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Time of India
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
10 excellent games you would be embarrassed to play around non-gamers
Image via: Crystal Dynamics/Eidos-Montréal In the universe of gaming, one thing is certain, not every game is created equal, especially in the view of the uninitiated. Some have pioneered the essence of design and storytelling; yet others will have you fumbling for the pause button and excuses when caught mid-game. Here are 10 games you may very well be proud of playing, but only behind closed doors. 1. Tomb Raider Ara Croft's reboot aimed to redefine the character as a serious and gritty survivor. What we received, however, was a wonderful action-adventure, largely resembling a really late-night adult film. The problem? Each scream uttered by Lara following a climb, fall, or blow definitely does not go well in shared company-and not everyone would enjoy witnessing your outburst. 10 Great Games You'd Be EMBARRASSED to Play Around Non-Gamers 2. Yakuza Series Yakuza is half an undergoing crime drama and half a fever dream. One moment you are doing battle in the underworld, the next you are in a rhythm game or watching women in bug outfits catfight. The tonal whiplash is both the charm and reason for only using headphones. 3. Stellar Blade It is fast and showy, but Eve's outfit comes off with revealing suit-like levels of jiggly physics that would have felt dated ten years ago. Underneath the cheesecake, there is a good game, but once they unlock Eve's "suit," judgmental side eyes, even from fellow gamers, will erupt. 4. Dragon's Crown The Sorceress in particular provides an anatomy lesson on the over-exaggerated side of things. You'll be embarrassed just selecting characters. And while it's an entertaining game, your rational defense for playing is about to die when anyone walks into the room and asks you just what you are playing. 5. Life Is Strange For all its emotional depth and social commentary, "Life Is Strange" bears some of the most excruciating dialogue in gaming. Sure, it tugs on your heartstrings; now try explaining to someone why you're crying over a high-school-breakup simulator rather than merely shutting your console off. 20 PS5 Games That Are Hidden Gems You Missed 6. Bayonetta Series Bayonetta is powerful, witty, but unapologetically odd. Clothes made of hair-letting the hair fly off during combat to summon demons-have got some feminists applauding, others crying "exploitative," while folks walking in at the wrong time will ensure a "damn, what are you playing?" 7. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 The story is epic, the world is wide, and the characters are they hard to ignore. Pyra could break your heart. This fantastic RPG is almost unplayable in public, seeing its characters as if they've been lifted from a fan-service sketchbook. 8. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain A mute assassin who "breathes through her skin" and looks good in strands of clothing pieces. The genius hiding behind stealth gameplay in a Kojima production is often questioned with thick jokes about why on earth your sniper comrade has to be dressed in almost odd dress while committing to warfare. 9. Dead or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball It is a vacation simulator for those who have never left childhood. Physics that provide a bouncing effect are probably better than the actual game mechanics. This is not something you play; you just keep it hidden beneath a pile of more respectable titles. 10 Games With Good Gameplay But DISAPPOINTING STORY 10. Final Fantasy X-2 The sequel to one of the most cherished RPGs in history starts with a J-pop concert and never looks back. Dress spheres, awkward massage minigames, and never-ending "girl power" energy make this one a guilty pleasure even amongst die-hard fans. Not all embarrassment is bad. Some of these defy conventions while others embrace irreverence. One thing for certain, if you're popping any of these on, be sure to lock the door and lower the volume. Because sometimes the cringe is just too loud to ignore, no matter how deep or brilliant the game. Get IPL 2025 match schedules , squads , points table , and live scores for CSK , MI , RCB , KKR , SRH , LSG , DC , GT , PBKS , and RR . Check the latest IPL Orange Cap and Purple Cap standings.
