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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 took a break from Elden Ring to play Animal Well. A pretty hyped game because it's the first project produced by Dunkey's BigMode business. It was offered with my Playstation Plus subscription so I spun it up this weekend. I plan on buying a copy because I love supporting small developers and I think Dunkey is a good voice in the industry.
Initial Impressions
Pros
Cons
Overall
I hope success with projects like this, Helldivers, and Another Crab's Treasure demonstrate to the market that we don't need more AAA and AAAA games. We need to surface this type of talent, studios can make games cheaper without betting it all on giant lowest common denominator type projects.
Some people are acting like this is the second coming of Fez or Undertale. Maybe it is but I haven't seen it yet. I like the game a lot but so far it hasn't been "mind blowing." But it doesn't need to be and we do a disservice to excellent games expecting them to have perspective altering impacts.
My wife is similarly interested in the game and it's pretty interesting since she's normally drawn to more narrative and cinematic titles. I think it was my whole ghost cat saga that grabbed her attention because I was making it much harder than it needed to be.
But it's an incredible package and I'd discribe it as a game made for people who already understand the language of video games. There's so many little design decisions and little nods that is making a good majority of my experience intuitive and satisfying. I also seem to stumble into hidden mechanics long before I should and that has made some puzzles laughably easy.
I made it to the credit roll and seeing reviewers play time, it feels like I'm missing quite a bit. Will give it a bit of a break and jump in later.
Definitely leave your questions like the "hoot" for until you've exhausted everything you know to try at all. (If you keep moving through the map you'll probably figure that one out on your own.) There's also a discord that's very good about answering questions and giving bread crumbs for things without fully spoiling the puzzle, if you ever need a nudge or want to know if you're thinking along the right track yet want to get to the actual answer yourself.
Re checkpoints, I somewhat disagree because I think the game is generally good at nudging that you have an answer to get yourself out of every situation you get yourself into - so if you bonk your head against something long enough you'll get out. From a convenience standpoint I get it, much like Outer Wilds, but you can just hit Quit and then reload the save if you need to.
I just retired it myself. I got to the "layer 3" bit and found those locations before giving up, then I looked up the "layer 4" stuff because it was way beyond me - that's where it really reaches some other games in the knowledgevania... genre? (Knowledgevania? Eh? ehhh? I really need a word for these games so I can find more lol) Like you said I think The Witness still has a singular moment or two that beats out Animal Well, and Outer Wilds is still the prime one of these kinds of these games in terms of tying its mechanics into a narrative and very powerful thesis - plus some utterly beautiful puzzle moments. But what I think Animal Well carves out for itself is metatextual. I've got a weird phobia of games or programs going awry, so games that break their own rules and typical UI affordances really get to me; something that I think is clear is that Basso really understands video game "prose" via mechanics, and he gets that sense of wonder as we figure out what's really in a game. The "well" here is that ability to layer meaning within mechanics and exploration, and that the sense of curiosity is often what's between the CRT scanlines or unsaid rather than what's in front of us. Literally, unsaid - I found one piece of dialogue and it's an easter egg. Animal Well is a love letter to the medium itself, and it's written in its own language.
...Also it's thirty three point three megabytes. Like, that's part of the beauty of the mystery here. What else did he cram in here? What the fuck??
I definitely think I'm prone to falling into the "if all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail" mindset. There's one area in particular:
Earlyish game spoilers
First toy I got was slink. Second I got was the bubble wand. I ended up kind of trapped in that 3 room high bubble column. Part of the issue was trying to climb up all three screens to get from the bottom to the top is where I ran into my only "technical" complaint. And that is that trying to chain bubble jumps across screens was pretty difficult with the screen changing while I'm trying to land my next bubble jump. It felt like the only way to get back to the central area of the map. I'm sure I missing an easier route back, but that was a little painful. I got really good at using the bubble wand though, pretty much unlocked flying with that thing!I kinda liked "brainvania" term used by some streamer(s) such as FuryForge. As I see this description of these types of game is somehow popular.
I got to the first credits last night and I'm mostly finished with egg hunting, but I'm not sure where I land on it.
On one hand it feels a bit underwhelming. I think this is largely because there was never a point where things really came together in a narrative or thematic sense. The game has a good aesthetic and visual creativity but even as the credits rolled I couldn't tell you why we were doing any of this. I don't mind when games let their world speak for itself, but Animal Well never felt like anything more than a collection of interconnected puzzle rooms. It never felt like there was something bigger going on; there was no rhyme or reason.
Another thing is that unlike The Witness or Tunic there was never an "Oh my god!" moment. It's a bit hard to articulate (though I'm sure anyone who's played those games will know exactly what I mean), but there was never a moment where the game changed my expectations and suddenly unveiled a grander scope than it first seemed. It's like, by the end it turned out to be the exact kind of game I felt like it was going to be within the first 10 minutes.
