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

Started playing Fields of Mistria - I'm only six hours in or so (first season still) so I can't give much in the way of detailed feedback, but it's really fun so far! Characters are interesting, graphics are nice, there's lots to do, it's a very relaxing farmsim game.

It's impossible to not compare the game to Stardew Valley (a game which I love) at every turn and I get the sense it's not necessarily trying to be distinct for the sake of being distinct, which I like - It has a lot of shared elements I like, but I appreciate where it deviates as well. Core gameplay (so far at least) seems basically the same as SV, but maybe with less focus on the inevitable hypercapitalist megafarm simulator that SV always ends up turning into by year 3 (well, that I always end up turning it into at least).

I'm a musician and composer so I've especially taken notice of the soundtrack. The music is pretty good but I can't help but notice just how much it draws from both Joe Hisaishi's Ghibli scores and the soundtrack from Chrono Trigger; there are a few pieces where I swear it's just 'here's my homework, make sure to change a few details though so it's not obvious'. Stardew Valley's music is more simplistic in a lot of ways but it has its own character, whereas Mistria's soundtrack is more compositionally developed but also a lot more derivative. But it's still really effective music overall, the influences just keep sticking out to me when I listen, I keep going 'oh, that part's just like the Kiki's Delivery Service theme' or whatever.

Hello! I exist still! I've had an extremely busy summer and haven't had much time for video games (though I know this thread is for tabletop, too).

I'm still going strong on Warhammer and other tabletop games, but even with those, I've spent most of my time hobbying and painting, though I've played three games of 40k at this point and it's so much fun! I'm still painting my Crimson Fists, my BIL is giving me a bunch of death guard, and then for other games, Starcraft is finally hitting store shelves. I got a Zerg founder's edition box all the way back at adepticon and then the launch of the game kept getting delayed and delayed and delayed and delayed... It's finally in the wild now, though, which means I can finally get a full zerg army assembled!

I did finally get some good vidya time in in the last couple of weeks though! I started Peak with a couple of friends and I love it. We're not that much into the "friend slop" category, but we used to play Halo and other co-op games all the time and this was nice to step back into. I love the game mechanics on top of pissing myself with laughter at some truly unfortunate situations. This has been a fun one.

I also put some more time into Space Marine 2, after I got a friend to finally pick it up. We've been playing co-op missions and it's a blast! After I saw that there's a melta-fist in the game, I've been making it my mission to work up to that.

I'm also still putting some time into Destiny 2 with some friends. It's easy enough for us to run through a couple of raids on a Friday night or something these days, so the game has been one of my go to social games and raiding is honestly still a ton of fun. I have yet to get the catalyst for 1k voices to drop yet though :(

I think I've kicked my Call of Duty addition for good, as I did prepurchase Modern Warfare 4 to access the beta this last weekend (with the full intent to refund it afterwards, which I did). The beta played really well and I liked how the game felt, but after a couple of hours, I honestly just didn't care to play any more. After playing a couple hundred hours a year of nearly every CoD game going all the way back to CoD 4, I think I'm finally actually done and I'm happy about it.

Lastly, I finally got around to booting up Spider-Man: Miles Morales yesterday and played it all day. Spider-Man games are just so much fun and I loved the story, characters, and size of this one. It was refreshing to play a fun single player game that has an open world, but that doesn't require me at all to go to every icon on the map. I'm unsure if I'll go right into Spider-Man 2 or if I'll play Wolverine first when that comes out and come back to SM2 later (considering I just spent 10 hours doing the same gameplay loop I'll be doing in SM2).

After finishing Breath of the Wild, I borrowed Tears of the Kingdom from a friend and already have probably 20-30 hours in it.

My first impression is that it doesn't feel like a Zelda game. BotW already broke from the formula, but it still felt like Zelda but with different tools. Unfortunately, they pushed Tears of the Kingdom a bit too far to me, and the beginning especially feels more like a physics simulator than the Zelda games I grew up with. That's not to say I don't enjoy it, it just isn't what I hope the mainline series looks like in the future.

Going straight from BotW to TotK means the combat and enemies are familiar, for the most part. The new weapon system took an adjustment, but I do like that weapon families are different due to specific traits rather than just raw damage numbers. Unfortunately, there's still definite tiers where some traits are nearly useless, others are situational, and a few are best in class overall. The durability/breaking system is still present and still a bit frustrating to work around, especially with the Master Sword - it doesn't even show the damage value, so I have no clue if it's better or worse to use it at any given time.

