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

Witcher 3 - No matter how old this game is, it still stands strong. I've finished it on Switch Lite (perfectly fine and playable, long loading times after death though) and now I play older (pre-next-gen) version on Steam Deck - this is purely to get good framerate and save battery at the same time. It does around 2:30 on almost two years old OG Steam Deck.

The thing I love about this game is how believable the game world is. It doesn't seem empty, it really is a living world, there are many things gapening in many settlements. Also - many quests are very very long and detailed, not just main quests, mind you.

What also differentiate this game from others is playtime. If you are 95%+ (completionist), you are looking at well over 100 hours! There really is so much to do!

Also - your decisions matter. And they matter in long time, not just within one quest. You may do something and after 20 hours something else may play out differently.

This game is really well done, true masterpiece. I know it was flawed at the time of release, but many years passed since then and as I said - this game stood the test of time very, very gracefully.

The Talos Principle 2

(This opinion will contain spoilers for the first The Talos Principle. If you want to play that, stop reading immediately, because you should go in blind.)

I spent over 40 hours of my life solving all of The Talos Principle 2's 140 puzzles and change, playing the 24 monument challenges, listening to the 36 audio logs from Straton, Trevor and Lifthrasir and the memories from Athena & co, chatting with the NPCs, reading the various texts, etc.

What a lovely game this is.

The iteratively grown AI controlled robot New Human from the end of the first game, who calls herself Athena, built more New Humans, and over the centuries they painstakingly started a new civilization. You wake up to find you are 1K, the 1000th new human and the fulfillment of The Goal set by The Founder Athena before, a long time ago, she went off and never returned. Now that everyone's done accomplishing the last thing she suggested, the New Humans are getting ready to never do anything of significance ever again and live out their many days in peace and harmony with nature. Except... A strange structure has been detected in a far off island, and the mayor reluctantly approves an expedition to investigate, which you are to be a part of.

The more cynical or impatient player might find it preachy, or perhaps boring, and that's OK - not all games are for everyone. But I appreciated the relentless optimism and faith in humankind, the philosophical perspectives being presented not just through real world material, but (mainly) through conversations, comments, and arguments being presented by the many NPCs. These characters, especially the main ones, have a lot to say, and each feels deep and unique, adding a new dimension to the formula of the original game. I found the writing in general to be pretty good. I'd say this one of those rare games that is educational, not in a sense that it will teach your kids to be nice, but in a sense that it can teach an adult engaging honestly with the material new ideas. That's not easy to accomplish! The conversations you have with the other characters will influence certain events at the end of the game, allowing you to steer society toward cautiousness and dogmatism or boldness and optimism.

The UE5 graphics are absolutely gorgeous - at least if you have the hardware for it. New Jerusalem is a dome city of smooth curves and manicured gardens. The other 14 locations in which the game takes place are vast (get ready to walk a lot) sets comprised of statues and massive brutalist structures harmoniously integrated into beautiful natural environments. Each area can feel very different each time you visit because the time of day and the weather can both change (no rain, but it can get cloudy and foggy). The two swampy areas and the Megastructure were not for me, but otherwise it was a pleasure to immerse myself in these locations. The textures are so high quality, and everything is so artfully designed, you can have fun just running around exploring, photographing either the small details or the big vistas using the feature-rich photo mode.

The sound is also great. The sound effects themselves are solid, but the game is accompanied by smoothly cycling music tracks that hit the right spot between unobtrusive and noticeably pleasant. The large voice cast did an excellent job. I like how far they went to give the New Humans accents from all around the world; the voices really help humanize the otherwise (let's face it) frankly uncanny looking robots.

The menus and UI are great. Clearly Croteam believe in player choice, because you have access to all the Display settings and volume sliders, and many gameplay options that can help you mitigate motion sickness and tweak accessibility vs challenge. I do recommend increasing the FOV first thing unless you're really, really vulnerable to motion sickness (for some reason it defaulted to an extremely narrow 70 degrees?)

