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

I'm playing Kingdom Come:Deliverance. I'm Czech and the team behind the game is Czech based with many Czech members that are well known in the gaming industry. It was just a matter of time until I start playing it. I play it on Steam Deck exclusively, runs well.

So far after around 10 hours in, I love the way this RPG game plays. You are basically nobody, no action hero, absolutely not invincible, quite the contrary. You have to eat, sleep, you start your skill on level 0 and the progress isn't that fast. You can't even swing a sword properly, fighting is kinda mini-gamish where you just don't click the mouse, you have to aim, block, parry, do combos and all while your stamina is getting lower and lower. If you get hit and start bleeding you can just die if you don't tend to it. You can eat foul food and die from that either. You can die from meeting a robber on your way.. And the craziest thing is that the game autosaves just sporadically and whennyou want to make manual save game, you have to have (and drink) a special potion. There is no magic, it is supposed to be like real-life middle ages set in real-life lore/history/with many (f)actual history information baked into the game.

I can easily see why the game is so successful. And I should have played it long ago.

Hades II (PC/Steam Deck): I wasn't playing many video games when Hades launched but I was aware of it and I was a fan of Supergiant Studio's Bastion (2011). And Hades did get a several hours of playtime last year (only 2.5 hours per Steam), the reason it didn't stick is that I didn't really give it the focus necessary to buy into its world.

That is not the case with Hades II (20.5hrs per steam): damn this game is clean.
✅ phenomenal voice acting
✅ darkly vibrant world brought to life through beautiful artwork
✅ hot but tastefully executed character designs
✅ a narrative structure that melds perfectly with the roguelike loop
✅ a very clean gameplay loop that is rewarding every time.

Just now at this 20 hours mark does it feel like farming runs are required for progression. All weapons are unlocked and I've reached the big bad once (and I think I was close to taking him down). But I'm well aware tha tthere is much more to this game.

I don't know how much longer I will keep playing it but October has a lot of stuff I've been waiting for (and Hades II wasn't one of them):

• Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles releases this week but will be delivered to me on Friday.
• Ghost of Yotei also releases this week but will be delivered to me next monday.
• Ninja Gaiden IV near the end of the month.

Edit: also forgot Hollow Knight: Silk Song I beat the fourth boss earlier this week but Hades II took over the rest of my week.

I finished everything in the original Hollow Knight except for the Godmaster content, so I figured that was a good point as any to finally start Silksong and I'm really glad I beat Hollow Knight first because the sequel comes right out of the gates swinging. Traversing the map is more demanding on platforming skills, regular enemies have more health and varied speed/attacks, and even early game boss attacks do 2 masks of damage. It is without a doubt harder than the first game, which is great for HK/metroidvania veterans that want a challenge to keep them engaged, but very rough on relative newcomers to the genre. The game can afford to tell a more clear story and plot this time around since Hornet can actually talk, so there's a good amount of dialogue with NPCs so far. I haven't reached the Citadel yet but I've been having a pretty good time, definitely struggled with a few bosses already but I'm still missing large parts of my arsenal so I figure fights will get more interesting once I discover more of those.

Hollow Knight

Decided to give this another try and got to the regular ending pretty quickly.

The runbacks and maps were the reason I first bounced off years ago, and they remain the only things I don't like about this game. Everything else is great.

1. Boss runbacks aren't too bad. Once you pick up the basic mobility moves, it's generally pretty easy (albeit still dull) to get back to the boss at full health.

2. Corpse runbacks are more annoying.

   Unlike in Dark Souls, you can't just empty your pockets at every bonfire and ignore this mechanic. There are ways to mitigate loss / move your corpse, and in principle you could just keep running back to the shop as soon as you can afford something, but those all require you to leave whatever you're doing and go somewhere else, so it's really just a different kind of flow-breaking runback.

3. I do understand what they were going for with the map system (i.e. making exploring with no guidance the default whenever you're in new territory), but the implementation just feels kind of clunky. If I missed a turn-off because the map didn't get updated in real time, I'm just going to come back once I get to a bench and the map does get updated. Hiding the map or my position on it does nothing to make the game more interesting or challenging other than the initial challenge of finding the map guy in each area (which I actually do like). Why not have the map / compass be automatic for the area once I've obtained the map? Heck, even an additional compass item per area like in Zelda to show my location and the other icons would be fine.

