5th April
Hello and welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we’ve been playing. This week, Bertie gets his starchiest white shirt on and descends into the corporate purgatory of The Stanley Parable, cleansing himself in the nearest river in between, while Tom O both dips back into Avowed and tries Split Fiction with his son.
What have you been playing?
Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We’ve Been Playing archive.
The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe, PC
I have a remarkable ability to allow things to completely pass me by – just whoosh! they’re gone. Perhaps I’ll do a masterclass on it one day. “One simply turns their head in the opposite direction and hey presto, the world passes them by.” Oh now I’ve given it away.
It’s how I found myself only this week playing seminal 2013 indie banger The Stanley Parable, partially because Lottie loves it and appears as if summoned whenever someone even slightly references it, and also because I was told it was a lot like Severance, the TV show. And it is by the way – it’s exactly like Severance, but I ended up writing a thing about that which I don’t want to echo here.
What I wanted to say here was that The Stanley Parable absolutely holds up. It feels as refreshing and magical and intelligent to me in 2025 as I expect it did to people in 2013 – as I know it did to people in 2013, because they wouldn’t stop going on about it. And I don’t think that’s a given. A game like that has to work harder in 2025, partially because of the legacy that precedes it, partly because it’s aging, and partly because there are that many more intelligent indie games around it. That The Stanley Parable should still shine so bright is borderline remarkable.
-Bertie
Avowed, Xbox Series X / Split Fiction, PS5 Pro
If there’s an annoyance I have with Avowed (other than the ghosting visuals when moving the camera), it’s the difficulty I have working out where to go, to get to where I want to be. I’ve started taking on some side quests having been focusing mainly on the central storyline, but it’s thrown some map markers way out beyond where I’ve been before. I often head over in the direction of a marker, only to find that the door I go through takes me to an area that is locked off from where I need to go, so I end up going down blind alleys and retracing my steps back again.
My solution has been to make a quick exit to the open world outside of whichever built up area I’m in, then go what I presume is the long way round to the marker. I know GPS-style navigation isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I feel Avowed would benefit from having it.
I’ve also put a couple of hours into Split Fiction alongside my son. I wasn’t really sold on the art direction in the pre-release footage, it coming across as a little bit generic, but in the heat of the action it’s perfectly solid and changes things up frequently. We managed to complete the pig section just before we called it a night, and it was a lot of fun, if rather traumatic. I’m not sure what was more disturbing, though, the twerking pig or the meat grinder. But we’re looking forward to seeing what happens next.
-Tom O
River Towns, PC
I’ve had this one earmarked for a while, but I was completely wrong – I now realise – about what kind of game it would be. What I thought it would be was a cosy building game about making settlements alongside rivers, and it sort of is that, but much more immediately it’s a kind of Tetris game. And I like that because I know that.
The premise is really simple: lay down pieces of a town shaped as Tetronimoes are, with the hope of fitting them in perfectly to a confined space by the side of a river. Place them perfectly and you’ll get a big score. It really is that simple. A town literally pops into being, as in a pop-up picture book, as you lay the pieces down.
You follow a dried out river across an overland map, gradually restoring life and activity as you go, and the complexity gently increases. I now have two types of building – two factions, sort of – that I need to place away from each other so as not cross-contaminate, and I get bonus points at the end for whichever faction is larger. It’s like playing against myself, which is odd.
I’ve only had a brief blast at it so how it develops from here, I don’t know, but the introduction is strong – immediate and tactile and pleasant. I like it.
-Bertie