I haven't done much of the main story, just one out of four regions, as I'm holding off on those until I've geared up a bit. I'm also saving them for when a friend comes to hang out (he's mostly just getting away from home), as he's enjoyed talking through the puzzles with me. The one I did do was fun enough, although one mechanic wasn't quite as clearly explained as I had hoped so I burned time and resources figuring it out. Still, it's the least confusing water temple I've done in any Zelda game I can think of.

Overall, it's a fun game, but I'll give it an 8/10 at the moment. It's not a bad game, just not a good Zelda game in my opinion.

I've been waiting for this scheduled topic to drop.

On Wednesday, Steam finally deigned to inform me that Restory: Chill Electronics Repairs had released back on Aug 6. I've been waiting for this one since the last Next Fest, when I played the "new and improved" demo at the advice of a friend. Why didn't Steam tell me when it launched? I have no idea.

If you're unfamiliar, Restory is a cozy electronics repair simulator, a la PC Building Simulator etc., set in the "early 2000s" in a fictionalized Akihabara District in Tokyo. The main gameplay loop consists of tearing down various vintage electronic devices, cleaning dirty components, replacing fried components, and reassembling them for your customers.

As you progress through the story, different devices based on consumer electronics from about the mid-1980s through the late 2000s cross your bench. The story encourages you to purchase repair certifications from the parts distributor that allow you to work on new devices–which is how the game gates progression–though you can just purchase certifications yourself without prompting from the main narrative, provided you've saved enough yen from odd jobs and reselling refurbished units you've bought from the eBay analogue. The main loop is insanely addicting. As I said, I only heard about the release on Wednesday, and I've already racked up nearly 20 hours on it.

This game more than any other I've played recently reminds me of "The Enigma of Amigara Fault"; I can't help but feel it was made specifically for me. I've been working in electronics refurbishment for a little over a decade now–in real life, that is–and I have actually really worked on a number of the same devices those in the game are modeled after. In pretty much every game device whose model I've worked on in real life, the screw map is pretty much identical to the real thing. The Xi-Box (original Xbox) has that one screw that's annoying to reach holding the ODD down in the corner. The Nony Playmachine (Sony PlayStation 1/PSX) has the distinctive 5-screw pattern at the I/O that trips people up because it's oddly asymmetrical. The original iPod analogue is pretty much spot-on to the original, though without the headache of actually prying the rear case off the bastard. Even devices I've never worked on, such as the "Nony PMP" (the Sony PSP, of course), have exactly the sort of internal designs I would expect, and going by the stuff I am familiar with, I bet they're fairly accurate as well.

The biggest difference between the game devices and the real-world analogues they're patterned off of is that the most annoying parts of working on electronics are almost, ALMOST completely removed. There's no fumbling with zero insertion force cables, no accidentally breaking headers and rendering a motherboard defunct, no mixing up screws and screwing in a fastener that's 0.5mms too long into an RF shield and severing a board trace (I'm eyeing you, Apple, with your iPhone 5s!). The game manages to capture some of the fun of tearing a device to bits and rebuilding it part-by-part, while mostly leaving behind the annoyances. It is gaming heroin straight to my obsessive gray matter.

What the game doesn't capture are some of the most complex and oddly rewarding aspects of repair. You never receive a defective part from the parts store for which you have to figure out the customs declaration designation in order to return it to China. There are no intermittent faults requiring long, drawn-out diagnostics sessions. You can tell at a glance whether a component is busted or dirty rather than performing diagnostics. In fact, the best policy when fixing stuff in the game is to tear it COMPLETELY down, just so you can handle the last part to see if your repair Spidey-sense deems it worthy or not. Very rarely do you tear a device completely down in real repair. Usually you know specifically which components you need to remove to have free access to the trouble part; there's no point to that here, and you're likely to miss a dirty component by leaving any portion of the device intact. It doesn't break verisimilitude for me, but it is a notable difference between the simulation and reality.

I completed the entirety of the story elements in the game a couple hours back, which is only a little quicker than I'd expect most players to finish. I didn't spend an awful lot of time grinding away for money or getting sucked into the primary loop, but I can't imagine my experience doing the real thing sped up my playthrough much, if at all, so expect around 15-20 hours for a first playthrough.

