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What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
For the first time in many months, I finished playing through another whole series. This time it was the recent Tomb Raider trilogy, starting with the 2010 reboot and going into Rise and then Shadow of the Tomb Raider. I believe it's known as the "Survivor" timeline for the series, as opposed to the Classic and Legend games.
That first game has been talked to death at this point, so there is not much to say about it now. The sequels seem to be passed over in conversation a lot but they're improvement upon improvement from the original. The gameplay of the series holds pretty strong throughout so if one enjoyed the first game in this trilogy, the other two games are safe bets for about 50+ hours of enjoyable content that go for really cheap prices on sales these days.
I've played through the first Tomb Raider (2010) game a handful of times since it came out. I really enjoyed the Batman Arkham Asylum level design approach it took, where the world is semi-open and there are things hidden all over it so you must use your platforming and puzzling abilities to collect everything. Between that and the tomb raiding throughout the games, there's a lot of itch to be scratched if that's your thing. Each one gets better than the last in this regard, adding more challenge tombs and refining the collectible collecting more and more.
One thing I was surprised by when playing these games is how little combat there is overall. Not to say there isn't any, especially if you're only playing the story missions and running through the game, but there's not as much as you would expect if you put in the time to explore the world and collect everything. And if you're at all half-decent with a mouse and keyboard, the fights really do not last long. These games were made for controllers, and imprecise aiming, so being able to plant some headshots will really make combat trivial. In fact, it's so trivial, I never engaged with many of the combat mechanics these games have to offer. Maybe higher difficulties would encourage me to go that way but so much of the combat mechanics revolve around crafting special kinds of ammo. As long as you can plant headshots often and consistently, there's really no need for them.
The really interesting thing to me about these games is Lara Croft herself and the story that she gets put through here. I remember shortly before Tomb Raider (2010) released there was some mild controversy over the game's director or producer suggesting that they want to make players feel somewhat protective (with shades of paternalism) towards Lara. The controversy was in how he contextualized it (he originally suggested that there would be a sexual assault attempt in an interview with Kotaku but the final game leads me to believe he either misunderstood a particular scene or he greatly misspoke there) but I think the point he was trying to make was interesting given the final Lara Croft we got in this trilogy. This is the first Lara Croft with a real attempt at personality... but they made her a Disney princess. This idea of "making the player protective" of Lara Croft was an interesting misstep that took years to play out, and in a way that left me going from wondering what the issue was to understanding why the issue is bigger than anyone may have first realized.
Let's get everyone's favourite bit out of the way first: the "ludonarrative dissonance". Yes, Lara Croft is all kind and helpful and she kills hundreds of people in each game. So does Nathan Drake. So would Indiana Jones, if he had a video game like these. This isn't really a problem for me, this is the genre of treasure-hunting adventuring. I've seen this notion of "but she kills so many people!" mentioned about TR2010 more than anything else about the game since it came out but it ultimately pertains to nothing in the greater scheme of the game itself except a head scratcher. It doesn't do anything to take away from how much fun it is to play, how good it looks, or how solid the story of the game is overall (compared to previous Tomb Raider games, at least). Yet this point is brought up so often that Uncharted 4 even included a tongue-in-cheek Achievement about it. But Rise of the Tomb Raider also addressed this, in quite an interesting way that it either didn't realize it was doing or it did not want to call out specifically.
After the constant criticism of "ludonarrative dissonance" with Lara having to shoot a bunch of people despite her Disney princess personality, it felt like there was a need to address this with Rise of the Tomb Raider a bit. The second game's villains are portrayed as borderline genocidal maniacs. Just insanely violent, with a lot of bloodlust, driven by religious zealotry. This is a group that has been committing horrific violence and genocide against groups of people around the world for centuries. This isn't some fun, ideal world outside of some mercenary groups in ancient tombs, this is a world where life is very, very cheap. And in the actual plot, there are multiple situations in the game's story where Lara chooses not to kill someone when she has them dead to rights, and then it quickly becomes evident she probably should have killed them to prevent more harm and suffering. But the game doesn't make this point explicit at all, as one would expect. In fact, perhaps it did not want to highlight this at all, but that's the world it portrays.
Lara is still the jovial, always helpful type throughout all this, going out of her way to help anyone and everyone. The Disney princess aspect holds strong, even when it's to her detriment in this game, and yet it does not waver. We've gone from the first game where Lara's Disney Princess attitude is at odds with the actions she has to take in the game to this second game where Lara's same attitude is now actively harming her in the story but it's largely going unacknowledged. This struck me as especially strange since this was the second game in this series and it was time for Lara Croft to display some character growth. The creators seemed to have taken in the criticism of the tonal discrepancy and factored it into the game world and story... but not Lara Croft herself. In the first game, she was just trying to survive an island she got trapped on filled with amoral mercenaries. Now she's trying to stop a genocidal group from getting unlimited power of her own volition. She's gone from hardeing over the course of a bad experience to being an active agent in stopping evil people but yet she still approaches it as if she was the first game's early Lara Croft again.
