Ori and the Blind Forest

Watching GDQ always activates gaming nostalgia in me and makes me want to play platformers, so I returned to a not-so-old favorite and 100%ed it while my husband and I watched the stream on Saturday and then hit up VODs for the runs we missed on Sunday.

Replaying the game was absolutely lovely. I played on easy difficulty which was the right choice, as I do think that the game's weakest point is its combat. Nevertheless, that doesn't dim the shine for me at all, and I consider the game to be a masterpiece: beautiful graphics, great worldbuilding, satisfying movement and abilities, clever game design, and a touching story.

I will say that returning to it after having played Will of the Wisps helped me see how much more of an improvement and iteration the sequel is. The original is still splendid in my eyes, but Moon Studios really were able to bottle lightning, as I think the sequel is actually the better game overall and I consider both to be masterpieces in their own right.

I recently bought Slipways, and have played it for several hours already. It's a procedurally generated, turn-based strategy/puzzle game, in a similar vein to a 4X but without combat, and with much more simplified/casual mechanics... so each game only takes about an hour to complete. Despite that simplicity, it still has quite a bit of strategic depth to it, and you really need to think carefully before making your moves or you will quickly render your Empire unstable, and find yourself slowly running out of options for expanding/progressing. It's great, and I will definitely be playing lots more of it.

I also bought Wildermyth last night after watching the video about it that was submitted by @Fal, and have already played it for 3+ hours... staying up way past my bedtime to do so! :P So far, it's exactly as advertised and exactly what I was looking for; A rogue-lite, sword & sorcery style, turn-based tactical RPG, with charming graphics, impressive emergent storytelling mechanics, and solid writing to back that storytelling up.

And just to highlight how amazing that emergent storytelling is; The accidental death of one of my starting characters during the final battle of the first chapter emotionally hit me far harder than I thought it would... especially given the character was just a randomly generated one, and I had only gotten to "know" them for a few hours of play. But in that time they had already been the center of a neat little side adventure, gotten seriously maimed in battle (losing a hand) whilst saving the party leader, and developed a serious bond with the party leader as a result. They will be missed. :( But hopefully the monument we built in their honour at the site of the final battle will at least ensure their name and sacrifice will never be forgotten! (which given the "generational storytelling" selling point of the game, I hope is actually the case, and that any future heroes that visit the site later will say something about the fallen hero)

I goofed around with a lot of games that didn't grab my attention until I got to Cloudpunk. I'm really enjoying it, and at least half of that is due to the way it put me into the game world.

A common problem I have with starting a new game is that it takes way too fucking long for the game to get started. Between tutorials and world building and exposition, too many games won't just let me play it. This is particularly frustrating when I want to play something like a JRPG. They all start with long cutscenes, lots of establishing of the world, walking around and talking, and then maybe it might drop me into one fight where my options are hobbled because I haven't completed the fight tutorial yet. Sometimes the tutorial is so awful that I can't tell what I need to do to get through it. I drop so many games after only 15 minutes of playing them.

Hey video games. Get to the fucking point. Please let me play you within the first 15 minutes so I can figure out if I even want to keep playing.

Back to Cloudpunk, this game starts and I'm immediately in the world, driving my car, and making deliveries. I make a couple deliveries, and I'm getting the narrative as I go. No long cutscenes. Sometimes I talk to someone and get locked into a discussion, but it's relatively short, in-world, and well written. The game starts and I am playing the video game. I love it.

Nioh 2 complete edition was on sale during the steam sale and I just finished hellpoint and was looking for another soulslike to get into. I remember playing through Nioh some time ago and very much enjoying it. I've more or less only just started, but finding it fun to play through a polished game as compared to hellpoint. Decided to go with a mage build since it's been awhile since I've done something like that, and forgot that early game you have to wait to unlock magic. Oh well, starting to figure out the switchglaive and split staff - definitely weird weapons which will require some time with them to really understand but feel like they might have a high skillcap which I enjoy. Not sure how much time I'm going to have to really devote to it anytime soon as I will be moving soon and frankly have had a very busy social life as of late. Took me probably 20 deaths to git gud and kill that opener boss right at the beginning of the game - I enjoy an early challenge to get me refreshed on how to dodge properly and whatnot.

