25
votes
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.
Satisfactory. I didn't know they made things more addictive than Factorio, but here we are.
I have both, I have played both for sjmilar time/effort. They are both great games and I would even say they are not actually the same as in they fight for their fans - they don't. Each of them is very unique and I'm glad I played both. And I will play both some more.
My friend, I don't know if you have ever considered running for office, but you clearly have what it takes.
It seems like I play on both sides. But I really see the difference between them.
I love the top down and kinda easy graphics of the Factorio. I also like that you can choose enemies to be active or passive (or nonexistent?) based on your preferences. I like to explore the game, learn the tech tree and I don't want to get bothered by enemies whiled doing that. I want to play against them later when I know my bearings. I like research system there, where you have to make research goodies to run your laboratories.
What I love about Satisfactory is the 3D kinda-FPS part of it. Satisfactory likely brought the genre towards more mainstream than Factorio, which is more for nerds in my opinion. Satisfactory looks better, no doubt, it kinda plays easier too, but it gets hard just as Factorio as you move forward to higher tiers. I like that there are no active enemies (or at least I didn't have them attack me on their own; that is if I don't come to them) and you are free to roam. The world is also very divergent and I have yet to see the most of it.
I like both games the same, yet they are very different for me. If you made me pick one, it would be Factorio for the simple fact that it is Czech-made and I'm Czech. I'm glad I could have and play both though.
(One fact: I believe devs of Factorio said they will never have their game in a sale and as far as I know, they didn't. I like that they keep their word so firmly even though it makes the game "expensive" for us.)
I like to play factorio on default settings except no growth for the enemies. that way they are a little bit of a challenge in the beginning, but as your tech progresses they are satisfyingly easier to deal with. eventually just one small design consideration that's never stressful to manage.
I never tried satisfactory because I couldn't imagine how the FPS view could work for a game like this. It doesn't seem like it would be comfortable. Like building stuff in minecraft is fun for a minute but gets tedious real fast for me.
There's a few ways that building in Satisfactory works that's much better than Minecraft. For one, your building range is immense. There's no need to be within 4 blocks to build: if you can see it you can build to it. Beyond that, there's something they call "zooping", where you can build a series of the same thing in sequence with a simple click and drag. If you want a conveyor belt all the way to the horizon in one zoop, you can do it. Combined with a jetpack or tall tower, you can do the rough sketch of a base with ease.
It's not bad at all, you elevate onto the machines which all have ladders for you early on until you are hovering freely on the late game. From there it's easy to click things into existence. There is a blueprint system that really takes the tedium out of the mid to late game that satisfactory had, so it's much easier to build to scale now a days.
Honestly give it a shot if you like factorio, they are beautiful complementary games that each stand ok their own merits and give their own experiences despite the same core game loop.
I also.play Factorio with enemies and they occasionally attack me, but I believe I have nerfed them in some way as well. I never got really far though - the most I have achieved was around crude oil rafination and making of plastic (things).
Satisfactory... It is unbelievable how they managed to put this genre into 3D. It just works.
You can build lookout towers to overlook what you build, ypu can use natural cliffs to do the same. There is alignment tool when building new things, so that your belts go straight and your building are aligned in the same line. I believe there are blueprints as well, but I didn't use them/got that far to need them. You can even zipline your energy wires and hop onnanother when you reach a pole, this is kinda neat way to get around in the beginning (as later it seems you will have vehicles).
I have to play the games again sometime. They are both great. I may buy another copy for daughter and play with her.
Me too! I just unlocked oil but I've done most of the MAM research already. I've been putting more research into aesthetics and have been trying to build some nice bridges and structures.
Like I talked about in the thread last month, I am loving getting to put more creative expression into this game than I feel like I could in Factorio. It feels good!
All JRPGs all the time lately.
Finished up Dragon Quest XI S.
If Final Fantasy aspires to be fine dining, then this is mum's home cooking. One hundred hours of mum's home cooking. The world itself is not even particularly expansive, but the assets and areas are recycled smartly enough that it never felt like a slog and I ended up finishing everything other than the super bosses at the end. I must have played that blacksmithing minigame for at least 5 hours by itself...
The thing that really struck me as I played this game is that against all odds, Dragon Quest still retains all of the politically incorrect sensibilities of the Showa era in which the original games were released. There are still bunny girls, porn magazines and dirty old men. You can still gamble at slots and pay ladies to shove their breasts in your face. You can still give your female party members racy underwear and dress them up as schoolgirls, exotic dancers or cats. A little difficult to imagine Square Enix (which is, after all, now a global facing games giant) giving this kind of leeway to any other franchise - see in particular the counterexample below for its other flagship series.
I wish this game would let you use the double / triple / quadruple techs all the time, Chrono Trigger style. There are so many combos and the devs obviously put a ton of work into creating custom animations for all of them (some of which are super goofy), but most players are never going to see like 80% of them because you can only use these skills when all of the relevant characters go into their super Saiyan 'zone' state, and that's complete RNG.
Speaking of RNG, I want to give a special shout out to the worst RPG side quest in history which is featured in this game. Anyone who has played this game will likely know the one I mean:
However, once you get in there and find the man, it turns out that he's a degenerate who refuses to part with the statue unless you show him a jackpot in roulette, which is when the ball lands on the specific number and that number also lands in the jackpot space.
There is some debate online about the exact odds of hitting the jackpot and whether you can improve them, but no one has come up with any method that demonstrably does so, and some unlucky players have reportedly spent dozens of hours grinding roulette without success. I personally spent about 2 hours save scumming it myself during which I tried every method I could find in Google - no dice.
What's worse, there is no other way to complete this quest. You cannot have your thief steal the statue. You cannot seduce him for it. You cannot knife him in the face and take it. You can't even give the money back to the little girl. You are committed to praying to the RNG gods indefinitely or forever being the hero who misappropriated money from an orphan.
I ended up downloading a mod which lets you win the jackpot in one spin and can heartily recommend this solution to any other PC players.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
What more is there to say about this game that hasn't already been said? Great visuals, great music, great gameplay and just enough game.
I was a little apprehensive that this game would melt my modest PC given it's UE5, but it runs fine at around 70-80fps once dropped to 1080p with DLSS. I grew up gaming on CRTs so have absolutely no issue with 'low' resolution, but I am feeling the limitations of 8GB VRAM more and more these days with these AAA releases as the pop-in and level of detail shifts are pretty noticeable.