The Star
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Star
A spectacular RPG has balletic combat and powerful twists
Narrative games mostly cater to the desire for victory or a flattering resolution, rarely placing the accent on an undigested loss. That is why Life Is Strange, The Beginner's Guide and The Last Of Us series have etched themselves deep into my memory. I can now add Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a stunning debut title whose story moves from a grandiose save-the-world premise to a smaller drama about a grieving family, to the list of video games that have left me emotionally shaken when I've reached the credits. Clair Obscur draws inspiration from Japanese role-playing games like Final Fantasy in addition to the viciously challenging Souls series, but it leavens those influences with a proud Gallic sensibility. (Fair warning: The irascible mimes in this game, by French developer Sandfall Interactive, are no joke.) In debonair fashion, Clair Obscur opens with Gustave, dressed in an elegant suit, standing in a rooftop garden and gazing toward a distant shore. There stands a monolith emblazoned with '34'. As Gustave throws a rock in its direction, his air of defiance slides into one of resignation. A 33-year-old woman dear to him is about to die. And he wants to bring her a rose. Flowers are arrayed everywhere throughout the Paris-like city of Lumière, where 33-year-olds are wearing floral necklaces on occasion of their Gommage, an annual ritual when a mysterious figure known as the Paintress will write the number on the monolith that triggers their disappearance. Gustave, 16-year-old orphan Maelle and a team of volunteers embark on an expedition to kill the Paintress and free the city from the ritual that causes people to evaporate and leave behind a swirling cluster of red petals in their wake. They are following in the footsteps of dozens of similar expeditions. But not long after leaving Lumière, Expedition 33 comes to near ruin when it encounters a cane-wielding gray-haired man and the army of monsters, known as Nevrons, at his disposal. Clair Obscur's art direction, voice acting and sumptuous score establish a fascinating world, and some of the game's fantasy aspects are cleverly undermined as the spirit of enchantment – the expedition's pursuit of an unambiguous goal – gives way to something messier, morally compromised and tragic. The end of each of the game's three acts arrives with escalating force. Though the twist at the end of Act 1 made me think of a key narrative manoeuvre in Game Of Thrones, I was fairly blindsided by the game's finale, so much so that I had tears in my eyes. Let's just say that there is a moment, in the ending I chose, where one of my favourite characters looks at her erstwhile companion and then slumps to the ground. The disappointment on her face may be the most haunting look I've seen on a video game character since the ripple of emotions played out on Ellie's face at the end of The Last Of Us Part I. Clair Obscur grew out of a prototype by Guillaume Broche, who taught himself to use Unreal Engine while working as a narrative lead at Ubisoft. He was interested in making a game with turn-based combat that explored the passage of time and teamed up with Tom Guillermin, a programmer at Ubisoft, to create an hourlong slice of gameplay. Incredibly, Broche met Jennifer Svedberg-Yen, who ended up becoming Clair Obscur's lead writer, through a vocal sample that she submitted through Reddit when he was searching for voice actors for his prototype. After Broche, Guillermin and François Meurisse founded Sandfall in 2020, setting up its headquarters in Montpellier, the team decided to scrap the original scenario of what was then called We Lost. Broche, Sandfall's creative director, was now interested in a story based around a monolith on which a number clocks down and causes people to disappear. The idea for structuring the game around expeditions came from a French fantasy novel, La Horde du Contrevent, which tells the story of groups of people setting out to discover the origins of a mysterious wind. 'We liked the idea of expeditions trying to overcome previously failed expeditions and finding their remains, their journals, their past stories,' Meurisse, Sandfall's producer, told me. Clair Obscur is a hard game in which it is best to not get hit. By listening for audio cues and looking for visual tells, players can evade or counter an enemy's attacks by precisely hitting the correct button. As someone not particularly drawn to games structured around turn-based combat, I was unexpectedly taken with the vigorous fighting mechanics that feature real-time elements. The timing window for dodging is more generous than that for parrying, but some attacks can only be parried. Even on the easiest difficulty level, it's important to come to grips with these mechanics. And