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

Death Stranding: Director Cut (PS5): I'm tempted by the new Death Stranding but never got far into the first game. So I revisited the this version available on Playstation Plus. There's a lot I like about this game. Environments and soundtrack are exceptional. I do want to wander around in the world and stare at the beautiful vistas. The main conceit of the game, making deliveries and building out infrastructure are a good enough reason to be in the world. As a sci-fi fan I'm interested in understanding the apocalypse that effected this world and brought the afterlife closer to the realm of the living. The BBs and "stillmothers" really taps into a version of mysticism melded with science that I really enjoy and reminds me a bit of The Locked Tomb trilogy by Tamsyn Muir.

What I can't get over is the crying BB. The stealth is primarily around these ghosts called BTs. A device on your back is hooked up to the BB on your chest and alerts you to the presence of BTs. When you are too close to a BT the BB starts crying. The thing is I don't really like stealth in games. When I'm doing poorly and the BB is crying I just can't take it for long. I might actually play and enjoy this game if I could avoid that part entirely. Maybe I can route myself around these guys better, I might give it another try but at this point I'm just not very interested in engaging with this game in the way that it wants me to.

I've started playing Tactical Breach Wizards. I wanted to buy it sooner, but the style of humour in the trailer is extremely grating to me so I waited for a good sale. Thankfully the dialogue in-game isn't as bad.

Gameplay-wise it's more like Into the Breach than I expected, with a bit of Chimera Squad in there too. It's a cute puzzle game.

Finally started Tears of the Kingdom. It's been about a year and a half since I finished BotW and I found myself for the first time since, wanting to jump back in. I was pretty burned out after BotW so it was nice to come back.

I'm a fair chunk through the game so far (30ish shrines, 100 koroks, half the towers done)

It's... difficult to say my feelings.

On the one hand, Ive enjoyed the loop of, seeing a shrine, making my way there to unlock the fast travel point, seeing a tower, making my way there to unlock the map and see whats around.

On the other, I have so many issues. The difficulty spike is absolutely ridiculous. Why am I getting one shot at 6 hearts from a blue bokoblin? Fucking stupid. I wanted to play Zelda not Dark Souls, but several points have been banging my head against a wall to do something that should be easy.

The closest tower after the first one is in a monster camp which is impossible to get into until so much later. It's so dumb. I had to come back twice to get to the tower. Incredibly frustrating. Also had a couple shrines where they take all your stuff away that were stupidly hard as well. I really don't appreciate that.

Exploration wise, I feel it's worse than BotW. When I launch from a tower I feel like I should be seeing 5 or 6 shrines yet Ill see maybe one. It doesn't feel as fun or rewarding.

Ultrahand. Oh boy. This is gonna be a hot take I think. I don't like it. It's very cool, and it's awesome seeing what some people have been able to do with it, it's a fantastic technical achievement. But it feels like they rely on it so goddamn much. I'm sick of it. I'm never much of a builder in games, so that's probably part of it, but whenever I have to cobble something together to help that guy keep a sign upright or cross a chasm in a shrine or something I'm so disinterested. I don't have much fun with it. The comparison a lot of people make is that it's like Legos. Except when I played with Legos I was always more interested in the figures and playing out a story, I never really had fun trying to build something random out of Legos. So this is mostly a me thing but...I just don't like it for gameplay.

Everything is so much slower. The tutorial was like 3-4 hours to do the Sky Island. Ugh. That was waaaay too much for a tutorial. I think BotW was an hour, maaaaybe 2 if you took your time?

All in all I think BotW is better in nearly every way. Granted there's still so much I haven't done yet. Haven't tackled any of the 4 dungeons, though I have the Rito one ready to go. But I'm worried with the difficulty spike, 8 hearts isn't going to cut it. So I'm going to explore more and do more shrines and more hearts before I go back. So maybe I'll like it more once I'm more kitted out, but we'll see.

