What we’ve been playing – games that refuse to die, superb interactive fiction, and The End

9th August 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, we struggle to come to terms with ending a game, we delight in a superb interactive fiction detective game, and we revisit an old zombie game that apparently refuses to die.

What have you been playing?

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

No Case Should Remain Unsolved, PC

After Lottie’s recommendation a few months ago (and the badgering of several other detective game fans in my life the intervening months since), I absolutely wolfed down No Case Should Remain Unsolved this week, and cor, it really is quite a special little game. Several years after the fact, a retired detective is tasked with finally solving the only case that she let go cold: a case about a missing girl whose father mysteriously insisted she let it remain unsolved. But memory is a fickle thing, and inspector Jeon Gyeong can only remember fragments of each witness’ testimony – and not necessarily in the right order, or even the identity of the person who spoke to them.

What follows over the next two and a half hours is a gradual piecing together of events that builds and builds towards a highly moving climax. Certain words can be clicked to unlock extra snippets of conversation, while linking together the correct chain of events and matching them to the right witness slowly builds the keys you need to use to unlock some of Jeon Gyeong’s trickier and more stubborn memories. It’s a complex tale that requires proper deductive work from its players, and the gradual unraveling of its story is both wonderfully paced and absolutely devastating to watch come into focus. Complemented by sparse, but evocative pixel art, and a beautifully layered musical score that crescendos as more and more details of the case start to crystalise, No Case Should Remain Unsolved is one of the most masterful works of short-form detective fiction this side of Her Story of her. And all for less than a fiver to boot.

-Katharine

Baldur’s Gate 3, PC

I will write about another game one day but guess what? I finally finished my Dark Urge playthrough, which I’m writing about in much more delicious detail for a Supporters piece this weekend. I also managed to write a big ‘Making Of’ piece about the Dark Urge in case you haven’t seen it. So, well done me, I suppose?

But the problem I have is what to do now. I think I’ve developed a case of game-ending-itis. For months, I’ve held this thing in my head and directed my energy towards finishing BG3 and what might happen when I do. Now, that energy has got nowhere to go. It’s as though it’s blasted off the edge of a cliff. More accurately, it feels like I’m at the edge of an underwater cliff, a sea ledge – one of those terrifying places where all life seems to stop as darkness prevails. These places really frighten me. I was in the sea once, underwater and scuba diving, when I turned around and saw the same darkness behind me. The same yawning, impenetrable darkness. It’s an image that still haunts me.

And yes OK, what’s happening to me now is not that dramatic, but I’m still at a loss about what I should do now. Nothing else seems as substantial or as meaningful. I now know what my partner meant when she finished Baldur’s Gate 3 and couldn’t bring herself to play anything else. Did any of you experience this? Long games do this to us, I think. We get so used to their surroundings and so invested in their stories and characters, and holding that all actively in our minds, that it suddenly feels very empty up there when we let it go. It’s like a clenched mind relaxing, which sounds a bit gross.

I started a new character last night because I didn’t know what to do – a halfling monk if you’re wondering (one of the most underplayed class-race combos). My aim is to play it in co-op, and go through the whole thing again. But I’m not sure I can face all that again so soon, and so I’m stuck in a kind of limbo. What shall I do?

-Bertie

7 Days to Die, PC

Just like the army of undead that inhabits its worlds, 7 Days to Die refuses to die. I used to play it on Xbox One back in 2016, but it’s actually even older than that. 7 Days to Die first arrived in early access on PC back in 2013! It’s a curious blend: a mix of survival, tower defense and Minecraft-style gameplay, and clearly it’s been compelling enough for a PC audience to stick around for more than a decade. I even bought the game again on PC last year to try it out in a flat-screen-to-VR mod, before promptly forgetting all about it until Liv reminded me with her excellent Beginner’s Tips video marking the game’s very-long-awaited 1.0 release.

Since then I’ve streamed about four hours of 7 Days to Die on my own YouTube channel, Platform32, and I’ve felt the game’s ‘scavenge, craft, defend’ loop dig its broken little claws into me again. It’s still not the best looking game I’ve ever seen, but compared to the console version I used to play, it looks great.

What I really like about it, though, is how customizable the sandbox experience is. I’ve been playing the main campaign on the Navezgane map – though it’s just as easy to create your own seed for a custom map – and I’ve tinkered with the rules. I shortened the day-night cycle from 90 minutes to 60, then set the game’s zombie horde-spawning Blood Moon event to happen at the end of the second day rather than the seventh. This makes it perfect for streaming: you get the unpredictability of the emerging gameplay, which gives me and the audience some unexpected scares, and a tense finale once the in-game clock ticks over to the Blood Moon. It’s fun.

Note that there are now two versions of 7 Days to Die on console. There’s the newly released 1.0 version for Xbox Series X/S and PS5, as well as the older Xbox One and PS4 versions which I own. But the latter are no longer updated, or indeed available to buy, so be careful if you’re looking for a cheap disk-based version somewhere. It won’t update to 1.0.

-Ian