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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.
I played Pokemon Let's Go Pikachu with my kids last night. They're 4 and new to playing games with controllers, so having motion controls for catching has really made it easy for them to participate. We've got a nice, simple system of taking turns catching Pokemon until they catch one. Which means "wasting" a lot of Pokeballs.
I generally handle the battles, but my daughter took interest in a few battles last night. Which is tough because she can't read, but I realized that they added attack type icons to each attack, which means I can easily tell her which attack to use. And with some experience she'll be able to figure it out herself (eg, fighting a fire-type, select the water icon attack).
We've also been playing "Pokemon battle" in real life. My son has a collection of Pokeballs that we throw on the ground and shout "<pokemon> go!" or "<pokemon> I choose you!" and we make sound effects.
I was 10 when Pokemon first hit the US and I was obsessed until my parents decided it was "evil" and stopped letting me play it. So letting my kids enjoy it and getting to share in their interests like that is oddly therapeutic for me.
The Let's Go Pikachu and Eevee games are perfect for exactly this type of play!
They really are. And we accidentally discovered two characters could run around on screen at the same time, which I hadn't realized. They're really struggling with joystick movements though, so may be a while before we can do that. But for now sharing the solo experience is working great.
The 2-player system actually works great for a parent/child team because it's really just one person playing and the other just kinda runs around for the sake of having fun and feeling involved.
Doesn't affect the gameplay all that much like most co-op games that actually rely on teamwork and coordination.But like you said, they need to be able to use the joystick, lol.It turns all the battles into 2 on X battles, which most times is 2 on 1 making the game much easier.
Ah I forgot that feature, thanks for pointing that out. I guess that makes it even better for parent/child duos since they both can participate in battles.
I picked up Stray during one of the recent holiday sales, since it had so much hype back when it released. I started off enjoying it quite a bit, but my interest level is beginning to wane. Now that I'm past the novelty of playing as a cat, the actual game itself is starting to feel a little bland. None of the characters you meet are particularly interesting, the platforming isn't as fun or challenging as I wish it was, and the collect-a-thon aspects (something I usually enjoy in games) are kind of ruined by the fact that once you progress the story it doesn't let you return to previous areas to keep hunting for things you might have missed initially. In other words you can't really toggle between story progression and being a completionist depending on your mood in the same play-through, which is something I usually do a lot in these kinds of games.
I'm actually surprised it's routinely on steam's top sellers list. Playing as a cat is cool, but the rest of the game just seems ok. I think reviews for it were in the 7/10 range for that reason. I figured it would sort of fade into obscurity by now, since the hype sort of disappeared as soon as it came out.
I feel like you've really summed-up the hype-cycle for me.
None of this is to say that these games are bad games, but there's been a reason I've avoided a lot of the major hype from 2023 unless they sound like "My kind of game". I skipped Bomb-Rush Cyberfunk, Dave the Diver, Against the Storm and even Dredge, because my gut just kept telling me they were the type of games that people hype up and they may be interesting for a couple of hours, but then get very old quickly. I did eventually succumb to Dredge when it was $12 during the Thanksgiving sale and did get absorbed in it pretty well for the first 6 hours or so, but the closer I got to 10-hours, the more I felt like there wasn't really anything interesting pulling me along to complete it.
I ended-up putting it down at 9.2 hours and I do occasionally think about going back, but realize I've pretty much seen all the game has to offer and there's nothing really terribly intriguing about it that I must get back to it. The most charming part of the game is the first Shallows area when the game seems open and you don't know what else is out there and it rapidly drops off after that.
I 100%’d Bomb Rush in about 15-20 hours(??) and it was an excellent time, but I loved JSRF back in the day. Some of the more collector-y things could easily be skipped without any detriment, but I wanted to extend my time in the game as it definitely didn’t overstay it’s welcome.
For what it's worth, it does let you go back to specific chapters from the main menu, if you want to wrap up all the collecting. It's also a pretty short game - I felt it was a pretty perfect length - at ~10 hours to get every achievement/trophy, and about 6 hours to finish the story.
Been playing FFXVI and oh man, it's good. The combat is so awesome, I only wish there was an option to make the game a little harder. Minor enemies pose pretty much no threat as you just stunlock and steam roll them in a couple hits, but major enemies are so fun to fight. Every time I beat a major enemy or boss I just audibly say, "well that was fuckin cool"
The story and themes are similar to FFIV as well, which is my personal favorite FF game, so it kind of feels like playing a modernized version of that. If I could play a FF action game like XVI where you can reclass to a dragoon, it would be ideal for me.
I got it on sale for like $35 too, and it only came out in what June last year? It's a shame it released in a year filled with absolute bangers, I feel like it didn't get the spotlight it deserved.
The gameplay is fun, I think they want you to figure out the mechanics to tear through enemies. There is a new game plus mode as well with a new difficulty available.
Recently purchased Victoria 3 plus the two content expansions. I'm a Paradox veteran (a couple thousand hours in EU4 and then another few hundred in CK3 and even a bit more in Imperator) but even still I've been watching tutorials and let's plays on Youtube for the better part of this last week, plus reading the wiki nonstop. Played a couple of games and, as expected, turned my economy to shit and had a couple of rebellions/civil wars form. But each game is going slightly better than the previous one!
Highly recommend it if you know you like Paradox games! STEEP learning curve but extremely rewarding and satisfying when everything eventually clicks and you can take off your training wheels and bend the AI to your whim.
And the visuals are incredible compared to EU4 that I'm used to. I thought CK3 looked good but Vic3 takes the cake. Hopefully EU5 (whenever that may be) will look even better.
Yeahp. You're describing my thoughts to a tee. I was thinking about picking up some new Paradox games over the winter sale, but I held off. I continue to chase achievements in EU4 at this point. I've done something like ~30% of the achievements. It's a fun way to keep the game fresh, when an entire play-through is dedicated to chasing 1/2/3 achievements that look related/viable/possible.
That being said, > 3500 hours on record, and I'm not even close to trying to do a proper world conquest. Any time I get close in the mid 1600s or early 1700s and decide to take a stab at it, the damn rebels in the pacific islands crush my soul. That, and the fact that if you have a vassal swarm, the game slows to a CPU-throttled crawl. It makes me sad because the game is only using 2-3GB of RAM, and < 30% of my CPU. Sad.
Enjoy Vicky3!!
I feel your pain. I used to use the fast universalis mod back when I played on an older laptop. Not having the unit sprites helped quite a lot. Similarly, I used to play Civ 5 and Civ 6 on strategic view to boil down the gameplay to its core, rather than the pretty units and buildings.
