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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.
Mewgenics, and I'm slowing down greatly. I got the final ending (I think), and now I'm just playing for completion, unlocking the hardest difficulties, beating house bosses, quest items, etc. Frank wants a frankly (lol) absurd number of veteran cats, unless I just run the alley over and over it's going to take forever to get him maxed out. I did finally get my 4th room, which I've dubbed "Thunderdome": all my reject cats go there to live with all my Appeal furniture and fight/fuck/die to their heart's content. I have so much food the extra mouths aren't a concern, and I figure they'll be good stock to feed to Tracy/Injury Boy/??? to grind out the last of those. And in the rare case that a good specimen rises from the filth, it can be moved to a proper room.
As an aside, I really appreciate how the game mechanics kind of naturally lead you to be an uncaring abusive cat hoarder. Rather than some cheap shock value of like, a cat murder simulation or something, the game overwhelms you and sets up incentives to lead you to the behavior. Maybe a subtle commentary on abuse and the conditions that lead to it?
I'm at nearly 200 hours, so definitely got my money's worth, remains to be seen if I have the patience for 100%. Would highly recommend
I have been playing the game Mech Arena on my smartphone. Its a PvP arena shooter where you control walking tank mechs and fight in a team against other players around the world.
The first thing you notice about the game is its completely infected with monetization. Every time I open the app my play sessions start with 10 seconds of methodically clicking through like 8 pop ups trying to entice me with microtransactions.
This happens every single fucking time you start up the game.
This is incredibly disappointing because outside of that I actually really like the game. Its such a good 5 minute game loop thats perfect for sitting on a train or waiting for an appointment.
The initial format they give you is "Control Point Clash" where you have 5 beacon points around the map that 2 teams of 5 players fight over. This game mode is so fun I dont even bother with the rest of the game.
The mechs are all well designed aesthetically, and the game is balanced reasonably well. There are a handfull of mech types, each with varying stats but mostly are defined by a single special ability unique to that mech type. Generally, most of the mechs are balanced well enough that you wouldnt really say they are even in a 1v1 fight, but in a group every mech is somewhat useful.
The big caveat to this is that is only the case when you are facing mechs within your same "tier". Since you can buy mechs with real money, sometimes you will enter a game and one player has paid to get access to a mech from a higher tier they can easily steamroll everyone else. This is the big sticking point with matchmaking, which is otherwise pretty good and tends to give balanced matches, but it really depends on who is playing.
Tiers are ascended by buying enough mechs and weapons in your current tier to be promoted to the next and get access to better gear. One thing I like is that this is completely achieveable in F2P, you will get enough of all the resources through the standard lootboxes to eventually keep ranking up without buying anything. Certain items are only obtainable through monetary purchase, but those are not needed to progress the game.
Unfortunately I cant say the same for the rest. There are sometimes there events that happen over the course of a few days, and if you do enough tasks you get special prizes like skins or gear. But the really good mech that they offer as the best prize requires you to make a purchase at some point, so its really a trap.
There actually seems to be a ton of stuff in the game, lots of skins, lots of other game modes, maps, weapons, features I havent even touched like pilots and modifications. But I havent bothered with 90% of it because its clear that a bunch of this stuff is ultimately pay walled.
If they could just strip down the game to just the F2P mechs and Control Clash and took away all the monetizations, this would be an amazing casual pickup game. Its just a shame how often they ruin my good time on purpose to try and squeeze some money out of me.
Only new addition is Titanium Court which is....a thing.
If you're curious you could watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSxuuoYkR3o
or if you'd like to know what the fuck that even was there's this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wEQGSvTonM
And if you're a normal human who is still VASTLY confused the briefest of sale's pitches is:
Match 3 first for resources and position, then auto battle based on the board state of the match 3 board.
That's to start. I have discovered at least one other totally different game in there plus the higher level meta game on top.
It is wildly unique. No idea how good i would consider it yet.
I strongly recommend it for anyone who's looking for something different. It truly is.
I've put a few hours into it. I get the sense that there's more to the story than just the Match 3 thing, but that's the only real gameplay I've experienced so far, and I'm not a Match 3 kind of person. I'm hoping it starts to open up for me
I had similar issues with Inscryption. I never really got past the first act card game, and wasn't enough of a fan of that card game to push through.