The reporting around this game really made the parrying sound a lot more important than it is. If that isn't your bag, it is still completely playable as a regular JRPG where you ignore the parry button and just make best efforts to learn the enemy attack patterns and dodge. I played the whole game this way on the regular difficulty and am convinced that you could probably even just facetank the damage and not dodge at all if you're setting up your equipment and skills properly.
As undeniably JRPG influenced as most of the game is, I had to laugh when I saw the camp system and how the character socialisation worked. It's the most Dragon Age / Baldur's Gate 3 western game design imaginable.
Final Fantasy XVI
If you're playing this in Japanese, you'll quickly realise that something feels off:
Between this and the Game of Thrones sex and violence presentation, it's difficult to avoid the impression that the devs were trying their damnedest to make something first and foremost for western audiences rather than Final Fantasy, and while I don't want to say that this game is bad as a result, it's kind of hard to recommend:
The level design isn't far off from FFXIII's trashmob corridors followed by a boss, and even where it seems to have some options for exploring, you aren't rewarded with anything more than expendable potions or crafting materials for stuff you can often just buy with money.
The combat feels like Nier Replicant (i.e. not the fun one). You're just repeating the same combo over and over, but it's even worse since your only weapon is the sword, there's no real choice of magic, equipment (+7% to the effectiveness of one move or +9% to a different move!) or items to speak of and your movement speed is so slow that I would often barely manage to stroll outside AOE attacks telegraphed an eon in advance. There is a teleport move, but it's not in every loadout and our protagonist only learnt how to teleport to enemies, so it's useless when you want to move away.
The subquests are largely fetch quests for randos reminiscent of Xenoblade 1. In some cases, there's at least an attempt at adding exposition to the depressing world inhabited by the characters, but none of them are actually fun to play.
But wait, there's stuff I like too!
The game looks great. It's some odd internal engine instead of UE, but it looks every bit as good. It's also reasonably performant, although it absolutely chugs on the world map due to the weird decision to load wherever you're going during the world map transition animation.
The idea of certain people being Dominants who can transform into gigantic kaijyuu Eikons (funnily only referred to as shoukanjyuu or 'summon beasts' in the Japanese script despite this being the one game where they're not summons) and turn the tide of battles is really cool in an Attack on Titan kind of way, although the story doesn't always follow through on it. For example, right at the beginning of the game, you have a nation that just abandons their Dominant entirely when leaving the battlefield, which is kind of akin to just leaving your nuclear deterrent behind. A real head scratcher.
Middle aged bad ass Cid is great and an obvious homage to the game breaking 'Thunder God' Cidolfus from FFT. I appreciate them giving a Cid a relevant story role again.
I may stick with this just out of morbid curiosity. It's a striking comparison with how confident FF7R is in sticking with its JRPG roots (switch to action combat not withstanding), weirdness and all.
Dragon Quest I Remake
The grand daddy of JRPGs which stole the fire from the Olympus of Wizardry and Ultima and gave it to Final Fantasy, Megami Tensei and all the others to follow.
Famously, this is the one which doesn't have a party - it's just you, the hero, against all of the monsters in the world. You might expect that this implies a pretty chill experience where you just grind fights, level up and roll through dungeons, but that's not where this remake is at. It takes every opportunity to send gank squads of 4-6 enemies your way, and often they'll hit like a truck, take two actions per turn and/or mercilessly spam the instant death spell Zaki (in a single party member game!?) The result is that you're constantly switching equipment to do crowd control and thinking about all of your options, because again, there's no designated healer or DPS or whatever - it's just you and your one action per turn. It's surprisingly engaging in a way that DQ XI isn't with its death squad of 8 party members, especially for the bosses that serve as a wall if you aren't hard countering their mechanics with your own strategy.
The original NES game is rough to play today, but this remake mostly solves the issues with a boatload of quality of life changes. No more buying keys, torches, etc. No more cryptic clues about what you need to do next. The only pain is from the usual garbage DQ inventory system, which is somehow even worse than DQ XI here since there's no 'equip' menu. Instead, you have an equip command which does nothing if your character's bag is full - it just asks if you want to empty the character inventory that you painstakingly picked out (you don't), even though all you want to do is replace one old piece of equipment item with one new piece of equipment. I ended up just using the workaround of opening the party inventory and manually replacing the relevant equipment in the character inventory, following which the game automatically asks if you want to equip the thing you just moved in. It's incredibly byzantine to have to do this each time and it baffles me how this wasn't raised by playtesters as the number one thing to remake.
In addition to the nice HD-2D graphics, the characters and story also get a bit of a modern overhaul. The original has very little story to speak of at all let alone characterisation, but characters in the remake move about, emote and actually have a bit of personality and relationship to the protagonist. I don't fault the original for not having this stuff, but it is something that people later came to expect as a given in JRPGs, so it's nice that it's in here.
Dragon Quest II Remake
Basically all of the above (it comes in the same package as a twofer), but significantly easier since you have an actual party in this game. I'm enjoying it and will likely also play DQ III Remake to round out the Roto trilogy.
I feel like people complaining about parrying just aren't using both words "parry" and "dodge" and would be unsatisfied with being told to just dodge instead. These people's issue with this game's system is that incoming damage feels kind of all-or-nothing based on a timing check, and it doesn't really matter much whether it's the tighter check with the bonus reward or not to somebody who just doesn't want that in their turn based jrpg type game.
FFXVI remains one of the few FFs I've finished. But I also finished it in like three weeks. Which for me and JRPGs, is usually on the order of months or even years. Like XVI isn't a bad game. And I enjoyed it enough. Obviously I played it to completion. But it's definitely...just mid. It's like the most solid 7/10 game I've played. Which is not necessarily a good thing.
I'm with you. If someone was new to the series or even JRPGs as a whole, and wanted to start with a Final Fantasy title, I would not recommend XVI. I'd recommend like X or even the VII Remakes. Maybe even IX (even though I don't particularly care for it).
I didn't mind the active battle system (though I think FF7R's is better). But I very much disliked how basic the equipment system was. Like once I got the accessories I wanted, I never changed them. And even with the Eikons, I barely swapped them out. I feel like the game should've forced players to use different ones throughout the game. Exploration, as in trying to completely reveal an entire map, was pointless since there were practically no rewards (ie treasure chest). But...I did like the story. And I thought the characters and their motivations were alright, if not particularly deep. And also Dion Lesage. So pretty...
