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What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
Can I be honest with you? This comment represents way more than a week's worth of gaming.
I'm going to talk about five games today. Terraria, Dead Letter Department, Skin Deep, Reverse 1999, and Warhammer: Rogue Trader are what I've been playing for the last maybe three or four weeks. The reason they're all in one block is because of Rogue Trader, an enormous fucking boondoggle that took me so much time and energy to complete that I was taking breaks to play other games in between its five acts. Let's go one by one, shall we? Spoilers will be avoided where possible.
Terraria: Bigger and Boulder
My little brother and I have a thing we do every time they release a new Terraria update: we do a quick little playthrough and see the new content together in multiplayer. He's been going through a tough time, so I was happy to jump in and bang out a run with him. When you've beaten Terraria as often as we have, it goes from a sprawling nonsense of way too much content to an honestly fairly tight and economical experience — though still with a lot of grinding. But honestly, this playthrough radicalized me against Terraria and maybe against sandbox games in general. Sorry to the Minecraft server people, I love you, but I don't think I can do it anymore. I would talk about the new content in the new Terraria update that took the team at Re:Logic years to put in but honestly most of it is marginal. There's some QoL stuff that's nice, a few decent new weapons, two overpowered new mounts for mobility. A lot of the stuff we found I couldn't even remember whether it was new, or whether it was just content I'd passed over in previous playthroughs. The biggest addition for me was the implementation of a lot of new custom world generation parameters, which the game calls 'secret seeds' — my brother and I had a lot of fun on the "planetoids" seed, which replaces the world with a bunch of disconnected floating circles. You know, like planetoids. It made traversal more challenging especially in the early game but it made caving a lot easier, and meant we didn't have to worry about the spread of the world evil (a Terraria feature where certain tough biomes can grown and "infect" other biomes. That was all actually pretty transformative in the very early game, but it turns out that for most of your playthrough, especially when you get into hardmode, you're not really ever interacting with the terrain becaue you'd rather just teleport around with pylons and build your own quick boss arenas and farming spots in the sky or the cavern layer or wherever. And that's where my frustration arose, because honestly, isn't all this kind of meaningless? I mean, look, we had fun, we beat the bosses, you know, whatever. But I've done it all before, and even if my creative copper brick and glass and living wood build for our main base was *cosmetically* different from other Terraria builds I've made, even if I had a new whip to use, even if the world was made up of a bunch of balls, it was kind of the same *functionally,* and in terms of, like, the experience of playing it. It sounds fucking stupid to say "the problem with sandbox games is that they don't mean anything," but I guess that's kind of where I'm at. Looking back on the Terraria playthrough it just felt like a waste of time, and I'm not sure I want to do it ever again. Plus, you know, my brother can be convinced to try other co-op games. He's gotten into Gunfire Reborn, in fact.At this time, having finished the update, I started Rogue Trader. I knew intuitively that it was a 100 plus hour game — a three work week game — but you know, that never really registers until you're in it.
Rogue Trader: Prologue and Act I
Rogue Trader was developed by Owlcat games — makers of the Pathfinder CRPGs that everyone seems to love — and is a turn based computer RPG set in the world of Games Workshops's Warhammer 40k, a setting which probably hosts a tabletop wargame and I don't know some novels? and a lot of video games based on it as well. *My* only exposure to the setting was through testosterone-y ads for the Boltgun or Tactics games, and, more relevant to me personally, lesbian mechsploitation-adjacent smut — sorry, erotica — which, you know, your life will be better if you don't look into that stuff, and it tends to paint an incomplete picture of the world in favor of painting a thorough picture of a cast evil dyke OCs. I liked the idea of a space fantasy CRPG, as opposed to the sort of medieval high fantasy space that almost all of the genre heavy hitters play in, and Rogue Trader definitely makes a strong first impression, with its gothic arched ceilings and gilded skulls and Gregorian chants, announcing you as you create your character and are then informed that you're being considered to inherit the spaceship and title of the Rogue Trader Theodora Von Valancius, your distant relative. A Rogue Trader is, in a nutshell, the lab-grown perfect power fantasy self-insert, someone who is given special power by the God Emperor to break imperial law in order to do super space colonialism in the far reaches of the empire, and even, like, the super cops can't say no to you. So that's neat. Anyway pretty quickly Theodora dies and guess who inherits her title by default? that's right, me. Time to make my mark on history and probably form a harem, you know how CRPGs go. Okay, so this is my main narrative problem with CRPGs — most CRPGs anyway. They tend to act as though the "great man theory" is actually true. Almost always, you play as some incredibly powerful individual who can physically — and without great effort — steer the course of the world. I think it's frankly embarrassing to create a work of contemporary art where that's the case, where the player is given this kind of ultimate agency. But that's the escapist fantasy of the CRPG, right? In these games, unlike in reality, your choices matter. Rogue Trader really leans into this "great man" fantasy, and the world is absurd and over-the-top enough that it probably juuuust gets away with it. In Rogue Trader, the main choice you'll be making, again and again, is between the game's three moral positions of Dogmatic, Iconoclast, and Heretic. Dogmatic Rogue Traders love the God-Emperor, they're literally and explicitly xenophobic, they embody the Imperium's ethos of rigid hierarchy and violent suppression of the other, to the extent that Dogmatic choices often see you, like, glassing planets when you find one cultist on the surface. Iconoclasts, meanwhile, are normal