The devs are claiming a post-launch roadmap for new characters and devices, with the first content update slated for mid-September. There are tons upon tons of era-appropriate devices they could introduce with minimal work, so it's very possible that this game could have some legs. I got it on sale and with a bundle discount (there are some 18 or so separate bundles it's included in, so check if you already have a bundle mate, especially if this is your kind of game), but I'd happily pay the $20 USD regular price.

This is my game of the year so far, hands down. Nothing else this year has passed the "always seems like I'm about to wet my pants when I'm playing it because I'm so engrossed that I'm ignoring my bodily functions" test, nor the "daydreaming about it at work even though I actually do this stuff for a living" test quite like this one. Full recommend, if cozy simulators are at all up your alley.

I've finished the campaign of Outriders (playtime: 26 hours with most of the side quests).

I bought it because I wanted an accessible looter shooter for the Steam Deck, and it delivered at 60FPS. The gunplay, power fantasy, and loot are good. I was able to perfectly tweak the difficulty setting during the campaign (and cheese the final boss because I ain't got time for that), and overall I enjoyed shooting at bad guys and ugly aliens with big guns and superpowers. I'd like to push a bit into the endgame just to get some shiny loot and because it's easy enough to load a mission for 10 minutes, but the game eats 60+GB of my disk, so it'll probably get uninstalled as soon as I'll have to install something else.

I only regret the extremely repetitive structure of the missions and the useless always-online requirement.

I nominated the OG NES Metroid for CGA last year, and it got eliminated in our last round of voting. So, I finally picked it up myself to try it out.

I hate to say it, but it is ROUGH by modern standards.

Like, the pieces of the metroidvania are there: sprawling map, powerups that let you access new areas of the map, backtracking through previously played areas with new powers, etc.

Unfortunately, it's tough for me to look past some of the "of the time" decisions, and I say that as someone who's generally a fan of retro games and their limitations.

The biggest issue to me is the slowdown. Seemingly any time there are multiple enemies on screen, the game crawls. It inhibits flow SEVERELY.

Another annoyance is that, if you start a jump without any direction on the d-pad, you don't get air control. I learned to work around this, but it's another flow-inhibitor and makes an already laggy game feel even more limited.

Add to this a lack of modern QoL features (e.g. there's no map) and very old-school game design and I found the game more frustrating than not. Enemies are constantly bothering you, and the game's very limited aiming enhances their annoyance.

That said, I play metroidvania games for the exploration and not the combat, so after frustratedly fighting my way through parts of it, I ended up turning on an invincibility cheat so that I could sail right by the enemies and explore the world.

This is where I learned that the game is mostly a series of samey long-linear hallways and vertical shafts. I ended up getting bored and stopping it.

I know I'm ragging on it a lot, but that's from a "things have come so far since" perspective. If I think of it as an NES game in its original context (my first console), it's very impressive. It's high-concept and big and fits right in with the other "Nintendo hard" games of its era. I can see why it's held in high esteem and why it's half of a genre name today.

But, playing it today with full knowledge of all the other metroidvanias we have out there now and how they've iterated on the formula was an exercise in frustration. I'm glad it tried it out, but I had no interest in seeing it all the way through to the end. I'm genuinely glad it didn't get picked up for CGA, because I think it would have ended up being a disappointment to most.

Pretty much just continuing to play Project Zomboid with a couple friends. The B42 content that we've experienced/tried so far seems alright. But we're definitely finding we still need mods.

We started as a vanilla playthrough, but after a week of playing, we were like, "Hmm, maybe one or two mods." Like one was some simple UI stuff.

Recently, a couple of us died after surviving for quite awhile (Like my character died after two in game months and >1000 zombie kills). And we just didn't want to have to re-read skillbooks, recipe magazines, retrain skill levels, etc. It's be too much wasted time. So we cheated and used admin powers to add at least skills and levels back, then introduced a new mod that would "bound" those skills/levels/xp to an in-game item, so that if we died again, we'd have a "save point" we could restart from.

Dying is too easy and too punishing. Bugs/glitches alone can kill a character. And the game still lacks some QoL things. So mods are still needed. Hopefully B43 will focus on some of that. But given how long it took for B42 to come out, who knows when the next major version will be released.

My wife and I just finished The Incident at Galley House. This is another entry in the mystery game mini-revival that seems to have been kicked off by Return of the Obra Dinn. If you're a fan of Obra Dinn, The Case of the Golden Idol, and/or The Roottrees are Dead, then you must play The Incident at Galley House.

