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

Slay the Spire has stopped being fun. I cannot for the life of me beat ascension 18. I went back to the Silent character and immediately went up 3 Ascension. With Ironclad i cant get to Act 3 with any consistency. Elite are just brutal and avoiding them is the only option. I cant stop playing yet it isnt fun.

Started playing Kingdom Deliverance which was free from Epic. It's a game i had my eye on since the kick starter because of "realistic" rpg and the small amount i've played has been fun. Especially kicking the shit out the drunkard from behind after he beat me up. It's very hard and i imagine very rewarding when you start getting good at the game. I've stopped playing though because i worry it will be too similar to Bannerlord and i dont want anything negatively affecting that.

I just want a game where I slowly construct a house around me that gets better and better over time and make shit cozier and cozier, and I have to earn the things I build & furnish it with-- also the graphics are preferably more realistic than Minecraft. So far Conan Exiles has been great for scratching that itch. We've also been playing Raft on game nights, which has been great, but there's not much endgame there (for now anyway-- it's in early access).

Other games I've tried in the same vein have been 7 Days to Die, Rust, Miscreated-- but those base-building games are all about defenses rather than just a cozy abode.

I'm hoping Animal Crossing helps scratch the itch even more.

Got back into Stardew Valley. I really enjoy the Harvest Moon-esque games. They are a really nice way to pass the time in a relaxing fashion. I like games like that: Harvest Moon/Stardew Valley/Rune Factory, Forager, Littlewood, etc. Oh and Fantasy Life for the DS was really enjoyable too!

Finished black mesa over the weekend. Playing a game without any collectibles or otherwise cheap addicting mechanics is something that I have missed sorely. I barely even checked under stairs for weapons and ammo! It helps smooth the already great pacing and I could almost entirely rely on intuition when navigating the game. There were a few spots which had me getting stuck and I suspect that people new to the franchise might also get stuck here and there. It seems like there might have been some lessons learned and/or change of developers that has impacted the level design in this regard. It is very apparent that with the last content update (xen), they were very conscious about using light, color, affordance etc to imply where to go next. I think this also goes to show how there can be value in reassuring the player that he won't miss anything of importance by checking every nook and cranny, which mainstream games tend to do by collectible-like incentive.

Spoilers:

Murder by Numbers came out on Friday, which I was really excited about, so I played quite a bit of that over the weekend. I love the Ace Attorney games and Picross, so this game seemed like someone went into my brain and built a game around my preferences. The soundtrack by Masakazu Sugimori is perfect, I'm so glad they managed to get him involved.

I should be about halfway through it now, since I've finished 2 of the 4 cases. Ori and the Will of the Wisps comes out on Wednesday, and I'm definitely going to be playing that immediately, so I'm probably going to try to finish up Murder by Numbers before then.

Other than that, I've also been playing a decent amount of Grim Dawn here and there. It's a great Diablo-like game overall, but unfortunately doesn't deal well with its DLC/expansions and multiplayer. Characters that ever get played with DLC enabled can no longer play multiplayer with anyone that doesn't have the same DLC.

I have the DLC, but some of my friends I'm playing with don't, so it means I need to keep a separate character to use with them, and have to always be careful to disable the DLC before choosing that character. There are command-line options to disable it, so it's not too bad, I just have two different shortcuts. It's still a little annoying to need to worry about, including leveling a second character to play all the DLC content.

I’ve been playing Empyrion: Galactic Survival. It’s in early access, but very playable. It’s Space Minecraft plus resource management, a tech tree, NPC factions, optional multiplayer, and the occasional abandoned space-demon-occupied structure. Resources are, generally speaking, food, fuel, or construction materials. There isn’t any real story yet, it’s just survival and running missions for the factions. There are a few corners of the game where the way things work isn’t obvious, so I’d recommend watching a few YouTube videos when you hit a dead end. The tutorial mission is a good starting point.

