T w e n t y S i d e d
Starting today, every Wednesday we’ll have a ‘what are you playing’ post for community discourse and general conversation.
I, a man of few words will share my own, briefly.
This week I am doing jack-all because it’s a holiday weekend. I played some Risk of Rain 2? It’s Risk of Rain 2.
What are you guys up to?
The Strange Evolution of OpenGL
Sometimes software is engineered. Sometimes it grows organically. And sometimes it's thrown together seemingly at random over two decades.
Push the Button!
Scenes from Half-Life 2:Episode 2, showing Gordon Freeman being a jerk.
Ludonarrative Dissonance
What is this silly word, why did some people get so irritated by it, and why did it fall out of use?
Stop Asking Me to Play Dark Souls!
An unhinged rant where I maybe slightly over-reacted to the water torture of Souls evangelism.
Lost Laughs in Leisure Suit Larry
Why was this classic adventure game so funny in the 80's, and why did it stop being funny?
I’ve been diving deep into the new Zelda, until my son went on vacation and took the Switch along with him.
So now I’m thinking of getting through Injustice 1 and 2 single player campaigns, since I love the B-movie vibe on the most recent Mortal Kombat games.
I’ve been playing a ground up remake of the infamous Sonic 06 called Project 06, which basically rebuilds the entire game in unity while fixing almost everything wrong with it along the way. Characters are smoother and faster, tons of cut content is restored, and the overall control is night and day compared to the original. It legitimately takes one of the most infamous games of all time and turns into arguably the best 3D sonic experience available. With proton, it runs great on Linux/steam deck too.
I’ve fallen into Factory Town and Factory Town Idle.
For some reason the Idle version gets its hooks into me deeper and hours vanish more readily than the ‘full’ game.
It feels like a… Factorio-ish game except with discrete levels and steps to victory in each ‘Level’, since I’m playing through the campaign. I suspect it’ll lose my interest when I finish the campaign.
The *Idle* game, though, is a pretty standard Make Numbers Go Up game, but it feels like it plays like Factorio or any of those other logistic-puzzle games, but abstracts away all of the conveyor/linking puzzles. Sort of just ‘assumes’ you can make everything link up and just asks you to build the right ratios of things to be optimal about it. Which is nice since that part tends to Annoy me.
Played Octopath Traveler 2, which is basically Octopath Traveler 1 with a lot of little mechanical improvements. Same classes with some rebalancing (Hunter’s stronger, Thief’s weaker), all 8 narratives have goals this time and they don’t clash as hard anymore (no more quests to catch a thief while unrelatedly teaming up with a thief), the Thief-Only chests are gone (the thief caused a whole lot of problems in 1, huh). A “day/night cycle” that can be manually rotated and is mostly there to give characters two town abilities and set up a couple of sidequests. Locked quest doors are more natural than the first game’s giant signs declaring the area a quest-only area. Main quests to find things can be done in any order this time, though the Recommended Level still makes an obvious route. Characters still enter the Cutscene Zone for main quests where the rest of the party disappears, but they’ve added some multi-character quests so there’s at least a little bit of interaction between characters. The first game’s character names spelled OCTOPATH, the second’s spell the totally different PATHOCTO.
Game’s basically 70 hours of hors d’oeuvres. I like hors d’oeuvres, I like this game. The main complaint I have is the references to sex in this artstyle. The tiny Lego people have brothels and “Who’s The Father” quests, and it’s a little disturbing. FFT had this artstyle and got dark, but was mostly sexless, and the one reference to sex was meant to be disturbing.
I’ve been playing Octopath Traveler 2 as well. The general gameplay is pretty fun, the story is… well, really mediocre so far. Which is pretty inevitable when you make a game with 8 storylines that can’t intersect, when your characters can’t have anything to say about sidequests, etc. On the bright side the character intros are generally an improvement from the first one, where I started with the Scholar whose big driving quest was to collect an overdue library book.
