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

So I've finally learned it's better for me to treat hard video games like a marathon and not a sprint. Usually, video game releases are a bit of a social event, so it's always good to be caught up with everyone else. Unfortunately I'm not as good at video games as most people, so trying to keep up is impossible with some games.

All this to say, as of January I'd reached Act 2 in Hollow Knight: Silksong. Choral Chambers started playing, the game opened up a bit and gave you a huge new, pretty beautiful area to explore, and by this point you're decent enough at the game that the boss battles are more "okay, just sit down and lock in" rather than an impenetrable barrier.

I know once I reach an area named Bilewater the pendulum will swing the other way but for now I am okay with these fleeting feelings of bliss I have towards Silksong.

Thanks to @kfwyre and the Christmas Giveaway, I've been enjoying BZZZT, or Celeste in which the self-actualization has been replaced by robot slavery. It's enjoyable precision platforming, but this scrolling adventure story fails to inspire the player motivation needed for this type of grueling genre.

I was in the mood, so I've been playing Resident Evil 6, the one that broke the series. It is fascinating how Capcom spent $50 million+ to have 600 people work on something that could be a topic for a Red Letter Media BOTW video. But it's not all bad. I truly hated Chris' campaign while playing it only to realize it is the best one of the bunch:

Truly transcendent material for an RE game.

I've just lost momentum on Satisfactory. As I've previously shared here, it's become my go-to game over the Christmas period. This year I started over fresh as there has been some new content released since I last played and made it as far as Phase 4 before the thought of building oil infrastructure gave me enough of a repulsion that I realised it was time to stop playing again.

I've simultaneously been playing through Coromon, thanks to a recommendation from @Carrow. I've been really enjoying it and have found it to be one of the better entries in the Monster Tamer genre. This one leans perhaps a little too hard on it's Pokémon roots, but I've found the story to be more engaging than most of it's inspiration's entries, and the difficulty feels about right. As far as creature design goes, I think it's fantastic.

I had been playing Adventurey/Explory games, but I've been feeling quite mentally overwhelmed recently with how things in life are going and I've pretty much only been playing Civ 6 in the past week or so. I appreciate that it's a game I can just jump into and depending on how much time I have, I can take a lot of turns or a couple and then call it a day. Then, when I come back I find it easy to pick up where I left off from without having to think, "Where was I? What was I doing? What's the story? Who's that dude?" It's been a perfect game for where I'm at mentally.

One recent anecdote from yesterday was that I got surprise attacked by my Northern neighbor while my army was in the South fighting off Barbarians so I could continue to expand. This caught me off guard and the enemy immediately started moving towards my Capital. Luckily I was Suzereine of the nearby City-State which had a pretty enormous military. I had enough money to Levy them and suddenly had half a dozen Warriors and two Archers, which I moved to defend my Capital with. I managed to beat back the invaders and proceeded to their nearest city, ultimately crushing the defenders and taking the city for myself.

Finally the enemy capitulated (they may have tried to buy Peace earlier with token offerings, but I'm nothing if not vindictive) and offered to let me keep the City, as well as pay me off. I still have plenty of grievances since they attacked me first and I'm off scott free with another city, so I'm pretty excited about that.

I finished Expedition 33, I loved it, and now I don't want to play anything anymore forever.
I was playing some Call of Duty before. After E33, COD seems ugly, gross, and noisy.
I was playing some Dead Cells. Maybe I'll go back, but the motivation is lacking right now and I'd just be grinding to get better and unlock boss cell 4, then 5, and I find 3 to already be very punishing for my skill level.
I tried Cyberpunk 2077 this weekend. I found it overwhelming and too combat-oriented. I was hoping for a more stealthy slower paced game (think Deus Ex).
Should I maybe try a Final Fantasy game? I have not played one since FF 13 on the PS3. Maybe a Persona game? Last one I tried was P3 on PS3.
Any other suggestions are welcomed.
On the other hand, a break from any games is never a bad idea. I am reading a book I quite like so far, and it would just mean more reading and less gaming.

Finished Skate Story recently. Highly recommended if you enjoy street skating games, unique aesthetics, and experimental electronic music.

Playing The Alters and knew nothing about the game. Happy to find out it's a resource management game as I haven't played one since Wanderlost. So far so good though the voice work is a bit stiff, then again I completed Indiana Jones and the Great Circle recently which is phenomenal when it comes to the acting.

Back into Animal Crossing with the latest update. I grabbed the Switch 2 update as well, can't say I notice much of a difference. It has been fun starting with a fresh island and seeing how the introduce mechanics from the new game perspective versus the periodic updates that I experienced the first play through.

All in all, it's been great. I love Animal Crossing in winter, the snow effects make everything so cozy. My son has been really into the game as well.

