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What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
This week I played Cairn, an excellent "open vertical world" third person game about climbing a very large mountain! My run took roughly 20 hours. I have a lot to say about this one. I understand if it's too much for anyone to want to read :D
Protagonist Aava, an experienced middle-aged climber, is making a highly publicized attempt to take on Mount Kami, a peak no one has successfully surmounted before. The game gives you a minimalistic tutorial in which you do some bouldering in a climbing gym (and learn the basic controls) and make a very short climb, after which there's a camera fade and bam, you're at the start of your real climb, no transition.
Gameplay
As far as climbing games go, Cairn is by far the most gritty and realistic I've played so far. Sure, many concessions are still made to the fact that it is a game, but it does an incredible job of conveying the difficulties, exhaustion and despair Aava goes through.
The fairly complex climbing system is at the core of Cairn. When climbing, the player must move each of Aava's hands and feet one at a time, and manually position them on cracks, handholds or wherever else it makes sense on the mountain's rocky surface (after reaching the snow line, you get to use ice picks too). Aava is a really strong and flexible person, but she's no spiderwoman; if you mess up - if you don't give her enough support, her strength will quickly fail and she will fall, probably to her death (I died 12 times during my climb) or at least to egregious damage and loss of time and progress.
The game will automatically attempt to select the "best" limb for you to move next, but you can also hold a button to select a limb yourself, and you will have to use this feature, because the game doesn't really know which path you're trying to follow. You have to learn to stop and catch your breath when your position is stable, to shake your hands, to use chalk to improve your grip and of course to rely on your limited amount of pitons and rope, which can be used for taking a break on the rock face, rapelling or just not falling to your death quite so often.
There is a day-night cycle and it can get very dark at night (Aava has a torch). There is also a weather system, complete with rain, fog and windy storms that will chill you to the bone and try to blow you off the rock face. You have to manage Aava's need for water, food and warmth and help her regain her strength by sleeping or taking medicine. When you deploy her little bivouac, in addition to sleeping Aava can cook, check her barometer, bandage her hands, organize her backpack and repair her pitons, all of which are essential activities.
The biggest videogame magic here (but they integrated it quite well into the world of Cairn) is your companion Climb Bot, a little robot that follows you up the mountain. Climb Bot's most important task is to retrieve your pitons after you reach a ledge - more often than not without breaking them! - but it can also turn piton scraps into new pitons (2 for 1) and recycle garbage into chalk. All of these things would seem unrealistic, but it would be a very boring videogame if you got stuck because you ran out of chalk or pitons half-way up the mountain - or else you'd have a variant of the "ammo problem" you have in shooters, wherein the entire mechanic is pointless because the player must have ammo, so the developers just scatter crazy amounts of it all over the place. Climb Bot is a great compromise!
There are three difficulty levels. I played on the normal, recommended "Alpinist" mode (and I myself recommend everyone does the same). In this mode, if you die, you can only restart from a save point. The game will helpfully show a clock if you haven't saved in over 10 minutes, which sometimes felt aggravating because there just wasn't a save point anywhere near - but it's important for where they're going with this game that failure has real consequences. The other two modes are a baby mode that lets you rewind time if you mess up, and an ironman (ironwoman?) mode in which if you die that's it. If you pick the ironman mode for your first playthrough I 100% guarantee you won't make it!
Story
Cairn is fully voice acted and contains a full-fledged story. During your climb, you meet (or fail to meet, depending on your choices!) several NPCs, including a fellow - younger, less hardcore - climber.
I gather there has been some condemnation among the player base of Aava's personality; our protagonist can come off as selfish or unpleasant. Early in the game, she often receives radio calls from her agent (who wants updates and photos) and from her romantic partner (who wants her to stop risking her life climbing dangerous mountains). The radio is on Climb Bot, so these calls sometimes arrive while she's hanging by her fingertips from a sheer rock face.
The intrusion from her life outside the mountain into the meditative quiet of the climb felt jarring even to me, as I'm sure the developers intended. Aava doesn't take the calls and doesn't respond with any updates. I won't claim I can fully understand what a climber like Aava truly feels, but I know that the developers were trying to convey something of it.
Short, minor spoiler
At one point, Aava's partner guilt trips her by describing how their cat just passed away. Furious, Aava rips off Climb Bot's antenna and tosses it into the void. My first thought was, "finally".
That is to say, I greatly sympathize with Aava as someone who is mostly polite but wants to be left alone, and doesn't take kindly to other people acting as if they're entitled to her attention at all times. She's a well-written character, and I feel like unconditional criticism of her behavior says more about the critic, really.
The developers also did a great job regarding the sense of scale and realism of Mount Kami. At the very beginning of the game, you can see the whole thing - you can see the daunting task ahead of you, all the way to the peak. As you progress, you really are climbing through "all of that", one handhold at a time, and you can always go into a detached camera mode that shows you your exact route so far. In-game, the climb took me 16 days.
Other than the denizens of the mountain (all of which are, understandably, a little loopy, but who are distinct people with distinct circumstances you get to learn about) you also find the many vestiges of the "troglodytes", which in this game are a people who inhabited the mountain and lived a "vertical lifestyle", but who are on the verge of extinction, having only just recently fully gone from Mount Kami.
You also find the corpses of dead climbers. Many dead climbers (and their own busted Climb Bots). You will want to loot them, for the sake of your own survival. Other things that may impress people who can't stand death and injury also include Aava's increasingly bloodier bandages when she takes damage, and the close ups on her shredded fingers which you must regulary bandage yourself.