Notably, it's published by Evil Trout, the same people that published the criminally-underrated The Roottrees are Dead. I wouldn't say I liked it quite as much as Roottrees, but I'm not sure that's the game's fault—it might have something to do with expectations, and also with the fact that Roottrees was comfy, and this game decidedly is not. Nonetheless, it's a stellar puzzle. I wish I could say more, but the nature of this sort of game is that you can only experience it once.

Like Roottrees, Galley House is actually a remake of an itch.io browser game—specifically, Type Help. (What an awful title!) I went and played a bit of Type Help after finishing Galley House, and the core game is actually 100% identical, except that Galley House adds an additional arc at the end (much like Roottrees did). I actually think that Type Help is in some ways more compelling—pure text gets certain vibes across better than voice acting and visuals—and it apparently made big waves in the interactive fiction community when it was first released. Still, don't let that stop you from playing Galley House, if for no other reason than to support the original developer.

I've been playing Enter the Gungeon. Been playing roguelikes for a while, but I can't say I am very good at them. I still like them tho! Dead Cells has been my longest running roguelike. I am on 4 boss cells in that one, but it's so hard now. That's why I switched to a different game. Enter the Gungeon reminds me of Nuclear Throne. Not sure which one I prefer. Nuclear Throne is faster. Gungeon is more polished. I also really liked Balatro. A roguelike that didn't need speedy reaction time. I wanted to love Slay the Spire, but couldn't really get into it too much. I didn't love the graphics, which ruined my immersion. I play Magic the Gathering so a roguelike deck builder really did feel like it should be up my alley, but, alas, that one was not.

I tried to play Duskbloods during the network test, but I had hardly any time. Basically I just got through the tutorial bot match. The game felt pretty overwhelming to me, especially as someone who gets through FromSoftware games with a sword and no magic. I also wish I had had a chance to play on a big TV instead of just the switch where the UI was a bit dense. I think the game is pretty cool, but I really love slowly going through new areas afraid of everything. Slowly getting stronger/better. And then becoming fearless cutting everything down. I don't think that loop is really going to be a part of this game.

I have mostly been playing Splatoon Raiders over this last period -- my physical copy arrived incredibly late.

I overall really liked it, but, I feel like Splatoon 3's single player had way more variety. The single player in Raiders is just a variety of set-pieces for Salmon Run. Which is still fun, but Splatoon 3 did that classic Nintendo thing where each level takes a mechanic and pushes it to its limits. Raiders has some of these, but they're bonus levels and absolutely not the majority of your playtime.

Nonetheless, it's really fun! It can be mindless too once you get into the groove.

I've been playing Planet Crafter and Solarpunk.

Both are very chill games with almost no failure mechanic, and I love being able to just collect resources and build my base. Solarpunk is definitely early in its development, since there's not a lot there yet, but it looks like they are working on adding to it over time, so that's fun. I also play them on the most "Chill" setting because I'm not out here to stress myself out. I play to relax and escape to another world where things are simpler for a while.

Voidwrought. I think I've put in about 20 hours and for a metroidvania game it's very good. crisp & responsive controls, every other thing that makes a good vania game. Works great on Linux too.

Angels Fall First, a very interesting PvP scifi FPS that apparently combines space battles with ground battles. I didn't get very deep into it, but I like that people are trying something different.

Bodycam, an incredibly realistic-looking and -sounding FPS with the focus on technical excellence and attention to detail. They've been hyping a September release that will bring a lot of interesting new stuff, so I decided to buy this and give it a shot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YUWQXv0MTk

It was good. The combat is as chaotic as you might imagine it being in real life and the sound design is already amazing without the upcoming new stuff.

KeeperRL. This is a GPL-licensed Dungeon Keeper rogue clone with artistic assets available for a price in Steam. Perhaps the best of its genre, but the mid game is pretty challenging.

Stardew Valley. I'm not really playing this myself at this point, but worth mentioning that I managed to set up a 3 player local co-op for my family with two controllers and a keyboard/mouse combo. This required to create a fake first controller, otherwise the first player would also take the first real controller for themself. Works surprisingly well.

Running a platform for others to play Stardew Valley feels a bit like work. Like it would be a serious catastrophe if their farms got wiped and we didn't have any backups. I guess Steam cloud saves can be trusted... but is that enough, I sometimes wonder.

