16th November
Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we’ve been playing over the past few days. This week, we cheer ourselves up by reliving the point-and-click adventures of old, we scare ourselves in a Lego game, of all places, and we try, and try again, to succumb to the charms of Horizon, but it just won’t happen.
Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We’ve Been Playing archive.
Lego Dark Space
Lego’s probably not what comes to mind when you think of franchises ripe for first-person horror takes, but in Fortnite you can pretty much find anything, and this new experience comes courtesy of Lego’s own digital designers.
Dark Space is the centrepiece of Lego’s latest set of Fortnite mini-games, which have previously seen you rebuilding Tilted Towers, tycoon-style, while paying homage to Lego Island, and chasing cats and battling ninjas. Each subsequent experience has slowly grown in quality and presentation, which brings us neatly to Dark Space: a pretty enjoyable horror mini-game with shades of Alien Isolation and Among Us.
The idea is simple: complete mini-games to progress around an abandoned space station and secure your escape, while avoiding several roaming monsters. Along the way you’ll read log entries from the ship’s former crew, which are kept light-hearted enough for Lego’s wider audience, and you can also bring your friends to help (or to quickly get caught and lose lives).
Completing Lego Dark Space while entering a code (which you can easily find online) will also unlock a bundle of digital Lego props that you can use in the main Lego Fortnite mode, which is a first for this kind of experience and, I admit, why I went to try it out. Overall, though, it was a pleasantly spooky way to spend half an hour as the nights draw ever closer in.
-Tom P
Horizon Forbidden West, PS5 Pro
This must be at least the fourth time I’ve tried to get into a Horizon game. First came Horizon Zero Dawn on PS4, then that game enhanced on PS4 Pro; then came the shift to PS5 with Forbidden West, and now that game again on PS5 Pro (and a bit of the remastered original on PS5 Pro to boot!). It gives me no joy to say that I think I might finally be at the point of giving up completely.
This should be a series I enjoy. It’s got vast areas to explore, it looks amazing (Zero Dawn and Forbidden West really pop on the PS5 Pro), there are cool mechanical creatures, neat gameplay mechanics, top voice work, and what seems like an intriguing story. And yet, I find it a real struggle to get invested in. In Forbidden West I finally made it beyond the intro (which took over two hours) and started on the main quest, but then I was hit by a wave of nonchalance. I had no drive to push forward. I felt stuck in first gear, so I hit the brakes.
I know people who love the Horizon games, and to give them their due they would absolutely shine in a PS5 showroom, but sometimes things just don’t click. I’m pretty sure I’d have enjoyed this a whole lot more when I was younger, but these days I clearly need a different kind of fuel to get me going.
Oh, and where are all the cars?
-Tom O
Loco Motive, PC
I’d forgotten the charms of a good point-and-click adventure. It’s easy to look at them and label them as quaint, I think, like they’re something you dragged out of the attic from 20 years ago and “don’t you remember when we used to play games like that?”. But Loco Motive has brought into sharp focus how powerful the charms of these games can be.
Right at the front of those charms is its enthusiasm, its relentless upbeat-ism – the kind we don’t often see in games any more. They’re so edgy now, so misunderstood. But there’s never a moment when Loco Motive isn’t plucky. Yes you’re investigating a murder on a train, that’s the general set-up, but it’s never made out to be an ominous or serious thing. In fact, it’s fairly routinely ridiculed. Nothing much in the game is taken seriously, come to think of it – it’s all treated with a smile as big as the character’s that you play, lawyer Arthur Ackerman. And it’s infectious.
Pair this with a bright kind of primary colour presentation, and an underlying determination to make you laugh – I will make you laugh, I will make you laugh – and it makes for a kind willing helplessness on your part as you eventually surrender to it. And do you know what? It feels nice. I feel uplifted after playing the game, and there aren’t enough games I can say that about.
(There’s a demo still available for Loco Motive on Steam, by the way.)
-Bertie