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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.
Revisiting some of the top games we reviewed this year for my roguelike podcast's end of season playoff tournament.
Binding of Isaac: Rebirth - Still holds up as one of the best roguelikes for its age. It still feels great to play and beating The Womb is good enough for a finished run for me these days. Anything past that feels far too luck based, but I was glad for us to review it and to have it come back for the finals.
Cogmind - 2/3 of the podcast hosts love Cogmind and one hated it. Sort of emblematic of traditional roguelikes in a nutshell - they not for everyone. But Cogmind is the top of its class, far beyond Caves of Qud for me anyway. I don't expect it to win the finals tournament, but it's part of the conversation and important to come back to.
Dead Cells - We only just covered this one recently as our last reviewed game of the season and it was quite a hoot. I forgot how much I love everything about Dead Cells and I'm only just diving into the DLC now. It hits all the right notes in just the right way that I could see this one taking the crown at the end of the day.
Enter the Gungeon - Another split decision rankings-wise. It took a long time to get into, but once you click with Gungeon, it does feel so good to play. I wish there was as much variety and QOL things here and there about how Dead Cells treats various things like unlocks and item drops, but Gungeon is its own thing and that's totally ok.
FTL: Faster Than Light - Maybe the grandpappy of modern roguelikes, and not totally shocking that it's #1 on our podcast list, just barely eeking out Dead Cells. I've been dabbling with the Multiverse mod recently and been having a lot of fun with it. I just wish it was more easily available via the steam workshop a'la Slay The Spire's Downfall mod. Multiverse is really an FTL 2 and I'm all here for it.
Hand of Fate 2 - A surprise that this one performed so well, but it's been fun to come back to. HOF2 does everything bigger (and I think better) than it's predecessor. Sometimes the Dealer get's a little annoying with his nonstop chatter, but playing on the couch on the Steam Deck is fun for a run here and there.
Invisible, Inc - I can understand people's love for this game, but it just feels super slow to me. There's some kind of game design principle about leveling up your party of allies, only for one or two of them to die off and you having to replace them with lower level units. I feel like that anchors this type of game (and other Xcom-likes) pretty hard. Unlike FTL where you're able to buy pretty high level allies pretty often to offset the death mechanic, it feels really painful to lose characters here in a way that feels more RPG-ish than rogue-ish.
Luck Be A Landlord - What a treat! It's such a fun pocket-sized game that plays so well on the Steam Deck that I could just sit there and spin spin spin all day long. The fact that this is a deckbuilding game in sheep's clothing is a fun twist. And once you get those item synergies going you feel like you're on such a roll you never want to stop. Gambling in a nutshell maybe?
Monster Train - Another surprise and one of our highest rated games on the podcast. I don't like the art style, but the gameplay is so well thought out that I find myself coming back to this more often than Slay The Spire. At least, for the moment anyway.
Rimworld - Hey that's not a roguelike! You'd proably be right, but we're using the excuse of "Well if Dwarf Fortress get's a pass...". I'm still learning the ropes of the Rim, but my cohosts have this as one of their favorite games of all time. Are colony builders roguelikes? Well maybe. We did an almost 2 hour long podcast episode on the topic.
Streets of Rogue - Another delight, but maybe accidentially too easy? We beat the game on our first try in a multiplayer setting. It was frantic and crazy and we had a lot of fun, but haven't really had the desire to come back since. It felt like we had seen it all in the few hours that we played. I am excited for the sequel, though!
The Last Spell - Another edge case, ATS feels a bit more of a tower defense RPG with some very rogue-lite mechanics baked in. The art style is great, the music is great, but each round goes on just a little too long for me. Overall, a fun game, but only if you're feeling up for the time investment IMO.
FTL FTW! I love this little game! I have played countless hours on an iPad and did quite some hours on the PC too. Have you tried Into the breach?
Into the Breach is one of my favorites and a definite stay tuned on the podcast for sure. I've been meaning to look into the new advanced edition content they released and still have yet to beat it on hard mode, but I think I wound up unlocking everything in the base game a while back. Love me some Rusting Hulks
Replayed and finished Half-Life, Opposing Force and Blue Shift due to the anniversary update. It was great fun to replay these games again, though the Xen levels in Half-Life still suck and I must admit that I skipped parts of them by using the console.