XVI absolutely feels like something created to cater to Western audiences (of which I am a part of) to get people into JRPGs. Which is funny to me, because E33 was probably better at that than XVI. And then I felt like Metaphor: ReFantazio, which stuck with its JRPG roots, was far more talked about and hyped than XVI.
YunYun Syndrome Rhythm Psychosis.
This game is... weird, and probably even weirder to describe to most people.
It's a rhythm game(it's in the name), you play as Qtie(Q-Chan in Japanese), shitposting on the internet while being obsessed with a fictional character called YunYun.
The most you shitpost, the more points you gain and spread the "influence" of YunYun.
The game goes for a fairly early internet era vibe, or at least reminds me of back when I used to listen to these IOSYS songs on early YouTube days.
The game focuses on "Denpa" music(I'll admit, I never heard this word until I played this game), and is a vertical scroller 4K(As in keys, not that 4K is the resolution you must play the game in, I'm not even sure if the assets go that high) rhythm game.
I'm honestly not much of a vertical scroller person, I dislike them for most part, coming from games like Project Diva, Project Mirai, Rhythm Thief ,among others, my skills don't translate to vertical scrollers.
Also, aside from IOSYS, I don't recognize anything else, who Nanahira is, etc.
If you've been into that corner of the internet back in the day and used to listen to IOSYS Touhou songs, Caramelldansen, Fukkireta, Paffendorf. I'm sure you get the kind of songs I'm generally referring to from these samples, I think you may feel at home with the songs used, some of them like Sennou Sakushu Tora no Maki ,Princess Bride and Miko Miko Nurse feel like songs I should've heard of back in the day, but didn't.
It does remind me of when being terminally was a badge of honor, instead of a mark of shame like it is today, back when I used to participate more in forums(remember those?) and had better sense of community/having a home online, compared to social media today.
I honestly don't know who I'd call the game's audience is, or even if I am its target audience, given my unfamiliarity with most of its content. But I think if you look at it, you'll know If it appeals to you or not right away. It used to have a demo but have pulled it from the store last I remember, because they were maintaining the demo, and it was too much work.
Thanks for the recommendation, looks delightfully unhinged! So the 4K rhythm game is a representation of the way the protagonists types, spamming the internet in an attempt to win it for her obsession? What a premise, I can't believe it hasn't been used before AFAIK.
This game does not look marketable at all. But a quick look at dev/publisher Alliance Arts shows a roster full of counter-culture games that don't make for good merchandising. I have got to keep my eye out for these guys.
Gematsu is where I found about the game, apparently back in 2025 when I tried to look to the oldest mention of it in one of my discord chats.
I want to say that Steam is also surprisingly good at recommending niche games sometimes, it's just that the queue is at first filled with mainstream games.
And now there's Steam'a personal calendar thing, Skimming a few games, there's Hollow Sorrow(JP Only, though), Rubinite and LarsGadiel.
Not everything it recommends is spot on(My Japanese is poor, I don't like Metroidvanias) but at least it gets vibes that I like, all the games are interesting artistically/visually, it gets me to check out games or wishlist them.
Dude, Rubinite looks amazing: pixel art souls-like with washed pastels and great animation? Its difficulty could take years off my life and I would still play it. LarsGadiel looks like as if Tarantino wasn't into movies but was a nerd for obscure sidescrollers; it looks so crammed full of influences, but I couldn't name any.
Impeccable taste, good sir. Your Steam wishlist beggars my imagination.
Great recommendations. I hadn't heard of any of these but feel like we probably have similar tastes in Japanese indie games.
It's wonderful that devs in Japan have finally come to the party on Steam in the last decade. Once upon a time, the only way to access games like this would have been to show up at doujin events and buy them on home burned CDs.
Reading this made me slightly annoyed that people don't know about Nanahira but then I remembered that normal people listen to whatever's topping the charts on Spotify rather than random Japanese songs with anime thumbnails on Youtube (recently it's been more alt-rock and shoegaze). Rhythm games aren't really my thing but I bet some of the tracks in that game are going to end up in my playlists at some point.
YouTubing her brought up some old Touhou stuff, not sure how come I never came across her before despite being a serial Touhou remix consumer at the time.
Here's a list of songs I liked.
Koi no Recipe
Not gonna bother remembering this one's name
the first the last
Sakura Saku
Princess Bride
Raspberry
This one's by Nanahira
I would be surprised that most of those are from eroges if characters/artstyle and OP/ED songs wasn't my main exposure to erodes.
I am done playing for the time being, I was trying to go for a PFC (On Hard(Hardcore Gamer as it is called in game)) but by 6 notes on great instead of perfect, ended up grinding like 5 hours across 2 days to get Koi no Recipe, at least I got in the leaderboards so that's something?
As far as playing rhythm games goes, I'm absolute garbage at vertical scrollers, I really got into rhythm games because of handheld/console style of rhythm games, think Project Diva, K-On, Rhythm Thief and the rhythm game Idolmaster on PSP(Not the idol sim ones), so none of my skills translate, Hardcore Gamer(Which feels more like Normal) to Tryhard feels like a hard wall I can't go through.
Aurelia is an erotic 18+ visual novel with incredibly light RPG mechanics which I finished last week. While I won't go into the lewd content of that game (of which there is a metric tonne of smut. No seriously, it makes Katawa Shoujo look incredibly tame by comparison) I do have some thoughts on it. The graphics are reminiscent of those late 90's/early 00's point & click adventure games that makes heavy use of dithering. Looks great in some areas, not so much in others. The gameplay involves light puzzles and a series of minigames that range between repetitive, luck-based and kinda frustrating. Your ability to do these minigames are governed by a series of 5 RPG stats, which you all max out at the level cap of 100.
What I don't particularly like is the story and writing. You play as an adventurer who inherits his deceased uncle's cottage, find a mysterious amulet left on a desk and touch it, knocking you unconscious. You wake up days later to find a sorceress who has been squatting in your home, and that the inconspicuous amulet you touched is cursed and gave you magic powers. Beyond that, there's not really a sense of danger despite the protagonist surviving some deadly situations. Much of the game's writing in its main and sidequests is just straight-up bad porno writing.
