What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?

Supraland Six Inches Under

This is a sort-of sequel to Supraland, which is amazing and one of my favorite gaming experiences of recent years.

I'm thrilled to report that this is hitting all the same notes as the first one. The sense of discovery and the way the game unfolds is a little less magical since I now know what to expect, but the game's big mix of open-world metroidvania puzzle-solving remains deeply compelling to me. It's sort of like a big, contiguous single-player escape room.

Also, it runs flawlessly on Linux via Proton.

Risk of Rain 2

A friend of mine picked this up and got me into it. I'd tried it out single-player before and bounced off of it, but playing it multiplayer is nice, especially because he acted as a sort of "tour guide" for me as we played and got me used to the game's mechanics and items. Without that I would have been alt-tabbing to a wiki constantly and that would have broken the flow.

Now that I'm acquainted with the game, I'm in love with it. Solo runs are exciting and are perfect as background play for listening to audiobooks, while multiplayer runs are fun, tense co-op. I like that the game gives you a lot of flexibility for how you play, and I like that it "respects the rules" of ridiculous item setups in the same way The Binding of Isaac does. In the later moments of longer runs, when you have dozens of items with stacking effects, the game achieves a level of chaos that I find, oddly enough, quite beautiful. The screen is an impressive mess of numbers, colors, and movement. I find it similar to the effect created by bullet hell shooters, only a lot more disorganized.

Also, it runs flawlessly on Linux via Proton.

Geo

This game was a compromise between me wanting to be better about not playing predatory incremental/idle games and me feeling a deep pull to play exactly those as an anxiety management strategy due to Omicron fears.

The game is basically just a clicker game with a bit more gameplay than usual. You mine blocks to get money to mine better. It's great as background for audiobooks or, as I did this past week, watching GDQ (or any other video content that doesn't demand your full attention). It's very grindy and repetitive, so it's really not great if you play it on its own, but as a supplemental game for other activities, it's quite nice.

Also, it runs flawlessly on Linux via Proton.

Off-topic question:

Didn't feel like this was worth a standalone thread, so I figured I'd just attach it here. There was some interest recently (cc: @aphoenix, @Seven, @meff) in doing another "Backlog Burner" month. Are people on board with doing that in February?

I know it's the shortest month, but I figure with Omicron doing its thing in many parts of the world right now, February might be a "stay in" month more than usual -- to say nothing for those of us for whom it's bitterly cold and already an indoor month anyway. Anyone have any strong opinions for/against?

Haven't gotten too far into it yet, but some pals and I who've been itching for 3p coop games just started Wildermyth. Seems super cool so far! I like how the characters will clearly have some story develop between them, rather than being somewhat generic self-inserts (though those can be fun too for immersion).
For The King was the last thing we played and we had a blast with that. Also picked up Gloomhaven but we put a hold on it for now as performance/loading got to be a drag. :/
If anyone knows of games in a similar vein lmk! :)

I'm still playing Deep Rock Galactic with my friends about 5h a week. We are having a lot of fun but one of the guys is starting to lose interest in the game. He played much more than me, at about 200 hours already.

In solo I finished Mass Effect Legendary Edition last friday. I played thoses games when they came out and to revisit them again for the first time in years was a really good experience. I missed this universe and the characters. Since all the dlc were included in that version of the game, some part of the games felt new to me. Took me about 90 hours and I do not regret it one bit. One of my favorite series of games ever.

About 3 weeks ago I started The legend of Zelda : Breath of the wild. I'm new to the nintendo switch (bought one for the kids for christmas, might as well buy a game for me :)) Combat is kind of difficult when you are not used to play with a controller in a 3D world, so I am having some difficulties. But the game is really good. Very open world... I don't know if I'm doing the right thing but it does not matter too much. Last time I played I was exploring and died when I received an arrow and lost 8 hearts in one shot... so I guess its to soon to explore that region. I'm excited to boot it up tonight.

Over the past month or so, I finished 2 games.

• Call of Juarez: Gunslinger had been sitting on my wishlist for a while, so I gave it a shot when it was given away on Steam a few weeks ago. It has some fluid gameplay (except for those damn duels) and interesting ideas. The story is told retrospectively by a slightly unreliable narrator, so some environmental details will change when he remembers a detail, for instance. This one is pretty short - I was done in about 4 hours - so it was over right when it started getting a little stale. Fun time.
• I had been wanting to do a run through System Shock 2 since greatly enjoying the original a few months ago in [immense] spite of its clunky interface and controls. The sequel leans way more into role-playing aspects than the original, with full-on character builds and a more open-ended design to suit the various solutions that different builds might use; but honestly, the role-playing felt like the weakest pillar of this game. Skill points and upgrades are limited, and I often felt more like I was setting myself up for failure against some new unseen challenge when speccing into something. One would expect it to play into the survival-cyber-horror atmosphere, but I just found it annoying. That atmosphere and environmental design, however, were absolutely gripping. This is the first game I've had a dream about in years, it's that good. There's so much tension on the Von Braun, and so many horrors to find in both its past and its present. That being said, I followed the mod guide in Mandalore's video, so objects and textures looked a hell of a lot more modern than twenty years old, but since the style and artistic intent remain the same, I'm not concerned about missing anything from vanilla. I'm excited about Nightdive's System Shock remake, even if a bit cautiously so because of how much it's been delayed.