The Path Actions create some weird incentives where, for example, the Merchant only spends money and therefore I don’t care about leveling him while the Dancer’s path actions are pretty terrible when not leveled.
I also wish I didn’t need to juggle people while in town. I’m in town, the inn is free, just give me all the path action options.
Oh, and it’s hilarious that asking someone about themselves has a chance to reduce your reputation in a town but mugging every single resident is totes ok. I felt like a real dick when I immediately mugged the guy who rescued the character with the Mug path action, but he had stuff and didn’t care in the slightest. Similarly, you can duel everyone in a town except the children and they don’t care but if you use an Owl to do it they’ll hate you… if you lose.
I did think there was a very cool moment in the game in Thief town when someone offered me bread, I checked their inventory, and they had two pieces of bread and a bottle of poison. What an interesting and dark bit of environmental storytelling! And then I Inquired them and found out that they are in fact just generous and kind and oh what a waste of a beautiful setup.
I dug the additions to the path actions, basically every action has all four approaches now; Percent Chance, Level Based, Pay Money, Fight. Only exception is gathering townsfolk which has two Pay Moneys and no Fights. But then they lock them to Day/Night and put plot progression behind them so you get stupid stuff like knocking someone out to get through a door and then waiting eight hours next to their unconscious body so you can use your other power to finish the activity.
Yeah, lots of missed opportunities. Had a similar moment when I stumbled across the Merchant’s endgame town and went, “Oh my, is THAT where this story is going?”, but then I got there through the plot and, no, no it wasn’t. On the other hand, on the way there he did get a riveting bossfight against a small puppy. And nothing beats learning a joke by subjecting the joke-teller to the Inquisition. (“Have I got a joke to tell you!”) (“I WILL get answers!”)
Definitely multiple writers involved; lots of stuff is very kiddy but some of the endgame sidequests are straight out of Nier. Thief quest was the most memorable, in that it was pretty legitimately disturbing.
Currently on maternity leave so it’d be an excellent time to work on any of the games I’ve started but haven’t finished: Pathfinder, Witcher, Mass Effect series. All games that can be paused whenever baby is awake and needs to be tended to.
Instead I’m still primarily focused on WoW gameplay. It’s a gameplay loop I find comforting and easy to do while I’m sleep deprived, though group content is somewhat difficult to do right now.
I just spent the last few days mostly alternating between rewatching an anime, and playing Deep Rock Galactic. There’s a new “season” update out (still a pay once+small cosmetic DLC game) with new enemies, and a couple weapon rebalance-ings that basically re-added a previously terrible weapon and a new weapon mod for completely changing the usage style of another. Specifically they made the Driller’s starting secondary pistol actually work (opening up at least 3-4 usable builds for it), and added a rapid-fire unguided overclock for the Gunner’s rocket launcher.
Probably gonna keep on that for a while, I’ve got more shows I want to watch/rewatch and Deep Rock is a great no-story no-commitment game for when I need a break.
I’ve been playing some older games, as is my wont. R. U. S. E. is an RTS released about a decade ago that I played when it was new, and have been replaying lately. In short, it’s a World War 2 alternate history where the Axis have the benefit of a highly efficient spy in the Allied command structure, allowing them to more effectively counter the Allied advance.
They still end up losing, of course, but they make it markedly more painful for the Allies to get that far. In the end, it turns out that said spy, codenamed Prometheus, is a double agent for the Soviets, meaning that the war in Europe ends with the first deployment of nuclear weapons against the rogue 4th Guards Army in Eastern Europe.
The second game is Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen, a fantasy A-RPG. Yadda yadda, low fantasy setting with just humans and Pawns (semi-human warriors from other dimensions), a giant dragon threatening the kingdom of Gransys (which is ruled by a Duke, weirdly enough) and the protagonist is some guy from the fishing town of Cassardis who was brave/stupid enough to stand their ground and pick up a sword when the dragon showed up and threatened to destroy the town. For their efforts, they get effortlessly beaten, then have their heart extracted and eaten by the dragon, marking them as the Arisen, granted a half-immortality to face the dragon and save the kingdom.
