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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've been replaying cyberpunk 2077. But this time, on a new desktop (that I spent more money than I care to admit, it packs a 4090), and on my 4k samsung TV, with RTX overdrive.
My previous playthrough was on my old laptop, which handled the game at high-medium settings.
I'll be the first to admit: there are weird graphics here and there, reflections not working right, ghosting, etc. But goddamn there are moments that I just stop and look around. When everything works just right, it's one of the most gorgeous games available.
Yesterday I had a moment. I was driving at night, it was raining, listening to the radio. Then this song "Delicate Weapon" starts playing. I just... Kept driving around. Idk what to call it, but it was borderline meditative. It was candy for my ears and eyes
I always argued and will continue to argue that graphics don't make a game, but damn can they go a long way when done right
None actually.
I had thought the reason why I haven't been able to get into video games was because I was depressed from my job. But now that I'm not dealing with the job or the depression, I'm wondering if I'm just not all that into video games in general anymore. I guess I am more absorbed into the project of trying to make one for myself. But that might mean that the game I come up with will be terrible. :P
I ebb and flow with video games... and honestly with most entertainment mediums I foresee a downturn in my gaming for a bit. Other things in life are fun too!
ABZÛ
Played the first half or so (looks like it's only a couple hours). It's more of an experience type of game where you swim through some beautiful underwater environments. So far it's been pretty good, though for whatever reason I felt like I was just kind of speeding through it without really soaking it in (no pun intended). I think I need to wait til I'm in the right mood to finish it.
The Talos Principle
You're a robot put in a garden and instructed by an entity that identifies itself as Elohim (a name for God) to...solve some puzzles. You get rewarded by opening up more areas with more puzzles and you can access terminals that let you read emails from (what seem to be presented as) human designers and error logs, and interact with a system AI. You are instructed not to ascend the Tower or else you will surely die.
The first few puzzles have been good so far. I'm not the kind of person who is going to particularly enjoy scouring the game world for more log files and lore to read, so I don't think I will end up getting the full experience out of the game, but I think I'll enjoy doing some more puzzles and I am kind of intrigued by the main storyline.
It Takes Two
Have been looking for a couch-co-op game to play with my brother when I visit for holidays and this one has had much acclaim and recommendation. The gameplay is pretty fun. There is a nice wide variety of mechanics and asymmetric duo puzzles and platforming and a little bit of combat. I could see myself playing it through a second time as the other character. I really don't like the storyline/characters/voice acting...Once we figured out (googled) how to skip cutscenes (both players have to hold B for a few seconds), we were skipping most of them.
I liked Abzu fine enough but it never lived up to Journey, which I know is hard to do but it's very clearly trying to hit those same notes.
I felt the same way. It was a nice casual sort of zen game, but it was difficult to wring any truly satisfying experience out of it.
I started Slime Rancher over the weekend. It's an interesting little game. Still pretty early on, haven't figured out where to find other slimes, I only have the 4 starting ones so far, but the shop shows lots more to get later I assume.
It's pretty fun so far. I do wish I had more freedom in placing pens instead of locked into a set number in set locations.
Also not a fan of the tiny inventory. Apparently you never get more than 4 slots which is just insane with how many items there are. I feel like you should be able to upgrade to 8 slots at least.
All that aside I did enjoy it and am excited to continue when I get home from work.
Juggling the inventory is essentially the only source of difficulty in the game. It's definitely built as a cozy, don't-try-too-hard game and I think it does a good job at that. But I do remember going on lots of "ignore everything but carrots and hen hens" runs in the early game. Eventually you get farms and silos and whatnot so much of the busywork can be reduced and it's satisfying to organize your structures around your priorities.
I haven't touched it in years, should run through again and then play the sequel (which I own but have never installed)
The problem I'm running into at the moment is the prices for the various slime poops have gone way down so I make very little money for my efforts. Feels very slow going cause of that
Yeah, just need to silo those until the prices recover. Go explore in the meantime.
Silo? I didn't know that was a thing, haven't explored all the buildings yet, guess that's my fault lol.