Also been playing Dave the Diver, it's a really neat game. I really like the aesthetic and the funny storyline. The restaurant part is a little annoying, but it gets better once you get more people in your kitchen.
I found the anniversary update pretty disappointing. The advertised controller support is extremely barebones, and the release is plagued with bugs. I had to turn to a many years old fix for a memory allocation error just to get multiplayer to work at all. And I would have hoped they would update their Mac version with apple silicon support, or at least a 64-bit intel build.
When I did get it working, my friend and I tried to play on a public server. When I logged in, it worked normally, but when he logged in it started blasting incredibly loud Taylor Swift music and the in-game mp3 volume option didn't have any effect on it.
The anniversary ended up prompting me to check out the recent ray tracing mod built on Xash3D and I've been having a blast with it.
Strange, I had no problems with it whatsoever. Played all three games without a single crash or bug.
The Taylor Swift thing must have been playing on the server he joined?
The music was definitely part of a mod the server was running, but the fact that the two of us were getting completely different experiences, and the fact that mp3 volume wasn't controlling what it was supposed to, indicated buggy behavior in the game itself.
I was going to try the older Baldur's Gate games, having really enjoyed BG3. But I noticed a lot of the negative reviews on BG3 were complaining that it felt more like a sequel to Divinity: Original Sin 2 than to Baldur's Gate 2. That is apparently a thing I like, so I bought that instead.
The intro sequence is comically similar. You've been captured, you're on a ship, the ship gets attacked, you get saved by a mysterious thing and wake up on a beach. It's the BG3 intro but with more water and less mind flayers.
It's noticeably less polished than BG3. There's little guidance in character creation and I had to look up what half the classes were supposed to be. There's a game breaking bug in the character creator where the game hangs if you try to rename your character using the Steam Deck's on-screen keyboard.
But overall, it looks like it'll be fun! I'm only a bit into it so far, I have found one companion (and one squirrel friend).
I really think you'll enjoy it. It has a lot of the "just try anything" that BG3 has and is even more famous for letting you find ways to cheese combat scenarios. Just know that barrels are your friends. Unless you're the one standing next to them.
I'd also recommend the first Divinity: Original Sin. The plot's a lot lighter than DOS2 and BG3 and has a fair dose more whimsy. The game itself can definitely be a little janky at times.
I wouldn't recommend going any farther back than the original Original Sin, I've tried a few of the older entries and they lack the same feel that made the latter ones popular.
Coffee Talk 1 and 2. Really nice games but between the two of them and some other games I've played before, I've had enough of visual novels for a while. I'll have a browse through my library to see what else I can play.
I also (finally!) finished Overcooked 2. Liked it well enough but not sure what's the point of NG+ as it seems like the 4 stars are pretty much impossible to get.
I started Coffee Talk over the summer and I've put it down. Not because I don't like it -- I think it's great! But I just have to find the right mood for it. I think I will pick it up again soon and try to finish it. I have CT2 already and looking forward to that.
Yeah, I had it in my library for quite a while before finally playing it. Then we had a string of cold and rainy days this past month, and I just got my refurbished Steam Deck, so it was really great to curl up on the couch and play such a comfy game.
I haven't been playing much this week as work has seriously started to pick up but I picked up Islanders on GOG during their Black Friday sale and it's a great little casual game. It's a simple city building game with no real objective. You can either play to score as many points as you can, or you can just play endlessly. As someone who doesn't game as much anymore, Islanders is a great game for just picking up and playing randomly, and then putting down again. It's a cool little game, developed by a cool little studio (only 3 people!) and it's pretty polished.
On a related note, this was my first time buying a game through GOG and they're great. Was a bit skeptical of buying a game through them as I run Linux but using Lutris and just connecting my GOG account to it, my new library showed up immediately and I was able to just click download. No ads, no fuss. Just click install, make sure its being installed where you want it, and then go. Islanders required no set up on my end on an Ubuntu 23.10 install. I also bought Fallout 3 and New Vegas in this sale and tried out New Vegas for a bit. That required some more Linux fiddling (as I was expecting) but still, only took me around 5-10 minutes max to get Fallout: New Vegas up and running properly.
