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

I finally rolled credits on Fire Emblem: Awakening... No that's a lie. I posted last week that I was burning out on it and was planning to skip optional content and stop grinding and main path it. That worked fine until I got to the Endgame battle. In my playthrough I pretty much neglected to level Chrom and Lucina because I didn't need them Chrom was just support for my Robin (female) and I didn't really level any of the kids including Lucina.

The final battle kinda requires a strong or at least sturdy Chrom and would greatly benefit from both Chrom and Lucina being highly leveled. I ran my head against the wall in that fight for 3 hours, realized I needed to grind levels for those two characters and just didn't have the stomach for it. I watched the ending on YouTube and am calling the game complete.

It's a fun game, but after ~40 hours I am good. I will never play a FE game on Hard Classic again. I think Normal Casual would've been a better fit for me.

Megabonk

This is currently my (quite literal) "treadmill" game in that I play it while I'm on the treadmill because it's got simple, easy input.

I love the idea of Risk of Rain 2 meets Vampire Survivors, but I don't know that I'm going to keep playing this one. Unless I'm missing something, it seems like the optimal way to play the game is to use the toggler to pre-determine an optimal build? In theory this shouldn't bother me, since in games like this you're always hoping that the randomization will give you optimal choices anyway, but I feel like it loses something when you systematize it like that. It takes away from some of the vibes-based in-game decision-making where you're locked into suboptimal choices and have to roll with them anyway.

Also, the game is sweatier than I would like it to be? For something so irreverent, it also seems needlessly hard. I've yet to beat Desert 2 yet because I invariably get steamrolled by the boss no matter how much I've put into survivability. I think this also kills my fun, because instead of the game being "enjoy building your character as you see fit" it instead becomes "build THE optimal build OR ELSE" which I can understand has appeal to some people, but it's not my fit.

I'm still going to give it a few hours and get some more of its unlocks. Admittedly, it's a great treadmill game because I'll get SO invested in a run that I literally forget I'm exercising (and then I die, go back to menu, and realize I'm sweating and out of breath). Unfortunately though I don't think I'll be getting the dozens of hours out of this game that other people do.

Monster Train

This has been a favorite of my husband for years now. He legitimately feels it's better than Slay the Spire. He 100%ed the game on Steam, only to buy it again on the Switch and do it all over again. At this point I've held off on playing it simply because I'm worried about it being overhyped.

He now plays a lot of Monster Train 2 on the TV, and he plays it SO fast that it's literally uncomfortable for me to watch because it feels so frantic (it's the same way he feels about my audiobook narration speed when he gets in my car XD).

Anyway, after falling in love recently with Inkbound (another game from the same dev team), I finally decided to pick this up.

I'm happy to report that it's great!

I don't know if I'd say it's BETTER than Slay the Spire (that's a high bar!), but it's definitely great, and I appreciate the variety that the game offers with all of the different clan combinations. StS can feel a little samey after a while, whereas this gives you tons of different options and synergies and whatnot.

Prior to playing the game I thought it was lane-based, like Plants vs. Zombies. I thought you had to simultaneously defend all the different floors of the train. I was genuinely surprised when it turns out that units move up the train linearly. I was initially disappointed (I love PvZ!) but I've learned to appreciate that design choice. Choosing how to structure your floors is fun. Feels a bit like routing enemies through a tower defense maze.

I'm only ten or so hours in (just beat Covenant 3), and I'll undoubtedly get dozens more out of this.

A few months ago, my brother and I hooked up the ol' Wii and started back in on Mario Kart. We got really into time trials 15 years ago, fighting to shave a few tenths of a second off of one another's best time, and we fell right back into it when he hooked it up recently.

Our roommate has a Switch and he let us borrow it when we started bumping into our ceilings on the Wii, so we thought we'd just continue the time trial competition on Mario Kart 8.

Never have I been more disappointed. It's not the tracks, the characters, or the bikes. Those are all good and fun. But am I to understand that we can't see one another's times and ghosts unless we BOTH pay for Nintendo Switch Online? This was a feature within MKWii, you'll recall. Four licenses available on the front screen, and you had those ghosts and one of two staff ghosts available to you for each track. But now, if I complete a time trial on my account, other people on the very same machine can't compete against my ghost, or even see my time, unless I upload it, which requires a paid subscription.

I get that our use case is a bit niche - who would want to play video games against people in their house without paying $8 a month for the privilege? - but goddamn am I tired of things getting shittier unless I buy into premium features that used to just be baseline.

Just played Near Death over the weekend. It was a fun little exploration survival game. Only takes about 2 hours to play through, but the simplicity of the game makes that the perfect amount of time.

