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

I picked up Return of the Obra Dinn on a Switch sale and finally got to play it (this is becoming a pattern: I already own a game on Steam, never play it there, rebuy it on Switch and finally play and finish it). It's quite brilliant if a little rough in how over the place the clues are to solve all the cases.

In case you never heard of it: It's a supernatural detective game set in the 19th century in which you have to investigate the fate of some 60 crew members and passengers of the Obra Dinn, a ghost ship full of literal skeletons and dark secrets. Your tools are a book of names and occupations, a sketch of the crew and a blueprint of the ship as well as a magical pocket watch which allows you to see a snapshot, frozen in time, of each crew members death after finding their body. It gives you a few audio cues and lines of dialog, followed by a freely explorable scene showing the person's death which you can run around in like in the Matrix or something. It's a very unusual -- and rather cool -- mix of mechanics.

In the end, you have to use rather oldschool detective work to solve your cases, though. Hints might be the language spoken in dialogues, people's clothing, little objects or blood splatters in a corner or a process of elimination after playing through several scenarios in your head. The variety of hints range from "obvious" to "are you kidding me how on earth am I supposed to notice that?!?", it reminded me of oldschool point-and-click adventures and it recreates that sense of open deduction based on story bits as well as the frustration of missing that 5-pixel-clue in a dark corner. Overall, just for its novelty alone, it's quite a remarkable achievement and an overall very enjoyable game. It reminded me of Her Story but, because of the actual "checklist" you can work yourself through, a bit more "game-y" and structured.

Also, I just gotta admit that what got me into this game, initially, is the amazing 1-bit black and white dithering which makes it look like an 80s Mac game or something. The amount of work put into this is mind-boggling and IMO one of those things that sets apart good games from amazing games and, yea, it's pretty amazing. Definitely one of those gaming experiences that stand out and leave you in awe at the level of creativity found in indie games.

I've been playing Cultist Simulator the most. It's an interesting game, but it has some rough edges. It uses a card like model, but I wouldn't really call it a card game. The aim of the game is to reach enlightenment while staying alive, happy and avoiding the police. Each card has traits and then you have verbs which act depending on the traits put into it and take a certain amount of time to do the thing, while many cards have cooldowns after which they disappear or transform. For instance the work verb can take a heart (your life basically) and give you a bit of money and put the card on cool down, or you could put in a reason and find an office job.

I really like the core gameplay loop, gathering resources and avoiding the police is fun, and for a game entirely in cards its quite immersive. However there are also parts that are very long grinds and many of the components of those grinds are only around for a limited time. It can be very frustrating to be part way through a bunch of combining only to discover you don't have the last part you need to do something meaningful with it and all your work is wasted, especially so when that component is actually easy to obtain but your verb is being used for something else. The game doesn't often tell you what the consequences of combing things is, which i think was an intentional decision to mimic the mystery of the occult but it can be a little frustrating. I was happier when I started using the wiki, although I try not to lean on it too much and I recommend anyone who tries it waits at least a few games before getting out the wiki. It's a game that really got deep into my brain and gave me a bit of tetris-effect, I started thinking about real life stuff in terms of cards and cooldowns.

The game also loads you up with trash cards (for instance many actions create "Mystique" which keeps the cops investigating for you longer but otherwise doesn't do much) and because the cards expire they can't be stacked. Which means everytime I do something that generates a trash card I have to manuyally move it over to the edge of the screen and deal with all the clutter.

Overall I would recommend the game.

I also played Reign in which you play as a line of kings making binary decisions to keep 4 aspects of your kingdom from getting too high or low. It's a super cheap game and well worth it, if a bit shallow, it has lots of fun events though. Well worth it.

Lastly I played Bullets per Minute. This is a rhythm FPS rogue-lite. it's as if you took Crypt of the Necrodancer and made it a FPS, you have to shoot and reload and dodge in time to the music. There's not many tracks but they are all pretty great songs. The visuals are a little annoying, everything is very high contrast and monochromatic. this made it hard for me to see see objects of interest, there have been countless times when I've accidentally ignored a chest because I just didn't see it. The game has a weird difficulty, I was going to say it was punishingly hard, but I just played a run where I got the right combination of items and the game was almost too easy. Before that run I never got further than the second level, but with that combo I went right to the end immediately and didn't really struggle. That was on easy so who knows about hard mode ;). Also the item descriptions are extremely cryptic and even after picking it up it is hard to figure out what they actually do. I think the game suffers from having too much "true" randomness, on some runs I've literally cleared every room on the floor and not gotten a single coin or key, but in the run I just won the first thing I got was a skeleton key and I finished the first level with 20+ coins. I enjoy it, will continue playing and don't regret buying it but it doesn't have much staying power.

I bought and finished Superliminal. I'd been waiting for it to hit Steam, and it's got a 25% off launch sale. I'm sure many have played it already, but it's a good brain-bender, and the first time a game has actually made me nauseous, at least until I got used to it.

I'm getting back into some favorites. OpenRCT2 is coming back on my playlist, and I'm chipping away at the scenarios. I just cleared RCT2's Crazy Castle, and RCT1's Mels World. For a first campaign, Crazy Castle is tough, and long, and I couldn't make any headway until I managed to get the Cash Machine, and retain guests. I could probably have priced my coasters less aggressively, too, instead of the the amount of money in its Intensity.

