What are you currently playing?

[Dreiko]

Been neck deep in Ys IX: Monstrum Nox this past week. Game has this really cool ghouls and ghosts through a japanese lens aesthetic to it, it's like someone took traditional Ys through a castlevania cosplay apparel store, really cool and atmospheric. The gameplay is tried and true responsive skill spammy goodness, but with a bigger emphasis on rolling and parrying than before. The one area where the game is revolutionizing the formula is exploration, because the monster powers manifest in traversal methods, where you can run up any wall like freaking spiderman, glide down on hawk wings, teleport on grapling hook points by becoming a red laser, all crazy things that make exploration a blast. There's a huge sense of verticality where you see a giant cathedral building and just know you can somehow find your way all the way up to the spires.

The story has a very dark mystery theme to it, it revolves around this prison town that is cursed by monsters and has the theme of a more recent hypothetical holy roman empire style place where the locals are being occupied by their conquerrors and getting imprisoned in the huge prison tower. Your party is a ragtag bunch of cursed weirdos who tranaform into their monster forms but have a real identity, and while you are the last person recruited you somehow go on to bring the entire team together, slowly uncovering their real identities and seeing their place in life in the city. So far I have gathered all but 1 of the monsters under my command, but who knows how many total there will be. And there's of course the girl with the prosthetic arm and leg who is kinda like the cryptic leader that is cursing everyone to get em to fight the monsters in the first place. I don't know what her deal is yet but she doesn't seem like a bad girl, she has her reasons for being gloomy and imperious. More mysteries to uncover.


Also I just fought a dinosaur-like dragon that felt like a more monster-style take on the dinosaurs from Ys VIII. Man that was an epic fight. This time around when you get bosses to half life they just go freaking nuts. This dude went from a stone armor thing which required you to crack his armor before doing real damage, into a flaming dragon thing and would 2shot you and douse the entire arena in fire so you had to run up the walls and glide to avoid it (or just parry all the fire like a true sekiro boss). My hand was kinda tired by the end of that fight lol.

 

[wings012]

Yeah, the cringe writing at times really put me off wanting to get it. I passed HoL because of that and I don't want it in AH even if AH is more interesting conceptually.

At least HoL is trying to be funny, as hit or miss as it is. I'm not sure what AH is even trying to accomplish with regards to the incessant nonsense chatter. It's not trying to tell a joke, it's not trying to give important exposition or develop character.... it's just one really angry man and his talking glove. I get that being surrounded by crazy killer robots is a high stress situation but still.

I think it would've worked a lot better if it was either a silent protagonist or a less chatty one(maybe like Master Chief), and then let the glove do most of the talking(like Cortana, Atlas, Tenenbaum).

 

[Dalisclock]

At least HoL is trying to be funny, as hit or miss as it is. I'm not sure what AH is even trying to accomplish with regards to the incessant nonsense chatter. It's not trying to tell a joke, it's not trying to give important exposition or develop character.... it's just one really angry man and his talking glove. I get that being surrounded by crazy killer robots is a high stress situation but still.

I think it would've worked a lot better if it was either a silent protagonist or a less chatty one(maybe like Master Chief), and then let the glove do most of the talking(like Cortana, Atlas, Tenenbaum).

Yeah, I think the issue might be that the writers are trying too hard. Knowing the game is Russian, the writing comes across as.....very not what I've seen from other Russian games and I have to wonder if they're trying to write for what they think Americans/Westerners want out of their main characters and it's just not working.

It's hard to explain. Like I've played Metro 2033 and that feels like it works. I'm playing Pathfinder Kingmaker and that's a Russian studio and honestly if I didn't know it was made by a Russian Studio I doubt I would have noticed from the writing(which is what I expect from a Fantasy D&D type CRPG). What I've seen from AH feels off and like it doesn't really know what it wants to be.

Edit: I just realized Metro 2033 is made by a Ukrainian studio though it's set in Moscow.

 

[BrawlMan]

At least HoL is trying to be funny, as hit or miss as it is.

