What we've been playing
A few of the games that have us hooked at the moment.
15th March 2024
Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing over the past few days. This week: sanctuaries, odysseys, and sausages.
If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We've Been Playing, here's our archive.
One Piece Odyssey, Xbox Series X
Last year I decided to properly get back into One Piece, which I believe was a great idea. (Though everyone who's had to listen to me talk about it might disagree. Special shout out to Jen who's had to listen to me the most.) This decision has led to manga re-read, still on-going anime catchup (got to start at the beginning), persuading my friends to watch the live action version and, over Christmas, buying One Piece Odyssey. It was very much a whim-purchase; the game was on sale and I thought, why not? At worst, I'd be a little shorter in money and lifespan.
I've currently spent over 50 hours playing One Piece Odyssey.
I'll openly admit it's not a great game - the combat system is basic, the special attack animations are long even when sped up and, while exploring the world is fun, it's hampered by a feeling of emptiness - but man if I'm not having an awful lot of fun. It's been a while since I've played a game where I can simply turn my brain off and enjoy the experience. Matters are helped by how well paced unlocking new attacks is, with the result being I feel actively encouraged to try new battle strategies amongst pummeling enemies to death with Luffy's rubber fists. I'll also admit to finding bizarre joy in how, to fully understand the context of what's going on, you need to have either read at least 801 manga chapters or watched 746 anime episodes. (One Piece everyone.)
I will get around to playing something else eventually - might just get every achievement first.
-Lottie
Sosig, card game
Sosig is a card game about making sausages. It comes in a small square box that contains small square cards. Each of them has a piece of sausage on it, and you use these cards, each turn to construct complete sausages, with two ends and a middle.
The aim of the game is to score points by completing the kinds of sausages that another stack of cards tells you to aim for. But there's also a PvP aspect as you can use burned or eaten cards to mess up your opponents growing collection of sausages.
Sosig is lovely, mean-spirited stuff, and if it didn't take a little bit of time and memory to set up each time we'd probably play it much more often in our house. It's not a faff by any means, but I need to remember how to stack the cards for the starting position and lay them all out, and by that time people have wandered off or turned on Friends and the card game moment is lost. That's the thing I always neglect when looking for new games: set-up time. If I could get my head around Sosig a bit quicker, then, it would be a proper banger.
-Chris Donlan
Diablo 4, PS5
It's been a while since I played Diablo 4 - so long I can't actually remember when the last time was. What struck me going back, yesterday, with a friend and then on my own, was how good a bit of time away is. I'd even go as far as to say Diablo 4 is better for it.
What bugged me about Diablo 4 when I was playing it a lot was that nothing seemed to change. Hours went by and I was doing the same things: using the same attacks, relying on the same build, and only making minor adjustments when show-stopping pieces of legendary equipment showed up. The simple loop was, perhaps, overused.
But going back to Diablo 4, I felt differently about it - I appreciated the simplicity. There was a moment where I stared incomprehensibly at my higher-level druid and wondered how they worked, how they were built, and tried to reverse-engineer my own thinking to find the answers. But something like five minutes later - if that - I was caught up. I went from being worried that I didn't understand the game any more, to ground-pounding anything that ran at me, with wild, reckless abandon. One-to-fun in a matter of minutes.
I now see why some of you keep Diablo 4 mixed in with other games you play, because it's exactly the kind of game you can do that with - one you can switch over to and blow off steam in, and not think too hard about.
-Bertie