On the other hand, I got far more absorbed in it than I planned. There was a density of creativity in both the puzzles, level design, and aesthetics that I never really lost interest (until egg hunting, but I'll circle back to that). Every single new room felt different enough from everything that had come before it so that it continually felt fresh and I was always excited to see what came next. Not only that, but the way that the rooms connected often meant that each one held multiple surprises that unveiled over time as I'd retrace through them from another angle or with another tool. I'm genuinely impressed at the game's density, especially given the size of the map.
Overall it was very fun and engaging, however trying to tie up the remaining mysterious in the post-game is wearing a bit thin. The game mostly does a good job nudging towards secrets and their solutions that I think you can get to the end game without too much frustration. However, there were still a couple moments in the main path that felt too obtuse and that just gets worse with secret hunting.
Spoiler:
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For example, I had no idea what the Top and Bouncy Ball were for until looking online hours after getting them because I didn't notice the clues in the rooms you get them in. Given that both were "rewards" for out-of-the-way exploring, I figured they were just cute toys that might give you an alternate way to solve puzzles that the YoYo or Slinky could already do. Another thing is that I didn't realize you could chain the bubble jump until I saw it online. I played around with it a couple times initially and couldn't get the timing right, so I figured there must be an upgrade or different tool later that would unlock a higher jump. Given it's importance, I feel like it should have been telegraphed better.
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Lastly, the map is huge and dense, which is cool the first time through, but when you're having to retread each area over and over again with a fine toothed comb with each new tool, it gets to be a slog just trying to get from point A to point B. The shortcuts are cool, but I wish there were a few more of them. Also that some of the secrets were a bit better telegraphed. How the hell was I supposed to know there was a fake wall in the top corner of that room or a switch under that pool when each room on the map is so tiny (and you can't zoom in) that the tell is literally a single pixel?
Honestly, I'm curious about the secrets I haven't discovered yet, but the grind is enough that I think I'll just YouTube them.
All in all though, I think it's a solid game. It's greatest liability may simply be the fact that it's choice of niche inevitable means it will be compared to games that have set an unfairly high watermark. It's good, maybe even one of the top 3 games I'll play this year, but it's not Tunic. It's not Hollowknight. It's not The Witness. Is that fair to Animal Well? No, but I can't help comparing anyway.
Just a heads up, the spoiler there has not turned out right and is in plain sight.
I pretty much felt the same way as you. Finished the base game and felt underwhelmed. Don't get me wrong, I felt the game was fun. It pulled me in and made me want to explore and gather things to progress. The game had great atmosphere and several iconic creepy moments. But the culmination of everything was.... underwhelming.
I learned that there was lots of to post game, and many more secrets to find. I looked up the secrets and what further story or meaning it would reveal, and unfortunately the answer is not much. The added problem is that the deeper secrets are so far a stretch that they would be quite difficult for a person to solve naturally. One of such puzzles requires 50 separate players combining information to solve. Maybe that's interesting for some people, but not for me. At the end of all the secrets, I would agree that the understanding of the world doesn't really change from your early impressions.
The game was introduced as a comparison to Outer Wilds for me, and I have to say that couldn't be further from the truth. Animal Well is more of a metroid-like with a focus on platforming and puzzles. Without spoiling anything, Outer Wilds is a game about exploration. At the end, everything you learn gives context to the overall story of the game, which Animal Well does not.
A friend sent me a copy of Blasphemous 2 after beating it because he enjoyed it just that much, though he is a huge fan of metroidvanias. I decided to give it a go and after some 27 hours I've gotten the 100% completion achievement. This is a really solid game. The fantastic pixel art and animation, the Spanish religious iconography, the superb soundtrack by Carlos Viola, tight gameplay with simple but effective variety and mobility, great map design with a fair spread of ability-gated pathways and collectibles, bosses that are all very unique and mostly very fair. It's a great game with great pacing, even when going for full completion, and I'd highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys metroidvanias.
Have you played Blasphemous 1? I didn't like the demo of the first game, but have heard many good things about Blasphemous 2.
I haven't actually, and my friend even said the second one was a lot better than the first gameplay wise so it wouldn't be very fun. I took his word for it and watched a playthrough instead to learn the backstory for the second game.
Company of Heroes 2, still blows my mind this type of strategy game is so unexplored.
I love the micro management, trying to keep your units alive instead of traditional way of just throw them to their deaths; the points throughout the map being how you get resources, it's important to hold half of the map or else you'll be unable to keep up with the production of units.
And especially the "realism" part of the game. I like how units seek cover or else they get obliterated if they stand in the middle of the road, I like how tanks are powerful units able to breakthrough the defences, but can still be defeated if you flank them and take a few well placed shots, and how you can't get too comfortable with your defences because the enemy can put artillery on them at any moment. All of this makes the game feel realistic, it makes look like a soldier can die anytime if he's unlucky enough to get hit, instead of just being a bullet sponge that loses health points. I'm not trying to say this game is realistic, but it feels like it, and I don't really know if there's a better word for what I'm trying to say.
There are a few games like this but what surprises me is that there isn't more.