I always find myself coming back to EU4 whenever I play a grand strategy game. Its like my comfort game at this point. It's just hard to put down a game after a decade spent mastering its extremely esoteric intricacies. And it's a bit detrimental at times, since I go into new games like CK3 and Vic3 and then get frustrated when I'm not able to immediately blob up and conquer half of Europe with some random OPM. Hence all the tutorials and let's play videos I've been watching...
So far Vic 3 seems a lot more familiar to me coming from an EU4 background than CK3 did back when I picked that up a year or so ago. The systems feel similar, just a hell of a lot more emphasis on internal politics and economy.
Again, to a tee. :D
I could never get into any of the CK games. Something just never felt like the form of Grand Strategy I like. Thanks for the fast universalis blurb, I just heard of that yesterday and haven't dug in yet. Drives me a bit nuts as I built a new machine last year to replace a seriously aging graphics card, but there's only so much that you can do with the old engine in EU4. I'll look into that mod to see if it can help.
But, yeah, I enjoyed Victoria back in the day. To this day, I've not yet watched a training video about how to accomplish a WC. I just can't get into longform video. Current EU4 game is yet another HRE blob run, though. Good chat :)
I recently got Victoria 2 from the last sale. And it is really good, and in my opinion, easier than EU4. In terms of making money and progressing the game along. And that you are in fact managing four different currencies. Currently doing a China run and it is fun to play catch up in the game. And along with China's potentit economic strength and it's ability to support a very large army, is frankly really stupidly fun.
I've picked up EU4 for the first time last week and I'm playing it with two of my work friends. I've played as Brandenberg/Prussia and Florence/Tuscany. It's been really fun to have some guidance and also seeing consequences of my poor decisions. I accidentally pulled one of my friends into a war he didnt know I was fighting and got one of his armies stack-wiped. Luckily he was kind enough to forgive me and give me East Frysia.
I've been trying to adsorb as much info from them as well as watching videos and reading guides. For now I am looking for a good guide that explains what each of the stat modifiers (think Merchantlism +10% or Absolutism -5%) means and how it affects everything else that is going on.
That's awesome! It's definitely a hard game to get into but I'm sure it's easier with friends.
And as for the stat modifiers... oh yeah there are tons. As you play more you slowly start figuring out what's important and what's not so important. Honestly the best place to look for info like that is just the wiki. I haven't looked at many eu4 tutorials in probably quite a few years, so the ones I remember are probably way too outdated given how much the game gets fixed and updated and balanced as time goes on. But I still go back to the wiki constantly to look at things like mission requirements, certain countries' ideas, very niche modifiers that I don't encounter too often so never really paid much attention to, etc.
If you want I can give you a basic eli5 right here: Most modifiers in the game really just affect some other stat or modifier. So everything typically always comes back to the main important stats, things like money, mana, manpower, army strength, aggressive expansion, and unrest. I'm sure there are others but these are the ones I just thought of off the top of my head. So pretty much any modifier you come across in the game is just going to help or hinder your generation of one of these important stats, be it directly or indirectly.
The most obvious example is something like a manpower modifier that just straight up increases your manpower. Sounds super easy right? Well then others like the ones you mentioned (mercantilism and absolutism) don't seem to be related to anything, so that's when you look at the wiki and see that mercantilism increases your trade power, which in turn increases the money you make from trade, which affects how many ducats you make overall. If trade is super important to your nation, maybe mercantilism might be important to you, but if all your money is coming from wars and gold mines, maybe mercantilism doesn't matter as much to you.
And absolutism affects your discipline, which directly improves your army strength, and it also affects another stat called administrative efficiency, which greatly improves how much land you can take without getting too much unrest and aggressive expansion. See how everything really just boils down to those few stats that I mentioned earlier?
Basically just ask yourself at any moment "What do I want to do and what is stopping me from doing it?". If the answer is that nothing is stopping you, then great! But if something is preventing you from doing what you want (like conquering everyone) then evaluate which stat or stats you need to improve before you can accomplish more goals. Do I need more money to sustain my army? Or maybe I have tons of money but my manpower pool is tiny? Or maybe I have money and manpower but my army lagging way behind in tech? Maybe I have the money, manpower, and I'm super advanced in tech, but I've conquered a lot already and now everyone hates me (aggressive expansion). Etc. Just find out what specific stat or stats are hindering you and look for things that improve those (or strategies that completely mitigate them).
I'll stop there because if not I'll keep going forever, lol. Feel free to pm me if you have any other specific questions! I'd be happy to help someone appreciate the map-painting masterpiece that is EU4.
I hopped back on to City of Heroes this week, after about a 6-month absence!
I played CoH back in the day when it was still live and to be completely honest, it was probably the only thing keeping me alive for a couple of years. I was truly heartbroken when it shut down back in 2012. However, since then there have been a few teams looking at making spiritual successors and eventually rumors started circulating that the source code for the game had been leaked and that there were private servers active.
Since then, a handful of those private servers have opened up to the public. The most populous among them, Homecoming, has been in talks with NCSOFT, the original publisher and owner of the CoH IP, and last week they announced that they had signed an official licensing deal! This is big news because there had always been a bit of a phantom sword hanging over the heads of the players, knowing that at any moment NCSOFT could demand that the servers cease and desist and we'd lose the game all over again. However, with this deal in place we now have official sanctioning of the Homecoming server, which should allow them to not just keep the the game alive and running, but to continue development to at least some degree!
Over the years, they've made some (very positive, imho) changes to the game, but it still feels very much the same. All of the same content is there, all the same fabulous costume pieces, everything is there! They've just made it easier to play the game solo in order to deal with a lower player count. They've also added a new character archetype (the Sentinel, it's a ranged attack character that has access to defensive sets like the melee characters have. Not terribly strong, but feels very safe in a group) and a few different power sets! Other servers have been more ambitious in their expansion of the game, or more vigilant in maintaining the game as it was when it was still live, but overall I'm happy with Homecoming.
CoH is truly my favorite game of all time, with one of the best communities out there. I think one of the main causes for that is that back in the day the only server-wide chat available was the Help channel, and people genuinely did help with other players' issues! It created a culture of knowledge about the systems of our game and fostered a helpful attitude. I suppose it also helps that the PvP was never very strong so there wasn't much competitive spirit built into the game.
Anyway, on Homecoming when a player returns (whether after an absence or after discovering that the game has revived) people like to say "Welcome home", and it truly feels like home to me. This was a good week.
Oh my God, CoH is on my top of all time, and is EASILY my favorite MMO. It's the only game I've played for 36 hours straight (back when it was live and I was a lot younger). I have characters on Homecoming, and this news is so exciting!!
