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TOAs I mentioned the other week, I’ve been playing a PlayStation 1-style low-poly horror game called Crow Country. Survival horror games aren’t usually my thing. They are too intense and full of unpleasant surprises; I even played The Last of Us with a text tutorial telling me when the fungal zombies were going to appear. For Alan Wake 2, last year’s critical darling, I recruited my partner so I could hand him the controller whenever I felt like something was about to jump out at me.
Like Alan Wake 2, a section of Crow Country is set in an abandoned theme park, a well-worn horror set (Max Payne did it too, as did Left 4 Dead), but one that still scares me. Unlike Alan Wake 2, I didn’t need my partner to shield my eyes.
The game allows you to turn off the enemies, so you can explore the park, solve the puzzles, meet the characters, and experience all the spookiness of the atmosphere knowing that anything that jumps out at you No Be a killer mutant zombie. Only occasionally has this made me feel like I’m missing something, like when I walked into an empty square room that was clearly supposed to have a boss. Most of the time it works surprisingly well in this game.
Shutting down enemies is the kind of feature that would make a certain type of player clutch their pearls. In 2006, a Dragon Age writer suggested at the Game Developers Conference that some RPG players would like to skip combat scenes, and she received death threats (she eventually left the industry entirely). I’d like to think, almost 20 years later, that the idea would be less controversial; An entire successful subgenre has emerged around “cozy” games without combat, “story” modes that minimize or greatly decrease the difficulty of combat are the norm, and even Grand Theft Auto lets you skip parts of a mission if you fail once. rarely. People can choose whether or not to use such features.
There are also a lot of interesting phobia changes in modern games. Arachnophobes have long lamented the ubiquity of giant spiders in fantasy games, so developers began adding an arachnophobia mode that removed or replaced them. It’s now a standard feature in many games with giant spiders, from Hogwarts Legacy to Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and Grounded, the game about being a team of miniaturized kids trying to survive in a garden. Even World of Warcraft now has an arachnaphobia mode, added 20 years after the game is released.
Horizon Forbidden West featured a lot of underwater gameplay, so when its Burning Shores expansion came out, developer Guerrilla added a Thalassophobia mode. I didn’t know what thalassophobia was until he did this, and it turns out I have it: fear of the ocean. I have always I’ve been afraid of deep water and felt an appropriately sinking feeling whenever a game I’m looking forward to features underwater exploration; I had to grit my teeth through Monster Hunter Tri, with its underwater hunts for giant dinosaurs.
Horizon adapts to this by increasing your visibility in the depths, ensuring that nothing suddenly approaches you from the depths, and making the hero Aloy unable to drown. Sea of Thieves also has a feature for people who are afraid of water: an automatic float switch that means you can’t drown if you fall off the boat.
Do these modes make the games a little easier to play? Well, they certainly do if you’re afraid of spiders or the ocean. But do they ruin the balance or represent some betrayal of the developer’s vision? No. All of these options are part of an effort to achieve greater accessibility in games. When developers spend millions of dollars and years of their lives working on something, it makes sense that they want as many people as possible to play it. An enemy-less mode wouldn’t work for every game (Elden Ring would just be a big empty map), but in the case of Crow Country, it helped me enjoy a game I would have never played otherwise.
What to play
It’s been a horrible year for Xbox, but The Senua Saga: Hellblade 2 It comes out this week and has received very positive reviews. The sequel to 2017’s Senua’s Sacrifice, it features an impressive performance from its lead character (played by Melina Juergens), a Celtic warrior who has psychosis. Seeing Senua’s suffering and trauma was too much for some players, but here she is more confident in herself and her abilities, leading her people against the northern raiders who killed her lover.
I just started playing and so far it’s an impressive action spectacle told from a unique and valuable perspective, although don’t expect light entertainment.
Available in: Xbox, PC
Estimated playing time: 8 hours
what to read
Grand theft car VI will launch in fall 2025, according to its publisher Take-Two, whose CEO is “Very confident“at that moment.
Two rumors of great games this week: first of all, a competitive hero shooter from Valveand secondly, a Star Wars-themed participant in the Total War strategy series.
Ubisoft has announced a new Assassin’s Creed game. It is set in Japan and stars a ninja and a samurai based on the real-life historical figure Ya.suke.
will be able to “help” you play Minecraft. I can’t think of anything more irritating than a robot telling me what to do while I’m trying to play a video game, but if the tech giants have their way, AI is the future whether we like it or not.
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Question Block
This week’s question comes from the reader. Brandwith a guest response from our gaming correspondent and retro expert Keith Stuart:
“One of my favorite consoles is the N64 (Even the strange controller!) and I’ve seen many electric magicians make portable versions of the same one as Play real cartridges. You think Nintendo Have you ever tried to make a portable version of the N64? I know how much doesn’t like emulation and this would be a way for Nintendo to make money off of N64 enthusiasts like me..”
There is a thriving market for modern retro consoles and several modders have built their own portable N64s, mainly as personal projects. The reason Nintendo hasn’t made one is simple: scale. While enthusiasts would love to see it, there wouldn’t be a large enough customer base to interest Nintendo. Is My childhood and NES The consoles did well, but they were actually emulators and would have been cheap and easy to produce. A console built to play with old cars would be a more complex beast, and demand is unlikely to be high enough to justify the time and expense, not with the Switch 2 on the way.
The good news is that the excellent retro console specialist Analogue is working on a version of the N64 named the Analog 3D, which replicates the original hardware. It’s coming out later this year and will run your old cars, is region-free, and will even let you use those weird stock drivers. Although it won’t be cheap. He Super NT and Mega Sg The consoles (new versions of the SNES and Mega Drive, respectively) cost $190 each.
If you have any questions for the ask block, or anything else to say about the newsletter, hit reply or email us at pushbuttons@theguardian.com.