Selaco (early access)

3D shooter made with modified GZDoom engine, with physics objects and some other modern FPS features.

• Was pleasantly surprised to have Steam Deck specific graphics presets
• When I first got the game, firing at an enemy would cause massive lag. Thankfully the devs fixed it within about a couple days. Weirdly it has already been in early access for a year, not sure how long the bug was around for, but it seemed to only affect a subset of Steam Deck users (and the devs couldn't recreate the issue on their test devices initially)
• I weirdly like the low poly (if that's the right term here?) aesthetic. Also the "dark mode" vibes of the environments with a lot of dark greys and blues with colorful lights
• Enemy encounters are spaced out quite a bit, it feels like there is a lot of exploration/secret hunting to do, compared to shooting bad guys
• The enemies are very aggressive and like to flank, sometimes I'm not sure if they spawned behind me or walked around me cause I don't know the layout of anything well yet
• Decent amount of enemy variety
• Against the first area boss I died several times, not really knowing how to approach the fight, until he got stuck on a corner and I easily/cheesily emptied clips into him
• The enemies and corpses are 2d when everything else is 3D. It's jarring and I don't like it. The devs said that's not going to change
• Guns are upgrade-able, which is cool and was one of the things that drew me to the game, but parts needed to do so seem to be extremely sparse. I feel "forced" to save up for more impactful ones. It's a bit of a buzzkill to get introduced to the mechanic and then not want to use it.
• Similar thing with money...seems like you can buy consumables for a low price, or upgrades for completely unobtainable prices
• There are some gun mods that you can find on the map. Some I felt I didn't want. The dual-wield SMG one I was happy to take!
• Ammo seems somewhat limited, while I have been forced to switch to different weapons, I thankfully haven't run completely out yet. It does add more incentive to secret hunting, which I have mixed feelings about.
• I've played about 7 hours and not done yet. I don't know how much more there is, but the map seems very big already.

Just got a Steam Deck and so figured now was as good a time as ever to replay Celeste. And man what an amazing little game. I'm usually not too big on platformers, but there's something so wholesome about Celeste and its themes and story and characters that just stay with you. I played it around 2019 or 2020 or so (when it was given out for free on the Epic Store) and loved it. It was one of those experiences for me that I played once, loved it, and yet didn't feel the need to replay it for years and years. Until this past weekend since I was setting up the Heroic launcher on the Steam Deck. I'm sure I'll go another 5+ years without playing it but still feel that it's a 5/5 game.

And btw, the Heroic Launcher worked perfect and was super simple to set up and launch. I have about a billion other games on Epic and GOG and Amazon Games that I've collected for free religiously over the last six years, and I can't wait to properly try them out now. I've played through a few of them before, typically the ones that caught my eye the most, or that I was already interested in trying out (like Backpack Hero which will be free later this week and has been on my wishlist forever). But there's so many others that I just never had the time for, or had never heard of before, and I think the Steam Deck is the perfect way to try them all out.

My son and I beat Portal together the other night. "Together" has mostly meant him trying to solve a test chamber, getting stuck, then me finishing it, but I'm still giving him the credit. He's 6, so the fact that he can wrap his mind around some of these puzzles to begin with is incredible to me.

We also started playing Portal 2 single player in the same way and I think we're about halfway through it. I got kind of stuck, so we pivoted to a Portal 2 co-op game. And I think Portal 2 co-op has got to be one of the best co-op games ever made. It allows my son to play the game with is own controller, but I can easily guide him using the pinpoint feature to tell him where portals need to go. It basically solves the problem of him wanting to play, but not being able to solve puzzles without my help. And to my pride/surprise he helped ME solve a puzzle in the first couple of test chambers.

Started up Tactical Breach Wizards (@IudexMiku, we're twins out here!). I bought it at least a couple months ago, but just finally decided to jump in. I love it. It's not the hardest game by any means. And the rounds are short. Like 10-15min would be a long round. But I enjoy being able to choose how I want to complete a level. Sometimes I want to go for the "stretch goals" to get extra points (which are only used to get costumes for the characters), so I'll play it like a puzzle. Can I finish this round in 1 turn? Can I incapacitate all the baddies within 2 turns?