You crash next to an abandoned Antarctic research base with your only communication a typewriter that's linked to another base a few hundred miles away. The people at that base try to help you with information as a huge storm is bearing down on your location so no one can come in to get you.

As you progress you'll have to scrounge for supplies to keep you warm in the -80 degree storm and repair parts of the base that have broken or fallen into disrepair. The base is a bunch of different sets of buildings all separated by a good distance of outside so you have to run through the storm to get to different areas for supplies and parts.

The simple mechanics are super engaging. The only danger is the cold and you have to find ways to keep yourself warm or you die. Had a lot of fun with it and highly recommend to anyone who finds that concept interesting.

Million Depth

Roguelite action/strategy game about descending a million layers underground in search of a missing friend.

The overarching structure of the game is a familiar one - plot your path through battles, bosses (with relic rewards), rest stops, shops and so on while working on a build that will hopefully get you through the final boss at the end.

The actual core gameplay is a little harder to describe, being made up largely of two parts:

1. The combat is in a small (and constantly shrinking) 2D side scrolling arena with a bunch of enemies shooting and charging at you at once, but time doesn't move except when you're moving either your character or one of your floating drone-like constructs. The constructs can be moved freely in any direction with your right stick while the character is moved with the left, so each battle is essentially a little action puzzle based around evading attacks with your character / positioning the construct to block attacks while also using both to attack the enemies. There's a lot of little quirks to the system like:

   • the constructs temporarily breaking if they take too much damage (but this can be a good thing, as they regenerate consumed parts like bombs when they come back)

   • being able to freeze time for enemies only and wail on them if you earn enough points doing risky things like just barely dodging an attack

   • the constructs having recoil when attacking (but this can also be used bounce a construct between enemies for combos)

   • constructs doing different attacks and damage depending on which part you bash into an enemy

   • being able to instantly recall your construct back to your character at a cost

   • managing multiple constructs at once

   and so forth, so despite being pretty easy to learn, the skill ceiling is quite high with a lot of options along the risk/reward spectrum depending on how you like to play.

2. The building of the constructs takes place on a grid which you slowly open up as the run progresses. As you descend, you collect building blocks which you can then arrange into a floating death katamari of your own design. Each run also earns points towards unlocking additional block types and configurations to give you even more options (e.g. assembling blocks in a certain pattern can turn that set of blocks into a gun, a bomb, a shield, etc).

   As with the combat, there are a ton of quirks with this system too - e.g. making the construct thinner allows it to move faster on that plane, while making the outline more jagged will increase its damage output. I found this part much more compelling than the combat and probably spent 2/3 of each run just trying to optimise my builds.

Overall, I'm digging it.

• For a game that takes place almost entirely underground, it's very colourful with a lot of big, nice looking sprites and weird characters and locations.

• There's also a whole bunch of complex lore (some of which is pretty dark) and even alternate timelines to play through, but you can take it or leave it depending on how much you care about that stuff.

• The difficulty is pretty reasonable, even though the small arenas are frequently crammed full of enemies and projectiles. If you're patient enough, it's possible to wriggle your way out of almost any situation through careful maneuvering and using all of the options the game gives you (there's even a 'turn around' button that doesn't move time forward and is great for teeing up last second jumps and dashes). The only times I really got stomped was when I wasn't properly reading a final boss' moves and positioning in response.

• My only real complaint is that each run takes a little too long (due to the above construct build management) and you have to do a fair few if you want to see the whole story.

I spent a good portion of the weekend glued to Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon. I'm surprised I had never heard of it before. It's like an obsessive love letter to modern Elder Scrolls games with a few elements of The Witcher 3 sprinkled in. It's also genuinely unsettling at times, with freaky little monsters and possessed peasants creeping around after dark.

I'm not big into fantasy/medieval/Aurthurian legend, so I'm not the best judge for the story, but it forces you to make difficult decisions that impact the story, which I really enjoy. It doesn't hold your hand and let you do everything the way Skyrim does. One "wrong" choice and your chance to join a faction is over.

I'm not sure how long the game is, or if the game gets worse as it goes on, but I just started the second act and it feels massive given the game file's overall size. Like Avowed, it separates the acts into different maps, only it has more areas to explore and significantly more npcs that offer various side quests, ranging from the silly and mundane to entire faction quest lines that alter the main story.

It's a little buggy and the graphics make it seem like it's 15 years old, but it's pretty good overall. I definitely recommend it to anyone looking to scratch an Elder Scrolls itch.