That's not to say the graphics are anything close to photorealistic. Character models are actually somewhat cartoonish and derpy-looking. I found the vistas quite beautiful, though - and occasionally remembered to make use of a small portion of the fully-featured Photo Mode the devs thoughtfully included! (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 no NPC or ending spoilers)
The ending was very interesting. I won't spoil any details of it here. I will say that the main menu option for having a real t-shirt with the route of your climb made for you, while really cool in a vacuum, left me unsure of whether there was a layer of intentional irony there.
Conclusion
(Edit) Figured I'd add a couple more paragraphs about the balance between the story and gameplay. While there are several cutscenes throughout the game (and I appreciated the added flavor they brought), I was pleasantly surprised by how little the story gets in the way of the gameplay. The game can be very visceral, requiring a lot of focus, persistence and careful resource management, and progressing up the mountain made the time fly. It's fun! If you're the right type of person, at least. The vast majority of the time you are directly engaging with the gameplay or can start doing so immediately.
There were only a couple moments when cutscenes robbed me of the chance to do some much needed cooking and repairs. In a certain spot, the cutscene restores Aava but there is no save point, which caused me quite a bit of trouble because I wanted to backtrack a little. These design mistakes were rare, though.
Previous
Cairn's art director and main writer is, in fact, a cartoonist : Mathieu Bablet.
That explains it. It's not a problem, but when you fall off a wall and they go 100% ragdoll is breaks the seriousness of the moment a little.
I think I'm calling it quits on Elden Ring. I made it to the Mountaintops of Giants and it seems like such a sudden ramp up in difficulty--and annoying ass enemies--that I feel kind of done. Elden Ring is generally a fine game and there's a lot I like about it, but I do think it generally pales in comparison to the Souls series, especially Dark Souls 3. At this point, I feel like I'm well done with Elden Ring and probably will not be returning to it (again) to finish it off or start a new character or whatever.
After owning it for years and with the recent announcement of the new game, I finally decided to give Ace Combat 7 a go. I've only played one other Ace Combat game in the past, that being Skies of Deception on PSP and while I was initially put off by the Fantasy/Sci Fantasy trappings of the game, I really just enjoyed playing it. I don't give a lick about the story, but the Jets are fun to drool over and the flying generally just feels fun. I did get to one of those "Boss Battles" like the 7th mission or whatever, where there's an NPC who is clearly cheating by being able to fly and maneuver beyond the laws of physics, as well as taking multiple strikes from Missiles/Guns, but I guess that's whatever. It's not my favorite aspect of the game, but it's still fun enough. I've not played it for a few days now, but I'm thinking I'll go back to it relatively soon here.
Saturday was a rare day for me. I very rarely play games with my friends these days and even more rarely for long periods of time, but I ended-up playing Valheim with them from about 1pm to 10pm, with random breaks in between. My kids went off to a neighborhood birthday party and then ended-up playing with other neighbor kids afterwards and my wife left the house around 5pm, so I didn't have a lot going on. I'd been thinking about jumping back into it with the 1.0 patch and seeing my friends play convinced me it was time. So we made good progress and I had an awesome time hanging out with them all day and I've been jonesing for more Valheim ever since. I don't particularly feel like going back to my own playthrough from about two years ago, but my friend didn't start a dedicated server, so I haven't been able to jump on and just mindlessly gather resources for our base, so I'm kind of at a loss for what to do. I did end-up starting a new world with 3x resource gain and played for a brief period of time, but it's just not the same at the moment.
My friends bought the Valheim 1.0 release, so I'm playing again for the second time since early access. This time around, I'm having an absolute blast and am hopelessly addicted. It's really impressive how they've tuned resource gathering to be so fun despite being mindless. Maybe that'll fade as time goes on.
I started a dedicated server on my performance-limited $100 homelab PC, and so far so good with 4 players.
I've been dabbling a bit in No Man's Sky recently and honestly, that game just feels utterly hollow to me. While I was playing Valheim, I was comparing it in my head and thinking that one of the things that makes Valheim feel so good is the simple interactions of say, cutting down a tree. First you cut it, then you need to split the log and then you need to further chop that log into the boards you need.
Things feel physical and like they exist within the world, which I find interesting.
And now that you mention it, I do have a server PC myself, I could just run the dedicated server there. I'm not sure if my friends would actually pop on it or not though, given the progress we made the other day. Though I could probably setup a very basic base and then cart some resources over from one of my other worlds to try and ramp us up to where we were.
For what it's worth, I've been running a Valheim server for the past week on a VM with 2 cores and 4 GB of memory and it has handled everything like a champ. I think peak memory usage was 1.7 GB and CPU usage has never gone past 40%.
Nice! I also just started my own server with a spare machine for a small friend group. The setup was way easy (I run Arch btw).
Oh yeah if mountaintop was too much for you then you would've HATED farum azula. Good point to stop.
That's wild, I also started with Skies of Deception and then played AC7 next. I actually really loved the sci-fi aspects of it though, Ace Combat is all about blowing up crazy superweapons and ACX definitely had some ridiculous ones in it. As for Mihaly, yeah he's like that, you will have to do that again more than once and it doesn't get easier or less nonsensical, but fighting ridiculous enemy ace pilots is also a staple of the series. Try QAAMs, those things are basically cheating.
Yeah, I just forget that kind of stuff can be kind of annoying. But whatever, I'm going to persist with the game, though I've taken a break recently.
Amen brother.
Hello! Skies of Deception was my entry point as well, and I played the so-called Holy Trinity (meaning the PS2 titles) through an emulator a few years ago. 7 isn't a perfect game by any means, but it certainly does enough to give you the Ace Combat experience. Plot armour like you mention is a recurrent issue but you will eventually be able to down that boss when the story decides you're allowed to in your last battle with him. In the mean time, enjoy the music and the gameplay, and I hope it impresses you enough to grab 8 when it launches in a month!