people with old fashioned moral views like, "maybe we shouldn't kill everyone all the time," and "maybe the people worshipping God are, dare I say, almost as important as God himself," and even the daring "maybe when we colonize planets (you WILL be colonizing planets, of course) we should, like, be nice about it, and not extract TOO much." And heretics are the evil route who like love murdering people and chaos and stuff. The problem with the triangle morality system here is just that it's fairly rigid and often limited in terms of the kind of character it allows you to roleplay. Instead of picking the answer that aligned with the character I had imagined at character creation, I was mostly just picking the answer that felt "least wrong." This is true of most CRPGs without "Disco" in the tile, of course, but it bears mentioning here. Where Rogue Trader has a leg up on its peers is just that its options are way fucking funnier. Even though I was being boring and mostly picking Iconolast, it was always a treat to see dialogue options like "your appalling and flagrant disrespect for human life is admirable, and something I want to emulate!" I discovered pretty quickly that 40k as a setting, or at least Owlcat's depiction of it, is totally campy, and you either get to participate in that absurd pantomime as a Dogmatic or Heretic character, or play the straight man as an Iconoclast. The prologue of Rogue Trader basically just teaches you the mechanics, introduces one of the main antagonists, and gives you a minor decision, but it's good at introducing the world and setting the tone, and I was quickly invested on the story and world side, if not the mechanical side. That would come later. For now, it will suffice to say that Rogue Trader is really combat focused, and it doesn't really have any of the immersive sim elements of, say, a Baldur's Gate 3. Fighting and talking are your only real verbs; stealth, environmental interaction, exploration, these are either not present or are extremely minimal. In general the Owlcat production value is a lot lower than Larian's, probably just because BG3 is an unreasonable standard to hold any game to. But there's not a lot of voice acting here, except in the prologue; no facial animation; models are of lower quality. That's fine, honestly. I never put much stock in fidelity. Rogue Trader is a game in five acts. Act 1 sets the tone, and it really effectively deceives the player into thinking that the game is going to be better than it is. That came out harsher than I intended. What I mean is, in Act 1, Rogue Trader offers you a really constrained environment with a couple different highly reactive questlines that not only change according to how you do them, but according to the order in which you do them. With Lady Theodora killed, a mutiny barely averted, and your grip on power tenous, you have to stabilize a critical situation, and the urgency is reflected in the way the game responds to you dealing with quests quickly (i.e. early in the order) or slowly (i.e. late in the order). Of course, some quests are gonna be completed early in sequence, and some late, there's no way to have your cake and eat it. When you're inevitably praised by NPCs for getting to their planet in the nick of time, or when another group laments your late arrival on their space station, it makes the world feel alive: like it's progressing without you, and responding to your decisions. This only happens in Act 1 as far as I can tell but the fact that it *does* makes the game better at creating a false sense of urgency. When the game tells you in Act 2 that three of your colony worlds — Dargonus, Janus, and Kiava Gamma — are in peril, and if you don't hurry, they might be lost, you probably will assume that there will be consequences to the order you proritize them and how you tackle them. There aren't; that would probably break the budget. But an artificial sense of urgency is still psychologically effective. I would know, I play gacha games. As a self-contained introduction to Rogue Trader, then, Act 1 lies to you in terms of what it says about the game's overall structure. But when it comes to what it says about the game's combat and questing and moment to moment gameplay, it paints a largely accurate (if incomplete) picture. You want the short version? The combat is pretty good. Keystone combat encounters often feature gimmicks, objectives and terrain that lend them a degree of strategic depth. Later, this will get undercut by the progression system, which allows you to far too easily outscale enemies and kill bosses while they're still practically in the womb. But even so, despite having an embarassment of fights against trash mobs, just way too many encounters for a turn-based game, Rogue Trader's combat stays largely interesting, engaging and fun through most of its runtime — even if I did have to turn the difficulty up. The encounter design shines: whether it be with oddly laid out rooms, well-positioned enemies, or additional objectives beyond "kill everyone," there's almost always something to think about, even in the easy fights. On the story front, things are maybe less rosy. Though the writing and plot in Act 1 is competent and reasonably engaging, it largely lacks thematic depth. The game's tangle of side plots and questlines that do not initially appear to be connected is fun to unpick — but then, that only even existed because I bought the DLC, which adds frankly necessary game-length questlines to flesh out the city-scale lower decks of your ship and add new worlds and romance options. And the companion characters have interesting hooks and are decently reactive, but never quite feel wholly real, I think because the reactivity only exists during quests that are specifically relevant to them. You never get to interact with your companions "at rest." It's really the setting doing a lot of the heavy lifting here, but fortunately if you can let yourself immerse in the absurdity of the Warhammer universe, it's a fun place to inhabit. The reactivity of Act 1 is frankly incompatible with the hundreds of hours to follow, so once your condition is no longer critical, the whole system is effectively destroyed, so that the things you did there can't continue to have consequences throughout the rest of the game. It's a necessary evil, I suppose.I really want to talk about a game that felt more true to an experience I personally had than almost anything I've ever played. I'm talking about the horror typing game Dead Letter Depatrtment, a game about how much it sucks to work a data entry job, and probably other stuff too.
