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

I've been playing Disco Elysium, and I'm really confident in saying that it's the best cRPG I've played since Planescape Torment. Plenty of other games have played around with the amnesiac main character, but none have come close to the sense that you're really forging a new "you" out of it. DE does, and does it so well. As you become more clearly yourself through your conversations, you unlock concepts for your self identity, which affect your stats as strongly as equipment or leveling up would.

And from that self-identity comes most of the total words in the game. On top of the actual words you exchange with other real people standing around you in the world, you're also talking with and gaining information from the various concepts that make up your personality to the degree those traits are present in you. If you're a lover and a dreamer, those sorts of aspects will comment more regularly. If you're a tough guy and a fascist, those sorts of things will dominate your experience of the conversation. If you've gone insane, it's not going to be almost the same text with a "wacky" option for response, your whole experience of the world will change.

When it comes to skill/stat checks, they've worked hard to make failure interesting. It's not just an immediate "I don't know anything about that", you get a selection of different conversation options that are entirely locked behind failing the check. If you're playing through again and you're not good at that thing you were good at last time? Yeah, you're getting new content for all those conversations.

There are aspects of the game that I'm sure I've failed to describe well. Hopefully it's enough to get people to check it out. It's incredible.

Been playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider since I got it in the latest Humble Monthly Choice.

I've really enjoyed these Tomb Raider reboot games. I enjoyed the first one enough to do it 100% twice (years apart). The second I've only had the chance to play once but it was effectively more of the same but in a new place, which was fine by me.

Now we're at the third game, and this probably has the most drastic changes. I'm approximately 10 hours in and... it hasn't opened up yet. I don't think this game will open up more at this point, this seems to be the way the levels go now. The previous games had largely open levels, with lots of bad guys to fight, and lots of things to collect. This game is much more linear (though still not anything resembling a hallway), with a lot less enemies to fight. There are also now hub towns where you wander around small towns, chat with the locals, take on a bonus fetch quest or two, and then find some items around. It's not a huge departure from previous games but I haven't found anything like the first game's few sprawling open areas (e.g. the waterfall area with temples) in this one.

Still, the game is more linear than I'd like than I was expecting. You get a lot of choices in which small discrete pockets you'd like to explore in what order, but even getting through those pockets is fairly linear. Between the more controlled traversal experience and the constant story stops as you progress, it winds up feeling like you are just going for a narrative ride for a lot of the game. It feels very Uncharted, really.

But the tradeoff is that there's more actual tomb raiding this time around. Linear levels mean smaller, more controlled adventures through the main game world, but you still have to find the entrances to most of these tombs yourself. When you do, you go off the beaten path and explore an intricate puzzle tomb to get a reward at the end. I'm impressed that the games still have interesting puzzles to raid these tombs with, none of them feel particularly redundant or played out by the previous games before.

There are some small but fundamental changes to the item handling. Where previous games were more in the Metroidvania style where you got bigger and bigger guns as you went on, and the ability to get upgrades as you progressed, the latest game takes more of a user-customization bent to it. There are now stores that sell various upgrades, ingredients, outfits, and components. There's an involved currency system where you must sell gold and jade you find to get more funds to buy these items. You get more kinds of weapons that specialize differently, with different upgrades now. You get clothes that give you different abilities now when you craft, and then wear them. These mechanics are basically built on top of the already established mechanics of the series, and are welcome additions. Crafting and collecting resources doesn't feel quite as much of a passive action anymore since you now have to think about how you can profit off of your excess resources, or which you need to keep in order to buy that next upgrade or shirt.

Story-wise, it seems like they've simplified heavily from the previous games. Instead of trying to build more about Lara's friend crew, it's now only with the trusty Jonah, the big Pacific Islander friend who has been with Lara Croft since the first reboot title. They're a good pairing, actually. It's one of the few platonic male/female friendships I've seen in video games where the chemistry is there, but not the usual will they/won't they energy. I'm not through the story yet to have any real judgements on the rest of it but it all does seem generally simpler—but not worse. If there's one thing that's still sticking out like a sore thumb, it's how goody two-shoes Lara Croft is in these games while also being the only one willing to kill people without a second thought.