Tangy TD is another game I played more recently. It's... a bit repetitive. While the skill tree is very expansive, it feels like you are expected to grind a lot to get to the next stage. Only three tower types also makes it really really boring, and the whole mechanic of microing a rather weak hero and picking up or dropping "towers" is quite frustrating.
Idle Sword Master got very weird recently. Because I'm on a platform that didn't get the latest update for a few months, I suddenly logged in to find I had been given hundreds of thousands of scrolls, tens of thousands of yellow upgrade gems, tonnes of pickaxes, and other resources as compensation. It's so much that I genuinely don't have a clue how to spend it all because they went into overload with compensating players who couldn't climb the leaderboards because they weren't on iOS. Companions level up so slowly unless you spend top dollar on VIP upgrades that I basically won't be able to raise any of them to level cap now.
League of Legends is the only other game I played this week, and I dunno why I'm torturing myself with this one. I'm hovering between Bronze 4 and 3, and it just feels like the quality of my matches has taken a further nosedive. Other than maybe trying League Classic once it launches next week, I'm not having any real desire to revisit it.
I rarely DNF games but I've given up on Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts about 30% through. I got it for free through Epic so I have no problems giving up on it up but I generally like to get the full picture of the game before I evaluate it. This one just never really grabbed me. It's very clearly ripping from the Sniper Elite series and isn't trying to hide that. That in itself isn't the issue, as it's also clearly pulling ideas from Hitman, at least in how it presents missions.
My frustration mostly is in immersion, which truthfully rarely bothers me. Here, though, I'm playing an elite sniper assassin, yet as soon as one enemy spots me, the whole map is aware of exactly where I am with seemingly no way to lose their tracking. Not only that, but they're able to shoot me from distance using their unscoped assault rifles. The same distance I'm measuring wind and distance to accurately line up a shot at 300 yards. Just isn't realistic.
The real breaking point for me was trying to complete the same mission checkpoint for the sixth time, as I kept dying right after doing the last part but right before hitting the checkpoint area. The last time I wasn't even killed, but accidentally jumped off a stairwell into an open barrel that was too tall for me to jump back out of.
Sisyphe's Backspace
The Divekick of typing games that dares to ask if it's better to not type anything at all makes for a strong proof of concept that is better to talk about than to play.
Click for more
If you really need to say something, text it instead; and if you really need to text something, don't. There can be no stronger guidelines governing the use of SMS messaging than these commandments that accept the limits of a medium that prizes efficiency over intimacy. But for all the glory that Gen Z proffers to it, the ubiquity of text messaging hasn't translated well to other media. Films and TV shows struggle to show text messaging that isn't awkward and intrusive. Video games have been more successful, with one example being Bury Me, My Love, a choice-irrelevant visual novel that demonstrates that asking someone to "text me once you get there so I know you're safe" doesn't apply to refugees.
And now, there's Sisyphe's Backspace, the SMS video game that explores the lost poetry of words better left unsaid. As an anti-typing game, this short, 5-minute game gives players control over one thing and one thing only: the backspace button. Yes, you're not role playing as someone hoping to reveal herself to her crush: no, you're her wisdom, her better judgment, her conscience that knows she'll be killing her friendship if she goes through with it.
Sisyphe's Backspace lets us drink from the misery of its protagonist, doomed to pour her heart out in a text box, only to delete it before pushing "Send". We our hero's heart-felt confession get expunged by the same cowardly heart. It's an agonizing wretchedness that can only be hinted at by the "...is now typing" prompt, a delay full of promise and dread.
Sisyphe's Backspace is a very good proof-of-concept game with a clever gimmick. What it isn't is smartly written. There's a good game to be found with the "delete to progress story" type of narrative, but it's not here, unfortunately. The feels are there, but the story is not.
The game deftly shows the protagonist (cleverly named "Phe" as alluded to in the title) pouring her soul out in an unrequited effort. The story should end with her ready to push Sisyphus' boulder up the hill again, but this gets negated in one of the secret achievements when the story allows Phe to finally bare her soul, betraying the whole point of the story/gimmick. What's more, the game isn't actually a one-button game, unlike what the direction "only use Backspace to play" tells us. And for a game that uses SMS messaging as its foundation, it doesn't adopt its informality and casualness, instead showing us a confession that took the time to write in sentences with punctuation, demonstrating that heartfelt confessions must be done with proper grammar.
But what's most annoying of all is that this game missed out on giving us the perfect secret achievement, one that makes sense for the story and is aligned with gamer culture. Instead of giving an out to the player to say "I love you" (without the decency of showing us what happened afterwards), the secret achievement should have been to require the player to individually press Backspace for every character of every word not used by the hero; no holding down Backspace, you'll need to tap tap tap your way to 100% completion. Gamers are used to fulfilling absurd requirements for the final achievements to unlock, and for a "one-button game", this would have been the perfect way to realize that goal.
In the end, Sisyphe's Backspace is still a bittersweet game that packs an emotional punch in its short running time. It doesn't fulfill a romance-ravenous audience's need for a happy ending. But, with these tender sentiments being lost to the digital netherworld, need we follow our heart's innermost desire that burns with a fire that consumes endlessly, driving us to ruin, leaving the sole satisfaction of having followed an irrationality to its empty end?
Epilogue (because it's too dark to end like that):
This game is just the middle of the story. If I were to continue it and to have the hero do the right thing, I would have her break off the friendship; don't admit your feelings in a text (no, Gen Z, no). There'd be some drama and confusion over it, but this is to give the hero of the story space to figure things out. After not too long of time, if the hero still feels the same way (and they do, in this story), then they should go through with the confession. This way, you're being fair to the crush, giving her a chance to see you as something other than the friend they have always come to trust and love you for being.
Grotto
Grotto may be the most sober game I've played about hallucinogenic drugs I've ever played.
Click for more
Adventure games have traditionally been rigorous trials of wit and fortitude, requiring questers to journey far and wide over various landscapes, each more exotic than the last. Not in Grotto. In this game, you play as that old blind seer in the cave that requires you to beat a mini-boss first. For the same reason why fishing mini-games don't spin-off into their own full-fledged iteration, Grotto is the anti-adventure game that dares to ask: "What else does that guy say after: 'It's dangerous out there! Take this.'"
Grotto is a very slow paced game. It is not very rewarding. It uses is first-person perspective as a way to emphasize the confines of the player's environment, giving you the agency to fully experience the claustrophobia of the two rooms of your titular home.