Dead Letter Department
Have you ever had a work of art hit too close to home? That was my experience with last year's Dead Letter Department, which I played several times through, in one sitting, trying to get the good ending. In this game, you get to process a lot of mail that didn't find its recipient. Make sense of the weird, blurred, smeared addresses on the envelope, send the letters on to their rightful homes. There's an AI system that's supposed to do it, but it doesn't get everything, so here you are, working night shifts at your prehistoric computer at a shitty warehouse in Arizona or Iowa or somewhere where the power keeps fucking going out, trying to fill in the blanks while your coworkers disappear one by one. Reader, my first job out of high school was going through a database of returned marketing mail sent back to the insurance company I worked for, and trying to figure out why it was returned, and then putting it all in a spreadsheet. Maybe the business had moved. I would have to go on Google maps and trawl South Dakota to find their new adress and put it in the spreadsheet. Maybe the pastor died and it closed. I'd have to delete the row from our database. Maybe the person who was addressing the envelopes fucked up a digit and it got sent to a wrong zipcode. I'd have to fix it, or, if I was feeling too miserable and tired and bleary to go looking for the mistake, write "no such business" in the notes field and hope no one spot checked me. So, okay, like, Dead Letters has a mechanic where the things the AI has you type in go from blurry addresses to like newspaper clippings on spontaneous combustion, or weird curses, or phrases like "I want to submit," you know, and then you go to hell, and things get pretty abstract. It's a horror game, you know? It tries to scare you, and it works; my typing speed went from 75 WMP at the start of my first, blind playthrough (helpfully displayed in the pause menu) to like 50, because my hands were shaking so badly and I was making so many mistakes at the end. But the core experience the game simulates — and very accurately, if a little bluntly, is that of losing your mind at an awful, tedious job. I think Dead Letter Department is great. It has incredible atmosphere, it has a neat, well telegraphed mechanical twist that you have to figure out to get most of the endings besides the default one where you get sold into hell slavery (you know, that's pretty Warhammer 40k if you think about it). It has this really well obfuscated and cryptic "curse" mechanic that really fucks with your head and, worse, your gameplay. But it also kind of hit too close to home. Left me really hollow, and unsettled, and uncomfortable. I thought trying to get more of the endings would defang it, as I understood the game better. It didn't; each one just made me feel a little more tired and a little more mad. I guess that's the mark of a good horror game, that it made me feel instead of making me think, but that fucking data entry job was the worst time of my life, and it might not have been the healthiest thing to go back to it. Even now, writing about it, I'm avoiding the specifics.Rogue Trader: Act II
You might notice that I'm talking about every act of Rogue Trader like it's a separate game. To a suprising extent, that kind of is the case. Apart from acts 4 and 5, which are pretty linear and can be lumped together, each act of the game feels meaningfully distinct from the others not just narratively, but experientially and mechanically. That's part of why I was taking so many breaks throughout the game, despite being completely compelled by it, and eager to play more, for 90% of the runtime. Act II is Rogue Trader's biggest and best act; it's the one that I'll think of when I look back fondly on the game. It makes up maybe half of the game's total length, and introduces a key new mechanic: the colony management menu, where you can make light decisions about the worlds in your "protectorate" (i.e. evil empire). These worlds will include an opulent capital, a brutal prison-labor world, and a factory where heretical rot festers (more, besides); managing them will often offer you choices where every option is completely incompatible with your selected moral system, with no tangible impact on the world or your character besides the recources acquired. I'm not sure whether this disconnection is a good thing or a bad thing. On the one hand, not allowing my iconoclast character to do "ethical, cage-free, non-GMO colonialism" is probably the correct choice, just factually speaking, because there is no such thing, and especially not in this universe. On the other hand, it makes the whole system feel almost vestigial, more an occasional reward dispenser than anything else. It did slightly strengthen my connection with the world, which I suppose is enough. Here, with your ship restored, the Act II plot revolves around you warping across the Koronus Expanse, exploring, restablishing Theodora's uprooted power base, and generally running errands. The sheer amount of stuff you have to do feels appropriate, for a setting this large; it will eventually become a problem for the plot that everything in the story is so disconnected from everything else, but here, it feels like a strength. Exploring feels free-form and incredibly open; you're frequently presented with surprising new sidequests from within your voidship and without, whether it be a conspiracy that your enforces expose in a scene that pops up when you make a jump, or a mysterious pit showing up on your scan of the planet below that someone should probably investigate. I should emphasize that maybe the majority of the sidequests I encountered on my ship came from the two DLCs I bought, Void Shadows and Lex Imperialis. These quest chains never quite felt like chains; more like series of isolated quests that, miraculously, turned out to be connected in the end. They were also the best quests in the game, bar none, with the best writing and the best reactivity (maybe barring of Act I). The DLC quests even had coherent themes and motifs, which is far more than can be said for the main quest. Lex Imperialis in particular was a delight. It seems to have been inspired by Saturnalia and its tradition of role reversal, where for a day the servants would rule over their Roman masters. With one quest set on a feudal world, the DLC forces the all-powerful Rouge Trader into the shoes of a lowly servant; in another, it first forces her to pass capital judgement in an imperial court, then turns that same judgement on her in an attempted coup. It's the most vulnerable I ever felt playing the game, a welcome departure from the power fantasy to explore themes of what it actually *means* to hold this much power, how fragile it really is. Though it's never truly deep, it gave me something to chew on, which is more than can be said for most of the rest of the game. I'll give the game credit: there were a few bright spots in the writing. The Yrliet romance — a forbbiden relationship between an Aeldari (space elf) and human (space xenophobe) — was my favourite part of the game. It being an asexual relationship felt different from every other gaming romance questline I've been through, and Yrliet feels just alien enough for the relationship to feel both challenging, and plausible. Most of the romances and relationships are good, actually; companions don't tend to respond to most story beats — which feels like a huge oversight, given that they're unvoiced and so it wouldn't have been to onerous to write more dialogue for them — but the dedicated scenes you get with each character feel believable and engaging, and the characters do change in subtle ways in response to your actions and conversations in the main story. And Act III, which we'll get to, is genuinely good throughout. But Rogue Trader as a text lacks cohesion, it lacks a point, it lacks a main fucking plot in fact. In Act II, that isn't a problem. Act II is a CRPG open world, a huge space to explore with a ton of shit to find and do — none of it repetitive or boring, all of it bolstered by the fact that in a CRPG, talking is a main verb, and there are as many interesting conversations as there are interesting fights. Unfortunately, outside of the DLCs, self-contained conversations is most of what they are.Now, a few words about Skin Deep.
