Keyrock

The Quarry is pretty great. I'm probably roughly halfway through the game. The prologue gives you a tease of what's out there and a small taste of tension, then the game chills out for a good while as it introduces the 7 teens. This very much works in the game's favor. One of the problems a lot of slasher movies face is that there's not enough time in 90 minutes to really get to know all of the characters AND have plenty of chasing and hiding and killing. What typically winds up happening is that I only care about 1 or 2 of them. So when the other characters are facing potential death, the moment is not nearly as tense and emotional as it would have been had I grown attached to them. The Quarry has a lot more than 90 minutes to work with and it puts that extra time to good use. I got to spend a generous amount of time getting to know all 7 of the teens. So now that my choices, actions, and performance on QTEs could be the difference between them living or dying, it's extremely tense because I give a **** about all 7 of them. So far nobody is flat out dead, but I highly doubt I'm saving all of them on this first playthrough. Several of them are now injured and bloody. I've made a couple of choices that I think will come back to haunt me, though I can't be sure yet. The timing on the QTEs is pretty generous but I have screwed a few of them up, so that's not helping matters either. The game gives you 3 mulligans that you can use if someone dies. I've not used any yet, but, from what I've read, it takes you back to the choice or action that ultimately caused that teen to die, and that could be several chapters back. I want to save them all, but my top priority is saving Kaitlyn, so I'm always going to hold on to a mulligan just for her.

Bigger != Better

I'm not panicking yet, but I am moderately worried. If nothing new surfaces by the end of the year I'll start to wonder if Avowed will ever see the light of day.

After the giant pile of feces that was Dynasty Warriors 9, I'm very much tempering my excitement for anything from Koei Tecmo. Hopefully Wo Long delivers, though.

I didn't play ONI but I quite enjoyed Griftlands, I thought it was a quality deck builder. The first character, Sal, is the least interesting to play. Rook and Smith both have way more fun mechanics.

I can't speak for @MrBrown, but in my case I tend to play until the end of the story. I don't bother with the endgame stuff in these types of games and MMOs because it generally comes down to grind the same content over and over and over and over and over and... Or fork oversome $$$ to get that purple set of SUPER LEGENDARY ARMOR OF AWESOMENESS.

This looks like it could be a quality mind****.

Even a large studio like Bethesda obviously can't custom craft 1000+ planets, there's not enough manpower and hours in the world for that. Presumably, there will be a heavy dose of procedural generation.

No Avowed. That bitter disappointment aside, my highlights were High On Life, Forza Motorsport, Forza Horizon 5 Hot Wheels, Pentiment, Persona 3-5, Diablo 4 Necromancer, and Starfield.

It's a given that Starfield will be a bug ridden mess at launch, but I was happy to see that you can make a fat character. Give me a combover hair option and I'm in!

Oh ****, it's Todd Howard time! 16 times the detail!

Microsoft stole Kojima from Sony!?

Diablo 4 bringing back my favorite class, the Necromancer.

Hell yes!

In the 6 years I've lived in and around The Queen City I've never seen triple digit temperatures. I've seen a lot of 97°F and 98°F, but never triple digits. This coming Tuesday and Wednesday threaten to change that, and it's not even July yet. Side note: I have been down to Laredo when it was something on the order of 107°F.

This is definitely the best looking game I've played on xXxBOxXx, or anything for that matter. It's not just the graphical fidelity, though it's certainly not lacking in that area, it's the lighting effects, depth of field, little particles of dust in the air in a light shaft, it's all really well done. Given that this is a very cinematic experience, it's an interactive movie essentially, it's a lot easier for Supermassive Games to push the limits than the mountain of open world games. Everything here is very controlled and scripted, the devs know exactly how many characters are going to be on screen at any given moment. Scripted and linear has its benefits.

The game has 3 filter modes. No filter: Indie Horror (high saturation): 80s Horror (film grain): Classic Horror (b&w):

For the Dead Space fans:

The prologue is dark, I mean really really dark. I don't just mean the tone of the story, I mean visually it's really dark. So much so that I was tempted to crank the brightness setting on my TV (I didn't). The oppressive darkness and Laura's feeble phone flashlight work really well with the atmosphere. Holy **** it's Ted Raimi! This game has the best facial animations I have ever seen in a vidya game, and it's not even close. It's comparable to LA Noire in how much better the facial animations were compared to everything that had come before it, The Quarry is a similar leap forward 11 years later