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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.
Got into a bike accident so I've been curled up at home chipping away at The Outer Wilds.
I'm loving it.
Like if No Man's Sky were designed to be a beautiful ship in a bottle.
Outer Wilds is my favorite game of all time. Enjoy every minute of it.
I convinced my partner (who doesn't love games) to play through The Outer Wilds. She managed to do a bunch of stuff I didn't do in my play through, and had no spoilers.
Such a great game. Enjoy the heck out of it!
Outer Wilds is on the GOAT list for me. Its the coldest take on the planet because everyone who plays it feels this, but I wish i could wipe my memory of the game and play it all over again. An amazing narrative mystery wrapped up in a mini solar system with a groundhog day loop is such a potent combo. And its all so expertly done, its almost frustrating that its so unique. I cant say I have found anything that really matches the high the game gives. Cant wait to hear your thoughts when you finish.
If the game did require 20 hours of playing to get 2 hours of new content, you might have a point.
There is some repetition in route B, but all of the boss fights are different and there's a new set of side quests, plus its a bit shorter due to some events that happen. The route C is entirely different.
I mean, there's really only 3 routes, A/B/E. Endings C/D/E are obviously not the same, but they're part of the same route, there's a reason you'll never see a review with someone stopping and ending D and not going further.
I also think a lot of the appeal of the game is running around and enjoying the atmosphere of the world while you're doing sidequests. If you're spending the entirety of route B just blitzing through it since you've played it before, and not taking the time to enjoy the world and explore the new sidequests, you probably weren't enjoying the game that much anyway. But the game is built to offer more to the people who really like it, not to have the widest possible appeal, that's going to have downsides.
Remember that the letters are tied to endings, not "routes."
"Spoiler" - Structural only, no narrative details
It seems clear that you understand that after ending A you play the same events that occurred concurrently with the prior "route" from a different PoV until ending B, but it seems like some clarification is needed for endings C, D, and E.
After ending B, the third "route" is not covering the same span of time and events, it's entirely new. Furthermore, endings C, D, and E are not representative of playing this segment 3 times, you really only play this portion once, and the typical play experience will involve the player unlocking C, D, and E all in pretty quick succession. Like all 3 within an hour or so.
Generally speaking, the 2nd "route" to ending B usually goes by much faster than A for a few reasons as well, so I would say that if you've finished route A you're probably actually closer to like 45%-ish progressed through the game's runtime, not the 33% or less it might sound like.
I would even go as far as to push back on the notion that any of this is "multiple playthroughs" at all, it's just a game with an experimental structure that involves a segment of the timeline getting 2 passes. Don't forget that as you would know based on where you've progressed to, these characters do get separated late in this segment as well.
That was me. I like the story but hate how it's delivered. I'm glad you decided to keep playing, although I burned out somewhere during the... Third play through I think. Good luck!
Anti-recommendation : If you were "meh" with Nier Automata don't ever try to play Nier. I feel that everything Nier try to do narratively Nier Automata does it better (which is reassuring in a way since it's an earlier game).
I finally got Hollow Knight to be properly prepared for Silksong, and I understand why people were so hyped for Silksong now. This is a really, really good metroidvania. Controls and movement are tight and responsive, combat and enemy design/variety is great, not too complex but still very rewarding of mastery. The art design for the different areas is great, as well as the usually subtle but impactful OST, which I will now use as bgm for work. Exploration and discovery of secrets and new paths is very rewarding and usually not a slog (backtracking to the nearest stag station can be dull sometimes). Characters are surprisingly expressive despite not having vocal dialogue past their unique sound effects. Difficulty wise it's pretty fair, though you can make things notably easier by collecting upgrades to health/soul and certain charm combos. Note that this is from the perspective of someone that's done all the bosses except the pantheon, knight/radiance, and nk grimm, so I'm sure I'll struggle more with those. Going for 100% completion right now, not including doing the Path of Pain because it's entirely optional and jump quests have been inflicting pain on me since I started playing Maplestory in 2005 so I'd rather not.