Skin Deep
I DNF'ed it. Wasn't for me.Rogue Trader: Act III
Act III of Rogue Trader is the best written act. It sees you stripped of all your powers, your gear, your resources and capital, and sent to be a torture slave at the evil elf city. Hot. I knew about that city, Comorragh, where you eventually become a pit fighter, from the abovementioned lesbian smut. In Owlcat's interpretation of it, you feel naked and vulnerable, with a ton of stat-reducing traumas that you have to deal with; with your build ruined, with your companions gone. I played through the game as an AoE psyker DPS (a kind of magic wizard) so I wasn't as powerless as most players would have been, with my mind powers still intact, but still, your vulnerability is felt as you try to find allies both new and old, survive the city, and find a way out. It's a refreshing, mostly linear break from the Act II open-world power fantasy — and by being a more linear story, it's a lot cleaner than the incoherent plot of the rest of the game. You have a clear goal, you encounter obstacles to it in a more-or-less three act structure; getting out means making compromises you otherwise wouldn't, challenging your morality; as weak as you are, talking instead of fighting seems more appealing. The characters you meet are intersting, and contrast well with the human NPCs prevalent throughout the rest of the game. My only complaint is that the act isn't quite long enough. You find your companions pretty easily, all things considered, and get your overpowered gear back well before your escape — which is a shame, because it was around Act III that I was starting to realize that combat balance was a serious problem, and around Act III that I had to start cranking up the difficulty in a futile attempt to preserve any semblance of challenge. I wish Owlcat had comitted a little harder to breaking the power fantasy here: maybe put in a couple near-unwinnable fights, held you gear back from you for longer, make your traumas harder to cure. And the way the story ends — with the option to destroy Comorragh and genocide its (epistemologically evil) inhabitants feels both a little anticlimactic and a lot underdeveloped as a moral choice. I might be wrong, but your choice here has basically zero impact in the rest of the game, which just feels wrong. An aside: as I mentioned, the Yrliet romance was my favourite part of the game. Thoughout Act III she kept apologizing for betraying me, and other NPCs kept acting like I was insane for still working with her after "what she did." I was bewildered by this because I didn't remember any betrayal happening at all, to the point that I had to reload an old save just to check back to the end of Act II and find out what this betrayal was even supposed to be. And frankly, it was so minor that I was confused how anyone could even give a shit, but I checked the game's subreddit and some people wee pretty dogmatic about it. There are a few things like this in the story, where the assumed player reaction from the game just feels miles away from the reaction the text actually created in me.Okay, so. Reverse: 1999 might be my favourite game. Its monetization model is gacha; its genre is visual novel (with turn-based RPG essential oils spritzed over it). It's a deeply flawed text, one which is incredibly ambitious about the political and philosophical themes it wants to explore, about the artistic mileu it wants to belong to. Ocasionally, it reaches bewildering height of quality, telling some of my favourite stories in any medium, which haven't left my head in years; consistently, its art direction is surpassing beautiful and its characters are surpassing excellent. It updates with a new major story to mull over ever six weeks. This most recent patch was, in my interpretation, about the Holodomor.
Reverse 1999: The Campaign's Tale
Set on the steppes of the Don River Valley, "The Campaign's Tale" continues Reverse's main story, which has been about dealing with the end of the first world war, and the beginning of a new, esoteric, alternate-history war. Here, the story revolves around a racist who engineers a magical famine to kill the Cossacks living there, who he sees as subhuman, and around his former commander, an old, traitorous general, who has traveled back in time from the 1990s and claims to want to atone for the war crimes he once committed (in part) by stopping his rogue protege. Developed in China, Reverse: 1999 can broadly be described as a left-anarchist text. The historical events it's engaging with here — first, the displacement of the Cossacks by Russian Bolshevists who wanted to steal their land; second, the Holodomor, where many of the Don Cossacks (and other ethnic minorities in the USSR) were killed in an engineered famine; third, (and most tenuously) the modern Russian encorachment on, and invasion of, Ukraine, are sort of lumped together in its framework as atrocities, acts of genocide, perpetrated in the name of efficiency and expansion, but really fueled by base hatred and lust for power. But Reverse: 1999 is not primarily about macro-level historical commentary, or about depicting atrocities. Instead, "The Campaign's Tale"'s most striking commentary is about the leadup to, and the aftermath of, these acts, and specifically, the way they affect people: victims, tools, and perpetrators. The leadup: the game's main character, a teenage girl named Vertin, is leveraged and manipulated by war hawks in the increasingly fascistic government she works for to do their bidding — though the task is inocuous, even noble, they know, and she knows, that doing it for them will give them more power and apparent credibility. She's only even in this position because seven main story chapters ago — over two years ago, if we count by the real-world timeline of the chapters' release — she and her friends and allies carved out a place for themselves and other marginalized people (queer, neurodivergent, disabled, and magical) to exist safely within this authoritarian world order. A Campaign's Tale asks, "is it even possible to have systemic power at all, without being made complicit in war crimes?" In the aftermath: Igor, a general who has committed many atrocities himself, both actively and by passivity, in the course of his service, feels acutely the weight of his past actions, which didn't even achieve the utilitarian good he thought he was serving. He knows that redemption is impossible (even though, it should be noted, is crimes are much smaller in scale than the story's antagonists); his desire to atone is frustrated at every turn by his victims, who refuse to allow him forgiveness or sympathy; their desire for revenge, meanwhile, is frustrated by the political games Igor still plays in. What does it say that, in the end, he claims to be willing to face a legal and moral judgement that he knows he will not have to? What right, or responsibility, does he have to still command an army, to try to stop an obvious evil that he himself