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

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.

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.

So, my non-AFK minecraft account has 24.30 days of active playtime in the tildes minecraft server, starting from from January 3, 2026... That's not a lot, right?...

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.

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.

Ive been working through my Steam backlog independently and have spent my time on a few games

Wanderstop - This is the newest game from Davey Wreden of The Stanley Parable and The Beginners Guide fame. On the surface, this game is a cozy cottagecore game about working in a tea shop. You grow plants/trees, gather ingredients and make tea for the patrons as they come through. However, there are heavy introspective themes sprinkled throughout. Given the creators previous two games, this game is not quite what I expected but it is extremely enjoyable. Many reviews of it I read discuss it as a type of foil to Stardew Valley and I think thats fair. Where Concerned Ape's game encourages and rewards an optimization grind, Wanderstop is laid back, allowing you to unroll the story at your own pace. The supporting characters are memorable, the best dialogue is thought provoking and the gameplay loop, especially the team making apparatus, is varied enough to keep it fresh. It's a short game. I''m in the last section now (or at least that's what the game told me) and I've put in just under 10 hours. Did I mention the adorable birds you keep as pets at the shop? If you crave constant action and progression, this game may not be for you but its the kind of title I'll think about long after I've played it for the last time

Minishoot Adventures - This game combines a bullet hell, twin stick shooter style with a Zeldavania format and is it incredibly fun. In this game, you play as a spaceship and zip around the world battling a variety of enemies, discovering powerups/secrets, and battling dungeons with multi-stage bosses at the end. The story is a little light on details but it works with the amount of action this game throws your way. The controls are tight and you're given several options for difficulty that can make this game enjoyable for a wide variety of players. It can rely a bit too heavily on the monster in a closet approach to combat but the gameplay is so fun that it never bothered me. Deaths rarely feel unfair and you don't lose progress which kept this game from feeling like a slog. I rarely play a game to 100% but I am working on completing it after defeating the final boss because Im not ready to leave this world behind

Invisible Inc - This is a turn-based, action espionage title that is around a decade old. It's held up rather well. In this game, you play as a futuristic spy agency that is being hunted by corporations hell bent on wiping you out. You travel around the globe completing missions like sabotaging the corps, stealing their tech/money and freeing other spies to be used in your agency. Standing in your way are guards, cameras and other tech dedicated to detecting you. If spotted, the difficulty increases as the quantity and quality of patrols increase. Each spy has their own advantages and you also have the assistance of an AI whose abilities can be used to seize control or disable of the technology being levied against you. This game is hard! Whenever I think I have figured out the corps defenses, some new adversary or strategy gets thrown against you and you have to rethink your plans to stay one step ahead. Beyond that, the levels are procedurally generated and youre forced to strategize accordingly instead of just memorizing floorplans/approaches. I'm only about halfway through my first playthrough but I do know some spoilers about this game and suspect the replayability is going to be very high

Tales of Arise on the Switch 2.

It released last Friday. Two days before, the Nintendo Life and SwitchUp reviews were published, so I took a look. That’s what convinced me. I’ve never played an action JRPG before, but this one seemed not only accessible, but also fun and polished.

I wasn’t disappointed. I’m 9h52m in. I’m having a ton of fun. The mechanics are obviously vast and complex and I’m making an effort to learn them well, but there’s definitely a learning curve. The combat got very satisfying once I began figuring them out though.

The story is also amazing. JRPGs have a reputation for convoluted tales, but this one, grandiose as it is, with its intimidatingly impressive worldbuilding, has been easy to follow so far. I’ve only reached the “second area” now, but I feel like I’ve already experienced a full game as far as the story goes, and there are still seemingly endless more mysteries to be uncovered. I’m on the edge of my seat.

This is my first foray into the Tales series. I’ve always wanted to play Tales of Symphonia, but didn’t get a chance. It was worth the wait. This will keep me busy for a while. I hope I manage to finish it in time for Star Fox on the 25th next month.

One of the folks in the gaming community I'm in just started hosting a Vintage Story server and as an enjoyer of Minecraft both without and with extreme amounts of mods, I was intrigued.