Also got Jump Space, which released on Friday in Early Access, to play co-op with my brother. This is a FPS that also has space ship combat, with procedurally generated series of missions to complete. Overall the gameplay's pretty simple and there's various features like the item shops that are still in development, but there are a couple things that have impressed me so far.
The biggest of these would be the seamlessness of on-foot to ship mobility and combat. This isn't some awkward clunky business where you have to fully land or stop to exit your ship or completely annihilate your performance like in Star Citizen, the ship can be going at full speed and you can just launch yourself out of it with a launch tube or just walk out the airlocks too. There's walkways on the outside of the ship where you can be walking around on it, and even on the sides or under it, and you'll be travelling with the ship. At any point, you can also just jump and jetpack off it, then just use your absurdly long grappling hook to latch back onto a grapple point on the walkway and re-magnetize onto it. The jetpacks themselves also move absurdly fast so it's not like you're just left drifting in the void if you do detach from the ship, so that really gives players a ton of freedom of mobility. Ground combat itself is very straightforward, you have gun, there are enemy robots, you shoot them, you try not to get shot too much. The grappling hook and jetpack (which can't be used in indoor environments) give you some more verticality options there.
The ship combat has more going for it, with the pilot having frontal ship cannons, and the gunner having potentially multiple different turret weapons. Ships have shields (that don't regenerate) and health, both of which can be restored by crafting shield/ship repair kits and then manually bringing them over to corresponding installation points. Your ship can also catch fire both inside and outside (not sure how that happens in the vacuum of space), but fortunately there's a couple extinguishers placed around the ship. Ammo is also not unlimited and additional ammo bins have to be found/crafted then loaded. You can tell this game was definitely made with co-op in mind, since they expect somebody to go around effectively doing logistics in the middle of a fight if things get messy. Ships are also customizable, with different options for the engine, aux generators, thrusters, and weapons. Unlocking more of these ship components is one of the main draws for the missions currently, as well as unlocking different ships altogether.
Overall, it shows a lot of promise. Only played a few hours so far but I've liked what I've seen, looking forward to seeing this game grow in features and content.
just to be sure, that's an in-game shop, not a real money shop?
Oh yeah in-game shops, there's no microtransactions here. You can get credits as one of the reward currencies but there's no way to spend them right now until those shops are implemented.
When Silksong dropped its release date, I started a playthrough Hollow Knight to actually finish the game. Today I just started Silksong after finishing most of the base game. Personally I think it was very much worth it to have played it in preparation. Lots of questions i have based on information from the first game.
Currently, I have been dumping an unreasonable (still not enough) amount of time playing Voices of The Void. Its a free itch.io pre alpha of an actively in development game, but honestly the game has a lot of content already and is stable enough that I think its worth engaging with already.
The game is a slow burn isolation horror game set in a satellite array in the Swiss mountains, and as the sole employee of this array you have the job of finding, downloading, and processing signals from space. You do this from a detailed and involved workstation in a dilapidated concrete base in the middle of the valley. In the downtime while waiting for signals to download/process, you are expected to maintain the radar towers, by manually going out to them and doing a simple math minigame, and do a daily status report on three randomly picked sattelites out of the 24 or so in the array, performed by doing some basic commands at the terminal in the satellite tower. The game runs on a day night cycle, and the campaign is currently built out for two months, so you have a good amount of ingame time on your hands. When you arent working you can fill said time by cleaning up the base and grounds to make it feel more homey and less run down and filfthy, or pursue other mysteries scattered about the large but managable map. All the while, events will fire off at certain triggers or randomly, such as a meteor shower overhead, or having a rock thrown at your window in front of your workstation in the dead of night, ramping up to more direct spooks which I will not spoil here. The events are often fairly sporadic, which I think is the magic trick here. The game is masterful at provoking a false sense of security, setting you in a routine, then at the perfect moment, it drives a knife straight through it. But even beyond the horror of it, the games central loop of collecting these signals is so satisfying because of how analogue the game is.