I do think I recall this being similar in Skies of Deception. I do need to get back to it, as I haven't played in a couple of days after putting that time into Valheim with my friends.
Skies of Deception is unironically one of my favourite Ace Combat games - not because it's great compared to the series peak, but because it succeeds despite being on a handheld platform with limited resources. The multi-path campaign and parts tuning mechanics do a lot to improve replayability, and although the story is quite basic it's good enough to keep players engaged, with hammy, very distinctive voice acting.
I just finished a replay of The Last of US, which I thoroughly enjoyed. There's a lot to love, but as someone who
kindareally sucks at video games, I think my favorite thing about this game is the manageable difficulty settings that allow me to actually finish the game and enjoy the world/story. When I played other survival/horror games in the past, I just got destroyed. I've never made it that far in a resident evil game, even on the easiest difficulty.I watched a few episodes of the HBO show after finishing the game, and I have a much better understanding for why so many fans of the game dislike the show. Not that the show is bad; in fact, I think some of the changes (like Frank) are really good. But the changes to the main characters leave a little something to be desired. I really like Bella Ramsey and appreciate their version of the character, but the game version of Ellie has an edge to her that isn't really captured in the show (especially in part two).
I've also been playing a lot of MVP Baseball 2005 via emudeck. Still the best baseball game I've ever played, and possibly the best sports game I've ever played. This is going to sound like gibberish to anyone who never played MVP 05 or appreciated mid-2000s baseball, but I have completely broken the game and managed to go undefeated in year three or four of owner mode without playing a single inning. I decided to manage the team and every game like it's 2026 (e.g., pull starters by the 6th, have a really strong/deep bullpen that pitches one inning, prioritize power + plate discipline) and my goodness, what an advantage. Somehow, over the course of 1.5 seasons, I managed to flip almost the entire 2005 A's roster for a pitching staff with Peavy, Willis, Greinke, Prior, Gange, and K-Rod. Last season I had one pitcher (a mid reliever) with a WHIP above 1. Madness.. On top of that, I have an absurd lineup with a core of Miguel Cabrera, Joe Mauer, Hanley Ramirez (aka Matt Derksen), Richie Weeks (who is a god in this game) and a handful of made up prospects a la Derksen that are now on track for the HoF. The AL all-star roster in year five had my entire starting rotation and lineup. At some point, I'm going to have to sim through a few seasons and blow it up so I don't get too bored, but for now I feel a strange obligation to continue this unbelievable dominance.
My wife finally wanted to play this game after the first season of the HBO show and it became her obsession. She "was" terrible at shooters, but the difficulty scaling allowed her to slowly get better to the point that she now plays on the hardest difficulty.
As someone who has never really played a sports game for more than a few minutes but has at least a passing interest in watching sports: What makes MVP Baseball 2005 so good? I'm actually interested in trying it based on your enthusiasm. Actually, what even makes a sports game bad or good?
Well, if I'm being completely honest, I think the nostalgia/generation factor plays a significant role. I was a teenager when it came out, so it hit that sweet spot when I was at the peak of my gaming and sports fandom. Also, the soundtrack is a no-skip mix of pop-punk and indie sleaze that warms my soul. Having said that, I've come across a handful of videos and reviews from younger people who say that the hype is warranted, so I guess it's not all personal nostalgia.
In general, sports games have been in a weird place over the last 15 years or so. On one hand, the graphics and animations are great (especially in MLB the Show, which has insane player detail and customization), and they make a good effort to incorporate features that mimic the things you see in a real game. In addition, the franchise/manager modes have a ton of features to simulate the responsibilities of a GM, and each game has a player career mode that allows you to play every game as an individual player for their entire career. On the other hand, these modern games are basically the same thing every year, the gameplay has exploits that can be really easy to figure out, the details can quickly become tedious, and they all have some form of a fantasy sports/card collection-based game mode that seems to take priority since it encourages micro transactions. Nowadays, every major sports league has an exclusive rights deal with one particular game developer (EA for the NFL, NHL, and professional soccer/football leagues, 2k for the NBA, and Sony for MLB) so there's a feeling among players that the lack of competition is lowering the overall quality of the games and slowing innovation. For example, Madden added more features in each installment from 2001-2007 than it did from 2010-2027.
As for MVP 2005, there are a few things beyond the nostalgia factor that make it special in my eyes. First and foremost, it's really well-rounded. You have a nice balance of features and details without getting bogged down by a ton of little tasks, which makes it easy to pick up and stick with.
The owner mode is a perfect example. You have full control over the team building for your MLB and farm teams, and you start with a modest budget to build up your stadium from a 10k seat minor league park to a 65k seat behemoth, all while improving amenities and controlling prices for tickets, concessions, and merchandise. There's a lot for you take care of, including team chemistry and off-season mini games to improve player stats, but the mechanics are relatively simple. Signing and drafting players is pretty quick, and the CPU can manage injuries on your farm teams without going rogue and overhauling the entire roster.
Now compare that with the modern games where you have to scout every prospect before the draft, manage the 40-man roster, deal with contract arbitration and the rule-5 draft, and maintain hyper vigilance over your roster because players get hot and cold and the CPU will get crazy if you delegate a few minor tasks. Those are all cool features, but the little things can add up over time, making it easy to get burned out a few years into a franchise. And you have no say over the price of a hot dog. Also, in my previous comment, I described how I essentially broke the game by trading for a bunch of young stars and managing every game like it's 2026. That's always an option, but if you end up managing your roster like a normal GM and simulate the games, it ends up being fairly balanced and won't let you dominate every year. With modern games, once you figure out and commit to the little tasks, you'll inevitably create a dynasty.