Final Fantasy XV

So it was free on Playstation + so I decided to give it a spin. I generally dislike JRPGs. I most recently played Persona 5 Royal and really didn't like the combat system at all. I loved the story and the time-management sim aspects which kept me going. I eventually just tuned difficulty down to easy so I could blitz through the combat as fast as I could. My friend told me the FF series moved away from random encounters and menu-based combat years ago (I lasted played FF VII which I thought was way overrated), so I gave XV a whirl.

It's. . . interesting. I'm not sure I like it necessarily, but it is refreshing in a way. There's a lot of unique and cool ideas built in here. So far almost all of them feel a little underbaked, but the game feels and plays so differently from just about any other big adventure game I've played. The fact that it doesn't actually apply any of your experience until you retire for the evening really creates a good sense of cadence to the game and encourages you to take it slow. I don't necessarily like the characters that much, so the appeal of the bro-trip is a little diminished, but the way of developing these relationships through incidental interactions throughout the journey, is great. I wish Bioware would take a page out of this and depart from their tired formula of talking to people hanging out at your base. The friendship between these guys seems much more genuine. The writing and character designs are worse than Larian and Bioware games, but somehow the relationships and characters feel much more rounded and believable than those infinity engine style RPGs deliver because the interactions feel less stilted.

I like the roaming via road trip mechanic. I kind of wish I could actually drive the car rather than "driving" it like a Tesla in self-driving mode. But I guess if they did that my expectations would get higher and I'd start resenting it for not playing like Gran Turismo, so maybe that's a fair trade off. It would also start to raise questions like "Why can't I just run the bad guys over?" or "Why not mod my car into an overland cruiser and drive it everywhere!?" It would be nice if they gave you more to do while roaming as well. You can take care of all your shopping while in transit, which is nice, but it would be even nicer if you could do all your inventory management and manage your quests and stuff while traveling. Actually, this would be an amazing time to do the lore and codex reading that a lot of RPGs have you do while still making progress in the game. This would be a good time to review journals and quests as well. They do the "putting quest markers on your minimap" thing, which always tends to make gameplay feel like a bit of a mindless chore. But making quests based on journal entries where you have to puzzle together the locations based on clues would make that all more fun, and you'd get a chance to have something to do while driving. Real missed opportunity there.

The combat, though, is terrible. Better than menu based battles, but I honestly have no earthly idea what I'm doing most of the time. You dodge by holding a button down until you run out of MP. You just warp from point to point and target guys while they're distracted from attacking your compatriots. It looks very dynamic and impressive, but I don't really feel like I'm making many intelligent decisions or passing any skill checks along the way. I'd say this is the games biggest weak point. There's lots of little mechanics and animations to make you and your mates fight together, but there's no real strategy around it. It's more like you do stuff and if you happen to be doing it in the vicinity of one of your mates they're link up with you. But you're not doing any kind of coordinating or positioning or anything. I don't actually know how I'd fix this though. It is nice not to have to load into a "tactical view" like a Fire Emblem game. And most other squad type games like this end up being sort of real-time with pause or turn based, like with Bioware or Larian, neither of which feel as dynamic. If it was more of a Devil May Cry combat system it would make Noctis seem like a lone-wolf superhero who isn't relying on his friends to succeed. So while it is the weakest aspect of the game, it's also a very tough problem to solve within the constraints of what they were trying to do with it, so I don't really fault Squeenix for not hitting it out of the park on this one.

I picked up Out of the Park Baseball 22 (OOTP 22). From what I've read, this franchise is supposed to be the gold standard in baseball simulation games (if not sports simulation games). It's not an "action" sports game, where you control players moving around on the field, etc., and I had calibrated my expectations around that fact going in. There are two modes to this game: offline solo, and online multiplayer. There are numerous negative reviews about the MP mode, complaining about it being pay-to-win, so I haven't touched that mode at all. But I can speak to the single player mode, which I have clocked over 12 hours on now.