I've been playing Hello Kitty's Island Adventure for a while now. It's pretty fun. There's more to do than in Animal Crossing, and lot of fun side quests. It's one hundred percent advertising for their franchise, but it's a well made game, and clearly someone had fun making it.

MENACE! I'm not super into turn based tactic games, but I really vibe with menace's way of doing things and atmosphere. Picked up the early access expecting to play a bit but mostly just wait for release, but it grabbed me and had me continue until the end of the early access campaign.

Now I'm back to Helldivers 2 to help liberate Cyberstan from some cyber-abominations with my super-democratic flag-waving.

In a previous topic about Humble Choice February 2026 I picked up a few games, including StarVaders, which is a modern take on the classic retro game, Space Invaders, with a deck builder spin.

So far I'm only 6 hours in, but this might just be one of my favourite "small" games. It's not grand, not revolutionary, but it's very well done.

The music and art style are fantastic, and there are plenty of fun deck combinations to go through. It's also very fun combo-based, a bit like Balatro. Except this is a bit easier on the brain. I have found myself enjoying this game a lot while in a voice call with friends.

The full price of 28 Swiss Francs (in my case) might be a tad too high for what it is, but if you can grab it on a sale, I really recommend it!

It's currently included in Humble Choice February for 13 euros, which is super worth it for this game in my opinion.

Vampire Survivors has gotten a lot more interesting since defeating the game's final boss and effectively unlocking the endgame. I have been using the O'Sole farm to farm gold (and golden eggs), which I wouldn't recommend because:

1. It's very active. The idea is that you run around Il Molise constantly with O'Sole because his baseline ability has the unique property of healing the enemies (that can't damage you) and earning experience that way.
2. Setting up this farm is a huge pain in the arse. You need to configure settings to only have one max weapon, have every stage modifier except Random events and Random level-ups enabled, and seal every pickup except for Gilded clovers, and ensure you have three particular Arcana and one particular Darkcana unlocked, then get very specific upgrades in a very particular order.
3. Your screen is going to be constantly flashing with spell effects once you reach a criticial threshold of Area % and Duration % scaling. This is not only horrible for anybody who suffers from photosensitive epilepsy (Vampire Survivors does have an epilepsy warning on start-up for reasons like this) but also lags the hell out of your PC. I'm running this game on an RTX 3080, Core i7 and 16 gigs of RAM and I feel like I always get close to frying the rig if I farm for too long.

Old School RuneScape: I have spent just over a week playing Deadman Annihilation and let me just say... I'm not a fan.

Jagex made the frankly asinine decision to disable the ability to pickpocket NPCs in Guarded areas. While I kinda understand why they did this (there's a relic that lets you auto-pickpocket up to 28 coin pouches at a time and makes all attempts to pickpocket succeed, effectively creating a money printer and an incredibly easy 99 skill to obtain), the problem is that a vast majority of the game's pickpocketable NPCs are in Guarded zones. Half of the NPC types you can pickpocket are in East Ardougne alone and the entire city is a safe-zone, effectively making Knights of Ardougne, Paladins and Heroes impossible to pickpocket. Actually, you can pickpocket Knights if you have completed Mourning's End Part 1 and unlocked the ability for them to spawn in West Ardougne, which is a PvP zone.

To do this whilst simultaneously buffing some of the game's more egregious money printers is baffling. We literally have 5x to 8x rare drop rates, autocast High Alch, sigils that reward up to 6 times more resources from woodcutting/fishing/mining and high level mobs dropping shitloads of consumables from a global loot table and Jagex are concerned about inflation when progress moves over to the Permanent Deadman world?

I also think Deadman is a bit of an afterthought to Jagex, even now. It's telling when you look at the map of safe zones in the world and see that the only safe zones in Zeah (the Western continent exclusive to OSRS) are Kourend Castle and the Wintertodt - which was made safe in the current season.

Teamfight Manager: I think if this game remained consistent as a 4v4 MOBA management sim, rather than forcing 2v2 and 3v3 in early leagues, it would be a lot better. The game is clearly not balanced around smaller team comps with fighter and assassin champions utterly dominating early ranks. While I do like that balance patches are automatically introduced after each split to nerf overperforming heroes and buff bad ones, I think these patches aren't frequent enough to really emulate the pro MOBA experience and often miss the mark due to their automated nature.

My playthrough of the amateur league went like this. I barely won my first game, saw how busted Swordsman was and treated him as an immediate pick/ban, pretty much winning any round where I picked him. After the first split, Swordsman gets a ~66% nerf to his attack damage, yet somehow is still viable. Sniper is introduced to the game and every team picks her because she's FOTM despite having a really bad winrate. I then treat Ninja as a pick/ban because of his ability to blink on top of Sniper and one-shot her. Archer has the hitpoints to actually survive a Ninja gank and can defeat him 1v1, but nobody picks her. Meanwhile the game's myriad of support and mage heroes are basically worthless in this part of the game because they are only effective in larger team comps.