So what's up with the last one, Shadow of the Tomb Raider? Well, it's the same bad guy organization from the last game, and now this one takes place with Inca and Aztec elements, including a whole city lost in time and preserving of ancient rituals, so human sacrifice is a more prominent element here. The game is even darker than the last two, there are graphic depictions of live human sacrifice multiple times, the idea of children being subjected to it explored, and graphic depictions of corpses in many locations. Life is cheaper than ever here but Lara is still the same Disney princess as before. And yet there is so much of this game's story that is utterly haphazard and sloppily written. Nonsensical retcons, forgetting about remaining plot strands from the previous games, creating new situations that aren't fleshed out long enough for it to really be of concern even though one cutscene refers back to it 30 hours later in the game. The game floats along with a certain attitude and tone for a while, and then suddenly takes a sudden turn of events that has to violate its own logic quite heavily to accomplish this. Shadow of the Tomb Raider's story is very clumsily written, you could almost play a drinking game with how many aspects it brings up only to never use again or violate later. So much of this game's story starts to fall apart when you start thinking about it for a minute. Rhianna Pratchett's absence from this final game is very much felt.
But there is one brief moment in the game when it looks like they're about to do something really daring and interesting with Lara Croft. As if there was something building up after three games, coming to a head, and would finally transform Lara from the naive girl from the very first cutscene of TR2010 to something else. It comes after Lara is at her lowest point in this game's story after she has lost her main allies and things are at their worst (which, in the game's haphazard way, all happen in the past half hour so it's all quite fresh for the player when this happens). Here's the moment. It's grim for grim's sake, it's clumsily written, it's almost cartoonish. It almost feels like it's a moment out of The Last of Us 2 in how overly violent and cruel it is. But it's awesome.
It's personality. It's growth. It's Lara Croft suddenly breaking out of her mold, internalizing her experiences, and growing in a direction. This is the most memorable bit in the entire trilogy for me because it felt like we finally got to see Lara Croft transform into something else after all these experiences. I didn't necessarily like that she decided to go hyperviolent about it but I understood it. We were on a similar page for a second there in terms of what I wanted to do in the game and what Lara wanted to do in her world. It wasn't supposed to be morally good, it was supposed to be the drive to commit acts of violence.
And then it's gone. Literally by the end of that video, it's all back to business for Lara, complete with self-doubt and a defeatist attitude, and she's a Disney Princess for the rest of the game.
I finished these games a while ago and I otherwise would have forgotten about the story, if it weren't for this one moment. It made me realize that trying to make Lara Croft so likeable was a decent enough idea but the insistence on keeping her that way throughout the series was a big mistake. When I think back to the classic Lara Croft, or even the Legends one, she is calm, cool, and collected. And does not give a shit about shooting some bad men. These are also worlds where life is cheap, but Lara was not written as a super kind, helpful, best friend of everyone type. She was a woman on a mission and that was all she was about. With this series, they wanted players to feel a lot of care and want to protect Lara... and I don't know why they kept to that for the entire series. They torpedoed any natural character development as a result because it seems like she doesn't learn from any of her experiences even if the script claims she does.
She was always supposed to be more, she is a world class adventurer who can do things that entire teams of mercenaries with all the resources in the world can't do, especially intellectually. She starts this reboot trilogy as a young, naive, inexperienced young woman starting to finally chase her father's legacy. It makes sense why she would be that way at the start. But she's still that same way at the end of the trilogy when she absolutely should not be. After the kinds of people she's dealt with, after all the horrible things she's seen these people do, we really should have seen Lara go from people-pleasing likeable into someone who is decisive and sure of herself and her abilities, evil organizations be (literally) damned. I think the reason that one brief moment from Shadow of the Tomb Raider stuck out to me is that it finally felt like they might be evolving Lara from the "golly gee" character to the one we may have seen in the Classic or Legendary games, and the possibility of that excited me more than any other part of the story in all three games. But alas.
In the end, I'm just confused about what kind of character they wanted Lara Croft to be considering they reverse or reject any avenues of growth. The insistence on keeping her "likeable" doesn't play out as well as I think even they would have wanted or expected because it makes her predictable, boring, and kind of annoying. It makes it seem like she doesn't actually learn or acknowledge anything about her situation or circumstances even when the plot almost literally rubs her nose in it over and over. It's not a story where a plucky attitude wins out over everything. I think I would have greatly preferred a Lara Croft who was not interested in pleasing everyone, someone who wanted something in return for every favour and exchange, and someone who wasn't interested in making sure that everyone liked her.