I'm a fan of OpenTTD, and TTD by extension, but didn't know much about Chris Sawyer's Locomotion until a few days ago. I'd seen it, but it was never on my radar. Apparently he meant to make TTD2 and got distracted by Rollercoaster Tycoon, and then did Locomotion. I started a campaign in OpenLoco, which is a project by a couple of OpenRCT team members. Interestingly, they've decided to write it in C++, and reverse-engineer Locomotion instead of sharing OpenRCT2 code.

I've gotten distracted, but wanted to point out the project. It seems perfectly playable, but I can't seem to make heads or tails of Locomotion, and can't progress meaningfully in the first campaign. I hope to figure it out, but the only reason I'm halfway decent at RCT is from watching videos about how the game works. Not as much seems to exist for Locomotion.

Adventures in OSSC Land. I got an OSSC and a bunch of SCART cables for my old consoles. I've got success in getting a picture out of my PSOne, PS2, Dreamcast, and Xbox. No success with my SNES, and I learned I'd have to do something different to get a picture out of my N64 and Gamecube. This week, I mostly played with PS1 games, so here's some super-relatable, super-timely impressions.

Kileak: The DNA Imperative - Super early PS1 FPS. I'm sort of fascinated by the lineage of Genki's FPS games. I started with BRAHMA Force: The Assault on Beltlogger 9 way back when, and then worked backwards. Kileak is not great. It's the definition of corridor shooter. For a game of biomechanical horror, the enemies are really pedestrian and nonthreatening. It's really rather drab to play too. I walk down a hall, something is in the hall, we shoot at each other until one of us dies. There is not a lot of room to dodge or maneuver in the halls. And then I'll get into a small room with one or two enemies, and we shoot each other until one of us dies. Here's where I can strafe a little. And that's it. That's the game. For being so early in PS1's lifecycle, it does manage to get the PS1 FPS controls right, with forward, back, left, right controls on the d-pad, and strafe mapped to left and right bumpers. Other games have done much worse. Otherwise, entirely unremarkable and less than fun.

Codename: Tenka - Here's a joining of two of my favorite things that didn't turn out so great either: Psygnosis and PS1 FPS. Tenka is another corridor shooter that's slightly less flat and slightly less corridor, especially when compared to Kileak. It's also not very fun. Sure, they manage to throw more than one enemy at me at a time, but, at worst, it's three. It looks better than Kileak but it's overly dark. But here's where it really falls apart for me: the controls are bad. It does forward, back, left, right on d-pad, but it sticks strafe into a R2 modifier. This makes it all but impossible to forward or back strafe, and entirely impossible to circle strafe. Since my movement is hampered by these controls, I feel even more like I'm just managing health resources rather than avoiding damage. This makes big hits even more punishing than they probably should be. Also, this game has a shield and a health bar, neither auto-recharge, and I've only ever found shield refills, not health. Maybe I'm just really bad at this game, but all these little frustrations add up.

Alien Trilogy - I'm really quite surprised I've never played this before. This is more or less Alien Doom TC, except officially licensed. It's okay. I'm only a couple levels into it, but it puts strafe on the shoulder buttons, and not everything happens in tight corridors or small box rooms.

Star Trek: Invasion - Another game that's right up my alley, but never played it. This is a Star Trek space dogfighter, along the lines of Colony Wars or Descent: Freespace. The concept is a bit funny, because the TV show only ever had one "fighter" type ship, but here I am in a different fighter type ship, in a squadron of Starfleet fighters. I'm using my phasers to shoot down Romulan fighters. I shot up a Borg cube, and I had to change my phaser types to adapt. One thing it does that Colony Wars doesn't is that it adds a "lockon" mode. This will cause my reticle to track a ship, but not lead it. I have to manually aim to hit a leading target. What's weird about it is that the left/right controls in lockon mode flip from standard to inverted. It's a bit unintuitive. This game is also weirdly difficult. I've played a lot of space dogfighters, and I'm particularly fond of Colony Wars on PS1, and I'm struggling with early levels.

I mentioned in another thread that I had Apple Arcade and was looking for recommendations. I've since dug in on them on a bit. This is my first time really playing mobile games, I've been into gaming since the 80s, but mobile games never really appealed to me and I wasn't sure how this would work out. After being told Arcade works on MacOS and AppleTV, I was way more into it. In fact, even after playing some of these on my phone a bit, I still think PC or TV is better, but maybe that's me be an old guy.

Mini Motorways - Very fun, easy to pick up and put down puzzle game. I wish it was trains instead of cars, but that's just me being a train guy. I am still trying to figure out how some people on the leader boards are getting 2x, 3x, the points I can at my best. The mechanics are surprisingly deep.

Sayonara Wild Hearts - A love letter to classic on-rails games of various kinds. This thing has A E S T H E T I C, it's basically a playable music video for 80s new wave music. Very easy just to "beat," the real challenge lies in getting high scores while winning. Not really mine kind of game mechanically (never cared for on rails stuff), but I enjoyed it because of it's very well realized vision and the style.

Next Stop Nowhere - A slightly unpolished point and click adventure game with a little bit of space piloting (that's actually on rails moving similar to Sayonara Wild Hearts). The voice acting and script is really good. The puzzles are perhaps too easy, so it's mostly a choices matter type story. The story is nothing mind blowing, but at the same time it's nice to play as an adult talking with other adults doing adult things (as an adult myself) then say being a teenager chosen by legend to kill god.

Grindstone - What a treat this puzzle game is. I thought I was pretty done with grid based puzzle games, but these folks really did a great job re-inventing the genre. There's also a fun aesthetic with the very beefy protagonist just slicing through the monsters with each move and the art style is very good (and well done). Highly recommended.