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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.
2010. I'm buying a small game in alpha (or is it already beta?) called Minecraft. It's neat, it's original, and despite being pretty barebones, the infinite worlds full of mountains to climb and caves to explore are incredibly enticing. That game has potential, it might become something.
2016. I buy a Switch, and my son is born (unrelated events).
2023. My Switch is slowly becoming a Minecraft machine for my son. We sometimes play "Bedrock" (the new, locked-down, mass-consumption-friendly, multi-platform, consoles-compatible version of Minecraft. As opposed to the original "Java" version) together. I'm on the PC, he's on the console.
2024. More and more often, my son also plays on PC. It's more beefy than the aging Switch, more comfortable. "But what's that, dad? You have two versions of Minecraft? What's the Java version?"
Well I'll tell you what it is, folks. Minecraft Java is a gateway drug that will get your kids learn about computers through the download and installation of shady and buggy mods, requiring understanding mods managers, versions compatibility, filesystems, and config files. That's how your kids become comfortable and knowledgeable about technology, without you doing anything.
2026 (3 days ago, actually). My son wants his own version of Minecraft Java, on his own account. "Now we can play Java together! Me on the PC, and you on the Steam Deck."
And I answer "well, we can already play Bedrock together", but at the same time my brain is already releasing way too much dopamine, because a dumb idea just came to me. What if I installed a Java server, on my VPS, just to see how it goes? Because there is something... magical about having your own free permanent world, living in your own server, with your own rules.
And so that's how, 16 years after buying Minecraft, I'm running my own server for the first time. And I even have a full auto-generated 3D world map, accessible from my website.
Some technical info, if anyone is interested:
My docker file, slightly adapted from the default PaperMC:
I tell my coworkers that our benchmark for our internal Java microservices are Minecraft servers. They think I'm joking, I'm not. Because it makes sense - here's an entire community of people running their own servers on the cheapest hardware possible will run highly optimized Java setups. Want deep dives on the latest and greatest garbage collection tech with ZGC? Oh there are plenty of graphs.
If people can run Paper and Velocity, maybe lightly modded Fabric on a container with 4GB RAM, there's no excuse that a Spring Boot app that does relatively simpler work (basically expose an API, talk to a database behind it, maybe talk to a message broker) seriously needs more.
"App slow, need more RAM" "Upgrade to Java 25"
"App startup slow" "Upgrade to Java 25"
"Crashing after X hours, likely mem leak and need more..." "Upgrade to Java 25"
Yay, welcome to the club! I started my Minecraft server journey around 2015 and have hosted numerous game versions and modpacks for my kids as well as my nephews. It's a lot of fun, and nice to have a persistent world that doesn't require someone to start up anytime someone wants to play. I will say that this is a double edged sword though which has enabled me to stay up really late on builds when I should be sleeping. :)
I have yet to run any of mine in Docker, but I do plan to try it at some point. I'm happy to answer any questions if you have any. One suggestion I would have is to use a chunk pre-generator to define an area of the world to be pregenerated. It really cuts down on the sudden CPU and memory usage spikes as people are exploring. Also, I like to occasionally prune my worlds with MCA selector. It's a handy tool that allows you to select chunks that have less than a certain amount of interaction time and delete them so they aren't taking up storage space.
@teaearlgraycold may have some other good advice, as he runs the Tildes Minecraft server, which is likely lots more demanding than anything I've ever done.
We use ansible, no docker. Here's the repo. We've got 16G of RAM and 8 9950X cores.
Back when my one of my groups of friends and I used to play Minecraft, I became the server host. And it was a lot of fun, I thought. Bought my first "server," that way: an old office desktop from a second hand shop. Was like $50 and loaded it up with tons of RAM (way back when RAM was cheap...sigh). We used bukkit and spigot I think?
Though I eventually moved it to the cloud hosting because there were times my home Internet was kinda crap. Plus, some players would unknowingly stress-out the poor little server, sometimes until it crashed or slowed down massively. Luckily it was relatively inexpensive each month and everyone contributed.
Ngl, kinda miss hosting severs for friends.
You probably already know about this, but just in case or for anyone else, there is a plugin called Geyser that will let bedrock clients connect to a java server, which is nice if you want to support both types of clients.
My third and probably last update on Vintage Story for the near future since I've hit all of my goals and then some, and I've more or less reached the top of the current tech tree so I'm running out of milestones. Last week's achievements:
Didn't find a limestone biome but I scraped up enough lime to make plenty of mortar anyway
Built a tier 1 cementation furnace and made just one batch of steel (it takes an absurd amount of coal)
Maxed out my inventory capacity with sturdy leather backpacks, which was only possible after making steel pounder caps for my pulverizer to crush chromite into powder to make chromium sulfate
Built a number of ceramic and langstroth hives from the "From Golden Combs" mod that expands on beekeeping, so I've got a very steady supply of honey and beeswax
Planted a bunch of berry bushes and fruit trees, but it's going to take half an in-game year before they mature enough to produce fruit
Made a full set of iron chainmail, and also bought a full set of broken blackguard armor from the treasure hunter trader and repaired it to pristine condition
Built a three-speed gearbox for my windmill powertrain so I can adjust speed and torque depending on how much wind is blowing at the moment
Built two more windmills because running any machines on third gear takes an enormous amount of torque and one windmill was just not nearly enough
I'll likely take a break once I get the sails built out on those additional windmills, and just in time for Destiny 2's final major update. My clan is planning on getting back on for a bit and enjoying all the stuff they're adding as a sort of last farewell to the game.