The gameplay has a simple yet refined feel to it as well. It doesn't require a lot of joystick action and pinpoint timing, but it's not easy to cheese, either. Once you go above the easier difficulty settings, the game has a good simulation feel to it. Modern baseball games are still good about this, but other sports games can be overly complicated or easy to exploit. But the feature that gets a lot of love in MVP 05 is the "hitters eye," which allows you to identify the type of pitch coming your way and adjust your aim and timing accordingly. That's something you don't get in modern games.
At the end of the day, it's all in the eye of the beholder. But for someone that wants a reasonably balanced game that doesn't ask you to do a million little things, 2005 might be the pinnacle year for sports games. In addition to MVP, you also had Madden 05 (another EA product which had similar features - many of them are long gone), and NFL 2k5 which has gameplay mechanics that were way ahead of its time and arguably better than the animation-based mechanics in modern football games. All three have a dedicated following two decades later, including mod communities that update teams and rosters every year.
Pioneer just released version 20260907, so I've been getting back into that. It's a free space sim in the style of Frontier: Elite II where you fly about in a realistically scaled galaxy between realistically scaled solar systems doing odd jobs, trading, smuggling, surveying, bounty hunting, piracy, reconnaissance or just sightseeing for fun.
I've become somewhat successful in this run by getting a planetary scanner early so that I could perform high paying survey missions near Sol. Eventually I had enough money to start moving precious metals between different cities on Earth, earning enough from this to buy a ship with some more freight space after which I started smuggling robots, nerve gas and battle weapons between systems with varying laws on those.
I once bought live animals to trade on the black market (many systems ban animal trade), but when I arrived I only had animal meat in my cargo hold. Apparently animals breathe and I had neglected to install life support systems back there.
There is both time compression and wormhole jumping to deal with the scale of everything. The ships are very fast and accelerate like crazy, but some interplanetary journeys would still take weeks without time compression. Still, most time will probably be spent in uneventful transit
I really appreciate games that don't shy away from this kind of realism. It might seem tedious, but the scale really sells the idea that you're in space. Outside the Elite series, most games with space flight I've played really scale everything down and making them feel more like toy models as a result. Sure, a billion planetary systems and limited development resources naturally ends up as what game designers call "10,000 bowls of oatmeal" where the results of procedural generation are too similar to make them all meaningfully different, but I think that's fine with me when that's just realistic.
Other than that I played a little Shenzhen I/O and finally came up with a somewhat satisfying solution to the laser tag mission. The game makes you solve small engineering problems using a combination of circuit design and assembly programming for an imaginary family of very limited microcontrollers. Usually with Zachtronics games I play and enjoy them a lot up to a point when it starts feeling more like a job where planning and design would take more time than I'm willing to invest, and this game has been no different. But I know it's the perfect game for someone else.
Just finished (here I use "finished" loosely) a 2015 indie metroidvania called Environmental Station Alpha. I'd say it was a mildly enjoyable experience. The world and lore are very heavily inspired by metroid. The world itself is frustratingly-designed. After each new ability, I spent a ton of time looking around for the one path forward rather than exploring a bunch of cool new unlockable areas -- the mark of a truly mediocre metroidvania imo.
The engine itself is very rudimentary and janky with lo-spec art and 4-directional aiming. I think the game was designed fairly well around these constraints. The boss battles were a big highlight for me, although they're nothing too special. Without getting into major spoilers, there is a ton of secret stuff to do after the "end". Think something like Tunic. Interesting, but very obtuse in a love-it-or-hate-it sort of way, and it doesn't really compensate for the game's general mediocrity.
I'd say play this if you enjoy metroidvanias, skip it if you're not really into the genre.
And the other game I'm currently playing through is The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages for the game boy color. I played Oracle of Seasons (its sister game) for countless hours as a kid, so finally getting around to this one now at 30 years old is kind of a trip. I replayed Seasons last year in preparation, and I have to say that this game is much weirder. The dialogue in particular is just strange. It almost reminds me of Earthbound. I'm glad that it has its own unique feel compared to Oracle of Seasons.
Gameplay-wise, it's largely more of the same from Oracle of Seasons. I've heard that these Capcom GBC zelda games are fairly divisive in the community, but I find them to be extremely cozy and nostalgic. In a way, I'm glad I waited so long to play this one. It's like having a sudden sequel to one of my most nostalgic gaming experiences.
The Oracle duology rips, Capcom also killed it with minish cap! I can't fathom why folks wouldn't dig them.
I think a lot of hardcore fans back in the day didn't like that Capcom had put their own spin on it, and made games with a weirder feel and little narrative connection to the rest of the series. But alongside Link's Awakening, I find it kind of charming that all three of the Game Boy-era LoZ games take place in some weird foreign land that never gets mentioned again.
I also agree that Minish Cap is excellent!
Do you still have your copy of Oracle of Seasons?
I have both physically, but I’m playing on an emulator
oh ok! that's great! I played the heck out of those before.
Meowgenics
Fun little rogue like where you breed cats to send into the fray. The art and music is especially delightful. the gameplay, hoooo doggy it is fun if you like strategy and games like darkest dungeon, ff tactics etc.
The two highlights are two of the weirdest games I've played: Drakengard 3 and Pandora's Tower.
