Proverbs

I finished! 100% done. I know we have some other people playing this, so just in case they run into the same issue I did: I had to reboot the game after finishing it to get the final achievement to pop.

Steam says I put in 26.7 hours, but I definitely left it open and idle a few times, so I’d say it’s probably closer to 25 hours or so. This is a perfect audiobook/podcast game.

Ziggurat 2

This is an FPS roguelite that’s pretty much an incremental upgrade to the first game. If you played the first, it’s immediately familiar and better. If you didn’t, you could still pick this up and enjoy it.

It’s pretty grindy, which I’m in the mood for right now, but if I weren’t I’d probably be put off by it. There’s metaprogression where you get stronger after each run, but progress is slow and you’re pretty underpowered for much of the early game. (Note: this could be a skill issue — I’m legitimately bad at most games.) I’ll keep playing it as my “audiobook game” now that I’m done with Proverbs.

Warhammer: Vermintide 2

I picked this up with my multiplayer group after we finished with Palworld. It’s basically a melee, fantasy-version of Left 4 Dead 2 or Back 4 Blood. I like it a lot more than either of those, but I haven’t yet been able to put my finger on why.

Combat is satisfying, and the level design is great. It’s got RPG progression systems and random loot, so you slowly build up your character which lets you tackle harder difficulty levels. It has the same “don’t be alone” mechanics of L4D2/B4B which pushes you to stay together and cooperate as a team.

I wouldn’t want to play it with randos (though, to be fair, I don’t really want to play any game with randos), but with my multiplayer group it’s been great fun.

Also shoutouts to Moonlight for letting me stream the game with a great frame rate and beautiful graphics to my tiny old Dell laptop running MX Linux. It still feels completely novel (and amazing) to me to play a heavy game like this on such light hardware.

I restarted a new Stardew Valley save.

I played in 2020 before 1.5 (or 1.6?) and stopped just shy of year 3.

Now, the added achievements and the Perfection tracker makes the game really fun. Ginger island is the perfect addition because of the fun upgrades you can get. I'm mostly into late game now, but I sunk in 100 hours in 3.5 weeks, totally addicted.

It's really just a planning simulator. You have a finite number of tasks you can do in a day and you choose which ones are the most important for now. Reset every 15-20 minutes.

I finally found a game that’s hooked me, Cities: Skylines. I was in the mood for a city builder and it was free to try on steam this last weekend and is currently on sale ($3 for the base game and I got some dlc too). I have a friend that’s really into city builders and management games so he helped me get some essential DLC and mods as well as give me some tips to get started. In two play sessions, I’ve already played 10 hours, good god. My first session was from the start and my city ended up sprawling pretty badly. At the start of my session tonight, I redid my downtown section as well as my bus routes and bike lanes to have a more efficient downtown area!

Living in Minneapolis of course I’m drawing some inspiration for my own city. Once this one (my learning city) is done, I’ll have a lot more ideas for a second city! The one downside is that there’s no mod to add the Target Center into the game (I want the Timberwolves and Lynx in my city, dammit).

I’ve also been watching a ton of City Planner Plays on YouTube, his content is excellent and I’d recommend watching him even if you don’t play city builders, yourself.

I finished Split Fiction with my friend this weekend, what an incredible experience! The story was admittedly a bit predictable but I think the build up was well done and the emotional beats hit well. The gameplay is top notch as expected from the It Takes Two company. I think the final level is incredible and might be the greatest thing I've played in gaming from a gameplay perspective in a really long time.

We tried the

Some other friends and I have been playing REPO which is hilarious fun a la Lethal Company. Golf with Your Friends also added a speed golf mode which is hilarious.

Otherwise I've been running DnD with friends and whatnot, definitely not enough time for too many things.

Lies of P (PC, Steam Deck)

A genuinely good Souls-like, mainly inspired by Bloodborne, with several quality of life improvements over FromSoft games. Oh, and you can follow and understand the story without having to rely on obscure lore tidbits in item descriptions and a 2 hours video analysis. It's not too hard, not too stressful, and in 10 hours of playtime, I've lost my Ergo/Souls/currency once, because I'm a dumbass and fell in a hole.

You feel like you're going too far from the stargazer/bonfire? Here's a shortcut. You died against a boss? You can collect your ergo right before entering the arena again. The boss is too hard? You can always summon an NPC to help you. Can't remember if you had a quest? There's an icon right next to the name of a stargazer, and you can teleport.