Great breakdown, I enjoyed these games as well and wanted to replay Shadow again with my RTX card to see the RT effects they added at some point.
I wish more games would take the sudo open world design that the later games in this series took. Eidos studios seemed to make a number of these style games, Deus Ex Human Revolution and to a lesser extent Mankind Divided. I feel it gives me almost everything that I want out of an open world game but actually allows the developers to tell a good story alongside it. I usually feel like open world games fall flat story wise because it never feels like anything changes as a result of your actions whereas this format encourages it. Plus it allows the developers to swap to a new map and change up the scenery a lot to keep things fresh instead of cramming it in to an open world where a 25 minute run in a direction will take you through a forest to plains to desert to mountains to the arctic.
I'm still playing Outer Wilds.
I'm a little better at piloting the ship now, which is a relief, and have actually managed to avoid ghost matter a few times. I'm working on filling out my Ship Log until I figure out what to "do," although I'm running out of items with the "more to explore here" note. I still have a lot of question marks in the log, too. I'm not sure if all of them get a little picture when I visit the right place. If so, I probably have more to explore than I realize.
I'm still very, very perplexed as to what's going on. In case it's interesting to people who have played the game, I'm going to write out my current theories below in a spoiler. I expect to be wrong, so please don't correct me! I'm completely unspoiled about this game. This is just in case you find my clueless speculations interesting.
Extensive Outer Wilds spoilers
Okay, so. The Nomai had a Vessel that crashed while following a signal from something they called the Eye. The signal coming from the Eye was older than the universe itself. There were three escape pods that jettisoned from the Vessel. I've found two of them, and the third is in the Dark Bramble. Feldsparr is also probably alive and in the Dark Bramble.
At some point, the Nomai started research into warping at the White Hole station. They found that people who use the warp arrive before they left, already realizing that something unusual was going on with time. Their research on warping is somehow tied to the Quantum Moon. One of the Nomai landed on the Quantum Moon. I tried to "pilot" the shuttle as much as you can, but couldn't go to the Quantum Moon. I also had no luck trying to approach it in my ship from the south pole.
The Nomai were very worried about building a Sun Station. I think the Sun Station is tracking the Eye? I assume that it got built, because there's definitely something near the sun that I can't go to without burning up. I think that the Sun Station is what explodes at the beginning of the game, and that the catastrophe that the Nomai were worried about keeps happening over and over again. Something went wrong at the Sun Station.
There are a lot of Nomai skeletons in the Sunless City. I'm not sure what happened to them.
I have absolutely no idea what the Projection Stones are for, the ones that give you that trippy visual when you put them in the right place. Am I seeing through walls? The past? A parallel universe? Absolutely no clue.
As for what I'm supposed to do, the only thing I can guess right now is that I'm supposed to recreate Feldsparr's route. This is a little ridiculous, but I think I might be Feldsparr, just caught in some time bubble thing. Probably not, though, as I assume the older people on Timber Hearth would recognize me.
Right now, the things that I most want to do are:
On @Stranger's suggestion I'm going to try to fill out my Ship Log, then do the DLC, then finish the main game. One problem is that I can't delineate between the DLC and the main game, as I've always had it and don't see some extra option for it in the menu. I hope I figure it out!
Living vicariously through those that are new is the closest I'll ever be to playing it again. Take your time with it and enjoy it, there's nothing else quite like it
I am excited for you. I won't say another word for fear of spoiling you. But I eagerly await your next update.
If you haven't beaten the game yet, I actually highly recommend finishing the main game entirely before tackling the DLC. I can't say why without going into spoilers.
Without going into details, the DLC is accessed in the same save file as the main game and won't be a separate option in the menu. But it's quite clear it's a separate area from the main game once you find it. If you have beaten the main game but haven't found the DLC, let me know if you need a nudge on where to find the first puzzle piece and you'll be good to go from there.
I love the art of this game and will be looking forward to the developers’ future releases. For me, the gameplay is not compelling. Although I did give it a good 15 hours. Not enough for me to finish but enough to understand what they were going for. Super elaborate puzzles where you learn a fictitious history just don’t do it for me.
I'm starting to ramp up in Vampire Survivors, I've had it for ages, but hadn't really played much of it. I've just barely unlocked the Arcana system, and 3 total cards so far (VI - Sarabande of Healing, XVI - Slash, and XVIII - Boogaloo of Illusions), I have a total of 79/190 achievements unlocked, which is a fairly good indicator of how much more game there still is for me to unlock.
I love how I can pick up my steam deck, and I can commit to a maximum of 30 minutes for a round, so I don't feel pressured to keep playing if I don't feel like it.