Drakengard 3 released on PS3 in 2013. It's the second directed by Yoko Taro, serving as something of an ancient prequel to the first Drakengard (of which the more popular Nier series spun off from). You play as Zero, a woman known as an Intoner on a mission to kill her fellow Intoner sisters. The VA cast is stacked in a way that's almost jarring, one dialogue had Ansem asking Edelgard if she really wants to kill her sisters, followed by half the sailor scouts begging Sailor Moon's mom not to kill them. But the whole damn game is intentionally jarring. The game starts with a traditional RPG exposition, just to quickly subvert the trope. Zero complains about the platforming mechanics. The game is constantly setting me up in a way where I'm right there with Zero, muttering goddamnit half a second before her. The characters are fuckin perverts. It's a hoot and a holler, I love it, though get why reviewers didn't. Emulating on PC was smooth enough, didn't mess with upscaling, some troubles making the dlc and base game play nice.
Pandora's Tower is a Wii game from 2011 published by Nintendo in which you feed your cursed girlfriend monster flesh to prevent her from turning into a monster. You delve into Zelda-esque dungeons armed with a chain that acts as a weapon, hookshot, and monster flesh yanker. The longer you spend in the dungeon, the more cursed she can become, leading to some heart breaking bits. You're frequently interacting with your girlfriend, giving her gifts and chatting with her. There's enough there mechanically I can raise it to being an ARPG-romance game rather than an ARPG with a damsel in distress inciting event. Emulating on Deck, configuring the controller was annoying, even after trying RetroDECK and using the ES-DS wizard.
I've been playing RuneScape: Dragonwilds for the last few days, since I learned that the 1.0 update is coming tomorrow. It's a very fun game, and I think at this point I can safely say it's a little more fun than Valheim, the game it's taking most of its inspiration from. They're really neck and neck, but Dragonwilds wins out.
This is mainly because it has a focus on magic, with spells to do everything for you better and faster if you have enough runes to spend and magic levels to learn it. You can magically cut down a row of trees with an astral axe, magically instantly explode those fallen trees into logs, and magically store those logs in your hammerspace storage trunk. All of this will have taken a lot of stocking up on magical runes beforehand, so it doesn't just feel like cheating, but the return on investment you get makes magic feel worth it. Also, notably, magic is a usable combat style, instead of the usual survival game approach of your regular weapons simply being enchanted - here, you can go full robe and wizard staff if you want. And I do. I always wanna be a magic main if I can, it's the coolest shit ever.
There is of course also the fact that it takes place in Gielinor, the setting for the popular MMO RuneScape. That's a plus for me because I've known and loved that world for over twenty years.
1.0 is supposed to only be the beginning, with a long roadmap of updates ahead, and I believe they're going to follow through, considering that this is definitely part of Jagex's initiative in the last year to rehabilitate the image of the RuneScape IP. They gave Old School RuneScape its first new skill, removed lootboxes and bloat from RuneScape 3, and now they're going to stick with a spinoff for more than five seconds, to prove they can do that too. Wild to see a company actually attempting to be better, but I guess when things fall far enough you have to step it up or jump ship, and someone finally chose the former.
If anyone here gets it when it comes out tomorrow, feel free to hit me up about playing it multiplayer some time.
Interesting!
I bought it the day that it came out in early access and it was terrible, my friend and I quit after a week or so of playing - extremely grind heavy, the mob difficulty was intense and the respawn times made it nearly unplayable
It sounds like it has had some major improvements since then though
Yeah, I stopped playing it after a little while past the early access release myself, since it felt so unfinished that it wasn't that fun. It has indeed had a lot of improvements!
They downright removed and replaced a good few things, like, for example, wardstones don't exist anymore, which is good since I have no idea why that mechanic existed in the first place.
Still playing The House in Fata Morgana, a visual novel, on my Switch 2. A bit slow-going because I have other things to distract myself with, so I'm now just past the fourth door.
And people: this is one of the best visual novels I've ever played/read.
Like... Holy shit. Nearly every arc so far had the climax catch me by surprise. I can't remember the last time I felt actually stunned by a revelation like this, and it's happened multiple times! I think I know where a story is going, then turns out nope, I was wrong, and it's in the BEST way because in hindsight the clues were there. My opinion on characters keep flip-flopping with every reveal.
The music is also just so great, and always captures the mood. Some of it feels legitimately like a fairy tale, other times it's just epic. I love the climax of the third door because the music is so intense.
Also, I actually really want some of these backgrounds and CGs as paintings/prints. They all just look really nice.
One tip for anyone who decides to play it: be sure to periodically check the log as you get later into the story. I don't know how often other people usually look at logs while playing visual novels, but I have the habit of just randomly jabbing buttons a LOT while playing visual novels (part of why it takes me so dang long to get through them). Without spoiling, this game does something special.
I finished replaying Fishing Craze (2009) on PC a few days ago.
I don't know anyone who's played it, which is really too bad, because it's a great little casual arcade/time-management hybrid with original gameplay and gorgeous aesthetics. It reminds me a lot of the old-skool PopCap games (which I need to review sometime).
The premise is that you play in fishing tournaments across the US where you race against time to catch as many fish as you can for points. But you gotta avoid certain predators that will delay you and lose you points.
There are 33 levels/tournaments in different lakes spread across 3 circuits (amateur, pro, and elite). You need to win 1st place (a PLATINUM trophy) in each one to become the New Fishing Champion. The story isn't super important tho.
The gameplay is really simple and completely mouse-based: move your boat with the mouse, click to drop the line and grab a fish, and then once it's in the air, move again to catch it. You can do cool combos too.
You can also buy upgrades at the shop using tokens you collect while playing. Bigger boats hold more fish, and fancier lures catch fish worth more points.
What I love most about this game is the whole vibe. The music is positive and upbeat, and a Frutiger Aero aesthetic pervades the entire game, from glossy, skeuomorphic buttons and heavily saturated colours to the cartoony aquatic theme to the overall optimistic tone. It's straight from the era too. And little details like the background art and the water design unique to each lake make it even more lively. A truly beautiful game that is satisfying to look at.
