think to myself, as the car is suddenly driving backwards for some reason. We pass the same barn for the second time. A nearby billboard warns me to beware of taking rides from strangers. Be more obvious please.
“Raisins and grapes, man. They’re the same thing, but they taste terrible when you eat them together. Obvious bug in the program, right?” Riiiight…
“Memory is a slippery thing”, he says after another awkward silence. “When you get where you’re going and someone asks you about this ride, which moment will your brain show you? This one?” the camera snaps to an arbitrary direction. “Or this one?” Another arbitrary camera shot. “You’ve been riding with me for a while now. What color are my eyes?”, he asks, blocking them from my view with his hand.
“Brown”, I guess. “Nope. Like I said. Some people are just waiting for their turn to talk.” the car is driving normally again.
He starts talking about being a raisin farmer, and about his dead wife. He tells me there’s a picture of her in the glove compartment and tells me to open it up to look at it. I open it and pull out a polaroid of a man and a woman standing together. “What the…, that’s not her! And that guy looks like you!” he says. “Then what’s it doing in your car?”, I ask.
“I dunno. Guess it’s yours though, so you may as well keep it.” I ask him if we’ve met before. “Nah”, he says.
Another awkward silence.
He says when he was a kid, he and his brother used to fill the time on long car trips by making up annoying songs. He starts singing an annoying song about challah over and over. He exhorts me to join in. I humor him. He stops singing and turns on the radio and a chorus is singing the same song. He turns it off. “Yeah, that one used to annoy the hell out of my parents”, he chuckles.
then he turns the radio back on and it’s some hokey trivia show that’s like a cross between twenty questions and Blue’s Clues. The hostess recites a riddle and I have to point at the answer.
“I fly but I have no wings”. I point at a cloud. “You did it!”
“It’s kinda like a door, but it makes the same sound when it opens as when it closes.” I point at a zipper. “Good job!”
“He’s a lying liar who lies.” I point at the driver. “Dammit, Darlene…” he mutters, and shuts off the radio.
“What was that all about?” I ask. “Look,” he begins, “I only ever lied to you about one thing, ok?” It gives me a choice of what to assume he’s referring to. I chose “You’ve met me before.” He says ‘yeah’, and goes on to explain how I was a photographer for a magazine who showed up to take pictures of him on his farm for a piece about ‘the heartland’.
“So why did you lie about it?” I ask, and he reaches up and turns the rear-view mirror. I look at it and see the chest of someone sitting in the back seat. “Who the hell is that?” I ask. “I dunno, you didn’t say anything about him. I just figured he’s part of whatever you’re running from.”
“Am I dead?” I ask.
The skybox slowly turns black. Then the car follows suit, with the driver sitting in an empty black expanse of nothing. He starts telling a story about a man on a journey who comes to a gate. The gatekeeper says “I can’t let you through yet”. So the man sits down next to the gate and waits. After years of waiting, he wonders aloud why he’s never seen anyone else show up at the gate. “I dunno, you tell me, you’re the one who made this gate in the first place”, says a bird on his shoulder. The gatekeeper comes back out and closes the door forever. The end.
The car and the scenery come back. Nobody says anything. I take a raisin from the box and throw it out the window. Crows start to flock around the car. “You don’t wanna do that”, says the driver. I throw another one. “Okay, okay fine, I’ll take you to a special place. Just close the window”. I close the window.
“I don’t really take people here, but if you’re so sure, well then… just make sure you do the right thing.”
Fade to black, roll credits.
I mean, you tell me
More later maybe. I’m tired
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That sounds awesome tbh
sounds like japan.
actually p1 had those drag shopkeepers and iirc if you chat with your party members in that location, they take a jab at them.
I don’t normally like phone games much at all and this could’ve easily just been an eshop game but it’s HAL Labs first mobile game and they actually know what they’re doing. 4 bucks, all included, no microtransactions. Very cute, good music, controls work, an extremely pleasant way to spend a few lunch breaks.
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It shows a pretty amazing wit and self-restraint to design a microtransaction-free mobile game based on the mechanics of the godfather of all pointlessly addictive money wasters
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I think I’m about 2/3rds through Hollow Knight. I enjoy it enough to get completionist, except the areas and map are so tiresome to try and comb back over sometimes.
For all the overtly metroidvania-souls stuff out there now (there’s a lot I haven’t or won’t play), this seems like one of the more polished and well executed takes. At least for the 2Ds. I wasn’t big on the art style at first, characters and enemies look so simple while the environments are incredibly detailed. But it grew on me, even if confined to a couple shades of bluegrey half the time, capable of stopping me after frantic hacks and slashes just to take in the backdrop.
Some of the optional bosses are mighty fine challenges.
Have you tried Momodora 4
YES FINALLY
This is a really charming game! You gotta love HAL Labs.
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rage quit Gunvolt 1 during that intermission level with the non-binary, mostly because of prevasion and the scoring system
yeah gunvolt doesnt look very fun
It really isn’t!
I don’t think any of these “Snoop through someone’s phone” games (Sara is Missing, A Normal Lost Phone) are terribly good. The adjacent surveillance-via-computer style is also pretty much already out of steam, unless anyone cares to recommend one.
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I played through the start of Observer yesterday, to the point where its first sequence ends. I feel kind of shook from it. I’m kind of amazed at what that initial sequence pulls off in terms of how successfully it approaches its theme(s) almost entirely through the aesthetics of the level design and its interactions.
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I played a couple hours of Observer and then went home for holidays and fell off of it. I should finish it. Despite its obvious debt to Blade Runner, it really carves out its own niche in its genre. I’ve never felt that embodied in a city in a video game.