Time to reinstall!
Edit to convince others: This game has the best character creator in any game ever. I don't mean the face has a billion sliders; your costume options are innumerable, and I keep screenshots of some of my favorite creations.
Half the fun of the game is seeing what joke (or just cool) characters others have come up with!
Edit 2: Meet Old Bae, the crab soldier
I just finished Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective (Steam) last night. It's an old game, originally released on the Nintendo DS. It's very much like the Ace Attorney Phoenix Wright games, because it was made by the same guy. It was good! It wasn't very long, maybe 10-15hrs. It's definitely more on the visual novel side than puzzle solving side. I thought the puzzles were going to get harder, but they really didn't. They were some areas towards the end where I was basically told what to do. In any of the Ace Attorney games, some of those trials get really convoluted and you really have to think about how things are connected. Ghost Trick really didn't have that. Only once did I have to look up a guide, and that was mainly my fault instead of being too hard: I was rushing and overlooked something.
Friends and I are doing our annual Project Zomboid (Steam) run. We're doing a modded run, but nothing too crazy. We've been playing for a week, so we're established and "safe." Which is actually an issue now, because we're "too safe" and it's boring. So we've been trying to figure out what restrictions we can place on ourselves to extend the game a bit more.
Love Ghost Trick! I played it a few months ago. Yeah the puzzles are mostly straightforward (I think the most trouble was where I overlooked a movement point on one) but they are very satisfying to solve and at times hilarious in their results. Which makes sense because that's how Ace Attorney can be too.
Are you 'safe' in the countryside or have you established a safe base in the city?
We're in Louisville, but on the east/southeast edges of town. We built a walled base in the small forest just south of the music festival. I've suggested we try to move into and live in like Downtown Louisville, but...we also have the number of zombies and spawn rates pumped up like crazy. A couple of us have ventured into Downtown a few times, and I'm not even kidding, there were probably 100+ following one person, with another like 50+ following me. But it'd certainly be a challenge! Though, I've gotten a tepid response with that =/
The other issue is that we had food spawning on default, which creates A LOT of food in houses. Even with 3-5, sometimes even 7 of us playing, we have so much food. Like it's trivial for me, as our chef, to keep everyone fed. We have so much cooked food in fridges, it's starting to stale/spoil. We've since did turn down food spawning, but I think the "damage" is done. Like we're not even farming this time around because we have so much food (though one friend is fishing like crazy and I'm foraging tons, too).
Any ideas on how we can make it more challenging?
Well, you're the chef. Maybe forget to turn off the stove and force an emergency evac. Or go on a run and get yourself trapped downtown and tell your group to get loaded up with guns and come save you!
Or maybe have the group set out to establish outpost across the map and stuff.
My usual go to is to try (and fail) to clear the cities of zombies.
My buddy and did this one on Friday! He had the great idea of bringing a moving truck to downtown to go loot. I was bored, so I went with. He died pretty quickly as we were finishing up looting. And then it was up to me to attempt to get out with the truck. While I had "Sunday Driver" on (I don't like driving in game). That went about as well as you think it did, with hundreds of zombies on screen, lol. So after we died, a few of us did try to mount a recovery mission on the truck and our belongings. Unfortunately, I broke the truck during my first attempt out. The buddy who initiated all this died again. But our other friend was able to distract the hundreds of zombies, while I recovered most of our stuff. Luckily we still had our other car, so the two us were able to extract. It was fun. So maybe we need to do that more.
And yeah...maybe I get lost and people can't eat. Or a whole crate of food goes "missing." Hmm...OK, I can do something with this. Good ideas!
I spent a lot of time away from Baldur’s Gate 3, or at least as much as one can call “a lot” considering I haven’t really touched it since I first beat it back in September, and am really enjoying the amount of replay value it has.
This playthrough I am doing a dark urge origin run, and it am playing him ironically as a better version of my first character. While I have been “giving in to the urge” numerous times, I’ve also been going about choosing dialogue choices that are much less manipulative. I didn’t realize how evil my first character really was until playing the dark urge. My first character would use lots of charisma to get people to trust him, then would, at the last minute, make choices that would ensure he got what he wanted. In comparison, my dark urge is much more upfront about what he wants, and as long as he gets it everything is okay.
It actually gave got me thinking about the levels of evil (in terms of morality or ethics) between those that are adversarial in getting what they want vs manipulative. While my first playthrough got lots of “happy” endings, my dark urge feels much more earned in all of his story advancements. Instead of getting lots of good endings because I made people think that’s what they wanted (because it benefited me), I am getting less of those, but the ones that do occur seem so much more genuine.
On top of the story changes, I am running a sorcerer (which felt fitting for the dark urge background) instead of my first characters Druid build. I am also running with very different party members, which makes the combat and strategy just so much more refreshing after my first 50+ hour playthrough. Using Karlach to pick up, throw, then absolutely destroy a goblin just FEELS so good. Having Astarion pull off a 25% chance to hit with a critical that pulls me out of a tough situation makes me actually want to support him (as much of a jerk as he is in the first act).
All in all, I’m having just as much fun as my first playthrough, if not more now that a lot of minor bugs and crashes have been fixed up. Before I would get regular windows that would cover my inventory or over a cutscene. Now those seem to have been mostly patched up as far as I can tell.
I picked up the farcry collection and started 6, just to see if it was as poor as people were saying.
I can see that it has kept to the routine that can definitely be described as stale. But the slight adjustments are a fair improvement.
I like that I can keep a slowly recharging homing rocket launcher on my back for when the enemies decide to swarm you with helicopters and your load-out isn't suited to it.
I like the overheating nature of suppressors (though the idea that the best one being a modified milk bottle is weird.)
I like that they have re-incorporated the farcry 2 feature of putting checkpoints in the way of major roads that can ruin your progress if you try to slam straight through it in a car. (Though they are destroyable)
I like that any random fight on the side of the road can escalate to a massive battle between AI. Plus, the fact that enemy classes are tied to their guns is funny. It leads to rocket launcher types blowing up horses randomly around you.
I dislike one of the main allies, the fact you can't pick up enemy weapons, the seemingly random effect of stealth, the grinding out of crates/races/collectibles, and I still don't know where I stand on the ammo type work around.
Theres prrobably more...
Still, it's early days so we'll see how it goes.
But yes. If they massively overhauled the formulae, I wouldn't complain either.
I enjoyed my time with Far Cry 6. It wasn't a perfect game, but it was pretty much what I expected it to be when I came into the game. I ended up buying one of the DLC outfit packs because it had an item that was practically necessary for my stealth playthrough (which is the only way I play Far Cry, or Fallout, or Skyrim, or Dishonored, or...) which was a bit of a turnoff. I didn't really like the abilities being tied to specific equipment vs. a skill tree, but I got past it.
