24th May
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 caves and installs the time-hogging phenomenon known as Balatro; Jim returns to the noir-like artistry of Grand Theft Auto 4; and Ed bangs his head repeatedly against Sekiro.
What have you been playing?
Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We’ve Been Playing archive.
Balatro, PS5
I did it: I finally caved and played Balatro. It’s free with PlayStation Plus at the moment so I thought why not? Let me explain that hesitation quickly. I’ve never really liked Poker. I tend to defiantly not like what everyone else likes, I don’t know why, and I also struggle to be serious for extended periods of time. The thought of sitting around a table with a ‘Poker’ face on, for hours on end, seems like torture to me.
But I bit, and guess what? No surprise: I really liked it. I had to search for what a couple of the poker hands meant, because I didn’t know my flushes from my straights – and I guess there’s some assumed knowledge on the game’s part there – but otherwise, I was (ahem) straight in. Time to being hooked: about five minutes.
I love the immediacy of games like this. I know I’m predisposed to liking quick-play deckbuilding games – they just work wonderfully with my mental wiring – but there’s clearly a skill to onboarding people in a way that’s fun and frictionless, and Balatro has got it. There’s no waiting for the game to begin, you just press go and learn as you play.
Anyway, brb, see you in a few hundred hours.
-Bertie
Grand Theft Auto 4
I’ve been replaying GTA 4 for a Thing I’m working on and rediscovering just how bold a game it is. Big budget video games tend to default to a sort of pseudo-photorealism as their visual style, and there’s nothing wrong with that. As we know from a century of pointing lights and cameras at real actors, there is plenty of scope for creativity within that. But it is often a safe choice. With a triple-A budget comes the expectation to have the triple-A ‘look’, essentially mimicking what the real lights, cameras, and actors are doing at the time.
GTA 4 doesn’t have that look. It looks like GTA 4, with its unmistakable forever autumn draping a decaying urban sprawl in soft baths of burnt orange. With its desaturated neo-noir nights pocked with bursts of colour where city lights cut the dour air.
It’s a look that fully serves the themes of the game: a dismantling of the American Dream as experienced through the eyes of an immigrant – a war-damaged man fleeing a war-damaged society, only to find, like millions of people before him, that the problems from an old world tend to follow you to the new.
Niko’s is a bleak life with fleeting moments of triumph and fleeting moments of levity, and his Liberty City reflects this in every flaking piece of paint and every particle of billowing trash. GTA 4 sticks resolutely and defiantly to its aesthetic of grime and decay in much the same way the underrated shooter Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days did, in
sending the player into an unwaveringly grim handicam snuff film and revelling in their discomfort. Both games are miraculous works of art.
Plus in GTA 4, the stockmarket is called BAWSAQ, which is funny.
-Jim
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, PS4
I don’t think I’ve ever been as angry as when I play Sekiro. I’m not just talking about being a bit frustrated. I’m talking ‘existential why the hell am I doing this to myself’ despondency. I am not enjoying it, but I can’t stop playing it.
I know I shouldn’t let it get to me. Get a grip Ed, it’s just a silly little video game. I should really just learn to git gud, right? But: sigh.
For context, this is the last big FromSoftware game I’m yet to finish, and I’ve started it three times now. I’m determined to finish it – I’ve come too far with these games to stop now. But Sekiro just hasn’t clicked for me like the studio’s other games have. In part that’s down to aesthetics, I think, as I just vibe more with the dark fantasy of Souls and twisted Gothism of Bloodborne than I do the Japanese horror of Sekiro.
But also it’s to do with combat. It’s so focused on a single method of fighting – parry parry parry – that there’s no room for the expression or build variety that I really like. I do enjoy how rhythmical parrying can be, but each boss encounter feels like I’m banging my head against a wall, much more so than any other game of this type. At least the end is in sight as I only have the final boss to go (I’m ignoring the Demon of Hatred for the moment).
At this point I’m just playing Sekiro out of stubbornness and spite, and I’m not sure what to be disappointed in, the game or myself.
-Ed