(@Douglas while your first priority in building bases and capital vessels is generally defense, there are a lot of items to make a base or vehicle cozy.)

I've been playing the original Doom (Steam bundle, comes with Doom, Doom II, and some others). I found my Steam controller (I'd never used it and completely forgot I had it), dialed in a configuration I was happy with, and have been having an absolute blast. The game still holds up pretty well.

I tried Black Desert Online and Destiny 2 the other day. I "played" BDO for maybe half an hour but had no idea what I was supposed to do. The NPCs's dialogue didn't match their facial animations which was kinda jarring.

I played D2 for about an hour but the constantly respawning enemies annoyed the hell out of me and like in BDO I had no idea what I was doing.

ive been playing a lot of animal crossing pocket camp recently since new horizons is coming out and a lot of my friends play it, im been playing animal crossing since wild world and the game is so shallow and just empty. its a shame to call it an animal crossing game because the game is just doing favors for people meanwhile in the main games you play like hide and seek with the villagers and stuff. my friends really like it and its their first animal crossing game. im really glad pocket camp made the game less niche but i personally dont really enjoy it and im curious to see how my friends are gonna react to playing their first mainline game

Last week I mentioned I picked up The Division 2, and after 41 hours I'm still enjoying it. Though I feel like I might start getting burned out soon after Title Update 8. My main issue is the difference in experience I have between solo or co-op, and running a 4 person group. Solo or co-op the game is still pretty fun, enemy numbers aren't insane and time to kill is pretty low so I can just have some fun. But once 4 of us get together it starts to go downhill, the numbers get inflated massively with now dozens of somehow overpowered reds and the yellows take 5+ minutes and half your ammo to kill. And this is with us still just playing on normal mode, haven't even ventured into hard territory yet.

Also still working on Persona 3 FES slowly. That game requires a certain mindset from me, that I'm not in as often as I am in mindless RPG mode.

I have gotten back into The Long Dark, which I hadn't really looked at since relatively early in their early access days. I played a fair amount when there was only survival mode; to me survival mode was a sufficient game in and of itself, and I enjoyed quietly stockpiling food and becoming self sufficient in the wake of a quiet apocalypse. They have since added an episodic story mode. I've finished Chapter One and have started Chapter Two, and despite my early positive feelings, I was pleasantly surprised with how good the stories felt. To be clear, this is a slow game; it is not thrilling, and it is not action packed. It is at the same time quietly horrific and delightfully beautiful; wandering around in a small frozen town is actually fairly relaxing until you hear the bark of a wolf and you realize you are about to die and you have to run, but you're tired and it's cold, and you can't run as fast as you could before because you picked up some sticks and OH GOD the wolf is right there but maybe you can drop some dear meat to distract it...

I'm going to do more survivor mode as well, I think, because the story mode has renewed my interest in the game. The voice acting is good, the story is sad but somewhat compelling, and I've rarely enjoyed the bleak, quiet, dreadful end of the world more.

I've also been playing Holedown which was, I think, recommended to me by @Deimos many months ago. The gist is that you have some balls that you shoot towards "rocks" on the screen that have numbers on them; every time you hit a rock it's number goes down by 1, and when the number gets to zero the rock disappears. After every shot, the rocks move up; if any of them reach the top you lose. It's a pretty good mobile game; if you only have 5 minutes every now and again to play, it's very convenient. You can close it and it maintains your progress, so you can stop midgame without issue.

I've been exploring some games on Apple Arcade more this week. I've been playing Sneaky Sasquatch which is actually kind of fun. Your character is a BigFoot who has to steal food from campers, avoid being seen or heard, and interact with other animals. It's light-hearted.

A few weeks ago I installed Stranded Sails and ended up getting bored. I picked it back up today and it's not too bad. I think there's some lost-in-translation issues, but other than that, it's moderately interesting.

I'm probably going to download some DLC for Talos Principle this week, as I had a lot of fun playing the original.