Grotto is a very unsettling game. It stinks of musky, damp earth, smelling of death and life all at once, stuck in a place where the only thing you can see out of a hole in the ceiling is the night sky. As the resident shaman, you need to "read" the constellations to find the answers that your petitioners seek.
That's your job. That's the game.
There's a story here, one concerning the people that meet you, each looking for divine guidance before acting on decisions with huge ramifications. They're fending off invaders, challenges to the line of succession, drought and famine. The thing is, as the all-powerful seer who stuck in this cave, it doesn't matter to me.
This could be the point of the game. As the one guy who can deliver divine messages, you have your thumb on the scale. Don't like one omen? Swap it for another. No one can stop you or read your chicken bones after you roll them. The message is whatever you want it to be. And yet, by being stuck in this cave, I'm beyond the cares of the world. Hey, guy who is making a power play to become the chief: I could make or break you with whichever advice I choose to give you, but what do I care? However it turns out for you, I'll still be stuck in this two-room cave in all its cell-shaded glory.
To me, the realest part of the game is the giant, glowing, looming face that appears when you're tripping balls. Unlike all the other people you meet, this insect-faced devil doesn't want answers out of you. Instead, it's trying to persuade you that the others are out to get you. You know, he's trying to protect you by getting you to become more paranoid than you already are, balls be tripping as they are sure to do.
Maybe there's an ending to all this, but I'm not likely to get there. The game is a chore, this two-room 3D environment chugs on my laptop, and I've absorbed as much David Lynchian subwoofer soundtrack as I can muster. I've gone as far as I can go. Playing more will probably lower my opinion of this game.
It's been so weird to give world-altering advice in which each day is your first day on the job, and then feel completely detached and removed from a world impacted by your decisions. In that way, this game is unique, but not unique enough for me to recommend it. Firstly, I don't like it enough to recommend, and secondly because I'm am pretty sure no many other people will like it either. Not a crowd pleaser, although it has a 75 Metacritic score and the Steam reviews are mostly positive from players that are gripped by Grotto's captivating narrative of people asking you for favors, and then leaving without an update or, at the very least, not even a thank you. Would it kill you to say a short, little "thanks"?
If I'm an old man stuck in a cave, and you come to me and ask me what I see, I'm going tell you what I see: the only stars that are viewable from a crack in the roof, the way the chicken bones fall from my hands, the shadows that flicker on the wall from the fire in the room. You asked me. Whether you believe it or not, that's on you.
Honest Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf that Loved to Tell Lies
Do you find that traditional fairy tales aren't conservative enough? Do you enjoy having traditional gender roles reinforced through cutesy anime characters in a free visual novel?
Click for more
Honest Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf that Loved to Tell Lies is the revised, version of the classic bedtime story that trad wives should be clamoring to read to their children before being led back to their cages to rest before the next day's chores begin. By shunting its antagonist to leading man status, this story finally grants readers the happy ending they've always wanted.
A short explainer on plucky female Asian protagonists that don't wield katana blades with whom you don't want to cross: traditional Asian heroines are girls. Like, literally and, if it has to be said, in that way where "physicality" and "technicality" meet. These non-women deal with every problem using only their looks and virtue. They don't change, they don't grow; they must persist in their pure, chaste forms until finally meeting the perfect man with whom they will attract and fix using indirect communication. Faced with a cruel and corruptive world, Asian heroine need to "batten down the hatches", as the saying goes.
This short story is a devoted disciple of the School of the Asian Heroine. What's astonishing about this interactive story is that the one agency afforded to the reader is whether or not you believe the corruptive lies of the Wolf antagonist in this post-Twilight world. You can kind of guess where this is going, but there is will spoiler tags from here on out for a free game you can complete in 15 minutes (provided you can read Mandarin Chinese).
Spoilers for real this time
The only good ending to this game is only achievable if you choose to believe the Wolf-Boy's lies. All of them. As the heroine, you must not deviate from your virtues; the only path to victory is to follow the lies to their end with the hope that the man of the story will finally receive the epiphany the has been waiting for all his life, but had never yet met a chaste enough girl as you. This would mean that this (and every) traditional story belongs to the male hero, but the true victor is the heroine; she's the model for the reader to follow.
Patience pays off. Like Cinderella waiting for the prince to arrive with her shoe or Snow White waiting to be resurrected from the dead, the Little Red Riding Hood of this story is a passive participant to her own fate. She needs to suffer the indignities of the character that means her ill-will until her the check of her virtue finally cashes in.
This retelling does a neat trick by splitting the Wolf character in two. By making some doppelganger pretend to be the grandmother, the Wolf-Boy can have that change of heart to show that his wild ways can finally be tamed by a true and righteous heart.
The best part of all is the "IF" ending. All alternate endings are triggered by "no" answers that ominously tell you that Little Red Riding Hood's rejection of Wolf-Boy obvious lies is what causes his death, or hers. But if you choose to believe him all times except for the last, the game goes into overdrive with a bonkers soap opera ending in which it is revealed Little Red Riding Hood is actually a scheming, two-face harlot. She hides her worldly wisdom with an innocent demeanor as a way to delude everyone. She heartlessly manipulates her mother into shooting Wolf-Boy dead, crying crocodile tears. It's deliciously dark and, if nothing else, true to the genre.
This game is an effective visual novel that makes great use of its meagre assets with a innovative set up. It's a decent read that should be noteworthy for introducing the term "flower holocaust" to the lexicon. Again, true to the genre.
Poetry Pigeon
So "pigeon poetry" is a thing. Apparently, sad urban misanthropes have been using the much-maligned flying rodent as the muse for their poetry. Embolded by a never-ending supply of bread crumbs, these perennial pavement oppressors have been inspiring artists in cities worldwide to dream, to write, and to make video games using the most obvious influence that even an ee cummings poem would put their dot on it: Flappy Bird.
Click for more
Poetry Pigeon is a hard-as-balls typing game where every flap of the titular bird needs to correspond with the next letter of a poem. Another way to put it: Poetry Pigeon is a one-button Flappy Bird clone in which the one button is subdivided into the 26 letters of the alphabet. And, unlike the original, Poetry Pigeon flies into hard mode fast, requiring you to tap like a fiend as familiar green pipes scroll to the left at a Dark Souls-like pace, allowing you to enjoy the beginning of the poem over and over again.