Of course, getting there is more than a little difficult since you’re starting out with a rusted sword, no other gear or skills to start with, and just a vague idea what you’re supposed to be doing. Thankfully, the nearby Riftstone calls to them and allows the Arisen to summon/create a Pawn of their very own, granting them their first and main companion for the journey.
So you set out, fighting monsters, collecting crafting materials with which to make new items or improve those you have, collecting quests from assorted bystanders, and working your way up the chain. Make friends with the Duke and get sent on missions by His Grace himself while trying to get strong enough to face the dragon.
And if you’re feeling confident, you can delve into Bitterblack Isle, a sprawling dungeon crawl filled with enemies far deadlier than any found in Gransys, and rewards proportionate to the challenge. If you survive. The island has no relation to the things going on in Gransys, but it can be nice to not have to worry about the plot all the time.
The third game is Total War: Warhammer 3, the finale of the Total Warhammer trilogy, a series of strategy games taking place in the famous world of Warhammer Fantasy. My current (moderately modded) campaign is as Grand Cathay (fantasy ancient China ruled by a family of immortal, shapeshifting dragons), doing the Realms of Chaos campaign.
Basically, Ursun, the main god of Kislev (fantasy not!Russia/Poland/Lithuanian Commonwealth) is dying, and his captivity in the Forge of Souls causes rifts into the Warp to open around the world, allowing multiple factions access to the titular Realms of Chaos with the winner getting access to the dying god and whatever they want from him.
The Cathayans want information on a missing sibling of theirs, so I’ve been working my through three of the four Realms you need to make it through to win. I keep getting distracted by other things, so it’s slow going.
Another TW:Warhammer fan! I’ve been playing a coop Belakor and Throt the Unclean game (myself playing Throt) and we’ve been having a grand old time terrorizing the old world. Having access to Chaos Chosen for skaven gun teams is almost unfair, it’s so good. Sadly, while my spells can affect allied units in battle, I’ve found the clanstone ability doesn’t work on them, so no mass healing the heretic warriors.
I’ve also been playing Satisfactory again, although I’m stalled at the point of needing to develop my train network which is tedious busywork in my eyes. I know some love building rail lines, but not me. Still, once it’s done I can get to work building a massive turbofuel oil rig design, so there’s light at the end of the train tunnel.
I’m back to Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, finishing an Oracle/Angel run. It’s so freaking broken it’ll be weird mechanically to go back to other classes. But Azata is still the best. Angel might have sacred satellite bombardments and buffs that make the entire team unkillable, but Azata have a floating island, a faerie dragon and crusader mimics!
Also I tested the new DLC, The Last Sarkosian, and it’s the best one by far, Ulbrig and his quest are amazing!
I vouch for trickster, not only do you get to do some silly stuff narratively (not enough if you ask me) but you get some abilities that literally break the rules of the game.
Start combat with a persuasion roll to paralyse enemies, or later literally make them coup de grace themselves! Make your party turn every 1 into a 20! Reverse attacks of opportunity (as in: you attack enemies when walking past them)! Have every magic item, including unique artifacts, get one more random magical property no matter if the synergy makes it utterly broken (admittedly you are at the mercy of RNG but when it rolls good it rolls good).It may not be the perfect choice for a first playthrough on account of being rather silly but I’ve enjoyed it a bunch.Isaac! So good to hear from you for the first time! Good to see you’re still playing RoR 2. What about Borderlands 3? Are you still playing that or did you drop it at the same time Shamus did?