I really like that this game almost completely does away with the more frustrating puzzle mechanics of the original, such as exploding minebots, machine guns or self-recordings. The tight timing required to solve those puzzles, coupled with pointless waiting times, led to a lot of frustration that had nothing to do with actually knowing the solution. In TTP2, the humble laser beam connector is the protagonist in almost every puzzle, accompanied by a large cast of new types of connectors and other machines on tripods. I was able to solve most (not all) of the puzzles without much trouble, but I don't ascribe that to the game being too easy - I've seen reviews of people who had more trouble - but to a solid learning progression and solid mechanics that meshed well with my own experience as a player of puzzle-based games. Much like in the original game, some challenges will require shooting beams out of puzzles into the wider world or breaking items out of puzzles entirely, and sometimes you can find unintentional (or at least non-canonical) solutions with a bit of creativity!

Also, you can pet the cats.

If you've read my previous opinions over the last two years you might have expected me to follow my usual structure here - start with the positives, then gradually get into the things I disliked. Sorry to disappoint! 10/10 .

Previous

I ended up dropping Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology. I was actually enjoying almost everything about it, but the combat, after 5 hours was already starting to grate. Unfortunately, it's just not interesting or tactical enough to actually sit through another 45 hours of.

Ended up just moving on to Advance Wars: Dual Strike, which has been fun so far. Wasn't sure I wanted to play more AW after completing 2 last week, but turns out it's just sitting right with me right now.

Dabbled a little bit in Dragons Dogma, having owned it for near a decade on Steam and hearing so much about the new game. It seems neat so far, but I'm not really sure I'm feeling up to playing it too much right now, but we'll see.

Have continued Lies of P now being about 16 hours in; weirdly, it's become the "family game", where my wife likes to watch, along with my 4 and 6 year old kids, everyone continually asking me to play more. The kids don't seem scared or freaked out by it and now play "Lies of P" out in the backyard when they're running around.

The game took about 6 or 7 hours to click for me, but now I'm really enjoying it and really getting the hang of it. I'm still mediocre at Perfect Guard, but I've gotten much better and I do like that the game feels like it's really making me switch weapons and strategies for each new area and enemy type and aside from my Boss Ergo Weapon, I feel like I have enough resources to upgrade several weapons to keep myself viable.

I'm still addicted to Minecraft. It just hits different when you have a handful of dedicated friends to play with. Not much to say, it's Minecraft, but it is scratching the creative outlet itch I have. I've built a Viking themed house and forge, which I'm in love with, and I started a wizard tower! The majority of my friends are currently working on a rail system from our town to nearby villages and points of interest!

Besides that, I talked about iRacing the past couple weeks and it's been going great! I've held myself to doing more official races, my new wheel has been utterly fantastic (which I talked about last week), and my team got P3 in GT3 in our split of the Sebring 12 hour! That makes two Sebring podiums in a row for me, and four podiums in my last 5 team races! I'm definitely improving and I was a lot closer to top team pace in this race than usual! I'm going to keep doing Indy open on Mondays, F4 Americas on Sunday, and I'm still trying to nail down a sports car series and night.

Just initiated a refund request for Helldivers 2. I'm surprised with the hype. Firstly, every game is fun with 3 friends. The dumbest of games. The weirdest of games. Lethal Company for instance, extremely funny. But when I can sync a schedule with 3 friends for couple hours, a video game won't even be my first choice.

The difficult thing is for the game to be fun with randos, and uh... nah. It makes me feel like Warzone on steroids: cooler enemies, cooler guns, cooler missions, all that, sure. It doesn't look nearly as well as the system requirements would suggest, specifically the terrain, but I'll live. Most importantly, it suffers from the same problems and struggles with solutions, at least at the beginning (I know there are vehicle drops later): it's slow to traverse the terrain, for a lot of time nothing happens, and worst of all: extraction.

Even in Warzone you can get murdered seconds before extraction only by enemies, and a troll teammate extracting early doesn't mess everyone else up, as you can just catch another extract. I was still on the fence 108 minutes in, thinking "I'll just finish this mission, and consider keeping it as I make supper"...

Then I got TK'd on purpose a meter from the extraction shuttle, and the game called me disappointing for it lol. And then crashed.