Grabbed a bunch on the fall sale. I don't have my main machine right now so was focusing on stuff that was easier to run on my weaker machines.
Quasimorph:
A dystopian scifi horror roguelike? that scratches a lot of itches really well. Simple but insanely lethal with a lot of neat systems interacting to keep it interesting. Curious to see where it goes as there's obviously some hints at future mechanics/systems.
Dune Imperium:
I would love to play this as a board game but just don't have the time right now, so i'm super happy there's a rules enforced with bots version on steam.
Crumble:
Fun little platformer. Sonic meets spiderman is the best way I can describe it. Surprisingly challenging and one of those games that I'm sure gets crazy as you get better at it.
Nova Drift:
Asteroids roguelike. Just so many cool ideas that can mash together keep it extremely replayable.
Started playing Elden Ring. Game is super fun and addictive, but, of course, have some quirks.
Like for example fact that you don't have to fight the very first (actually second, but who cares) boss is not super obvious for me. Have to google to find a recommendation that it better to come to this boss a bit later in game.
I have a lot of fun, game is very good, mini bosses feels like real mini bosses, you have to find a tactic for the each one. Story is interesting, characters are interesting and unique. Unfortunately my laptop started straggling with FPS on bigger locations... but I`m very curious to play it further.
Feeling of curiosity and desire to find a way to overcome bigger and more interesting enemies reminds me about Dead Cells somehow.
I'm making a serious run at Frostpunk, on the advice of @cfabbro from almost a year ago.
I've owned this game for quite a while now and have tried it before. But it didn't really hold my attention then. This time it's keeping me here. It's definitely a little uncomfortable for me since I'm kinda under the gun with resources and I'm having to make decisions where I can't predict or know the outcome. And it may cause my people to die and the colony to die. Plus having to micromanage workers is stressful, lol. I'm not used to playing colony sims like this where it's so "serious." Like I've played plenty of Banished and Timberborn. And yeah people (or beavers) can die from starvation. But those are usually recoverable events. Here, it doesn't feel that way. Feels like one wrong move and everyone dies.
But so far, after Day 13 in-game, it seems to be going OK. Only a couple deaths. I'm somehow keeping people fed and not-freezing. I've get exploration going. Research is going. I'm getting better resource gathering. Most people are housed. The only downside is that I have tons of ailing people. And my food supplies are precarious.
We'll see how long this lasts.
I'm actually going through a Frostpunk binge myself right now in anticipation for Frostpunk 2, though it's my second time through so I've been doing the scenarios on hard while going for specific achievements to make it more interesting. You shouldn't treat it like a regular city builder, which is meant to give you the room to flex your creative muscles in city design. It's more like a puzzle game where you need to figure out the right allocation of resources, research, and exploration to make it through the challenges it will throw at you.
If you end up enjoying it and are left wanting more, I recommend you give IXION a try. It's heavily inspired by Frostpunk but it's on a spaceship and has a more drawn out campaign rather than several relatively short scenarios. It's also much more demanding than Frostpunk in the logistics management though, which can be a run and fun killer if you don't figure out how it works in time.
Also, good luck with the Fall of Winterhome scenario. I beat A New Home on Survivor difficulty with almost no deaths, but Winterhome on Hard still was a mess to get through. Improve your healthcare, I cannot emphasize this enough. Sickness will wreck you.
Not who you replied to (I'm the person that recommended Frostpunk to @JCPhoenix). But just a heads up to anyone that may read this: IXION is one of the few games I have actually had to refund on Steam, since I unfortunately wasn't able to get it running properly on my PC (Win 10, 3070Ti). :(
It's been about 8 months since then, and several patches have since been released, so all the issues I experienced with it could be fixed now. And at some point I genuinely would like to revisit IXION, since I did enjoy the little bit I was actually able to play of it before it either soft-locked, the UI went all buggy, or the frame rate tanked into total unplayability. But just in case it's not totally fixed yet, the warning is still worth keeping in mind in case anyone else runs into serious bugs and performance issues like I did. Especially since I actually wound up going past the "2 hour max playtime" limit for a Steam refund, mostly spent banging my head in frustration trying to fix the issues. Thankfully, Steam still issued me a refund despite that, but they might not do that for everyone.
p.s. Glad to hear you're giving Frostpunk another go, JC. :) But if you die, just remember, losing is fun! :P
I'm replaying Metro 2033 Redux for some achievements.