So, you play the part of both General Manager and Manager (you can elect to do just one or the other, if you want). That translates into a wide range of responsibilities, tasks and duties, including: setting lineups, pitching order, bullpen membership, roster management, trades, promotion and demotion from and to minor leagues, injured list management, scouting, and more. The nice thing, though, is that you can delegate some, none, or all of these to an AI, so you can tailor your experience nicely to just how involved you want to be in micromanaging the details of your team. There are a lot of stats available that you can look up, so you can better justify the decisions and tweaks you make to your team, like setting up batter-pitcher matchups. Already more than once now, I feel like I've lost a game due to my mismanagement, so the challenge level is pretty cool.

The game is supposedly pretty rich with features, but I haven't explored them all. For example, you can set up a historical game, or even a historical playoff series by matching up any two teams from history to play each other. e.g. one team in their prime (from some specific year), vs. another team in their prime (from some other totally different year).

I paid about double what I usually am willing to spend on a Steam game, but I'm liking this so far. If I can get 40 hours of enjoyment out of this, I'll consider it a worthwhile purchase. Worth looking into if you're into baseball stats.

I've been playing the critically-acclaimed Yakuza 0 on and off for a few weeks, and I'm still only 1/3 of the way through it. In it, you play as two yakuza-affiliated characters, Kiryu and Majima.

The main story is phenomenal. Set in 1980s Japan, you alternate between the two main characters throughout the game, swapping between their stories every two chapters. Kiryu is a big teddy bear of a man - he's not afraid to beat someone within an inch of their life if his job requires it, but he has a strong moral code and a big heart. He's a grunt for the yakuza, and suddenly finds himself in serious trouble when a simple debt collection job goes wrong. Majima is a suave, successful manager of a cabaret club. He was exiled from the yakuza after refusing orders and has spent the last year trying to get back in.

It takes maybe 3-5 hours to get rolling, but when it does you'll be hooked. I won't spoil it but the first chapter ends in the most dramatic, yakuza way possible - it felt like a Quentin Tarantino film.

The game is a great entry-point into the series and was really what made an obscure series well-known in the states. If I had to describe it, I'd say that it's essentially GTA but extremely weird and Japanese. A dense, open world, filled to the brim with side quests and mini-games, pulls you away from the main plot with endless distractions. In contrast to the serious, dramatic main plot, the many side quests are absolutely bonkers and frequently hilarious. As Majima I had to pretend to be a young girl's fiance over dinner to appease her overly protective father (hilarity ensues). As Kiryu I helped a pop star named "Miracle Johnson" produce a music video, directed by a man named "Stephen Spining", the famous director of "Indian Jeans". And the help that he needed was protection from zombie-dressed actors while he moon-walked down a street.

I spent about ten hours at one point learning and playing mahjong, as well as watching youtube videos on strategy. Tried to learn Shogi but it was too frustrating to pick up after playing so much chess - the piece movement is less interesting, it feels like you're slowing moving an army.

Combat is engaging, complex and rewarding. Each character develops three distinct fighting styles that you can swap between on the fly. Certain ones can be useful in different situations, but all are fun to mess around with and eventually develop large repertoires of moves, stat boosts and situational abilities as you upgrade your character. It features a "heat" system that changes how you fight as it builds in combat, and can be spent to perform incredibly violent, cinematic attacks. These heat attacks vary with enemy placement and any weapons you've picked up. Think brutally smashing a nearby bicycle into a man or stomping them into the curb. I was really sold on the combat after I force-fed a man a box of nails.

I'd recommend the game if any of this sounds remotely interesting, and it's a few years old so it's fairly inexpensive (and free if you have XBox Game Pass). I bought it during a steam sale $10 and have put probably 30 hours in.

I do this thing sometimes where I play games which have natural stopping points, like distinct rooms, levels, battles, maps, whatever, and in between those levels I do something productive for a short amount of time. It's basically a pomodoro timer but it works really well for my brain to have an "event" rather than a "time" dictate when to move on.

