Moz

The bottom three didn’t happen to my recollection, so I didn’t have any cause to look at the item tooltip until after the explosion and reload. I got the cutscene with Troy Baker, then went to compass mode to get my bearings, then went straight where it told me to go. Apart from the Troy Baker cutscene it was no different from any other mission as far as I can remember. I had built roads everywhere by that point so it wasn’t tricky getting around. Then I blew up and had to Google what was going on, immediately saw I was supposed to have had multiple hints about it I didn’t get, and went to do what the guide said. I did have a bug where Deadman kept telling me about a body that wasn’t there over the radio though, every single time I left a location for several hours around the same time. Exactly the same message on repeat. It might have interfered. I also got a weird bug where Sam would get stuck making clipped breathing loop noises a handful of times, which definitely interfered with some of his dialogue. I would get the first half a second of a line of dialogue and then back to weird gasping noises for no obvious reason. Even when driving. But I’m really clutching at straws with that as it was a few minutes in total out of nearly 60 hours. I’m not the only person asking this question or saying they didn’t get any warnings outside of the tooltip either. I found a couple of references to it being broken in the PC version on the steam forums also. (I also got a recurring bug where large chunks of the geometry disappeared in increasing amounts until Norman’s face itself disappeared and he was nothing but a pair of floating eyeballs driving an invisible car on an invisible road, to an invisible building, until I restarted the game. That would happen any time I played more than a few hours without restarting. I got a video of that one I can post at least, it was hilarious).

There are 70 story missions and precisely one of them requires you to read the description and go to a different place other than indicated by the in-game UI. More of that would have been great, showing some independent thought from Sam. But they do it once and poorly. It’s not hard, it’s just unintuitive.

It’s because you’ve spent the previous 100 missions going exactly where it tells you to go on the map, plotting a course etc. Then it tells you to go to a point on the map while making vague mention of actually needing to go somewhere else. It changes the context of how it delivers instructions in a confusing way which requires carefully noting two or three different bits of info delivered in tooltips and cutscenes. And then doesn’t do it again for the rest of the game.

I struggled with the nuke mission too and had to look it up, I think the same thing happened to me. The other thing I struggled with was a body going necro and being told constantly that I need to dispose of it, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. Eventually I had a voidout and was forced to load an old save, then I spent three hours looking for a body that I still couldn’t find, before realising that once the voidout occurs and you reload, the body disappears and you don’t have to deal with it. What a strange, pointless, counterintuitive mechanic. Other than that I didn’t have any issues with the mechanics and systems.

57 hours to finish. I'll definitely have more to say once I've let it settle, but I think I loved this. It's completely unique and incredibly imaginative, in a world where those words are bandied around far too often. I've always felt like Kojima's games got in the way of themselves, with endless tinkering with mechanics and easter eggs getting in the way of gameplay, or endless cutscenes making them feel claustrophobic and a bit dull at the same time. And though it goes full Kojima in the final couple of hours (mostly in a good way) it earns it by letting the player soak in the atmosphere while trekking from place to place in the expansive middle section. Half way through I got completely obsessed with building all the roads, and ended up building every single road on the map. Every time I signed in I'd have another 20-30k likes. It's so weirdly gratifying to know that all of the work I did helped other players avoid the various annoyances the game throws at you. It's not perfect by any means, far from it, with some notable problems around unpolished mechanics, creaky boss fights and an abundance of snagging nouns and acronyms, but I'm incredibly eager to experience whatever Kojima Productions do next. I want to see something as different from this as this is to MGS. Keep giving Kojima blank cheques to make confounding weird marmite games and I'll keep showing up. It's also a brilliantly cinematic game in ultrawide, despite me having some problems actually running it to run in my resolution (I had to hex edit the executable!) I'm not even sure how a lot of shots translate to standard widescreen as they seem to fill the space afforded by ultrawide so naturally.

It’s already here for some people https://youtu.be/UWyVe0k5oH0

This is usually the problem with American comedy. Setup, punchline, someone explains the punchline and takes all the wind out of it. It should go setup, punchline, even funnier response to punchline. Frasier nails this.

I really liked the visual motif with the antagonist, I could have done with a lot more of that. Perhaps hidden through the film like Lake Mungo/Hill House. It was a little too humdrum at times and took a while to start firing on all cylinders.

Remember when it was called Spaceworthy and they changed the name to Outer Wilds

They should make this free to play and sell the music packs.

Jan de bont's 1999 The Haunting has popped up on Netflix if you want to watch a pretty shitty film with a couple of funny bits.

But can it run Flysis?

It will do, but only for that input. If you plug your Xbox into a different input it will revert to the default movie mode I expect. Or if you have a PS5 and an Xbox, SDR game mode on one input will differ from the other. But you can use "copy to all inputs" to paste your config for that mode to the other inputs. Likewise the other problem is if you go to watch a Netflix Dolby vision movie on your Xbox, it might default to Dolby Vision game mode which might not be ideal for your preference. However if it's clever it will switch between game mode and movie mode depending on whether it's getting an ALLM signal or not. Short version, it can be annoying to try and do everything on a single device. I use consoles purely for gaming and an Apple TV 4K purely for media. That's all I'm getting at.

LG TVs have completely different per-input per-mode settings for SDR, HDR and Dolby Vision. You can use ISF Bright or dark for SDR, Cinema Home for HDR and Dolby Vision Cinema for DV. Then switch to SDR/HDR/DV game mode when you're gaming. They're all configured differently on each input so it's a job to keep on top of it all if you have multiple consoles. I use an Apple TV 4K but I imagine watching all your content on a single device might prove to be a bit annoying too, as you'll have to keep switching modes on that input. If the TV supports ALLM and detects an ALLM signal (the Xbox Series does this) it should automatically switch to the game profile and tell you in the top right hand corner.

On all modern TVs I've used, Dolby Vision being active removes brightness/contrast/tonemapping settings while still allowing people to turn on their horrible oversaturated colours, cool colour profiles and motion smoothing. It's already an on/off solution for HDR and works exactly as it should, but it's not commonplace. All it needs is wider adoption. You're talking about filmmaker mode, where a whole glut of settings including framerate, colour, interpolation etc can be changed to match directorial intent regardless of the viewing environment. I don't think we'll ever see a "filmmaker mode" for games, though I wouldn't put it past Kojima... Besides, most game modes turn off most additional processing to decrease latency. Once you've got a game running in Dolby Vision "game" profile there's very little you can do to alter the image.