Thank Goodness You're Here! (2024)

I started, played about 20 minutes and very much enjoyed it. Thankfully I was prepared for it to only have the lightest of gameplay, so my expectations were calibrated correctly. Only slight annoyance is that I don't want the subtitles on but also if I miss a line of dialogue from someone there's no way to get the information I missed. This might end up not being an issue at all, though, seeing as the main way to get through the game is just to walk around and click on everything. I'd prefer to understand what it is I'm solving by clicking on everything, though!

(This turned out to be a total non-issue!)

Finished, it was great: legitimately very funny; wonderful animation, acting, and general presentation; not very much there gameplay-wise but it still made time to put fun little platforming sections in. My only sliiiight niggle was that while most of the time repetition was used to great comedy effect, there were one or two points where I groaned a little at having to go through the same tunnel or walk around the same hub again, even at less than 3 hours total play time. But they did keep on dropping new content through most of the game, and before it became a problem there was that truly excellent ending. I love how the game became an ode to interactive entertainment, just squeezing all it could out of a very limited interaction space.

Rating: some minor issues around light gameplay and repetition, but overall funny, fun and gorgeous.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (2023)

I've now started - great presentation and rolling out of the opening narrative, looks gorgeous, tons of detail. Bit frustrating that my impressive-for-2022 PC doesn't seem to be able to run the game maxxed out, but I guess they're future-proofing it and I'm getting what would have been expected at launch. Gameplay seems to be very much an Ubisoft so far, but because it's being all Na'vi rather than some modern-day bloke running around with a gun, things aren't as clear so I'm doing some of the fumbling around that I expect more from immersive sims than from an FPS sandbox. Having said that, I think I did pick the less intrusive UI option for full immersion so it may well be my own fault. I don't want to be a total pinkskin and give in and fill my screen up with little icons, though. Also, I feel a little underpowered and having to scrabble around constantly for arrow sticks and stuff, and there's a ton of crafting and cooking systems that I'm not sure if I've misunderstood. I guess this is typical RPG opening act stuff though, and it does at least fit with the story of me being a Na'vi raised by the humans and then suddenly flung into the jungle with no cultural knowledge.

Now trying to tempt myself back into Frontiers Of Pandora. I've been told that I should at least keep going until I get an ikran (the pterosaur things) as that really opens the game up. I also think I might need to get myself into the mindset of playing it an hour a day and picking away at the foraging and crafting and stuff. I didn't realise it would be so heavy on that stuff, it's like No Man's Sky level. I also keep giving up on NMS for similar reasons - tons of systems that I can never remember if I take a break for more than a week, which is something I often do because I've never really had that habit of regular gaming. I tend to just pick up an 8 hour game and play it start to finish over a weekend. But the lack of  manual saves is a huge barrier to that because it demands committing to the game for a certain, unknown length of play session. Apparently you can force autosave with the fast travel system, but it's not ideal. I guess modern AAA games are getting to a level of complexity where manual saves aren't feasible anymore...

I gave it a little go, and watched some videos about crafting, and I might jump back in tomorrow. It's not great when learning to play a game feels more complicated than learning to make games!

Continued with Frontiers Of Pandora, did some crafting and got some small quests. It does lend itself to lovely moments, it's really cool to be climbing up a tree and spot a weird bug, then check out the wiki and find out about its survival techniques and place in Navi culture, or to go hunting a deer type thing and realise that they herd around the big hammerhead rhino things intentionally for protection so you have to try and get one wandering off from the herd. But also, the menus are still nigh-impenetrable and there's a huge amount of faff around the simplest of things like getting food for health. Also, the weapons are all extremely underpowered and tricky to aim with right now. I hear that once you've levelled up a lot then you can have great fun slaughtering camps full of sky people, but for me the promise of 'the game gets satisfying later' is never really enough. If this were a Far Cry game I'd probably have given up on it by now, it's only the Avatar trappings that are encouraging me to stick at it.

Okay, I uninstalled Frontiers Of Pandora. Hopefully I'll come back to it some day when I'm more likely to be able to regularly sink a couple of hours into it over an extended period, and I'm a little more prepared for the crafting and upgrading system that is this game. Also maybe when I've got a big enough hard drive that 80GB sitting there not getting used much isn't quite so irritating.