As for me, I’ve been playing the same stuff as last time, except less of them :D
– I’m casually playing Legends of Runeterra (I’m currently Silver): the new expansion is really fun, although I’m a bit disappointed at how bad I am with Poro King. I’m playing the Bilgewater variant that’s supposed to be really strong, but I just find it really slow. I try to mulligan for Poro Snax, the Husk spell, and Poro King, but even when I get them, my board is just not beefy enough. On the bright side, I’m having lots of fun with a Neeko-Garen deck, as well as my old Deep Deck with Nautilus and Maokai.
– My sister and I are playing the original Diablo and she seems to like it a lot. We’re playing a Rogue and we’ve just beaten King Leoric and the Butcher. I had forgotten that you could learn any spell you like as long as you have high enough Magic. Right now, we’ve just got Healing and that bolt that’s good against Undead. We’re pumping the rest of our points into Strength, Vitality, and Dex – in that order of priority. I hope I’m not hamstringing our build for the future. I guess we’ll have to wait and see :D
– We’re also playing Minecraft, as well as some other stuff like Plants vs Zombies, Thief: Deadly Shadows and the original Half-Life.
I played it when it released and then again a few months later after the game updated a bit. I did beat the game at least once but I felt the guns in the game where all over the place in terms of rarity and quality. I don’t seem to remember particularly liking any area in the game it was all just kind of fine.
I’m revisiting Celeste. It’s as good as I remember. Good story, an awesome soundtrack, interesting challenges, and just beautifully produced all around. This time around, I managed to grab all the strawberries with about 100 deaths per stage, which is pretty low for a game of this type.
The finale is just a lot of fun, too. The final level is designed around the new double-dash ability you’ve just gotten, but it feels less like it’s trying to test the limits of that ability and more like it’s letting you completely style on challenges that previously kicked your butt. It fits the story really well and gives you the feeling that you’re speeding towards the ending.
I got this in the BLM bundle on itch.io ages ago and was very excited, having played Hollow Knight and thinking it would be the next in the highly acclaimed indie platformers for me to fall in love with. But I really didn’t gel with it for some reason, it felt like starting up the Path of Pain again in Hollow Knight, time to repeat the same thing hundreds of times because of my poor platforming skills. Maybe the time just wasn’t right – I ended HK with that ridiculous PoP, and it wasn’t fun – ended up spending 6 hours of a Saturday on it, uninstalling the game so that that didn’t happen again, re-installing it as the saves were still there, uninstalling it again and deleting the saves from my PC, re-installing and salvaging the saves from the cloud, spending another 6-8 hour Saturday on it, then deleting it from everywhere.
If you want to play through the story without needing super platforming skills, it does have a very nice assist mode with a lot of options to make it easier.
That’s interesting, thanks for letting me know, might have to play through in that mode then to see what it’s about.
Assassin’s Creed Origins – for some reason I decided to play all AC games in sequence, with 5-ish year delay so I can get them cheap, with all bugs fixed.
It’s one of the games I can play in small doses and it’s easy to continue if I cannot play for a month.
The main story on that looked like a modern AAA story that tries to be impactful and emotional but that I’d have a hard time engaging with… but the world looks amazing. I think my friend said he just wandered around in the viewing mode learning about the history of the place – what an excellent mode to include.
The main story is a bit forced, but the whole relationship between Bayek and his wife, and how that evolves over the game, is genuinely one of the best bits of character development I’ve encountered in a game.
I’m kinda sorta doing the same (redid them up to Black Flag and from then on it’s a first playthrough) only the last one I’ve played was Syndicate. The gameplay is overall good in these but the stories are just so infuriatingly stupid I need a long break after every one. Maybe the trilogy starting with Origin will be better about it (AFAIK it will not).
Replaying Fallout: New Vegas. It always hooks me in with the setting and the factions, and then once I kill Benny the story hits a brick wall. Like, I thought I was a courier out for revenge, now I’m picking factions? Let other people play politics, I’m just here to help people out and get paid.
At least this time I managed to find some really good weapons, so combat is a ton of fun. Headshot, headshot.
What build and what ending are you aiming it?