Each day at midnight, your boss will contact you over email to give you the three random satellites you need to report on and a number of signals to send off via drone. To get those signals you will use your signal processing workstation. The signal processing station is large, with four different terminals and screens that almost surround you sitting at the main desk. One terminal for searching for signals, one for homing in and downloading the signals, one for listening to the signals, and one for processing the signals, refining their sound quality to be able to gather more data from them. You interact with the chunky retro interfaces most often by physically using the knobs, buttons, and dials, on them. For example, looking at the dial that shifts polarity, holding a button, then scrolling your mousewheel to change the value in a positive or negative way. Or physically grabbing and slotting in the chunky hard drives you work with into a terminal to save a signal onto them. You are almost always directly doing the work, even as you eventually automate some tasks in small ways, however it never feels too tedious. Its often a case of setting up the parameter to the right values using the buttons or dials, then stepping away to do other tasks while the signals do their thing. And since its all so manual, it makes you feel like you are actually doing a basic version of the job, not abstracted but you are physically doing the work, which fully sucks me into the game and has me in a "just one more day" kind of mood.
Its important to note, the game is played entirely in first person, and runs on the Unreal 4 engine thats modified to mimic the Source engine. That shows in small ways like the sound effects in game, but mostly in that the game is fully physics based. You can fully decorate your base as you please, buying furniture and appliances and placing them where you see fit, stacking your food supplies in just the right way, of setting up your work desk in a way that flows well for you personally. It really lets you make the base feel like yours in an organic way, cleaning it to make it habitable, then sprucing it up to make it feel like home. That plus the excellent sound design and atmosphere the game puts on makes for a very immersive experience that can be quite cozy at times.
Which makes the unsettling and horrifying moments all the more effective. After spending a day organizing my kitchen in between processing signals, hearing the sound of tearing flesh beneath the floor or knock at the door from inside my server room is so much scarier than it would be otherwise. Dont get me wrong, the game has a lot of direct scares that are very effective, but the little scares peppered throughout are what make them so effective. Its the routine of doing a fun job, making your work space into a home, cleaning up the grounds and maintaining the towers, and then a metaphorical rock is thrown through your windows, shattering any sense of peace or security to make room for increasing paranoia and unease. And when the tension crescendos, it leads to some of the most visceral terror I have felt experiencing a piece of media in years.
I highly recommend this game if any of the above interests you. I think its best experienced as blind as possible, to keep the mystery and spooks unknown. The game also has a slight learning curve. The tutorial covers most of the game fairly well, including the somewhat unique control scheme, but some things are left out, and there is a fairly detailed wiki to consult for instances like that. If anybody else here has played it I would love to hear your thoughts/experiences.
Have you played Firewatch? It sounds maybe very loosely similar in vibes based on your description, so if you have played Firewatch I’d be interested in how you thought they compared.
I’m guessing Firewatch was much more linear, but I did enjoy it quite a bit.
I’m not sure I’d play Voices of the Void, while it sounds neat, I’m very much not a fan of horror/suspense games.
Some of the vibes are definitely similar, especially as the conspiracy vibes of Firewatch ramp up towards the end, and the often extemely unsettling feeling of being alone in the woods, especially at night. I have also been thinking a fire watch setting would be a good alternate fit for the framework of Voices of the Void lays down. But beyond that, I'd say they are very different games, mainly in that Firewatch is a super narrative heavy and narrative forward game. There is a story being told directly to you, so Firewatch is a little bit less of a sandbox, and to my knowledge is entirely scripted in its events. Plus you are talking to the woman in the other fire watch tower most of the game, and your character's and that character's relationship are a central aspect to the game.
Voices of the Void is more focused on an emergent experience. You are given the same baseline for every playthrough, but the signals you get and events that trigger are mostly random to my knowledge, beyond a few specific things happening on specific in game days. Beyond the daily tasks the game gives you, there is no overarching mandate from the game on what you should be working towards. Rather, you have a lot of threads popping up that you can pursue if you want to, like mysterious locations around the map and some mysteries that youll start coming across in the first few days, but its all entirely self driven.
It's also far more solitary and isolating than Firewatch, with the only communication being over notes or emails, and only a few times a week are the emails anything more than perfunctory work talk. And while you do play a predefined character in Voices of the Void, its more a Gordon Freeman type, which is a mostly defined backstory that is doled out in minor ways here and there, but otherwise is just a vessel character for the player, and thus never speaks. More a canvas with some of the background painted in, but you filling in the rest from your personal experience with the game.
