Appreciate the kind words! I’m very lucky to have a spot to talk about gaming every week on the site, and to hear from y’all about what’s on your plates.
William Hughes
plumberduck
Writer on The A.V. Club's Newswire desk since 2014, covering stories ranging from TV, to film, to games, to that time the Harry Potter lady said wizards used to poop on the floor, like dogs.
I’m repeating what I wrote up above, but it really feels like they took FF7R—which was already a pretty clever hybrid of reaction-based character action and a more traditional turn-based RPG—and added like... 10 percent Nioh to it. (It doesn’t feel especially Souls-y to me at all.)
One place where it’s ABSOLUTELY a… Read more
So sorry for your loss.
I ran a Dex/Bleed build (viable, eventually!); I’m going to start a new playthrough focused on magic when I start streaming the game in a few days, because there’s lots of neat spells I haven’t touched at all.
I think the broadest possible answer to this would round down to “no”. The signaling that you’re under-statted for an area is basically “Go there, pick a fight, see if you can do much damage when you connect, or get killed in a single hit.” If you’re very good at avoiding hits, that gets a bit trickier to parse - and… Read more
In a lot of ways, it’s both easier and harder - the increased freedom means you can get yourself into bad situations by pushing at the edges, but it also means you generally have ways to get stronger to alleviate the harder fights. If I found a particular boss especially brutal, is that because it’s actually hard, or… Read more
I’m sure Martin absolutely did that, but given that the backstory is functionally the same as every other Souls game - once there were gods, they screwed up and died, the world is boned now - I’d hesitate to say his work was hugely impactful. If, upon playing, you can find one story element that makes you say, “Thank… Read more
There’s no pause, even in offline mode.
You can play as both a male and female character.
He supposedly had it legally changed to Michael, although the sourcing on that is a little looser than I’d like. Probably worth adjusting.
The only quality it needed in order for me to describe the game as controversial was that I observed it creating controversy in the people I’ve talked to about it - especially since this is an opinion column about my personal experience with this company and their latest effort to do something similar. I suppose I… Read more
Now I’m genuinely confused - I never referred to Dark Souls as controversial. (Again, my opinions on Dark Souls are not difficult to find, on this very web site! I penned a love letter to it for the 10th anniversary like a month ago!) Read more
If you looked up any of my writing on Sekiro, including my entry on it for our Games Of The Year list in 2019, you’ll know I absolutely adore it. That being said, I hang out online with a fair number of From Software fans and there are a lot of people who view it as an unfortunate deviation from the Souls formula -… Read more
You are clearly moving in different circles online than I am.
I genuinely did not think “Shooting dogs in video games sucks” was going to be a controversial opinion, more fool me.
Animals are typically presented as a) innocent, and b) not on a level playing field with the humans in these video games, who are generally actively seeking you out to murder you. If not wanting to… Read more
A.V. Club and Kotaku editorial run entirely independent from each other. We ran our review today because that’s when the game came out.
I get this as a critique, but a) Deathloop invites the comparisons aggressively, and b) I don’t think it’s wrong to evaluate design choices based on what was sacrificed to pursue them. If Deathloop’s time loop stuff worked perfectly, I’d be singing its praises. As is, those choices impact a bunch of different systems… Read more
You'd get CPU-Julianna, I think
I think the lack of enemy variety really hurts Deathloop’s rigor as a shooter, honestly. The base Eternalist you’ll be killing for the entire game isn’t especially smart or dangerous unless there’s like six of them aiming at you at once; Julianna helps balance those scales a bit, and the Visionaries have some… Read more
I’m probably going to have to do a separate year-end ranking of time loop games this year, just because there have been so many. (I like Returnal more than Deathloop, I think, but I’m more in the pocket for how nasty its themes get.)
Hades is an interesting touchpoint, in that Deathloop is definitely trying to… Read more