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

As I suspected would happen in my previous comment, I ended up uninstalling Halo Infinite directly after playing a multiplayer match. I finally reached the breaking point with this game when I was given the final weekly challenge of needing to get five kills via running over a player in PvP matches, and by my count, only being placed in multiplayer matches where it was even possible for a vehicle to spawn in 1 out of 10 matches. I highly suspect the matchmaking algorithm takes into account the challenges that need to be completed and will try stretching out placing a player in those match types until after they have exhausted their initial boosted XP pay out that you get for the first 4-5 matches. My final playtime stats were ~79 hours. Of which, I can probably say I enjoyed 20 or so hours. The rest were trying to get into matches that allowed me to work on the challenges. And to be clear, I wanted to at least finish out the battle pass that I purchased but that system relies on me logging in every day to play matches to get the initial boosted XP or completing the assigned challenges. In the end, I often came away from the game feeling worse than when I started. Combine this with the fact that I actually craved playing the game even when I hated how I felt after a session, and I can only conclude that 343 studios has created a harmful system through Behaviorism practices to keep people playing this game. I feel that if a game makes you feel bad playing it, then logically you shouldn't want to play the game anymore, and if the game is creating this type of feedback loop, it is ultimately harmful and the loop needs to be broken. Which is a shame because mechanically, I think Halo Infinite is a great game. It's merely the practices that 343 is relying on to drive engagement (and $$$) that is ruining it.

I've been playing the absolute crap out of Wildermyth. It's not exactly what I expected, but I really enjoy it.

I've always been interested in the idea of having legacies, of shaping the world over a long enough period of time that you see heroes come and go and develop relationships and family trees. MASSIVE CHALICE, released 2015, was a game I had been excited for along this theme but was ultimately disappointing due to bland combat and bungling the succession mechanics. All I wanted was MASSIVE CHALICE but good, and I didn't think I'd ever see it.

Well, Wildermyth is basically MASSIVE CHALICE but good. Not perfect, but really good! The difficulty is good, requiring thought into team composition and careful actions. The interfusion system is very cool and unique especially, and the writing and world building in a couple of the built-in campaigns impressed me. I am so excited for more DLC and campaigns for it.

As with Hades, a lot of what I think the games needs is just more of it because the core system are pretty solid. I like that the random promotion system forces you to build characters in different ways so you can't necessarily have a "standard" build, although I would like to see just a touch more variety in abilities. More events would be great too.

I would also love the ability to create legacy items as well as just characters. Like the sword used to kill the Nightmare Doom King could show up in other campaigns with a small stat bonus. That would be cool.

Playing a lot of Animal Crossing New Horizon lately. I slowed down and stopped for a long time because the daily loop/grind for bells in order to do any cool decorating on the island got to be tedious. But then one of my kids taught me about "treasure islands"--people with hacked Switches who run multiplayer islands that have every item in the game dumped on the ground for the picking up, as well as a Nook's Cranny hack that will net you a billion bells (literally!) for selling just a few turnips. I managed to find one and take advantage of the turnip glitch and now the game is fun again, since I no longer have to spend 75% of my time tediously collecting and selling the same stuff over and over before I can get to the fun part of designing my island.

I got Monster Sanctuary on sale for like $6.00. It's like min/maxer crack. Other than the time I pulled Master of Orion 2 out of a bargain bin for $3.00 20 years ago, this is the best gaming value I've ever gotten.

One of our Pathfinder 2e players has had to drop out of the group, so the rest of us opted to play boardgames while we take a little hiatus from PF.

Me and a some friends tried Scythe last weekend. I really like the aesthetic, it's like alternate history post WW2 with mechs. The game has you produce resources and battle on a hexagonal map to achieve certain requirements gaining victory points as you do.
It took about 2.5-3hrs to complete with setup and some time to learn, but I never had a feeling of a slow pace like I've gotten with Risk or other games. It does a good job of keeping you engaged and the turns moving along. The only thing I disliked was that there's not a lot of interaction between players besides a few battles or moving into someone's territory. We all had fun though and we'll definitely be playing it again.
It's also encouraged us to try other board games. We've decided on Rising Sun next Friday and a friend wanted to pick up Arkham Horror. I've got a Sentinels of the Multiverse Kickstarter coming that I'm looking forward to as well.

I’m back on Breath of the Wild. I beat two of the main bosses years ago, but I took a 2-3 year break from it. Put in some time over the holidays to get the Master Sword and make progress on the other two main bosses. I’m really bad at puzzles and not great at sneaking, so I let my partner do some of those parts. I love the fighting, collecting, exploring, and cooking! I may actually finish it before the sequel comes out. ;)

After a lot of anticipation I finally beat Shin Megami Tensei 5 and I was very disappointed. I was really hoping that Altus would improve the alignment system from SMT 4, which was one of the aspects of that game that I felt really fell flat, but they somehow made it even worse. Instead of the ending you receive being a culmination of all the choices you made throughout the game, it’s literally just a choice you make at the last minute, which takes the fun out of wondering which ending you’ll get. The story isn’t interesting at all, even with all the side quests, and the characters are boring and super predictable. Also, the music in these games are very important to me, and I felt like even though it had some good tracks, overall it wasn’t as good as it’s predecessors in my opinion.

