11th July
Hello and welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little about the games we’ve been playing. This week, everyone’s hot again. Nice of you to notice, Bertie. Kelsey’s getting into embroidery with Silksong providing artistic inspiration; Bertie’s banging on about the time system in The Blood of Dawnwalker; Marie’s got a crush on Death; and Matt thinks he’s found an ingenious bit of fourth-wall breaking in a game.
What have you been playing this week?
Here’s another question: do you remember what you were playing last week? You don’t have to! The What We’ve Been Playing archive has you covered.
Silksong… arts and crafts?, An Embroidery Hoop
Aside from some time spent exploring the Caribbean in Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced for work this week, it’s been too hot in my household to otherwise even consider gaming. That said, I also can’t sit and do nothing other than melt into my sofa, so I’ve picked up an old hobby: embroidery.
I say old hobby because I haven’t touched my needle and threads in months, but inspiration recently struck in the form of a simple Hornet-themed project of the beloved weaver sitting on her own needle. Painting her with thread couldn’t have felt any more apt, and it’s made me realise that Hollow Knight and Silksong’s 2D characters are perfect to embroider. The blocky colours, the bold outlines, the simple but fascinating designs. I’ve now moved onto a Trobbio-inspired project, but also have plans for a much more ambitious Soul Master project soon. Maybe Bertie will let me share some pictures in a few weeks…
-Kelsey
The Blood of Dawnwalker, PC
Yes, Bertie absolutely will, Kelsey. Motion granted.
I spent four hours playing The Blood of Dawnwalker recently – a name Dom has ruined for me by pointing out it sounds like a person’s name: Dawn Walker. I can’t unhear it. The Blood of Dawn Walker. I mean, it sounds grim, but also a bit like a BBC detective series?
Anyway, I was impressed by the game. I’m particularly enthusiastic about the feature everyone seems really unsure about: the game’s management of time. Dawnwalker has a time limit, sort of, although that’s not a helpful way of looking at it. It’s better to think about it as time being deliberate here; it doesn’t just flitter away like grains of sand in an hourglass. To move time on, in a way that counts against the time limit, you have to purposefully select an option in a quest that does that – an option marked with a time symbol, so you know this will happen. Nearly all quests have options like these, the net effect being that you won’t be able to do all of them, though you’ll be able to do something like 80 percent of the quests in one run, I’ve been told by the developer before, so you can do a lot.
The intention is that you choose and that time becomes a relevant factor in the adventure, which in so many other role-playing games, it isn’t. In most, you have all the time you need to clear the world of small tasks while the big tasks wait. I much prefer how Dawnwalker is doing it – it’s addressing a fundamental flaw in RPGs.
-Bertie
Moonlight Peaks, Switch 2
Death is on vacation and I’m about to romance the hell out of him. Well, in theory anyway. Romance is just a fraction of things you can do in Moonlight Peaks, and Death is one of the many characters you can seduce. There’s also Llemi the love demon, which is a hell of a title, but something about Death being a chill dude on vacation stole my interest. One moment that really made me laugh was during the first heart event with him, when he acknowledges that the drinks are going through him because he’s a skeleton, and he’s making a puddle on the ground beneath him. “I’m a good tipper, so this should be fine,” he says, so casually – it really tickled me.
This game has something magical about it. Yes, it includes a lot of literal magic, but there’s something about how I keep playing without getting bored. I play a lot of farming and life-sims, quite often drifting away from them soon after beginning, but I’m spellbound by Moonlight Peaks. From being the offspring of Dracula to speaking to Ghosts, to catching fish and planting Blood Grapes to make wine – it’s so different while being so familiar too. Oh and naturally I have a fully fledged plan about what to do with my farm – this is just the beginning.
And shout out to Kelsey’s embroidery. It takes a lot of talent and patience to do that. I’ve loved seeing the pieces take shape – amazing stuff!
-Marie
Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo, Switch 2
If you’ve ever played Another Code: Two Memories on DS, you’ll doubtless remember that puzzle – a think-outside-of-the-game moment so jawdropping I’m still reluctant to spoil it some two decades on. Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo, which ended up being my summer holiday game last week, has a similarly cheeky bit of fourth-wall-breaking cleverness that, I think, comes close. I won’t say too much, seeing as I don’t want to ruin the sheer joy of revelation, but it was a lovely reminder, amid all this *gesticulates wildly* doom and gloom, that all it takes is a bit of imagination for a game to properly delight.
The rest of Paranormasight is more conventional, admittedly, playing out – moment by moment at least – in classic visual novel fashion as you follow a group of characters, brought together by the deadly power of those seven titular mysteries, over the course of a single night. But it’s a wonderfully atmospheric thing; a woozily hued small-hours jaunt through folklore-made-real. And its satisfying narrative structure – which slowly opens out to present events from multiple perspectives – does a fantastic job of shifting our sympathies as we spend time in different characters’ heads, learning of the tragedies that compel them. It’s great stuff and I’m excited to dive into this year’s follow up, The Mermaid’s Curse, when I’m done with this one.
-Matt