I didn't love the plot, to be honest, but Giancarlo Esposito plays such a fantastic villain. It also doesn't have the satisfying traversal and oomph that Just Cause has, but with 6, I found that Far Cry does still have that satisfying feeling of progression as you brutally slaughter your way through what amounts to an entire country's military presence.
All in all, I'd say that I was left with an overall impression of a 7/10 game. Good, but not amazing.
Yes I feel like ubisoft had the right idea in updates of assassins creed odyssey where you could wear whatever armour you wanted and could adjust the cosmetic look of it to any other design you had already accrued. They at least realised the choice of making the headwear invisible, coz some of it is godawful.
I'll probably power my way through the majority of it. When the gameplay gets quiet in a new area, I just start collecting stuff and put a podcast on.
I wish they would bring back the awkward map from farcry 2. That made traversal more difficult. Like having to look down into your lap if you open it whilst driving. Doesn't really work when you establish the character having a smart phone though.
Oh maybe they could do a historic farcry again. Not quite primal, but maybe the 19th century or something. Or maybe a wartime spy or partisan.
Ok, hear me out: Far Cry 1995. They play it up as a fight against some soviet remnant that's held out in a remote corner of the world somewhere, amp up the stealth & spycraft components and the internet is technically available, and has some useful sites to visit (or maybe is required in order to unlock bases), except it can only be accessed at locked down terminals. You could probably manage to sneak into a place to use it, but you have to activate the dial-up and hope nobody's close enough to hear the modem squawking and screeching as you wait to access whatever it is you need.
Haha. I can see it.
We are probably only a few years off of actual 90s retro nostalgia anyway.
I haven't played Far Cry beyond 4. Far Cry 4 was exactly the game I wanted it to be. I'd be curious to hear how it holds up from a modern perspective so post if you end up playing it!
I've actually played them all now, bar the expansions of 1 where it seemed like you became some sort of mutant with powers.
I remember enjoying 4. I liked that the map felt more vertical than the rest of the series. And you used that little chopper a fair bit.
Beyond 4, they don't change all that much, beyond setting. I did like 5's story right up until the end. It was fun going about ruining a creepy cult. They all really just get bogged down in the similarities of their gameplay loops outside of the main story.
I just played 4 a couple months ago and found myself pleasantly surprised. I mostly was just playing it to get through it because I really want to play 5, and I want to play all of them, or at least give them a fair chance. I couldn't stand Far Cry 2 and gave up on it pretty quick, similar with Blood Dragon.
But 4 was just kinda there so I got into it and found myself enjoying it quite a lot. Granted it's been a long time since I played Far Cry 3, probably 6 or 7 years now, but it felt like it improved on everything 3 did me hanically speaking. The story was fine, perfectly acceptable for a Far Cry game. I'm not expecting some grand epic narrative heavy game here, I'm mostly wanting to shoot bad guys and blow shit up.
But I went in expecting a slog/not caring and ended up having a lot of fun and enjoying it. Still a good game if you like the Far Cry formula, which I do.
I am in the same boat as you in the fact that I could not stand Far Cry 2. What caused you give up on 2? The reasons that it for me annoyed at it is that I was expecting to see the fire spread mechanic at work for a game from that era of gaming. But I saw no fire spread at all, and I got annoyed at the weapon breaking mechanic that game has. The game is not a hardcore shooter, nor a survival one (you know the ones that actually make sense to have such mechanic in them). And I had so much anti-malaria drug by the middle of the game, which was touted as a hard thing to get around. I got annoyed at that system also. I am glad that 3 did not have those mechanics.
What got you to give up on Blood Dragon?
The whole malaria thing was a big turn off right off the bat. I didn't want to constantly be hassled with this mechanic, and I found the gunplay and AI really frustrating.
I played Far Cry 1 first and absolutely loved it as a classic Half-Life esque story shooter. And Far Cry 2 changed that entirely to the more open world style that the series is known for, but did it in just not a fun way I felt. It's kinda hard to remember any specifics because this was over 10 years ago now that I tried that, so this is all just my memory of how i felt about it. Not to mention the story of 2 didn't grab me either. Just every part fell flat for me.
Far Cry 3 obviously did a significantly better job with the mechanics and story.
Blood Dragon just seemed pretty generic. The atmosphere was weird and it was just here's the same mechanics as 3 with the enemies replaced by polygon things...idk felt lazy. Also hard to remember details on this one as it was a long time ago.
So I much prefer the more standard Far Cry formula that 3 and 4, (and I assume the rest afterwards) follow.
I played a lot of games over the winter break, a lot of them just for a couple hours so I will just be writing short thoughts on most of them.
Gears 5
This game crashed on the second level on my previous PC, was happy to see it runs on my Steam Deck. The story seems dumb and bad. Cole Train drove a motorcycle with a bomb into the mouth of a dinosaur monster then I blew it up.
I love the movement/cover/active reload systems of the franchise. It feels weird to be fighting robots instead of grubs. I haven't played Gears 4, I guess they explain where the robots come from in that one. I wonder if they will make a similar product to the Master Chief Collection but for the Gears games on PC/Steam. I hope so.
Control
Since another user here encouraged me to pick it back up, I did. I fixed some stuff in Maintenance (the Directorial Override mission). Then it told me to go to Research and it took me way too long to figure out how to get there (fast travel back to Executive, find the elevator). Actually I didn't figure it out, I googled it.
Once I got to Research, I went up and down the stairs looking for the scientist I'm supposed to find. Enemies spawn seemingly at random and it feels like an NES game where they respawn if you leave and come back. Honestly the combat feels like a nuisance. I eventually got to an area where the walls shift and it's like a maze. I tried walking through it a few times but it kept spitting me out where I came from. At this point I got frustrated and dropped the game again.
The Hex
Really cool game by Daniel Mullins (Pony Island, Inscryption). You play as six different characters through at least six different game genres. It gets glitchy (intentionally), weird, and meta. My favourite part was in a top-down turn-based game you boot up some hacks, but can only have 2 active at a time, so you're switching between a bunch of hacks (infinite movement, infinite range, infinite damage, more) to beat the encounters. Can't wait for Pony Island 2!
Glyph
Another user recommended this game and I had fun with it. You're a metallic scarab rolled into a ball. The (desert) floor is lava (death). You can regain your jump by touching any surface (which allows you to climb up walls. You can also gain a second jump on special pads, and glide for more distance. It's fun to roll around narrow tiles and go flying across a level and try not to fall into the sand and die. Mainly you are collecting things around the levels, there are also some time trials.
