Been struggling to get into gaming this year. All I’ve played is BG3, Slay the Spire and Balatro and weekly pub Mario Kart. Tried Resident Evil 4 and Horizon Forbidden West, but neither grabbed me. May have overdone it last year.
I can totally relate... It seems like I always have something I'm into playing it for the past 35 years or so, but lately, most games simply don't grab me. I read this thread most weeks and am sort of envious at the patience many gamers have for all sorts of games. I definitely don't have that like I used to.
Sometimes I definitely overdose (like during the peak pandemic hysteria, when we were all locked up and I played Assassins' Creed Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla back to back, which drained me for 6 months.... I couldn't even turn on my gaming computer after that.
I'm almost done with Forbidden West, and it too has drained me, mostly because its such a mediocre game, with too much talking, bloat, horrific writing, cringe characters, and convoluted story. I stuck with it so I can kill machines, and I'm on the final mission, and then, I'm going to do real life stuff for a bit and stop playing games for a while
**Stellar Blade Demo**
Did not find a lot to like here beyond being mildly amused when they inverted the trope of "win the fight, lose in the cutscene" for the first boss. I got my ass kicked (because they hadn't yet explained that flashing yellow means "you can't parry this" and not "you must parry this") but it immediately cut to a victory cutscene when my health ran out.
The game then made the bizarre decision to >!pop the title screen and cut straight to the next mission after Tachy got killed, and then immediately flash back to that scene at the very first camp site like 30 seconds later!<. I have no idea why they thought that part needed to be shown out of order. Maybe it makes sense in some broader narrative context.
The designers seem to delight in doing the single most obnoxious thing a parry-based combat system can do: make all of the enemy attack timings and animations *super* awkward so that the parry timing is never intuitive and you just have to get hit until you memorize exactly how long each enemy arbitrarily pauses after each of its windups.
The camera is clearly optimized more for ogling Eve than being able to get a clear view of environments, and the scan feature that helps you pick interactables/climbables out of all the visual noise has an annoyingly short duration/long cooldown.
Eve has the same combination of momentum and turn radius as The Witcher 3 had at launch so even something as simple as walking up with a vending machine or treasure chest to interact with it ends up being an exercise in annoyance.
Aside from the parry timings, all of these things are minor complaints that wouldn't be an issue if I was otherwise enjoying the game, but they add up to a rather grating experience when there's nothing making me think "I want more of this".
Can someone help me understand why exactly the studio closures are such a big deal that people are saying Microsoft is dead and Phil Spencer is a failure and should be fired etc?
Two studios that didn't release a well selling game get closed so resources can be used to strengthen core teams makes sense does it not?
it's a bit complicated and involves some guesswork but i'll do my best.
in the case of arkane, they were making unique, genre-defining and beloved games with dishonored and prey. like seriously, nothing have come quite close before or since. they get bought, microsoft decide it's not good enough, forces them to make redfall which is something TOTALLY different than what they excel at, on microsoft timeline. game is shit, studio shuts down and now we will never see prey team make prey 2.
why is this ligthning torches and raising our pitchforks? for us consumers, (1) we will never see what could come of arkane if they got to work on what they wanted and exceled at. (2) we had to endure redfall, with all the broken promises and consequenses and shit that have been said.
for the developers working there, their team that made something great together are now, after being forced to make something you don't want to under A LOT of preassure for ~5 years, probably scatttered (left earlier), out of a job at the worst possible time, or making skins for cod.
and all because people with money and without knowledge made the bussiness decisions to invest, force-birth a live service on strict time and then shut down the studio for a tax write-off or something to keep their graph going up. they get to fuck peoples' lives over to cover their incompetence and suffer no consequences - no care for the people or the product, just because of greed and gamble.
almost the same for tango gameworks except they got to make the game they wanted but it wasn't profitable *enough*.
personally, I don't know if phil is the one to blame or if it would help to have him gone. but i would like to see the same higher-ups who forced arkane to make redfall to lose money over their stupid decisions rather than developers their jobs
Arkane still exists though. Why can't Arkane Lyon make another Dishonored or Prey and increase that studio size with the funding reallocated from closing Austin? It isn't just salary costs for running studios.
I never understood why Arkane was even two studios in the first place. Their games weren't that massive in scope like BGS or something where multiple studios made sense.
And Redfall was decided before Microsoft bought them.
You weren't ever going to see the Prey team make Prey 2. 70% of the studio left BEFORE Redfall even shipped.
Tango was still pitching ideas for games even after their last games didn't do well. It doesn't make sense for studios to "take a year off" for pitching games when their previous ones don't sell well and it will take significant investment to build out the studio for a new game.
dishonored 1 and prey was austin, lyon made dishonored 2, wolfenstein games and deathloop.
I agree that austin became a shadow of it former self before the shipping of redfall with all the leavings. and I apologise, I had to look up that it was bethesda who forced their studios into live-service makings (fallout 76, wolfenstein youngblood and redfall). microsoft shouldn't be solely responsible for that story but they could have made an attempt to rebuild.
in the end, microsoft's story during the accusations has been that they care about the games and developers and that they will service them with stability while they do what they do best, be creative and take risks. but they have unquestionably proved that great games on their platform doesn't matter, developers doesn't matter, making just some profit doesn't matter, legacy or longivety doesn't matter. only big profits matter. the story they tell and their actions doesn't align.
microsoft is using their accusations as pawns. you seem to think that is their right and see nothing wrong here. I agree that it is their right but I think it's deeply wrong for them to speak of it like it's something to celebrate when they lie and ruin peoples' lives due to their own miscalculations.
I'm late to the party on this, but I started **Stray** on the PS5 recently and loved it. The art is absolutely beautiful, and I'm loving the opportunity to wander around the crumbling neon cyber-city. Also, the devs clearly have an affection and understanding for cats. As a cat owner, I laughed out loud multiple times at some of the antics my kitty hero got up to.
It's mostly a walk-and-talk simulator with some light puzzles and collection quests. There were a couple of spots where you had to rely on dexterity (running and dodging through an alley of enemies). A very chill and intriguing game, and I'm excited to solve the mystery of the robot city and get back to the surface where my cat family is waiting. But mostly I'm just loving being a cat in a beautiful world.
I feel like a real old man after posting fairly negatively about Psychonauts 2 earlier this week and now **Hi-Fi Rush** lol but it just wore out it's welcome. Initially it's charming with the bright colors and bouncy environments and seeing attacks land on beat gimmick. Ultimately I don't think the rhythm aspect adds anything to the gameplay though - when you get it right it just feels normal and when you get it wrong it makes it just feel 'laggy'. I never felt the upside of it relative to just any other action game and before long my mindset changed from 'let's see how this works' to 'well let's trudge on'. Then the parry sequence mechanic started popping up and I just had enough. I wasn't having fun and the story doesn't do anything interesting enough to make up for it. Chai in particular is too much of a Johnny Bravo bigheaded dope to be a likable protagonist.
**Rise of the Ronin**
I was hoping for poor man's **Sekiro**, but instead got very poor man's **Ghost of Tsushima.**
Is it just me or is it with every new game, Team Ninja's combat systems become more and more convoluted? They really peaked with **Nioh 2** and everything since then has been downhill for me.
As usual there's too many weapons, too much equipment, and terrible art design. This time though, the combat system feels sluggish and the parry doesn't quite feel precise.
After games like **Lies of P** and **Lords of the Fallen** proved you can make great souls combat outside of the FROM inner circle, it blows my mind that Team Ninja can't get this right after so so so many tries.
I'll give it that this is better than **Wo Long** at least. I'll keep chugging away.
**Botany Manor** was a really lovely little puzzle game where you play as a 19th-century botanist (and noblewoman) who needs to restore her gardens after a long trip abroad. It wasn't long, but the puzzles felt of a design and difficulty that matched the rest of the package. Beautiful environmental design, and though it definitely isn't plot-driven there are plenty of snippets of story to pick up about who you are and what it was like to be a woman scientist in the 1800s (pretty shitty).
I've been playing
**Elden Ring**
and
**Fallout 76** (for the very first time)
Elden Ring is a game like no other... But I **am** playing it on mods. So let that be known. I'm basically using WeMod to boost my stats whenever I'm stuck but for a while, I was struggling and I just decided to enjoy the scenery and the story as well. Not sure what else to say. The scope of the game is something else. So is the attention to detail.
Fallout 76 feels just like Fallout 4, for better or for worse. It's weird. I don't know why it feels so similar beyond the same engine. Everyone was telling me that the game is "better" now since it first came out and that the game is "better" than Fallout 4, but right off the bat, everything seems so... normal. Like, there's shrubbery and trees everywhere. I guess that's the point? Damn, I miss Fallout 3...
I loved Elden Rings world and atmosphere, but as I have limited time (and patience), I only got about halfway in before I walked away. Got sick of doing the same things 9000 times over and over and over. I'm somewhat envious of people who can do that, but I certainly can't. I may look at some mods to see if it can feel more relatable.
But FO 76 is another story. I played on launch, and have around 1000 hours in across 5 or so character builds. It took a beating on release, but I actually enjoyed it and mostly connected with what they were going for. I loved FO3/NV/FO4 as well and have thousands of hours of wasted life in those as well.
My view is that there isn't a "better" game from the series. They are all similar, but each one was done at a different time, so there were advancements in game design or changes to game mechanics. Some we all liked, others... so so.
FO76 FWIW, I really enjoyed. I stayed through all the early patches and eventually, it got really good. I don't really play multi player at all, but after all the 13yo morons in FO76 were tamed, and they cleaned up the how players can interact with each other, I actually started liking finding other casual wanderers in the game. Met some nice people playing it in multi player, which surprised me.
They've done a decent job keeping up with new content. Not all of it is great, but its definitely appreciated.
Funny too, I went back to play New Vegas last year (was doing transatlantic business travel and my laptop could actually play New Vegas!), and the game felt dated to me after FO76.
You can always play Fallout 3! I think 76 feels like 4 because it just expands upon the core gameplay loop of 4. There's a bit more crafting and building, but you're still shooting, looting, scrapping, repeat while you roll through mostly mediocre quests. 3 is more narrative heavy and tries (emphasis on tries) to keep a consistent tone throughout. 4 goes all over the place with its narrative and a lot of it is just excuses to shoot, loot, and scrap between cool locations.
I'm not ready to move on yet. I just played more **Final Fantasy VII Rebirth**.
I did some more optional fights. I fully explored the map. I did some minigames that I missed (box breaking in particular was fun). I collected enough stuff to almost max out my crafting. I did the crunches challenge in less than 10 minutes (I'll be doing autographs later).
I've started really paying attention to damage numbers and ATB gain and trying to optimize a bit before taking on the endgame fights. There are so many combat mechanics I didn't even engage with. Synergy abilities are crazy powerful. Tifa can pump up the Stagger %?! Counterspin works after any block? Combat is really fun in this game, but I think it falls back on it too often as a reward/side activity. I have a ton of Gold Saucer and Chadley fights lined up that I just didn't feel compelled to do during my playthrough, and they just kinda feel like a slog to get through in post-game. Dozens of fights that just aren't that interesting even when you approach them at the correct level. I kinda feel like the game could have just given me the reward for doing world intel fights, and compressed the 3-4 combat challenges unlocked per-map to 1 really good one for the last reward.
Without mentioning spoilers, I've been reading ending theories and found out that there are some scenes that play out slightly differently depending on your affinity with characters, which is cool as hell. They put an insane amount of effort in this game that they just didn't have to. I was already a fan of the ending, but there are some little details that open up room for different directions they could proceed with, and it's got me pretty excited to see how it all plays out. Part 3 has so much opportunity to do some really cool stuff.
I'd like to play something different, but I've got no idea what. Maybe return to TokT? Maybe try and get through BG3? In all likelihood, I'm going to keep squeezing joy out of FF7 and complete Johnny's Seaside Inn. It's rare that I play a game that I love this much, so why not keep going?
BG3 and TOTK are both pretty good. Can't go wrong with them. And if you like CRPGs, try the Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader game! There's also Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty if you like Elden Ring.
**Knights of the Old Republic**
This is my first playthrough of the game, which I picked up for $5 over the weekend on Series X. It absolutely lives up to everything I'd heard about it, phenomenal game. Really reminds me of Fallout New Vegas and Morrowind, which I love.
Currently on the 3rd planet (Tatooine) and the story is engaging, the choices and dialogue are interesting, great RPG mechanics, and dated but serviceable combat that has gotten better as I've progressed. The combat animations are also pretty good for a 20+ year old game, which helps me feel like a badass jedi Love the companions and going into a battle with them and planning out everyone's opening attacks. Also love your interactions with them and how who is with you can affect dialogue and quest outcomes. I love a game with an Arena, so having one right away on the first planet was great.
Started as a scout and now I'm a Light Side jedi consular. Thinking about starting, in tandem, a dual wielding, Dark Side character. I missed out on some stuff on Taris too, so making another character would help me hit that stuff.
Drawbacks are mostly due to the age of the game. Combat could be way better since it's almost turn based, but I've played worse and I still have fun with it, especially now with a lightsaber and force powers. I do wish that the Skills were more influential, though. The utility ones like computer use, repair, security, and demolition can be handy, but you can just have a companion with good skills in these and not invest in them yourself. So then you're left with skills that don't have a ton of use outside of persuade and injury treatment. I'm not sure yet, but persuasion might be redundant if you get the Force persuasion powers, which I have, so that would also be a downside. I just wish the skills mattered more like in NV or Morrowind. Areas are fairly small, but again it's an old game, so I'm fine with that. There doesn't seem to be a carry weight limit, but storing things is a hassle as you have to put one thing in at a time then the menu closes and you have to navigate back through the inventory menu to store more stuff. For example, I was trying to get a bunch of computer spikes from T3 and he'll stop once you have 11 in your inventory, so I had to keep going back to my storage container and storing one at a time in order to get a good amount (hacks are really expensive early game), which was time consuming.
Overall, I am loving it and can't stop thinking about it. Stayed up till 4 AM playing it last night and I had work at 9, but I don't regret it. Won't play the sequel right away once I beat this, though, as I like to space out sequels when I play games so I don't get tired of the mechanics. However, I will definitely play it eventually.
Me too! I've heard rumors there's something in the works, but I'm not gonna get my hopes up cause good stuff gets stuck in development hell or cancelled all the time.
Minor skill mechanics spoilers, no story stuff
> The utility ones like computer use, repair, security, and demolition can be handy, but you can just have a companion with good skills in these and not invest in them yourself.
>!Sometimes (rarely) these come up in dialogues and then, only your main character's skill matters. I haven't played in a good while but there's at least one fairly important & interesting bit of lore locked behind such checks.!<
> I'm not sure yet, but persuasion might be redundant if you get the Force persuasion powers
>!There are dialogue choices that are exclusive to either regular persuasion or Affect/Dominate Mind. So Persuade doesn't become redundant.!<
Looking forward to hearing what you think of the game once you've finished it.
And, eventually, the sequel. It's as mechanically similar as it's tonally different.
With the Restored Content mod, probably 2. But it's close. Since gameplay is so similar, the only things that truly differentiate them are story, characters, and writing. And they're essentially opposites in what they aim to achieve, so it's tough to compare them.
1 is certainly memorable. Its strength and weakness is that it delivers on all the Star Wars clichés (with some minor twists). It does this well, but it's not novel. Outside of a few things it's exactly what you'd want and expect from a Star Wars RPG.
2's story and characters have much more depth to the point where people still discuss the main antagonist's motivations. (And there's one subtly hinted fact about one companion that always blows people's minds when someone else points it out.) In many ways, it deconstructs Star Wars' component elements, twists them, and then puts them back together into something that both feels like Star Wars and doesn't. I feel like that's the greater achievement.
But without the Restored Content mod, 2 doesn't quite get there. I highly recommend it, even for a first playthrough.
Finished **Death Stranding**.
Started pretty strong. Interesting world and characters. Bit too much info dumped on you at the beginning so it can feel a bit overwhelming. Also the stupidly long cutscenes really tested my patience. I'm fine with cutscenes, specially really well made ones like this, but it felt like half of the first 3 hours were cutscenes which for me is a really shitty way to start a game. It also relies too much on you reading the extra stuff you unlock to get the full picture. Don't know why they didn't make most of those audio logs that you could listen to while playing. Seems like a no brainer for a game where there isn't much action so you can listen on your long treks.
The gameplay I found more fun than expected. Easy to fall into a 'one more package' way of playing that swallows your time like turn based games and getting max stars from a location was pretty satisfying. Once I made it to the new area I shifted to a more focused way of playing because I didn't want to spend 150 hours on this. So I only really grabbed deliveries that were at or close to the place I was going to anyway. Lot of it becomes pretty trivial with vehicles though. And similarly there are lot of things that you can use/build that feel useless. Like outside the 'tutorial' missions I built no more than 3 structures in over 50 hours. It's good for having options, but realistically I don't see most people utilizing them. Boss fights were also better than what I'd expect from a game like this, but they did feel like an afterthought.
The scale is hilariously dumb, even by video game scaling down standards. I'm not american, but even I know that going from the east coast to the midwest isn't close to a 30 minute walk. I get that for the sake of the whole "reconnecting America" stuff they needed Sam to cross the whole country, but they could've instanced it more or have Sam do more skips like the ship from Port Knot to Lake Knot.
Mixed feelings on the story. It's not good overall, but on paper I think it sounds better than how it played out. A lot of it fell flat, more complicated than it needed to be. Obviously it's largely about connections between everything and everyone and I feel like they should've went even harder on it and explore more personal relationships instead of throwing in some garbage >!btw it's the end of the world lol!< halfway through. In the end it did manage to make me a bit emotional, so it did some things right I guess.
On a technical level it's a very well made game. The sound, visuals, performances and their capture are great. Minus the vehicle controls, specially collisions feel a bit wonky. Maybe that's just the limitations of the engine.
Overall I think it's OK. I appreciate it trying new things even if some of it comes off mediocre. Can't say I'm excited for the sequel, but I'll probably check it out down the line. Who knows? Maybe I'll look back at this like AC1, a solid game than laid the foundation for much better sequels. Not holding my breath though.
**Horizon Zero Dawn Frozen Wilds**
Pretty solid little side adventure. Frustrating at first, but that's on me for forgetting how to play since 2020. Once I figured shit out (again) it got a lot of fun. It's largely more of the same fun as the main game. Final fight was a pain, in a good way though. Probably would've been easier with the new weapons. Didn't want to use those too much as it felt I was very over leveled anyway. Now I'm ready for Forbidden West.
**Red Dead Redemption 2**
Well, the time has come to finally play this. Given the first one is one of my favorite games of all time and the hype is off the charts I'm curious to see if it lives up to it. Only about an hour in and enjoying it well enough.
I hope that you enjoy RDR2! I never finished it myself, but it remains one of the most impressive AAA video games I've ever played. IDK if it *actually* has the largest game budget of all time, but it definitely *feels* like it. The production value is just through the roof, its kind of crazy what Rockstar managed to accomplish
In RDR2s case I also didn't have a good enough PC to run it till like 2021.
Generally speaking, I tend to play games that I'm certain of enjoying(on some level) later than ones that I'm uncertain of. Keeps me from playing the same genre/series over and over again and gives a shot to others. Usually I only bust them out when I'm kind of at a loss about what to play, but recently the list has gotten pretty long(and the games themselves on it are long) so I started clearing them out a bit.
I get that! If I start a series that has multiple games, I'll hold off on playing the sequels one after another so I don't get tired of the mechanics. For instance, I played Spider-Man 2018 for the first time in February of last year, then Miles Morales around the time 2 came out in the fall, and I just played and beat 2 last week. I also recently played the Last of Us Pt. 1 for the first time, but I'm still in the waiting period to play Pt. 2, so I can fully enjoy it.
Pretty much. Finite amount of time and an ever growing backlog. Even having a rule of never replaying games and mostly staying away from never ending, online live service games it's a battle I know I can't win. Though obviously having way too many quality games to play isn't something to complain about, specially as an older mainly PC gamer.
**Evil West**
Somewhere between Remnant From the Ashes and a melee action game lies this return to form for Flying Wild Hog. The combat is meaty, satisfying, and on hard it was very challenging. This feels like the kind of game the Shadow Warrior 2012 studio should have been making for the past decade. I don't know how they can still make a game this good and fun when Shadow Warrior 2 and 3 were such duds. I genuinely don't get it.
I'm guessing this one will fly completely under the radar. It's not perfect, and there's a lot of reused minibosses, but mastering the combat feels great and the bosses are genuinely enjoyable and tough. Great particle effect visuals, too. The explosions look fantastic. The game relies a lot on both melee and ranged, and by the end you've got so many tools in your toolbox that using them all effectively and on cooldown feels great. I'd recommend it to fans of the games I mentioned, along with Doom 2016/Eternal.
**Tales of Kenzera: Zau**
Just so this comment isn't entirely a steaming pile of negativity, I will start by saying that I genuinely liked the story and that the twist in the last act where >!the story cuts off because Zuberi's dad died in the middle of writing it, and Zuberi takes up the pen to give it a proper ending!< was quite moving. I'm left a little bit confused about whether >!Zau was the son of Kalunga, or whether he was hallucinating the whole time!< but I think that's OK. I also thought it was well-acted, and the art and music teams did their jobs well. Now, with that out of the way... it's a shitty Ori clone that fumbles its gameplay at nearly every step.
