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

I'm still playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance on Steam Deck. It is really great RPG without unnecessary fantasy elements. I'm around 60 hours in and I still have plenty to do.

If you are interested in history and want to live in a period of time in Czech kingdom, this is the game for you.

You start as nobody and make your way up the ladder, both in your skills/power and in society. There are many way to approach your current situation (quests) and it's up to you to take some action - sometimes it's brute force, sometimes persuasion and it can also be stealth. Quests are very variable as are characters ypu meet.

I knew it will be a great game right away when they started on Kickstarter. I even pledged there for digital copy. I only got to play it after almost 12 years since. And I didn't know how much I was missing.

Out of the blue, a friend bought me Battlefield 6 because he wanted someone to play with, so we have been doing that.

I hate it. It's way too chaotic and fast-paced. To be fair, I don't play player-versus-player video games anymore. Generally haven't for years now. My idea of "fun" in a video game is no longer sweating it out in a virtual dick measuring contest against other people. I'm much happier playing exclusively with other people against semi-competent bot opponents. (That's why I play a ton of Insurgency/Sandstorm these days.)

Battlefield 6 is just a massive clusterfuck of "run around and kill people until you die". It isn't fun. It's the FPS equivalent of brainrot. The "most video games are porn" that Over-Quoted Game Developer quoted about.

I also think there is something about the design of Battlefield 6 that makes it feel "antisocial". Even when I did well in a match and my team won, I still didn't have fun or feel good. The game feels like work rather than play. I didn't feel that way in the past, when I still regularly played PvP FPS games. Maybe it's because I'm older now and my tastes have changed, but I really do think the design (and monetization) of these games has ruined them to their core.

For example: it's stupid and bad design that you have to endlessly grind to unlock new weapons, attachment, gear, and other "toys" in the game you already paid (at least) $70(!!!) for. The in-your-face monetization and "buy this DLC to unlock future DLC" nag screens every time you launch the game don't help either. This is a dog shit "experience". Battlefield 6 isn't a video game made for me, it's an "experience" made for executives at EA/DICE/whoever-makes-Battlefield-these-days.

So even though I've put way more than two hours into the game now, I'm going to request a refund and maybe Valve will do me a solid and rid my library of this piece of shit.

Oh, I almost forgot to talk about the PvE in Battlefield 6:

It doesn't exist.

At least, it doesn't exist anymore than a superpositioned qubit exists, because DICE is constantly fucking with the "experience" and no one knows what's going on. Apparently the sweatier players are mad that people could (gasp!) exclusively play against bots and still earn full XP and progress and, you know, generally unlock things in the video game they already paid for, without fighting against real people.

So now some PvE "servers" (all of which are actually just hosted by DICE, not actual server admin people???) no longer give full XP because go fuck yourself but other servers are exclusively XP bot farms where only one player is allowed in at a time because go fuck yourself but other servers say they're PvE and give full XP but they still let up to eight players join on each team because "PvE" doesn't mean anything anymore because go fuck yourself and did we mention you can buy a subscription to our RedSec DLC pass to get DLC for your DLC when that DLC releases at an indeterminate date because go fuck yourself?

Bought Blue Prince on Steam's Black Friday sale. Man I am hooked! I played it all weekend. This might be a problem is 😂. I'm in my late 30's, so I don't play a game all weekend too much anymore.

There's so much to find and solve. A lot to keep track of. At first it was just trying to build my way through to the end. Also solving the puzzles in each room. The deeper you go, the more there is. Puzzles requiring multiple rooms, lore and some mystery hidden throughout, etc. The more I play, the more I need/want to do. The game does a good job of putting in explanations and strategies, but you need to find them. It's not hard once you know how to get that help.

I don't even mind the RNG. Once I found certain rooms and unlocked somethings, I realized there's more I can do to help with the RNG aspect.

I'm only 15 hours in, but I'm probably going to be putting in a lot more. I'm more excited about figuring out the puzzles and lore than getting to the end. So it's safe to say that I'm loving this game.

I went home this weekend for Thanksgiving, so I've been playing a bit of games on my phone!

