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

Obligatory BG3. Long time fan of CRPG (OG BGs, Dragon Age, the Owlcat Pathfinder games, Divinity series, etc) and enjoying it just the same, with some occasionally annoyances - it being a BG game, I am going back to some BG (and Pathfinder WOTR that has similar controls) muscle memory and being stymied, like when the "Something that is possible a trap was detected" sound goes off hitting Space to pause which doesn't work in BG3. But no game is perfect and I'm quite happy with it.

That said - save early, save often. Autosaves don't kick very regularly and it's easy to get accidentally completely rocked in seconds if your attention drifts.

I have mentioned Palia before. Well, it's in Beta, not Alpha, so the NDA is lifted.

Oh. My. GOODNESS. Palia is such a sweet game. And I don't mean sweet in a "Bruh, sweet!" way, I mean it's cute, and tender, and cozy. It's the first MMO I've ever played where, as far as I am aware, the character cannot take damage, never mind die. Where the closest thing to combat is bow hunting, where yes, you get hide and meat, but there's no animal body, just a cute little bag with your loot. The emphasis, therefore, is on crafting and community. It's as if Animal Crossing invaded Everquest or World of Warcraft and evicted all the aggression. It's a truly different game.

Add to that, the monetization plan is "free to play, and only cosmetics are for sale" and it's the most casual MMO I've ever heard of.

I picked up the remaster Chrono Cross The Radical Dreamers Edition. I already played the text game it came with ("Radical Dreamers") thanks to ROM translations, and frankly the only reason I bought it. It's great to see it released outside of Japan so more people can enjoy it.

I'm just now getting to Chrono Cross itself for fanfic research purposes for nostalgia, and I find the AI scaling of the "remastered" backgrounds offensive. The PS1 graphics may have been janky and not aged well, but the island environs is now overly smooth and has that AI sheen to it I've come to recognize and loathe.

EDIT to add a positive: This is one of my favorite battle systems. It's turn-based, but with the added challenge of elemental field effects and stamina-- you'll need to strategize when to defend, cast spells, or beat up the enemy.

Also, one of my favorite soundtracks of all time. The remastered tracks are a delight too.

Question for those with Steam Decks: what have you recently enjoyed? Always want to hear what people are playing on theirs!

I've mostly been tinkering around with Path of Exile ever since that PoE 2 gameplay video dropped. I'm constantly surprised just how well it works with the controller. Too bad it needs to reconnect each time I wake the SD, but the load times have been minimal. I'm extremely casual with PoE, so I'm just following some random leave starter builds. Not really a fan of Crucible in general (it's just boring and extra random), compared to the one with delving (and I hear heists are also ok). I'll check in again when the next expansion releases.

Been playing some Hotline Miami on my Vita. Recently found my Vita collecting dust so I thought I'd charge it up and play with it. However, since I've been kind of burnt out with gaming and can't play for longer than like 5-10 minutes at a time, I wanted something that I could just pick up and put down at any time. Got recommended Hotline Miami and I've been thoroughly enjoying it. It's a little difficult but very fun to just pick up, kill baddies, and then put down for next time. The game is pretty forgiving and has a lot of checkpoints in a level so when you die, you don't lose too much progress on a level. Definitely recommend the game!

Nothing quite scratches my gaming itch like RimWorld.

I swear I'm up to some obscene amount of hours just faffing with religions and royalty. Trying to have a royal nomadic, peaceful colony is hard graft I tell you.

I recently introduced my 5-year-old son to gaming through A Short Hike on the Switch.

I've been a bit nervous about the right age to introduce him to games. I know plenty of people start their kids younger, but even though I've always enjoyed gaming and know the value it can offer, I also think it's vital for kids to really experience real life things first. But now seemed like a good time.

It was a brilliant experience for both of us! He took to the controls very quickly, and soon became obsessed in the way only kids can with collecting shells and catching fish. He's done great at reading the dialogue on his own, and eventually learned that he could get new quests and items by talking to NPCs. It was so awesome to see how excited he got when he got each golden feather, and when we reached Hawk Peak he was beaming. He couldn't die, there's no fall damage, no combat - just good wholesome adventuring.

It's a top game anyway for any age, but I highly recommend it as a great way to bond with your kid as their first game.