Hades 2 - hammering awayyyy. Enjoying it. It's challenging in more ways than the first. Not having a divine dash or tidal dash right now is frustrating, but the sprint mechanism is a welcome addition.
As always, art direction on point.
As always, I have tons of question about the story which is currently being slowly revealed, which is fine. I just gotta get through my 9 to 5. Lol
It's funny, because I really missed having the second dash when I first started playing Hades 2. Really missed tidal dash too. But I went back to playing Hades 1 right after finishing Hades 2, and I missed the sprinting so much.
This week I played last year's narrative RPG Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector. I wrote up the original Citizen Sleeper last year in November and though I was quite positive on that game it took me a bit to get around to its sequel. Ultimately I'm glad I did — in many respects, Starward Vector represents a significant imrpovement on and evolution of its predecessor.
I'll try to keep things mostly spoiler-free below.
Citizen Sleeper: Starward Vector
In the family of the CRPG, a game genre that, in the nineties, aimed to emulate the old school tabletop roleplaying games for computers, two distinct branches have developed in recent years. An oversimplification: CRPGs can either be narrative games or adventure games. The former, a subgenre largely stemming from Planescape: Torment and Disco Elysium, features games that eschew combat in order to focus on a fairly linear story, while developed political and philosophical themes. Meanwhile the latter — a subgenre with a much more filled-out history, spanning from 1998's Baldur's Gate to 2023's Baldur's Gate 3 (and many, many more besides) often focuses on traditional adventure stories, where the focus is more on exploring, fighting, and expressing power over the world through the decisions you make to shape the story and your character. I've been really only playing CRPGs lately and when you do you really notice just how fundamentally different these two subgenres are, how different a narrative game like Esoteric Ebb is from an adventure game like Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. Principally, the narrative games are often extremely light on gameplay, and can even feel a bit like a chore; can even evoke feelings of "I wish this were a novel," as I often felt while, say, playing Disco Elysium and changing my clothes in the middle of a tense scene to get a better chance of passing a skill check.
The heavily Disco-inspired game Citizen Sleeper fit solidly into the "narrative" camp. That game was an episodic story set on a space station, with every episode sort of running in parallel, where you, an escaped robot slave, found a new community for yourself. But as its sequel, Starward Vector, evolves the formula, it becomes on the one hand considerably more linear, less choice-y — but also more gameplay-driven, more focused on telling its story through its systems like the adventure CRPGs do.
In both Citizen Sleeper games, the story progresses in "cycles." At the start of each cycle, or day, you roll a pool of five six-sided dice, and you have to find things to use those dice on throughout the day. You roll a six? You might want to use it to progress an important main story quest. Roll a two or a one? Spend it on something less important, like a gig, because your chance of failure will be higher. This "dice pool" system was honestly not very well implemented in the first game. The reason for this was that there was a whole separate game system, the hacking system, that used low dice rolls like keys in locks, so when you got "unlucky" and rolled all ones and twos for a day, you would just progress the hacking segments, whereas when you got lucky, and rolled high numbers, you would just do regular tasks. This effectively meant that you were never choosing where to spend dice: what tasks you must succeed on, what tasks were okay to risk failing. Starward Vector largely does away with this system, and in general, dials up the difficulty and pressure significantly.
Last year, I described Citizen Sleeper as a game about gig work, where every day you would work four or five different shifts for four or five different employers: whoever had work for you that day. Starward Vector by contrast is more a game about contract work; in it, you'll start jobs that take three to five days, and with your crew, fly out to those jobs and work with single-minded intensity on them till they're done. The pressure on these jobs is high: numerous game systems like stress and dice damage are designed to make failures cascade into more failures, so low rolls can be devastating, but tight timers mean that often you'll have to risk a bad result to get the job done in time. The general feeling with a lot of these jobs is that when you succeed, you succeed by the skin of your teeth, and when you fail — as I did in three jobs throughout the game — it was always due to a mistake on your part. When you fail a plot-critical job, the game will always ensure you have a way to fail forwards and progress the narrative anyway, but he mechanical effects of the failure — broken dice removed from your pool, high resource costs, or even a permanent glitch on death — will stick with you for a long time.
In addition to adding, in essence, difficulty and gameplay and time pressure, Starward Vector evolves on its predecessor in terms of how it structures its narrative. Citizen Sleeper the First takes place on one space station: the Eye — where a slate of largely disconnected episodes unfold in parallel. It largely lacks a main plot; though there is some connective tissue, my experience with the game was that it was more about exploring the Eye, and the people who live there. By making repeated decisions to stay on the Eye at the end of every questline, by how expansive and lived-in it becomes, the place begins to feel like a home for your character, which is, I would argue, the game's emotional core. Starward Vector takes place instead across a large asteroid belt on maybe a dozen different outposts, which you fly between in your ship the Rig, and of course none of these places are as well-developed as the Eye. Though the narrative remains episodic, it's a bit more linear and directed, with more connective tissue and a mostly set order in which you'll visit each station (though you can explore and do sidequests). Structurally, this allows for a better paced experience, with stronger core themes. But it also means that there's less of a feeling of agency in the narrative, and it's much harder to get invested in the world or the characters.
