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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.
For most of this week, I was playing Luna Abyss!
Luna Abyss
Where to start?
This game reminds me of Respawn's Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order (and its sequel.) Formally, Luna Abyss, a double-A bullet hell fps, developed by Kwalee Labs, released this year, bears no resemblance to Respawn's pair of third-person metroidvania action games. The similarities lie more in the fact that both games feel like amalgams of other, better games. In Fallen Order, that's Uncharted, and Dark Souls, and Titanfall; in Luna Abyss, the obvious inspirations are Control, Returnal, and DOOM Eternal; to say nothing of the megastructure the game is set in, inspired by the likes of Naissance and BLAME!
Undeniably, both of these works are derivative; they borrow a lot and add only a little that's new. But in Luna Abyss's defense, the result in this case is something that feels starkly different from its inspirations. It's not blindly borrowing ideas even when they don't fit; instead, it's remixing bits of gameplay formulae to create a unique combat experience; it's suspending its derivative visual ideas within stark and striking compositions. Compared to the Jedi games, it might be best to say that it's sampling and interpolating ideas from other games, not remixing them — and the result is a pretty unique experience even if its inspirations are obvious in every frame of every scenario.
The main, notably excellent thing about Luna Abyss is its pacing. The game is an entirely linear shooter, though it adds in some platforming segments to complement a moveset that grows as the game progresses, some gameplay set pieces about possessing giant robots for variety. What's notable about this is that the best parts of the game are often the parts where there is no combat. The artists at Kwalee Labs are masters of composition, and they're able to create extremely striking environments that made me feel tiny, agorophobic, and lost, despite how on-rails the game actually is. I've been writing a piece about the way Alan Wake 2 uses negative space — the space between combat — to build dread, and suspense; the way that game is comfortable with silence, happy to let the player stew. This is a quality Luna Abyss shares: for as frantic as its combat is when it breaks out, the game is very slow and deliberate with its pacing, and gives the player massive amounts of time to soak in its environment and world, to curate a specific emotion, which in its case is less dread, more worry and awe and smallness. But the game also uses negative space in a very literal, artistic sense. The game makes heavy use of blacks, of darkness with tiny areas of light and definition to direct the eye. On my super fancy high color accuracy HDR OLED display with all the fixings, there were often scenes where I literally couldn't see what was around me, not even the gun in my hand, and I was making leaps of faith towards a spot of red in the distance, hoping that it indicated a platform to land on. Even when the player isn't shrouded in darkness, the game constructs its environments and its skyboxes with stark, low-detail blacks and whites, often putting blurring distance fog between the player and the surrounding floor, ceilings and walls, to better frame major set pieces, create a sense of scale, and/or guide the player through the level. The way this game is composed, and the way it guides the player, should genuinely be studied in art schools. It's exceptionally good.
I'm not sure I would call the combat good — I might even be willing to say I dislike it — but it's certainly distinct. It combines DOOM Eternal's lock-and-key style combat design, where specific enemies can only really be damaged by specific guns, with Returnal's bullet hell attack patterns, and a healthy dose of fast, floaty movement to keep things interesting. It includes glory kills which can either heal the player (as DOOM's did) or turn the enemy into a grenade, to explode and damage other enemies, which makes every kill a decision instead of a brief breath of invulnerability. It often stretches its battles out over long platforming segments, forcing the player to balance moving forward with killing enemies before their pressure becomes overwhelming. The result is a very mentally fatiguing system full of constant decision pressure — so to alleviate the stress, the game has an ADS lock-on system so aggressive that it becomes almost physically impossible to miss your shots, meaning you can focus entirely on managing your weapon rotations and avoiding the enemies' attacks.
The system has problems, don't get me wrong; the weapons often feel too similar, and you only really get three of them — the fourth is only for the last couple levels, is super powerful but can only be fired very occasionally due to its tremendous cooldown period, a sort of BFG-9000 that you'll typically use as a fight opener. At certain points it feels like it becomes optimal to play the game like a cover shooter, hiding behind level props or bits of terrain to snipe at enemies, instead of dashing into the action like the game is clearly designed for. But the game is nine hours long, and probably less than half of that is combat, so it certainly doesn't overstay its welcome, and the very unique feel of the combat was more than enough to keep me interested in it. Oh, I should note that I played on the highest, "Scourge" difficulty because I remembered the game's demo being trivially easy — and that remained true for the first couple levels, but the game eventually grew some real teeth, especially in the bossfights, which all took several attempts and all were pretty interesting both visually and mechanically, even if they showed repetitive gameplay design patterns.
The part of a game I care the most about usually is the story, and unfortunately I don't think Luna Abyss's is anything to write home about. Don't get me wrong, it had some elements that I liked: it was cryptic in a way that tickled my brain, without veering into Souls-level impenetrability; it had some neat twists, and some cool, genderfucked characters. But on the other hand, it leaned far too heavily into what felt to me like uninspired Tarot and Norse mythology references, and it had the kind of abrupt ending that usually indicates that the team ran out of budget. A charitable reading of the game could infuse it with a lot of depth. Some interesting points could be made about how the player character Fawkes is only ever a side character, is constantly offered choices that, for them and the player, aren't actually choices at all along a totally linear journey; the game is clearly making a point about power, revolution, and incarceration; its family-drama twist gives the game more emotional weight without undermining the narrative up to that point. But personally, I found the gameplay and exploration experience to be much more compelling than the story, which I would only call "good" in the context of first person shooter stories; which suffers from being too obscure to be affecting, too derivative to be arresting, and, in dialogue, too contemporary to feel mythic or symbolic or weighty.