As for the update content itself, haven't really gotten to any of it yet except for the ability to use your homes inventory for crafting (which is great). Not super excited for the hotel as it seems like the other DLC reskinned. The Lego furniture has been super cool though!

I've been going through another playthrough of Stationeers, this time a brutal Mimas start with all ices removed from the map. The challenge with Mimas is that the usual power sources of solar and wind are not viable, so your power infrastructure is a lot more involved and active than the rest of the maps. Iceless on a vacuum world means you're initially scrounging for every bit of gas you can save, and it's essential to get a good greenhouse up in order to do oxygen conversion and generate biomass for volatiles. I'm pretty well established now and am enjoying it a lot, I still have a few more advanced bits of gas generation and material processing stuff to set up before I start to call this playthrough complete.

Bought the early access of Starrupture which launched last Wednesday and it's probably my first proper factory-style game (not including Minecraft tech modpacks, though I've made some mighty conveyor systems there). So as someone with no experience with Satisfactory, Factorio, etc, I'm having a pretty good time exploring and redesigning my production line to be more efficient while trying to keep it as neat as reasonable.

The most unique feature of the game is the regular ruptures that occur, which is when the star in this system briefly scorches the entire surface of the planet you're on, killing any living creatures not in the safety of a habitat and overheating all the machinery outside the range of a functional cooling tower. There are certain resources available only shortly after a rupture occurs, and vegetation and water quickly regenerates after 10 minutes or so, along with the resources that appear during the planet's lush stage. It's an interesting feature so far, giving a very clear indicator of when resources respawn and adding some tension to exploration while encouraging the construction of little safe houses across the map to ensure you're not totally without nearby shelter. However, it does get annoying when I'm in the middle of just working on my megafactory since it interrupts me for several minutes, usually when I'm in the middle of building or planning.

There's also combat in the game, with the enemy being some crawly aliens of a few different varieties, and currently there's a pistol, AR, shotgun, and machine gun available as self-defense options. The gunplay's fine and doesn't feel jank, the enemies go down pretty easily and usually rely on sheer number to present a threat. It makes exploration a bit more interesting and sometimes a few waves of them will attack your base after you've upgraded your base core once so you need to take a bit of time to set up some basic defenses there too.

Currently the game has a decent level of polish but it is a fresh early access title, so naturally there's some bugs that need fixing and not a huge amount of content in terms of story progression, but the factory building alone should last you a few dozen hours if building bigger, better factories is what you're into. Lots of potential here.

Came back to World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Anniversary yesterday as prepatch went live. Debating whether or not to fork out the money for a level 58 boost, level up a shaman in the three weeks before the Dark Portal finally opens, or to just shelve the idea of playing. TBC is a lot more comp-dependent when it comes to endgame PvE, and since Bloodlust/Heroism would not yet become raid-wide buffs, it would make sense to play a Shaman for the almost-guaranteed raid spots, as each group would need 2 Shamans for Kara/ZA and 5 for every other raid for buff coverage.

On one hand, I never got to experience BC endgame first time around. I was a dumb teenager halfway through secondary school when the expansion originally launched and unfortunately I played on Turalyon EU Horde and had to deal with a lot of really toxic players and guilds who eventually bullied me off that realm by the time I was halfway through Wrath.

But on the other hand, I currently work in a temp job, do karaoke at least two evenings a week and feel like I'm not in a position to treat WoW like a full time job and dedicate 3 - 4 evenings a week to playing. And I don't think Burning Crusade is one of those expansions where the average guild will have content immediately on farm, unlike Vanilla which is practically trivial by comparison. Also, everybody and their mother are playing the two new races (Draenei & Blood Elf), so each of their starting zones are heavily packed with new players and the servers are genuinely lagging.

The Case of the Golden Idol / The Rise of the Golden Idol

Point and click deduction puzzlers.

The art style takes a bit of getting used to (all the characters look like they've been microwaved a little), but the story is fun and the gameplay is solid.

The games do feel a fair bit easier than others in the genre as:

• in addition to deducing the names of the characters and what happened in each scene, there are usually a couple of other small puzzles to solve which, once solved, become useful references for the more difficult ones; and

• it's chapter based, with each scene forming part of a larger narrative. You'll be able to recognise characters who reappear in later scenes, understand what their likely motives are and so on, to the point where by the end, you're relying more on your instinct for where the story is going than the actual visual clues.

Both are quite short and each can be knocked out in a day, which feels about the right pacing for this type of game.

When I finish a long/time-intensive game, I like to play a few shorter games in a different genre as a kind of palette cleanser.