Almost all of the gameplay will be match 3, so if it's not your thing it'll be hard to push through to the novel bits.
I have two games to write about this week. I'll try to keep it short (at least by my standards) — not because I regret the interminable rambles I sometimes go on in these threads, but because both games are kind of too much in my head to neatly summarize.
Pathfinder: Kingmaker
Pathfinder: Kingmaker is the second CRPG I've played from Owlcat Games. It was their debut project, a Kickstarted COVID-era adaptation of an official module for the Pathfinder TTRPG (an open-source-y D&D derivative from the nineties). A few weeks back I wrote about their most recent game, Rogue Trader, which I generally quite liked but had some quibbles with, and playing Kingmaker was a revelation, because it was everything I wanted from Rogue Trader, and it also made me realize why some of its best elements would get streamlined away in subsequent games from the studio.
It will suffice to say that, unlike Rogue Trader, huge amounts of Kingmaker's systems are designed around creating a sense of friction between the player and the game; of making their actions feel committal and deliberate. The game is divided into an exploratory, open-world-ish RPG campaign and a crunchy, challenging kingdom management simulator; by and large, you won't so much be doing both of these at once as you will be alternating between them, going from long, challenging main quest adventures to months' worth kingdom crisis resolution on the map screen, all under the weight of an ever-present ticking clock. You're playing a baroness, building your small barony into a poweful and influential kingdom, but even so the game never makes you feel powerful or secure in your position. Constant crises undermine your authority, challenging both your power base and your philosophy. And all of this ties into a sprawling but well-crafted plot about displacement, curses, the cruelties of the powerful, and violence against women.
A real standout here are the characters in your party, which are, I believe, almost entirely original to Owlcat's take on the Kingmaker story (in a tabletop campaign, they would be replaced by player characters). Owlcat do a decent job at tying them into the main story where they can, but where their character writing really shines is in incidental moments: in camp conversations that don't involve you, in the advice they give on dilemmas facing you kingdom, in main quests where they interject at a moment where you don't expect them to. Although only one of your twelve companions — maybe two, tops — feels truly integral to the game's main plot, they're all extremely believable as people, with key links to the game's themes, and arcs that generally felt extremely natural. At one point in the game I noticed that a character who I had hated at his introduction had suddenly become one of my favourites, both because I understood him better, and because our journey had humbled and changed him. And I didn't even notice as it was happening.
Kingmaker takes place over the span of I think three or four years, so the passage of time allows characters and plot to really go places without anything feeling rushed or crammed. If anything, the game runs into the opposite problem, especially at the end, where it's just too big, and you're kind of eager for it to be over (this not helped by the penultimate dungeon, which decides to be an ultimate combat test and increases both the quantity and difficulty of enemies in a way that grinds the pacing to a dead stop).
It was a case of extreme serendipity perhaps, but the character I built and roleplayed for my Kingmaker playthrough played a pretty big role in my enjoyment of the game. A lot of its plot involved the fae, including one whose whole aesthetic is "big burning ball;" I conceived my character as a whimsical, chaotic figure, who was burning up inside, which manifested in the form of intense fire powers. A lot of the game is about explicit or implicit sexual violence (at least in my reading); I named my character Io. You know, how you roleplay the character you create has a substantial impact on your enjoyment of a CRPG story, and Kingmaker never really asks you to consider the character's backstory, but more than most games I've played I felt that the game really responded to and enabled my roleplaying choices within the story thanks to its alignment system — which often provides 5-9 options at major decision points, instead of the 2-3 you often see in other RPGs. And since the character I conceived of happened to align naturally with the game's themes, it really felt like I was in conversation with the game when it came to the choices I made, even or especially when they led to tragic outcomes that forced my character to re-evelauate herself. The ending I got, pursuing an ultimately doomed romance with one of the game's antagonists, felt suitably tragic and complex (though I hear if I had just done one or two things slightly differently, I could have gotten the "true" ending, which probably would have been less bleak).
In some respects, the game really feels like a freshman effort. The pacing is rough, especially near the end; though I liked the kingdom management system, it was pretty controversial; I haven't even talked about the combat or buildcrafting, which was pretty confusing, assuming a level of familiarity with Pathfinder's systems that I did not have. There's a ton of asset reuse, and the camera is fixed and can't be rotated, which severely limits environment design. All that said though, Kingmaker might be my favourite experience I've had with a fantasy RPG. Part of that is just the character I played, who felt really important to me by the end; part of that is the game's themes, its story, its sense of mystery and precarity, all of which are genuinely really well done. In part because of all the friction (some the result of elegant systemic design; some, of jank) It's just a super rewarding experience, with a lot of bold design choices that maybe don't quite work out all the time, but never fail to contribute to a wholly unique gameplay experience.