So Luna Abyss is in some respects a flawed game, but I found it tremendously enjoyable and interesting, and, in terms of its art direction and pacing, genuinely, uniquely excellent. Much like last years Expedition 33, it felt like a really great freshman effort, where while I wasn't over the moon (haha get it because the game is set inside of a moon and Luna is in the title) about every aspect of the final product, I can't wait to see what the studio does next. Oh, hold on, I'm getting a phone call. One second.
Okay, so I've just been informed that the studio that made this game was unceremoniously shuttered and everyone was laid off and they might never get the chance to get another crack at making a game? Oh, ok. I mean, the credits were so short that they had to pad them out by listing the law firms and accountants that the studio contracted, the game had a Game Pass deal, it can't have cost that much to make but — well, I guess that's the state of the gaming landscape in 2026.
What a fucking bummer. Anyway. I encourage you to play Luna Abyss, because it's still excellent. And if you can find a way to get it without sending a dime over to the shit ass publisher so much the better. More than any game I've played, I think Luna Abyss deserves to be a cult classic that people stumble on and are fascinated by for years to come. How can a game be so derivative, and yet also be so compelling, and esoteric, and singular? Well, since the people who made it have all been summarily executed — that's what "laid off" means, right? I assume it's some kind of euphemism — I guess we'll never know, but playing the game and wondering at it provides its own kind of answer.
I also played the Through the Ashes campaign DLC for Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous (will this crazy DYKE ever stop talking about Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous?) I held off on playing the DLC for a long time because it's a self-contained campaign with very little relevance to the main game — only using the same systems, is only set in the same city as the game's opening act — but I'm actually disappointed it took me so long to get around to it. "Through the Ashes" is a really interesting piece of design that injects gallons of challenge and interactivity into Wrath's low-level adventuring experience. While Wrath of the Righteous is a power fantasy game, "Through the Ashes," a more im-sim inspired story about a few weak townspeople navigating a treacherous city in the wake of a demon attack, is brutally difficult, and on the higher difficulties, demanded a ton of thought and creativity to get through it. It exerts a ton of resource pressure, makes even getting basic gear a forbiddingly difficult task, and really stretches your system knowledge. "Through the Ashes" also has a neat gimmick where, if you want to be heroic, you can shepherd three to five NPCs through the campaign — but they're all ill, so keeping them alive will put even more pressure on your limited healing/restoration resources. When my journey through the DLC ended with me bringing them all safely to the end, it was delightful and satisfying. I had to really work to get there!
"Through the Ashes" would probably be better in a game with more in-built systems for environmental interactions, like Larian's Baldur's Gate 3. As it is, though the game works hard to offer alternative approaches to combat, the way it does so doesn't ever feel fully natural. Wrath's system was really built around fighting, so giving the player more out-of-combat options mostly just boiled down to putting a contextual prompt in the world here or there. It's certainly a step in the right direction, but it didn't get me thinking creatively about how to use the environment so much as it got me looking around the world for an encounter's auto-win button: a cart on a hill somewhere to push down into the enemies; a spot where I was prompted to throw a rope to climb up a wall and ping kinetic blasts down at cultists who didn't have rope themselves.
"Through the Ashes" was fairly light on narrative content and roleplaying, but the game used a milestone leveling system (where you got XP from completing story quests, instead of by killing monsters) to further disincentive combat, and to encourage you to protect the NPCs and see their stories. This system also works well as a pacing tool — since you level up after finishing a quest, you're often doing so at a moment of rest: after a big battle, or a decision, or an emotional moment, or at the end of an area, instead of the way it works in the main game where levels would often seem to come at a random time: in the middle of a dungeon, for instance, when you don't really want to have do the tedious work of leveling all your characters. Clearly this leveling system was an experiment for Owlcat — like a lot of the stuff in the DLC — and while I didn't notice much of its ideas making its way into their next game Rogue Trader, I think "Through the Ashes" does a good job introducing new gameplay ideas and using them to really stretch the player to their limits. Clearing it did require a frustrating amount of save scumming, though! It's not at all built for a new player.
I've completed Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. Good game on the whole!
And started Motorslice. It's a "parkour" platformer game. Mildly apocalyptic aesthetic, with machines gone rogue. Megastructures that must be climbed/traversed, and such. @countchocula recently played it and had a very lukewarm opinion of it. Too bad it wasn't enough to put me off! Because I'm finding the game extremely mid.
