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

40k Mechanicus has been scratching a itch I hadn't realized I needed to scratch. It seems to perfectly distill down the items I like from XCOM into a smaller, more streamlined package with some inspiration from Darkest Dungeon.

The cliff notes is that you are an exploratory group of the Adeptus Mechanicus, who are a group of cybernetically modified humans (simplifying, but true) that stumbled on a planet that is a tomb world of the Necrons, (to oversimplify again) a mass of Egyptian themed robots that give a horror combination of zombie apocalypse and Terminator.

I really have enjoyed the devs properly catching the mood of both factions from 40k while providing a gameplay loop that allows both sides to show off how they are freaking scary and overpowered in their own ways.

The game itself is not that deep. I'm probably going to be done with it somewhat soon but thats part of the charm. It's not overstaying its welcome. You go on various missions that, once you have enough knowledge, allow you to take on the "boss" enemies of the Necrons. I feel strong enough to do that now, and am looking forward to using my preferred flavor of cheese to bring them down.

WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness and Beyond the Dark Portal.

I finished Tides of Darkness a few weeks ago and have been playing through Beyond the Dark Portal. The Beyond the Dark Portal expansion pack is soooo much more difficult than the original game. The nice part is that a lot of missions you don't need to research every spell/ability because you are given them for free at the beginning of the level. The gameplay is just as satisfying now as it was 27 years ago.

I finished the 2025 indie darling The Roottrees are Dead, in one sitting, and I think I finally have enough evidence to say that I just don't like puzzle or mystery games.

Not that I disliked Roottrees — quite the opposite, actually; I enjoyed it a fair bit. It reminded me of a mix of The Return of the Obra Dinn (which I played and DNFed years ago) and Dead Letter Department, the horror typing game I wrote up a few months back. Dead Letters is a bad comparison, kind of a Boss Baby situation — it borrows the lightest possible version of the internet research systems from games like Roottrees or Hypnospace Outlaw specifically for the purpose of lulling you into a false sense of security before the horror begins. But that was the comparison that came to mind while playing, because the games conjured similar feelings albeit with very different valences.

Essentially, Roottrees is structured like one big puzzle, where you have to reconstruct a branching family tree of a candy magnate and his many descendants — and maybe even discover the black marks in their history they meant to hide — in the wake of the tragic death of the candy company's fifth President. The game is set in the nineties, so you're doing this on dial-up, searching forums, VHS archives, and old digitized periodicals. And I enjoyed this — like Dead Letters, which was one of my favorites last year, it reminded me of an insurance job I used to do, trying to find missing clients from internet information alone; it reminded me of some of the more obscure research rabbit holes I've fallen down recently, the ones where there's not enough information on a topic to produce an accurate AI overview. Discoveries in Roottrees were often rewarding, and it felt good to doggedly chase a lead until I found that one bit of information, a sentence fragment that let me fill out a missing name or occupation on the tree.

Towards the end, I felt like the game got a little particular about which queries it would accept and give you actionable information for. At that point it the process started to feel less like an internet search and more like a password field that would only unlock clues if you put in the exact right keyword (it wasn't case-sensitive, at least). The immersion kind of breaks at that point, and I had to rely on a couple hints from the game's useful contextual hint system to fill out the last couple names. Ultimately I did get the full 50/50 family tree completed, with all optional spouses and photos to boot, though it required a few short jumps in logic that I'm not quite sure would have been intended.

The game also has one big "final puzzle" about a hidden Roottree excluded from the tree, but I found all the necessary information to solve it trivially easily, in the midgame, so it was a bit of an anticlimax. Still, the ending conversation where that backstory got explained was satisfying, and the game tries to use it to make a point about the importance of collective memory and how we shouldn't let (queer) history be erased.

Then, the game informs you that it has an additional mode called Roottreemania! which I assume is like a new Roottree family tree to reconstruct with new family members and an entirely different history, and I realized that there was nothing I wanted less in the world than to play Roottreemania. I was exhausted; I had a headache like I'd just been pulsed in a mental blender. I started searching Reddit for negative posts about the mode so I could justify not playing itm before I realized, "wait, no one's forcing me to play more of this game." Like I said, I DNFed Obra Dinn, as well as Hypnospace Outlaw; I loved Outer Wilds's ending, but not the puzzles leading up to it; Roottrees took me 5 hours to complete, and while I had a good time, I thought it ran out of steam at the end, and I was nauseated by the prospect of playing it for even a minute longer. I think I just don't have the patience, or the right type of mind, for these deduction-style puzzle games. I'll probably continue to dabble in the genre anytime a new "one of the best games of the year"-tier ones comes out, and I'll probably continue to be unreasonably frustrated by them anytime I get even a little stuck.

I also completed a third playthrough of Pathfinder: Wrath of The Righteous, this time doing an evil playthrough on the Demon path. It was only on this playthrough that I actually grasped one of the game's core themes about evil and intimacy — not least because of the two fantastic female companions, Camelia and Wenduag, who will only join you, or at least let you follow their questlines, if you're sufficiently evil. I mean to write a longer essay on the topic one of these days, discussing Wrath's interesting and nuanced view on the tired good-evil conflict/theme/narrative construct, but suffice it to say that the game takes an interesting position on what evil is, and what makes a person irredemable, that you wouldn't expect from the title and the premise. Shame that it took me three hundred hours to fully catch on; I fully intend to play two hundred hours more, albeit with a long break first.

This was also my first Wrath playthrough where I understood the game well enough to make my own builds! In playthrough one I used the auto-level-up options (which produces some truly bricked characters); playthrough two I used a lot of online build guides; this playthrough, I came up with things myself, only relying on the wiki and in-game systems for information. Pathfinder 1e is a real fucking boondoggle of a system, so I was really proud of myself for coming up with a party of characters that could function on Core difficulty (the one that warns you "this difficulty is only for REAL Pathfinder fans") and even, by the endgame, to complete the final Inevitable Excess DLC on Hard (the second-highest out of a half dozen difficulties, the last one with any semblance of real balance or playability) — this was even better then the build guides I followed for playthrough 2 performed! I can now consider myself somewhat okay at Pathfinder! And, again, it only took three hundred hours.