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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 playing Haste! This is a 3D runner roguelite by Landfall Games, indie developers of 3D runner game Clustertruck and various other games and prototypes. I have a bunch of stuff to say about it - sorry!
Haste's core gameplay is ridiculously good. It feels good, starts off deceptively simple, has a good learning curve and is extremely addictive. You play as Zoe, an inter-world courier who is going (more on that later) through rapidly decaying world "fragments". She has to run very quickly, as the world is literally crumbling into nothingness right behind her. A stumble or two and you might die!
While you can start and stop running by pressing down on the analog stick, Zoe runs forward (away from the screen) automatically without any buttons having to be held. Instead, you steer her left and right like a missile. The fragments are very hilly, with plenty of smooth curved terrain (dotted with cracks and obstacles). Zoe will automatically jump into the air after running up a hill (with no problems). That's where your third button comes into play: It makes Zoe dive down faster, allowing you to control her landing. The entire low level premise is to aim Zoe such that she doesn't slam into any obstacles and lands exactly at the beginning of a downhill slope and at an angle close to that of the slope, which the game will announce as a "perfect landing". This will allow her to "hit the ground running" and maximize her momentum so she can keep ahead of the fragment's collapse. Conversely, staying in the air too long, jumping at too high an angle or hitting an obstacle will kill Zoe's forward momentum. The game shows how well you're doing at keeping ahead of your impending death as a ranking in the corner of the screen: S, A, B, C, D or E.
Each individual fragment can be cleared very quickly, and this is where the roguelite mechanics come into play. A run - called a "shard" - contains several fragments, organized as a randomly generated graph that lets you decide where to go next, very similar to Slay the Spire and the like. Depending on which shard you access from the hub world, fragments will belong to certain specific biomes. In addition to fragment nodes the graph contains campfires (where you meet NPCs), shops (where you also meet NPCs and buy items) and random encounters or challenges, culminating in a boss level. Obtaining a good set of items that synergize well is crucial to allowing Zoe to survive the shard by enhancing her speed, jump height, invulnerability frames, healing, etc. After all, when you fail out of a fragment you lose a life, and if you lose all your lives the entire shard is toast and you must start over. Typical roguelite exasperation applies - you may lose simply due to bad luck, or bad "RNG". It's just how it is.
Haste has... several NPCs. They're represented in dialogue scenes by detailed still images - reminiscent of Hades - and toss lines of text at you (no voice acting to speak of). They do this very often. The game has dozens upon dozens of polished conversations - it's not like there are any spelling errors or anything - but they're all just so damn bland. Someone played too many bad JRPGs and decided this game could use a cast of characters who really want to exchange a series of grunts, ellipses, one-word non-answers, admissions of not knowing somehting, or outright denials to explain anything. Why make the player sit through this torture? Worse, the characters sometimes ambush you with these stupid dialogues. You go to a shop node, you want to grab an item and move on to the next fragment, which normally would take ten seconds tops, and instead you need to press A fifteen times to get through a conversation with a character who literally doesn't speak? My girl Zoe literally runs faster than a car (there's a speedometer in the UI); stop stalling her with the most annoying dialogue ever written. This is especially aggravating after playing a game with good writing like Cricket.
I think the devs just took the wrong lessons from Hades. In Hades, exchanges are (usually) straight to the point. The hub area is streamlined; characters can be accessed quickly and there's almost always something to be gained by talking to them. Also, they're just better characters. Haste wants you to cross a large hub world inbetween shards just to get to yet another inane piece of dialogue, then run all the way back.
There are other strange decisions bogging down what is otherwise an excellent game. Boss fight difficulty seems extremely uneven, with some bosses being fairly trivial to beat and others nearly impossible to the point where a good dose of luck and persistence are needed. I thought it was just me at first, then I went online and confirmed that my opinion is shared by dozens of other players. Challenge nodes are the same; it's sometimes entirely unclear what you're supposed to be doing in them, or you just can't spot your goal at all. The shard graph often offers very little choice since the paths on offer are exactly equivalent - I would have introduced constraints in the generation algorithm to prevent this (I don't remember Slay the Spire having this issue, at least not notably).
There is a large piece of terrain used in various biomes that can glitch and turn intangible, meaning you dive down to land on it and clip right through and die. The devs are aware of it but don't seem to think this is something that needs urgent fixing. Landfall have been around for a while now - I expected better! They're also still not super good at doing UI (which they never have been); the menus seem plain and amateurish and the UI often shows keyboard controls until something is actually pressed in the gamepad. It's hard to see which items you currently have since the icons that represent them are not very distinguishable/memorable. You can see their descriptions by hitting the select button outside a fragment... but not in reward screens, when you're trying to select another item to obtain - which is exactly when you would need this information!
Anyway, if you can put up with all these annoyances, 90% of Haste will be a good time. Just running really fast, following the lay of the land with your jumps and dives, it's a high adrenaline experience and really not as difficult to master as it sounds. It feels a bit like an upside down Lifeslide; instead of wanting to stay up high and swooping down for momentum, you want to stay low and jump to clear obstacles. If you give it a try, I hope you like it!
Previous
Okay, that looks ridiculously cool, I’m going to have to try the demo!
Yeah, I liked my time with the demo well enough, but the NPCs just felt very lifeless and lacked any charm. Likewise, the boss fight I got in the demo did not seem very fun. The core gameplay was intriguing, so maybe I'll have to try giving it another go!
You can mostly work around the NPC annoyances, I guess. Skip all the dialogue, don't deliberately engage - having played through the whole game now I'm fairly certain you gain nothing from talking to them. All the "campfire" nodes in the shard graph should be dodged whenever possible, because other than the very first time you never get anything from them - which means that, unlike in Hades, visiting them is actively detrimental to gameplay by robbing you of an opportunity to instead visit a node where you gain more resources before the next levels and final boss! Feels like bad design! Eurydice and Sisyphus would be disappointed! (EDIT: You refill a life that you may have lost, read Prodiggles' response.)
The bosses are not as fun as normal fragments but they're mostly not that bad, other than for the difficulty swings. There is one, level 7 out of 10, which is notoriously unfair, but you can kind of make it if you figure out you need to bring in a specific special ability (I didn't discuss those in the previous post, but they're your fourth controller button - they use up a limited "energy" resource. Be sure to purchase them all.)
The final boss I just didn't beat. It fell afoul of my no-bullshit-final-bosses rule - there is nothing gated behind it that I want, so why bother! (I have since played a 36 fragment endless mode run, which is way more fun, and I probably will be back to play more of that mode, which you unlock... I believe it's after shard 3.)
You do gain back a heart when you get near the campfire. So it's meant to help you out if you've lost hearts earlier in a run. The dialogue is just a bonus if you want to advance the story.
I never noticed that! Thanks for letting me know. I didn't typically need to recover hearts for any reason; the shard's success was determined by other factors (though I did unlock 4 lives at the Captain). I would always choose boost, invulnerability or especially compounding items if given the opportunity, since I find that it's better to just run faster and not take the damage. Performing well means more shards, which means better items, which means a better outcome. If you're doing so poorly that you keep taking damage (other than due to unpredictable hidden obstacles) you're probably going to fail anyway. (I'm not saying any of this is a bad thing; I enjoyed the roguelite mechanics and item builds and have no complaints there.)
Dune: Awakening has consumed me whole (as have sandworms on three separate occasions to punish me for my hubris). It just looks like a survival multiplayer game with a Dune skin on from the surface, but it goes deep. Like, DEEP. Hagga Basin, the place where 90% of the gameplay happens, is deceptively large, but also fairly dense with content, so it's not just dunes (heh). The early game resource grind is pretty fair and most of the time spent there will just be getting acquainted with the mechanics and various machines to build in your base.
The hydration and water gathering mechanic is really well done, with the player struggling initially to just avoid being dehydrated, to eventually having a surplus of water and blood until you burn it all while processing resources. It goes from quenching yourself to quenching your insatiable resource production and stays very relevant the whole way through.
Traversal is interesting since the only form of fast travel is a pilot stationed at the handful of tradeposts throughout the Basin, who will only take you to other tradeposts or to the major cities, for a fee. This means that early on you'll be travelling relatively slowly by foot, or sandbike, or buggy, while needing to stay vigilant of sandworm breaches when crossing open sands, and it's a great way to really feel how vast the map is. Plus, you get to drive by other peoples' houses and admire their architectural skills (80% of them are boxes). Once you've progressed far enough to craft your own ornithopter, the game transforms as you can travel significantly faster and no longer need to worry about getting eaten by a worm (unless you land on open sand of course), and you also unlock access to the deep desert, which I haven't gone to yet as it's the endgame area that's primarily PVP. However this does not render your ground transports obsolete, as the buggy is still the objectively best way to gather resources by a huge margin, and the sandbike is just cool, plus you can keep it in your pocket.
