Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of December 17th

I played the entirety of "Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion", which was short, fun, and cute. I'm increasingly finding that I lack the stamina and mental headspace for large games, and I'm appreciating the little indie games a lot more. Something about the combination of cute food characters and running around committing petty crimes and ripping up documents just really appealed to me.

Yesterday I started "Earthlock", which I got a couple of months ago in a giveaway. I'm liking it so far. Has a lot of "Final Fantasy games in the 1990s" vibes which is working for me. There's more frogs than I expected, which is always a pleasant surprise.

I've been playing Starfield, and I think I'm getting close to just wanting to wrap it up. I may or may not want to get a larger ship before that happens, because the starter ship has been a bottleneck in seeing through some of the other faction quest lines. At the same time though, better ships are expensive, and I'm not sure I want to grind missions with better money payouts to get there. This game should be better.

While traveling, I've been playing Pillars of Eternity on the Steam Deck. I've got 5 party members now, and I'm level 3. I think I'm about to get access to the stronghold that has its own button on the UI. Really enjoying this one so far. Thankfully, it exposes all of its dice rolls to help me learn the systems better.

Making my way through Phantom Liberty slowly but surely. It's quite a decent amount of content, and it's enjoyable.

Jumped into Chernobylite the other day, haven’t sunk much time into it, but I’m digging the atmosphere. So far it’s been a decent game to pop into after work and poke around a bit.

I finished Laika : Aged through blood. An indie metroidvania / 2d bike shooter / bullet time.

And i can say that it is, damn amazing!

It's the story of a mother in a post-apocalyptic environment having to care for her daughter and village while doing the war outside.

Everything, art, music, is a masterpiece. The music is just extremely good.

Outside of special zones, there are 20 you have to find, and it cycles between them. All 20 are voice, with words or humming.

The story is good, and is extremely anti-war.

The gameplay feels amazing. It can be hard at first, but I quickly learned how to control the bike and and to do backflips and frontflips at the right time to reload guns and the pary.

The main character laika is one-shot, but the game isn't very punishing. The respawn points aren't too far away from each other, and they are optional. When you die, you loose a pouch with the currency, and can get it back.

There are some little issues with the game tho. It doesn't tell that combo rewards more currency from enemies (it's a timed combo, sho shooting will either increase or refresh the combo, and shooting flying bodies increases the combo up to 2 more times). The ending seems to also be a bit rushed. The ending boss isn't that difficult, and there were some cuts it seems.

But overall these little issues aren't that bad, and the game is still amazing.

• Subnautica. Beautiful, frustrating, thalassic. The Freedom mode (no hunger or thirst) is nice. Searching for specific materials is frustrating.
• WIldfrost. Roguelike deckbuilder set in a frozen wasteland. Cute, but deceptively difficult (especially for a newcomer to the genre). Apparently simpler than most "roguecards". The art style falls under the category "I can't believe the main artist doesn't draw smut".

I got an entirely new gaming rig up and running (Ryzen 7 7800X3D / Radeon RX 6700) so I thought I'd grab a couple more recent games to push it a bit, as I had a potato before. Been having a lot of fun with Forza Horizon 5 and the World Tour mode of Street Fighter 6. Thinking about maining Juri in SF6, she's fun to play.

Still on Baldur's Gate 3. Just started my fifth or so character. An Abserd (someone multiclassing into every class) character who fools around in Honour Mode. Works surprisingly well so far and I still manage to find stuff I have never seen before.

Finished Paradise Killer early last week. I liked it a lot, it got to be pretty addicting uncovering new pieces of the mystery. Whenever I had to put the game down, I'd come back to it thinking "Oh shit, I discovered x last time I played, can't wait to see how that pans out." The one negative thing I'll say is that there's not a lot of actual detective work on the player's part. The actual mechanics of the game are pretty much just running back and forth over the island, talking to the same characters, and chasing collectibles. But I enjoyed the loop, so it worked out.

Started up Moonlighter for a low-commitment game. I've played about 10 hours and enjoyed it so far. It's got a pretty well-balanced progression loop (explore the dungeon, sell your stuff, afford a small upgrade, get a little further in the dungeon, sell your stuff...) which is a big draw for me. Not sure it'll keep my interest to the end but I'm fond of the time I've spent.

In the last 2-3 weeks I've been on a bit of a gaming binge. I've played through spider man 2, final fantasy 16, hi-fi rush, horizon forbidden West. Just started on Jedi survivor.

I also got to play through it takes two and just started on trine 5 with one of my partners. We've never really played co-op games together before despite both having gamed for ages and I'm having a lot of fun.

Still playing Octopath Traveler, it's alright, although with some really rough spots. I should hopefully be done soon though.