The tutorial was not very in depth haha
I saw it go on sale so bought it for the kids. They loved it but I wasn't interested at all.
Ostranaughts. I saw a video on it and was like "hu it's more complete than I thought".
It's a cassette punk space ship scrap yard simulator by the same guy who made Neoscavenger.
I've played a little over 10 hours and it's pretty good. There are a million improvements over Neoscavenger but there's still some uh, quirks.
The good stuff is the game feels pretty rock solid in it's foundations. The space ship building, flying, the atmosphere (and lack of it ha ha), the setting, (for the most part) the style and graphics are all really good. The audio seems totally broken though, which is sad because the bits I heard like once every hour or so sounded pretty good.
The gameplay is kinda sandbox do what you want which obviously only appeals to certain people. For me it's fine because I wana go be a wanker and build a big spaceship. Others might struggle with the lack of direction. There's a lot of ways to make money and lots of things to see and do it seems.
It has one of the weirdest and more interesting character creators I've seen. Where you start at 18 and need to spend years of your life developing skills or making contacts to use in the game. Pretty cool! Though I'm not sure there is a downside as of yet to just doing character creation until you are like 50 and being totally stacked on skills except for the fun/challenge.
The social system is also crazy, it kind of devolves into nonsense but the mechanics of it make sense to a degree. I've not quite got it yet, but it seems like a give/take game of trying to balance your character's social meters with the other character to achieve something.
Critisism, it seems like it can be a little grindy. I've found myself already considering how much work would be in expanding a ship and thinking "ugh" but I wonder if it would be easier with the orders system and some crew which I've not touched at all yet.
The ui and ux is a little old school. Everything is point and click and then interacted through a massive right click context menu. They've got some wonderful, great ui and ux for some systems like the helm and doors which feel very immersive to play with, then the vast majority of other stuff is like, right click, massive list, find entry, click, wait, repeat.
I read the next update was a bug fixing and quality of life update which sounds like what they need. I have only encounter two bugs so far, one was minor when I got a console popup error about a crate without an owner and the other was more serious when the game let me dock my ship ontop of another ship so we overlapped. Everything suddenly became one huge mess and I had to reload.
The graphics are pretty great for the most part but it takes you a few hours to adjust your eyes to actually identify stuff in the world. I went through a burner character and did not realize I was missing bins and racks full of loot because they just blend into the background, but once you see them it's fine.
Overall, I like it, it's my jam. But it's definitely a niche.
And it's not making me want to scream like Uncle Chops Rocket Shop so that's going great so far!
I also just picked this game up and have been thoroughly enjoying it. I've only got ~2 hours in so far. There have been a couple of odd behaviors that a reload fixed for me (my user model completely disappeared at one point), but for the most part it's been stable.
I had someone mention in the Discord when I asked how old people tend to age their characters that after 30 years of age there starts to be a chance to randomly developing negative traits when I asked how old people age their characters.
I've so far killed my first character by docking too fast, and my second character I started very young and didn't know there were some freebies on K-LEG that I didn't see, so I've got no money and am about to go in debt. Planning to scrap sell some items at the scrap kiosk and use the free welder to repair some items while I fly to the Flotilla to see if I can make any money there so I can afford a license.
I enjoyed the looting aspect of Neo Scavenger, and this game is basically that. I'm looking forward to what else they add to the game and quality of life improvements. It feels like there is tons of room for this setting to be expanded by the developers or mods. There are so many asteroids in the solar system that could house stations.
I only get to play in 20–30 minutes chunks on average, so a lot of my progress is pretty slow, especially just starting out as I'm figuring out how to play the game, but it's one that I can see myself slowly putting in a lot of hours.
Ah thanks for the clarification on the age thing, that makes sense!
Yeah your experience sounds similar to mine lol. I've been lucky on the bug front.
I'm on my... 4th character?
First one I also missed everything on KLEG and was doing OK scrapping but ran out of power coming back to KLEG one trip and ended up smashing into the station at 200 m/s.
