Video Games 2015

5. Grow Home

A genuinely stressful experience in which you pilot a shambolic robot as it climbs up a star-scraping beanstalk. Initial prods can cause your droid to stumble off wildly, a model of movement that seems entirely unsuited to a slow, methodical climbing game. Once you finally manage to figure out the finickity controls though, Grow Home comes into its own, mutating from a frustrating Octodad into a tense, physically draining approximation of ascension.



4. Everybody's Gone to the Rapture

Slowly nose around an abandoned, provincial village, activating a series of sparkly, etheral conversations that drip-feed information about the total destruction of mankind as a physical entity. Find enough of these Radio 4 style chit-chats and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture allows you to trigger a cosmos altering crescendo. The Chinese Room's game mixes The Archers with John Wyndham to arrive at a deliberately paced snoop 'em up that faithfully simulates the onion-layered bullshittery at the core of British social interaction.



3. Fallout 4

Potter around an irradiated Boston getting into scrapes. Fallout 4 proposes a storyline about a parent desperately seeking their kidnapped child but this is more of a regulated series of diversions than a narrative backbone. Instead Bethesda's game is at its best when you go completely off-piste, excavating haunted slate mines or dressing up as a radio serial vigilante at the behest of a neurotic zombie.



2. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

Hideo Kojima's final game for Konami isn't just the all-time greatest open world adventure game, it also gifts the player a truly wonderful action figure in the form of Venom Snake. Despite some fussiness bumping up against objects and their physical barriers, everything about driving this iteration of Snake is such fun that it takes an eternity for you to recognise the ceaseless repetition that powers this sequel. Whether creeping into Soviet forts or radioing-in precision artillery strikes, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is one-hundred hours worth of opportunities to feel unbridled, interactive joy.



1. Bloodborne

Bloodborne reminds me of Resident Evil or Devil May Cry. It's a game that plonks you in a corrupted version of something recognisable (architecturally speaking) then, when you've found your feet, it forces you further and further towards the source of this malignant transformation.

FromSoftware's genius lies in how this exploration unfolds. Progress is explicitly tied to raising various RPG stats but the environments and enemies are such fantastic actors you hardly notice. Since the player is always pushing deeper and deeper into some hallucinatory, transgressive horror, every step taken feels like trespassing. All visual and aural data demands you turn around and flee. You simply shouldn't be here. You proceed against all reason. How's that for a psychological model for adventure?


Also Liked:

Downwell / Axiom Verge / Xeodrifter / Tearaway Unfolded / Curses 'N Chaos / Arcade Archives: Mat Mania Exciting Hour / Under Night In-Birth / Ultra Street Fighter IV (PS4) / Call of Duty: Black Ops III (multiplayer) / Fallout Shelter / DmC Devil May Cry: Definitive Edition / Resident Evil HD Remaster / Transformers: Devastation / Devil May Cry 4 Special Edition

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain - NUMBERS TICK UP

Chugging ever closer to a mid-80s completion percentage on Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain I started rooting around YouTube for some details on the hidden tasks I was expecting to be lumbered with. Instead I ended up stumbling on this video by Super Bunnyhop in which he talks about falling down Konami's resource management hole and how the game's optional tasks actually direct you to approach missions from unforeseen angles.

The Skulls Unit by Francine Bridge

E3 2015 - DIAMOND DOGS

Perhaps Konami have finally twigged that Metal Gear Solid as a brand is indistinguishable from Hideo Kojima? As if to allay fears that the interaction auteur had been snatched off the project, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain's big E3 tease runs with a front-and-centre direction and editing credit for Kojima.

FULTON RECOVERY SYSTEM

Screened for the press last week, the E3 gameplay demo of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain shows off a game primarily concerned with being an exciting toy. This is actually a bit of a shock - story trailers have so lasered in on grim dark themes like child soldiers and genocide suggesting something a little more constrained and directed. On the strength of this, The Phantom Pain is nothing of the sort. Kojima and co selling on an idea of an interactive GI Joe playset with all the gadgets and vehicles tucked away in the code just waiting to be discovered, then airlifted back to your customisable base.

E3 2014 Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain - DIAMOND DOGS

Four minutes of absolutely bonkers cutscenes taken completely out of context? It must be Hideo Kojima's trailer for Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain! With a horn shaped lump of shrapnel lodged in his head, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater hero Naked Snake jets around the world sticking his nose into genocide, getting himself covered in blood, and wiping the ashes of his fallen comrades all over his face. Hideo Kojima is tackling serious issues!

"Looks like an enemy recovered the car, so..."

It's hard to get a handle on what Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes is going to be. All released footage has revolved around the infiltration of this particular POW camp. The emphasis on rescues and recruitment recalls Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker (itself intended to be the fifth series instalment at one point), suggesting a hub based collect 'em up? Systems and gameplay feedback are also front and centre, looking delightful. The ability to create a solid, working foundation of interactive expectations is an undervalued ability. The best games allow players to generate a sense of security through basic calculations - cause and effect is everything. In that sense, Zeroes looks like it's got a rugged, but flexible machine pumping away under the hood. Out in March and budget priced, Zeroes would seem to be a slimmed down, chaser experience, with the real meat to come later in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.

Vid

E3 2013: Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

So far, the most impressive thing at this year's E3 has been Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Shown at the head of Microsoft's game heavy presentation, The Phantom Pain depicts a cybernetically augmented Big Boss sneaking around Afghanistan putting lumps on Russians; Rambo III by way of Red Dead Redemption. Franchise bells and whistles aside, the most exciting thing about this new game is the sense of scale it seems to be implying. Unlike the relatively linear paths of previous instalments, this Phantom Pain clip suggests a world teaming with detail and incident. The Metal Gear series has always been a playground - a set system for you to play with, and a variety of interactive options that each create different outcomes. This 80s set Snake Eater sequel looks set to be the most elaborate yet.

LIMB LOSS

Metal Gear Solid games are always fun and maddening to speculate about. Fun since Hideo Kojima never lacks for imagination, maddening thanks to series continuity being slippery at best. In this tease for Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain it seems like we're seeing an older, late 1970s Big Boss taking hits fending off an imperfect clone and slipping into a coma, only to be rescued by Psycho Mantis and Revolver Ocelot of Metal Gear Solid's FOXHOUND unit.

It's interesting as well that in what appears to be a post-coma, pre-rescue sequence Big Boss has injuries similar to those he picks up during the original MSX Metal Gear game. Set in the mid 1990s, Metal Gear sees the player cast as Big Boss's clone son Solid Snake, out to thwart his father's apocalypse attempts. Given that mainstay Snake voice actor David Hayter has apparently been dropped in favour of Kiefer Sutherland for this instalment, it got me thinking that Solid Snake might pop up a minor, perhaps adversarial role? No such luck if Hayter's twitter feed is anything to go by - he denies even being approached to lend his gruff talents to this game.