I mentioned a couple week ago that I restarted Triangle Strategy (on Steam Deck instead of Switch this time). I'm enjoying it, and I'm making different story choices from the last I played...But wow, this game is a grind! Most of my time has been spent doing the mock battles and redoing prior stages to get resources and level up my characters. Sometimes I'll do the same map over and over and over to get a character up to a certain level. I'm used to grinding a lot in JRPGs; I just don't remember doing this last time.
After like 6-7yrs, I've gone back to Rimworld! I previously only played one colony for like 50hrs (which is a lot), but I kinda forgot how to play altogether. I'm just doing vanilla right now; not even any of the DLCs (though I do own Royalty). I'm normally someone who's fairly anti-mod, but Rimworld is one of those games where I understand the need for mods. Some of the UI is clunky. So I need to find some QoL mods. I'm not really looking to "expand" the game at the moment, just make navigating through UIs less tedious or having to have the Wiki up another screen. Any suggestions?
Haven't played Rimworld in a while myself, but two mods I remember not being able to live without are:
Color Coded Mood Bar to catch mood fluctuations quicker
Heat Map to give a visual indicator of temperature variances (for cold storage, bedrooms, etc).
I had about 40+ mods at one time for various things, but those are two that should be vanilla, just off the top of my head.
The Vanilla Expanded mods are great and a must for most play throughs. Also one of the modders are part of the developers for RimWorld.
There are a lot more mods that has QoL stuff.
Thanks, I'll try these out!
I did get the two u/godzilla_lives recommended (thank you!), along with Work Tab, Compact Work Tab, and Item Finder.
My colony is still tiny at only 7 or 8 pawns, but somehow they've all survived their first year. Though not without some close calls!
Now that I've "remembered" how to play, I might do a new start with the Royalty DLC turned on. Or I'll just keep going with this colony for a bit longer. We'll see.
If you are looking for mod lists, after you familiar yourself with RimWorld, I would recommend the lists that Mr. Samuel Streamer, which he builds for his YouTube series.
Also, as for the number of pawns, I would not recommend going over 10. Mostly because your game will run like shit. I would shoot for 7 or 8 pawns, that have more than one specialization for your colony. See Streamer' latest series to see this in action. I
No problem, glad to be of help. :)
squintsUhh... huh... what...
what... what year is it?
It's so bright out...
where am I?
who are you?
what's that smell?
So, despite not liking Divinity Original Sin II or really being a fantasy fan at all, a friend and big overall fan of D&D convinced me (by hounding me and subsequently buying me the game) to try Baldur's Gate 3, and dear gods am I glad she did.
I am not a big fantasy gamer, I usually trend towards Mecha/SciFi settings and away from fantasy/magic. Story is important to me, but most games are pretty lacking in that respect in all honesty. BG3 though, it's honestly a masterpiece in gaming.
Gear actually feels useful and not just a this-one-has-bigger-number swap slot.
Most of the classes feel unique to one another (from those I've played/respecced into/outof) allowing varied playstyles even within the same class.
The story is amazing, varied, and has only felt on rails a few times. The dialog is awesome, I've had moments where I was laughing, moments where I was pissed, and I literally made one enemy bleed out and suffer as slowly as possible before I killed them for what they did.
The graphics are great, the scenery is awesome, the game is absolutely rock solid stable.
I have very few gripes and of those that exist they are generally minor annoyances about moving around in the game, dice rolls requiring mouse usage, inventory sorting, and camera angles during cutscenes/dialog sometimes being behind a character or object and blocking the view.
For a game that I hadn't intended on playing at all to be this good is a rarity for me. Diablo IV bored me at just the right time and at present I have 110 hours 27 minutes on my first BG3 playthrough. I haven't even finished the story yet, this first go is with one of the pre-made characters, using the same party all the way through, and I am already planning the next playthrough with an entirely different theme and likely mods to expand a bit (without breaking the game) and fix some of the above annoyances.
Chants of Senaar puts you in a Tower of Babel (never named) where each floor is inhabitted by a culture that speaks a different language. All these people forgot to talk to each other and aren't getting along. Not to worry! We can fix this!
While there are other gameplay mechanics, such as stealth sections, item usage and device operation, the main gameplay objective is to learn languages. Each language, both when written and when spoken, is represented by its own unique set of glyphs - nothing too complicated, mostly relevant nouns and verbs, negation, plural, etc. The game contains just shy of 200 glyphs in total. Each language has its own twists - radicals, ligatures, syntax changes, etc. The game lets the player (re)assign any guesses to any glyphs that have been encountered, and those guesses will be displayed in dialogue henceforth, making it more intelligible.