I also have Lego Star Wars Skywalker Saga installed and in play, but it will probably be the "play anytime you're bored" type of game for me, I won't play it heavily with the goal to finish it ASAP.
I have also bought Super Woden GP 2 a few days ago. It is a great mix of Gran Turismo 2/3 and isometric racing games. You have career and a bit of tuning like in GT games and the racing itself is in isometric. You have your weekend races and chapionships and rally stages etc. The game has non-licenced cars and track sometimes woth great names that will make you smile - ie. there is a car a name "910" that resembles Mercedes 190E, Porsches are name Schöne (which translates as nice/beautoful from German I believe) and many others. Racing itself is kinda short as all the tracks are shorter tha real-life - ie. Monza is sub 1 minute even in kinda slow car.
I will have to pick new game after Metro 2033 and I'm thinking what it would be... I still want to replay Zelda BotW and I think I will finally do that.
REMNANT 2. Why didn’t I hear of this before this week?!
So, so good. Super deep secrets, great puzzles, challenging combat, beautiful graphics, procedurally generated levels, a dog you can pet.
Well, I finished The Outer Worlds. I have commented on the game just feeling off and admittedly it does kind of just ends suddenly but there's something about those stupid end game slideshows that endeared me so much. I kind of forgot a lot of the people (which is odd for only 36 hours of gameplay) who popped up along the way but suddenly had a feeling of... I dunno some emotion and I just enjoyed it. Overall? No, not great. Not the level of quality and replayability of New Vegas... But I'm also stuck because I didn't know what really didn't make it work (other than the level of freedom compared to NV) so I can't speak authoritatively about how they could've fixed it. Lightning just struck is all.
Other than that, Timesplitters 2. I've long listed TS3 as one of my favorite games and any time I say "I know" I think fondly of it... Yet, I never played TS2 and long heard all the praise. I've been slowly playing through this one, so slowly I didn't list it last time because it'd been a few months. Well, I really enjoyed the start but the later levels have started to feel like a drag. Still a good game but not as memorable as 3. I've got about two levels left and after I might get a playthrough of Future Perfect in because, I mean, when's a bad time for that?
All the other games from last week are still on the shelf but life hasn't given me a chance to pick them up again.
I've played Outer World on Switch. I don't know what people find bad about the game (I don't mean you personally). I'm not sayng it's great, but definitely not bad.
The weak points from my point of view: short, expensive
The pros: choices matter (makes the game replayable), skillset (makes the gam replayable again), setting (I like the sci-fi/space theme).
The biggest no for me (to buy on PC) is just the price. It is older game but it doesn't get lower than 20€ in the sale for the whole pack, which is still a bit high.
I didn't really find anything bad, I guess, just... aggressively average? With regard to skills, I found you either have to be aggressively spec'd into a single skill set to be able to really impact the game but maybe I'm just not remembering a lot of the lower level checks because so much of the game went by quickly. Then, for the combat considerably in the open world areas, the stealth felt so underwhelming that I ended up feeling that I built my character wrong.
Plenty of older CRPGs let you build an objectively terrible character which may not be able to beat the game but this just felt like I couldn't enjoy it... I probably should've used the respec machine or something.
And, maybe I'm just too much of a commie but I felt like half the choices were almost as cartoonishly evil as blowing up megaton. Should I help the board with their drugging of the peons to eek out another ounce of productivity in their doomed existence or... allow them to self govern? Choices choices.
I didn't dislike the game but the board felt more evil sometimes than Caesar's Legion! Maybe I'll have to do a corporate bootlicker playthrough and see how different it is but I can't see myself replaying it to skip into the sun.