Have you tried Men of War (Avoid 2, which just came out.) at all? I actually have a strong preference for it over CoH because it really tries to push the realism over other games. In particular, each soldier has their own inventory, so say if you have an AT Rifle team and the guy with the rifle is killed, you could sneak his mate over and pick up the rifle to have him take things over. Same goes for repairing and recrewing guns; just last night I was playing a match against my two friends and they killed the crew and damaged an AT gun I had in a town, so I sent some new, cheap riflemen up to cover it and had a couple run over, fix it up and then move it to a new position.
You can also do the same with tanks. Generally when a major component (such as an engine) gets knocked out on a tank, the crew will bail out and leave it there, but you can have them repair it and get it back into combat. Alternatively, if you've knocked out an enemy tank and haven't caused an ammo rack explosion or anything, you could go repair it and send it back into fight against your opponent.
There's also direct control. Admittedly, I don't use this too much because it forces you to focus on one particular area of the battlefield, but I do often use it when my enemy has a tank that maybe the AI isn't getting through or whatever. I can take direct control of my own tank, point to the weak spots on the enemy tank (such as the lower glacis) and start firing; or, if my tank hasn't been spotted, control it and move it into a flanking position so I can get side shots on the enemy tank.
It's really very cool and I highly recommend. The latest game in the series is technically Call to Arms- Gates of Hell: Ostfront and is my favorite (I've been playing this series for like 10+ years now), but Men of War: Assault Squad 2 is also excellent and I can highly recommend it.
Didn't try it yet, thanks! It's 0.74€ right now, definitely going to give it a shot. Will also wishlist the other two games
If you don't mind me asking, what's the problem with 2? Buggy, bad game or a case of people expecting more than what was delivered?
Men of War 2 doesn't feel like Men of War. It feels very much like they wanted to move more towards Company of Heroes, so many of the little things from MoW are missing. No longer can you break up a unit, for example. In the rest of the series, you get a unit of 8 to 10 men usually and you can split people off as you like, so you could send the machine gunner over to a flank position or what have you. Now you have units of 5 and they cannot be broken up.
You can no longer recrew your own guns. If your team gets killed on that gun, it costs you resources to actually get a new man there and if you don't have them? Well the gun sits there useless. Even if you have men in the field already that could move over and take it on, you aren't allowed.
Tanks lost their granularity. Where once you'd disable a tank and could repair and recrew it, now they generally just blow up and you can't do anything about it.
The game is significantly faster. Men of War is generally a pretty slowly paced game, so to speed it up it ends up just feeling "off" if that makes sense.
There's heaps of little changes that they made that just make the game feel like something else entirely. I played for 2 hours and decided to refund it because I just wasn't happy with it and after going back to Ostfront, I just knew I didn't want to pay MoW 2 any longer.
The UI is God awful.
You may like it, coming from CoH, as I think it still has some of the granularity of Men of War, but is (probably?) more approachable than the rest of the series. Again, as a veteran of the series it just feels bad to me and is lacking in all the things I adore about it, so you may differ there. I was excited about it and bought it immediately, which is something I flat out do not ever do with games, but I trusted the name and ended up coming away disappointed.
Sounds like Men of War and maybe MoW:Assault Squad are where it's at? And the II's less so?
Men of War is one of the earliest, so it's not necessarily as refined, though the series hasn't changed substantially since its inception. At this point, I'd really recommend AS2 and Ostfront, as those are the newest and if you're into multiplayer, have player bases.
If you just want to do the single player missions, you can't go wrong with most of them, just check steam reviews. I didn't play Cold War as I heard bad things. Call to Arms - Gates of Hell: Ostfront is pretty cool though as it has a dynamic campaign for single player, so you pick a faction and your allotted some resources to buy units, which you then pick from to take into battle. Winning earns you more resources with which to research new units, reinforce or repair your old ones and buy new ones. Though it has the least amount of factions not locked behind DLC.
Assault Squad 2 has a pretty huge amount of single player missions from a variety of factions such as Soviets, Japanese, USA, Commonwealth and Germany.
Everything "Men of War" is hugely discounted on Steam right now so going with your recommendations there plus the original and original AS because so very cheap now.
C2A will have to wait for a sale. Looks good though!
I hope you enjoy them, they're really one of my favorite series ever. I'm already a big WW2 buff, so the added realism of the series, while still maintaining the fun is just great.
Ostfront can definitely wait until you know you're going to enjoy the series. Again, they're not terribly different from each other, little tweaks and iterations here, so you'll get the idea once you start playing Assault Squad. Ostfront was actually developed by a splinter team of modders, as I understand it, but they really understand the series roots better than the original developers, it seems.
Enjoying AS2 already. Just need my left hand to heal from a break so that I can play it worth a damn!
Sorry to hear about your hand! That does make gaming challenging. I actually cut part of my left thumb off about two years ago (ER visit with deep ass needles to numb it up was absolutely the worst part. Still makes me wince.) and discovered that it was pretty damn essential to have a vertical handheld for gaming. My hands are large enough that I can play a Gameboy/GBA SP with one hand, especially turn based games. Really helped me keep my sanity while that thumb was largely unusable for gaming.
