30th November
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 cram ahead of what could be one of this year’s biggest sequel releases, we draw attention to an excellent nostalgia-drenched horror game, and, um, birds – lots of birds.
Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We’ve Been Playing archive.
Path of Exile, PC
I’ve been doing a bit of Path of Exile swatting ahead of the imminent early access arrival of the sequel, Path of Exile 2, and it’s striking how old the first game feels. I don’t say that to throw any kind of shade: POE1 has done tremendous things in the action RPG genre, and it was a small project that grew and grew – it didn’t arrive with the fanfare or production values POE2 does. But playing it after playing something like Diablo 4, which has extraordinary production values of its own, definitely highlights how much time has passed. POE1 is so by comparison.
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You can’t, for instance, seamlessly swap between mouse and keyboard controls and a controller, which I think you can do in almost any game now as standard. You have to quit to the main menu and then specify the control method you want to use instead. You can’t independently move a character around with WASD keys while you use the mouse to click and attack, either, which feels really restrictive and weird. And look, I get it, these are elbowy bits that fade into insignificance as you embrace the eccentricities dozens of hours in, but they still contribute to a feeling of how timely a sequel now is.