This would be an excellent text for homeschooling or for an extended project. I would recommend this to students who like mystery and adventure. Return of the Obra Dinn takes about 8 hours to play and has a lot of logic and reading. However, you do your detective work by using a pocket watch that time travels to the last moments of the crew and passengers’ lives. You do everything in black and white dithering to emulate old computer games and the game mostly unfolds in still images. It sounds gruesome, but the style helps tame this. We must attach names and roles (Boatswain, Cook, Captain) to corpses we find aboard. The adventure unfolds in a non-linear way and is basically one big logic puzzle. The merchant ship, last seen five years ago, has returned off the coast of England with no survivors. In this puzzle adventure game, you, playing as an insurance inspector for the East India Company, have to figure out what happened on the last voyage of the Obra Dinn. Return of the Obra Dinn (Lucas Pope, 2018) As we witness the Naming Ceremony, we get hints of the conflict about to unfold.Īsk your students: What do we learn about these characters (through direct and indirect characterization)? What do we learn about this society? What hints in the scenery do we see that show this world is more than it seems? This last question provides a significant challenge for your students who may have played the game – what did they notice in this opening that they missed during their first time through?

We are introduced to a tribalistic world and our main characters are an outcast and the “cursed” baby he cares for. As you watch the opening scene of Horizon Zero Dawn (5:30), consider how the setting and characters impact the mood. They released the sequel in 2021, and it’s likely you have students who have played one or both. There are spears and ceremonies and the Old Ones, but there are also terrifying machine animals and artificial intelligence. This is a vast oversimplification for this open-world game that is so expansive. This is an action role-playing game where the action unfolds on a futuristic Earth where tribes battle robots. It made me realise how much I value a handcrafted world vs procedural generation (and I honestly had thought I was a bigger fan of the latter before NMS.Horizon Zero Dawn (Guerrilla Games, 2017) I've been back to NMS several times since release (most recently with the PS5 patch) and despite all the obvious effort and improvements I feel like that early experience just broke the game for me. It made me realise how much I value a handcrafted world vs procedural generation (and I honestly had thought I was a bigger fan of the latter before NMS.) I literally thought to myself while playing 'this is what I had hoped NMS would make me feel like.' The sense of discovery, progression, story, exploration all gel together so perfectly as you go through the world. The game is a technical mess and filled with jank and bugs, but I loved every second of it. Subnautica was a sublime experience for me. What I got was just a random single roomed building with a dude stood in the middle of it doing nothing.

I had expected this slow sense of exploration, finding clues of sentient life, following a trail. Somehow it really shattered the illusion the procedural nature of everything broke down and it ruined the game for me. Then I found the exact same building with a near identical alien a km or so away. It wasn't even the missing features or anything, I think the thing that really ruined it for me is I found an alien base (which was literally just a room with a guy stood in it) on the first or second planet I visited. I pre-ordered NMS and was pretty disappointed on release. Funny you should post this as I just got the platinum on Subnautica last night and have been itching to talk about this exact topic.

Subnautica game too dark