Lately I've been using Stardew Valley for this one, and at the end of each day I've been catching up on my IRL chores. I haven't played it for a while, so there's a lot of stuff in there I haven't seen before, and I heard there was a lot of new postgame content added by the version 1.5 upgrade so I'm looking forward to that. The save file I chose to use was already in the middle of year 1; I just got to the desert, and there's very few things I need before I've finished the community centre.

I'm also still playing Assassin's Creed Odyssey. For some reason I got it in my head that I wanted to find all the Orihalcum after finding a map which lists all 607 locations. I need about 50 more, and the only places left to look are one of the islands and Macedonia. I finished the main game so I bought the DLC as well, I really liked the Elysium map but I'm taking a break back in Greece before heading on to the next one.

I've been playing Dark Messiah of Might & Magic and it's hecking amazing. I've always heard good things, and I had a feeling I'd enjoy it, but it's really surpassed my expectations.

The combat is fun and rewarding. Melee feels more meaty and methodical than even recent games. There's a lot of use of the environment, like cutting ropes to drop boxes on enemies, or kicking them into spikes. Spamming left mouse button is rarely the best way to approach a fight.

The story is simple but enjoyable. It doesn't overstay its welcome. It's a tight linear experience rather than an expansive open-world, which I can appreciate once in a while. There's also many secrets to explore which are very rewarding. I'm sure I've missed a ton as well.

The developers went on to make Dishonored, and I can see the similarities. In many ways that feels like a spiritual successor (though with a greater focus on stealth).

Dark Messiah is an older title now and doesn't run perfectly on Windows 10. For some users (including me) there's rare crashes. I applied an x64 patch as well as a few compatibility flags which helped stabilize it. My only complaint now is the lack of borderless fullscreen, but I can cope with that.

It's a fun game, and well worth putting a few sessions into. Give it a try some time!

I've tried a bunch of different things in the last week, most not very good.

Fantasian is a turn-based game with some nice graphics. Unfortunately, what I'm learning is that I don't like turn-based games. It seems very predestined. At least in the early levels you have exactly 1 weapon you can use to fight enemies. It deals some amount of damage (maybe there's some slight randomization?), and the enemies at this point are in a similar position. So there's no "game". It's just whether you have enough hit points to withstand their hits before the damage you deal to them takes them out. Very boring. The story is moderately interesting, but for me, not enough to make up for the boring combat.

I had started Wonderbox a few months ago, but put it down for reasons I don't recall. Just got too busy or something. It's a fun game that I really like for the most part. It's an action adventure game sort of similar to something like the original Legend of Zelda, but it's 3D, and each level is contained in a box. You can spin it around to see it from different angles and see otherwise hidden things. But its strengths are also its weaknesses. The camera will stick to certain angles, so sometimes you end up with no ideal position for the camera and performing some task is hard just because of the way the camera works, not because it's a hard puzzle or a difficult skill to learn. Also, I'm on a level where the gimmick is that there are various floor tiles that appear and disappear on a timer. It's a neat trick in moderation. Unfortunately, several of the screens on that level are set up such that you have to execute the entire board perfectly or you have to start over from the start. It's incredibly frustrating, and I've ended up putting it down several times because I wanted to throw my computer at a wall after playing it for a while.

I also tried out UFO On Tape: First Contact. The premise was pretty fun — you have to photograph UFO sightings. Unfortunately, the game feels not even half finished, and the controls are clunky and confusing, and the graphics are terrible. It really feels slapped together.

I've been itching to play some single player story driven games.

So I restarted Danganronpa 2. I'm about halfway through the game I think. While I'm enjoying the it, I will admit that I'm not as impressed with D2 and I was with D1. The story seems kinda slow and not as focused. And the characters aren't as interesting or engaging. They're a bit more stereotypical and caricatured than the original cast in D1. I'm hoping to finish it by the end of this week and then I'll start D3, which I picked up on the Steam Summer Sale.

