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

I've been off and on playing the Outer Wilds! Not to be confused with the outer worlds. I started the game not really knowing what to expect. I had asked my SO if he knew anything about it and he'd said he'd heard some things about it and generally there were pretty positive reviews for it. But again, I knew nothing about it.

Oh boy. This game is great. I will do my absolute best not to spoil anything but things are definitely not as they seen. You play a low tech space faring alien race who's exploring the local solar system. There are many planets, anomalies, and an incredibly diverse array of environments. On top of being able to explore any planet you want, you also get to explore the ruins and technology of a seemingly long gone space faring alien race, the Nomani. They had been there millions if not billions of years ago. Some of the ruins of the things they built remain; and so does some of their technology. You get to learn and try to find out why what's happening is happening and learning about the Nomani, why they were there and what they were doing.

This game is such a delightful surprise. There's so much to explore and you can do it more or less at your own pace. You're rewarded for exploring and hypothesizing. My SO and I have been playing together and we'll either be in the same room or chatting over the Xbox, just being in absolute wonder over everything! We've had a lot of fun talking about or own hypotheses with one another and learning whether or not we were right. I would highly, highly suggest anyone play it or at least give it a chance. Give it at least a good half hour, give or take.

Last week @moocow1452 and @Deimos picked the Steam tags Cute and Great Soundtrack respectively as a way of helping me pick a game out of my backlog. I've now played two different games that each fit both of the tags.

I began with Figment. It's an isometric adventure game with puzzles and light combat -- think "Amanita Design does Bastion". Visually it is stunning, with a fantastical, whimsical art design straight out of children's books.

Sountrack-wise, the game is also a standout. I was charmed when, in the first scene of the game, there was water in the scene dripping in time with the music and actually making its own percussive line. The game continues this setup, with each area featuring a base musical track that is augmented by specific additional instrument lines whenever your character is near certain objects. So, if you're walking you might see some guitar plants (they're a thing!) on one of the islands, and while your character is near them, you'll hear a guitar line added to the main theme, which will fade away after you depart from them. It's a neat setup that keeps the relatively repetitive music from playing itself out, since it dynamically changes over the course of a level.

Also of note: the game's boss fights are actual musical numbers. You can hear an example here of a creepy, suggestive spider singing to the hero between attacks. The numbers are well-executed, fun, and high-camp (the first boss, The Plague, is 110% over the top).

All told I think the game is excellent, but I also didn't continue playing it past two hours. Though its presentation is sublime, the gameplay didn't grab me. A big part of me wants to recommend it to younger audiences, as it would work great as a My First Puzzle Adventure game, but I hesitate to do so because it has some coarse language (the main character uses "bastards" and "damn" occasionally), dark moments (the game's inciting incident is a family in a car crash), and odd choices (there was a poorly executed vaccines cause autism joke). Nothing too egregious, but something that would definitely give me pause before wholesale recommending it to children/parents.

I should add that my playthrough of the game was very likely negatively textured by the fact that I played it while I was very, VERY ill. As such, there's a good chance that I didn't enjoy the game much simply because I was playing it while absolutely miserable. Nevertheless, I think the game's art style, presentation, and sound design are second to none, so it's definitely not without merit, I just didn't feel compelled to finish it.

The next game I picked up to fit the tags was Yoku's Island Express (which, if I'm not mistaken, @moocow1452 actually just finished with?).

It's a pinball metroidvania that is way better than it has any right to be. Despite having no interest in pinball, I was completely drawn in to its gameplay and world. It's also beautiful, both visually and aurally, and it reminds me of Ori and the Blind Forest, which is high praise coming from me, as I adored that game.

The game plays like a standard metroidvania, where there's a continuous world with sections that you can't access because you lack requisite powers. As you traverse through the game, you complete different tasks which often take the form of small little pinball "tables" set within the larger context.

I appreciate the game for giving me a better understanding of pinball. I'd only ever played pinball by mashing the flippers whenever the ball came near, but this game has taught me how to place my shots and target specific areas.

I'm roughly halfway through the game right now, and I'm absolutely loving it. I didn't expect to be into it, but it's got me hooked. I will admit that there are moments of frustration. Navigating the island isn't painless, but I'll admit it's a lot smoother than you would expect for, well, a pinball game. Furthermore, there are plenty of times where I know what I'm supposed to do for a given table/challenge, but the timing on the flippers is so precise that I can't do it reliably, leading to a lot of repeated attempts.

Nevertheless, I'm still loving the game. I don't think I'll have the patience to 100% it, which everyone knows is the "True Fun" of any metroidvania, but I'll definitely see it through to the end.

I played something new!