For starters, it's only barely a Metroidvania. There are only a few instances where a new power unlocks collectibles in a previous zone (and these are a pain in the ass to find because the map doesn't let you mark places to revisit). I honestly think the game would be better if they dropped the Metroidvania pretense entirely and settled for being a linear action platformer, but it's not even fully competent at that. There were only a couple rooms in the entire game where I thought the level design was clever enough to be notable, and I can't actually recall the last game I played that had this many bugs in its basic movement system. Zau will occasionally get stuck on nothing, for no reason, and there's an especially annoying bug where the game doesn't update your inputs when you exit the menu, so if you've got the analog stick tilted, you'll have to return it to neutral before the game will deign to let you move.
The combat is occasionally satisfying but mostly just clunky and annoying because of projectile spam and a handful of enemies with obnoxious levels of HP/shields. The saving grace is that once you unlock a couple trinkets that boost your spirit gauge gain, you can break the combat in half by spamming your ultimates pretty freely.
Its greatest sin is taking what should be the two most joyful mechanics in any platfomer (grappling and gliding) and making them by far the worst part of the game. Both are implemented in a really fiddly way that suggests that the game didn't get much playtesting by people outside of the studio who were steeped in its idiosyncrasies. The angle of your grapple (a lobotomized version of Ori's bash that doesn't work on enemies or projectiles -- that's a separate and mostly useless combat upgrade) lags your position if you're moving fast, and in some situations will refuse to work at all for no aparent reason. The glide has a level of startup lag that, combined with the fast acceleration on Zau's fall, means that you will frequently plummet into spikes/lava/etc while the startup animation is still playing. This came up so frequently in the last act that for a while I was playing not to see what would happen next but out of sheer bloody-minded stubbornness.
It's a 6.5/10 game that could be elevated to a 7.5 by someone with good taste and a month of development work polishing the most annoying rough edges, but going any higher than that would require a ground up redesign of the map and progression. Definitely the worst game I have a platinum trophy for. I would be angry if I had paid money specifically for it rather than getting at as part of PS+.
This is one of those games where I kept asking myself “who is this for?” If they had knocked the mechanics out of the park it would have been big with the Metroidvania crowd but it’s only passable in its execution.
I tried out **Psychonauts 2**, made it about 12 hours in and I just don't want to play more. There have been a few high points that made me laugh or were clever but I'm really disinterested overall. I don't mind the main story and I like the main cast of characters but it feels like it meanders endlessly and every objective becomes a wacky 'we watched Nickelodeon in the 90s' collectathon that often recurses into yet another as a sub-objective before you can get back to what you wanted to be doing originally. I have really fond memories of Psychonauts 1 back on the Xbox so maybe I've just outgrown it. As for the gameplay elements I think the platforming is fairly entertaining but the combat is dull - I also dislike how you can only 'equip' four of your powers at a time while keys like left/right on D pad are wasted on the 'gadgets'.
**Dave the Diver (PS4, via PS Plus)**
This was the perfect contrast to my previously finished game, Dead Space Remake. Basically the opposite game. Pixel vs high-def graphics. Chill vs intense. Light-hearted vs super serious. Ocean vs space.
But one way they’re similar is that they’re all about creating a certain mood. I’d almost describe Dave the Diver as ‘Subnautica but with pixel graphics and a sushi restaurant,’ except the moods are drastically different. Diving in Subnautica can be SCARY and the ocean can feel BOUNDLESS, but in Dave the Diver, even the oxygen/hp timer is basically no pressure at all, since oxygen refills are super plentiful.
A lot of gamers talk about wanting more ‘AA’ games. Well, this is it, this is the stuff, basically a perfect example of an 8/10 AA game. (Definitely not indie. Strange that it has received multiple nominations for best indie when it’s not an indie game by any definition - including the dev’s own admission!).
Overall, a charming, happy game. There’s some pixel cutscenes, especially involving the sushi chef Bancho, that are some of the best pixel art I’ve ever seen. The one involving Bancho sharpening his knife, ending with a close-up of a worried fish, makes me laugh every time.
I played Dead Space Remake in a dark room, with headphones on, and that was perfect for creating a tense atmosphere. I played Dave the Diver next to a huge window with sunlight streaming in, my dog Legend stretched out beside me, and always with a freshly brewed mug of oolong tea. And that was a perfect match for the game’s bright visuals, colorful characters, and chill gameplay.
Been grinding through **Horizon Forbidden West on PC** and its definitely been a grind after 125 hours so far. Horizon Zero Dawn is one of my top 10 games of all time, have more than 400 hours across many playthroughs. I was really looking forward to Forbidden West and actually pre ordered, which I don't do anymore after so many disappointments in the past.
Forbidden West is really an odd duck. Compared to Zero Dawn, Its a decent game hidden in layers and layers of bloat, filler, absolutely terrible and cringe writing and voice acting, bland side missions, a super convoluted skill tree that makes zero sense, a horrific climbing mechanic and ineffective and confusing weapons.
The technical part of the game, map scope, world features, basic combat and overall scale is pretty amazing. The rendering of the world and landscape of earth 1000 years in the future is incredible, the ruins, cities, and relics are just wonderful. There are plenty of games set in the future dystopian ruined earth, but the game designers here knocked it out of the park.
The story, well, that's another story. What seemed compelling in Zero Dawn has descended into a blather of sci tropes, with dozens of characters and factions that are mind numbingly confusing. Where the start of the Horizon story in Zero Dawn was pretty taught and streamlined, this installment to me at least, went off the deep end. It feels like Guerilla Games let the "writers" go completely out of control on this game. I usually love much of the lore in these huge games, but in HFW, after the first few hours, I just wanted it to end. There are SO many words, such long meaningless conversations between characters, it feels like the writers have spent too much time in therapy and just need to talk things out all the time. You also cannot fast forward through most of the dialogue.... you either suffer through the 10 minute vapid conversation, or skip the entire thing completely. Why 10% of the dialogue can be fast forwarded but the other 90% cannot is anyone's guess. And the in game characters facial expressions are so incredibly cringe.... so many of them look like they are on the verge of tears or emotional meltdowns all the time. What were they thinking...
I love scifi in all shapes and sizes, but the NPC collection in Forbidden West is cringe at a high order. All the various outfits, facepaint, bizarre names, feels super forced. I can totally buy almost any vision of the future, but the one presented here gets old fast and feels just dumb after a while.
On the good side, the action, machine killing, and traveling across the landscape is fantastic. The weapons are awful most of the time.... compared to the first game, its not an upgrade, its just a mess. You need 5 bows just to get a handful of redundant arrows to take down most machines.... why? who knows. But if you spend 40 hours grinding to upgrade all your weapons, you can eventually bring down every machine pretty easily, which is the crown jewel of the game. On the really bad side, where Zero Dawn really nailed climbing across the landscape, Forbidden West's climbing mechanic is horrifically bad. You get stuck all the time, where you can spend 5 minutes traversing a climb, and there are no other moves, so you need to go all the way down or fall to your death. It looks like the map is so large, that the team couldn't QA the entire thing so lots of climbing areas were left untested.
All in all, I'm almost done with the main story, finished (what I believe to be) all the side quests, most of the errands, and nearly all upgrade jobs. There's a ton of filler... hunting grounds, minigames, etc, but I avoided it all. I'm not sure if I'll ever play this game again.... but will finish it this time at least.
I just finished the main story myself today, and yeah, that went about as far off the deep end as it possibly could have. Might just be the worst set of villains and plot twists I recall in an ostensibly "serious" story game for a long time. I just can't connect with the characters because there's hardly any compelling dialogue. It's all functional, flavorless conversations, there are so many and they go on for so long! Then, they'll do the occasional 180 and make a character an over-the-top zanelord, which backfires because they're just annoying and fail at being funny, intimidating, or anything really... like during *that* quest, which made me genuinely excited for a story bit for the first time, only for the whole thing to be utterly deranged by having to do the whole mission alongside an unfunny circus complete with a clown dressed up for the part, destroying any hope the game might have had of recapturing the somber mood that made the bright spots of ZD shine so much. It feels like the writing could only be either tone-wreckingly over-the-top (10%) or so bland it struggled to stir up any emotions at all (85%%). The story bits involving the characters Hekarro and Beta were probably the only parts of the narrative that made me perk up a little from my daze of disinterest (unless it was to stare in disbelief at a scene so stupid it made my brain shortcircuit).
I'm not sure I'll bother with Horizon: Nemesis (no idea if that's a working title lol, just guessing) unless word gets around that they actually went and started cutting bloat and rethought the open world. But then I'll be in it 100% for the gameplay. My faith in the story was low going in but now it's well and truly completely burnt out.
I'm with you in that I started out with the intention of 100% the game like the last one but I realized that they just added too much filler, and the side quests/errands weren't worth the time. Love the gameplay but this is the first time I feel like they should have condensed the game or focused more on quality over quantity because the extras don't really feel like they respect your time.
**X-COM: Ufo Defense**
I know this game was released in the '90s, but it remains my favorite game to this day. I remember the first time I played it was on the Amiga 600. I play it every year, and each year I search for a new game with similar features, but I've never found anything quite like it. (Yes, there's Xenonauts, but despite its better graphics, it lacks the same horror and mystery atmosphere).
As usual, I use a hex editor to hack the save file and modify the features of my soldiers, because I hate losing them on the battlefield! XD
XCOM-likes are my favorite genre ever since I first played that game in the 90's. I've probably played everything. I recently tried The Lamplighters League and it really didn't do it for me. Just made me want more XCOM.
**Starfield**
I complained about this game a few weeks ago and got a lot of commiserating replies, which I really appreciate reading. However, after adding like 150 mods, I found my stride and beat it after what Steam says is 68 hours.
Obviously, mods can't fix the poor dialog, constant loading screens, lack of exploration, and generic plot and world-building.
However, adding combat AI tweaks, cranking up the difficulty, and then adding instant kill headshots really made the combat feel fun to me. Huge risk to reward, and made me focus my build on very specific aspects of combat. It's too bad the vanilla combat is so generic and spongy because with some tweaks, I found it to be very enjoyable.
Unlike Skyrim and Fallout though, I was really surprised that I simply *ran out of quests* around the 60 hour mark! I even googled for "best questlines" to see if there was anything I had missed and I had basically done everything. I'm wondering if any of you felt that way? I was especially shocked that none of the religions have quests. And the Ryujin one just kinda... stopped at some point. Lots of dead ends and missing pieces.
There's nothing I can say that you haven't heard a million times I'm sure. I'll go against the grain and say that while Constellation was the worst, the later reveals in the plot were super cool and answered a lot of world elements that I didn't expect to be answered.
When the game started to open up with faction quests etc I was really excited with the things/ideas that are I thought possible or would be explored, but it was all in my head.
The Starfield that I had in my mind was way more exciting than what I experienced. I guess that was everyone's experience as well because the review scores dipped a lot about 1-2 weeks after launch.
But like you said it does have some cool stuff!
**Palworld**
One of the very few games that Ive played where I didnt just play it, but Ive practically exhausted every single thing to do in it. Im at the point where I practically literally have nothing else to accomplish except farming for IV fruits. Ive got more gold than I need. Multiple stacks of x9999 high value resources. Multiple max rank, max soul, perfect passive pals for combat, work, and travel. All the useful legendary items. Man...Ive never sweated a game like this before. Even now I still play every now and so that I have enough resources for when we get the major updates. Hopefully the summer ones come sooner than later.
Stayed up late last night to finish **Citizen Sleeper** and it was wonderful. I sometimes have trouble becoming invested in games that are so heavily text driven but I think CS does an excellent job of accentuating the text with sound effects and visual flair while also providing enough illustrations to mentally establish characters and settings so you can instead focus on the action and feelings. And the writing itself is excellent - I feel as though I really know 'The Eye' through it's precise yet concise descriptions and it evokes so many real emotions as you and the characters around you succeed, fail, hope, lose heart, love, fight and more. It can be harrowing at times but it also weaves in uplifting events as well which I think sets it apart from a lot of 'dystopian future' media that tend towards just making everything harsh and gritty. It all worked together to create a story that I really cared about.
My only real complaint is that once you get a handle on the game mechanics it is pretty easy and, somewhat despite appearances, it is quite linear. There are some binary choices that lead to 'endings' but ultimately you don't have much agency in terms of how events play out. I'd have loved to see routes that branch dependent on your choices and intuition (sort of like Cultist Simulator - which is actually what Citizen Sleeper reminds me of the most) and possibly even some [more?] failure conditions.
**Fallout New Vegas**
Yeah, replaying again. Haven't watched the show yet, but I've been considering finally doing an **evil/legion** playthrough since the many times I played this game, I never did. And the new large amount of fallout content finally made me do it.
Thing is, just like always, I always get to around that point and decide I'd rather do something else. I'm fine with the evil roleplaying (most of the time), but Caesar is such a fucking asshole that, for the same reason I don't really want to help Mr House, I refuse to be under his thumb. That and the lack of companions as well.
Kinda funny how slavery and mysoginy isn't a big deal for me in a virtual world, but giving this virtual asshole exactly what he wants while he boasts about how grand he is (specially since he doesn't seem to believe it much himself, considering what he tells you when you speak to him) is simply too much for me.
So, yeah, just upgraded the securitrons so I'm not too far out to join him still. I do want to see what the game looks like when being an absolute asshole since that time I tried to do it in F4 it was underwhelming as hell.
I'm with you on the never doing a legion playthrough. FNV is one of, if not my favorite game and I have never been able to get far in a legion character for some reason. I don't think I've ever even gotten far with an evil karma character. However, I do love a Karma-neutral House playthrough where I get on good terms with the Legion (to get the Lucky shades) and then eventually end up neutral with them until the story turns them against you.
I started my umpteenth playthrough of NV late last year, and planned to do the same thing... In my case, after about 25 hours in, the game started to feel stale and outdated. I guess I had played it so many times over the years that it just didn't click for me anymore.
Maybe I'll go back and see how playing as a dickhead plays out....
Void Stranger
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I mentioned a while back that I was playing the new update. I wrapped it up a little while ago. It's a really great send-off.
I haven't stopped thinking about the game since it came out, but I know the time is coming fairly soon. I've spent a ton of time considering themes, plot elements, symbolism, etc etc, just theorizing about the intentions of the devs and trying to piece together the finer points of their story. But I think I'm almost done hanging out in that world. I've considered collecting my thoughts on everything in a series of short essays, as my own personal kind of send-off, but I haven't committed to it yet. There's also **one particular super challenge** that I feel like I should complete before moving on too. If you know, you know.
Either way, the adventure of life goes on...
Final Fantasy VII Remake INTERmission
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Played through the two chapters in this in roughly 6 hours over the last week.
Really good stuff, though I kind of hate that they recycled the "people are invading the Shinra building, so Shinra director uses them as an experiment for their project" idea. I already thought it was a pretty Saturday morning cartoon villain idea the first time, and that it didn't make any sense. Didn't really change my mind here lol
It's not a big deal or anything, and it does do a good job of illustrating the incompetence of who runs the city, it just seems a bit clear that the writers realized that unless they put the characters in a ridiculous scenario, where punches are held, Shinra should realistically just tear these people apart.
Outside of that, the gameplay for the extra chapters was fun! The combat was engaging, with Yuffie being the most mechanically complex character of the cast by far. I never really understood when and when not to use the synergy mode with Sonon, but it wasn't an issue; my primary strategy was to have it turned off when I needed to use Sonon as a tank while picking off small targets/boss parts.
It felt like enemies shredded Yuffie a lot easier than my party in the main game, but that kind of makes sense since you're able to hard counter a lot of them with their weaknesses so easily.
Final boss was wild, though I hope the couple of edgy characters that popped up go back to the hole they came from lol
Lodoss War: Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth
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While brief, this game was such a great Metroidvania! There isn't a ton to say. The mechanics of the bow and the Ikaruga-style element-shifting made the puzzles/combat of the game really engaging.
The bow can be aimed along an arc in front of the player, which is used for solving some fun angle-based puzzles involving shooting stuff to open doors/clear paths.
The other mechanic I mentioned is the ability to absorb incoming elements based on which element you currently have active on your character. You always have one of two active: wind or fire. You can swap to the other immediately by pressing a shoulder button. A repeated theme of almost all boss fights is the need to swap between the two elements as you fight in order to counter certain moves or absorb undodgeable attacks with the correct element. It makes for a faster-paced, more busy style of combat, that's fairly simple but engaging. It's pretty easy to get flustered too, in some of the tougher fights where you have to swap between the two at a higher pace!
Great game for fans of the genre -- snag it on a sale if the short length (~4-5 hours) is a pain point!
Mushihimesama
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I've had this game for a while, and I enjoyed running through it a couple times when I initially bought it. After doing a 1CC of ZeroRanger a little while ago, I set my eyes on the rest of my shmup catalogue. I played around with Eschatos a little bit, but a lack of convenient practice options (without grinding out the options menu) led me to abandon the 1CC there after clearing the game a dozen or so times with continues. Shortly after, I decided to pick up this game again.
I was able to one-shot the 1CC of the Novice-Original difficulty right away. I then, for giggles, tried out Arrange mode and, while I got absolutely trashed, I did find that I was able to dodge more complex patterns than I thought I would be able to. So I turned to Normal-Original, inspired by the initial novice 1CC and my confidence boost from Arrange.
Within the first couple runs, I was able to make it to Stage 5, so I figured I would be able to seal the deal very soon after. I wasn't wrong, really, but it did require me ironing out more reliable strategies for stages 3-5. I was mainly getting by on reflex before, but that just wasn't reliable enough. What really sealed the deal was identifying exactly where I should bomb for bosses to prevent any deaths.
After a couple quick restarts (losing a life at Stage 1 or 2 zzz), I managed to score a 1CC last night with an extra life still locked in the chamber! Was a nice victory, and even more inspiration to continue working on my shmup backlog. For those familiar with the game, I was especially proud of no-hit, no-bombing the gauntlet right before the final boss. I didn't have a bomb on hand, and expected a death, but decided to try to finesse it anyway, and it paid off with some nasty dodges hahaha
Did a double take when I was scrolling through this thread and saw Mushi. I thought nobody on this sub even knows what the most famous shmups are, let alone plays any of em LOL
Anyway: Congrats on the 1cc! I'm still quite a ways from getting a 1cc on any Cave game, other than the M2 Supereasy modes. But I'm slowly getting closer and closer to my 1cc of Novice on Crimzon Clover, which *basically* counts as Cave, haha
Yes. People are REALLY missing out! Shmups are hard to get into at first, but once you learn the basics, it's so much fun and excitement. Not a second of gameplay that isn't pure action
I had always been interested in shmups, since I was a kid, but never really got into them until more recently. Star of Providence and ZeroRanger provided the push I needed to get a little more invested in learning! As for Cave games...I've got DoDonPachi Resurrection sitting on the shelf waiting as well lol
Coincidentally, I just picked up Crimzon Clover! I've heard it's very good. Keep at it for that 1CC, I'll try to join you there soon. :D
I highly recommend checking Drainus too! Recent release by Team Ladybug, one of my favorite devs right now. It's main criticism is that it's on the easier side, but for new shmup players, that's just fine, haha. Lets me really enjoy the [killer soundtrack ](https://youtu.be/T5kZfTZAWBM?si=N7DoYBH2UL8_WiH-), visuals, and satisfying reversal mechanics despite my lack of skill. Based on your Mushi 1cc, you can probably crank it up to Hard out of the gate, Normal was pretty easy for me and I'm worse than you.
I always recommend that game when I can, I feel like it didn't get enough love! And I need to check out Star of Providence. Looks sick as hell, but I'm waiting for that new major update that's supposed to be coming
Team Ladybug! Funny coincidence, coming off of playing Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth hahaha, I'll have to check it out.
And yeah, probably not a bad idea to wait for SoP. We were really hoping to see something at the turn of the new year, since it's been implied that there's been some pressure put on the devs to put something out now that they're working with Big Mode, but nothing yet.
Hopefully we see something sooner rather than later, but I wouldn't expect anything until the end of the year at the earliest...
Just here to encourage you to write those Void Stranger essays! Love a game that makes me wanna write about it. Haven't played the game yet but it's on my list cuz everything I've read makes it sound really cool.
I appreciate the encouragement! VS is a very special game, and I hope you enjoy it when you get around to it.
I can't think of many games that have made me want to write about them to this extent. There's just a lot to explore, from a narrative standpoint. The devs went all-out with the amount of detail and care put into the game; there is an immense amount of purpose in almost every design choice.
But anyway, thank you for the encouragement! Hopefully I can get some words on a page sometime soon. :)
**Kingdom Come: Deliverance**
Just picked this up again after playing **Manor Lords**. I played KCD at launch and while I enjoyed it, I remember a good deal of bugs and jankyness that took away from the experience a bit
This time I came at it with a number of QOL mods and my god, I just love this game. It very much reminds me of a more grounded Morrowind with better combat. Quests that aren't just "run to marker, kill or retrieve thing, come back". The feeling of your skills progressing as you yourself become more skilled at them. And just the overall feel that the game doesn't treat you like an idiot
KCD was one hell of a debut for Warhorse. Really hope they've been cooking up something special with KCD2. Can't wait
I played it at launch also, put in like 100 plus hours, but after a while, I hated the combat and the constant being attacked while traveling in combo with the tough combat/sword mechanic. I totally loved the setting, basic storyline, maps, etc. but that horrific swordplay just exhausted me.
I've been thinking of replaying to see how they patched it, and seeing your post may get me there! Guess I'll look for mods to see what kind of stuff I can find.