Glad to hear you're liking it! I know I sound like a broken record at this point, but it really is one of my favorite series. I can't even remember how I came about it at this point, but I think I received it in a bundle with a bunch of other historical wargames, which I'm not sure I actually ever even tried other than MoW.
V Rising
It's essentially another survival crafting game with a carefully tiered system based on your gear level, levels of bosses you've killed, and your region. Scaling up is mostly predictable though you can partially jump ahead, if you're extremely skilled and extremely stubborn.
When I'm looking for something that's not massively overstimulating, it's not a bad time spent.
As a single player game, it's somewhat relaxing. You mostly control the pace yourself. However, it's mostly predictable.
I imagine it shines more in MP but gaming hell (and heaven, but usually hell) tends to be other people.
I've been playing it since the 1.0 release as well. I'm doing most content solo, though playing on a private server with a few friends. We're playing in Brutal mode which is definitely a step up in difficulty since the last time I played.
I'm somewhere around the mid-point of Act 3 right now. I could definitely be focusing more on progression, but I'm enjoying taking my time with this time, and building up some foundation and my castle between bosses.
Most of the 1.0 changes have been solid improvements. New content, some definite quality-of-life features. I was hoping they'd redo the fishing system, but at least more fish types are effective for reducing misery in prisoners, now.
It's definitely a fun game, and scratches that Terraria progression itch that few other games have managed for me.
I've been playing a lot of Vintage Story this past week. I had only first heard of it from the post here and I'm sorry to have missed it for so long. It's funny that the first though that stuck me was like, oh this was basically what hytale was supposed to be but never came out, and then found out that there was a split off a ways back and vintage story is the result.
I was a bit older when minecraft came around and while I initially was excited for the promise of it, I never felt like it delivered on, well, anything I wanted to see with it. I know there are lots of mods delivering unique experiences and graphic overhauls, the modding in minecraft is just so obtuse feeling last I looked (couple years back now) that I didn't feel like fiddling around to make it into something a little more interesting for me.
Vintage story pretty much hits the mark for myself and my friend right out of the box. We typically play a lot of survival games, but actually never did a minecraft style game, even though I know we would have appreciated some of the bigger mods for it.
The game just looks great IMHO and the lighting system is very nice, bringing out a lot of character in the world. Music is good, sound effects are nice, even just walking across a plain with tall grass being pushed around by a strong wind is super immersive. I had a nice moment where we were able to just look up to see where it was raining because there were actual rain clouds over the places it was raining.
Just now getting through the winter and it is perhaps one of the best winter implementations I've seen in a game. The snow can layer down on the blocks as either 1 or 2 slices of height and blankets everything. I went to leave through our door and had to get out the shovel to shovel the snow because the snow was too high to fit. The lake outside our house is frozen over and partially covered in snow, but not there are patches of ice, snow, and then in the middle it didn't quite freeze. It's a pretty realistic frozen lake honestly. You can't harvest the grass under the snow unless you first shovel it. It slows you down and blankets everything. You can grab it up and make a snowball and throw it at your friend. It was just like walking outside the house the first time in a fresh snow and was great.
I'm ranting about this because I sort of love and miss winters having moved away from a place that had strong winters to a bit warmer climate. Not a lot of games have really done snow and the effects of winter that much at all, typically it is just a winter map and some generic snow goop at your feet.
But really that is an analogy for all the systems in the game, they gamify things but leave in a strong theme for them. I love the smithing, where you heat an ingot, pick it up with tongs, put it on the anvil, then hammer to push around microblocks in different directions to fill a specific pattern. You can get faster at it by keeping the same hammering direction but rotating the piece around. If you chop off too much you might need to waste a whole other ingot to fill in just one square, so there is an element of needing to be careful. They also give some time pressure if you have a few ingots on the fire if you want to get through them before they cool too much to hammer.
Early tool making you lay a pattern on the ground with a stone, then use another stone to 'knap' away microblocks into a pattern to make tools. Clay making is similar that you lay out a pattern then build it up in 3d layers to make the thing you want. But then you have to fire it by digging a hole, putting it in, filling it with grass, sticks, and a fuel, then light it on fire to burn all night. To get charcoal you chop trees and stack the firewood underground, put a fire on it, light it up, then bury it overnight and it turns to coal.
There are just so many cool systems at play in how you do everything, it is a really nice experience. I did totally miss minecraft modding so I don't know if these are all common mod things, so it is new and exciting to me.
Finally, I felt the game was put together really well. Dedicated server set up was super easy, it was easy to look up what the config files do (we did tune down hunger speeds a lot), the op commands all worked if needed. We also dug into the mods, which felt pretty healthy and had a good variety of cool different things to add to the game world.
All in all I'm really happy this game got posted here a while back for me to find it and enjoy it so much!
Also been playing VS the past two weeks on a dedi with freinds and totally agree with you on pretty much everything you've said.
I'd like to also add that the developers seem like they really know what they are doing. The regular updates, strong modding support, great QoL and lots of interesting and fun systems.