Luck be a Landlord is really good for subway time and time killing time, and I managed to beat Floor 20 a couple of times this weekend. It's a bit too addicting though, I'm still playing every once in a while. I can't figure out some builds though, and I feel like there's a bit less variety here than Slay the Spire and other similar roguelike deckbuilders. (If anyone has any more suggestions that I can play one handed on the subway please send them my way)

In the physical space, I brought out Captain Sonar for our Thanksgiving gathering. It's really fun for people, and a bit higher stress than most board games because it's in real time and hectic. I love these kinds of games though. Real life battleship pretty much!

Now that I'm back in my apartment I've been making a run or two of Ball x Pitt and Megabonk, but I've been looking for more games to fill my last week of funemployment.

I am playing Persona 3 Portable for the PSP via emulation on my phone. I have a cheap (but pretty good) controller. I put my phone inside it, and then it looks very much like a Nintendo Switch. It's Persona, and therefore an enjoyable and cozy turn-based experience. The characters shoot themselves in the head multiple times during combat. It is how they liberate their Persona (basically their skills). Since the 2000s, I gave up on the game multiple times because of that. Due to mental health issues. Playing the game became a milestone to me. A demonstration that I am now well.

Mahou Shoujo no Majo Saiban / Magical Girl Witch Trials

Death game / murder mystery / courtroom VN.

Thirteen girls are imprisoned in a mysterious mansion and told that they have been isolated from society because they are witches in the making, doomed to eventually awaken to an irresistible compulsion to kill.

This game received a fair amount of buzz in Japan (and seems to have sold well enough for the developer to immediately announce a bunch of other games), so as a death game / social deduction / VN tragic, I thought I'd check out what all the fuss was about.

1. First off, the game isn't shy about wearing its influences on its sleeve - It's very transparently Danganronpa wrapped in a Madoka Magica setting and aesthetic:

   • Each character has their own unique (in this case, magical) skill which often plays into the mysteries, although not everyone is keen to reveal what theirs is.

   • Everyone is forced to live under a specific set of rules about when they can be outside their rooms, when food and water is available, when they need to shower and sleep and so on. Failure to comply with the rules is punished by the obligatory death game animal mascot.

   • When a murder occurs, you have to investigate, gather truth bul- er- items of evidence and then use them at the ensuing witch trial to make your case, following which - you guessed it! - a vote is taken on who is to be executed as the culprit.

2. The visuals are nice and colourful and the writing is decent enough, with plenty of mysteries about the setting and the various characters established right away and a snappily paced introduction that doesn't drag out the tropes of the genre (although it has a lot of those). The murder mysteries also feel pitched at an appropriate level of difficulty.

   However, the music and prose are quite understated and the game doesn't feature anything like the off-the-wall humour, bombastic visual style or frenetic electronic soundtrack of its inspiration.

3. On the gameplay:

   • The trials largely work the same way as in Danganronpa. In each round, the characters hold a timed discussion with certain lines having highlighted keywords, and your job is to work out which of those to rebut or support. The main differences are that:

     • You don't respond directly with evidence - instead, you choose the keyword, the response you're proposing to make from a list, and then the evidence to support it where needed. I rather like this approach, since it's easier to tell whether you actually agree with the proposed input before making it.
     • There's no life bar and (as far as I can tell) no fail state as long as you answer correctly within the extremely generous time limit. I can imagine people being divided on this, but I've always thought that a life bar system was a bad fit for games like this since being forced to do a runback is just a waste of time when you already know the answers.

     Unfortunately, you'll still occasionally run into the issue common with this genre where you know the answer but aren't sure how the game wants you to frame it, particularly with more complex answers involving several different elements.

   • There are decisions you can make outside the trials too, but most of them seem to just be a choice between a swift death and continuing the story. There's even an option in the settings (on by default) where it'll show you whether a choice leads to a game over.

   • A couple of minor annoyances:

     • When you get important new information, the game will notify you that your journal (containing information about the clues, characters and setting) is updated, but there's no option to go directly to the page that got updated, and nor is there any marker for the pages with unread new info. It's not a big deal as long as you're paying attention to the text, but a bit frustrating if you want to read along as it gets updated.