Staying away from Speech for once and investing in both guns and energy weapons. Have several weapons for various situations: That Gun for close range, Sniper rifle for long distance, Plasma Caster for heavy damage, and the YCS/186 for taking down Deathclaws & Supermutants before they can get close. Trying to maximize critical damage, especially with sneak attacks.
Probably will end up going with Yes Man, but don’t care that much right now.
I did an energy run last time. A little stingy on ammo, but very funny. I strongly recommend the VE – Essential Visual Enhancements mod to make it look super pretty.
I am playing a game that Shamus most likely would’ve hated. Ghosts of Tabor. A Virtual Reality “extraction shooter”. really addictive!
This is a great idea, people are always up for giving thoughts on what they are playing, and r/PatientGamers is a bit big these days haha.
I’m playing Ancient Enemy – one of the Giveaways in the GOG.com sale. It’s essentially Solitaire, but moulded into a puzzle and battle system, with some interesting mechanics, abilities and bonus cards. Rather fun and easy to play on the settee with just a mouse.
Currently playing Alien: Dark Descent when I feel like tension. It’s very fun and I hope the go on to refine the formula. Lots of interesting little choices, but most importantly I just really love the detail-oriented level design. Every room feels like someone put thought into it. That means a lot to me.
When I just want to relax, I’m playing Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Lots of thoughts about that one, but one criticism I have of it is that Nintendo just doesn’t value people’s time when it comes to designing interfaces etc. – everything that I have to 20 times in a row is still just something I have to select with many button presses, then wait for a small cutscene (or hit “skip”, but the fade-to-black and fade-from-black take almost as long as the cutscene…) and then start over again. It all takes so long. I just want to improve my clothes or horse or bag-size, and the charming nature of it wears off very quickly when I have to look at these as chores.
Yeah, agree that a lot of interface aspects of Tears (and BoTW before it) could have used some streamlining. I really like the new system for arrows (generic arrows + elemental attachment, rather than BoTW where I was always “out of arrows” despite having a hundred or so elemental arrows that I didn’t want to use…) but having to reattach on every single shot is a damper on the system.
And, yeah, the cutscene skip thing is annoying, too – I saw a lot of boss intro cutscenes that were similarly unskippable or only pseduo-skippable.
Weirdly, they did think of the “repeat actions” thing a little: if you turn in for multiple heart containers or stamina wheels, it only shows the cutscene once… but it doesn’t seem like that logic was applied to turning in korok seeds or upgrading armor. (Admittedly I haven’t actually done any of the latter in Tears yet)
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(My other big QoL wish-list item would be a “send horse back to stable” command – I would ride a horse around more, but it just doesn’t make a lot of sense when it means that if I need to leave my horse for any reason (which is common – either I find a tower for the first time, or need to climb a cliff, or cross a river…) it’s annoying that I’ll have to come back later and escort it to a stable before I can use it again)
Regarding the horses: you actually don’t have to do that! It says “taken out” at the stable, but if you hit the button, you get the same dialogue to get the horse as if it was boarded at the stable.
Ah, thanks for the hint! That does help.
Just replying to myself here since I didn’t really know where to put it, but Jacob Geller, who does amazing essays on video games, just released a video about games that “don’t fake their space” and him mentioning FUEL immediately reminded me of Shamus’ fascination with it. Good times.
Mostly Terra Invicta. So much Terra Invicta…which is basically “what if XCOM but grand-strategy game”, by the same team of people who brought you The Long War mods for XCOM & XCOM 2. Ironically, I wasn’t very into those mods (because when they say “long war” they are not kidding), but as a grand-strategy game where you play one of seven factions (secret international societies, essentially, who infiltrate countries to get resources), it’s got its hooks into me. It’s basically like the strategy layer from XCOM, with the tactical battles abstracted away into your councilors doing missions twice a month, sort of like the covert missions from XCOM 2: War of the Chosen.