A lot of Citizen Sleeper 2's characters are carry-overs from the first game, albeit with slight redesigns, a few years on. Unfortunately, I recognized almost none of the characters — apart from the three refugee captains from the first game's ending DLC, who were all better fleshed out there than any of the base game's characters. Despite strong designs and visual identities, this general lack of recognizability speaks to the fact that Citizen Sleeper's characters were not particularly memorable, but I fear this is going to be even more true for its sequel. So many of these characters are just unbelievably flimsy, with their entire screen presence amounting to three five minute scenes in a ten hour game — barely enough to amount to an arc, in most cases; often, if they do change, it feels abrupt, clumsy, and forced.
This is a direct consequence of Citizen Sleeper's writing style, I think. It's tight and punchy, very plot-focused and fairly fast paced. On its own this isn't a flaw but it doesn't leave a lot of room for moments to sit with the characters, hear what they have to say, and watch them evolve. Starward Vector's intended fix for this problem is that the incidental dialogue characters have on jobs will help flesh them out, but that dialogue, too, feels wasted, because what characters I take to a job is determined not by what characters I want to hear from, but what skills I literally need to be able to succeed, and what they say is mostly static and work-oriented anyway. That plus a lack of strong character-specific dialogue voices means that characters are usually made up of no more than a gimmick, a strong portrait, and a clumsy arc, and the only characters that get well developed are the sleeper you inhabit, and, to a lesser extent, your friend Serafin who, unlike the other companion characters is always with you on almost every job and story mission, and has full episodes dedicated to fleshing him out.
An episode usually consists of entering a new station, maybe one where a timer is ticking to apply some pressure. You'll spend a couple cycles exploring the station by spending dice, meet some characters, and eventually, do one or two jobs for them, during which the plot will unfold. At the end of the episode, you might be given a bit of technology you need, or a lead on how to deal with the game's antagonsist, Laine. These episodes have a very nice flow both internally and from one to the next; the game is more-ish and hard to put down, just like Citizen Sleeper. But unlike its predecessor, Starward Vector's gameplay variety: alternating between relaxed station exploration and dialogue, and tense, skin-of-your-teeth jobs, contributes a strong feeling of pressure, momentum and variety that was sorely needed. Experienetally, it reminds me of one of the CRPGs I've been writing about these past few months, the adventure CRPG Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Kingmaker has similar ticking clocks, similar resource management loops, and a similar two-way split between its relaxed kingdom management segments and it tense, more story and combat-driven episodes as you fight to stabilize your kingdom in the Stolen Lands. Of course, Kingmaker is longer, more esoteric, and less polished, but the similarities here are not just structural, but thematic. Both games, fundamentally, are about bodily autonomy and sexual violence.
In Starward Vector, much like in the first game, you play as an escaped robot slave. In this one, though, you're not escaping a corporation. You're escaping a man, Laine, who lured you into working with him with promises of helping free you from your corporate masters, before, eventually, severely traumatizing you, taking control of your body, and severely damaging your memory. Waking up in tatters at the start of the game, you escape Laine's space station and spend the game trying to put yourself back together and heal. Throughout that experience, you meet characters who see you explicitly as an object, or who refer to you as a slave, as an 'it'; you meet other sleepers who have had similar experiences, and humans who don't understand, but will try to support you anyway. I can't talk about the ultimate message of this game without spoiling the ending — and I won't, because the game is very much worth playing — but by the end I was in tears, feeling a bit hopeless and a bit mixed up inside.
I think a good, spoiler-free way to put it is that Citizen Sleeper and Kingmaker explore similar themes from opposite directions. In Kingmaker, you make your burgeoning kingdom a home for outcasts, victims, and survivors, and support them as they fight their battles against the past; the game is about gaining stability, about healing, about proving to the world and your companions that you are a worthy leader — even, if you choose to — unto the point of redeeming that game's main villain, herself a victim of gendered violence and a millenia-long curse. But in Starward Vector, you play as the victim yourself, and the game isn't about gaining stability or healing; it's about coming to terms with your brokenness, with what you can hold onto and what, despite your best efforts, you can't. This story feels less exploratory, more specific; the type of painful, hard-to-swallow thing that a narrative RPG can do, and a rollicking adventure about growing a kingdom can't. But Starward Vector also surpasses it narrative CRPG peers, by using its mechanics, its dice, to reinforce that story about damage and brokenness and the long-lingering impacts of trauma. Even with its weak characters and occasionally clumsy writing, in its subgenre, it's my favourite experience since Disco Elysium, and an easy game to recommend.
