Happy Monday, folks, and welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread!
Yesterday, I started one of the most exciting new titles of the year, at least for me: TR-49. It involves a woman searching through the files of a massive British database, one that’s seemingly devoured decades and decades of books, magazines, articles, propaganda, and letters. Due to disintegrating memory and the inherent way that people write, it’s a challenge to simply get the words to read correctly. You essentially go through pages and pages, find the names of titles, and correctly link title to page in order to learn more and get more data. I guess it’s a bit of a mashup of the “putting name to face” gimmick that Return of the Obra Dinn popularized and the “search the database” gimmick that Her Story popularized. Which is great for me. I love Obra Dinn and Case of the Golden Idol and Hypnospace Outlaw.
There are not many games that actually explore the procedure of searching in games. Searching through files and documents, I mean, though after having finished Batman: Arkham City, I am reminded of how boring deduction is in most games anyway. Right now, I’m speaking of gameplay that is evidential, or clerical, or what I do in my day job as a librarian. I would love to talk about these more, but unfortunately, they’re very niche, very few in number, and not super popular amongst the Avocado. Which is a shame, and I do encourage you to try all of these games and more. Maybe not TR-49, which is quite flush with material, but Golden Idol‘s super accessible. For now, though, this isn’t the prompt.
Instead, I’m thinking about a different kind of searching: specifically, the kind we do as consumers. And this prompt is one that comes in two parts. First, what are your main ways to search for new games, reviews about games you’ve heard of, and general information on releases. Because just finding out about these is hard, and there are a ton of games that don’t even have to “fly under the radar” for us to miss them. The other is whether, and to what extent, you use those pre-made tools within game stores. I personally rely almost exclusively on the “sales” pages, but when I was putting Game Pass through its paces, I did try to look through a few of them and found them reasonably interesting. And when I bought my PS5, I found it helpful to get an idea of some of the big fancy games I’ve been missing.
Anyway, this is a weird and somewhat ungainly topic for today, but have at it. And in the meantime, what did you play this weekend?