it's fitting that Maelle and other characters often invoke the notion of a dance when they strike up a fight. When things go well, fights unfold like a piece of choreography. Each of the six characters whom players end up controlling has a different fighting style. Characters can equip up to six skills from their corresponding skill trees in addition to three 'pictos', or stat buffs, that can be used interchangeably between characters. After winning four battles with a particular picto equipped, any party member can also make use of that ability – for example, incurring twice the amount of burn damage when using a fire-based attack – provided they have enough 'lumina points.' If all of this sounds like it can lead to some heady decisions over character builds, that's absolutely correct. Away from the game, I found myself daydreaming about how best to gear up my party to tackle some of the more daunting boss fights. For the 54 hours that it took me to see Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 through to the end, it ably held my attention. Its world-building, character arcs and challenging gameplay are executed with no shortage of finesse. Expect this one to be a serious contender for game of the year. – ©2025 The New York Times Company (Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was reviewed on a PlayStation 5 Pro. It is also available on the PC and Xbox Series X|S.) This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
The Guardian
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Lost Records explores the joys and dangers of our cultural obsession with nostalgia
I finished Lost Records: Bloom and Rage several days ago, but I'm still thinking about it. Developed by Don't Nod, the creator of the successful Life Is Strange series, it's a narrative adventure about four girls in a town in Wyoming, who meet one summer, form a band, discover a strange supernatural force in the woods and then meet up 30 years later to dissect what exactly happened to them. It is about growing up, growing apart and processing trauma, seen through a nostalgic lens. We meet the lead characters as adults, and join them as they scour their shared past, revisiting old places – a shack in the woods, their teenage bedrooms, the local bar – and exhuming old feelings. Lost Records has an excellent feel for the mid-90s when the girls were 16: you can explore rooms and pick up artefacts such as game carts, diaries and mixtapes and, if you were around at the time, you absorb the nostalgia as keenly as the characters themselves. While playing I was struck at what a vital role nostalgia plays in video game design. I don't mean in the extrinsic sense of playing and remembering old video games, and I don't mean games that call back to old titles. I mean nostalgia as a central theme and a motivational force for characters. So many role-playing adventures are about unlocking the past through narrative archeology. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Horizon Zero Dawn, Avowed, Journey, Outer Wilds and Heaven's Vault are all games in which your primary aim is to discover what happened to some ancient civilisation and, through it, your character's own legacy and identity. It's nostalgia that infects the landscape of The Last of Us as much as the deadly fungus – Ellie's love of old comics, songs and joke books; the repeated use of ruined museums, theatres and playgrounds as key locations – that Naughty Dog wanted to tap in to by repurposing our own nostalgia for lost childhood pleasures. I'm reading Agnes Arnold-Forster's excellent book Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion, which looks at the origins of the concept and how it was first considered a fatal disease of the mind, a sort of mortal home sickness. In Death Stranding, this idea is made physical in the shape of the Beached Things, the smoky tar-like spirits that haunt the game's ruined landscapes. Nostalgia is the perfect theme for video games, because we have the freedom to explore and discover in them. They immerse us in landscapes and provide countless objects for us to observe and interact with. They also allow us to collect our own mementoes – most major titles now have photo modes where we can capture specific scenes, composing and editing the footage to our specific emotional requirements. In Lost Records, you can record video footage on lead character Swann's camcorder; you do this throughout the game and then there's a lovely payoff, which reminded me a little of the unforgettable climax to Cinema Paradiso. What is particularly absorbing about Lost Records, however – and it has been one of the game's most controversial aspects – is that it deals in the inconsistencies of nostalgia as much as the comforts. It is unapologetically ambiguous, with its central mysteries remaining largely unresolved. There is no comfortable catharsis, no shock