What we played – scary crime scenes, clouds over fields and scary cities

October 26th

Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little about some of the games we've been playing over the last few days. This week we wonder whether becoming a detective would have been a wise career choice, we use new technology to drive a car in space, and we enjoy watching Fresh Eyes play a horror masterpiece for the first time.

What did you play?

Check out back editions of this column in our What We've Been Playing archive.

Nobody Wants to Die, Xbox Series X

I was at Lidl earlier this week and was amazed to see whipped yoghurts. This sight shocked me so much that I went to the EG Slack and asked if anyone had actually tried these potential miracles. Nobody had that, so it's not a great story, sorry, but this curiosity made me think outside the box. Just as the yogurt people had tried something new, I ventured out and tried a game that I wasn't really keen on.

Step forward, no one wants to die. Eurogamer (that's this website, in case you're still remembering the whipped yogurts) called it “a noiry cyberpunk story,” and that's right. The problem is that this isn't the type of game I normally like. Don't get me wrong, I like Bladerunner as much as all the wannabe film critics on Twitter, but Nobody Wants to Die is a slow, dialogue-heavy, clunky piece of storytelling that I can't quite get lost in.

I love a lot of what is on offer. I've just finished watching the BBC Smartarse show Ludwig and I'm obviously now imagining myself as some sort of detective, and Nobody Wants to Die delivers brilliantly in that regard. It involves piecing together a lot of things and examining evidence, plus far-off future technologies, but I found myself drifting a bit as I looked at the crime scenes and wondered what those whipped yogurts looked like.

-Tom O

Starfield, a nice, comfortable bed

You may have noticed a lack of “Yours sincerely” on Eurogamer's YouTube channel lately, as I've been in bed after an absolutely lousy reaction to this year's seasonal vaccinations (but at least I know they work: get it) . these cans when offered, people!)

Luckily, we live in a time where having to stay in bed for a few days is a situation, with endless entertainment options like browsing Ebay (Netflix for bargain hunters), Kindle Unlimited (Netflix for book lovers), and Netflix (Netflix for people , who like their shows to be canceled after one season). And Xbox Cloud Gaming, Netflix for people who aren't where their Xbox is right now. A recent upgrade to 1GB internet and a theft of my wife's Steam Deck on the grounds that I wasn't well laid the groundwork for serious testing of what cloud gaming actually looks like today: a controversial idea I've been grappling with since the fabled Eurogamer Expo, where OnLive gave everyone with a blog one of its elegant microconsoles and a press release. Back then I managed to complete the first Space Marine over a 6MB ADSL line, playing in Block-o-Vision mode with a full second of controller delay. But it was the future and it was cool. And just a few lifetimes later, I'm happy to report that cloud gaming is now… mostly fine. Xbox Cloud Gaming, still in a seemingly endless public beta, is very good. Your stuff is all synced across your other Xbox platforms: I've now seamlessly played the same Starfield character across PC, console and Steam Deck, and semi-officially running it in the device's built-in web browser. Getting it to work requires some finesse, but Microsoft itself has created its own guide on how to do it.

There's just a hint of input lag, barely noticeable, over my lovely Virgin fiber connection and the brand new Hub 5 with its snappy WiFi 6 protocol. The busy graphics can be a little blurry, as many of Starfield's fine environmental details are blurred in the real-time encoding, but on a screen as small as the deck's, that doesn't actually matter much. It's a perfectly playable, perfectly good representation of a major home console game, running the technical equivalent of two tin cans and a piece of string on a device that wasn't actually intended for it. I'm honestly impressed. Cloud gaming has truly arrived, albeit as a complementary service.

What else? Oh, um, Starfield? Yes, it's fine. I'm a big Bethesda simp, but Starfield tested my resolve at launch. However, after many updates and additions, I can confidently say that it is one of my favorite space games ever. For example, adding a rover didn't turn a 7/10 into a 10, but it did fix my biggest problem since it was an exploration game where exploring was a damn pain. At least now you can glide around with a small motor and cover the great distances between these points of interest in a fraction of the time.

As a running game, Starfield sucked, but as it turns out, it sucks even less as a driving game: it's another example of human civilization being vastly improved by the humble automobile.

-Jim

Silent Hill 2 Remake, Twitch

Well, me say I played Silent Hill 2 this week. What I have Strictly speaking I'm playing – since finishing the remake of Bloober myself last weekend – is my new, slightly obsessive favorite game: “Watch streamers who have never played Silent Hill 2 before run the emotional gauntlet of the final hour and each other over time completely disintegrate into a crying mess. The credits roll.

Silent Hill 2 has been one of my all-time favorite games since I first played it almost a quarter of a century ago, when it burst onto the scene with confidence and announced to the world that they were, in fact, video games may Treat your audience like adults. The fact that I'm 25 years later Despite it As I think about what it all means and wake up at 2am with new theories, Laura's theme – the perfect encapsulation of Silent Hill 2's forlorn rawness – is still a testament to Team Silent's phenomenal work.

And Bloober's remake is equally phenomenal in its own way, a brilliant reimagining of a truly groundbreaking classic that mostly evolves, expands and improves on the original in all the right ways. It remains as creepy, frightening and emotionally devastating as ever; Arguably even more so when you consider the excellent work of its excellent new cast and some deft upgrades of familiar moments, including the astonishing new fight against Abstract Daddy and a brilliantly choreographed prison sequence that is easily one of the most relentlessly suffocating and harrowing pieces of horror I've ever seen have seen. I played.

It was a rare treat to be able to revisit one of my all-time favorites with fresh eyes and in such a wonderfully thoughtful re-release. But it also offers the perfect opportunity to watch a whole new generation (admittedly distilled into a cross-section of howling streamers) discover its secrets for the first time, and see this almost a quarter century later: Silent Hill 2 has none of his lost incredible strength.

-Frosted