19th 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, Tom has been persevering with Avowed, and Bertie has been both redesigning a mansion every day, with little success, and sucking up second-hand enthusiasm.
What have you been playing?
Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We’ve Been Playing archive.
Blue Prince, PS5
I really admire the layers of this game. I’m assuming that by now, you’ll know the game’s set-up: day by day, you attempt to build a blueprint of a house in such a way that you’ll find the mysterious 46th room of it. You place a room when you touch a door handle, picking from a choice of three, and keep doing it until you run out of space or footsteps, or hem yourself in. Then you go to sleep and try it all again the next day.
It sounds easy but it’s not. I’m low-key alarmed at how little progress I seem to be making. I’m on my seventh attempt so I’m a good few hours in, yet my builds seem to be getting smaller rather than larger, which I take to be a gauge of success, or non-success as the case may be. But isn’t it always this way? There’s the initial surge of confidence, of ‘I’ve been playing games for years so I can manage this’, followed by the dip as you realise no, there is a significant puzzle here and I’m not going to do it easily. It’s only once that’s passed that the more enjoyable gradual incline of discovery comes.
Discovery is a good word to use here, too, because it’s in each unsuccessful attempt that smaller details are absorbed, where you look more closely at what’s around you and examine each detail for any clue you might have missed. And it’s here where the layers of the game present themselves – the underlying story of the enigmatic mansion, the quirks of the puzzling systems, the greater puzzle itself. And a sign of a great game, I think, is it having many layers to discover. I’m impressed.
-Bertie
Avowed, Xbox Series X
I’m still slowly making my way through Avowed. My time with it is so sporadic that I’ve semi given up on learning most of the systems and am now essentially treating it as a nice big walk through some previously unexplored areas of land. I’ve pushed the difficulty down so combat isn’t really a problem, and I’m enjoying the sightseeing. I’m also trying to resolve as many disputes as possible by just talking, although that doesn’t always work. If anyone does start something with me, I simply torch them into oblivion.
So, yeah. My save file says I’ve been playing for 13 hours and I’ve only just traveled to Emerald Stair. A little Google suggests people tend to get there a lot quicker than that, but I’m happy taking my time. Check back in six months to see if I’ve hit the end credits.
-Tom O
South of Midnight, PC
I’m cheating slightly here because I haven’t actually played it, but I’ve been watching my partner play it for the past week or so – she streams if you ever fancy watching – and it’s not so much the game itself that strikes me, though I have plenty to say about it, but what she says about it.
Quickly, here are the things I have to say about the game. It’s gorgeous – I’m so eloquent I know. And with its deliberately low animation frame-rate and spidery character movements it reminds me so strongly of Into the Spider-Verse sometimes I forget what I’m watching. Two: Olivier Deriviere. The French music maestro is in literal full swing here. But it’s not just that it sounds nice, it’s that the music itself is welded to the gameplay in the game. This is something Deriviere does – he designs music systems rather than soundtracks. I did a whole interview with him about it not so long ago. It’s – and he is – fabulous.
But back to what my partner says about the game. Simply put, she’s enthusiastic about it. She wants to play South of Midnight, I suppose more so than Assassin’s Creed: Shadows and The Last of Us Part 2, which she’s also playing at the moment. (She puts me to shame.) And although that sounds like an unremarkable thing to say, that someone wants to play a game, it feels remarkably refreshing to hear in person. Because sometimes I forget, in all my frowning at games and forming opinions about them, how nice enthusiasm is to be around.
-Bertie
