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The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt gameplay footage (from August 2014)Tighter spaces can also lead me away from the game's narrative. The movie-authentic environment assets of Alien: Isolation are mesmerizing in their detail. It's easy to be distracted by a monitor, by a helmet or something personal left behind by a long-since-gone inhabitant of Sevastopol Station—they probably buggered off to write nonsense on a wall somewhere—and completely forget about the instant-kill threat that shadows each step from one save point to the next. The way a light silently spins in its casing, a warning of something that's been and passed—distracting enough to leave the motion tracker unmonitored. Isolation's poking about necessitates caution, then—but I still play it to feel a part of its setting, rather than a character desperate to escape it.BioShock Infinite's floating, failed utopia of Columbia is The Last of Us–like in its approach to world building: it's not a go-anywhere sandbox despite the suggested scale, the game funneling your progress down set pathways, ensuring your gun's sights are always pointing in the right direction.Yet when I previewed the game ahead of speaking to series creator Ken Levine, I spent more time perusing the plant life in its Garden of New Eden, listening to its barbershop quartet take on " God Only Knows" and exploring each corner of its fairgrounds full of freaks. When Ken asked me about a particular sequence, I had to stare at him blankly—I'd only just reached the ball toss, so what came after that flash of extreme violence, I had no idea. I was too busy getting up close and personal with loaves of bread, to see how pixelated they were(n't), and chasing hummingbirds.
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