I recently finished playing through Chrono Trigger for the first time and had a blast with it. The story behind how I started playing it is that I wanted to get into jrpgs a bit more after beating Octopath Traveler, and I just happened to remember that I heard about Chrono Trigger being very good. And good it was, I played the SNES version and it honestly aged very well. Battle menus were basically the only thing that felt a bit awkward with how cramped they were, but you couldn't really do much better with snes resolution. I was expecting it to be a bit more difficult than it was though, but that could just be because I was right after fighting the true final boss in Octopath Traveler (which requires pretty decent preparation beforehand and knowing what you're up against), while the final boss in Chrono Trigger wasn't that bad. On the other hand, the rest of the game was more challenging than most of Octopath (which I really wish had difficulty options), so that's nice

But hey, I heard that Octopath Traveler 2 has a harder final boss than the 1st one, so I'm looking forward to getting absolutely destroyed once I get to playing that game!

I've been playing Xcom 2 again for the hundredth time. This time on my switch though, gotta say it's a pretty decent port, the only thing I hate is the lack of legacy content. I don't see why they removed it

Still, it's a great game with some crazy progression in it.

I play Hunt Showdown a lot it's a nice game and very challenging but the main reason i like it is because the whole gameplay loop only lasts for 45 minutes tops which fits perfectly with my busy schedule . You will need to invest a lot of hours if you want to be a top hunter but the game doesn't force you in that direction in any way.

Lately i've also been trying out elder scrolls online it's pretty decent and very chill fun game. It does have micro transaction and DLCs but it doesn't force you to buy anything if you don't want to, there is a lot of content if you just buy the base game which is on sale now on steam btw.

I've been playing the hell out of Total War: Warhammer 3. I bounced off TW WH3 a year ago and picked it up again recently since there was a big sale.

Finally went in with a learning attitude and found i absolutely adore it(Same thing happened with EU4 funnily enough). The setting is a rather important draw for me. I look at the other TW games and dont experience any draw since it feels like unit diversity will be nonexistent since medieval, roman, or egyptian settings dont have much diversity in army composition between the empires historically(and its all humans), plus I dont think historical games like that will have magic like WH does.

I'm enjoying the Warhammer Fantasy universe so much and I absolutely cannot wait for more DLC and hopefully a TW WH4 in the future. I strongly recommend it for anyone into RTS and/or TB Grand strategy. The faction

The last week or so I've been playing through Sleeping Dogs which has been surprisingly fun. I really generally don't like open world games and Grand Theft Auto in particular is not fun for me, but something about Sleeping Dogs clicks. I think I'll be wrapping up the storyline tonight.

I've also been playing Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair which is a nice throwback to a Donkey Kong Country style 2D platformer. Enjoying it but I can only play it for 30 min to an hour at a time or it feels a little too repetitive.

I started playing Ozymandias, which is a semi-abstract strategy game with an ancient empires theme.

Unlike, say, Civilization, it’s nicely paced. It’s turn-based but turns are simultaneous; everyone queues up their moves and then they all happen at once. I didn’t time it, but I can finish a game in one sitting. Compared to Compact Combat, there’s more depth to it and I’m only starting to figure it out. I’ve only played single-player and it might be a while before I can decide if the AI players are good.

There’s no tech tree as such. You can buy improvements with research, but they are abstract like improving the amount of food grown on one terrain type. Also, you get to choose from two opportunity cards each turn and sometimes they have a technology theme.

At the beginning there is a land grab where you spend food on flags, which let you claim tiles. When empires grow to touch each other, combat consists of positioning units so they push at borders between empires. All your units have the same “power,” which fluctuates depending on how much money you spend per turn, but power also varies depending on terrain improvements and nearby cities. It takes two turns to conquer a tile, so you have warning and can reposition your units to try to prevent it. This tends to result in stalemates as empires react to invasion attempts, so you need a strategy that they will find hard to counter.

I started playing Unpacking last week.

It's a very beautiful, relaxing indie game about unpacking the boxes of your life into new living spaces as you get older, but at the same time very melancholy if you are part of the lost generation with no hope of being able to buy and own a home of your own in the foreseeable future.

I beat Hyper Light Drifter last week and am now playing Moonlighter which is a roguelite where you do dungeons to grab materials and items then the next day open shop to sell your items for gold.

The game is pretty fun with a good gameplay loop and the shop helps break up the runs which is really nice. The pixel art is top-notch and colourful too. I've been enjoying my time with it overall. My only gripes are limited weapons/movesets and the game is fairly buggy (at least on the Switch).

Luck be a Landlord

Ever need to kill time on long plane flights and layovers, where you're too tired to do anything meaningful but sleep is also out of the question? That was me last week. So I played a lot of Luck be a Landlord on my phone. The game sits in a perfect sweet spot of mindless enough to not ask much of you, but compelling enough to keep you playing.

