What We Played #126: Rain, Battlefield 4 & Beyond: Two Souls

I played a game this week!  Only for about an hour mind but it was most definitely a game.  Rain’s first trailer sold me on the game, I’m always up for something a bit different and a bit arty.  Plus it had shades of ICO about it.

Things started well and I loved the watercolour intro with the accordion music.  Very French for a Japanese game.  Then came the niggles.  The floating narrative text was fine until one line of it flashed up only briefly and I realized that its appearance and disappearance was tied to invisible checkpoints.

Call me picky but for some reason I found that really jarring.  I was happy to accept the text within the environment but now I had to be careful to move at a pace through the rain-soaked streets that gave me time to read unpredictably transient text.

From that point I became a little too acutely aware of the game mechanics and that began to detract from the overall experience.  I gave up a short way into the second chapter but the game does intrigue me so I will go back to it when I have more than a few minutes to spare.

Stefan has been playing the Battlefield 4 Beta on his PC and while it “still hasn’t quite convinced” him he admits that “that map is pretty darn impressive”.  He’s also dived into the “quite odd, yet compulsive close quarters deathmatch game” War Of The Vikings.  There’ll be more on that in ’round these ‘ere parts soon enough.

Sonic Lost World on the Nintendo 3DS has had both Dom and Peter collaborating on a joint review.  Dom’s also been back to Killzone 3 to brush up on Higs-persecution in preparation for the forthcoming Shadow Fall.

A multiplayer excursion was brief and bloody though apparently parts of the scenery have a new respect for him having been riddled with bullets.  He was last seen skipping merrily about having finished his joint review as he just got a Dark Souls 2 Beta invitation.

Aran has played “a lot of” GTA V and despite not yet having completed the story and being online with some of the motley TSA Crew he still thinks that “it’s good fun and the impromptu acts of violence really are brilliant”.

Also living it up in Los Santos is DanToo who’s found additional time for some more Bioshock Infinite, “a little” Crash Team Racing and has made an early start on Beyond: Two Souls, a game I’ve personally got high hopes for and therefore a corresponding sense of trepidation that it will fail to live up to them.

Blair‘s been playing Beyond: Two Souls too, and as his review shows, he thought it was above average but overall disappointing, with the story being a bit of a messy affair. He’s had more success with GTA Online, which he’s loving more by the day. Aside from that, there hasn’t been much time for gaming.

Have you been able to tear yourself away from GTA V?  Are you gushing over Beyond already? Have you been chanting “Rain, Rain go away come again some other day” like me?  Enquiring minds want to know!