Shovel Knight
Funny I should mention NES games earlier...this one has the 8bit graphics and everything.
I guess I have mixed feelings about what I played so far. It seemed sort of on the difficult side, but doable. Movement feels very slow, main shovel attack feels bad. Midair downward shovel attack seems good. Not sure if any of this will be upgraded later.
LevelHead
Some Steam reviewers hail it as a better Super Mario Maker. Seems like there is a lot to explore. Some of the initial levels don't have the Mario gameplay vibe to me though. You've got to carry around a block to progress through the levels. Feels a little more...deliberate than I was hoping for. Of course there are endless custom levels which may not have that problem.
Guacamelee 2
Played the first one with my brother during the summer, and we played through the sequel during the winter. Mostly it's re-treading over what the first game did. There's still some good humour and I'd say it was still fun saving the Mexiverse. The main thing they expanded was combat while in chicken form, which was a great addition. The end boss felt a lot easier, and unfortunately less satisfying to beat.
Baba Is You
Really unique puzzle game where you push around words to create/change rules. It's broken my brain a few times and makes me wish I were smarter so I could enjoy it more.
For that part of control, I had the exact same thing. Couldn't figure out where to go and got to the ashtray maze which you can't get through yet. That's much later in the game you go there.
From where you enter the big room from the elevator there's an area diagonally across and down a floor which has some red stuff blocking the path, that's the way to go. But you have to kill a bunch of enemies before it'll open up.
I absolutely loved Control, I went in only playing it to get the Alan Wake stuff in time for Alan Wake 2, but ended up loving Control so much. However if your this far in and not enjoying it, it may not be for you.
But if you want to try to keep going, that's where you need to head next.
Last week I posted that I was playing a good amount of Realms of Arkania - Blade of Destiny (Remake), which I had, but it ultimately didn't pan out for me. By the end of my 15 or so hours, I'd realized I'd pretty much seen all that there was to see in this (nearly) 1:1 remake of a game from 1992, so I called it quits. However, that ended-up giving me a taste for a first person RPG, so I poked through my Steam and GoG libraries and ultimately settled on...
Wizardry 8 from 2001, which has been great! So far I've spent just over 10-hours on it, but I'm loving every second of playing it and I'm pretty surprised my party, which I just completely guessed at and cobbled together, is working very well and only suffered one death in the opening dungeon! But since then I've made it out of the dungeon and took the very long road to the first city, which I just finished-up and am now heading south to follow, what I presume, is a quest.
At any rate, it's mostly combat and doesn't have the survival aspects of RoK:BoD, but that's fine with me. What it lacks in that granularity it makes-up for in exploration. RoK had zero exploration, whereas Wizardry 8 has a good amount of it; even exploring the initial city/town there was a lot to find. I also like the very unusual mix of SciFi and Fantasy; I normally don't go for this kind of thing, preferring my genres not to mix, but it's just so weird here and the game on its own is quite fun that it doesn't bother me and in fact, I find it pretty charming. I mean, I'm running a party with a Monk, Mage, Fighter, etc, fighting bats, rats, spiders and bandits in the first couple of hours, but then I come to the first town which has a crashed spaceship and a SciFi tower of doom that the main villain has built in the town.
Also continuing my playthrough of Last Window - Secret of Cape West in the evenings as I lie in bed, which has been great. Kind of stopped on Infinite Space for now as Wizardry 8 has taken its place.
I've also messed about with PCEm, an emulator that does various kinds of PCs from the past 40+ years and got a Pentium 2 233, 128Mb RAM, Voodoo Banshee up and running on Windows 98. It's been a fun little puzzle to get drivers working on it and the like and I've been able to transfer some of my GoG installs over to it, though they don't work as they still need a CD (But I guess I could find a NoCD patch), but they do launch. The funny thing is, I spent a bunch of time on it and I'm still a bit entranced by it, but once I've got it up and running, I can't help but wonder, "Why?" Anything I want to play is already on GoG or Steam and runs (generally) just fine on current hardware (Due to many people's hard work, of course), so why emulate an old machine or even have old hardware sitting on a desktop? Authenticity is an argument, but I experienced all that back in the day already and current experiences are 99% close enough that not playing on authentic hardware doesn't bother me in the least. At any rate, I'll probably still futz with it here and there and see what I can get working on it, but there's not a whole lot of reason to do this.
been playing factorio basically whenever I have the creative energy for it. Working on a set of blueprints for a modular, block based base with full roboport construction coverage, using trains to transport things between subfactories. The idea is that I can really easily place down new blueprints and have hooking it up to the rest of the base be a less painful experience.
Hah, I'm doing the exact same thing right now. I don't think I'm actually gaining much in terms of less painful experience as I keep fiddling with the blueprints and have to redo vast swaths of the base (or rather, have my bots redo), but it's great fun regardless.
My love and I have really been enjoying "co-op" single player games lately, where it's one player but there's ample opportunity for both of us to weigh in and participate.
We'd recently finished Papers Please, and this last week played through Not Tonight, which is a similar game based in dystopian post-brexit england. It was a good time, and fairly similar to papers in concept and gameplay but noticeably different. The tone was much more humourous and absurd, and the gameplay felt more fast-paced in that you had less to look at but expected to act much faster to get the best bonuses. The game wasn't very difficult, but we had a great time and plan to play Not Tonight 2 at some point.
Now we've started on Inscryption, and to avoid being a spoiler as possible I'll just say we just encountered the first... Unique tonal shift. The game has been great, the card-game itself is cool and discovering the outer puzzle is good fun.
My partner and I also love "co-op" single player games!
We've just finished one playthrough of Heaven's Vault after still having that itch to "translate" after completing Chants of Sennaar. I think it makes a great game for "faux" co-op since it's all about decoding and parsing information + has branching story choices and multiple endings. So there's a lot to discuss with each other.
Ooh that sounds right in our wheelhouse! We've got Outer Wilds in the chamber next, which from what I've heard has similar themes, so if we enjoy that I'll definitely look into your suggestions too:D
My birthday passed by recently, and my lovely wife got me a copy of Sifu. Over the last few years I've gotten more into difficult/souls-like/melee combat games, and she's always been into fighting games. I've only played through the intro/tutorial bits so far, but it seems really deep. I am still finishing up my cyberpunk phantom liberty playthrough, but once I get done there I'll be diving fully into Sifu.