You summarized it well! It is just a total average game. I enjoyed playing it, but not hat much to pay those 20€ to play it on PC. I don't remember skills as I played it two years ago, but I remember myself thinking that I have to replay it someday with different skillset. Never did, though.
With old games and not being able to finish them with bad build... Yeah, I come from these times. I haven't played such (modern) game in a very long time. I can't even remember one, to be honest. Games are either made to not be unfinishable no matter your choices or build (read easy or for masses - say Skyrim) or mechanics are good for any type character (ie. melee combat useful even in the end game fight - Wasteland 2 comes into my mind).
Still in the BG3 train. In act 2 and this game just keeps on giving. I play an hour and find myself in totally new environments and creating tiny little vignettes that even my partner has fun hearing about.
Her: "How is your game, anything happen?"
Me: "Well my warlock talked a cult into suicide..."
I'm on my third playthrough and I'm trying to do different things in every playthrough and it's really making me realize that there's so many options. There are times where I'm thinking "why wasn't this accounted for" but those times are far and in-between
I tried playing Dragon's Dogma and just kinda bounced off it. There are a lot of interesting ideas and the game is fun at first, but the package as a whole feels underdeveloped. However, I do think that with some modernization, Dragon's Dogma 2 has the potential to be really good, modern Capcom has not disappointed in the last 5 years.
I had the same experience, I've actually tried it twice now because I loved the ideas in the game but I just found myself not going back to it. It's one of those games I'm glad exists though and I'm interested in the sequel.
So I was playing High on life last week. Well I played a bit more this week and I’ll be honest, the humour just isn’t my cup of tea. I don’t know if it’s bad per se or if it feels horribly awkward since I’m looking at it as a participant versus as an observer but regardless, I’ve dropped it. To fill the gap I’ve gone back to my ng+ playthroughs of ffxvi and star ocean second story R (I cannot recommend second story enough)
The Invincible. This is basically a walking sim based on a hard Sci-fi book by Lem which might not be everyone's cup of tea, but man, does it draw you in. Beautiful game with a fascinating story, interesting characters and excellent voice over work.
I started Dune: Spice Wars now that it's finally out of early access and I'm honestly a bit disappointed in it. It feels like a combination of the Dune 2000 RTS shell but with the added social and political mechanics from the Galactic Civilization series. I appreciated them trying to represent the political intrigue of Dune but it came off seeming more like artificial complexity. Additionally, the difficulty settings are exclusively numerical and don't change the computer's AI at all so your only option for variety is to give your opponent bonus resources to start.
It did inspire me to dig up Dune 2000 again and that definitely holds up. You can find abandonware downloads of it pretty easily nowadays.
A local drugstore had a random assortment of deeply discounted PS4 games so I picked up NHL '21 and Cobra Kai: The Karate Kid Saga Continues for $3 each this week.
Cobra Kai is surprisingly fun for something out of the bargain bin. It's a fairly standard side-scrolling beat 'em up where you choose to play as either the Cobra Kai or Miyagi-Do dojos, each with different characters and play styles. You swap between party members on the fly during stages and can customize each character with a pretty robust upgrading system.
I like the cel-shaded art style and it was nice to hear a few of the actors lend their voices to the game, I just wish that the controls were more responsive. You have a wide variety of moves at your disposal, but actually pulling them off reliably is tough. Some of the enemy designs felt really out of place as well. I don't know why I'm fighting hippies and soccer moms. All in all, it's a pretty fun game that just needed a bit more polishing.
As a rule, I wait a few years before updating my sports games and even then, I stay a few years behind. The last version of 'chel I bought was '17, so I was due. I haven't spent any time with '21 yet, but knowing EA, I assume that nothing has changed except for team rosters and player ratings.
I've been playing Slay on my phone which is an older game by Sean o Conner. Its essentially a hex-based strategy game of expanding your territory using your units that have different tiers. A higher-tier unit can destroy or take a hex adjacent to a lower-tier unit. You then try and take over each map until the AI surrenders.