There's a sequence early in the game where we finally see someone that's not Lara incapacitate someone (Jonah stops someone ambushing Lara by stealing the gun from him and then pistol whipping him) and he clearly feels WRONG about it. He even gives the gun straight to Lara because he's not going to use it, he goes weapon-free. So here's Lara Croft, weaponsmaster and life-taking badass who doesn't even blink when it comes to killing evil mercenaries after multiple adventures of dealing with evil mercenaries, and she's still presenting as a doe-eyed girl who traipsed into a dangerous world by accident. It also makes the few grindhouse-inspired aspects of the game (the colour filter, the elaborate gruesome death ragdolls, some intense gore and violence) that much more of incongruous with the feel of the game. It strikes me like a Disney princess in Uncharted with arbitrary Resident Evil aesthetic choices. I just can't help but think they're wasting an otherwise good character of Lara Croft with the necessity of presenting her as squeaky clean but also a tomb raiding, merc killing badass at the same time. What makes this such a tragedy in the end is that one of the main themes of this game's story is supposed to be about Lara going to far in her obsession with artifact hunting but the story doesn't take advantage of this theme with her character at all.

One thing that is very impressive about the game is the sound design. The game has some top tier sound work. The jungle sounds positively alive. Hunting animals is a lot of fun because you can hear them all around you. Walking into an area populated by entire crews of howler monkeys sounds great, for example, when you can hear them throughout all the branches around you. The game offers a unique Spatial Audio setting—I highly recommend turning this on, whether you play with Speakers or Headphones. You don't even need to use the Windows Sonic or Dolby Atmost (or DTS Sound Unbound now) with it, you can use your native audio set up and it will adjust the sounds for better positional audio regardless. The only game I've played with better sound design recently is Resident Evil 2 (disclaimer: I havent played RDR2 yet, this game was kind of a litmus test for audio).

Overall, a solid good adventure that I'm enjoying. If you enjoyed the previous Tomb Raiders, this will be more for you. If you didn't, I don't think this game will convince you otherwise.

I bought Banner Saga and Dark Souls Remastered on Switch, so naturally I restarted Hollow Knight.

My friend gifted me Factorio and we've been playing together since and I already feel like I will lose a good chunk of my life to it. Love everything about it, in particular how it never feels like you're grinding or waiting for something to happen despite essentially being a game about resource management with progressive upgrades. The game strikes a very good balance between giving you obstacles and hindering your progress and also rewarding your work at every step of the way. And that's not even getting into mods that completely change the experience as well.

Frankly one of the best early Christmas presents I could have gotten.

Titanfall 2 is one of the free games on PS+ this month so I decided to check it out. Took about 6 hours to download and install, but wow! Short, fun single-player. I haven't messed around with multiplayer much, I know this game has been out for a while so I imagine I'll just get instantly stomped from across the map in PVP. There is a cooperative mode that seems fun, but I've only played a couple rounds.

My friends and I recently picked up Minecraft again after a long time without playing it. Personally, I usually can’t play it for very long by myself, but it’s a total blast with friends. We’ve been playing on our server for a bit now, but we aren’t even really trying to beat the game / ender dragon. It’s a ton of fun just building cool stuff with friends and expanding your base.

Husband and I have been playing code vein together. One of the few 'souls like' games I can play. Plus, the character creation is so much fun. Can't wait for the dlc.

Currently 4 hours into Star Wars the Force Unleashed, and man my memory of the game does not hold up at all. Sure the graphics aren't great, pretty shit at times and pop in constantly. But what really hurts this game is the actual combat just sucks even for it's age. Sure the force abilities are super fun and carry this game, just flinging storm-troopers off to the moon is incredibly fun no matter how many times I do it.

But the lightsaber combat is so boring and uninteresting, the game has various combos you are supposed to use. But half the time the combos take too long to finish or start to be useful, or get blocked halfway and it ends up being easier to just spam attack and lightning your enemies. And whenever you run into the boss battle it gets frustrating, they don't have any noticeable weaknesses or ways you are meant to kill them so it just becomes 20+min of spam with basic attacks or trying combos to see if something works. This issue also effects the various mini-bosses that appear throughout the map.

Also the level I just did had some of the worst enemies I've ever dealt with. They were infinitely respawning and would never stop no matter how many you killed, had shields that I never did figure out how to break, and were able to block 60% of my lightsaber attacks so I had to use force abilities to kill them. That level was just frustrating and I ended up running past the last couple combat arenas to reach the boss so I didn't have to bother with the frustrating enemies.

