The Games We Play: What the Paste Team Is Playing This Week
Every Friday Paste’s editors, staffers and games contributors share what they’ve been playing that week. New games and old, TV and tabletop, major hits and wild obscurities, action-first knuckle-busters and slow-and-stately brain-stokers: you can expect it all, every week, in The Games We Play.
Telling Lies
Platforms: PlayStation 4, Switch, Xbox One, PC, iOS, Mac
Because of school, I wasn’t in the right mind frame to engross myself in a story the way you need to with a Sam Barlow game by the time Telling Lies came out. Now that I have some breathing room, I’m excited to finally play it. I’ve just started, so I don’t have much to say for this edition of what we’re playing this week, but I can tell things might hit a little different considering we’re all under quarantine. The new normal is to see your medical providers, professors, and friends through screen sharing, whether it’s zoom or Discord, so I wonder how the game’s themes of voyeurism, privacy invasion, and whatnot will be affected by that. It feels like it hasn’t been talked about as much as Her Story, but it seems far more complex in terms of both the technology and writing. I adored Her Story and was thrilled with every award it rightfully won, so I’m really excited to finally play Teling Lies.—Games Contributor Natalie Flores
Streets of Rage 4
Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, PC
This loving tribute to Sega’s early ‘90s beat-’em-up doesn’t just channel an overlooked classic. It’s one of two recent games, alongside March’s smarter Treachery in Beatdown City, to revive a genre that was once a cornerstone of the whole medium. The primal thrill and eternal allure of pulverizing waves of bozos with your fists, feet and special moves might have ebbed since their quarter-swallowing heyday in the early ‘90s, but Streets of Rage 4 shows that, when done with love and attention, this kind of violence can be as invigorating as ever.
Pandemic
Platform: It’s a board game
Ironically, the board game Pandemic has become hard to come by in the last few months, with copies sold out via online game shops and Amazon as ironists scamper to snatch up something particularly apropos to our current quarantine situation. As fate would have it, though, my wife and I received a copy of Pandemic as a wedding gift only weeks before the country began shutting down in the face of the novel coronavirus, and thus inadvertently beat the rush before the arrival of the actual pandemic. And now that we’ve had a few weeks to explore the game through a few test runs, I can say that it’s a thrilling combination of strategic planning and “race against time” thrills. The game is wisely structured around several different factors that limit how long any one game can last, which creates a “ticking clock” mechanic that helps make every player’s turn feel critical to your success. It truly demands a collaboratory mindset, as simply taking turns without planning as a team is an almost inevitable recipe for failure—at the very least, you need a coherent, overarching goal. Unique abilities inherent to different player classes offer significantly different ways to tackle the problems inherent in treating and curing diseases as more outbreaks crop up, and the overall pace of the game has a feeling of constant acceleration that builds toward a frenzied conclusion. Best of all, it can be satisfyingly played with only two people, although we’re certainly looking forward to when social distancing has eased and we can play Pandemic with a full, four person crew, as is probably intended. Leave it to an actual, viral pandemic to limit our ability to play Pandemic the board game.—Staff Writer Jim Vorel
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