August 2023 Channel Update – Everybody Did, In Fact, Expect the Inquisition

Hi all,

Apologies for the late-ish post! It’s been A Month and I am just. Wow. Okay. And the big gaming block in September/October hasn’t even rolled around yet. 💀 Let’s get started!!

TL;DR

• Finished: OXENFREE II, Viewfinder, FF16, Miles Morales, Stray Gods
• Ongoing: Telltale Expanse, DAI
• Upcoming: me crying at all the upcoming releases

Finished Since Last Update

OXENFREE II: Lost Signals (7 parts): It retains the very fluid and life-like conversations from the first game, but I think the happenings and cast were not as memorable. Still enjoyable - I liked that it felt tonally more mature than the first, which may be a reflection of the writers themselves maturing over the years too, with the first game having been seven years ago.

Viewfinder (6 parts): Fun puzzle game that plays with optical illusion-like concepts! I think it’s worth experiencing alone for the whole take-a-pic-and-superimpose-it-onto-the-world mechanic. The narrative not a huge thing to write home about but getting to see the different ways to play with the mechanic kept me wowed throughout. It’s short and sweet if not a little on the easy side.

Final Fantasy XVI (53 parts): The initial world setting and characters are interesting and there’s cool cinematics, but there are some critical, experience-affecting issues with the rest of the game. It feels like the flashy main missions were done by one team and the rest was cobbled together by another with a far smaller budget. Even as a completionist I would have to recommend new players to stick to main missions and forgo the rest. (I go in-depth about why I feel this way in the last part of the let’s play, but there are spoilers of course.)

Spider-Man: Miles Morales (17 parts): Skipped out on this at launch but now using it to get ready for Spider-Man 2 in October! Fantastic and lovingly made from gameplay to narrative. There’s a few story contrivances (why won’t anyone just slow down and communicaaaate) but nothing big enough to bother me. Just the right amount of collectibles and optional challenges to make use of the extremely fun swinging around. I wish every AAA game was like this!

Stray Gods: A Roleplaying Musical (7 parts): A Telltale-style choose-your-own-adventure game with a musical twist: your choices influence the songs that play throughout. I’m a sucker for musical stuff so this was an immediate sell, the Greek God characters + murder mystery + well-known voice actors were just the icing. It’s written by David Gaider, one of the lead writers on Dragon Age, and it shows: there’s a lot of thought into small worldbuilding details, and the romance options are fantastic as well.

And a first look:

Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood: By Deconstructeam (whose Red Strings Club I previously played) – it’s a 2D pixel art game telling the story of an exiled fortune-telling witch looking to make a comeback with the help of a demonic (??) pact. Its very cosmic witchy aesthetic will really vibe with certain people I think. The main gameplay looks to be about getting to know the characters on a deeper level via tarot cards and fortune telling, and some choices made in the beginning make me curious about what’ll happen later on too. I liked what I saw, but tbh all the text reading even just in this first hour took a lot out of me 😭

Current Stuff

The Expanse: A Telltale Series: By Deck Nine, the people who made Life is Strange: Before the storm/True Colors. Five-episode sci-fi adventure based on the The Expanse TV show (which is based on the book series). I was already a fan of the TV show but I think it’s easy enough to pick up for people unfamiliar with the setting too. Currently three of the five episodes are out - they’ve been engaging but quite short (~ 1-1.5 hrs/episode).

Dragon Age: Inquisition: Finally getting to the last of the trilogy! It’s a rocky start technically with the EA App + modding + the DA:I application itself being all sorts of incompatible (by which I mean I’ve spent close to 10 hours just getting all the settings right), but I’m reasonably confident I’ll still have fun with the narrative. I’m unsure how long of a series this is gonna be though HLTB.com tells me this is the longest DA game yet. (You might’ve noticed the DAI videos are little longer on average than the DA1 and DA2 ones – my small way of trying to make the series go a little faster!)

Upcoming Stuff

My main priority atm is in making sure the DAI series runs smoothly. After that though, not much else is set in stone. It’s always improv central around here 🤷💀

Baldur’s Gate 3 has been making a huge splash and lots of you asked me about it. I’d love to do a series, but I don’t think now is the right time with DAI around (both are long + with the similar medieval-ish vibes). I’d like to do a first look to confirm if it’s something I’m interested in though. I hear the hype and all, but I don’t have ANY experience with D&D nor CRPGs to really know for sure.

Some other loose thoughts on where I’m at mentally with the upcoming releases (subject to change):

• Sep 1: Starfield (early access): very likely I will do a first look, though I’m very unsure about a full series if it’s going to be another 100+ hr game. For a longer game like this I’m tempted to check it out for more than just for an hour, but I don’t know how to justify it beyond a first look lol – I don’t want to be like 5 hours in and end up leaving people hanging...!
  
• Sep 26: Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty: this is a must-play for me, but CDPR loves their long DLCs/expansions so I may have to push back when to start it depending on length (+ whatever else I’m playing around the time).
  
• Oct 20: Spider-Man 2: also a must-play. I don’t expect this to be ungodly long so I should get to it on release no problem.
  
• Oct 24: Metal Gear Solid Master Collection: I’m excited about this series, but it’s a re-release of an series that’s been available for a long time, so it’s not as high on the priority list. My initial excitement has also been dampened by the reports of max 1080p/60fps – worried about the general quality of these ports.
  
• Oct 27: Alan Wake 2: okokok here’s the plan. I’m totally gonna finish Spider-Man in a week and get to this right on time…. right…?????

…. Yeah, looking at this really just tells me I should be trying to expedite DAI ASAP to get ready for the rest!!!!

If you’d like, feel free to share what you’d be most interested in seeing out of all these – or even anything else I haven’t listed here. (There’s a few indie things I’ve been eyeing too.) I will loosely take it into account when shifting around priorities.

Unrelated to Everything Else

With Twitter (excuse me, X) dying and all, I've gotten some asks with any plans I have with being on other social media platforms. At the moment I'm still mainly going to be at Twitter, but I did make a repository for all my links and will jump ship to whichever one of these ends up being the "winner": https://linktr.ee/welonz 

That’s it for now! Hope your summer’s been good, and let us all survive the incoming onslaught of Good-Ass Video Games 🤝

Cheers,
Welonz