It seems I can finally play some games without losing interest immediately. Depression sucks.
I’m playing Signalis and I think I’m quite advanced,
spoiler
I’m Nowhere (literally what the game calls that area) and running out of things to do in the area. Not sure whether I missed something or the game just doesn’t want you to have a map of the place, but it’s a bit annoying having to run around without it. Fortunately my memory is still good enough. I have more than 30 revolver bullets plus some rifle ammo and a few grenades for a grenade launcher I still haven’t found. I’m running out of healing objects though.
Also playing Divinity: Original Sin at times.
spoiler
I think I’m level 4 and close to solving the murder case.
The combat is fun and I can see the base upon which Baldur’s Gate 3’s was built.
I also like the sense of humour.
I am near the end of Signalis (I think, based on how long to beat data) and was also stuck in the nowhere may for way longer than I should’ve. I ran around everywhere looking for the last hexagonal stone for the door and finally had to look up what I missed. I’m not sure how to do spoilers but it ended up being completely obvious what I was overlooking. There was a puzzle that needed some rearranging but I thought I was still missing a piece.
I’m very slowly playing Valheim again since 1.0 released. Technically “new” but I’ve had it for years.
On my phone: Mindustry (again)
On Steam Deck: Caves of Qud (still)
Ocarina of Time
I’ve never gotten this far before. Didn’t realize the back half was so dungeon heavy. I miss the more open world stuff
I’ve been playing Super Metroid recently and got absolutely hooked. the art style, the sound effects, the music, they’re all excellent. I haven’t tried many metroidvanias and found Hollow Knight quite frustrating, but in this one, trying to figure out the solution or making another loop through the maps after obtaining a new thingy in order to get to the place where I thought I remembered a potential spot to use the thingy is actually entertaining, most of the time.
I just wish the wall jumps were doable, because fucking hell.
Best game ever. Try Bloodstained and all the GBA Castlevania games
The Etecoons wall jump thing was a pain the first time I played all those years ago. I also remember my second playthrough when I realized you could run from the start. Love this game. Need to play it again soon.
I had to resort to save state spamming after getting on the shelf halfway up, otherwise I’d probably commit acts of violence.
Personally, I don’t think Hollow Knight is a great example of a Metroidvania. If you’re looking for suggestions, check out Castlevania Dominus Collection, it includes three of the best Metroidvanias ever made. I’ll also recommend Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. Not an official Castlevania game, but produced by the same guy who did the games in the Dominus Collection. Thirdly, I endorse Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom. Really fun and really charming.
None of those games seem to be on sale at the moment, but they can usually be found discounted well under the list price.
I’ve got some Castlevanias (Super Castlevania IV for SNES and Aria of Sorrow for GBA) queued up to try out on my Game Dad, I’ll see how I like them and proceed from there. so far my closest encounter with the Castlevania series was the Dead Cells DLC, which is obviously not the same thing.
Super Castlevania IV is really just a straightforward sidescrolling action game, it doesn’t have any Metroidvania elements, but Aria of Sorrow is a good choice, also made by the guy who did the Dominus Collection games and Bloodstained.
I just started Ori and the blind forest this weekend. What a beautiful game. Looking forward to how it will unfold :D
Great game! Way better than the second one in my opinion.
Oh boy, make sure you’ve got tissues at hand. It’s a beautiful game though, enjoy!
I’ve been playing a bit of Roadwarden this week. Actually, I only played about 6 hours of it, then I gave up and started to listen to this delightful playthrough as an audiobook instead. I think Roadwarden is probably a good game. I think the problem may be that my attention span is just destroyed. But I am not yet sure.
How should I describe this game? How about this: have you ever played Pentiment and thought to yourself “nonono, this is too action packed and too interesting!”. Or what about… have you ever wished there was a game with as much text as Disco Elysium, but without any voice acting, visual art, humour, mind-blowing world building, charm or top quality near-poetic prose?
Roadwarden takes a lot of inspiration from the Witcher setting. It’s a low-magic, low-fantasy world filled with dangerous monsters, and you’re playing as a sort of peacekeeper. But instead of being a magical mutant with superpowers and steeped in centuries of interesting lore, here you’re instead playing as… just a guy. Just some dude meant to scout out an unmapped peninsula, get to know the locals and report back to your superiors in the big city who want to colonise (or at least exploit) it.
And that’s kind of just… the whole game. Granted, I’m not all the way through listening to the playthrough yet. But you’re just riding around, reading mundane descriptions of mundane things, helping locals with mundane tasks.
One thing I want to praise though, is how the game does player-customizable world building. At certain points you’ll get some questions about certain minor aspects of the world, and you can pick an answer out of usually 5-7. And whatever you pick will be the reality in your playthrough. Are people in the capital wearing tunics or furs? Is the capital well off or poverty stricken? What happened to that old inn on a street off the harbour? It’s something I haven’t seen before, and it does make every playthrough a little more unique. I found it neat.
I had a similar experience with Roadwarden. I played a few hours but it didn’t hook me and gave up on it. My verdict was that while the premise is interesting, the writing isn’t good enough to keep me invested.
Yeah. There are games out there with worse writing, but honestly that is not saying much. And when your “game” is literally only text, that text better be top fucking quality. And this isn’t really bad enough to be entertaining, it’s mostly just dull.
I have a lot of qualms, but there are two main problems:
- Protagonist has extremely weak (almost nonexistent) personality and internal motivation
- The overarching plot has no early hook, no emotional investment and no stakes.
Again if we take the Witcher comparison: imagine The Witcher 3 but you play as a cardboard cutout instead of Geralt, and the whole Ciiri storyline is completely absent. You just ride around doing contracts.
Assassins creed odyssey
Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-reckoning
Got it on sale recently after reading somewhere some time ago it could scratch a similar itch to Skyrim, and I didn’t realize until booting it up it was a cleanup of an old XBox game. Hits that sweet spot between fun, interesting, and juuust familiar enough mechanics-wise to shut my brain off after a long workday.
Highly recommend if you enjoyed the on-rails-ish-but-open-world-ish console feeling of the early 2010s 😄
Oh and it runs frickin beautifully on Steam Deck - 90fps OOB
Slime Rancher
Played it for a few hours and that’s my limit. It a charming game but then it gets too repetitive and grindy for my liking.
I did install Machinarium ready for another platform after many many years :)
I’m playing The Lost Crown. A very charming point and click adventure, one of those games that give me a distinct vacation feeling. The use of photos for parts of the enviornment works quite well and gives it just the right atmosphere for an English harbour town. The puzzles aren’t good though. You are too often told exactly what to do and others just don’t work very well. But the plot and the characters are just as charming as the graphics, so it’s definitely worth a try if you like that kind of games.
Came across Diablo 2 resurrected while hacking my playstation 4. Gotta say, it didn’t need the reboot, I still have my pristine battle box from back in the day and replacing the character select with animation from the 2007 Beowulf movie added absolutely nothing of value.
Damn fun game though, nothing like having an army of skeletons to flood every square inch of the screen.