Reverse 1999: Spring Unending
If Kingmaker is too big to really talk about, Reverse 1999's newest story update, Spring Unending, is too dense. It feels like an extremely concentrated distillation of all the game's themes about marginalization, power and politics into a frankly delightful Wuxia story set in the distant past. In it, Yao — personified plants and animals who will only live for a few months or years — desperately search for longevity; they bump up against an immortal Daoist who tries to help them but is simply incapable of understanding their experience of the world, a city-state that is hell-bent on blaming them for all its problems, and a cabal of influential figures who leverage this climate of bigotry and hostility to push the Yao towards radicalism.
Meanwhile, in the nineties, another Yao, doomed to die before spring, uncovers this ancient story on the burgeoning internet, on forums, in internet cafes, her path crossing with some of the immortal figures from that ancient history as the events of the past threaten to repeat themself.
On the one hand, you've almost certainly read or played a story that's a lot like this before. On the other, Reverse's take on the quest for longevity is quite simply a clinic on storytelling and structure: thematically dense; rich with believable characters whose arcs intertwine and overlap and mirror each other in delicious ways; an elegant mechanism of setup and payoff that is never shocking but still manages to delight in its specifics. There are so many threads I could pull at, could weave into a workable analysis, that it's a bit overwhelming.
Here's just one. The story is titled "Spring Unending." Both of our main perspective characters, past and present, are herbacious Yao: embodied reeds who "won't even survive a full cycle of seasons." Implicitly, then, the story suggests a question: "what good is an unending spring, if you won't even survive the winter?" And this is deftly explored: for example, our immortal deuteragonist, Paper Heron, urges the Yao not to hurt themselves in their pursuit of longevity; to instead follow the Way, and let the world wash over them and not trouble them. But how can the Yao acheive this kind of peace when they're told it might take years, and they're faced with a ticking clock counting down on their lives? It's an excellent depiction of the transperency phenomenon, the way that the privileged, however well-meaning, are often literally incapable of understanding the experiences of the marginalized. And it's not a surprise when this friction of worldview eventually plays into the conflict in a way that feels both tragic and inevitable.
It feels like Spring Unending has a dozen or a hundred threads like that. To explore them all, I would have to turn into a spider. And since that's beyond my powers, I'll just say that I'm not sure that this story will stick with me — it didn't move me, really — but it feels genuinely masterful in a way that you almost never see in gaming.
Oh yeah, should I engage with Spring Unending now, or catch it in reflections after I catch up? It sounds rather good and self contained, but I don't know if I need more context or if it's gonna spoil plot.
Spring Unending is completely unrelated to the main plot -- not all side events are, but you'll be fine doing this one!
In general, while the event is running, it's recommended to use as much of your energy as you can spare farming the event boss so you can buy out the event shop for its high level materials, exclusive items, etc. Spending energy there is more efficient than anywhere else.
Played a lot of Windrose with a friend and we've more or less finished all the exploration and mission content currently available. All in all, a really solid survival crafting game with a bit of a learning curve for both ground and naval combat, but plenty of great quality of life features out of the box, and a decent execution on the pirate theme. Took us 60-70 hours to clear all the missions, max out our preferred equipment, build the current biggest ships, and explore all the points of interest, and that's including the tedious resource gathering, so it's a good value for 30 bucks. We're not avid builders so we'll just wait until more content is released to pick it up again, but the building system and available building pieces are quite good and varied, and if you visit the subreddit (r/crosswind, that's the game's old name), you can admire other players' Spanish-style mansions, sprawling pirate coves, or minimally functional leaf shacks.
Also really briefly started a new endless mode run on Frostpunk 2 to hunt down a few more achievements and by the "end" of that one I managed to have a workforce 17 times higher than my population. Love how absurdly imbalanced Fractured Utopias can get, very much looking forward to Breach of Trust in June.
