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

Pretty much exclusively Hollow Knight. I restarted my first play through and was shocked by how much easier it was to get through the first couple of zones. No geo lost, so I very quickly was able to buy out everything at the stores (up to that point). Which of course made the rest of my efforts to catch up to my original game much easier. I'm currently stuck at a boss fight in City of Tears. I think this might be my favorite zone so far? I was just getting so tired of these cramped tunnels and somehow reskinning it as a city with cramped hallways is better...

But yeah all in all I'm really enjoying this game a lot. I don't know that I'll ever beat it, or if I'll ever give Silksong a chance, but this is already $15 well spent.

I'm in the hidden Act 3 of Silksong, with my completion progress ~85%. The game is really, really, really good, perhaps my favourite "hard" game I've ever played, but it took like 30 hours to click for me.

I think the thing with all of my favourite hard games is that I kind of play them, oddly enough, to relax. Lies of P, Elden Ring, Remnant, the original Hollow Knight, Returnal, once I got a feel for those games, I could kind of just steamroll them while paying only half attention and listening to an audiobook. Like, sure, bosses took multiple attempts, but I didn't really have to lock in or fully focus. I literally first beat the Radiance from Hollow Knight during an attendance-mandatory history lecture.

Silksong is not like that. I think the best way to put it is that the game is not substantially more difficult than the above games, but it is much more taxing. Because bosses, enemies, and Hornet herself all have really complex movesets, and you die in way fewer hits than the first game, you basically have to be fully locked in the whole time. It can be really tiring to play, and my worst experiences with the game were a couple sessions where I was just playing tired. During the mist section, and against the big Bilewater boss, and in the room where you enter Hunter's March. But when you're able to lock in, fully focus up, and get into that flowstate, this game feels better than anything I've ever played. Since winning requires utilizing all the tools you have available, and since you die so quickly, the game forces a level of mastery and fluidity I have never experienced in another game. Every time I finish a tough platforming challenge, I feel like a speedrunner. Every time I beat a boss, I feel like a challenge-run player. It's honestly incredible. Easily my game of the year so far.

It's worth mentioning that the game's exploration is amazing. For Silksong players, Act I spoilers: I got to the Citadel, and rolled credits the first time, without ever even seeing the Blasted Wastes or the Last Judge. I thought the way I got to the city -- through Bilewater, the Exhaust Organ, and the Mist, was the main intended path, and when I explored the Citadel the whole time I was wondering how to get through that big gate that locked the city shut from the outside world. There are so many alternate routes, paths, and connections in the world, with so much to explore and discover, that it's truly mind-boggling.

Between Silksong sessions, I also played the demo for UNBEATABLE, a narrative rhythm game slated for release in a month. I'm not usually a rhythm game fan -- I bounced hard off of Hi-Fi Rush, for example -- but this was really fun, and, notably, really well-written, using some neat tricks to really make its (unvoiced) dialogue flow naturally. The dialogue feels musical in a way that few games I've played achieve, and I'm actually looking forward to the game, to see more of the story, and to play more of the goofy rhythm-based minigames that were in the demo. Really recommend giving it a try if you haven't.

I finally started Blue Prince with a couple friends! We're 14 hours in (I think 8 or 9 runs?)

Blue Prince is an exploration and investigation roguelite with no combat, dialogue or NPCs. You play as 14 year old Simon (so far as I'm aware), the grandnephew and heir of eccentric, puzzle-loving billionaire Herbert Sinclair. Sinclair passed away and left us his empire... so long as we can locate the 46th room hidden in his 45 room mansion. But in order to do so, we must respect a set of rules: We can't bring items into the mansion, we can't sleep in the mansion, we can't change the position of the furniture. So we're camping in the garden, and every day the mansion "resets" and we can try again from scratch.

And when I say the mansion "resets" I don't just mean the items. The big gimmick of the game is that the layout of the mansion is itself drafted from scratch on each day, out of a random selection of square-shaped rooms (blue prints) that you can place on a grid whenever you reach an unopened door - think Betrayal at House on the Hill. The grid has a fixed size, with certain cells (such as the entrance) having fixed particulars, and each room you encounter comes with its own set of furnishings, clues, benefits, hindrances and exit door directions that you need to leverage in order to make the mansion as big as possible and tease out as much information from it as you can before the end of the day. Some rooms are more common than others, and some have highly specific requirements that must be met before they can be drawn, used, or accessed. Simon has a limited number of "steps" (action points), representing his stamina, that must be expended whenever he goes from one room to another, and can be replenished by eating. When these reach 0 you are required to go to sleep immediately, forcefully ending the day.

My brother told me the game is good for the first 20 hours and then becomes annoying because you have to burn runs trying to randomly get rooms that you already know you need in order to make progress. Since I haven't gotten that far I don't know if that's true or not. So far, most of our runs have been fun and productive, having resulted in large, sprawling houses (there were only two "early day" failures). We have figured out several puzzles involving multiple (sometimes many) rooms, unlocked a bunch of permanent things, upgraded others, and collected a vast quantity of information, mostly in the form of screenshots. I never felt aimless in the game; there are always mysteries and loose ends that I know I want to do something about. Honestly, this seems like a consistent, surprisingly well designed (certainly more than Betrayal!) experience with good pacing (again, so far) and an acessible but challenging difficulty level. I'm enjoying it and looking forward to continuing it.

Previous

I've been playing Overcooked 2 on an Archipelago randomiser; a multiplayer multi-game challenge where everyone's items are scattered across the various games.

It's been a challenge! I started out just about scraping one star ratings, and even now that we're getting to the end of it I'm struggling to manage two stars on most levels. I was wondering if the game had always been that hard - I hadn't played a ton of it before - but then discovered that the archipelago mod gives you blunt knives to start, which is why everything was taking forever. And my sharp knives haven't yet been found, so I think 3 star ratings will stay out of reach for the time being.

It's been a tad frustrating at times, but overall a great excuse to hang out with friends online and play a fun game I hadn't touched in years.

I addressed an item in my backlog and have been playing Dungeons of Hinterberg. I'm very impressed so far, the concept is clever and the gameplay loop is a nice mix of stardew-style community interaction, zelda-style puzzling and various other exploration tasks in the mix. It manages to be both relaxing and engaging in turns. There's a lot of content in it and apparently a NG+ if you really want to grapple further.

Nier Automata - Finally bit the bullet after someone who also enjoys Kojima games and Hideaki Anno films kept talking about it. Gameplay wise it's pretty straight forward and quite enjoyable but PC performance is slightly annoying (as expected for a PC port of a Japanese game) and being locked in lower res cut scenes and 60 FPS is kind of annoying as I don't feel like modding and from what I glanced, physics/timings may be locked to FPS which is the dumbest way to do it.

I remember reading the plot of the game out of curiosity years ago and while I don't remember the details, I do kind of remember the "feeling" and the fact I'm forced to kill non-threatening robots or kill robots pleading for their lives is slightly unsettling. Curious to see where this goes but I feel that I'm definitely the audience for this kind of experience.