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What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
I've been playing a lot of Gorunded, which is basically Honey I Shrunk The Kids meets Conan Exiles or Rust. You're a teeny teen in a backyard full of threats and possibilities. Crafting, building, combat, exploration, it's all great, but the theme is where the charm lies. When you build your house out of blades of grass and stems, all the while collecting dew for drinking and crafting things to help you harvest better materials to craft better things... that's my bread and butter. And it's so cute.
This looks super cool. There are a few games like this that I often pick up to play with my kids; I'm in the midst of building a 3rd machine (part sourcing has been gross lately) so when that's done I might pick this up, and then maybe pick up 2 more if the co-op is good.
Have you played any of the co-op?
The coop is great! I have played Grounded a bunch of times now with a bunch of different groups of friends, starting in early alpha and all the way through to more recently too, and it's been a ton of fun almost* every time. So I suspect you and your kids would similarly enjoy it too. As the game host, you may want to lower the difficulty to "Mild" or even "Creative" though, depending on your kids ages and gaming abilities, since it can actually get pretty difficult, especially on the "Whoa!" (hardcore) setting.
I hope your kids aren't afraid of bugs though, because some of the ones in the game are actually pretty scary, even for me! ;) Though there is at least an arachnophobia mode you can enable to make the the spiders less scary for them, if you need to.
BTW, it's on Xbox Gamepass for Xbox and PC as well, if you don't want to buy it. But even if you do buy it on Steam, it has full cross-platform multiplayer, so you don't have to worry about anyone not being able to play with you. Everyone with the Steam version just needs to load the Xbox Console Companion app and friend request the players on the other platforms first.
*One of the first times we played in Alpha we got completely trapped late in the game, kept dying over and over again trying to swim out of where we were, unable to get back to our base, and also unable to retrieve our loot bags either (which kept falling under the world), so we had to completely restart. That was not super fun, but they have since fixed all those issues.
Not yet, as no one I know has the game. I'm mostly still learning the mechanics, and cooing over the aphids.
And I feel you on the part patrol. I was lucky enough to grab a 1060 in the Before Times, but I am dying to upgrade to a 3000 series RTX card.
While I haven't played the co-op, there's stuff in the game specifically to enhance it, like a basketball court and a difficulty mode that turns off friendly fire.
I don't like singleplayer FPS games, so of course I have been spending my time playing two singleplayer FPS games.
Halo: Infinite!
I just beat it, I went back afterwards and cleared out the FOBs and purple places that I hadn't done before the main story, and now I think I'm just about finished with the game.
I enjoyed it overall. I'm not a Halo guy, not a singleplayer FPS guy, not a general enjoyer of video games stories, but I thought they did a pretty good job of delivering a nice quick experience that I don't have regrets about trying.
The open world concept is interesting and I think it's a good approach to take Halo games, although there's a lot of room for improvement. It's more or less a true open world, you can go anywhere and there doesn't seem to be any restrictions I ran in to (although I basically followed the campaign missions like a good boy), and there are some side quests you can do in the form of fast travel bases, rescuing marines (gets you goodies at your fast travel bases), special targets with powerful weapons (e.g. an upgraded needler), and some upgrades scattered around the map. Pretty quickly the side quests start to seem repetitive -- you go to a place, there's the usual selection of enemies, you dispatch them, a few new ones spawn, you dispatch the, your new Cortana makes a quip, and you move on with your day. The open world is one big temperate forest kind of environment, broken up by the story missions by making you run through repetitive and boring looking Forerunner bases.
I don't think the open world is that engaging on its own on the level of a GTA game (which I have spent hours driving through each one just enjoying the world and not having any particular goal), but I do think its way more engaging than traditional linear singleplayer FPS game design, and it felt way more immersive to me to actually see and feel and play the scale of this gigantic ring world when a (relatively small compared to the whole thing but) quite large section of it is really there for you to run around and fight and explore.