You will cry. You will cry, "Unfair!" You will also gain a newfound appreciation for the short, concise stylings of Emily Dickinson and Oscar Wilde. You will not have properly enjoyed "Ozymandias" until you've died a thousand deaths trying to type it out in a stilted rhythm that will not be taught in any typing tutor.
There's a casual mode without pipes, sure. But then the game reminds us that Thomas Pynchon prose is a thing and challenges us to write the poems backwards and without looking. It is most definitely challenging and invigorating, but what good poetry shouldn't be?
Many kind people from the Kingdom of Tildes have shared their games with me, but I have unfortunately not played any yet except Gato Roboto) That's because I have fallen down a typing game rabbit hole. They include:
After the sublime experience of Cryptmaster, I wanted more. And though there is nothing like Cryptmaster, there are a lot of typing games, so I picked up Typing of the Dead during the Summer Sale; it wasn't on a big discount, but I knew I would play it if I bought it, and I was right.
But there's a problem: none of these games teach you typing; they're not going to improve your skills or give you any helpful feedback. For example, none of these four games tell you your average words per minute typed, meaning you won't know if playing them improves your typing. But there is one...
Keeb Quest: Typing Battles
The typing tutor with RPG game-fication that features a good enough balance between video game and educational software that it actually can improve your typing.
Click for more
The worst thing for me about Keeb Quest: Typing Battles is that it doesn't quite deliver on its name and marketing. The game unfortunately comes up short as an RPG that allows you to explore dungeons and fight monsters with words, making for a worthwhile grind that let's you practice your typing. Instead, there's a Classic mode that allows you to word-fight successive rounds of enemies punctuated by the occasion mini-boss; it's reminiscent of the RPG experience, but definitely not anything close to the real deal.
But. It's hard to be disappointed when Keeb Quest generously delivers a wide variety of game modes that are aligned with its role as a typing tutor. In addition to Classic mode, there are:
Adventure Mode: Practice your skills by typing out a branching interactive story. Again, sounds great, but falls short, mostly to do with the game's copious use of AI assets for its text and accompanying visuals. The stories are all bland, and none of the choices feel consequential. It's just nice that this mode maintains the same RPG genre themes for a unified playthough.
Boss Rush: Take on the mini-bosses found in Classic mode. Feels like Arcade mode. Good for a quick round; this game keeps a frenetic pace, so in no time flat it will change from way too slow to way too fast. An ongoing problem with typing games is that sometimes the gameplay displays words in a way that won't help with your typing progress, like the way the words fall from the top of the screen for the King Slime mini-boss.
Academy Mode: touch typing lessons and drills. This by far is the best thing about this game for me. Sure, there are other typing tutorials that do the same, but they don't do it with the style and game-fication of Keeb Quest, which kept me engaged enough that I can feel my skills improving.
Stats and Leaderboard: See your progression and compare yourself to other players. This is another big benefit to this game. There are stats up the wazoo here. Separate stats and leaderboards for the different modes; report cards shown at the end of every game take to show you where you went wrong.
I've been looking a long time for the perfect dungeon crawling typing game. Cryptmaster came close, and now Keeb Quest does its thing by actually being effective at helping you make demonstrable growth. The dev is very responsive; having gotten out of Early Access earlier this year, the game received its most recent update just yesterday.
I am most interested in trying out The Chef's Shift, Touch Type Tale, and Blood Typers next. Until then, I've tried out a few free typing games:
Also playing Orbi's Chronicles, but it hasn't grown on me yet even though its an RPG-type game that allows you to grind in dungeons by solving word puzzles, doing what Letter Quest: Grimm's Journey and Spellspire both alluded to but never ended up delivering.
I picked up Silksong recently, now that the hype died down and most issues/bugs should have been fixed. Similarly to Hollow Knight, I found some parts amazing and some parts needlessly difficult/punishing.
Typically, I'm not a huge fan of boss fights that are very chaotic or that pretty much require spamming tools, and there are a few of those. Arena fights often falls under this category, but some bosses alos spaws smaller enemies. In those cases, I find it incredibly difficult to "learn" the fights, making them difficult, without the feeling of accomplishment once I finally win.
The system of crests is quite interesting. I've done almost everything using the reaper crest, since it's easy for platforming and generate enough silk to heal a lot. However, for the more difficult bosses near the end of act 2 and act 3, I'm often trying out different crests with vastly different success. For example, I found the hunter crest really usefull for the Karmelita fight.
Been getting back into Oblivion: Remastered. Such a fun game. I'd love to get recommendations for your favorite quests.
I don't have Oblivion: Remastered but from the original one I recommend Vaermina's daedric quest. It will take you... places.
And maybe Through a nightmare, darkly, another one that will take you places.
And of course the one from Dark Brotherhood that takes place in Skingrad - Whodunit?
I've been desperately wanting to play PC games recently, whether on my laptop, desktop or Steam Deck, but I just haven't been feeling them. I've tried numerous games, but nothing is sticking; not sure if that's just because I'm not interested in what they're offering right now or if it's because it's so damn hot, it's hard to focus and be around hot PC hardware.
So I've been playing a good amount of Nintendo DS games instead. I think I'm on the last mission of Advance Wars - Days of Ruin, which will be something that I've been meaning to go back to for 18 years. It was my first Advance Wars game I ever played and while I liked it I didn't get it, if you know what I mean. I was a tender 24-year old at the time and hadn't yet entered my Turn Based Strategy Dad Era yet. Since then, I've played and completed every other Advance Wars game, but Days of Ruin has always been a bit of an albatross around my neck (I mean, not that bad, but you get me).
I very much like the mechanics of the game and feel like they've added a lot of great units, but I hate the art style and the very silly story. I really appreciate the general carefree and colorful attitude of all the other AW games, so DoR has been tough for me over the years. But I've finally persisted this time and aside from those complaints, I'm really enjoying the game and as mentioned, am getting close to the end. I've been playing for several months now off and on and am very much looking forward to starting the entire series over again, starting with the GBA games.
Though, I do have an English translation of the Gameboy game and I'm pretty sure translations exists for the Famicom Wars games, so maybe I'll explore those a little bit after I finish this one up.
I finished the campaign of Remnant II, one of the games I bought during the Steam sale.
This series is often branded as "Dark Souls with guns": you will roam tortuous levels, loot, craft, and improve unique weapons and armors, kill many enemies and bosses, and allocate points into passives. So while there are definitely similarities and equivalent mechanics, Remnant is far less punishing and overall just "more fun".