I bit the bullet and dropped $70 on Dragon's Dogma 2 and I've been having a lot of fun with it. I've kind of been wanting a big, open world fantasy game, but I'm also not good at action combat for the most part. This one has a nice balance where I can get a bunch of pawns that can do a lot of the heavy lifting. And overall the combats feel appropriately exciting and dangerous. Exploring is fun, nighttime and camping feels pretty good as a mechanic. I've been going with the flow in terms of just walking everywhere. I'm not too concerned about the microtransactions, as there are a bunch of mods to give you fast travel stuff if I get to the point where I want that.

There's definitely a hint of jank, similar to the previous game. I wouldn't mind a few patches to tidy things up a bit (or perhaps mods to do the same). Overall I'm really enjoying it. I haven't had a game that I've looked forward to sitting down and playing consistently like this for a while.

Been playing FF7 Rebirth. One of the few games I'll actually have time for this year. So far it's been worth the price of a PS5 just for this one title. I was nervous about them diverging from the main story after the Remake, but honestly you can tell this is a labor of love, and they tried to fill in as many of the elements from the original FF7 as they could. Honestly impressed how creative they were with referencing just about everything the original had going for it, as well as adding some new content to keep it fresh. Been so awesome seeing some iconic locations re-imagined and fleshed out. I would say the combat is probably the worst part of the game for me, but plenty of people are having a blast with it, so I can't say its bad, just not my favorite. Overall 9/10 and one of the few things these days that lives up to the hype.

I wanted to find and play a game that made me feel the same way Fable did when I was but a carefree child returning home from school with nothing better to do and no responsibilities.

So I got Kingdoms of Amalur: re-reckoning and am thoroughly enjoying it! The art style is very similar and some of the dry English sarcasm and humor is there too. For the past 2 days I've been off in my own imagination reliving that childhood feeling mentioned earlier.

• Slice & Dice a roguelike similar to Slay the Spire but with dice and class progression. Originally on itch.io it's on PC, iOS, and Android. It's the perfect iPad game for me. Each run starts with a party of characters. Each character belongs to a class which determines what is on their D6. Enemies roll first and display what they will do (a la Into the Breach). Your team rolls, you can set aside die, and reroll (default is two rerolls per turn). Then you take your turn before the enemies do. Each victory alternates between offering a level up or an item. When leveling up two of your characters are offered a new class (within their class family). Items can change the sides of die or add modifiers to sides, each character can equip 2 items. This game absorbed hours of my time this weekend. A lot of randomly generated stuff which makes for some really fun mechanics to play around with.
• Jailbroke my 3DS and loaded up some Pokemon Black. I never played black but do appreciate the older style of Pokemon game. Only complaint is "fast forward" isn't possible on a 3DS, pokemon games are so much better when played on fast forward.
• Installed Ghost of Tsushima from Playstation Plus. Only played a an hour or so but it feels like "God of War in feudal Japan." Will be a fun diversion occasionally but it isn't blowing me away. Tried the "Kurosawa vision" which was fun but I don't know that I could play a whole game in black and white with a faux film grain. I wish it was an option for cutscenes only.

Alan Wake 2 - I tried playing the Alan Wake Remaster before playing this game and couldn't get past the tedious and joyless combat and visual bugs that the developers never worked out. I had high expectations for Alan Wake 2 given how much I enjoyed Control and Max Payne 1&2 and at two thirds complete, it's not a universal recommendation the way Control was.

If you can get past the basic concept, the plot is wonderfully weird in a David Lynchian kind of way and how they tell the story should inspire future games. Visually it's staggering and the overall polish (with a few visual glitches here and there) and atmosphere of the game is great. They nail the spooky surreal vibe and I get chills on a regular basis.

However, the combat, while vastly improved from the first game, still feels incredibly tedious. The "challenge" comes from enemy movement speed, bullet sponginess, resource limitations, and the 'shield' mechanic which while not uncommon in survival horror games, is just not fun and annoying. I didn't find that I had a problem killing enemies or bosses, but about a third of the way through found the combat to be a chore and actually turned down the difficulty so I could focus on the plot.