The only negative point is, IMO, the weird JRPG look of Pinocchio and one or two NPCs. They just feel off with the rest of the game. Though for Pinocchio, I solved the problem by wearing a dead donkey mask.

Speaking of Pinocchio, I think using the tale was nothing more than a way to promote the game as "that old Disney movie, but it's super dark". The developers just recycled some names and characters, that's it.

Trombone Champ (Switch)

My 8yo son loves it, so at least I don't feel robbed, but I wouldn't recommend spending more than 5€ on it. It's not interesting as a rythm/musical game, and not fun as a joke game. The trailer is better than the game itself.

Keep Driving (Steam Deck/PC): The game I want to highlight this week. Set in the early 2000's you are a young adult setting out on a road trip form your parents home. Developer/Publisher YCJY Games competently captures the vibes of young adulthood and setting out on your own with only the stuff in your trunk and the cash in your pocket. Gameplay is management RPG similar to FTL: Faster than Light except that "combat" consists of dealing with standard road hazards, slow tractors, potholes, puddles, etc. Hazards can deal damage to your energy, car's durability, or gas. Different items you carry and abilities you have allow you to deal with these hazards. Of course you can also just floor it away and eat the cost.

Along the way you will pick up hitchikers, find jobs delivering stuff, and overall try to get by as you make your away across the map. It's a delightful game and I plan on playing some more.

I first installed on Steam Deck and it is playable but you control a cursor on screen. The settings menu has a section for controller that is not yet implemented. The hour or so I spent with the game was on my PC but I think I will enjoy this game most when I can play it on Steam Deck with proper controller support.

Star of Providence (Steam Deck):
Have continued to slip in some time in this game. I really do enjoy it and progress is slow but consistent. It's genuinely perfect for 5-10 minutes at a time though I can easily sink an hour or so in.

Death Stranding: Director's Cut (PS5):
The trailer for Death Stranding 2: On the Beach nudged me towards picking up the first game again. I'm only several hours in. I do enjoy this game. The environment is beautiful and it does well at providing that sense of exploration. In games like Skyrim and Avowed I find myself often crouch hopping my way up terrain that I'm not meant to be on. I just find it fun to get to the top of geometry and see what shortcuts/secrets I can find. Death Stranding scratches a similar itch. The story is also engaging and I'm curious to learn more... but it also feels like so much made up bullshit. I'm both fascinated by Hideo Kojima's imagination and also surprised at how thin it can feel at times.

Avowed (PC): The third area is more of a desert thing. Exploring continues to be engaging and the game provides a surprising amount of pushback if you play on the more "imperialist" side of things. I am still using a 2h great sword but also picked up a 2h gun. The gun is very fun. Previously I held a grimgoire for some magic/environmental puzzle solving, but this new load out has me using grenades which are also effective at the elemental puzzles. Very happy with how the game has opened up; I felt pretty locked into my original loadout due to upgrade resource requirements. But now it feels like that effort has paid off and I can swap around some weapons more frequently without being at a disadvantage.

^{Some old thoughts (~ 2024-11-28) when I tried to play Grandia that I just never posted}

Grandia

I'd heard good things about Grandia's battle system and the story, and finally decided to pick up during the Autumn Sale. It then hit me with what felt like all of my pet peeves with video games, and I ended up refunding it:

• The first time you get control of your character is after what feels like 15 minutes of unskippable credits, and then multiple cutscenes.
• You can't skip voice acted dialogue.
• I've never played the original, but I think a lot of the HD filters they applied probably made the game look worse?
• Performance was atrocious.

edit: crediates (?) -> credits

I finally finished AI: The Somnium Files last week so if anyone wants to discuss something spoilerish I can do that now.

Naiad is finally out as of December! This chill top-down 2D game spent years in my list nearly making it to the top (oldest), and I spent 13 hours to 100% it this week. It proudly proclaims it's the work of a single developer (save for outsourced localization and such) and I have to say it's even better than I expected! I bought it during the sale but it's worth full price.

As the rain kisses the rock in a spring high up in the forest, the titular Naiad is born. The cloud proclaims her to be the Guardian Of This River. During the course of the game, you will control Naiad (who is a silent protagonist) in her long journey downstream.