Certain triggers in the game will make the protagonist pull out their trusty journal and draw the things that some of the glyphs represent. Presumably, at this point, we've seen enough that we're supposed to be able to drag the corresponding glyphs to match them with the drawings, after which those glyphs will be marked as confirmed and their guess labels replaced with permanent labels. I found this the clumsiest part of the game by far. Sometimes the character drew things when I still didn't know what they were, so the confirmation mechanic itself led me to the knowledge, which wasn't satisfying. Other times I'd been sure of what a glyph meant for an hour but somehow missed the trigger and couldn't confirm it. Infuriating!
Throughout the game, the player climbs the tower from the bottom to the top, navigating around the hindrances posed by each floor's natives' distrust for each other. The art direction is pretty good and the twists and conclusion are fairly satisfying. I don't want to spoil much about this, but I felt the game was satisfying enough.
OK, that's the casual game out of the way. Are you a glutton for punishment? An actual, bona fide masochist? Do you get whipped every morning, noon and night? You just might be hardcore enough to play Tiny Thor!
In this 16-bit style platformer which I've seen described as "Celeste with fights," you play as child Thor, future norse good of hitting things with a hammer. In celebration of his birthday his jolly ol' dad Odin has gifted him a magic hammer, mjolnir! But that sneaky dastardly trickster Loki is sniffing around, and he's up to no good...
The game starts you out with some basic running, jumping and tossing a hammer at things. The hammer can actually be aimed and bounces off everything (including the edge of the screen, this is important); it can toggle things on, push things, collect things, kill enemies and more. It's Thor's main tool for interacting with the world. Throughout the game, you unlock genre staples like wall jump, double jump, air dash, etc.
Tiny Thor is a bit of a glass cannon. He can destroy almost anything that gets in his way, but everything can kill him, too. Things like crushing, spikes or water will slay Thor instantaneously, forcing you to restart from a checkpoint. Sometimes, it takes a fairly long sequence of tightly timed actions to go from one checkpoint to the next. Get ready to die about a million times! Spread out throughout the game are blocks that can be hit to give Thor an extra "heart". The heart prevents some types of damage... exactly once. The heart will then fly out of Thor - think the rings in Sonic games, except there's only one and it's bouncy as hell. It can be recollected for a few seconds before despawning, but the timer is cumulative - if you lose your heart again, the countdown resumes exactly where it left off.
It's not easy - and might be impossible - to collect your heart anyway, because environments get extremely deadly. Remember how water insta-kills you? Several levels feature rapidly rising water, because fuck you! Enemies are also straight out of hell. Don't expect basic pattern monsters like in Super Mario. Instead, almost every type of enemy will beeline straight for Thor, including but not limited to snails that run exponentially faster when our back is turned, bees that position themselves to shoot indestructible stingers at Thor from afar, bats that divebomb you and must be hit at least twice, penguins that can swim, slide ultrafast on platforms and also divebomb you, unkillable pillbugs and, worst of all, goats that jump really high, bounce off each other to make their attack patterns unpredictable, ride air currents and somehow end up landing right on top of you each time. Fuck those goats.
There is a built in achievement system that rewards you not only for regular story progression, but also for defeating each boss fight without getting hit, collecting gems from levels (this makes the levels harder, although once collected they stay collected, even if you die or don't complete the level, which is nice), or beating challenge levels. Challenge levels, which are optional, are the same hellish nightmare I described above but about twice as hard and with no checkpoints. About half of the achievements in the game have (according to Steam) been obtained by less than 10% of its players, and several by less than 5%. I imagine some of the ones I didn't get are even more rare.
I confess it was pretty satisfying to beat it, though.
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I'm still doing Starfield. I don't have time for the endgame content (I want to do these quests in a sitting each, at minimum) and lost last weekend to a changing schedule, but I'm doing the Crimson Fleet/SysDef quest and... it's pretty good. I think they did a great job with the major content.
I started Outer Wilds and don't get it yet. I don't want it explained, either, but it's so open and lackadaisically narrative that I want to peel it open in time. I also died because I landed rough and didn't put on my spacesuit before stepping out. I'm not missingnany information about goals for now, but you really have to lean into the game to get this info, which I find great.
Finally got around to picking up Cyberpunk 2077, and the game is really good. I was excited about this game pre launch and was put off by it when it finally did launch and everything was a mess of bugs.
That being said, the game is stable enough now that I can enjoy it and it certainly is a well fleshed out game. The brain dance investigations are one of my favourite parts, although it does kind of hold your hand through them.
The level of dedication to dialog and story building can be a little much at times (has anyone read every collected shard). It does create a nice overall atmosphere.
I'm about 28 hours into the game and have come across two bugs. One causes a game breaking audio glitch, so I'm ignoring that particular event for now. The other was causing an elevator to stop working.
There are so many storylines/quests to follow that it does become slightly daunting. Doesn't help that mission prompts will pop up in the middle of other missions. Just random phone calls for help. I guess it does add a level of realism that someone could call out of the blue.