The lore and quests are actually not bad! To avoid spoilers, I'll just reveal that the premise and "main story" revolves around this being an alternate timeline where Lady Jessica gives birth to a girl instead of Paul, Doctor Yueh's betrayal is caught ahead of time so House Atreides is not destroyed in the Battle of Arrakeen, thus a War of Assassins between the great houses breaks out after, the Fremen are all but wiped out by the Sardaukar, and you are some seemingly random individual sent by the Bene Gesserit to find the remaining Fremen. The writing won't be as deep as something like BG3 or KCD, but it's pretty solid overall, you can see some familiar names and faces, and it's pretty immersive. The story quests are also optional and you can put them off indefinitely to just explore and advance your tech tree, but some very useful items are locked behind them and they're fun anyway so it's highly recommended you do them.
The combat is quite interesting. With the exception of one rare and very endgame lasgun, ranged weapons are all dart shooters that will struggle to take down Holtzmann shields, while melee weapons can bypass shields with slow stab attacks. PVE enemies will be a mix of shielded and unshielded foes, with melee ones that charge straight at you almost always having shields. It becomes a strange dance of parrying and stabbing the melee enemies, while dodging and shooting back at the ranged enemies, or in the case of troopers that have both a strong shield and a heavy rapid-fire weapon, creating opportunities to stab them a few times in between volleys. There's an assortment of abilities at your disposal to help you dispatch foes, from a stationary auto-turret to various grenades to poison to special melee attacks to the voice. These are spread out across five different skill trees, one of which you start with and the others you have to unlock by completing a quest for a trainer NPC somewhere in the world or cities, plus follow up quests to unlock later levels of those skill trees. You can mix and match between all of them with only your skill point investment as a limitation, so there's a ton of flexibility.
I haven't even gotten into the guilds, or allying with one of the great houses, or the Landsraad, but rest assured there is already some content for endgame multiplayer activity, with hopefully more to come soon, especially on the PVE side. If you were on the fence about getting this game, get it, it's excellent so far. If you weren't but you're a fan of survival games, I highly recommend this one. Even if you only play solo PVE, there still a lot to do.
I haven’t been big on survival crafting games before (and I really don’t care about building the biggest and bestest base), but I do like adventure games and love Dune as a universe. As someone who would want to primarily experience the adventure aspect (though I do understand a fair amount of resource gathering and crafting will be necessary), do you think there’s enough there for someone like me? I’ve been on the fence with the game and I really care about if the story, world, and lore would sate my hunger for more Dune content.
If you can tolerate the survival crafting gameplay, I think you will still get a lot of enjoyment from treating it as an adventure game. The main story and some of the side quests do a decent job of deepening the lore of the world, and exploring the world there are some pre-recorded messages left in some enemy camps, shipwrecks, and botanical testing stations that add a bit more meat to the lore, as well as a good amount of environmental storytelling.
I've been playing No Man's Sky again for the past few days. There was an update to settlements in game, and the new mechanics have reignited my interest in the long forgotten feature. Plenty of bugs still in the system, but here are my high level feelings:
No Man's Sky is one of those games I leave for a year, come back and marvel at how the new changes have vastly improved the game, get sucked into playing too much...and then stop playing for a year. I'm glad to hear that the game is still so fun to play! Better inclusion of trade goods sounds great, and the general improvements to settlements (and the boosting the number you can have) sounds like a great reason to jump back in.
I've settled into a very similar loop, and I imagine I'll burn out on the game again after I get my settlements all to S class. Some of the updates that have been recently released definitely lean more on the side of polish. It's too early to really call it, but it feels like the dev team is wrapping things up by revisiting common complaints and tying features together. I still have a couple of items left on my wishlist, but Hello Games has for the most part addressed all of the remaining major complaints with the game. It's pretty amazing really.
After being Star Wars pilled by Andor season 2 I played through Jedi: Survivor - having played the first game awhile ago. It was amazing! Such a great game AND a great Star Wars story on its own. I really hope they further integrate these characters into the larger Star Wars canon.
Star Wars Battlefront 2, I started up the single player campaign and ended up finishing it in a few days. Obviously not as fleshed out as most games but still pretty dang good! AND they actually did tie THAT game's narrative into The Force Awakens! I'm finishing up the story DLC "Resurrections". It's been really fun.
Elite: Dangerous, I've got way too many hours in this game. Every few years I jump back into it for a bit. Amazing space sim, though it does have a little bit of a learning curve. Works great with an Xbox controller.
Heroes of Valor, Anyone remember Battlefield: Heroes? It was a really fun free to play game that EA released back in 2009. This game is a spiritual successor and so far they're nailing it. It's definitely still pretty early but it's a lot of fun. Really hoping they add more stuff to the game over time but even now it was a definite buy for me.
I might do another play through of Survivor soon. I haven't played since I beat the game soon after it came out, but I've been feeling the itch.
I started up Jedi Survivor again after Andor as well, really got a hankering for some space opera. So much so that I picked up Dune Awakening on a whim and it carries a lot of processing in my mind.
The recent surge of players (~9k/day) has me back in after a long session with Alan Wake 2. The heavy contrast of story vs action is such a welcome change of pace, and I forgot how great an MMO feels when there’s tons of others to join and fight. It reminds me of the golden Halo days… The battles feel real.
I returned to Dark Messiah of Might and Magic after about a decade, when I managed to get to the second to last chapter and lost interest because I had a non-ideal build and some of the fights (goddamned ghouls!) just got too tough on the hard difficulty.
This time I did a mage build and around that point in the game it got maybe a bit too easy due to a couple overpowered spells.
Man, is that game fun. What I love about it is how gamey it is. The level designs are not realistic, they are, together with the enemy encounters, obviously designed as a playground for you. Some of the designs slightly remind me of Arx Fatalis, though there's more emphasis on movement and more verticality here. The story is cheesy as hell and not that important. The game gives you plenty of options to win, so on hard difficulty in many of the encounters you die multiple times but then find out a couple tricks to "solve" them and suddenly do it without issues.
There are some weak points: boss fights are kind of weak because they usually can be cheesed, so the fun (and difficulty) lies in normal encounters. And platforming sucks, but is usually not mandatory. Graphics is hit or miss, some still looks great, some really doesn't.
Overall it's about ten hours of pure fun.
I found out that there's a tiny modding scene which is bringing cut content into the game and also released a testing version for coop mode, so I might actually return to this one in the future.
Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound (Demo) (SteamDeck):
A game I've looking forward to this year. Was excited to get some hands-on-time. The demo runs about an hour showcasing the primary mechanics through three disparate levels. There is one early boss fight as well. The game is developed by The Game Kitchen, a studio which established itself with Blasphemous (2019) and Blasphemous 2 (2023). I liked Blasphemous and I'm a fan of the Ninja Gaiden series so this is an exciting project to me.
Rather than a metroidvania, it is a level based 2d platformer in the vein of the original NES Ninja Gaiden games. There is clear inspiration in the level design inspiration and enemy placement. Gameplay is light and heavy attacks with a dodge. Another character grants you some magic abilities but thus far I haven't come across the standard ninpo abilities. Killing certain provide buffs to your next attack which you use to take out tankier enemies quickly. It is quite fast paced and flowy. Levels also contain these short "speed run" type segments where you use a different character, they provide good checkpointing so they never got frustrating to me.
Ninja Gaiden Sigma (PS5):
The Ninja Gaiden Collection was 40% off on Playstation's store. With Ninja Gaiden IV coming out this fall and after my experience with Ragebound I decided to revisit the original 3d games. I played Ninja Gaiden (2004) on Xbox back in the day and then lost track of the series. I played Ninja Gaiden II Black when it was released earlier this year. So I've started with the remaster of Ninja Gaiden (2004). What I like about these games is relatively short play times (10ish hours) across bite-sized levels. Combat is fast and draws a lot of influence from fighting games with many combos amid frenetic groups of enemies. It's also just a sick ninja+cyberpunk vibe.
Enjoying revisiting this game, it holds up as I hoped it would. The Sigma releases are generally disliked by the fan base due to reduced enemy count and visual gore. I partially agree that the reduced enemy density (and commensurately buffed health pools) slows the game down a bit. But I still enjoy it for the vibe and gameplay.