Unfortunately, the rest of Teamfight Manager centers around pot luck due to what I can best describe as braindead AI. Sometimes you will draft an assassin and dunk all over your opponent with 20 kills by the end of the round. Sometimes, your assassin will constantly focus the tank or bruiser and die repeatedly.

Another thing I don't like about Teamfight Manager is their egregious use of existing League of Legends and Dota 2 pro names in the randomly generated player names of their rosters. You'll see Dendi, Carzzy, Faker, Nemesis, Rekkles, Bjergsen, Puppey and so many others...

Agent 64: Spies Never Die: I got into the playtest for it and played through the first campaign mission to refamiliarise myself. I don't know if something changed for the worse since the demo dropped, or if A64 has always been like this, but the controls immediately put me off. There's an almost complete lack of responsiveness when you try to turn with your mouse, and excessive amounts of autoaim which trivializes the game. The only time I even used the right mouse button to manually aim was when I had to shoot locks off a door.

I really don't know how one could fuck up a Perfect Dark/GoldenEye 007 successor this badly...

Absolum (Windows)

Roguelite side-scroller beat 'em up, with coop multiplayer. I'm going to throw out an unpopular opinion: This was the best roguelite of 2025. Yes, even better than Blue Prince (which was however the best puzzle game of 2025). Yes, much better than Hades 2 (which was a bloated shadow of its predecessor). The combat is tight, the story and world is cool, the characters and voice acting is good, and it's multiplayer!

I've mostly been playing it together with a friend over the Internet, but he's mostly moved on to other newer games, so lately I've been playing alone.

I just Azra for the first time earlier tonight!

Highly recommended, especially if you liked Hades 2 but wished it had less farming and crafting.

I had this past week off work and managed to sink 40 hours into Returnal, which I picked up in the past holiday sale. Something about the game hits a happy spot in my brain. Maybe it's the permanent progression that mainly has to do with unlocking gun perks? Either way I'm really enjoying it. I beat it a couple days ago and I'm on my way to beating it again.

I kept hearing about how hard the game is, but apparently playing with a mouse and keyboard makes it a lot easier. After clearing the music playing boss in act 2, I cleared the rest of act 2 in the same run including the final boss who is insanely easy. It hasn't wrecked my enjoyment of the game. Probably the opposite as I have still had my share of dumb deaths.

Regardless, I'll probably get all of the achievements assuming there isn't some super dumb or annoying one.

I just finished Fire Emblem Engage. My expectations for the story were rock bottom, which definitely helped with appreciating some story beats that I would've otherwise dismissed. It's a really weird Fire Emblem game. I started with the Awakening era, so I'm used to thinking about my second playthrough as I reach the endgame. Engage is the first modern title where I haven't. There's no paired endings, so nothing new to try there. No NG+, so can't easily play with crazy builds. Have to unlock the DLC units again in maps I really don't enjoy. And I didn't particularly enjoy the story. So... I'm just done. Which is a strange feeling for a Fire Emblem game.

Anyway, I've now moved back to Sakura Wars for the Sega Saturn and just reached chapter 7.

Oh, and during the free weekend in World of Warcraft, I finished the bulk of the story for War Within. See you in two years again, WoW!

This weekend I played Nocturnal. Received last giveaway from @CannibalisticApple !

It's a competently made combat-action 2D sidescroller/platformer in which you control a protagonist who uses fire-related abilities to fight shadow monsters. You accomplish this by setting your sword on fire temporarily using torches found in the levels/background. Besides unlocking ability use until the fire goes out, this also provides light and makes the shadows vulnerable, and best of all, it can be used to light other torches on fire, extending your ability to explore and fight, and solving small puzzles. This game is a pyromaniac's dream as it encourages you to basically set everything else on fire as well; both kills and destruction are rewarded with a currency that can be spent in a small skill/upgrade tree.

The game looks good and has a fine balance. By the end a lot of monsters are coming at the protagonist at the same time, requiring the use of the various special abilities you unlock, but this isn't super difficult to figure out. I thought the torch-sword-torch fire spreading mechanic had great potential and, if anything, the main disappointment was that the game was pretty short at only 3 hours!

Previous

I'm a sucker for a good picross/nonogram game, and lately I have fallen into Voxelgram. I was skeptical of how well a nonogram would work in 3D, but the presentation and controls end up working really well (both mouse and Steam Deck).