Reverse 1999
Still playing too much of this one. On the advice of @Evie, I played a couple events and went through part 8, now on the Last Evening on Earth event. I really liked Route 77 event and the Sao Paulo chapter, the San Fran event was nice to get time with Matilda and see what ol' MV were up to after the events of chapter 7.
Spoilers
R77: OH MY GOD THAT ENDING made me gasp. I knew something else had to be going on with that mirror scene with how it was "shot". I figure I'm gonna learn what's actually up with 'Ms Grace' before too long.I didn't believe for a moment Arcana was dead after all the foreshadowing they did with Lucy and the Awakened. They wrote it well though, the reader gets that through different viewpoints, so it felt reasonable that Team Timekeeper and Zeno didn't necessarily realize it.
Pokemon Legends Z A
When the trailer came out, I clowned on it with my digimon pals. "Oh they're copying digimon world 1 gameplay after 25 years", "who wants an entire pokemon in a city, y'all figured out with Arceus we want to go exploring."
I was so wrong. This game does a great job of integrating Pokemon into the lives of folks and demonstrating the struggles that could arise. The battles feel fast paced, a good match for the city vibe, and pokemon mostly feel reactive, though they made Aegislash feel awful (he has to unsheath to attack, other mons easily get 2 hits in during the animation, basically unuseable). There's actually a good bit of exploring to do between tucked away alleys and rooftop parkour. The wild areas don't feel like a gameplay contrivance, nor are they the only area where you find wild pokemon, they're everywhere. It's even got something to say about real estate and politics if you choose to read the subtext, but can also just have a happy go lucky pokemon adventure without thinking about it too. It feels like the perfect compliment to Legends Arceus, the director has earned my full trust going forward.
Clair Obscur Expedition 33
I just bought and started this one yesterday but I've got like 4-5hrs in it so far. It's rather good so far, quite the interactive, cinematic experience. They've gotten one or two "jaw drop hand to the mouth" reactions out of me. I wasn't expecting a light experience but fuck this game starts heavy. I've just met the brush-head merchant.
-Gustave has kinda got a Rob Pattinson face.
-I'm very glad I turned around and got the baguette cosmetic.
-I'd quite like to find the light for that one guy and see what his deal is.
-I'm convinced that they knew what they were doing calling expedition 69 the climbing expedition.
-"gommage" seems to translate as exfoliating, as in cleansing dead cells from the skin. Clair obscur seems to reference an art style with strong contrasts between light and dark, coined in reference to paintings but not exclusive to them.
-it looked like garbage with no real graphics settings available (not even presets) until I set the launch option to "SteamDeck=0 %command%", real weird default behavior to hide all the settings for all Linux PCs and set them to lowest low settings.
Argus is one of my favorite characters in Reverse. I read her as the writers going "what if toxic masculinity was a woman?" Her character story, "The Red Wall," is about exploring her mental space after the events of Route 77 and it's an unsettling personal favorite.
Expedition 33 has one of the strongest openings of any game ever. I don't love the whole game quite as much as most people, but my jaw was on the floor through the whole prologue. And it's super fun to find all the remnants of previous expeditions while exploring and work out their little stories.
ZA was so good! I'm a few of the last 'mons away from finishing the Hyperspace dex (Pokopia got in the way), and it's just been a joy throughout. I have trouble thinking of any game I've enjoyed quite so much for the nearly 100 hours I put in.
Vampire Crawlers (a turn-based roguelite deckbuilder set in the same universe as Vampire Survivors) was released a few days ago and I've been having a blast. There are some things about the game that I am not keen on.
Progression feels much slower than in Vampire Survivors and the game's balance leaves a whole lot to be desired. Some Crawlers available early in the game like Giovanna Grana and Pugnala Provola are capable of pulling off infinite combos with the right cards and arcana setup, which outright trivializes the game's difficulty, whilst other Crawlers are dogshit from a balance perspective.
Another thing I don't like is the voice acting. Vampire Survivors didn't have voiced characters, so hearing these characters spout voice lines is jarring. Antonio's lines are particularly bad, they sound like shitty imitations of cockney or even Australian accents at times.
Horsey Game is a horse breeding & racing game where your partner falls ill with the horse flu and you need to earn enough money to pay for medicine to cure her. I picked this one up last week purely because of a YouTube challenge run video that appeared on my feed.
