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

I started Gamedec (Game Detective). Stylistically the game looks like an isometric cyberpunk RPG a la Shadowrun, but functionally it's more like Disco Elysium (or so people say). There is no inventory system or any combat mechanics; the gameplay consists entirely of solving cases as a detective by having conversations, examining/interacting with things, reading through an order of magnitude more lore than you'd see in any Myst game and making deductions with the help of a very nice deduction view that collects facts you discovered and things you're trying to figure out.

I'm enjoying the game for the most part. It looks pretty good, and all the written information you're presented about the world and the characters you encounter hint at great care and dedication from the developers, at least during development. The premise is also interesting: In a future in which most people spend a lot of time in immersive VR, a whole range of crimes (both against systems and against users) can take place that can't easily be solved "from the outside" due to the sheer complexity of these simulations and amount of people involved, so Gamedecs step in to investigate within the game - the old-fashioned way. It's usually not possible to fully exhaust most characters' dialogue trees; what you choose to say can change their stance towards you, or they can choose to clam up or leave, denying you access to clues forever. Many dialogue choices require personality traits you acquire from a skill tree by spending points created through the actions you chose to take before. The game contains adult themes, as well as the occasional moral dillema to trip you up.

But unfortunately it's not all good. I fully subscribe to the complaint you'll find in several reviews about the quality of the text in english. I gather the developers are polish. I understand it's a lot of text, but there are loads of typos and ambiguous wording, even in dialogue choices, which can confuse you or lead you to make important mistakes that close off dialogue and deduction paths. Even when it doesn't matter, text in the codex, which includes interview transcripts and stuff like that, can have dubious translations(?). It's also littered with broken HTML-like tags, what appear to be incorrect separator characters, etc. They urgently need to get a proper proofreading/QA team, go through the whole body of text and fix it in a patch. Some things like the answering machine messages are also missing subtitles, which the developers are aware of (according to the steam forum) but are taking their time to fix.

There are other glitches and little things that lead me to believe the game didn't quite reach 100% development. Several seemingly important characters are missing either their sillouette picture (for dialogue sequences), their profile picture or both, appearing as just a black shadow. A character I never met was immediately added to my codex with his profile picture as soon as he was mentioned, but a character I've talked to who is relevant to the case he's part of never gets a picture at all! Also, some choices require you to reference lore in the codex in order to be correctly resolved (such as hacking sequences), but the codex does not "remember" where you were when you close it, so every time you want to access the relevant page you need to click through, scroll down, click through, scroll down... which is really annoying and tiresome. Some pages are missing and will show the content of the previous page you accessed. The codex always report there are unread pages even when there aren't any.

When you make a deduction, it's "locked in" and you can't change your mind about it. If all deductions were sequential I'd agree with this choice. However, deductions are often made in parallel; you need to decide on multiple factors before you can progress to the final decision. This means if you're still in the stage of your investigation in which you locked down one of those parallel deductions and uncover new information that makes it obvious you're wrong... well, tough, it's impossible to make the right choice now! This is very stupid and I wish the developers fixed it in a patch.

Sorry, I guess this ended as a full fledged review. Either way, despite all the nitpicking I'm enjoying it. It's a pretty decent game with (fixable) flaws, not the opposite.

EDIT: Pretty miffed as toward the end I was railroaded into a deduction I disagree with and now I'm basically forced to participate in dialogue trees in which my character behaves opposite to what I want them to, with no recourse. Oof. This is just bad.

Friends and I have been playing copious amounts of Project Zomboid. It's an isometric zombie survival game set in 1990s Louisville area, Kentucky. I've put in over a hundred hours over like a week and half.

Each player is randomly spawned inside a selected town, and then has to forage and salvage their way to survival, while attempting to evade and/or kill the zombies. As a player progresses, they learn skills like cooking, fishing, mechanics (to repair drivable vehicles), etc. Or as one friend put it, "It's like these characters woke up one day to find they've forgotten everything they've known." And if the player dies, it's permanent. They'd have to create an entirely new character, with new base skills and traits, to rejoin the game.

Like most survival games, it's very difficult in the beginning. But we eventually got to the point where we were pretty safe. Entering into winter (and seasons do affect the game and the characters), we had tons of food, clean water, guns and weapons, crafting materials, and more. We had like 10+ vehicles and two buildings that we barricaded/surrounded by a huge log wall. This relative safeness comes after we even upped the number of zombies and had them spread out a bit more. There are still locations where there are hundreds of zombies at like a street intersection, but we're amazingly clear where we're at.