     • Sometimes, the answer isn't in the evidence file at all and you have to actually recall the fine details from the story to work out the solution. It would have been nice to have a timeline or case summary feature where you could look up that info in case you forgot.

     • The game doesn't support controllers, which I find to be the most comfortable way to play VNs. However, it does let you scroll forward with the mouse wheel, which is the second best way.

Ultimately, I feel like I should like this game more than I actually do, since the premise has promise and I don't miss the bits of Danganronpa's gameplay that they actually cut like the skills, the shooting, the minigames and the awkward 3D exploration, but the lack of any original elements to replace those things leaves it feeling a bit bland and without its own identity. Still, it might be worth a look if you're into the genre.

(Note: This game currently only has Japanese and Chinese language options, but should be available in English shortly.)

Also finally finished Final Fantasy VII Remake.

My issues with the combat aside, I came away feeling quite good about the game:

• The more I played, the more evident it became that this was a game made for people who already played and loved the original (and its spin-offs) - to the point where a lot of the last third probably just feels like nonsense if you haven't got that context. Now you can argue about whether that's a good way to make a "remake", but the part of me that played the original as a kid and thought "What if they made a whole game that looked as cool as these FMVs? That would be so sick!" can't help but resonate with that, because yeah, this is that game.

• Although I could take or leave a lot of the new story in the base game, I liked Intergrade. I couldn't stand Yuffie in the original game, but the voice acting, expressive character animation and additional backstory all add up to make this new version much more likeable than just some annoying rando you run into on the world map. Yeah, she's still fundamentally the same dumb kid, but that naivety is actually utilised by the story and given contrast by the addition of Sonon. I hope they give Vincent a similar treatment.

I continued the seamless co-op playthrough of Elden Ring. We eviscerated the last few bosses and beat the main game in just under 8 hours. We’re about halfway through the DLC now and are also doing Malenia for fun since she’s my favorite boss.

I’ve also been watching lots of Elden Ring speedrun and randomizer content lately. Over the weekend, there was a 6v6 team USA vs team France randomizer relay race that was a ton of fun to watch. I do want to eventually try out the randomizer for this game, but I have to get a bit better, first, before I’m good enough for that.

My friends and I also started up another Minecraft server. We have about 8 of us playing regularly and we found a pretty nice starting area with a good mix of biomes and caves to explore. I definitely don’t know how to do advanced things with redstone and all that, but I do like decorating my house and our little town and exploring caves and stuff.

One game I want to recommend to my fellow Tilde gamers is Blippo. It's a lovingly crafted homage to late-night channel surfing with funny, quirky, and thought-provoking skits about what our human culture would look like from a parallel world. If any of this interests you, give it a try! I plan on writing a more detailed post about it later for the community.

Another game I can recommend for fans of The Binding of Isaac, Nuclear Throne, Enter the Gungeon etc. is Morsels. The presentation, music, and game feel has me coming back for more and more and more.

Finished My Time at Sandrock last week. Fun game overall, would recommend it to any cozy gaming enjoyers. That said, it is not without its flaws, especially on the technical side of things. I've experienced more bugs in this game than in any other game in the past year, ranging from the merely annoying (like NPCs vanishing in front of you or teleporting into the sky, making it impossible to complete a delivery or finish a quest on that day) to the completely game-breaking (I had 2 softlocks in total that forced me to ALT+F4 and restart the game). The base-building is also very barebones and disappointing. I hope they can work on these things in their next game, which I'm definitely looking forward to.

I tried Where Winds Meet, which recently got its western release. The game is F2P but feels like a full-value game, which is already impressive enough. All the fundamentals seem really solid. Unfortunately I had to uninstall the game after a few hours because the combat just doesn't really work well. The game is heavily parry-focused like Sekiro, but unlike Sekiro enemies have a heavy tendency to just... miss you with their attacks, even when you're standing perfectly still. This not only makes you miss your parry but also allows the enemy (whose attack takes them sailing past you) to get a free hit in on your back because the game's movement inertia makes it impossible to turn around that fast. I found that very unsatisfying and frustrating, especially since I was playing on the hardest difficulty, where one or two missed parries are enough to end you.