One thing I like is that you can play all the various factions (other than the aliens) and they all have their own unique goals and even victory conditions. I’m playing The Resistance as my introduction, which is basically non-copyright-infringing XCOM with the goal of saving Earth from the alien invasion, but there are factions ranging from “destroy all the aliens” to “serve and support the aliens with everything we’ve got” to “just make a quick buck off all the chaos” to the orthogonal-to-everyone-else “figure out how to move humanity out of the solar system entirely to escape the aliens” faction. I’m still learning (and have restarted once so far when my initial wild expansion led to an alien reprisal I was not equipped to fight off), and looking forward to future playthroughs with the different factions.
Now I’ve got this image of a small group trying to hide from invaders, while one member is just… hellbent on learning how to play the saxophone.
I quite like the inclusion of that faction (Project Exodus) from a thematic standpoint. Aliens show up, and people’s reactions run the (semi-predictable) gamut from “let’s kill ’em all!” to “please don’t kill us!”, and then when you contact this faction (as The Resistance) their leader’s all like, “Good luck saving the world! Just know that we have other plans.” :)
That game caught my eye, but it’s still in Early Access and I usually avoid playing games until they’re complete. How early access is it – is it basically feature complete and they’re just balancing it with player feedback, or is it still a long way from release?
I’d say more towards the former than the latter. Funnily enough, Patch 10 just dropped last night, which is the first major update I’ve seen since I got the game back in May. It mainly involved a bunch of tuning, some new minor solar system bodies, some QoL updates and updates to some behind-the-scenes logic; no “here’s a brand new system/mechanic” or eighth faction or anything like that. That said, it brought the version number up to 0.3.98, so they clearly feel they have a ways to go with it. In terms of playability, it definitely feels like a complete game at this point, though I’m nowhere near the endgame yet, so I can’t say if it tails off…but given what I’ve seen so far, I’m decently confident it’ll stick the landing. In terms of Early Access I’d say it’s the “launch a slightly bare-bones but complete game and improve it” type rather than the “launch a few disarticulated bones and maybe scrape together a complete skeleton by 1.0” type. That said, I totally understand the aversion to buying Early Access, this is merely my impressions from ~66 hours playing so far.
I have been alternating between Mass Effect Andromeda and Borderlands 3.
MEA has me roaming around space, solving everyone’s personal problems for xp and Andromeda Viability Points. That’s the kind of content keeps me engaged for a good while, though the main plot with kett hasn’t really grabbed me at all.
Despite playing on an un-networked PS4 (and therefore not having installed any patches) I haven’t encountered too many of the legendary glitches – Cora t-posing during an important scene is about the worst of it.
BL3 is similar experience, really. Exploring the world and side-questing all the side-quests is fun; the main plot and main antagonists are… present.
Alan Wake: Remastered is free on PS+ this month, so I’m going through that. It’s… fine? The combat is okay and the story is decent, but… it’s just fine. 6/10. Bread and butter. All I can really say is that I’m enjoying the game well enough, but I’m definitely glad I didn’t pay for it (well, not directly, anyway).
Really missed these posts – glad to see them return!
I’m playing Master Detective Archives: Raincode. It’s the new game by Kazutaka Kodaka, the Danganronpa guy, sorta in a similar vein to those games but changing up the setting a bit. Rather than a death game in a school you’re just a detective with supernatural powers investigating a big overarching mystery (mostly by way of completely randomly stumbling into seemingly unrelated episodic mysteries that end up being related). It’s… alright. The mysteries have been solidly constructed, but I’ve played enough of this type of game to see the big central twists coming from a mile away (three cases in and none of them have used big central twists that haven’t been in an Ace Attorney game yet), and the move away from the closed in school setting has meant they’re having to introduce a new cast of characters for every mystery, which… Man, the writing can not keep up with. They’re all incredibly bland rough-outline sketches of characters. The cast for the second case doesn’t even get names, they’re all just referred to by their jobs, and they’re in a grand total of two scenes before you have to point to one of them as the murderer.
