^{context: I wrote a draft of this back in November 2024, and recently found it again after finishing Metaphor Refantazio. Re-reading this draft was helpful when I was reflecting on my Metaphor playthrough, so I figured I'd finish it.}

Octopath Traveler II

I've been playing Octopath Traveler II since it got added to GamePass back in June (2024), and finished it about a month ago (2024-10-28). It's essentially a carbon copy of the first game, with better execution: gorgeous graphics, a fun battle system, and NPCs that are fun to mess with, packaged in a game that was surprisingly amenable to being played at my own pace.

What sticks with me most about this game was how well it fits into the life of an adult. I usually carve out large chunks of time to binge games, but Octopath Traveler II was the first singleplayer game that I had to play in shorter sessions. I'd sit down once a week and play 1-3 hours. Eventually, I stopped playing entirely for 2-3 months, and then finally finished the game in a couple longer sessions. Never once did I end a gaming session feeling dissatisfied with the time I spent in the game. And I was pleasantly surprised that even after an extended break, I didn't feel like I'd lost the plot. Both were a product of the structure of Octopath Traveler II's story: you follow up to eight characters each on their journeys across the continent. Each one of those stories is broken up in chapters that take about an hour each, that all play the same way: you arrive in a new location, interact with a couple NPCs, enter whatever dungeon they point you to, beat a boss, rinse-and-repeat. These aren't stories that would've won "Best Narrative" at The Game Awards; each is straightforward enough that you have a pretty good idea how it'll end right from the start. If that sounds formulaic, it's because it is! In fact, every single dungeon in the game is basically a straight path to the boss with a couple short branches for chests. In isolation, these can sound like big negatives. But together, they made for an experience I enjoyed. I knew exactly what to expect, having played the original Octopath Traveler, which let me just focus on the game's strengths. I was in a headspace for stories that were just fine, since it let me engage with them fully regardless of how much or how little attention I had for their cutscenes in the moment. The uniformity of the dungeons didn't get old, because they're all gorgeous and vehicles to get you into the fun combat. The game's consistency across its narrative and environment design meant I could put the game down for weeks and months and always be able to pick it back up.

The most notable difference between the first Octopath Traveller and the sequel is party interactions. In the original Octopath Traveller, party members never interact outside short, throwaway moments. The series only requires you to recruit one character, so you can finish the game only having seen one storyline. This structure deeply limits how character's relationships can develop, since those relationships wouldn't make sense for all party combinations. Octopath Traveler II tries to address this with special paired character chapters and by more deliberately tying the 8 stories together towards the ending. While I really did enjoy these additions, especially the end of the game where the full party interacts, I was left wanting an Octopath Traveller game that just commits to telling one cohesive story instead of eight independent ones..

Outside of some weaknesses with the storytelling, the game is consistently solid. I have a soft spot for pixel art, and adore the series' "HD-2D" graphics. The "discover weaknesses -> break opponent -> deal massive damage" loop in combat hasn't gotten old after my 200+ hours with the series. It was fun constantly experimenting with different builds, and then going online later to see that I wasn't even scratching the surface of what was possible. Interacting with NPCs was an unexpected highlight for me in the original, and remains so in Octopath Traveller II. Each party member has a special action that let you learn about NPCs, receive items, recruit them, or start fights. These interactions are never anything spectacular, but were an opportunity for the game to accentuate small joys with a sense of discovery: stumbling on a surprising backstory, finding an incredible item, or laughing at the absurdity of some of the fights you can start.

With a year and a half's hindsight, I'm surprised how positive I still feel about this game. The game doesn't really try to do anything novel, but is consistent enough across the board that it elevated the entnire experience. I'm really interested to try Octopath Traveler 0, which does away with the "eight stories" gimmick.

edit: highsight -> hindsight,

While I was in Cali for a bit taking care of my parent's house, I found a card show nearby their place that happens weekly, so I went and finally found some packs/singles of Riftbound! Brought it back to NYC and finally got to jam a couple of games with my friend. I really liked it a lot, the system is really simple and makes sense (besides some kinda confusing rules on a specific mechanic because I insisted on playing Teemo) so now I'm looking to do some events here in the city!