I don’t want to rant too much more but even though I had my issues with SMT IV, I at least had a lot of fun with it, plus the soundtrack was phenomenal. This game in my opinion has nothing good about it at all, not particularly bad but just very average.

Loop Hero is pretty fun. It was free the other day on the Epic Games Store. I like the theorycrafting aspect with the deck building and the item stats to go for. Some cards have special interactions with other cards.

A great deal of my time has been dragged into the black hole that is Elite: Dangerous. I'm enjoying this space game, but, man, does time really fly by while you're engaged with this!

I started Mortal Shell on the Playstation and made it about 20 minutes in. Trying to be Dark Souls but when you try to be Dark Souls you need to have a combat system with a decent feel and this one was horribly clunky. Also you need to stop shoving your boring world lore down my throat because one of the key features of From games is they don't do that. Deleted it and was glad I didn't pay for it.

I've also dug out the old PSVR headset for a NYE multiplayer Beat-Sabre-a-thon, Beat Sabre remains the best VR game and one which almost justifies the cost of the hardware by itself. But after everyone had left I fired up SuperhotVR and I had forgotten how great that game is. The control system isn't perfect but it's good enough and when you get a series of kills going it's so satisfying. The mechanic where the game only moves time when you move your body is interesting and works really well to make you feel like some kind of Matrix-like badass. Short review here with some examples

I have been playing Road 96. It's a very interesting game that I would describe as a narrative roguelite. You play several runs as one of many teenagers trying to escape from a country, Petria, that's rapidly slipping into authoritarianism (the game rolls three characters for you every run after the first and you can choose which one you take) by crossing a walled border. I've seen it described as functionally very much like the situation in North Korea, although there's clearly an american theme to the place as well.

Every time you play you take a different route with different self-contained scenes in which you meet different people, do different things and travel in different ways (you might walk, hitchhike, drive, ride a bus or ride a taxi in each stretch of your journey). You can take actions that accumulate across runs to influence the likelihood of peaceful democratic change in the country or of violent revolution. Across multiple runs you encounter "seven" (eight, since one of the encounters is a duo) unique "protagonists" living through their own stories, and through their interactions with the nameless player characters you get to know these protagonists better; the UI shows how far along the story of each of these characters you currently are. They teach you skills that carry across runs and unlock new actions or dialogue options. If you reach and cross the border, the strategy you used for crossing is discovered and "the government adapts" (it becomes unavailable in future runs). It is also possible for the player character to just die/lose the game. So far I've been able to successfully cross the border in all but two runs.

I should point out, in case you're actually interested in playing this, that the named protagonists can be pretty goofy and over the top, but for the most part they don't take themselves too seriously and I appreciate the goofy humor of their encounters. The only character I truly hate is Zoe (I can explain why if anyone's interested!)

I have sunk about a hundred hours into Hunt: Showdown since discovering it back in November - this is the most committed I've been to a multiplayer game since Overwatch originally came out back in 2016. Managed to get my brother and my best friend to buy it as well, so I don't have to play it solo all the time, and so far it's just been fun. The sound design is great, and the skill ceiling is extremely high - I can see myself getting better and better at this the more time I sink into it. The general horror aesthetic wasn't something I thought I'd like (I don't watch horror movies, and the most exposure to horror games was watching my partner play through Silent Hill 2), but the PvPvE gameplay is fantastic.

If you have an extra $20 to snag Hunt up on sale, I strongly recommend it.

Pyre - Pretty game, actual gameplay not for me.

Tharsis - Not a lot of replayability in my opinion, real ass kicker of a game though.

I finished playing Grand Theft Auto V last week and this week I started playing Red Dead Redemption 1. (I was able to snatch 2 from the Xbox sale so I'll be playing that one next.)

GTA V was pretty fun, although I might end up playing from scratch at some point because...

Compared to GTA V, RDR1 is pretty different in terms of pace so I was not immediately hooked but I'm slowly getting there. I literally have no idea about the story of both games so it's fun to explore as well. RDR1 feels especially rough with controls, I can't get over how stupid the horse animation is when you land from a jump but it's a 12 year old game at this point (it doesn't look it!), I can't really blame it too much.

I also played Halo Infinite on the side (single player) but I think I'll put that on hiatus. It was my first Halo experience and while graphics and controls are pretty good (except while I was on vehicles, those didn't make any sense), I found the story to be uninteresting and missions to be repetitive. I came in with very low expectations and it surpassed them though, so that was good. Before it, I didn't think I'd ever play a FPS on a console but apparently they aren't too bad!

I've been playing the Outer Wilds DLC with my partner. They drive, and I observe and help with puzzles, like we did with the base game.

