While we here at Operation Rainfall love covering the latest in gaming news and sharing our reviews of titles new and classic, we also just enjoy playing games in our downtime. So with that, sit back, relax, and check out what the oprainfall gaming crew have been up to this week!
My sister and I continue our trek into biological horrors with Resident Evil 6, which we are once again playing through co-op with her on the PS4 Pro and me on the PlayStation 5. We just completed Jake’s campaign and I have got to say, it is total and utter shlock, A++ I’m having a great time. Jake is an insufferable tough guy and I love him. He deserves absolutely zero of his ending and his character motivation is all over the place, but he has charming one liners and I like a buff bald dude, so he gets a pass. His entire reason for being is contrived beyond belief, even for RE standards, but again, I don’t play these games for the plot. Some of his sets were actually pretty good, too. The cave was a standout moment, and I enjoyed the underwater facility. Ustanak was a fun threat, though he pales in comparison to Nemesis, which sort of just encapsulates the entire RE6 experience so far: it’s fun, but is a pale imitation of whatever came before. Resident Evil 5, for all its boulder punching glory, felt like a Resident Evil game that pivoted to action gameplay. RE6 feels like a generic action game with a Resident Evil coat of paint. The games have never felt more like their movie counterparts than here. Nothing about it mechanically feels like a Resident Evil game, even though the story is a logical progression of the plot started in RE1. Having shambling zombies forever would just not be fun and wouldn’t make sense for a company trying to make bioweapons.
That being said, I can’t even say the gameplay is all that great for what it is. The guns feel okay, but don’t have the same satisfactory sound design or impact that my shotgun did in RE5. I was actually really excited for the cave sequence because I thought we’d actually have to be, you know, stealthy and sneak over the broken ice on the ground to avoid detection, but it was mostly just a glorified corridor where you bap a bat on the head to keep from being caught. Driving the snowmobiles felt legitimately awful thanks to janky controls. The quick-time running sections were fun visually but not all that engaging. Our session was also plagued by bugs (and not the fun bioweapons kind.) Enemies would die but continue reloading their weapons; walls were only a suggestion at times; prompts wouldn’t register during some of the QTE sequences; audio and video didn’t always sync. Most of these just gave us a good laugh, but it definitely feels far from polished, and I’m unsure if that’s a PS4 version issue or not, since my husband doesn’t remember any of these happening when he played on the PS3 or Xbox 360.
Regardless, we still have three more campaigns to do before we can put RE6 to bed and jump into Ethan’s saga, and I’m honestly looking forward to it, because despite the story being completely off the rails and the game eschewing claustrophobic horror for bombastic B-movie shlock, I’m having fun. – Leah
This week in gaming I’ve been playing a very cute visual novel called Suger Sweet Temptation. The story revolves around a pastry shop called Folkroll. This shop is known for making the best cakes around, but the owner has fallen ill and the shop’s future is very much in question. On the magical night of fairies the chef’s granddaughter, Meru, and her best friend Kōri make a wish to save their shop. Soon after a stranger with amnesia appears, and the girls befriend him quickly. They call him Crow, since they don’t know his name and their adventures begin.
The three main girls each have a route to play through. So far Meru is my favorite with her carefree attitude and straight up cuteness. Time will tell if Kōri can overtake her, since she is very cute as well. –Steve
Lately I’ve been mostly playing Harvestella. In Harvestella, I made a good amount of progress this past week. First of all, I finished up the Coral Shrine and did some quests in Shatolla which became available after finishing the dungeon, thus clearing up the main issue in town. After that, I found myself going back and forth between various story characters you regularly get quests from and raise your bond with. For the most part, I haven’t at all been having a hard time balancing my time in Harvestella. You have plenty of time to do some farming and then go explore dungeons and deal with story quests. But now that I’m as far as I am, I do find myself not able to juggle all the different characters with bond levels, quite as well. It seems like there are always a bunch of them bugging you to go continue their story and I didn’t want to spend all of year 1 fall dealing with them. I’m finding myself ready to be done with Chapter 3, simply because I’m curious how the world opens up from here.
In Chapter 3, you have three different main story quests, there’s 3A, 3B and 3C. Each of these is one of the different seasonal towns and their issues with their town’s Seaslight acting up. I finished up Shatolla, the summer town and finally went to Argene this week, the winter town and Seaslight area, which is 3C, the last chunk of Chapter 3. I find myself wanting to be done with Chapter 3 because I’m really curious where the story goes from here and what more there is in the world. Chapter 3 alone almost feels like a whole game in itself. It feels like Chapter 1 and 2 were the early game/introduction to everything and then Chapter 3 is the whole main game. By that I mean, after finishing Argene, I’ll have seen what seems like the whole world. I want to know if this is just one section of the world and you simply don’t know there’s more out there yet. Or, because of how mysterious Harvestella‘s story is and on account of some things that are mentioned, I’m also starting to wonder if maybe you travel to some sort of alternate universe or something after this.
I won’t go too in depth on my theories since I don’t want to say too much. But pretty much, I’m just not sure yet what comes after this and where else you can go in the world and I want to know. I did get to briefly visit Castle Lewis where the princess is supposed to be, with Heine and Unicorn. But it’s all closed up and no one can enter. Perhaps that’s what’s next, going to Castle Lewis to find out what’s going on. All I know is, I’m ready to get out of Chapter 3 and explore some more. Which is why the amount of different bond characters constantly wanting me to deal with them, started to get a bit overwhelming and in the way of everything else. I enjoy getting to know them better and finding out their stories, it just seems like you get a lot of them unlocked near the end of this chapter. Oh also, it turns out that extra field I could see in the distance was for crops needing to grow in water, it got covered by water when I unlocked it. Now I’m still stuck splitting my main crop area between maker machines and crops. – Jenae
What games have you been playing this week? Let us know in the comments!
You can read previous Week in Gaming entries here!