let fester? As a postmodern text, Reverse feels no obligation to answer that. It just leaves us to stew on the injustice and cruelty it depicts, the questions it poses. The evils Igor commited are done. They can't be changed, not even in this time travel narrative. So, what now? I left The Campaign's Tale feeling the sort of perverse delight you feel when a work of art depicts something awful in a really mature and thoughtful way. Though it wasn't a perfect story by any means, with some things I would have changed or cut, it tackles extremely difficult themes with skill, nuance, and a radical degree of compassion. Reverse 1999 might be my favourite game because this is what it's capable of; most games that aim for political are incapable of being this challenging, and of sticking in my head this ferociously. I never thought that I'd be so consistently looking forward to live service game updates because of their story.After that, going back to Rogue Trader felt a bit shit. Because, remember, last we left off, the game offered me an option to genocide the Drukari on Comorragh. I didn't, but either way, this decision would never have received even a tenth of the thought, effort, and care that went into Reverse's meditation on similar themes. An ending slide is all you get, friend. And sure, I hear you, "WH40K just isn't that kind of setting," "it's called grimdark for a reason!" Fair enough. At the time, though, the juxtaposition really damaged my experience of Rogue Trader's story. In Warhammer, genocide is camp. A Dogmatic character actually does them all the time, to help with digestion. In Rogue Trader, none of this is explored. The only thing that's really explored is the Koronus Expanse as a physical space. This is a game without, in my experience, much to say about anything.
Rogue Trader Acts IV and V
If you did as I did and completed all there was to do in Act II before moving on to Act III, these last few acts of the game are pretty linear. A few companion quests to tie up here and there, sure; one choice of what order to do two major quests, but even these feel streamlined compared to what came before. This is probably the right choice. The narrower structure does feel restrictive, but it keeps the game tight and well-paced all the way to the end. Shame none of it is actually that good, I guess. Throughout the game, you've been fighting off a cult, an alien attack, and a weird virus. You expect, at some point, to reach this point where everything comes together, where the story is revealed to be an ultra-cohesive masterpiece with a thundering finale. To a certain extent, this does happen, as in the end the sinister plot of the main villain is revealed, and you have to race against the clock to stop him. But on the other handd, you finish off the cult in an anticlimactic fight at the end of Act IV. You barely even see the aliens again after Act III. The final threat, from which the virus originiated, is revealed to be an out-of-nowhere SECOND alien civilization, with an out-of-nowhere imprisoned god that the villain wants to free (so that they can enslave them themself). Maybe these beats would have landed better if I had more familiarity with the setting, but on a narrative level, this all feels unsatisfying. The climax isn't climactic, it's just a workmanlike checklist of all the tenouosly connected threats you've been dealing with all game, there for you to cross out one one by one. It doesn't help that the mechanics collapse under their own weight at this point. Earlier I praised the combat, but gradually, little by little, the game's enjoyable progression and buildcrrafting system had been chipping away at its encounters, bit by bit, until there was nothing left. It's just to easy to come up with ridiculously broken builds in Rogue Trader, characters that pump out enough damage to end fights in one or two rounds by themselves (to say nothing of what you can achieve with a 6-man party), often before enemies can even act. I raised the combat difficulty, gradually, from Normal to Daring to Hard to Unfair and all that seemed to change was that enemies gained offensive capacity to rival mine. Fights would still end in a handful of turns, but now, enemies could end them in a handful of turns too, so I had to bring along one (1) defensive support. Revolutionary. I only ever lost one fight, out of like, hundreds, in all my time playing the game. Ship combat fares somewhat better: it's not as broken, fights still takes multiple rounds through the whole runtime of the game; your progression feels significant, but doesn't get to the point where it ruins encounters. But that does little to ameliorate a situation which is pretty dire: a story that feels badly constructed, a villain that feels like an asspull, a thematic tapestry that never existed in the first place. I'm a lot harsher on Baldur's Gate 3's story then most of its fans. But one thing you can't deny about that game is it has a central theme — abusive and coercive relationships: their formation and their aftermath — that it explores throroughly, through EVERY character and sidequest. The strength of the CRPG as a narrative genre, as a framework for storytelling, is that you get to take a position on that theme, in all its permutations, in a huge variety of scenarios; that, at some point, a situation is almost guaranteed to challenge your way, or your characters way, of thinking about the world. What, by contrast, is Rogue Trader about? Anyone who's played the game want to tell me? I have a hard time saying. For me, for the character I imagined, it was about the responsibility my character felt towards human life in a world that devalued it: a responsibility so strong that she even created a God to share her values and uphold her mission. That's an experience, an interpretation, that the game supports through the choices it offers. But not one that it challenged me on (except for one moment in the DLCs, incidentally). Not one that it endorsed or criticized or really even engaged with in its text. Rogue Trader is a build-your-own theme buffet, a game with nothing much to say besides, "hey, wasn't it fun to explore this universe? Didn't you enjoy getting to roleplay within it?" And yeah, Owlcat are right: it was fun, and I did enjoy it. Even though the game didn't make me think. Even if it rarely made me feel. Even if it had no falling action (my biggest pet peeve in gaming btw), proceeding directly from final boss to (pleasantly bleak) ending slides. Even if it ended in disapointment.When I look back on my month with Rogue Trader, I'll be looking back almost entirely favorably: on the exploration, the Romance, the openness, the fun and the camp. By sheer volume, this game is far more good than bad. But this month, I also played games that actually moved me: that made me feel miserable, and bad, and confused, and, in the end, changed in small ways. Rouge Trader, in extremis, was Terraria: Bigger and Boulder. I wanted it to be Reverse: 1999.
