3rd May
Hello and welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we’ve been playing. This week Bertie triumphs, but then feels slightly empty because of it; Tom O reorganises his house and it reminds him of Resident Evil; and Victoria finds herself entranced by the music in South of Midnight.
What have you been playing?
Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We’ve Been Playing archive.
Slice & Dice, Android
I did it – I beat the game on Hard mode! I also beat the game on Normal just for the hell of it. And now I feel a curious kind of emptiness inside of me. Maybe it’s not emptiness, actually, but a lack of desire – a lack of desire to play.
It happens to me. Take away the immediate need to play something, or do something, and my mind turns away from it, and when I turn away from something it effectively disappears. This is why I’ve always enjoyed a challenge in games, and difficulty, because it gives me something to work towards, something to strive to be better than.
There are still plenty of harder challenges I could take on – there’s an Unfair difficulty and a Nightmare one – and perhaps I will get to those and revitalise my interest in the game. But for now, I feel satisfied. Does this happen to anyone else?
-Bertie
Sort of an attache case in a Resident Evil game, but for my house – my house
I’ve not been able to play any games for a while (yes, very sad) because my house has been having some work done. I won’t bore you with the specifics, but apart from not being able to use parts of my home for days on end, the most annoying part of it all has been having to move furniture and belongings around to make them fit into spaces that I had previously thought were full. Imagine the classic Resident Evil attaché case, but instead of skillfully rearranging guns, ammo, and herbs, you’re spinning sofas, slotting TV stands, and combining boxes and boxes of kids stuff.
I haven’t enjoyed it. To throw another analogy into the mix, imagine doing all that Resident Evil item management but your controller is radiating heat hotter than the sun. Bit extreme, but we’re sort of in the middle of a heat wave in England. Please don’t tell me it’s not an actual heat wave due to reasons such as “the temperature wasn’t x number of degrees warmer than the monthly average for enough consecutive days”, or anything based on facts like that. The HEAT WAVE has made me irritable enough.
-Tom O
South of Midnight, Xbox Series X
Watch on YouTube
I started South of Midnight earlier this week. I’ve had my eye on this one for a while, having fallen for its Deep South setting and stop-motion art style the moment it was announced, and now, the game is here. And while I am still enamored with the style and setting, it’s not these that stay with me after I put the controller down. It’s the music that really has its hooks in me.
The world of South of Midnight is alive with music – the soundtrack is probably among the best I have ever heard. It makes South of Midnight a more emotionally affecting game than I first anticipated, and it’s because the emotion is amplified by the songs that accompany it. Some songs are upbeat but others dive into soulful melancholy, providing moments of deep contemplation. The music in South of Midnight is as much a character as Hazel is.
South of Midnight’s gameplay – specifically its combat and platforming – is not as engaging as I had hoped it would be, which is a shame. But the music, combined with its story, has done enough to keep me coming back to the mythical Deep South every night this week. It is a thing of beauty.
-Victoria