The Outer Wilds

This game has come through these threads quite often so I am pushing my way through it. I tried it about a month ago, didn't understand it too well, and then took a month-long break. I'm back it now and I get it... I think. I'm going into the game blind so I am unsure of how much progress I am making. Half the time I go into space, choose a place, and fly to it. Other times, I will consult the ship log to give me a direction to go towards. I will unfurl this mystery!

Rocket League

Still hooked into Rocket League. I purchased the Season Pass since I am already playing often enough that I will max out the rewards. I seem to be hovering at the platinum rank but was briefly a diamond 1 rank in competitive modes. Running into more and more toxic people in just casual. I don't know if that is something I should expect or not as I climb up the ranks, but if it is I will probably just quit. I'm not the biggest fan of high-level Rocket League play as it requires more mental energy and investment to play. Lately, I have been playing the Extra Modes like Rumble, Hoops, and Hockey so that I can have a more casual experience. But I did win my first tourney even with a team of randos, so that was exciting.

Just got Valheim off of Steam based on the reviews for it where everyone was hyperventilating over how great it is. Only got to play for 20 or so minutes so far, but it definitely has that "first time you played Minecraft" feel to it. Looks like a pretty cool game to play multiplayer on, so looking forward to playing it a little more.

Just started Oxenfree, loving it already. The atmomosphere is great and so is the art.
I have also been playing ΔV: Rings of Saturn (pronounced delta-vee) It is an indie hard-scifi space mining simulator with solid stories. It is very relaxing to play, but certainly not for people who need to have missions and directions. The dev is super friendly and updates the experimental channel super frequently.

I've been playing Euro Truck Simulator 2. I posted recently on last week's thread; here's an edited repost:

When I saw it in the Steam listings, I was like: "Okay, come on, how boring is that? The whole premise of the game is doing something which people are paid to do because of how boring it is to drive for a long time? Who wants to play a game like that?" Well, it turns out, my interest got piqued after I got the free demo and did the first little tutorial job.

It's obvious and silly to say it, but until you try it, you don't really consider how different it is maneouvering a huge, multi-part vehicle (truck + trailer) compared to a regular consumer vehicle. Even just going forwards was tricky, trying not to hit or even scratch the vehicle on anything (fences, posts, curbs, walls), and trying to cleanly perform a left or right turn. I ended up jumping the curb and running onto a sidewalk on my first left turn, though, in fairness, that was partly because I was trying to manage the camera angle (look direction) at the same time as handling the steering wheel. You also have to handle other traffic on the road, including: trying to find a gap to make a turn; staying in your lane; changing lanes. I was trying to use my turn signal every time, at all the times you would in real life, and also trying to be respectful and not cut people off when changing lanes. But these big vehicles don't exactly handle like a sedan! Sometimes, you just have to do what you have to do, and change lanes anyway, because your heavy weight has so much momentum, and you're running out of merge lane. Another funny thing: I guess they nailed the immersion, because I was constantly turning my head (in real life) to check my blind spot whenever I changed lanes. And I felt silly every time because I'd end up looking around my room instead of actually checking the in-game blind spot. :D I'm still getting into the habit of just relying on the mirrors for that.

Backing up the truck is a whole other ball game. With some practice, I can see how I could get better at it, but dang, the first time I tried backing up to a loading dock, it probably took me 10 minutes wall clock time. I probably went back and forth 12 times. And the parking areas that I had to maneouver in were small, with some tight spots, and various obstacles.

I've begun to see what the big draw is (this game is very popular, it seems). I got to the end of the demo, and purchased the full game (at 75% off). I'm not sure I'll spend dozens of hours on this, but I had fun with the 2 or 3 8+ hours I've spent with it so far, and that's probably worth the price I paid for it already. So now I'll try to progress deeper into the career. It seems to allow me to continue where I left off from the demo, which is nice.

Updates (after several more hours of gameplay):

I'm still physically turning my head to check my blindspot. I figure I should actually not try to force myself out of the habit of doing this, in case I transfer that to real life and neglect to check it when driving for real.

Still taking a while to park, though I have gotten better at it. Some parking spots are easier to get to than others. I've also figured out a trick or two to park faster.

I've done maybe 10+ jobs now, and was beginning to fear that the gameplay would get monotonous, but then, as I've progressed and unlocked new job types, the game has injected some fresh challenges. For example, last night I had to handle a wide load (large yacht), and I ended up slightly damaging the cargo (argh), scraping its side because I didn't turn wide enough. The game also throws you a curveball now and again, such as road blockage or detours due to collisions or construction, and you have to deviate from what your GPS is telling you.

One thing I'm not sure I like: Although you can get dinged for traffic violations (speeding, failing to stop at red lights (so I learned the hard way that you're not allowed to turn right on red in Europe)), and there are other undesirable events like you colliding with another vehicle, it looks like the only consequences of this are an automated fine or penalty that gets deducted from your current funds. Like, literally, if you exceed the speed limit (for long enough), you'll hear sirens and see flashing lights in your rear view mirrors... but you don't have to stop, and the police don't chase you. Also, if you collide with another vehicle, you don't have to stop in that situation, either. No exchange of insurance, no delay, etc. Overall, this kind of thing breaks immersion for me. I'd appreciate at least a little popup message saying "you spent 30 minutes dealing with the collision" or something.