I've also been playing a lot of Space Haven, another Summer Sale pickup. This is a space-based ship builder/crew manager with survival elements. I guess it's similar to Rimworld or Oxygen Not Included. It's definitely challenging than I expected, but I'm enjoying it a lot. I think I put in like 20hrs in the first few days of playing it. It's early access. There are some things that can be improved, especially on the crew management side, but it's absolutely playable.

Still playing Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel 2 on my Vita here and there. I really want to finish that this year so I can start the next sequel in the series.

I recently sat down and played Paradise Killer in just a couple of sittings. That almost never happens to me anymore with any game. I had barely even heard about this game before.

It's one of the most unique games I think I've ever played. The closest analogue to it is probably Outer Wilds, though it's still an extremely different game. At its heart, this is a murder mystery game. The ruling Council has been murdered and the island of Paradise's cycle of rebooting has been halted until the killer is caught. You're an investigator brought in to figure it out.

Paradise exists in an alternate pocket dimension after a great religious schism around 1000 AD where there was a rebellion against the Lovecraftian gods of this story. The faithful, who are now the Syndicate, were brought into Paradise to serve and become closer to the gods, except the gods were all physically killed, so their purpose is to revive the gods into corporeal form. They can't do this by themselves, so they bring in humans to basically do all the crap jobs and essentially run as perpetual energy machines. But, invariably, demons somehow get into Paradise so they have to wipe and start it over every time. This involves Ritual Sacrifice, in which all the humans are slaughtered so their blood can be splashed around the slaughter room to hopefully appease the gods, and then all the demi-gods of the Syndicate move to the new Paradise island and get a fresh batch of humans from the "real world" (that's what they call it in the game).

You play as Lady Love Dies, the investigation freak. That's her title. That's also her actual name, everyone has a strange name in this game. She used to head up the Paradise Psycho Unit, effectively the investigation force, until she was tricked by the god Damned Harmony somewhere in the 19th island cycle and was exiled for 3 million days... until now. The Judge (another Syndicate member and also literally the only one with a normal sounding name) has brought her back to solve this murder before the remaining Syndicate members can move onto the new island, Perfect 25. It seems the Grand Marshal already has someone in custody, a demon-possessed human named Henry Division who was found at the scene with a knife and a bellyful of the Council's blood. But is all as it seems?

So with this premise, how would such a game stand out in a medium filled with anime murder mystery visual novels with strange stories and settings? First of all, this isn't actually an anime game—it's British. Secondly, it's the piece of media with the most accomplished vaporwave visuals style I think I've ever seen. Every component of this game's visuals should be garish as hell but there's actually a coherent beauty to it all. It's a great looking game, and a world I was fascinated to explore. The in-game screens and interface has that MS Paint look to it, the UI is constantly tinged with the teal and hot pinks of those late 80's/early 90's windbreakers. There's no such thing as a clean background, only a maximalist use of low res graphics and many, many cheap looking Windows 95/98 era looking wallpapers. Combine this with that Lovecraftian dark world I described above and you get a very, very strange world to explore.

It's bright, colourful, and looks like a happy wonderland. It's an absolute treat for the eyes. It also makes it all that much more jarring when you enter a room and remember this is a Lovecraftian universe that seems to revolve around blood very much. Or when you go to the garden of gods and see all the rather freaky looking busts and statues all over it and realize that these gods are entirely designed like Lovecraftian monsters.

The music is not vaporwave, by the way. It's instead an amazing collection of energetic jazz and pop. It's a hell of a soundtrack and even with 16 or so tracks, I never got bored of it. It's a good collection with some reminding me of Persona, and others still reminding me of Kid A era Radiohead.

And exploring it is a ton of fun. Going in, I thought this would be a visual novel. Instead, this is where those Outer Wilds comparisons come in. You explore this entire island in first person view, with a heavy dose of platforming and lots and lots of exploration. You really do have to investigate the crime scenes in this game, and collect evidence. Years of AAA titles have really deprived me of a true investigation experience, where Witcher 3 and Read Dead Redemption instead give you a coloured circle to mill about in and won't let you leave until you find all the clues. In this game, it's entirely possible to miss a huge piece of evidence simply because you didn't inspect the area close enough or follow clues to find new areas to investigate.

