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

After watching a short video on youtube I ended up buying a copy of Rain World. I know I should have waited since there are a ton of other games I also want to play, but the last update said that there would be a price hike after they publish their expansion and I already wanted it enough that the pricing game actually worked on me.

Rain World is a very strangely magical game.

Practically nothing is ever explained to you. There's a short slideshow that shows how your player character gets stuck where they are, but they don't tell you what kind of creature you are or anything about the strange location you find yourself in. The world is filled with untamed life stretching through miles of what looks like abandoned buildings. And there are predators all over the place who are looking to eat you.

You could call Rain World a metroidvania, but that frankly does the game a disservice. Sure it's got a sprawling map to explore that will require a lot of skill and inference. But the thing that makes this game so much different is that this game is full of life. Every animal and plant that can be interacted with are procedurally animated, making them move around in strangely organic-feeling motions. They also have really well designed AI that goes so far as to give them personalities. They even interact with eachother and remember how you treat them, which causes them to be either friendly or hostile. You can even train some of them to follow you around and guard you from the others. Rain World isn't just a static adventure, it's a living ecosystem.

It's a game that's also brutally hard until you learn the tactics of survival. You actually have a very wide and complex set of movements; the game only tells you about a 10th of the possible moves you can perform. While you have no hand-to-hand combat, you can pick up rocks and spears to defend yourself - though don't expect any given predator to go down with just one spear. You're also under a constant time limit; Each day there is a limited time in which you can go out and find the food you will need to survive because at the end of that time it will rain and flood the entire world minus a small selection of safe spots you can rest in.

I'm just kind of amazed at how interesting I find this game. It feels almost random at times, but in reality it's presenting the entire world, including it's ecology, as a giant puzzle for you to master.

I have been playing Prey (2017) and it has given me a lot to think about with how I interact with modern game design. I love the concept of "Play your own way" advertised in the game, but really, it feels like it's more akin to "Play based on your skill point path (or lack thereof) and the challenge proceeds from there".

After about 16 hours into my play through I have realized a few things, and maybe this is a reflection of what I want out of games and not the game itself:

1. Why am I essentially an engineering intern performing chores for like 4 hours? I get that I can read books of "lore", but I am uninterested in your home brew D&D campaign and it's rules. I know I can skip this, but the 4 hours of chores makes me feel obligated to engage with something, or else I'm just doing busy work.

2. Realizing that the "multiple routes" don't actually make the experience more fun. Maybe this would benefit me if I had a self imposed challenge, or was the type of person to replay games, but I am essentially checking out every route at the same point.

3. the game wants you to play in a "correct way" (the same flaw I saw with the Dishonored games, I don't want to call it good and bad though), but is way more fun mechanically to engage with the "not correct way", in which I get achievements for being a terrible person (but good for science!).

4. I started this blind play through on the Nightmare difficulty with all survival options on, and I still feel like I am given unlimited resources to do with as I please.

I thought I was going to be coming into a game that would be more of a brain twister, I guess this is what fans of the immersive sim genre had lead me to believe. I am having fun, but that comes from ignoring what the game wants me to do, rather than engaging with it. I do like the sci-fi aspects of the game though. As of right now I would give it 6.5/10, definitely worth one play through, I'm hoping the ending makes up for it, and I am kind of excited to try Mooncrash, which seems to be focused on the game mechanics.

Power To The People

It's a fun little grid based game where you run a power grid company. You start off with a tiny town and have to supply power to it. The city expands, new cities are established, you have to perform maintenance and infrastructure improvements to keep up with demands. It's not super realistic because equipment is allowed to operate beyond their intended capacities, for example low voltage power lines have a default limit of 30MW but you can go beyond that for short periods of times without triggering any safety cutouts. Something that is kinda neat is that the game only pauses at midnight, once you're done building and press Go time keeps going until the next evening. You can still build but you can't pause the game.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

Some of my friends started doing co-op randomizer runs of OoT. I love the idea of running a randomizer with them, but I've never actually played the game myself. Thus, I figured an actual solo runthrough of it was in the cards for me (it's long overdue, actually).

I got it running on my Steam Deck via Ship of Harkinian, which is a pretty very incredible PC engine port that adds a ton of quality of life features to the game (most notably an increased framerate and right-stick camera controls and you can set a toggle so the owl defaults to not repeating himself if you button mash through his tutorial comments).

I haven't played it long enough to have actual opinions on the game itself, but I'm liking it so far and it's perfect for playing on the Deck.

Grand Mountain Adventure: Wonderlands

This reminds me a lot of Lonely Mountains: Downhill, except it's skiing instead of biking, and it's also more relaxing and less punishing.

Each mountain is its own little open world with different runs and paths and secrets. Also, you gain speed by slaloming, so even just navigating around is fun because you can get into a good back-and-forth rhythm with the controls. The challenges make it more difficult, because you can't just turn at turns and expect to do well -- you have to slalom your way through the course while making sure you're hitting the turns and making the gates, which takes a lot of finesse but feels really good when you get it right.

It's a genuine hidden gem, IMO. I'm loving it so far.

Paradise Killer is a weird murder mystery loveletter to early 90's platforming collectathons, being weirdly low-fi in its environments and 90's anime in character design. You've got to double-jump and airdash all over a dying island to interrogate the remaining members of an immortal apocalyptic cult dedicated to the resurrection of elder gods about the murder of their leaders, as well as a bunch of lesser mysteries along the way.

Did I say it was weird?

It falls down a little bit at the very end when you bring your evidence to trial. I was expecting Phoenix Wright and instead had a fairly dry rendition of the facts that I'd gathered, but it didn't spoil the meticulous gathering that I put into discovering my truth. And it really is your truth, whatever that ends up being. There's no achievement for getting everything "right". It's weird and janky in ways, and is really heavy on existential dread. My favorite item description was on a soda I bought from a vending machine:

A slightly sweet melon flavoured soda best enjoyed on a summer's day, under a tree, fearing the last drop and having to return to whatever it was you were doing.

It's heavy in just the right way.