All that to say, they are going after a similar unsettled feeling of being alone in the woods and trying to solve a conspiratorial mystery, but the structures they deliver those qualities through very different. Good call as a comparison point though!
Baldurs Gate 3
I've put close on a thousand hours on this game since it came out, but I recently finished a run in Honour Mode (took about 80 hours), to get my achievement and my golden dice. It's one of the most challenging things I've done in gaming, and I'm very pleased with myself for having managed it. I know it's no longer a particularly exclusive club but by golly it was tense at times.
Having a bit of a rest. Going on a business trip soon so will be taking my steam deck with Tetris Effect and Wylde Flowers.
I failed out of an Honor Mode run this weekend in the most spectacularly stupid way possible. I was just about to reach the fight for the MacGuffin that lets you go into the fight for the end of act 2, told my party to make one of the jumps and for some reason, every single one of them failed the jump and threw themselves off the cliff into oblivion. Like, it wasn't even an honor mode failure, I just wasn't careful enough because the jump looked good.
It might be another couple of months before I have the strength of will to get back into it again, but I really want those golden dice too. Congrats on your successful run!
Ah man that's rough! I saw a video on YouTube with someone failing out of Honour Mode do to a faulty elevator platform in the gauntlet. The platform moved down and the characters just didn't. Until they fell to their doom of course.
I had one party member detached every time I had to do astral jumping or use an elevator. Good luck with yours, I had two fails before I got this one.
After three and a half years, I finally went back to Elden Ring and finished the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC.
I bought the DLC when it first released, but found I was still too burnt out to actually play. Since then, I've been trying to dodge DLC spoilers while telling myself I'd definitely get back to it soon.
Elden Ring is a big game. On my first playthrough, I spent some 250 hours just exploring every nook and cranny, and testing out different weapons and builds. I also spent an inordinate amount of time piecing together the story. This was before wikis and "loretubers" had it all figured out, so I read every item description myself to put together a timeline of events. This was rewarding, but also exhausting.
My original goal was to collect every item. Doing so required a NG+ run to collect all boss weapons, and to also redo the quest lines I messed up the first time. Quests in Souls games can be quite cryptic, so this is expected. I had started the NG+ run, but quickly found I just didn't have the energy to play through the game again. So I put it down, and didn't pick it up again for over three years.
The impetus for finally doing so was the recent release of Nightreign. The game plays a lot like Elden Ring, but faster and in a roguelike format. I picked it up with some friends, and it rekindled my interest enough to dust off the normal Elden Ring again.
Thankfully, I found the game considerably faster the second time around. You can really move in NG+. Though even overleveled, there's still an absurd amount of content. It doesn't help that I completed every cave and side dungeon again.
At this point, I was finally ready to jump into the DLC. And let me say, it completely exceeded my expectations. The overworld map is so layered and deceptively large. The dungeons each feel unique and interesting to explore. The bosses are also a high point. There was far less boss reuse than in the base game, and they're each brilliant in their own way. The new musical themes were also very good. This is a true and proper expansion pack.
I did find I was quite overleveled at the start, unfortunately, so I abstained from using the scadutree blessings for most of the game. I finished the final boss fight at blessing level 3, which was fun but challenging.
Being that this was a blind playthrough of the DLC, I of course messed up a quest line. So one day I might need to revisit with a NG+2 playthrough to fix those mistakes. That day can wait. For now, I'm happy to close the book on Elden Ring and call it finished.
You're fortunate (or unfortunate) for doing the DLC after this many patches going through it.
At launch the DLC (and especially the last boss) were infamous for being way too difficult, even while having consumed most of the scadutree blessings.
There was even the advice, for those who can cheat on PC or those who have the time on console, to do the DLC on new game instead of new game+ because the way the enemies life/attack power/etc... boost is calculated in NG+ was way too overdone in the DLC.