Other times, I'm just like "So anyways, I started blasting..." and it takes me 10 turns, as I'm not barely being tactical. I think I'm like halfway through the campaign, but I've also spent some time doing the extra side maps and missions.

The ability to rewind my actions, after seeing the results (e.g. I accidentally defenestrated one of my own), before committing to the next turn is super helpful and time saving. Reminds me of the quicksave/quickload feature in like Desperados 3. Basically, I'm not having to restart the whole round because I messed up.

Really enjoying the humor as well and just enjoying it overall. Glad a friend recommended it to me since he knows I like turn-based games.

Also started up Diplomacy is Not an Option last night. It's an RTS that I picked up during the Summer Sale. I've only played the tutorial so far, but it was enjoyable enough. Definitely hitting some of that C&C/WC2/SC nostalgia. I'll probably start the campaign tonight.

Lastly, finished Paper Perjury over the weekend. Supposedly a free DLC is coming out later this summer, for Case 6. So I'll keep that on the backburner for now.

I picked up Backpack Battles on Steam after playing a similar mobile game called Backpack Brawl. I can't tell which of the two games I like better, and I dunno who ripped off the other with the idea.

Both are PvP auto-battler games that rely on clever inventory management and crafting to win, but there are serious differences in execution.

The PC game (Backpack Battles) has a typical buy-to-play model where you get everything for £12.79. Six character classes all being cutesy anime girls, thirteen different combinations of loadouts (including the "random" option.) Class balance is better in this version and the developers are constantly updating the game, but some aspects of the presentation sucks.

But the mobile game (Backpack Brawl) is a free-to-play title with better presentation that relies on ads and in-app purchases. If you want to earn extra lives ad-free and more in-game currency, prepare to pay a £7.99/month subscription which honestly ain't worth it.

One example of where the mobile game is better is in how it shows the player crafting/upgrade paths for each item in the tooltip - something Backpack Battles sorely lacks.

Still playing Dune: Awakening, but now that the game's past its honeymoon phase and I've spent a good amount of time with the endgame, I figure an update review is in order. The endgame is, as is more or less the standard for any live service game shortly after launch, rather lacking in meaningful content and rewards. It hasn't even been a full month since the game officially launched so this is not really a problem yet, and just the content in Hagga Basin alone will easily give you 50+ hours of gameplay, especially if you're taking your time or really into creative base building (there have been some wonderfully artistic builds), so even with the endgame deep desert (DD for short) being somewhat lacking right now the game is still quite good. That isn't to say that Funcom is neglecting the endgame experience though, they've actually been quite receptive to player feedback and have already implemented some experimental changes to the DD and other balance tweaks which have been met with mixed reception but generally considered to be in a positive direction.

As for me personally, I think I'll drastically wind down the amount of time I'll spend on this game (I have devastated my sleep schedule) as I've reached most of my fairly modest personal goals for the time being: a modestly-sized but well organized and furnished abode, t5 assault and scout thopters, a full set of t5 unique armor, weapons, and tools, and enough fuel in my generators to coast for about 3 weeks. I'll hop on to help my guild out with the Landsraad (a sort of weekly 5x5 missions board where whichever faction clears the majority of missions or gets 5 in a row wins and gets a bonus for the next week) or when they're doing group activities in the DD, but aside from that and keeping my base maintained I'll be diverting time to other things (like sleeping properly) so I don't burn myself out.

After getting it for free last week, I replayed Steamworld Dig, a resource-gathering mining-themed Metroidvania that punches way above its weight. It delivers tight platforming, a cool aesthetic, and features a tiny storage size of just 193 MB. More than that, it should be remembered as being a platformer in which you design all the platforms yourself (not completely, but the point still stands), meaning that you quickly remember to build yourself a way back. Another cool tidbit: this game features a throwaway post-apocalyptic backstory in which humankind nuked itself to extinction that is all but ignored by the main plot. A fun playthrough that inspires you throughout.