For context, virtually everything in the game is classed as a "horse" from trees, apples, fish, crocodiles, zebras, birds, mooses, humans, cars, etc and can be crossbred, raced, melted down to glue for money, even spliced with CRISPR gene editing which is surprisingly complex. There is even a walled-off power plant full of plutonium that you can use to rapidly mutate your "horses." It's genuinely a game where you could end up breeding biomechanical Eldritch horrors that look like amalgamations of six-wheeler cars with giraffe necks and large heads with no eyes which can go incredibly fast.
Do I recommend it? Only for the sheer absurdity and jank on display. If you ever read All Tomorrows and felt unsettled by the Qu, then maybe it's not for you.
I found progression to speed up a lot in Vampire Crawlers when I started considering the choice of taking a gem or cashing out for 200g a lot more closely. Sometimes getting to the end is valuable, but sometimes getting several hundred gold to put into durable upgrades is the better choice.
I noticed that I had the demo version of The Hundred Line - Last Defense Academy in my library. Guess I forgot I downloaded it at some point. So I gave it a try.
In many ways, it's very similar to the Danganronpa games. Style, music, general idea of a bunch of Japanese high schoolers getting kidnapped and locked in some abandoned high school in a world of ruin. Even has a non-human "mascot" character like Monokuma who directs/controls the students. This is the exact set-up of Danganronpa titles.
That said, it's not a mystery/detective game about a killing game. It's actually a tactical JRPG. With still some mystery elements. But it's not a killing game! Hell, the students can't even die! Well, they can die in battle, but they just get resurrected and sent back to the battlefields.
The proposition here is the students have to fight to defend this school against these weird monsters for 100 days before they can go back. While trying to figure out what these weird monsters are, why they were chosen, what happened to the "outside world" that they're now in, and if they can get back to their previous lives of peace and quiet back in the "Tokyo Residential Complex," which is like a gigantic enclosed dome they all lived in (can't even see the sky from inside it)
It was a little confusing at first because of the similarities to Danganronpa, yet I didn't see anything about Spike Chunsoft, the developers of Dangaronpa. However, the actual creator of Danganronpa, Kazutaka Kodaka, created his own studio, Too Kyo Games, and made The Hundred Line. So that's why it looks and feels so similar. Literally the same dude.
I like it so far. It mixes Danganronpa, Persona, and like maybe FFT (a very light version of it; nothing as indepth as FFT). There are a lot of cutscenes -- in many ways its a highly-interactive VN just like Danganronpa -- which can be annoying, but the dialog is at least decent and mostly voiced. Some of the humor is great. One character is like "Yesss! I've been kidnapped to partake in a killing game! I can't wait!!" but then is told something like "What?! What is wrong with you? Why would we have you kill each other??" obviously referencing the game's wild "cousins."
Anyway, the demo was like 3-5hrs long, which was great. Got a solid feel for the game. I ended up buying the full game last night (it's on sale 40% off on Steam until the 30th) I'm only on Day 9 in-game. I'll definitely keep playing this for awhile. I have heard it's a REALLY long game with multiple endings. And to see all the endings, you gotta spend potentially hundreds of hours playing it. Idk about all that, but I'd like to beat it at least once!
After eight months, 137 hours of Cruel and Unusual Puzzle Solving (as measured by Steam - includes a non-negligible amount of pause and discussion time), I believe 110 runs/days, a dozen spreadsheets, hundreds (more than a thousand?) of screenshots and a whole Notion wiki...
My friends and I have finally finished Blue Prince today!
And I don't just mean reaching Room 46 - that was just getting started. We have accomplished the following:
Pretty extreme spoilers for Blue Prince
This game was awesome and an incredible value for what it cost (plus they keep making bundles with other cool games - it's currently being sold in a bundle with ANIMAL WELL, Outer Wilds, TUNIC and FEZ, all of which I recommend). I'm happy to answer questions if people have any. It makes me a little sad that the game's popularity will always suffer from it not being "for everyone" due to how it does require quite a bit of patience to truly "get", not the point of it, but how to make the game dance to your tune. By the time you finish, there are a myriad different ways to manipulate the game's RNG aspects, and even when there aren't, it becomes second nature to know it's time to change tacks (or tactics at least) for the duration of a run. Even by the time we were done I don't think we had more than a dozen unproductive runs in total!