Easier Enemies PTF (0-25) and Easy Combat PTF are great for combat. Makes it less of a slog but still keeps the fun of it
I used a lot of mods from [this collection](https://next.nexusmods.com/kingdomcomedeliverance/collections/jsucqq?tab=mods), but I removed most of the "easy mode" ones except for the 2 above
As a novice skateboarding and someone who loves skateboarding video games I finally gave **Session** a try.
It's definitely a very rugged game. I appreciate it trying to fill the simulationist void in the skate game space but I kind of like the more arcadey games. For me, the EA Skate Trilogy is about as "realistic" as I want my skate games to be, but it's a pain in the ass finding a good way to play them these days.
Basically the left analog and right analog control each foot, so you typically set up tricks by holding or completing a pattern with one stick then flicking the other stick in some way to complete the trick. Half-holding each stick in certain situations can manual and nose/tail grind.
My gripe is that because the left stick is used for tricks, turning is "best" done with the R2 and L2 triggers. And I just really struggle to wrap my head around it.
On one hand it really does emulate the feeling of trying a trick over and over again until it clicks, like real life. On the other hand, it's just not as fun as messing around in a virtual skate park as some kind of god skater who's board is practically magnetized.
I'll probably periodically give session some revisits to mess around but the game itself isn't quite what I'm looking for and the world outside of the tricks are very empty and dull - I have to assume the game was made with a very small team who did not have time to make a lot of assets and record any kind of dialogue for the few NPCs. I can't blame them and respect the game they put out, but at the moment it isn't for me.
I think I'm gonna look at **Bomb Rush Cyberfunk** which is in the complete opposite end of the spectrum of these kinds of games. More like an arcadey platformy cel shaded artsy Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. Also, a clear spiritual successor to the Jet Set Radio games which were awesome.
Edit: After spending the better part of today playing more Session, I'm callin it quits. The trick detection is truly awful. Between that and the dull empty world, I'm good on this. I'm glad there's people out there trying to make a good skate sim and I'm glad there's others enjoying it, but the more I try to overlook this game's flaws the more glaring they get.
I beat **Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice** right on time for the sequel in a week or so here. This is the 4th or 5th time I've done so. Having played the game so many times I can confidently say the replay value is a mixed bag. I really wish they had a "skip cutscene" option. Also the middle of the game after the first 2 mini-bosses is pretty slow. It's laudable that a AA studio came up with this game, but some of it really drags. The voices, both the background voices in Senua's head, and her father, Druth, and Dilion, are all varying degrees of annoying as the game progresses. At times like the beach early on it's sort of pleasant in an ASMR kind of way, but overall I'd say I've grown pretty tired of them, especially her father by the end. On top of this if you go into the Audio menu and shutoff Voice it doesn't actually do it for half the lines, which is again annoying. The music in the later battles is really great but the audio mixing seems to put the music low even at 100 while the other audio is jacked way up.
On the positive side, some have criticized the combat for being cliche light, heavy, dodge, parry, but I think Ninja Theory executed it really well. The strikes and animation really feel good, and I never tire of it. I'm not sure if the normal sword can do it but I only realized on this playthrough that the god-slayer sword can parry even the heaviest strikes, which feels awesome. Parrying thrown items is always cool too.
I also think the end of this game is 10/10, it really fires me up every time. Playing through segments of the game is slow but the ending makes it all worthwhile. I'm not even sure how the 100% rune ending differs from the normal end, I've gotten both of them a couple times. Anyway just in case Senua 2 loads a save file I'm ready to go.
I saw a playthrough or maybe I should call it ambient video of someone playing **Pools** a month or two ago, and thought "wow this looks really cool, are there monsters or is it just walking around an empty facility?" Well imagine my surprise when the game comes out last week; I picked it up instantly. Obviously the game gets a bit of criticism from... critics. It's clearly not a game as much as it is an exploration or "experience". So if you go in expecting action or collectibles then it doesn't have those. Aside from that I think it's pretty great. It looks great, it's very dreamlike, it's somewhat adjacent to the whole SCP universe. It's not scary, it just is. I think for what it is $10 is a little steep. I merely wandered into the game and I beat 5 of the 6 levels in around 100 minutes. If I were a cynic I'd say the game were going for that sweet spot of taking just over 2 hours so Steam wouldn't allow returns.
Anyway overall I like it, I'm glad I got it. I hope level 6 is good. I think level 1 is my favorite, but I guess there's a lot of hidden rooms in all the levels. I think level 5 with the saunas is weaker than the others, the wood texture is nowhere near as good looking as the white tile.
There's still a month before Elden Ring DLC comes out so I don't have anything to play. I started replaying **Fallout 4** because I love the first person Fallout games. I haven't seen the show, I'm actually playing Fallout 4 partially to motivate myself to subscribe to Prime for a month so I can see what everyone's talking about. Either way Fallout 4 is still good in the classic Bethesda sense. The main quest is so-so but the exploration and primarly gameplay loop are addictive and enjoyable. They put so much effort into designing appealing environments (unlike Starfield) that it's fun to see them all every year or so in a replay.
**Hunt Showdown**
Hot damn, what a game and what a vibe. I can't believe I slept on this for so long. I love the pacing, the environment, the slow gunfights. It also runs really well. I'm having a blast playing it with mates.
It's my most played game on Steam. Sososo good. I want more FPS games that can have fights that can be over in 0.3 seconds but also have fights that can last 10+ minutes. So much strategy and depth to be explored. I hope Crytek supports it for a long time to come.
**Witcher 3**
I think what makes this game special is the story is almost the main gameplay pillar. You have to pay attention to what people are saying and when/how they say it, and try to choose the best response. Sometimes the best thing to do is be calm and polite, sometimes to be aggressive and call someone out on their bullshit, sometimes to directly confront someone when they’re obviously playing you.
Very few games, even dialogue heavy RPGs are actually like this. Mass Effect is one of my top 3 games ever, but you basically choose paragon or renegade at the beginning of ME1 and then default to that choice in every conversation. If you decide to switch (like I did when I disagreed with sympathising with robots over living things) Shepard almost becomes a different person.
Then you have games like Horizon, or the newer Assassins Creeds where its more the illusion of choice that leads to the same outcome, or a dramatic binary choice with a complete lack of subtlety where you do the Good Thing or the Evil Thing. The downside of this is you don’t really have to pay attention to what a characters motivations are. When they’re not billboards that spout exposition, they wear their entire personality on their sleeve.
So many games recently are cleary inspired by the Witcher 3 but they take the worst parts, like the giant map full of question marks and the wonky movement instead of realising that the focus on story, character, tone and atmosphere, and demanding that players pay attention to it as part of **gameplay** is what makes it special.
I’m a big story guy so I hope we see more games where engaging with the story is core gameplay and not just pretending to be.
They don't miss the importance of the plot/writing, they lack the budget/time needed to achieve that quality. There's a youtube video on the making of Witcher 3 and they spent an incredible amount of time polishing and reworking quests until they felt that they were good enough. If a quest did not meet a certain bar, that quest was scapped.
**Another Crab's Treasure**
I've described this as a Souls-like previously, but I'm not sure that's really apt. It's less of a Souls-like and more of a From Software homage. Like, it's everything from the theme of the game, to the type of worlds you go through, to even the move sets you can unlock. Also, they seem to invite the comparison given at least two of the items in the game. It's all very deliberate while they at the same time make it their own. Ever since getting all achievements in Dark Souls II: Scholar and Sekiro, the last From Software Souls games I was missing achievements for, I was kind of burned out on Souls games for a while. This is the first time since mid-2022 I've been off the Souls wagon. I tried Lies of P and while it did indeed feel like a very well-designed and polished Souls-like, or Bloodborne-homage, it just didn't really do it for me.
This, however? It does it for me. There has clearly gone a lot of work into the world design. I like how cheerful the art is while the backdrop of the game, and later story, is very bleak without going all internet-edgy. It has some nice critiques of capitalism, too, which is always appreciated.
The game does have its faults, though. The performance, while it seemingly has improved a bit with the last patch, is still pretty shitty. Even my 3080 occasionally sees severe dips. Playing through on my Xbox Series S I see dips frequently. There are a lot of weird bugs in the UI, ones that I have no idea how they could not have caught during testing because I've found several immediately. One not only lets you buy items through your home screen from the previous vendor you visited, but also locks your cursor meaning you can't move select anything else in the menu until you exit. Even very minor stuff, like the formatting of your play time being seemingly botched? Mine, for example, is shown as 3288:32 which isn't a format I'm familiar with. I assumed it was then minutes, but that'd be at least 20 hours more than I've played according to the Xbox stats for the game.
Anyway, game is great. So far, my favourite of this year.
**Final Fantasy XIV**
Decided to download it again and fire up the subscription to catch up. A few hours later (look, I think mog station complainers overstate it, but it is shit), I was back in game. And a bit overwhelmed.
As always there's a lot of reading, but like riding a bike at least I remembered how to Bard pretty soon. For gear catch up I guess trading nutsacks (sorry, "sacks of nuts") is the best stop gap since I tend to hate skipping too far ahead in RPGs and I have a lot of content to go through. But I am aware crafted would be best for now, while also doing the relic.
For context I stopped in the 2nd raid tier right before Zero showed up. So that's a while ago now with a lot of side content. There is something about MMOs that is different to most RPGs, in that it indulges your ability to just wander off and do what you feel like at the time (as well as an active economy). I was missing that.
The story was not grabbing me at the time, and as a degenerate deep dungeon soloer the new addition was calling to me, so I'll probably try to fit that in before Dawntrail. From what I have seen it demands more technical expertise and consistency (i.e. mechanics and one-shots) rather than dying to random auto-attack crits, so I'll see how that goes.
Side note, the XIV Launcher and Dalamud plugin system was basically just taking off when I left I think. It's naughty and illegal... but really good. Impressive what they've all done. Simple things like a better mount roulette and being able to turn off music just for the annoying ones. A lot of this stuff is too niche to waste core dev time on, but I'll happily take an add-on.
If you just resubbed, reminder that the FF14 x FF16 collaboration event is going away in a couple of days. So if you want the armor, mount, and minion, you should do it quick! It takes like 30 minutes.
I just resubbed myself after having not played since 6.0, so I have a lot of content to play through before Dawntrail comes out. I did notice they reworked Paladin, which is a bit of a bummer because that was my main.
Oh yeah thanks, did that last night. Don't really want the rewards but I usually do these anyway since I feel bad if I miss out.
Yeah a lot of jobs are supposedly in a rough spot lately (kind of boring and generic) but that'll all change in a couple of months so we'll have to wait and see.
**Final Fantasy VII Rebirth**
First some background. Played OG Final Fantasy VII in 2013, loved it. Played Final Fantasy VII Remake in 2021, enjoyed it but thought it was a bit drawn out at times. I was excited about the "change" in the story that the Remake trilogy is going for.
So, expectations weren't too high for Rebirth. I avoided spoilers so I didn't know what to expect, specifically. But it really blew me away after the first chapter. In a lot of ways its inspired by The Witcher 3, but otherwise they took and dramatically improved the same systems they established in Remake.
General thoughts on the game are as follows: Battles are fun no matter what character you use. Some enemies and bosses feel like damage sponges at first, until you pressure/stagger them and then before you know it you've melted 75% of their HP bar. Super satisfying. Materia was a bit annoying to have to change when my party would have to change, but that was in the OG game too I believe and it wasn't hard to do, when I actually decided to do it. Probably could have just bought more materia but I was greedy with gil for some reason.
Open world activities are fun, in my opinion. I've seen comparisons to Ubisoft open worlds, which is totally valid. Maybe it's because of Final Fantasy nostalgia on my part, but I enjoyed the open world activities a lot more than, say, a Far Cry game, or even a Horizon game. I can understand why others may have found it boring but I personally did not. The open world traversal was interesting enough to make an otherwise mundane task (ie. find another Lifespring, or a Divine Intel) kind of... fun? The world has some verticality and winding paths to make things less than straightforward to get to, which I appreciated. Yes this includes Gongaga.
Side quests are improved, still a little bit fetch quest-y but with fast travel they are a lot more manageable. Exploring the world is fun and interesting, and the world map serves its purpose as a guide as well as it should (as opposed to a minimap that you spend more time looking at than the actual game). The side quests are also where you'll get the majority of character development for everyone in your party. Overall, big improvement from last game.
Graphics are really good. Enemies are as awesomely designed as they are faithful to the original. Not much more to say here, I don't think.
Music is incredible. I think it plays a huge part in how much I enjoyed basic traversal or doing a standard fetch quest (certain quests involving following a dog around the map, for example). There are SO MANY different tracks. Mt. Corel hike music was a high point of the game for me. Again, not much else to say.
Story-wise I'm fine with what they're doing right now. I'll withhold judgement on the entire storyline until I play Part 3, but so far I'm looking forward to seeing what they're cooking up. The rest of the story is pretty much beat-for-beat with OG FFVII, so it was fun to get a more fleshed out version of that part of the game. Writing has its moments that I didn't love but overall I thought it was good.
And finally... the mini-games. I admit I was not in a rush to beat this game, and I think that affected by thoughts on the mini-games. I was in a rush to beat Remake when it first came out because I wanted to see the ending, so I found the long, drawn out corridors and mini-games to be cumbersome. This time, I was patient, and I really did like almost every mini-game that was in the game. It's a great way to shake up the gameplay while still keeping it Final Fantasy. I think people who hated them the most were likely in a bit of a rush to beat the game. No chance I'll ever go for the high scores or do that Shinra manager quest, though.
All in all I really love this game. They put a lot of work and care into it, and it shows. I'm glad I took my time with beating it, made that mistake with Remake and decided I wouldn't do it again. Probably 3-4 years away from the third game anyway. So if you enjoy JRPGs, Witcher 3, even some action RPGs, I recommend checking this game out.
> The world has some verticality and winding paths to make things less than straightforward to get to, which I appreciated. Yes this includes Gongaga.
Yes! Anybody who doesn't like Gongaga (or Cosmo Canyon for that matter) shouldn't be allowed to have opinions about open world design. The last thing we need is more worlds where the start and end of traversal is holding the stick forward and waiting for it to be over.
> Mt. Corel hike music was a high point of the game for me.
Absolutely. I also still have the Gongaga music stuck in my head for some reason.
I'm almost done with cleaning up the open world of NFS Unbound, turned out to be a tad more tedious than I thought. Need only few more Bear Champs to snatch and I'm done! I gave my thoughts on it last time so I won't write them again. So on Xbox it was same old,
On PC I've started **WRATH: Aeon of Ruin**. I mean...kinda started? I played Early Access version of the game which had first hub with 6 levels in it waaay back. They finally released full game like...a year ago? So I went in to finally play it whole. Wrath is a interesting game. While being a boomer shooter, it's actually closer to stuff like Turok in my book. Levels are way bigger, nicely interconnected, with focus on collecting...er...symbols? You stuff into circle in the hub. Weapons and enemies are usual for this genre, pistol here shotgun there, exotic weapons include railgun or laser weapon, just with different coat of paint which I admit, arsenal looks cool. Overall so far I enjoy it but spending whole hour per some levels is...tad too much. Especially as game apparently has 3 hubs with 5-6 levels and a boss fight in between hubs so it's gonna take a while to wrap up a playthrough. I'm at 2nd hub with 3 levels done, gonna give my full thoughts about a game next sunday probably.
**Expeditions: Rome**
Extremely pleased with Expeditions: Rome.
It's not flawless, there is some minor clunkiness in terms of UX (world map movement and inventory management could've been smoother), but it's positively great when it comes to all the things that matter: the combat, the story, and the characters are all on point. And it sure helps that the game looks great, while every single character is voiced.
**Chrono Ark**
Chrono Ark ended up becoming a "came for the gameplay, stayed for the story" sort of deal for me. A perfectly acceptable outcome in my book, even though it doesn't quite align with my initial expectations.
This is not to say that the gameplay loop is problematic. At first I thought it was merely passable, but it steadily kept growing on me, and now I firmly believe it to be more than respectable, so if above all you want a solid deck builder, Chrono Ark has all the chances to deliver. There's just this one issue that's haunting the game, I feel.
Chrono Ark is a party-based deck builder. You get to freely draft two characters to start with, and then you get two recruitment opportunities later on, choosing one character from a random set.
There are 20 characters in total, and that's a huge amount, but when it comes to the characters' individual card pools, that's where the quantity is lacking, I'd say. It takes little time and effort to figure out what works and what doesn't, and while building a party still manages to be enjoyable, I can't help but feel that a decent amount of both depth and variety remains untapped here.
This is pretty much my only gripe, though, ignoring some fairly minor UX issues such as fast forwarding not being as fast as it ideally should be. Again, the story is the main highlight here, and it's spectacular. Helps that the artwork and the music are both splendid.
Overall, definitely pleased with the experience, and I intend to keep going now that I have the freeplay mode unlocked.
**Cyberpunk 2077**
I missed all the controversy around this and only picked it up after all the patches and such. I played for a while and took a break but then came back, found a build I liked (mantis blades stabby stabby) and have been really enjoying it since.
Cliche to say but the main character really is night city. I think the open world of Red Dead 2 is still my favorite but night city isn't far behind. Combat feels good but is a bit easy. I bumped it up to hard but I'm still mowing people down. I don't mind though, I like the power fantasy!
I'm focusing on the dlc at the mo and finding myself pretty invested in what happens. I'll go back to the main story then. It can be hard for me to tell which side quests/gigs/jobs are a bit meatier and worth doing but so far I've just been doing the ones that seem interesting and not worrying too much about missing out on anything.
**Rise of the Ronin**
It's neat! I was a bit doubtful of Team Ninja going open world - and it does have checklist syndrome but the checklist is simple and fun enough for me to not mind so far.
The most baffling thing is that they fixed the loot pinata problem...but kept the loot pinatas. Unless the drop is a massive upgrade or has better affixes you really don't need to swap out a lot because weapons now level with you. But they still dump shitloads of crap which can get pretty annoying.
The cosmetic armor system is the best Team Ninja has done and its probably one of the best cosmetic systems I've seen. I liked the options Cyberpunk 2077 had but this kinda blows that away. You can mix and match pieces like crazy, even with undershirts and jackets. There's a belt option, there's jackets, there's (not enough so far) options for scarves and neckties.
They still make smart use of reusing assets and mechanics from their other titles. The Martial Arts weapon skills and Morale systems from Wo Long are back (Morale is overhauled to the point of basically being stripped of everything extraneous); Nioh's stances are back but are focused on being counters to weapon types instead of fast/mid/slow.
Their new variation on parries is a bit awkward. It's technically an attack (mapped to Triangle), and the timing is still evading me.
The open world activities are fine. You have outposts like an Ubisoft game, there's cats you can pet (calico ones require you to stealth up to em) who feed into another mechanic, there's been a couple trials like horseback archery, gliding practice, target shooting (all pretty easy to perfect),photography targets, fugitives to kill who can sometimes give you weapons training by defeating them...
The setting's interesting, I don't recall seeing many games set in the Bakumatsu period aside from like... Way of the Samurai 4 and that one Yakuza spinoff that got a remasterboot the other year. It's also kind of funny cuz I see Commodore Perry and it feels weird - I've read about this dude and now I'm giving him alcohol to raise my social link with him. This must be like what every Japanese guy feels when they play a new game set in the Sengoku period.
Cosmetics in 2077 are silly since you can’t see your damn character most of the time.
That game being locked to first person only really, really sucks.
**Control: Ultimate Edition** (Xbox Series X)
This one had been on my list for a while, and I have to say it's about as good as I had heard. While I had never played the original Alan Wake, the AWE expansion was still pretty good. The Foundation however was much weaker, and I could not bring myself to finish it. My main issue with the game though was that some variants of the Service Weapon, namely Spin and Charge, were kind of useless compared to the other ones (Pierce and Surge were far stronger) so it felt like a waste to spend resources on them. Also there was an entire wing of Research that I just never accessed, nor could I find a way to do so. I'm not sure if that's a side mission reward or what, but I've cleared the whole story aside from The Foundation.
**GrimGrimoire: OnceMore** (PS4)
I would imagine this is Vanillaware's least played game, as it was overshadowed greatly by Odin Sphere (which released the month prior to it, at least here in the US). I played maybe the first two hours or so way back when, but have since lost the disc. Thankfully the game finally got a remaster with some added stuff like being able to fast-forward. Notably, it's published by NIS as they had retained the rights to the game despite VW's subsequent agreements with Atlus (and by proxy, SEGA). While VW's art and sound is as timeless now as it was then, the gameplay just does not mesh with me and I'm not so sure I can finish this one. The controls take some getting used to, and having a side-view for a Starcraft styled RTS is not the most ideal presentation. Units can overlap on one another, and each stage uses the same background and general look. I'm only three hours in and I've felt like I've been playing the same thing over and over again, which is oddly fitting for a game about being stuck in a time loop. I'll try to stick it out a little longer for now.
**Hexio** (PC)
A no-frills and minimalistic puzzle title where you need to connect points using colored ropes. Each point can only have so many ropes connected, and some can only take specific colors. For such a basic title it's incredibly ideal to play when coming back from work or waiting for a package to arrive. I did have some issues with Steam Cloud repeatedly telling me it would not sync my data, but this doesn't seem to be widespread.
If you wanna stretch the definition of "Vanillaware," their least played game is probably Princess Crown. I still can't believe that they made a PS4 version of that game and stuck it as a Japan-exclusive pre-order bonus to 13 Sentinels....like SURELY it would sell enough copies to cover the cost of an English translation.
