I just started Have a Nice Death and it’s so instantly appealing! I love the action, the art, the story. It stands besides the best action roguelite platformers I’ve ever played like Dead Cells, Blazblue Entropy Effect X, Rogue Prince of Persia, and Astral Ascent.

Got laid off this week. Sucks. Severance is good enough for few months, will just work my backlog I guess.

Finished Witcher 3 main story, will start DLCs after the remaster is out (I thought I was in the safe 11 years post release, guess not lol).

I am trying Helldivers 2, not into multiplayer but thought I could see if it is something I like.

I wanna get into Cyberpunk 2077 next, but I feel decision fatigue after Witcher 3 (my first CDPR game). I actually like linear games with not many choices, makes me anxious that I’m playing game wrong, just like I feel I’m living life wrong. Especially when games are 40+ hour long. Let’s see if I can get over it.

I’m back on Rogue Trader. Between DLCs releasing mid-playthrough, my chronic restartitis, and forgetting what I was doing when I took a break and got sidetracked, I’m on a new character again.

But, rest assured, this will be the sixth time we have saved the von Valancius worlds, and we have become exceedingly efficient at it.

Also, his special features confuse me a bit, but new companion Eogunn is great. I was worried about too much overlap with him and Pascal, but they play off each other wonderfully in dialog, and in combat you can spec Pascal into plasma while Eogunn handles arc rifles. I’m actually using him as my primary Officer this time instead of Cassia or Jae.

These weeks I binge play OpenTTD (stable, waiting for the opcoming 16.0). Such a stressless game when plaing solo with no competitors, i.e. just playing with my choo-choos.

Though if there was something similar which plays well on rhe iPad, I’d do that instead for the couch convenience (thereis something called OpenTTD for iOS, but it is hprrible).

I’m currently hooked on Yet Another Zombie Survivors. I can’t believe it’s only $15. Well worth it.

I haven’t had much time this week, I’m still playing Quantum Void and still figuring out what to play after the Routine mishap.

Unfortunately I haven’t had much time to play, but I picked up Detroit: Become Human again after a very long hiatus. The story and characters are great so far, and I’m very interested in where it’s going to go.

I think I’m almost halfway through Control because the new one looks like an action game and I got tired of people asking me to play it… and I’m bitter.

Context: The three games I beat before picking up Control are Evil West, El Shaddai, and Homura Hime.

WTF is that gameplay density? Most of what I’m doing is going from point A to point B looking for stuff. The way the game dolls out powers sucks so bad… I feel as if I’m slaving away just to pay the toll to start having fun… I have about 8 hours in the game, I unlocked only 3 powers?

The upgrade system sucks too… it’s so boring to collect resources for % increase in damage, health… etc. And weapon/personal mods feel tacked on, and don’t offer anything exciting past more % boost.

And oh, God, the puzzles… I feel like at least 1 of the 8 hours are my spending time overthinking puzzles that turned out to be way dumber than I thought and less interesting that I wanted them to be. Everything is basically match A shape to shape B.

The enemies so far have been painfully generic. Not only in look, but in behavior as well. None so far made me think or strategize to get through them past the basic: take cover and target the higher priority enemy first.

That sequel better drop the metroidvania BS and give us a proper action game with much higher gameplay density because this is boring AF. It better be a more heightened experience overall.

Also, Dylan better be more interesting to play than this “Temu Scarlet Witch with a gun”

I was gonna move on to Lost Judgment after this, but I think I’m gonna need a proper action game or a shmup to cleanse my palate first.

Edit: I just beat it. Fuck this game 😂 Also speaking of Scarlet Witch, isn’t the story a little too similar to Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver’s origin story?! Eh, maybe I’m reaching. Either way, fuck this game.

After a long time i started playing games again, finished a few games recently. Hoped into divinity original sin 2 for the first time now and having a blast

I finished The Séance of Blake Manor, which I’ve been playing on weekends with my sister and brother-in-law for the past few months. On the whole I must say I was disappointed, especially given the hugely impressive reviews it has garnered.

We can start with what the game does well: it’s a very well-researched game about mythology, particularly Irish mythology but also some 19th century occultism and mysticism. This is by far the most interesting part of the game. If you view it as a glorified few hours of stumbling through Wikipedia pages about Irish folklore and mythology then maybe you’ll enjoy it.