I also downloaded Lies of P and can't wait to try it, but that's 3rd on my list and I've yet to boot the game up
Just finished Phantom Liberty. Man 2.1 and PL made Cyberpunk 2077 a damn near perfect game. I did two endings, and they were both very bittersweet, just what I expect from this game. The end credits of PL have no reason to go so hard; it literally could be the intro of a Sci-Fi James Bond movie. It's such a huge juxtaposition to the vanilla Video Voicemail end credits.
The only gripe I really have about Cyberpunk at this point is the vehicle handling. Cycles are fine, but cars and trucks feel like you've got slicks and are driving on ice, even when using a controller. I had mods in vanilla before 2.0 that helped, but even then, I mostly stuck to cycles. I was really hoping when they announced vehicle combat that they'd have made the whole vehicle system more ergonomic to handle the added complexity. Instead, it was a huge letdown and not very fun, especially on some of the hijack missions where your vehicle will literally explode from gunfire and vehicles ramming you from all angles, causing you to fail.
Man, I love Cyberpunk and Phantom Liberty with all my heart but I am begging CDPR to not make me drive a car in this game (aka why I am stuck on one particular mission). Bike, no problem, but cars are all blindfolded mules on skates.
I need to find a good let's play for Lies of Pie, it looks amazing but also like the kind of game I would ragequit in 5 minutes :D
The saving grace of PL is that there is only a couple mandatory missions for driving, first so it can introduce you to the combat system and second is a tail mission that really doesn't require fancy driving.
The rest come by way of side missions of hijacking cars. Hijacking cars is by far the most lucrative way to make money in Cyberpunk without cheesing the system but like one in four involve combat and often result in your ride blowing up, I'll often quicksave and reload as soon as it's apperant that it's a combat mission.
I never drive cars so I am really bad at it :D I got so mad at the mission where you have to hijack the twin hackers' car that I stopped and played God of War Ragnarök from start to finish instead :D But I'll pick it up again now, I want to finish it1
I picked up Return of the Obra Dinn on the last day of the Steam winter sale (it was like 33% off) and I’m kinda … extremely meh on it? I’m thinking of returning it, which is disappointing. I see what it’s going for (basically Clue, but way more involved and with an actual story) but it really feels like I’m just going from memory to memory and not super compelled by the story. Maybe if I didn’t have a 3 month old I’d enjoy it more, but right now I just want to turn my brain down low (Descenders has been excellent for this) when I have time to game.
Anyone got an impassioned plea of why this game has a 96% rating on steam?
It may just not be your kind of game. For me, it's one of my top favorites and I wish I could forget it all and play it again fresh, because it has nearly zero replay value. I loved the puzzle/clue/detective/investigatory aspect a lot, putting together the pieces of what had happened and identifying people-- and since that's the core gameplay, well, it was pretty great. But there are loads of people I absolutely wouldn't recommend it to because it's such a unique, specific sort of experience.
During the Steam Winter Sale I snagged Who's Lila. I finally started to play it two nights ago and have become completely captivated. I don't want to really say much about it but in the game you direct a character named Will, a young man that has trouble displaying his emotions. As such, your
royalduty is to guide Will on this bizarre journey to answer the question; who's Lila?The world is dripping with mystery, symbolism, and ARG elements. And depending on how you perceive this world around Yu those elements may help on your quest for an answer... or they may not. I think I'm close to having solved it but that's just a matter of perspective.
If this interests you then try to play this experience as blind as possible and try not to look up any guides. Be astute, listen very carefully, everything is important and know that the game begins before you even start it.
I have been playing God of War: Ragnarök and have just finished the main story. I hadn't planned on playing this, but a friend gave me a code, so I thought, why not. I did NOT expect to love it as much as I do, it is so much fun. The story and characters are compelling, and it made me cry more than once. It also gave me combat that is brutal, over the top and really satisfying when you pull off good combos (it helps that the tutorials/hint system is very good, too). The puzzles were fun - I keep calling it Myst But With Violence and I stand by that point.
Shoutout to the soundtrack by Bear McCreary, especially the combat and ambient music. And to the accessibility options, those are truly impressive and range from being able to autocomplete minigames to picking if you want button mash or button hold to audio cues for a huge list of things to being being to make characters and environmental hazards a super bright colour so they are easy to keep track of.
Definitely try the free DLC when you get the chance! It's pretty incredible and made me pretty emotional as someone who loved all the God of War games
Oh I absolutely will! I want to finish up the post game-quests and then it's DLC time.
I did not expect to get as involved in the story and characters as I did because I only had pretty vague knowledge of the series before, but man. I am excited for what comes next.
Oh man, Bear McCreary is one of my all-time favorites! He did the music for the 2005 version of Battlestar Galactica and I've been using The Shape of Things to Come as my wakeup alarm for the past 15 or so years.
I'm really looking forward to playing GoW: Ragnarok when it (presumably, eventually) comes out for PC. In the meantime, I never quite finished the 2018 God of War on PS4, which I've since bought for PC. Sooner or later I'll get that cleared out of my backlog, but in the meantime I'm still looking forward to seeing what it looks like with the visuals cranked up as high as they can go.
You encounter a dwarf in Ragnarök who's sitting there playing the hurdy gurdy, and I thought: oh damn they really got someone who actually knows how to play for the motion capture. They sure did
Battlestar Galactica was where I first heard his music, it's such a good soundtrack.
I bought 2 "boomer shooters" (aka "old-school FPSes") during the Steam sale.
Prodeus is the love child between Doom 1993 and Doom 2016. It's not as good as one or the other but it was obviously made by fans that managed to capture the most defining elements of both games. There are small but intricate levels, many secrets to be found, and it feels good to kill zombies and demons. I only regret a lack of variety in enemies, and the super shotgun is good enough 90% of the time. I bought it at ~18€ and IMO it's worth it.
Project Warlock is a Wolfenstein-3D-like. The demo was nice enough, but the first act is disappointing. There are claustrophobic levels with corridors that all look alike, and only a relatively useless map of the immediate area. The trailer and demo show levels that look more varied and interesting than what I've seen so far... For 3 bucks I don't feel robbed, but I'll come back to it once I'm done with Prodeus.
I also went back to Binding of Isaac. I stopped playing shortly after buying the last DLC because I found the game was getting harder, and I'm already not a really good player, though I've been enjoying the game since its release. I picked it up again this week, got a broken build with Azazel, and beat Mother first try in normal mode. I still have the last 2 final bosses to meet and defeat.
I'm about 3-4 hours into F.I.S.T Forged in Shadow Torch. I enjoy Metroidvanias but I'm trying to decide if I should continue with this one. The production is surprisingly high in some places, but then randomly voice lines won't play. The controller is recommended, but then in some instances the analog stick is inverted, but not in others. It's also seemingly impossible to navigate certain menus with a controller, dialogue loops, attacks stop working randomly (and so on). Essentially the jank is getting to me.