Only change I would like to see is how vehicles handle. Most cars travel like they're hauling a trailer which deters me from using them in favour of using fast travel. It's a shame because I do enjoy the sights of night city.
It feels to me like they're encouraging you to use your own cars you buy, because any vehicles I've bought have handled much better than the ones I've stolen. Even, like, the base starting car handles a lot better than the not-Lamborghini you can steal.
I think I've finally played enough Starfield that I can start playing the other games I was planning to play. Over 200 hours in, I've satisfied the cravings enough that I can wait until the modding scene is developed and I can have an even more amazing experience.
Next on the list is No Man's Sky - there's an expedition running now, and I've managed to catch all the expedition for the past... almost two years? I've been really enjoying all the content added to the game recently.
Cruelty Squad was shorter than I had expected it would be, but I really liked how abrasive it was while still having good levels and controls. I appreciate a game that encourages you to test its limits and try to break it.
Deus Ex is a game with a similar ideology for its world, it just doesn’t want to assault your senses. (This was a coincidence, I’d just been meaning to play them both for a while.) I’m far enough in to have sent the distress signal in New York and I’m loving all the little nooks and crannies there are to find and the way the game responds to so many of the things you do.
Hot take: Deus Ex pretty good
SANABI
An Early Access 2D grappling hook game where you play as a retired military general swinging into a cyberpunk city for revenge. It took me about 6-ish hours to complete the 4 out of 5 chapters available, nice for a day's gaming with the inherent replay value of grappling hook swinging. I'd say the game really nails the feeling of being a badass with just the right amount of hitstun for taking out a foe and the areas designed well enough that you can just keep swinging without stopping (save for the Factory where you have to wait for the moving platforms to block the lasers). I do agree with some of the steam reviews though that the cutscenes and dialogue feel long for its genre and break up the action even if I do enjoy the story's surrogate father/daughter dynamic. The cutscenes are skippable and there's a speedrun mode for people who just want the gameplay.
Genshin Impact
Well no, I haven't played for a long time or done anything past the first area because I'm getting the F2P feeling of falling behind and not knowing how anything works. Still, my friend keeps talking about it so I owe it to him to actually give it go. Last thing I remember was looking up team comps I could form with my available characters which was some triple ice setup with Kaeya, Chongyun, and Barbara?
I just know my general next steps are: do enough of the endgame area to unlock the F2P character there, do the current event with the new city, and get enough adventurer rank to unlock the 2nd region.
I finally finished Diablo IV's campaign, and I bought the game at release. What a slog.
Like, ok, the story isn't too bad (compared to III at least...), but it was soooo long. It went on and on and I just wanted to be done with it. There's also - like in many games - a strong disconnection between the story ("hurry up Lilith will destroy the world, we gotta catch up with her"), and the actual game that offers hundreds of side quests unrelated to the main quest.
Aside from that, it's not a good game. Diablo II was immersive, Diablo III was dumb fun, Diablo IV is just sad and boring. It's a pile of baffling design choices.
I still played the 1st season for a few hours, and enjoyed it a bit more than the campaign, but aside from trying the other classes, there's nothing interesting to do.
Oh and good job Blizzard on that multiplayer aspect. The game is dead, I haven't seen another player since a few weeks after launch. Truly worth the always-online requirement.
I’m surprised how boring the biomes are in Diablo IV. Didn’t feel like they got interesting until I was apparently in the last area of the game.
Cyberpunk 2077. Started a new game for the new DLC since and it's been fun to see how a difference choice of background affects things.
FFXIV. Keep intending to start the 6.x patch content but avoiding it to do other things instead. It's a mix of the last expansion feeling like the end of the story and also not wanting to be "done" with the main story.
Derail Valley. An early access train simulator, a bit more gamified than the usual simulator. After playing a lot of Factorio recently I kept thinking about how a lot of games have very simple mechanics for trains and wondered what a game with more complexity might look like, and how you might add things like loading yards and more complex signals. Derail Valley is a completely different genre of game but does have some of those elements and has been a fun way to learn more about how real trains and their logistics work.
For some reason I keep going back to the good’ ol simulator games. For me it’s been the past weeks nothing else than Farming Simulator 22. The game offers a wonderful experience and is really relaxing in the busy times I have at work. I’ve launched a server and it’s with some friends we meet up in the evening and simply talk while playing this game in the background. For me it’s more about meeting up with them than playing the game but hey it’s a nice extra.
Other than Farming Simulator, I’m sometimes tapping a bit into Baldurs Gate 3. Is an amazing game but I need to push myself a little to play this as with all the stories it can become sometimes a bit overwhelming.
I really want to like Age of Empires IV but the game feels so dull and barebones, like an objectively worse AOE2. It forces you through an incredibly dull unskippable tutorial on first bootup that drags on for way too long, while the campaign mode itself feels like one of those shitty history documentaries you'd watch in primary school more than it telling an actual story. When AOE2's campaigns feel more engaging from a narrative point-of-view, you know Relic fucked up.