I've been mildly obsessed with playing things on my Android tablet as of late and in the past week, I finished the first episode of The Case of the Golden Idol. I really loved it and I did start the...Spider of Lanka, I think it's called? But so far, only completed one scene. Not exactly sure why, either I'm ready for something different or it's just not grabbing me in the same way the first chapter did.

I've also been putting time here and there into OpenTTD. I'm a huge fan of Transport Fever (2) and have been meaning to give OpenTTD an earnest go for years now. I haven't made it very far, only about 20 years in my current map and haven't done a whole lot, but I am very much enjoying it. I do find the building a little clunky and more unforgiving than Transport Fever, but I suppose that's to be expected of such an old game.

Nina Aquila: Legal Eagle, Chapter IV: "Sacred Feathers"

So this is the next chapter in the Nina Aquila series. The first game, "Season One," had three chapters (or cases) and while they got progressively longer, they were all still pretty short. Chapter IV, however, as a standalone game seems longer than even Chapter 3. Which is mostly good.

Some of that length comes from small annoyances that add up. Like the city map has a lot of story-related obstacles that weren't present in Season One. So the streets are more maze-like. Seems like there's also a lot more back and forth between locations. Which means more traversing of the maze-like streets. The gimmick or minigame in this chapter is a bunch of River City Ransom- or Double Dragon-style fights, and there are plenty of those; maybe too many. Lastly, the MC has this Sailor Moon-like transformation (she's just a plain lawyer after all!) before each of these fights. And it's long cutscene with seemingly no way to skip. The first time was fun and funny to see, but after that, don't need to see it every time.

As far as the story, it's a lot more serious than in Season One. Which is a little disappointing. There are still some jokes here and there, but far fewer than in Season One. The tone has definitely shifted. Even the friendship between Nina and her assistant, Dylan, seemed to be strained from the get-go, with no explanation as to what happened between Chapter 3 and Chapter IV to cause that. Clearly, I just want more comedy with my game about murders!

Anyway, with that added length, there's more story. But I think there are too many stories going on. Nina's past, Dylan's past, Nina's tutor's past, the actual case and the relationships between those involved, why the city is being attacked, and -- from Season One -- who is LIVEWIRE and what is this "great game" that's being played that LIVEWIRE is aware of? I'm probably forgetting a couple more storylines, some of which also come from Season One! They're all seemingly related, but it's hard wanting to be invested in that many things at once, especially since I'm being drip-fed information. Will all or most of these be resolved at the end? I don't think this is like a 20-30hr game, but I've already put in several hours and feel like I'm at least halfway through, so it feels like I'm running out of time to see development and resolution of some of these storylines.

Obviously Nina Aquila is being released in an episodic form, but given that Season One came out in 2023, then Chapter IV in May 2025...when will Chapter V be released? This year? Next year? It's been announced, but there's no release date (it's an indie game by a very small team, so I get things take time). And will Chapter V add even more storylines? I wouldn't be surprised.

I'm enjoying this game and I will finish it, but it's definitely not as polished and tight as Season One was. I hope the ending will be satisfying. But right now, I'm a little worried.

FFXIV

The Valentine's Day special event instance is actually great! Gotta "build" a cake while avoiding mechanical mobs gone mad? Yeah, I'm in; let's do this. Glad to see the dev team add in some actual interactive content for an event, other than fetch quests or quests that are all dialog from visiting various event NPCs. I get that can't be done for every holiday event, but it'd be great to get a couple of these every year, rotated through different holidays.

Finally finished my run of Rogue Trader, just in time to start Mewgenics! My save says I played 4 days 11 hours (107 hours).

Overall, I loved the game. I love the world of 40k, and playing a rogue trader is a great way to do a self-insert in the universe, as it allows a ridiculous amount of customization, both in the player and the companions as well as the choices, while staying realistic within the setting.

The system is fun and offers tons of builds, synergies, and power. If anything the game might be too easy; I can count on one hand the number of times I team wiped, and I was playing on Daring (the middle of the 5 default difficulties), but I had gotten so powerful I was just one or two round murdering every combat, big bosses included (I did win a minor boss combat in the first turn, nevermind just the first round). That being said, it was a level of powerful that to me was fun rather than boring, I felt rewarded for my amazing builds and tactics rather than like the game was taking it easy on me. I will be ratcheting up for my next playthrough.