I'm still chipping away at Clair Obscur with the few hours I have each week. What a refreshing take on an RPG!

I've been playwatching Watch Dogs and the character motivations are flawed but the story is still reasonably enjoyable. The stealth game mechanic (hacking cameras and/or telling people to move around) feels pretty unique--especially in the cases that you can complete a goal by only partially entering a building (going from camera to camera instead of walking around).

Last week I played a few games of the card game SCOUT. You're a ringmaster and you're poaching acts from other circuses... except all the talent are reduced to numbers... it's a pretty simple game but I feel like it is funner than something like UNO even though you use similar strategies to win.

I have finished AI: The Somnium Files 2.

I'm a bit divided on how it turned out overall:

• The storyline set up in the first half of the game was promising, but in the second half, the actual answers to the mysteries and the antagonist's plot end up playing out in a rather silly Saturday morning cartoon way. It kind of feels like the potential of the material was squandered by not taking it in a more mature direction.

• However, the big plot twist and the way the game very gradually introduces increasingly large contradictions towards the end (which at first made me question if I had misread the story, and then if the game was just flat out gaslighting me) actually feel pretty well done and tie in very well with this instalment's themes about reality being malleable and shaped by how we perceive it.

I've read that Uchikoshi Kotaro writes his stories backwards by starting with the ending and big twist and working back towards the start from there, and the weaknesses of that approach kind of show through here in that the underlying ideas around which the story is built are quite interesting, but the connective tissue which gets the player from point A to B to C can often feel like an afterthought or unconvincing.

I'm now playing the Infinity series of visual novels, also written by Uchikoshi.

The first of these, Never 7, is now 25 years old and probably no longer even runs on modern Windows, but conveniently, a remaster of the game (and its sequel, Ever 17) was released just this year on Steam.

I probably won't be writing much about these games as there's only so much you can say about playing a visual novel, but my high level thoughts:

• Despite the game's age and nicheness, I feel like it holds up pretty well. At the same time, as the kind of dork who was playing Japanese visual novels during their golden age (late 90s to early 00s) when this game first came out, my tolerance for this kind of content might just be abnormal :P

• The majority of the game is your standard galge fare which only features sci-fi elements in the most tangential way, but having now gotten to the final route, I find that the usual Uchikoshi plot twist which recontextualises the rest of the story and crunchy sci-fi ideas are absolutely also there.

• I wish they'd built in a route flowchart for the remaster. It's an absolute pain to have to guess what choices are necessary to get to each route, particularly when some of them go against intuition / make sense only once you're in the route itself. This is one part of the 'vintage VN experience' that I definitely don't miss.

After I'm done with this series, I think I'd like to conclude my Uchikoshi / Kodaka retrospective with The Hundred Line, which they wrote together. The concept and positive buzz around the game have my interest, but the 100 endings are honestly kind of intimidating and I'd like to clear everything off my plate before I tackle it.

I think I'm in the final stretch of Blue Prince. Almost 100 hours of active game time, I have very much gotten my money's worth.

It's not quite July but I think this is my GOTY. There's so many layers of puzzle to dig through and so few flaws.

