So, since Thursday I have done nothing (gameplay wise) but play Mechwarrior 5, because I finally got around to installing the VR mod. It is absolutely incredible. I have been unable to tear myself away from it, nor stop thinking about it since I got it working and I'm a person who doesn't really like MW5 nor really care for VR. My VR headset generally sits in a cabinet unused for long periods.

But my God, I can't help but play this and just be completely enraptured, awed and absolutely stunned by how much more amazing MW5 is, in spite of its flaws (of which all are still true), just piloting a mech in VR and feeling like you are there. Playing my campaign, piloting my Griffin and looking over to the left of my cockpit to see my giant shoulder mounted missile launcher is unlike any other experience I've had in gaming up to this point.

The modders put in incredible work, remodeling great swaths of the game, including cockpits, the initial Home screen, the star map (which is awe inspiring to navigate) and all kinds of other things. The HUD, aside from stuff like your crosshair and heat, has been completely moved to be diegetic, so when you're in your mech, you're looking at screen readouts on your actual dash/cockpit panel. Your map, your weapons, your Lance, enemy targets, mission info, everything. Often, I've found myself in a mech I'm unfamiliar with cockpit wise and I have to look around to actually get my bearings and find where each of the screens are, so I can get that information as I run a mission.

Not just that, but being in different mechs actually feels different. My Griffin has this wide open windscreen where I can see around my instrument cluster, around my legs and have wide peripheral vision through the huge amount of glass. Other mechs can feel downright claustrophobic, like my little Commando's I have in my Lance, who just have a tiny windscreen in a part of the head, significantly decreasing battlefield awareness.

It's just incredible. I had been playing a lot of Darkest Dungeon 2 and was branching out into emulating Breath of the Wild again, but MW5VR has completely shut that down and I have zero motivation to play either of those games right now and simply want to exist within the Battletech universe.

One thing that is a little disappointing is that it doesn't work great with my HOTAS setup. The HOTAS itself works fine and brings an even further level of immersion, considering you can see your pilots hands on the stick and throttle, which move in-tune with your own inputs. This did make the game a lot harder for me, but it just felt so good I didn't want to stop using it.

Altogether an absolutely incredible experience. I showed my oldest, as he loves Battletech and MW5 as well and he's become similarly obsessed with it.

I've been playing Spirit City: Lofi Sessions recently. It is not something I would normally play, but it's been a great tool to throw on the monitor and force myself to go do chores or what have you. Very simple but effective, especially with the spirit animal hunting mechanic which creates a great introductory pull to explore the different functions and cosmetics of the game early on. It's hard to find a productivity game that gives you enough of a distraction to be a game while also stepping out of the way for productivity to happen. I feel like this does that so well in a very ambient way.

Put another dozen hours or so into the Fractured Utopias DLC for Frostpunk 2 and now that I've tried out each of the new hubs and skill trees for all the factions I gotta say 11-bit did a good job with this one. Just one faction's hub and skill tree can drastically change city planning and policy, but the fact that you can also invest in the opposing faction's hub and skill tree at the same time adds a whole extra layer of options and complexity since investing deep in one faction will inevitably anger and stall progress with the other, but both have huge potential benefits to take advantage of. Out of all the factions, the one that I had the most fun with was probably the Venturers (libertarian hyper capitalists basically), where my personal goal was to create an economic bubble by artificially driving up goods demand as much as possible. My approach on the run very quickly went from "I have a heatstamps problem" to "How can I make this a heatstamps problem", and true to life, you CAN solve most problems with overwhelming amounts of capital.

Think I'm done with FP2 again til the next DLC comes out though, I've gotten way too much mileage out of it already. Title update 4 for Monster Hunter: Wilds recently dropped and supposedly they fixed some of the devastating performance issues, so maybe I'll shake the rust off my artian switch axe. Can't believe they're adding even more layers of RNG to artian weapons though, Capcom really wants people to be rolling the monhun slot machine forever.

Our podacst on roguelike/lite games just wrapped up its 2025 GOTY episode, revisiting the best ones we played for the year.