At first, the scale of the game seems small. Guided by your friendly cloud, you learn various ways to swim and dive. Your many duties include taking care of various plants and animals who live by or in the river. Armed with your song, you coax birds to their nests, guide ducklings to mama duck, make plants grow and remove obstacles, plus many other things. Larger animals reward you for helping them with abilities that make you stronger and faster, but there's a tradeoff. If you're too fast and leave them behind, ducklings will wander off. The fish that follow you downstream won't be able to keep up. The frogs will give up and hop out of the water. Naiad is a game of patience and relaxation, in which you're expected to enjoy your time putting things in their place, and thoroughly exploring your surroundings. Some objectives actually require waiting a little bit for something to show up or someone to move.

Soon you learn that there's more to the river than meets the eye. There are secret passages hiding in river bends or behind rocks. In addition to cataloguing all the animals, you can find various songs, poems, floral essences and, if you're thorough enough, other things that you need to unlock the game's true ending. As you progress downstream, you also encounter more and more humans, who live by and interact with the river and with each other in various different ways. Eventually, human presence changes the river itself, and not in a good way. Naiad grows and ages as she travels, and the river grows and ages with her. Naiad's adventure is almost a hero's journey, with an awesome ending that to me is reminiscent of

The developer's art and music are both simple but lovingly crafted, assembled into beautiful set pieces, and highly effective. Vibrant colors bring the river to life, and their later absence convey that it's dying. My one qualm is with the singing system, which is core to the game. It makes use of what I'll always think of as the "Aquaria singing wheel" (though I've since seen it in other games), or in other words, you can use the analog stick to output eight musical notes, and have to output various notes in a sequence to correctly sing a song. If you fail you have to start over - and it can be difficult to get it right even if your analog stick doesn't have any kind of drift, which we all know often ends up happening to everyone's analog sticks. I also thought the synthesizer notes they used for Naiad's singing voice were underwhelming, compared to the rest of the game.

Previous

Thanks to @elight and their playlist for last week, I've gotten around to trying Battletech Advanced 3062 and in spite of the long load times and terrible performance on Steam Deck (though that may be due to the Urban Warfare DLC, actually), I'm enjoying myself and taking it mission by mission.

To my surprise, the missions are actually significantly faster than both BEX and Vanilla, owing to the increased tonnage limit for drops. I've not only started off with heavier mechs in BTA, but also more of them, so I'm basically crushing through most of the missions I've done, so quickly that I don't even need to worry about having a mid-mission Save. That said, I did do a one and a half skull mission last night, which ended-up being against 4-clan mechs and some battle armor and I took some losses, two of my pilots dying in the process, which sucks, but it's the nature of the game I suppose.

One thing I will say is that the battle armor seemed pretty buggy. I managed to shoot it once, but then it seemed to fall through the map and while it could still attack me, I couldn't target it in any way; my mission was still a success, since I just needed to kill the final mech, but still, that was a little annoying.

At any rate, I'll probably get back to it today and I'm excited to install it on my new laptop when it finally arrives.

Started Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky the 3rd (Steam). This is a sorta Part 3 of a three-parter JRPG. I finished the first two back in like 2022/2023 (though I played & finished Part 1 on either PSP or Vita way back). I say "sorta," since technically the main story wrapped-up in the first two parts, but I guess "the 3rd" is looking at some of the villains of the first two and how we got here.

Kinda a weird, unexpected start. Like I'm starting with characters I already know, that I've encountered and even used in my party in the first two games. But whereas Part 1 of the trilogy was a real slow burn (probably why it was split into two parts), this just drops you into the mystery right away. Which is nice, though again, it's an unexpected direction in terms of this mystery.

Mechanics-wise, it's a pretty standard traditional JRPG. Which is why I love the Legend of Heroes universe JRPGs. Idk, feel like I've been craving that traditional, old-school JRPG lately. Tried to play Metaphor ReFantazio and just wasn't scratching that itch.

I finally beat Life is Strange: Double Exposure. It was a true letdown. It captures none of the magic of the original and even having Max return as the main character doesn’t help it much. It puts you in a new environment with new characters and a new mystery, but none of it made me care. I care about characters from the last game and I think it would’ve been better to keep it in the same setting or at least keep the characters.

I’m trying to sell it on eBay and I can’t. No one wants the game. -_-

Everdell and the New Leaf expansion.