Unfortunately it’s an absolutely lousy deduction/detective game. Actually maybe that’s too weak a word. I found it to be complete garbage. I’ll go into more detail, but the short version is this: at every single step of the way the game fundamentally fails at the central principle of a deduction style game - making the player feel smart.

Now, I do concede that constructing a detective game is very difficult. A central challenge is the interface with and verification of knowledge: how does the game know you’ve figured something out? Obra Dinn had an elegant way of solving this, Blake Manor does not. You will constantly be frustrated, shouting expletives at the moronic protagonist as you’re clicking on every interactible object you can find in the hopes of the game finally accepting that you know the thing you as a player figured out three hours ago. The “hypothesis” mechanic is terrible. 90% of the time you already know the hypothesis long before you’re allowed to actually input it by the game, and the rest of the time there is usually only one word in each slot that makes grammatical sense. Again, never making you feel smart. Also the protagonist farcically exclaims ‘Wait! I know what happened here!’ every time, which is less euphoric when you’ve known what happened for hours as a player.

And this poorly implemented mechanic of what “clues” unlock the state of something being known leads to further problems, too. You have a myriad of discussion topics available to you, but there is no real throughline or logic about which topic leads to actually unlocking new “clues” or “evidence”. If there was a sound logic here, this would be an opportunity to make the player feel smart: “Wait… I need to talk with this person about that subject!”. That would be good design. Unfortunately Blake Manor does not have good design. Sometimes a completely random person-topic combination gives you the clue, sometimes a very clearly important person-topic combination gives you nothing. The end result is that you’re just kind of talking about everything with everyone, exhausting every available topic until you finally talk about the one random thing with the one random person that the game decides will give you the next piece of “evidence”. It doesn’t make you feel like a detective. And that is the central defining trait of Blake Manor mechanically: it fundamentally fails at the raison d’être of the genre. You’re never really investigating or deducing, you’re just walking around clicking on things until the game gives you the next thing to click on, which gives you the next thing to click on, etc etc.

The only actual deduction in the whole game is related to who the central “culprit” is, and that is so laughably easy I hesitate to call it a puzzle even.

I also had a lot of issues with the writing. Especially the “character arcs” of each NPC are bizarrely written, with almost all of them doing a complete 180 after you simply confront them with their own plan. Like imagine you have someone plotting to consume the soul of another person to obtain magic powers, which they’ve desired their whole life. This would be actual dialogue in game:

Protagonist: You plan on murdering Johanna and consuming her soul to obtain her magic powers!

Previously magic-obsessed woman: Oh no! I see the error of my ways! How horrible! I must give up on this, and never again pursue the allure of magic!

Also the voice acting wasn’t great either, or at least very uneven. Especially one climactic moment in the endgame was let down by poor delivery. And it felt like most of the cast struggled with the Irish accents?

Anyway, I could go on but I’ve probably ranted enough.

Still playing FO4. I’m pretty busy lately and just jumping it, raid a base, horde some mats, maybe do a quest fits perfectly in my schedule. Still think it’s the worst FO mainline entry by a large margin

Finally got Blue Prince up and going. Didn’t really like it at first, but after the fourth in-game day or so, I started enjoying it.

Also, playing the new next-gen remaster of The Lord of the Rings: War in the North with a friend. It’s pretty mindless hack-and-slash, but it’s fun.

Got my first win in Noita recently by stopping attempts to do more interesting variations and just going to the ending boss. Now to figure out New Game +, the metaprogression of the orbs, the suns, parallel worlds, and the myriad ‘lesser’ bosses.

Shadow of Mordor - Got a steam controller recently, still very satisfying and fun to play even if I prefer the sequel.

Quake - The first instalment got a remaster for the 30th anniversary. I’ve always been a Q2 guy personally and have many fond memories playing it at a mates place in primary school. Very much appreciating 1 again with the remaster though.

Factorio - Every so often I still get a craving for this even if the space age release really took a lot of the shine off it for me personally. Still enjoy it but doubt I’ll even make it to rocket launch this run.

Vintage story - Not really a patient game. Very much enjoyed it, very comfy, managed to get a good farm going, some chicken/boars and to Bronze Age. Will probably scape through winter but having recently started the search for iron will probably drop it until further updates.

Started playing Getting over It with Bennett Foddy with my partner - I completed the game a few years ago but it’s fun reliving the first time playing in watching (and helping sometimes!) my partner play. Their reactions when seeing stuff for the first time, trying to problem solve how to approach the next area, its awesome. Oh, and they do rock climbing IRL so their commentary is also very interesting too.