The final boss was easily the worst part of the DLC for me. Which is fitting, because I also found the final boss fight of the base game to be the worst part of that game!
While I understand that they want the fights to be hard, I do think some of those combos were just a bit too much. When a boss moves too fast, unpredictably, and never gives an opportunity to get any damage in, there's only so much we mortals can do. I admit that I wound up poking with a rot stick with maximum holy elemental resistance just to get through on NG, and on NG+ I found a slightly better -- but still ultimately unsatisfying -- solution.
The DLC release version of the final boss had a combo that couldn't be dodged even with frame perfect dodges. Unless you're the parry god Ongbal it pretty much made it RNG whether or not he would get a hit in.
Honestly? The fight is mid both then and now. It just sucked even more then because that combo wasn't about skill, just luck.
Please don't tell me you mercy-killed Igon when you first saw him. I considered doing that myself the first time I did, and I'm really glad I didn't. The fight with Bayle just isn't the same without him hyping you up.
Not quite, but close. I completely missed the Dragon Priestess questline. I simply took a left instead of a right, and so never encountered her before fighting Bayle. I didn't even realize there was a questline until after I'd finished and checked the wiki.
Igon was a great character. I'd have been devastated if I missed his battle cry. FromSoft always have some incredible voice acting, and Elden Ring in particular has so much emotion put into many voice lines.
Sekiro also deserves mention here, with the first and final bosses having some incredible deliveries.
Oh yeah I love how over the top the narrator in the opening cinematic is, especially considering how ridiculous some of the things he says are, and just how damn hard he sells Gideon's title. FromSoft dialogue can have some truly peak moments.
I haven't started Elden Ring yet, but fully agree on this OP. It's really exactly the same thing as the Dark Souls OP, but the narrator goes so hard with the delivery.
Will definitely pick this one up when I have a spare 200 hours.
Gears of War: Reloaded. Been having a blast reliving the glory days.
I’ll acknowledge there’s a lot of contention in the community into this game’s implementation. A lot of the same complaints and counterpoints as always (net coding, gnasher tuning) that have always plagued the series.
I do want to call out that it’s always disappointing to me that the series largely abandoned the horror and design styling that made the first game seem grim and personal. The washed out color palette draws a lot of criticism, but other elements are missing: atmospheric distortion (foggy haze on distance objects), high contrast and intense shadows, motion blur, rain and weather effects. Sound design isn’t as bassy and full and lack of screen splatter makes the chainsaw feel like a loony toons weapon—which is made worse as multiplayer tuning causes the player to get staggered if a bullet so much as grazes the air around them.
Overall it’s still a positive pvp experience that plays much better than the original in terms of minimizing host advantage and gaps in ping. There’s still a lot to gripe about, but when gameplay focuses on intense CQC battles that come down to milliseconds reactions, there’s probably not much more that can be done to solve that problem.
I have been incredibly, incredibly sick for like three weeks now, so I haven’t been playing much of anything, but I’m starting to feel better and hoping I’ll have some gaming time at the end of this week since both Hades 2 and Tokyo Xtreme Racer hit 1.0 on the 25th! I’ve been playing TXR in early access already, but not Hades 2, so I’m excited! And then the week after that is Ghost of Yotei, which I will be no-lifing.
I also booted up and played Destiny Rising for a bit through emulator on PC. I’m completely fed up with the state of Destiny 2. I tried to give it a fair chance after the expansion and system reworks to see if a few updates got the game into a better state and it really hasn’t. Rising has been surprising to me in the 2 hours I’ve played. They managed to make the moment to moment gameplay of a mobile version of Destiny almost just as fun as Destiny 2, it’s pretty neat. I’m not far enough yet to judge the story, endgame, or gacha mechanics, but I’m actually enjoying it so far. It’s also showing me how much room this franchise has to thrive if there’s actually some investment into making more and better games. D2 feels like it’s on life support right now with how bad the grind had gotten, and it’s still such a jarring change from the near perfect sandbox we had at the end of Final Shape.
My son and I played Lego Voyagers over the weekend. It was a really fun little co-op puzzler! It probably took us 4ish hours to complete the story, but we have more achievements to get. He was very upset by the ending though, so if you have young kids maybe be ready for that.