Other thoughts:

• The difficulty for the bosses felt very reasonable throughout. They all have a pretty limited moveset that is easy to read and punish, and none of them hit as hard as soulslike bosses. Being able to heal after getting a few good hits in also feels great and creates a nice risk/reward mechanism that fits right into the flow of the fight.

• The controls feel super tight. Your character has no inertia at all, so you can stop and start movements / jumps on a dime. My only complaint is that the magic button is the same as the heal button when they could have easily been split between RB and B, so you can accidentally use magic when you mean to heal during a busy fight. Not a major issue once you get used to it, though.

• Goes without saying, but the visual design is outstanding. The storytelling, while sparse, is also easy to follow (although like the rest of the game, it does crib from Dark Souls pretty hard).

Silksong

Not as big on this as many people, but enjoying it overall.

• Art, music and atmosphere are all still great.

• Still dislike the map system and the runbacks, which are only dialled up further in this game.

• Needing basically the whole silk bar to heal is rough. I'm not using the silk arts because being locked out of healing immediately doesn't feel like a worthwhile tradeoff.

• Bosses are pretty fun and none have felt cheap or unreadable so far. I especially enjoyed the 'duel' boss early on. In contrast, the gank gauntlets are just annoying due to the high enemy HP and feel like they should have been mini-bosses instead.

• I could take or leave the quests. They're not egregious, but I'm playing a Metroidvania to explore and find cool stuff / bosses to fight. Constantly checking quest boards so I don't miss out on useful upgrades puts a brake on that, and finally reaching an area only to find an NPC who wants me to grind for 10 rat tails, gather 5 herbs or deliver packages from A to B instead of a cool reward feels like a bummer.

PARANORMASIGHT

Horror VN / adventure game.

It starts out normally enough with the protagonist helping his friend investigate some local folklore in 70s downtown Tokyo, but it suddenly turns into

The presentation is reminiscent of old adventure games like the Famicom Detective Club series, with the player being able to look around each scene and check / think / speak with other people. You can also move the camera around with a 360 degree field of view (kind of like Google street view), and this is often used as part of the gameplay - e.g. if you turn your back on someone, they might do something while you're not watching / things might appear, disappear or change when you look away.

Seems pretty interesting so far, although it has a fair number of jump scares which some might not like.

I'm about 16-hours into Robocop: Rogue City and it feels like I'm approaching the end. So far, it's been a great experience--minus a couple of parts--and honestly it feels like an authentic "roleplaying" game if that makes sense. The developers did such a good job with making the player feel like Robocop that I can't help but really roleplay him, where I choose responses to dialogue that I think Robocop would choose and even though there's gun pick-ups to use, I just use Robocops pistol, because that's what feels right.

I also think it's pretty interesting how you can tell this is a budget game (I mean, I picked it up for $5 and it's not that old) and you can really tell how the developers tried to be economical with their assets. Reusing one particular song throughout the game, reusing a lot of the same environments but altering them based on time of day or what's happening in the story, reusing previously used enemies, etc, etc. I just find all of that really interesting and frankly, charming. It doesn't feel like the developers were being cheap, as it feels like they achieved what they had in mind with the resources they had and didn't try to go overboard with anything and end-up making the whole game inferior because of it.

My only real complaints are the following: UE5 optimization is absolutely awful. The game runs abysmally on Steam Deck, fairly mediocre on my laptop with an A3000 (roughly a 3060) and sees constant dips from 85ish FPS at 1080p High down to 40 on my desktop. I primarily play on my laptop around medium settings and there's this issue with the Global Illumination where if it's on anything but "Ultra" lights flicker and dance, looking really bizarre. I've come to just cope with it because I don't want to take the further performance hit on setting it to Ultra with my laptop. The other complaint is the ED-209 fights; they're boring. It wasn't terribly fun the first time I had to fight it and it's worse the next two times I needed to. ED-209 is just a bullet sponge, the fight isn't interesting in anyway and I don't need to use any new skills or tactics to take it on. In fact, I found a way to cheese it and ended-up using that for the second and third of the three fights; basically hide around a corner and try to get ED-209 stuck on some terrain, all it'll do is shoot missiles at you, which are easily dodged and then you can simply unload on it for 5 minutes until it's over. Very boring. But, very much a rare low spot in an otherwise very fun game.