The Ace Attorney series cleverly dodged this bullet by having a lot of the characterization happen during the bits where you actually solved the mystery, so each episodic cast would get a shocking amount of screentime – your main method of mystery solving IS presenting evidence in response to witness testimony, after all – but when Raincode goes into mystery-solving mode it whisks you away into a Sherlock-style mind palace where it’s just you, the mascot, and one of your detective buddies, so you just wind up never caring about any of the people involved in the cases you’re solving. It’s a really bizarre choice, because it’s effectively unsolving a problem that the whole visual novel detective genre had accidentally solved from day 1.
There’s also a really weird choice made which makes the main character completely unlikeable:
His detective mind palace superpower comes at the cost of killing the perpetrator of any crime he solves with it, but he just keeps using it. To be fair he’s conflicted about it, but when in the third case the perpetrator of the crime is shown to be sympathetic he still decides that, nah, death sentence for you.It’s really, really hard to root for him as a result, and it sucks a lot of the fun out of peeling back the layers of a mystery.For all my whining it’s still a fun experience, but considering just how much I like the Danganronpa games it’s really surprising and incredibly disappointing to have this game be such a step back in quality.
Just finished The Outer Worlds. It was pleasant enough in that I wasn’t ever having a bad time while playing it, but the writing and overall worldbuilding was very generic and phoned in. It felt very lazy: corporations have taken over space and the most interesting thing you can say about it is “they’re all (without exception) 80% stupid and 20% evil!”? It was salvaged somewhat by the fact that Obsidian is incapable of writing a game with bad roleplaying: the dialogue trees were deep and rife with varied skill checks.
Started Death Stranding. I think this is a great game for my play style: I generally love busywork games but I don’t like find-your-own fun games. Death Stranding is open world but if you’re uncreative it gives you plenty of specific directions on what needs doing. And the mundanity of a primarily wayfinding-focused gameplay loop actually really appeals to me a lot. Now, the story is as overstuffed and pretentious as any other Kojima game, which is good and bad for me. When the story is personal and features people talking to Sam face-to-face, I love everything happening (I just hit Troy Baker’s first scene and it sucked me right into the conflict and made it personal). I must admit I keep zoning out every time it cuts to a dream about the beach or the perspective of a baby.
If you think Death Stranding is pretentious at this stage… Admittedly this was my first Kojima game and maybe he’s just a bit much for me (on the other hand I have heard opinions along the lines of “Death Stranding is what happens when there is nobody to reign Kojima in”) because I was literally yelling at the scream “that’s not how X works” regarding multiple phenomena from physics, biology and sociology. To be clear, I get that it is the authors prerogative to make their world work differently than reality, in fact I like weirdness in my fiction, but I think there is a limit to how much you can pile things on and on before it becomes meaningless and you just patch any issue by declaring another aspect of reality works the way you want.
Having said that it looks good, sounds good and the traversal is probably the best kinaesthetic experience I’ve ever had in a video game.
I unfortunately had to sell my Switch (my only console) to pay for food recently, but prior to that I was playing Skyrim.
Hoping to upgrade to the OLED model in the next two months once I’m back on my feet. I was initially skeptical of Tears of the Kingdom, but after watching the building mechanics and gameplay, I’m becoming hooked.
I’m still playing The Old Republic, playing my Bounty Hunter based on Mirrorverse Ben Sisko, I also did manage to start replaying Dragon Age 2, and am enjoying it. I really like how the rogue’s combat is based on basically jumping around the battlefield.
If this is every week, though, I have to warn you all that mine will be pretty much the same for quite some time, All of my gaming plans are long, long term (my plan is to play through the six remaining TOR classes for the TOR Diary segment on my blog and also play through the Dragon Age games including Inquisition, so I’m looking at next year before I’ll pick up anything new).