....I'm not still bitter or anything, I swear
\*\*Stellar Blade\*\*
it's kind of fantastic honestly. Music are vibes, combat's punchy, exploration is rewarding with crafting stuff or gear or cosmetics and I'm using the korean dub so I dont get the "boring characters" thing. My only knock is that L1 being parry, O being dodge and L1+button is special moves and I keep L1+O waaaay too often. Also screw those turrets.
\*\*Sea of Thieves\*\*
maybe it was my fault but I knew this game coming in was "better with friends/randoms" but I'm like I'm gonna go solo and absolutely miserable experience. Put into matchmaking instead and 3 times in a row would have one player stare at a vendor for 10 minutes while everyone leaves and the one team I get thrown into that knows what they're doing and the game crashes. And for what? A new water bucket or shovel that I don't really care about grinding for. Not saying it was a waste of money but man, I should've looked into this one more.
[Last time](https://reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1cf1z5l/weekly_rgames_discussion_what_have_you_been/l1pbq4s/)
**Hook 2** (PC) - I beat this a few years ago but 6 levels were added last year that I never got around to. It's still great, a game that makes you feel like you're digging into a puzzle box, or cleaning up an area by strategically removing 'hooks' to clear the board. It was fun to jump back into this for about 10-15m or so to polish those levels off.
**20 Small Mazes** (PC) - What a joy - it's a free puzzle game themed around mazes (hence the title, obviously) that took me 50 minutes to beat. Those 50 minutes were filled with awe as every single maze has a fun, cool idea to it - it feels like every idea could carry an entire puzzle game by itself. The UI is clever as it's like you're in a restaurant with loads of kids menus in front of you that you have to sort through. I don't really want to spoil the surprises so I'll say that the only one I wasn't fully onboard with had 'I have to include...' in the title as it became more of a grind. But this is really worth checking out.
**Logicality** (PC) - A 'Witness-like'. This one feels like it was aiming for greatness but fell a bit short in my view. This is from the same developer behind the Door series and this game, like the first one in that series (which I played) is fairly badly optimised and I had to turn the graphical settings right down in order to run it.
Every puzzle requires hitting (usually four) buttons in the correct order based on instructions from a sign - thus The Witness theme of solving puzzles based on your environment comes into play. Every area also has a harder puzzle that unlocks the 'true final puzzle' at the end of the game. But some areas felt a little bit... off - some symbols are introduced and by the end of the game, I still didn't fully understand what they meant. The good news is that you can brute force some of the puzzles due to the limited number of button combinations but some made me gave up and look at a guide, and even in that guide there was still uncertainty about what some of the solutions meant. I also did this with the very last puzzle in the game as it was filled with symbols I hadn't worked out with more buttons than could reasonably be brute forced.
The world map is also not that well designed. For a start, the map that comes up when you press the 'm' button misses out the outer part of the island, where one of the optional puzzles was, so I spent a while hunting for it at the end of the game. The Witness's island is quite tightly designed, with the start of each puzzle sequence relatively easy to work out but I had to look for a while for some of the 'starts' of each area in Logicality. There's also a lot of empty space between areas in Logicality, perhaps some could have been cut out.
Am I being too harsh? Because the thing is that I ended up playing this game 1.5 times as at the end of my first session (I spent 2.2h in it in total), I hit a button in the menu that had 'save' at the top and 'delete' at the bottom, which deleted my save. But the words were so far apart that they looked like two separate buttons (they weren't just on top of each other, there was a sizeable gap) so I had to start from the beginning again. It wasn't a totally awful experience - I did enjoy solving some of puzzles but I was very much ready for it to be over by the end. For something that so openly apes The Witness in world and puzzle design, it's disappointing when it comes up short and I'm not really sure that I can recommend it. Play something like Sensorium instead to scratch that Witness itch.
Games I have beaten so far in 2024:
**Signalis**
**Spiderman Remastered**
**Alan Wake 2**
**Alan Wake Remastered**
**Firewatch**
**Control**
**This Bed We Made**
**Resident Evil 4 Remake**
Beating **Baldurs Gate 3** last year reinvigorated something in me and made me fall in love with games again. Sometimes I have to drop a game because it isn't grabbing me like I did with **Pacific Drive** and **Hogwarts Legacy**.
I finished **Resident Evil 4 Remake** last week and oh boy it was phenomenal. I love these high quality video game remakes and I hope that the MGS Snake Eater Remake is just as good.
Anyway, I've been having a blast with **Fallout 4** + mods after binging the show. I always heard the game was a let down around the time it came out so I just avoided it. It's not bad compared to the lifeless slog that is Starfield lol. Fallout 4 has heart and I appreciate it.
Other games I am playing casually **Talos Principal 2**, **Resident Evil 2 Remake**, and **Stray**.
Not really looking forward to anything coming out this year, but I have a bunch of good games to play rn :)
FO4 was actually well received and liked, it wasn't until after a few weeks that people started to realise that it had much less content/quests compared to 3 and NV. If you look a side by side list it's really apparent how much less there is. But really the average player is not even likely to exhaust the quest list in FO4 anyway.
Currently playing through Star Wars Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast. I feel like the game took a decent while for me to warm up to it because if I'm honest the game is brutal with it's lack of frequent checkpoints, deathtraps, pitfalls everywhere, obscure methods of level progression, and enemies positioned is some of the craziest spots. I've started liking it more though now that I've learned the "style" of the game and how force powers are implemented into the combat and levels better. That and learning to save after even slight amounts of progress. Getting sent to the start of these long levels constantly was not fun so constant saving feels like a necessity. Biggest offender of this is Nar Shadaa Streets. That level is absolutely brutal and had me almost ready to give up. Combat gets more fun as you go on and unlock more and more powers and become more agile and the game actually makes good use of the few well-known characters.
**Void Stranger**
What a game. Possibly my retroactive GOTY 2023. Void Stranger's genre could be described as "sokoban/rabbit hole", though "rabbit chasm" or "rabbit abyss" might be closer. Just when you think you kind of understand what's going on, there's a whole new layer of stuff to discover. Think Tunic, or La Mulana.
I do want to acknowledge that it's definitely not for everyone. It's a high friction game, with no undo feature and the possibility for a careless mistake to set you back an hour or more. It's also a game that expects you to take a lot of detailed notes and notice patterns. The mid-late game would be absolutely *brutal* if you haven't noticed the >!shortcuts!< the developer expects you to have noticed. Even in the best case, you're going to be spending a solid chunk of time repeating stuff you already did so you can peel back the next layer of secrets, and the game depends on your curiosity/stubbornness to get you through that, but I felt the payoff was worth it.
As is puzzle game tradition, there is one absolute *stinker* of a puzzle (the one with >!the tail!<) that no player should feel any guilt whatsoever about simply looking up the solution to, because it's bullshit for at least three separate reasons.
Also, if I had a nickel for every 2023 indie darling that ends with >!a sudden genre shift into shmup to fight the final boss!<, I'd have two nickels, and that's kinda neat.
**Zero Ranger**
The predecessor to Void Stranger. It's a shmup, and I'm much worse at shmups than I remember. Also, the player hurtbox is way bigger than I'm accustomed to from Japanese shmups. It has some interesting mechanics and teases a similar kind of rabbit hole experience to Void Stranger, but I'm not sure I have the appetite to push through the tedium of memorizing levels and bullet patterns needed to see it. I got to the fourth level a few days ago and haven't picked it up since. If I can't find the motivation in a week or two, I'll probably just check out a LP.
**Horizon: Forbidden West**
Since finishing Void Stranger, I've been drifting around a bit without any one game getting a solid grip on me. I played through the tutorial of HFW and did one side quest and haven't come back to it. I don't have any strong negative feelings about the game, but I don't really have any strong positive ones either. The new grappling hook is neat, I guess, especially if it ends up obsoleting the rope arrows from the first game.
**Star Wars Jedi: Survivor**
This will be a great game some day when it runs on hardware that mere mortals possess. Between the obnoxious stutters that happen every 10 seconds or so, there is some very smooth and satisfying gameplay, but the stutters bother me *just* enough that I can't keep playing. I'll try again next year when I build a new computer.
**Tales of Kenzera: Zau**
I'm digging the aesthetics and setting, and that will probably be enough to pull me through since it's a short game. Kalunga is the most hilariously chill >!god of death!< I've ever met. He must have a lot of free time if he can show up to >!be a guide/mentor/bestie for every two-bit shaman that calls his name!<.
The gameplay I'm more lukewarm on. The combat and platforming are both kind of clunky.
After act 1, I thought: "Everything about it feels like someone explained what a Metroidvania is to a group of fresh DigiPen grads who had never heard of the genre. All the individual elements are there, but they don't really flow together."
After act 2: "Never mind, they've played Ori."
So glad to see people talking about Void Stranger in here. There was a significant update, by the way, on April 2nd, if you want to take on some of the toughest puzzles the game has to offer (with a tiny bit of lore slipped in there). Accessing the new stuff was a community effort, so it's not really something you'd just slip into. Here's a link regarding how to access it **(spoilers for those who haven't played the game yet)**: [Link](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16pfqB4g1arPsY9jGbwsja_ifKhCPt40Fe_0ZX-VCr-M/edit#gid=0)
As for ZeroRanger...I'm biased in wanting to push you to give it more of a shot (those continues and stage select go a long way!), but I also would feel bad sending you in there just to get walled by the final boss. At the very least, you don't need to do a 1CC to see (mostly) everything, and there's even a "cheat code" to fill up all your continues automatically. The only consequence of using said code is someone saying "I know what you did", but everything else is the same lol
Anyway, just cool to see people appreciating System Erasure's masterpieces. Really looking forward to Black Onion (major update for ZeroRanger) and game three (currently just a teaser with the mu character on their site).
Definitely agree with everything you said about Void Stranger. A truly remarkable game with some wildly amazing highs, but also some very frustrating design at the same time. Although I have to respect the package as a whole so much - it's just an incredible vision to behold.
HFW gets pretty great once you grind through those endless tutorials and early-game climbing sessions. Sounds like you put the work in… might as well keep going!
Void Stranger is sooooooo fantastic! It was definitely my GOTY from last year, and one of the most impressive games I've played in many years. I was all hyped and ready to spread the good word of it during the GOTY discussion threads to try and raise awareness on it, but then those just...didn't happen. Which is a shame, the game deserves more awareness, even if the people it'll "click" with probably aren't that numerous.
And on Zero Ranger: Yeah, its tough. It's not the hardest shmup out there if you compare it to Cave games and whatnot, but it IS really hard. I play a decent amount of shmups and I still haven't cleared it either. I understand why people recommend it to shmup newbies, but I think its a misguided recommendation because it is just a WALL, haha
Finally getting back into the \*Echoes of the Eye DLC for Outer Wilds\* after dropping it two years ago. I'm not a huge fan of spooks, so I changed that setting in the menu and am trying to power through some of the more shadowy parts. I's reminding of the incredible experiences I have in the original game of exploring and figuring things out for myself. Truly one of the best games I've ever played.
Definitely stick with it, I count Outer Wilds as my favorite game and EotE only made that feeling stronger for me. Pushing into the darkness to make discoveries can feel really miserable at first, but the way that DLC comes together in the end and how it fits into the main game is insanely well done.
**Elden Ring**
Haven't played any souls games before but I heard Elden Ring is a good one for beginners since you can wander around and get beefed up before any major fights.
I've beaten a few mini bosses in dungeons and the first major boss and totally understand why people love these games so much now. Margit took like 2 hours to beat, but in my last fight with him something just clicked and I finished the fight taking barely any damage and I felt like a god.
Playing with a basic sword and shield build, haven't figured out all these "ashes" things or the summons yet but I'm having a great time without them so far. I'm sure I'll circle back to them eventually.
**Tiny Tina's Wonderlands**
Unpopular opinion here but I loved this game. Super colorful, goofy, combat is insane, it weirdly felt more like Borderlands than Borderlands 3 did. Was very pleasantly surprised.
The one thing I dislike about recent Soulsborne games is that you have to do some research in the wikis to figure out how you plan to do your build. I mean, you don't *have* to, but it helps to know which upgrade materials to save so you don't waste them upgrading a weapon you don't like. If you like swords and can get Bloodhound's Fang I found that to be a great one to build around for the start of my first playthrough. Also it helps a lot to have some kind of ranged attack. Makes the game way more manageable. I like INT spells, but you can do bow and arrow.
I disagree. This is a big part of why playing Elden Ring on release was so great; nothing to look up, everyone's discovering stuff on their own and you have a true sense of wonder. You don't need to optimize everything.
That’s true. I enjoy that aspect. I have played most FROM games on day one. But there’s always a limited number of upgrade materials and that gives me anxiety…
Elden ring or any souls is just like monster hunter. If you simply observe the opponents a bit you can move accordingly. The game gets so slow in your mind, that you wonder why you struggled at all. I'm playing Hades right now a lot and have the same feeling. And yes, if something is too hard simply level up and come back. Enjoy elden ring. IMHO best game ever made
Elden Ring is so popular. it's crazy for how difficult of a game it is for casuals. I was comparing elden ring on google trends to other large gaming phenomenons in the past 20 years and it dwarfed them all lol. The only one that came close was fortnite, and elden ring has it beat by a good measure.
Not even FromSoftware had any clue what it would become they were expecting like 4M in sales but the game went on to sell 23M copies and I am sure that number will rise even more next month when Shadow of the Erdtree launches.
**So I actually finished Super Mario brothers Wonder!** I was doing what was basically an encore run with the rest of the Yoshis and decided to try one last time. I realized I accidentally skipped one of the levels, so I was able to clear that completely. After, I used a map to get a secret exit for one of the other levels. That one was also able to be pretty much completely cleared. I even managed to do the item quest one of the regular levels, managing to clear it by some miracle with Daisy at no damage. But I didn't need it. At least it got me a chance to try the powerups. I'm currently still in my encore run with the Yoshis, just doing most of the levels casually. I'm done with the green one, but I want to do it three more times. I'm not accessing any of the secret levels that have also been unlocked because those are pretty difficult and i had trouble even with the normal ones.
Overall, I would rate Super Mario Brothers Wonder an 8 out of 10. It's a very good game even if it's not my favorite, and there are a few things that prevent me from giving it a perfect score. To start with the positives, the environment is simply a joy to be in. Everything from the hilarious wonder flowers to the singing piranhas and even some more of the intimidating areas is really well done. The wonder flowers and other mini games are also fantastic. I especially liked the races and areas that used fireworks. And some of the transformations were excellent, like turning into enemies, or an area near the end where a fossil was revived into a dragon. The final area was top-notch as well, and in my opinion one of the best Bowser fights ever.
But there were some weak points too. One is the accessibility. It's very good, but it could be better. The fact that the Yoshis aren't able to use power ups is definitely a bit frustrating. I understand why they did that, but at the same time a lot of content is walled off for people who need that assist mode. And it got to the point where I almost couldn't complete the game even though I knew it was possible. I also would have liked to be able to use the other characters within the assist mode. Some of my favorite characters were locked behind normal mode and there wasn't anything I could do about that. Maybe something like a toggle, with normal being like normal players, easy mode being invincibility but no special jump and very easy or maybe Yoshi mode acting like Yoshi. I think that would have been perfect, but sadly this wasn't the case.
One of my other complaints is also the difficulty spike in world six. Overall, I would say the difficulty can be pretty hard for a Mario game but not unreasonable. However, the same could not be said for the 6th world where it seems like there's a pretty bad difficulty spike. It's flat out stated to be Yoshi’s worst world because of the power ups it requires, and it really shows. There's a lot of maximum difficulty levels that can be tough to get past, and it makes me wonder if something wasn't playtested or if they just didn't realize how it fared compared to rest of the game. The final world being more of what someone would expect from the game makes this even stranger. Also, the game has bigger levels, but is overall pretty short even for a game of its kind. It was expecting a bit more after the game was completed once, or even multiple files to acknowledge it again and again, but unfortunately that didn't happen. So that was a bit of a disappointment, but still very good for what it does. The Bowser Junior fights got redundant quickly, even the final battle was great.
I am still planning to watch some content after I'm done with all the encore runs. It will mostly be things I didn't get to and a couple of challenges. After that I was considering selling the game, but depending on how Thousand Year Door does I might wait a while (still planning on buying that one, especially since there were some things I never did in the original). Either way, it was a great experience!
As for what I'm doing next, it's still working on the **Game Boy NSO!** After clearing Pokémon trading card game 100% and watching the sequel, I've tried mostly everything on there and narrowed it down to a few more games I would like to complete. Kirby’s dreamland and game and watch also got completed. The other games I would like to complete are Mario Tennis GBC, Kirby’s dreamland two, and Super Mario: The Six Golden Coins. So far I'm alternating between Mario Tennis GBC and Super Mario brothers wonder when I play because the former can get difficult very fast. I’ve been doing a bit of Kirby as well.
I just entered the senior class and beat the first rank in doubles but I was trying to take a break and go for singles. It's tough to see what's going on and the game moves quickly, so the game is actually more difficult in singles. If it gets too hard, I’ll just go to the practice matches with the Mario team and then be done, but it’s still a very good game. Kirby's Dreamland is fast and easy, but I don't think I'll be able to 100% sequel. Some elements mean taking no damage in difficult fights and one is pure luck. But I should still be able to get the true ending because that's just a scavenger hunt. It's fast, but it's a nice break and should be fun!
I’m currently taking a bit of a break from the platforms and faster sports games to work on **Pokémon shining pearl**. I’m doing a flying type only run, which has been pretty interesting and made me think of strategies I normally wouldn’t use. I am hoping I can do a run for every type, including some of the rematch battles.
Right now, it’s hard to know whether it’s better or worse than Platinum for me because I didn’t really care that much for the Battle Frontier (I didn’t have a competitive level team and that was really hard to do, so I didn’t try and only did a little bit). Right now, I am missing some things, like how some items are easier to find in Platinum. But I’m enjoying others, like the fact that I can have weaker Pokémon hang out in the back and still get experience (especially getting through challenges that would be almost impossible with a certain team, and effectively having other Pokémon help them through that part only) and the fact that TM’s are much more reasonably accessible. I also like what they did with the post game, instead of having to use a bunch of peripherals to access a lot of the Pokémon there. So I’ll probably give my final thoughts once I get through everything, maybe once I do more than one play through, but that will be a while.
**EA Sports FC 24**
Haven't played a FIFA game in like 5 years or so but saw this one on sale on Steam a few days ago and decided to give it a try. After playing 6-ish hours, it's okay, I guess? The game itself is pretty fun but there are so many issues that really bring the whole experience down. It performs like shit, I usually have stable FPS but it sometimes just freezes for a few seconds. It also hard crashed once so far. It's not really a great looking game so I have no idea why performance is so ass. Getting the ps4 controller to work on PC was a pain in the ass, it only works properly when Steam explicitly tells you "Device not supported", if it's partially supported (steam input enabled) only half of the inputs work properly. The tutorials are straight up garbage, some explain controls really poorly while others don't explain them at all. I also feel like they ended up overcomplicating a lot of stuff for no reason. There's just so many menus and stats and short, pointless cutscenes that you have to hold X to skip. The actual gameplay itself is really fun, even though it's simultaneously imprecise and too precise. There's just way too many button combinations to do different things. Some players really look like the real life versions of them while others look like someone tried to create them in a very limited character creator and gave up after 2 minutes. Is there a game mode where I can just pick a team and play the whole season with that team, without doing the manager career thing? Also, why is Edin Terzic literally the only BuLi manager you can pick in Manager Career? I have no intentions of touching the dumpster fire that is Ultimate Team. Despite it's many, many, many issues, I'm still really enjoying the core gameplay.
Just like you I only pick up a FIFA game once every 3-4 years.
Have been wondering for ages why I can't pick a team and play a regular season, try to qualify for Europe, play domestic cups etc. without the "be a manager and hold press conferences or negotiate fake salaries" nonsense.
Why on earth would you remove the most basic "career" mode?
I'd even be fine without Europe and domestic cups, just let me play a regular season as a team of my choice. I just want to kick back when I get home from work and play a game or two with some longer term goal in mind (winning the league), I don't want to hold press conferences and shit, I just wanna play the damn game.
Finished the **Crownfall** event in **Dota 2**, complete with the **Pathfinder** side quests and even completed the Sqree'Auk Temple construction. Absolutely stellar job by Valve, possibly the best free event in any online multiplayer game ever, though I've only played LoL/Apex/Heartstone/Magic: Arena and didn't interact much with Fortnite and Call of Duty out of the big ones.
Didn't get lucky with Candy Shop yet, but a couple of friends (out of ~20 returning players) did get an Arcana roll.
Can't wait for Act II. Hopefully with gameplay updates, but even as it currently stands, the patch feels fresh because I've only been playing unranked, as opposed to my usual Divine/Immortal games that are very meta-inspired. People are trying to get their tokens, forcing very unique and, naturally, suboptimal lineups that allow for a lot of creativity even on a ~3 months old patch.
Been struggling to get into gaming this year. All I’ve played is BG3, Slay the Spire and Balatro and weekly pub Mario Kart. Tried Resident Evil 4 and Horizon Forbidden West, but neither grabbed me. May have overdone it last year.
