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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.
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've also been back in Hollow Knight. I got stuck on my first playthrough pretty close to the end (see below) and just decided to restart this time since it's been years. It's been awesome. I wish I was having as much luck as you but this game is just a reminder that my reflexes just don't get better. Navigating has been easier, though, as little memories pop up.
I'm telling myself if I beat this and am still hungry for more, THEN I'll get Silksong. But this should keep me busy.
Boss I was stuck on
The Watcher Knights just kept. Kicking. My. Ass. And I had to put it down.
Gaming as an "old person" is getting depressing haha.
But seriously, this is my thoughts on the game. I'm actually trying hard to get into it by not reading the 10-30 min before bed and instead playing it on the Switch... it isn't sticking very well yet. :(
I did a LAN party last weekend at VCF Midwest. Played Quake 3.
I used to be able to easily top the charts in any multiplayer game I played from my teens into my 30s. Now that I haven't touched them for a decade, I struggled to just be middle of the pack at best.
I was often in the top 3 in one of my favorite servers (where I also met my SO) back in the CS beta days. The owner hosted a LAN in the Sacramento area, and I was the only female who showed up... it was a blast, but yeah, I used to be somewhat good I'd like to think (my spray was Meg from the Disney Hercules movie, laying on her side holding an AK with the phrase "you just got killed by a girl").
Now I don't play much of anything with others, because I generally just can't keep up, which doesn't set well with being competitive... :D
Personal sprays were awesome. I've always been puzzled at the non-reaction by players when Valve monetized them.
Sure sure, it prevents the full on hardcore porn or racist sprays here and there but the general creativity and personality that sprays could have were a pretty solid addition to the game. That Meg spray of yours sounds like a personalized victory lap.
I'm fairly certain that personalized sprays nowadays would be too much of the former because the amount of gamers in general and how the CS playerbase has ballooned since the 1.6 and Source days, but I must say I preferred the cool shit with the odd bad spray mixed in over the clean paid for sprays of CS2.
I think the general tolerance for stuff like surprise goatse has fallen away. The internet of the '00s was fucked up and weird and free and the people who engaged with it knew that. It's full of normies and ipad kids now.
I can't really say I'm competitive, but I do like being good at things, so to see my skills at the level they're at. Well, no wonder I stick to single-player games these days.
is it soul master lol. That guy almost broke me during my first go-round, wow.
YES. ugh.
I took a 2 day break from Hollow Knight and on my second attempt of the evening last night, I beat soul master. And just barely. I had like a single mask of health left. I then very foolishly proceeded to venture into a new zone with 1200 geo, died, and then died on my way back. So RIP to my small fortune. I was planning to finally buy the lantern with that :(
Sekiro
I beat the last boss! Thanks to everyone for the encouragement.
I took a short break from the game after last week's post, then started practising in the evening after work. I don't think I ever had any real "breakthrough" moment where I was suddenly Neo seeing the Matrix - it was just a gradual improvement in how well I played each day (although I did experience a kind of Tetris effect when trying to sleep where I could only think about attack patterns and deflection timings).
All up, I probably died on this fight 70+ times, which is a ton to be sure, but any defeat that I learned from is one I'm happy to own :P
Shuten Order
The newly released mystery VN from Tookyo Games. This is the 16th game in my playthrough of the Kodaka / Uchikoshi catalogue.
The basic premise is that the protagonist must obtain a murder confession from one of 5 suspects, but can only choose one of them to investigate. The route you choose then determines the genre of the game.
The genres are:
1. Mystery / deduction
2. Escape / death game
3. Multi-perspective / flowchart novel
4. Dating sim
5. Stealth / horror
I have to admit, I was worried when I heard that this game was going in so many different directions. This is a studio that's constantly short on funding, and it's easy to imagine the game becoming over scoped and ending up half-assed on all fronts.
So far:
The good
The setting - a theocracy run by a doomsday cult - is pretty unique and gives the game a distinctly different vibe from any of their other games. The Danganronpa composer Takada Masafumi is also on board and his synth tracks are instantly recognisable.
There's a lot of art. For most VNs, the text does the heavy lifting to describe what's happening and the player has to use their imagination, but in this game, anything beyond people just holding a conversation is specifically shown in panels like a comic book (even in the very text heavy flowchart novel route). All of the named characters are also given a good range of expressions (some of which are pretty funny/creative), which is no mean feat given each route has a different cast and many characters appear only briefly.
The bad
The style of writing feels very 'to the point' and lacks a lot of the dark/silly humour and character back-and-forths that Danganronpa, Rain Code and The Hundred Line had so much of. I wouldn't have picked it out as something written by Kodaka at all if his name wasn't in the credits.
