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

I recently reinstalled Heroes of the Storm after earning a temp suspension from League of Legends, following a string of Ranked losses where I tried to play Quinn Jungle (she recently got buffed two patches in a row) but had inters sabotage my matches, provoke me into flaming them by being assholes, then maliciously mass-report me when I understandably got heated at them.

When I say "sabotage", we're talking:

• Support players who end the game with borderline single-digit vision scores. They start with a dedicated item for warding called the World Atlas, basically making them the only role that can actively place stealth wards, of which you can have up to 3 active at once. And when you are not warding in the only role that has consistent access to stealth wards that can hit the placement cap, neglecting to use it basically makes your team play completely blind. I can understand people neglecting to use their World Atlas in casual modes like Swiftplay and Draft Pick especially when the game's tutorial does a horrible job at explaining how the game works, but this is bloody Ranked we're talking about. You need an account at level 30, to own at least 20 unique champions and to have played at least 10 SR games to even queue up. That takes about 100+ hours of game time.
• Laners who die 6+ times by the 10 minute mark either due to them deliberately dying to their lane opponent or placing absolutely zero wards, getting bodied by the enemy jungler then crying "jungle diff" in chat like some entitled manchild who expects to be constantly babysat. Which leads to the opponent snowballing because they're now more fed than Gabe Newell.
• Players who don't participate in team fights. One of my most frustrating losses in the last few days was due to a Taric Support player who didn't follow any commands, didn't read chat, didn't obey objective pings from myself or anyone else on the team, barely fought in skirmishes, and decided to solo push mid all the way to the enemy's inhibitor turret and basically kill himself about 15 seconds before Elder Dragon was due to spawn, which led to us losing 4v5, losing Elder buff (adds a true damage DoT and a 20% execute), Baron buff, and ultimately, the game.
• Players ducking out and Alt+F4ing the moment they concede First Blood.

Sent an "appeal" to the ban which was more-so a complaint about three particular players that stood out for their flagrant inting, where I quoted game IDs and match timestamps of what occurred. Been over a day (and counting) and I'm still waiting on Riot's customer support to respond to my ticket, and I doubt they will take it seriously, but if they claim they'll escalate the matter then I look into the players' match histories and find they're still active, I'll know they're completely full of crap.

Yes, I know I was out of line and probably deserved the suspension, but I don't think it's fair that Riot allow players to sabotage matches with utter impunity whilst they target chat offences like the low-hanging fruit they are.

Heroes is one of those games I used to really like before Blizzard completely and utterly abandoned it. I mean the game still gets balance updates but it hasn't had a new content patch or hero release since 2020. After three ranked matches (two losses, one win, and both losses in games where I was practically doing top DPS as a tank.) And sadly, I think the inting problem in that game is 50 times worse.

I think maybe playing solo queue MOBAs is making me a worse person.

Mina the Hollower is another game I played for a bit. It has some problems. Combat feels incredibly clunky and that's probably because I chose the flail as my weapon which not only has a significant attack delay but also can only be swung in four directions. The game also has no map whatsoever and gives incredibly vague hints on where you need to go next.

Kinda wish that Yacht Club didn't make this game a Soulslike.

Child of Light - it is over a decade old Ubisoft game which likely was an attempt to capture some the same market as indie games of the time.
It is basically a whimsical fairytale told in a rhyme and with good artwork.
The combat system is actually good blend of turn based and real time with every character taking an interruptible action of varying length with subsequent cooldown. The actions take place simultaneously and can be affected by player.
What I really like is that the combat is trivially skippable except for bosses. It still means it is needed to engage in it to be able to pass them but it is significant improvement on games forcing a meaningless encounter every five minutes.

On the other hand it features cosmetic DLCs, Ubisoft shenanigans and seems about two thirds of the actual planned length.

After having terrible luck and failing to win it in multiple giveaways, I finally got my hands on Sable some time ago for a very generous (75%!) discount.