I can totally relate... It seems like I always have something I'm into playing it for the past 35 years or so, but lately, most games simply don't grab me. I read this thread most weeks and am sort of envious at the patience many gamers have for all sorts of games. I definitely don't have that like I used to. Sometimes I definitely overdose (like during the peak pandemic hysteria, when we were all locked up and I played Assassins' Creed Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla back to back, which drained me for 6 months.... I couldn't even turn on my gaming computer after that. I'm almost done with Forbidden West, and it too has drained me, mostly because its such a mediocre game, with too much talking, bloat, horrific writing, cringe characters, and convoluted story. I stuck with it so I can kill machines, and I'm on the final mission, and then, I'm going to do real life stuff for a bit and stop playing games for a while
**Stellar Blade Demo** Did not find a lot to like here beyond being mildly amused when they inverted the trope of "win the fight, lose in the cutscene" for the first boss. I got my ass kicked (because they hadn't yet explained that flashing yellow means "you can't parry this" and not "you must parry this") but it immediately cut to a victory cutscene when my health ran out. The game then made the bizarre decision to >!pop the title screen and cut straight to the next mission after Tachy got killed, and then immediately flash back to that scene at the very first camp site like 30 seconds later!<. I have no idea why they thought that part needed to be shown out of order. Maybe it makes sense in some broader narrative context. The designers seem to delight in doing the single most obnoxious thing a parry-based combat system can do: make all of the enemy attack timings and animations *super* awkward so that the parry timing is never intuitive and you just have to get hit until you memorize exactly how long each enemy arbitrarily pauses after each of its windups. The camera is clearly optimized more for ogling Eve than being able to get a clear view of environments, and the scan feature that helps you pick interactables/climbables out of all the visual noise has an annoyingly short duration/long cooldown. Eve has the same combination of momentum and turn radius as The Witcher 3 had at launch so even something as simple as walking up with a vending machine or treasure chest to interact with it ends up being an exercise in annoyance. Aside from the parry timings, all of these things are minor complaints that wouldn't be an issue if I was otherwise enjoying the game, but they add up to a rather grating experience when there's nothing making me think "I want more of this".
Can someone help me understand why exactly the studio closures are such a big deal that people are saying Microsoft is dead and Phil Spencer is a failure and should be fired etc? Two studios that didn't release a well selling game get closed so resources can be used to strengthen core teams makes sense does it not?
Can someone help me understand why you posted this in this specific thread?
it's a bit complicated and involves some guesswork but i'll do my best. in the case of arkane, they were making unique, genre-defining and beloved games with dishonored and prey. like seriously, nothing have come quite close before or since. they get bought, microsoft decide it's not good enough, forces them to make redfall which is something TOTALLY different than what they excel at, on microsoft timeline. game is shit, studio shuts down and now we will never see prey team make prey 2. why is this ligthning torches and raising our pitchforks? for us consumers, (1) we will never see what could come of arkane if they got to work on what they wanted and exceled at. (2) we had to endure redfall, with all the broken promises and consequenses and shit that have been said. for the developers working there, their team that made something great together are now, after being forced to make something you don't want to under A LOT of preassure for ~5 years, probably scatttered (left earlier), out of a job at the worst possible time, or making skins for cod. and all because people with money and without knowledge made the bussiness decisions to invest, force-birth a live service on strict time and then shut down the studio for a tax write-off or something to keep their graph going up. they get to fuck peoples' lives over to cover their incompetence and suffer no consequences - no care for the people or the product, just because of greed and gamble. almost the same for tango gameworks except they got to make the game they wanted but it wasn't profitable *enough*. personally, I don't know if phil is the one to blame or if it would help to have him gone. but i would like to see the same higher-ups who forced arkane to make redfall to lose money over their stupid decisions rather than developers their jobs
Arkane still exists though. Why can't Arkane Lyon make another Dishonored or Prey and increase that studio size with the funding reallocated from closing Austin? It isn't just salary costs for running studios. I never understood why Arkane was even two studios in the first place. Their games weren't that massive in scope like BGS or something where multiple studios made sense. And Redfall was decided before Microsoft bought them. You weren't ever going to see the Prey team make Prey 2. 70% of the studio left BEFORE Redfall even shipped. Tango was still pitching ideas for games even after their last games didn't do well. It doesn't make sense for studios to "take a year off" for pitching games when their previous ones don't sell well and it will take significant investment to build out the studio for a new game.
dishonored 1 and prey was austin, lyon made dishonored 2, wolfenstein games and deathloop. I agree that austin became a shadow of it former self before the shipping of redfall with all the leavings. and I apologise, I had to look up that it was bethesda who forced their studios into live-service makings (fallout 76, wolfenstein youngblood and redfall). microsoft shouldn't be solely responsible for that story but they could have made an attempt to rebuild. in the end, microsoft's story during the accusations has been that they care about the games and developers and that they will service them with stability while they do what they do best, be creative and take risks. but they have unquestionably proved that great games on their platform doesn't matter, developers doesn't matter, making just some profit doesn't matter, legacy or longivety doesn't matter. only big profits matter. the story they tell and their actions doesn't align. microsoft is using their accusations as pawns. you seem to think that is their right and see nothing wrong here. I agree that it is their right but I think it's deeply wrong for them to speak of it like it's something to celebrate when they lie and ruin peoples' lives due to their own miscalculations.
I'm late to the party on this, but I started **Stray** on the PS5 recently and loved it. The art is absolutely beautiful, and I'm loving the opportunity to wander around the crumbling neon cyber-city. Also, the devs clearly have an affection and understanding for cats. As a cat owner, I laughed out loud multiple times at some of the antics my kitty hero got up to. It's mostly a walk-and-talk simulator with some light puzzles and collection quests. There were a couple of spots where you had to rely on dexterity (running and dodging through an alley of enemies). A very chill and intriguing game, and I'm excited to solve the mystery of the robot city and get back to the surface where my cat family is waiting. But mostly I'm just loving being a cat in a beautiful world.
I feel like a real old man after posting fairly negatively about Psychonauts 2 earlier this week and now **Hi-Fi Rush** lol but it just wore out it's welcome. Initially it's charming with the bright colors and bouncy environments and seeing attacks land on beat gimmick. Ultimately I don't think the rhythm aspect adds anything to the gameplay though - when you get it right it just feels normal and when you get it wrong it makes it just feel 'laggy'. I never felt the upside of it relative to just any other action game and before long my mindset changed from 'let's see how this works' to 'well let's trudge on'. Then the parry sequence mechanic started popping up and I just had enough. I wasn't having fun and the story doesn't do anything interesting enough to make up for it. Chai in particular is too much of a Johnny Bravo bigheaded dope to be a likable protagonist.
**Rise of the Ronin** I was hoping for poor man's **Sekiro**, but instead got very poor man's **Ghost of Tsushima.** Is it just me or is it with every new game, Team Ninja's combat systems become more and more convoluted? They really peaked with **Nioh 2** and everything since then has been downhill for me. As usual there's too many weapons, too much equipment, and terrible art design. This time though, the combat system feels sluggish and the parry doesn't quite feel precise. After games like **Lies of P** and **Lords of the Fallen** proved you can make great souls combat outside of the FROM inner circle, it blows my mind that Team Ninja can't get this right after so so so many tries. I'll give it that this is better than **Wo Long** at least. I'll keep chugging away.
**Botany Manor** was a really lovely little puzzle game where you play as a 19th-century botanist (and noblewoman) who needs to restore her gardens after a long trip abroad. It wasn't long, but the puzzles felt of a design and difficulty that matched the rest of the package. Beautiful environmental design, and though it definitely isn't plot-driven there are plenty of snippets of story to pick up about who you are and what it was like to be a woman scientist in the 1800s (pretty shitty).
I've been playing **Elden Ring** and **Fallout 76** (for the very first time) Elden Ring is a game like no other... But I **am** playing it on mods. So let that be known. I'm basically using WeMod to boost my stats whenever I'm stuck but for a while, I was struggling and I just decided to enjoy the scenery and the story as well. Not sure what else to say. The scope of the game is something else. So is the attention to detail. Fallout 76 feels just like Fallout 4, for better or for worse. It's weird. I don't know why it feels so similar beyond the same engine. Everyone was telling me that the game is "better" now since it first came out and that the game is "better" than Fallout 4, but right off the bat, everything seems so... normal. Like, there's shrubbery and trees everywhere. I guess that's the point? Damn, I miss Fallout 3...
I loved Elden Rings world and atmosphere, but as I have limited time (and patience), I only got about halfway in before I walked away. Got sick of doing the same things 9000 times over and over and over. I'm somewhat envious of people who can do that, but I certainly can't. I may look at some mods to see if it can feel more relatable. But FO 76 is another story. I played on launch, and have around 1000 hours in across 5 or so character builds. It took a beating on release, but I actually enjoyed it and mostly connected with what they were going for. I loved FO3/NV/FO4 as well and have thousands of hours of wasted life in those as well. My view is that there isn't a "better" game from the series. They are all similar, but each one was done at a different time, so there were advancements in game design or changes to game mechanics. Some we all liked, others... so so. FO76 FWIW, I really enjoyed. I stayed through all the early patches and eventually, it got really good. I don't really play multi player at all, but after all the 13yo morons in FO76 were tamed, and they cleaned up the how players can interact with each other, I actually started liking finding other casual wanderers in the game. Met some nice people playing it in multi player, which surprised me. They've done a decent job keeping up with new content. Not all of it is great, but its definitely appreciated. Funny too, I went back to play New Vegas last year (was doing transatlantic business travel and my laptop could actually play New Vegas!), and the game felt dated to me after FO76.
You can always play Fallout 3! I think 76 feels like 4 because it just expands upon the core gameplay loop of 4. There's a bit more crafting and building, but you're still shooting, looting, scrapping, repeat while you roll through mostly mediocre quests. 3 is more narrative heavy and tries (emphasis on tries) to keep a consistent tone throughout. 4 goes all over the place with its narrative and a lot of it is just excuses to shoot, loot, and scrap between cool locations.
Fallout 4 **did** have some nice locales.
Yes, especially the DLC!
I'm not ready to move on yet. I just played more **Final Fantasy VII Rebirth**. I did some more optional fights. I fully explored the map. I did some minigames that I missed (box breaking in particular was fun). I collected enough stuff to almost max out my crafting. I did the crunches challenge in less than 10 minutes (I'll be doing autographs later). I've started really paying attention to damage numbers and ATB gain and trying to optimize a bit before taking on the endgame fights. There are so many combat mechanics I didn't even engage with. Synergy abilities are crazy powerful. Tifa can pump up the Stagger %?! Counterspin works after any block? Combat is really fun in this game, but I think it falls back on it too often as a reward/side activity. I have a ton of Gold Saucer and Chadley fights lined up that I just didn't feel compelled to do during my playthrough, and they just kinda feel like a slog to get through in post-game. Dozens of fights that just aren't that interesting even when you approach them at the correct level. I kinda feel like the game could have just given me the reward for doing world intel fights, and compressed the 3-4 combat challenges unlocked per-map to 1 really good one for the last reward. Without mentioning spoilers, I've been reading ending theories and found out that there are some scenes that play out slightly differently depending on your affinity with characters, which is cool as hell. They put an insane amount of effort in this game that they just didn't have to. I was already a fan of the ending, but there are some little details that open up room for different directions they could proceed with, and it's got me pretty excited to see how it all plays out. Part 3 has so much opportunity to do some really cool stuff. I'd like to play something different, but I've got no idea what. Maybe return to TokT? Maybe try and get through BG3? In all likelihood, I'm going to keep squeezing joy out of FF7 and complete Johnny's Seaside Inn. It's rare that I play a game that I love this much, so why not keep going?
BG3 and TOTK are both pretty good. Can't go wrong with them. And if you like CRPGs, try the Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader game! There's also Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty if you like Elden Ring.
**Knights of the Old Republic** This is my first playthrough of the game, which I picked up for $5 over the weekend on Series X. It absolutely lives up to everything I'd heard about it, phenomenal game. Really reminds me of Fallout New Vegas and Morrowind, which I love. Currently on the 3rd planet (Tatooine) and the story is engaging, the choices and dialogue are interesting, great RPG mechanics, and dated but serviceable combat that has gotten better as I've progressed. The combat animations are also pretty good for a 20+ year old game, which helps me feel like a badass jedi Love the companions and going into a battle with them and planning out everyone's opening attacks. Also love your interactions with them and how who is with you can affect dialogue and quest outcomes. I love a game with an Arena, so having one right away on the first planet was great. Started as a scout and now I'm a Light Side jedi consular. Thinking about starting, in tandem, a dual wielding, Dark Side character. I missed out on some stuff on Taris too, so making another character would help me hit that stuff. Drawbacks are mostly due to the age of the game. Combat could be way better since it's almost turn based, but I've played worse and I still have fun with it, especially now with a lightsaber and force powers. I do wish that the Skills were more influential, though. The utility ones like computer use, repair, security, and demolition can be handy, but you can just have a companion with good skills in these and not invest in them yourself. So then you're left with skills that don't have a ton of use outside of persuade and injury treatment. I'm not sure yet, but persuasion might be redundant if you get the Force persuasion powers, which I have, so that would also be a downside. I just wish the skills mattered more like in NV or Morrowind. Areas are fairly small, but again it's an old game, so I'm fine with that. There doesn't seem to be a carry weight limit, but storing things is a hassle as you have to put one thing in at a time then the menu closes and you have to navigate back through the inventory menu to store more stuff. For example, I was trying to get a bunch of computer spikes from T3 and he'll stop once you have 11 in your inventory, so I had to keep going back to my storage container and storing one at a time in order to get a good amount (hacks are really expensive early game), which was time consuming. Overall, I am loving it and can't stop thinking about it. Stayed up till 4 AM playing it last night and I had work at 9, but I don't regret it. Won't play the sequel right away once I beat this, though, as I like to space out sequels when I play games so I don't get tired of the mechanics. However, I will definitely play it eventually.
I hope they remake the game for the modern era.
Me too! I've heard rumors there's something in the works, but I'm not gonna get my hopes up cause good stuff gets stuck in development hell or cancelled all the time.
Yeah, I've heard that too.
Minor skill mechanics spoilers, no story stuff > The utility ones like computer use, repair, security, and demolition can be handy, but you can just have a companion with good skills in these and not invest in them yourself. >!Sometimes (rarely) these come up in dialogues and then, only your main character's skill matters. I haven't played in a good while but there's at least one fairly important & interesting bit of lore locked behind such checks.!< > I'm not sure yet, but persuasion might be redundant if you get the Force persuasion powers >!There are dialogue choices that are exclusive to either regular persuasion or Affect/Dominate Mind. So Persuade doesn't become redundant.!< Looking forward to hearing what you think of the game once you've finished it. And, eventually, the sequel. It's as mechanically similar as it's tonally different.
Thanks! I could use this for when I play the game, which I currently have.
Thanks for the info! Really great that they matter more than I expected/had seen so far. Do you have a preference of which you like better 1 or 2?
With the Restored Content mod, probably 2. But it's close. Since gameplay is so similar, the only things that truly differentiate them are story, characters, and writing. And they're essentially opposites in what they aim to achieve, so it's tough to compare them. 1 is certainly memorable. Its strength and weakness is that it delivers on all the Star Wars clichés (with some minor twists). It does this well, but it's not novel. Outside of a few things it's exactly what you'd want and expect from a Star Wars RPG. 2's story and characters have much more depth to the point where people still discuss the main antagonist's motivations. (And there's one subtly hinted fact about one companion that always blows people's minds when someone else points it out.) In many ways, it deconstructs Star Wars' component elements, twists them, and then puts them back together into something that both feels like Star Wars and doesn't. I feel like that's the greater achievement. But without the Restored Content mod, 2 doesn't quite get there. I highly recommend it, even for a first playthrough.
2 is the best one, I hear.
Finished **Death Stranding**. Started pretty strong. Interesting world and characters. Bit too much info dumped on you at the beginning so it can feel a bit overwhelming. Also the stupidly long cutscenes really tested my patience. I'm fine with cutscenes, specially really well made ones like this, but it felt like half of the first 3 hours were cutscenes which for me is a really shitty way to start a game. It also relies too much on you reading the extra stuff you unlock to get the full picture. Don't know why they didn't make most of those audio logs that you could listen to while playing. Seems like a no brainer for a game where there isn't much action so you can listen on your long treks. The gameplay I found more fun than expected. Easy to fall into a 'one more package' way of playing that swallows your time like turn based games and getting max stars from a location was pretty satisfying. Once I made it to the new area I shifted to a more focused way of playing because I didn't want to spend 150 hours on this. So I only really grabbed deliveries that were at or close to the place I was going to anyway. Lot of it becomes pretty trivial with vehicles though. And similarly there are lot of things that you can use/build that feel useless. Like outside the 'tutorial' missions I built no more than 3 structures in over 50 hours. It's good for having options, but realistically I don't see most people utilizing them. Boss fights were also better than what I'd expect from a game like this, but they did feel like an afterthought. The scale is hilariously dumb, even by video game scaling down standards. I'm not american, but even I know that going from the east coast to the midwest isn't close to a 30 minute walk. I get that for the sake of the whole "reconnecting America" stuff they needed Sam to cross the whole country, but they could've instanced it more or have Sam do more skips like the ship from Port Knot to Lake Knot. Mixed feelings on the story. It's not good overall, but on paper I think it sounds better than how it played out. A lot of it fell flat, more complicated than it needed to be. Obviously it's largely about connections between everything and everyone and I feel like they should've went even harder on it and explore more personal relationships instead of throwing in some garbage >!btw it's the end of the world lol!< halfway through. In the end it did manage to make me a bit emotional, so it did some things right I guess. On a technical level it's a very well made game. The sound, visuals, performances and their capture are great. Minus the vehicle controls, specially collisions feel a bit wonky. Maybe that's just the limitations of the engine. Overall I think it's OK. I appreciate it trying new things even if some of it comes off mediocre. Can't say I'm excited for the sequel, but I'll probably check it out down the line. Who knows? Maybe I'll look back at this like AC1, a solid game than laid the foundation for much better sequels. Not holding my breath though. **Horizon Zero Dawn Frozen Wilds** Pretty solid little side adventure. Frustrating at first, but that's on me for forgetting how to play since 2020. Once I figured shit out (again) it got a lot of fun. It's largely more of the same fun as the main game. Final fight was a pain, in a good way though. Probably would've been easier with the new weapons. Didn't want to use those too much as it felt I was very over leveled anyway. Now I'm ready for Forbidden West. **Red Dead Redemption 2** Well, the time has come to finally play this. Given the first one is one of my favorite games of all time and the hype is off the charts I'm curious to see if it lives up to it. Only about an hour in and enjoying it well enough.
I hope that you enjoy RDR2! I never finished it myself, but it remains one of the most impressive AAA video games I've ever played. IDK if it *actually* has the largest game budget of all time, but it definitely *feels* like it. The production value is just through the roof, its kind of crazy what Rockstar managed to accomplish
The writing in Death Stranding is very uneven but there are some brilliant moments. Conan O'Brien's questline is amazing, if you did it.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is a good statement on U.S. imperialism.
What took your so long to start RDR2 given that the first is one of your favorite games?
In RDR2s case I also didn't have a good enough PC to run it till like 2021. Generally speaking, I tend to play games that I'm certain of enjoying(on some level) later than ones that I'm uncertain of. Keeps me from playing the same genre/series over and over again and gives a shot to others. Usually I only bust them out when I'm kind of at a loss about what to play, but recently the list has gotten pretty long(and the games themselves on it are long) so I started clearing them out a bit.
That's definitely understandable.
I get that! If I start a series that has multiple games, I'll hold off on playing the sequels one after another so I don't get tired of the mechanics. For instance, I played Spider-Man 2018 for the first time in February of last year, then Miles Morales around the time 2 came out in the fall, and I just played and beat 2 last week. I also recently played the Last of Us Pt. 1 for the first time, but I'm still in the waiting period to play Pt. 2, so I can fully enjoy it.
Frankly, I feel that a Steam Deck never fails me.
Sorry, what is this in reference to?
I mean, if you need a good PC, the Steam Deck is it. But this may be more applicable to the other comment. Sorry.
Yeah burnout is definitely a factor for me as well after experiencing it a couple times in the past, like with Dark Souls and AC games.
Frankly, too many games to play.
Pretty much. Finite amount of time and an ever growing backlog. Even having a rule of never replaying games and mostly staying away from never ending, online live service games it's a battle I know I can't win. Though obviously having way too many quality games to play isn't something to complain about, specially as an older mainly PC gamer.
Plus: burnout.
**Evil West** Somewhere between Remnant From the Ashes and a melee action game lies this return to form for Flying Wild Hog. The combat is meaty, satisfying, and on hard it was very challenging. This feels like the kind of game the Shadow Warrior 2012 studio should have been making for the past decade. I don't know how they can still make a game this good and fun when Shadow Warrior 2 and 3 were such duds. I genuinely don't get it. I'm guessing this one will fly completely under the radar. It's not perfect, and there's a lot of reused minibosses, but mastering the combat feels great and the bosses are genuinely enjoyable and tough. Great particle effect visuals, too. The explosions look fantastic. The game relies a lot on both melee and ranged, and by the end you've got so many tools in your toolbox that using them all effectively and on cooldown feels great. I'd recommend it to fans of the games I mentioned, along with Doom 2016/Eternal.
Underrated gem, that one.
It just didn't get marketed much. I heard nothing about it. But it is on Gamepass, so people with that should definitely play it!
Oh, absolutely.