The overarching plot is interesting, but the individual routes are pretty short, with the route-specific gameplay mechanisms never really being built upon to a point where they shine before the route is over. The degree to which the routes shed light on the main story also varies quite a bit, and on the routes which are only tangentially related, it can feel like you're just wasting time on something unrelated to your main objective.
Not sure if it's the game or just my system, but I couldn't get my controller to work with it (I prefer a controller for VNs as it's easier on the fingers) - and yet, you can't play entirely with a mouse like most VNs either. It's not a big deal to play with mouse and keyboard, but kind of weird coming from devs with decades of experience in VNs. Maybe they're not used to using Unity?
Will keep playing, but keeping my expectations in check for this one.
Wow congratulations on Sekiro! I had to put it down because of how frustrated I had gotten. Seems to be my trend with SoulsBornes… crap! I’m doing the same thing w Elden Ring, where I will play for what seems like a long time until I just die which brings me to turn off the PlayStation.
Thanks! I definitely understand on the frustration and had to put it down a bit myself. I feel like maybe that's even the best way to enjoy these difficult games - just play a bit each day and enjoy the moment to moment gameplay rather than the focus on progress or beating it within X tries.
All the recent debate about the difficulty in Silksong lately has definitely gotten me thinking more about difficulty vs punishment and mastery vs discovery in games. I consider myself a 'discovery' person at heart - I'm motivated by finding out what's in the cave behind the dragon, who the culprit is or how the puzzle is solved - but repeatedly going through the cycle of failure, analysis of what I did right and wrong and eventually becoming able to execute on the right approach in these 'mastery'-based souls games has kind of expanded my horizons!
Do you think this can get in the way for final bosses specifically if you know there's only cutscenes afterward?
Seeing how the story turns out is still discovery to me, so I don't think it would if there was some form of story or even lore reward.
If I got nothing from it except the satisfaction of mastering the boss, though... yeah, I'd probably pass on that. For the same reason, I don't generally play challenge runs or boss rush modes.
It's an interesting question, though. I mean, there's nothing stopping me from just watching the ending on YouTube, right? So maybe there's an element of not wanting to be defeated by the game too.
Yeah discovering the end of the story is a valid answer and probably how I'd have answered had I been asked the same question, though sometimes I am motivated by just overcoming a challenge.
That said, there are games that I got sick of close to the end and simply watched instead, and in some cases are games that weren't has hard as Sekiro, which I did finish for myself. Funny how that happens right? I think I chafe against difficulty way more when I feel like it's "not what I signed up for."
Hmm I’ve never thought about it that way. In playing games like Bandicoot, or The Last of Us, it’s about mastering the flow of controls, whereas these “SoulsBorne” games deal with repetition, bosses, and memorization. I’m gonna think about my own gaming traits. I’m not sure what they are hah! Thanks for the food for thought.
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'd sunk a ton of time into Blue Prince a couple of months ago and really should go back to try to tie the remainder up.
There's a few puzzles that have irked me but most are skillfully and thoughtfully put together and the drip feed of story elements is pretty exciting as you piece things together.
I think the intention is that some of the meta-progression elements (and your own improving drafting strategy) alleviate some of the frustration of having to draft particular rooms to progress. What I've found is that as you progress further it does kind of suck if you've only got one objective for a day and it doesn't work out, so I've been trying to keep an updated list of things I want to try so I can pivot to whichever is feasible. Early game there's such a wealth of things to explore that this is fairly effortless, later game it might partly depend on your memory or organisational skill.
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 agree with this description, I generally like "hard" games. But I find my self more drained playing this game, enemies just feel so dang spongey. It's doing the thing where I know how to win in combat, I "get" it, but the focus it requires just limits the amount of time and energy I have to repeatedly attempt stuff.
I am the kind of person that suffers from recency bias when it comes to which boss fights I enjoy, but (still in ACT 1 of Silksong), the boss I just beat has been the most enjoyable so far.
Minor ACT 1 spoilers (location and boss names)
The boss at Bellhaven, Widow. The fight just felt like a “dance” to me, which I think mirrors what you were saying about “flow”. It took me probably an hour to beat, playing for 30 mins (maybe 5-8 attempts?) then took an overnight break because I tend that helps to cement fights in my mind. After that, I was able to consistently get to Phase 2 (probably another 5-8 attempts), and then the next day I beat Widow on the second attempt.
The previous boss I fought, Sister Splinter, was also fun, but I think the adds she summoned kept it from feeling as flowy to me. I really suffer in fights with more than one enemy :(
Currently trying to finish up in Hunters March and the Skull Tyrant before I move on to exploring the Sinners Road or Blasted Steps.
