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Chloyster [she/her] @beehaw.org

Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of July 30th

Whatcha all playing!

I've been going hard in Pikmin 4. Also been playing shattered pixel dungeon and recently ascended for the first time which was super fun.

79 comments

  • Final Fantasy XVI. Much more gritty than the others. Just as much angst. Still, I’m enjoying it.

    • I'm waiting for this one to go on sale. Really enjoyed the demo but I'm in no rush to play it just yet.

  • Just finished my first playthrough of Cyberpunk last night after about 120 hours. I had 3 or so gigs left but wanted to make sure I got it done before Baldur's Gate 3 (will need to free up some disk space...).

    Overall I liked it a lot, despite its many flaws. It has some moments, characters and stories that are really engaging. Judy was a standout for me, and her voice actress really killed it. I regret not choosing Female V now, but of course I had no idea at the time. And I know it's controversial but I kinda liked Keanu as Silverhand, even though his voice acting isn't always "good". The relationship between V and Johnny was the thing I enjoyed the most, and Johnny's character development.

    Not sure I'm super happy with the ending I got, though, and I might go back and play out some of the other alternatives.

    • From memory, I'm pretty sure Judy can only romance female V (if that's what your regret was).

      I'm one of the weirdos who had a good time with Cyberpunk when it first came out. I'm really looking forward to the DLC and trying hard not to play it again before the DLC so I don't burn myself out on it.

      • Yeah, Judy made a big impression on me. I'll wait a while after Phantom Liberty's release until I'll play again, but I'll definitely play Fem V then so I can see the Judy romance.

        I just played through another ending today, (Don't) Fear the Reaper into the Temperance ending, and I much preferred that to the one I got at first (Rogue's path into The Sun ending). I'm much more satisfied with the game now.

  • I just finished Tunic (not 100%, but got to the "right" ending). I managed solving all the endgame stuff myself, man it was hard resisting to just look things up, but it was really rewarding to figure it out!

  • Just got to 1000hrs on my new Steam account. I am just playing DayZSA, modded hardcore PVE mostly. Rarely, I go back to minecraft.

  • I've been busy as heck at work and kind of dipped out of TotK. I keep thinking about playing sekiro again, however

  • I was offered a month of PC Game Pass for $1, so I took MS up on it. I've mostly been playing Forza Horizon 4(my computer can't handle 5) so far, the game's really fun.

    I'm open to suggestions on games in the PC Game Pass library, btw. I plan to cancel before Aug 26th, so I want to get my gaming in before then. I honestly do prefer straightforward action games and RPGs(and strategy as well). Things I prefer to avoid are puzzle solving and super open world stuff. I generally strongly prefer single-player experiences, too.

    • Forza Horizon is just a sheer joy to play. 4 or 5, you can't go wrong. I'm not that into car games, but I have sunk hundreds of hours into both.

    • Don't know if you've played/heard of these, but some good short singleplayer stuff on gamepass that might fit the types of games you like and you could easily finish before then:

      A Short Hike is getting added today and is something I'd recommend to anyone if you haven't played it. Very pleasant game, and as the name suggests it's very short, you can complete it in an afternoon.

      Celeste is on there and is one of the best 2D platformers, if you enjoy those and haven't played it definitely try it out.

      Death's Door is a top-down zelda-like, and one of my favorite takes by indies on that type of game.

      Doom 1/2 are classics that are still very much worth playing and hold up well.

      Mirror's Edge is a first person platforming/parkour game, a bit older at this point but holds up pretty well.

      Monster Train is a deckbuilder roguelite, which I know is a polarizing genre, but if you're either into those or open to the idea of trying them it's one of the best. Might not fit as a shorter game depending on how much of the stuff in it you want to do, but you could at least get a good taste for it and see if you like it.

      Both of the Ori games are good metroidvanias that are relatively short.

      Prey is a great immersive sim/fps/stealth game, if you've tried other Arkane stuff like Dishonored, or the Deus Ex games, it's similar to those.

      Both of the Psychonauts games are great 3D platformers. 2 is especially good and a big step up in gameplay, as you might expect with the time gap between them.

      Tinykin is a 3D platformer with some Pikmin inspiration, where you're a tiny person exploring a giant house, very fun if you like platforming and collectathon type stuff.

  • Yesterday finally bought Remnant: From the Ashes on sale after seeing the new one all over Twitch. Played 6h of coop with my brother and hell was it a lot of fun. There seem to be less and less good coop games, but this one does a good job. Of course there are many small issues though (e.g. a memory leak crashing the game every few hours on Xbox lol). Glad there is a second one already waiting after we're done.

  • I am playing Jedi Survivor. Having had a blast with the original I was excited to hear people say that the second installment is similar but better in many ways. I don’t know what it is about it but I’m just not able to get into it. Maybe it’s the semi-open world feeling of some of the larger areas? I dunno it’s just not working for me, which is disappointing.

    • I'm waiting for the price to come down on it. I never finished the original because I suck at souls games but we need more good Star Wars games like these. I want to support both single-player Star Wars adventures and Respawn because they made my favorite shooters of all time (Titanfall and TF2).

  • Played Dredge on the Steam Deck, which was a nice, relaxing experience.

    Besides that I've been playing Blood: Fresh Supply on my beefy gaming pc. Great fun, much glee when blowing up hordes of cultists.

  • I'm deep into TOTK, though I'm looking forward to getting started with Don't Starve on my Deck.