Lego Voyagers Story Spoiler
The basic gist of the story is that a rocket ship crashes while taking off, so your two little brick characters go off to find it. By the end, you rebuild the ship, do some space training (surprisingly hard little mini games), and then one of the characters blasts off in the rocket, leaving the other one behind. This is what upset my son so much.The other game I have been playing a lot the last week or two is Deadzone: Rogue which is a really fun FPS/roguelike mash up. It really needs to be played with others to get the most out of it, but I've had good luck just joining random games. Once you get a handle on the builds, you can get very OP which is fun. The shooting mechanics are good - they remind me of Destiny quite a bit. I linked to the Steam store for it, but it's available on consoles and is cross-platform. I play on PS5.
I've been playing the RallySimFans mod for Richard Burns Rally. I wish the graphics were better and some of the damage seems a little unfair (hitting small wooden poles on the side of the rode or even bike lane separators can total the car) but the physics in general feel the best of any rally sim I've played. I also like the variation in cars a lot.
Ive been playing Silksong, and its really fun.
I am at Greymoor, which I think is still fairly early on. The game is a bit slow early on, but the game gets a lot better once you get more mobility equipment like the abikity to dash and hover.
I am surprised that the game isnt as hard as I was expecting, given the discourse around it. Ive seen a bunch if articles online saying stuff like "Is Silksong TOO hard?" And "Silksong raises questions about the role of difficulty in games and whether an easy mode should be included", and I really dont think its that bad?
The game is pretty difficult, sure, but its not overly punishing and all the attacks aive seen so far are well telegraphed, if fast paced. Its nothing near the level of bullshit I felt when trying to play a Dark Souls type game, for example. So I was surprised at how reasonable I thought the difficult curve is.
The difficulty ramps in later areas, even in the first act. I haven't been too challenged either in act one, but I'm sure I'll hit a wall at some point in act two or three. Having seen how some people play games and miss incredibly obvious tells it's not really a wonder they're having problems when they miss half the tools to help them. That sounds like a negative opinion but it isn't. Lots of people just don't care enough to deeply investigate all corners and it bites them when they miss some pivotal upgrades later on.
I'll say that a large part of the discourse about difficulty is how later on even the regular enemies start doing 2 damage for contact hits. Damage quickly becomes higher than one can heal.
Like you say though, the curve is rather gentle. It eases you into the movement tech and different abilities before throwing down the gauntlet so by the time you need to platform well, you've practiced enough that you're comfortable doing tricky jumps.
The first few walls I ran into with Silksong that weren't based on needing more movement tech to deal with a boss were mostly due to me starting to go on autopilot. Different combat styles and equipment loadouts can be the difference between a trivial fight and a nearly impossible one. Stopping to think about how my loadout interacts with the bosses' moveset is half the challenge.
That sounds about right. I lost my first big chunk of rosaries yesterday because I was careless and running on autopilot. Like Dark Souls, overconfidence or carelessness is punished. When I play like that it's usually an indicator I need to stop and relax for a while.
I have jumped back into Stationeers now that they've released a big update to terrain and some other things, it's a wonderful survival simulator that will kill you dead a hundred different ways. The math can be intimidating at first but it's very rewarding to build little gizmos and watch them do what you wanted them to do. One of my favorite survival/craft/build games.
I am early days on this new playthrough but so far the terrain is a huge improvement, the handcrafted maps make the planets much more distinctive and interesting to run around in. I'm on Vulcan and there's this squiggly maze of lava tubes right below my base, and I'm on a larger plateau that's surrounded by glowing lava lakes. It's super cool in a non-literal way.
Finished up Shuten Order.
I think the problem with this game is that:
if you don't like the underlying genres, you're not going to like this game; but
if you do like the underlying genres, you're just going to be wishing this was Ace Attorney or Zero Escape or whatever.
Each route is just too mechanically shallow and short to feel satisfying - e.g.
spoilers
The escape room route only has one escape room!The overarching story is fine, but:
A lot of the clues that you pick up for it are actually the same across the routes - you just hear it from different people.
