Metroid Dread

Completed it twice: on Normal and Hard. Firstly, the pros:

• Samus is VERY agile. Some of the moves she can perform give the game a superior level of mobility to Super Metroid on the SNES.
• MercurySteam knew that players would try to sequence break the game. Rather than neuter the game's design to actively prevent this, they added bonus easter-eggs as quick ways to kill certain bosses instead. Loads of discoveries and exploits have been discovered, which is actually making Dread one of the better speedrunning titles to play right now.
• Boss fights are the best-designed in the whole series. First time will be challenging and you will die a few times, but I've reached the point where I was able to kill each boss first or second try on my Hard Mode playthrough.
• Story is pretty good. There are some twists in the latter half and as far as I'm concerned, it leaves no questions unanswered.
• Progression is kinda linear but the layout of each zone doesn't make it feel as such. The actual route you take through the game is masterfully crafted.

And the cons:

• The E.M.M.I borderline ruin the experience, especially the Blue & Purple ones. E.M.M.I zones make for terrible stealth sections and the best way forward most of the time is to just run to the next exit and ignore the one hit death robot. There are of course some exceptions to this rule.
• Keeping on the subject of E.M.M.I, Purple is by far the worst foe in the game. It can see through walls, has an incredible range of hearing and can paralyse you with a projectile. Incredibly hard to get past unless you sequence break and get early Gravity Suit, which you can obtain as soon as you defeat the Blue E.M.M.I if you can nail a few shinesparks.
• You also kill each E.M.M.I in the exact same way, by destroying the exact same Control Unit miniboss, getting an Omega Cannon & Omega Stream and using that to weaken each E.M.M.I's head armour and land a final charged shot in its face. Each E.M.M.I even slows down to a crawl and neglects to use its abilities when you're in these sections. It's so repetitive.
• Controls are quite clunky and you'll be spending a few hours getting used to them.

Dusted off dwarf fortress for the first time in ~10 years. It took a while to re-familiarize myself with the various menus and while I'm sure lots has changed it feels very familiar to how I remember it. Have a bit of an interesting fortress going on because I'm mostly building upwards.

I found an embark site that had a virtually sheer cliff (inclines at 1 tile per z-level) that spanned the embark map in a straight line and extends upwards about 8 z-levels. I tunneled into it horizontally and have placed most of bedrooms/workshops/storage extending upwards into the cliff, which is kinda neat. I do have some stuff below ground: my farms are down a level where the soil is and I channeled downwards a large pit and lined it with spikes over which a drawbridge sits in my main entrance-way as my only defense for right now.

Also just a sidenote: the last time I played dwarf fortress I was just getting into programming and was very much a mouse-centric PC user. I didn't mind the interface back then, but I thought it was clunky. Now, it's actually striking to me how quick and efficient a game UI is if you're willing to forgo the mouse entirely. Obviously this is a popular sentiment among programmers but I'm not aware of any other games that are both heavily menu driven and keyboard-centric.

Hades

It's an action rogue-like. I'd heard good things about it, and was not disappointed. While nothing it does is really new, it's very well executed all around. The story is solid, but the combat is something else; there are oodles of build options, but to a degree I don't think I've seen before pretty much all of them have real uses that can actually come up in gameplay. The combat itself is fast and fluid, and there are lots of styles in the form of different weapons it can take. Overall, I'd recommend it giving it a try.

I've been playing a bit of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup lately. I've always really enjoyed roguelikes but I've never really tried this one!

So far I've been having fun delving with a troll berserker as a move fast and hit things type of character. I'm still in the phase where I'm learning what enemies are most likely to ruin my day and what-have-you but it's fun!