Right at the start of the year, I hit credits on Dragon Age II, so I've since turned my attention to a few other games: Deliver Us Mars, INDUSTRIA, Medal of Honor (2010) and Blue Prince. Up next will be Dragon Age: Inquisition.

Before I touch on the other games, I want to write a little bit about my experience with DA II and the Dragon Age games in general.

I almost didn't play this game. Early last year, I played Dragon Age: Origins for the first time and honestly, truly did not enjoy it. It had so much of what I love in RPGs (my favorite games of all time are KOTOR and KOTOR 2), and I felt like I could draw a straight line from DA:O to the success of Baldur's Gate 3*, but I struggled to get through this game. The combat system was frustrating as hell to me, and I realized pretty late in the game that my preferred class (Ranger) was just about the least interesting or engaging class of character, and it was too late for me to feel compelled to start over with a new character. I eventually convinced myself to play through Awakenings with a Mage and had a much more enjoyable time, plus I'd read that DA II had a simplified approach to combat, so I finally gave it a shot.

Playing DA II as a mage certainly felt better than playing DA:O as a ranger, but oh my god was I tired of the same cities and same dungeon layouts by the end. It was extremely apparent by the second act that this game was developed on a rushed timeline. I've read that it was initially conceived of as DLC to the first game, and it would've been far more successful that way. It's a short game compared to DA:O, but it felt like one step forward in combat and two steps back in everything else for me. I think it's kind of a miracle this franchise has the reputation that it does.

Moving on to what came after:

Deliver Us Mars: I played Deliver Us the Moon a couple years ago and mostly liked the way it looked more than I enjoyed playing it. It's a simple narrative game with puzzle elements that reminds me of Tacoma but I felt that Tacoma was more successful in executing its narrative. Deliver Us Mars had some technical quirks (the climbing was unbelievably frustrating in some places) and frankly looked quite ugly to me compared to its predecessor. The narrative was way less compelling to me than even DUTM. You play as the daughter of the primary antagonist from the original on a mission (with your sister and two other astronauts) to learn about the fate of your father and potentially return him to earth to face consequences for his actions. The game really wants you to sympathize with the protagonist's desire to reunite with her father, but fails to make even the remotest case for sympathizing with his actions. You are an adult in this game and were a child when he left the moon. You don't seem to have emotionally matured enough for this mission, quite frankly. So, there's kind of a disconnect between what's unfolding and what the game is pushing you to feel. Truthfully, everyone kind of sucked as a person and I was just looking forward to the credits rolling by the midway point.

INDUSTRIA: The setting and early gameplay reminded me a little of Bioshock, with some Atomic Heart's eastern European setting mixed in. The game itself is about two hours. There's the hook of a story that is basically hand waved away in the end, and ultimately this feels like a proof of concept more than anything. Supposedly a sequel is coming, and I assume that will be a fully fleshed out game, but we'll see. There are 5 weapon types and even fewer enemy types, and that's about all of the variation you're gonna get.

Medal of Honor (2010): I'm about halfway through this. It's been a long time since I've played a straight up modern war FPS, and this hits the kind of campaign I like. Short levels, straightforward missions, no open world, no backtracking, very little need to manage ammo consumption. It's just mindless with a little story thrown in, and I appreciate that.

Blue Prince: I'm very early in this game. Like day 3 or 4. I have a couple notes jotted down, but I'm still getting the feel for what I'm supposed to be doing or looking out for. I'm doing my best to avoid looking anything up about this game and want to see how much I can learn and uncover without any outside help.

I have been having great fun bouncing between two games that I'm admittedly not very good at!

Fellowship

This one really brings me back to the glory days of WoW. I have wondered if my fond memories of running dungeons with my guildmates were colored fully by rose-tinted glasses, or if that kind of gameplay is actually just fun. Turns out, the formula is great. I always played a healer in WoW, and Sylvie fits my style. It's been a lot of fun getting geared up and learning new mechanics in various dungeons. I even got a few of my buddies from back home to spend an hour a week playing. It has been wonderful.

Deadlock

I have played a lot of DotA. But not recently. The game is practically unrecognizable to me nowadays, which is quite sad. Anyways, playing this game, the third person shooter is so well suited for the MOBA gameplay that I'm surprised no one else has tried. I am having a blast, and I am absolute garbage at the game. I feel like I'm always low on player damage for my team, so I think I need to stop farming and start fighting. I've been playing a bunch of different heroes and haven't found my favorites yet. They all seem to have so much character, it is wonderful.

I was off work last week and have been playing Rune Factory 4 for the Switch. I've been playing farming sims since N64/PSX era and have previously played Rune Factory 3 on the 3DS but never finished that. Rune Factory differs from Harvest Moon in that it has combat and is more combat focused than Stardew Valley.