A game like this lives and dies by the low friction of its controls and the smoothness of the player's movements throughout the in-game world, but this protagonist has a penchant for jumping into the void, or just from too high up. She'll easily push off walls into the void or drop like a rock, because the controls aren't always intuitive - the button for dropping without pushing off when climbing is the reverse of the one for doing that while running, for example. There's a button for softening falls but it only works on a narrow band of altitudes. And worse, there are only two camera modes: The one that swerves abruptly mid-sequence, changing the direction of your controls relative to the player and making you die, or the one that sticks very close to you, preventing you from seeing where you're going and making you die.
Narrative cutscenes are another problem. You do have the option to not engage with them, thankfully, although of course that means you will miss out on whatever story the game has. Or you can enter them and experience... Slow paced, unskippable lines of dialogue that force you to stare at the character for a long moment before allowing you to proceed. The camera will be positioned to get a good view of, say, her butt. Yes. Let's just say her butt. You will also get dialogue options for yourself. I'm sure the dialogue choices you make do something at some point but certainly they do not affect the dialogue (monologue?) progression, possibly because you play as an AI drone who is incapable of speech, so it's all actually just beep beep boop no matter what you choose. Plus, after you're done with the scene, you're still prompted to engage with it again - literally nothing changes.
The designers saw fit to be on the wrong side of realistic when it comes to the lighting inside the megastructures, perhaps to justify the presence of the player drone. You, the drone, turn on a flashlight in these situations so the character can, theoretically, see where she's going. Meaning in much of the game you can only see what you're doing through a narrow flashlight circle overlaid with a crappy, pixelated flashlight cookie sprite. I'd say this is a puzzling decision, except I find 9 out of 10 times a designer chooses to use any flashlight mechanics they're already as misguided as it gets.
Checkpointing is mostly OK if you're not trying to collect the optional floating orbs spread throughout the game world. If you are, expect some deaths to put you in a checkpoint that's beyond the collectible you were carrying to its drop-off location... without the collectible. Oops.
And I'm afraid there are several other small irritants. For some reason, if you go into the menu the game is incapable of remembering the status of the camera and flashlight for one. The radar button that shows interactables doesn't show doors at all, nor do they show any interaction prompt, even though they look just as flat as the many non-interactable doors save for different coloring (I think). Combat isn't super interesting as it doesn't follow typical industry practices; dodging works poorly because the little excavators (why are there even excavators of that size anyway?) beeline for you no matter what.
I should be clear in disclosing that I'm still early into the game. Maybe it gets better! There are certainly good ideas and typically most of this is stuff - the megastructures, the climbing, the parkour - would appeal to me, which is why I wanted to check out the game in the first place. Even the implementation details - the moves you have or the types of traversal you must perform - are theoretically appealing, but none of it ever quite feels good. It doesn't feel too bad either, which is what makes it even more annoying. I keep expecting better.
There are a lot of positive reviews on Steam which others may find more aligned with their own tastes. But there are also negative ones and they echo my opinions.
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I picked up The Artisan of Glimmith during the Steam sale but didn't get around to playing it until just before the weekend.
This was a bad idea because it ate up my entire weekend. Cheers for lost productivity.
As I get older, I'm finding myself less tolerant of games with elaborate stories, opting for games where I can just jump into gameplay without having to run through 2 hours of cutscenes. In that respect, I consider Tetris to be the perfect game because it's easy to learn, difficult to master, infinite replayability, no two play sessions are the same, can play short sessions or long sessions, etc. Artisan of Glimmith isn't Tetris but it has a lot of the same things that make me like Tetris.
At its heart, Artisan is about drawing shapes on grids. Each puzzle has certain rules to which you must adhere, such as only certain shapes allowed, shapes must have certain areas, shapes must contain certain symbols on the grid, certain shapes can't be next to each other, etc. The variations can get pretty intense, especially when they start combining rules. The easy puzzles can be finished within seconds but the harder ones can take up to an hour to get the right combinations of shapes in the right place. Most of the puzzles, though, are short enough that I got easily trapped into the "just one more" loop.
My only real complaint is that some of the puzzles seem to be mislabeled in their difficulty. Each puzzle receives a label from 1-7, with puzzles rated 1 supposedly being the easiest. I've only run across one 7 puzzle so far and a handful of 6's and I've been kind of disappointed with some of the 6's because they seem pretty easy. In fact, I solved the first 6 I saw within five minutes. This is opposed to some of the 3's and 4's, which had me pulling my hair out for dozens of minutes (with one particular 3 keeping me occupied for an excess of 45 minutes).
Still, this is easily my best buy of the year and I would've been happy to pay full price for this.
I've had the same issue with single-variable "difficulty" ratings on puzzles lately, and I think it's because there are actually multiple types of difficulty with any puzzle that's about a chain of reasoning:
Within The Artisan of Glimmith, high difficulty puzzles seem to ask you to keep more in mind, and the boards are big and complex, but having only a single possible starting spot is not necessarily harder. If you can identify it and keep the rules in mind, even a giant board can be resolved fairly quickly because the ruleset just makes the solution propagate across the entire surface without additional complex solving. Some of the "medium" difficulty puzzles are actually 3 or 4 smaller puzzles in one board with unclear borders between them, and so you need to pick away at multiple lines of unrelated logic. Perhaps some people would find this easier, but I do not.