I also played Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous a second time, and have started a third playthrough, even. The game is so reactive, it's very very hard to put down. Every time I make a major choice, I think, "I can't wait to do another playthrough to see what it would look like if I chose X instead."
"Finished" Forza Horizon 6 to the amount im basically willing to, i may return every once in a while for a casual cruise through japan but overall im just a bit disappointed that they refuse to change the formula even slightly. If the first dlc releases as some shitty brand tie in AND it isnt part of the base map, ill have completely lost faith in playground games's ability to deliver compelling horizon games. What a sad game for what could have been.
Playing Screamer now as my racing game, really fun, bright and loud. The missions where i HAVE to achieve objectives X times piss me off a bit but in general it is a good time.
Also started Motorslice because i have it steam wishlisted but saw it on game pass. Fun mechanics and movement but the fetishization of the female lead is... weird. Not sure if ill see it through but im enjoying it so far.
That's very unfortunate to learn about Motorslice. It's on my list and I was very likely to get it later this month. By all means please let us know if the game ends up being undeserving of our time and money.
I ended up finishing Motorslice in my evening time. It didnt demand very much. There are collectibles that add a bit of difficulty but the game does not reward you at all for collecting them. The main game was pretty fun, the tools you start with are what you have for the duration. The movement is neat but i found really cumbersome in a couple of spots in the last two levels where i definitely felt like the game killed me and not me. Its a video game-ass game. It does continue to do creepy stuff with the girl character and the robot you control as the camera. Its pretty overt at times with dialogue options to sniff her feet. Being a physical camera was cool, the little lens effects because its actually a part of the world. Id recommend if you like to explore these types of indie games but dont expect depth.
I finally ran out of games (with one exception I will discuss at a later date) so I bought a handful of deliberately selected short games from my list, meant to keep me entertained until the next Steam Sale. The first one was SOPA: Tale of the Stolen Potato.
In this cozy, 3 hour long adventure, you control Miho, a derpy child who is asked by his Nana to fetch a potato from the pantry. Unfortunately, the sack of potatoes is stolen by a... frog... muppet? Miho falls through a portal in the pantry shelf into a jungle where he has to chase the frog thief and get his potato back!
The game is best played with a controller but otherwise has "point and click style" mechanics, with a gameplay focus on dialogue trees and inventory items that must be collected, combined and used. Early on there is some jank (it took me all of 5 minutes to break the game, forcing me to restart) and a weirdly out of place rafting section that lowered my expectations from the game. However, it later becomes a fully realized adventure game with a good sense of humor, polished 3D visuals and... reasonable puzzle logic? It's not as bad as some of the stuff that existed in the 90s, that's for sure.
In the end there are only two main locations, beside grandmother's house: The frog black market (which you visit twice) and the inside of a giant fish. The game ends on a cliffhanger and obvious multi-pronged setup for what might be a sequel, but sadly it felt like the developers ran out of money, time or both, and just made a game that was much shorter than it could have been. I hope the developers have the opportunity to work on a larger scale project in the future.
Previous
I played Phonopolis, a point and click (point and fiddle?) adventure game just recently released by the legendary Amanita Design, creators of Machinarium, Samorost(s), Botanicula and a game I didn't know (or forgot) existed, Creaks. It's playable in less than 5 hours and super awkward on a controller, so I recommend using a mouse.
In a city made of painted cardboard, where loudspeakers constantly blare orders from The Leader, controlling every aspect of the brainwashed citizens' lives, the protagonist is a garbage picker tasked with the destruction of the artifacts from the old, unnecessary ways of life. But by accident he finds a pair of earmuffs, and acquires the power of silence! Now he can finally think for himself, not to mention finally dream.
Phonopolis adds a new element to the Amanita formula, full and crystal clear voice narration in english by their excellent music collaborator, Joe Acheson (I loved it!) The whole game is also an exercise in soundscape and gameplay integration, and almost immediately earned the rare privilege of me setting aside my wireless headphones and turning on the Good Speakers. As the protagonist bumbles his way through the city, sowing chaos and destruction, the game plays as a series of puzzles that can be solved by messing with the environment (as is typical of Amanita games). The sound crescendoes as things get more and more broken until the current problem is solved and we crash back into quasi-silence, only for the next puzzle to begin another piece. Orchestras and compositions also play a part within the theme of the game itself, as we seek to find and rescue a soprano everyone seems to have forgotten.
I thought this game was a great experience, with a lot of effort crammed into its small package. Do expect plenty of moon logic on this one - often (not always) you really have to try things and see what works - but as it's not a super long game, and you typically know what you're supposed to be doing, it didn't get too frustrating. It also helps that buttons and draggable elements are almost always clearly indicated by painted targets.
Omg what a flex.
Congrats! You’re now the patron saint of the Backlog Burner.
If you pray for my intercession, I show up with an overly verbose lecture on time management!
(Spoilers: I'm always sacrificing something else's backlog...)
In all seriousness, there were more than 20 upcoming games in this SGF week's showcases that peaked my interest (and I only watched about half of the showcases). For the first time ever I went through my list and just... removed stuff. It's getting hard to stay on top of it with so many games being made.
I'm slowly making my way through E33 still. I got into Act 3 and kinda took a break.
