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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.
I played Type Help, and while I liked it, my overall take is “meh” because
spoilers
I found the “ending” to be a total disappointment. I also did not like that Helen’s (assumed?) disappearance was never explained or seen, considering everyone else’s death was witnessed (though I accept in-world reasons for why). The writing in general was sort of poor, but not so bothersome to be unplayable. The hangman puzzle’s unsolvability irritated me extremely.
I did however love the “frustration” of the game, the friction of not being able to immediately discern who or where or how many. In that regard, I highly recommend. But be sure to save if you play on mobile, as the save file is linked only to the browser’s cache; I had to restart after spending some time away from the device.
Hopped back on Monster Hunter: Wilds after a half-year break to check out the performance improvements and Gogmazios and here's my impressions after a dozen hours and a decent number of hunts:
Performance is definitely a little better than before on my machine (5600x, 3070, 32gb RAM), especially in the camps where it used to sometimes tank to below 20. Now it'll usually sit pretty solidly between 50-70 on mostly medium settings, which still isn't ideal but it's acceptable.
Gogmazios is a cool fight, pretty straightforward once you learn the mechanics of it though it's not hard to cart on it if you're careless or underprepared, especially if you're using a ranged weapon. Last phase gets pretty cinematic, a little slinger-heavy though.
Gogma artian upgrading adds yet another layer of RNG for min-maxing. On the one hand, it gives people super rare god rolls to chase. On the other hand, all the monster weapons are totally left in the dust. Artian IS the endgame, and even when the expansion rolls around I expect they'll have some upgrade for artian there too.
I still hate flying wyverns (swaxe main). Stupid rathalos land you dumb lizard, I only have so many flashpods to knock your ass to the ground.
Also picked up The Alters on sale and I've got about a dozen hours in that too, currently mostly through Act 2. I'm enjoying the writing so far, mostly the interactions between the alters themselves. It's an interesting thought experiment, seeing how you'd interact with different versions of yourself that went down different paths in life, and I think the game does a reasonably good job of portraying that. As for the gameplay outside of the narrative stuff, it's a pretty simple but polished resource management game with a little bit of exploration and some hazards. It's definitely not for everyone but having put a lot of hours into Frostpunk 1 and 2, it suits me just fine.
Monster Train 2
Deckbuilding roguelike similar to Slay the Spire. I played the first one for about 130 hours. It's been a great side game to play while eating dinner or watching a show. I've only got a few runs down in the second game. I have somewhat mixed feelings at this point.
It's nice having new mechanics, new heroes, new cards, etc. But it's not intuitive yet, as I often have to check things like "what does Conduit do again?? And have I unlocked any cards that synergize well with it?" So it requires a bit more mental energy to play.
Also, the changes from the first game feel a bit like "just make the numbers bigger and add more things to keep track of" sometimes. I.e. power creep. And I don't like that the final boss fight has 7 waves, as it drags on IMO.
But that's an early impression, and I'm sure that will change over time. I've just unlocked the third clan and started my first run with them, so I've only seen a fraction of the game so far.
Sifu
Third-person brawler with tight combat. I realize now that watching this game doesn't really do it justice. It feels really fluid and satisfying to play. Like Mirror's Edge but focused on martial arts instead of parkour. Singleplayer action games have not grabbed me recently, but I think I'll stick with this one. It's basically a fighting game, but one that's not weighed down by old tropes (saying that as a casual fighting game fan).
It's the kind of game where the presentation doesn't really matter, because the core mechanic is so good. But the presentation is actually cool too. Revenge story set in China (it feels like Hong Kong specifically, but apparently it's not, and there appears to be some discourse around that and other cultural issues on the web), that provides a fitting atmosphere without bogging down the gameplay.
I played just an hour or two so far, so these are early impressions.