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

I'm playing Need for Speed Underground PS2 version through emulator on Steam Deck. It is great! It just sips power from the battery, yet it runs fine. I play all the races on hard and I do that with Mazda MX-5 (starter car). Right now I'm in the worst part of the "career" - my car is plenty fast, but I will start losing in drags dues to just having five gears and either blowing engine or not winning to save engine. The only thing I can do is restart all over until other cars total themselves (or at least the fast ones). Or lower the difficulty. Or exchange the car for some other.

I also play CrossCode. I like the game, but the story is still kinda non-existent, I can't wrap my head around it yet. The game is like old-school probably 16bit kinda hack'n'slash RPG. It is very strange concept and it kinda requires player to understand the workings and put them to use heavily - you have to learn combos, switching attacks, enemies and their abilities etc. It isn't exactly the game for me, but it was talked a lot at many places and has very good reviews, so I tried and went for it.

I like the graphics and the styling of the game, I also like the concept of the game inside a game, I also like the skill tree and having a party and all the different quests, I also love all the puzzles. It is overall a great game, just the fighting isn't my cup of tea. I still haven't had any serious problems with he difficulty though, I defeated all the boss enemies I encountered after a few tries. The puzzles are sometimes a bit harder, but I consider myself rather hardcore player than casual or mainstream one, so I take it as a challenge. But sometimes I just have enough of it and then - NFS Underground time

I've been playing Nomori, a 3D puzzle game that flew under everyone's radar. It's about 20 hours worth of content.

Nomori features self-contained levels each with a pair of portals. Like... well, Portal! But there's no psychopathic AI and no momentum-based shenanigans. Instead, the gimmick here is that portals are preset, and depending on how a portal is positioned and rotated, anything that goes through it will acquire a new referential and gravity. So for example if portal A is perpendicular to portal B, when protagonist Kiko goes through it, her gravity will rotate 90 degrees, and she can now stand on the wall (or fall to what used to be the "side" of the level).

Each regular level has a main goal of carrying a (non-companion!) cube to the exit, and a minor goal of collecting a number of nature spirits ("kodama") hiding in hard to reach places. A minority of levels have more than one cube for platforming use. In addition to being affected by portal transitions, cubes can eventually be modified in a few of other ways, and Kiko also eventually gains the ability to rotate the portals themselves or to reposition them into other pre-existing locations, which means there's a nice increase in complexity and difficulty throughout.

The aesthetic is... tolerable. Colorful, cartoonish, with fairly simplistic (and in some cases generic) assets, but it doesn't matter. The music (which only plays on occasion) is surprisingly decent.

The plot on the other hand doesn't do it for me; I find the banter annoying and unnecessary, and the localization-agnostic grunts and screeches that take the place of voice acting are overdone and get on my nerves. Yet another game that would have been better if it focused on just the gameplay! Jonathan Blow was right to remove the plot from The Witness after all.

Just as an aside, since I've been complaining about plot a bunch in recent months - I want to make it clear that I love narrative games. But the narrative has to be worthwhile - see Cairn for a recent example. Shallow, inane narrative is just a waste of time.

Previous

Fresh of the metroidvania Silver Pines, I picked up two more: Echo Weaver and Well Dweller. Each of them is good, though in very different ways, and the ways they are bad are very similar.

Echo Weaver is a time loop game, where you have 13 minutes to save the world. Much like Tunic or Animal Well, all powers and abilities are available to you from the start, you just need to know the right actions to take to make them happen. There are a few small unlocks to expand your teleportation network, but I imagine that the speedruns are going to be insane. The movement tech feels good to use, and has a high skill ceiling. Much of the game is exploring out from the location where you start every loop, finding echos of the past that can teach you about the powers you didn't know you had, and running into people and events that change throughout the time you have.

And that's the major weakness of the game for me. Needing to be standing in a particular area 8 minutes into the run to discover that there's someone there who needs a boost onto a ledge is fine, if there was strong signposting that told you exactly where/when you need to be there. But when someone just mutters about being in a given zone, it gives you a lot of area to cover in that minute. Sure, the time loops are endless, but my time isn't. Someone who wanted to move slower and explore in more detail (or use a walkthrough) might have more fun with it.

*Well Dweller" is in some ways a simpler game, and it's designed to offer handholding if you want it. Fairly early in the game you unlock the ability to pay to get the next destination marked on your map. This seems too easy, but the map is so big and sprawling it is legitimately possible to just entirely lose track of which ledge your latest movement tech means you can now traverse. I'm confident in my map traversal, and I've still paid to find the next goal. The fact that there's no narrative or logical route through the map is a bit of a bummer; one of the things Silksong did so well was having a coherent world, and this is not that. Movement feels good, and combat is fine, though even on hard mode the combat is fairly easy. There's no touch damage, so fighting the bosses is mostly about standing in their hitbox and attacking continuously while dodging the attacks. Fighting smaller enemies is mostly dodgerolling through them to avoid the attacks. It's functional.

It feels really good to play, though. Instead of a double jump you get the ability to shoot your weapon into walls to use as a secondary platform/springboard, and so theres more technical complexity to where and when it can be used, and then you get the ability to climb walls a little bit to extend it further, and so on. They found ways to make things feel different than the standard movement tech in ways that feel good. I'm enjoying it more than Echo Weaver, though your mileage may vary.

Ace Combat 8, lots of Ace Combat 8, both campaign and online. Went for a gun-only run for the medal but I must've fired a missile by accident at some point so it didn't count, which was annoying. Going for all of the secret aces in each mission now with one of the endgame not real planes (name omitted for spoiler sake) and this thing handles like I'm trying to grip a stick of warm butter, it rolls and pitches with absolutely zero resistance haha.

As for online, I've been grinding sorties for more Zoll (in-game cash) because it takes so damn much to raise the level cap of a plane, and that's even with the 2x Zoll boosters. Wouldn't be so bad if Emergency Sortie and Scramble showed up more often since they give way more and are also just the most fun game modes by a lot, but I'm lucky to get 2 of them to show up in a play session. Current favorite planes are the Su-33 for air-heavy missions and dogfighting in Warfare, and the Su-34 for groundpounding, which it does magnificently. Sukhoi planes are just real pretty.