I finally picked up Cities Skylines with some of the DLC and I have to say: it really fills the hole the newer Sim City did not manage to fill. Not to mention there's an astonishingly active modding and YouTube community for when you want to go really in-depth. It's a shame that it does follow the standard Paradox DLC model of basically requiring at least two or three DLCs to get really good.

I'm getting back into roguelikes, and started playing the ADOM version on Steam (the one with NotEye as a wrapper, I guess). I never really played it before, but it's a fun game. The static overworld was surprising, but I guess it makes sense. I'm still trying to find one that can be done spoilerless.

I picked up Just Ski, a skiing game where you have two controls: Mouse move up, and mouse move down, to control your character's posture, and in turn affect rotation speed for flips. It's one of these "rage games" that are also extremely serene.

I managed to force myself back into Stardew Valley, and my farm is growing nicely and now have to actually stop myself from playing for a bit to study. The 1.4 update added all sorts of nice sounds, the different music is a decent change, and there are all sorts of new animations across the world. i'm playing a wilderness map, so those late-night treks home across the property are more exciting now.

Gaming was on the backburner for me due to the close of Timasomo and the fact that my graphics card is acting up and needs to be replaced. I'll be sending my computer off to get fixed, but I'm going to wait until after the holidays since they were doubtful about a before-Christmas turnaround. Until I get the NVIDIA card replaced, I'll be limited to what I can run on the Intel integrated graphics card, so I'll be focusing on lower-end games for the next month or so.

Before the graphics card issues were fully diagnosed, I was halfway through Spyro 3 in the Spyro Reignited Trilogy. I can't decide whether I like it more or less than Spyro 2, as there are some aspects that I think are an improvement and some that aren't. Like I said about Spyro 2, the base gameplay is there and there isn't anything fundamentally wrong with it (Spyro controls well, the levels look great and are fun to explore, and collecting gems is great), it's that the game takes a dive when you try to push it to full completion. Spyro 3 features Spyro going... skateboarding? (Tony Hawk, so hot right now in 2000.) And it has levels with a cast of side characters whose movement is much more stiff and unpolished than Spyro. And the flying levels now have really tedious races.

Like with Spyro 2, I find myself wanting levels more like Spyro 1, with clever secrets. I haven't finished the game, so I can't speak for all of it, but nothing in 2 or 3 comes close to, say, Tree Tops from the first game. I know it sounds like I'm sour on the game, but it's not terrible. I'm enjoying it and will finish it, I just don't know whether I'll have the patience to 100% it. 80% of the game is fun, but I don't know if I have the chops to trudge through the final 20% of tedium. I will give thanks to @Deimos for telling me about the dragonfly tricks to find hidden treasure and improve abilities. Those have been invaluable.

Outside of that, Drift86 left early access. It's a ridiculous Initial D-inspired drifting game where you slide sideways in cars to the sounds of eurobeat. The driving mechanics are slippery to the point of absurd, which makes it have a surprisingly high learning curve. I played it for a bit over half an hour and I could only confidently make it through turns about 30% of the time. I don't know how much I'm willing to put into learning it, but I'm not prepared to stop just yet.

My mindless audiobook game at the moment is Tennis in the Face, which is a sort of Angry Birds meets The Incredible Machine mashup where you hit tennis balls to take out opponents, often using physics and objects in the level to cause cascades or access places you can't directly reach. The game very much feels like it was a mobile game first, but it works well enough on PC. It's dumb fun.

I bought a Steam controller in the recent sale, and it turns out Superflight is a lot more fun with a controller than with a keyboard. Not something I would play for hours on end, but it's kind of relaxing.

I've been playing Halo Reach pretty heavily. It holds up great, I'm really enjoying playing through the campaign. There's some issues with crouching at the moment which is kind of irritating but I'm definitely getting my moneys worth.

Otherwise I've been playing a heap of DOOM II. I've started the Eviternity level pack which is just a master-class in amazing level design.

I just bought the new assassin's creed bundle on switch. I have played black flag on pc before. I really like just having a ship and being a pirate. I decided to go for it to have it on a mobile platform.

It is quite a step back from BOTW. Link can climb anything, it just takes a bit of planning and preparation. In Black Flag, you still have to try to figure out what the developer decided they wanted you to climb. Since I played it before I was expecting this, but it is really noticeable and frustrating coming straight off the back of BOTW. I think I'm going to stick with it because I really like the naval combat. So far, the cities are just a place to unlock more shanties, upgrade a few things, and maybe do a quest or two.