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

You're standing on a path that leads to a cabin. In that cabin there's a princess. You must Slay the Princess in order to save the world, or so does the snarky, semi-antagonistic narrator - like the one from The Stanley Parable and other games since - tell you. Don't believe her lies!

Slay the Princess is a visual novel featuring three locations, three characters, several dialogue trees, limited irreversible choices, voice acting and hand-drawn, largely monochrome art. I believe most people can play through it in roughly 6 to 8 hours. I thought the central gimmick was pretty good/creative; the implementation left a little to be desired. My main gripe was with how it wasn't always clear from the many dialogue choices how the story would progress as a consequence, or whether you were just repeating a dialogue tree you'd already gone through before or actually sending the story down a new path. It's worse when there are like 10 possible answers but the game moves on after you explore 3 or 4; I'd prefer if the character and I were on the same page!

As is common with this type of game, it can also be a little frustrating when you figure out what's going on before the character does, so none of the dialogue options seems satisfying, which happened to me a couple times. But it was still pretty entertaining and I can see why so many people like it.

I and a couple friends started playing Windblown, a 3rd person "isometric" roguelite in early access that largely plays much like a more colorful Hades, although a few of the mechanics clearly owe more to Dead Cells - unsurprising, as this game was developed by the same studio!

Because the game is still in active development, it won't surprise you to learn that it's not uncommon to run into some kind of glitch (patches are released frequently!) Fortunately, glitches don't get in the way of a really fun, snappy roguelite experience. The co-op online multiplayer for 3 people really adds another dimension to the experience. You have to balance the added firepower with a busier screen, your friends accidentally triggering mines that hurt you or the fact that if anyone is currently dead, it's one-hit sudden death for the others.

This game is not super easy either way. You should expect to have to make strategic upgrade choices and fight carefully, avoiding the enemies' very strong attacks and leveraging combos and effect synergies. With each run, you can unlock more items that will appear in future runs (like Dead Cells) and other upgrades. I'm looking forward to playing it a lot more!

Previous

Only a few hours into S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 so far (at least one of which has been spent exclusively on loading and fiddling with graphics and performance settings) and it is definitely STALKER, both in the atmosphere and the bugs and the punishingly poor enemy and economy tuning. Having put 200+ hours into the original trilogy including dabbling a bit in the higher difficulty mods (MISERY mod to this day is still the most masochistic mod I've ever had the displeasure of playing), I was expecting combat that was stressful and somewhat punishing but ultimately rewarding to survive through. The game does the first two well enough and currently falls on its face on the third. Looting other humans after a firefight will rarely yield anything of good value and typically just partially replenishes your food, med and ammo supplies. As a silver lining, they go down easily enough, especially with headshots. Looting mutants just isn't a thing now, and they're fairly common and also bullet sponges, so they're not rewarding at all and only serve to annoy you and burn up your supplies. Note that this is only less than 10 hours in the game and I haven't left the beginning area yet so my experience might change as I get further in, but I have a feeling it'll be more of the same but with more expensive gear.

Of course, the bugs and performance also deserve mentioning. All the old STALKER players came in expecting a fair amount of eurojank, as all the previous STALKER games were also buggy messes on launch. STALKER 2 has met our expectations in that regard, and even gone above and beyond in others. Memory leaks after a short while of playing? Oh you know it. Weird physics interactions causing big frame drops? Got that too. Huge losses in FPS if you have the audacity to alt+tab? That's a given. But compiling shaders EVERY SINGLE TIME you start the game up, and it takes at least several minutes each time? You have outdone yourselves, GSC. The fact that the game is still mostly positive on Steam despite all this is a testament to how badly people wanted a new STALKER and how only GSC has managed to deliver that. There's fixes and such in the works of course, but it puts a damper on the experience nonetheless. Won't stop me from playing it though.

This is just turning into a Steam review at this point but what the heck. I would still recommend it in its current state to diehard STALKER fans who are willing to put up with the bugs so they can get back into the Zone. For everyone else, give it a month and the worst of the bugs and balance issues should probably sorted out by then.

I've been playing a lot of TFT recently! I've never played any other sets besides right at the beginning, so there's a LOT to learn. It's pretty fun as a zone out and and roll type of game, and I've been enjoying that.

Been getting dragged into a lot of League games recently too, I like it for what it is mostly because the group I play with isn't that serious about the game, so we kinda run around like headless chickens most of the time.

On the board game front, I was at a wedding recently and was playing Kelp with my friend that invited me, it's a great game with an asymmetrical goal in the 1v1, where one player is trying to hide and playing a deckbuilder, while the other is hunting them in a dicebuilder. I really like the mechanics and it makes it feel really tense and really thematic, I definitely recommend picking it up if you have a chance.

Prepping for (American) Thanksgiving this year with a bunch of party games, namely Jackbox 1-10, Mario Party/Smash Bros, and maybe a board game or two! I'm usually the one in charge of Thanksgiving games, and I need to figure out a good list for what to bring every year, it's a nice challenge.

Friend and I have been playing Turtle WoW the last few days and while it's interesting what they've done and expanded on, it also feels amateurish at times but I guess that was to be expected. I've leveled through the High Elf area and am already level 15 when it ought to be about 10 for the first area. Apparently there's a 2x XP gain on our server, and the other server has 1x as default - not very easy to have known but it's alright.