The characters and their story bits are fun, it seems like you get lots of opportunities to shape the story, and have a frankly crazy influence where seemingly small decisions have lasting impacts later (the option to just straight up kill companions happens like half a dozen times, if you're a sadist I guess). I will say some characters personal storylines are cool and interesting, while others kind of fall flat; so much buildup or potential, but then not a whole lot happens? I only really did the story for my go-to crew, so I look forward to exploring the other half of the cast next time.

The game is either multi-faceted, if you enjoyed it like me, or cluttered if you don't. If you're looking for a streamlined tactics game, this isn't it. There's so many different systems, and you kind of have to engage with them all to get the best juices out of it. You have the top down tactical RPG, there's also void ship combat (my least favorite), there's colony management, colony resources, storybook-style choose-your-own-adventure segments, factions to manage, and more, and they all intertwine at random times. Heck, one of the more intriguing questlines only gets discovered if you're poking around in your quest log aimlessly. Like I mentioned I really enjoyed all the bits and bobs, but if you're just wanting to run your party though scifi dungeons beware.

I mentioned it in a previous post, but both the DLCs are definitely worth the price, each adds a new interesting character, and also dozens of hours of unique quests, items, and bosses. They are also really well intertwined with the base game content, so they feel a part of the story rather than a bolted on diversion.

Ultimately, I

Warning: mechanical and minor story spoilers ahead:
In honor of my retinue, here was my go-to crew:

Lavinia - Rogue Trader (Operative/Bounty Hunter)

• Pure sniper build. She sat in the back, in one spot, and deleted the most important targets. The number of debuffs I was able to stack were insane, I could reliably strip the armor and deflection entirely off even the toughest bosses in a single round or two. Highlights include a special quest item that let me use my heroic act immediately each battle (the ability to take 30% off a bosses defense turn 1 is bonkers obviously), and a synergy with a sniper that refunded 1 AP on crit, and the officer heroic ability that let me have a full turn with no attack limit, which meant I had unlimited sniper shots only limited by my AP to reload. (I did discover there is apparently a hard-cap on attacks per turn, as they cut me off after a dozen or so, but by that point most if not all the battlefield was dead so). Roleplay she was fully dogmatic with a few exceptions, and truly believed in the emperor (even if her interests happen to coincide with the emperor's more often than probable).

Sister Argenta - Soldier/Combat Master

• During the first non-tutorial mission I hated her, she seemed so bad and I planned to replace her once I got my 7th member. A quick trip to the re-spec merchant though, and she was suddenly way more effective, and by the end of the game became my most terrifying death machine. Ran her bolter + area weapon (melta or flamer). The insane number of attacks let her build versatility stacks quickly, which made her even deadlier. Her personal quest reward sent her to the moon, and she was doing 1000s of damage by the end. If you needed a lot of guys dead, she was your gal.

Abelard - Warrior/Vanguard

• Abelard had one job: get shot. And damn, he did it well. Shield and one handed melee, plus heavy armor, made him just not take damage to anything. The AI does a lot of "get the closest dude" which made it easy for him to tank, and he had other taunting abilities when needed. Did have a funny interaction, where he has the ability to react when attacked with a shield bash... And so did the enemy he was engaged with. So they both alternated shield bashing each other for a solid minute, before they got tired or something.

Cassia - Officer/Grand Strategist

• To start: zero psyker abilities, at all. Honestly probably should've just brought Jae but whatevs. Officer is amazing, the ability to just give another turn to whoever needs it most is obviously good, but Grand Strategist was the real secret sauce. Besides it's other features, the real cinch is they always go first in combat, every time. Which combined with officer means any other person you want always goes first. Whether it was Lavinia immediately executing the biggest target, Argenta clearing out half the goons, or Abelard using his navy ability to get everyone positioned safely after an ambush, this flexibility was indispensable.

Kibella - Bladedancer/Executioner

• Bloooood. She was my highly mobile goon who went around slaughtering all the smaller chaff. Insane dodge and parry, plus a healthy HP courtesy of a skill that let her use Medicae for max HP rather than toughness, meant she could hang on her own. She wasn't a slouch at killing big dudes either, but her many many attacks and crazy movement made her much better for cleaning up hordes.

Pasqual - Operative/Overseer (Servo Skull)

• Loved his character, but he was the most replaceable, and was the guy left behind when I had to bring some other random companion for story stuff. I feel like operative didn't really jazz with his build, and it took me a while to get servo skull to feel like it did anything. Eventually though I did get him chugging, servo skull with healing and taunting aura made a great Frontline unit, and pasqual threw out debuffs and buffs and the occasional attack. I'm looking forward to next run, I want to try retooling him from the start.

