HORIZON: FORBIDDEN WEST was a hot two week binge that I have a LOT of thoughts about. I've settled pretty well into considering it a bit of a disappointment compared to the first game, and yet that feels weird to say considering all the things it does better than last time or at least makes some interesting alterations to the formula. All the new robots are great, the new skill tree is really interesting with some truly OP abilities later on in the game. The story is really what's got me flummoxed. Either it's some kind of camp masterpiece or a sort of minor sci-fi disaster and I just don't know where I land on THAT.

It'll probably be my Game of the Year, but I was expecting Game of the Decade.

ELDEN RING I've said what few thoughts I have in the dedicated thread, but playing this alongside Horizon does have me thinking about the great open world discoursing going on in podcast/Twitter journo land right now. Personally I don't see a huge difference between a map without activity icons and a map with them. Has it been fun stumbling onto little adventures like this fort I raided for an item that seems like it'll come in handy for story progression later, or an island full of spells and gear way more powerful than anything I currently have? Sure, but it's the activity and the reward that's the interesting part for me, not the idea that I had no idea it was there. Because of that, Elden Ring doesn't have this air of Changing the Future of Video Games that journalists are applying to it though I'm sure plenty of devs will be taking notes. It's because the world is interesting that their approach to this world works, however, not the approach itself.

Lastly, GRAN TURISMO 7 is my first GT since A-Spec on the PS2 and first driving game since whichever GRID was dropped as a PS+ game on PS3 a decade ago. I'm fucking HOOKED, for real for real. I didn't see this coming at all. I thought it'd be a nice little lark to marvel at the PS5's power and the magic of the DualSense but I can't put this thing down, I've already got over 12 hours in this and I just fired it up for the first time yesterday evening. I'm playing with the gyroscope controls so the DualSense is basically operating like a racing wheel and it is REALLY cool how unique all the different cars, tunings of those cars and roadways feel. It's not life changing but this does feel like a perfectly acceptable alternative to a huge racing wheel rig.

The game is super dry with writing that mostly lingers in the bizarrely earnest realm of side conversations in the Yakuza series, and its design for teaching the basics of the game and unlocking everything it has to offer is needlessly drawn out - after all that time I've still got 7 locations yet to unlock. You can also easily get stuck in a credits crunch if the muscle car races brick wall you, and this game is really eager to get more of your money via microtransactions which is pretty whack for a $70 game with a relatively slow drip of credits on its own. There are also time limited and exclusive car offers that don't have countdowns or stocks attached to them - this game might be terrible for the whales it'll no doubt reel in.

But overall, yea, it's fucking incredible and I just wish I had other PSN friends that were playing so I could see those leaderboards fill up.


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"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
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