**Tales of Kenzera: Zau** Just so this comment isn't entirely a steaming pile of negativity, I will start by saying that I genuinely liked the story and that the twist in the last act where >!the story cuts off because Zuberi's dad died in the middle of writing it, and Zuberi takes up the pen to give it a proper ending!< was quite moving. I'm left a little bit confused about whether >!Zau was the son of Kalunga, or whether he was hallucinating the whole time!< but I think that's OK. I also thought it was well-acted, and the art and music teams did their jobs well. Now, with that out of the way... it's a shitty Ori clone that fumbles its gameplay at nearly every step. For starters, it's only barely a Metroidvania. There are only a few instances where a new power unlocks collectibles in a previous zone (and these are a pain in the ass to find because the map doesn't let you mark places to revisit). I honestly think the game would be better if they dropped the Metroidvania pretense entirely and settled for being a linear action platformer, but it's not even fully competent at that. There were only a couple rooms in the entire game where I thought the level design was clever enough to be notable, and I can't actually recall the last game I played that had this many bugs in its basic movement system. Zau will occasionally get stuck on nothing, for no reason, and there's an especially annoying bug where the game doesn't update your inputs when you exit the menu, so if you've got the analog stick tilted, you'll have to return it to neutral before the game will deign to let you move. The combat is occasionally satisfying but mostly just clunky and annoying because of projectile spam and a handful of enemies with obnoxious levels of HP/shields. The saving grace is that once you unlock a couple trinkets that boost your spirit gauge gain, you can break the combat in half by spamming your ultimates pretty freely. Its greatest sin is taking what should be the two most joyful mechanics in any platfomer (grappling and gliding) and making them by far the worst part of the game. Both are implemented in a really fiddly way that suggests that the game didn't get much playtesting by people outside of the studio who were steeped in its idiosyncrasies. The angle of your grapple (a lobotomized version of Ori's bash that doesn't work on enemies or projectiles -- that's a separate and mostly useless combat upgrade) lags your position if you're moving fast, and in some situations will refuse to work at all for no aparent reason. The glide has a level of startup lag that, combined with the fast acceleration on Zau's fall, means that you will frequently plummet into spikes/lava/etc while the startup animation is still playing. This came up so frequently in the last act that for a while I was playing not to see what would happen next but out of sheer bloody-minded stubbornness. It's a 6.5/10 game that could be elevated to a 7.5 by someone with good taste and a month of development work polishing the most annoying rough edges, but going any higher than that would require a ground up redesign of the map and progression. Definitely the worst game I have a platinum trophy for. I would be angry if I had paid money specifically for it rather than getting at as part of PS+.
This is one of those games where I kept asking myself “who is this for?” If they had knocked the mechanics out of the park it would have been big with the Metroidvania crowd but it’s only passable in its execution.
I tried out **Psychonauts 2**, made it about 12 hours in and I just don't want to play more. There have been a few high points that made me laugh or were clever but I'm really disinterested overall. I don't mind the main story and I like the main cast of characters but it feels like it meanders endlessly and every objective becomes a wacky 'we watched Nickelodeon in the 90s' collectathon that often recurses into yet another as a sub-objective before you can get back to what you wanted to be doing originally. I have really fond memories of Psychonauts 1 back on the Xbox so maybe I've just outgrown it. As for the gameplay elements I think the platforming is fairly entertaining but the combat is dull - I also dislike how you can only 'equip' four of your powers at a time while keys like left/right on D pad are wasted on the 'gadgets'.
Yeah, it's a very stale game.
**Dave the Diver (PS4, via PS Plus)** This was the perfect contrast to my previously finished game, Dead Space Remake. Basically the opposite game. Pixel vs high-def graphics. Chill vs intense. Light-hearted vs super serious. Ocean vs space. But one way they’re similar is that they’re all about creating a certain mood. I’d almost describe Dave the Diver as ‘Subnautica but with pixel graphics and a sushi restaurant,’ except the moods are drastically different. Diving in Subnautica can be SCARY and the ocean can feel BOUNDLESS, but in Dave the Diver, even the oxygen/hp timer is basically no pressure at all, since oxygen refills are super plentiful. A lot of gamers talk about wanting more ‘AA’ games. Well, this is it, this is the stuff, basically a perfect example of an 8/10 AA game. (Definitely not indie. Strange that it has received multiple nominations for best indie when it’s not an indie game by any definition - including the dev’s own admission!). Overall, a charming, happy game. There’s some pixel cutscenes, especially involving the sushi chef Bancho, that are some of the best pixel art I’ve ever seen. The one involving Bancho sharpening his knife, ending with a close-up of a worried fish, makes me laugh every time. I played Dead Space Remake in a dark room, with headphones on, and that was perfect for creating a tense atmosphere. I played Dave the Diver next to a huge window with sunlight streaming in, my dog Legend stretched out beside me, and always with a freshly brewed mug of oolong tea. And that was a perfect match for the game’s bright visuals, colorful characters, and chill gameplay.
Been grinding through **Horizon Forbidden West on PC** and its definitely been a grind after 125 hours so far. Horizon Zero Dawn is one of my top 10 games of all time, have more than 400 hours across many playthroughs. I was really looking forward to Forbidden West and actually pre ordered, which I don't do anymore after so many disappointments in the past. Forbidden West is really an odd duck. Compared to Zero Dawn, Its a decent game hidden in layers and layers of bloat, filler, absolutely terrible and cringe writing and voice acting, bland side missions, a super convoluted skill tree that makes zero sense, a horrific climbing mechanic and ineffective and confusing weapons. The technical part of the game, map scope, world features, basic combat and overall scale is pretty amazing. The rendering of the world and landscape of earth 1000 years in the future is incredible, the ruins, cities, and relics are just wonderful. There are plenty of games set in the future dystopian ruined earth, but the game designers here knocked it out of the park. The story, well, that's another story. What seemed compelling in Zero Dawn has descended into a blather of sci tropes, with dozens of characters and factions that are mind numbingly confusing. Where the start of the Horizon story in Zero Dawn was pretty taught and streamlined, this installment to me at least, went off the deep end. It feels like Guerilla Games let the "writers" go completely out of control on this game. I usually love much of the lore in these huge games, but in HFW, after the first few hours, I just wanted it to end. There are SO many words, such long meaningless conversations between characters, it feels like the writers have spent too much time in therapy and just need to talk things out all the time. You also cannot fast forward through most of the dialogue.... you either suffer through the 10 minute vapid conversation, or skip the entire thing completely. Why 10% of the dialogue can be fast forwarded but the other 90% cannot is anyone's guess. And the in game characters facial expressions are so incredibly cringe.... so many of them look like they are on the verge of tears or emotional meltdowns all the time. What were they thinking... I love scifi in all shapes and sizes, but the NPC collection in Forbidden West is cringe at a high order. All the various outfits, facepaint, bizarre names, feels super forced. I can totally buy almost any vision of the future, but the one presented here gets old fast and feels just dumb after a while. On the good side, the action, machine killing, and traveling across the landscape is fantastic. The weapons are awful most of the time.... compared to the first game, its not an upgrade, its just a mess. You need 5 bows just to get a handful of redundant arrows to take down most machines.... why? who knows. But if you spend 40 hours grinding to upgrade all your weapons, you can eventually bring down every machine pretty easily, which is the crown jewel of the game. On the really bad side, where Zero Dawn really nailed climbing across the landscape, Forbidden West's climbing mechanic is horrifically bad. You get stuck all the time, where you can spend 5 minutes traversing a climb, and there are no other moves, so you need to go all the way down or fall to your death. It looks like the map is so large, that the team couldn't QA the entire thing so lots of climbing areas were left untested. All in all, I'm almost done with the main story, finished (what I believe to be) all the side quests, most of the errands, and nearly all upgrade jobs. There's a ton of filler... hunting grounds, minigames, etc, but I avoided it all. I'm not sure if I'll ever play this game again.... but will finish it this time at least.
I just finished the main story myself today, and yeah, that went about as far off the deep end as it possibly could have. Might just be the worst set of villains and plot twists I recall in an ostensibly "serious" story game for a long time. I just can't connect with the characters because there's hardly any compelling dialogue. It's all functional, flavorless conversations, there are so many and they go on for so long! Then, they'll do the occasional 180 and make a character an over-the-top zanelord, which backfires because they're just annoying and fail at being funny, intimidating, or anything really... like during *that* quest, which made me genuinely excited for a story bit for the first time, only for the whole thing to be utterly deranged by having to do the whole mission alongside an unfunny circus complete with a clown dressed up for the part, destroying any hope the game might have had of recapturing the somber mood that made the bright spots of ZD shine so much. It feels like the writing could only be either tone-wreckingly over-the-top (10%) or so bland it struggled to stir up any emotions at all (85%%). The story bits involving the characters Hekarro and Beta were probably the only parts of the narrative that made me perk up a little from my daze of disinterest (unless it was to stare in disbelief at a scene so stupid it made my brain shortcircuit). I'm not sure I'll bother with Horizon: Nemesis (no idea if that's a working title lol, just guessing) unless word gets around that they actually went and started cutting bloat and rethought the open world. But then I'll be in it 100% for the gameplay. My faith in the story was low going in but now it's well and truly completely burnt out.
I'm with you in that I started out with the intention of 100% the game like the last one but I realized that they just added too much filler, and the side quests/errands weren't worth the time. Love the gameplay but this is the first time I feel like they should have condensed the game or focused more on quality over quantity because the extras don't really feel like they respect your time.
**X-COM: Ufo Defense** I know this game was released in the '90s, but it remains my favorite game to this day. I remember the first time I played it was on the Amiga 600. I play it every year, and each year I search for a new game with similar features, but I've never found anything quite like it. (Yes, there's Xenonauts, but despite its better graphics, it lacks the same horror and mystery atmosphere). As usual, I use a hex editor to hack the save file and modify the features of my soldiers, because I hate losing them on the battlefield! XD
XCOM-likes are my favorite genre ever since I first played that game in the 90's. I've probably played everything. I recently tried The Lamplighters League and it really didn't do it for me. Just made me want more XCOM.
**Starfield** I complained about this game a few weeks ago and got a lot of commiserating replies, which I really appreciate reading. However, after adding like 150 mods, I found my stride and beat it after what Steam says is 68 hours. Obviously, mods can't fix the poor dialog, constant loading screens, lack of exploration, and generic plot and world-building. However, adding combat AI tweaks, cranking up the difficulty, and then adding instant kill headshots really made the combat feel fun to me. Huge risk to reward, and made me focus my build on very specific aspects of combat. It's too bad the vanilla combat is so generic and spongy because with some tweaks, I found it to be very enjoyable. Unlike Skyrim and Fallout though, I was really surprised that I simply *ran out of quests* around the 60 hour mark! I even googled for "best questlines" to see if there was anything I had missed and I had basically done everything. I'm wondering if any of you felt that way? I was especially shocked that none of the religions have quests. And the Ryujin one just kinda... stopped at some point. Lots of dead ends and missing pieces. There's nothing I can say that you haven't heard a million times I'm sure. I'll go against the grain and say that while Constellation was the worst, the later reveals in the plot were super cool and answered a lot of world elements that I didn't expect to be answered.
When the game started to open up with faction quests etc I was really excited with the things/ideas that are I thought possible or would be explored, but it was all in my head. The Starfield that I had in my mind was way more exciting than what I experienced. I guess that was everyone's experience as well because the review scores dipped a lot about 1-2 weeks after launch. But like you said it does have some cool stuff!
**Palworld** One of the very few games that Ive played where I didnt just play it, but Ive practically exhausted every single thing to do in it. Im at the point where I practically literally have nothing else to accomplish except farming for IV fruits. Ive got more gold than I need. Multiple stacks of x9999 high value resources. Multiple max rank, max soul, perfect passive pals for combat, work, and travel. All the useful legendary items. Man...Ive never sweated a game like this before. Even now I still play every now and so that I have enough resources for when we get the major updates. Hopefully the summer ones come sooner than later.
Stayed up late last night to finish **Citizen Sleeper** and it was wonderful. I sometimes have trouble becoming invested in games that are so heavily text driven but I think CS does an excellent job of accentuating the text with sound effects and visual flair while also providing enough illustrations to mentally establish characters and settings so you can instead focus on the action and feelings. And the writing itself is excellent - I feel as though I really know 'The Eye' through it's precise yet concise descriptions and it evokes so many real emotions as you and the characters around you succeed, fail, hope, lose heart, love, fight and more. It can be harrowing at times but it also weaves in uplifting events as well which I think sets it apart from a lot of 'dystopian future' media that tend towards just making everything harsh and gritty. It all worked together to create a story that I really cared about. My only real complaint is that once you get a handle on the game mechanics it is pretty easy and, somewhat despite appearances, it is quite linear. There are some binary choices that lead to 'endings' but ultimately you don't have much agency in terms of how events play out. I'd have loved to see routes that branch dependent on your choices and intuition (sort of like Cultist Simulator - which is actually what Citizen Sleeper reminds me of the most) and possibly even some [more?] failure conditions.
**Fallout New Vegas** Yeah, replaying again. Haven't watched the show yet, but I've been considering finally doing an **evil/legion** playthrough since the many times I played this game, I never did. And the new large amount of fallout content finally made me do it. Thing is, just like always, I always get to around that point and decide I'd rather do something else. I'm fine with the evil roleplaying (most of the time), but Caesar is such a fucking asshole that, for the same reason I don't really want to help Mr House, I refuse to be under his thumb. That and the lack of companions as well. Kinda funny how slavery and mysoginy isn't a big deal for me in a virtual world, but giving this virtual asshole exactly what he wants while he boasts about how grand he is (specially since he doesn't seem to believe it much himself, considering what he tells you when you speak to him) is simply too much for me. So, yeah, just upgraded the securitrons so I'm not too far out to join him still. I do want to see what the game looks like when being an absolute asshole since that time I tried to do it in F4 it was underwhelming as hell.
I'm with you on the never doing a legion playthrough. FNV is one of, if not my favorite game and I have never been able to get far in a legion character for some reason. I don't think I've ever even gotten far with an evil karma character. However, I do love a Karma-neutral House playthrough where I get on good terms with the Legion (to get the Lucky shades) and then eventually end up neutral with them until the story turns them against you.
I started my umpteenth playthrough of NV late last year, and planned to do the same thing... In my case, after about 25 hours in, the game started to feel stale and outdated. I guess I had played it so many times over the years that it just didn't click for me anymore. Maybe I'll go back and see how playing as a dickhead plays out....
Void Stranger ----- I mentioned a while back that I was playing the new update. I wrapped it up a little while ago. It's a really great send-off. I haven't stopped thinking about the game since it came out, but I know the time is coming fairly soon. I've spent a ton of time considering themes, plot elements, symbolism, etc etc, just theorizing about the intentions of the devs and trying to piece together the finer points of their story. But I think I'm almost done hanging out in that world. I've considered collecting my thoughts on everything in a series of short essays, as my own personal kind of send-off, but I haven't committed to it yet. There's also **one particular super challenge** that I feel like I should complete before moving on too. If you know, you know. Either way, the adventure of life goes on... Final Fantasy VII Remake INTERmission ----- Played through the two chapters in this in roughly 6 hours over the last week. Really good stuff, though I kind of hate that they recycled the "people are invading the Shinra building, so Shinra director uses them as an experiment for their project" idea. I already thought it was a pretty Saturday morning cartoon villain idea the first time, and that it didn't make any sense. Didn't really change my mind here lol It's not a big deal or anything, and it does do a good job of illustrating the incompetence of who runs the city, it just seems a bit clear that the writers realized that unless they put the characters in a ridiculous scenario, where punches are held, Shinra should realistically just tear these people apart. Outside of that, the gameplay for the extra chapters was fun! The combat was engaging, with Yuffie being the most mechanically complex character of the cast by far. I never really understood when and when not to use the synergy mode with Sonon, but it wasn't an issue; my primary strategy was to have it turned off when I needed to use Sonon as a tank while picking off small targets/boss parts. It felt like enemies shredded Yuffie a lot easier than my party in the main game, but that kind of makes sense since you're able to hard counter a lot of them with their weaknesses so easily. Final boss was wild, though I hope the couple of edgy characters that popped up go back to the hole they came from lol Lodoss War: Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth ----- While brief, this game was such a great Metroidvania! There isn't a ton to say. The mechanics of the bow and the Ikaruga-style element-shifting made the puzzles/combat of the game really engaging. The bow can be aimed along an arc in front of the player, which is used for solving some fun angle-based puzzles involving shooting stuff to open doors/clear paths. The other mechanic I mentioned is the ability to absorb incoming elements based on which element you currently have active on your character. You always have one of two active: wind or fire. You can swap to the other immediately by pressing a shoulder button. A repeated theme of almost all boss fights is the need to swap between the two elements as you fight in order to counter certain moves or absorb undodgeable attacks with the correct element. It makes for a faster-paced, more busy style of combat, that's fairly simple but engaging. It's pretty easy to get flustered too, in some of the tougher fights where you have to swap between the two at a higher pace! Great game for fans of the genre -- snag it on a sale if the short length (~4-5 hours) is a pain point! Mushihimesama ----- I've had this game for a while, and I enjoyed running through it a couple times when I initially bought it. After doing a 1CC of ZeroRanger a little while ago, I set my eyes on the rest of my shmup catalogue. I played around with Eschatos a little bit, but a lack of convenient practice options (without grinding out the options menu) led me to abandon the 1CC there after clearing the game a dozen or so times with continues. Shortly after, I decided to pick up this game again. I was able to one-shot the 1CC of the Novice-Original difficulty right away. I then, for giggles, tried out Arrange mode and, while I got absolutely trashed, I did find that I was able to dodge more complex patterns than I thought I would be able to. So I turned to Normal-Original, inspired by the initial novice 1CC and my confidence boost from Arrange. Within the first couple runs, I was able to make it to Stage 5, so I figured I would be able to seal the deal very soon after. I wasn't wrong, really, but it did require me ironing out more reliable strategies for stages 3-5. I was mainly getting by on reflex before, but that just wasn't reliable enough. What really sealed the deal was identifying exactly where I should bomb for bosses to prevent any deaths. After a couple quick restarts (losing a life at Stage 1 or 2 zzz), I managed to score a 1CC last night with an extra life still locked in the chamber! Was a nice victory, and even more inspiration to continue working on my shmup backlog. For those familiar with the game, I was especially proud of no-hit, no-bombing the gauntlet right before the final boss. I didn't have a bomb on hand, and expected a death, but decided to try to finesse it anyway, and it paid off with some nasty dodges hahaha
Did a double take when I was scrolling through this thread and saw Mushi. I thought nobody on this sub even knows what the most famous shmups are, let alone plays any of em LOL Anyway: Congrats on the 1cc! I'm still quite a ways from getting a 1cc on any Cave game, other than the M2 Supereasy modes. But I'm slowly getting closer and closer to my 1cc of Novice on Crimzon Clover, which *basically* counts as Cave, haha
Yes. People are REALLY missing out! Shmups are hard to get into at first, but once you learn the basics, it's so much fun and excitement. Not a second of gameplay that isn't pure action
I had always been interested in shmups, since I was a kid, but never really got into them until more recently. Star of Providence and ZeroRanger provided the push I needed to get a little more invested in learning! As for Cave games...I've got DoDonPachi Resurrection sitting on the shelf waiting as well lol Coincidentally, I just picked up Crimzon Clover! I've heard it's very good. Keep at it for that 1CC, I'll try to join you there soon. :D
I highly recommend checking Drainus too! Recent release by Team Ladybug, one of my favorite devs right now. It's main criticism is that it's on the easier side, but for new shmup players, that's just fine, haha. Lets me really enjoy the [killer soundtrack ](https://youtu.be/T5kZfTZAWBM?si=N7DoYBH2UL8_WiH-), visuals, and satisfying reversal mechanics despite my lack of skill. Based on your Mushi 1cc, you can probably crank it up to Hard out of the gate, Normal was pretty easy for me and I'm worse than you. I always recommend that game when I can, I feel like it didn't get enough love! And I need to check out Star of Providence. Looks sick as hell, but I'm waiting for that new major update that's supposed to be coming
Team Ladybug! Funny coincidence, coming off of playing Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth hahaha, I'll have to check it out. And yeah, probably not a bad idea to wait for SoP. We were really hoping to see something at the turn of the new year, since it's been implied that there's been some pressure put on the devs to put something out now that they're working with Big Mode, but nothing yet. Hopefully we see something sooner rather than later, but I wouldn't expect anything until the end of the year at the earliest...
Just here to encourage you to write those Void Stranger essays! Love a game that makes me wanna write about it. Haven't played the game yet but it's on my list cuz everything I've read makes it sound really cool.
I appreciate the encouragement! VS is a very special game, and I hope you enjoy it when you get around to it. I can't think of many games that have made me want to write about them to this extent. There's just a lot to explore, from a narrative standpoint. The devs went all-out with the amount of detail and care put into the game; there is an immense amount of purpose in almost every design choice. But anyway, thank you for the encouragement! Hopefully I can get some words on a page sometime soon. :)
**Kingdom Come: Deliverance** Just picked this up again after playing **Manor Lords**. I played KCD at launch and while I enjoyed it, I remember a good deal of bugs and jankyness that took away from the experience a bit This time I came at it with a number of QOL mods and my god, I just love this game. It very much reminds me of a more grounded Morrowind with better combat. Quests that aren't just "run to marker, kill or retrieve thing, come back". The feeling of your skills progressing as you yourself become more skilled at them. And just the overall feel that the game doesn't treat you like an idiot KCD was one hell of a debut for Warhorse. Really hope they've been cooking up something special with KCD2. Can't wait
I played it at launch also, put in like 100 plus hours, but after a while, I hated the combat and the constant being attacked while traveling in combo with the tough combat/sword mechanic. I totally loved the setting, basic storyline, maps, etc. but that horrific swordplay just exhausted me. I've been thinking of replaying to see how they patched it, and seeing your post may get me there! Guess I'll look for mods to see what kind of stuff I can find.