As such, we've kinda considered that we've "won" that round. We're about to start a new playthrough where we'll drop in Louisville with guns and will have to fight our way out through hordes of zombies. Think "Black Hawk Down." Wish us luck.

I tried Half Truth, by Ken Jennings and Richard Garfield: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/287158/half-truth

It's good. I've only tried it with two players but the nice thing is it comes with a HUGE number of cards, a high enough number that you can't memorize them. I prefer this to something like Trivial Pursuit.

However, a lot of cards are US-centric, which makes the first-play experience poorer. I've started re-packing some cards that are just too reliant on american culture as a separate deck.

I picked up Resident Evil Village after all the GotY nominations and wins it got. I played through it five times, I really enjoyed it.

I still don't understand or get why it got all the GotY nominations and wins. It's a solid 7/10 game.

It's fine. It's not one of the great RE games that will convert non-RE fans like RE4, RE7, or RE2 Remake were. It's a competently made, heavily scripted horror game adventure with great graphics and interesting enemy designs. It's really creepy and spooky when it wants to be, and there's a lot of good action to be had. It's not dull at any point but it's also not particularly amazing at anything either.

Like, I just don't know what there is to say about this game. It's not remarkable if you've played an RE game before. If there's one thing about this one that stands out compared to other RE games, it's that its story is even more paper thin than any other RE story—and that's saying something to anyone familiar with how ridiculously nonsensical RE stories usually are. This one is so easily broken with even a moment's thought that it's completely audacious how little thought they put into it. So little that I can't even bring myself to dislike it and it circles back around into kind of funny all over again.

I'll put it into the spoiler section below so it won't be ruined for anyone who is curious and wants to go into it fresh but the story really is the only thing I find worth remarking about.

So, yeah. I've seen some wild fan theories to handwave or explain away all kinds of things over the years but I can't imagine how anyone, even the most diehard militant lore-based fans, would even begin explaining it.

And that's really about all the thoughts I've really got about the game itself after five playthroughs. This is the most heavily scripted RE game, probably ever. To the point that some sections really do feel like they're on rails. It's also one of the easiest RE games to explore and traverse in since it's a limited world (probably only the size of RE3 Remake's world, but that was at least a much more linear game) and enemies don't respawn at all. There's probably less combat sections than any other RE game as well. It's a serviceable RE adventure whose only really unique quality is a plot that's too brainless even for a Resident Evil title. Otherwise, it's RE7 style mechanics applied to RE4's general tone and design. It's neat enough that I had fun replaying the game multiple times, getting those infinite ammo weapons and playing on progressively harder difficulties.

That last part is the only reason I played through the game so many times. Well, that and that every subsequent playthrough is 2-3 hours long. This is something I've really come to admire about the RE series and something I wish more games would do. It harkens back to the pre-Xbox 360 gaming days when playing a game on multiple difficulties would unlock cool things like costumes and weapons, and every difficulty changed things enough that it kept things interesting and fresh. It's not just that enemies take more hits and you take less, but items and enemies get moved around, and the game offers tweaked and heightened challenges for those who have committed earlier lessons to mind. RE Village isn't the best application of this but it's proof to me that I enjoy the entire approach enough that even a decent game can be an enjoyable timesink when it offers good meta gameplay.

Any old-school adventure game fans here? I just completed A Mess O' Trouble, the classic Mac shareware adventure from Ray Dunakin. (That link points to a 2015 re-release for modern macOS, but I played the original World Builder version in an emulator like this one, to reproduce the experience I had growing up with Ray's games in the '90s.)

AMOT follows the player as an intrepid treasure-seeker, either Fearless Frank or Daredevil Dawn, through a mysterious interdimensional maze of worlds loosely connected by "jump gates" which flicker in and out of existence. The worlds are Revenue City, an abandoned Nevada mining town; The Void, an archipelago of floating dirt clouds populated with high-tech ruins and the colossal Voidbeast; the Enchanted Forest, a magical but decaying fairytale kingdom; the Isle of Lucy, fortified island home of a reclusive artifact collector; and Monolith City, a world of bureaucratic cliff-dwellers emerging from post-apocalyptic ashes while grappling with a new planetary threat. Your goal: Help the locals, save the worlds, and emerge from the Maze with as much treasure as your arms can carry.