The game is essentially a roguelike deckbuilder where you choose the icons that appear on slot machine wheels. Different items have different values and effects -- for example, some icons gain points when adjacent to each other, while some icons destroy others but give big payouts each time.

After every few spins you owe an increasing rent payment to your landlord, so only by strategically directing the randomness can you stay ahead of the pay curve with your slot machine winnings and not lose the game.

My first few rounds I didn't really love the game. It seemed a bit too random, and I didn't have a top-down picture of a lot of the synergies and strategies at play. Also, once I started to parse those, I spent way too much time trying to force a specific type of run (and failing, because the randomness wouldn't give me the icons I needed) instead of doing a more "play it by ear" approach and building around what became available to me.

Once the game "clicked" for me, however, and I learned how to lean into the game's embrace of randomness, I couldn't put it down. Part of this was because it was the only thing that helped me forget that I was bog tired on long flights, but the other part of this was because the game has a lot of tantalizing possibilities that are often just out of reach, so you want to have another go or two to see if you can get a successful launch.

The game has "floors" that are different difficulty levels. You start at floor 1 and make your way up to floor 20, with each level adding a new obstacle that makes winning more difficult. When I started playing the game, I spent several hours on floors 1-3, and almost gave up the game on floor 4 after trying several runs and getting nowhere.

Thankfully, I pushed through, making it to floor 8 on my flights and in airports and feeling quite achieved in doing so.

It was clear that the game had fully grabbed when I got home and, instead of tossing it aside now that it had served its purpose of getting me through my travel, I instead picked it up on my Steam Deck and started over at floor 1 (then running quickly through all the way through floor 20). It's a good time.

World of Warcraft (retail) roleplaying

While Official Classic Hardcore doesn't drop, I have been playing and roleplaying on World of Warcraft (retail). From a gameplay perspective, it is not a great game for 2023. The tab-targeting, rotation-based combat is outdated and inherently unsustainable since upping the difficulty is a matter of increasing the number of buttons that must be speedily pressed, as well as the amount of elements on the screen.

Retail WoW is in serious need of a UX and gameplay revamp. There's just too many buttons to press and too much shit on the screen.

I'm using a rotation helper, which is an addon that literally tells me which button to press at any given time. So the game feels like a glorified auto-battler. The fact that an MMORPG allows such a game breaking addon to even exist is a demonstration that there's something very wrong about its gameplay. But, unless you want your eyes to bleed and your fingers to fall off, that is what you do. And it's not like basic rotation by myself is any fun anyway. So fuck it.

I'm not really playing for the mechanics. Moonguard is the most active RP (roleplay) server in the game and this is why I'm there right now.

It is great to walk around talking to people in-character. I even made a friend that I am "tutoring" on roleplay. They are incredibly shy and insecure, and I'm pretty sure they feed me GPT lines from time to time. Not because it's a bot, they just use it to mask their anxiety. They seem to have a problem differentiating between themselves and their character, so everything someone does to the character have an exaggerated effect on themselves. We roleplayed for a few hours, and I even used an in-game quest to advance my story.

The Total Roleplay addon has an extension that allows me to write my own quests by altering assets already present in the world, and even make my own items. It sounds laborious, but not too complicated. Maybe I'll do that in the future.

Yesterday I've read quite a bit about dwarves, because my dwarf Paladin's backstory is kinda weak at the moment. Interactions are getting stale quickly because I don't have much to go on. I did meet a romantic Dracthyr and a demon hunting Worgen.

I unlocked the Kul Tiran just because they're so big and female characters look awesome. But I'm not really in the mood to level yet another character at the moment, and the character boost is egregiously expensive.

Looking at people's TRP3 profiles in Stormwind can be a lot of fun. Some profiles are super long and elabore, complete with images and, sometimes, theme songs. Serious roleplayers put a lot of effort and that is awesome.

I got in a RP guild, so hopefully I'll be able to go beyond walk-ups and develop some stories.

I have been completely obsessed with Transport Fever 2 for about two weeks now. I love that it's continually a puzzle to solve, you set up a new line to bring one piece of product to another place and you need to make sure all your ducks are in a row.

After that, it's about ironing out all the kinks in your transport; finding what stations are overloaded, what need fewer trucks, maybe there's a better way to transport what you're trying move? How about distribution once the product gets to the city you need it at? All these little details to iron out, thinking about how to maximize your efficiency (which I suck at), has just completely enamored me.

