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

For our podcast on roguelike/lite games we recently played Warhammer 40K Darktide

No it’s not a roguelite, you’re correct. BUT a couple of the game modes in it we were interested to explore and see where Darktide fell in the spectrum of “not rogue games that have rogue modes” like Bloons TD6, God of War, The Division, etc.

Warhammer Vermintide 2 had this fun roguelite mode called Chaos Wastes that we were hoping would make a reappearance for Darktide, but sadly is missing.

In order to do either the Mortis Trials or Expeditions in Darktide, you need a pre built character and need to be about half way through the main story of the game to unlock. Both modes don’t offer all that meaningful of build decision and both seem more or less aimed at players who have a maxed out level 30 character.

What Vermintide 2’s Chaos Wastes did well was to allow you to jump in at level 0 immediately after beating the games prologue tutorial. You built up some meaningful synergies along the way in a simplified Slay the Spire type overworld map, and there was a lot more encounter variety as a result.

I’m hoping Darktide implements something like that at some point but I’m not super optimistic. Otherwise the main game mode in Darktide is plenty fun, albeit repetitive, but a solid time with a full party of friends online.

For the past 7 weeks, I've been playing Pillars of Eternity. I haven't posted about it, because I've just been so absorbed with it. I love the writing in it and it's a rare game for me where I actually go through and read all the Lore books and little bits scattered about; I usually could not give less of a shit about Lore, but Pillars has it's hooks in me on that front.

I've been playing the Turn Based mode, which has been good, though after about 65 hours I'm finding it kind of tedious. My general style is to enter a new area and then fully explore it, looking for items, quests and interesting places, but of course, there's always monsters around and in the way. The combat itself is good, but it definitely drags the overall momentum of the game down when a fight takes 5 to 10 minutes and then after an encounter, you walk a few steps directly into another one.

I'm currently on my way to Twin Elms, which I think is the third act of the game, having finished the first DLC recently. I might need to change my attitude and just try and shoot for the story stuff more and then come back and do more exploring when I feel up to doing combats.

I've also been playing kind of a lot of Monsters & Memories, which has taken me away from Pillars quite a bit. My friends have been very gung-ho about it for several years now and I typically just make fun of them for that fact, because M&M is basically a clone of Everquest and who wants to go back to that (they do)? I played a whole lot of Everquest as a teen between 1999 and maybe 2002 or so and I'm kind of over that whole playstyle, which if you know, you know. I feel that WoW pretty much surpassed it in every way.

That said, I had been playing Turtle WoW on and off for something like 6 or 7 years and with it finally shutting down, I figured I'd give M&M a serious go and well, I'm very much enjoying myself. It has a lot of that old Everquest feel to it and it has a whole lot of that friction that comes along with it, such as slow recovery times, needing to constantly carry food and water, weight limits, hard stats on various classes and races that could be optimized (not that I'm one for that) and all that stuff. But it's also taken a good amount of inspiration from WoW; the first class I started, Fighter, actually has quite a few skills from the Warrior in WoW, Charge, to name just one of them. This kind of changes the entire feel of the game, because Warriors didn't really have that kind of stuff back in Everquest, so it was interesting to see how this kind of changes the entire proposition. Once I discovered this, I started having a lot more fun with the game.

My friends and I have also delved into a few dungeons over the past weekend, which was an absolute blast. Sure we were really only camping one particular room in those dungeons, but it was fun to have some danger getting there and then feeling a challenge to figure out how we could get out without getting killed. I've been having a good time with them and with the game in general that I've been playing on my own just for fun; yesterday I found my way to a relatively uninhabited part of the world where I could harvest a bunch of resources for the next time my friends and I play and I also sat and grinded on some mobs to get myself a level.

Really didn't expect to enjoy it so much, but it's a game I'm actually still thinking about when I'm not playing, which has been nice.

I finished Sekiro, it was the last "soul-like" from FromSoft l haven't played, it was really good, focused, with clean intentional design (unlike Elfen Ring that is a mess). The combat is top notch, beating the bosses really makes you feel like the boss. The more character-driven story was great too.

I'm a bit sad because l don't have anything really good to look forward to now, l was keeping it as a treat.

I distracted myself from Backlog Bingo by purchasing Rune Dice, which has been a lot of fun. The combining of dice with each throw is a neat enough gimmick that it feels like there's a bit of skill involved while still having some of that roguelike randomness. And it's very satisfying to see the dice jump around, especially if you can get multiple chains going at once.