Serpent's Gaze advertises itself as a multiplayer soulslike roguelike. Basically a Nightreign competitor? It's Fine, balance and multiplayer scaling is all over the place, but it's also early early access. A lot of it feels like "indie devs copied dark souls' homework", I'd sooner simply class it as an ARPG instead. Roguelike works well enough, the meta progression is only more build options, routes get randomized curses like extra enemies or a stalker mini boss, but hand crafted levels with no proc gen. My friends were enjoying it and I've had fun playing with them, but I wouldn't recommend it solo.
Guild Wars Reforged, what can I say, 3's announcement got me excited and they put it on sale. Nothing special to report here, pretty classic MMO -- oh, it plays nice on Deck and with controller, that was unexpected. But wouldn't generally recommend it unless you're already a GW fan looking for that old school fix.
Reverse 1999, mainly just doing timed events and dailies here, I've got some weird anxiety limiting me from re-engaging with the main story.
Pokemon Shin Red seems to be the peak gen1 rom hack for preserving the experience while providing QoL. Most such hacks go overboard, this has a few more than I care for, but has been a really nice upgrade. There's a yellow hack that mainly makes all 151 accessible, that's the one I'm going to recommend my partner play first so they can get the experience I had back then while getting the show cameos. I made a retro arch overlay for my playtile controller, that's been nice.
I have been playing Megaman ZX Advent. The game continues the plot of ZX with a new protagonist wielding Biometal A, which is modelled after Axl from Megaman X7. However the main continuity ends after X6 so Axl technically never existed in this world and the A is named after the antagonist of this game, Albert.
Much like in the previous game here you are able to transform into the main and supporting characters from Megaman Zero, but in addition you can now also absorb the forms of several Mavericks called Pseudoroids. These range from being fun and useful to being highly situational but its a cool addition to explore some less humanoid forms. The new ZX form is better than the original, though you will have to wait till half way through the game to get it. One annoying thing is that even though theyve doubled down on this transformation aspect, you still need to return to the Model A form in order to talk to or interact with anything.
The map has been reinplemented and avoids much of the headache of trying to navigate in the previous game, and you can now use warp to any checkpoint from an save point, which is nice for revisiting old areas.
The game has faltered when it comes to flow. The new voice acted lines are not particularly well done, and theres a lot of dialogue that offers very little new information. Model A in particular is very tedious when explaining your new abilities after acquiring a new form.
I havent finished the game yet, but from what Im aware of this game series wasnt continued so the ending is going to be a cliffhanger either way.
Slowly making my way through the latest No Man's Sky expedition. It's OK, but I'm not loving the time gating they added this go round.
More broadly, I'm feeling like the game may be winding down. There are still a lot of active players, but recently there has been a bit of a disconnect. I think it may have started with the introduction of corvettes. They are a super cool addition, and for a hot minute the game's popularity exploded again. But their introduction brought a lot of multiplayer issues. I know No Man's Sky has always been a single player game with some multiplayer bolted on, but I've noticed more and more people (myself included) playing solely with multiplayer off due to problems related to the corvettes. The space anomoly (the sort of shared lobby of the game) used to be a fun place to scope out interesting players, ships, and pets. But now I have to keep multiplayer off when visiting if I want to have a lag/crash free experience. I've also tried co-op with family and found it to be a frustrating buggy mess. I really hope Hello Games addresses some of the tech debt before fully moving on to Light No Fire. NMS is in my top ten, and I'd love to have its end state be something I can continue to come back to.
I'm three generators down in Mina the Hollower and it's finally getting good. Once I got past the first dungeon and the utter bullshit that was fighting Midden, The Duchess and Maxi, then bought some upgrades and levelled up a few times, it finally started feeling like a Zelda game.
Yacht Club packed so many secrets and so much side-content into this game that if it weren't for the identity crisis between being a Zelda clone or Soulslike, it would be an easy 10/10.
Im very excited to eventually get to Mina, is it a difficulty cliff or like... just a slog to get through the early part of the game?
From what I understood it's more like a mountain. The first part is uphill climbing until you get stronger with items and levels and it's just smooth sailing downhill from there.
In other words, the difficulty is front loaded.
Very difficult early game, but it gets easier.
Part of the problem is that you can only attack in four directions and each of the starting weapons except for the Nightstar (flail) are trash. The other two options are twin daggers and a huge hammer. Both have pitiful range and bad damage, the only difference is that one has fast attacks and the other let's you charge up an attack and jump/roll whilst charging. The hammer would be really good if the swing radius was doubled and if the roll had any invincibility frames (it doesn't) so it's not useless compared to burrowing.
Interesting, I found the hammer incredibly useful and the flail not so much. I do pretty much only use the hammer's charge attack, though. The basic swing is for breaking pots and accidentally swiping people I meant to talk to.
The hammer seems to be the weapon-of-choice for speedruns, and I saw a 1 hour 29 minute run take down the kraken boss at the very start of the game in mere seconds with it.
It's one of those "unkillable" bosses that is meant to flee when you're at low health. If you do beat it, you get a really powerful trinket.