The island is on the small but dense side of things. It's eclectically designed but with a purpose behind it all. It looks like a confusing mess when you start but nothing here is based in reality at all. This is entirely a manufactured island, and as you explore around it, it all comes together. There's a ton of verticality to it, and you have no fall damage. If you find certain unlocks in your exploration, you get to double jump and do a mid-air dash to improve the movement even more. Soon you could be zooming up and down the island. You'll need to do that to collect all the evidence, relics, and lore items around the island, and talk to all the various NPCs.

The characters are all fairly fun, if a little 2D (also quite literally—all the NPCs in this game are 2D sprites in a 3D world). They all have distinct personalities and fit into the overall lore and story very well, all of them. With how bizarre and off-kilter the world is, and the fluid metaphysical nature of it all, there are some interesting things to discover and investigate between them and their surroundings.

Reading up on this game, I got the impression that it is designed so that you "make your own truth". In fact, you can start the trial at any point in the game. Indeed, this game is 80-90% evidence gathering and exploration, and then the final stretch is the trial where you resolve all the mysteries and make your accusations. The impression I got is that it's possible to change the plot and how things unfolded (see: the 1985 movie Clue's three sensible endings). But it's not that, I don't know why so many reviewers were purporting it as such. That's certainly the impression the game gives you but it's not like the plot changes if you do what is basically a bad job of investigating. The order of events is the same no matter what, the game is about if you can discover what it is. And honestly, that's fine for what's basically a small-budget indie game. It's already way more than I expected it to be, and then some.

I got interested in this game because the more I tried to find out what it was, the more confused I became. Often, that's a good sign. That usually means the game is going to be something unlike anything else. It's impossible handful of writers to be incapable of creating a good picture of an established concept after all, no matter what you think about their quality. One of the first games I remember feeling this way about back in the day was Devil May Cry and sure enough, that game proved to be completely unlike any action game before it. If you're into weird, daring games that try to do something unique and interesting, this is one to check out.

I've been playing Control on Gamepass. It's been a really fun game. Also been playing Mass Effect Legendary Edition, first time playing Mass Effect, and really enjoying it as well.

Celeste

Disclaimer: I actually played this game a while ago, so consider this a glowing, well-overdue recommendation.

Pros

• Greatest soundtrack ever
• Excellent pixel artwork
• Solid platforming

Cons

• The DLC is too hard for me :(

Other thoughts

Celeste might have one of the best soundtracks ever made for a video game. Considering that soundtrack in totality with Celeste's excellent platforming and beautiful pixel artwork, one could easily conclude that Celeste is a great game.

And although one could center a review around those three points, it would be too easy to overlook the plot and miss the brilliance of the mountain metaphor. Madeline, the game's protagonist, suffers from some combination of depression and anxiety. And in-spite of self-doubt she sets out to prove herself: she will do something hard because it is hard. And thus she commits herself to climbing Celeste Mountain.

And climbing Celeste Mountain is hard. First we recognize this fact through the game's lore and characters, who frequently remind us -- sometimes mockingly -- that climbing Celeste Mountain is an audacious task. But we also realize this through the gameplay. Since the player controls Madeline, Madeline's journey to climb Celeste Mountain is just as equally the player's; and thus when Madeline finally conquers Celeste Mountain, we rejoice with her because we share the victory. The game's difficult platforming does not merely serve as gameplay -- it is a device that enriches the story.

Of course, something similar could be said about most games. A player should feel some sense of accomplishment for finishing a game, but usually the lore reason for feeling accomplished (eg, saving the world, to use a typical JRPG trope) diverges greatly from the player's reason for feeling accomplished (eg, overcoming a difficult final boss battle).

The brilliance of Celeste is that there is no such divergence.

Final Fantasy X

Got the X/X-2 HD remaster on Switch because I wanted to get back into a game series I played a bit of during my childhood. Currently at the part where you first board Cid's airship en route to Bevelle.