The modding seems really easy play with as well, which is great after looking into modding other games and getting turned off the long list of setup.
Great game, would recommend to anyone really!
I tried Diablo IV again, because the description of the new season "Loot Reborn" looked interesting , and goddamn was it a good idea. I'm having fun, something that didn't happen since... the public beta test.
Blizzard made many changes regarding the loot, itemization, and crafting (and I suspect, leveling speed). They also had the good idea to finally add helltides to lower difficulty levels. Helltides are periodic events (like once an hour?) where a whole region is invaded by Hell and there are tons of mobs, bosses, and special chests. This change alone makes the leveling to 50 much less of a chore. I am discovering mechanics that I never bothered to try before because the game was too boring to even hit 50 with a seasonal character. I think I played more in 5 days than since the game came out last year.
Tangentially, I'm also slowly migrating from Windows to Linux (Mint), and the game runs pretty well after a small fix for missing textures (see protondb comments). There are heavy framerate drops when the screen gets really busy, but I need to compare with Windows. Otherwise, full 60fps with raytracing, which was also recently improved iirc.
I also came back for season 4 of Diablo 4. I think I enjoyed it more than you initially but fell off fast in Season 2 and didn't touch Season 3.
They definitely made leveling significantly faster and this is the first time I have hit 100. Previously I had only made it to 80.
Helltides happen all the time now with only 5 minutes in between and I agree with them being added to World tier 1 and 2 leveling is a lot more fun. They also brought in aspects of the vampire stuff from season 2 and increased the monster density. So it's a lot better then it would have been when you last played.
I'm also having a blast. I'm playing a dust devil barb and it is completely crushing things. I'm almost done leveling my glyphs and have been flirting with the pit and master working but I'm probably almost done with the season. And that's fine. This was easily the most fun I have had with Diablo 4 yet.
I'm still addicted to Destiny 2. Into the Light has been such a great content drop leading up to the expansion (only a few weeks away!!!!!). I've been participating in the boss rush mode, Pantheon. I've now cleared the first three weeks, and week four will be 8 bosses straight (with the mechanically most difficult boss in the game being #7) at -20 power level, meaning that all of the bosses and adds hit like trucks (and hit like they did during the "contest mode" for those raids). This mode represents the absolute pinnacle of raiding in Destiny, with these raids being much harder than the normal or master version raids. Bungie even updated the mechanics of some encounters to make them more difficult, such as Rhulk making a copy of himself so you have to keep track of two bosses roaming around during the DPS phase instead of just one.
At first I was just doing it to get some raid exotics I didn't already have, but now that I'm 3/4 weeks done for the coveted Godslayer title (which will represent you being one of the very top raiders in the game), I feel like I have to try to finish it up this week, even if it will likely be a pretty painful 12 hour gaming session. Even if I fail to complete week 4, at least I have the pretty dope in-game emblem for completing week 3, which already shows I'm a good raider, and I got a bunch of pretty awesome loot along the way and made some new friends.
For those that don't know what the fuck I'm talking about, tldr raid bosses hard, Bungie made them harder, and now I'm being more of a gamer than I have been in years just so I can dunk on people with a digital title in stupid game lol.
Besides that, I did play the first few hours of Another Crab's Treasure and I want to pick up Animal Well, but I've seriously only been playing Destiny. I'm kind of falling into the boomerism (not in a bad way) of just having "your game" that you play because it's familiar and easy. I still like trying new games, but I have so much going on in life right now that it's kind of nice to just play my one game that I already know well.
I've been trying to get back into Destiny 2 ahead of the new expansion, and man they do not make it easy. I've played every expansion but the last one, and I have mostly no idea what I'm doing anymore.
Yeah, that’s still the worst thing about the game, it’s still incredibly hard for new players to know what to do and this is after they revamped the new player experience multiple times. If I didn’t have a veteran to guide me when I got back into the game, I wouldn’t have put a thousand hours in.
They did just make the Shadowkeep and Beyond Light campaigns free, so that might help a little bit, but it still kind of just plops you in without directing you.
Been playing more Unicorn Overlord, which is becoming even more fun than last time I posted. The difficulty is ramping up and making the game a bigger chess battle. I like it a lot. Recommend it on a handheld, 720p30 is really nice on the SteamDeck. Purchased on Switch, then just dumped it. I get like 2hrs of play before needing to charge.
Also playing Valheim Ashlands update. Started on a new server with friends, but we have limited play time. So 2x resources, ores through portals, player progression vs server progression. Really nice to get all the copper and tin I need in one play session instead of many. Lets me enjoy building and surviving more. So far not seen much of Ashlands, unless there have been some Biome updates.
Extremely mild spoiler of early on
Because it seems like Greydwarf Brutes and Shamans spawn in the Meadows post Eikthyr kill now.What difficulty mode are you playing UO in? How easy or hard are you finding it?