  • Still grinding away at Street Fighter 6, and currently starting another run of the FFVII Remake!

  • Discovering Octopath traveller II. Not a big fan for now, It’s beautiful but I’m a bit disappointed by the story. Hope it gets better 🤞

  • Persona 4 mostly, I really like it although I'm tending to prefer P5 from what I've played so far.

  • I've started Elder Scrolls Online again after a long break and do the dailies there every evening with all my characters.

  • I'm playing Team Fortress 2. It's my comfort game.

  • Hades. I bought it a few months ago and finally installed it yesterday. Only played about 30 minutes, but love it so far. I didn't even know it was a roguelike -- I thought it was more like Diablo from the screenshots. I just bought it because everyone said it was amazing, and I think I'm going to agree with them.

  • I got sucked into playing Witcher 3 again. I swear I'll finish it this time! I've also been playing an early access indy game called Inkulinati, and when I need some mindless kick-ass action, I have my go-to TMNT: Shredder's Revenge.

  • Started playing InFAMOUS 2, i played the first one maybe 10 years ago and now just getting to the 2nd one lol.

    • What an amazing game it is!! It's a shame we don't have remakes of 1&2 on modern console or PC yet.

      • Yeah, they would do well with a remake. Gameplay is pretty solid, Hopefully Second Son and First Light hold up, those are next in the list

  • I play Dragons Dogma DA for weeks now and I still love how fresh the combat feels everytime you change vocation. Right now I am a magic archer and I pretty much spend all the weight I can carry on blast arrows. This plus the skill where I can double zoom in on enemies from far away and do A TON of damage makes me the biggest danger in all of gransys at the moment. I can't stress this enough: the combat in this game is just so good and varied it's absolutely insane!

    But!

    I just can't stop thinking about how great it would be if Dragon's Dogma had lore and quests like the third Witcher! I feel like Capcom tried with a handful of quests like the one with the dude from the village who constantly gets lost and you have to rescue him. Or some main storyline quests also can be exciting. And yet, most quests are kill quests with just a little textbox explaining who wants what killed.

    Dragons Dogma made me realize how much of Witcher 3 is actually carried by the writing, the lore, the world and the interesting characters interacting in it and how bland, almost bad the combat is.

    So now I wish CD Red would hire the people responsible for the combat in Dragons Dogma for the next Witcher! Sounds like a perfect game in my book!

  • I just finished replaying the Arkham games. Thinking about not moving to the Uncharted series since I’ve only ever played the first game, a tiny bit of the second, and half of the fourth. Want to experience the series / story in full.

  • I've been playing a couple of neat games.

    Time Bandit is a really unique mix of genres focused on real time-based interactions. There's puzzles you solve that take hours and you have to leave machines running and check back later, people you meet at certain times, stores that have different schedules. It's a dystopian setting where you work in a factory, and there's this guy you meet early on who's with a rebellion group that teaches you about communism. It's really neat, and less of a time commitment than it might sound like, most of my sessions have been like 10 minutes just checking in on stuff, sort of like a very weird animal crossing. It's pretty cheap and getting a criminally low amount of attention for how cool it is.

    The Void Rains Upon Her Heart is a roguelite boss rush shmup. Really approachable for that genre. I got interested in it because the dev got hired by the Revita team (one of my favorite games from last year) to work on the expansion for that, and it definitely has some similarities to that, also kinda reminds me of Undertale combat. It's got a ton of content and does a great job at pacing the unlocks and stuff.

    Last, Pseudoregalia is a 3D movement focused metroidvania. It's very N64 inspired in style. You're exploring a big castle, with a lot of platforming and interesting movement abilities. There's no map, so it definitely requires some patience with that, but it's a really neat game overall. Seems to allow a lot of sequence breaking. It's looking to be fairly short as well, which is nice.

  • I saw Timberborn getting shilled a bit on here so I've been checking that out. Lots of fun so far. The droughts keep absolutely wrecking me, though.

  • Still Final Fantasy 14, I'm near the end of the Stormblood base story (some general spoilers in the comment).

    This expansion has been a massive disappointment so far, and this time it's not even about all the time-wasting (of which there's still plenty). It's about a war to end the occupation of two different regions / nations, but it's just not executed well at all.

    The scale of the fights, that are supposed to drive out the invaders, have like a dozen people on either side, so they are just really lame. The villains are not compelling at all and have a really dumb reason for fighting you. Some of your companions, that should play a bigger role, basically don't matter at all. It's just not interesting at all.

    I can't wait for this to be over, hopefully the post-game patch content can improve things somewhat. I should at least get a bunch of dungeon unlocks, probably a raid, maybe more, which will most likely be a good time.

    As for jobs I've played this week, at the start all Summoner, to get it to 80, afterward I switched to Dancer. Both are really fun and I liked them. I want to check out Red Mage a bit more, and have done some duties with it, but I need more practice with it. I leveled Dark Knight to ~50, but I'm just not really that much into playing tanks. I'll do some duties here and there, but not much more for now. Same with healer, which I'm leveling a White Mage a bit, for now slowly trying to get it to 50.

  • Still deep in Tears of the Kingdom, but I am close to 100% of shrines and light roots. Have not even tried fighting Ganon yet, but with my power level it shouldn't be that tough. Gonna finish it this week and then hop back to Final Fantasy 16, which I binge played release weekend and got over 50% through according to the PS5 progress indicator.

79 comments