This new area feels really fresh though, and it's definitely keeping my interest for longer than if it was real vanilla. To be fair I played that for a month or two in 2019, then ~2021, then SoD for like 3-4 months over last winter. So even though I've had more than my fill of classic, Turtle WoW still grabbed me a bit! Will see how it goes now that I'm out of this new leveling area, but it seems promising even though my expectations were definitely too high. I guess people praised it a bit too much for what I feel it actually is.

Still Black Ops 6 lol. Besides that, I said last week that I was excited for Stalker 2 and Flight Sim 2024.... welp.... Both have had pretty disastrous launches. I decided I'm holding on Stalker 2 until some more patches come out and the game is in a better place, but I'm really excited by the bones of the game and do want to play it. It seems to be in a Cyberpunk 2077 situation, where the base of what's there could make for quite a good game, but it needed more time in the oven. As for flight sim, I did get a chance to play a bit. There are some definite improvements over 2020. The UI is so much better, the streaming data (vs having hundreds of gigabytes on your SSD) is working well for me, though it isn't for everyone, having jobs and purpose in the sim now instead of just making your own flight paths is nice, the flight model is improved, the sim is gorgeous, etc. It's a nice product, but it also needs a little more time to bake. Unless you're obsessed with flying, you can probably wait a few weeks or months to see what gets ironed out here. That said, I'm off work all week, so I'll likely be sinking some time in here. I was hoping that would be Stalker 2, but oh well...

I've been "playing" X4, this time with the amazing Star Wars: Interworlds mod.

I say "playing" because there are large spans of time, as with Dwarf Fortress, where I walk away and let the simulation run unattended for hours.

I've been playing... chess.

Maybe not the answer you were expecting in this thread, haha. This all started after I had watched LoL Worlds after not having played for a while, maybe since 2015. I started watching some "macro basics" videos to catch up on the game, which led me down a long path of being interested in RTS/MOBA macro as a whole.

At the same time, I watch a lot of Wirtual, a Trackmania streamer, while I'm working. He is dating and frequently collabs with Anna Cramling, a chess WFM and also streamer. Me being recently into studying video game strategy but also having no time/interest in really playing a competitive video game, I figured I'd get back into chess.

I've known how to play since I was a kid, but have never been good. I've tried on and off to get into it, especially over the pandemic, but a combination of ladder anxiety + overthinking each and every tactic made it more stressful than fun back then, and I never made decent progress. But, this time around, I discovered this video series, which is Yet Another Chess Guide for Beginners™️; only the idea isn't to memorize like 4 openings, or to play 1.e4 just because, or whatever other rote beginner advice is floating out there (none of that really helped me understand what to do); the idea is to build good habits, play very simply, and stop overthinking. Which turned out to be exactly what I needed.

Now all of a sudden chess is really fun. I'm just playing a really simple game and doing puzzles most days, purposely not thinking too hard. Over the past few weeks I've noticed I actually am building an intuition for tactics and can actually formulate a plan in the middle game, whereas before the idea of finding the perfect move every time stressed me out. I've recently realized I'm a positional player who prefers a slow opening and breaking open the middle game with tempo.

My Chess.com rating is still only like 500, though I've climbed from 300 in like 2 weeks. I'm still blundering pieces randomly, but I'm having a hell of a lot more fun.

I’m back in FFXIV, after a year long lull. The vibes are so cozy, I truly love that game. It helps that I’m playing on a brand new ps5 and oled tv!

Currently in the beginning of the Stormblood expansion and taking it slow. Doing a couple of side quests when unlocking new environments to get to know the local people and the conditions they’re living in.

Still a bit stressed when going into a dungeon party, but thank god for MTQcapture and her awesome guides.

If there’s anyone here also playing: I’m on twintania. Always open to do a dungeon run with friendly faces!

(Forgot to add: originally played as a monk to
Lvl 75, now back as a dancer also lvl 75 because it’s a little easier. )

I have my sights on playing The Black Parade for Thief, having installed it on my Steam Deck, but simply have not had any time in the last week or so and really lacking the patience for such a slow burn. I do intend to start it sooner than later (hopefully this week?), but we'll see as my week is already as busy as last week and weekend was for me, so...

I have been playing Dragon Quest V PS2 when time allows. Playing it via emulation on a pocket sized handheld just makes it very easy to pick up and play for 30 minutes here and there, so that's what I've mostly been doing. I think I'm around 6-hours in so far, having just completed the opening of the game where you're a child; Dragon Quest is a very chill, cozy game that is just damn easy to play. I dislike random battles, but I'm approaching it on its own terms, so it's not bad and it makes it easy to just mindlessly grind when I need to.

I've also been putting in 30-minutes here and there on Daggerfall Unity. I've been playing off and on since earlier this year and I do very much enjoy it, though I'm "bad" at it for lack of a better term. The game is very heavily skewed toward those who are capable of roleplaying and figuring out who their character is; I suffer from a lack of imagination, so I often feel pretty directionless and don't really ever have a sense of who my character actually is, so I think the game tends to be a little less fun for me. I like having some direction and letting a game help define who I am, so when I need to think of it all my own, I just struggle. I am hoping to fix that about myself though, so I do keep playing, as I enjoy existing in this world that is indifferent to me.

I got fed up trying to get ePSXe working on linux, so I threw in the towel and got the android version. Been playing random PS1 games for about a day now.