Anyway. I do feel like I'm entering a very "modern CRPG" time in my life. Next week I'm meaning to play Esoteric Ebb; after that, maybe Larian's Divinity Original Sin 2, or the Owlcat pathfinder games, or Pillars of Eternity. We shall see! These games eat your life a little, but I always get at least something out of them.
I'm with you on the inherent meaninglessness of sandbox experiences, but I think you might be missing something in looking at what you did mechanically. On its own, a sandbox is just a pile of sand. But you built something meaningful there, with your brother. And I'm sure he appreciated it.
The time I spent with my brother was certainly worthwhile. I think what I mean is, I can spend time with my brother doing a lot of different things. In Terraria, my specific frustration is that what we did in game wasn't meaningful, it was the same as all the other times we'd played Terraria. Maybe it's less an indictment of the genre as a whole and more my burnout on these couple specific games, that I've spent so much of my life in: they cannot possibly make me feel anything anymore, I'm too used to them. Maybe we'd love Hytale or Vintage Story or what have you? IDK. I just know that playing Terraria made me genuinely miserable in about half of our play sessions, which is not a good ratio.
Aw, yeah, no. If you're retreading the same ground and unhappy with it, do something else.
Have you guys considered problem solving games (Myst etc)? I've been doing those together since I was a kid; I played Myst IV with my older cousin who was staying with us for a time and we had a blast. They're often narrative, often visually good looking, always goal-oriented with meaningful milestones and the satisfaction inherent to figuring out something complicated.
And I'm also guilty of sometimes merging multiple weeks in this thread, don't worry about it!
I've been playing UNBEATABLE, a rhythm game I awaited for years with overwhelmingly positive reviews on Steam, and oh boy, do I have mixed feelings! Oh no! Huge rant incoming! For reference, I'm playing on Hard, which (and this is conveyed as confusingly as it sounds) is the intermediate of the initially available difficulty levels, and presented (snarkily) as the intended experience, but is not the default.
First things first, as I attempt to be rigorously fair: Aesthetic is 10/10. UNBEATABLE features comic-like 2D characters on 3D environments, in that style that's all jagged lines and edges, and comic book speech bubbles; in addition, there are also several animated/prerendered 2D cutscenes. It's a little like Hi-Fi RUSH! All characters are visually distinctive, with their own charisma and personality, and scenes are generally visually cohesive. First impression is brought down - after a straightforward prologue - by the initial premise, as your character is, if not amnesiac, at least a (deliberate?) blank slate. She doesn't know anything and no one knows anything about her, so no information about her or from her is forthcoming to you, the player.
You meet a child in a field. She amicably kidnaps you (by being super forceful) and convinces you to tag along with her while she does music crimes. Yes, you observe that in this world, music is illegal, probably because it summons the Silence, cute little sketch monsters that fly at you. There are music cops, HARM, consisting in infinity redshirt grunts (not actually wearing red) who shoot real bullets at children and cartoonishly mean and over the top leaders, think Kill-la-kill-style. Soon you're thrown in jail, where you meet more music criminals.
I have to question the wisdom of starting your cool rhythm game by throwing your characters in jail. For the first multiple episodes and gameplay hours, there are almost no rhythm sequences or songs. You have to go through a boring, repetitive routine in which you revisit the same locations, repeat the same actions and have redundant conversations. And here's where the first weaknesses in UNBEATABLE's game design start to show. All throughout, the game features fairly vast sets you need to run across back and forth, or over and over, which takes time. The pathfinding of any acquaintances tagging along is 90s-grade, so they keep getting stuck on things. There is a lot of dialogue, and let me be clear: A good half of it is voice acted, and the voice acting is very nice and clean. That's good! But the tenor of it, on the other hand, is sleep-inducing. Maybe it's a generational thing. These young women and men are always angry and mopey and comunicate poorly and confusingly. They talk and talk and talk and say very little of substance or practical interest. It's not always clear what you need to be doing, and there is no quest log, although there seem to be snarky quest notifications (often played for laughs). Real progress in the story sometimes happens in sudden jumps and lurches as you're blindsided by a timeskip or there's a chapter transition. You get a full credits roll after every chapter, by the way, even though this was not an episodic game. Why???
Maybe you're supposed to be stoned during this part, or something. There's this sound effect that they play on many (most?) scenes during these chapters, I think it's supposed to be cicadas? Maybe it's part of the music. To me it sounds like dentist drills. Boy do they love this loop. It's usually the first thing to kick in and the last one to stop in each scene. You can't un-hear it once you notice it, I assure you. So there you are, playing UNBEATABLE. You've been running up and down long hallways for half an hour real time, listening to the gentle melody of dentist drills, a basic 5 second beat loop and the mopey characters' inane bickering, when suddenly! A rhythm sequence! Finally!!!