I've been revisiting Hollow Knight for the first time in some years, with a bit of a self-imposed challenge: I'm not using any of the things that make the map useful. I've still gotten the initial rough maps for each area, but I haven't bought the compass, quill, or any of the markers to help fill it out. The fact that these are all technically optional purchases made me curious how viable it was to just not use them, so in a way I'm putting the world design to the ultimate test: is it consistently distinct enough to navigate using only itself?

I'm closing in on the ending pretty soon, so I feel like I can pretty comfortably say that it's a mixed bag. Areas themselves are easy to tell apart, but regularly I've had trouble remembering where specific characters or locations are when I'm looking for them. There is some good landmarking in most areas, but it's generally separated by a lot of similar looking rooms; it's easy to get mixed up and spend a good amount of time lost, retreading the same paths, trying to remember where something was. The world itself is large, so things are quite spread out, and it can be easy to miss things entirely, even if I know generally where to look.

This has encouraged me to be more thorough, and I surprisingly haven't missed nearly as much as I expected I would, though I'm probably not going to be going for 100% completion. I feel like the fact that this was pretty doable, in spite of a good amount of wandering, is a bit of a turning point for me. I've never been a fan of the kind of reliance maps can encourage in games, and this has got me wondering how many game worlds will actually be navigable without that crutch. Again, it feels like putting them to the ultimate test. Once I finish this, I think I'll try the same with Silksong and see how it stacks up. Let's hope that isn't misguided confidence.

I've actually played a few recently.

Agent 64: Spies Never Die was a game I was greatly anticipating since it was meant to be a spiritual successor to Goldeneye 007. Unfortunately, I'm a bit disappointed with the end result and kinda wish I passed after playing the demo. The cipher system forces you to play on harder difficulties to progress through the game in a meaningful way. Guns feel very weak, enemies feel like bullet sponges, your character comparatively takes very few hits to die and the excessive amounts of autoaim and lack of permanent crosshair just make the experience feel really clunky and cumbersome to play. The story also sucks and the level designs are just so boring and unmemorable.

I mean that control scheme made sense on the Nintendo 64's limited hardware and was a solution coined for a very weird gamepad, coming out three years before Alien Resurrection on the PS1 (NOT Halo: Combat Evolved on the Xbox, contrary to popular belief) created the twin-stick control scheme that has become the standard in all console first person shooters. Designing a game around the N64's limitations in 2026 just feels bad.

Tyr held an open playtest recently and as someone who used to play a lot of World of Tanks, I just had to step in. Not a fan. Matchmaking is poorly balanced because you pick your tank after queueing up, meaning that the distribution of light, medium and heavy tanks is all over the place. There are also no artillery or tank destroyers (which are core roles in WoT.) The game straight-up highlights enemy tanks and tells you if your shot will penetrate or not (and is extremely fucking lenient with this), completely removing all sense of skill expression and any reward for learning the strengths/weaknesses of each tank. When I lost two straight-games to bullshit like a tank taking off and flying halfway across the map with its signature ability, I just knew this game had issues in its current state.

Marvel Rivals is an Overwatch clone that may or may not be better than the hero shooter it's copying. The complete lack of a tutorial, the clusterfuck that is matchmaking and my overall lack of knowledge surrounding the Marvel universe kinda holds back my ability to enjoy the game. It also seems to suffer from a similar issue to League of Legends where players will actively throw tantrums and outright sabotage the game if they either don't get to pick their character or you draft a character that isn't meta.

Duskfade is actually really good. My only issue is that the combat feels a bit unrefined. Zirian also feels really, really brittle, but then again I have been playing on the hardest difficulty. It feels a bit too inspired by Kingdom Hearts, to the point where your main weapon is also a key that works a bit more practically as a blade.

I actually caved and decided to return to World of Warcraft: Midnight recently. Part of the reason is that Fellowship simply didn't scratch that dungeon crawling itch because of its low player count and slow gear progression. The campaign was mostly alright. My main reason for wanting to go back was to try PvP, but progression is arguably worse than previous expansions, with the only way to grind Honor points now being co-op vs AI game modes.

Mostly done with my Warhammer 40,000: Darktide class penance spree, with all done excluding one or two for zealot and arbitrator (not because they're less fun, some penances are just really grindy). There's currently an event going on where there's a mission modifier that just sends trash enemies non-stop at you and personally I'm enjoying the higher killcounts and lower action downtime, but it's not as great for builds focused more on special/elite hunting with less horde-clearing power.