The game sucks you in from the beginning: Upon entering the Maze you're trapped at the bottom of a partially collapsed mineshaft. I love the way the story starts small with a simple puzzle and a singular goal of escape. It teaches the basics and sets the tone for the rest of the game before fanning out into something truly epic.

Gameplay is standard World Builder fare for those familiar. It's similar to a text adventure, with written descriptions of every scene and a basic text parser for most actions. But there is also a graphical window with Ray's evocative black-and-white illustrations adorning every scene. Many objects are clickable to take or interact with, so you're frequently switching between keyboard and mouse as you play. Frequent commands like look, search, inventory, status, and navigation have keyboard shortcuts which are essential to memorize. The game also has sound but depending on how you're playing it that may not work due to known forward-compatibility issues with World Builder. The sound is not essential, but because sound playback is synchronous and blocks interaction / animations, you might think the game is frozen when you really just need to wait for it to finish playing a silent sound effect. I emulated a Mac Plus with System 6 to get the full experience w/sound and recommend that.

Like any good graphical adventure game, it's the tightly-crafted puzzles and stellar art + world building (heh) that really make it. The Maze is a joy to explore, with bizarre characters to meet and satisfying mysteries to solve. Each world's story is (mostly) independent from the others, so if you get stuck on a problem, look around for a jump gate and work on something else. I highly recommend keeping a scratch pad with you for notes, the game will occasionally expect you to remember code words and other things you have encountered previously. Getting around is fairly intuitive but you might find it useful to make your own maps as you go.

There are a few standard adventuring items you'll want to keep with you, like a rope, pistol, flashlight, and canteen. But these conveniently respawn in various locations if you lose them. Likewise you'll need to eat and drink regularly but food and water are not hard to come by in the Maze. And if you spend all your cash you'll find more of that easily enough too. Your flashlight requires batteries to see in the dark but again, more of those can usually be found when you need them. You also require regular sleep, which can be done anywhere, however you'll get in-game hints in the form of dreams if you do it in a proper bed. Personally I find these "survival" mechanics to be more of a nuisance than anything else, but it's not hard to stay alive, rested, and illuminated if you're paying attention.

It's almost impossible to find any information or walkthroughs for this game online, which I consider a tragedy. I'm certain there was plenty about it on the web in the '90s, and maybe some of those sites are still available in archive.org, but I can't find anything surviving on the searchable web today. Even after the 2015 re-release, sadly.

That said, AMOT is a well-constructed adventure game. Important objects are obvious, all the necessary information is provided fairly. The puzzles are mostly sensible and consistent. No pixel-hunting. Very little verb-guessing. There were a few puzzles I wasn't able to solve on my own, thankfully I remember fooling around with World Builder when I was kid... if you open the game executable with it, the full source is readable. Holy crap the World Builder UI and syntax are bad by today's standards, but I summoned the patience to crawl through until I found the solutions I was looking for (which in hindsight should've been pretty discoverable if I'd have found the same patience in-game). Since no walkthroughs exist, and I was able to complete the game, I'm happy to help anyone out who gets stuck following in my footsteps. Let me know, preferably soon while it's still fresh in my mind, haha.

The most frustrating thing for me occurred toward the end of the game, as my inventory filled with "maximum value objects," aka the treasures that are your goal for game completion with a high score. You have a finite carrying capacity and I had to keep dropping important stuff like my rope and canteen just to hold all the loot. I ended up dumping items in an accessible location I could return to if I needed them later. A number of "bonus items" in the game are automatically transported to the endgame for your convenience, honestly all of the treasures should have done the same as they have no practical use during the game.

I'll leave you with two useful hints if you're inclined to try AMOT:

AMOT is the final and greatest entry in the Ray's Maze trilogy, preceded by the original Ray's Maze and its sequel Another Fine Mess. If you enjoy any of those, I highly recommended you play his 1997 game Twisted! which is a quirky comedic mashup of the movies Twister and The Wizard of Oz, and the 1996 US presidential election season. Dated political satire aside, it's Ray's magnum opus, a phenomenal (if obscure) example of the adventure game genre done right. I've also beaten that one a few times and may be able to help if needed. These games really need a permanent home online for hints and guides! I remember chatting with Ray directly on AOL back in the day. Super nice guy but not really fair to hit him up for game help after all these years! Though I imagine he'd probably be happy to know people are still enjoying his creations.