reveal – what the lead characters learn when they reunite is that memory is unreliable, perhaps even duplicitous. In this way, it reminded me a lot of independent genre cinema – We're All Going to the World's Fair, Skinamarink, It Follows. It is elusive and non-compliant. We often think about games as power fantasies, but they are equally fantasies of reconstruction and remembrance. Games make us yearn for worlds that were never there. Perhaps one day, some sort of brain-computer interface will allow role-playing adventures to be set in our own memories, our own nostalgic kingdoms. It sounds idyllic, but what video games have been trying to warn us is that our brains are unreliable narrators. Nostalgia is a door, but it's also a trap. If you were playing PC games in the mid-1990s, the chances are you were a fan of the real-time strategy genre. Dune II, Command & Conquer, Total Annihilation … how the hours flew by as we harvested resources, built war machines and set out to destroy the other side's bases. Tempest Rising is a shameless paean to that era, set on an alternate 1990s Earth ruined by nuclear war and now housing two battling factions. The core loop of exploring, gathering, building and fighting is tight and compulsive, and the detailed visuals lend a modern sheen. Now let's have a new Advance Wars title for the Nintendo Switch 2. Available on: PCPlaytime: 20+ hours I love that Polygon has written a guide on how to take physical notes of the hit puzzle game Blue Prince. As someone who spent his childhood making maps of Commodore 64 adventures, I approve of this most tactile way to navigate games. Last year, I used multiple sheets of graph paper (complete with little flaps for hidden areas) to map Lorelei and the Laser Eyes and it was so fun to be back. The games industry can breathe a sigh of relief – it turns out Assassin's Creed Shadows has performed well, despite manufactured outrage over its use of a black samurai in the leading role. has a good opinion piece on the subject. Amid endless layoffs and studio closures, here's a piece from Eurogamer about how institutional memory helped make Indiana Jones and the Great Circle such an assured and entertaining game. It turns out that experienced teams who have worked together for years make good games together. Who'd have thought? Lost Records: Bloom & Rage (Tape Two) – love, grief and self-recrimination as the girls reunite | ★★★★☆ Now Play This 2025 – the end of an era of experimental game design | Simon Parkin 'It's allowed me to see through his eyes': Super Mario, my dad and me Piece of the action: entering the British puzzle championship Super spicy! Jack Black's Minecraft song Steve's Lava Chicken becomes shortest ever UK Top 40 hit Sign up to Pushing Buttons Keza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gaming after newsletter promotion This week's question comes from Andrew Wilcox, head judge and founder of the Cuprinol shed of the year competition, who asked via Bluesky: 'Why are there lots of sheds in games but no games about shed-building?' Considering how big the cosy games market is, you'd think some clever indie studio would have attempted a shed sim by now. Imagine pottering about in your own virtual wooden den, perhaps doing a spot of carpentry or sorting seeds to plant. You can build sheds in The Sims 4: Cottage Living and Farming Simulator, but these tend to have very specific utilitarian uses, such as grain storage. Anyway, I put the question to game designer and keen shed botherer, Will Luton, who has worked at Sega and Rovio and now runs the consultancy Department of Play. He said: 'There are two problems to consider here: what is the main action (AKA the core loop), and what are the ways you move through the game (AKA the progression vectors)? 'There are multiple ways you could address these. Is the main game more about designing the shed? Or are you making it to a specific design? This defines if it's more open-ended and creative (like Townscaper) or more systematic (like Car Mechanic Simulator). This decision also likely defines the type of interaction: isometric drag and drop v first-person traversal. 'Once you've made one shed, why do you want to make more? There must be some kind of 'unfolding' where new mechanics or possibilities unlock. So, for example, when you complete your first shed, you unlock a nail gun, which means you can assemble much quicker and more sturdily. Maybe now you can make sheds over 10sqm. Or perhaps you install electricity, which unlocks lighting and power tools. Maybe you have a shed yourself that you can constantly upgrade and add new tools to, which allows you to then make bigger and better sheds for clients. 'So to answer the question: there is no reason why someone hasn't made this game. Indeed, if the reader happens to have £500k, I'd help them to bring it to market.' If you've got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – email us on pushingbuttons@