Playing on Tactition mode or whatever it's called. Early on it was rather easy, but now I'm getting to the point of needing to level some of my Units up so that I have a well balanced set to face off against most enemy Unit types. While not hard, it's definitely getting tougher. I'm about lvl 18~20 right now, and enemy units are beginning to include Promoted classes, making it even tougher.
We just finished our Valheim run and the Ashlands was absolutely brutal but a ton of fun. Our group of 5 each had different weapon and armor sets that worked together really well. And yea the difficulty amps up after each boss you take down but the game still requires you go back to older areas now and then for resources which is a nice break from the challenge and makes you feel super powerful. You definitely need to find new ways to defend your base from all the new spawns though!
I've been playing Slime Rancher 2 lately, and I am only 5 pods away from 100%ing it (at least until they drop their end of spring update and fall update this year).
I loved the original Slime Rancher but only just now got into the sequel because I was holding out hope it would be playable on the Mac like the first was. Oh well, janky Bootcamp it is then.
I still haven't decided which slime is my favorite, but I know for sure which is my least favorite:
spoiler: rare slime type
the Dervish slime. Always throwing its food outside the corral somehow, which makes the others upset that they can't eat, and then they all start hitting the top, breaking the ceiling, and getting out.
I've been interested in trying out Slime Rancher (didn't even know there was a sequel!) for a while now but haven't found the right time. How easy do you think it would be to pick up, put down, and then come back months later? I tend to do that a lot nowadays and I find myself not wanting to return to a lot of games because I know that I won't remember anything that's going on which then kinda stresses me out. Does SR 1 & 2 have a lot of story progression or are they more self-contained stories/levels?
It's kind of weird in that the story is mostly on "signs" strewn about the world. You can encounter them in any order and read them as many times as you like. Otherwise, the story is told to you early game, but it is quite simple. But the story is definitely not integral to being able to enjoy the games, though.
Before I bought SR2, I'd been absent from SR1 for at least a year, but I still went back to it. Other than forgetting what I was trying to accomplish with decor and organization, it was super easy to pick up again.
Good to hear, thanks for the info!
Been playing tons of Final Fantasy XIV. We're in the last stretch til the new DLC, so I've been trying to finish up the currently latest expansion, Endwalker. And I did last week! I think Endwalker might be my new favorite expansion. That said, I'm glad that this whole story arc, that started from the basegame and stretched over 4 expansions over the last several years, is now over. At least it appears to be over. There's still a lot of content I need to get through before the new Dawntrail expansion launches in July. Either way, I'm ready for a new world-ending plot, with new faces driving the world to the brink, in the world of Etheirys.
Aside from that, I'm still playing Rimworld here and there. My current colony of like 14 people is still doing well. Surprisingly, they're all still (mostly) alive. But man, it's a slog time to play at times. Having to manage 14 literal idiots is tiring. Even with mods. I'm usually pretty mod-averse in games (I hate having to troubleshoot mod conflicts), but I totally get why people use tons of mods in Rimworld. I have relatively few mods (only like ~30), but I don't think I'd still be playing if I didn't have these mainly QOL ones. Although I like management in city managers/colony sims, I've never been a huge fan of micromanagement in games. And Rimworld is definitely a micromanagement game. But I'm still mostly having fun, so I'll keep playing.
I'm still replaying Witcher 3 (for he last 6 or 7 weeks). I have clocked over 100 hours, I'm doing Death March difficulty (highest) and going for 100% run (actually what I can get naturally without making checklist) including DLCs. I'm expecting another 100 hours...
So if you wanted a summary - this is a loooooooong game. But it is so great that it doesn't bore you and drives you to keep exploring, doing stuff, going forward. I don't use ANY fast travel except a horse. I ride or walk everywhere and this includes Skellige where I swim everywhere. Yes, swim, not ride a boat, just swim. This of course adds up on top of playtime but I don't care, I enjoy the game and that's what's important to me.
Even on highest difficulty Wotcher 3 isn't that hard. It's not Dark Souls hard, Witcher 3 is rather "just about" hard on highest difficulty. You ca get killed very easily but if you fight using all the techniques, skills and potions and oils, you are not going to have problems.
I have written about this game quite a lot already in previous threads, so just to do abit of summary: It still stays strong today, world is very well done with its problems and quirks, quests are plenty, colorful and can be very long, not just ordinary "fetch me 5 of these", quite the contrary. Witcher 3 is still worth paying for and playing.
I olay on Steam Deck and I use classic lre-next-gen version (because next-gen eats up resources much much more and doesn't look that much better on small screen). Runs absolutely perfect, no crashes or bugs.
I feel like I haven't had any focus lately, at least, as it relates to a game. I've been pretty much just playing one level each morning of HROT which is a pretty great Boomer Shooter. One thing it's made me realize is this: I like Boom Shoots that focus on recreating that early FPS feeling, rather than trying to iterate or be something slightly different. For example, I've heard that Turbo Overkill is excellent, but it honestly just looks a little too different for me; what I liked about the revival genre is that it felt like it kept on from a Quake and Blood lineage and didn't over extend itself much beyond that and honestly, I just have been preferring games that are "more of the same" for lack of a better term.