Rhythm sequences can catch you unaware, especially if you've been lulled into complacency by a long absence. Silence (which has to be blocked with button presses) can start coming at you in as little as a few seconds after the beginning of a song, depending of the song. You can miss a few button presses, but this will increase a "Heartbreak" bar. Miss too many, and it's game over! The button matching mechanics are all pretty standard (tap, hold, mash), but UNBEATABLE can feature several visual styles of rhythm gameplay. Some are tutorialized, some are not - figure it out, I guess! The visual style can and often does change within the same level - it can change constantly, making what's happening extremely difficult to parse, especially because there are insane amounts of camera shaking, double vision, UI moving around, etc. If you play this game, I strongly entreat you to enable "stable camera" mode immediately. It's still hard and shakey with it on but it's way more sane.
Alright, say you missed a few notes and you lost the rhythm sequence. Game over! Damn, you lost in ten seconds after waiting half an hour for this! No big deal, that's the fun thing about rhythm games, right? You're learning the song. You can play again, try a few more times until you get good at it. Right? Wrong. Instead, more often than not, your one and only failure is "permanent." The story of UNBEATABLE will move right on, except all the characters are a little (even) more miserable after getting beaten up by cops, or whatever. As you can imagine, this has come up in reviews. Steam's delightful community recommends lowering the difficulty level, which is what I might say if I had never played a rhythm game in my life. I don't want to win every level in one try with no challenge - I want to be allowed to fail and try again! The developers, I'm happy to say, have played rhythm games before. They acknowledge the issue and claim to be working on modifying the game to allow for retries.
Some things about the game improve a lot in later chapters, which I'm sure contributed to the game's positive reception. Rhythm sections become more frequent, thankfully. More of them allow for retries, too (this happens when winning is required by the plot). When allowed to retry a few times, I can deal with this difficulty level just fine and have fun. I did eventually have to stop using the controller and switch to my mechanical keyboard for gameplay, but this is fairly typical for me, as many rhythm sections do require quick reaction times from the visuals rather than the music, and I don't do well with the stiffness of xbox controller buttons. From an experience standpoint, I appreciate the soundtrack. I'm no expert, but I think it's good? There are various genres in evidence, with the protagonists having a more grungy sound - the occasional ballad - and the evil cops being more beat-heavy, which will be a funnier sentence to think about if you play the game. One particularly unhinged antagonist is mostly dubstep. All those busy visuals of the rhythm sequences are also pretty cool as a viewer! I'd enjoy them a lot more if I didn't risk losing the fight forever with a few mistimed button presses.
The plot, on the other hand did not yet become much clearer 10 hours into the game. At first I thought I was getting distracted. Why are these people arguing about the failure of their band? They all met after the start of the game, they didn't know each other, but I don't remember them deciding to start a band - not on camera, at least. Then I became convinced the plot was just bad. Where I am now, however, after a major inflection point, I'm starting to think the lapses are deliberate, and there's more to it that I haven't learned yet, so I'm not holding this against the game, especially if everything becomes clearer later. It would make sense. The writers aren't entirely novices, I don't think. There's plenty of perfectly fine snark, for one. The character voices are solid (if boring). So my advice to anyone willing to try the game is, fill yourself with patience and survive the insufferable prison and beach town portions.
There is an arcade mode too. You can switch to arcade mode and play just the rhythm levels. It even changes the style of the main menu! At one point I thought the story mode of the game was so infuriating, I was just playing to unlock everything in arcade. Even after surmounting the worst (so far) part of story mode, I still intend to use arcade mode to at some point retry those levels I barely got to try.
Previous
I skimmed your post because this game is somewhere high up in the backlog and only because I received it as a gift and I didn't want to get... uhh, not spoilered necessarily because that doesn't seem terribly relevant for this kind of game, but I did want to go in with minimal bias from outside opinions?
The prison is where I remember leaving off... the dialogue was driving me a little nuts. But I'll try to suffer through it if you say it's worth it!
I'm happy to know I'm not alone in feeling that way about the dialogue! I tried not to spoil the story; I don't think I mentioned anything significant after the fact that Beat ends up in jail.
I confess I still don't particularly like the protagonists. It gets better strictly because there's more gameplay, which dillutes the annoying dialogue down. Possibly the least annoying character is HARM leader Rest. Contrast with Hi-Fi RUSH, where every protagonist is likeable...
But speaking of dialogue, you reminded me of yet another gripe! The terrible checkpointing! (I'm a magnet for games with terrible checkpointing lately...) This is important. Even when you can repeat a rhythm section, the game just resets the whole scene. That means, go through the exact same dialogue again. And again. And again. And this isn't just button mashing through a bunch of text lines; sometimes there is enforced pacing, pauses and animations mixed in. I measured a particularly annoying instance of this a couple days ago: Every restart required you to rewatch forty six lines of dialogue. JFC.
Oh lord you have no idea how much this kicks the game down a few rungs in the great backlog... This was the sense I got for the game from my very brief (120 minutes according to Steam) playtime: Unpolished as heck. Very stylish and cool but with things like how the dialogue is built (the enforced pacing) you can tell that they either didn't account for multiple attempts or, even worse, didn't care. AAAAAA
I still want to give it a fair shake, because demanding exceptional polish and thoughtful design from all my games means the games I play will skew towards those with money. I want to still reward a passion product!
So I've been playing a game called Retro Rewind: VHS store simulator.
It's ok, I think it could be a lot better. Buuut at least I consider it a nice cozy game.
It lets you add video files to play on the TV in the store, so I've converted a few 80s and 90s movies into the right format and added them so I can watch, or listen, to the movies in game.
I do think it could be a lot better. It definitely feels early access even though it's not considered early access anymore, and misses the mark if it was ever trying to go for a retro 90's nostalgia feel. It definitely doesn't feel nostalgic at all. Lighting is too "cool", it's in a weird modern mall, architecture of the doors and rooms look modern, none of the NPCs have anything that makes them look like they're from the 90s, the auto-generated movies don't feel 90s.