The Guardian
18-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Lost Records: Bloom & Rage (Tape One) review – go back to a riot grrrl summer in clever teen thriller
Ten years ago, Parisian studio Don't Nod effectively crafted a new sub-genre of narrative adventure with its teen mystery Life Is Strange. Part thriller, part relationship drama, it used music, art and relatable characters to create a touching paean to unshakeable friendship. After a series of sequels, Don't Nod's Montreal studio has crafted a new tale about teenage relationships, split into two episodes, or Tapes, the first of which will doubtless have fans on tenterhooks for the concluding part. It's 1995 and introverted teen Swann is facing a final quiet summer alone in the rural town of Velvet Cove, Michigan, before her family moves to Vancouver. But in the parking lot of the local video store, she meets fellow 16-year-olds Nora, Autumn and Kat, and the four girls bond over their boredom and frustration with small-town life. Soon, they are inseparable, spending their days hiking in the nearby forests, making camp fires, confessing their secrets – until they discover a spooky shack hidden out among the trees and decide to make it their base. Here, they form riot grrrl band Bloom & Rage, channelling their dreams, desires and fears into fantasies of fame and revenge on shitty boys and repressive parents. But when their swirling emotions seem to awaken a supernatural presence in the woods, something terrible happens and the girls swear each other to a lifelong secret. Now, 27 years later, the group are meeting again in a rough bar on the outskirts of town that holds special relevance to their story. Autumn has received a sinister package addressed to their band. Whatever's in the box may well be the dreadful result of that tumultuous summer. In a style typical of Don't Nod, the game intercuts compelling cinematic sequences with interactive scenes, giving you control over conversations that subtly shape your relationships and the direction of the story. The narrative swaps back and forth between two timelines – the adult characters reminiscing in 2022 and their pivotal summer together in 1995 – and your actions in one affects outcomes in the other. At times, decisions you make as 43-year-old Swann at the bar are then retrofitted into her youthful experiences, creating fascinating ambiguities of causality and memory. Indeed, this game is as much about the way we craft and edit memories as it is about what actually happens to the girls. Swann is a keen film-maker and her 1990s camcorder is with you throughout the game; at any point you can hit the right trigger to view the world through the camcorder lens. In the main story, you're using it to film a music video for the band, but you're free to record whenever you want. This feature is incentivised by a bunch of themed checklists – record 10 different birds, or five ruined playground rides, or snatches of graffiti. But you can also capture your own scenes from the town and its environs, or discreetly record your friends, building themed sequences that you can then store and edit. Although the interface recalls games such as No Man's Sky and Marvel's Spider-Man, where filming objects is a practical gameplay component, here the camcorder is also a metaphor for recollection and nostalgia – how trustworthy are these recorded artefacts? At the same time, the player's role as both gamer and cinematographer asks interesting questions about how we relate to the protagonists we embody in games. It's not the only clever trick the game plays with format and convention. The dialogue system, for example, is specifically designed to capture the energy and chaos of the excitable-group dynamic. Options and responses change depending on who you're looking at as you talk, characters shout over each other, and comments get lost in the noise. At times, you can simply allow the dialogue options to time-out and choose not to say anything. In several wonderful moments this mechanic perfectly captures the desperate improvisational nature of teen relationships, the way a whole day can teeter on a single comment, or a fleeting moment of eye-contact. There are times when the dialogue feels stilted and over-earnest, and the sense of authenticity gets stretched. Those who've played Life Is Strange will also see many parallels with that game, especially between Swann and Max Caulfield, both shy photographers using the lens as an emotional security blanket. But like its predecessor, Lost Records wonderfully captures how, in young adulthood, seemingly insignificant moments can be charged with meaning. There's a picnic by a lake and later a game of truth or dare that absolutely crackle with intensity. The 90s setting is also well-supported, with spot-on contemporary references, from grunge band mix tapes to video players and troll dolls – it's fun to just pick up objects in the environment and reminisce, like wandering about some themed pop culture museum. In the background, the mystery at the heart of the game is subtly introduced and there's much to anticipate from the second part. Mostly though, it's the characters and their brittle relationships that stick with you. Three days after finishing the game I'm still thinking about them, worrying about them, inhabiting that old shack with them. Unless you simply refuse to indulge in emotional young adult drama, you will be right there, too. Lost Records: Bloom & Rage (Tape One), is out now; £59.99