Now, being that I can't play RoboCop around my kids (with heads being exploded and everything...), I finally started playing Baldur's Gate - Enhanced Edition; I've put maybe 20-hours into it previously on a different character before finally petering out, but I'm ready to try again now and I'm hoping I can make my way through it this time. So far, I'm still very early in the game, my characters only just beginning to hit level 2 after clearing out the Nashkil(?) Mine; I'm now exploring a little bit more and trying to tackle some of the party side quests before getting back on track with the main quest. So far, it's a lovely game and I've been finding it surprisingly addicting, which I really didn't expect. I've been overall pretty sick of D&D for many years now, but there's something exciting about going back to something pre-5e, which I feel is pretty mediocre as an edition and I really hate a lot of the lore changes they've made in recent years that I feel have really watered things down.

Lil Gator Game
This has proven to be a nice way to unwind for a couple of evenings. It starts out as a nod to the Zelda games old and new. But themed around children acting it out in the playground.

Horizon Forbidden West
After 100+ hours finally finished the main story. I really enjoyed Zero Dawn, so seeing where the story went next was something I was looking forward to.
Some of the story beats I worked out ahead of them happening, but others caught me off guard.
All in all enjoyed it, I've got the DLC to play next and since this one properly takes place after the main story, unlike the DLC for Zero Dawn, I'm curious how much it will further set up the eventual third game.

Like others, I've been playing Hades II. I managed to hold off on playing during early access and only picked it up when it hit 1.0. I haven't played Hades 1 since 2021, so this is pretty fresh for me right now. God I missed this series. This game has all the charm of the first one, but the gameplay and storytelling has leveled up so far. I'm only four hours in (and have died repeatedly to the second boss, who's design is PHENOMENAL), but this is a special game already. Everybody who likes action games, roguelikes, or greek mythology should be playing this right now.

The other game I've been putting a lot of time into is Tokyo Xtreme Racer since that also hit 1.0 last week. I did play 5 hours of this one in early access, but played another 6 since Thursday now that the rough edges are rounded out a bit. Honda is finally in the game, so I'm very happy. Some other brands like Lexus were added and most of the existing brands got a number of new cars added, so the roster feels pretty complete now. I souped up an S2000 and also just beat the second chapter, so I now also have a GC8 impreza to match my GC8 I have IRL (though this in game one is MUCH faster with all the upgrades lol). This is such a great game to just burn an hour on when chatting with friends on discord. The gameplay is simple and reminiscent of racing games from the late 90's and early 00's. It has a ton of charm and is EXTREMELY Japanese, but the simple gameplay and the quirks are what keep me coming back to this one. This will be my go to game for a while when I just want to burn an hour on something simple.

Finished two games last week: Duck Detective: The Secret Salami and Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping.

They're mystery games somewhat similar to the Ace Attorney series. At least the investigation phases of those games. So maybe closer to the Ace Attorney Investigations spin-offs. But each Duck Detective game is a singular case.

Anyway, both are humorous and light-hearted. In The Secret Salami, the Duck Detective is investigating a most dastardly heist: who's stealing an employee's lunch out of the staff fridge! But there is a twist in both where something more serious is actually going on behind the scenes that the Duck Detective stumbles upon and decides to bring to light.

Super short games, like a few hours long at most. Easy to play, though some of the deducktions do require you to think just a little bit. I also didn't come up with that myself; the game calls them "deducktions." Because, y'know, he's a duck.

After that, restarted Coffee Talk Episode 2: Hibiscus & Butterfly. Just a chill visual novel where you play a barista making drinks and listening to your customer's problems with work, social and romantic lives, among other things. Super low-stress. Loved the first game, which I've talked about before, so just finally getting back into the second one. Just as enjoyable so far.

I've been playing Disfigure, Nimrods and Lords of the Fallen.

Disfigure:
A free Horde survival on Steam, that is actually quite fun. I haven't won a run yet, but I do tend to go back everyday for a run or two. The gameplay isn't the most interesting, but it's pretty simple fun - you just gotta aim where the enemies are, if you see them (otherwise aim.in a direction and hope you him something). What do I mean by "if you see them"? Well you have a vision circle around you and you can only see enemies in that (unless you damage them, then they flash up for a few frames). There is upgrades to increase or decrease the size of it and other upgrades with effects affecting enemies in or outside of the circle. And it doesn't even have in-game purchases. If you want to support the Dev(s), you can buy the ""DLC"" on steam for that.