I've also been dabbling in some multiplayer stuff here and there with my buddies. Playing Call to Arms - Gates of Hell: Ostfront here and there both multiplayer and in my own campaign mode, but also played 2-hours of Hell Let Loose since my friend bought it for me a few weeks ago. It's a cool game and one I would have probably been obsessed with about 10 years ago, but I struggle in it right now with my limited time to play and...I think I'm just getting old. I struggle to identify targets and shoot them quickly enough for the most part, though I have periods where I do well.
Laugh at me as you will, but I’ve been playing American Truck Simulator and what I’m pretty sure is a RPG Maker game called Siralim Ultimate while working on my backlog of podcasts.
American Truck Simulator is exactly what its name implies: driving big trucks across the United States. You pick out a job, pick it up, drop it off, then go and modify your truck or purchase other ones for your company to use. It’s relaxing and slow, and the white noise of the truck while driving is nice while listening to podcasts.
Siralim Ultimate looks and plays like an RPG Maker Pokemonesque game with Warframe-like leveling. I beat the main story, which was honestly pretty easy and boring, and then unlocked end-game content. And holy crap, it’s so much.
The game is not particularly mentally taxing, and is actually pretty boring 90% of the time when you have your party setup. But when you start getting into theory crafting, that’s when it feels like you need to pull out a spreadsheet.
Each of the “pokemon” have their own unique ability, ranging from basic “the character attacks with 75% bonus to damage”, all the way to “when this character is attacked and knocked below 40% max health, every creature you have will cast a random spell that they have equipped”.
Since you can have 6 creatures, you can see how those abilities would begin to synergize. But wait, you can also fuse creatures, giving them two different abilities at the same time. So now, you can have 6 creatures with 2 of these unique effects.
And then there’s items you can equip each creature with that improves stats… and can add on other unique abilities… and those items can be further improved as well. And the spells aren’t chosen statically for each creature; no, they are items that you get to craft and upgrade and assign each creature. There is so many other mechanics I haven’t mentioned, like the player’s class, which has its own skill tree.
Right now I’m fighting creatures double my level because I’ve found a good synergy that lets me kill things early, and stay alive when they don’t go down in the first round.
I will say, the grind to get all the needed resources feels tedious at points, but once you get your build going it can take you really far into the game. The grind is why I’ve been playing it though… as I’ve been using it with American Truck Sim to (once again) get through some podcasts.
Oracle of Ages & Seasons
Platform: Gameboy Colour / Nintendo Switch Online Subscription (played on Steam Deck)
The oracle games were two Zelda games developed by Capcom, with a similar playstyle to the earlier Link's Awakening gameboy game. Although they use the same underlying engine they are two separate games with separate mechanics, items and stories. Ages focuses on puzzles and uses time travel as a core part of its puzzles and storyline. Seasons focuses on combat and uses the four seasons as a core part of its puzzles. You can play the games in either order and, once you've completed the first game, you can start the other game with some unlocks and a link to the story and characters from the previous games.
I started with Oracle of Ages and, having recently completed it, have moved onto Oracle of Seasons. The puzzles and mini-games are definitely easier in Seasons but the combat is noticeably harder. The Ages games have some tricky puzzles and I referred to a guide a few times to progress. The total playtime for each game is under 20 hours and you can break up the playtime easily to fit small gaps in your free time.
I strongly recommend playing through both games but make sure you complete one first so that your playthrough of the second counts as a "linked" game.
World of Warcraft Remix: Mists of Pandaria
Platform: Windows/MacOS
Blizzard Activision recently released a new gamemode called "WoW Remix: Mists of Pandaria". This is a time-limited, three month system exclusively for new characters. These characters are locked to the continent Pandaria until the gamemode is retired. You start the game with flying and dragonriding (the more fun version of flying, added in the latest expansion) and work through the quests and storyline from the Mists of Pandaria expansion. This expansion has aged very well and is a lot of fun to play through.
Every quest reward has been changed to a chest that contains gear and gems. There are two kind of gems:
The gear has categorised gem slots for the different types of gems above. Gems can be transferred between gear and stat gems can be combined to create more powerful gems (much like Diablo).
You can unlock a lot of collectables (mounts, transmogs, toys) for the main game by playing and level new characters. If you're a fan of WoW then I recommend giving it a try but I can't see the main gamemode ever being fun again compared to this.
In recent months I picked up and played through a bunch of big games from my list (which mostly ended up being puzzle solving games this time) and wrote about them here. After setting aside Islands of Insight, and during the time leading up to the 2024 Steam Summer Sale, I decided to spend some time on the games in my library that had fallen by the wayside, which is something I'm currently still doing.
The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets is a very small VR game (less than 2 hours), which makes it all the more shameful that I started it in May 2023 and only ended it in May 2024. It has a colorful, cartoonish mood, I'd say child-friendly if I didn't suspect VR is probably a bad idea for young children to begin with. There is a story that takes you through five different "dreams" - each dream is a self-contained little animated set or diorama (perspective is a bit like in Moss) which you can rotate and move up and down. You interact with the diorama to collect hidden coins and solve little puzzles - make a volcano erupt, redirect train tracks, unlock doors, etc. - with the aim of rescuing all the pets in each dream.