I've been plugging away at Kingdom Come: Deliverance for a few weeks now, taking an hour here and there for each play session. I am still enjoying it greatly but I had to make some adjustments to my play style over the weekend. I hit two roadblocks, beating Runt and losing two hours worth of my time due to an ambush. Runt took me several tries before I gave up and loaded an earlier save to better prepare myself for the fight. Originally, I had jumped into the fight with only half health/stamina. Once that was finished, I decided to whittle away at side-quests. I spent ~2 hours going along a path working on them before heading back into town to rest and turn them in. Unfortunately, I encountered a bandit ambush along the way and died, without saving, losing all my progress. Sorry @Pistos, but after that I downloaded the save anywhere mod so I won't get too frustrated later on down the line and end up uninstalling the game. I haven't actually used the mod yet since I primarily save by sleeping, but I plan to use it for back-up when I'm ready to call it for the day and fast travel back to my location.

I'm playing Dorfromantik

its a very beautiful and chill game, that puts you in a state of flow and makes you dream about it. it has some challanges and rewards, but can be played and enjoyed by anyone. and once you "lose" you have this beautiful landscape you build. i'm playing it for 2 weeks and its already high up in my all time favourites.

must play for people who can't or won't invest hours of their day but still look for a deeply satisfying experience.

Superliminal

It was on sale on steam a week or so ago. Banged it out in one night in like 3 hours, convinced my friend to get it too, they loved it.

Real cool little FPS puzzle game about playing with perception, like making items get bigger or small when you pick them up and place them farther/closer from yourself. They pack a lot of creative puzzle systems in there and are great about changing up the environment and making it feel like a big package.

The best part, aside from it being fun, is that you can crank it out pretty fast and be satisfied. You don't have to spend a few weeks labouring over and completing the puzzles -- or the flip side where you just put it down out of frustration and never come back to it. It's just as long as it needs to be and leaves you with a grin on your face.

I've picked up Sayonara Wild Hearts a few times recently and managed to get a few more gold runs, which feels good. The four (I think?) levels remaining are going to be trickier for me to get gold, because they're longer and more stressful, and my health limits how many times I can play through a level in one sitting. But I'll keep trying periodically~

My partner and I finished the Outer Wilds DLC (at least, we think we did) - it got much spookier, and we actually turned on the "reduced jump scares" option because... Again my health, haha. But we figured things out, and when my partner was getting stressed at the last part I actually took over and got us through!

Interestingly, the end of the DLC actually encourages you to keep playing, so we're continuing (albeit at a more relaxed pace). Since we've already played the base game, we're in no rush, and I've actually been taking some turns. I've managed to crash the ship a fair bit, and I got it lodged so thoroughly in some geometry that we couldn't get it free. But I've also managed to land pretty softly (thank you, landing camera!) and help us fill up our ship's log.

Last Epoch

"Eterra is a world of gods and empires doomed to a ruined future unless the past is changed and the Void is stopped. "

This a newish aRPG that falls somewhere between POE and Diablo 3 in the depth scale. It is still in beta but plays very well. It is not P2W nor does it have a store or micro-transactions. I would say that it is like Grim Dawn but more fun and less dark.

The community is friendly, lots of good twitch streamers and websites to look up builds and loot. Multiplayer is scheduled for this year also which should be fun. The devs seem to be responsive and working hard to make something great.

Overall its a fun game if you like aRPGs and want to try something fresh and new.

I've been playing the free demo version of the game Terra Nil (full version is not out yet). It was described to me as a Solarpunk game, and I think the label fits.

You start in a desolate, toxic landscape and the different buildings have different functions to rejuvenate it and fill it with nature again. So far it's a fairly standard, if very satisfying and visually pleasing, base-buildings game. But at the end of the level there's a twist: now that the landscape is restored, you oversee the logistics of tearing your whole base down again, packing up the materials onto your airship and getting out of there, leaving nothing behind but a lush green wilderness full of animals. It's just a great inversion of the base-building mechanics that brilliantly enhances the pro-environment themes of the game.

Overall, both the art design and the leisurely pace of the gameplay make it a really chill and relaxing experience. The demo has only one level, yet I've found a lot of replayability in it, partially because the stage is randomly generated each time.

ROCKET LEAGUE SIDESWIPE : Link

It’s free, 2D, mobile rocket league and it is pretty fun. Been out for over a month I think. I’m super trash at the game right now but that’s kinda how it goes with rocket league lol.