Because Remnant is what I call a "self-aware game". There is a serious story, but it's just an excuse to send you into random alien worlds. "If we fail, all is lost", but still let me fail (and respawn without consequences) five times before I finally beat this boss. The campaign is kinda short (15 hours), but the game encourages you to replay all the worlds again and again to unlock quests, gear, archetypes, view new random levels, random bosses, random events, random everything. Even the campaign is random: my very first level and quest were actually from a DLC. I'm done with the campaign but I probably only have seen 20% of the game, at most? And parallel to the campaign, you can progress you character in the Adventure mode, which will roll a new random adventure on your chosen biome.
Though the random construction can also be a detriment to the immersion and power fantasy. You'll speak to what seem to be important characters, only to never see them again in the campaign. Enemies constantly scale to your level, so you never really feel powerful.
The bosses also felt like a high point. I often dislike boss fights in Souls-likes, but not in this game: most bosses are truly original and interesting to fight, and the first difficulty level was perfect to make them feel challenging, but not tedious.
Doom Dark Ages DLC - Revelations
This is one of the best dlc packages I have ever seen. Some great work by ID Software. You can tell they really put some thought into this one and put things out that they wanted to put in the base game but probably did not have time to. If you liked DOOM Eternal then you will most definitely enjoy Revelations. They bring back the movement tech that made Eternal stand out and added more on top of that. It’s fast paced and blood pumping action. Also the soundtrack by Finishing Move Inc. is top quality. You can tell they took a lot of inspiration from Mick Gordon’s work and built on that. First person shooters is my favorite game genre and this is the most fun I’ve had playing one in a while. Second to this would be The Finals but I’ll have to make a separate post about that game.
After completing Big Hops (23 very fun hours - read my writeup from last week, which is also in this comment section) I got started with Upalu Mundi, a generous gift from @xavdid , thus discharging my commitment to playing it sooner rather than later, and to leave a Steam review:
The reason I did this a little earlier than I'd planned is because as part of the Steam Train Fest, which is only running another 24 hours, you can buy this 40% off if you're interested. And it's already a very cheap game to begin with.
My friends and I finished Lingo 2 (100%). I was right in my initial impressions - the chaotic charm of the original was traded for a more polished and consistent design. The author claims it's a bigger game, but we finished faster, possibly also because we're just better at those puzzles by now. Finding things was the only significant hassle. Still fun though!
I needed something to get the bad taste from MOTORSLICE off my mouth so I started Big Hops, a traditional 3D platformer from my list that I bought during the sale. I've already spent longer on it than on MOTORSLICE and I'm happy to say that it's really good!
Big Hops is the charming, colorful, cozy tale of a little frog child named Hop who wanted to see the world, but gets more than they bargained for when they get kidnapped by an, uh, interdimensional jerk called Diss. Diss entices Hop to collect certain orbs for him in exchange for skill boost trinkets, but Hop isn't buying it and is independently trying to find parts to build an airship that they can use to go back home.
Hop is very athletic and has a good range of platforming moves that, ironically, make them considerably better at parkour than the high tech, chainsaw wielding protagonist of MOTORSLICE. The main way they interact with the world is through their long tongue, which can be used to grab fruit and insects, pull levers and springs, swing or pendulum off fulcrum points, and even pick locks. But in addition, Hop can also climb, wall run, crouch jump, swing from bars, air dive and belly slide. Everything feels polished to perfection. The camera doesn't fight you, the levels aren't pitch black for no reason, and it's satisfying to chain moves together for crossing wide spaces. The only thing Hop is bad at is swimming, a funny shortcoming for a frog that is mentioned on several occasions (I think they will learn though).
Another mechanic of this game - possibly my favorite - are the fruits. Hop can grab all kinds of objects and store them in their backpack, and this includes several types of fruit that, in addition to being edible, have certain effects upon the world when thrown. One fruit throws ropes. One bounces. One sets things on fire, and so on. Because you can take things with you anywhere, that means even if you can't nail the platforming you can always devise your own solutions for bypassing complex obstacles. There are no invisible walls. You can go anywhere as long as you're creative enough!
This game doesn't feature combat as such - even boss fights are platforming and parkour based - but there are many other things to do. You can collect different items of clothing for Hop and dye them in different colors. You can grow plants and make your own stamina juice. You can collect insects - the first time Hop finds a new variety of insect, they'll cheerfully describe it out loud and name it - did I mention the game is fully voice acted? It's all very accessible and family friendly; I think this is a game a child might enjoy that might whet their appetite for other platformers. And finally, there are side quests and extra challenges.
Playing this game right after MOTORSLICE makes the latter look so much worse in comparison. It annoys me that they both cost the same. I wish I could get my money back and just pay for this one twice. And it's absolutely worth paying full price for.
Previous
I just finished the basic mode of Shotgun King, courtesy of @cheep_cheep 's game giveaway - I give it a thumbs up!
It's very much what it says on the tin - a rogue like chess-puzzler where you play as a single King piece versus an expanding board of opponent pieces, with the added dimension of being able to shoot occasionally. I felt like it stayed relatively grounded given the ridiculousness of the premise - it balances the shooting with a timing and ammo mechanism. It's very much not chess, but for me it kept a lot of the appeal of chess puzzles- being dropped into a tough spot and figuring some way to squeeze out a win.
If you enjoy rogue-likes and chess, I'd recommend it! It has enough variety in modifiers (grenades, changing how pieces move/attack, etc.) that it's got replayability despite being a bit one-note. Great for picking up and playing a quick round or two, I'll probably revisit this one often, but not sink a great deal of time into it. Thanks again cheep_cheep!
I'm so glad to hear you enjoyed it! My spouse loves chess puzzles, but he wasn't interested in Shotgun King - his loss! That's cool that it lets you modify the "rules" of the game, and it does sound like it would add a lot of replayability.
I've been playing Digimon Story: Time Stranger recently. I've been a fan of the first 4 seasons of the show, and I will re-watch them every few years.
It's fun enough. It's very similar to Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth (that was my only entry into the series) and probably the rest of the Digimon Story games. You collect Digimon, you evolve them and you build up a massive collection. You then battle with them via a turn-based combat system.