It's been great so far! A satisfying combination of intuitive mechanics and figuring things out. It basically feels like a whole new game once you find the new area. It's pretty spooky, but we're making good progress on figuring things out. And I really geeked out when we found the new stuff. It looks so cool, and reminds me of a particular book...

I beat Doom Eternal last night! Man, that game made me feel old and slow at the beginning, even after finishing Doom 2016 on Nightmare difficulty ("very hard"). I had to set my difficulty to Hurt Me Plenty ("normal")!

It takes some getting used to, but once you get through learning the mechanics and get adjusted to the new combat flow, it is just :chef's kiss:. I don't know if I can ever go back to the 2016 game, because my muscle memory is already starting to get overridden by this game, particularly with the addition of dashing. That's OK, though, because this game is so good.

I've already got the DLC, so I'm going to start it next before trying to up the difficulty rating for another playthrough.

Still playing The Outer Worlds. There's just simply not enough time in the day to play this game.

The first two locations you go into are very small and I was starting to appreciate that about the game, but the third world you go to is probably three times bigger than the previous two combined and is filled with creatures that are at least twice as deadly. Combat in this game isn't terribly difficult, but my companions are dying very quickly.

So having played this game for quite a while, all of the loops and mechanics that made this game are starting to become more mechanical in nature, and that's a real shame because my instincts are telling me to skip through the text when it's clear that there's still a ton of interesting and unique characters to interact with. And there's a ton of great interactions to choose from every time. I never realized it before, but the conversation system in this game is a game in and of itself; some choices will prevent you from using others, some will give you prestige and experience, and others may even change which quests you can go on or even the trajectory of the plot. If you were to strip off every other part of this game, I'd probably still enjoy playing it.

I've also been offered the choice of several character flaws, and while I like the concept, I really don't think that any of the perks are actually worth accepting the stat downgrades. Beside that, I don't think that the kinds of character flaws that I would want for my character are actually options.

On a completely different but related subject, I just watched a short video from Ben Crawshaw about why he never did a Zero Punctuation episode on Undertale in which he admits that he did not do the genocide route for the game because he genuinely liked the characters and didn't want to see them hurt; he opted instead for watching a lets play. As someone who felt the exact same way but chose to go through that route anyways, I'm starting to worry I might be somewhat of a psychopath.

I found Solar Ash just yesterday and I am already in love. It is absolutely beautiful! Gameplay wise, it is Shadow of the Colossus with the movement abilities of Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart (rocket boots, grappling hook, floaty movement). It seems like it might be short, but that is okay with me. Also, this is just reinforcing my belief that almost anything published by Annapurna Interactive is a must play.

Chess.

Some vacationing family members arrived from abroad, and one of them brought a chessboard. I took turns against him and his brother, both much younger than me. They beat me with ease four games in a row, half with a 10 minutes time control, half with a 15 minutes time control (at my request). They are obviously not bad players, but the mistakes I made were elementary even for me, blundering the queen away twice!

I was not habituated to playing on a physical board. Visualization is completely different! The fifth game was against the best of the two, and I was in a winning position when we realized that my opponent had made an illegal move at some point, exposing the king to a check. Since we didn't have the game notated and didn't remember our previous moves either, we agreed to draw, which was fine by me because I could make a ridiculous blunder any second.

I knew playing on a physical board can be hard if you're not used to it, but I didn't expect it to be so much worse. The adaptation to 3D pieces and board is problematic in and of itself, but playing with a human in front of you present is anxiety-inducing as well.

Practicing with a physical board would probably improve my visualization skills when playing online as well. I'll try to do that more often. Reproducing an online game on a physical board during play is considered cheating, which is kind of a shame. Not that they'd be able to enforce this anyway, but I don't think anyone would consider it questionable for unrated play.

I've got all these games I could be playing and... I've been playing Minetest. Specifically the Mineclone 2 game, which aims to replicate Minecraft 1.12 (because every game needs a target). I prefer it to Minecraft these days, even, as I don't really care about mobs beyond resources, which Mineclone provides solid mechanics for, and mostly like the cycle of mining and building until I get bored with it.

Fallout 4 and Skyrim are still in my rotation. FO4's settlements, when leveraged properly, help offset the cost of ammo which is nice, and I regret ignoring the mechanic on my first playthrough. I had to do a lot of wiki reading before deciding to clear The Castle, which I've determined I can do, as the radiant events don't start until the story is finished, and the story event doesn't happen until you get there, so I'm going to focus my energy in fortifying it with the biggest, baddest turrets I can get. I've also been staking settlements and dropping machine gun turrets to prevent attacks. In Skyrim I'm just bopping around, currently knocking out another main story step. With fast travel disabled it's a radically different, and much harder game, but in a fun way.

Morrowind/OpenMW: My first playthrough was a janky Redguard that was supposed to be a mage. It was a bad decision, so this current build is using what I know about the game. Like the rest of the RPG playthroughs I'm doing on games I beat last year, I'm just sort of vibing in the world, trying to override that urge to race across the finish and take in the worlds.