Menace/The king is watching/Mage Tower/Titanfall 2/Blightstone/Hades 2 for my current rotation

I just beat Pathologic 3! I haven't gotten all achievements but I've gotten all the endings except the worst ones. Going back to get the "you didn't really do any of the main quests" ending would be too much work and I refuse to walk down The Street, so that's probably it for my endings until I go back to mop up some achievements later. I had a blast playing it! I love the Bachelor, prickly prick and all, and the writing was imo on par with the previous game. It's very fun seeing the Haruspex from an external perspective after playing Pathologic 2.

It's also a lot easier than the other two, since it's much more of a puzzle game and not really a survival horror anymore. But I think it suits this game's narrative well and I respect the devs for not just repeating the mechanics from Patho 2 when they very easily could've done so. I think the narrative they made here is ultimately more interesting for their willingness to experiment. God, I hope they get to make Pathologic 4. Fuck knows what'll be in that.

For anyone who has vaguely heard of these games but hasn't played them, especially if you were put off by their difficulty, I highly recommend giving Pathologic 3 a try (although maybe wait a few months for more bug fixes and proper subtitles to come down the hotfix pipeline; the devs have been working their asses off on these updates). You don't need to play the previous two games first -- each game is a retelling of the same event from a slightly different perspective, so you can play them in any order, and this one is much easier gameplay-wise than the others, so you can get a taste for the writing without dying immediately. TW, as there is a literal "convince yourself not to shoot yourself before you pull the trigger" minigame, but there's nothing particularly graphic.

If you haven't heard of the Pathologic games at all, HBomberguy's video on the first game is really phenomenal. I have friends who have never played any of the games who regularly re-watch this video, so it's worth a watch regardless of whether you ever touch the games tbh (and though it does spoil some of the first game, I think the spoilers in question are either totally unavoidable in any discussion of the game or signposted well enough to avoid if you're set on playing the game by that point in the video).

I picked up Fallout: New Vegas during the Steam Winter Sale and almost immediately dove in. Despite its age (15 years old now!) the gameplay is excellent. The core RPG mechanic of gaining levels and applying points to skills and perks feels much better than later Bethesda games imo. My main early complaint was that shots that were clearly on-target kept missing, but I discovered that was a product of my Guns skill being low, which adds a multiplier to the bullet spread. I've been doing a sneak/guns build for combat (cue Skyrim stealth archer jokes) and it's been feeling pretty good. I'm finally at the point where a sneak crit with the AMR on a Deathclaw can one-shot it, so I'm a lot more confident roaming around now. For social gameplay, I've really enjoyed the faction reputation system and wish it came back in future Bethesda games. It's mildly frustrating to have a questline cut off because you don't want to piss off your preferred faction, but it makes decisions feel a bit more impactful.

The game is somewhat held back by the limitations of the game engine. Dialog trees are fairly limited, although knowing what level you need in a skill to achieve success is really nice in the times you can leave and come back later. Having the physics tied to framerate means I had to lock my monitor to 60 Hz because I couldn't find any other way to cap FPS, but otherwise I couldn't hit anything on the move. There's been a few other nitpicks along the way, mainly physics engine issues and lack of weapon mod interchangeability (why can't I move scopes around?), but nothing that truly ruins the experience.

I've also been playing Hades II on my Switch so my wife can watch. She's a disaster with a controller and can't get past the first boss after dozens of tries, but she still wants to experience the story and characters, so this is our "together" game. She makes decisions about who to gift items to and who to curry favor with, and I make decisions about boon choices and how to play each run. The system worked well for us with the first game, and it continues to do so now.

I like the mix of new and returning characters, I'm very glad to see that they didn't get rid of the entire cast of the first game. Some gods have had their personalities shift a bit, but in a way that fleshes them out more rather than just tossing the old version. I've gotten to the point that I can reliably read and beat both boss options (not saying who either option is, but the ability to choose between routes is presented early on) if I make it to them with reasonable resources at my disposal. The gameplay feels very similar to the first one, just with a little "more" to it, and each of the weapon choices feels unique without having a clear best one to take every time.

If you enjoyed Hades, I definitely recommend picking up Hades II. If you haven't played the first one, I recommend playing that first - it's excellent, and there's definitely spoilers for the first game here.

Goblin Sushi

Released in Early Access this week and I liked it from its Next Fest demo. It's a roguelike conveyor belt sushi bar where you put the right ratio of ingredients to make sushi, keep the different timers going (ingredient refills, rice cooker, plate cleanup, the grill, drink mixer), and pick from random perks to keep up with the landlord's increasing rent demands. Objectively? It's a $10 game with only the first restaurant level and having any experience in roguelike synergy building will let you identify the good perks and effortlessly sweep through the 5 current difficulties/ascensions. Subjectively? I'm having fun. You get to play as a little gobbo following their dreams of being a sushi chef and kickstart your little sushi chain while keeping the customers happy and getting maximum tips. I guess it's a mix of the game's style and the ease of watching your build take off. Oh, and win or lose, the predatory landlord who keeps jacking up rent will die at the end of the run.