I picked it up for a few dollars after seeing a YouTube video about it and thought it looked fun. It's become a bit of a gaming time killer for me as it isn't very difficult, besides a few maps, so I can play it in bursts and not think too hard about it. The game also saves after every move so I can play in short bursts and the app always opens quickly so I can jump back in whenever. It makes being able to get in 30-60 seconds of play before my kids or something else needs some attention easy and enjoyable. I'd recommend it to anyone, especially at the mobile price. I also think he has an older version avaialble on his website for free for people to try out.
More Baldur's Gate 3. I'm in the Underdark and shit was getting tough until I hit level 5, which gave all sorts of wild perks that made things easy again, so that was nice. I'm pushing 40 hours played (28 according to the save, lots of dying), but the game has a weird way of contracting and relaxing. I keep spoiling puzzles for myself, which I need to stop doing, but aside from the self-inflicted harm I'm having a lot of fun with it.
I got the itch for it and started playing Diablo again. I didn't like D4 and didn't want to deal with battle.net, so by way of Switch emulation I have D3 and D2: R on my steam deck. It's really silly to me that D3 on switch is practically the only version with a "legit" offline mode. D2, even the switch version occasionally has to phone home - interestingly, this was introduced with an update, and wasn't the case with the unpatched game. For a while I just played that version, until I found a way to update it and continue without authenticating.
Every time I have played Diablo, I have been a Barbarian. I can't get over leap + whirlwind, it's that simple. Feels good. I tried starting a paladin in D3, but after a while found myself doing Adventure Mode as a Barbarian again. Then I figured out D2 and just went full Barbarian from the jump.
It's been something like 20 years since I last did D2 in its entirety. I forgot how much I liked it and Resurrected does a good job of updating the look and feel of the thing. Flipping between Legacy and the new graphics shows it off really well. It's interesting to me just how much imagination was working for that game - I remember my friends getting pretty annoyed with D3's aesthetic choices, and in looking at D2's original graphics again I'm left admiring how much it landed with folks. There wasn't as much there as I thought I'd remembered, is perhaps the way to put it.
I'm toward the end of act 1 and still kinda deciding how the build will operate. The typical combo for me would be dual-wielding + leap + whirlwind, but I want to try some of the other skills and see if I land on something that feels really good. So far that's been shouts + bash + two-hander. I'd really enjoy an Adventure Mode similar to D3's. It's all simple fun for me, just as nice as it was way back when.
Finally giving Alien: Isolation a proper try. Been wanting to play it for awhile now, but was kind of waiting on my wife to want to go through it with me, but honestly in the evenings, we usually don't want to do anything but watch TV. So I finally decided to just try it myself and I'm very much enjoying it. I'm only about 3-hours in so far, but really liked what I've played and am finding it...tense, but not really scary? I had the first encounter with the Xenomorph and it killed me a few times, but for some reason didn't really feel terribly scared, which is totally fine with me. At any rate, I'll continue for now and it's been a great fit for my Steam Deck.
Also kind of been half-heartedly playing Silent Hill. It's a series I never got into and having recently finished Resident Evil 2 earlier this year, I was getting the itch for something similar. Given how people love the Silent Hill series, I figured I'd finally give it a go and see how I like it. So far, it's...ok? I've played maybe half an hour, which has been mostly running away from everything and trying to figure out what streets are not blocked. I can definitely see myself getting more into it as the game goes on, but just haven't reached that point quite yet.
Definitely thought that would be the case. Haven't made it any further yet, as I've been pretty interested in Alien: Isolation and been experimenting with some titles on DS instead of playing Silent Hill, but I'll come back around to it at some point.
I finished Radiant Historia Perfect Chronology on the 3DS. Tried to defeat the final, final, final boss, but it was impossible and reading a guide they said grinding to level 99 is mandatory and even then requires some luck. I threw in the towel because while I've loved the game, another few hours of grinding would just spoil it for me. The retconned 3DS ending+ is less great than the original ending, undoing some of the emotional impact, but I liked spending more time with the characters.
Started Zelda OoT 3DS Master Quest play through. I've never finished this mode, despite finishing the original loads of times, and it's super difficult! I wish I could do the alternate layout for dungeons, plus mirror mode for the world in general, without the harder difficulty. One hit removes a heart instead of a quarter like normal mode. I keep getting killed 😅