PlayStation 5

Sony’s gaming consoles have long been a staple of my childhood, with my family owning every iteration of the PlayStation console along with its handheld counterparts. Sony famously has a “ten-year plan” for every console they launch and vow to support it for at least that amount of time. Last year, in the middle of a pandemic, they launched the fifth iteration of the PlayStation home console. And what a reveal it was.

I watched their announcement stream leading up to them showcasing the actual hardware and was pleasantly surprised to see such a bold, striking, and alien-esque design aesthetic for the console. It was a deliberate and standout move away from the boxy rectangular shapes of gaming consoles and towards something entirely different. The designer in me immediately began to question why it was the way it was. Surely all of those curves had to serve some functional purpose, right? A big multinational corporation cannot simply have poured all that money into specialized molds and casts to fabricate this wacky design purely for aesthetics, right?

Turns out most of it does have a functional purpose. The airflow patterns required to maintain a general level of cooling inside necessitated a tilting design, and the curved faceplates keep dust away from the air vents by over-extending and allowing the air from the heatsink to blow away the dust. And it is one massive heatsink. It’s part of the reason the console is so huge, towering over the others like a newly crowned skyscraper. Unlike its predecessor, the PS5 is very quiet. It’s got a big SSD inside and yet manages to stay nearly silent during operation.

Most folks looking at the reveal though were mostly concerned about the logistics of it all — would it fit in their entertainment console and would it match the look of the rest of their electronics and furniture in their living rooms? Many jokes were also made about the design of the console resembling a popped collar or a futuristic building, with equal fun being poked at the fridge-like cuboid that is the Xbox Series X and the speaker-esque aesthetic of the Xbox Series S. At the end of the day though, it’s not what the console looks like that matters, it’s what you get to play on it. And PlayStation had certainly created a big name for itself with mega-hits in the last generation spanning several studios. Players weren’t buying consoles based on specs or looks anymore, it was all about the games. And knowing that Sony Interactive Entertainment was about to drop many more big hits on its new toy, folks lined up in droves to wait and pre-order the PlayStation 5.

And wait a long time they did, because as soon as the console launched, it was out of stock everywhere for months. All major retailers restocked and sold out instantly. Eager gamers’ attempts to rapidly click the “Buy Now” button across seven different open tabs were thwarted instantaneously by scalpers and bots buying up the restocks in bulk and reselling them for three or four times the asking price. This scarcity of supply drove up demand even more, pushing people like myself who would’ve normally waited a year or two to get the PS5 to try their luck at snagging one earlier so that they had one ready to go for whenever their favorite game franchises dropped their sequels on the PS5. The semiconductor shortage and several other delays with the supply chains of manufacturing and shipping due to COVID certainly didn’t help either. Almost a year after the console’s launch, it’s still not possible to walk into a store and purchase a PS5, making this a very surreal start to the console generation already.

I had actually given up on buying the PS5 after many curses at the poorly implemented checkout experience on the Best Buy and Walmart sites that would seemingly crash at the slightest overload on their servers. So I just said screw it and that I’d wait a year or two to buy the Horizon or God of War bundle, whenever those come out. Until one day, I received the direct order email from Sony, which is apparently sent out at random to PSN members. I couldn’t say no to this chance, so I logged in at my reservation time and ordered the PS5. A week later, it arrived on my doorstep and I was the proud owner of my fifth PlayStation console.

The first thing I did on my PS5, like most folks, was play Astro’s Playroom. What was meant to be a cheeky little tech demo showcasing the capabilities of the DualSense controller and tutorializing the PS5’s features turned out to be one of the best little surprises on this console. It’s a beautifully made platformer that outdoes the likes of Mario at times and contains many charming odes to several PlayStation characters as well as the history of the brand itself. It’s Sony cheering itself on in a cutesy heartwarming way that we haven’t really seen before. I really enjoyed playing through this little adventure and was blown away by the haptic feedback on the DualSense controller. I had seen reviews and videos explaining the features, but it’s something else to experience the adaptive triggers rapidly spring back and forth as you try to apply pressure on it. Astro’s Playroom featured many gameplay mechanics and levels that demonstrate what’s possible with the controller. It was screaming and loudly proclaiming to all game developers “Hey, look at all the cool things you can do on PS5, now try to think of ways to implement these in your game!”. This game sealed the deal for me as an instant classic when I came across an addictive catchy song being blared out by an anthropomorphized GPU singing with pride about its own capabilities.

