Hi all, I’m Zander.
Pronouns: he/him/his
One of my favorite game series of all time is the Sly Cooper series. It was Sly 2 Band of Thieves that first got me into playing video games. The story is super fun—you play primarily as a racoon who is the descendent of a long line of master thieves. The characters are quirky and lovable, and they grow and change over the course of multiple games. The platforming and stealth mechanics are well tuned, especially in the latter titles which are more open world. I’ve seen many very similar mechanics echoed in stealth games since, like Assassin’s Creed. I’ve played through the series many times, with friends and even my parents!
Recently, I’ve been playing Returnal. If someone made an aesthetic successor to the Alien franchise, it might look something like this game. The story is hauntingly revealed through environmental interactions with multiple alien races, and voice logs from the player themself from previous iterations of the time loop in which they are trapped. The bullet-hell gameplay is extremely well-tuned, with support from great mechanics such as perfect reload, invulnerable dash, brief enemy stun, a grapple hook…and I’m sure there are more I haven’t discovered yet. I’m playing it slowly because I only play when I see a friend who lives in Oakland, but really enjoying it.