Disco Elysium

I didn't yet play a lto of it (maybe an hour or one and a half), and it's pretty good. It's quite different and has soem very interesting (in a good sense) mechanics. So far it looks like it's going towards a very dark path.

Borderlands 3

It's, well, more Borderlands. Considering that this is exactly what I wanted I'm happy about it!

Some stuff I didn't like:

• The writing doesn't resonate with me as well as the predecessors and can sometimes be more annoying than funny. They're walking a thin line between obnoxious and hilarious and sometimes cross it.
• Other than that the boss fights started out better than in BL1, BL2, and TPS. Shiv was alright, and Mouthpiece was really fun even! I was extremely happy about that, because I don't like the boss fights of the previous games. They're all pretty bulletsponge-y. The next one was Kilovolt, who destroyed my hopes for the remaining bosses. It was frustrating, boring, and lengthy. I spent an hour last night trying to beat him, and then gave up. Guess he'll need to wait for a few more levels.
• Human-like Lilith in her overlay looks weird, I wish they had stuck to the rendered ones from the previous games.
• Lastly, they made a semi-big deal about my character's name in the beginning (got asked a couple times by various NPCs), but after than everyone kept referring me to some generic one (Vault Hunter, VH, whatever) so they don't need mutliple voice lines for the different characters. That's an issue which has been present since BL1 though, including "adressing the player as single charachter even though you are playin as a group" (have played BL3 only solo so far, so this could be fixed)

And the good parts:

• It's more Borderlands, and generally pulls the same strings. It's a great game
• I've always liked the gameplay feel itself of all Borderlands games (with some exception for the low gravity stuff in TPS), and this one feels even a little better (could be due to a different charachter, I've played "VH who drops a companion to help" in the past games, that is: Roland, Axton, Gaige, and Wilhelm. This time I went with Amara, who is more hands-on in combat
• The map. The map in the older games have always frustrated me, and I have wasted lots of times trying to navigate around and finding stuff. Been one of my major pain points with the predecessors. They kept improving it from BL1->BL2->TPS, but never enough. So far, the map in BL3 is a huge improvement. I still wish I could add a route to quest point on the minimap for the early game where I'm not yet familiar with the map. But at least now the full map is actually good

I've been playing a lot of Dragon Age Origins recently. This game is much longer than I thought it would be.

I've started playing this game many times since its launch, but this is the first time I've really progressed into it enough to actually get all the Player Companions. I think the key was to give up on any visions of being a tactical genius and turn the difficulty down to Easy. The game is a lot easier to get through when you don't have to keep replaying the same fights over and over until you finally survive against a surprise Revenant.

But I'm also far enough into the game now that I think I can turn it back to Normal and have a good time. My characters are developed enough that I have options beyond struggling and praying to RNGesus. I did download that combat rebalancer mod this time, so that's probably helping out. I remember the vanilla game's systems being a bit inscrutable at times with how damage and combat would be affected by certain stats.

So far, I'm enjoying it. I think anyone that's interested in Dragon Age Origins has played it by now, I don't think there's anything I can really add to any conversation about it, especially since I haven't completed it yet, and it feels like I'm perhaps 40% through the game's story (including the DLCs). But the one thing I have noticed about this game in particular, among all games like it, is that it's probably the last game that Bioware made that was designed for isometric view.

It's interesting to me because most of the footage, and likely the design of the game, is meant to be over-the-shoulder, following the vein of KOTOR, Jade Empire, and Mass Effect. But those games didn't offer a true zoomed out isometric camera, whereas this one does. I think it's interesting because it reveals a lot about Bioware's approach to level design with Dragon Age, it very much feels like Neverwinter Nights, the last game of theirs to be mainly isometric view, except with much better and more detailed level art assets.

It makes me wonder about Mass Effect (especially the planetary "bases" that all had a similar layout) and Jade Empire, whether much of those games' levels were designed in a similarly top-down way and then a fully 3D camera gameplay was injected into it.

I've been bouncing around a little this week. Some 7 Days to Die, some Caves of Qud, some Rimworld, and I just picked up Fire Emblem: Three Houses last night.

7DTD is new and fresh with A18, as I've mentioned in prior weeks. It's new fun, and the new mini-dungeon nature of most houses breaks up the scavenging and building nicely. You have the uncontrollable excitement of horde night coming regularly, but you also have more controlled, optional excitement anytime you enter a house.

Caves of Qud continues to be good, but I might give it a break. I've played it plenty, to the point where if I can get a character past level 5 or so I'm good all the way through what exists of the plot. I'm hoping that the new endpoint of the plot that's coming out near the end of the year will be an actual narrative conclusion, because you currently can't bring back the McGuffin to finish the game as you might in NetHack or Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup. It's always been way more sandboxy than most other ASCII roguelikes, but I'm tired of my successful runs ending on a whimper of being too powerful to be challenged anymore.

