What we’ve been playing – “I can’t stop thinking about balls”

22nd November

Hello and welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we’ve been playing. This week, Kelsey discovers the joys and stresses of managing border control in Papers, Please; Tom holds off his Kojima dislike and plays Death Stranding; Victoria looks for anyone she can to talk to about Dispatch; Ed can’t stop thinking about balls; Connor finds himself back in Guild Wars 2; and Bertie finds himself back in Dungeons & Dragons, getting everyone in trouble again.

What have you been playing?

Papers Please, PC

I had some time off work last week and plans that had fallen through, so I’ve been using that time to clear some indie games out of my backlog. The one I’ve spent the most time with so far and can see myself returning to regularly is Papers Please, the dystopian document thriller that tasks you with working as an immigration officer in the 80s. I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to play it…

The game unsurprisingly features a lot of paperwork to sift through and check. I first thought it was a nightmare. There are far too many things to remember at once. But as you become used to your in-game nine-to-five, Papers Please slowly grants you more freedom and you begin to realise you don’t necessarily have to play by the rules. That’s when the ‘thriller’ aspect of this game comes in and suddenly grips you, and your empathy and feelings towards the cast of characters that you’ll meet plays more of a part in things than the job you’ve actually been assigned to do.

-Kelsey

Death Stranding, PS5 Pro

It’s finally happening. Me, the infamous Kojima-game-disliker, is playing Death Stranding. My immediate feeling is that you really don’t get many games that go all out to achieve an artistic vision like this does. It’s striking how unconventional the whole thing is. Where most modern games tend to follow conventional wisdom for a lot of the general gameplay systems, Kojima creates games like he has either never played another game before or simply believes his way is better. It’s refreshing.

That doesn’t mean I’m enjoying Death Stranding, as such. It’s a bit too early on to say for sure how I feel about it, but I know it’s made me consider how similar a lot of games feel these days.

-Tom O

Dispatch, PS5

I finished Dispatch last week and it made me a little emotional. In fact I’m still not over it. So now that I’m not playing Dispatch, I’m finding as many people as I can to talk about Dispatch with.

Who was your favourite antihero? Who did you romance? I’m sorry what happened during your playthrough? He actually said that?! You get the idea.

I’ve even dipped into YouTube videos to check out the cinematics I missed, and there’s one particular bit from my playthrough I’m not happy with, so I’m going to have to go back to that chapter and see if I can change a certain character’s fate.

What an absolute treat of game Dispatch is.

-Victoria

Ball x Pit, Xbox

I can’t stop thinking about balls. In a pit, specifically. Forget Tetris, it’s the ball effect. Wake up? Balls. Writing news articles for Eurogamer? Balls. Go to sleep? Balls, constantly. Patterns of balls, bouncing off walls. Up the alleyway they go in a blaze of special effects, fired against encroaching enemies, ricocheting at increasing speed. Balls are mesmerising. Then it’s back to my base to bounce balls again, upgrading facilities and harvesting materials. Just one more ball-bounce and the building will be complete. I’m straight in for another ball run.

The balls are everywhere. Hours have passed and the balls won’t stop. I have become one with the balls as they take over my mind. This is a cry for help.

Balls.

-Ed

Guild Wars 2, PC

I’m back into MMORPGs and it’s all Bertie’s fault. All it took was for one new trailer for Guild Wars: Reforged to come out and for us to have one discussion about the genre for roughly 40 seconds for me to be back in the arms of an MMO yet again. It’s the style of game I truly cannot escape.

Guild Wars 2 is particularly brilliant because all the level 80 content released over a decade ago is not only still there, it still provides rewards that are potentially valuable to max level players. As such, when I pulled up to Queensdale (the human starting zone) I still saw roughly 50 people pull up for the world boss… At like 3AM no less.

I’m on a fresh account and awash with nostalgia. I stopped playing the game back when Heart of Thorns first released, so I’m exploring the world and going: “Oh yeah, this is where the big toxic Scarlet Briar events used to be!” Then I look at how long ago that was and turn into a skeleton.

But yeah, the game’s sick. I bought like five expansions a while ago on Steam so I just own this cool RPG forever and it doesn’t have a subscription cost. I do wonder what happened to those Elder Dragons…

-Connor

Dungeons & Dragons, pen and paper

You’re welcome, Connor! And I hear you – MMOs speak to me on a skeletal level.

I found myself returning to a game after a long time away this week too: Dungeons & Dragons. Months have passed since I last played. But this week I was friendly Firbolg Miché again, scuttling around as an ermine up in snowy Icewind Dale and getting everyone into trouble. Somehow, though, we actually saved the day. We went out for a walk at night and captured a robbery in progress – that’s a very reductive retelling of what actually happened, but you know what it’s like when D&D people get going and tell you what they’ve been up to: give me a minute, I’ll take an hour. Suffice to say shit went down. What really struck me about this moment though was it was completely missable. We could have gone – and nearly did – to sleep, only to wake up in the morning and hear what we’d missed. Really it was only a spontaneous desire to examine somewhere nearby the building where the robbery was taking place that took us there.

I love this sense of a world quietly in motion in the pages of D&D campaign book, whether you’re there to witness it or not. It’s something that Baldur’s Gate 3, itself of course based on D&D, does so well too. No world feels so real as one with implicit FOMO.

-Bertie