Honestly, despite having played the original two back in the day when they were new, this new one is how I’m going to picture them going forwards. Not just because I never liked tank controls, but because it feels like such a natural evolution, like the way the game would have been of they had the tech at the time.

I’m kind of amazed at how good it looks too. There’s nothing actually very flashy about it and obviously it’s a very ‘last gen’ game but the smaller scope and really careful, subtle detail to the environments really sells it. Early on in the sewers I was looking around randomly after realising I’d been so focused on the water (for obvious reasons) that I hadn’t really looked up, and where there was a little industrial light there were maybe four or five little moths just fluttering around each other, crowding it. The attention to detail like that, somewhere 99% of people will never look, is just great.

The randomiser thing does sound cool and I could perhaps see myself using it in the further future, but I doubt I’ll be jumping in for another run once I’m done any time soon. One of the things I’m really enjoying about it is playing a bigger budget game that is a much tighter, busy parent friendly experience and I’ll actually probably finish the same week or two that I start it.

There’s so few of those these days. Yet the weird thing about this is that I always think I’ve been playing for longer than I have. Not in a bad way, but in an engrossed kind of way. Each time I think, oops I’ve been doing this forever I bet it’s after midnight already, I find a typewriter to save and discover I’ve only been playing for an hour instead of the two or three I’ve assumed. I’m not sure whether it’s an engrossing atmosphere thing, a pacing thing, the steady but simple pace of progress or what. It’s a strange sensation but very liberating when you’re old and busy.