Marvel Versus Capcom 2 (SteamDeck):
The recently announced Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls really caught my eye. Aside from Smash Bro. and some Soul Caliber I've never really been a fighting game guy. But I would like to have some basic competence. So I picked up MARVEL vs. CAPCOM Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics which contains Marvel versus Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes. I spent a couple hours this weekend learning the systems and getting my feet under me. So far I'm actually enjoying it a lot. In particular I like that combos are not "pre-coded" and are just chains of attacks you can learn individually until you can chain them together correctly. Actually finding that this style of game really work for me as a podcast game.
Elden Ring: Nightreign (PC):
Really enjoy this game as I mentioned a couple weeks ago. Other stuff has distracted me but my brother asked if we could play some. He's early 20's and doesn't have experience with souls-likes. His gaming tends to be in the GaaS shooters. So I was curious how the game would hit with him. It is difficult, it took me around 5 hours to figure out what I needed to be helpful in my sessions. And that's coming in with ~200 hours of Elden Ring as well as experience in every From Software game. It was steep for him as I was explaining stamina, weapon and attribute scaling, dodge timing, and enemy reading. But We had fun and I hope we can play a bit more.
Quickie: A Love Hotel Story
Yes, this is a NSFW adult-only game on Steam with a lot of explicit sexual content. No, I will not elaborate on those aspects.. It's a visual novel/hotel management game where you play as Kaito, a university student who takes over his family's failing hotel business while his father falls ill and transforms it into a love hotel. I completed the main story and 5 of the 9 story arcs for each love interest. The cast is a bit hit-or-miss with some likeable and other very unlikeable characters. Also, the hotel management minigame kinda sucks, especially with the full release patch changing a lot of mechanics which screwed up some of my room placements.
Mario Kart World
I don't know whether I love or hate this one. The open world nature of the game is truly spectacular and on a level that I don't think was possible on the OG Switch. But damn do the intermission tracks between each circuit suck. I don't even understand why they're a thing in the Grand Prix and Online Multiplayer modes because you're still being thrown into a loading screen between each race. The concept only works in Knockout Tour and Free Roam.
Other things I dislike about MKW are:
Heroes of Valor
This is a third-person shooter that recently released in Steam Early Access and is a very blatant recreation of Battlefield Heroes, for better or worse. I want this game to succeed because BFH deserved better, but the class and weapon balance is awful (fully automatic weapons suck, have excessive spread and deal low DPS, while semi-automatic and sniper rifles can practically two-shot opponents.) It also has a lot of problems like AI that ranges between pants-on-head stupid and aimbotter, an inconsistent/broken system of detecting assists, atrocious plane controls that hardly work, etc. Hopefully the issues are ironed out, more content is added and the game grows a healthy playerbase.
I think what HoV needs is a buff to fully-automatic weapons (especially at close range), and better level design which isn't just outright copied from Battlefield Heroes. Almost everybody plays on Valor Village because it's probably the most balanced map - others tend to leave you way too open to sniper fire, making the Recon class OP-as-fuck.
MapleStory
I watched one-too-many Coppersan videos and felt the urge to play this game again, choosing to take part in the Hyper Burning MAX event (where you gain 5 levels upon level-up instead of one.) Within about seven hours of play over two days, I had hit level 145 on a (Cygnus Knight) Night Walker.
A lot has changed with MapleStory since I last played, which was a few years after the disastrous Big Bang update revamped the game world and made things worse. The campaign is far more story-driven, and from what I played of the Cyngus Knight story, it's actually pretty decent.
What I don't like is how linear and all-over-the-place level progression felt. This may have been a consequence of the 5x levelling event, but I literally blinked and missed much of the content in Victoria Island and Ossyria, quickly outlevelling all the nostalgic locations I remembered like Perion, Kerning Sewers, Sleepywood Dungeon, Orbis Tower, El Nath, Aqua Road, Korean Folk Town, etc. And if you attack mobs outside of your level range, any EXP or Meso gains are greatly reduced, if not outright nullified. It's likely Nexon did this to deter vac and float hackers, but it still sucks.
At level 145, I also reached the point where you can't get any meaningful gear upgrades (highest gear drops are level 90) and enemies near my level get substantially harder as a result - to the point where they can 3-shot me.
Playing this just made me realize... I can't wait for MapleStory: Classic World. Despite it being one of the most grindy MMORPGs I ever played during my teenage years, the game was excellent before Big Bang trashed everything.
Every damn Knockout race has at least one moment where I get blue shelled and double or triple red shelled and lose anywhere from 3 to 10 places.
Of course, when I only lose three places, that's the final corner and I lose the whole thing.
The horn could destroy Blue Shells in MK8 as well, if you timed it right.
Finished Act 2 of Expedition 33 and decided to take a bit of a break before finishing up. After the amazing showing from the game and story to that point, I seriously found the little time I spent in act 3 disappointing.
plot spoilers
So it's not the whole family drama, pocket dimension plot twist that I take issue with. Was all fairly well telegraphed and not so far out of left field. It's probably the part of the story I'm most interested in and something I want to see explored more in future games.My real issue is that they managed to pull off my video game pet peeve and have the immersion killing "critical situation and time is of the essence" event and give you all the time you need to tie up loose ends. Hated it in Mass Effect, JRPGs and every open world game it happens in and seeing it here was almost more of a let down.
Almost all of the Act 3 events and side quests would have fit in just fine in a sort of intermission act. Between the paintress fight and retuning to Lumiere. Frame it as not knowing when the team would ever have the opportunity to return to the continent and you now have the chance to take care of personal business.
And act 3 could have been a marathon sprint to the finish where you don't loose the plot momentum and sense of urgency. Maybe pad it out with the Infinite tower or old levels as they are being erased for variety.
Since it's all busy work at the moment, I'll probably just grind through it on the steam deck and finish off properly on the PC later.
Act 3 aside, I love everything this game is doing. Characters are all a joy to see on screen and voiced so well. I actually look forward to scial times at came, just to see where they go.
Environments are evocative and the music just elevates even the most basic area. The fasion game goes very hard and the mime look is the best look. There just needed maybe one more playable character and some sort of recolour system for outfits.
The active combat system combined with interesting character abilities/pictos are a joy to experiment with and break. Monster designs are incredible and combined with the animations and parry system, it scratches that Bloodborne itch nothing else seems to reach. (Granted, there's 2 particularly devious enemies I can't seem to get.)
Also the generous respec and upgrade materials makes it easy to experiment with different builds and also tune difficulties. It was a lot more enjoyable to not max out attributes and stay just a little under powered.
Overall, it's one of my best games this year and really hope the devs do more.
I've finished Danganronpa V3.
Usually, when you have a series that isn't planned out right from the start to be a single story told over multiple instalments, each new instalment tends to be worse since:
each time, the writers are burning through the best ideas they can come up with and things that can plausibly be done with (and to) the characters and setting; and
at the same time, they're building up more backstory that later instalments need to be consistent with, restricting where they can go with the story more and more.
Despite that, and on top of two games already filled with loads of crazy plot twists, this game somehow manages to pull it off and simultaneously present all kinds of fresh ideas and gimmicks for its cases while also managing to be a proper sequel (and it is a sequel despite first impressions - definitely play the first two games first!) which builds on the existing story with an even crazier sequence of twists in its second half. A really satisfying end to the series!
I'm now playing AI: The Somnium Files. This is an adventure game where you play as a police detective in near-future Tokyo investigating a series of murders using a device that lets you enter the dreams of others.
I'm not far into the game, but so far I'm digging the setting and designs (the protagonist's sci-fi 'evolver' revolver is particularly neat). Despite the noir premise and all the murders, the writing (from Zero Escape author Uchikoshi Kotaro) is also often pretty silly and fun to read.
I'm less hot on the actual gameplay:
The bulk of the game is point and click style investigation and talking to people. This in itself is fine, but the game generally forces you to listen to most of what everyone has to say before you can move on to the next scene, so it ends up feeling kind of pointless to let the player choose conversation topics in the first place.
The other half of the game is investigating dreams. In these sequences, you have 6 minutes to get around the obstacles presented by the dreamscape and uncover clues, but the clock only really counts down when you move / take action, Superhot style. The issue here is that all of the puzzles work on nonsensical dream logic, so it's impossible for the player to deduce what to do without trial and error and eventually just memorising the correct sequence, which isn't particularly engaging and kind of the antithesis of the gameplay in Zero Escape.