It’s one of my most frequently chosen games when I visit board game cafes.

Last week, I purchased the base game and the New Leaf expansion to have it in the house.

I genuinely enjoy this game. The artwork is excellent. You build a vertical tree as part of the board, which enhances the “immersive” experience. It’s well-suited for 2-3 players.

The level of complexity is perfectly balanced for me. It offers enough depth and requires strategic thinking. But it's also simple enough that you can easily get back to it after some months, without having to re-read the whole tiles, since a lot of what you need to know is written on the cards.

I'm trying to focus on just one game, but I've been playing:

• Okami HD on the switch: man, this game is beautiful and the movement feels so good, I was so stupid for not playing it on the PS2 when I had the chance.

• Yakuza 0 on PC: Yakuza 7 was my first Yakuza game, so this is the first one I'm playing with beat em up combat, I would say I prefer the battle system of 7, because on here I'm more prone to spam the same attack in every fight and that makes it more repetitive. But I'm enjoying the story so I don't mind.

• Rhythm Heaven on the DS: I'm getting into the hardest levels of the game, I realistically don't know if I'll beat this one, I'm very bad at rhythmic games, but it's so fun to play it. I'm hoping Nintendo releases a new entry for the Switch 2, this series needs more love from them.

• and Animal Crossing: New Leaf on the 3ds: Very stupid me trying to 100% animal crossing, I've been playing this game since 2016 and I can finally see that I'm getting there, according to my spreadsheets, I have completed this much:

  Category	Current	Total	Percentage
  Fishes	70	72	97%
  Bugs	68	72	94%
  Deep Sea Creatures	28	30	93%
  Fossils	67	67	100%
  Paintings	20	25	80%
  Sculptures	5	8	63%
  K.K. Slider Songs	91	91	100%
  Gyroids	102	131	78%
  Total	451	496	91%

I got back into a space sim game that's been sitting in my backlog for awhile awaiting updates:
Avorion was first released in 2015 but it's still being worked on. I tried the free demo back then and really fell in love with the physics and ship construction. Now it's been expanded a lot to include automation for mining and trading and building large fleets.

I setup my own server and have had a couple friends drop in. We started an alliance so we can share ships and fight pirates together. Or in my case try to run away and get my engines torpedoed off right as I enter hyperspace and then have to crawl back to a repair yard with just thrusters. Now I'm focused more on cargo runs since the trading system is pretty advanced with all kinds of mining stations and factories needing to move goods. Eventually I'll get enough cash to get myself a real warship and take revenge on those pirates and then venture deeper into the galactic center.

I'm playing Postal 2 on Steam Deck. The devs went as far as actually making official control scheme and adding Steam Deck button images into the game to make it fully verified. It runs great using only 3W TDP, which means it can last for several hours of gameplay. You could probably finish the game on one battery charge.

About the game... Well, I think it wouldn't be able to be created and sold in today's world where everyone is too cautious. It is great over the top game that plays great on stereotypes but you have to keep your head cool while playing it, you have to be able to see past it (if I make sense). It is violent, hilarious and unbelievable at the same time. I like the game and I will be finishing the in-game week for the very first time since I played it for the first time twenty years ago.

Pretty much all Dark Souls 3 this week. I've been having great fun with a strength build.
I've clapped every boss up to the last lord of Cinder and I've not struggled (so far).
Awesome game!

I also got to play a little Arkham Horror LCG after a long hiatus with 2 of my friends. We love it! It's such a good PvE card game and I would recommend it to ANYONE who likes a coop game to be honest, it's so good.

Finally got into MH Wilds and i've been enjoying it.

As a SnS/Gunlance user I feel like there's been a lot added to address the issues I had when I played World (skipped Rise).

For SnS it was just that it felt like you were just rotating through the same two combos most of the time. Even if you wanted to "just do cool stuff" there wasn't that much cool to do. That's been 100% remedied from my pov, although I don't know how much of it was done in Rise.

Likewise gunlance has always seriously struggled with "ok here's your lance, now stop using 2/3rds of your movelist" and I think they fixed that as well (again maybe in rise). Feels a lot more fun to figure out ways to use all of its abilities, and I don't feel as punished for doing fun stuff vs doing optimal stuff.

I've been playing TF2 Classic (the mod for TF2).

I thought I hated games, especially multiplayer games. Turns out I don't like the modern day microtransaction grindy nonsense that is in modern games.