What I find most annoying is probably how you advance the plot. Whether it's using the 'memory place' or 'changing the plot' to advance the story, making sure you found every little item, or searching around for codes to open boxes or locks, I find myself completing 90% of what's required only having to resort to a guide to find the tiniest detail I've missed. Case in point, I found a fuse which I believe would work to turn the power back on but because I didn't talk to the right people in the right order, I was unable to turn the power back on and instead had to double back, talk to the right NPC, then go back to the generator and start the process over again. It was very annoying.

I think there's a group of people this game appeals to. If you're a "read every piece of in-game media" kind of person and don't need your combat to be stimulating, this game is probably for you. For me, I'm glad they made it but at this point, I just want to see how the story ends.

edit : finished the game and it feels like a 6.5/10. Tons of great ideas for the mechanics but feels clumsy to the point of annoyance. For the final mission, I had to search around for items in a shoe box... that's just unnecessary tedium

I've been playing Minecraft on a superflat world. It forces me to think about the game in different ways. Here's the Superflat customisation settings I'm using:

minecraft:bedrock,3minecraft:stone,5minecraft:sandstone,8*minecraft:sand;minecraft:desert

These give me abundant diamonds and gold, but I need to get the iron to craft a pick to get the diamonds.

Also, slime-proofing my base is hard work.

As well as that I bought an Anbernic "RG35XX H" (they have a terrible naming scheme) and it's been fun playing PSx racing games and some Advance Wars. It's remarkable that I can emulate some Dreamcast games on this pocket device.

I'm going to complete Advance Wars, then look to Final Fantasy games and the Final Fantasy tactics games, and then I'll have a look at what else is available.

I've got 8 1/2 hours in Balatro a rogue-like deck builder based around poker. Angory Tom and NorthernLion on YouTube has some videos on it. It's pretty good even though I've only won once. It has lots of replayability.

Sea of Thieves - you are a pirate, sailing the seas, pillaging, killing skeletons, raising reputation with a few different factions. There is no "progression" to speak of; most of what you can get are cosmetic items. You can save up to buy your own ship, but it's not needed. You can buy new guns or swords, but they're just updated models; they do not function any differently than the swords and guns you start with. It's quite fun to pop on with some friends, get in their ship, do some quests, and maybe start a battle with another galleon. It is a fairly hefty game - it took something like 130gigs of install space - but overall it has been pretty good. It's easy to get into, and after a fairly bad tutorial, it gets pretty easy to know what's going on.

Been playing multiplayer Rimworld with a friend. It works surprisingly well, even with all sorts of mods. I think we've had one issue of desync in like 15-20hrs of play so far. I don't have deep experience with Rimworld (friend does), so it's nice to be able to learn from him. And also just have some share in the ridiculousness that often arises in Rimworld.

Also playing Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney. I played this game on the Nintendo DS when it came out (I've played all the mainline AA games and a few of the spinoffs), but picked up this trilogy when it came out on Steam. I'm on the final case, which uses the "Jurist System." Honestly, I think this is one of the weaker entries in the AA universe, but I'm still enjoying it. Ready to get to Dual Destinies!

Lastly, still playing FFVII Rebirth. I've arrived in Costa del Sol. There are more minigames. I won't say anything more about that =X.

Point-and-click adventures, I like them…quite a bit. This weekend I came across some free game site and played through some. They were all pretty good! So here’s some I played and enjoyed.

https://gamaverse.com/trace-game/
https://gamaverse.com/forgotten-hill-the-third-axis-game/

Special mention for the Palm Cracker game, it was such a fun surprise. I owned a Palm at some point and this game took me back to that great time.
https://gamaverse.com/palm-cracker-game/

I have played Potionomics but failed to pass the first week successfully. I think I have to get a fresh restart because I lost so badly it wasn't even funny.

I shall search for a good guide before starting though, don't want to waste another hour.

I recently found Century: Age of Ashes, a dragon dogfighting game (as in, you could make a fantasy spinoff of Ace Combat from this).