Therefore, if you play certain routes first, you'll already know everything needed to work out almost all of the major mysteries by around the third route and the remaining routes will feel like a drag because you know much more than the protagonist.
The final chapter goes on for way too long. A lot of the content is either stuff the player should already have figured out, or plot points that didn't really need expanding and are less believable when it's shown exactly what happened.
There are multiple endings, but you can't save in the final chapter, so you have to do a super long runback if you want to see all of them - and you can't just fast forward through it all either, since there's a ton of menuing and QTEs too. It's an unnecessarily user-hostile design decision, since there's no challenge after you've cleared it once.
Kind of difficult to recommend, even for people who enjoyed Kodaka's earlier games.
Lorn's Lure
Indie first person 3D platformer about a robot spelunking into the ruins of a deep underground facility.
There aren't any enemies, but you'll still die a lot since the platforming is pretty demanding. Like in Celeste, you'll just get sent back a little bit if that happens, so while the difficulty is high, it's not particularly punishing.
I liked the concept, but:
It's often quite difficult to work out where you need to go next. There's no "trail of red" like in Mirror's Edge that functions as a visual guide, and due to the very brown/grey setting and low-fi visuals (feels a bit like the original Quake), you can get lost pretty easily - and when you do, the game won't tell you you're on the wrong track. It'll even set your checkpoints back to earlier ones if you inadvertently backtrack.
To alleviate this:
The game does have a sprite that the protagonist is meant to be following as part of the story, but it's often either out of view or too far away to be a meaningful indicator of what your next step should be (and its design, a kind of random assortment of shapes, is also often hard to see).
There's also a help mode you can toggle which shows the next waypoint, but again, it's usually really far away and unhelpful if you can't work out what the immediate next step is.
I got serious motion sickness playing this after a while. The first person 3D platforming itself is OK, but some of the mobility tools / skills you get later on involve looking at a rapidly scrolling wall which my brain does not like at all.
It's rough, but it feels like the sort of game that will really appeal to a specific niche.
This week we played the procgen 4X fantasy game Hero’s Hour for our podcast on roguelike/lite games.
Yes, we do discuss at length whether it qualifies for talking about on a roguelike podcast, and I think it generates some interesting discussion about how 4X and other Civ-like (lite?) games blend into the standard rogue genre.
Overall, I thought this game was interesting despite the bad tutorial. The differences between the factions and heroes makes for some interesting gameplay decisions. The art and music is fun and charming, and the big battle sequences are quite fun to watch.
Makes me want to dip my toes into the Heroes of Might and Magic series, from which it’s inspired by.
I think my most played game over the past month or two has been Monster Train. Not usually through marathon sessions, but just by putting in an hour or two while eating dinner and/or watching something. I'm late to the game, but that's typical for me. It's a roguelite deckbuilder pretty similar in format to Slay the Spire, but different enough to feel fresh.
I've almost unlocked everything in the base game. And a few times I've felt burnt out and thought "I don't think I'll play that again for a while" but within 1-3 days I'm playing it again. The gameplay is hard to match. It's playable in 20 minute bursts. It rarely requires full attention, (although I do regularly come back to the game mid-run and make significant errors due to forgetting a key part of my particular deck in this run). And yet there are so many moments when I feel like a genius, like I won the lottery, or I'm just surprised at a new interaction I hadn't considered.
Anyway, even as I'm ostensibly reaching the end of the base game's rope, there is still a DLC I haven't bought. And a recent sequel. Feels good to have all that lined up.
I also downloaded and played a bit of 2XKO, a new fighting game set in the League of Legends universe currently in closed beta (easy to get in). I've been excited at the prospect of getting into a new fighting game. And it is a really well-polished game whose controls feel great.
But it didn't quite grab me. I've never played a tag team fighter (where you can swap between two (or more in other games) characters in a single match), so maybe that was a hang up. I was also fairly tired at the time, and learning a new fighting game requires some focus. But I have a vague memory of feeling this way with other fighting games. And I suspect that if I push through the initial ambivalence, I'll enjoy the result. So I am determined to have another session at least.