Outside of that? Not much. TF2 Classic has got it's talons into me.

I'm playing Xenoblade X: Definitive Edition on the Switch (in Japanese language).

I very much enjoyed 1-3 and was thrilled when it was announced that the spinoff would also be coming to Switch. My thoughts after getting stuck into it for about 6 hours:

• The opening part is rough. Most of it is just sitting in a briefing room / standing around while people lore dump on you. You really need to push through to at least chapter 3 before the game hands you the keys to actually play.

• I'm used to systems on top of systems within systems in the Xenoblade series. It's one of its trademark characteristics! Having said that, the other games do a way better job of organically introducing the systems one by one (to the point where you'll sometimes still be getting new mechanics halfway into the game). X really forces you to read the 'TIPS' (equivalent to the manual) to understand what you can do with the layers and layers of menus. There's often little to no tutorial on how they work beyond that, which slows down the already slow opening even further.

• Once you do get acquainted with the game, it's a lot of fun. There's a nice big open world with lots of nooks and crannies to explore, loot to find and nasty high level monsters who you can come back for revenge on later (or just try and sneak past!). The systems are all very much Xenoblade 1 era, which means a lot more inventory / skills / relationship management and menuing compared to 2-3. I'm in two minds about that since it does break up the flow of the game a bit, but at the same time it's nice having more loot / progression that matters too.

• The 'Earth is destroyed and now humans have to rebuild on another world while dealing with aliens' story is... uh... OK so far. It's very different in tone from the traditional JRPG fare of 1 or the extremely anime-like story from 2-3 (which I enjoyed but some people understandably cannot abide) and makes me think more of something like Mass Effect (or maybe Xenosaga, given the mechs). This is compounded by the fact that you create your own protagonist who is silent except for the frequent choice of responses where you get to choose the vibe of the response, but not specifically what to say.

Overall I'm pretty into it, though I don't think it'll be keeping me up late on a work night like the other games did.

Went back to World of Warcraft: The War Within recently, levelled a Disc Priest to 70 and started trying to do Mythics and Mythic+ (currently at 621 ilvl.) Already, the sheer amount of elitism, gatekeeping, toxicity and overall disrespect I get from the player base is putting me off. It doesn't help that content is vastly overtuned compared to previous seasons/expansions.

League of Legends hasn't been so great either. This may be a bit of an obsessive thing to do, but I have been keeping a spreadsheet log of every report I've sent for instances of intentional feeding, griefing and overall sabotage, because I 100% plan to use this as ammunition in the event of me escalating a customer service complaint to Riot. Heck, I might even raise it to some games journalists.

I currently have 121 reports logged on this sheet. Nearly 49% of these reports are behaviour documented in Ranked games which have made it impossible for me to climb out of Iron 4.

The kind of things I have reported for include:

• Excessive deaths (often more than once every 2 minutes.)
• Not placing wards. Especially a problem when your ally is a support and it's basically their job to place wards, because the game is designed around them receiving a gold income item that can let them place up to 3 stealth wards at once.
• Stealing roles from other players.
• Sabotaging the game as early as Champion Select. In one Ranked game, everybody drafted ADCs except for me. We had a Varus Top, Master Yi Jungle, Caitlyn Mid and Jhin ADC.
• Leaving match after 1 or 2 deaths. This is a lot more common than you think.
• Substantial amounts of time AFKing.
• Maliciously banning champions I hover over in Champion Select. As I do play a lot of off-meta stuff, this is very commonplace, very disrespectful and Riot don't think it's a problem...

Also, shoutout to /r/summonerschool and /r/leagueoflegends for being some of the most unfriendly communities to exist and having really toxic moderators who have been the complete opposite of helpful.

I am playing through Final Fantasy: Pixel Remaster and am wrapping up FF5 at the moment. I was a little apprehensive because FF1 was long the only Final Fantasy I had ever played, and it is one of my favorite games of all time (no doubt due to the many long nights playing it on NES in my youth). I tried FF7 a couple years ago but just didn’t like how it felt so on the rails in comparison. Also not a fan of ATB. So I wasn’t sure how FF2-6 would compare to my beloved FF1.

But I gotta say, I am liking them all, and each one seems to get better than the last. FF5 can be a bit much with all the multiclassing options and not always knowing how to spec characters out, but it’s proving to be a lot of fun.