Yakuza, Like a Dragon. Got it on Game Pass. I'm really liking it. The story is a mafia melodrama, very over the top and extremely enjoyable. I'm still getting used to the fact that gangsters are now moral upstanding citizens, though :P

The turn based combat is nice too, makes for a more relaxed experience. And the attack animations have punch.

I picked up and played the following 4 games during the Steam Summer Sale:

Superliminal

Starting with the one I finished first. I remember watching an in-dev video over in one of the gamedev subreddits, demonstrating the size changes with the object in hand. Then I mostly forgot about it over time. A buddy of mine mentioned the idea of streaming it, so I looked at the game again. I didn't want to watch him play the game and spoil it for me if I wanted to experience it myself!

The game have been compared to Stanley Parable, which feels more like a surface-level comparison. There's some humor, but it felt more puzzle-focused rather than a walking simulator type of game. A little bit more like Portal 2, I suppose. The story is also fairly short (Steam says I had the game running for about 4+ hours) and doesn't have multiple endings. At least nothing in the game suggested multiple endings.

It left an impression on me, regardless of how helpful it was in the end.

Craftopia

This game is still kind of rough. Some translations are clearly still in first draft or missing. Despite all that, my experience with it has been pretty chill. I play it at "Enjoy" difficulty though, which makes the combat way more forgiving.

The game's been review bombed after the studio announced a new IP. But as far as I can tell, they're still working on this game so I'm choosing not to worry about that.

Dyson Sphere Program

This was the first game I got from the sale. It's very much like a 2.5D Factorio, but you're not limited to the one world. I ran into the same frustration as I had with Factorio, shapez.io, and Satisfactory in the past: building too small and too compact in the beginning. The factories from the start are still there, but I took an experience I learned and cultivated from shapez.io and opened myself up to reshaping and rebuilding some of it.

Eventually, I'll have to tear it all down when the vein's tapped out but it felt like a growing experience for me. I'm pretty happy with the game facilitating that.

So far, I've expanded to the other two rocky bodies in the planetary system I'm in...but my research progress is well ahead of my production progress! I've researched the means to use logistic drones and to transfer products between planets, but I haven't started building the factories to produce them yet!

All I'm doing now is stockpiling the research cubes (research currency used in the game) while my production starts catching up.

...maybe I'll jump back in tonight and see if I can make any progress.

Space Haven

I'm starting to notice the games I got seem to be similar to another existing game. This one has been compared to RimWorld. I couldn't get into RimWorld to save my life. I'm starting to suspect it's the lack of Space :)

It's basically a spaceship (fleet) management simulator, rather than a colony simulator that RimWorld is. The isometric pixel art aesthetics appealed to me and it's been fun watching the crew go about doing their work. I like that I can change up their schedule and draft them to explore. I'm sure not all this is unique to Space Haven. I haven't played it long enough to give a more in-depth opinion of it either. I'm still in the starting system! I have watched the dev's livestream on Steam Solid Content's videos (broadcasted by the dev on Steam) and he has at least two large ships in his fleet. I'm looking forward to it!

Ultimately, I have zero regrets over my purchases :D they've all been pretty solid and I've been rotating between them since I've bought them.

I've been playing the Knockout City trial for the past few days with some friends, which is sort of a dodgeball arena shooter. It's fun, brings back memories of when we used to play Robot Roller Derby Disco Dodgeball (say that 3 times fast), but the matchmaking feels very unfair. I'm not sure if there's an MMR system, but it keeps putting us against teams with ten times our playtime and we get rolled game after game. Still, mechanically it's great, has a lot of fun features like the ability to roll up into a ball and be thrown by your teammates. I'd definitely recommend giving it a shot, I'll probably buy the full version when the trial runs out.

I picked up Escape from Tarkov to play with my friend(s). It's almost fun but it's in beta and there's things they're doing that are unfun in the current patch. Scav vs scav fights are broken and ruin the scav experience. Normal PMC runs were okay at first (like a week ago) but that was because it had just wiped everyone's progression. It's already starting to become really unfun because of imbalanced playing field of people that play nonstop and casual playing.