Sacred Fire

https://store.steampowered.com/app/900400/Sacred_Fire_A_Role_Playing_Game/

I clicked through on the Steam news item that this publisher is having a sale, and saw this game. It has a free demo available, so I downloaded and tried it out. Finished the demo in just over an hour of gameplay. It seems to be a hybrid between an RPG (with stats and so on), and visual novel, and games tagged "choices matter". Graphics and music are nice. I enjoyed the demo, and will probably buy this if it ever goes on a sale under my threshold (around 10 USD).

I've been playing a lot of Back 4 Blood & Gunfire Reborn lately, at first more of the former, but now more of the latter.

I started playing Back 4 Blood during the closed alpha test and continued through the closed & open betas throgh to today when I got it via Gamepass — I would've pre-ordered on Steam, but then I found out about the singleplayer having no progression and went for the refund pretty fast. Honestly, I'm glad I did, because this game is not worth $60 in its current state. The biggest reasons for this are two-fold:

First, there are six distinct types of special, and the three most common ones are split into 3 sub-variants which are visually almost identical but have noteworthy mechanical differences. As an example, there's the "tall dude with a huge arm," which is split into the Crusher, the Bruiser and the Tallboy. The first one grabs and kills you similarly to a Hunter but without the pouncing, and the other two just do overhead slams. The main problem of these is that this is basically taking a good idea and pulling the pieces apart for no discernible reason — they could've easily just had one enemy that combined them and it would've been interesting, but instead we get 3 that are boring and one-note. Add to that that it's awful hard to distinguish between the variants and now you've got crummy visual design as well; I still don't know of any way to distinguish a Bruiser from a Tallboy except by behavior or pinging them.

After that, further problems abound in that most of the specials are absolute bullet-sponges, they spawn at ridiculous speeds, and that they have a tendency to deal a lot of difficult-to-heal trauma damage. Put it all together and you've got yourself a big pile of annoying that just gets in the way of your playthrough.

The second problem is the maps. They aren't in-and-of-themselves annoying per se (with exception to the ones with map-wide mist/fog) but they're also by and large entirely dull. Of the maps I've played so far, I can only think of two crescendo events / finales that were actually interesting, and they both occur in the first quarter of the game. The rest just ends up feeling samey or outright reusing set-pieces, and the environment variety feels pretty lacking as well. All told, I've long since ceased to be excited to see what the next map brings to the table, because the answer is usually just "a slightly different layout."

Gunfire Reborn, however, has been a great deal of fun. It's a pretty simple FPS game belonging to the Binding of Isaac school of roguelikes, so the concept isn't very novel, but the visual design in this game is absolutely stellar and the gameplay is likewise very nicely polished. Also of note is that, in contrast to most roguelikes I've played, the bosses in this one very frequently pose a real challenge, even if you have a good build. The only real problem I've noticed in it is a tendency for bad English translations, but that's not worth worrying too much about. Overall, I've got less to say about this than B4B, but that's because I've spent more time enjoying this game rather than analyzing problems, and I think it's safe to say that's a good thing.

I realized that correspondence chess is the one that brings me more joy. Regular chess makes me very anxious, with correspondence I have time to really think about what I'm doing.

I'm playing a dozen matches at the same time, some with a 24h time control, others 48h.

Chess this way feels like playing one of those mobile games you can use to fill idle times during the day. If something feels too complex, I just give myself time to think. If it doesn't, I make the move.

For correspondence, Chesscom allows using self analysis (without engine assistance) and consulting the database in the opening phase (both available inside the app), which is great for beginners to acquire better habits. And I play much better too!

Inscryption. By the Pony Island developer, Inscryption is a combination of deckbuilding roguelike, escape-room style puzzles, and psychological horror. I don't want to say too much and spoil it, but I played it in one ten-hour sitting, and I haven't been so engrossed in a game in ages.