The story/plot is.....there. I can't quite tell how this fits in to the Halo lore, and I don't really care (although the Halo lore I've seen on halopedia does seem pretty interesting). The banished (the new baddies I take it) are pretty cool and I liked the different characters introduced. I love The Weapon and I think she's absolutely adorable. There's footage of the old Cortana in this strewn around to provide exposition and a bit of a mystery, and I bounced right off of her -- I think The Weapon is more charming and seems less generic as a character. Also she's not dressed like a 12 year old boy playing Xbox before dinner's fantasy of a "babe", which is nice.
The gameplay itself in terms of fighting is awesome. You get a grapple gun and some other abilities in Infinite that let you feel like a superhero. It's a blast just shooting your web from place to place, flinging yourself in to the air and showering rockets down on enemies. The banished call Master Chief "demon", and you really feel that when you play him in Infinite, your power plot-wise matches how powerful you are gameplay-wise perfectly. I never got tired of grappling around in combat and dispatching enemies how I pleased. The extreme mobility and different ways you can approach combat with abilities made me feel like I had a lot more levers I could pull over how to play the game and broke up the usual "shoot enemies, hide behind cover, reload, shoot enemies" monotony of most FPS games.
Overall it's good, but not great, and it feels kind of short and small -- it's been 6 years since the last Halo game was released, but it seems like they ran in to a lot of development mismanagement (a la Anthem and BF2042) and basically started again a year or two ago. It feels to me like a soft reboot of a new style of Halo game, and it's one I'm excited to see a new iteration on. I'd love to see them take it in more of a Metroidvania style, where parts are gated off due to abilities or story beats and you backtrack through the world as the story progresses and see it change. You can very easily just go straight from story mission to story mission in Infinite and barely engage with the open world, and if you do that you'd get an underwhelming game, but at the same time completing each side quest along the way will start to feel tedious and repetitive, and although the world is open and large and looks good it is also a bit of a facade gameplay wise. It's a start, and a great start in my opinion.
And then after that I got curious about the previous Halo games so I downloaded the Master Chief Collection and played
Halo: Combat Evolved
I didn't really like it. I got up to and beat the Silent Cartographer level and stopped. It feels very much like the singleplayer FPS game from 2001 that it is. I can't be too negative about it for having come out 20 years ago, but I also didn't feel it match how people describe it contemporarily. It felt like they were very very levers to pull gameplay wise, you shoot at enemies, they die, you reload, take cover if your health is low, rinse, repeat, that's it. The map design of the game just feels like "corridor going to the left, then corridor going to the right, then large room you shoot a bunch of enemies in, left corridor again, right corridor, repeat" -- which is what some of the Forerunner areas in Halo: Infinite also felt like and were just as boring.
I started playing the game for two reasons: to get a sense of how the game series feels, starting from basics (since I hadn't really played the rest before Infinite), and to see what the hype was about the "Silent Cartographer" level which even has its own separate wikipedia page talking about how great it is. I don't get it personally, I thought it was a pretty standard linear(-ish, I know there's technically different ways of approaching it than just a single path, but it didn't seem like they were big departures from each other, no matter how you cut it you're going to end up going through a maze of corridors and rooms that are hard to orient yourself in, shooting enemies and getting down to the button you have to press somewhere) level through mediocre looking scenery.
I think that puts me in a weird place, where (from what I've read) the rest of Halo:CE starts going downwards in quality (the library and the Flood, maybe my sense of this is wrong), but I also don't like the game up until now at all. Fans of the series seem to hold the first 3 games in high reverence, and I didn't enjoy them. I much preferred Infinite (granted it's a game with 20 years of improvement and is doing something just not technologically possible until now) and think it is a much better game.
I played Halo CE when it came out and it was kind of so-so then. I got a sense that it was too console-ish and I'm sure it was developed to shine on the new Xbox first and foremost. Multiplayer was pretty decent though on PC and on console especially it seemed to be really popular. I tried Infinite multiplayer but gameplay is just way too slow for me as I'm used to more twitchy shooters.