Right now I'm playing Saleblazers, an underrated gem. I rarely see anyone talking about it. Even when I'm trying to look things up on Google, the results are scarce at best. It's a very fun game though, with a unique twist on the survival crafting genre. Too much useless loot? Too many crafting resources? Just make a shop and sell them!

It does have quite a lot of jank, especially where combat is concerned, but it's an indie game in active development, so I'm sure many of the kinks will be ironed out eventually. For now I'm having fun with it.

Two of my favourite moments: picking up a giant claw and clobbering people with it. Also, in order to unlock a crafting recipe from a book, you take the book in your hands... and then eat it.

I finally beat NGU idle. Screw that idle game and the three years it took for me to get to the ending. While the only Steam achievement I don't have is the level 69 equipment one, I can't be bothered to start another save and spend a few mins getting it.

Sailing came out in Old School RuneScape and it's honestly a mixed bag. Port tasks are boring, and the skill's early game is a slog. But the skill does improve by the time you unlock Barracuda Trials and the game world expansion is much appreciated.

Other than Sailing, my main focus has been trying to level up my combat stats. Unfortunately I had to abandon completing Perilous Moons because having 60-63 in your melee stats is nowhere near enough to fight the bosses needed to complete that quest. Another thing holding me back is the 25 or so Herblore levels I need for Moonlight Potions to give me super combat potion stats.

Finished Outer Worlds 2, wanted to like it, but could not recommend it.

Somebody said, "What if we made Fallout again, only this time it's cowboys in space?" Interesting at first, but it just never really went anywhere. The characters aren't engaging or real. They are shallow and uninteresting. The story feels like there's no point. You really aren't rooting for anyone, because nobody is worth rooting for. Some parts of the gameplay are kind of awful, like when you're in a shootout, and your own NPCs keep pushing you as they run around. They'll even push you off a cliff.

It has a lot of interesting elements that never really come together. The different factions are all kind of awful in their own way. There's the evil-ish corporate overlord cliche, the evil-ish religious overlord cliche, the other evil-ish religious fanatic cliche (and the other other religious fanatic cliche), the oppressive evil-ish 1984-style overlord cliche, and it just goes on like that.

It's pretty much a lot like Fallout, which was a great game, but that's exactly the problem. They're offering the best gameplay 2015 has to offer, but Fallout was better.

For being a space game, you don't actually do anything in space. You just get cutscenes going from one planet to another. Then you're back on the ground again just like the last area, only this time it's snow planet, or crystal planet, or whatever. It kind of all feels the same.

When you're on the ship, it's filled with things like hanging potted plants which would be perfect for a home base but have no business being in a spaceship. This pretty much sums up the game. There are a lot of stylish ideas which are so stylized that they don't work and just don't fit together at all.

There's nothing really wrong with it, but it got old fast. It's just a game that fails to reach it's potential. Most mid game I have ever played.

It's been a tough month for me, and I haven't had a lot of time to play anything. But I did manage to finally play GRIS on the Switch (I bought it on sale over a year ago). It was such a lovely game, and exactly what I needed for an emotional boost. It's short (I think I finished the game in 2 sittings), but that's kind of what I needed. A bite sized experience meant to tell a story and uplift. :)

With Desert Bus behind us for the year, I was able to put some time into Bittersweet Birthday. Another ultra-obscure one! It's a whimsical 16-bit-styled indie JRPG in which you play as a young boy who awakes with amnesia in a destroyed underground facility, as well as the same person through long interactive flashbacks as he regains his memories. It reminds me of a mixture of different games so far; the conversation-driven narrative mystery (I'm not entirely sure what's going on yet!) is perhaps a little Undertale-ish, though I'm getting undertones of impending tragedy more typical of more recent games. There are no random encounters; the primary gameplay are real time boss fights (think CrossCode but no magic or skill tree) and environment-puzzle-based or inventory-based tasks. There's a charm/notch system, but instead you equip regained memories for combat benefits (or penalties, if you're that kind of player). I'm enjoying it so far.

Previous

I have played a few hours of Sektori now, and I really love it.