I’m playing Subnautica and finding it quite a nice balance. Some survival games go too hard-core into the resource-gathering grind for my taste, and I just finished Song in the Smoke which I really enjoyed as an immersive but quite lightweight survival game. So far, Subnautica is splitting the difference nicely.
Also been playing Against the Storm which is quite a fun little base-builder.
Street Fighter 6. The single player world tour mode weirdly enables both character designs that are much stronger than official canon characters and breaks several character concepts so they can’t be equally effective as the official canon characters. For example, you can equip all of Guiles’ moves and give you custom character hadoken and shoryuken as well so he has more consistent access to fireball/dp, making him basically completely superior to the original.
At the same time, other characters like Ken use an input system preventing you from having all their moves equipped simultaneously, breaking their character design and ruining their fighting style.
Modern controls are presumably the root of this problem.
Prey (2017) has really gotten its hooks in me. I got it free from Twitch and recently got around to installing it, largely on Shamus’s old recommendation / recap. It’s been a lot of fun! I didn’t read his retrospective to avoid spoilers, but I’ve been reading some of them now and am amused at the ways I apparently play similarly to how he did. It’s been a good time.
Yes, I love these! Not only do I like talking about games I’m playing but I love hearing other people’s opinions on games they’re playing and am often reminded of titles that are languishing in my backlog or wishlist.
As for myself I’m playing Vampire: the Masquerade – Swansong. And it’s sooooo good. There is a lot of jank: character animations are limited, repetitive and sometimes break in a way that makes them fidget, voiceacting is uneven and not perfectly edited, interactive spots can occasionally be difficult to find or lock onto. But there is a lot of fun tension and politicking and wondering if this person is just transparent or if they’re faking it. I can also totally see why some players get a “I didn’t invest in this skill so I can’t follow that conversation path” vibe and see it as a problem but personally I didn’t feel that the game was locking me out of stuff but rather presenting alternative playthroughs “if you developed this character this way you could have done this” where instead I get to do something else. So yeah, I can totally see why it’s not to everyone’s liking but I am just so into it perhaps because it’s been a long time since I’ve played V:tM in tabletop and this brings back so many memories. I just hope the ending doesn’t make a mess of things (I’m at about midgame I believe).
One more thing about Swansong that I want to cover separately is that the game also leaves some stuff for the player to figure out, major spoiler for Galeb’s first solo mission:
Galeb is sent to recover an accountant and upon arrival finds his headless corpse so the objective switches to finding his files, once you get those the objective is to go back and report. Except! There are several clues that things are off. One bodyguard is unaccounted for, one of the wounds on the corpse was made post-mortem, you can eventually find the head and see it is clearly not the right person. Then there is an invoice from a security company and you can find their brochure stating that they set up panic rooms. You can also see that the family kid was taught the “cellphone code” for letter-number substitution and there is a note to, in case of emergency, “call a place name”. Finally, one of the mirrors has a digital panel for several house functions and a phone. Put all of this together and boom, you go into the panic room and find the accountant alive. The things is none of this is explicit in the objectives, there is no “something doesn’t add up, investigate further” you have to figure it out as a player and I loved it.Other than that playing Solasta:Crown of the Magister with a friend in co-op. Characters are a bit potato faced and I don’t expect the story of the main game to particularly shock me with anything but it is a solid conversion of 5th edition D&D (so I’m told, I’m a 3.5 kid) and it has workshop and scenario creation tools so I’m hoping once we’re done with the game and expansion we can delve into that. Plus it has co-op so you know, poking your eye with a stick is fun with a friend. I’d kill for Pathfinder games to have co-op but alas…
VtM: Swansong is from the same studio that gave us The Council, which was absolutely nuts. Not what I’d call a great game, but for sure a fascinating one.
The last couple week I’ve been playing Roguebook. Similar enough in style and quality to Slay the Spire, yet also different enough that it’s not at all a clone.
I also played a bit of Pokemon Y that I’ve been playing very infrequently for the past several months.