In short:

• Blue Prince: Great, unique experience that felt quite grindy at the end. I only barely made it to Room 46, and after hearing theres like 60% more stuff to do still, leaves me somewhat interested, but also terrified.

• Caves of Qud: Our 2025 GOTY, I was a BIG Qud hater when I first tried it in 2023. I've come around on it significantly and now it's one of my favorite RPG games of all time. Incredible ending and payoff to such a one of a kind thing that it is.

• Deadzone: Rogue: I also bounced hard off this initially during a Steam Next Fest demo, thinking it was super boring, but I had a great time with it overall for the podcast episode. A new major update adds a new final act to the game (an epilogue?) that I'm quite excited to check out now.

• Elden Ring Nightreign: Maybe the most unexpected entry for the year, I'm super glad it exists but it feels like the first test of the concept of a FromSoft Smash Bros "gangs all here" idea. Whatever the SSBM version of Nightreign that comes out in the future is, I'll be first in line.

• Hades: An all time classic, so long as you're on board for 100 hours of visual novel style family drama. Not for everyone, but I loved every minute of it after maybe the first 2 hours, which were very confusing for me.

• Halls of Torment: Maybe the best Survivor-like out there? A great mashup of Diablo 1 aesthetic with bullet heaven gameplay. Incredible value for at even the default, hilarious price point of $6.66

• Noita: Incredible game and maybe the most user friendly version of something like a modern NetHack. The spell and wand crafting system seems like an impossible challenge to learn, but fumbling with the daily practice mode helped a lot.

• Path of Achra: Brilliant design and aesthetic for a solo-dev game. I love the dark, Conan-like fanatasy setting, the music, the variety, and most importantly, the search box. Being able to search for keywords to figure out what will synergize with your setup is some galaxy brain level design and I wish it was more common.

• Spiritfall: Our #1 hidden gem game of the year. The mashup of Smash Bros gameplay with roguelite mechanics is like a peanut butter / chocolate combination that I desperately need more of.

• The King is Watching: Very interesting design and approach to town building and auto-battler combat. Very tense fights and great art direction.

It's become a tradition for me to play through games in December. I had a really old code for Gamepass
available, so I working through games in that catalog that interest me.

Ball x Pit

I was looking for a "brain-off" game, had heard very good things about Ball x Pit, and decided to give it a try.

I can see what people enjoy about it, but I ended up bouncing off really quickly. I think it was because it felt like my success in a run was strongly gated by RNG. When I think to other roguelites that I enjoyed more (e.g. Hades, Skul, Moonlighter 2), I enjoyed the feeling that I could beat a run with no upgrades and that the RNG acted as a supplement as I built my skill. With Ball x Pit, every run felt like I got to a point that was impossible to pass unless I got godly RNG during a run, or spent time grinding out in the city builder part of the game that I really didn't like.

It may be that "being good" at Ball x Pit lies less in mechanical skill and more in managing the RNG to get better upgrades. I definitely wasn't in the headspace to appreciate that when I played nor did I want to stick with the game to get better at that.

Metaphor Refantazio

Metaphor Refantazio has been on my list of JRPGs to play since it came out. Whenever people talked about Metaphor, it came across as one of those JRPGs that is outstanding in all areas (plot, gameplay, graphics) that only comes by once a decade.

I've put in ~15 hours into it so far, and I think my expectations going in were set so high that the mismatch with reality has dampened what would've otherwise been a great experience.

The expectation gap was probably the biggest with the plot; I was expecting a great plot, but I got a great plot for a JRPG. The distinction primarily lying with the countless shonen-isms that have made me go "HUH?!" or sigh disappointingly: main characters leaking a nation-destabilizing secret in the open multiple times, insane coincidences, Grius' asinine plan for Louis, tournament arc, etc...

This isn't to say that Metaphor's story is bad. On the contrary, the story is pretty interesting and has layers that I'm very interested in seeing through (e.g. 4th wall). I guess my issues came from expecting a story with the quality of a Breaking Bad or a Sopranos, but ending up with a How I Met Your Mother: still great with a lot to appreciate, but definitely has flaws.

On the whole, definitely enjoying the game and will probably end up rolling credits.