Controls are very close to AC's arcade style (Joystick handles pitch and turns, triggers speed up and slows down, face buttons are attacks, no target lock as far as I know, flares are spread among abilities).
In action, well, it is very close to AC, again:

• Your basic attack are Standard Missiles Fireballs, max of 2 charges, homes into your opponents (does reload faster, but then you don't have any other ranged options), small change is they'll speed up as you do.
• You of course have a Minigun Flamebreath, dragons can't hold it for long but will aim for you, also reloads (in general there isn't limited ammo unlike AC).
• You don't have a Special Weapon (which themselves often were bombs/unguided rockets/missile but _/a railgun), instead you have a class-specific Power and a less class-specific Ability, for the most part even the damaging abilities/power either rely on Fireballs or do something else which is why you use them mainly.
• And now diverging from AC, you have a stamina gauge, used for boosting and dodging; shields (just more HP); and no way to switch target lock manually.

Handling-wise, again AC but you are slower but overall more maneuverable to suit the game itself taking place in smaller and more crowded spaces (there are a lot of caverns, ruins and other tight spaces under the open air to go back and forth between complete stop and divebombing someone).
They also use energy and pickups to try and keep you from just staying in the open (the main source of energy is energy rifts in the ground or flowing by terrain, pickups themselves are placed close to bits of terrain like spires or on top of gates).

It is a F2P game, but the monetization is... maybe fair? I mean, 20 bucks for a dragon skin isn't nothing (and that's the most expensive ones), but you only have to pay for skins, the classes and abilities are overpriced but available for free currency, and none of them are overpowered it feels like.
Meanwhile World of Warships Legends asks 40 bucks for one ship (a bit more actually), and while they try to balance premiums the best they can, there's a reason why there's a bunch of premium CE ships (and one who got uptiered, hi Weimar).

Really, the game's big problems are the lack of content (7 regular maps, 1 racing map, 1 training/small map; 6 classes) so expect to do the same thing over and over, and against the same people often since it has less players than Ace Combat 7 has (AC7 has around 800 players on a 24-hour peak, Century only 170, hell, it loses to payday 3 on all fronts and that's considered a failure), while it does have crossplay that doesn't make up even just the 700 missing players AC7 has on average on steam alone.
Hell, World of Warships Legends only has PS/XBOX, spreads players across tiers and classes (and modes too often enough), is a 9v9 game instead of 4v4, and I don't think it has taken me more than 30 seconds to find a match there, meanwhile here it's 1 minute minimum and half the time 2 (not desperate lack of players but still a good amount of time).
Also, Season 3 started late July, was supposed to go for 12 weeks, and is still ongoing.

It is a fun game, but it feels like its on life support...

I still regularly play Factorio; though I've been having a hard time enjoying any games (or anything) as-of-late; just struggling with some internal issues I guess. I've been playing the "seablock" modpack, which makes big changes to the game, and is hundreds of hours to complete at minimum.

Rift Wizard 2 - Just hit EA and given it's 1 with a lot of clean up on "what made this fun, how do we make it more fun" I have 0 regrets. They've made it so you automatically heal to full and get all your spells back each level, no more shrines or circles, but instead you can find equipment and spells on each level which do similar or even crazier things. Plus just a ton of new spells and skills. Spells can currently only take 1 upgrade (not sure if that'll stay), but it's not nearly as harsh as it sounds given how skills/spells/equipment interact to still create obscenely powerful stuff.

On the enemy side you've got a ton of variation in them due to some code changes (things like "icy" are traits and thus can be mixed and matched), but they've also introduced massive 3x3 enemies who add all sorts of wacky nonsense to combat.

Really cannot recommend it enough if you want a "quick to play" roguelike. A run can be over in about an hour if you play fast, and you still get all the fun of doing stupid over the top nonsense.

I've honestly been playing a lot of Spirit Island on TTS. I've been playing the game for years now, pretty much every week for multiple games. We were discussing tier lists/spirit powers with my friend and it revitalized the game for me, so I've been playing a lot of random spirits two-handed and I've been having a ton of fun.