I'm also just patiently waiting for Slay the Spire 2 to come out this Thursday :)

RV There Yet has been a joy on Steam with a buddy! Fun animations and co-op puzzles.

I’ve also been playing my original copy of Pokemon Fire Red on my GBA SP since the new Switch version got announced. It’s inspired me to hop around and also play it on my Steam Deck OLED and Miyoo Mini+ via emulation. I’m tossing around the idea of picking up the new official Switch versions for both Fire Red and Leaf Green to build out an official team of Pokemon from both games and get all the legendaries/event pokemon. Still undecided on that route since I do like the fast-forward function, flexibility of ROMs, save-states, and OLED colors that are all available on the Deck.

I tried the demo for Windrose in Steam's NextFest and I haven't made much progress yet but it already feels like a better thought out pirate adventuring game than Skull and Bones. You've got the usual trappings of a survival crafting game with resource gathering, base building, etc., and then there's also your ship which you can improve as well, and conveniently summon to the nearest shoreline at the press of a button. I haven't had any naval combat yet, but on-foot combat is rather awkward and seems to be heavily intended for a co-op experience, as dealing with multiple enemies at a time when solo just turns into an exercise of poking the closest enemy and running away lest you get jumped. I very much intend to play this with a friend when it does come out though, and it's still a pretty solid package overall in spite of that, so I'm looking forward to release.

I beat Space Marine 2 last week and also played a bit of the multiplayer. The game is pretty fun! I don’t see myself sticking with the co-op missions for that long, but it’s fun to blow up tyranids. I definitely had a blast with this cheesy shooter!

I’ve still been playing Kill Team as well and want to start to play in tournaments. I’m not able to make it to adepticon this year and I do miss going (I used to go for X-Wing miniatures), but I’ll be going to some local tournaments this year and I should be able to make it to adepticon next year! KT is rad and is definitely scratching my competitive miniature gaming itch. I’m still absolutely loving the hobby portion, as well, I’ve gotten really deep into painting and I’m enjoying the creative outlet!

I also tried out Marathon over the weekend. I’m a huge Bungie fangirl and I really want to love this game, but I think I just don’t “get” extraction shooters. There isn’t enough structure for me. It’s a shame because the gunplay is fantastic and the aesthetics are so striking and utterly unique! I want to explore this world more, but the gameplay loop of extractions isn’t compelling to me. I’ll have to wait and see on this one to see if they do anything interesting with the narrative, have pve events, or something like that.

About to finish Trails Beyond the Horizon. I'd say after Act 2 this is one of the best Trails in a long while, easily better than CS4.

Hitman is on sale currently on Steam, I think there was a recent thread saying that this game is easily one of the best game this decade. A Tildes member recommended me that since last month, cross save is in and I can now restore progress from the original game. I don't know why I miss some map achievements though, and I was grinding the first two maps back before the sale.

Finally I've found StarCraft 2 coop relaxing and I try to get a game in daily. I can manage brutal fine and probably can solo it on some commanders, but nowadays I play on casual which give you damage/tank bonus so you can yolo more. If you get matched with a partner playing on hard it's like smurfing.

I've been playing Dice a Million, which is a fun Balatro-like (is that a thing we're calling games?) but with dice rolling rather than card mechanics. It's got a lot of fun items and synergies, although I haven't quite figured out how to break the game quite like I had with Balatro, so I'm still in that middle phase where I'm figuring out the best synergies.

This week I tried again to get into Persona 5 Royal, but I've bounced off again, albeit a little more softly than in previous attempts.

This time it was the pacing that was the biggest obstacle. I'm engaged with the plot and the battle mechanics, but the tutorials and introduction are glacially slow in rolling out. I've said in the past that JRPGs are like stray cats: it takes a little time and effort to gain their trust well enough for them to allow you to play with them, and nowhere is that more true than in Persona games. It took me about 7.5 hours of playtime before I felt like I was released to actually play the game, and even then some pretty substantial guardrails were still up.