Second one worked out the free stuff but I got that weird bug mentioned before and I wanted to start again.
Third I realized I messed up the character creation badly and just didn't have any of the skills I actually wanted. I know you can grind them in game and that's something I might do for a challenge run one day but baby's first scrap run I wanted a solid character with an OK starting ship.
So my newest guy is 33 I think, no negatives I am upset about, lots of skills and contacts. Good starting money and ship.
I love it. Also, the bugs are hell. I say this having put in dozens of hours.
Finally back from vacation and back to my home computer and the first game I've played this year was the new Indiana Jones game.
I think it kinda starts off a bit slow, but that might just be my overstimulated brain. It's pretty fun though, it feels almost like a cross between Wolfenstein (which is understandable) and a bit like the way I play Dishonored but like super low powered lol. I'm enjoying it so far but I have a lot of games on my docket right now too, dunno how long I'll be on it.
Been continuing my TFT journey too! It's been great, I really like the game a lot but I'm definitely still not good at it. Since I've been back I've been playing norms, and haven't been able to get a 1st place in a while, I guess I don't understand the set as well after the nerfs. It's still fun to kill time though!
It definitely is slow to build up. I loved the game, but my biggest complaint was a lack of action set pieces. There's a few more later on in the game, but especially the first major area it's very scarce. Also there's a big lack of heroic moments where the Indy theme blasts and you feel bad ass. I only recall one lackluster use of it.
Something I hope they do more of if they make sequels which I really hope they will
I started playing the Grand Theft Auto 5 singleplayer campaign this week; I first started it 10+ years ago and never made it very far, as I found the character just so unlikable. I'm still pretty much there and hating the characters and having not made it very far, but I'm trying to take it pretty slow and just enjoy the character of the city. When I have played (which hasn't been a lot lately), I've actually just been walking to objectives/missions and trying to enjoy the atmosphere and set the characters aside. I'll probably continue, but it hasn't been the primary thing I've been playing.
Earlier this year I spent a lot of time with Dragon Warrior 3 on my modded Gameboy Color. I'd been meaning to play it for several years after seeing the fantastic animations the game had on offer and having a general affinity for Dragon Quest, though I've only ever finished 4 many years ago when it first released on DS. At any rate, I made it to Portoga, got the ship and then felt pretty lost and put the game down for six months or so until just the past week. I decided it might be interesting to use an old Prima Strategy Guide to help me make it past the "wander the world in your ship" phase, so I ended-up finding a scan of the strategy guide on archive.org.
Before I go much further, I just want to say: Thanks to the person who uploaded this scan. Generally, scanning books and magazines like this for archival destroys them, as you can't simply put the book in a bed scanner page by page, but need to actually disassemble it and feed it through a page scanner. So much love to whomever made this sacrifice with their guide; something I've been unwilling to do with some of my old magazines.
Anyway, with the guide I've made it much further. I feel a little cheesy using a guide, but I had little to no desire to just wander around in search of stuff to do and frankly, without it, I'm not sure how in hell I could have known certain things. The guide itself doesn't even tell you what to do to acquire certain items (the Final Key, for example), so I did have to consult the internet for that. I mean, I guess it is originally an NES game, but I would have never figured out any of this when I was a kid on NES, had I played it then. I'm not sure if I'll complete the game during this stint I've had, as I'm already beginning to think about other stuff, but I'm still having fun and I'm not even sure I'm halfway through the game now at level 28. I only have two of the six orbs I need to collect and I'm pretty sure there's an entirely new world map once I have all those together.
I haven't played GTA5 in over 10 years at this point (jeez I remember downloading the whole game in high school junior/senior year the day it came out) but isn't the point that all 3 of the main characters really unlikable? I remember Franklin is the only character that was somewhat likeable
Almost every single character in the game is designed to be unlikeable. It wasn't a good idea in the end, as it's really grating when you just don't like anyone. Franklin only escapes it because he's relatively underwritten compared to everyone else, so his bad deeds don't come off as bad as everyone else's because there's less of them, affect less people, and aren't rooted in some kind of evil intent or action.
