What we've been playing - monkey epics, vampire masquerades, and storybook adventures

27th September

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 we've been playing the only Vampire: The Masquerade game that appears to be ever coming out, we've been struggling with action adaptations of famous Chinese stories, and we've been jumping out of storybooks altogether.

What have you been playing?

Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We've Been Playing archive.

Vampire: The Masquerade - Coteries of New York, Android

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I've been meaning to sink my teeth into this one for a while. Hey! What's a fella to do when the other Masquerade game keeps being delayed?

Coteries of New York is the first in a series of visual novel games you can play on pretty much everything - phones included. That's where I'm playing it. And given that, I expected it to be a pretty limited affair. In some ways, I was right. There's not a lot of visual bedazzlry going on: it's static screens and a lot of text to read, and it's a bit of a chore to wade through at times, especially given the small display. The user interface isn't great. But there's definitely something worthwhile here.

It's more generous than I thought it would be - a lot more. The set-up is pretty familiar to any piece of vampire fiction you've ever come across: you get bitten and then, what follows, is your induction to the vampire world - in this case the famous World of Darkness, the world the Vampire: Masquerade tabletop RPG is based in. Night by night, you explore this nocturnal playground and set about making your way in it, impressing the vampire who vouched for you while also making slinky moves of your own. There's a lot of dialogue but you get the chance to use powerful abilities in certain situations too.

It's not entirely linear either. Each night, you'll see a map of New York and several places you can visit, and you'll have to prioritise what you want to do because you can only manage a couple of stops before you need to rest. I like it. There's a lot of reading but it's turned out to be a great way to learn more about this famous setting, while also being somewhat compelling and wonderfully moody in its own right.

-Bertie

Black Myth: Wukong, PS5

28 Things You Need To Know About Black Myth Wukong - BLACK MYTH WUKONG GAMEPLAY REACTION + ANALYSIS

I was so excited to play Wukong. After two previews - at Gamescom last year and earlier this year - I was enamoured with the game's tight combat and gorgeous visuals, and couldn't wait to face up against its menagerie of Chinese folklore bosses.

Now, though, that excitement has turned to disappointment. The more I play Wukong, the more tedious it becomes. I was worried the game would be empty outside of boss battles and sadly, I was right. There's little reason to explore its world, spectacular though it is, and that's hampered further by egregious invisible walls and the bizarre and frustrating decision not to include a map. And combat is far too monotonous. Standard enemies are repetitive and I find myself using the same strategies for each boss. That's due to a lack of diversity in the character skill tree: new stances and spells don't do enough to shake up tactics, and upgrades don't meaningfully alter combat. I'm all for a more linear action-RPG that isn't a Soulslike, but Wukong really is missing some breadth to its gameplay, and its storytelling is far too subtle for anyone unfamiliar with the novel it's based on.

I'm deep in the snowy depths of the game's third chapter and still keen to see it through and best those beautiful bosses, but I can't help but feel I'm just going through the motions and, err, monkeying around for the sake of it.

-Ed

The Plucky Squire, Xbox Series X

The Plucky Squire Review - An Ingenious Puzzle-Platformer!

I don't know if you've read many picture books lately but they're often scrappy things - big bold pictures, dubious plots, lots of repetition and rhyme. And the Plucky Squire, a video game built around and within a picture book, has all of that in abundance.

Fundamentally, The Plucky Squire's adaptation of its space, which is to say levels laid out across double-page spreads, with the light catching the texture of the heavy-printed paper just so, is brilliant. So too is the initially brain-melting ability to hop out of the book's two-dimensional pages onto the three-dimensional desk it's resting on - there's simply nothing else like it. You encounter different areas of the game's world as separate chapters, and adventures outside the book into a child's bedroom are as different as toy layout there tends to be - forever in flux.

Ideas come thick and fast - a jet pack! A rhythm mini-game! Match-3! Bombs! - though not all of them land, and characters can be overly verbose, which is something that would certainly be edited down in print. The plot of the game is also, pardon the pun, paper thin. And yet when the Plucky Squire does land something it's superlative - not least the game's visual direction as well as some of the mechanics around using the story book as a physical item itself, opening and closing the cover to imprint ink and rifling back through pages to revisit areas.

This is a memorable experience from a new studio. Scrappy, yes, but big and bold and brilliant too.

-Tom