Also started a fresh playthrough of STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl on Master difficulty to experience update 2.0 and the Cost of Hope DLC in full. There's been a good number of positive changes with this update, from improved lighting and vegetation to the addition of binoculars and NVGs (crazy that we didn't have these at launch), and some new weapons too. Haven't gotten very far in the DLC story itself yet but the Iron Forest has some cool spooky vibes so far, and the characters seem decently written and voiced. As for Master difficulty, the economy's crap and it can be annoying to die and have to start again from a save 10-20 minutes ago since you can only manually save at hub locations, but as a seasoned stalker I know a few tricks to get good gear for cheap or free which lets me overlook the awful prices of everything. Protip, get your hands on a shotgun that can hold more than 2 shells ASAP. I personally recommend heading straight to Rostok right after you can leave the Lesser Zone, the Arena is great for getting a head start on money and gear.

I started playing Pronoun Palace recently because I was on the lookout for scrabble-ish game.

It's well written with an amazing gameplay loop, looking forward to playing it some more this week.

I've been playing three games regularly at the moment:

Big Walk: lots of chill fun with friends, and for me at least, the first game to feel like it's set in my home country. It's a cooperative puzzle game with wonderful attention to sound, lighting and the general experience of a low stakes outdoor adventure.

Nuclear Option: Despite the name, nukes only play a small part in the gameplay (though a significant one when they are used). The reality is, it's a clever, semi-realistic flight "Sim", but without the downside of focus on realism to the detriment of gameplay and balance.

DCS: This one is the full flight Sim experience, but I enjoy learning the different aircraft. Had a fun moment recently, and decided to upload it: https://youtu.be/UbrJGRc0GuA

I've been playing Waterpark Simulator. Normally, I don't find simulator games that engaging, but this one seems to be the exception. It has a lot of silly surprises that keep me coming back to it.

I'm going through a Personal 4 binge before Revival. No, not the actual game, I've beaten that thing like five times. I'm playing the spinoffs, baby! Specifically, Persona 4 Arena, Persona 4 Arena Ultimax, and Persona 4 Dancing.

Persona 4 Arena: I think I liked this more than I thought I would, story-wise. The stories get a bit repetitive, particularly if you do Yu, Yosuke, Chie and Yukiko in a row like I did. But rhe interactions between the P3 and P4 cast felt pretty natural, it gave me a new ship I didn't know I wanted (Yosuke x Labrys), and Labrys story was genuinely compelling and moving. And because it kept the cast relatively small (for a crossover), everyone was able to shine in some way or another.

Ultimax: This surprised me in a different way. I've heard praises about this game, that if I liked Arena, I would love Ultimax. Boy did that not happen. It took Arena's contained cast (investigation team minus Rise, 3 of the sees team, Labrys, Elizabeth) and bloated it to an insane degree. Literally all of the cast (except for Makoto) is here. And because they moved away from character stories to parallel paths, the two things I was afraid of in Arena actually happened here:

1. Bloated cast, nobody had time to shine. If your name isn't Yu, Mitsuru or Labrys, you're mostly shame out of luck. Never mind my new precious ship, I don't think Yosuke and Labrys exchanged more than two lines of dialogue in this game

2. The casts are now poorly integrated. In Arena, it almost felt as if the 3 P3 members could be part of the P4 story. Not here. There's a P3 story and a P4 story, and rarely did they intersect in an interesting way. Part of the reason Yosuke and Labrys barely talk is because Yosuke is on the P4 side and Labrys is considered to be P3, so their scenes barely touch each other.

Also, the story is super uninteresting. If the final boss last line is "how could I fall to the power of BOOOOOOOOOOONDS", you need to go back to your Word processor and try again. The mystery of Arena is revealed here, and by God is it boring.

The only thing that saves this thing for me from me outright saying "I hated it" is that it ended in Episode Adachi, which is really good. Ending the entire game with Adachi in prison talking to Dojima, hiding a small smile as he looks at the ground, you finally see that he just now realises everything he threw away, and it's heartbreaking. Chef's kiss.

Dancing: still playing it. Expectations are low, and every girl you save is almost the same exact dialogue (yeah, I get it, ribbons, shadows, believe in yourself, etc), but hey, I'm interested in the mystery of the dead idol, so thats something!

I went back to Cataclysm Bright Nights. It is a fork of cdda that focuses more on gameplay. There are more forks by now but I have yet to explore the others.

It is a complex sandbox set on a zombie/portal post apocalypse. It is fairly approachable for the tiles version but the ux is very poor due ro complexity and no mouse support. There are some additions since the last time I played it such as planes or a significant increase in boat types and other vehicles.