If I recall correctly, there's only one single character in the entire main story who is actually a morally good, likeable character who thematically represents the real-world point of "everything else in this [game] is evil, you know that right?" and she's a side character in only Franklin's story that is in all of four cutscenes at most.
To be fair to Rockstar, It's pretty intentional because it's supposed to be a scathing commentary on American Capitalism and that no one is innocent in it, if I remember it correctly. "The mighty American Dollar" and whatnot.
True, it's the running theme behind the GTA games since 3 for sure. But even compared to all the previous GTA games, I feel like GTA5 went too far into the satire and that it started to feel more like it was being played straight. There's a lot in the game that I felt was not satisfyingly concluded or commented on compared to the previous games. A lot of people point to the torture scene but I'd point to Trevor's character and arc entirely.
The problem with GTA as a satirical criticism of American capitalism is that Rockstar pivoted 100% into selling predatory microtransactions so they're the villain in their own story.
4 was much more poignant, and I think there's a lot that can still be done with the immigrant/outsider experience that would feel a lot less hypocritical. I have absolutely no hope that 6 is going to manage that.
I'd assume that's the point, given we know Rockstar can make characters who are likeable, even if they're bad guys. But at what point does satire tip over into just regular character?
I'm not very far in, so maybe they change, but I like my characters to at least feel relatable and not like completely hateful shits. This is actually the reason I never got very far into Breaking Bad; Walter is just such a See-You-Next-Tuesday and so unlikeable, I had no interest in watching.
That makes me kinda sad, cuz Breaking Bad is one of my favorite (and arguably one of the best) shows ever. It's fun to root against Walter
I had the exact same experience when I played about 6 years ago. I did not want to hang out with these people. But as someone who grew up in Los Angeles, going through the city was wild. Figuring out all the references and all the things they kept and left out was the most fun part of the game for me.
I haven't played Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth (just don't really have a lot of time right now to get into something like that), but it seems like the antithesis of GTA V. I've heard multiple critics describe the main character as the most endearing character in any video game. I enjoyed walking around the pseudo Kabukicho in Yakuza too. While the scale is not the same as GTA, the density of things to do and buildings you can go into is pretty great!
Yeah, that series is pretty great, speaking specifically of the games with Ichiban. I liked Yakuza 0, but Like a Dragon is just so grand and the characters are fantastic.
I actually would prefer to go back to Like a Dragon, as I've played like 30 hours of it, but since I'm also playing Dragon Warrior, I don't want to overload on RPGs, but it's on the list. And yeah, the characters are so much more interesting.
I hear that the Ichiban games are turn based because he's such a huge fan of Dragon Quest that he conceptualizes everything he encounters as if it were part of a Dragon Quest game.
This is exactly true. Going into battles, he visualizes people as different kinds of caricatures to battle; it's very funny. All the little other Dragon Quest nods are great too, like seeing pixel art versions of your party during certain times.
I made the mistake of starting Rimworld again. Playing in casual mode with a neolithic colony. Almost lost anyway because of winter.
I had a sudden craving to play Ace Combat again, so I reinstalled Project Wingman and Ace Combat 7 and played through the campaigns for both on hard and ace difficulty respectively, but entirely from cockpit view for that extra bit of immersion (though I did miss out on seeing the gorgeous plane models as a result).
Project Wingman is still the closest any game not made by Project Aces has gotten to Ace Combat, though with its own unique charm (and by that I mean considerably less regard for warcrimes in its story, the villian in that game would make all the Ace Combat villians blush). The original campaign was just as hectic and orange as it was before, but the new DLC campaign where you play as a reserve pilot for the enemy faction on a different front was a nice thing and lets you see that there are people on both sides in this conflict that are willing to commit absurd warcrimes, which is kind of concerning but it makes for great final boss fights and really hammed up dialogue!