I thought the game was quite good in a casual way. It's pleasant and relaxing, and the little details in each diorama are a lot of fun to observe. A minority of the puzzles required some thinking outside the box, or just trial and error, I suppose, but it wasn't too bad. What made me the saddest was how short the game was - I would have happily played through twenty of these dioramas rather than five!
Syberia 3 was the last game I received from @phoenixrises ' holiday giveaway in 2023 - I discussed the others here already. After finishing it, I have... complicated feelings about this game. Brace yourselves.
It has been many years since I played the original Syberia games. They're dearly beloved adventure classics in which you play as Kate Walker, an american lawyer who abandons her stressful life to ride a wind-up clockwork train with an automaton conductor all the way from the French Alps to northern Russia in search for the mythical island of Syberia, where the wooly mammoths purportedly still live. It's whimsical, melancholic, absurd in a way, a truly unique experience - or at least it was at the time. I will always love this game, but even if my memory is a little fuzzy, I'm fairly certain that, even then, the original games suffered from what might kindly be referred to as jank - frustrating pathfinding, an obtuse interface, pixel hunting, etc.
Fans of the originals will be "happy" to know, then, that they'll feel right at home in Syberia 3 in that regard. The absurdity of the control scheme puts the original story to shame, involving a heavily mouse-based main interaction scheme that requires you to click, drag and even draw circles with your mouse to wind things up - but even though there's more UI feedback than I remember from the original, it's not at all clear when you have to do these things. The mouse won't be enough to play the game, though, you'll also need to use keys from all over your keyboard, such as the numbers (press 2 to read page). Keys like I and J open your inventory - but don't close it, you need backspace for that, for some reason! Definitely not Escape, which opens the pause menu without closing the inventory. Also, the inventory shows one item at a time, and always opens on the wrong one, and you'll have to scroll through a bunch of crap to reach the latest thing you picked up. The game is full of little frustrating problems like that. Your mouse pointer will often vanish mysteriously, forcing you to exit a scene, move around a bit and return to the same scene. The camera glitches out frequently (there's a recenter key at least). Things will be hidden outside the viewport (of the mostly fixed cameras) requiring you to slooowly drag the camera using your mouse, which is something only possible in some scenes. Kate will often not go where you want her, take time to start walking when you tell her to then walk the wrong way and exit the scene, requiring you to do the same thing to return to where you were to begin with and try again. Argh!
I also disliked the plot in this game compared to the original. I don't remember if the second game was this bad, or if I'm the one who changed - probably a mixture of both - but I'm not going to beat around the bush: As Kate Walker accompanies the nomadic northern siberian Youkol tribe, she feels like one hell of a white saviour. The Youkols are presented as completely inept and incapable of doing anything on their own - she has to do it for them. She outright says they're "like children". Good thing she's "one of them" now! They, in turn, always act a mixture of slow and pathetically grateful. The bad feeling I get from the overall mood of the game isn't helped by the very uneven voice acting (at least in the english version, the only one I played). Some of the voice actors are great - the Youkol shaman Ayawaska comes to mind. Kate Walker, on the other hand, sounds extremely condescending at all times. Others are even worse, just stiffly reading out their lines. The same voice actor does some 5 very different male characters with the exact same voice. The evil russian colonel has the most overdone PS2-era american videogame officer accent I've ever heard. What? The evil russian doctor (Olga) is just as bad. Speaking of which, this game goes hard on its stereotypes across the board. I won't even get into the caricature jewish clockmaker. And none of this is helped by the extremely inaccurate subtitles, often saying something significantly different from the voice actors. Dialogue options are almost always "wrong" and won't convey well what Kate is going to say if you pick them, although you can tell that most of them will make her say something nasty/unpleasant.
On a less disappointed note, the art and design of the various sets is actually still good. Like the other Syberia games, this game features believable soviet towns, decaying infrastructure that conveys that sense of melancholy that I remember from the original (including a closed, ruined amusement park this time!) and believable machines and devices whose operation "makes sense", janky annoying drag and drop aside. It really isn't the logic of operating the machines that will frustrate you when solving this game; rather, you may want to pick up a walkthrough (as I did) after you check the same scene 4 times only to find that really was where you needed to go but you were missing some flag and now have to go back a fifth time.
To add insult to injury, the game ends on a cliffhanger and you need to purchase the DLC to get the actual ending.
Played the demo for Live a Live, and just ordered it. This feels like a really special game, although I can already tell that the Japan section is going to be very annoying.
It's my first time playing Homeworld Remasterd that came out a while ago.
I love that for an RTS is not very action perminute intesive (at least at this point in the single player campaign).
And I just love the setting!
To bad that the third installment is apparently not that good, but I'm hoping that by the time I'm done with 1 and 2 it will have been patched/modded/updated.