Games I Should Be Playing: The Definitive Review

It’s a real horror of my middle agedness that the amount of time I have to actually play things is so diminished that when an old favourite returns to relevance thanks to some fairly decent DLC, a bunch of very interesting things get pushed out of my attention vortex. These are then sent into some rarefied orbit labelled ‘games I really should play to enrich my life, but will never actually touch’. When it comes to my personal style of highly experienced1 gaming, the bad habits - of which I am very much a creature - are so ossified into permanent traits that when Starfield suddenly beckons, I tend to ignore anything new and uncertain in order to revel in the old joys I can always depend on. Slipping back in was like returning to a wonderfully warm bath after a hurriedly forced exit, or smugly returning to sleep when you realise you’ve woken up too early at the weekend. While I am a firm believer that in the time we have left, we shouldn’t hold back on clinging to whatever joys we can afford, this invariably leaves me with a virtual list of regret. A lost wayside of missed chances to explore exciting new worlds and indulge in third-person action gaming that absolutely deserves my time, but for which I am too distracted, and too complacently satisfied, to be fucked with starting.

With this in mind, and in the absence of anything actually interesting to write about, I’ve decided to compile a short list. You can read this as inflammatory clickbait or the desperate attempt of a rank amateur to try and uphold a self-imposed posting schedule. The truth of it is I’ve been playing too much Starfield and can’t justify writing yet another piece about why everybody gets Starfield wrong, as well as recording far too many waffly monologues for the Oratorio Tangram podcast. I should warn you in advance that there isn’t some witty ending paragraph at the bottom. The list just ends, as it should do. And thus, we begin!

Pragmata

A gleaming beacon for Capcom’s new IPs and wonderful Japanese design sensibilities, Pragmata would seem to be an excellent choice for me to wallow around in, despite the fact that I once installed ReCore, did the tutorial, loved it, and unfortunately never played it again. Pragmata looked more exciting still, and yet I was unable to detach myself from Terran Armada, despite promises to myself that I’d wrap the DLC up in no time. Undoubtedly, my status as a fully indoctrinated GamePass cultist meant the idea of actually buying a game at full price had become so foreign to me that after buying a physical copy of Crimson Desert, I’d already exhausted my mental capacity for going to shops to buy new games. The concordant paralysis caused by the possibility of buying it digitally for the PS5 was down to the icons for Gran Turismo 7 and Crimson Desert leering at me from the dashboard before I could hop to the store, making the guilt so impossible to bear that I had to find some Crimson Fleet scum to eradicate in order to make myself feel human again. I’d guess the notion that Pragmata might be very pretty and mechanically sound wasn’t enough to get me over the hump of presumed tutorial stages that take too long and cutscenes I may not be able to skip, allied with the hope that it’ll arrive on GamePass at some point. That said, Pragmata does at least give me another reason to mooch around the PlayStation 5 shelves at CEX, so maybe it’s not all bad.

Routine

Actually sitting on my Series S, right now. Yep. I kinda love that it’s just there, waiting, being ominous. Seems fitting for ominous horror games where the ominousness is almost the point. Oddly, I got a strangely masochistic joy out of Routine’s opening tutorial and found the general aesthetic and environmental design to be genuinely the fucking good stuff. I loved everything aside from the creeping dread. The game cues you so heavily from the off that the anticipation becomes fatiguing in fairly short order, meaning I was expecting standard jump scare mechanic or movie-coded red herring to leap out at every turn, even though I hadn’t even crossed the threshold into genuine peril. Having found Still Wakes The Deep to be a profoundly flawed horror game that only works if you ignore its genericism and overlook its obvious shortcomings and arbitrary perils, I was in no mood to push deeper in Routine’s thick blanket of foreboding unpleasantness, lest I find the same shallow trope-flinging in the same abundance. Sad but true, but then I was also far too fatigued by the deliberate prodding of anxiety to enjoy Alien Isolation’s extraordinarily prolonged romp around similarly fabulous sci-fi installations, of which Routine seems to take an awful lot of inspiration. I’m almost happier to enjoy them from afar than to actually devote valuable Starfield time to playing them, but Routine has just enough mystique to stay installed as some totem of what I could be doing.