Unfortunately I am encountering soft and hard crashes irregurarly on both stable and experimental versions.

I have mostly given up on the cdda by now. It is an impressive achievement from technical perspective but not a game I would want to spend my free time on.

I usually only have a bit of time to play games, and that has generally been taken up by Slay the Spire 2. I'm still working on getting to A10 with all characters and I play the occasional run with my friends.

I sometimes will pop a let's play in my other monitor and saw someone playing Probably Stolen - Cyberpunk Shopkeeper Sim, after the first bit this game seemed like it would be up my alley. There is a public playtest/demo, and I was able to get my work finished early so I installed it and gave it a go, and I am hooked. I've been thinking about playing it today during my work and hope I have some more time to. The dev is actively working on adding new things, and what is already there is a solid foundation.
I hope the dev manages to complete his vision and potentially add some of the ideas that people have floated in the Discord.
I keep my gaming budget to close to $0 these days since I have a bunch of games as it is and don't have much time to play the ones I do have. I usually end up buying myself 1 game for my birthday each year and maybe one for Christmas as well depending on how things are going. This game has gone to right near the top of my list of games I plan to buy based on the bit I played. It hits all of the right feels for me and I'm glad I was checking the time yesterday as I could have been late picking my kids up if I hadn't.

I've also played a bit of Pikmin 1 recently, my kids like to watch me play. I'm way worse than I remember being at it as a kid, but the gameplay is still tight and fun and I'm well ahead of schedule to get the 30 ship pieces. I don't remember if I beat Pikmin 2 as a kid, but I'll probably slowly make my way through that one as well.

Kind of between games at the moment. Was playing Palworld up until a few weeks ago. It's the third time I've played it, and was excited for the new content with 1.0. Started a new save file and quickly got Chillet, my beloved. Played up until about the World Tree and then just fell off it. I'm not really surprised, that happens to me with this game. I always have a great time and am obsessed with it until I'm just done. I'm sure I'll come back in about a year or so when I get the itch again. Will finish the story then, and if I'm lucky maybe there will be some new updates.

I'm really waiting for the release of Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave next month, but until that point I'm in a deck building roguelike kind of mood. Tried playing a new one, Star Renegades and am sad to have bounced off of it. There's a lot about it to like: the battle system is interesting, the opening animation is intriguing, the pixel art is gorgeous, and the class system seems fun. The runs take too long, however (3-4 hours), which really feels like it slows down the pace of learning and finding new things. The map can also be difficult to read, and the writing immediately pivoted to comedy despite the more serious opening. I actually do wish it had stuck with the more serious tone. So I'm back to playing Monster Train 2, as I slowly continue my quest to beat all clan combinations on covenant 10.

I really do want to pickup a new game, I'm feeling the itch. But not really sure what to play before the new fire emblem next month. I have a ridiculously huge backlog, so it's not like I don't have options.

Still on Assassin's Creed Odyssey

I have become invested in the gameplay loop, but only enough I think to wait until I start fighting some myths. I think I also kind of like the cultist leader mechanic where it becomes a political intrigue, but it also feels so damn daunting, so I don't think I'm going to try and finish it, but I usually go straight to them if they're revealed.

Honestly that's what takes a lot of the wind out of the sails for me - a sub menu tells me which cultists are left, and to reveal their identity, you need to find parchments with lore that are hidden in chests or on corpses, found in its own side quest or hidden in the world behind a rock.

Okay well the game has the largest walkable AC map ever created, so I am not going to do this without googling their exact locations; good job game designers /s

I do agree, it's too far of a departure from the series to feel like assassins creed, but I still get some enjoyment out of the memory of Assasins creed game, likely because it just climbed into Origins' skin and turned itself into Greece.

I'm still playing Outer Worlds and I'm looking forward to be done with it. I finished the main story already and I'm doing DLCs now. Don't get me wrong though - the game is good, I like it. But I play it for too long already and I just want to play something else. But I force on myself the rule I set - one game at a time until I finish it or I decide it's not worth it and I will never get back to it. And Outer Worlds is worth it.

The question already lingers in my mind though: What should I play next?

And this is where I wanted to ask other Chosen Ones (aka Tilderinos or other names we call ourselves here). Would you try and pick one for me? I have a list here:

• GTA Vice City (PS2 emulation, replay)
• GTA San Andreas (PS2 emulation, replay)
• CrossCode
• Zelda BotW (Switch emulation, replay)

I''m weighing in how long the game is and how much story vs. freeplay there is. Cast your vote now then proceed reading.