Other than that, some Monster Hunter World, my friend told me about this game that he played a lot. I really like the grinding/farming aspect of the game, plus the visuals and the story... but the gameplay is just meh. I hate being stuck into long animations, especially considering the very nature of the monsters you fight against. It's not natural for a human to be stuck for 3-5 seconds into doing the same motion when the monster moved after the first second.

I finally picked up and played Bomb Rush Cyberfunk at the end of spring sales, among a few other games. Never played either JSR game, but I love anything with good movement and I've always admired the aesthetic, and having played a bit of Team Reptile's Lethal League (/Blaze), I was very interested ever since the first teaser. Was on the fence because of the price but I finally caved in when I saw how the modding scene was developing.

I've put a good ~23 hours into it now, finished the main story and a good bit of the side content. What a great experience! It's not perfect ; the combat is weird and not very relevant to the experience and it kinda lacks difficulty, but the gameplay flows so ridiculously well and every part of the aesthetic is splendidly done.

One big thing I've learned that bothers me, though. I came across a comparison video of BRC and JSRF and when you put them side to side, it seems like the similarities in the different locations goes past just plain inspiration. I had noticed Brink Terminal looks a lot like that one zone I saw in gameplay of JSRF, and just thought that was kinda cute, but when you look at it, even the layout is super similar. Even if I enjoyed the different buroughs, I'm bothered by the idea they might not be so original after all... I may have to play JSRF to find out.

Bought a Steam Deck which has reinvigorated my love of gaming. For a while I just felt like I wanted to game in bed but never couls.

Been playing and enjoying Paper Mario and the Thousand Year Door, Divinity Original Sin 2, and Crypt of the NecroDancer.

PM because emulation rocks and I'm loving the (somewhat dated) humor.

DOS2 because I love Baldurs Gate 3. I never played any of the previous BGs or DOS. Kind of surprising how incredibly similar they are. Guess Larian really made BG3 their own type of game.

Crypt of the NecroDancer I bought a while back but played 10 minutes and didn't really care for it. But I figured playing it on a handheld would change my experience and I was right! Still really hard for me but it's a lot more fun this time around.

I’ve been one of those people who’s become absorbed with Helldivers 2 lately, but since that’s all over the place I’ll just note that I enjoy it quite a bit.

A more niche pick that I got from the spring sale on steam was Cavern of Dreams which is this little n64-styled platformer that has a baseline charming aesthetic but gets a bit darker the further you delve into it. Pretty solid little game you can finish in a couple of smaller sessions or one “I don’t have much to do today” session. The reward for collecting all of the eggs was pretty nice, and practically kneecaps the final encounter if you get stuck trying to finish the game.

I’d place it in the league of other cozy-themed platforms like “Mail Time” and “Smushi Come Home” (which are so visually similar it’s almost hilarious). Though it seems more visually invested in dealing with darker themes like “Super Kiwi 64” and “Corn Kidz 64”, the latter of which is next on my list after finishing Psuedoregalia (Not a lot of thoughts yet, pretty mechanically solid with good sound design)

Sifu

It's pretty fun. I like the aesthetics. On normal difficulty it's challenging without being too punishing. There's a good number of combos, but they're not super complicated. Not like a typical fighter I.e. SF or Tekken. It can be frustrating figuring out timing and what not. But it feels good when I do finally get it. Much like other rogue-like games, it gets easier as you replay levels. I have had to look up a strategy for a boss. I'm close to the end and it's a good ride. Curious how it will all end.

Desecrators has been eating up most of my gaming time since getting it during Steam's spring sale. I really enjoy it, and it's damn challenging, but conversely rewarding when you play well.

Mechanically, it plays like a mix between Forsaken and Descent, so it's a six degrees of freedom shooter, kind of a mix between an FPS and a space sim where you dogfight flying enemies in winding tunnels in asteroid mines and derelict space stations. Aesthetically, it obviously takes most of its inspiration from Forsaken, even emulating the low res texture+interpolation look of mid-to-late 90s 3D accelerated games, but concedes to modern affordances where it counts, for example for dynamic lighting.

The levels are generated so as to be unique on each playthrough, so you can't rely on rote memorization of layouts and enemy placements to beat the thing.