The game looks nice enough, but something with how the characters look (especially the eyes), the on-and-off voice acting and at times the limited animation leaves something to be desired. On the whole, I have been enjoying it more than not. I'm thankful I got this on a sale, as I don't think the game is worth the full/original asking price.
In tabletop news, I got into One Page Rules miniatures game! Specifically their 40k knockoff Grim Dark Future. They just recently put out starter boxes for the first time, and after being tempted by that and finding a weekly meetup local I decided to get in.
I played a lot of Warhammer 40k from 2017-2019, so that's my main point of reference. OPR so far has been much more humane;
Overall I've had a great time. A personal upside for me too is between the smaller army size, and my own efforts, I'm trying to get less "sucked in" than I did to 40k; my experience with that game never got unhealthy, but it is the kind of hobby that can fill as much void as you have, and I was in a low place personally so it filled a lot. Trying to handle it more intentional, both in my collecting (I'm playing the starter box robots) and in my bugging people to play with me haha
I'm not usually one to balk at difficulty too badly but ever since around Chapter 4, and now in Chapter 5 of Deltarune I've been finding the incoming damage for taking hits to feel a bit too punishing, at least for the quantity/frequency of hits I'm taking. I'm eating these bullet patterns for breakfast. I swapped to my arcade stick and that has helped somewhat, though. I think probably part of the problem is the episodic release, I'm getting rusty between chapters and they're not long enough to fully recover. That said, I'm also not going to replay the entire thing until after the last chapter is out, and even then I'll probably want to play just the chapter and see an ending first before I go for more complete runs (secret bosses, routes, or whatever) so for now I continue to slog it out.
I'm still playing a lot of WoW Classic Hardcore. Way more than I should, to be honest, but that aside, I'm really enjoying it. I officially got the farthest I've ever been in Hardcore over the weekend -- level 26. Which sounds ridiculous given I've been playing this for 2 months or so now, but I'm pretty proud of it. I've never played Horde-side classic, but I've been enjoying it a lot. Barrens is a much better questing experience than bouncing between Darkshore, Loch Modan, and Westfall on the Alliance side. Although you do dip into Silverpine a bit with certain leveling guides, it's much easier to get there than it is Darkshore at the level you're expected to.
But yeah, all in all it's fun. Will probably die to something stupid in the next couple of days, delete the game, swear it off, and start over a day or two later.
Edit -- called it. Died of something stupid an hour ago. Deleted game. Swore it off. We'll see where I land in day or two.
Edit 2 -- less than 24 hrs later I've got the itch. I have D&D tonight so I won't be able to play even if I want to, but we'll see how the weekend fairs.
Edit 3 -- I did fall victim to the itch. Reinstalled. Currently running around with a Level 21 Orc Warrior.
I've been playing Warframe, slowly poking and prodding at my prime list, slowly getting stuff off it by getting their rares.
Of note, recently I played a Void Cascade relic mission (same as usual + wait for some enemies to get corrupted and kill them to unlock the relic and get a prime part), and we had trouble getting the reactant to open the relics. Now, it's Void Cascade, so the occasional round getting skipped because you're too efficient? Normal, somewhat expected.
This was on another level, because even when we made it, it often was at the last moment (so much so someone not opening their relic was common), or we just. can't get enough reactant to open our relic. period. over multiple minutes (usually, you skip rounds by making them last under a minute).
So I checked the stats, see if there's anything that could explain and. YES. THERE. IS.
So, for a VC lasting this long, you should expect 1-2k kills per player. 3 of us (me included) had a combined total of 495. The last player had 14312 kills on their own!
Dude was too efficient for our own good! And despite that, I still got a couple rare parts I needed to make a couple more prime weapons!
But I can see why Pablo (design director for Warframe) basically went "I think I made
fishbrothers too hardcore" last devshort.On the other side, I was playing Hitman for a bit, mainly leveling Hokkaido (until you max it out, you can't use your starting gear slot). While that was a fun bit of grinding, I can see why it was never really reproduced even if a few other locations do have some limiting starts (Berlin's story start also completely locks you out of your gear, and the club entrance still locks you out of your weapon since you'll be frisked; meanwhile the Carpathian Mountain is a unique level that never lets you bring anything in, not even by smuggling it in, but at the same time, it is the only truly linear level, so I don't think we're expected to play it more than once or twice) since it requires a lot of work to get essentially back to the basic level of preparation we're given elsewhere.
Which frame are you maining currently? I am just curious. I've been maining Styanax Prime lately, and oh boy is he fun to use. Something about just chucking spears at enemies does something to my brain, but for the more higher level stuff I usually bring out my Uriel or my Oberon Prime (whom I had mained before his buff) because they are more built up than my Styanax.
I have heard that Sirius and Orion that they are either overpowered or they just did not meet expectations for the amount of power that was hyped. And I have played them and mastered them, they just did not really clicked for me in terms of playstyle, so I just subsumed them for my Helminth. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Granted I really wasn't really looking for a new main at that time.
I usually stick to Zephyr as my main, although I've been using Valkyr and Volt a lot more recently (only frame with the lens I needed to unlock the last represent shop).
And on S&O, from what I understand they gotten repeatedly buffed to the point they can do that (at least when in the normal starchart, no idea how strong they are on steel path), so you could have gotten them before the buffs really kicked in (or they don't mesh with you, still is an option).
I rented Persona 5 through my local library a couple of weeks ago. Given its reviews, and that I've played other JRPGs in the past and liked them, I was sure I'd have a blast playing it. Unfortunately it just isn't fun. The story is slow, and the gameplay is rather dated. I like the ideas the game presents, but something just isn't clicking for me. I think I'll return it for now and revisit it again at a later date.
Maybe I'll start another Stardew Valley farm in the meantime ¯_ (ᵕ—ᴗ—)_/¯
I know it's terrible, but pubg mobile. Sniper game is great. Everyone has a sniper gun and that's it. Takes 10 minutes to finish a map. If you get that far.
Marvel Tokon beta hits this weekend so that’s most of my time spoken for.
Otherwise I’ve been killing time with Shogun Showdown which is decent so far.
Edit: Tokon Thoughts-
Fantastic. Labbing Goblin/Ghost/Doom/Cap and it's just...gross. Alllll the degenerate nonsense I look for. I'm sure it's fun in other areas but there's sooooooooo much nonsense.
I’m with you. I’ve been having a blast playing tokon. It’s nearly perfect.