Nimrods:
Another Hordesurvival, this time sadly not free. You play a "Nimrod" (Basically just the characters of the game) and explore a world for upgrades and resources, while trying to survive endless hordes of enemies. The resources you gather can then be used to actually unlock the upgrades you find on the map, once you are back at base (where you go to when you fail at the "surviving" part or when you win). When your run ends (for whatever reason) your weapon will get brought back to base and you can give it to your drone, that'll follow you around and use the gun you gave it (but it still has to level it up over time, as it won't start at full power). There is currently 3 characters that all have thier strenghts and weaknesses, two of which you ha e to unlock. And levelling up, doesn't just give you the upgrade, they drop a pod into the battle field, that you have to collect. It can evem crush enemies (there is a steam achievement for that happening 100 times in a mission). The gameplay is similar to Disfigures, but you can actually see the enemies.

Lords of the Fallen:
A soulslike that kind of reminds me of a combination of Darksouls 1 and 3 with dual wielding (powerstancing) and the Sekiro parry. It also has that Umbral lantern, which is one of my favorite festures of the game. It's just such a cool idea, even though I tend to forget to use it. The lantern can bring you into an Umbral world, where there might be paths that aren't there in the normal world. The bosses weren't all that challenging so far, with the exception of the boss required to reach the hub and the boss required to get into the Ice area. But I'm having fun with it, even if I tend to get lost or not find where I am supposed to go.

I can say, I enjoy all three of these games and can recommend them to people that enjoy thier respective Genres. I enjoy both Horde survivals and Souls likes.

Pinball Spire

This is a neat little hidden gem.

It’s a contiguous-world pinball game, meaning that when you beat one table, you ascend to the next one, and you can fall back to previous ones. There are minor deviations from this path, but it’s mostly linear. The tags say metroidvania but I wouldn’t go in with that expectation. It has some of the elements of a metroidvania (new powers over time) but its map is very constrained so there’s no real exploration.

Anyone wanting a full pinball metroidvania should look no further than the amazing Yoku’s Island Express.

The powers that you gain along the way will help you to overcome certain obstacles or make certain things easier. Early on you gain a time-slow ability that shows the ball’s trajectory. This helps immensely with lining up specific shots. A lot of what you have to do in the game requires precision, so if you’re not a pinball wizard (I’m not) then it can be tricky to do without the ability.

Even when I was missing shots or falling back to previous tables, I didn’t feel like I was wasting my time. The game has an XP system where you gain points for hitting different table elements and following different paths. As you level up, you gain more mana for your powers, which lets you use them more often. This acts as a nice counterbalance for skill, so even when I was spinning my wheels, I was gaining overall mana which would make it easier to hit the shots I needed to hit.

It took me just over three hours to beat the game, which I think was the right length. It does what it sets out to do and doesn’t overstay its welcome.

Silent Hill f

I'm confused about the reception of this game. I've seen in described as a "masterpiece" multiple times and it's a fine game, but after about 6-ish hours I'm already bored of the gameplay loop. I'm wondering if the bar for the franchise has been so low, for so long that anything competent passes for a masterpiece.

As a huge horror fan, I'm not finding the game all that scary, outside some jump scares and some decent enemy design. Not every horror game needs to be the scariest thing ever, but I would have hoped the combat/exploration/puzzles would pick up the slack. It's all decently well executed, but nothing all that special.

For what it is, the atmosphere is great, but it feels like there is no variety. You go back and forth between foggy '60's rural Japan, to foggy '60s koi pond Japan, and that seems to be it? I'm wondering if the SH franchise just isn't my thing, because I felt a similar way to the SH2 remake, where it lacks any interesting environment changes. I would consider the SH2 remake much scarier than SHf, though.

Speaking of variety, you literally fight the same 3-4 monsters reskinned monsters, which is a huge pain point. From what I've read, the second half of the game introduces even more combat, but with larger numbers of enemies, which REALLY makes me not want to try to finish the game. Again, the combat isn't bad but the idea of it becoming any bigger part of the game sounds like a slog. If they aren't going to add more enemy variety, then they should have had you fight less of them. By my 10th encounter with the limping puppet things, I just didn't care anymore.