Oh, and they let the fish go back into the lake at the end!!
Regarding the difficulty, I gotta say the game is pretty easy, especially when you have maxed out your upgrades, but I don't really mind that. If you ever struggle with any of the predators, you're safe at your dock unless there are dolphins in the level. Anyway, on my next replay, I might try beating the game with no upgrades at all (if that's possible); that could be a fun challenge.
Overall, I think this is a true gem of a casual game with top-notch art direction. Best enjoyed in short bursts, I'd say. If you know what to expect, you'll probably have tons of fun with it! You can get it from Big Fish Games … or other places.
I finished the Cost of Hope DLC for STALKER 2 and while the story did feel like it ended a bit abruptly, the quality of the content itself was quite good. The environments were masterfully detailed and true to life, especially the CNPP. English voice acting for all the characters was done well, though I'm sure it's even better in the native language. The scripted mutant fights were annoying bullshit but that's par for the course. The final fight itself (duty route at least) was eh, definitely not the best part. The side quests were really good though, some nice puzzles and platforming sections that were simple enough but not overly frustrating or easy (assuming you can save where you want, expedition mode really sucks and I don't recommend it).
The Loopler is a great, albeit heavily RNG-dependent game. It's a roguelite deckbuilder where you drive a car around a loop track, rack up higher scores and aim to achieve infinity. My only real problem with it is that there are a lot of truly shit-tier cards, gates and charms that can kill a run early. At least you can enable/disable these with relative ease, at the cost of only being unable to earn a particular achievement for that run.
It's up there with Vampire Survivors in terms of how you can customize a run. Just wish it had more content.
I'm playing the demo for IGTAP: an Incremental Game That's Also a Platformer, a game that is exactly what it says it is. The better you do at the platforming challenges, the faster your clones will do it. The faster the clones run the course, the faster the number goes up. There are hidden upgrades in the world on top of the ones next to the explicit challenge courses, so exploring is beneficial. As someone who enjoys both of its influences, it's a fun little game. Definitely optimized for controller play, though.
I'm reaching the end of Xenosaga Episode 1. I've settled on a final party of Shion, KOS-MOS and Jr. I had watched the Albedo scene on YouTube all the way back in the somethinawful LP forum days, but man, what a great way to introduce a completely unhinged insane villain.
I'm just about to enter Proto Merkabah (I think that's the name). My plan was originally to play through the series, but I might take a break after this, I forget how draining JRPGs can be, especially since I hear Episode II is the black sheep of the family.
It's been really fun. I don't know that I understand anything so far, but all the characters have been delightful,.with maybe the exception of chaos who I find a bit boring.
Finished two since the last post.
The Plucky Squire - play as the hero of a children's story book. This felt about the right length of game with it's combination of 2D/3D puzzles as you jump between in the in story world and the child's desk that the book lives on.
I think they really captured the right tone for it with the narration that takes place and what I remember of children's picture books from when I was a child.
Rollick N' Roll - I've been playing this on and off in short bursts since the steam summer sale. Premise is a marble run puzzle game themed like children's play sets.
There are 20 levels each with 3 levels of difficulty, with the difficulty being the amount of vehicles you have to complete each level with.
And I've just realised that there's a bit of a theme for these two now....
Since 1.0 came out last week, I've been playing Valheim on a private server with friends. I'm so happy that this game has been doing well, I first heard about it all the way back in 2019 when I was excited to hear about an upcoming Linux-compatible survival game. I've been following it loosely since, but the only other time I've actually put this many hours into it was in 2021 when the early access version first launched.
First off, the game feels super familiar but there's obviously some polish. There's an intro cinematic that plays every time the game opens (it's skippable, but worth watching the first time or two), and the menu has a list of cinematics to re-watch, most of which I haven't seen. Building is easier with new snapping settings, but mechanics such as stability and smoke points are for the player to figure out on their own. There's a few new creatures in early areas that add a frightening level of danger that we were woefully underprepared for, and overcoming those adds a nice mid-level step between bosses in the early game. I can't speak for anything past the second boss, as I never got past the swamps 5 years ago (lost my stuff, then lost my second-best stuff trying to get it back, then lost my third-best stuff trying to get that back, then quit) and I haven't done much in the swamps yet.
Playing with friends is far superior to playing solo, in my opinion. We had a server back in 2021 but didn't cooperate nearly as much as we did now, so it was basically single-player with resource competition. Now we're able to pool resources, such as multiple people using a single advanced crafting station, and everyone is able to specialize a little. Two friends have been out exploring the map, one by water and one by land, which gives us a direction to push toward. Others are focused on building, and I'm settled somewhere in the middle with both combat and resource gathering (I spent 2.5 hours last night basically just mining copper and tin). We have a small portal hub set up so advanced resources are within reach for everyone, including those who aren't pushing story progression, but nobody is forced to engage in content they don't want to. We have the server set up with the
playerprogressionflag, so upgraded raids only hit the people who have beaten the specific boss needed for each raid.There's still small issues, mostly QoL pain points, and many of those have mod fixes that are extremely tempting to use. Our "village" area has a crack into the void beneath the map in the ground, luckily it's positioned so nobody can fall into it. The only bug we found was solvable with a server restart, and other than that server performance has been fine even on a VM with 2 cores and 4 GB of memory (I could probably drop a core and not notice). Overall, the game still has a very indie feel where the limitations are noticeable but not problematic, and there's plenty of fun to be had solo or in groups. If you're a fan of open-world survival/crafting games, come try this one out too! It's actually worth the hype.
I started playing RV there yet? with my friend.
Well, in short, if you have friends who play PC games and who are great to stick with (jokes, funny, etc.), you go and buy the game right now. It is in sale for 5€, but even at full price of 8€, it is basically free.