I'm also frustrated with the fact that there's no really useful way to block attacks. There's a parry, but it's limited to two uses (with a few other options on the same resource) before needing an execution or item to refill.
The Finals, free to play shooter with decent movement. It's been a while since I've played a more action packed fps and I've been having a blast, it's really easy to drop in and out. Coming from Counter strike and valorant it's been a nice change of pace.
Still playing through Asgard's Wrath 2 for the Meta Quest. This is the pack in game for the Meta Quest 3 (which I have) but it runs on the Meta Quest 2.
I'd compare it to the Legend of Zelda series in that it is a lightweight action RPG centered around combat and solving puzzles. You've even got a hookshot. It has experience points and skill trees, but all of the systems, particularly inventory management, are all streamlined so you'll never feel like you're struggling with character configuration UI.
I'd also compare it to Metroid Prime in that it is carefully tuned to make the most of its graphics; a VR headset is basically a smartphone on your face and wants to draw 2 frames, one for each eye, 90 times per second. Visuals are not as complex as you'd see in a state-of-the-art PC game, but the world is beautiful to be in. Video games have long had boss monsters which were bigger than your character, but in VR you face boss monsters who are bigger than you!
Personally I think the combat is a lot of fun. The answer to the "what happens if you hit another sword with your sword" is that you trust your eyes instead of your proprioception, the first time I felt the mismatch I felt my sword had broke or bent and had a bit of an uncomfortable feeling that is like the motion sickness you feel when you have a tracking failure. (Maybe that's right...) I got used to it pretty quickly.
Meta's movement tracker claims you are burning calories playing this game; I've been playing it sitting on the couch and can't say it is much of a workout in the conventional sense, although it's certainly more strenuous than the average video game because you sometimes need to reach above your head to climb or hang or hold a shield up over your chest so you can definitely feel a burn in your arms sometimes. In a boss fight or in certain puzzles you have to manage physical as well as mental fatigue and it's important to take breaks when the game gets intense.
I've rarely found a game as buggy but I rarely play games on day one. I've had a few crashes and once had to roll the game back to the beginning of the quest because I managed to remove an offering that was locked in a snake's head by pulling really hard and that act of sequence breaking made it impossible to finish the quest. I got on the developer's Discord to make a bug report and got a really great reply in an hour.
Despite some imperfections (which I imagine they could fix) this is a groundbreaking game that proves a VR game can be just as "big" as a flat game, and I'm having a great time playing it.
I had been playing WoW Classic almost exclusively since Season of Discovery came out, but finally kind of ran out of things to do except logging in for raids with my guild.
So I went back to new WoW, and started leveling a new character and the difference between the two is truly staggering. It should be obvious since it's 20 years between the two versions but it still surprised me to see the difference side by side like this!
Almost everything about the new version is - or should be - better. Sound design, voices, UI, environment, quests, combat... Almost everything works a lot more smoothly, animations are way more unique and fluid, etc. But still, it's interesting that the 20 year old version still holds up on account of the slower and more strategic gameplay having a lot more to offer. Because in comparison, new WoW is really quite brainless a lot of the time. What always drew me in was immersing in the open world but you don't really do that anymore - almost all open world content is extremely easy, except maybe for the very rare elite mob designed for a group of 5 which I just barely couldn't solo. The only challenging content is instanced, which is such a shame because it means that the part I always liked about the game no longer has challenges.
That's one thing I thought New World did really well. For all its faults, it had a very engaging open world and questing experience - going to try it again once I inevitably bore of WoW for the thousandth time!
I’ve been playing a lot of Samba de Amigo: Party Central on Switch.
Pros: I’m having silly fun. It’s helping me close my exercise ring on my Apple Watch - my heart rate definitely gets up there as I commit pretty hard while playing.
Cons: The music is fine, but I’m just not feeling a bunch of the songs (a handful of standouts, though). The single player campaign-ish mode requires some precision that I don’t actually believe the JoyCons are capable of (though, you can pick and choose missions, and earn the same experience from replaying completed ones).
Overall, no regrets buying it. I got it on sale for $30 (deluxe version). I haven’t gotten my wife to play with me yet, but I think she’ll enjoy it and that will make it better. A little challenging for the six year old, but that one would rather do other things not on the Switch anyway.
Kirby and the Forgotten Lands. Grew up a huge Kirby fan and Kirby's Adventure was one of the first games I ever beat and 100%. Great game and very "Kirby" like in it's approach : whimsical , approachable, challenging enough to not be boring (if you 100%) but not challenging enough that young children can't beat a level.
Really love it and if you're older gamer who just wants something chill with a good dose of nostalgia, I highly recommend it.
I played Talos Principle 2 and I really liked it.
The gameplay consists of solving 3D-puzzles (similar-but-different to the Portal series) set in beautiful landscapes scattered with huge brutalist monuments and towers, while the story evolves around philosophical questions regarding the motivations of humanity, growth vs stagnation, religious beliefs and myths, and what makes us human.
I thought the puzzles were not very hard, but enjoyable. It took me about 40 hours to solve and collect everything.
Minor nitpicks would be a few situations, where I wished that the devs enabled me to traverse the levels faster (the running speed is fast already, but the levels are pretty vast), and I thought some of the activities to get collectibles ('stars') were a bit uninspired.
But I loved the game as a whole, just a good time in beautiful scenery. I hope they release a DLC like they did for the first game.
Been playing a lot of Remnant II recently, and it's pretty damn good 20 hours in. I played a bit of the first one, and 2 is definitely more of 1 but better.
You can tell the designer was playing Dark Souls one day and thought "what if this, but with guns?", and then went and did it. And it works.
It's a goodie. I was playing it quite a bit recently with some buddies until I got kidnapped by the seamless coop Elden Ring mod.
I was sleeping on Remnant 2 until this week. I always had the assumption it was a generic looter shooter that I wouldn't enjoy that much, but I was super wrong! I was binging Iron Pineapple videos this week and decided to watch a Remnant 2 video from him and the boss fights just looked excellent! I'm making sure to pick it up next time it's on sale (and force a couple friends to buy it with me, too, ha).
I've been playing spiderman 2 with my son. It's... What I expected. Pretty world. Cinematic combat.
Most of the combat just goes on a little too long for my taste. "Beat 6 guys. Now beat 6 more. This time there's a dog. Now beat 5 and two birds. Ok you're done! Cutscenes!" The world also just isn't explorable. You won't discover anything. You won't have your own personal adventure.