New York Times
18-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Riot Grrrl Rebellion With Supernatural Cues
The narratively profuse mystery game Lost Records: Bloom and Rage is like living in a Bikini Kill song followed by a Phoebe Bridgers ballad. The four main characters who form the title band, Bloom and Rage, are strong together — even as teenagers, even when one describes herself as meek. Through the highs of anger and the depths of sadness, they search for deeper meaning through self-discovery as they come of age. It's freeing. It's feminist. It's powerful. But the rebellious grit, augmented by the game's mature themes, does more than amplify an energetic liberalism during this 1995 period of revelation. Everywhere the girls go in tiny Velvet Cove, Mich., they rock. Autumn, a spirited young woman of color, sings duets loudly with Nora, a gothy Joan Jett type who likes to push friends' buttons. Music plays an important part throughout Bloom, the first of the game's two episodes. (Rage is scheduled to be released in April.) The D.I.Y. riot grrrl essence here is inspiring, especially for those who lived through the time. And yet, there's a serene, attractive innocence when suburban boredom turns to goblincore-inspired escape. After Swann, the red-haired central character, is called 'fat' by bullies, she turns to filming everything with a video camera. (There's no idealized perfection here, a good, honest thing; every teen has zits, even Swann.) She explores a lurid forest. She sits at the water's muddy edge among the mushrooms, frogs and dragonflies, the height of Zen peacefulness. You can't help but appreciate her outsider essence. Even Thoreau would be jealous. Swann and her friends yearn for more than hanging at the local ice cream stand or watching movies at the multiplex. You can hear it in their words. All they care about is one another, their fleeting summer together, holding hands and making their art. They make fun of condom wrappers and heavy flow days because speaking truth is freeing. Just as in the Life Is Strange series, also by the French studio Don't Nod, the gameplay elements are light and not necessarily new. There's the convention of placing fuses correctly in a breaker box to get power running. But the play isn't the point, not really. It is in service of the story, which feels dramatic when it should be and, at the end, surprisingly melancholy. The game makes mistakes regarding pop culture history. Characters cite the found-footage horror film 'The Blair Witch Project,' though that movie wasn't released until 1999. They repeatedly use the anachronistic term 'bounce' (meaning 'leave'). The Furbys and Tamagotchis seen in Swann's room weren't sold until the late '90s. When the details are right, though, the game approaches perfection. Troll toys sit cute and big-eyed, a Newton's cradle clacks appealingly, and nods are made to films like 'Pulp Fiction.' At the practice garage, there are homemade mix cassettes featuring groups like Hole and Belly. It's here that Kat, an overall-wearing, occasionally furious writer, introduces 'See You in Hell,' the raucous tune that will be the group's anthem. (Unfortunately, you can't access the song to play it again when the episode is complete.) A mix of horror and science fiction becomes revealed when three of the band members reunite at a local dive bar 27 years after their brilliant but tragic summer together. Through snippets of reminiscences, you see that Swann leaves a cabin at midnight to videotape bizarre moths. They're suddenly, supernaturally colorful, surrounded by a fog of luminescent hues. They lead Swann to a seemingly bottomless sinkhole that radiates a purple glow. Then, back in the present day, a shoebox-size package addressed eerily to Bloom and Rage is brought to the bar. A 'Grey's Anatomy'-style cliffhanger is moving because it isn't just the girls who are friends. Invested in their stories and emotions, you've become close to them as well. The game's final episode promises to reveal all mysteries, perhaps violently and supernaturally. True to form, Bloom and Rage sings, 'I can tell I'll mess you up — when I see you in hell.' In riot grrrl fashion, they may indeed live their music.