That said, the story is interesting enough for me to stick with it and I'll see if the gameplay improves from here.
For readers who are fans of Danganronpa I just want to give a STRONG! recommendation for a game called "of the Devil". It takes a lot of inspiration from Danganronpa as well as from Ace Attorney.
You play as a woman named Morgan who serves as a public defense attorney in a cyberpunk world defined by intense surveillance. Private security collaborates with the government so there is a massive unified network of cameras filming just about every street corner for the state. Personal phones have always-on cameras that not only track their users, but will automatically upload footage they passively gathered if the user was within a certain radius of a crime scene. The internet is, of course, tightly monitored and controlled. Rather than the setting being cartoonishly evil and authoritarian it's more... uncomfortable. And given the nature of things, there are now very few crimes that the state isn't able to score a conviction on.
Morgan has a penchant for gambling and so a lot of the mechanics are themed around poker. It's got the familiar information-gathering phase (where you gather "chips" that serve double duty as your life meter) and then a kind of "show down" phase which doesn't necessarily take place in court but during which you argue your point and try to put the information you gathered together. The poker theme is cute: like if someone comes to you with a challenge that you suspect is a lie, you can either "call" their bluff, or "fold" and move on... sometimes your goal isn't so much to win as it is to lose as little as possible. On the other hand, you can also "raise" on certain challenges that you are confident about, betting more of your chips. (You get little cosmetic rewards with them at the ends of the chapters, so there's an bit of an incentive to having more of them.)
I find the writing really good. It's more grounded and serious than both Danganronpa and Ace Attorney, but it definitely has its moments of humour, too. Morgan in particular is a really interesting character to me.
The prologue is free on Steam! So if this sounds intriguing to you you should pick it up and then DON'T LOOK ANYTHING ELSE UP ABOUT IT until you've beaten it. It's one of those games where spoilers can really affect the experience of playing it, I think.
Interesting! Thanks for the recommendation, this looks very much up my alley. I'm also curious about Paper Perjury mentioned in this week's thread.
Thanks for the rec, will have to check it out! Never heard of it!
I've tried the first game before and I thought it was quite fun but I never finished it.
I wanted to play one of the games with my partner and see if she liked it. I assume from your comment you would suggest playing 1 first to see if you like the series and go from there?
For sure. The first game is pretty short, so it's not a major undertaking. The game gives you a lot longer than you need in the action parts too, so I think you could easily pass the controller around and take turns if you wanted to.
God, I hated the dream portions of AI. The nonsense dream logic and wasted time redoing segments meant I ended up looking up solutions towards the end of the game, especially as they ramp up in outrageous dream logic...ness. I feel like one could look up the dream segment solutions for the entirety of the game and not lose out on the experience at all (other than maybe some immersion - some were pretty cool environments).
tl;dr FBC: Firebreak is good, but you have to tolerate about two hours of it being not so good.
I picked up FBC: Firebreak this morning and was able to sneak in a few sessions before work, and another hour over lunch. My initial opinion is overall positive, with one very large caveat: you really have to play for a good 2-3 hours before it feels like a complete game. Which, that's a shitty thing to have to say, but hear me out, because inevitably, this game is going to be compared to the likes of Left4Dead, Darktide, and Deep Rock Galactic (DRG), so folks ought to know what they're getting into. I'll focus on DRG because I have the most experience with that one.
In DRG, after one short and skippable tutorial mission, you get access to a full cast of classes that all feel wildly different and attract folks for different reasons - the scout's focus on mobility, the driller and engineer's very different takes on accessibility and support (via destroying and creating terrain, respectively) and their wildly different weapon loadouts, and the gunner's focus on dishing out major DPS and keeping the team alive while doing it. All of these abilities and all of this variety is immediately apparent and present in the game, and every form of upgrading your character's classes is just a bunch of proverbial cherries on top. If you played a session of DRG with every character using their level 1 stock miner loadout, the game would still be very fun and have a lot of variety.
In FBC: Firebreak, everything I just said is absolutely not the case. The first two hours of the game feels like you're playing purposefully gimped characters. Yes, the different kit loadouts have different tools, but apart from being able to do very specific actions within missions, there is virtually zero other difference between the classes. The jump kit can recharge environmental objects quickly. The fix kit can repair damaged environmental objects quickly. The splash kit can put out fires. When you first start the game, that's about all the difference there is between the three classes. And to be clear, you can do all of the things I just mentioned on any character, just more slowly (there are manual repair/charge/extinguish button sequences). So there is no one action that's truly unique to any kit. Which, fine, that's a good thing overall--you'd hate to be softlocked in a level because you didn't have a _____ kit on your team--but it's just another straw on the camel's back that makes it feel like you're playing a pretty bog-standard co-op shooter with random tools that don't provide any utility to start with.
With all of that in mind, the progression system does unlock the "full" versions of all of the kit tools in relatively short order. I think it took me about ~90 minutes, and that was barely understanding what I was doing. Even with those small changes, suddenly the different kits feel like we have distinguishing traits between the classes that make them feel more like feature-complete characters (the upgrade system literally states that you're upgrading the kits from "faulty" to "functional" status), and it starts to feel a lot more fun and unique, akin to DRG gameplay, albeit still very slimmed-down.
Last gripe, and then I'll change gears: the enemy variety is okay, but suffers from the same issue that the co-op WH40K games (Vermintide & Darktide) suffer from: too many fast-moving fodder/mob enemies that get up in your business way too quickly. Going back to DRG, there are tons of huge waves of low-tier enemies, but the level design is very frequently cavernous (aptly so), so there are tons of sightlines on the floor, walls, and ceiling alike to take out a lot of the mob ahead of time. Not only is this satisfying from a tactical perspective, it also means you're not constantly set upon by tons of mobs that fill up your screen entirely... unlike FBC. And in FBC, since this is happening near-frequently, and there is a "resonance" mechanic built into the gameplay loop that encourages firebreakers to stay close to each other, it means all three players and nearly all the mobs are often all right on top of each other in a closed-off space. While this feels like a punishment in DRG when it happens due to sloppy playing or lack of foresight, it just feels like it's par for the course in FBC so far. Maybe there will be systems and upgrades that unlock down the road that will help with this, but it makes it feel like you're actively discouraged from taking AoE/crowd control items because friendly fire is a thing, and it'd be far too easy to kill off teammates while trying to deal with these extremely-close crowds.
Switching to the positives: the atmosphere and scenarios are very engaging. I love The Oldest House and all things CONTROL, and this fits right in. The different missions carry a lot of variety as far as the gameplay loop itself is concerned, and the layout of the levels captures CONTROL's vibes well enough (though I'd still extend the same complaint about it being tough when large hordes approach). I'm also a huge fan of the enormous range of session lengths over which players have control. If you set missions to the shortest length setting and a lower difficulty, it's not unreasonable to finish a level in sub-5 minutes without really putting much effort in. That's an awesome thing! FBC has billed itself as a co-op shooter that doesn't ship with FOMO, and it really feels like it'd be an easy pick-up-and-play game once you get the hang of it. Finally, back to the classes that I mentioned earlier, the synergy between the three breakers does become a lot of fun as you start to engage with the systems more. There is a mission pretty early on in which the splash kit's water ejector makes clearing the mission objective incredibly quick, and I love playing that mission as a support character who does very little DPS throughout the entire level but basically trivializes the mission itself because of how quickly I can focus down the objective, while the jump kit breaker can clear out the objective items with their AoE electricity gun & the third breaker can work ahead towards other mission objectives or watch our backs.
All of that said, if you can tolerate the first ~2 hours of playing a (stylistic and atmospheric yet) somewhat boring co-op shooter, you are eventually rewarded with a much more engaging gameplay loop with a killer atmosphere, though it's a really rough start to be sure, and I fear a lot of people are going to fall off before they get to that point.
Is it possible to play this solo or with bots? I love Control and Remedy games but I have no one that would be interested in playing this, and not a fan of randos online.
Some digging around leads me to believe that you can play solo, but it's not an intended mechanic so your mileage may vary from a balancing standpoint.
Looks like you have to unselect "public matchmaking" as an option, then queue up a party and start a mission, which you're allowed to do before filling the party. In other words, you're starting a mission ahead of time with a party of 1, and telling the game you're waiting for two others to join, but you blocked public matchmaking so nobody else can join.
That said, and I swear I don't usually evangelize this much, but I do have a small Discord server that has several folks on it who are interested in the game, so if you wanted to try the MP experience, you could give that a shot. I know we're still randos for all intents and purposes, but so far everyone seems friendly :) I'll shoot you an invite, feel free to keep or toss.