I grabbed Airport CEO over the weekend. It's an airport management sim game and I kind of love it, but I'm also very frustrated by it. The gameplay itself is fun, and it scratches the "I want to build/manage an airport in a video game" itch I had, but the UI/UX is incredibly rough. A few random gripes:

• There doesn't appear to be keybinds for common actions
• There's this "death loop" where you make a mistake when setting up a gate resulting in you needing to disable the gate so you can make changes, but you can't disable the gate until you clear it, which you can't do until you do something else, which you can't do until you do yet another thing. And you need to work quickly to resolve it because a simple mistake means delayed flights, which means pissing the airlines off, which means...something? Not sure what, but the scary red approval numbers scare me.
• The UI uses a nested menus for build objects, but it doesn't remember what you just accessed when switching to/from the bulldoze tool. So if you're building something and need to delete you need to re-find the thing you were just doing. Which should be simple, but...
• I'm finding it hard to remember which menu each little thing is under. Is it a terminal object? a runway object? a transport object? It's not entirely arbitrary, but when you're building a runway and need to build a service road to attach it to the fuel depot, it's weird that you need to switch to the transport menu.
• The in-game errors (X is missing a connection to Y) aren't very clear. For example, "not connected to a security gate" usually means you have a gap in your security zone somewhere, but good luck figuring it out.

All of this should be easily remedied by mod support, which the game has via Steam Workshop, but it's all asset-only mods (planes, logos, saved games, etc.).

I promise I don't hate this game. I'm thoroughly enjoying it, but it's so rough around the edges and the game is 4 years old at this point, so I doubt any major overhauls to the UI are coming at this point :(

Before COVID knocked me down and made me forget even that it was time to write in this thread, I played Ellingby House, a myst-like adventure point and click game. You play as a nameless security contractor who has been hired by an old and prestigious financial company called JR Holder and Sons. Your workplace is Ellingby House, the 10 floor building housing their headquarters. But soon after you park your car in the underground parking garage, you find that the building is in lockdown - you can't leave! The phones don't work, and due to impending structural repairs, no one will come in to work for several weeks!

The game plays similar to Myst III or IV - it's traversed as a graph of preset locations where you can look around in 360 degrees. It has a "realistic" (up to a point) vibe and, just like Myst, includes full motion video footage for the conversations with the main characters, "cleverly" overlaid onto the scene. I thought the design/mood for the building and its various company offices was fairly well done, with some caveats. It makes some sense when you balance the scale of the project with the size of an indie team, but they used a ton of stock and AI-generated assets. The thousand silly paintings hanging all over the walls aren't so bad, but I found the computer-generated voices for all the audio recordings, cutscene narrations, etc. very robotic and immersion breaking. Only the filmed actors are fine.

The story is... goofy? Ellingby House is a gigantic clusterfuck of corporate malpractice. It very soon (enough that I don't count it as a spoiler) becomes obvious that JR Holder and Sons is trying to pivot into... cryptocurrency mining! They treat their employees horribly and the building, which is old and unmaintained, is literally falling apart, to the point where you narrowly escape death on various occasions. Other than a "lockdown" system that violates every fire code past, present and future, the building is bursting with unnecessarily locked doors, broken equipment, fire exits that don't work, the canteen is infested with rats and cockroaches, the toilets are unsanitary, the lifts are broken, and many of the computers are infected by a ransomware virus. Other companies that rent out some of the floors of the building are variously involved in fraud or criminal negligence. It's a little much if you want to take the story seriously, but funny enough if you just roll with it.

Puzzle design and progression are all over the place, unfortunately. The biggest problem is that there is often a very large area to cover when looking for clues without you knowing quite what you're supposed to do. You may be "stuck" without being able to progress because you have access to a hundred nodes and you are looking for something specific and absolutely tiny. For example:

There is no way to highlight clickable things in a location, and it's inconsistent which things will be clickable and when. Some switches are clickable, some are not. Some doors are unlockable, some are not. Some items are one use, some are reusable. Sometimes an item you won't need again is accidentally "dropped" or equivalent so you know you don't need it anymore... but sometimes it isn't. And there's no way to take notes. This is especially galling because this game involves figuring out various people's computer passwords so you can read their e-mail. You will need a separate note-taking solution (pen and paper for me).

