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Friday Fun Thread for September 6, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I got In Sound Mind as a free giveaway from Epic Games ages ago. I was hesitant about playing it because I was concerned it was one of these games that markets itself as a survival horror but is really just a walking simulator with periodic jump scares. The other night I started playing it around 11-11:30 and found it so absorbing that it was 1:30 before I stopped. Pleased to find it's emphatically not a walking simulator, but a real game with real mechanics. The pleasingly goofy premise is you play as a therapist who has sessions with his disturbed patients, and in order to resolve their traumas (and get to the bottom of the mysterious conspiracy at their root) you enter into surreal dreamscapes and defeat a boss. A bit like Psychonauts crossed with Silent Hill (or perhaps Alan Wake).

After spending several months trying to beat X-COM 2 on Classic difficulty, this is just the kind of game I'm in the mood for: enough of a challenge to be satisfying but forgiving enough not to be tense or stressful; spookily atmospheric but rarely actually "scary" (I've completed three dungeons and only the first one ever made me feel any degree of fright); puzzles which I don't require a walkthrough to solve 90% of the time; story which is well-written enough to be entertaining but which doesn't seem to take itself terribly seriously, like a 2000s psychological thriller (Secret Window, Identity) which is sort of aware of how silly its conceit is without fully lapsing into self-parody. The only criticisms I have of In Sound Mind so far are that the dungeons seem a bit padded with samey areas it's too easy to get lost in, and the inclusion of a stealth mechanic seems a bit half-baked and largely useless.

On XCOM 2 (well, Long War, but for both XCOM I never really played anything else), I found the opposite, if played well the stealth mechanic is extremely substantial (though I preferred the first XCOM). But I also used a whole bunch of mods, including one that made timers freeze until stealth is broken (bc that just seemed stupid except for very few exceptions).

Oh sorry for the confusion, I was referring to the stealth mechanic in In Sound Mind, not XCOM 2.

In vanilla XCOM 2, I agreed with Zero Punctuation that it's annoying that breaking concealment instantly makes every enemy on the map aware of your location until the end of the mission. It would have been nice if killing one group of enemies before another group arrives on the scene restored concealment.

including one that made timers freeze until stealth is broken

Agreed, this is one aspect of the base game that makes absolutely no sense and is blatantly a contrivance for gameplay's sake. That being said, it's hardly the only such aspect.

I'm pretty sure I had some way of restoring concealment, but it might have been from a mod as well. In general XCOM2 is imo one of those games substantially improved with mods.