The other thing I love about it and this might be slightly contrary to my previous point: it's very much like an ant farm. You spend a good amount of time just watching things move; no quick reaction times or thinking about big decisions needed. The other fun aspect of this is the ability to "ride" everything within the world; jump on your train, watch it drive through a tunnel, fly on your aircraft across the map, jump into the eyes of a pedestrian on the street and watch them try to navigate your traffic ridden hellscape.

I just love this series.

Playing The Last Spell and Brotato for the next episode of my roguelike podcast.

The Last Spell - a kind of tower defense / crpg mashup with a great heavy metal soundtrack. The sprite work in this game is incredible and the artwork overall is very well done. Gameplay systems feel a little overly engineered or too heavy in some instances but I'm still early in the game. It feels like a medium heavy weight euro board game, which isn't at all surprising given the developers listed that exact thing on kickstarter.

Brotato - maybe the first to follow on the success of Vampire Survivors and really find success in the subgenre. I don't really get why this game is so popular outside of twitch streaming. I can only criticize it so much given that it's a solo dev effort, and if nothing else it's great to see the dev get the success he's gotten. But the aggressive lack of theme doesn't leave much of a lasting appeal for me. It's a fun pallette cleanser after such a heavy game like The Last Spell, but IMO there's other, better ideas from the VS-like genre out there now. Of you know you're into that kind of game it's likely worth the very low price of admission though.

Plan B: Terraform
I’m a sucker for terraforming games and I’ve held off for as long as a could because it’s still in early access but it was on sale for $8 so I took the plunge. So far so good, love the smooth graphics and super easy UI. The zoom in and out is gorgeous in my opinion. I’m going to have to play more for an actual review but so far so great especially for the price.

Valheim

It may be the best game I've ever played. It's a survival-craft game with interesting combat mechanics. What is lacking in character graphics is more than made up for in environment graphics. My only complaint is that the multiplayer game requires you to join a public server or host your own. It's too easy to use cheats so you may end up playing with folks who use cheats.

I just finished up Octopath Traveler 2, and was incredibly impressed. I loved the first one, but it lost its shine once I started working towards the epilogue. The sequel however is better in every single way, leading me to fully complete it. I loved how the epilogue neatly tied together everyone’s side quests, and the characters themselves. They all seemed much more likable than the first games’. If you have any interest in turn based RPGs please give it a shot

Master Detective Archives: Rain Code

Danganronpa's younger cousin made by the same team; instead of teenagers trapped in an academy being tempted to kill each other for freedom, it's about an elite team of detectives sent to investigate the mystery of a completely isolated city, ruled by a hilariously corrupt & brutal police force that takes every opportunity they can to execute the main characters. I'm still sorting through my thoughts about the game though I think I'm settling on good but not great. While the dev team carried over many mechanics from DR, they also deliberately chose to contrast some designs which I believe made it worse since they were going out of their comfort zone rather than playing to their strengths. If there's a sequel for this, I'm certain it would refine the original's flaws and surpass it.

Characters is one such element that suffers. Unlike DR's cast who are all suspects and active participants throughout the game, Yuma rotates partners with the other Master Detectives along with new suspects and Peacekeepers for each case. As such, there's less screentime for everyone aside from their dedicated chapter and everyone has fairly basic personalities.

Mystery is another thing that is lessened due to the established rules of the Mystery Labyrinth. For one, Shinigami will not take Yuma there until he gathers enough evidence to solve the case lest he is guaranteed to die there. As such, the culprit and case is easy to solve just by looking at the gathered evidence and the cases that do get complex telegraph the solution just by progressing; there isn't any sudden testimony or evidence to shake things up and twist the case around. Because the Mystery Labyrinth plays fair and doesn't lie, it doesn't get to pull the rug under your feet.

The Gumshoe Gabs are the friendship scenes which are leveled up by finding glowing but hidden collectibles around the city with some being chapter exclusive. This probably fits better than DR's gacha gift system & limited Free Time Events due to the smaller core cast, but it also means dealing with a pixel hunt instead or just looking on youtube after finishing the game.

Overall, the game carries the bombtastic style of its predecessor, but doesn't reach the same heights or tension. If you're on the fence, I'd advise waiting for a PC port due to all the lengthy loading screens and at least half-off if you're patient.