Ace Combat 7 is, as expected, a much more polished product with more grounded characters and more nuance with the warcrimes and villians' motivations, but it's still a great experience all the same. You still get that great confidence boost of your allies and enemies alike wondering if you're even human over the radio chatter as you obliterate scores of tanks, ships, planes, buildings, and anything else you can lock onto with the 100+ missiles your plane is somehow capable of holding while you do 40g maneuvers and somehow withstand multiple missile impacts. It really is the best simulation, not of a fighter pilot's reality, but of how a fighter pilot feels. Here is a link to a fan documentary that goes a lot deeper into that, which is also a great history of the entire series. Also shoutout to the CFA-44 Nosferatu, that plane carried the hell out of me. ADMMs and dual railguns are both disgustingly overpowered and trivialized some mission S-ranks.
I also picked up Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth on PC while they were still on sale and decided to beat Remake before Rebirth became available on PC (it's out on the 23rd). I haven't played the original FF7 but I have played Crisis Core, watched Advent Children, caught up on the plot of the original, etc. Square Enix did an amazing job at recreating Midgar in modern graphics. The slum towns feel dirty but homely, the plates are pleasantly urban, the Shinra facilities are clean and cold, Wall Market is the very essence of a casino town, Aerith's house is absolutely beautiful. The soundtrack is just incredible as well, with tons of familiar tracks remixed and reorchestrated to perfection, plus a VERY unexpected but not at all unpleasant future bass-ish remix of Tifa's theme for an iconic moment. The new dialogue and character development is also excellent. Cloud is still awkward and standoff-ish but in a kuudere kind of way. Tifa is still strong and kind but her moral conflict done with great nuance. Barret gives off much more caring dad energy and Marlene being so dang cute really helps that. Aerith is ridiculously adorable in her moments with Cloud. Just A+ execution of all of that, bravo Sqenix.
Oh yeah, there's the combat too. What an interesting blend of real time and turn based action, where everything is technically happening without pause but selecting abilities and skills puts the game in extreme slow-mo so you have time to choose targets or just take inventory of your situation. It even encourages you to switch between characters frequently like you'd have to in a turn-based game by not having your teammates spend their action charges automatically, so you jump around from character to character to use abilities/spells, though there isn't anything stopping you from just sticking to Cloud the whole time if that's too much hassle. I still haven't fully gotten a grasp on how some of the synergy and materia work and have gotten my ass kicked a number of times by some bosses and particularly tough groups of enemies, but I do like that you can't just bulldoze your way through with brute force on Normal difficulty without being super overleveled.
Another Ace Combat and Project Wingman fan here !
One thing to add is that the soundtrack for both games (and the whole series really) have absolute bangers. It's mostly orchestral music, and quite often bombastic, but unlike other modern military fictions it's more... joyful for the lack of a better term. It's as /u/Flashfall and the linked documentary said: it's a simulation of not reality, but of the feeling of a pilot. And, I might say, the pilot is 13 years old and runs on rules of cool. And thus the act of killing someone you know is not gritty and messy, but rather a joust between two knights of the sky. And in that regard, the soundtrack for this moment is not an emotional piece full of strings and brass, but rather an orchestral flamenco piece. Rule of cool indeed.
I suspect /u/Flashfall had a grin has wide as me when he realized what mission 4 ("Express Lane") was about,
because...
it's a that's nearly entirely about a tunnel sequence, and that is a staple of the series because it's *plain cool*.Back on Frostpunk after taking a year off. Really want to play Frostpunk 2, which I picked up during the Steam Winter Sale, but figured I should finish the first one beforehand.
I'm on the last DLC mission, "On the Edge." I did "The Fall of Winterhome" and "The Last Autumn" last week. The former was fairly difficult (took me 3 attempts), the latter easier...except for the end. That was nailbiting for a bit. Anyway, hope to get that finished up tonight or tomorrow, then start FP2.
With friends, playing Barotrauma. Our yearly playthrough. We're about 4/5 the way through the game. I imagine we might be able to finish up by this weekend.
I just went back to Helldivers 2 after several months away. It sure is a good time, now that so much has been un-nerfed (as I lack a better word/neologism).
Un-nerfed is probably fine. I assume you avoided "buffed" on purpose. Could consider "rebalanced".