I got some jobs which entailed driving onto a ferry or onto a train, and that was neat. I also crossed the Strait of Dover from Calais, and was (without mental preparation) made to drive on the left side of the road in the UK. Maybe for native Europeans, this is nothing special, but for North Americans like me, it was quite a challenge (but fun). At least twice I missed a turn because I couldn't figure out which lane to turn into, ha ha. I can't imagine what it'd be like to be a new truck driver in the pre-GPS years. I also took a job that started in the UK, so the vehicle was a right-hand drive, and that was disorienting at first, too. All the dashboard and GPS screen position, etc. were on the other side, so my muscle memory kept making me look at the wrong spot, ha.

All told, I'm having fun, and I'd recommend getting this game on sale (there's a Steam sale on right now, though it's just about to end). There's always the free demo, though. It lets you do about 4 or 5 jobs. This game has definitely blown away my misconception that a truck driving game would be boring.

I've been playing Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey for a couple of days. Gameplay is fun, atmosphere is really dark and oppressive, and I love the sci-fi themes. The soundtrack does well to set the tone for the game, but it's not interesting enough that I would listen to it outside the game, like I usually do for SMT games. So far its pretty good.

The game Outlanders released 6 new levels, so I'm playing through them. The first one was a little tricky, but I eventually figured it out. They set it up so you have to do something that you learned earlier was not very useful, so you've probably avoided it up until now. That threw me. But now that I get what's going on, it's getting a little more interesting.

Lonely Mountains: Downhill

Gosh, I love this game.

It kind of scratches the same itch that the Trials series does for me, but in a different way. I think the game is low-poly beautiful and the mountains are wonderfully designed. The game is genuinely fun to get better at, and I like how some challenges focus on being careful while others focus on being speedy. I haven't tried the challenges where I have to be both at the same time, but I'm hoping to get good enough to tackle them soon.

Also, my poor, poor rider. He has seen... um... a LOT of pain.

I finished Act 1 of Ghost of Tsushima and decided to take a break and try out Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order. So far I've been enjoying it and can't wait to play more. I'm not very skilled at games and I can tell this one is going to be a little tough for me. I'll probably end up changing the difficulty to the lowest so I can progress through the story more quickly.

I've still been playing Ghost of Tsushima Legends with my friends a few nights a week. 3 of them are raid ready and I'm getting close. It will be interesting to see if we can get through the 4 player raid missions.

I'm at the end of my summer intersession so I have some time for games again. I started playing Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin. The fiance bought the Switch version and has not yet played it himself.

It's a very unusual game. You have RPG-like character improvements with numerical stats, but they only go up by farming rice, which can at times be very labor-intensive. At the same time, you have to go out and forrage for materials and ingredients, and that's when the game turns into a 2d brawler/platformer that is somewhat reminiscent of Treasure games like Mischief Makers.

And it's pretty fantastic!

The best part of the game is the combat, which feels significantly different from anything else that I've ever played. On one hand, your character is kind of stiff; you don't move very quickly and your attacks lock you into a direction. But on the other hand you have a magic cloth that lets you boomerang around the screen, and the combat is built around the idea of throwing your enemies into the air and against eachother, which creates a naturally emergent form of combo system. And so everything is built around it; every boss fight has a supply of automatically replenishing smallfry enemies to anchor your cloth against and use as ammunition.

Because of the quality of the combat, the perfectly fine rice farming mechanics seem really bland. Some parts are just a function of doing some semi-complex controller moves - think like the spraypainting mechanic of Jet Set Radio - and other parts are just basic housekeeping like clearing rocks and plowing a field.

The most surprising part of all of this is what I just found out right now while googling the full name of the game; it's made by Eidelweiss, a doujin group. And if my one source is correct, this circle only has two members, though they did hire extra people to help them for this game. I have no idea how they managed to make a game this polished, even with the extra help; there are some really technically impressive visuals, especially given that I'm playing this on Switch. And yet there were probably more people involved in the localization of this game than the development.

Fair warning to anyone wanting to play this game, though; the audio quality for the voices is terrible. It sounds like they chose to use 22KHz sampling or something like that. I hope it's just a problem with the Switch version.

Borderlands 3

Started this last weekend during LAN with the guys as it was co-op. It's okay. Not bad, not great, just okay. Areas aren't huge, but also feel mostly empty and I find myself going to areas on my own, instead of needing to be in an area because of a mission, just to see if there's anything I might miss. The thing is, nothing other than that internal desire to not miss something is making me explore. In my opinion games like this have two main ways of getting you to explore, the "grocery list" option and the beauty option.

The beauty option is making an environment that the player wants to explore, issue is developers have to go above and beyond to do so and it's more difficult in a dystopian game like Borderlands.

The grocery list option is having some mission in an otherwise unused area so that a player decides "well, if I'm here I might as well look around/pick something up" in order to explore the area.

Borderlands 3 has neither and I'm probably just going to power through the main story line, finish the game, and be done with it. Also there is just way too much loot and the gun descriptions are lacking so I have to pick them up, use it, then drop it if I don't like it. An example is shotguns. I have picked up shotguns that shoot a spread as you'd expect, one that shoots in an alternating grid pattern, one that shoots a big glowing orb, and one that sends circular saw blades along the ground. These are all "shotguns" per the game. Without picking them up and trying them I'd just skip them as they don't have stats better than what I'm using. Same goes for all other categories.

I've been playing Battlefield 4 but I'm currently very annoyed with a level that seems impossible to beat.

I picked up Forager today and played a bit. It's one of those games I want to love but can't. It's way too chaotic for me. It throws a ton of stuff at you all at once and is like "Good luck!" Resources spawn so fast that the area is constantly cluttered. Trying to figure out what you want, what resources you need for it, and collecting them is a pain.