Hades. Very good game. Bought it on Steam because there was a sale on and I needed something new to play on the Steam Deck. It's one of those games that I'd be playing well into the morning if I didn't have to get up for work.
Tiny Tina's Wonderlands is a weird game that I've been playing purely to spend time with a close friend of mine who wanted to do more gaming with me. I absolutely loved Borderlands 2's Assault on Dragon's Keep DLC, and releasing a full-blown standalone game based on the concept of Tiny Tina hosting a D&D campaign should have been a winning formula. But the game suffers from way too many callbacks to past Borderlands games and characters, which were fine in the context of AoDK, but not here. Another problem I have is that Wonderlands' weapons are completely and utterly dogshit. They feel like they have very little impact or feedback, and that the rate in which you level quickly turns enemies into bullet sponges.
Played a bit of I am Setsuna and I am already finding that game fucking dull. Chrono Trigger remains one of my favourite JRPG's of all time, but this feels more like a small-scale knock-off than a spiritual successor, and from something published by Square Enix, that is downright shameful. Tokyo RPG Factory just cannot make a compelling setting or any likeable characters. This may actually be Final Fantasy XIII levels of bad. It really doesn't give me much hope to ever see a decent Chrono Trigger remake.
A final game which I only played a few minutes of on Steam (despite it being Verified for Steam Deck, it crashed to a black screen after less than a dozen random encounters), but played a lot of on iOS was Cthulhu Saves The World. Incredible RPG, well worth the relatively tiny price tag I got it for.
I found and started playing Dyson Sphere Program. As someone who spent hundreds of hours playing Satisfactory, this scratches that itch. In fact, the more I play it, I think I like Dyson Sphere Program more.
It's all of the fun of figuring out the logistics of a giant factory, tangling all of your conveyors like spaghetti, and pushing for optimization; but there aren't enemies to fight, so you're free to just go and build.
I really like how even if you're not producing enough power, everything doesn't just shut down, it runs at reduced capacity so you can work to increase your output.
There's also a more robust production design. There's a whole subset of multiplying your production, stacking materials on belts, and making things more efficient.
I'm looking forward to unlocking the rest of the research and building the sphere!
DSP is a really great one. I'm looking forward to their next big release to play through again
I've been playing F-ZERO 99, which I can't believe it's here. Initially I struggled with it until I plugged in my controller using a wire and since then I'm a happy boy. (Actually I'm using a SNES Mini "Wii remote connector" controller, plugged into a GBros adapter, plugged into my Switch dock).
The game feels like F-ZERO to me in terms of handling. The additional things like the orbs and skyway, and being happy not winning, make me think of Excite Truck and Excite Bots which is just fine by me. I'm looking forward to many more races.
I had been doing a NG+ playthrough series of Sekiro, trying to get the Shura ending. I reached the final boss for this particular ending maybe sometime in August, and I just hit a brick wall. It was so hard on NG+!
Some other stuff happened, I was traveling, started doing playthroughs of Dark Souls 3 and Armored Core 6, etc., and I just lost my touch at the time.
A few days ago I sat down to get a feel for the controls back and learn the boss fight. I practiced for a few hours every day until finally I had beaten the final boss for the Shura ending 5 times. Then I decided to hit record, and I was able to defeat him on my first try!
Man, I love Sekiro. I actually regret doing my Dark Souls 3 play through after the Sekiro playthrough because it doesn't feel as satisfying in comparison. :/
Recently Trackmania (and Openplanet) updated, and Nadeo re-added the endpoints for Better Chat and... you can feel the changes, it is that bad.
I can move it around, make the whole thing show up for a few seconds only so I can focus on the race (instead of every message individually lasting like 30 seconds), can actually use the gamepad to race while keeping the message window open (base chat the only thing you can do is start to close, still locks the whole pad).
Oh, and it's actually at a easily readable font by default unlike base chat's too small or too big issue on Steam Deck.
Only issue I have is that I can't close with the start button, but seeing how I can still race and the text box isn't distracting by itself I'd consider that a nitpick.
That's all on the TM front for now since the autumn update isn't live, but yeah if you install 2020 you should also install Openplanet. If only for better chat.
Also after seeing Aliensrock videos I've begun playing Balatro's demo (full game TBA), in which you play the biggest poker hands you can to maximize to beat a target score in as few hands as possible.
It's a fun but difficult game which does suffer slightly from the usual pitfall of this type of roguelike (namely randomness and "buildup syndrome" where a early choice/mistake may screw you over way later) even if they try to mitigate it somewhat (just how reusable some jokers are and multiple upgrade paths like leveling up hands themselves for randomness, and scores constantly building up making mistakes hit you fast for buildup syndrome).