I played Crypt Custodian! It was a gift from the same exchange santa who gave me Dungeons of Hinterberg. This game bills itself as a metroidvania but I don't personally think the moniker applies to these kinds of top down games, which hark back to the tradition of the early Zelda games. It feels like Death's Door meets Hyper Light Drifter.
The combat in this game is on the hard side (not that the two games I listed above aren't either!) but not in a bad way. The boss fights stay challenging throughout and you should expect to die a bunch of times but never feel impossible. There's a truly massive world to explore in a relatively non-linear way with not only combat but also traversal challenges (much like in hyper light drifer, dashing is a key mechanic). Everything is tightly designed and balanced with no bugs that I've spotted.
The story isn't super impressive. You play a critter (cat) traversing an afterlife and meeting other dead animals; their personal stories can be found in the form of collectible photos, which is the nicest part of the lore. Otherwise you're looking at fairly straightforward motivations and an obvious villain. The art is cute but not super complex either. Still, it's worth playing for the gameplay! If it clicks, it really is a great game. I've reached 100% of the game in shy of 15 hours.
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I finally finished the base game of Ghost of Tsushima!. It took me about 50 hours of gameplay in spurts over about two years. I did vastly enjoy the world, the exploration, the combat, and the side stories. One reason it took me so long to beat it because the game is just perfectly laid out for you to play a couple hours at a time and then come back a week later, with how some of the side quests are. I will say that I was extremely burned out on the open world of the game towards the end. Once I got to the third main area, I had already wanted to be done with the game, but there was still about 1/4 of the game world left. Well, I’m finished now. I did love the game overall even if it did drag. I’ll be looking forward to Ghost of Yotei! I still have the dlc for Tsushima, but I’m going to put that off for a bit.
I also resumed my playthrough of Uncharted 2. I never played the uncharted games when they came out (only ever had an PlayStation 1 and an PlayStation 5, so I’m still catching up on some classics) and I’m going through them now. I beat uncharted 1 last year and while it didn’t age very well, it was a fun 8 or so hour action romp. Uncharted 2 has a better story and cast thus far, but the gameplay isn’t much improved, it’s still a late 00’s cover shooter written with 18 year old men in mind (my god is the target audience clear in many points in the game). I do find it fun enough and there have been some fun set pieces (I’m on a train mission right now) and I do fully intend to continue if even to just know that I’ve played through this piece of gaming history. I will say that a more linear experience is refreshing after every modern AAA game seems to be open world.
I am still about halfway through Dragon Age: The Veilguard and fully intend to continue, I love the game, but having re-broken my foot, it’s comfier for me on the couch right now vs my computer, so I’ll probably resume in a few weeks. In retrospect, I think I should have just bought it on ps5, considering I play with controller anyways and don’t hang on discord on my pc when playing single player games anyways. Oh well, I’ll get to it eventually!
I'm playing B42 of Project Zomboid. I'm still trying to figure out if I love this game or if I'm just a masochist. The game tells you, at the outset, "This is how you die." And, well, yes.
It's The Walking Dead but open world and without crazy bloodthirsty anarchists/authoritarians trying to kill you.
Grabbed Ghost of Tsushima recently, been really enjoying it. The combat is smooth, intuitive, and satisfying when you do things right. While the up-close graphics aren't anything super amazing, on a larger scale in the macro world the scenery and overall ambiance is absolutely gorgeous. I'm only done with the 1st act so I still have more game to play, but so far it's looking like I'll want to play Ghost of Yotei whenever it comes to PC (since I don't have a PS5). I will say the side quests can seem a bit repetitive with rewards generally not worth it, but the extra world exploration makes up for it.
I've been playing Marvel Rivals with my partner! It's basically 3rd person Overwatch with Marvel characters. Some hero abilities are so similar we call them by their "Overwatch counterpart" names 😄 First time playing, there was barely any learning curve because of how similarly it played to Overwatch, aside from learning new heros. The art, UI, graphics, and FX aren't Blizzard quality but it doesn't really affect gameplay as far as I could tell. I've settled into playing mostly Cloak & Dagger, who plays like a better Moira in that there's some aim assist, her healing shots are projectiles, and she has some decent offensive abilities. We usually go double healer, but sometimes my partner will switch to tank.