Myself

So I've been pretty obsessed with Star Citizen for about a month now, to the point that I've already bought and set up dual flight sticks. I'm aware it's pretty controversial, but I bought it with the full awareness of what it is (an alpha game) and what it isn't (a polished release). Here's what matters to me: The game is fun. Regardless of whether they've met their goals yet, or whether they ever do, for me it's a fun game in it's current state. The bugs can be annoying, but not to the point that I want to quit the game. Many studios release buggy games then patch them later. CIG is taking what I feel like is a more honest approach and calling their game what it is, an alpha. I played No Man's Sky and I personally strongly prefer Star Citizen to it.

My wife

My wife played through Ghost of Tsushima. Technically I wasn't the one to play this game, but I watched her play it quite a bit, and also got her opinion on it. She gave it an 8 out of 10 (something she doesn't often do). It appeared to be pretty historically accurate, and the story was engaging as well. The game play featured medium complexity combat. It wasn't just hack and slash a la Skyrim, but it also wasn't as complex as something like The Witcher. It had good skills and equipment trees that made you want to put in the time to advance them.

I started Fallout 3 and promptly got stuck. I'm out of ammo, out of healing stuff, and out of money, so I can't quite make it to Minefield from Megaton, so I just need to play and find ways to grind cash and ammo. Like FNV, I'm still a little skeeved out, but for both games I'm trying to play on default settings now, since I know what to expect. Fallout 3 feels a lot goofier to me, from the Church of the Atom to Moira, and the grocery store. Because of Liam Neeson's appearance, I named my character "William Nielson" because it's somehow funny to me.

I'm restarting FNV. After Skyrim I've found I like to revisit these sorts of games (Bethesda-engine RPGs, mostly) with at least a rabbit-ass idea of how to build a character after what is initially a first blind run. My character has somehwere around S of 7, P 6, E 8, C1, I~7, A 6 L 8 (with an Intensive Training perk put in at level 2), and I'm going to grind my speech and energy weapons up as fast as I can manage, so I can have a fast-talking laser cowboy, hopefully with some implants later. I also just learned that the radio actually shuts off the background music I hated so much (the "music" keeps me thinking something's always going to happen). I'm also thinking of slapping JSawyer on this run, but need to be sure it's okay to do after I've already started.

Morrowblivion: I've finished Morrowind and Oblivion's major stories so I thought I'd try this mod out (it's Morrowind to Oblivion) and I'm not really feeling it. It changes the Morrowind stuff too much and gives everybody that generic human potato head look. I miss the pointy Dunmer. I also don't like that the mouths on the silent Morrowind NPCs move when they aren't saying anything, and refuse to use a robotic-sounding computer-generated voice acting download.

I bought the Indie Arcade Puzzler Pack, which I'd already had a game from because I love these sorts of games, here's the two I played recently:

Ekstase is a game that's like Tetris, except you reorient block color positions on a field that periodically scans for large rectangles of the same color. I'm getting the hang of it, and it's a good fun game, in much the same way Tetris or Puzzle League are (also, check out this awesome Puzzle League clone Flipon I've commented about).

Crossniq+ is an interesting one, it doesn't work like any puzzle I've played, and I would recommend either playing this on a Switch or a computer with a touch screen. Mouse is fine, but the alternative control schemes feel wrong to me. It's a fun puzzle game where you make crosses to eliminate blocks.

I mentioned Flipon, it's basically just a Puzzle League (aka Tetris Attacks) clone. It's extremely well polished and feels great to play, with a good campaign for challenges if you get tired of endless or time attack.

Broken Reality

It's a very chill adventure game with a gorgeous kind of low-polygon vapourwave art style. I could best describe it as a sort of slowly paced puzzle game, but with a sound and a look to it that really immerse you in the aesthetic. Even if the humour doesn't always land. Very much a "space out after a long day of work" kind of game IMO.

I finally played Deltarune part 2. It has been quite some time since part 1 came out so I also played that before starting part 2. It was a pretty good time. Playing it reminded me of how great Omori was. Man, it is almost a year since Omori was released and I still think about it all the time, I have to replay it again, maybe around the anniversary of it's release.