Overall it's really enjoyable. There's levels for literally everything, walking, sleeping, eating, bathing, farming, as well as the usual suspects like sword, spear, magical elements like fire, water, earth so it's really satisfying to see the levels go up and trying to maximize experience. All of them contribute towards your overall primary stats such as HP, RP (stamina), and strength.

The characters are pretty good and the villagers interact with one another frequently with low-stake sub-plots being triggered causing events amongst certain villagers to happen. They feel more fleshed out than Stardew Valley but the stories in Stardew are a bit more mature from what I've encountered. Characters in Harvest Moon and Stardew felt more siloed than this.

Overall the core gameplay loop has me hooked, winning the festivals, beating up monsters, growing my crops for money and levels, and crafting new equipment is all right up my alley. The game is longer than I anticipated though, I probably have ~80ish hours on it and I'm waiting to enter the last stage of the game. I'd recommend it to any fans of the genre with the caveat it's rather anime which may be a turn-off for people.

I've been playing Afterimage, another gift from the generous @kfwyre (aka "Background Image" in the giveaway). It's a huge/vast Metroidvania of Chinese origin, with typical mechanics and an art style that combines Ori-like painterly locations and anime-style characters and NPCs (complete with outfits that are very extra). The production feels fairly high budget for this type of game, with most cutscenes voice acted by professional voice talent in chinese, japanese and english. In japanese, protagonist Ree is voiced by Ishikawa Yui (2B, Mikasa, Violet Evergarden). It's expected to last 30-40 hours.

The movement and platforming are fairly snappy and satisfying, especially as you unlock your various typical metrodvania movement skills. The world of the game is crammed with little platforming challenges and many, many hidden chests, items and other rewards for exploring every nook and cranny. There is also a wide variety of monster types with different attack mechanics and behaviors, as well as many bosses and mini-bosses. In general, it's a nice game to play, so much so that two friends who saw me playing it already (separately from each other) picked it up.

I have mixed feelings about the combat. Afterimage features a set of mechanics you might expect from an RPG or Roguelite, without being either of those things. There are lots of different types of items, including consummables, armor parts, accessories and weapons with different attack mechanics. There is a skill tree/grid, too. But for most of the game, Ree has little to defend herself with from the typically very fast and diverse attacks of boss monsters. There is no parry, no dash through, no i-frames, and there tend to be attacks you can't jump over, so the best you can do is mind where you are and try to jump back from attacks (or duck). On the other hand, if you have some care to pick up most of the goodies in the map as you run around, Ree is quite tanky and hard to kill. So even though the game is presented as souls-like, I quickly realized that the best strategy is exactly the opposite - don't fret any hits you take and just beat the shit out of every boss as quickly as you can! This also means that most of the "gameplay" you get out of most of the game's many items is when you decide whether to use them or not. Once I decide an item is just worse than what I'm using, I never touch it again. Very Diablo-esque, I guess! At least nothing here is getting in the way of my enjoyment of the rest of the game.

I also want to rant a bit about the story and the UI. Let's combine these! First red flag: On multiple occasions, there are mismatches between (english) written dialogue/quests, spoken dialogue and map locations. There are also occasional spelling mistakes. Careless translations? Unfortunately Afterimage's plot is complex, rambling and non-linear, so these can get in the way. The game has a map system that explores as you go, but is largely useless on its own as the world is very large and nothing is marked on it except NPCs (which are very few), checkpoints and the odd background feature. You are expected to complete the map yourself with a set of provided unlabeled icons (most of which are of dubious usefulness). Quest item requirements for "cooking" quests are likewise a problem - they are displayed only as an icon, so you have to pore over the long list of enemies in the "bestiary" tab to find out which one drops an item matching that icon (assuming it's even there).

All these little design flaws coalesce into, once again, what I believe is not the outcome the developers desired. Typically you have a dozen quests running at the same time, and with the confusion about what is what and unclear item requirements for doing things or crossing barriers, it's more efficient to ignore all the chaos of icons and quests and just play the game in the expectation to eventually run into most of what you need. And at times, to be at a complete loss regarding where to go next! At one point, a friend who played the game before had to un-stick me by reminding me of a portal I had unlocked several hours earlier (not marked in the map or quest log in any way). Currently I'm fighting a boss that kills me in a cutscene immediately after I beat it (who doesn't love that?) I probably need to go do something else before fighting it (what?)

The game is still plenty entertaining and great value if you're considering buying it. I've never wanted to quit. You can challenge yourself by trying out less than ideal playstyles and loadouts, and the combat does get a lot better in the late game, after finally unlocking the better dash and other combat-relevant skills. And if you're confused, there's always the Internet!

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