9 August 2024

Hello! Welcome back to our regular post where we write a little about some of the games we’ve been playing over the last few days. This week we struggle to come to terms with finishing a game, we enjoy an excellent interactive detective game, and we revisit an old zombie game that seems to refuse to die.

What did you play?

Read previous editions of this column in our What We Played archive.

No case should remain unsolved, PC

Following Lottie’s recommendation a few months ago (and the urging of several other detective game fans in my life in the months since), I devoured No Case Should Remain Unsolved this week, and, man, is it really a special little game. Set several years after the crime, a retired detective is tasked with finally solving the only case she had left unsolved: a case about a missing girl whose father, for mysterious reasons, insisted she leave it unsolved. But memory is a fickle thing, and Inspector Jeon Gyeong can only remember bits and pieces of each witness’s testimony—and not necessarily in the correct order, or even the identity of the person who made it.

What follows over the next two and a half hours is a gradual piecing together of events that builds ever further to a hugely moving climax. Certain words can be clicked to unlock additional snippets of conversation, while linking the right chain of events and matching them to the right witnesses slowly yields the keys you need to unlock some of Jeon Gyeong’s trickier and more stubborn memories. It’s a complex story that requires some decent deductive work from its players, and the story’s gradual reveal is both wonderfully paced and absolutely devastating to watch as it thickens. Complemented by sparse but evocative pixel art and a beautifully layered musical score that swells to a crescendo as more and more details of the case emerge, No Case Should Remain Unsolved is one of the most masterful works of short-form detective fiction this side of Her Story. And all for less than a fiver, too.

-Katharine

Baldur’s Gate 3, PC

I’ll write about another game one day, but you know what? I finally finished my Dark Urge playthrough, which I’ll write about in much more detail in a Supporters article this weekend. I also managed to write a big “Making Of” article on Dark Urge if you haven’t seen it yet. So, well done I guess?

But my problem is what to do now. I think I’ve developed a case of game-ending-itis. For months, I’ve kept this thing in my head, focusing my energy on finishing BG3 and what might happen if I did. Now that energy has nowhere to go. It’s like it’s been blasted off the edge of a cliff. More specifically, it feels like I’m on the edge of an underwater cliff, an ocean ledge – one of those terrifying places where all life seems to stop while darkness reigns. These places really scare me. I was in the ocean once, underwater, scuba diving, when I turned around and saw that same darkness behind me. That same yawning, impenetrable darkness. It’s an image that still haunts me.

And yes, OK, what’s happening to me now isn’t that dramatic, but I’m still at a loss as to what to do now. Nothing else seems as substantial or as meaningful. I now know what my partner meant when she finished Baldur’s Gate 3 and couldn’t bring herself to play anything else. Have any of you experienced this? Long games do that to us, I think. We get so used to their environments and so immersed in their stories and characters and actively holding all of that in our minds that when we let it go, it suddenly feels very empty. It’s like a cramped mind relaxing, which sounds a bit gross.

I started a new character last night because I didn’t know what to do – a halfling monk, in case you were wondering (one of the most underused class/race combinations). My goal is to play him in co-op and go through the whole thing again. But I’m not sure I can face all of this. The so soon again, and I’m stuck in a kind of limbo. What should I do?

-Bertie

7 Days to Die, PC

Just like the army of undead that inhabit its worlds, 7 Days to Die refuses to die. I played it on Xbox One in 2016, but it’s actually even older. 7 Days to Die first appeared in Early Access on PC in 2013! It’s an interesting mix: a blend of survival, tower defense, and Minecraft-style gameplay, and it’s obviously captivated the PC community enough to have stuck with it for over a decade. I even re-purchased the game on PC last year to try it out in a flatscreen-to-VR mod, before promptly forgetting about it until Liv reminded me with her excellent “Tips for Beginners” video to mark the long-awaited release of version 1.0 of the game.

Since then, I’ve spent about four hours streaming 7 Days to Die on my own YouTube channel, Platform32, and have felt the game’s “scavenge, craft, defend” loop digging its nasty little claws into me again. It’s still not the best-looking game I’ve ever seen, but compared to the console version I used to play, it looks great.

What I really like about it, though, is how customizable the sandbox experience is. I played the main campaign on the Navezgane map—though it’s just as easy to create your own seed for a custom map—and I tinkered with the rules. I shortened the day-night cycle from 90 to 60 minutes, and then set the game’s Blood Moon event, which spawns zombie hordes, to take place at the end of the second day rather than the seventh. This makes it perfect for streaming: you get the unpredictability of the evolving gameplay giving me and the audience some unexpected scares, and a thrilling finale once the in-game clock flips to the Blood Moon. It’s fun.

Note that there are now two versions of 7 Days to Die on console. There’s the newly released version 1.0 for Xbox Series X/S and PS5, and the older versions for Xbox One and PS4, which I own. However, the latter is no longer updated or discontinued, so be careful if you’re looking for a cheap disk-based version somewhere. It won’t update to 1.0.

-Ian