Occasionally the game will prevent you from "going back" for a time by blocking a path you have previously followed (mainly through the building falling apart), which can help - good job there. But this mechanic is also used inconsistently. You're often allowed into a "new" area with a new puzzle without having everything you need for it, and the way back simply won't collapse until you have gone back and retrieved the missing items - but you have no way to tell that you're missing said items in the first place! Sometimes puzzles are unsolvable simply because you have to return to an area later, even though everything makes it look like you are progressing linearly through the building. And sometimes you need to remember knowledge you may have casually noticed several hours earlier in the playthrough - which might be days earlier for a player with a normal life!

Anyway, the game doesn't feel particularly unfinished or unpolished so much as it feels like the product of a relatively inexperienced puzzle designer. The experience itself was memorable enough. Once I realized what I was in for, I unrepentantly used a walkthrough for the few most frustrating puzzles. If you play it, you should be able to finish it in a dozen hours.

Previous

Vellum

This week we played the 3rd person hack and slash game Vellum for our podcast on roguelike games.

Overall: I had fun with it. At first I was kind of meh in the art style and gameplay, but it grew on me a lot the more I played it. Vellum is very much a “don’t judge a book by its cover” game, as there’s quite a lot of new twists on the rogue formula here that are very interesting.

We all know the choose-one-from-three perk system that’s common in roguelikes these days but Vellum offers a twist for applying that formulas to the enemies as well after each stage. There’s a great amount of decision making on how you want to buff your opponents relative to yourself that builds over the 5 or 6 stages in a run in a novel way.

Online play is fun and interesting as well. There’s a voting system for applying buffs to your home base that meshes well with a coop environment and a lot other subtle design choices like that which I haven’t seen in other roguelite games.

It’s great fun for a 20-30 minute “filler” session and wound up being one of the top 10 “hidden gem” games we’ve covered so far on the podcast.

Half negative, half positive rant/praise: I've been working my way through the Mass Effect trilogy on Insanity (max) difficulty. Currently on ME3, and I'm trying to do a specific achievement in the game, namely Unusual Scores, the final fight. I like to try to do games without searching for tips on the Internet, but with this one, I cracked. Tried it maybe 20+ times myself, without success. Honestly, I went searching because I seriously had suspicions that there was no actual number of rounds (like, it went on forever), and the achievement was unattainable. However, from what I've read, there really is an end to it, and I've already made it to the last round. Unfortunately, this last round is really hard. I've can complete the rounds ahead of the last one pretty comfortably now (because I've had so much practice failing :P), but that last one is just crazy.

they're super-elite level Collectors. The next wave is super-elite level geth, then Cerberus, Reapers, and finally, a combination of all high-level boss enemies: Banshees, Praetorians, Geth Primes, and Atlases all in a single wave.

I'm taking a break from the game for today, aiming to try with different teammates. Next one I will try is an assault-rifle-focused Garrus that I've read about, plus James, both with Typhoon rifles.

I feel like I have a pretty effective strategy in running on the map to where the enemies aren't, and shooting from mid-range while constantly collecting ammo whenever there's an opportunity. The tank teammates keep the enemies distracted well enough, and I usually have enough medkits to revive them at any time. However, the last round seems especially hard to do the "run to low-pressure areas" strat. Just a few seconds out in the open melts you in like 2 or 3 hits, and most of the enemies have high-damage ranged attacks.

This will be quite an achievement if I get this. I haven't looked it up, but I hope it's a Steam achievement, or something.

I picked up Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping for the steam sale. It's completely silly but still a decently fun game to run around in for an hour. The great voice acting definitely makes it worthwhile for what is essentially a point & click adventure type game. While I had played their previous game Secret Salami it isn't required at all to enjoy this one.

After the renewed interest, I started playing Star Wars Battlefront II now that I was able to get it on steam for € 4.
I'm only 1.5 hours in the campaign, but I'm not sure if I'll finish it ever. Maps and objectives feel very linear, UI glitches, overall bugs (I can't remap the F2 key for some reason??). Furthermore, I've tried multiplayer but the lobby system is crappy, and it also crashed on me couple of times.
In summary: a typical EA-game.