StaceyPowers

Do you sometimes play a game for years before realizing you can do something in it? Like last night, after 3+ years of Oblivion, I finally realized you can pick up objects and position them like you can in Skyrim (not just put them in your inventory or drop them).

If you focus a lot on exploration in games, do you frequently find solutions/keys/etc. before you know what they are for?

I just finished Stray, which has a number of “puzzles” that reminded me of figuring things out in old point and click adventures a bit. In fact, they didn’t really feel like “puzzles” to me—just exploring the environment and seizing opportunities. It made me curious. What actually makes something a “puzzle” in a game? Is it subjective at all?

What video game(s) have helped you most through rough times in your life? I think for me it is BioShock. I was badly injured a few years ago and in bad pain most of the time for many months. I stared playing BioShock after it happened, and it persuaded me that good things could still happen in my life and it had not been 100% bad since the injury (feeling much better now).

I know two people who are unable to play most shooters because the gun effects trigger their seizures/visual sensitivities. Is anyone else here affected by this? I feel like games should just have a option to switch off these effects.

What are some games or sections of games where you can take a totally pacifistic approach and avoid killing anything at all?

I wanted to start a thread for sharing excellent video game analysis videos. To kick things off, I will share this amazing mathematical analysis of the ending of Stray (SPOILERS, obviously):

What has made you cry hardest in a video game? For me it was the ending of Stray.

In another thread, I posted about obvious plot elements that you might have missed. Conversely, what are some games where something put in as a plot twist—or which other gamers called a plot twist—seemed obvious to you early on? For example, I’ve heard a lot of people call the big reveal in BioShock Infinite a plot twist. But to me it just seemed like normal plot. I guessed it quite early.

Can you think of any games that featured “plot twists” that you missed, but which in hindsight seemed obvious? In other words, plot elements that may have only felt like twists to you, but not most gamers.

@Yaramaki As an example, in Stray, you play a cat in a world of robots, but none of them really treat you as anything but a person; they don't question your cat-ness. Contrast that with say, Skyrim, where if you play a Khajit (cat person), you have to put up with racist comments and scorn from NPCs.

If you game at night, do you use blue light filters? I don't. It doesn't seem to keep me awake, and I prefer true colors for gaming.

What games ended up being weirder than you expected?

Has anyone else noticed that light looks overexposed on PS5? I have found it to be especially obvious with Skyrim and BioShock Infinite. In Skyrim, it even makes little bands across the screen directly around torches and such. It is awful. Does anyone know why this happens and how to stop it? And no, it is not that PS5 HDR thing.

How do you feel about games that have a single difficulty setting with no way to adjust it up or down?

Do you ever look up if main characters in a game will die before you start playing the game, or in the middle of it? Sometimes I do this, just because downer endings are easier to cope with for me if I see it coming.

What are some games where music plays a really strong role, but as something more than just backdrop?

I absolutely love the zoom feature in Stray. You can zoom on the background or foreground and get wonderful detail and sharpness that I don’t think was possible on previous generations. What other games have solid zoom features?

What are some examples of clever minimalist storytelling in games that make use of player interaction in some way? For instance, there is a moment in Stray where you can have the cat take a nap in a particular location. When you do, the camera pulls way far away, as if to suggest the cat's dreaming mind journeying away. It plays an instrumental song which, in conjunction with a previous conversation, hints strongly at what the cat is dreaming of, even though it is not shown on the screen or stated explicitly in any way.

Prejudice and bigotry are common parts of many game universes. What are some games where they play only a minor role or no role at all, despite there being a diverse population?

In a lot of games, it seems to me like the average NPC is rude at best, hostile at worst. What are some games where NPCs are generally friendly?

When I first started gaming on console, it took effort for my brain to adapt to each new game I played. But by now, it is almost effortless. Have you noticed this for yourself?

What are some games where there is dialogue and it is aloud, but it is all in another game world language, so you read the translations off a screen? Two examples I can think of are No Man’s Sky and Stray (which I just started).

What video games feature the most disturbing atmospheres? And what makes them so unsettling?

If I were good, Quake Champions. Though I'm not =D