Hah! That's fantastic. I'm glad they have that sort of thing in the game. There's so much thoughtful and clever game design, and I bet the speeedruns are going to be incredible.
I found myself getting sucked into Unicorn Overlord again for like my 4th playthrough. Swapping the squads and equipment around is just so satisfying: my other playthroughs I mostly put heavy hitters in Alain's squad but this time I went with Hodrick (heavy armor / tank) and Travis (dodge tank) in the front.
Haha, what timing. I also just started playing Unicorn Overlord for the first time. The story seems meh so far, and some of the women characters jiggle physics are so bad I can only laugh, but the battle system is so addictive. Only just made it to the drakenhold.
The female character models are ridiculous. Scarlett's shirt alone is hilarious and for the rest of them it looks like they just told the designer to imagine the trashiest sorority Halloween party possible and animate it.
The combos and equipment are so much fun - my first playthrough I don't think I even did much with the Command conditions but it's a whole game-within-a-game trying to make the most versatile units - like giving the Fighter a passive action but having it trigger on "No Archers" so they "Arrow Cover" the back row but only when they really need to.
Haha, right? And the way her chest is constantly twisted towards the camera, and the awkward way her legs bend inwards. She almost looks physically deformed. If I could meet the artists, I would question if they had ever seen a human before.
I've only just started using the command conditions myself. That might be my favorite part! It's been very fun trying to narrow down the conditions. I've been playing around a lot with Auch most recently. I have a passive action equipped on him that attacks the entire enemy unit if it strikes a burned enemy. I've set it to target burned enemies on the command menu, but I've noticed it won't go off if no enemies are burned. I've been trying to come up with a way to have a secondary condition where it will target a non-burned enemy if there are no burned enemies, but there does not seem to be an if not setting.
You can put the exact same command below that one without the "burned" check. So basically it will try the top one first ("find a burned opponent and hit them so you get the splash effect") and if that doesn't work it does the one below it ("hit anyone / lowest HP"). You should have "lowest HP" as a condition on most of your attacks - the only exceptions being archers and things aimed at the back row and "benefit on hit" attacks (that should generally be aimed at "lowest evasion").
Hey, thanks so much! I will totally try that
Found Returnal on a decent Steam sale, and went ahead and picked it up. It's an interesting blend of third person action and bullet hell, with some roguelite elements.
There's a bit of character narrative that seems like it's being slowly drip-fed, the old house and astronaut are interesting teases.
I'm only a couple hours in so far (reached Phrike once but haven't beat him yet) and I'm finding it enjoyable.
I finished Tyrion Cuthbert: Attorney of the Arcane. Great game. A worthy clone of the Ace Attorney games, and probably the best I've played.
Which means I've moved onto my next detective game: Staffer Case. It's alright, but if feels slow. And not just the story, but like game loading screens, responsiveness to advancing dialog, switching screens. I don't know if that's intentional or not. But it has a couple interesting systems, like its evidence/testimony deduction system, and that there's actually branching story in each case. Like in the first case, I successfully wrapped it up, only for the MC to be thinking, "But did I really get it right? Maybe I should think about the case some more..." And then I was surprisingly presented with an option to go to the "branching point" in the case. So I did, chose to present different evidence, and I guess I finally got the "true ending." Which is definitely different from all other detective game I've played; they're always fully linear. But I've yet to see if there's long-term effect to not getting the true ending.
In Path of Exile 2, I completed Act I! Took me two attempts at killing that Act boss, which made me wonder if my build is wrong, though I'm only like a lvl 13/14 Ranger, so not like a whole lot I can play with.
Kinda put Deadlock down for now. I like playing with my friends, but two of them are way better than me, so it's tough playing in their lobbies. I just end up feeding to the enemy team =(
Interesting, I didn't realise that all of the cases in Staffer Case had alternative routes. I only got the 'bad ending' in case 4 and assumed it was something you had to see before seeing the good ending.
It sounds like the sequel will implement actual branching paths based on how you resolve each case.
I also enjoyed Staffer Reborn, although it's much shorter. It has story elements which directly follow on from Case so is probably best played after completing that one.
Recently added the sequel to my wishlist! And thanks for confirming that Reborn should be played after Case. There was like a bundle deal recently so got both of them and was wondering about that. I assumed since Case came first, it should be played first.
It'll be interesting to see how the branching paths work in a whole story arc. Though as a story completionist, I'll probably try to do them all.
This past weekend I finished up Dungeons of Hinterberg, and it's mini add-on Episode Renaud.
At first it felt like a little quirky game, magic / dungeons now exist in a mountain village in Austria. A four part day cycle exists, so you can only do so much on a given day which is the primary way pacing is controlled.
general story thoughts
Starting pace to the story was a tad slow, but given the premise was the main character is on holiday(vacation) to experience magic & the dungeons I wouldn't hold that against it.
Things do start to pick up once the Onion Festival event happens, but I also think the story only really lands if you make sure to engage with enough of the extra characters in the evenings.
Episode Renaud, as a mini prequel serves to mix up gameplay a bit but will also be largely familiar based on the end state of the main game. It's stronger point to me was how it feeds into the start of the main game.