Rabbit & Steel

The free expansion Extra Mode released last week with more rabbits, loot, and new areas/enemies. I should probably go back to Normal after not playing for so long instead of spamming Hard Solo for the palettes, but I need the style and practice is the first step towards getting good. So far, I have all of one win in the new areas using Pyromancer and I'm trying to get a Gunslinger win. There might be something to say about the readability, but that might also be my skill issue talking. Again, the smart thing to do is go back to Normal to learn.

I played through System Shock 2 again. This time in french -- to spice things up a bit since my last playthrough more than 20 years ago. Too bad only the texts were in french, even though funnily some of the voices had a silly french accent.
Also did a PSI playthrough, which I guess was some sort of interesting.

It's still a good game, and the "remake" didn't change really anything.

Then I started consuming this digital crack called Ixion. It's a basebuilding game centered around a movable space station and finite resources, and is relatively story-based. Somehow it scratches an itch for me that I remember only Settlers 2 reaching before. Really great game, made by a French studio. The plot reminds me of Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. I've probably lost 10 hours of my average weekly sleep time due to this one.

Incidentally, I stopped buying games from Steam because of USA or something and am now using mostly GOG.com and heroic-games-launcher on Linux. Seems to work fine, and actually a bit better because the launcher doesn't have to login to anything.

I'm finishing Kingdom Come Deliverance.

The game is from Czech lands, developers are (mainly) Czech, I'm Czech - this game was simply mandatory for me. I was even Kickstarter backer back in the day, yet I got.to it just now.

I started the game in late september 2025 and I'm playing it without putting it down to this day. I finished the base game already and I did DLCs also with only Theresa's story remaining and I plan on finishing this one today or this weekend if it's longer than I think.

While I don't share Daniel Vávra's (team leader of Warhorse Studios, the devwloper of the game) opinions, he clearly knew what he was doing with this one - making middle-ages RPG without magic and dragons set in the real world at certain time. Let me just add that he is also behind Mafia: The city of Lost Heaven and also Hidden & Dangerous games.

The game is RPG as we know it, kinda. Primary stats, skills, NPCs, weapons, armor, traders, ... And many many quests with many many different themes across them.

The game's combat system isn't intuitive and is kinda hard to learn or even master. Yet the moves of the characters while fighting each others looks so great! Combine that with using stamina while.fighting and I would probably call some fight even epic! You try to.parry enemy moves while landing your own while trying to not be exhausted at the same time - I believe this is how it really went at the time.

As in RPG you can often do things a few ways -/brute force, stealth, speech, thievery... The game let's you deal with quests in your way, which is great to have. You don't want to be shoved into corridor game when you play RPG.

I don't know what more to say... The game is awesome, it is perfectly designed and just as well executed. I'm 160 hours in and it still seems like I just started playing a week ago, it just managed to keep my interest for all of those 5 months.

Bow is hard. Very.

I've spent a shameful amount of time playing Fuel. It's an open world racing game from 2009, known for it's very large map. Apparently it's 14,400km² in size, though largely empty except for an absolutely absurd road network tens of thousands of kilometers of winding roads going nowhere. You can ignore most of the map and open world if you like, and directly accept races and challenges from a menu system. Winning races unlocks new camps around the world, which function as hubs for more races.

The novelty of just driving around the map was enough to keep me interested until the racing mechanics started to grow on me. It's not realistic in any way, but you need a certain finesse when it comes to exploiting shortcuts and executing sharp turns, which is necessary to win some races at the highest difficulty.

At its best, its races make really good use of its map: a lot of freedom in picking a route and long distances covered. At worst it's extremely frustrating, though I don't think I've played a racing game that isn't at times. Usually this is in circuit races.

One point of criticism with a world this large is of course that the surroundings can get quite repetitive. There are a lot of different, clearly distinct areas of the map, but they're all so, so large. At the same time, the maps are littered with instances of models of a few handfuls of buildings, abandoned cars, broken wind turbines and so on which I don't think offer enough variety to fully support the illusion of a large world.

Another is that it's very unpolished in some senses. One thing that comes to mind is hitboxes around things which will stop your car dead if you hit them. They're often bigger than they look. Good news is that with not that many objects and after a few hours you get a good sense of how big the hitboxes are.