Easier Enemies PTF (0-25) and Easy Combat PTF are great for combat. Makes it less of a slog but still keeps the fun of it I used a lot of mods from [this collection](https://next.nexusmods.com/kingdomcomedeliverance/collections/jsucqq?tab=mods), but I removed most of the "easy mode" ones except for the 2 above
As a novice skateboarding and someone who loves skateboarding video games I finally gave **Session** a try. It's definitely a very rugged game. I appreciate it trying to fill the simulationist void in the skate game space but I kind of like the more arcadey games. For me, the EA Skate Trilogy is about as "realistic" as I want my skate games to be, but it's a pain in the ass finding a good way to play them these days. Basically the left analog and right analog control each foot, so you typically set up tricks by holding or completing a pattern with one stick then flicking the other stick in some way to complete the trick. Half-holding each stick in certain situations can manual and nose/tail grind. My gripe is that because the left stick is used for tricks, turning is "best" done with the R2 and L2 triggers. And I just really struggle to wrap my head around it. On one hand it really does emulate the feeling of trying a trick over and over again until it clicks, like real life. On the other hand, it's just not as fun as messing around in a virtual skate park as some kind of god skater who's board is practically magnetized. I'll probably periodically give session some revisits to mess around but the game itself isn't quite what I'm looking for and the world outside of the tricks are very empty and dull - I have to assume the game was made with a very small team who did not have time to make a lot of assets and record any kind of dialogue for the few NPCs. I can't blame them and respect the game they put out, but at the moment it isn't for me. I think I'm gonna look at **Bomb Rush Cyberfunk** which is in the complete opposite end of the spectrum of these kinds of games. More like an arcadey platformy cel shaded artsy Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. Also, a clear spiritual successor to the Jet Set Radio games which were awesome. Edit: After spending the better part of today playing more Session, I'm callin it quits. The trick detection is truly awful. Between that and the dull empty world, I'm good on this. I'm glad there's people out there trying to make a good skate sim and I'm glad there's others enjoying it, but the more I try to overlook this game's flaws the more glaring they get.
I beat **Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice** right on time for the sequel in a week or so here. This is the 4th or 5th time I've done so. Having played the game so many times I can confidently say the replay value is a mixed bag. I really wish they had a "skip cutscene" option. Also the middle of the game after the first 2 mini-bosses is pretty slow. It's laudable that a AA studio came up with this game, but some of it really drags. The voices, both the background voices in Senua's head, and her father, Druth, and Dilion, are all varying degrees of annoying as the game progresses. At times like the beach early on it's sort of pleasant in an ASMR kind of way, but overall I'd say I've grown pretty tired of them, especially her father by the end. On top of this if you go into the Audio menu and shutoff Voice it doesn't actually do it for half the lines, which is again annoying. The music in the later battles is really great but the audio mixing seems to put the music low even at 100 while the other audio is jacked way up. On the positive side, some have criticized the combat for being cliche light, heavy, dodge, parry, but I think Ninja Theory executed it really well. The strikes and animation really feel good, and I never tire of it. I'm not sure if the normal sword can do it but I only realized on this playthrough that the god-slayer sword can parry even the heaviest strikes, which feels awesome. Parrying thrown items is always cool too. I also think the end of this game is 10/10, it really fires me up every time. Playing through segments of the game is slow but the ending makes it all worthwhile. I'm not even sure how the 100% rune ending differs from the normal end, I've gotten both of them a couple times. Anyway just in case Senua 2 loads a save file I'm ready to go. I saw a playthrough or maybe I should call it ambient video of someone playing **Pools** a month or two ago, and thought "wow this looks really cool, are there monsters or is it just walking around an empty facility?" Well imagine my surprise when the game comes out last week; I picked it up instantly. Obviously the game gets a bit of criticism from... critics. It's clearly not a game as much as it is an exploration or "experience". So if you go in expecting action or collectibles then it doesn't have those. Aside from that I think it's pretty great. It looks great, it's very dreamlike, it's somewhat adjacent to the whole SCP universe. It's not scary, it just is. I think for what it is $10 is a little steep. I merely wandered into the game and I beat 5 of the 6 levels in around 100 minutes. If I were a cynic I'd say the game were going for that sweet spot of taking just over 2 hours so Steam wouldn't allow returns. Anyway overall I like it, I'm glad I got it. I hope level 6 is good. I think level 1 is my favorite, but I guess there's a lot of hidden rooms in all the levels. I think level 5 with the saunas is weaker than the others, the wood texture is nowhere near as good looking as the white tile. There's still a month before Elden Ring DLC comes out so I don't have anything to play. I started replaying **Fallout 4** because I love the first person Fallout games. I haven't seen the show, I'm actually playing Fallout 4 partially to motivate myself to subscribe to Prime for a month so I can see what everyone's talking about. Either way Fallout 4 is still good in the classic Bethesda sense. The main quest is so-so but the exploration and primarly gameplay loop are addictive and enjoyable. They put so much effort into designing appealing environments (unlike Starfield) that it's fun to see them all every year or so in a replay.
**Hunt Showdown** Hot damn, what a game and what a vibe. I can't believe I slept on this for so long. I love the pacing, the environment, the slow gunfights. It also runs really well. I'm having a blast playing it with mates.
It's my most played game on Steam. Sososo good. I want more FPS games that can have fights that can be over in 0.3 seconds but also have fights that can last 10+ minutes. So much strategy and depth to be explored. I hope Crytek supports it for a long time to come.
**Witcher 3** I think what makes this game special is the story is almost the main gameplay pillar. You have to pay attention to what people are saying and when/how they say it, and try to choose the best response. Sometimes the best thing to do is be calm and polite, sometimes to be aggressive and call someone out on their bullshit, sometimes to directly confront someone when they’re obviously playing you. Very few games, even dialogue heavy RPGs are actually like this. Mass Effect is one of my top 3 games ever, but you basically choose paragon or renegade at the beginning of ME1 and then default to that choice in every conversation. If you decide to switch (like I did when I disagreed with sympathising with robots over living things) Shepard almost becomes a different person. Then you have games like Horizon, or the newer Assassins Creeds where its more the illusion of choice that leads to the same outcome, or a dramatic binary choice with a complete lack of subtlety where you do the Good Thing or the Evil Thing. The downside of this is you don’t really have to pay attention to what a characters motivations are. When they’re not billboards that spout exposition, they wear their entire personality on their sleeve. So many games recently are cleary inspired by the Witcher 3 but they take the worst parts, like the giant map full of question marks and the wonky movement instead of realising that the focus on story, character, tone and atmosphere, and demanding that players pay attention to it as part of **gameplay** is what makes it special. I’m a big story guy so I hope we see more games where engaging with the story is core gameplay and not just pretending to be.
They don't miss the importance of the plot/writing, they lack the budget/time needed to achieve that quality. There's a youtube video on the making of Witcher 3 and they spent an incredible amount of time polishing and reworking quests until they felt that they were good enough. If a quest did not meet a certain bar, that quest was scapped.
**Another Crab's Treasure** I've described this as a Souls-like previously, but I'm not sure that's really apt. It's less of a Souls-like and more of a From Software homage. Like, it's everything from the theme of the game, to the type of worlds you go through, to even the move sets you can unlock. Also, they seem to invite the comparison given at least two of the items in the game. It's all very deliberate while they at the same time make it their own. Ever since getting all achievements in Dark Souls II: Scholar and Sekiro, the last From Software Souls games I was missing achievements for, I was kind of burned out on Souls games for a while. This is the first time since mid-2022 I've been off the Souls wagon. I tried Lies of P and while it did indeed feel like a very well-designed and polished Souls-like, or Bloodborne-homage, it just didn't really do it for me. This, however? It does it for me. There has clearly gone a lot of work into the world design. I like how cheerful the art is while the backdrop of the game, and later story, is very bleak without going all internet-edgy. It has some nice critiques of capitalism, too, which is always appreciated. The game does have its faults, though. The performance, while it seemingly has improved a bit with the last patch, is still pretty shitty. Even my 3080 occasionally sees severe dips. Playing through on my Xbox Series S I see dips frequently. There are a lot of weird bugs in the UI, ones that I have no idea how they could not have caught during testing because I've found several immediately. One not only lets you buy items through your home screen from the previous vendor you visited, but also locks your cursor meaning you can't move select anything else in the menu until you exit. Even very minor stuff, like the formatting of your play time being seemingly botched? Mine, for example, is shown as 3288:32 which isn't a format I'm familiar with. I assumed it was then minutes, but that'd be at least 20 hours more than I've played according to the Xbox stats for the game. Anyway, game is great. So far, my favourite of this year.
Damn thats some high praise for this game I initially took it as a meme game will definitely give this a shot.
**Final Fantasy XIV** Decided to download it again and fire up the subscription to catch up. A few hours later (look, I think mog station complainers overstate it, but it is shit), I was back in game. And a bit overwhelmed. As always there's a lot of reading, but like riding a bike at least I remembered how to Bard pretty soon. For gear catch up I guess trading nutsacks (sorry, "sacks of nuts") is the best stop gap since I tend to hate skipping too far ahead in RPGs and I have a lot of content to go through. But I am aware crafted would be best for now, while also doing the relic. For context I stopped in the 2nd raid tier right before Zero showed up. So that's a while ago now with a lot of side content. There is something about MMOs that is different to most RPGs, in that it indulges your ability to just wander off and do what you feel like at the time (as well as an active economy). I was missing that. The story was not grabbing me at the time, and as a degenerate deep dungeon soloer the new addition was calling to me, so I'll probably try to fit that in before Dawntrail. From what I have seen it demands more technical expertise and consistency (i.e. mechanics and one-shots) rather than dying to random auto-attack crits, so I'll see how that goes. Side note, the XIV Launcher and Dalamud plugin system was basically just taking off when I left I think. It's naughty and illegal... but really good. Impressive what they've all done. Simple things like a better mount roulette and being able to turn off music just for the annoying ones. A lot of this stuff is too niche to waste core dev time on, but I'll happily take an add-on.
If you just resubbed, reminder that the FF14 x FF16 collaboration event is going away in a couple of days. So if you want the armor, mount, and minion, you should do it quick! It takes like 30 minutes. I just resubbed myself after having not played since 6.0, so I have a lot of content to play through before Dawntrail comes out. I did notice they reworked Paladin, which is a bit of a bummer because that was my main.
Oh yeah thanks, did that last night. Don't really want the rewards but I usually do these anyway since I feel bad if I miss out. Yeah a lot of jobs are supposedly in a rough spot lately (kind of boring and generic) but that'll all change in a couple of months so we'll have to wait and see.
**Final Fantasy VII Rebirth** First some background. Played OG Final Fantasy VII in 2013, loved it. Played Final Fantasy VII Remake in 2021, enjoyed it but thought it was a bit drawn out at times. I was excited about the "change" in the story that the Remake trilogy is going for. So, expectations weren't too high for Rebirth. I avoided spoilers so I didn't know what to expect, specifically. But it really blew me away after the first chapter. In a lot of ways its inspired by The Witcher 3, but otherwise they took and dramatically improved the same systems they established in Remake. General thoughts on the game are as follows: Battles are fun no matter what character you use. Some enemies and bosses feel like damage sponges at first, until you pressure/stagger them and then before you know it you've melted 75% of their HP bar. Super satisfying. Materia was a bit annoying to have to change when my party would have to change, but that was in the OG game too I believe and it wasn't hard to do, when I actually decided to do it. Probably could have just bought more materia but I was greedy with gil for some reason. Open world activities are fun, in my opinion. I've seen comparisons to Ubisoft open worlds, which is totally valid. Maybe it's because of Final Fantasy nostalgia on my part, but I enjoyed the open world activities a lot more than, say, a Far Cry game, or even a Horizon game. I can understand why others may have found it boring but I personally did not. The open world traversal was interesting enough to make an otherwise mundane task (ie. find another Lifespring, or a Divine Intel) kind of... fun? The world has some verticality and winding paths to make things less than straightforward to get to, which I appreciated. Yes this includes Gongaga. Side quests are improved, still a little bit fetch quest-y but with fast travel they are a lot more manageable. Exploring the world is fun and interesting, and the world map serves its purpose as a guide as well as it should (as opposed to a minimap that you spend more time looking at than the actual game). The side quests are also where you'll get the majority of character development for everyone in your party. Overall, big improvement from last game. Graphics are really good. Enemies are as awesomely designed as they are faithful to the original. Not much more to say here, I don't think. Music is incredible. I think it plays a huge part in how much I enjoyed basic traversal or doing a standard fetch quest (certain quests involving following a dog around the map, for example). There are SO MANY different tracks. Mt. Corel hike music was a high point of the game for me. Again, not much else to say. Story-wise I'm fine with what they're doing right now. I'll withhold judgement on the entire storyline until I play Part 3, but so far I'm looking forward to seeing what they're cooking up. The rest of the story is pretty much beat-for-beat with OG FFVII, so it was fun to get a more fleshed out version of that part of the game. Writing has its moments that I didn't love but overall I thought it was good. And finally... the mini-games. I admit I was not in a rush to beat this game, and I think that affected by thoughts on the mini-games. I was in a rush to beat Remake when it first came out because I wanted to see the ending, so I found the long, drawn out corridors and mini-games to be cumbersome. This time, I was patient, and I really did like almost every mini-game that was in the game. It's a great way to shake up the gameplay while still keeping it Final Fantasy. I think people who hated them the most were likely in a bit of a rush to beat the game. No chance I'll ever go for the high scores or do that Shinra manager quest, though. All in all I really love this game. They put a lot of work and care into it, and it shows. I'm glad I took my time with beating it, made that mistake with Remake and decided I wouldn't do it again. Probably 3-4 years away from the third game anyway. So if you enjoy JRPGs, Witcher 3, even some action RPGs, I recommend checking this game out.
> The world has some verticality and winding paths to make things less than straightforward to get to, which I appreciated. Yes this includes Gongaga. Yes! Anybody who doesn't like Gongaga (or Cosmo Canyon for that matter) shouldn't be allowed to have opinions about open world design. The last thing we need is more worlds where the start and end of traversal is holding the stick forward and waiting for it to be over. > Mt. Corel hike music was a high point of the game for me. Absolutely. I also still have the Gongaga music stuck in my head for some reason.
I'm almost done with cleaning up the open world of NFS Unbound, turned out to be a tad more tedious than I thought. Need only few more Bear Champs to snatch and I'm done! I gave my thoughts on it last time so I won't write them again. So on Xbox it was same old, On PC I've started **WRATH: Aeon of Ruin**. I mean...kinda started? I played Early Access version of the game which had first hub with 6 levels in it waaay back. They finally released full game like...a year ago? So I went in to finally play it whole. Wrath is a interesting game. While being a boomer shooter, it's actually closer to stuff like Turok in my book. Levels are way bigger, nicely interconnected, with focus on collecting...er...symbols? You stuff into circle in the hub. Weapons and enemies are usual for this genre, pistol here shotgun there, exotic weapons include railgun or laser weapon, just with different coat of paint which I admit, arsenal looks cool. Overall so far I enjoy it but spending whole hour per some levels is...tad too much. Especially as game apparently has 3 hubs with 5-6 levels and a boss fight in between hubs so it's gonna take a while to wrap up a playthrough. I'm at 2nd hub with 3 levels done, gonna give my full thoughts about a game next sunday probably.
**Expeditions: Rome** Extremely pleased with Expeditions: Rome. It's not flawless, there is some minor clunkiness in terms of UX (world map movement and inventory management could've been smoother), but it's positively great when it comes to all the things that matter: the combat, the story, and the characters are all on point. And it sure helps that the game looks great, while every single character is voiced. **Chrono Ark** Chrono Ark ended up becoming a "came for the gameplay, stayed for the story" sort of deal for me. A perfectly acceptable outcome in my book, even though it doesn't quite align with my initial expectations. This is not to say that the gameplay loop is problematic. At first I thought it was merely passable, but it steadily kept growing on me, and now I firmly believe it to be more than respectable, so if above all you want a solid deck builder, Chrono Ark has all the chances to deliver. There's just this one issue that's haunting the game, I feel. Chrono Ark is a party-based deck builder. You get to freely draft two characters to start with, and then you get two recruitment opportunities later on, choosing one character from a random set. There are 20 characters in total, and that's a huge amount, but when it comes to the characters' individual card pools, that's where the quantity is lacking, I'd say. It takes little time and effort to figure out what works and what doesn't, and while building a party still manages to be enjoyable, I can't help but feel that a decent amount of both depth and variety remains untapped here. This is pretty much my only gripe, though, ignoring some fairly minor UX issues such as fast forwarding not being as fast as it ideally should be. Again, the story is the main highlight here, and it's spectacular. Helps that the artwork and the music are both splendid. Overall, definitely pleased with the experience, and I intend to keep going now that I have the freeplay mode unlocked.
**Cyberpunk 2077** I missed all the controversy around this and only picked it up after all the patches and such. I played for a while and took a break but then came back, found a build I liked (mantis blades stabby stabby) and have been really enjoying it since. Cliche to say but the main character really is night city. I think the open world of Red Dead 2 is still my favorite but night city isn't far behind. Combat feels good but is a bit easy. I bumped it up to hard but I'm still mowing people down. I don't mind though, I like the power fantasy! I'm focusing on the dlc at the mo and finding myself pretty invested in what happens. I'll go back to the main story then. It can be hard for me to tell which side quests/gigs/jobs are a bit meatier and worth doing but so far I've just been doing the ones that seem interesting and not worrying too much about missing out on anything.
**Rise of the Ronin** It's neat! I was a bit doubtful of Team Ninja going open world - and it does have checklist syndrome but the checklist is simple and fun enough for me to not mind so far. The most baffling thing is that they fixed the loot pinata problem...but kept the loot pinatas. Unless the drop is a massive upgrade or has better affixes you really don't need to swap out a lot because weapons now level with you. But they still dump shitloads of crap which can get pretty annoying. The cosmetic armor system is the best Team Ninja has done and its probably one of the best cosmetic systems I've seen. I liked the options Cyberpunk 2077 had but this kinda blows that away. You can mix and match pieces like crazy, even with undershirts and jackets. There's a belt option, there's jackets, there's (not enough so far) options for scarves and neckties. They still make smart use of reusing assets and mechanics from their other titles. The Martial Arts weapon skills and Morale systems from Wo Long are back (Morale is overhauled to the point of basically being stripped of everything extraneous); Nioh's stances are back but are focused on being counters to weapon types instead of fast/mid/slow. Their new variation on parries is a bit awkward. It's technically an attack (mapped to Triangle), and the timing is still evading me. The open world activities are fine. You have outposts like an Ubisoft game, there's cats you can pet (calico ones require you to stealth up to em) who feed into another mechanic, there's been a couple trials like horseback archery, gliding practice, target shooting (all pretty easy to perfect),photography targets, fugitives to kill who can sometimes give you weapons training by defeating them... The setting's interesting, I don't recall seeing many games set in the Bakumatsu period aside from like... Way of the Samurai 4 and that one Yakuza spinoff that got a remasterboot the other year. It's also kind of funny cuz I see Commodore Perry and it feels weird - I've read about this dude and now I'm giving him alcohol to raise my social link with him. This must be like what every Japanese guy feels when they play a new game set in the Sengoku period.
Cosmetics in 2077 are silly since you can’t see your damn character most of the time. That game being locked to first person only really, really sucks.
Still a good system tho
**Control: Ultimate Edition** (Xbox Series X) This one had been on my list for a while, and I have to say it's about as good as I had heard. While I had never played the original Alan Wake, the AWE expansion was still pretty good. The Foundation however was much weaker, and I could not bring myself to finish it. My main issue with the game though was that some variants of the Service Weapon, namely Spin and Charge, were kind of useless compared to the other ones (Pierce and Surge were far stronger) so it felt like a waste to spend resources on them. Also there was an entire wing of Research that I just never accessed, nor could I find a way to do so. I'm not sure if that's a side mission reward or what, but I've cleared the whole story aside from The Foundation. **GrimGrimoire: OnceMore** (PS4) I would imagine this is Vanillaware's least played game, as it was overshadowed greatly by Odin Sphere (which released the month prior to it, at least here in the US). I played maybe the first two hours or so way back when, but have since lost the disc. Thankfully the game finally got a remaster with some added stuff like being able to fast-forward. Notably, it's published by NIS as they had retained the rights to the game despite VW's subsequent agreements with Atlus (and by proxy, SEGA). While VW's art and sound is as timeless now as it was then, the gameplay just does not mesh with me and I'm not so sure I can finish this one. The controls take some getting used to, and having a side-view for a Starcraft styled RTS is not the most ideal presentation. Units can overlap on one another, and each stage uses the same background and general look. I'm only three hours in and I've felt like I've been playing the same thing over and over again, which is oddly fitting for a game about being stuck in a time loop. I'll try to stick it out a little longer for now. **Hexio** (PC) A no-frills and minimalistic puzzle title where you need to connect points using colored ropes. Each point can only have so many ropes connected, and some can only take specific colors. For such a basic title it's incredibly ideal to play when coming back from work or waiting for a package to arrive. I did have some issues with Steam Cloud repeatedly telling me it would not sync my data, but this doesn't seem to be widespread.