First off, this definitely does not play like Minecraft, at all. Yeah it's got the same general voxel style and block breaking/placing, but the act of doing basically anything is significantly more methodical. Just started and want to go mining? In Minecraft you can punch a tree, build a crafting table, and make a wood pickaxe within 30 seconds. In Vintage Story, to make your first pickaxe, you have to find pieces of loose copper on the surface or pan for copper pieces from sand or gravel, then once you have enough you need to add those pieces to a crucible that you had to first form from clay then fire in a pit kiln, then you need to heat the crucible to the copper's melting point using sufficiently hot fuel (charcoal most likely, or coal if you get lucky and find it in a ruin), then you need to pick up the 1100 degree celcius crucible with tongs and pour it into the ceramic pickaxe head mold you made (again, formed from clay and fired in a pit kiln), and once that's solidified can you then combine it with a stick to make a copper pickaxe. That whole process, going in completely blind, took me 10 hours from starting, and I had to learn more things just doing that than I did in the entirety of base Minecraft.

Everything in this game is skews heavily towards realism, and as such everything you do is much more deliberate and slower-paced but significantly more rewarding. Simply avoiding freezing and starving to death in your first winter (there are seasons, naturally) is already a huge milestone. It's not just a total realism mod though, there's some eldritch horror stuff mixed in to keep you on your toes with little tears in reality that show up temporarily on the surface that spawn monsters at night, or "temporal storms" that roll through every 2-3 in-game weeks that allow monsters to spawn basically anywhere, even in your well-lit house.

That's just the survival mechanics though, for the folks that prefer a more creative experience you can go hog wild here as you can chisel individual voxels out of blocks, and even mix other materials into the same block, so the potential for artistic expression is limitless. Personally I was never much of an artist so I haven't gone into that (plus still trying to survive winter and all), but some people on their creative worlds have made some truly impressive things.

i've been playing dragon quest 7 reimagined and enjoying it ok.

dragon quest games are like comfort food for me and i have played an early remake before but was craving an rpg and decided to give it a go. i have to say, i'm finding the story so boring and simple that i've started skipping every cutscene and clicking through all text without reading. normally this would be a death sentence in some rpgs but this dragon quest holds your hand so much i've learned that i don't have to read anything really. i only just discovered i could turn off hints and quest markers, which i should have done from the beginning.

i have a really bad habit of just blazing through games if they're the least bit boring or overly easy. bad example but i remember playing elder scrolls online or diablo 4 and never reading a single line of text for quests and just yeehawin' until i got bored and quit. other times i want to read and explore everything (baulder's gate 3 for example) and prolong doing the main story.

i don't know, i have a weird relationship with games. sometimes i feel badly after playing, like ive wasted my time and then other times i feel accomplished or neutral.

Mechanicus 2.

I like it, but so far it's hard/not clicking. There's a lot different from 1 (which i'm either fine with or think is objectively better, although I know that's not popular), but man can missions (which are mad up of 1-3 skirmishes with some choices inbetween) swing from "okay it's fun finding dumb combos to ruin my enemies" to "annnnnnnd we're screwed" FAST.

Think it's mostly a skill issue thing as i'm only on normal right now, but I don't want to spoil it yet by just watching someone better play.

Currently running admech as well because while I think i'll like the necron army better, I like absurdity (even if toned down) of the admech more.

Ive gotten into shapez2, and Ive gotta say, Im relieved that Ive found another factory game, was worried Factorio had completely spoiled me. (Ive tried satisfactory, and bounced off of it due to jank and the first person view.)

Im really enjoying the core premise of the game: There are no recipies. Instead, you have shapes made of 4 quadrants, each of which can be 1 of 4 shapes and 1 of 9 colors, and these shapes can be stacked 4 high. Every operation is valid on every shape, operations like splitting a shape in to 2, rotating a shape, stacking one shape on top of another, swapping the west halves of 2 shapes, etc. Its closer to mathematical operators than to traditional 'recipies' that most automation games use.

Ive finished the 'main' game, making increasingly complex shapes and delivering a higher and higher throughput of them, and this past weekend I started on the final challenge of the game: the MAM.

With the circuit logic the game provides you, its possible to make a factory that makes any shape. You give it a logic signal containing a shape, and it makes that shape from raw materials. Ive made a factory that can make any single shape, so now I need to make 3 more of them and build a system to stack them on top of each other in order to make the final shape. Theres a few more complications than that, but after Ive finished this MAM, I think Ill put it down for a bit, do some other hobbies that Ive been neglecting.

