Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of August 6th

Baldur's Gate 3.
I can probably count the number of games I've paid full price for in the past 15 years on one hand, and this is one of them. No regrets whatsoever.

Looking back on Steam, last time was GTA V. Prior to that Skyrim, and prior to that Portal 2.

Currently playing 'Brotato' on the Switch! Super fun quick game,.

Each round you have to survive and then spend money on weapons/items to survive the next round until Round 20 (unless you do endless).

You unlock difficulties (by surviving the rounds) and characters with different perks/attributes.

I'm at 86% main story progress of ff16 and the game is such a letdown after reading people hyping it up so much... feels like a chore at the moment but I'm so close to the end I'm just gonna power through it

I just finished Hollow Knight this week (basic ending, didn't go out of my way to find items I didn't organically come across). Metroidvanias and 2d side-scrollers in general haven't traditionally been my thing, but I was persuaded by Monty Zander's video and...yeah, it's as good as everyone says. The world is surprisingly immersive for its format and the gameplay is tight and rewarding. Abilities and enemy variety were always changing the way I played, and the different areas each had their own identities and obstacles. The sense of excitement on unlocking a new area and getting to explore it was on par with Elden Ring.

Unfortunately, I moved on to Kena Bridge of Spirits, which I think is a pretty good game so far, but it has some AA jank that I think stands out more after the fine tuning in Hollow Knight, and the combat is a lot more rote. Trying not to be too harsh though because not everything can be what Hollow Knight is, obviously.

Just finished Life is Strange and Life is Strange Before the Storm.

Both are great games with a really good soundtrack but I personally preferred the story of the first title.

I was playing red dead 2 a few weeks ago and picked it up with my steam deck. Now I'm playing uncharted 4 and realizing how rockstar and naughtydog built very similar games between the two. Rockstar is far more slow and frankly full of themselves. Not respecting the players time. Meandering through the story with no real semblance of player respect. I put 26 hours into red dead 2 and I feel like I've literally done nothing and feel very under accomplished. I've put 8 hours into uncharted 4 and feel extremely accomplished and invested in the characters.

Even though I'm pissed at Nathan. He's such an idiot, I hate him and can't wait to play him more. Author Morgan is just a bland cowboy that tries so much to just get by. Red dead 2 introduced more main characters than uncharted 4 has in side and main characters. Yet in red dead 2 they've developed none of them part the point of the basics. I'm uncharted they've developed all of their characters. Even the side ones that barely show up.

Likewise in red dead 2, they kill one character I only liked because their accent allowed me to actually tell them apart from the rest of them. The other character the big baddies kidnapped and I've played like 2 hours waiting to go get him back. It's like wtf, let me go rescue the damn character already. Yet the game keeps saying we'll do it as far as possible. We gotta track down all this shit. It's clearly like this filler content because during it another random main character gets kidnapped, they find her right away and it's rescued in one mission. Like what universe is this?

In conclusion, red dead 2 is trying hard to do what uncharted 4 did extremely well. The open world system does not help it one bit and it's turned me off of open world games altogether for a while.

Loop Hero! It's free on Epic right now and I've been really enjoying it! A nice blend of procedural generation, deck building, and roguelike allow it to be a very rewarding and engrossing experience overall where I feel I'm consistently progressing.

I still haven't been able to beat The Lich yet, but little by little I'm knocking his health down that much further to make the loop (heh) feel rewarding!