I have my doubts that the developers' expectations regarding the duration of play sessions will align with my own, but from what I've seen of the first Palace, it seems like it should be manageable. I'm hoping that the hour-long exposition sequences with few-if-any opportunities to save are mostly features of the tutorial, because I don't know how frequently I can jam them into my life otherwise.

So I took a little break from that and started my first A Link to the Past Randomizer run. I must've played that game three dozen times over the years, but I've never broken sequence before, so it's been a bit of a learning process. I had to dip into the spoiler txt to learn that you can bypass the Master Sword check at Agahnim's tower with the Magic Cape, because that would never come up if you weren't intentionally breaking sequence. I'm impressed with the resources the ALttPR community has built to help people give it a go, but I don't really have much to say aside from that.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

Went back to check out the original search action Castlevania after seeing the announcement about the new one.

I've never been big into the series, but jumping in at this point was easy enough after watching the Netflix show and a bunch of playthroughs of the older games on Game Center CX. Apart from some quality of life issues stemming from it being a PSX game, it still holds up really well.

• The pixel art has aged very gracefully and features all sorts of charming little details. Sparks fly off the walls when the elevator tears up the tower. A skeleton's head will bounce comically around on the floor after you shatter its body. A good portion of the items you can pick up appear to just be jokes, like shoes which just increase your height by a few pixels. In contrast, the polygonal effects look their age and stick out like a sore thumb.

• The usual Castlevania physics are here (plunging like a rock with nearly zero horizontal momentum, out of control knockbacks at the slightest touch, etc) but tolerable due to the lower than usual difficulty. Since you can level up and gear up, brute forcing your way through is often feasible, especially if you're using the busted holy water subweapon.

• The controls are a bit odd in that dash and shield are both on the face buttons (whereas they would normally be triggers in a modern game), but this is easy enough to remap for yourself. The only thing I couldn't ultimately get used to is that the dash is backwards - Alucard will backstep instead of dashing in the direction you input. I ended up just using the jump or shield 9 times out of 10 instead.

• If you die, you get sent right back to the title screen and have to go through the rigmarole of reading the memory card, loading your game again, etc. which would be unforgivable in a modern game. If you're playing on an emulator, though, you can easily get around this with save states.

• The voice acting in the English release is absolutely atrocious, but enjoyable in a period appropriate Resident Evil 1 kind of way.

I'm in the 'second map' now and plan to chip away at it a bit at a time.

I finished Upalu Mundi over the weekend, which was excellent. I wrote up a full review if you want to know a lot more, but the tldr is: Factorio trains crossed with Zachtronics puzzles. Had an absolute blast with it.

Past that, I finally dug into Ruined King, one of the games in the LoL universe that riot was publishing for a bit. I liked the dev's previous game (Battle Chasers: Night War) and this is more of the same (albeit with some extra polish). Great turned-based battles, great music + voice acting, and a great adaptation of these characters. Weirdly I'm having a similar experience to @zoroa above, where I can play it for 10-60 minutes at a time but I enjoy it no matter how long I got to sit down for. Excited for more of it!

I've been playing Neyyah! This investigative game from last year takes place in a huge island world made of navigable pre-rendered vistas and makes use of prerendered video with live actors, constructed languages and symbols, loads of written scribbles, imaginary fauna and flora, and plenty of vaguely steampunk (crystalpunk?) gadgets. In other words, it's a massive love letter to Riven, with maybe a dash of Exile in the mix as well. I waited patiently for it for several years as the developer worked on it (and regularly teased it), and then a little while longer because of Blue Prince (which, by the way, I haven't 100%ed yet).

We've run into the odd particular here and there where it feels like the game design could have used a little bit more playtesting, as some stupid detail or other can make us lose a lot of time running around in circles while scratching our heads in confused frustration. But for the most part this is a very solid game world where (if you can wrap your head around the fifty zillion made up words) the way things are built, positioned and connected makes "sense" and it should be possible to keep making progress by looking around, thinking and paying attention to the various clues that you encounter. It should certainly scratch that Myst itch.

The game also contains a number of helpful features that can help reduce frustration where it comes to the whole note taking and organizing side of things. Should you choose for it to be so, it will create a journal with the information you have learned organized by area, such that it can be references easily. There are other little things as well such as marking in maps the way you came in from, stuff like that. I like all of that.