It has some neat mechanics, like hitting enemies with their weakness to eventually stun them and cause them to take more damage, but it also leads to a lot of fights (mostly against trash mobs) that take far too long, because you might not be able to exploit that weakness well or at all.

Also, as the name suggests, there are eight playable characters, with a party size of four. You might think you could easily have an A and B squad, but for some reason, one character is fixed and can't be changed. This leads to this one character being massively higher level than the other party members at times, and because there's no exp for inactive party members, makes keeping everyone else roughly the same level a real pain. I just had a main party and would occasionally swap in one of the lower level guys to do their story.

Speaking of story, it's pretty boring. Every character has four chapters (dunno if there's more for the whole group afterward) and almost all of them play out the same. Start a story with some exposition, gather intel by speaking with a few NPCs, a bit more exposition, go to a short dungeon, fight a boss, exposition, done. By the way, your whole party never shows up in the "cutscenes," it's always just the single character, whose story you're doing.

Started with Rogue trader, can recommend it as a solid CRPG - Act 1 anyway. Apparently in Act 3/4 the gamebreaking bugs start to appear, and I've already found a few talents to be rather buggy. Probably should wait a month or two.

Otherwise, a game of Shadow of Forbidden gods is always good to relax while sending the world into shadow.

Okay, I'm really enjoying Deathloop now. At first I wasn't super feeling it, but as it went on, it seems to have become kind of like "Dishonored, but if it didn't take itself seriously at all".

Part immersive sim, part detective/puzzle game, part rogue-lite.

Has a lot in common with the Sexy Brutale as well, which is interesting, but plays very differently.

Weapons are fun and I love the '60s spy-fi vibe, so I'm enjoying it.

A lot of Death Must Die - basically a horde survival with Hades-like god boons and Diablo-esque equipment. It’s addicting

Tried lords of the fallen - biggest disappointment of the year.

Miasma chronicles - reached the bottom of my game list, it’s pretty good. Don’t really know why I bounced off of it originally

BG3 - got to act 2 on an evil playthrough

Pokémon Violet: Indigo Disc DLC.

I've started playing Rogue Trader. I'm not very familiar with the warhammer 40k universe and my god it's a depressing place. I'm heavily leaning into the iconoclast play style because I don't think I'd be able to roleplay as a dutiful servant of the empire.
There's also a ton of stats that make my head spin. But I usually just avoid thinking about that by decreasing the difficulty and choosing upgrades that sounds interesting.

• I've finished Eiyuden Chronicles: Rising, as a preparation for Eiyuden Hundred Heroes.
  • It's not a good game, but it's not terrible either. I played it while watching TV.
  • The combat is interesting, you have 3 attack buttons, and each of them switches your main character. However it's really unpolished, you can't do uppercut or downward attack before upgrading your weapons.
  • The story... is not interesting at all. It's largely fetch quests for the residents to build / expand stuff.
• I'm halfway thru Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII
  • This is a bad game. The gunplay is okay, but the level design, the enemies become increasingly dull and boring in later chapters. Halfway thru the game, I just find most chapters are way too long, empty, and repetitive.
  • The story / writing is not good at all. All those Deepground characters are boring, cliched, and annoying.

Also, I'm back with my BS, where I play Resident Evil Zero with a guide and skipping all the cutscenes, so that I can get the infinite rocket launcher, before replaying the entire game for the story.

Edit: Lol, wrote a whole thing about Elite: Dangerous here since I was about to start it.

As predicted, not for me.

Trying out Deathloop. It's not bad, but also kind of just makes me yearn for older Arkane. I do enjoy the setting and humor, and the '60s spy-fi vibe and artstyle is great.

Just feels like it's missing something. It might be that the whole thing is in like bite sizes as opposed to the usual "wide open levels" of other immersive sims.

A quick run through a mission takes a few minutes. They get longer as the game goes on and each Loop itself can take a bit of time to finish, but it also feels a bit like it rushes you with to the whole "times of day" thing instead of really letting you take your time and soak it all in.

All said, it's got charm and is pretty fun. Less emphasis on stealth than I expected, but I can still generally stealth through most of it.

Also, I thought Dunkey's video with all the kicking was just him being, well, him. But the kick is actually very versatile (sometimes feeling a little, but not too, OP) and does make for some pretty funny moments.

I didn't have too much time for gaming this week, except for my usual Diablo bs lol.

Diablo 3: Season 29 - Finally completed the season journey. I've got my pretty wings and a new pet. D3 is now going to the back burner until the Darkening of Tristram event in January.

Diablo 4: Season 2 - The Midwinter Blight event started this week, so my focus has been temporarily on that. Well, that and farming Forgotten Souls in Helltide, bleh.

Dorfromantik -- so relaxing! Planning to try to finish a couple other games (Guardians of the Galaxy, Far Cry 6) over the winter break too, and maybe start new ones (RDR).