Anyway, I'm really not trying to say its a bad game, but I probably would have waited for a sale to have picked it up. I'm super confused how anyone could consider it a "perfect" game.

Like many others, I have been playing a lot of Silksong. I have put about 65 hours into the game and am at 96% completion and deep into act 3. I wrote a bit about my experience with HK and metroidvanias on the Silksong thread (here). Overall, I am quite happy with the game. My biggest gripe right now is that I desperately want a Godmaster-esc DLC because I have so many crest/tool combinations I want to try out and no more bosses to face to do so. Jotting down some quick thoughts:

• Music - As good as HK in my opinion. Very small gripe: they made the music slightly too quiet by default IMO. Once I tweaked my sound settings to make everything else a bit quieter I am happy with this part of the game.

• Biomes - Improved over HK. I really love the map and areas of Silksong. Diversity in color and types of areas, the layout of the world makes sense generally, the biomes transition well from one to the other. My only complaint is that they put a water biome in the trailer, and that area is not really in the game (hard to explain that more without spoilers). In general, I wish more metroidvanias had water biomes.

• Movement - Holy shit is this better. The base movement feels better, they added a sprint so I am not mashing dash the whole time I am going anywhere, they added more movement options that allows for some more interesting platforming. And some of the new movement options make movement and combat bleed into one another in a way I find very satisfying.

• Combat - Again, holy shit is this better. I like that the dash-attack combos into your down-air, making for more interesting combat options that "hit them with your nail until they die". I like the silk spells more than the spells in HK and I use them infinitely more than I did spells in HK. I like the addition of tools. I like a lot of the "charms" (or whatever they are called in the new game I can't remember). I love the crests. All of the changes build to a game where I actively want to try out different combinations of crests and charms and tools because of how dramatically they change your play style. Flying enemies were a fucking nightmare in HK. They are one of the few things I look at in HK and go "this actively made me miserable and want to stop playing for a while, I wish Team Cherry didn't do this." I am so happy that Silksong gives so many more tools for dealing with them. I still hate them, but it isn't absolutely miserable anymore.

• Bosses - This is probably the only area I think Hollow Knight beats Silksong. Silksong has equally high highs and low lows with boss fights. The big differences are (1) Silksong has a lot of meh to decent boss fights that drags the average down, and (2) HK has great boss fights where it matters the most. The Hollow Knight and Radiance are incredible final boss battles. They are really high up there on my list of favorite final boss fights. They are the right difficulty that it really feels like you are fighting the final big bad of the world. Beating them gives the sense of success, accomplishment, adrenaline, and joy that you should feel beating the final boss of a game. Comparing the Hollow Knight to Grand Mother Silk, I felt way better after beating the Hollow Knight than I did Grand Mother Silk. Though to be fair to Silksong, when I fought and beat the Hollow Knight for the first time, I didn't know there were multiple endings. I thought I was done. Silksong I already knew there was an act 3 and knew this was just a pit stop on the way to the REAL final boss. And in Silksong's defense, some of the best bosses in HK were added as DLC, so there's always a chance it will surpass it in the future with some good DLCs.

  • Side tangent - Grimm and Nightmare King Grimm are the best boss fights ever and if you want to disagree I'm ready to fight over it (ง'̀-'́)ง

• Visuals - Same or better. I will never get sick of the hand-drawn 2D artstyle of HK and Silksong. Its great.

I'll give my unpopular opinion: I kinda wish the game was harder. I understand it is already a difficult game and making it as hard as I wish it was would alienate most people, which is why I am not upset or complaining about it. I'm the unreasonable one here. It's just sad because the ways I want the game to be harder are not easy mods. It isn't easy to mod in a way to extend the platforming sections to be longer and more difficult. At least not compared to like, making enemies do 3 damage instead of 2. But I still love it for what it is and the way it is. I'm excited to wrap up my first play through and start my second with a whole different play style.

I have been playing a fan translation of Spice and Wolf on the Nintendo DS. It was supposed to be more of a joke as I played it around friends the first time since anime adaptation games tend to be hit and miss but it has got a surprisingly fun game loop where you buy stuff for cheap in one village and sell it for profit in another. It has got a time limit but I'm not sure of if it's very difficult to fail. I could look it up but part of these kind of DS games for me are that I know next to nothing about them usually. I think I am gonna read the light novels.