My partner and I are still working through BotW. He really likes the shrines and climbing mountains, and I enjoy the cooking and wailing on baddies. I’ve been trying to get more of the armor sets so we can go to the more extreme regions more comfortably. The monster masks have been super useful!

XCOM Enemy Within - Story/acting are weak. Once again another game that should be navigable with a mouse, but I had to use a controller. Gameplay itself isn't bad, AI is a little one dimensional though and when I tire of trying to track down that one last hidden enemy I just keep putting everyone on overwatch until the enemey comes out of hiding or the little helper wave looking thing pops up to point in the right direction. I feel like that's one of the things the devs should realize shouldn't be necessary. If during playtesting, players can't find one last enemy that's hiding somewhere so frequently that you have to incorporate a mechanic that gives them a hint of where the last enemy is hiding, then maybe you should fix the AI/game so there isn't one last hidden enemy so often.

Caves of Qud: I'm picking it back up again. I was rolling a new character and found the devs added a Roleplay mode that saves at settlements, so if you die, you load from the last settlement you passed through. I like playing roguelikes, but don't have the patience for them, so I find this as a (potentially) good way to be able to progress. I also want to check out the similar modes in TOME4 and the modern ADOMs to try to get more of an RPG experience. People complain that it can get boring, but I think the randomness between characters can offer great opportunities, since no two runs will be the same in any mode.

EDIT: So, while you don't die when you die, the game is still every bit as unrelenting, it just gives you a safety net. There's also an "Exploration mode" that makes most animals non-hostile initially (which may change rapidly in your game with the faction system).

Shapez.io: I stopped playing for a couple months, came back, and keep losing hours in it. It's addictive, just building things to meet objectives and re-optimizing previous structures when they're used for more than one objective.

Mindustry: I always play this around when I play Shapez.io. I stopped because I didn't "get it," but I fought the last waves for the first level and it started to make more sense: You clear sectors to progress, and I assume you progress infinitely. You also need to mine resources and bring them to your base to research stuff to build better stuff, rinse, repeat.

Littlewood: Now my go-to chill game. Standard chore-based farm/town game, but with a twist: You play as the hero after his game, after he's taken a bonk to the head and forgotten the adventure. He helps rebuild his town that was destroyed in the final battle. Your day is determined by your energy, so once you run out you have to go to bed (unlike Stardew Valley, where you have a timer and potentially infinite energy, and Graveyard Keeper, where time and energy are separate measures, and you'll pass out after not sleeping for too long, whatever you do). I don't feel the need to play it with spreadsheets like I do Stardew, and it doesn't crash my computer like Graveyard Keeper (it'll just freeze my Windows install for some reason).

I played The Pathless, an open world puzzle solving platformer thingy by Giant Squid (Abzu, ex-thatgamecompany employees). It's a mechanically simplistic and fairly easy but gorgeous game. You control a character, The Hunter, who wields a magical bow and you dash around by shooting at these charms in the air that refill your stamina bar. Soon you gain an eagle companion who can help you glide through the air (and do basically everything else!) and the world opens up as the eagle gains the ability to flap her wings more times while carrying you. As far as I can tell it is a truly open open world, if you can see it you can reach it.

As for the story, the land you're on has been taken over by this stereotypically evil looking and sounding character who goes by The Godslayer, and its gods have been corrupted (of course). Both sides had followers, and apparently every other human has died in the war between them, though you can listen to the spirits hanging out by the hundreds of corpses littered about the place. Throughout the game you visit the domains of the various gods, hopefully avoid each of them until you manage to cleanse three obelisks using crests retrieved from the many ruins you can visit, then chase the god down, shoot them until they stumble and fight them head on in these long and very epic feeling combat encounters.

Soundtrack by Austin Wintory!

Elite: Dangerous Still playing this. It's been enjoyable playing in single-player mode, but I found an online community to join (just one of many out there), and participating in the semi-political mode of the game (called "PowerPlay") with other players is opening up another level of fun and engagement. Just last night, we were trying to achieve a certain political objective (expand into / claim a star system), but were thwarted by an opposing party, but only just barely. Though we failed, it was still kind of fun to compete against other people in the game world, by way of hauling cargo to specific spots, combatting other pilots, patrolling or guarding star systems, and so on. As with most multi-player games, it's fun and interesting to attempt to coordinate multiple players' actions to be more effective rather than everyone randomly doing their own thing.