The Halo Hype was the exact point in time when I realized that popular opinions in video games were not only bad, but objectively wrong.
I wouldn’t have ever described any particular aspect of any Halo games to be bad (except early Halo 2 matchmaking), and quite a lot of it is very good. But at the peak of it’s hay day there would always be these askreddit threads about what the best X is in a video game and without fail someone would mention Halo. And I would think to myself, really? In decades worth of games, across thousands of titles, in a field with legendary artists constantly producing their best work, this is the best?
I think it's all a matter of perspective, totally depends what someone's gaming priorities are, and exactly what people are referring to when they say "best". The original Halo: Combat Evolved may not be the best single-player game of all time, it's definitely not, but the multiplayer was and still is amongst the very best ever made, IMO. Me and my friends still play it at almost every LAN party because of how great it still is, and I would rank it right at the top along with with UT2K4, TF2, L4D+L4D2, Tribes: Vengeance, and Quake III Arena, which we also play at almost every LAN.
The multiplayer is pretty high up there for sure. But the issue at the time was that it was mentioned for every category. Popular opinion had people saying that it had the best music, the best plot, the best art, and everything else you could imagine.
This isnt a halo specific phenomenon either. Anything that got that popular has the same thing happen to it. A lot of people were doing the same thing to CoD for a while. More recently people were doing that to Dark Souls. The same thing will happen once we have the next big video game IP.
Stardew Valley: I have less time to play now and I think I'm about to drop this one off. I'm halfway through summer year 2. Community center is one fish away from being completed. I'm making too much money from wine to care about most of the farm stuff but not enough for the endgame items. I need to start planning skull cavern runs or the more complicated bulletin board tasks and I'm starting to not care. Other than that it is a lot of fun. I have maxed out a lot of characters and trying new farm buildings. Will probably go back to this at some point.
Mahjong Soul (Riichi Mahjong): I'm about to rank up to adept (level 2) on 4 player mode. I'm liking the game a lot, which surprises me a little as I don't care much about card games. I'm still learning all the possible hands but I'm starting to work on being efficient and being aware on which tiles are more dangerous to discard and when. I'm finding it more enjoyable than go or chess as matches are faster and I am very bad at joseki / openings.
Stardew Valley is a great game! It really helps me to relax and I love the way the developer (one person made the whole game) set it out. One of the best indie games out there, and personally one of my favourite games too.
A fair warning though, it's meant to be slow and for you to take your time. If you don't enjoy those kinds of games, it can get mundane fast.
It is very enjoyable, I'm just having trouble keeping up with my plans. I play a day or two every now and then and I keep forgetting that I need to grind X item to craft Y to do Z, or that certain shops only open / only have the item i want on X day. When you have to wait two real life weeks to try something again it gets very frustrating. I think I mentioned in an older post that I need to get to modding and get a task manager mod to set reminders to myself.
Yeah that is quite frustrating. Also the fact that days are so short and the energy bar always adds this overlay of stress and constant 'Should I do this? Do I have enough time left in the day or energy to do it?
Maybe those problems are my only irks with the game to be fair
I have gotten back into Elite Dangerous with the purchase of Odyssey. The base game is about space exploration. The first expansion Horizons lets you touch down and explore certain worlds on planetary vehicles. Odyssey takes it a step further and adds a first-person component - you can exit your ship and engage in first-person shooter missions, or just head out into the concourse of the local space station.
I haven't done much of the FPS stuff, but I have enjoyed heading to different space stations. Most notably, though, the best thing about first person mode is that when you exit your ship, you are standing right next to your ship and holy heck are the ships beautiful in this game. When I stopped playing a while ago, I was saving up to buy an Anaconda - a big ship vaguely reminiscent of a small star destroyer, with incredible customizability. I was originally saving up for a Imperial Cutter (a different expensive top-end ship), but decided to just switch to one that was slightly cheaper and didn't have a reputation restriction; you must be a Duke of the Empire to buy one, and I am merely a Marquis.