I picked up a few games on the steam winter sale this year (I've started two of them), and was also gifted a Switch game. So I have started playing some new and some older new to me games over the holidays / beginning of this year.
Balatro
I am really enjoying this game, the art style is great, music is good, and it just has enjoyable gameplay that allows for short sessions or longer ones (which I do appreciate from a game). I still feel that I have a lot to learn with this one, but it'll probably be my GOTY out of 2024 releases. (I'm a big indie guy and roguelike guy tbf)
New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe
This one has been on my list for years now, and I'm happy someone bought it for me since I feel like I was too reluctant every time I found it in a store. The Wii and DS 2d Mario games are some of my favourite childhood games, and I am so happy that the sequel to the Wii one is just as good if not better. I am almost done the main campaign, and am really looking forward to the Luigi U part from what I've heard from friends. I seem to have a bit of a soft spot for Wii U and 3ds era nintendo games though, so I might be biased in my opinions on this one!
Just a little side note on this game, I do find it interesting that the French Canadian translation is seemingly different in spots than the Euro French one. Not that it matters but these kind of things I always find interesting.
Alien: Isolation
I have wanted to play this game for YEARS. I watched Alien and Aliens at way too young of an age and since then they have become one of my favourites, even well into adulthood. This game really holds up graphically despite somehow already being a decade old now, and while I am still early-ish in the game I am enjoying the stealthy nature of the gameplay and the great Xenomorph ai. I don't want to spoil too much of it, but this is definitely a game that's worth picking up on sale.
I have only three deck stakes left to complete in Balatro. Black deck Orange and Gold, and Gold with the Erratic deck. (I am really dreading the final two Black decks.)
I'll be excited to finish these up -- I don't think I'll be going for gold on all the Jokers because I'm only at like 63% now and getting gold with some of them sounds like a nightmare. (I have over 500 hours and I've never found a good use case for Obelisk.)
Arena Breakout: Infinite (AB:I): It's something like Escape From Tarkov, but more accessible. I've never really enjoyed PvP games where you lose everything, I don't like the risk. For some reason this game works for me. A few sessions every night. Probably cause you start out with quite a lot of cash, and if you get the battle pass, you get a bunch of free Koen and gear to use. I've not yet run out, but I'm going into rounds with pretty cheap gear.
We've found a bunch of people to play with, some good, some not so good at the game, and we've had a lot of fun. Most of them seem to be very patient with casual players like me, and even like to hang out on our voice calls when we play other games like pubg, star citizen and even fortnite.
Some can't deal with the pressure of losing everything, and don't play anymore, but we've found middle ground in Delta Force that is more casual and arcade than AB:I.
I've fixed up my Steam Deck, and I'll be trying to play some single player games from my backlog the next coming weeks.
I've been playing the MySims Cozy Bundle since Christmas and just indulging in nostalgia. The first one was the first game I had for my Wii, so I put a LOT of hours into it. The game is pretty basic overall, but it's great to play while watching/listening to videos on YouTube that are more audio-based. I just spend time finding essences, and then designing furniture. Kingdom has more game-like elements with actual story beats and quests to follow (and jumping, whee!!), but is also still good for YouTube multitasking.
My main wish is to combine the furniture customization from the first game with the extensive building blocks and options for external buildings from Kingdom. The first one is really rigid about building, well, buildings, the door has to be ground level. In Kingdom I've put houses on stilts or put the entrance on the second level. I even made some interiors "multi-story" by putting in stairs and bridges or wooden planks to use as floors.
Combine those two levels of customization, and add the ability to choose the interior layout of the houses, and I could spend hours just building in these games. Kinda hoping EA does decide to reboot the MySims franchise with the Cozy Bundle's success, and this time avoid delving into drastically different genres like they did with Party and Sky Racing.