It's a 2D twinstick shooter by a finnish developer who used to work for Housemarque, the studio behind Returnal and the upcoming Saros. It's very intense, looks great, features a fantastic techno soundtrack, and I feel I'll be playing this for a long time.

I ended up heading back to Bannerlord now that its dlc, War Sails, is out.

It is hard going back to the base game, but I think the naval combat is gonna really shine once the patching settles and folks play around with it. It's very fun building a fleet, customizing the ships a bit, and taking on folks out in the world. I had an encounter against a group of corsairs, in which during a rainstorm we bobbed across the waves firing off fire pots and burning their ships down. In another encounter, I took a medium galley sort of thing and rammed the shit out of a little bandit boat so bad folks flew off into the sea. It's amusing too, watching a bunch of constantly-yelling dudes swim like mermaids in full plate as they try to get back up on the boat.

On its own it feels a little rough, in that the ai kinda isn't that good and they don't do a lot of complex maneuvering, but having seen what folks can do modding the game it's got me very excited. I cannot wait for a proper, combination land and sea siege. Despite it being in their trailer it isn't actually in the game, but I've noticed some overhaul mods mention managing to put that together.

In the meantime though, I've gone back to my mod pack while I wait for stuff to get worked. After that campaign I did earlier in the year, I spent some time just putting more mods together, in my eternal quest to see how big of a ball of systems I could duct tape together. With a new character, I went out into the world and hunted wild game to get some money together. The big ticket hunt was a pack of bears, that I ...BEARrly... managed to bag thanks to finding some traps. After trading the hides I hired some guys, and trained em up by beating the hell out of each other in an arena pit. For a while we roamed around, and hit it big on a group of deserters. When big battles happen, the survivors of the losing side will sometimes desert, and we scored some excellent equipment ambushing them in a forest. With some more money in hand, I went back to the city we trained at, made friends with some alley bandits, and worked out becoming a gang boss.

While I got started, the wider world turned. Different clans got scooped up by the kingdoms, others made their own minor factions, and mercenary bands went around hunting down bandits and assisting different armies. Commanders, after winning big battles would sometimes execute their rivals, creating new tensions between kingdoms. Border regions got real spicy, and sometimes those skirmishes would evolve into broader conflicts as the kings decided, you know what its time to settle some ancient scores. Each year a little message comes up regarding the Tournament of Champions ("LETS GET READY TO RUMBLE"), where the top lords all over the world head to a randomly chosen city and duke it out for big prizes. One kingdom ended up in the beginnings of a civil war, with one group of nobles deciding their king was no longer legitimate. Two other kingdoms revived an ancient grudge and are fighting hard over territory. New clans arise now and then, with the possibility they'll become their own factions or join with the kingdoms.

I'm hopeful all this stuff will make its way to the new version of the game, because omg I need ship fights in an environment that turns this much. I know folks tend not to like the idea of a game depending on mods to be really good, and they're right to think it can sometimes be very tedious to manage, but honestly having seen what's in War Sails plus what already got done for the base game, yes please, I will suffer some tedium if I can have all this activity and be king of pirate island.

It's hard for me to know if I was even enjoying it due to how tense and stressful it was, but I out ~14 hours into the Resident Evil 2 remake this past Thanksgiving break. Not sure when I'll get back into it... ended a bit after Golem Guy enters the picture. Right when I start getting comfortable with the level of stress imposed upon me until then, he shows up and just raises that to be off the charts! Beyond that, it's a very pretty game. Well, as pretty as a blood-and-guts affair can be, anyway.

Oh, and also started playing the Hello Kitty Island Adventure collect-a-thon, which despite the frustrating controls that come with playing these types of games on a damn phone (let it be known this is the only game I have on my phone), it's been pretty enjoyable. Dunno if it's enjoyable enough for me to continue the Apple Arcade subscription past this trial, though.

Holder of Place -
It's a $10 card/team like autobattler (while looking nothing like it sooooorta like balatro) dripping in flavor and has a decent pile of strategy to it. Easy recommendation if you think it sounds remotely good. There's a free, old, itch demo that I haven't played, but main game has 4 different "classes" of sorts that all change the gameplay, with some game mods that actually change how you approach your runs. Great time killer that's priced accordingly.