I don’t think I’ll be able to beat the game, I figure I will get “skill issued” at some point like I did in the original HK, but I’m having fun exploring so far.
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.
I enjoyed that when I played it last year! Good to see other people mentioning it. My comments are here in case you're interested.
I hope you enjoy it. The story is both the best and worst part of the game. If you stick with it, you'll probably agree.
I completely agree. Superficially, the plot events and dialogue are silly melodrama. However, on a larger scale, I found the story's themes to be cleverly presented and quite moving. As an overall experience, this game is much greater than the sum of its parts.
You put it well. It was both entertaining and thought provoking and annoying that you have to beat the game multiple times to start enjoying.
I found the bit of down-resolution cutscenes also annoying. I started playing the Kingdom hearts 1.5 game and had the same issue where they are 30 fps which I thankfully was able to smooth out by using lossless scaling. Basically just always have it multiply frames by 2x (or whatever you prefer without artifacting) and this does the job.
It also makes emulated games not need to be heavily modified internally to get better game feel. For example, games like Bloodborne are locked at 30 fps, but you can multiply the frames to any number to get it feeling less like it's chugging. They have a variable frames toggle you can use if you just want more than 30, but not a fixed multiplier.
I'd say it was one of my favorite purchases I also use with NIGHTREIGN or Elden Ring to get 120+ fps without getting anticheat banned. Can also be used with VLC to upscale older or newer anime to have more than 24 fps and even 4K upscaling.
RuneScape 3. Catalyst League started today and I don't know if I like it. I'm one of those people who hates the fact that Old School RuneScape isn't getting Leagues this year, but its MTX-ridden older sister game is; probably because RS3 is in crisis mode and was pulling about a tenth of OSRS's playercount prior to this league's launch.
To explain why I don't like RS3 and why the game is in dire straits, I'd have to give a very brief history lesson on how things got that bad.
RuneScape 2 went through years and years of bad updates which had led to the game hemorrhaging players and the developers adding increasingly predatory microtransactions and lootboxes to the game to make up for lost revenues. But the straw that broke the camel's back was the 2013 Evolution of Combat update. Jagex had effectively tried to transform a point & click MMORPG's tick-based autoattack combat system into one based on abilities and action bars, more akin to World of Warcraft. The update was very poorly received, made a lot of people quit the game and utterly trivialized content which wasn't designed around abilities. Jagex ended up scaling it back (first via adding Revolution combat, which effectively automated your rotation for you, then via adding Legacy Mode, a combat mode that replicated how the game used to play pre-EoC with the caveat being that it's wildly inferior to using EoC/Revolution.
EoC is more akin to Star Wars Galaxies' New Game Experience update in terms of how badly it ruined the game.
Then they did all this dumb lore-breaking Sixth Age God Wars crap, rebranded the game to RuneScape 3 for very dubious reasons (the game wouldn't improve graphically until a few years later with the NXT engine update.) When the rise of a private server running on an older version of RuneScape 2 (and its shutdown via C&D) led to them launching Old School RuneScape, and OSRS getting content added, everybody started flocking to that game instead.
As for my thoughts on Catalyst League and RS3 so far? I've already hit 321 total level and my second relic as of writing. The game is not only too easy and trivial to progress in, but has one of the worst and most overbloated user interfaces of any MMORPG. The game is such a clusterfuck from a UX perspective that it would even make Linux nerds wince.
Want an example? Changing attack styles and how you gain XP in OSRS is as easy as clicking the Combat tab and left-clicking a style to change it. For RS3, I realised I wasn't gaining Defence XP at all and had to google the solution because I couldn't find the combat tab. Turns out the toggle for what XP you gain from combat is buried deep in the fucking Settings menu, under the Gameplay and Combat XP tabs.
This week for our podcast on roguelike games we played The King Is Watching
I thought this game was neat. It starts off strong with a very colorful and detailed art style, has a pretty thorough tutorial, and some interesting and unique mechanics.
I think the only downside is the meta progression system. Not anything that can’t be fixed in the long term, but it sort of felt like I didn’t really unlock anything super meaningful after a number of runs.
Overall a game that I put roughly on par with Loop Hero: interesting art and mechanics, maybe a bit grindy for my tastes, but interesting enough for one of my cohosts to put 100+ hours into it and platinum all the achievements.
It's currently also my "ah, let's play that" game. Should go beat lvl 10 now.