The first “real” game I actually played on the PS5 was Demon’s Souls. It was a bit of a strange move for Sony to bundle this as a launch title on the PS5, given that it’s technically a remake of a PS3 game and that it’s a Souls game, which immediately puts off many players. I had played and beaten Bloodborne on the PS4 before, so I wasn’t as intimidated by Demon’s Souls. In fact, the more I played it, the easier Demon’s Souls got. It is perhaps the most “exploitable” Souls game, with you being able to cheese many enemies and bosses with magic as well as grind XP to level up quite easily. Despite being a remake, the underlying code governing the AI of enemies was not changed, so many of the techniques that worked back on the PS3 also work in the PS5 remake. There are quite a few quality of life changes, like the addition of omni-directional rolling and being able to send items back to storage directly from the inventory, which were all greatly appreciated. The game also tries to make some of its notoriously obscure features like World Tendency and Character Tendency clearer with tutorials and messages lying on the ground. At the end of the day, it’s still a Souls game with all the quirks and tediousness that comes with it.

Visually, Demon’s Souls was gorgeous. It really does showcase the power of the console when you stand on a tall battlement in Boletaria and can see far out all the way into the King’s Tower. Every level is dripping with visual details, with revamped animations and lighting. You can feel every magic spell cast, every consumable ingested, and every successful riposte to great effect with the controller’s haptic feedback and controller audio. It’s truly special. Maybe the most stunning thing to me was the complete lack of load times, thanks to the PS5’s SSD. Respawning after dying and teleporting to archstones is so instantaneous that it’s hard to get used to at first. We’ve been hardwired to expect a loading screen, even if it is for a few seconds, to go into a new area. But there’s nothing at all here, just a mere second of fog while the game spawns you in the next area. After years of opting to play many of the games with long load screens on PC specifically because I could play them on a SSD, it finally felt like I could get the same experience on the big screen in my living room. This felt like the biggest game changer about the PS5 to me.

The next game I dove into was Returnal. And this is easily my Game of the Year so far. It is weird, different, strange, unique, challenging, and rewarding in a way that not many games today are. So many AAA-titles stray too close to the same narrative structure of tension, conflict, and resolution with boring shootout segments in addition to tacked-on puzzles. So it was refreshing to see such an oddball attempt from Housemarque at genre-blending metroidvania style progression, a roguelike structure, bullet-hell gameplay, all with top of the line third person shooter mechanics and gunplay. And it was difficult. It’s an unforgiving game that respawns your cycle all the way at the beginning if you mistime one dodge agains a particularly tough miniboss, forcing you to be hyper-aware of all your actions and movements at all times. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, and it certainly took a while for me to start falling in love with it, but when it clicks, the payoff is so satisfying that it’s hard for other games to top it.

My only criticism about Returnal though, is its complete lack of a save system. As of August 2021, you cannot save your cycle mid-run. The developer’s recommendation to get around this is to suspend your game and put the PS5 into rest mode, which in turn necessitates disabling system-level features about not installing game updates or system software updates in rest mode. When you’re being told to go into the PS5 Settings menu to turn off global settings for one game, you know there’s a problem. And even doing this doesn’t stop your cycle progress from being erased if the power goes out. It’s actually shocking to me that the game even released in this state without a save system. On a podcast, the game director mentioned that the intent with this game was to preserve the arcade-style “commitment to a run” game feel, and they certainly accomplished that with Returnal. But it’s still possible to have a save system for people who might need to drop everything in an emergency to take care of a child or a pet. There are many ways to design un-abusable save systems while preserving the integrity of the arcade feel, and not having it is a big misstep in my book.