I'd say it's a C.
Yeah; got it for Christmas, finished it before I got back to work. The bits I enjoyed were the fluidity of the combat, and the web-slinging mechanic that rewards timing with speed.
I’ve recently started playing a rogue like called roboquest after seeing it recommended by a YouTuber. It’s pretty fun, fast fairly responsive combat.
I’ve also (finally) gotten back to persona 3. It’s not bad but it’s definitely a product of it’s time, missing a lot of quality of life changes that the later games have
In the middle of shuffling all my stuff so it's mostly been iOS games. Back on a pinball kick with-
PinOut- Simple pinball survival game where you just keep going up and up and up and trying not to run out time. Nice arcade style and fun little gaming loop.
Pinball CC2- The ONLY littlewings pinball game I can find on mobile, but their stuff is phenomenal.
Zen Pinball- a variety of tables. I like that they're wacky/not physically possible mechanics. Leads to some really fun tables.
Williams Pinball- Medieval Madness, Attack from Mars, and Theater of Magic all are fun enough, although I don't play this one as much, mostly because it wants to validate online, which means if i'm somewhere with a not great connection I can't play, and I think that's extremely stupid.
Lego Fortnite. At first I was hooked and dumped a bunch of hours into it, but now I'm reaching somewhat of a plateau. There are a few hitches in the later game villager automation that make resource gathering a bit grindy. I'm hoping that future updates will help with this a bit, but for now my play has slowed a bit. Still fun to run around in world and build occasionally though.
Had a Teyon marathon. Finished Terminator: Resistance + Annihilation Line DLC, and I have to say that aside from some minor issues, they're pretty fun, though Annihilation Line is rather skippable. On the other hand, RoboCop: Rogue City (again, aside from minor issues) is absolutely fantastic, not to mention with this guy's audio mods as they restore movie sfx. Pure joy. Nuclear-powered nostalgia. I can even monitor people (with CRTs). They really know how to reproduce the original vibes.
I can't wait for their next game, and I hope it'll be either Dredd or Total Recall.
I played Hellblade for the first time and man, what an experience. The constant paranoia caused by the voices was a lot to deal with. The bosses were cool, the normal enemies were a bit repetitive, but the combat system was surprisingly good for a game that really wasn't focused on the combat. The story/lore was kinda all over the place, but I really did enjoy it. My only complaint about it was the Swamp Shard Maze was extremely frustrating and not fun at all. But other than that, I enjoyed the game, got all the achievements and un-installed it. It's not a game I would go back to for fun.
Now, I've just started Pokémon Sword and I'm already amazed at how much better it runs than Pokémon Scarlet. I like the Pokémon being on the overworld, and don't have many complaints about it yet.
Was in a roguelite deckbuilder mood this week and the new Momodora came out.
Momodora: Moonlit Farewell
The fifth (and final?) game in the Momodora series came out Thursday and I'm just plain satisfied as a fan. Took about 7 hours, which is more than the 4 hours of RutM and Minoria. It hit the right notes with me and I liked being able to see Momo and Dora in HD pixel. Gonna hop back into it for Arrange and Hardcore mode.
Objectively, there's a few changes to the formula:
Fights in Tight Spaces
Finally got a win on Classic difficulty with every deck type. I do like playing it, but it's all too easy for a single mistake to wipe the run. It feels like the UI doesn't signpost the each enemies attributes enough (ex. the enemies that move when you do) leading to preventable mistakes, especially with the lack of a combat preview.
Vault of the Void
Stepping back into this, got 2 wins as Tempest, one with Power Walk + Wrath for massive attack multipliers and another with Amplify + Retaliate for constant multi-hit shocks. Unlike the other roguelite deckbuilders I have, this one always gives an overwhelming feeling for actually starting a game due to all the planning for the routing and fights, so it needs the right mindset to play at times. Still, it's always good to see the run come together once the deck starts shredding enemies apart.
Sekiro had thoroughly kicked my butt, but I have beaten the final boss. The game has some of the best feeling combat I've ever played, and I'm currently on NG+ for the Shura ending (final boss is once again kicking my butt).
Picking up OSRS again after getting burnt out from a specific quest (Mourning's End 2 can f*ck off). So that'll be fun.
Starfield to do NG+. I believe there's DLC coming out soon, so I wanted to start banging out NG+ to prepare for it.
I did what I wanted to do with my first character with NG+ in the Main Story Quest. It was really great, at least if you liked the story in the first place. It introduces a bunch of great twists that make it worth running twice. In a sense I think you're not done with the story until you go through the main story in NG+. After this run I'm just going to power through the next iterations, or mess around between runs to find fun variants.
Portal: Reloaded is just... more portal which I won't hold against it. So far it starts just like the first one, setting you up for what is to come.
Baba is You I'm plugging away at it again, but it's hard as hell. This is definitely one of my favorite puzzle games ever.
Baldur's Gate 3 I'm cooling a bit on BG3, as I've not left the first act yet trying to do everything. I believe the forge is the last thing I need to handle, and I'll be moving to Act II. It's a great game, well-made, I think a peak cRPG, so I do still feel a pull back to it.
I managed to play Dominion with my family over Christmas. It's a fun 2-4 player deck-building card game. The cards available to you change every game, which provides good replayability and unusual synergies between cards. Slimming down your deck to refresh the same few cards frequently seems to be the dominant strategy. The natural opponent to such a strategy is how the victory point cards are both limited in number and don't do anything in hand, providing an excellent built in catch up mechanic. I don't know how good the expansion packs are, but I'm excited to find out. Very good board/card game, 9/10.
Finally finished Portal 2 coop with my sister over the holidays. It's taken us 2 years. We get to the end and
Spoilers
when we got to the final chapter and GladOs starts saying how wonderful it would be to test on humans again, she looked horrified.Very good fun. Slightly easier than the single player levels, I thought. The levels seemed to reuse ideas more frequently than in SP, like gel on light bridges. I'll definitely check out the Talos Principle after this.
OpenTTD is always a hoot. Being able to play on any old laptop (even phones) makes any long distance trip pass by. It was made in the 90s and has been kept up to date ever since. It's also free.
The scale of the map is far greater than modern equivalents like Transport Fever, with more variety for goods to transport. Mods also make the game a lot more fun.
The cargo distribution system is barebones. You take product A to factory A. Factory B needs product A as well, so you set up a line that connects all three. Everything is offloaded into factory A, forcing unoptimal distribution networks. That is, until you go into settings to turn on a feature that should be the default: a product has a destination when made. This is doubly important and immersive when transporting passengers.
Good game, though occasionally tedious.