Previous

Tunguska: The Visitation is a surprisingly immersive "Stalker-lite" as shown from an isometric perspective; honestly, it's a lot like playing the OG Fallout but in real time without the time-stopping V.A.T.S. and its accompanying "pssssssht" sound. It goes quite hard in its simulation elements, requiring you to micro-manage your eating, sleeping, radiation sickness, but so far it's been manageable, the same way it has been with its obtuse controls and steep learning curve. For me, it could be the post-apocalyptic setting that keeps me enthralled in this ugly orphan stepchild of a game that would never otherwise receive the grace of my love.

And here's a fun fact for you: this is a not some game made by a "Ruskie". I know this because the dev chimed in on some board that he's a Chinese guy living in Texas. So, the more you learn...

Choo-Choo Charles is a quirky survival game that makes the most of its meme-friendly antagonist. It's great fun to ride the rails of your own train with straightforward get-the-keys-to-set-up-a-confrontation-with-the-previously-undefeatable-big-bad gameplay, but never derails from its propensity for jank. It could use a lot more polish, but then nobody with money would ever take a chance on a whimsical game like this. One reviewer had the gall to criticize this game for not animating lips to match the voiceover; it's like, do you hear the words these NPCs are saying? I don't think the performance of the "Pickle Lady" would be improved by this extraordinary effort to placate errant critiques. To which I say: top points for coining the term "lockpickles".

The game's music does a lot of its heavy lifting. It's not emotionally affecting, but interactive to the degree that such a spooky-but-not-scary game demands.

I'm salty that this game's display goes haywire whenever failing Nightmare Mode, thwarting my need to 100% it.

Tried War Mongrels, but can't make it out of the tutorial that kills you and reloads on an auto-save made after a critical move that can't be changed. Was excited to try this modern take on Commandos, but the vast moveset does not seem to be very friendly for the Steam Deck. Oh wells. One day I'll get a proper computer when I grow up.

I bought Pokopia last night.

I like Pokémon.

I like Animal Crossing.

I am very happy.

...More seriously, I haven't gotten very far yet since I started last night at midnight. Had to restart my save because I decided I didn't like the name I chose very quickly, and that was a pain since you have to do it from system settings rather than in the game.

Of the bit I've played thus far, I'm enjoying it though! It's definitely a bit handholdy and made to be very accessible to young players with the way they talk sometimes, but not obnoxiously so. It's clear this world had some apocalyptic scenario. You can find old journals and documents from humans that reference weird stuff with the weather, so I'm very curious to learn more about the history. It feels like a bunch of the Pokémon fell through some spacetime wormhole given so far only Professor Tangrowth has any memories. Others talk about being confused on what happened and remember seeing humans very recently.

It's packed with super tiny references to old games, too, like in the background tracks and the message "Now saving... Don't turn off the power" when you save (I don't think the modern games really use that message anymore). Despite that, it thankfully doesn't prioritize Gen 1 or the newest generation like many spin-offs do. I've seen more Gen 1 Pokémon so far, but it feels like there's a fairly even spread of representation overall. So that's fun!

Also, I saw Ho-Oh flying. Gave me flashbacks to Ash in the first episode of the anime.

First up, not an actual game, just a Collab for Monster Hunter Wilds, who're with Ichiran Ramen for this one.
Thing is, when I think of them, I just think of this video (French only).
Long story short: it took them about 20 minutes (or 1h30 if we go by what he says at the end of the review) to get a seat (on the second attempt 'cause first time they'd have to queue for 2h30m), and while the food was cheap and fast... it was "ultra basique". Compared it to a Big Mac against other burgers.
So no matter what the game tries to sell the whole thing as being really good and all, I just think back to the video where it's basically pay a couple bucks, spend a few minutes hours (mostly waiting), and then

You have eaten. You no longer feel hungry.

Yeah. Also the food skills aren't that good. Just get a base Village menu.