Just finished Ace Attorney Investigations Collections. It's two games: Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth, and its sequel, Investigations 2: Prosecutor's Gambit. The first game came out in the West on the Nintendo DS back in day, so that was a replay for me. But Prosecutor's Gambit never released in the West, until last year as part of the collection. Though there was a fan translation that came out years ago. Anyway, this was my first playthrough of the second title.
In the Investigations series, Prosecutor Miles Edgeworth is the star of the show instead of his friend/rival and overall series mascot Defense Attorney Phoenix Wright. One of the things I really like about Investigations is that it's much more "fluid" than the mainline Phoenix Wright/Apollo Justice games. In the latter, there's the investigation and evidence-gathering phase of a chapter, and then the court phase. And sometimes you might go back and forth a couple times if the case is really long and complex.
In Investigations, there isn't really a formal court setting. There are a couple times Edgeworth or another character are arguing court, but for the most part, Edgeworth and crew are out in the field doing investigative work and questioning and arguing with suspects and witnesses. So there's still "court," but it's just all wrapped up within the field investigation portion. Idk, I think it just makes the game move quicker and the story feels more organic.
Overall, I enjoyed the stories of both games. Gambit did a great job of giving more background to Edgeworth, who is a main character in the whole Ace Attorney series. We get to understand his motivations more. Why he became a prosecutor. Why he was tutored under a man who secretly killed his father (this was revealed, even to Edgeworth, in a previous AA game). What being a prosecutor actually means to him.
One wrinkle, without giving away too much, it that it's a bit weird that so many characters in "Gambit," and even the AA universe as a whole now that I think about, have dead parents. Ones who were often murdered, which is what often brings much of the cast and crew together.
Anyway, with that, I've now played (and for some, replayed) every single one of the mainline games, plus the spin-offs. Even the Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright game. Clearly, I'm a huge fan of the Ace Attorney games.
I'm thinking about replaying The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, which I finished in 2023. I've probably I've talked about it in a weekly post.
In the meantime, however, I've started Paper Perjury. Which you might've guessed from the name is an indie Ace Attorney-style game! Man, maybe I should've been a lawyer...
Nice! I just started Investigations myself and have been really enjoying it.
Would you say the mainline AA games are worth seeing though to the end? I haven’t played Apollo Justice or further. I have played GAA though and absolutely loved it!!
If you've enjoyed GAA and like what you're seeing in Investigations, I'd say so! Certainly the first games in the series, the older ones, don't have as many bells and whistles. Few to no forensics tools. Not a huge thing, but something to be aware of. The stories are still solid and cast just as colorful, IMO.
But since you're playing Investigations now, playing the mainline games will give you way more context, especially for Edgeworth. Even though Investigations is a spinoff, it still has solid ties into the mainline games, surprisingly. Investigations takes place directly after the first three PW:AA games. But you can still play it out of order.
Oh, to be clear, I've played the first three games in the mainline series - everything before Apollo Justice. I'd just heard that Apollo Justice and onwards weren't as good, so I didn't buy that collection yet. I was curious if their reputation was deserved, or if they're better than people say and worth playing!
I absolutely loved the first three games, for what it's worth.
Ah gotcha, I misunderstood. I think they're worth playing still!
Idk, I don't share people's complaints about the AJAA titles and even SoJ. I think Dual Destinies is great, for example. It has a twist that I did not see coming. I guess if anything, I wish Athena Cykes had more cases, but that's it. SoJ took me a bit to get into and I even put it down for a few years before getting into it again. But once the main story started coming together, I enjoyed it a lot. And AJAA has a lot of commentary on the legal system. I know none of it is very deep, but I did find it interesting to think about. I could see AJAA being the weakest of all of them, but I don't think that makes it a bad game.
If anything, if you're this deep in, might as well. The only game AA game that I could recommend or not recommend is the Professor Layton one. The AA side of is decent, but if you're not into puzzles and brain teasers, the PL side is kinda meh. I have played a couple of the Layton games, but I definitely cheated my way through some of the minigames in PLvAA because I just wanted to get to the AA side of things.
I put down Horizon Forbidden West and went for something easier for a bit (I do this from time to time when I play big game). I picked Midnight Paradise (NSFW) as my side game.
If I had to describe Midnight Paradise in one sentence, I could probably shorten it even more to just two words - incest simulator. Please, don't judge by this point, keep reading.
Before making any conclusions, let's have a look at it first. It has very positive reviews on Steam (including mine), it looks quite good on screens (which NSFW doesn't, hey?) and it was in sale, so I wanted to try it.
Story - This game actually has decent story. If it was in other type of game (normal non-adult game) it could probably stand by itself. I won't spoil anything story-wise though, you have to believe me.
Visuals - This is what caught me by surprise. You can see a lot in screenshots already, but you have to see some of the scenes yourself in the game to know how good it looks. I especially love complexion where you can even guess (correctly) the age of woman in question by looking at her arms or thighs. They did a great job! Downsides of visuals are definitely faces for me - they have something weird about them, at least on some characters. Sequences are not that great either, stills are much better. The women are looking good, almost too good - quite a few with really big boobs, small waists and nice butts. Even if there is not that much variety on body type, there actually is on how intimate parts look (including pubic hair) - each woman has her own... .... ...look down there. On the other hand there is only the protagonist for female players, sadly. He is quite handsome, young and had big dong, though. He is also into sex. A LOT.
Text - You will read a few books if you read everything the game offers you. This is also why I already have 40 hours in and I'm not done with the game (well,this and doing side quests...). There is so much text in this game! I don't play adult visual novels (or any visual novels, really) games so this may be just normal, but I still can't believe how much I have already read in this game.
Progression - If you want to rub one out, this game isn't the right one. You have to work for the scenes to unlock. You have to do quite a lot if you are going for home run. And quite a lot more if you want to go for home run with all the characters (hence my 40+ hours playtime).
Replayability - This game forces you to choose here and there and this has some consequences. This means if you want to experience the game fully, you simply have to replay it. I will replay it, but sometime in the future, not right after I finish it.
There is one drawback that kills the mood a bit - you can progress with a woman in her "storyline" to the point of having sex but in the mundane everyday tasks, she may not even let you see her naked (or do other things). There are certainly a few continuation bugs like this.
Incest simulator - This game let's you change the relations between you and main characters. It defaults to landlord, landlady and roommates. This is clearly bullshit. After playing for less than one hour, you will realize it was meant from the beginning to be dad, mom, sisters and brother (and aunt). Dialogues and setting highly suggest that scenario. It is up to you if you want to go with default or set it so that you are all one family (or even to some other setting). I think devs wanted to make it a family from the start but before pushing the game to stores, they may have changed it (or had to change?) so it isn't that weird or even illegal.
If you told me in the past that I will write a review this long and possibly this detailed about adult game, I'd think you are making fun of me...
I don't know if it was intentional or not, but this comment made the review for me.
That wasn't intentional, I swear! But it can definitely be read in THAT way :-D
My wife and I finished It Takes Two last night. As a coop game? Great fun! I see why it was recommended. But the plot is weird and while I agree with the message that couples should communicate openly with each other, I felt really off about A) breaking your kids favorite toy so you can make them cry and B) forcing someone to perform an activity they adamantly say, multiple times and very emphatically "No, I am not doing that activity" and went end up forcing them to do that anyways. If I did that to my wife, I'd be in the doghouse
Great gameplay though, it was fun picking out the inspirations of the devs for each level and mechanic. My favorite was that they did Sonic Adventure better, especially in the racing climax of the snow globe level. Did the open world Sonic game have that feel? If so, I may give it a try.
The characters aren't great in It Takes Two. Infact one would argue they are terrible role models as parents and they fail to adhear to the message of the story at all.
But we don't play It Takes Two for the story or the plot or the characters, we play because it's charming, funny and there's lots of good coop fun.
I didn't have the same experience with Split/Fiction but some of my friends have.
They are terrible people and you're right, the plot to purposefully make your daughter cry for reasons is bad parenting.
You could argue that May didn't fully realise they were actual dolls in a very real world but you'd be defending a shoddily written character just to make them slightly less bad people.
No need to do that in a game known for its mediocre writing. Split/Fiction and even A Way Out also feature some questionable writing so the gameplay is what carries them all.
I think the idea of the story was to build them up as terrible people to make the eventual redemption arc hit harder, but they did such a good job making the characters awful that they didn't have enough game left to make their transformation believable. So at some point they suddenly start acting completely differently and you're left wondering whether you missed a full act of the story.