Final Fantasy IX: Trance Seek
I finished disc 1 and am around half-way through disc 2. It's a lot of fun but because of the increased difficulty and depth to batles there's only so much that I can run-through the game at a time. I'll return to play some more later.
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Justice for All
I'm half-way through the third case. It's a lot of fun but I've played the previous game straight before this so I'm taking a break: too much of a good thing can tire it out.
Rayman Legends
On a discussion of Hollow Knight: Silksong I said that I realise that it's an intentional design decision to make people play more carefully but I strongly disagree with death runs as a mechanic in modern video games. I think that the modern Rayman games did this best: difficulty that feels amazing when you perfect it and the regular deaths putting you straight back into the action.
After talking about it I couldn't resist jumping back into Rayman. Although I've played it before I started again and have finished the first two worlds.
WoW: ChromieCraft
Following on from the news of two private servers being hit with lawsuits/C&Ds (Turtle and Epoch) I felt that itch to play some WoW. I noticed that there's a new progression Cataclysm server that just launched but, after what's just happened, it doesn't seem sensible to support servers that unethically keep their changes to AGPL3 server emulators to themselves. When they eventually get shut-down all of their improvements are lost.
ChromieCraft is a progression Wrath of the Lich King server that follows the open source licensing correctly. I'm reasonably sure that the people running it are regular contributors to the AzerothCore project. It's currently on the Wrath prepatch with Death Knights added but Northrend closed.
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 have been jumping between Foxhole and Factorio.
Foxhole is a new game to me and I am really enjoying the massive breadth of it. From Infantry combat, to vehicle combat, to the insanity of the complex logistics involved in keeping the war effort going. I love that you can get really invested into the manufacturing of weapons and vehicles and lose yourself in that for a hundred hours --- , or you can just drop into a front to do combat.
Factorio has been a deep time sink for me for a long while. I keep going back to it because plotting out new methods of manufacturing items and factory layouts just scratches that itch. My friends and I recently begun a 1000x science run -- where all the researches cost 1000x more. Its been a fun challenge that requires you to megabase even early on just to get basic things unlocked. Eventually we plan to let the server run overnight to get some of the more insane cost researches done once we have established a proper defense -- as the enemies bug-aliens will grow and evolve over time so leaving the game running has the possibility of the aliens out evolving your defenses so you need to plan accordingly.
I bought Undertale several months ago in preparation for the new chapters and managed to finish the neutral ending immediately before the chapters. After Deltarune and True Pacifist + a few breaks, this week I did the no mercy route myself for the first time for the 10th birthday of Undertale!
Funny enough, beating sans only took me
~7 tries including getting dunked on, I found Undyne the Undying to be a way harder and more frustrating fight, I would always manage to deplete 70% of her HP but the last 30 would be very diffficult and attrition-heavy, although I recognized literally every single one of sans' attacks beforehand, so it was a lot easier to know what to do lol. (Although his last 2 attacks are genuinely pretty fearsome, I found them to demand a lot more of my reaction time.) Despite some people thinking Undertale is a kinda unserious game with obnoxious fans and Megalovania becoming one of the big memes of the 2010s, sans' dialogue in the no mercy route is still great commentary on what it would be like for the monsters and video game characters in general to "see" you playing and replaying video games alongside leaving lots of mystery surrounding him that we are gradually getting more of in deltarune (most notably the lines where he talks about going back to someplace other than the surface and describing an anomaly that eats and messes with timelines which he knows about without ever experiencing it directly plus the literal death tally he does), and flowey's monologue immediately preceding it is genuinely amazing and it really demonstrates how great of a character flowey is beyond just being great at the role of playing a pure evil villain without actually being one, just becoming completely detached from his world due to gaining SAVE/LOAD/RESET powers and losing his compassion without his soul.
Anyway, happy 10 years of Undertale!
I have finished Horizon Forbidden West including its DLC Burning Shores. It was 167.5 hours long journey, I played on normal difficulty, didn't use fast travel in the game (teleporting from place to place) but I used machines to get around.
I wrote about the game here a few times already so I will make it shorter this time.
The story is continuation of Horizon Zero Dawn's one, it is so well executed that it might have been one long game. Many things you learn in Zero Dawn are teansfered and enhanced in Forbidden West. If you liked Zero Dawn's story, you will like Forbidden West's too.
The world is huge. And also diverse. You will find snow, swamp, desert, forests, hills... There are many machines to encoubter, learn about and kill through many various means and tactics. Everyone will find their own playstyle. The game is what I would define as action RPG with many things to master, yet you don't really have to - I'm not a good player of such games but I managed perfectly fine.
The game (world) looks great and if you have hardware for high or even max settings, it would likely be like playing a role in a movie.