Anyway, the first actual game is The Last Stand: Aftermath. An isometric roguelike where you from point to point to scavenge for stuff, both for you right now and for your home.
Small problem, you're infected. that is why Volunteers (the poor sods you're playing as) have to go on suicide missions. And why their max health is constantly decreasing.
Hey, at least you get augments (mutations) every ~16 Max HP lost! And it can give you things like this:
My character arrived at the HERC Blockade (the first boss stage of the game) with about 30 Max HP, about 15 bullet for an SMG, a hunting rifle with enough ammo to not care about wasting some, and one or two melee weapons.
Stage is set up as 2 "rooms" you have to push through to start a generator (which alerts anyone you snuck past that food's by the gen), then spend like 10 seconds poking at the gate controls to open the gate. By the time I hit the second gen I was out of ammo for my SMG, leaving me with one melee weapon and a (slow firing) hunting rifle to fend off whoever I left behind.
Thankfully they didn't group up into one giant murderball so I could just shoot and slice(/punch) my way through a group, and barely have time to reload.
I though that was impressive and that my character would die soon (again, less than 30 max HP).
Then I got to a Detour (story mission) with 15 Max HP.
I neede to get to a building in a base, which needs a keycard. The keycard was in a small courtyard with 2 zeds. Small problem, those weren't normal zeds.
They were basically a Hunter and a Charger. I was sure that either could kill me in one hit by that point.
The Charger was fairly easy to avoid being hit by, but it took an absurd amount of damage to die, I needed multiple mags from the hunting rifle, a grenade, and 2 flares to do it.
The Hunter went down more easily sure, but if it leaped on me, I was fairly sure I wasn't getting back up (for reference, I think they do around 18-20 HP and lock you in place for a while, don't get pinned while a horde is nearby). I got in, shot once, immediately rolled aside to dodge the leap, then killed it with a point-blank shot.
I entered that base with 20 Max HP. I left with 12 and a new mutation.
Of course this is a roguelike, so literal next stage has me die to a Hunter hiding in grass one-shoting me with a leap. But then I had 12 max HP.

Next, that DLC for Inertial Drift I talked about in it's review back in Marsh.
I got it for like, a buck? (It was on discount.) Must have been a buck top.
Anyway, you get 4 pairs of tracks (normal and reverse like the base tracks), a new soundtrack (and the option override the traacklist with either), and 4 cars to unlock in Twilight Rivals, a GP/Story hybrid mode. Much like GP mode, you must win every event. You don't have to do them in a row, but you won't pass on a fail.
You also have a set car for each event, it'll switch through a few cars for each rival.
I'd rec it if you like the base game and can get it at a discount.

In anticipation for the resident evil 9 release I decided I would finally get round to playing through the series.
Over the past couple of months, I've worked my way through RE HD and the remakes of 2, 3, and 4. I played 5 & 6 when they first released so I'm gladly skipping over those two, and I'm planning on starting 7 on the switch 2 during an upcoming trip to visit family.
I definitely understand why RE has garnered such a huge fan base, I have enjoyed myself much more than I anticipated! As much as the remakes look great, I have to say I think I enjoyed RE HD the most.
Roaming around the mansion and discovering all its secrets has quickly jumped to being one of my favourite gaming experiences, and since I grew up playing tomb raider I was happy enough to just use the tank controls and forego the newer analogue stick movement.
Although RE HD is my favourite, if someone were to ask me to pick one game to recommend I think I would say RE2 remake. It's a much easier game for modern audiences to pick up but still has that disturbing "I'm out of my depth" sort of feeling to it.

Long story short, resident evil is very good! Who knew??

I was playing Animal Well on the Switch. I enjoyed it, but it wasn't what I expected. I liked the very vague almost dream-like scenario. The dynamic lighting adds a lot to the game, despite having a retro look at first glance. I thought it was going to be a Hollow Knight-style metroidvania, but thank goodness it is much more chill than that, and has virtually no combat. It's more about how you traverse the environment and use the items you find.