Like if it were me, something I'd add is more emphasis on memberships. Like I want to have to make membership cards for new customers for a one time fee, and then have to check them every time a person rents something. Then the progression of that feature is to go from paper cards that you have to manually review/scan to plastic scannable cards that you can just scan, and eventually you can get a scanner where the customer just auto-scans it.
And on that note, more databases. Doesn't have to be super deep, but like I want to track my regulars, look at movie trends of what's being rented or genres trending, see which movies are late, and use that data to see if I have to buy a replacement for that movie and write it off. Or have someone call or ask about a movie that is currently rented out, so I have to check the system to see when it'll be returned.
Right now, it just feels like a barcode scanner simulator where all the interesting things happen automatically as you just scan tapes and pull money out of the register. Which frankly is a system that feels way too general, like you could just replace VHS tapes with CDs and have a record simulator, or switch out the VHS tapes with random snacks and you have a convenience store simulator, or switch out the VHS tapes with make up and you have a makeup store simulator. Or switch out the VHS tapes with movie tickets and theaters, and you'd have a theater simulator. Like nothing about this game currently feels tailor made to the VHS store experience, it feels like a store sim skinned to be about a VHS store, which was disappointing as I started playing.
The auto-generated movie posters and names need more work. They look like those generic public domain books you find at the library. And frankly, I think the use of AI in a case like this would be perfect if you used a basic model trained on fake movie posters and make sure it's all cleared artwork. And a basic LLM with some parameters to generate the movie names.
And the rest is basically nitpicks.
Like then the whole return thing. There should be a customizable space to do returns. Like I should be able to purchase more rewinders and not just do returns one at a time.
And the location. It looks like you're in a shopping mall. Which is bizarre. I don't know what they were going for there. I'd much prefer to be at a strip mall or like a building surrounded by wilderness. And the entire design feels modern, not a single thing from the doors, to the machines, to the clothing, to the style of the buildings look 90s. The only thing that looks 90s is the carpet selection. lol
And like the popcorn and icee machine. I never knew VHS stores to have those. The VHS stores I went in the 90s had claw machines, a pinball machine, gumball/sticker machines, and maybe an arcade cabinet or two, then sold microwave popcorn packets.
All in all it looks and feels like a game designed by someone who never experienced VHS stores at the height of their popularity in the 90s.
Anyways, it's a good game that I can turn my brain off with, but that's about it. It does get my creative juices flowing in wanting to make a much better game based on the concept though. Like for an authentic 90s VHS store there needs to be that one employee that sells drugs to customers on the down low and you should be able to either fire him or demand a cut.
Skyrim (Lorerim)
I've been meaning to play this for ages but it's been on the back burner, especially as it's another Skyrim mod pack, and we all know we all spend longer browsing and downloading Skyrim mod packs than actually playing them.
This one is completely excellent. I am blown away, it is properly like a Skyrim remake in 2026. I'm playing it in third person, with a controller. A feat I never would have attempted in vanilla Skyrim.
Everything looks and feels amazing. Like AAA quality. There's a couple of small niggles that you'd expect with any Bethesda game, like the camera being an asshole in tight dungeons, the occasional crash in really intense areas and a couple of small weird UI things like the equipment comparison window. But the mod pack with like 6000 mods some how holds together better than vanilla, honestly.
It's a requiem mod pack which might be a problem for some. I'll be honest, I loved the idea of requiem and the more I play the more I wish it was more like vanilla levelling, unfortunately. I love the idea that you need to prepare for certain types of enemy and your build/equipment means a lot more. But it really bothers me early game when I pick up a lot of quests I can't even start because I get completely bodied by like dragur and vampires, so need to just put a pin in it and come back later.
Though it's nice to come back eventually and flatten the guys who did me in earlier, so there's some pay off eventually.
Also there's a weird "dark souls like respawn" mechanic I had to work around which I didn't much like. The author claims that saving and loading in the script heavy mod pack can cause scripts to get stuck forever in your save game, theb cause crashes as you play longer. Which I completely believe. But the "fix" is to basically turn off saving and instead make you respawn at your last sleeping place. You're encouraged to set your respawn outside a dungeon with a camp site and it's smooth enough... But it's a fucking huge waste of time if you die even a couple of times deep into a dungeon. It's a lot of walking and setting up your spells and equipment etc again. My "workaround" was to add the "simple bedroll" mod to the end of the pack and slap that guy down every 5m in the dungeon. That was good enough for me.
My favorite thing is though it's really not some Skyrim simp pack (like every Skyrim mod pack). There's no nudity, the armour and clothes are all reasonable and not like nude boob armour and all the NPCs (especially the important ones!) look like real people and not like super models.
If someone was looking for a Skyrim mod pack in 2026 and didn't mind the requiem and respawn stuff (you can modify the difficulty in the settings) the I would whole heartily say use this pack. I'm 20 hours in and having a lot of fun!
Retro Rewind
This is a really well made shop simulator where you own a 90's VHS store. It's crammed full of nostalgia and charm. The developers are clearly quite talented as everything they've done and added feels really polished.
There's not much to say here except it's a really good around 10 to 20 hour experience of running a VHS store simulator. The content gets a little dry towards the end but they said they are adding a lot more stuff reasonably soon, and I felt like I got my money's worth already. I think I'll come back when they add it.
Ha! To each their own, my own review of Retro Rewind is kind of the complete opposite of yours.