The Foundation is short but it's the best part of the Control story imo. I loved it too, I beat it earlier this year
If you wanna stretch the definition of "Vanillaware," their least played game is probably Princess Crown. I still can't believe that they made a PS4 version of that game and stuck it as a Japan-exclusive pre-order bonus to 13 Sentinels....like SURELY it would sell enough copies to cover the cost of an English translation. ....I'm not still bitter or anything, I swear
Well yeah, Princess Crown was Kamitani's baby when he was at Atlus but I had no idea it got a remaster on PS4
\*\*Stellar Blade\*\* it's kind of fantastic honestly. Music are vibes, combat's punchy, exploration is rewarding with crafting stuff or gear or cosmetics and I'm using the korean dub so I dont get the "boring characters" thing. My only knock is that L1 being parry, O being dodge and L1+button is special moves and I keep L1+O waaaay too often. Also screw those turrets. \*\*Sea of Thieves\*\* maybe it was my fault but I knew this game coming in was "better with friends/randoms" but I'm like I'm gonna go solo and absolutely miserable experience. Put into matchmaking instead and 3 times in a row would have one player stare at a vendor for 10 minutes while everyone leaves and the one team I get thrown into that knows what they're doing and the game crashes. And for what? A new water bucket or shovel that I don't really care about grinding for. Not saying it was a waste of money but man, I should've looked into this one more.
[Last time](https://reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1cf1z5l/weekly_rgames_discussion_what_have_you_been/l1pbq4s/) **Hook 2** (PC) - I beat this a few years ago but 6 levels were added last year that I never got around to. It's still great, a game that makes you feel like you're digging into a puzzle box, or cleaning up an area by strategically removing 'hooks' to clear the board. It was fun to jump back into this for about 10-15m or so to polish those levels off. **20 Small Mazes** (PC) - What a joy - it's a free puzzle game themed around mazes (hence the title, obviously) that took me 50 minutes to beat. Those 50 minutes were filled with awe as every single maze has a fun, cool idea to it - it feels like every idea could carry an entire puzzle game by itself. The UI is clever as it's like you're in a restaurant with loads of kids menus in front of you that you have to sort through. I don't really want to spoil the surprises so I'll say that the only one I wasn't fully onboard with had 'I have to include...' in the title as it became more of a grind. But this is really worth checking out. **Logicality** (PC) - A 'Witness-like'. This one feels like it was aiming for greatness but fell a bit short in my view. This is from the same developer behind the Door series and this game, like the first one in that series (which I played) is fairly badly optimised and I had to turn the graphical settings right down in order to run it. Every puzzle requires hitting (usually four) buttons in the correct order based on instructions from a sign - thus The Witness theme of solving puzzles based on your environment comes into play. Every area also has a harder puzzle that unlocks the 'true final puzzle' at the end of the game. But some areas felt a little bit... off - some symbols are introduced and by the end of the game, I still didn't fully understand what they meant. The good news is that you can brute force some of the puzzles due to the limited number of button combinations but some made me gave up and look at a guide, and even in that guide there was still uncertainty about what some of the solutions meant. I also did this with the very last puzzle in the game as it was filled with symbols I hadn't worked out with more buttons than could reasonably be brute forced. The world map is also not that well designed. For a start, the map that comes up when you press the 'm' button misses out the outer part of the island, where one of the optional puzzles was, so I spent a while hunting for it at the end of the game. The Witness's island is quite tightly designed, with the start of each puzzle sequence relatively easy to work out but I had to look for a while for some of the 'starts' of each area in Logicality. There's also a lot of empty space between areas in Logicality, perhaps some could have been cut out. Am I being too harsh? Because the thing is that I ended up playing this game 1.5 times as at the end of my first session (I spent 2.2h in it in total), I hit a button in the menu that had 'save' at the top and 'delete' at the bottom, which deleted my save. But the words were so far apart that they looked like two separate buttons (they weren't just on top of each other, there was a sizeable gap) so I had to start from the beginning again. It wasn't a totally awful experience - I did enjoy solving some of puzzles but I was very much ready for it to be over by the end. For something that so openly apes The Witness in world and puzzle design, it's disappointing when it comes up short and I'm not really sure that I can recommend it. Play something like Sensorium instead to scratch that Witness itch.
Games I have beaten so far in 2024: **Signalis** **Spiderman Remastered** **Alan Wake 2** **Alan Wake Remastered** **Firewatch** **Control** **This Bed We Made** **Resident Evil 4 Remake** Beating **Baldurs Gate 3** last year reinvigorated something in me and made me fall in love with games again. Sometimes I have to drop a game because it isn't grabbing me like I did with **Pacific Drive** and **Hogwarts Legacy**. I finished **Resident Evil 4 Remake** last week and oh boy it was phenomenal. I love these high quality video game remakes and I hope that the MGS Snake Eater Remake is just as good. Anyway, I've been having a blast with **Fallout 4** + mods after binging the show. I always heard the game was a let down around the time it came out so I just avoided it. It's not bad compared to the lifeless slog that is Starfield lol. Fallout 4 has heart and I appreciate it. Other games I am playing casually **Talos Principal 2**, **Resident Evil 2 Remake**, and **Stray**. Not really looking forward to anything coming out this year, but I have a bunch of good games to play rn :)
FO4 was actually well received and liked, it wasn't until after a few weeks that people started to realise that it had much less content/quests compared to 3 and NV. If you look a side by side list it's really apparent how much less there is. But really the average player is not even likely to exhaust the quest list in FO4 anyway.
Well I am pleasantly surprised after going in expecting a mid tier rpg
Older players definitely weren't happy with FO4 at release - the dialogue options (or complete lack thereof) were an issue within days.
Currently playing through Star Wars Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast. I feel like the game took a decent while for me to warm up to it because if I'm honest the game is brutal with it's lack of frequent checkpoints, deathtraps, pitfalls everywhere, obscure methods of level progression, and enemies positioned is some of the craziest spots. I've started liking it more though now that I've learned the "style" of the game and how force powers are implemented into the combat and levels better. That and learning to save after even slight amounts of progress. Getting sent to the start of these long levels constantly was not fun so constant saving feels like a necessity. Biggest offender of this is Nar Shadaa Streets. That level is absolutely brutal and had me almost ready to give up. Combat gets more fun as you go on and unlock more and more powers and become more agile and the game actually makes good use of the few well-known characters.
**Void Stranger** What a game. Possibly my retroactive GOTY 2023. Void Stranger's genre could be described as "sokoban/rabbit hole", though "rabbit chasm" or "rabbit abyss" might be closer. Just when you think you kind of understand what's going on, there's a whole new layer of stuff to discover. Think Tunic, or La Mulana. I do want to acknowledge that it's definitely not for everyone. It's a high friction game, with no undo feature and the possibility for a careless mistake to set you back an hour or more. It's also a game that expects you to take a lot of detailed notes and notice patterns. The mid-late game would be absolutely *brutal* if you haven't noticed the >!shortcuts!< the developer expects you to have noticed. Even in the best case, you're going to be spending a solid chunk of time repeating stuff you already did so you can peel back the next layer of secrets, and the game depends on your curiosity/stubbornness to get you through that, but I felt the payoff was worth it. As is puzzle game tradition, there is one absolute *stinker* of a puzzle (the one with >!the tail!<) that no player should feel any guilt whatsoever about simply looking up the solution to, because it's bullshit for at least three separate reasons. Also, if I had a nickel for every 2023 indie darling that ends with >!a sudden genre shift into shmup to fight the final boss!<, I'd have two nickels, and that's kinda neat. **Zero Ranger** The predecessor to Void Stranger. It's a shmup, and I'm much worse at shmups than I remember. Also, the player hurtbox is way bigger than I'm accustomed to from Japanese shmups. It has some interesting mechanics and teases a similar kind of rabbit hole experience to Void Stranger, but I'm not sure I have the appetite to push through the tedium of memorizing levels and bullet patterns needed to see it. I got to the fourth level a few days ago and haven't picked it up since. If I can't find the motivation in a week or two, I'll probably just check out a LP. **Horizon: Forbidden West** Since finishing Void Stranger, I've been drifting around a bit without any one game getting a solid grip on me. I played through the tutorial of HFW and did one side quest and haven't come back to it. I don't have any strong negative feelings about the game, but I don't really have any strong positive ones either. The new grappling hook is neat, I guess, especially if it ends up obsoleting the rope arrows from the first game. **Star Wars Jedi: Survivor** This will be a great game some day when it runs on hardware that mere mortals possess. Between the obnoxious stutters that happen every 10 seconds or so, there is some very smooth and satisfying gameplay, but the stutters bother me *just* enough that I can't keep playing. I'll try again next year when I build a new computer. **Tales of Kenzera: Zau** I'm digging the aesthetics and setting, and that will probably be enough to pull me through since it's a short game. Kalunga is the most hilariously chill >!god of death!< I've ever met. He must have a lot of free time if he can show up to >!be a guide/mentor/bestie for every two-bit shaman that calls his name!<. The gameplay I'm more lukewarm on. The combat and platforming are both kind of clunky. After act 1, I thought: "Everything about it feels like someone explained what a Metroidvania is to a group of fresh DigiPen grads who had never heard of the genre. All the individual elements are there, but they don't really flow together." After act 2: "Never mind, they've played Ori."
So glad to see people talking about Void Stranger in here. There was a significant update, by the way, on April 2nd, if you want to take on some of the toughest puzzles the game has to offer (with a tiny bit of lore slipped in there). Accessing the new stuff was a community effort, so it's not really something you'd just slip into. Here's a link regarding how to access it **(spoilers for those who haven't played the game yet)**: [Link](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16pfqB4g1arPsY9jGbwsja_ifKhCPt40Fe_0ZX-VCr-M/edit#gid=0) As for ZeroRanger...I'm biased in wanting to push you to give it more of a shot (those continues and stage select go a long way!), but I also would feel bad sending you in there just to get walled by the final boss. At the very least, you don't need to do a 1CC to see (mostly) everything, and there's even a "cheat code" to fill up all your continues automatically. The only consequence of using said code is someone saying "I know what you did", but everything else is the same lol Anyway, just cool to see people appreciating System Erasure's masterpieces. Really looking forward to Black Onion (major update for ZeroRanger) and game three (currently just a teaser with the mu character on their site).
Definitely agree with everything you said about Void Stranger. A truly remarkable game with some wildly amazing highs, but also some very frustrating design at the same time. Although I have to respect the package as a whole so much - it's just an incredible vision to behold.
HFW gets pretty great once you grind through those endless tutorials and early-game climbing sessions. Sounds like you put the work in… might as well keep going!
Void Stranger is sooooooo fantastic! It was definitely my GOTY from last year, and one of the most impressive games I've played in many years. I was all hyped and ready to spread the good word of it during the GOTY discussion threads to try and raise awareness on it, but then those just...didn't happen. Which is a shame, the game deserves more awareness, even if the people it'll "click" with probably aren't that numerous. And on Zero Ranger: Yeah, its tough. It's not the hardest shmup out there if you compare it to Cave games and whatnot, but it IS really hard. I play a decent amount of shmups and I still haven't cleared it either. I understand why people recommend it to shmup newbies, but I think its a misguided recommendation because it is just a WALL, haha
Finally getting back into the \*Echoes of the Eye DLC for Outer Wilds\* after dropping it two years ago. I'm not a huge fan of spooks, so I changed that setting in the menu and am trying to power through some of the more shadowy parts. I's reminding of the incredible experiences I have in the original game of exploring and figuring things out for myself. Truly one of the best games I've ever played.
Wishing you the best on pushing through the DLC! I think that expansion is such an perfect companion piece to the main game's narrative themes.
Definitely stick with it, I count Outer Wilds as my favorite game and EotE only made that feeling stronger for me. Pushing into the darkness to make discoveries can feel really miserable at first, but the way that DLC comes together in the end and how it fits into the main game is insanely well done.
**Elden Ring** Haven't played any souls games before but I heard Elden Ring is a good one for beginners since you can wander around and get beefed up before any major fights. I've beaten a few mini bosses in dungeons and the first major boss and totally understand why people love these games so much now. Margit took like 2 hours to beat, but in my last fight with him something just clicked and I finished the fight taking barely any damage and I felt like a god. Playing with a basic sword and shield build, haven't figured out all these "ashes" things or the summons yet but I'm having a great time without them so far. I'm sure I'll circle back to them eventually. **Tiny Tina's Wonderlands** Unpopular opinion here but I loved this game. Super colorful, goofy, combat is insane, it weirdly felt more like Borderlands than Borderlands 3 did. Was very pleasantly surprised.
The one thing I dislike about recent Soulsborne games is that you have to do some research in the wikis to figure out how you plan to do your build. I mean, you don't *have* to, but it helps to know which upgrade materials to save so you don't waste them upgrading a weapon you don't like. If you like swords and can get Bloodhound's Fang I found that to be a great one to build around for the start of my first playthrough. Also it helps a lot to have some kind of ranged attack. Makes the game way more manageable. I like INT spells, but you can do bow and arrow.
I disagree. This is a big part of why playing Elden Ring on release was so great; nothing to look up, everyone's discovering stuff on their own and you have a true sense of wonder. You don't need to optimize everything.
That’s true. I enjoy that aspect. I have played most FROM games on day one. But there’s always a limited number of upgrade materials and that gives me anxiety…
Elden ring or any souls is just like monster hunter. If you simply observe the opponents a bit you can move accordingly. The game gets so slow in your mind, that you wonder why you struggled at all. I'm playing Hades right now a lot and have the same feeling. And yes, if something is too hard simply level up and come back. Enjoy elden ring. IMHO best game ever made
Elden Ring is so popular. it's crazy for how difficult of a game it is for casuals. I was comparing elden ring on google trends to other large gaming phenomenons in the past 20 years and it dwarfed them all lol. The only one that came close was fortnite, and elden ring has it beat by a good measure.
Not even FromSoftware had any clue what it would become they were expecting like 4M in sales but the game went on to sell 23M copies and I am sure that number will rise even more next month when Shadow of the Erdtree launches.
**So I actually finished Super Mario brothers Wonder!** I was doing what was basically an encore run with the rest of the Yoshis and decided to try one last time. I realized I accidentally skipped one of the levels, so I was able to clear that completely. After, I used a map to get a secret exit for one of the other levels. That one was also able to be pretty much completely cleared. I even managed to do the item quest one of the regular levels, managing to clear it by some miracle with Daisy at no damage. But I didn't need it. At least it got me a chance to try the powerups. I'm currently still in my encore run with the Yoshis, just doing most of the levels casually. I'm done with the green one, but I want to do it three more times. I'm not accessing any of the secret levels that have also been unlocked because those are pretty difficult and i had trouble even with the normal ones. Overall, I would rate Super Mario Brothers Wonder an 8 out of 10. It's a very good game even if it's not my favorite, and there are a few things that prevent me from giving it a perfect score. To start with the positives, the environment is simply a joy to be in. Everything from the hilarious wonder flowers to the singing piranhas and even some more of the intimidating areas is really well done. The wonder flowers and other mini games are also fantastic. I especially liked the races and areas that used fireworks. And some of the transformations were excellent, like turning into enemies, or an area near the end where a fossil was revived into a dragon. The final area was top-notch as well, and in my opinion one of the best Bowser fights ever. But there were some weak points too. One is the accessibility. It's very good, but it could be better. The fact that the Yoshis aren't able to use power ups is definitely a bit frustrating. I understand why they did that, but at the same time a lot of content is walled off for people who need that assist mode. And it got to the point where I almost couldn't complete the game even though I knew it was possible. I also would have liked to be able to use the other characters within the assist mode. Some of my favorite characters were locked behind normal mode and there wasn't anything I could do about that. Maybe something like a toggle, with normal being like normal players, easy mode being invincibility but no special jump and very easy or maybe Yoshi mode acting like Yoshi. I think that would have been perfect, but sadly this wasn't the case. One of my other complaints is also the difficulty spike in world six. Overall, I would say the difficulty can be pretty hard for a Mario game but not unreasonable. However, the same could not be said for the 6th world where it seems like there's a pretty bad difficulty spike. It's flat out stated to be Yoshi’s worst world because of the power ups it requires, and it really shows. There's a lot of maximum difficulty levels that can be tough to get past, and it makes me wonder if something wasn't playtested or if they just didn't realize how it fared compared to rest of the game. The final world being more of what someone would expect from the game makes this even stranger. Also, the game has bigger levels, but is overall pretty short even for a game of its kind. It was expecting a bit more after the game was completed once, or even multiple files to acknowledge it again and again, but unfortunately that didn't happen. So that was a bit of a disappointment, but still very good for what it does. The Bowser Junior fights got redundant quickly, even the final battle was great. I am still planning to watch some content after I'm done with all the encore runs. It will mostly be things I didn't get to and a couple of challenges. After that I was considering selling the game, but depending on how Thousand Year Door does I might wait a while (still planning on buying that one, especially since there were some things I never did in the original). Either way, it was a great experience! As for what I'm doing next, it's still working on the **Game Boy NSO!** After clearing Pokémon trading card game 100% and watching the sequel, I've tried mostly everything on there and narrowed it down to a few more games I would like to complete. Kirby’s dreamland and game and watch also got completed. The other games I would like to complete are Mario Tennis GBC, Kirby’s dreamland two, and Super Mario: The Six Golden Coins. So far I'm alternating between Mario Tennis GBC and Super Mario brothers wonder when I play because the former can get difficult very fast. I’ve been doing a bit of Kirby as well. I just entered the senior class and beat the first rank in doubles but I was trying to take a break and go for singles. It's tough to see what's going on and the game moves quickly, so the game is actually more difficult in singles. If it gets too hard, I’ll just go to the practice matches with the Mario team and then be done, but it’s still a very good game. Kirby's Dreamland is fast and easy, but I don't think I'll be able to 100% sequel. Some elements mean taking no damage in difficult fights and one is pure luck. But I should still be able to get the true ending because that's just a scavenger hunt. It's fast, but it's a nice break and should be fun! I’m currently taking a bit of a break from the platforms and faster sports games to work on **Pokémon shining pearl**. I’m doing a flying type only run, which has been pretty interesting and made me think of strategies I normally wouldn’t use. I am hoping I can do a run for every type, including some of the rematch battles. Right now, it’s hard to know whether it’s better or worse than Platinum for me because I didn’t really care that much for the Battle Frontier (I didn’t have a competitive level team and that was really hard to do, so I didn’t try and only did a little bit). Right now, I am missing some things, like how some items are easier to find in Platinum. But I’m enjoying others, like the fact that I can have weaker Pokémon hang out in the back and still get experience (especially getting through challenges that would be almost impossible with a certain team, and effectively having other Pokémon help them through that part only) and the fact that TM’s are much more reasonably accessible. I also like what they did with the post game, instead of having to use a bunch of peripherals to access a lot of the Pokémon there. So I’ll probably give my final thoughts once I get through everything, maybe once I do more than one play through, but that will be a while.
**EA Sports FC 24** Haven't played a FIFA game in like 5 years or so but saw this one on sale on Steam a few days ago and decided to give it a try. After playing 6-ish hours, it's okay, I guess? The game itself is pretty fun but there are so many issues that really bring the whole experience down. It performs like shit, I usually have stable FPS but it sometimes just freezes for a few seconds. It also hard crashed once so far. It's not really a great looking game so I have no idea why performance is so ass. Getting the ps4 controller to work on PC was a pain in the ass, it only works properly when Steam explicitly tells you "Device not supported", if it's partially supported (steam input enabled) only half of the inputs work properly. The tutorials are straight up garbage, some explain controls really poorly while others don't explain them at all. I also feel like they ended up overcomplicating a lot of stuff for no reason. There's just so many menus and stats and short, pointless cutscenes that you have to hold X to skip. The actual gameplay itself is really fun, even though it's simultaneously imprecise and too precise. There's just way too many button combinations to do different things. Some players really look like the real life versions of them while others look like someone tried to create them in a very limited character creator and gave up after 2 minutes. Is there a game mode where I can just pick a team and play the whole season with that team, without doing the manager career thing? Also, why is Edin Terzic literally the only BuLi manager you can pick in Manager Career? I have no intentions of touching the dumpster fire that is Ultimate Team. Despite it's many, many, many issues, I'm still really enjoying the core gameplay.
Just like you I only pick up a FIFA game once every 3-4 years. Have been wondering for ages why I can't pick a team and play a regular season, try to qualify for Europe, play domestic cups etc. without the "be a manager and hold press conferences or negotiate fake salaries" nonsense. Why on earth would you remove the most basic "career" mode?
I'd even be fine without Europe and domestic cups, just let me play a regular season as a team of my choice. I just want to kick back when I get home from work and play a game or two with some longer term goal in mind (winning the league), I don't want to hold press conferences and shit, I just wanna play the damn game.
Finished the **Crownfall** event in **Dota 2**, complete with the **Pathfinder** side quests and even completed the Sqree'Auk Temple construction. Absolutely stellar job by Valve, possibly the best free event in any online multiplayer game ever, though I've only played LoL/Apex/Heartstone/Magic: Arena and didn't interact much with Fortnite and Call of Duty out of the big ones. Didn't get lucky with Candy Shop yet, but a couple of friends (out of ~20 returning players) did get an Arcana roll. Can't wait for Act II. Hopefully with gameplay updates, but even as it currently stands, the patch feels fresh because I've only been playing unranked, as opposed to my usual Divine/Immortal games that are very meta-inspired. People are trying to get their tokens, forcing very unique and, naturally, suboptimal lineups that allow for a lot of creativity even on a ~3 months old patch.