I rolled credits after about 10 hours, which is probably about 50% of the game. Then I carried on to see what the post-game was about. I stopped playing when I had about 5 of the hidden collectible items to find. I'd really pored over the map to find them, and couldn't see where I'd missed the others, so it was starting to get annoying. The one thing the game could have done better is guide you to the basic uses of the items you collect. You know, like in say Metroid, where you collect double-jump inside a pit, and have to use its ability to jump back out. In AW you find new items fairly randomly, and they don't always have any obvious immediate use. Having said that, the mystery is part of the charm. I may end up biting the bullet and looking at a guide for the last few hidden collectibles, because I've not played it for a couple of weeks now purely because I can't advance on my own.

What I have been playing though is an educational game called Wagotabi on Android. It advertises itself as "Master Japanese through full immersion in an educational RPG set in Japan". I heard it recommended on a podcast a while ago, and I went in not really knowing what to expect. I had zero knowledge of Japanese, and no real intention of learning the language. The demo is free on Android too, and once I was hooked the full game was only a couple of euros.

Calling it an RPG is a stretch. There are plenty of stats and things to unlock but the game is like the part of a Game Boy Pokemon where you walk around locations and talk to NPCs. Initially it's all mostly in English, and gradually it adds in Japanese phrases - for example the UI changes Yes/No to the Japanese equivalents quite early on. The Pokemon battles are replaced by learning new words, or by tests where you have to fill out sentences. There are mini games and learning tools in your in-game dictionary. One clever thing they did was add spaced repetition tests that award "mastery points" for each word/phrase. If you get something wrong it isn't the end of the world, the words get marked as difficult for you and it requires more points to return to non-difficult and eventually fill out to mastered level.

I don't know if I've learned anything useful, but the game is pretty good! It starts off in one region (Kagawa), and you travel to other regions and islands of Japan. It has you battling noodle chefs (write out "this udon is delicious", and "no I am not Mr Tanaka") to find out where the Japanese Master of the region lives. Or another section you have to push blocks with words on them into the correct slots corresponding to their order (like sometimes -> frequently -> always).

The Pokedex is replaced by a Kanjidex where you collect words written in Kanji (Chinese characters, which are usually more complex than the Japanese "alphabet" words). I played Heavens Vault and Chants of Sennaar a couple of years ago and, while the language stuff was good and fun to figure out, they didn't go as all-in as I'd hoped and once you learn the words things get auto-translated so you can gloss over the language aspects. Here the Japanese sentences remain, but you can tap individual words and it shows the translation and some context notes.

It's now starting to get really difficult, as you'd probably expect. We've moved on from basic greetings and "my dog is under the tree". When it started talking about adjectives and verb conjugation I struggled to keep up, but I'm still at it, learning about the weather now.

Started a game night with The Guys^TM.
We decided to play Final Fantasy 14.
I've played a lot of RPGs.
I've played a lot of JRPGs.
I've played a lot of FF games.
This game has the worst UI I've experienced in an incredibly long time.

Hades/Hades 2 I had a big ol comment I wrote up about how the games feel that I wiped, but I've been going back and forth between the two. Slay the Spire took over my game time as I tried to crank out a win to unlock the Watcher before STS2 hit EA, but I play both of these side by side because they're different enough they're still individually entertaining. And you actually need to beat Hades about ten times for the full main story. The magic in the sequel adds a different sort of depth, and progression feels different, but just as good, making it separately enjoyable from the unga-bunga, more straightforward approach of the original.

Slay the Spire I wanted to get a "clean" win (no dailies or custom starts) before STS2 hit early access. I did buy and play a bunch of STS2 today, but came back to the first to just mess around and see if I can get somewhere. I decided to do a Silent build, figuring I'm not getting anywhere with Ironclad, and wound up with a phenomenal build that basically breezed through Act 3.

Slay the Spire 2 Kinda like Hades to Hades 2, so good, quite different, the new characters are great, and I like that you just need to do a run with the old ones to unlock. It feels better, surprisingly has plenty of the jank of the first (weird sounds not playing right sometimes on Linux, odd hangs, but nbd). It's the same great game with an overhauled progression, and an interesting adjustment: You can't do dailies until you unlock all characters, and beat it with at least one. STS frustrated me because I beat it twice on lucky, super easy dailies, but couldn't get a vanilla win until tonight.