Sable is a young woman who, having just come of age, is sent by her nomadic tribe on her Gliding, which is immediately clear is a journey, or time period if you prefer, during which, having no obligations, she is to go out into the world on her own, experience things, and decide who she wants to be. And that's the whole premise of this game - it's an open world exploration game with all sorts of things to do, but no single, mandated goal. The player is vaguely told to procure badges related to various tasks, and every three badges of the same type can be traded in for a mask representing that trade or specialty. Very Scout-like! At the end of the game any masks you have claimed are presented as options for your final choice of Sable's new trade. It's your own decision when to go and end the game, the option becoming available once you have a mere three masks.

The aesthetic of the game is fantastic. The vibe is very Moebius combined with a Scavenger's Reign like cel shaded art style, complete with a full day-night cycle, shadows and indoor/outdoor lighting. It becomes very quickly evident that you are not on Earth, but on a barely terraformed desert planet. Everybody wears masks, not just for cultural reasons, but because the air isn't quite breathable to humans (one of the things you can choose to do during your Gliding is collect logs from various crashed ships that paint a better picture of why people are even there). The fauna and flora are vaguely familiar, but clearly alien. There is also a mystical (or at least mysterious?) component, seemingly tied to remains of a previous, long-gone civilization that people have integrated into their lives. This is mostly present in Sable's Gliding Stone, an artifact that allows her to temporarily, well, glide - fall slowly and safely - and her hoverbike Simoon, a customizable vehicle with a mind of her own that at times behaves more like a horse than a machine (you can whistle for it!)

Sable's world may be mostly a desert, but it's far from uniform. Various regions contain different biomes with distinct topography, geology, plants and colors, which your CPU and GPU both will work surprisingly hard to make look cool for you, for how flat the shading (deliberately) is. They are accompanied by simple but well suited soundscapes to help sell the vibe. There is a pretty good photo mode, although unfortunately they forgot to include a way to move Sable off the center of the view. What about the rule of thirds, devs? Some of these biomes are extremely craggy, so it's fortunate that one of the game's most important systems is the climbing system. It's like Breath of the Wild, where you can climb almost everything, limited only by your stamina. There is a way to increase your stamina, though, unlocking access to loftier peaks, and it's very satisfying once you're able to perform long, complicated climbs to get to the tops of very tall things!

I want to shout out two more things. First, the (written) dialogue, while often terse, does have a fairly good sense of humor that imparts personality upon Sable (and some other characters). Second, I quite liked riding the hoverbike. Its physics are very unstable, but in a fun way. And the game's framerate struggles all the harder when you're moving faster across the world, but there's something special about being able to shoot up a dune, fly onto the side of a mountain while your ride neighs like a panicked horse, and then hop off it, letting it drop like the most betrayed of Yoshis while you cling to the cliffside and leverage your limited stamina to complete a climb that would otherwise be impossible.

One thing I felt about the game was that it doesn't quite manage to sell its own promise of scale. Now, I'm not talking about the size of its 3D world, which was just right - videogames need to balance size with player boredom and it already does have some pretty empty regions as it is; I've availed myself of the extremely generous fast travel system without hesitation. It's just the implementation doesn't quite gel with the world building, in a way that's understandable but a little disappointing. Sable is the only glider at the time; you won't meet others. It doesn't make sense that some of the things she does haven't been done by others before. There is a job of Merchant, but who are they even trading with? All other jobs will trade and barter with Sable, and the population is pretty low. At one point Sable has to deal with a thief and saboteur, but their actions make no sense in such a small community - you can't steal the power source of a third of the world's population and then expect to sell it without being caught! There are like a hundred boarded up buildings while many people are living on permanent tents - why? And who built those buildings? And many other such details. I think this setup could have made for a fantastic AAA game with a richer world, if people actually were willing to pay for games like this, but no guns means no interest I guess.

Another problem was jank. Here's a non-exhaustive list of issues I ran into while playing Sable:

I put that in a collapsible block because in the end, who cares? I kinda loved the game, despite its limitations. It had a lot of heart and style, and I'm happy to have played it. I finished every quest (that I found), collected every mask (probably) and maxed out my stamina in 24 hours of game time as measured by Steam. I did not find every fish or acquire every item of clothing and hoverbike part.

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