The Local

This game is great. I don't think its perfect, the game kinda loses its momentum after about an hour into a session, but the vision is there, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't have fun with it. The premise is quite the master stroke. The "movement shooter" genre is pretty saturated at the moment, and the games in that field are really strong, but none of them have focused THIS hard on movement mechanics. Playing movement shooters for just the movement mechanics has always felt a little hollow to me, which makes sense when the game is MEANT to be played WITH the combat, and they're usually built with the assumption that the movement will complement the combat. The Local tries to take the combat out of the equation. You're given a pea-shooter to dispatch hazards in the map, but every hazard can be simply dodged if your movement is good enough. Unfortunately, this is where the game kinda loses the plot. It feels like the "Zen" mode is the intended experience, but somewhere in development, the developers realized that the game needs some objective to have staying power, and they added the other modes. My biggest gripe is with the way "Orders" works, specifically, the way the player's health works. There's fall damage in the game, and it CAN kill you and end your run. It is present in the other modes (including Zen, but it can't kill you there and you can disable it if you don't want it), but the other modes are so fast-paced that the fall damage usually isn't relevant. In Orders, the destination can be placed on top of a floating island that will singlehandedly end your run if you mess up the jump to it, which feels less like a natural challenge and more like an unfair difficulty spike. Other than that, the game is really fun to pick up and run around in for a few hours while you listen to a meeting or something else. I've been using it to keep my hands busy while I'm in D&D sessions on Discord, and it's great for that. Its free for everything except the Inferno mode and some cosmetic options, and I'd recommend giving it a try at that price.