Aside from that one save issue, Returnal hits every mark in full stride. The weapons are all varied and interesting enough to dramatically change gameplay (especially with the trait upgrades), the Arrival-esque narrative is drip-fed to the player through several sequences and cryptic lore tablets, and the game is visually stunning. The environments, the animations, the enemy designs are all a feast for the eyes. The game even manages to have a unique implementation of the adaptive triggers, allowing a half-press of L2 to aim and a full-press to engage the alt-fire mode (which is announced quite loudly through the controller audio when it’s ready to go). You can feel every raindrop and Selene’s footsteps through the controller, and it’s incredibly immersive. And again, the non-existent load times make it incredibly quick to hop back into a run or rapidly zip around the map through fast travel points. At the end of the day, I know many folks won’t be able to put up with the grindy nature of the game and the patience required to commit fully to a two or three hour run in Returnal without a proper save system, but I was thankfully able to get over those roadblocks and it still managed to be the best thing I’ve played all year.

Finally, the most recent game I played on the PS5 was Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. And just in time too, because Insomniac released a 120 Hz mode that runs at 40 FPS in Fidelity Mode. A nerdy aside for a second: games typically run in 30 FPS or 60 FPS modes because the refresh rates of most TVs and monitors are 60 Hz (the framerate needs to be evenly divisible by the refresh rate to not have screen tearing or frames landing on the wrong screen refresh). Typically, 30 FPS modes target higher visual fidelity and 60 FPS modes target higher performance. Now that 120 Hz TVs are hitting the market (one of which I happen to own), Insomniac has decided to target 40 FPS, which just so happens to be evenly divisible by 120 and happens to have a very similar visual fidelity to the 60 FPS mode. It’s a nice middle ground between 30 FPS and 60 FPS, and I played all of Rift Apart in this 40 FPS @ 120 Hz mode, which was truly the best of both worlds.

The game is an absolute blast. This franchise has always been about maximizing fun, and Rift Apart definitely delivers. There’s a new character, multiple dimensions, new gameplay mechanics, and an actually engaging narrative that knows when to get serious and when to deliver funny moments. Every new planet you visit has some new traversal or gameplay thing to learn. There are tons of unique and novelty weapons that synergize and combine in interesting ways. And most importantly, it’s fun. The game legitimately feels like you’re playing through a Pixar film with all the high quality lighting and animation. The complete lack of load times, yet again, surprises in the most delightful ways as you rip through several different dimensional rifts in a matter of seconds. I had to do double-take many times in this game because I didn’t realize when it transitioned from cutscene to gameplay or when the world immediately changed to a new dimension around me with absolutely no load times whatsoever. It’s that revolutionary. This might be the first game that truly takes advantage of the PS5’s SSD to evoke a “I can’t believe that just happened” feel.

So that’s we’re at now. I’m shocked that the PS5 has already received three top-tier exclusives in less than a year after launch. It usually takes two or three years for the good stuff to start coming out. I’m even more surprised that the ongoing supply shortage is still ongoing and that it’s projected to last deep into next year. But so far, I’m pretty happy with my PS5 and am looking forward to playing the new Ghost of Tsushima expansion that just came out and then dive into Deathloop next month. I bought the console for Sony exclusives, and I’m being treated to quite a handful of them. I’m excited to see what the visual fidelity and performance gains of games like Horizon Forbidden West and God of War Ragnarok will be when they come out, and what little tricks Naughty Dog will do with their upcoming games to truly leverage every possible performance improvement from the PS5 towards the end of its lifecycle. It does feel like we’ve stepped into a new era of PlayStation with the SSD allowing for instant load times and the DualSense controller evolving for haptic feedback in novel and unique ways, and I’m now fully onboard this wild ride.