The end is an unearned whiplash. Extra odd is how the cinematics are bringing them together a little, but their banter is still downright hostile and then it abruptly "culminates" into reconciliation.
I've just chalked it up to their inability to write strong stories. It could be worse than it is and it facilitates the game so I'm not too up in arms about it.
I just started Split Fiction today with my wife and she’s absolutely loving it. She’s specifically requested playing more games like this, so we’ll have to check out It Takes Two next!
I finished The Outer Worlds a couple days ago, including the DLCs. It was enjoyable for the most part, but in my opinion, it was lacking in depth. I got it for free on Epic so I'm not complaining too much.
I'm technically not playing this yet, but I'm going to check out the demo for Insider Trading later today. A stocks themed deckbuilder seems like something I'd really enjoy. I discovered this from being in the Dungeon Clawler Discord server. They seem to partnering with other indie devs to cross-promote similar games, and I'm all for it.
A new season of Rocket League starts tomorrow. I sure hope they bring Snow Day back. It's my favorite mode, and it's presently out of rotation, so I've been slumming it in Rumble for the three months.
So if you miss dealing with the most toxic fanbase in modern gaming, tomorrow's the day to get back into Rocket League.
I'm still deep into Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and loving it. I'm in Act III now, doing side stuff before I go on to fight the big bad at the end. The side stuff itself is interesting and worth doing even if you don't need a useful way to level up before the big fight.
They recently patched the game to loosen parry timings and damage and stuff for the 'story' difficulty level, which has really enhanced my enjoyment of it, as I am a low-skill scrub and was having a hard time getting parries right.
I also made a conversation choice at camp that pretty much killed any further relationship progression with one of the characters, which I wasn't aware was a thing in this game until it happened. Oops.
Very excited to try this one!! Really hope it makes it to Switch 2 or becomes more playable on Steam Deck. It seems so up my alley.
How is the character customization? Are there interesting variety of builds for the characters?
Character customization is very minimal, since the game is character driven you have some skins at most, but build variety is quite substantial. Variety comes in the form of "weapon + skill tree + 3 active equippables called Pictos + passive equippables called Lumina" and each of those can change playstyle rather significantly. Each character has an entirely different playstyle with their own ruleset and skill tree so you can fairly easily create a team that fits your style.
Weapons have an element but often also unlock certain modifications when upgraded. Think things like:
Then you have equippables called Pictos. Each picto gives you two stats and a modifier ranging from 'Always Attack First' to 'Gain Action Points On Successful Dodge' or even a '25% increased break damage on burning enemies' (synergizing nice with the weapon above), to more crazy stuff like 'Cant be healed for 3 turns but deal 50% extra damage' and 'Max Health is reduced to 1'.
The main benefits of these is that they can be near infinitely stacked as passive Lumina, but the stat boosts granted by Pictos apply only once. So each of those abilities listed above can apply to a single character. To illustrate, you can have 10 or more of those game altering passive abilities enabled or switched out at any point in time.
It sounds more complicated than it is, really, but each of these allow for a pretty significant change in playstyle.
Long story short: yes, lots of build variety. Go play. It's really good.
Oh, to be clear, by 'character customization' that's exactly what I meant: changing abilities, skills, etc.
I'm a huge JRPG fan, but there's so many where you have all these equippable abilities (materia, quartz, what have you) but 90% of them are just "number go up". It's much more satisfying when you can put together a character with synergies, combos, etc. and not only feel clever, but have a 'game plan' in mind, like how in Paper Mario you can have "Danger Mario" or "Jumpman" builds, for example.
What you've described sounds PERFECT for that! That's 100% like what I've been dreaming of from an RPG, honestly! The more I hear about this game, the more I'm convinced I must have been abducted to some French laboratory and experimented on, it seems so tailor-made for me, lol
Thank you very much for the in-depth reply! I appreciate it so much!
It can get wild!
You can stack the following:
Die at round start.
Give 4 action points to team when you die.
Fill up enemy stance break bar when you die.
On death, deal damage to all enemies.
Revive instantly.
Give 3 action points to team when you revive.
Immediately take a turn after reviving.
Gain the Powerful buff when reviving.
Under 30% health get buffs XYZ.
Always play twice in a row.
At battle start you and your team* get fully buffed and you can immediately play twice. It's great!
Orrr you can take Pictos and Lumina that massively increase your effectiveness when fighting alone and just dismiss your team.
Or go full heal bot.
It's nice.
*Edit a word
Ratshaker is a fun game that no one seems to acknowledge is about masturbation. Not to spoil anything, but it's not much of a spoiler when metaphor is present in the title, the first screen you see, and is the main game mechanic all the way through the game (honest). It mixes the taboo and the ridiculous to create a heady concoction that you'll be nursing the next day as you try to figure out what it all means... besides all the jerking off.
Strikey Sisters is a game I received from generous benefactor @CannibalisticApple during the Christmas giveaway. It falls under the "honest grind" category: a what-you-see-is-what-you-get, bare-boned game that gets a lot of mileage out of its elevator pitch gameplay of what if a brawler had a baby with a wall breaker that can't escape its red-headed pedigree of bad voice acting.
Expectations were high for Wall World, a game I recently bought in a cheap bundle that I remember as having been praised in online circles. It's a fun roguelike that balances the chillness of ore mining with the oppressiveness of an imminent boss countdown. Dying to get better never did anyone any favors in medicine, but this drawn-out roguelike tactics doesn't wear on you as much as others of its ilk (hello, Dreamscaper), showing that, yes, a jumble of ideas sometimes do stick when you throw them at a vertical surface.
The priest protagonist in Forgive Me Father likes to say "no", but his cool Abyssal Shotgun says "yes, yes, ka-chunk, ka-chunk". A tonally dissonant game that makes the astonishing decision to cast a reluctant milquetoast as the unstoppable force in a precision boomer shooter. It's hard to hear the lamentation of the dead over the continual moaning of this game's protagonist.
Mario Kart World - Mario Kart has always been a 'party game' racer. There are so many concepts that I really like in the game and it's... I'm torn.
The open world is inconsequential but the interconnectedness of the tracks feels great. I love the races taking place between the tracks, feels like an arcade rally game's take on transit between stages.
The game feels frantic but, by the same token, arbitrary. Tonight alone I fired off three red shells that just decided to ignore non-ghost racers in front of me and I constantly see the AI drivers take nearly impossible lines perfectly and pass me when I'm at full boost. 150cc, sure, but the first place racer never gets triple mushrooms... Unless they're in front of me.
The GPs felt too easy to beat but the Knockout races seem to be completely down to luck - That is, race the whole race and hope you have good item drops in the last leg and don't get lightninged and blue shelled to last place while Daisy on a Flying Carpet Kart does a flip off your corpse.
I enjoyed about 75% of the game I've played but I think I unlocked almost 'everything', at least, everything I know about. I've beaten every cup and endurance race on 150cc with at least a podium, most of them gold, and... I don't have 200cc or anything. No mirror mode. Maybe they've all got to be gold? I dunno. There's definitely a best character or something but even when I copy the AI after they stomp me my kart seems to be stuck in the mud. It's really frustrating.
I don't think the game makes a good 'single player' game, honestly, but it is still fun. I don't really have the motivation to drive in circles eating fast food to unlock all the costumes when there's not even bonus Cow outfits.
Unlocking Mirror Mode is strange, yes. You have to
spoilers
complete every cup and endurance race in 150 CC - finish 10 P-Switch missions - have 10 Peach Medals - open 10 ?-plates - and THEN complete the Special Cup again, apparently.Well, good news, I've done more than that. I've got at least that in the free roam. Maybe I'll give that cup another chance.
Elden Ring Nightreign
I really like the game. I've got all but 2 night lords left to kill.
I've been severely struggling to get any kind of premade going on a regular basis.
The Elden Ring discord is completely unresponsive to my lfg requests despite having sometimes over 100 people in voice channels, and new messages in the lfg channel every minute, by all counts its very populated, but I go in there and say "LFG to kill Equilibrious Beast or Darkdrift Knight" and I get zero replies. Maybe later I check back in and instead of typing an LFG message of my own, I reply to someone else's: no response. Very weird.
Honestly I don't have a lot of faith that the core souls community won't be full of ragers who talk shit to me in vc the second I'm revealed to be flawed anyway, so I'm not too broken up about that not working out.