I typically play for trade and exploration; I have a fantastic Asp Explorer for exploring the galaxy, so I outfitted the Anaconda for trade, and in about 4 hours made back the 200M that I had invested, and then reinvested another 140M or so, and then made that back... I've achieved the "Tycoon" rank, and am closing in on "Elite" rank for trading, which is pretty cool. Once I get my "Elite Trader" badge, I'm probably going to do a round-the-galaxy tour to get the Elite Explorer badge.
The galaxy of ED is stunningly massive, since it's based on our actual galaxy, and there are a lot of cool nebulae and things to see. You start in "the bubble" which is relatively close to our own solar system which I haven't visited in game yet, but just got the permit for, so will do when I go exploring. There is a massive black hole in the centre of the galaxy - Sagittarius A - to which I have made pilgrimage before, so I'm going to choose a different place to check out. I saw someone else do a circumnavigation of the galaxy, which took him hundreds of hours and many months, but made him almost 2B credits, so maybe I'll do something similar, but on a smaller scale.
I also need to fully flesh out engineering. My ships all need massive improvements.
A while ago I was playing with my brother and a friend of ours, and we were doing a fair amount of combat missions. My friend has played a lot longer than either of us, so he had a pretty well outfitted Federal Corvette for combat that we could use together, and that was a ton of fun. I'm hoping to do that more; I've outfitted a smaller ship for the same purpose, but which would allow the friend to pilot fighters from the fighter bay instead of the main ship. The Corvette is absolutely massive, and a tank, but there's something about being in an incredibly mobile ship with tons of firepower and little shields that was a ton of fun, so hopefully we can do that again some time. My brother and friend have mostly moved to other games though, so I'm not sure if we'll get back to it.
Odyssey was originally plagued with bugs at launch, but I have experienced none, and have only good things to say about it.
Elite Dangerous: How welcoming is the experience for new players, given that the game is fairly mature, with many experienced players already? Do new players just get stomped, or can they level up relatively safely?
When I started, I did not find it particularly welcoming or easy. There are still things that I am learning about how to play the game years after I've started.
That said, there's no "stomp" mechanic if you don't want to experience it. There are a few different game play modes. One is open, where you may, in fact, get stomped at times, though there are several systems where stompers cannot go right around the starting zone, in an attempt to stop more advanced players from griefing newer players. There is solo play, where you will not encounter another human. In many systems, there's no functional difference between solo and open, because the play space is so vast, that there are relatively few systems that have other players in them, but if you don't want to even chance having someone able to kill you, then solo is available. There's also a third middle ground option, which allows you to only play with people that you have invited to play with you. There are a few large groups that run what is basically "open" but without any ganking or griefing.
So to sum up - actually making your spaceship go can be difficult, and the controls are very customizable and there are so many that it can be confusing, even years after starting. You don't have to experience any stomping if that isn't your jam; you can quietly explore or trade or do PvE combat without ever seeing someone else, and that is fairly rewarding all on its own.
Thanks for your response. This clears things up for me, and I will definitely pick this up during this winter sale. I'm not afraid of having a hard time; I enjoy difficulty and challenge in games. I was just worried about, as you say, griefing or just outright stomping by PvP, where new players have no chance against experienced players. There's no fun in getting destroyed repeatedly, with no chance to hide or escape.
There are some very positive reviews of some of the later enhancements, such as Odyssey. Any thoughts on any of those? Recommendations?
If they're on sale, I would definitely recommend maybe both Horizons and Odyssey.
Horizons adds the ability to go down onto planets, upgrade your ship using engineers scattered through the cosmos, have a multi-crew ship with friends, dock in planet based ports, and more. If you like solo grinding out reputations / working towards minor improvements with your ship, it's got lots of interesting content. I think it's also the expansion that adds carriers, which is another delightful time and money sink if you're interested - for 5 billion credits you can buy a carrier, which has a 5M per week maintenance cost.