Romeo Is A Dead Man

There’s an alternate history where Suda 51 gets the reputation and recognition he absolutely deserves: mercilessly mocked and shamed for being an absolute charlatan. But thankfully, we live in a world where his clumsy, attitude-first work proves to be utterly confusing to the critical mainstream, which is more than enough to warrant a cult audience and a loyal fanbase. Less Russ Meyer or John Waters and more Roger Corman’s rejected work experience boy, Suda’s games always manage to have some intriguing element that makes me genuinely value them as interesting artefacts and yet when I play them, there’s some idiotic flaw or sloppy acquisition arc or senseless restriction that makes them joyless shells that seem to be just pretending to be fun. Just as he pretends to be a punk. Lollypop Chainsaw being a case in point, which was utterly shamed by the even more tasteless Onechanbara series, which presumably cost less to make and yet outdid Lollypop in every respect. I’d suspect if Suda’s other games had similar counterparts, my alternate history wouldn’t be quite so alternate. The obsession with tiresome Americana, the posturing, the faux-anarchy, all of it distilled into a vapid mishmash of whatever the fuck it is in No More Heroes confirmed to me that Killer 7 was a stopped-clock blip where Suda managed to nail a visual style that allied so well with the thematics and character design that you ignored how shit the actual game was, lending him a stylistic authority that he absolutely failed to properly exploit - all the way up to Romeo Is A Dead Man. I wondered - if this exercise in style has a super-easy mode, could I tolerate it? I haven’t been bothered to find out, but I suspect I’d quite enjoy the ride here, especially in the sense of its absolute earnestness in trying to be as wacky and cool as possible, as if Suda dropped the pretence of being a game designer to just focus on making shit that looks cool. I suppose you can always admire his games when they show a certain pace, a freneticism we’d associate more with 80s JAMMA. From the outside, Romeo Is A Dead Man looks like Suda’s Natural Born Killers and perhaps it’s that naked ambition to be as Suda 51 as he can be, that idea of the inept auteur stretching his ineptitude as far as it can go, that makes me want to play it. But not quite enough to actually commit. Maybe I should be playing Devil’s Third instead, seeing as Suda’s spiritual brother-in-cringe, Tomonobu Itagaki, is literally as much a dead man as Romeo, and I’ve left that one un-played for far too long (to insist it’s actually an underappreciated cult gem with a staggering level of dogmatism).

Warriors Abyss

Yes, I already played it. Quite a lot and yet not enough, but I had my momentum dislodged by Crimson Desert and now there’s so much to play that Warriors Abyss is on the back burner of the back burner. It still sizzles, though. This ultimate expression of the Musou template at peak intensities killed any desire I had for Dynasty Warriors Origins, but I’m not that worried. Musou is in your bones and like a wayward Ronin, I know my past will catch up with me and I’ll be chasing 10,000 KOs per second with Zhou Tai when the time is right. No sooner, no later. Warriors Abyss will simply come to me when our fates align. In a peach garden or something. And it’ll be fucking brilliant.

Saros

Fuck that.

I’m being flippant, of course. I greatly admired Returnal’s casting of the Housemarque arena twinstick into third-person formalism, but it was one of the first games where my fatigue with tutorials and slow difficulty ramps ‘to ease the player in’ had me lose interest far too early to really judge whether the game was worth my dedication or not. I suppose Returnal falling at such an early hurdle kinda answers the question all by itself. Saros is more of the same, it seems. Do I want danmaku in my boss fights? Sure. Do I want boss fights? No, not really. I think they’re boring. Yet another case of “I understand this is an excellent game, but I cannot conjure anywhere near enough fucks to play it”. In other words, the Breath Of The Wild paradox in third-person shooter roguelike form. Housemarque, have you ever considered a wildly over-ambitious sci-fi RPG that you cannot possibly hope to fulfil your promises for? Just a thought.

Gran Turismo 7 Power Pack

An oddly under-sung DLC that added a vast new mode to the Gran Turismo 7 proposition, my immediate encounter was filled with enthusiasm that rapidly dissipated. Despite huge rewards to be had, I couldn’t muster the necessary devotion to drive cars with professionalism, making me a colossal fraud who only really enjoys Turismo for the car collecting and t-boning AI cars at slow corners to gain extra unfair advantages on top of all the other unfair advantages I stacked against them. Yes, I am the sort of scum scrub that factors in an additional 38,000 credits for every car purchase because I am absolutely shoving race soft tyres on everything I drive. And the weight reduction. And the exhaust. I mean, if I’m not winning a 3-lap race by at least 30 seconds then my car is woefully under-specced. The idea of a close finish is anathema to me, so the prospect of an entire career of actually challenging races doesn’t spur me on to improve my driving. No. It sends me back to raiding Starfield POIs for crafting materials like the ruthlessly awful pervert I am. That said, I still turn up a few times a month for the weekly challenge easy money and a driving marathon. You gotta keep an eye on that second-hand dealership, for the car roster never sleeps and I might miss a cheap Mazda that I don’t have!

No Man’s Sky (As It Is In 2026)

The founding father of my eternal gaming waiting list. Saving this for one of several scenarios:

1. Severe back injury necessitating months in bed

2. Terminal illness diagnosis

3. Major global catastrophe that doesn’t affect electricity supply

4. Much-anticipated life-changing lottery win

Starfield’s Main Story

I’m never fucking going through the fucking Unity, OK?

[21]