It definitely felt more "fair" when I lost compared to Dungeon & Degenerate Gamblers (calvinball blackjack).
Lastly I've been enjoying Arknights's IS3. Integrated Strategies is the roguelike mode of the game and is basically Slay the Spire but combat is TD, recruit operators (that you own, mostly), collect a ridiculous number of relics to buff yourself and debuff the enemies, yadda yadda.
Most notable is a trio of relics which basically cut in half the enemies' max HP (which alongside another relic that halves my fast-redeploy unit redeploy time gave me my first win) and one relic which deals a good amount of true (unblockable) damage to all enemies when you leak which saved my ass twice.
But the main reason I've been enjoying it is that it basically needs a fast-redeploy nuker, and Kirin R Yato is always fun to see turn into a buzzsaw and slaughter a bunch of enemies.
Which can be an issue as Kiriyato is a collab unit so not coming back and either more common replacement aren't as good (Red's filing other niches, and Phantom's skill is more finicky than hers from what I read).
I've been working my way through The Last Case of Benedict Fox which was on Game Pass. It's this Lovecraftian inspired Metroidvania which sounds intriguing except that the story doesn't really exist except in oblique hints and disjointed conversations. I'm about 4 hours in probably and I seriously could not tell you what the plot is. I'm some kind of paranormal investigator, my father and his new wife were involved in some kind of occult group and now they're dead and I guess I can explore their memories? Or something?
Idk. Metroid games don't have a clearly plotted narrative either but at least there's a fully fleshed out world and lore that they're building on. Benedict Fox just seems to take that for granted.
The game isn't anything special. The combat is clunky and slow and truthfully pretty rare. I've seen a lot of people say it's hard and I think that's because the game does a terrible job of explaining what options you have or providing you with confirmation that what you're doing is effective (no health bars, status bars, few indicators on hits, even for "bosses"). But enemies are relatively few, truthfully. The most annoying part for me is that so much of the map looks the same as you're traversing and there's no minimap so I have to pull up the map every ten seconds to make sure I'm still heading where I intend to head.
I think I'm about 65% of the way through but it's not a game I would recommend.
I’m one of very few people that has eagerly awaited Witchfire. To be honest I didn’t even know what genre it was until I loaded it up a few days ago. I just knew I liked the developers and it looked fast-paced and pretty.
It turns out to be a single player raid/extraction shooter. You alternate between a home base and portaling into different zones to get loot and beat a boss. There are only two zones right now - the game is in early access.
Overall a very fun experience but it has some rough edges. The game could do a better job at explaining itself. It’s the kind to garner a base of players chanting “git gud” - so maybe the devs wanted the game to be obtuse? It’s not super hard to figure out, I had a good understanding after a couple of hours.
Not really worth the $40 but should be a good value after its full release.
The new Separate Ways DLC for RE4:R is out, and I had a blast playing through it again. It was a nice short expansion for an already great remake that I loved, and well priced, imo. I feel like the new characters are a bit broken in Mercs mode, but so, so fun.
I've recently picked up Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart on PC. I really enjoyed the original and Future series (to the point of even playing the spin-offs), but I fell out of love with the PlayStation consoles so I haven't bought any since then. I'm still too early in the game to give a proper opinion about it, but it's very neat so far. Feels almost like a soft reboot with the way they highlight the original and future trilogies in the beginning.
I've also been replaying Skyrim with a load of mods, both to wait to see if Starfield gets better, and to wait for Starfield to get mods, neither is mutually exclusive to the other. I feel Skyrim doesn't really need an opinion stated, but I've far preferred it over the shooty games Bethesda likes to put out.
Going through some of the Sonic games I've never played. Right now, almost to the end of Sonic Battle for the GBA, and also playing Sonic P06, which actually makes Sonic 06 a good game. Trying to procure a copy of Sonic Chronicles, but having a hard time.
I have recently been getting into Age of Empires IV. I put in hundred of hours in the year (or so) at release and thereafter, only recently really getting back into it. And it even has an expansion coming soon!
I can only recommend it to those that used to play RTS games because for me, no AoE or AoM game has ever been as good as this one. I played AoE II so much as a kid, mostly just messing around with howdoiturnthison though none of that this time! Since I last played IV, they added three more difficulties which is my current obsession to try to master. Tons of fun!
Among others, I've been sinking a few more runs into Noita. Finally won my first run today, feels like I'm starting to get an idea of how to abuse the wand mechanics.
Which did lead to the slightly odd experience of entering terrifying new areas with imposing miniboss-style fights who nevertheless disintegrate like tissue paper within a second.
Lots more to explore, but I think for my own sanity a lot of that exploration will be guided by spoilers on the wiki rather than self-guided.