On the other hand, I've also checked in with smaller communities I'm a part of on discord and either nobody I know in these communities has bought the game, or there's a few people who will say "sure we can play some time" but never want to actually commit to a time or show up when I say "anyone around for some nightreign?" - just that we'll play an undefined sometime.
Obviously if I've killed all but 2 night lords it's going okay using the built in matchmaking to play with randoms, but in the past ~2 days or so I feel it's getting worse, and ironically it's not people being bad at the Souls-combat side of the equation but rather being really poor at the efficiency logic of the roguelike aspects of the game. People who want to march across the entire map for their 7th flask charge on day 2 and get downed in the rain for doing so. I even had a guy who wanted to do a cross-map day 2 trek for the Libra merchant of all things, like come on. Regularly having people 2 levels behind me because they are not coming to participate in the same objectives as the other two of us and often dying on their own.
I just want a premade so I can communicate with my voice and not just map pings, and where people will play with urgency and strategy, but not social intensity. We try hard, we aim to be efficient, and then give the night lord our best effort while remaining chill and not yelling at each other over failed dodges and shit. I thought I'd be able to find that, but I can't even find any premade at all.
We have a little Discord server that we've put together based on an old Tildes topic of mine! I'll shoot you an invite. There are folks from all over the world in it (only about 30 members so far but it's a good spread). There are folks actively playing Nightreign in both CST/CDT & CET/CEST timezones several times a week. I'll caveat this by saying that the whole point of the Discord server is that it's for folks who have a hard time scheduling things, so it's not terribly consistent, and folks sometimes have to get up and leave mid-match. But if you're struggling to find any LFGs at all, hey, something's better than nothing :) I'll shoot you an invite, feel free to keep or toss.
Space Haven is an early release game, just went from Alpha to Beta, added an actual storyline, and they're hoping to hit 1.0 release "soon".
I picked it up a few days ago. It's still ragged around the edges, but still fun and interesting.
It's basically "Rimworld In Space" ... Build your own spaceship with a half-dozen grumpy pawns, generally not the brightest bulbs on the console ... and then get out there and start exploring the galaxy.
Mainly spaceship architectural planning, resource/employee management, but the new plotline suggests the beginnings of a broader gameworld.
I really love how they did the resource management and ship construction. I find the derelict exploration really annoying though, there is no attack-to-ground command so when an enemy shows up the squad just continues on to their last waypoint while their faces get eaten unless you constantly pause it and give new orders. It's not too bad to deal with at the start with just 4 crewmen but late game with multiple ships and transports it's a nightmare to deal with.
I am seeing multiple reflections of this same issue t/out the game. They keep getting jammed up on "Logistics" because no matter how high priority you set for it, they keep doing other stuff first; and even when they do get to "Logistics", they will move everything else except the giant pile of new stuff that's blocking the airlock, until that's the only thing left to do ... so day after day, I'm stuck for a game hour or 3, manually telling each pawn to pick up each box and put it into each storage unit, over and over again.
Also, when they're not doing the stuff they need to do, and you have to tell them, manually ... there is no way to give them a sequence of tasks. You literally need to follow each pawn around, until they finish the current task, and then manually give them 1 more task to focus on.
Generally, the pawns are even stupider than they are in Rimworld, but on the bright side, they're also less persnickety.
And always, top of my mind ... this is still an early release game. They're still working on it.
At least with logistics issues you can usually overcome it mid to late game with robot haulers since that's all those do, or just having lots of extra crew for hauling. But the fact that the crew will only attack enemies when standing still means exploring or assaulting ships becomes very tedious if you want to keep your crew alive.
I'm a person who plays games long after they have been released, so buckle in for some Nostalgia or skip ahead if you're not interested in them.
Last weekend my daughter finally got the Switch (1) that she had been saving for, and I made a deal with her that I would buy her some games if I could also use it to play Zelda. So in addition to some games for her I went and got Breath of the Wild.
Say what you want about Nintendo, they sure make a Zelda game. The last one I played seriously was Ocarina of Time, so I've been fairly out of touch. But probably 10 or 15 hours in I can see that it's a huge game. I'm enjoying the callbacks to the old games and the interpretation of the "formula", as well as the new mechanics and puzzles.
It's fascinating to me to think that I'm basically getting a "higher resolution" interpretation of the world in each iteration. The way the moblins have been carried forward all the way from the original, where they were barely more than tiny blobs on the screen is amazing, plus the way they've translated the "green is a stronger version of the brown monster" theme through to other monsters like the bobokin. The most mind blowing moment for OoT was when I realized those huge things on the plains were Peahats.
One thing that's interesting: a few years ago I played Horizon Zero Dawn. I mainly
chose it because it showed up on a lot of lists of "games that are like Zelda". So I expected it to be similar, but until now, I wasn't prepared for how similar it is. Sure the story line is different but the ways that the hunting mechanics overlap or the fighting mechanics or the way that you climb a tower order to get a map all feel directly pulled from lesld the character of some of the completion side quest stuff is pretty similar. I don't think that lessons my enjoyment or liking of HZD, but it does put everything in a completely different light. I still have Forbidden West sitting out there in my future somewhere, and I don't doubt I will enjoy it.
Been traveling a bunch for work, and so playing SteamDeck mostly. I mentioned a few weeks ago about starting the Suikoden 1 & 2 Remaster.
Suikoden 1 is just a really well out together JRPG. It's short (~20hrs) and the story is good, if a little fast paced.
Suikoden 2 is over twice as long, but also a really good story. I'm using a guide to collect all 108 Stars of Destiny, because I didn't do that as a kid. Maybe that adds a bit of play time.
Overall, I almost completed Suikoden 2, and I can't wait. It's a great game. Runs immaculately on the SteamDeck, and I would recommend it highly if you want to scratch that classic JRPG itch.
I got Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon, caving after watching a streamer play it off and on and fortunately not having any story beats spoiled. I saw it compared to Elder Scrolls favorably, and I'm always looking for something that plays like them. Avowed worked, and I need to finish it, but this game is very similar. Aesthetically it's got this weird HR Giger meets Dark Souls vibe with Arthurian legend as the premise and the aesthetic works really well. It's hard in a way that feels fair but isn't Dark Souls-difficult on the middle/default setting. I'm sensitive to janky difficulty curves, but I feel like I'm really paying for my mistakes, but not too much, like I can turn an encounter unless I just do too badly. I can't grok parrying yet, even with the +.1s perk for it, so I"m going to pump that and see how it goes, but it's a good story, killer cutscenes, and a striking world.
I almost ragequit it last night but cleared the dungeon and am quite happy with it.
The last two weeks or so, I finally buckled down, started and completed Resident Evil 7. I'm not a Resident Evil fan or anything, but I do like the games and have played and completed a handful of them.
I'd been wanting to play this one because I'm a sucker for first person games and have been since I first played Doom as a kid. I did enjoy this one, but I feel the first 2/3rds is pretty good and the last 1/3rd is a bit of a slog. Exploring the house in the early game is a good time, but after a point you start encountering these enemies you originally find the the basement, all over the game. They just aren't very fun or interesting to fight and the last 1/3rd of the game really dispenses with the exploration and instead just starts throwing these tedious enemies at you. There's also the fact that one of the villains basically completely disappears from the game with no explanation and the story is kind of trite nonsense.
That said, I do appreciate the fact that the bosses were easy. Had they been a slog, I probably wouldn't have continued with the game and I also appreciate that it was only 9 hours long, which is perfect. I did enjoy myself, in spite of the criticism I've raised here; the fact that I completed the game is a mark in its favor, as I'll generally abandon something if I get bored or annoyed with it.
After that I took a few days to figure out what I wanted to play next, deciding I was finally ready for Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. I adored the first game and was super stoked to give the new one a go, but by the time I finally bought it a month or two ago, I was feeling burned out by dialogue heavy games, so I downloaded it and waited until I was ready.
So far, I've only been able to play about 5 hours, but I'm loving it so far. The combat system seems much improved and the Codex is fascinating; usually in games I completely ignore codex stuff, given it's usually just lore I don't care about, but in KCD2, all the Codex entries contain historical context, as well as what Warhorse took liberties with for the sake of their story. So far, I've probably spent an hour or two just reading new codex entries and... It's just great, I love it.
Very slowly working through some of the smaller titles in my steam backlog.
Recently finished playing Jusant, a game about free climbing that tells it's story through environmental interactions as you make your way up.
Mechanically, fairly straight forward, but also enjoyable because it's got it's core mechanics down well. The game recommends that you play it with a controller and I can see why, the core climbing mechanic of gripping surfaces with each hand is mapped to the triggers (L2/R2).