Back to Arc Raiders!

I stopped playing a few months ago because my partners in crime also stopped playing (one is kinda done with it, and the other got less time), and I wasn't interested at all in playing PvP alone. If you're not familiar with Arc Raiders, it's a PvPvE game where there are actually very few incentives in playing PvP. The game actually pushes you to collaborate to take down greater PvE threats, and PvP happens either to secure loot or just because you like it.

But there's an interesting system in this game: the "aggression based matchmaking" (ABMM). Basically, the matchmaking tries to put you in lobbies of like-minded players. PvE players living in harmony, and PvPers happily murdering each other. So depending on your playstyle, you can experience a totally different game. And since I'm not PvPing when I'm alone, I effectively end up with the carefree players that expect you to not shoot them, and would never, ever, shoot you. Not that I'm complaining because I'm having an easier time to complete quests, but you know... A liiiittle bit of tension would be welcome. I'll probably end up trying to "gently" shoot them and try to get them to retaliate.

Bought an early access train simulator game called RUNNING TRAIN | 走ル列車！. It's a train simulator game set in rural Japan and you're in charge of a railway operator. The game is early access but still quite fun to play. There's two rail lines, one main line and then a shorter spur line. The game is developed my a single person but looks quite stunning and is already fairly polished, which honestly surprised me. I've only been playing it for the last 2-3 days but I've had a ton of fun with it. I'm still learning things as there's an insane amount of detail in this game. Various different kinds of signals, signs, and more to learn.

I'd recommend it if you're super into trains and love train simulators. Every comment on every YouTube video about this game talks about how the developers of the established simulator known as Train Sim World, should be ashamed that a single developer has managed to create a simulator better than their entire team.

Esoteric Ebb
I've not finished it yet, but I'm itching to get back to it. I loved Disco Elysium, and I love Dungeons and Dragons. Espteric Ebb in short takes the Disco Elysium formula an marries it with the DnD SRD along with some homebrew and a distinctly non-faerun take on the classic high fantasy setting. It's great, you play a cleric and you get a goblin sidekick, and fron there expectations are routinely broken. Prime example - combat feels just as undesireable and rough as it does in every day life. And not in that gritty-realism way. But in the way were you don't want to get hurt and don't really want to hurt anyone else. Also the vibes are deeply scandenavian so I personally feel a sense of home in the game.

I decided to pop/redeem the bond I had been sitting on in Old School RuneScape (OSRS) recently.
It has been fun playing and making some progress on my account. I've done a few more quests and still have a bit over a week on my bond. I've been leaning in to some of the more AFK methods to do on the side while I work to increase my stats.

The thing I enjoy about OSRS as a Dad is that the bit of progress I make on my account is still relevant whenever I come back. Some gear may be out classed, but they do a good job of not making gear completely redundant like you would expect when a new World of Warcraft expansion releases. Barrows is a minigame/bossing content that was released in 2005 and the content is still very relevant in 2026.

I picked up a cheap little logistics game called Truck City. It's a bit like Transport Tycoon except vehicle routes are fully automatic, you cannot adjust them except by changing roads and factory locations. Products also do not decay and will block factory output if you don't keep up hauling it out. Some products can be sold off-map but not all of them so you have to carefully balance production and routes. It is a surprisingly challenging game to get everything running without traffic jams!

The map is just 2D and I find the terrain graphics are a bit of an eyesore but that helps to not feel bad about paving over all of it. It is built with Godot engine and runs really well natively even on the large maps.

Shovel Knight.

I wanted to finish it back in like 2019. But the problem is I have the Treasure Trove, so... Four games. It's equally hard and easy, because you don't ever die as long as you've got the time/gumption to go forward. I also feel like I both know the game better coming back, and am better in general, so it's more fun than than before.

I was going to try to crank through it before Mina the Hollower came out, but that isn't happening obviously. I bought and started that, as well, and it's probably going to be just as good as Shovel Knight.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning: I saw this video randomly that was a good pitch for the game (she doesn't like the remaster though), and bought it for $15 with the new DLC on Humble Bundle. I played for 30 minutes, so just most of the opening dungeon bit, and it's really good so far.