I would prefer shorter game now, this scratches off the BotW and SA for now in my mind. I recently got Vice City used on Ebay from Italy and I would likely pick it as it is the newest one right now.

I'm a bit sceptical about CrossCode. I read very positive things about it, I just don't know if I want to jump into something new and potentially heavy.

I can always drive a few hundred miles in Rubber Duck's Mack RS712LST in American Truck Simulator I guess.

My current second screen, "I should probably be working right now but I'm waiting for a build anyway" game rotation is:
How Many Dudes? - An autobattling roguelike deckbuilder where you draft dudes to fight ridiculous things like horse sized ducks and the like! I really enjoyed this one, Steam says I have 56 hours in it but I also got it on my phone to play on the train. Broken builds are really fun but the runs are a bitttt too long tbh, not being able to beat the final boss while stomping the rest of the game is a bit dissatisfying. The main meta progression system is higher tiers with more modifiers but there's only 3 tiers so it's less exciting to complete the game, but I got almost all the Dudes to Gold on Tier 1 and I was feeling pretty satisfied with the game already.

Nubby's Number Factory - Roguelike pachinko, it's really cheap and also has a mobile app release so I've been on this too. Very fun, you shoot a ball and number go up. Get relics to get your number even higher. It gets a bit tedious when you get to the UnD numbers though, I've literally left the game running to go play Magic for two hours and I came back and only just barely passed the goal on stage 280 or something. I keep messing up right before 300 for the achievement and it takes so long to even get to that so I might be missing something with my relics. It's a good time sink though and I like the variations and challenges, going to try to beat them when I can! 35 hours.

Combolands - My latest get and obsession. Think Balatro meets Monster Train meets city builder. You choose two guilds at the beginning of the run, and each of the guilds have specific buildings in it's pool that interacts with other buildings. You want to pass a certain point every milestone and each building triggers other buildings and such and such. There's about 6 factions I think? And you can mix and match every one so there's a lottttt of variety (a la Monster Train). This one came out this week so it might have gone under the radar but it's really addicting!

I've 100%'d Tomb Raider (2013).

I realized I love these kinds of action-adventure games where I can blend both combat with exploration and collectibles (Control and Alan Wake 1&2 also scratch this itch), and Tomb Raider didn't disappoint. I do think the story and characters could have been a bit more fleshed out, and I do see where the general "torture porn" criticism comes from, they really did find plenty of creative ways to kill Lara when you make a mistake, but I don't really mind it that much. In short, TR is immensely fun and it's kept me immersed from start to finish so it's definitely worth playing, and definitely worth 100%-ing.

Moved on to [Rise of the Tomb Raider] and this already feels like a much more vast world, but it's not unreasonable about it so it's still quite enjoyable. Currently at 10% so I can't give a good evaluation yet.

(I also have to mention I did play Rise a few years back, and got softlocked during a puzzle with only a single save slot because I was a dummy and didn't save in multiple slots; I've since forgotten everything about this game so I'm rediscovering it as we go - a rare ADHD win if I can call it that.)

I played through Marvels Guardians of the Galaxy, a gift from u/cheep_cheep (thanks again 🌻), and I really enjoyed it.

It took me a while to get used to the combat, since it combines (quite simple) third person shooter gameplay with directing the four NPC team mates to do special attacks. I really sucked doing both these things at first (probably partly because I played with mouse and keyboard, and I believe that a controller would have been nicer for the NPC controls), but after some time it got better and I realized that staying out of trouble and using the fellow guardians a bit more strategically was what the game wanted me to do.

The story was ok, but the world design, the dialogue, voice acting and the character design of this version of the guardians is really excellent. I kept being baffled by just how many lines they recorded, the team banter basically never stops, and it was all written in a very fitting and amusing manner without ever getting annoying.

The soundtrack is also well done. Star-Lords greatest treasure is his moms mixtape with 80s and 90s songs, and it's just a good time to battle aliens with these titles in the background.

I really liked this, great game.

Warthunder and more CS2 recently. For Linux online games they’re both fun but a little overly addicting and want you to spend money. Like any online game they’re most fun when you truly outsmart your opponents.

Love getting collaterals in CS or an ace. Simply being where they least expect you is a joy.

Warthunder is most fun outmaneuvering others especially shooting only with guns.