Since finishing that, I've started playing Universe for Sale, a narrative point and click style game. So far I'm enjoying the setting of a colony on Jupiter and the art style that they've gone for. Since I've taken the approach of not looking up anything in these games unless I really have to (work out if I'm being silly about spotting how to progress), I'm not sure how far in I am story wise, but I am looking to see how things progress for Lila and Master.
I’ve been very busy and stressed lately (I’m buying a house!!!) so I haven’t really picked up anything new. I think I mentioned in a prior week that I did get a switch 2, but I’m kind of just waiting for more games I’m interested in to come out. In non switch 2 gaming, I’m still rolling on Star Wars Outlaws and playing a few hours per week. I’m still enjoying it, I just haven’t had time to sit down for 4 hour sessions lately, so it’s going a bit slowly.
I’ve also been grinding Black Ops 6 again. Say what you will about CoD, but I enjoy that I can turn my brain off and be good at a game that’s familiar to me and I don’t have to cram more shit into my brain when life has been busy for me. I just hit prestige 10 and am going to try to get to prestige master. It’s the furthest I’ve ever progressed in a CoD game and the most I’ve played one since MW2 2009.
I’ve been more involved with iRacing again and it’s reminding me that racing is my true love. I’ve never fully quit, but for the last year or so I basically just did one league race a week and then an endurance event with my team once a month or so. In the last month I’ve been doing more official races and have been doing more leagues. One league I’m in just had our final race last night. I had a stellar outing, qualifying 8th and finishing 4th, with two of those positions being gained on the last lap, one of which was me beating someone to the finish line by about 6 inches. It was enough to move me up from 5th to 3rd in the championship standings!!
I’ve become almost entirely disinterested in Destiny 2 and the upcoming expansion is the least excited I’ve ever been for new content; I’ve been more excited for a new season before. I played for 1500 hours over the last 3 years and had a bunch of fun with friends and got very deep into raiding and dungeons. It was 100% worth my time and I accomplished a lot, but it’s just kind of time for me to move on. Inb4 my post here in a month is talking about the expansion, ha.
I think the next games I’m looking forward to are Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 and Donkey Kong Bananza. Ghost of Yotei is so close, yet so far.
Summer break started for me last week - the perks of being a teacher! - so I've been able to start and finish a few different games.
First of all, I beat Ys IX: Monstrum Nox. I'd really enjoyed my time with Ys 8: Lacrimosa of Dana, finding it to be a really fun action-RPG, and the 'castaways on an island' story felt pretty original and lent itself to some nice gameplay. It was cool to have to craft all of your items with no currency, to slowly build up your village by gathering survivors, and the 'two-fisted tales' vibes of a lost island full of dinosaurs and ancient ruins was way up my alley.
I was hoping that Monstrum Nox would also be a great fit for me, because I love 'spooky Halloweencore', and it seemed like that was the vibe of the game at first. The story of Ys is that you're a traveling adventurer, Adol Christin, who always ends up in misadventures. In Ys IX, you get trapped in a prison-town, Balduq, and cursed by a mysterious woman to be forced to fight these strange phantoms, but also get cool monster-powers out of the deal. The main character's monster-form is themed after vampires, and looks awesome!
I was bummed that the other party-members weren't as "monster themed". One of them is a cat-girl; another is a bull-girl; then there's a living porcelain doll (good!); a... priest with horns? And... edgy-blue-guy. I was really hoping they'd all be patterned off of classic monsters (werewolf, mummy, etc...) or at least supernatural folklore, but oh well.
The gameplay was still good though! The new 'Monstrum Gifts' were really fun, with most of them being cool movement options that make it interesting to navigate the city. In Ys 8, it was a little like Zelda or Metroid, with you getting new abilities that let you explore more of the island. But each ability was a piece of equipment, and you have limited equipment slots, so that was frustrating... In Ys 9, these abilities are separated from equipment slots, which was a huge QoL upgrade. Unfortunately, it lost a lot of the Zelda-like feel, because even though Ys 8 was pretty linear, you still often got to revisit parts of the island you'd seen before but could now progress further through... while Ys 9 didn't often have you 'unlock' areas like that, so it lost a bit of the fun of a Metroidvania feel.
The game is a very straightforward action-RPG. I can sense it has a high skill ceiling, rewarding careful play and analysis of moves, timing windows, etc... but I'm more 'RPG' than 'action' fan, so the Ys games are a little lacking in the parts I like (customizing abilities, etc...) Still, they're what I'd call 'mindless fun', just smacking enemies with cool moves and experiencing interesting and fun stories.
After Ys 9, I moved onto a few different games. I started Pseudoregalia as a little palette cleanser between games, mostly because the Monstrum Gifts in Ys IX had left me itching for a game with 'schmovement'. And wow, this game is definitely as great as people had been saying! What an experience! It's so moody and atmospheric, feeling exactly how child-me had imagined the empty castle in Mario 64 to be. The exploration in the game is extremely satisfying, always rewarding you for investigating nooks and crannies, and challenging yourself with the platforming. On that note, the platforming is incredible. Every single ability you unlock opens up a huge range of movement options, and there's lots of ways to sequence break. I have no idea what the intended 'sequence' even is, because every single environmental obstacle has so many different ways to overcome it. You can chain wall-kicks on corners to leap over walls that theoretically require the high-jump. You can use the long-jump and a backflip to cleverly circumvent the need for the long-jump. Etc... There's only a few abilities that feel 'mandatory' with no way to get around them, such as the charged-attack to break through certain blocks, but those 'locks' are pretty few and far between. Overall, it's a really wonderful game that I can't recommend enough to fans of 3D platforming and Metroidvanias.
I started playing Split Fiction with my wife last night - as I mentioned in another reply elsewhere - and we're both having a blast. I picked it up when I got my Switch 2 on a whim, and I'm very happy I did! She's having a lovely time playing together with me, and outright demanded we get more games like this that we can play together, which made me very happy. 😊 It's charming and cute so far, and it's really satisfying how each character gets their own unique abilities for certain segments, so we can delight in watching the other player at the same time.
Lastly, I also got the remaster of Raidou: The Mystery of the Soulless Army last night. I've only played for about an hour, but already it's leaving a very good impression! I never played the original, but I did read an LP of it a decade or two ago, so I can already tell they've improved the game immensely just from the tutorial. It feels like a very slick action-RPG at this point, and the setting - 1931 Japan - is really cool to explore. It seems like it also has a bit of a 'pulp two-fisted tales' vibe to it, which I love! Can't wait to experience more from it.
(DLC) Sea of Stars: Throes of the Watchmaker
Finally took some time to complete the DLC which came out a month back. For better or worse, it is definitely more Sea of Stars so that's gonna depend on how you feel about the base game (I much preferred The Messenger's wit and thought SoS was trying to take itself more seriously while lacking the depth to make it work). Since the game came out about 2 years ago and most people would be rusty, there's some plot excuses to make sure the party starts on a fresh slate: the DLC area has an evil presence that generates evil clones so the rest of the party is benched with the Artificer tagging in instead, while Valere and Zale are forced to learn new classes because they have to be entertaining to deal any damage there. 4.5 new dungeons of content (the .5 being the tutorial dungeon) which took me almost 8 hours according to the save file time difference. I did notice many of the new skills deal a lot of multi-hits and/or are theoretically infinite as long as you get the timings right, which fit me just fine since I used the moon boomerang and needle jumps a lot in the base game.
I guess a few things did irk me:
First Boss spoilers
The First Boss ends with a reference to the infamous FF6 train suplex meme, except it's performed by one of the pirate NPCs tagging along. So there's that obvious feeling of getting killstolen and the fact that they're not doing anything else to help in the DLC, so the whole moment just feels a lot emptier.I did like the final boss though
It was a bit easy, but the mechanics replicated the Wheels minigame which generate an instinctive knowledge of how to counteract by attacking the wheel to stop the boss from getting 3+ symbols.
Clone Drone in the Danger Zone
It's a melee-focused game like Chivalry except less complex, but with voxel robot limb damage. There's the basic sword which can deflect horizontal sword strikes and arrows, the bow & arrow which has very low projectile speed but will of course one-shot just you specifically, the hammer which can't block or be blocked by the sword, and the spear & shield which stabs instead of slashes. Each new (single-player) game starts you from scratch and every finished round gives an upgrade point to invest in the skill tree to focus on one of the weapons or perks. That's about it honestly? What you see is what you get and I feel done with it after 6 hours. Not sure how this has 30k steam reviews besides the multiplayer.