Odyssey allows you to do some first-person missions, and to disembark from your ship in starports and walk around. It is reported that you may be able to walk around your own spaceship as well. Early on it reportedly had a lot of bugs, but I haven't noticed any; I started in on it months after it launched, and it has been quite smooth. I think it's worth it just to be able to get out of the spaceship and walk around it and look at it.
Whatever I purchased already seemed to have come with Horizons already. From what I've read, the devs changed Horizons from a paid-for to a for-free at some point in the past. So I'm good as far as Horizons goes (and I've done a planetary landing or two already).
As for Odyssey: It's on sale at the moment at 30% off, but the price is still too high compared to what I'd normally buy even for a full game, so I think I'll wait for a bigger price drop before getting it. I'm having a blast already with just the base game + Horizons, and I haven't even done any combat yet beyond the training. Just pure Trader + Explorer at the moment.
I'm also feeling out the PowerPlay part of the game, seeing what that's about. I haven't pledged myself to any faction/power yet.
This game is really fun, and quite the time
sinkvortex. Hours go by without me noticing! This is both a good and a bad thing. :PIt's awesome that Horizons is included. It is thus far much better than Odyssey. The FPS style stuff is fun, but I'm much less a FPS person than a space pilot sort of person, so I've definitely enjoyed that aspect more.
I think that eventually Odyssey will get a price reduction; I don't recall how much it was, but I feel like 20 bucks is probably pretty acceptable for what it is.
The reviews I skimmed on Steam for Odyssey were mostly negative. It sounds like it was buggy and poorly designed for quite a while up until only very recently (mid December). Your thoughts? I'm an avid FPS player, but those reviews make it sound like this dev company ventured into an area that they didn't have experience in, and it shows.
I've only played a couple of missions, and I'm definitely not an FPS guy, so take my enthusiasm with a bag of salt, not just a grain.
I have enjoyed it. The movement feels good, the missions are a bit same-y, but a lot of the mission based stuff in the game is same-y so it matches. I like getting out and running around on a moon, or walking through the concourse to look at a beautiful Imperial garden starport. It just feels like a natural next step after Horizons. What I'm struggling to put into words is that the ability to get out of my spaceship and walk around it makes the parts where I am in my spaceship feel better.
I haven't experienced any bugs, but I picked it up in December, after waiting for people to say "hey, most of these bugs seem to be fixed", and I did so on purpose, because playing buggy stuff is a bit annoying. It feels like a good addition to the game to me, though as I said, 95% of the time I have spent in first person mode has just been walking around looking at spaceports. Then again, 95% of the time I have spent in this game has been either exploring and looking at stars and spaceports, or trading and looking at spaceports. The combat, both first-person, and in spacecraft, is not my forte, nor my focus, but they both feel okay.
The space dogfighting is certainly more polished than the FPS missions; the AI people on foot are not particularly difficult to kill. Frontier is clearly better at programming pilots than soldiers.
Overall, I'd say there's no particular benefit to buying Odyssey now; I'd definitely wait until you get a bit more time into it, enjoying what I would consider to be the core of the game, which is very space-commander oriented.
Diablo II Resurrected:
I have no nostalgia whatsoever for Diablo I or II. My first foray in the series was with III and it was a game that I thought never actually became good until Reaper of Souls fixed everything wrong with it, and then some.
Currently have an Amazon at level 12 and I'm on the quest where you need to find Tristram and Deckard Cain.
I don't think I'm a fan of D2R. It's clunky-as-fuck and is one of those cases where sticking to the original engine's limitations actually cripples the experience. Limiting keybinds for attacks to the left/right mouse button may have been somewhat acceptable years prior to the game's original release, but it was dated on the game's release and is especially dated in 2021 where every other competing ARPG has support for binding more than two abilities. Vicarious Visions should have added additional keybinds for abilities without question. The way that function keys (F1 to F8) work for switching abilities is also nonsensical. There's only eight function keys that allow ability switching and you can only switch one ability per keybind, or with the scroll wheel.