Lamest answer on here, but my pal's new girlfriend got him into it and now my gaming buddies have switched from Counterstrike to this.

*Crap, I meant Fortnite.

It's fun - sugary, gross, kid infested fun. I like the concept and remember playing other titles that uses this encroaching wall mechanic. Any suggestions on which is best?

Other than that, we're still playing Age of Empires 2. It'll never die.

It's been out for years at this point, but I'm finally finishing out my playthrough of Baldur's Gate 3. I'd gotten it when it first released and got midway through Act 2, when general life and indecisiveness stopped me from playing. Now I'm back in and nearly finished with Act 3. As others have said, Act 3 loses a little bit of the shine that the other Acts had, it just feels kind of unfocused. Topping out at level 12 and having no way else to grow other than acquiring more loot, and some of the storylines feeling somewhat lackluster or unresolved just kind of takes it down a notch.

Still an amazing game that I wish they'd just convert to an engine for running tabletop RPGs online. Like, just make a standalone sandbox tactical setup where a GM can drop in whatever monsters they want in different environments with the players, and that's it, that'd be such a step-up above Roll20 or other VTTs. Maybe some capabilities to edit environments or they could just have AI automagically convert 2d maps into 3d, it'd be f'ing amazing. They wouldn't even have to write a single-player campaign or anything, just create a bunch of assets and let players make up their own stories.

Heretic's Fork

So the game sounds cool: you play as a manager of hell with an ingame computer choosing an employee for the run with the goal of punishing sinners and preventing them from reaching the map center. It's a draw 4, 6 energy roguelike deckbuilder(?) where you're powering up your chosen towers/garrison units by continously fusing 2 cards of the same tier to a higher tier for better quality cards.

Then there's the bucket list of flaws. Due to stapling turn-based card game UI onto tower defense, there's nothing to do during the enemy waves which take a while even on fast-forward; the wave times are long enough that it's boring but also just short enough that you can't do something else instead of just having it on another monitor as an idle game and a full run is like an hour according to the in-game timer. There aren't any synergies to really build towards with the entire thing being a min-maxing dps check: it's a simple flowchart of did you choose towers or garrison units and then which element of holy, unholy, or hellfire you picked at the beginning and then picking cards that buff X type by Y%, rinse and repeat. If there are cards more complex than that, it's hidden behind a crapton of meta-grinding to unlock new cards one at a time or some of those more obtuse achievements cause I've won a run with every character and there isn't anything besides make DPS numbers go up.

I dunno, I feel like I heard some hype around this game and it didn't do it for me.

Forest Heroes

This is also a roguelike deckbuilder, one I chose to fill out a fanatical bundle after playing its demo, and it's surprisingly fun enough that my MtG/farm-sim brother is borrowing it a lot from my steam library. In this case, it's one of those games where your tower is on the left and you have to keep summoning units to advance to the right and take down the boss. 1 mana gen per second and a hand size of 4 that instantly redraws to fill whatever you play, along with a discard & redraw hand option on a 5 second cooldown. Each run has 9 stages (the patch notes say a 10th stage was added, but I don't seem to have it unlocked yet?) with each round only being a few minutes each so runs are relatively quick. Post-stage rewards are like Monster Train where you pick one of the two paths for the reward types on them, but each stage also drops a unit/skill/artifact from defeating the midbosses that immediately take effect.

Can't make any judgements on strategy yet though considering my bro has been spending way more time on it than me. Mostly the principles of tank, damage, and mana efficiency for cycling apply here and of course picking up synergies and taking stuff based on what they do rather than rarity. It feels on the easier side, but I'm only on curse level 2 and I've already had a few close shaves from my frontline collapsing from lack of tankiness or the lack of mana to set up that frontline in the first place.

Well that said, the Cool Red Panda is always a good choice to me. Its stats are inflated for a 3-cost which easily lets it singlehandly tank earlygame, it's a special unit so it avoids deck clog, and it permanently removes itself from the deck if it dies.