Another point of friction is the game's lack of in-game organization/note-taking. This is very much the Myst in the 90s experience - and not everyone is set up to comfortably wrangle five binders' worth of information. It's easier if you're playing on a desktop computer (or at least have one nearby) and have at least two monitors. Playing with copilots also helps! I'd love to play more games made by these authors in the future, but I hope they consider including data organization features. Outer Wilds did this very well, and even later Myst games at least had an in-game camera.
Previous
I just started playing Clair Obscur, and somehow the prologue made me ugly cry for like 15 minutes. Just the idea of losing someone you love, even if you broke up with them, caught something in me, especially as I was in the process of winding down my own relationship at the time.
I'm back on RimWorld again - decided to get the Ideology expansion while it was on sale. Now Royalty is the only expansion I don't have.
Ideology is really neat, it enables some playstyles that are drastically different than the norm. The colony is doing well, don't think I've ever gotten this deep in from a tribal start before, which is probably due to the super fast research speed and improved work speed memes my ideoligion has. Got some slaves in my colony and it's kind of meh, probably won't do that again. Having a colony of cannibals is great though, you can get so much more meat!
Overall I think the ideoligion mechanics are very well-considered.
I have finidhed Borderlands 2 base game on Steam Deck. I have previously finished it on PS Vita with DLC there (not all are on Vita I believe).
This is one of the classics I might say. I love the FPS and RPG combination and the game itself is quite over the top at everything it does. If is hilarious, funny, I'd say it is joking about itself - like Hot Shots movie or similar. I like this style.
I'm going througb DLCs now and I will very likely replay the game in harder and hardest modes (True vault hunder and Ultra vault hunter). I will probably try new class as well, as I always olay as commando (guy with turret).
Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands
It's a whimsical RPG that introduces its tone by having the party open doors via kicking them across the room. All the doors. There's also the thing where all the bands unknowingly sign up to fight to the death and are cursed to be able to fight and heal with music, but it's mostly humorous. It's about 10-ish hours, a bit more time for completionist grinders for the RNG beat drops and money for upgrades, with 6-ish dungeons (and a superboss in each dungeon +1 tutorial area +1 final area that doesn't really feel like a dungeon). I had fun with the game's vibes, but it definitely feels short for how customizable everyone's loadouts are and no postgame areas to really push a build's limits, though the game was apparently kickstarted which would explain that.
The game does that initiative thing where characters with higher speed takes turns faster, but it does a few neat things with it.
Then there's the customization aspect:
I thought the ultimate class mods were a bit of a noob trap though since their skill costs 66% max hype to use which in turn requires having a dedicated hype battery to justify bringing them along.
Outriders
A third-person cover-optional looter shooter with 4 classes, 3 active skill slots during combat, and a skill tree that branches between gun power, skill power, or survivability. The storyline and all the sidequests are pretty much about humans being bastards, enough that Earth was destroyed and abandoned in the prologue lore before humanity found a new planet and screwed that up too. I'm on apocalypse tier 12 with my main being a pyro with enough skill leech to tank and heal to full instantly as long as any enemy is on fire plus a huge damaging laser on a 7 second cooldown. By all means though, I don't know how I got 39 hours or 2 more alts of the other classes that finished the campaign. FOMO of how the different classes play? The campaign being easy to mindlessly speedrun as a podcast game with the loot/difficulty tier tured down for the alts? The dopamine of extracting mods and resources from postgame expeditions while playing an unkillable phoenix? The game simply running well enough and gotten cheaply from a bundle? A mix of not playing a cover shooter or looter shooter in a while? All of the above?
That said, it's also an always online game with no pause. Whatever gear I get is probably gone and pointless once the plug gets pulled on the servers. This is one reason I don't gacha.
I got Dungeons 4 and Legend of Grimrock 2. Also the MUD I've always played, Icesus got their original wizards back from a decade-long hiatus, which has revived the game quite a bit.
Dungeons 4 is a spitting image version of the good old Dungeon Keeper. In addition, it has an overworld (which is a bit boring frankly at least so far), and it has the same laconic voice actor who's in The Stanley Parable.
Legend of Grimrock 2 is a grid-based first-person puzzle CRPG where you control a group of 4 in a mysterious island. Spitting image of Dungeon Master from late 1980s.
I also get Drova from GOG sale but haven't got to it yet.