My biggest mistake: I unintentionally 100%ed FF1’s Steam achievements because I know it well enough that I know where everything is. After that I was like “oh let’s just do it for all of them” not realizing that FF1 is the only game in the series without missable content and each game has progressively more missable content, so making sure I don’t miss anything has taken a bit of fun out of it. But other than that, having a great time.

I still hate ATB though.

I continue to struggle with playing "big" games. I started Metaphor Refantazio a few weeks ago before being distracted by Wanderstop and I keep meaning to stick with that. I think the fact that each dungeon takes so long to get through means that when I have a night where I only have like an hour to play, it just really doesn't feel appealing. Which isn't a problem with just Metaphor but something I keep hitting with large-scale story driven games. Like I started Banishers: Ghosts of Eden and Dragon Age: The Veilguard but they both just felt overwhelming relative to the fun and progress I could make. Some years ago when I would spend more hours at a time on games I could get through in a week what now takes me a month so it was easier to get into and stay in the AAAs. But now on a day-to-day level it just feels like work to trickle my way through those stories when I already have reading books and coding projects and writing projects and house stuff I want to get through that take substantial commitments.

Anyways, I've played Persona 5 so the gameplay loop for Metaphor is utterly familiar. I'm just past the first proper "cycle" and left it off the day before the next big story event happens. The core gameplay is good and I enjoy some of the changes they've made since persona like the ability to change the archtypes of other characters. It took me a bit too long to realize they made MP restoring items much more common so I ended up taking like three or four days on the story dungeon since I kept exiting once I ran out of MP. Overall I think my favorite improvement is getting away from high school; I was surprised when it turns out you're fully in the fantasy world, I was expecting an Inuyasha/Narnia style plane/time walking for the main character.

As for the things that have been distracting me from Metaphor, I finished Wanderstop right after the last thread like I expected. The ending made me shed a manly tear.

Then I spent a couple nights playing A Game About Digging A Hole. It is a first person version of digging games like SteamWorld Dig or Motherlode made in a couple weeks so super short and straightforward. It definitely could be expanded several times over with more power ups and mechanics gradually introduced but it is fine as it is. Some of the "UI" elements aren't straightforward and I didn't love the gameplay of the last like 2 minutes.

Most recently I've been playing Fields of Mistria. I would describe it as Stardew-like more-so than any other cozy life-sims I've played (maybe I should say they're both Harvest Moon-likes but I never played those). I don't mean that in a pejorative way, it's good and has distinctions but both the 90% of the mechanics that are shared and the 10% that are new make it feel more like a sequel to Stardew than anything else.

In Board Games...

Antiquity

I'm a sucker for Dutch game designers Splotter Spellen's work - rich, toothy, deeply interactive games that flip standard game ideas on their heads. Since playing Food Chain Magnate many years ago, I've been trying to collect thier "Golden Five", of which I am only missing one (Indonesia, which is getting reprinted later this year!)

Antiquity is the latest addition to my collection (but not their newest game - this released in 2004), a game that uses a foundation of Worker Placement (a concept arguably started by Splotter with Bus) and Civ Building, and adds all these strange cool twists and turns to what would otherwise be basic decisions.

Played two games, one 3 player and one 2 player, and they were both exciting, stressful times. Both were won by a San Christofori player, which I've heard is a strong pick for new players. I found that I spent too much time setting up for a big play and not enough time actually trying to win, so for my next game I plan on going for a very agressive Border Expansion strategy. Sanm Giorgio wins by completely enclosing another player's borders with your borders, and I did love doing a Cultural victory in Civ IV.

I just finished Eternal Strands, and had quite a good time with it.

Climbing giant monsters = great fun.
Fairly simple controls, so I didn’t bounce off of it like I did Monster Hunter.
Interesting mechanics to the magic system, which I enjoyed. (You can use an ice wall spell to freeze enemies to the ground, stop the giant enemies from being able to move their arms, etc. It’s really neat and fun to mess around with).

The lore and story were decent, I guess? A little predictable maybe, but I still really enjoyed it and wanted to figure out how it would end.

There were a couple of quests where the game dragged a bit with the number of places to visit and do just one or two things, and I found myself running past most of the minor enemies rather than fighting them, because I had enough materials and was mostly just trying to finish the story (but I would still fight the epic monsters because I wanted the resources from them).