Overwatch 2 released on Steam 3 days ago. Yes, it's at 91% negative reviews right now, but if you've already been playing the game like me on Battle.net (in my case, 7 years now) you may as well lose one launcher and just play it on Steam since it launches from it directly. I'd rather have the devil closer to me than it running even more processes in the background of my computer. I hate this game, but I'll always play it. I love those custom games way too much.

I installed Call of Juarez: Gunslinger and L.A. Noire. The second I haven't really played yet but the first I've gone through the first 30 minutes and damn, I wasn't expecting it to be that fun. I didn't really know anything about it so it was a welcome surprise. That's mostly been what I've been doing gaming wise

I managed to play a bit of the Payday 3 Closed Beta that just ended and as someone that played Payday 2 from the start and some 800 hours after that, Overkill has somehow made the same exact game, but with a fresh feeling. All the essentials are still there - shooting cops, bagging cash, and throwing it into the back of a van. It's the less obvious changes that set it apart and probably aren't as easily noticed by players new to the series - movement and actions are more fluid and have more weight, regular police are no longer swarms of tissue paper enemies but actual threats that require substantial firepower to put down, stealth is vastly improved with the ability to interact with objects without masking up, and being able to move bodies without bagging them, though it's still a much worse stealth system than stealth-oriented games, which isn't surprising.

The new skill system is vastly streamlined from the previous game's skill trees, which should make build-crafting much easier as there's no longer the previous game's convoluted skill point math to contend with. Unlocking new skills in a skill line and new attachments for your guns by using them is a decent enough system that forces players to be familiar with those things before they can specialize, though it does add another layer of grinding. The menu UI could use some work, but I won't nitpick that here. Overall though, this is going to be a great Payday game for old fans and new players alike.

Other then Baldur's Gate 3 (which is the first game I've bought on release since Borderlands The Pre-Sequel in 2014...) I've been enjoying Dota 2. I was never a huge MOBA fan growing up but occasionally played some Heroes of the Storm. I got into Dota with some friends and have been enjoying it a lot more then I thought I would. Even when I don't really have it in me to play with/against real people I usually start up a bot match to practice. The only problem with it is some people can take the unranked mode too seriously, even at low skill levels, but that's what the mute button is for.

I am in closed alpha of Silence of The Siren.

It's a Heroes 3 clone in space. And it's super good. They took the best pieces of HoMM3, polished them, said NO to weird fun-breaking parts of later installments and added some fresh twists.

The game is gorgeous. They really took their time and worked some cool details in while keeping a pretty good overall feel.

I can't wait to play more maps and factions!

Been playing Forgive Me Father and god do I love it. I think I'm in love with this boomer shooter genre, which is funny, because while I played some video games in the 90s/00s I was mostly on consoles and never played the original doom or similar games so it's not entirely a nostalgia thing. I think I just really like the fast pace. I'm probably going to play Project Warlock after this.

Ngl it gives me the game dev itch. Makes me want to try making a small one as a project.

Just picked up Disco Elysium and Mount and Blade Bannerlord for ps5. Put about 8 hours into DE and 15 hours into Bannerlord in the last week which is the most time I've spent gaming in months.

Elysium surprised me by how interesting it is. Very impressed by how many dialogue option there are without devolving into just repetitiveness. I spent a while getting a ham sandwich from a guy and convincing my partner to share it with and hearing about weird race science shit and it didn't seem to affect the story at all but it still was fun (and funny). I like the politics baked into the game, and the overarching nilhistic feeling. Would give it a solid 8.5/10 so far. I consider it more if like an interactive novel however than a "game" but if youre into that definitely give it a try.

Bannerlord is so close to exactly what I want it a game, my big complaint though is a lot of it is wide as lake but shallow as a pond. Dialogue options are very repetitive and while there is tons you can do and dozens of locations and factions, in the end there's only like 3-4 ways you can interact with each. Still a lot of fun, but I think a little tweaking and it could be the type of game I put a thousand hours into instead of maybe 50-100.

Started playing Arma Reforger again. An intermediate entry into the series that is supposed to bridge the large technology gap that is being developed for Arma 4. The early access launch was pretty bad, with multiplayer (no real singleplayer content yet) being unplayable as you would get kicked from a server after 5 min. That has since been fixed and a recent patch also added more detailed health system. It is still very bare bones compared to previous Arma titles, even for being EA. But it makes up for it in polish that the series has sorely needed. The old engine is pretty much abandoned (finally) and everything is being rebuilt from the ground up.

Still good old Arma 3.

Tried the PAYDAY 3 beta… wasn’t my type of game. I removed it from my wishlist.

Just some good old Bloons Tower Defense 6 with friends.