Why should you buy the game? Let's have a look at it.
The game starts when you and your friend(s) ended just your camping vacation with your RV and you are ready to go home. But the road is closed and you have to take a little detour through wilderness. You will have to think how to get through various obstacles in your way, be it really bug rocks, canyons, half-deconstructed bridges, narrow mpuntain-side roads, river, venomous snakes, bears... You have to drive the RV through all of that using your wits, lumber, winch and other things. Sometimes you use many things at once to get over obstacle. You have to take care of the RV, fix it if it gets damaged. All this while drinking beer, eating burgers and smoking cigarettes with your friends.
I have played only for a few hours and only with one friend, but I had the time of my life. It was just like we actually went for such a journey but without fear of breaking something or dying (both of which we did many times in the game).
Just as I said in the beginning - if you have friends, buy the game and play it. It is worth even more than full price.
In anticipation of Graveyard Keeper II, I've been playing the demo. It's excellent. If you liked the first one, the second is that, but with more polish and more to do.
One thing that is kind of interesting that's not really about the game is that there are some people who're swearing up and down that the in-game opening cutscene is AI and that the game should be boycotted because of it. In the past I've been potentially open to such critiques, for all the reasons someone might be against generative AI. But the cutscene is lifted wholesale from the prior game that had been released 8 years ago. It couldn't be AI.
Lazy Bear (the developer) is a solidly mediocre developer. They make middle of the road games with a few fun concepts and occasional amusing writing. They're true-blooded human mediocrity! It seems like for creative works "It's AI!" is just a thing people say now regardless of whether it's the case. What do we do with that?
If I were a more conspiracy-minded person, I'd suspect that pro-AI people are using AI to push spurious anti-AI claims everywhere they can to flood the zone. If everything is AI, what is there to fight? As it is, I'm just getting tired of looking for new interesting things.
I played Goat Simulator 3, Untitled Goose Game, and am now nearly done with Chants of Sennaar.
CoS is probably going to go on my "favourite games" list as I felt like it was made specifically for me, a person who used to do translation puzzles for fun, but the other two were phenomenal as well. GS3 (mind, there's no GS2) was just so stupid and fun and really engaging, especially the endgame which felt like such a labor of love; it was deeply relaxing to just fsck around doing legitimately nothing and happen upon some wild bullshit, as a goat. UGG was probably the tightest game I've played in years, not counting anything by Nintendo, and I really wish they had maybe 19± DLCs.
Small aside: I've been playing them all on the Mac via Crossover, while my partner has been playing Hyper Light Drifter. We have a pretty nice
well now it's midline for gamingWindows machine, but they all run better on the Mac. I legitimately never would have thought.I proved the old saying that "you don't quite Old School RuneScape, you just take a break" true.
Usually when I play actively I'll activate a bond and then play for the 2 weeks, buy another bond and not touch the game for a while, besides logging in maybe once a month or so to do some bulk flipping of items (buying low and selling high). After 3 months I felt like coming back and activated my bond.
My account is still early game since I barely play, but it is still fun to do some of the quests and make progress on my account. With how Old School RuneScape is structured the small amounts of progress I make when I play means my account is that much better when I come back.
I'm planning to work on a couple of longer quests this go around, and I'll see if I want to activate another bond or not when I'm done. I've found that with the bond prices going down to ~11 million GP it is actually not that bad to maintain a bond by just doing some flipping throughout the day. So far I've made ~3 million GP over the last 2 day just opening up the mobile app and doing some flips throughout the day.
Hell Clock
I think I already mentioned this game back when I bought it. I played less than expected, probably because I already spent most of 2025 playing ARPGs, so I got a bit of fatigue with the genre. I picked it up again this week because I wanted to finish the main campaign in fewer than 21 runs to unlock an achievement (which I got). I appreciated the original setting and story of the game, based on the aftermath of the War of Canudos. The endgame also offers a bit more variety than I expected.
I find it to be complementary to The Slormancer, as both games are basically ARPGs in a condensed form, with their own takes on skill builds, gearing, and crafting. They probably won't keep you occupied for hundreds of hours, but if you got an itch to try a new build without investing too many hours, they're excellent.
Remnant Series
I'm playing both games side by side; Remnant: From The Ashes (FtA) on the Steam Deck and Remnant II on my desktop. While Remnant II is objectively the better game, FtA is still worth the investment, if only for the campaign which is undeniably better.
I played a bit of coop in Remnant II with a friend, and I'm not sure it makes the game better. Like sure, coop play is usually fun by itself whatever the game, but Remnant games don't need it. You don't miss anything by playing solo, and coop doesn't elevate it.
So I put about 10hrs into the Demo for SlashZero. Seriously, it feels more fleshed out and complete than some fully released games.
The best way to discribe it is Side Scrolling, anime, sci-fi Hades (or knock off Dead Cells if that's more your speed). It's pretty obvious after the tutorial and getting into the Home Base area and the subsequent 1st run.
Multiple upgrade trees and hub unlocks for new systems. Different flavors of upgrade that imbues elemental effects on attacks. Set room layouts with rewards telegraphed before selecting. A good stream and veriety of rewards, currencies and powerups to keep you scaling and engaged. Fully voiced and characterized NPCs that can be engaged with gifts and quest lines. A veriety of weapons/classes with unique movement and playstyles (this is through multiple characters).
The selling point is gameplay. It has a style of fluid, animation rich combat that I'd associate with the Dex weapons of a FromSoft game. For example, my favorite character uses a lot of firearms, with a ton of pointless acrobatic flairs and choreography. So a single light attack with a pistol can be seamlessly chained into a follow up and then a delayed medium attack on the third hit. At any point you can interrupt into either a medium shotgun spread shot, or the shot can be charged into a long range rifle shot. But the animations to do that includes a backwards dodge which is not always needed. So to avoid that, you need to do a small jump because the airborne animation is stationary. And then there's a sort of active-reload indicator that lets you chain into quick follow-up shotgun/rifle shots.