I will give VV credit though. The modern game graphics added are decent, and I see what Diablo purists mean by Diablo II being far more atmospheric than the third game. Caves are genuinely pitch-black and give a sense of isolation and tension which was just missing with D3 and RoS.
But the remaster feels almost as half-assed as StarCraft Remastered was from a gameplay perspective. SC:R did nothing to remove the 12 unit/1 building selection limit because StarCraft pro gaming fans would be up-in-arms about it and would whine about it killing the game's balance. I mean we're talking about a game that is already balanced around complex engine exploits and glitches where you need to play at 400 to 500 APM just to optimally produce units - and it's no surprise that StarCraft pros often go down with severe carpal tunnel given this.
To my knowledge the only build that removed this limit was one exclusive for Blizzcon attendees to try (not even virtual ticket holders.) Even proposals to fix a pretty major bug that existed all the way back in the original game (where the game wouldn't register keypresses if you had a mouse button held down) had the community divided.
Fallout 4: I've just added this mod and am running around in a set of T-45b power armor I just upgraded (still just the set you get in Concord). My reason for the mod is this: If it's a power supply that can power armor for NPCs and buildings indefinitely (on the player's timescale), it should do the same for me. Now I'm running around in this power armor with a bunch of legitimately gained powerful weapons, and am having fun going through the story. Even before I leaned into this mod with the power armor I'd gotten over the initial curve of the game, which is the normal, steeper Fallout curve, and am liking the story . I'm toying with the idea of completing a bunch of faction questlines, but ultimately going for an Institute ending to subvert my normal first-run of being a moral paragon.
Fallout: New Vegas: I'm working on a more experienced RP-based run where I actually do the non-story stuff and participate more fully in the world, but I still can't just get comfortable with this game because it's often just too much for me, but I keep finding new, interesting things to check out. I can play FO4 for four hours just fine, but maybe an hour in FNV before I get too anxious. For some reason the environmental design fucks with my head too much, unlike FO4 (even the Glowing Sea is cool, if dangerous, but Searchlight is terrifying), and I'm trying to come to grips with it.
Graveyard Keeper: I'm scared to death of this game crashing my system in Windows, so I'm playing it in Linux, and in Windows sporadically. However, because its cloud sync is broken in Steam I have to play it via Proton to continue my save. It's still fun, but I don't like how the tech trees are locked, because if you miss a person on their day you have to wait a week to get that skill. The other thing, though, is it's about time management, which I'm getting the hang of. It's a fun story with a kooky, interesting world.
Doom 2: I thought I'd beaten Doom and Doom 2 at once, but apparently only did the first game. I'm switching to GZDoom as my main engine for no reason, and was able to pistol-start E1M3 and clear it easily enough on "Hurt Me Plenty" to get back on track. There's not much to say, it's Doom but with a super shotgun.
Played about 8 hours of They Are Billions over the last few days and it's honestly too slow. I love strategy games, I typically go for turn based strategy so I can plan moves and take my time, I'll be the first to admit I'm not the greatest at RTS, but this game even as an RTS with pause-to-plan functionality is painfully slow.
If the main RTS missions weren't slow enough for you, the hero missions are even worse. I just couldn't do it any longer. Uninstalled.
IMO They Are Billions was decent, but after 10 hours I got kinda bored with it too, for different reasons than you though. I simply found it a bit too repetitive. However, I played it back in Early Access when Survival mode was the only game mode, and there were way less unit types. So I should probably give it another try now that the campaign, and all the new units + game modes are out.