I played the game completely on Steam Deck which was a rough ride. The base game runs at kinda medium settings with FSR enabled and it still can't keep even solid 30fps. You could go low but then you lose shaders and it all looks like crap. I limit TDP to 11W because even at full tilt of 15W there is no noticeable improvement and 11W at least conserve a bit of battery making it run for around 100 minutes on one charge. As for the DLC... It is much rougher ride! If Steam Deck hit its limit in base game then DLC is far beyond. With the same setrings the RAM and VRAM combned usage closes almost to 20GB but Steam Deck has only 16GB. Lowering textures doesn't really help because if you manage to free VRAM, game uses this freed space for RAM thus closing to 20GB once again for the price of losing visual fidelity and not gaining anything. The framerate tanks even harder in Burning Shores and I'd say that you really have to be hardheaded or desperate to play it on Steam Deck. I'm kinda both so I managed tonfinish the DLC on Steam Deck as well.
About the DLC - it comes with the game. If it didn't I'd speak up and sa, don't buy it. It isn't bad, but I didn't find it great either. It's just meh. The world looks stunning but the content isn't that much.
Overall the Horizon Forbidden West was as great as I couldn't even imagine. Combine it with Zero Dawn and you get 300 hours of absolutely great gaming time. The games are worth their full price.
And last thing I have to say - It is absolutely unheard of, but who would have thought that it would take console firalst franchise made/funded by console manufacturer to show us, PC players, how games should be made (for PCs). To clarify - there is no 3rd party launcher, no always on-line requirement, no anti-cheat, no login required, no bullshit! This is just pure game - you install it, you play it. This is how games should be made. With that said - Ubisoft, Rockstar, Bethesda, EA and others, go F yourself.
Hollow Knight.
What even is this damn game?! I asked a coworker it if was like VVVVV with its map layout and he said "sorta..." but it's like that on steroids. I've played Shovel Knight, Cave Story, but this just feels like Skyrim: The Platformer.
I'm burning out a bit so I also bought Animal Well, which I don't quite understand but played for five minutes. I keep working myself into a corner where there seems to be one thing I miss before the next major progression.
Skate.
I was out sick so had the opportunity to get this one running after setting up SecureBoot and registering my Debian key so I can use Javelin in Windows. The goals break the flow up, the tutorial should be skippable if you say you already played Skate 3 (they ask for controls), but it just feels like more of a great open franchise.
Apologies if you're as already aware of this but Hollow Knight is what's usually called a 'metroidvania' game, a subgenre of platforming games with a much larger focus on exploring a large interconnected map and unlocking new capabilities to slowly open up that map. Named such for the Metroid series and several of the later Castlevania games being regarded as the progenitors of the genre.
Hollow Knight is definitely one of the darlings of the genre but yeah if you really get into it and are looking for similar experiences that's how I'd find them.
I've been playing Ale Abbey which is a really fun tycoon-style game where you make different beers and build up your production and supporting infrastructure to be successful. It looks very nice, plays well and has a satisfying gameplay loop.
I've also been playing Broken Arrow with some pals. It's an RTS that has a fun balance of micro and macro managment.
I played through the original Star Wars: Dark Forces. It's one of those games that somehow end up "in rotation" for me, so I end up replaying it every year or two.
From moment to moment it plays a lot like a decent-not-great Doom clone, but it differs in that its levels are each their own mission, set in a believable location with a variety of objectives serving a clear purpose in terms of the overarching narrative. I'd say most first person shooters at the time didn't have the ambition to approach levels as anything more than a weakly connected series of challenges to get from the start to exit. System Shock comes to mind as an exception, but System Shock is also not really as much of a Doom clone in design as Dark Forces, probably owing more of its sensibilities to the Ultima Underworld games.
Sure, the objectives of Dark Forces are basically just a fancy abstraction over key hunting but that's often enough to give the game a sense of purpose. Still, sometimes the game sometimes manages to hit the worst of all worlds: Star Wars logic combined with LucasArts puzzle logic combined with FPS puzzle logic.
I also played Truer than You, a VN where you play as a gig worker who gets hired to play the roles of a friend, lover, a parent or whatever in social situations for a variety of clients. A sort of ultimate form of Sartre's waiter where you have to be what someone else wants, all while figuring out what they want you to be. At the same time, as a player you are of course role playing the character role playing a character, so it can get confusing. The game then throws curve balls at you through situations where you awkwardly have to choose between authenticity and playing your role. It deals with its subject really well and I liked how interactive it was, through frequent choices (and no explicit choice always being available as a choice in itself).