All of that is important to keep track of because your character starts of pretty squishy, while enemies tend to hit like trucks, can stunlock you and cram into arenas that border on bullet-hells. You do power-scale quickly enough to overcome this challenge, but the demo only goes to Area-2 ans I hope the difficulty spikes in the full release. I'd also note that the Steam Deck performance is lacking so it's best on PC.
The other game I played was ULTRA0. Was looking for something easy and fun to unwind from a pretty hectic working-weekend. This came up in a random bundle and looked to be a simple "3D" pixel art rail-shooter. Average play time was about 3 hours and I figured it'd keep me occupied on the ride home.
Gameplay is largely forgettable. Zero difficulty. Upgrade system that makes thing trivial within 30min. Largely static levels with a small handful of enemies and music that becomes annoying pretty fast.
I was not prepared for the story though.
Starts off fun enough. You play a cute-high-school-cyborg-orphan-girls that tries to prevent kaiju from breaking containment or else the rest of the world with nuke [unspecified east Asian Island nation] into glass. Chapter 1 starts with your character flight testing a new suit and texting her girlfriend about dinner plans. And ends... in a much darker place.
And it's all a roller coaster from there. You jump between performance anxiety and someone trying to save thier idol poster. Grief and substance abuse to a gag about picking up the wrong sketch book. Its the type of anime that would be tagged cute and "psychological" at the same time. Along the lines of Madoka Magica, Shinsekai Yori or Gakkougurashi!.
On the whole, I didn't exactly enjoy my time with the game. I also wouldn't just recommend it to most people and there are plenty of more substantial options for people who are into this style of story. But I don't regret my time spent with the game/story. It does seem like the creators wanted to explore real themes and difficult topics over making pure shock-factor driven trauma-porn.
Its a weird mixed bag. Can't recommend, but it's not something I'd just refund.
I have finally picked FANTASIAN: Neo Dimension back up out of boredom. For context, I'd played through half of it on Apple Arcade before deciding I wasn't going to pay for Apple Arcade anymore. I am currently playing it on Switch 2, thanks to the Handheld Boost Mode finally letting me play in 1080p in handheld mode.
This is an odd game. Despite being inspired by Final Fantasy 6 (and having the same creator and composer), the character writing is, by all means, bad. I cannot say if it was the original writing or localization. But it doesn't matter because it's so bloody fun. It's a turn-based RPG with attack trajectory mechanics kind of like Chrono Trigger. Nobuo Uematsu has still got it with the music, too, the track Battle Oath has been in my rotation since I originally played it. My only wish is that the OST was orchestrated instead of synthesized.
The backlog continues to grow!
Just finished up Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined:
Having just come off of Dragon Quest 1-3 which is a set of sequels in its same world, I was uncertain if I would come on board with something entirely new. I had also never played either of the PS1 or 3DS versions of the game and I heard it was originally a 100 hour minimum game, but I consider this a boon so I could enjoy the game as it presented itself instead of focusing on what was cut/changed/etc
Story-wise, it was ... strange because it felt more episodic with its structure and the "grand adventure" feel was made into smaller bites that felt less connected until you literally are connecting them over time that leads to the overarching story coming together in the back 15-20 hours of the game!
Graphics: I feel like people originally didn't like the graphics because it felt uncanny a bit, but if you read into it a bit the models themselves were actually created in real life then scanned in and it gives this beautiful diorama-like feel to it and the characters really do fit the aesthetic if you give it a chance!
Gameplay-wise, it's fairly streamlined which isn't the worst approach to meet the tone of the game overall. Fairly standard fare Dragon Quest where after you figure out the terms and systems (either carry-over from another DQ game or not), it's nice and chill. The dual-vocation system works nicely and you can get more vocations over time as you master earlier ones.
Other games I recently played/started TLDR:
My Friend Pedro: Great 3-4 hour romp as a masked assassin that makes you feel like John Wick or someone straight from the matrix. Absolutely worth for the humor and set pieces that I'll definitely remember!
Shotgun Cop Man: Another game from same developer as Pedro, about halfway through and reminds me of playing Super Meat Boy but with a shotgun in hand
Final Fantasy 1 (Pixel Perfect): Started on the plane to Boston, the game that was supposed to be the last game of a company was the beginning of a franchise. Basic JRPG elements, but has lots of customization on spawn/exp/gil rates and especially with this older grindy games I appreciate being able to just get on with it!
Forza Horizon 4: Never was a fan of racing simulators, but I feel like this strikes a nice balance between arcade & simulator. The racing feel is pretty tight overall, and the British rural town-feel is solid. Unfortunately no longer available to buy, but there's 2 other more recent ones too! Would recommend the series!
Just going to throw up a new post to compliment my previous one in this thread:
I forgot to mention another game I've been playing (given I've been playing it for a year or two now), which is Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, which I just completed yesterday. The last mission is a bear, but after several false starts, I somehow managed to finish that mission in 11-days and earn an A rank.
Days of Ruin has by far the best mechanics of any of the AW games, but is also my least favorite of the series. The bland art and silly story just don't do it for me, but I really like having the newer units like the Duster and the AT Gun. Anyway, now that I've finally finished it, I went back to start the entire series over again. The first GBA game is by far my favorite of the series and if I make it that far again, I'll probably skip DoR. I should probably also try some of the older Famicom/Gameboy Wars games as well, though they're pretty primitive by comparison.