I've been playing Blue Estate recently, and with the Backlog Burner just beginning, it looks like I will have to stop playing this, so I thought I'd share that this is a under-appreciated on-rails shooter that is just dripping with style.
This is no "gem" to speak of as its unapologetically juvenile and crude that errs on the side of cringe more often than not. And yet, the polish and presentation on this game is through the roof, surprising you at every turn. It's comic book origins are taken to new highs with good voice acting and well scripted scenes; things don't go stale in an on-rail shooter when you can interrupt any animation with a well-placed groin shot.
I'd like to appreciate it more, but it's largely a futile practice to play shooter games without a keyboard and mouse (I'm basically just flying by the seat of my pants with a Steam Deck), so this would be a game I'd like to revisit when my battlestation catches up to the baseline.
This game is like Sin City but without demons/horror elements or ninjas, like as though it was made by a pre-bug-up-his-ass Frank Miller that starred a self-aware Jason Statham. This probably is not many people's cup of tea, but should you be interested in copious amounts of sex, violence, and post-modern humor, this is a Fanatical darling that gets a lot of rotation as a low-cost pick.
A dev I've been following since 2019 finally released his first proper game: Terrafactor. It's an automation/crafting game similar to Factorio, although it's in early access so some content is still being worked out. The sorting methods are somewhat primitive and I haven't figured out better power generation yet, but the bones are good.
Almost every resource is self-regenerating (e.g. when you cut down a tree, a sapling automatically spawns in its place. You can dig up the sapling to move it or let it grow where the old tree was) so you're not limited on resources, but instead you're limited on space. You start out with a tiny area that you unlock by completing tasks to earn a specific in-game currency. After Era 1 (which took me about 2.5 hours to complete) the world expands and becomes more procedurally-generated. However, most of it is an airless wasteland with different resources available, so you can't use it for all the same purposes as the normal land around where you start. Getting advanced resources means excursions into the wilderness to set up harvesters or find resource nodes.
The big innovation of the game are the Tesseracts. They're portable pocket dimensions that you can set down and enter through any side. Most plants won't grow in them (maybe none will, I haven't found any that grow there), but you can put machinery in them and expand them infinitely as needed. Whole complex processes can be stuffed into a single cube with four sides for input and output. The best part? They're stackable, potentially infinitely. Put a Tesseract inside a Tesseract inside a Tesseract inside... You get the point. Unfortunately there's no way to clone existing Tesseracts, so you can't use them quite like programming functions, but I might try getting a bug in the dev's ear about that.
If you like Factorio, Minecraft FeedTheBeast, Satisfactory, or other similar games, I recommend you give it a try. I'm already succumbing to the temptation to re-factor again, amd I'm remembering why I set down Factorio early.
I picked up Assassin's Creed Odyssey + Seasons Pass on Steam since I've been eying that one as a potential mindless podcast-listening time-sink ever since it came out, and the price is finally right on sale for $20 right now. So far it's delivering what I wanted--neat looking open world to explore, simplistic side missions, no high-pressure story missions shoved down my throat. Unless they drop the ball somehow once I progress a bit further I could see myself putting a decent number of hours into it.
Update: I ended up returning it just shy of putting 2 hours into it. Dunno if it's because Linux or what, but I was getting occasional stutters and screen tearing (despite vsync being on) that were driving me crazy.
I have recently finished the first three Metal Gear Solid games, and while waiting for MGS4 to release in August, I decided to try out another game series known for its “wackiness”.
So I gave Yakuza 0 Director’s Cut a try. Judging by the reviews & online discourse, the game seemed like the greatest thing since sliced bread. However, I fell off about 5 hours into it. I might get some hate from the fans, but it overall struck me as a very lazy game.
After seeing the animations & UI, I thought this is a remake of a game from the early-mid 2000s. Imagine my surprise when I learned it’s an enhanced version of a 2015 game. The camera & controls overall felt awful, the meat of the game is very repetitive, and actual gameplay is too sparse for my taste.
About 10% of my time was spent engaging with the gameplay itself, 50% watching cutscenes and/or dialogues, and 40% reading text in non-voiced dialogues.
Still, the game, story & characters have their charm, so I tried to persevere. The breaking point however was when Goro was introduced, and I saw that everything I already went through once started to repeat. Old men showing up for fighting tutorials, similar story beats.
And that’s the point where I gave it up. Now I’m searching for something else that can help fill out the hole left by MGS.