Rimworld is one that I'm picking up after a long hiatus, now with literally 300+ mods installed. It's the same framework underneath, but with enough new stuff my previous knowledge is only kinda applicable. It's a nice balance. I know how to play the game, but I don't know how to deal with the challenges.

FE:TH is fun so far. It's basically "Princess Maker: Tactics", but for a whole class and without the weird sexy overtones. I'm playing on the easiest mode so that I don't permanently lose students when they run out of HP in battle. I would just be stuck in a reload loop because I can't handle that kind of permanent loss. Which is weird since I love permadeath roguelikes, but I think that permanent loss in this sort of longer narrative is just too frustrating.

Haven't been playing much in the way of videogames besides my usual Apex: Legends.
That game still feels great, the shooting feels nice and punchy, it's exciting, the pacing of most games is very good. My gaming PC is starting to show its age though. I have an old ivy bridge machine with a GTX980, and the game chugs a bit.

Besides that, I've been continuing my weekly D&D 5e game which has been going well. We're up to 11th level, and the challenge is still up there. Paladin is such a fun, versatile class in this edition.

Other than that, I've been GMing a monthly Numenera game. I really love the setting, and the books are beautiful and fairly well laid out. One thing that sort of annoys me about the books though is that there are a few rules scattered around. There's no unified flow of what can and cannot happen during a given turn of combat, and there are instances where the authors say things like "Oh by the way, if this happens, you can do this also" in an unrelated section, which makes it very difficult to keep track of all of these little caveats.

Also, being a "rules-light" system, there are not definite rules for some things, which I don't really mind so much, however, in some cases there are rules that don't make any sense, which people tend to defend with "Well it's rules-light". For instance, other than using ammunition, there is absolutely no mechanical reason to ever use anything other than ranged weapons. They're strictly better than an equal melee weapon. Things like that make me kinda wonder if the designers put much thought into how these rules work together. Other than that, all the other stuff about the game makes me enjoy it and I'll continue playing I think.

I've been getting back into playing Mario Kart 8 Deluxe again recently. It's just something that's great to play in the background when I'm watching TV or YouTube or whatever. It's super fun regardless of how much attention I give it.

After spreading it out over almost a year, I've finally beaten the singleplayer campaign in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. The save slot says 45 hours. I think that's officially the longest time I've ever spent on a fighting game and it was a lot of fun! There's a dizzying amount of content in singleplayer (whenever I thought I've finally seen the end boss, a new part of the world opened up) and the presentation is so charming! The "spirit" fights remind me of oldschool modding communities where fans try to recreate a different game character by putting together pieces of content, modified settings and custom skins to get as close as possible. Individually, those are really "cheap" approximations of various game characters but there's literally hundreds of them (I think I've done like 500+ and skipped quite a few), making it one of the oddest type of AAA content I've ever come across. Even though it's all just custom fights, in the end, there's enough variety to never quite feel like a grind.

Also dug up Baba Is You. Trying to do this without hints (which are essentially spoilers in a puzzle game) so it's taking a while but I think I'm close to beating all the main areas and moving on to what I assume is the end game. I'm starting to see the really weird game rules and it's quite exciting.

I just finished 2018's Call of Cthulhu and it was okay. It starts with investigative stuff and multiple options and skill tests, but it quickly ends up on a rail. I'm not even sure the stats matter in the last half of the game. And there are parts where you reconstruct scenes, but the game doesn't really do much with them. You collect clues but never have to put anything together to form a conclusion.

It's got all the other things you expect: an asylum, a small town on an island full of mystery, a mad scientist, nightmares, deep old ones, forbidden knowledge, cultists, etc. It's also ugly. Like, 5 years on a shelf ugly, not stylistically ugly. It's not bad for a weekend game, but I'll probably never play or think about it again.

I’ve been playing ring fit adventure on the switch over the past week and I just got Dragon quest xi yesterday after playing the demo.

I’ve been enjoying both. Ring fit adventure has been great for getting my butt off the couch. I really like the adventure mode. The stages feel like a good mix of different types of exercise and has a decent amount of cardio (if you can count running in place as cardio). I don’t like to exercise, but using this is actually fun.

I don’t have much to say about Dragon Quest xi yet because I’ve pretty much just started. It seems like a pretty standard jrpg with a lot of nostalgia. However, I’ve played maybe a few hours of a different dragon quest many years ago, so I feel like I’m missing out on that nostalgia factor while playing.

I played all the way through Life is Strange recently. It was really, really good, and captivating (I marathoned the whole thing in 2 sittings). I'd definitely recommend it, even at full price, the game is easily worth $20. More specific thoughts and criticism in the spoiler tag.