Deep Rock Galactic is top of my list recently. A mix of mining, digging, shooting, and angry dwarven bastards. FPS with plenty of fun stuff to it, and recently added a 100% free battle pass style thing which I'm trying to complete. A little Gunfire Reborn too- more FPS stuff, this one's mostly being pushed by my friends playing it, but it's fun enough. Roguelite, FPS, lots of neat weapons and abilities and stuff... And a bit of engrish here and there, but almost all of the ability text is perfectly translated. A touch of Power Wash Simulator whenever that one adds a new level or three. I just like power washing stuff without having to deal with any of the other stuff. I've been a fan of other cleaning games like Viscera Cleanup Detail in the past, so it's no surprise I'm enjoying this one. There's a lot more I've been wanting to play, but have had difficulty keeping focus on for personal reasons.
I started and, thanks to getting sick, completed playing Echo.
I'm always looking for new queer stories to be told, but the problem I have with most of them that feature gay men is that they overwhelmingly tend to be about coming out of the closet or integrating with the LGBT community, and they're usually featuring white boys who are at least moderately attractive. The one thing that I find refreshing about Echo is that the plot could have just as easily been about straight people but the experience would have been very very different.
So Echo is a visual novel. A furry visual novel. But it's furry in the best way; characters are not anthro for the sake of being anthro; the animals that portray the characters are reflective of who they are as people. The fact that everyone is an animal highlights how different the characters are from eachother, both in character and physical ability (which is important for the plot in several points). It's clear at times that species is also a stand-in for race, and that has the effect of highlighting exactly how much racism there is in the world.
It starts with a very slow burn, so it's very easy to forget that Echo is supposed to be a horror game. And to be honest it's not terribly scary most of the times. There is a distinct lack of gore; there's literally only one CG that has anything approaching it, and it doesn't really show any organs or blood. There are monsters, and the art does a really good job of keeping them hidden away so they stay scary when you see them, but at the same time the monsters aren't really the things that are scary about the game. The horror is more psychological in nature, especially once you understand the nature of the supernatural event you are experiencing. The main character is not carte blanche and the game takes great advantage of that fact in very unpredictable ways.
There is one thing in particular I really love about this game, though, and that's the structure of the plot. Like most VNs, there's multiple routes to follow. The twist is that all of them are cannon; you need to play through all of them in order to get a full understanding of what's happening in Echo. It's a bit difficult to explain, but essentially you'll come across things that happen on their own with absolutely no explanation, which makes them scary, and as you learn why it's happening it's so vague that it builds more tension retroactively.
To be honest, a good part of the reason why I liked Echo so much was simply because of how much it reflected my own life. The characters are all my age, and they're all weirdos who all have their own traumatic pasts. The town of Echo is a place in a desert without many opportunities and which slowly eats away at your soul. These are things you simply don't see a lot in media.
I've been playing a mixture of games:
Cookie Clicker: Just a game that's running in the background. I've finally got it to the point where my prestige level can be upgraded to 3290 which is maddening as the last run I was struggling to increase it in the 10s. Planning to leave it alone over the holidays, come back, and pop some wrinkers for those cookie gains.
Project Warlock: Playing this on PS4, it's a neat FPS. I got stuck on the first level (after visiting the workshop first time) and it felt damn near impossible to beat that level but I did it. I'm now doing the second set of levels and having fun even though I've barely scratched the surface with the upgrades.
DOOM, DOOM 2, DOOM 64: Got them on PS4. Utter classics. I love all three for different reasons (DOOM was the first FPS, DOOM 2 refined it, DOOM 64 bought the eerie atmosphere in). I have got DOOM 3 on PS4 but truth be told it's a fine game but something I've beaten and I have no desire to revisit any time soon.
Wasn’t Wolfenstein 3D the first FPS?
Nah, it was just the first to have mainstream commercial success, and so pretty much came to define the genre. Maze War is generally considered the first though, and predates it by over 20 years.
Huh, I learned something new. Thank you.
I've been working on finishing a lot of old games I used to play as a kid. This includes the first Sonic games, the Crash trilogy and Wario Land games.
All I can say is, Sonic 2 didn't age so well, but 3 is a riot. Crash is still lots of fun. And that the Wario Land games must be some of the most creative games Nintendo ever did, they are overflowing with fun ideas and stuff that makes you go "how'd they think of that?"