TFP has played some games recently: Split Hunter: Wild Fiction
So yeah, as mentioned at the end of the last post, I've played a lot of Monster Hunter Wilds lately. I'm just now starting to slow down, as I've hit the point of almost maxing every Gunlance tree, but I still had a great time with it overall.
That's not to say it's not without its issues. The walk-and-talks are, in fact, pretty egregious until you hit high rank monsters. I don't necessarily think the increased focus on story paid off, because outside of a handful of decent characters, it's not like the story is that wildly different from past entries of "Hey, there's a monster causing a ruckus, go fight the monster. Whoops, turns out there's a reason the monster is causing a ruckus: It's a bigger monster, go fight that one too." At the very least, I do enjoy most of your squad, especially Erik and Olivia, although Werner was extraordinarily irritating.
I also saw a thing about how "Monster Hunter gaining a lower barrier to entry is causing it to lose its uniqueness" and I have to say I think that's a frustratingly bad take. Look: I've played Monster Hunter for a while. I started with 3, bounced backwards into Freedom series, then forward into 4/World/Rise, then found a copy of Monster Hunter 1 even recently and like: I loved 3/4 at the time but give me the newer ones now. Additionally, it's not like the spate of Monster Hunter-likes of the mid-late 2010s, like Toukiden, God Eater, Freedom Wars, or Soul Sacrifice have maintained as series, or even newer options like Wild Hearts or Dauntless (pre-catastrophic mismanagement) have struck the same chord. It's kind of like Pokémon in that regard, where people seem to love to complain, but the alternatives aren't stepping up in meaningful ways.
I'm dipping my toes probably too deep into modern cultural analysis here, but I find that there's this weird hang-up where loud people complain about things being "for" a certain audience and if you ever try to make that audience bigger it's automatically a failure. While there are probably instances of that being true, though off the top of my head I'm not necessarily coming up with any, I don't think it's a real problem, and in fact in most cases, it turns out to make things way better. (See: Witcher Series, The)
The other major game I played as of late (and streamed) has been Split Fiction. It's not often a developer has hit every game out of the park, but so far Hazelight is an incredible 3-for-3 in terms of incredible co-op games. While I think I prefer A Way Out as a total package compared to It Takes Two, I do think Split Fiction has probably surpassed both of them as Hazelight's best outing yet. They've progressively gotten better at designing extremely intuitive co-op systems with basically no barrier to understanding what you can do, what your co-op partner can do, and how they interact in the world.
Every situation in Split Fiction gives each person a new, unique tool to play with, and the way they design levels to meld each character's toolset into a system of progression that gives both people unique objectives while not turning into some kind of awkward slinky where one person does things-then the other, back and forth until your slinky hits the bottom of the stairs is truly outstanding.
All of this is bolstered by Hazelight's best protagonists yet, with a fun story that, while very clearly a blunt allegory about how generative AI steals from human creatives, is extraordinarily well executed and effective at conveying its message. To crib from a joke that's about a decade old at this point: I don't think you will be able to name ten games better than Split Fiction by the end of the year.