Mini Metro I've had this game for a while but never really touched it. Now, I'm addicted to it and its cousin Mini Motorways. Basically you draw rail lines between stations and connect shapes. Circles wait at a square and you need to make sure they can get there across your rail lines to the circle, which may have squares, triangles, or others. Then it's just how efficient you are, and how long until you lock up. It's been a great game for me to chill with on my iPad, PC, or phone, so I've been relaxing with it.

Mini Motorways Same premise as above, but colored cars from houses to colored destinations. You build a road system on a map to randomly placed destinations, and lose when you take too long to unload something. Similarly chill, the stress is low and manageable, usually "Hm, I didn't optimize that..."

Freeways: My brother figured if I liked the above two I'd like Freeways, you basically freehand freeway interchanges to get colored cars to their destination, either houses and/or highways. Similarly chill, but surprisingly deep game of path optimization.

I bought Everspace 2 on GOG, mainly to play on my Steam Deck.

It's a sort of a space dogfighting ARPG with randomized loot and nice little hand crafted levels. The main campaign seems to be long enough when I look at all the areas I have to unlock, and random short missions will often pop up when flying between waypoints. I've been looking/waiting for a neat space game to play on the Deck for a long time, and this one might be it.

The most negative point is the controls: I think the default layout is actually great, but I'm having a hard time to aim. The sensitivity is too high, I always overshoot and overcorrect, and there's no way to adjust it the way I'd like to. The auto-aim is kinda compensating for it, but it's not really satisfying. Mouse control seems to be much better and precise.

Note: if you want to play it on your Steam Deck, you should buy it on Steam. I spent two hours trying to start it through Heroic Launcher (which supports GOG cloud saves), and it just wouldn't start in gaming mode. In the end I just added the exe as a non-steam game, and setup Syncthing to sync the saves myself.

Midnight Suns - I heard good things about it among the bad so I decided to get it on sale despite not being something I would usually consider. It was both better than I expected and about as expected in different aspects.

The actual card game is good. It is varied in heroes, their abilities and synergies. The addition of positioning and enviromental attacks also adds another interesting aspect.

There are two other gameplay aspects of exploring the small open world and interacting with the heroes.

The problems I had with it can be grouped in three categories - technical, structural and gameplay.

Technical
On playstation I did not have all that much bugs but I was apparently lucky and those I did have were major ones. It is also the only game that I had crash on PS. To be fair it was only one time but it is apparently a lot worse on pc.
Years after release there are known problems ranging from annoying to game breaking that you need to be aware of while playing the game. They also introduced major problem in later update and simply never fixed it.

Structural
Paid currency for cosmetics. Season pass, though now it is more of dlc bundle as the game is finished.
Denuvo is the reason I got this on playstation. Which I have in part for games I don't want on my pc but still want to play for some reason. I am neither interested in restrictive drm, launchers or third party accounts and keeping that contained to a dedicated box is a compromise. Steam is bad enough but at least it provides added value on top of being drm client lacking basic configurability.

Gameplay
While the core gameplay is actually good they decided to go for large respawns and level scaling. Level scaling basically negates any point in leveling characters and it may as well have been left out entirely and create a better game for it. While increasing the challenge with the level is not inherently bad, doing it with numbers go up is possibly the worst and least interesting way.
The missions also only have a few basic templates that repeat which eventually decreases the appeal of the core part of the game.

Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii

This is a very silly but fun game, that was let down by a pretty crappy free demo that didn't do it justice. I'm enjoying the shit out of it. If you liked the prior Yakuza/Like a Dragon beat-em-up games before the series went RPG that is basically what you get here, plus pirate ship battle mechanics. It reuses the Honolulu map from Infinite Wealth, and you get to meet a bunch of characters from that game again, assuming you played it before.

I've been on a pretty drawn-out path to not really gaming much these days. The only thing that's been keeping my attention is playing on my friend's Minecraft server for the last couple of months. I had been starting to play a few different ones, enjoyed them for a bit, and immediately lost interest (I also finally got diagnosed with ADHD recently). It feels like the right habit change for me at the moment.