Still on Tales of Arise. I’m 30 hours in. I hope I can finish the main campaign until the 18th to play Adventures of Elliot.
On the side, I’m also still playing Pokopium. I’m at 160+ hours, and more than 50 Pokémon on my new save.
I stumbled upon a youtube video on Bubsy 4D which introduced me to the developer Fabraz and their newest game Demon Tides.
I haven't gotten too far into it yet but my god, as a lover of 3D platformer collectathons who's been searching for a scratch to that itch since A Hat in Time, this game is so amazing.
Movement feels very inspired by Super Mario Odyssey which is great because that's an incredible aspect of that game. But then you have an open world with tons of secrets to discover and platforms to clear and you're free to do with it as you please. The characters are so charming too. And by the looks of it, I have well over 15+ hours of content ahead of me.
Highly, highly recommend it if you've been looking for a modern 3D collectathon.
Your comment prompted me to go and check just now when I last played a traditional 3D platformer - not just a game with platforming elements. I guess Blue Fire kinda counts (played in 2024)? Or was it Hi-Fi RUSH (played in 2023)? The Supraland games definitely have true platforming and holy crap that was from 2019.
I recently heard pointed out that despite the exponential increase in the amount of (playable) videogames being released every year, the 3D platformer genre is a good example of a genre that's not overcrowded, especially for someone who avoids Nintendo, and I'm starting to think this is really true. A golden opportunity for some of the games whose trailers I've seen this week! All we need is more good, polished titles.
You are right to point that out because it is indeed a genre that surprisingly few developers dab into and even fewer make successful games for. Usually you have 3D platforming coupled with another genre that's actually the primary one (and nothing wrong with that of course!). Which is insane because so many classic games are 3D platformers, the Super Mario series being the most standout. It's crazy that Nintendo still makes such successful games within the genre but once you leave their walled garden it's almost a barren wasteland.
I'm sure there are reasons for it, likely monetary, but it always feels like such a a shame because I always get such a rush playing games that have the platforming movement nailed down to perfection. Games where the whole point is you finding joy in traversing engaging level designs. I feel like there's so much creativity that can be had with them and there's still a lot of untapped potential within the genre. Let's not forget Astro Bot won game of the year at the game awards, which shows people absolutely still crave for this type of gameplay.
It is my absolute all-time favorite genre since I was a kid so I'm always on the lookout for newer gems and am always giddy when I find one that instantly clicks with me. Always happy to know the genre is not dead.
Tried 2 of this month's Humble Monthly titles, the shorter ones since there's a Next Fest next week.
Overlooting
It's a very, very simplistic rougelike where the only action is clicking an enemy to attack and initiate the turn. There's a take-one-of-three equipment drop after every fight with the goal of getting a set bonus and a build with enough DPS/survivability to win. That's about it though. Not much depth or ways to influence drops and the overall style is minimal. After a win with two of the characters, it just felt like a waste of time.
Indika
It's almost 50GB of space for an unoptimized 3.5 hours of walking, mild puzzles, one chase scene, and the occasional pixel minigame. Indika is a nun who is disliked because she ends up being disruptive due to either A. being possessed by the Devil and dealing with his commentary and visions, or B. struggling with her mental health and hallucinating. After being sent away on a letter delivery, she gets sidetracked with an escaped prisoner who claims to hear God's voice and is on a journey to pray to a holy artifact so his arm will heal instead of having to amputate.
I don't really understand how this game got so much reception though? There were the conversations about faith in the fish factory and the last talk between Indika and the Devil, those were alright, but the rest of the game doesn't match that quality of conversation or questioning. There isn't really much of a plot besides the A to B journey and the short length doesn't lend to much development besides showing a harsh, uncaring world throughout.
I started playing Dwarf Fortress for the first (proper) time this week.
Like most DF players, I had a false start a few years ago where I tried it but couldn't get into it, despite watching Kruggsmash and listening to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable. A few weeks ago I wanted to listen to something different and popped on A Strange Mood, Kristin and Drew's Couples Dwarf Fortress podcast, and it starting a building urge of giving it another go for me.
This time round I took to it like a duck to water, I think in big part due to the steam version now having the permanent log. I remember feeling like I constantly had no clue what was going on in the fort as a whole when I played before, I haven't had that feeling this time at all.
I've really enjoyed getting a thriving fort up and running, and have just started getting forgotten beasts and invasions today. It's the first game I've played where I found there was a bit of functionality I really wanted and found frustratingly absent (seeing the membership of a guild or religion), and within an evening went from never having looked at or heard about how Dwarf Fortress represents data internally to having written a DFHack script in lua to list membership of religions, guilds, and worship of deities. That was hugely satisfying, to just be able to add something that really enhanced my experience of the game so easily - it's a testament to how well DF is designed (even if the implementation is still a little wonky - forgotten beast parts don't obey refuse stockpile rules and that's a bug that's been in the game and known about for 14 years, as far as I can tell).
I've played 60 hours of it this week (don't @ me 😉) and I feel like I have still barely begun to scratch the surface!