I did have to look up help for two of the epic monster fights that I wasn’t understanding, but both times I went “oh, that makes sense, I just misunderstood/didn’t see it at first”.

There’s some free DLC on the road-map I’m looking forward to (should be coming in the next few months it looks like).

The story has one character with explicit OCD which I thought was handled pretty well, and well written (and interesting to the story). One of the other characters was displaying traits that I interpreted as autism, but it was not touched on in the story, but they were a well-written character and I felt it added to the story and was handled appropriately.

Overall I did really enjoy the game. It wasn’t too difficult, the epic monsters fights were fun, and I enjoyed the lore and character interactions. I will be picking it back up when the free DLC comes out, and probably trying to collect some of the achievements and codex/lore-book entries I missed while completing the main story.

I finally started playing Master Detective Archives: Rain Code, which I got for my Switch for Christmas in 2023. It's made by the team behind Danganronpa, and it has a very similar atmosphere with the investigations. I really love the overall aesthetic, it's set in a futuristic city that's always raining so it's just really Neo-Noir. So far I've played through two chapters (Chapters 0 and 1) and I'm hooked.

I really like the characters, none of them feel particularly obnoxious so far and they all have great designs. (I also keep zooming in on people's eyes because almost everyone has some cool little extra design in their eyes, like one guy has a yen symbol.) Surprisingly not all characters get names (the Chapter 1 case has only two living characters who are named, and one of them is still called "Boy" in the files), but even then their designs and personalities still stand out.

A key part of the game are Mystery Labyrinths, which honestly just give me big Persona vibes. There aren't random enemy encounters or even really a maze-like aspect though. They're like a more game-y version of the trials in Danganronpa.

I mention them because my biggest gripe so far is with the "continuous attacks" in them. They require very fast reactions to choose the correct option, so fast that I barely have time to read the options as they pop up. If I couldn't pause the game during those segments, I'd need even more tries to get it. And they're so far the one aspect that doesn't have some ability you can unlock to make simpler...

As a final amusing side-note (and spoiler for Chapter 0): turns out I started playing on one of the characters' birthdays! And that character also died that day. Sorry for the bad birthday.

A few days ago I beat Nine Sols, a fantastic action platformer with Sekiro-inspired combat and some light metroidvania mixed in. It was a day-one buy for me when it released last year, as I was totally hooked by its "Taopunk" premise blending Chinese mythology, science fiction, and Taoism, but I never sat down to play it until this month.

Now, it's up there as one of my favorite games ever - but good LORD is it tough! I'd never played Sekiro or any of Fromsoft's Soulsborne games, but I've seen comments from people who have, saying that the final boss in Nine Sols was a harder challenge than Isshin in Sekiro. I myself took about nine hours to finally win the last fight, spread out over a week and a half. My total playtime was approx. 58 hours for a completionist playthrough.

This game was a breath of fresh air, and fit perfectly with an interest I expressed years ago (damn, didn't realize we've been here that long) in seeing some originality and different perspectives in video games. Overall - great story, awesome setting, challenging yet enjoyable combat, and notably excellent sound design. Highly recommend it if you are at all interested.

Aside from that, I recently had a rally racing fix and had significant trouble finding a suitable game. I gave V-Rally 4 a go, and it's been much better than the reviews gave it credit for. Despite some occasional wonky physics, long-shutdown multiplayer servers, and a software crash maybe every 7 or 8 hours, it's great fun! It's a decent challenge and has a good variety of tracks, cars, and race types (even hill climb and rallycross!).

This week for our podcast on roguelike/lite games we played the very interesting game Diceomancer.

The hook here is being able to roll a dice to change any number on screen like enemy health, card damage, energy pool, etc. It kind of seems like a gimmick at first, but there’s a deceptive amount of depth to it.

You start with a D4 which is great for re-rolling enemy damage from 10 down to 1 for example. But as you upgrade you’ll get a D20 and all of a sudden you’re second guessing that strategy in favor of boosting your stats instead.

It has a great, low-framerate hand drawn art style art that looks right out of a fairytale book. A lot of the card art is well done with some fun pop culture references as well.

I think the biggest drawback is the complexity of the cards. Slay the Spire and Monster Train master the balance of simplicity of what the cards do while building this subtly intricate synergy engine. Diceomancer can get there, but it requires a lot more study of the card descriptions.