Buckshot Roulette and Dying Light (replay, owned on PS4).
Buckshot Roulette I've criticized, said zoomers are retards. They are, the game isn't scary whatsoever. It's both overly edgy to the point of goofiness (like Coldsteel the Hedgeheg levels) and the consequences of being shot with a fucking shotgun shell at point blank range are that you're revived with defibrilators and smoke a cigarette. It's retarded. And, in its launch state, boring. But the Double or Nothing mode adds enough complexity that it's great. As I understand the game is supposed to be both overly easy and random (random bad luck can you fuck over) when you know what you're doing, but I think it is fine for what it is, a simple solitaire game that has the probability and planning-around-their-reaction aspect of something like Liar's Dice combined with dealing with distinct items like a card game. I enjoy it for $3.
Dying Light is fine. It reminds me of Mad Max (that I replayed) in that it takes too long to actually start to get good. The game distinguished itself by being another fucking zombie game that just made its name by having a really weird but successful high concept. What if zombies BUT you're like a Mirror's Edge courier at the same time. I started playing it because I was playing Mirror's Edge, was very very unimpressed (I cannot get into the childish cyberpunk evil corporations thing, nothing about it was appealing), and then realized that I might as well be playing Dying Light instead. The game has this sort of soullessness in that everything is super-AAA quality - lots of animations, high production values in general, big scale, is smooth - but the story is delivered with no energy at all and is like white noise. You've got this gritty Resident Evil or Dead Rising thing going on where a Turkish city-state (it's Istanbul, basically, but an Istanbul out of time and place, cosmopolitan/Americanized lazily, no hint of genuine culture besides the architecture and most people being swarthy Middle Eastoids with accents, like the laziness of Sleeping Dog's Hong Kong) has had an outbreak, is in quarantine with aerial resupply a la Berlin, and an undercover agent is parachuted in by the relief effort who are <groans> secretly trying to weaponize the virus for a profit.
The zombies are your typical serious "big boy" scientific zombies, fast (not all are, but many are) and basically not corpses at all but just sketchy looking people. In among them you have the variants, bullet sponges (I hate them, they're creatively bankrupt), ranged ones, and so on. Every fucking enemy feels like a bullet sponge, but except for when the game specifically forces you to deal with them (which is often), it's fine because the game isn't about committing genocide. It's a parkour game about navigating densely populated hostile environments where these things never fuck off. You run around rooftops and duck around street corners trying to get away.
The selling point was that the game had a night cycle where they get insanely overpowered at night and you basically can't do anything but run from uberzombies that are better than you in most every way except for that they kind of have to stop and think when they come to an obstacle. Even in a straight climbing competition they'll fuck you up, so you have to basically try to shake them. It's super intense, but in a way, it's TOO intense. As a kid (well, young teen) I found night so stressful I avoided it all costs. As a real man, I go out of my way to play night now, but really what you do is clear all the safehouses in advance (Dying Light is basically a Ubisoft Game of the Far Cry mold) and understand that you WILL probably get caught (stealth is possible, but super stressful; the game is also realistically dark, so you're just fucked trying to navigate), but you only have to outrun them one step at a time, leapfrogging from sanctuary to sanctuary to do your nighttime runs. (It's all about getting the air dropped packages.)
I'm rambling a lot. It was a good game. It still is a good game. It (again, like Mad Max) had a very unique style of gameplay stapled on to a very bland but functional story. I've just gotten to the point of the story where you unlock the other major map area.
I also tried the multiplayer (about a decade too late) for the first time. You can play as the uberest zombie trying to hunt somebody, which is basically Spiderman where you are super overpowered if you ambush them but can be easily foiled with countermeasures. The closest thing I ever played to it, I feel like, was Assassin's Creed multiplayer where preparing an attack was 100% of it (not execution).