DF is great. I used to play succession games on a forum now lost to time where someone would take over fortress for a year in game (about an hour of playing time) and then write up a report and hand the save file off to the next person in line. It was hilarious watching things explode out of control in unexpected directions after you finished your shift.
Very cool! Those had a resurge of popularity a couple of years ago with a few different podcasts doing succession forts. I think there's some community ones going on in some of the DF discords too!
I've been playing Guild Wars 2. Like someone above mentioned, the announcement of Guild Wars 3 made me completely remember that I only finished half of all of the main quests, so I'm back to grinding that out.
Guild Wars 2 has to be the best MMO of all time, and it's not even close for me. I know most would say that goes to WoW, but every time I get back onto WoW, not very long after I ask myself "What's the point?" and I don't really have a good answer. I was never truly addicted to WoW though, even when I was playing it in 2008 at its peak, however Guild Wars 2 just does something to my brain and feels right.
I have more hours logged into Guild Wars 2 than any other game at around 450 right now, and counting, and I have not gotten bored. I will have months I don't play, but when I hop back in, it's basically muscle memory how my scrapper build works. There's also clear, obtainable goals. At any point I can continue the main story, do map completions, do world quests, do any of the plethora of end game options... Oh and the best part, no monthly subscription.
We recently played Mewgenics for our podcast on roguelike/lite games and it came in at our new #11 ranked game overall out of the 96 we’ve played so far.
A game that big fans of Edmund McMillen have been waiting 15 years for has finally arrived and I was glad to have had a fun time with it, dumping 40 hours into it over two weeks.
Much like other Edmund games, it’s rather strong aesthetic of Troma-style edgelord humor of the early 00s kind of washes away once you are deep into the actual gameplay.
Generally it doesn’t seem that punishingly difficult compared to Edmund’s other mega hit with Binding of Isaac, and it’s much more up front about things so you’re not constantly referencing the wiki.
I’ll be curious to see how future DLC updates add to the base game, as there’s already like 200 hours worth of content in it.
Mewgenics is basically everything I wanted out of an Into the Breach 2 game, except for the theme. It’s certainly unique and ties into the overall mechanics well. I’ll have to admit I got really attached to my party of cats by the end of an adventure.
My son found some old games installed on my laptop and has been enjoying 20 Small Mazes, which is a free collection of maze games that sounds dumb but is actually a really clever little puzzle game. The developer's other two games (one free, one $5) are both good as well.
I've been mostly playing Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes on the Nintendo DS. I've been thinking about going back to it for a long time, remembering that back in the day, I'm pretty sure I got towards the end of the game, but never actually finished it.
Well, now I'm close to finishing the third...act? I don't know, the third character you play as and I've got to say: I really don't remember any of this. My memory is pretty poor, so that's a thing, but maybe I never made it as far as I thought I did? Maybe I only ever made it to the end of the first characters story before putting it down, though I do remember playing as the second character, so I'm not sure.
At any rate, it's been fun to return to, but I'm a little frustrated with the boss for the third character. Maybe I'm just not playing well, but it seems massively unfair to me. The boss almost immediately summons two very difficult creatures that are almost impossible to block and typically end-up taking me out within the first several turns. Then the boss will also move around, which is challenging because your attacks take several turns to actually go off and even if you do hit the boss, she heals herself and summons more of those tough creatures. So I've been hammering away, trying different strategies, but haven't found anything that even looks like it'll work yet and well...I'm thinking I might put it down. We'll see.
Started the month playing Unicorn Overlord, but got immediately sidetracked by LumenTales: the Memories of Trey. Monster tamers are my favorite genre, how could I not? I'm playing on Switch 2, and I'm a little torn because it's buggy mess. It's constantly crashing, and the autosave only triggers when you change areas/rooms, which means if you're hunting for a rare mon in a single area and the game crashes just after you caught it, you're out of luck, the last autosave was likely hours ago. Loading times are additionally terrible, and they happen every time you enter a battle, enter a building, or even change rooms in a building. Looking on the games subreddit/discord, there are also quests that are bugged and can't be completed, and the rare unfortunate soul who's save file gets corrupted or hardlocked due to a bug.
From a gameplay perspective, it lacks polish. The hololens feels finicky and difficult to use. The opening tutorial lasts about two hours, however once you're past it nearly all tutorials stop. There is nothing telling you how to run, that you can fast travel, how to use the hover board, how unlocking information in the dex works, how to train your animon, etc. You will need to use outside resources and guides to figure things out, especially for animon evolutions.
That being said, I'm having so much fun with the game. The battle system is very solid for an indie team, not to the heights of cassette beasts or monster sanctuary, but interesting enough to keep you engaged. Exploring in the game is the highlight, so many rare mons to find and fun maps to explore. Backtracking is optional, but rewarded as you often find new cool stuff. While the game lacks giving information to the player, you can sometimes find news articles and posters around the world that do explain item crafting, animon evolution methods, and hints at boss fights (it would be great if there was more of this). The art is also fantastic, with the games version of shinies having fun, unique art instead of just a re-coloring. Good mon design and good music. I'll be excited to see where the game goes once Beehive Studios finishes polishing it up, and addresses the bugs.