Hm, thanks for the 4X insight guys. That taking-a-week-off problem is my major issue with them as well. It's just hard to remember what you're doing if not living and breathing a given game.

So I'll hop onto Twitch pretty much once a night at this point, just to check if any streamers I enjoy are on. Anyone familiar with Twitch knows the first thing you see is the games being played, ranked by popularity (number of viewers at a given moment). Hanging around at the top of the list a lot recently, with the likes of League of Legends, DOTA 2 and the other mainstays, is a game called Playerunknown's Battlegrounds.

It's apparently in early access on Steam and is $36 (seems high for early access? I dunno). It seems to have similarities to DayZ and H1Z1 in that it's a Battle Royale/Hunger Games sort of last-one-standing murder fest. This game seems better though. It's obviously janky as hell, but of course that never bothered me, and it seems to bother fewer people these days as we eschew our obsession with high fidelity.

Is anyone familiar with it? I'm tempted to test the limits of my so-so laptop and get into it. If you're not familiar I recommend checking it out on Twitch. There are tons of people streaming it.

From what I've heard, muting other players is an essential part of Playerunknown's Battlegrounds.

I forgot to mention one of the cool things about it, that being everyone (100 people) starts inside the same plane, and as it flies over this island you jump out whenever you want. But yeah, apparently at that early stage of every game you can hear the voice chat of everyone since it's based on proximity and you're all in the plane together; it seems like that's a nightmare.

Everything else seems cool. There's always a different safe zone that appears a few minutes in which players will eventually have to get to as it closes in, becoming a smaller and smaller circle. Plus continually changing zones where bombs will be dropped. It's neat.

Nier Automata is on my must play list. Several critics I trust have said it's the sleeper hit of the year so far, including Patrick Klepek, now of Waypoint, who said it's one of his favourite games of all time. My taste crosses over a lot with his so I'm pretty eager to try it out. I'm downloading that demo!

Oh, yeah, Until Dawn is a pretty great little game for what it is, and especially now that it's pretty easy to get it for $20 or less. It's a very well-executed interactive narrative; sort of the other side of the Telltale coin: where Telltale games relish the character relationships and giving you a story to choice your way through with a certain degree of attachment to the proceedings, Until Dawn is a lot more like, "Hey, wouldn't it be neat to play an interactive slasher movie?" It's a lot less about the story and characters being engrossing on their own (they aren't; they are unabashedly genre cliches on purpose) and more about just toying with the branching nature of the story. The game-y parts actually make this a lot more explicit, too, to make seeking out outcomes you haven't seen easier.

Synonamess Botch said
I played the Nier Automata demo [...] Anyone else played it?  

Armand looooooved it and I've heard many others say it's incredible too so it's one I'm hoping to play in the future at some point.

In total agreement with Dix here. I've not played many of these branching narrative games but I feel like they're pretty much in their own bubble at the moment when they could afford to embrace elements from other genres. I dare say there's a potentially huge market here that remains largely untapped.

Until Dawn, though, is one of the few exclusives on the PS4 that I'd really love to play.