I find that highly debatable. HoL is Rick and Morty jokes from the cutting room floor, and makes the mistakes later seasons of Family Guy, The Simpsons, and R&M did. Where the references and jokes are told so obviously, out loudly, and to the point of near plagiarism or "homage". If you want witty banter with two (or more) main characters and supporting characters done right: either play Shadows of the Damned, Lollipop Chainsaw, MadWorld (Howard and Kreese are the best parts of this game!), Hi-Fi Rush, or even Oneechanbara Z2: Chaos.

Shadows of the Damned may go overboard with the dick jokes at times, but at least the game bothered with its own material, and Garcia and Johnson play off each other so well. A similar case for LC, minus the dick jokes while having a few pop culture references that became dated a few years after. Hi-Fi Rush is the more comedy-centric than most of the titles I mentioned, but even it knows not to be "quippy and witty" 24/7, takes breaks, and lets the characters have serious moments without it being jarring or unearned.

I haven't played anything tonight, but Urban Reign will be coming in on Saturday. I will be playing it the first chance I get.

 

[laggyteabag]

Ive been playing Ori and the Blind Forest, and I do not like it at all.

Getting the good stuff out of the way: the music is great. Visually, it is a treat (though not as much of a "every frame a painting" as something like Gris). And I also really liked the first 10 or so minutes.

But once I actually got into the game, I found very little to enjoy.

First of all, the act of attacking enemies is a bit dull. You don't really aim, or brawl enemies, instead, when you are in range of an enemy, they glow red, at which point you can press X to shoot a homing barrage of light at them, with most enemies needing to be shot 5 or 6 times.

There are other methods of causing damage, like using the ground-pound, or firing a projectile back at an enemy, but these options are inconsistent at best, or dangerous at worst. To execute a ground pound, you need to jump in the air, then point the movement analogue stick down - unfortunately this doesn't happen very reliably, and if it doesn't work, and you touch an enemy, you take damage. To fire a projectile back, it launches you back in the opposite direction, but this can often launch you straight into a spiky wall.

Speaking of the controls, I don't think this works too well on a gamepad, which is odd, considering that this is an Xbox game. Jumping, attacking/charging your bomb attack, and jumping through enemies/projectiles are mapped to the A, X and Y buttons respectively. The issue here is that the game often expects you to use all of these things at the same time, like jumping up a tunnel, whilst also fighting an enemy, which is quite difficult when you only have one thumb actively hovering around those buttons. It often feels like I am also fighting the controls.

As for the combat, or the way the enemies attack you, I feel like this game is quite difficult, but not in a "damn, it was my fault that I didn't avoid that damage" kind of way, but in more of a "fuck you, take some damage" kind of way, which makes the game feel quite frustrating. Some enemies seemingly have very little windup, and shoot projectiles that move quite quickly, or are otherwise hard to avoid. There is also an issue where the game's art is layered with a foreground layer (which tries to add some additional depth) - the issue with this foreground layer is that it sometimes obscures enemies, and their attacks, so I feel like I am taking damage that I cannot have seen. And because the game doesn't have regenerating health, all of these issues are made just that more frustrating.

One other weird quirk is how the game uses energy, which is this resource that you can use for saving. Essentially, the game has very few checkpoints, but you can hold B to create a save point. What is odd, is that this resource is also used for charging your "bomb" attack, and also opening some doors. Its a very bizarre shared resource, which can only be collected from some resource nodes spread around the map.

So yeah, I am about half way through this game, and ultimately unsure if I want press on to tick it off my list, or just drop the game and never touch it again. I am really not having a good time with this one.

 

[Old_Hunter_77]

Ive been playing Ori and the Blind Forest, and I do not like it at all.

Getting the good stuff out of the way: the music is great. Visually, it is a treat (though not as much of a "every frame a painting" as something like Gris). And I also really liked the first 10 or so minutes.

But once I actually got into the game, I found very little to enjoy.

First of all, the act of attacking enemies is a bit dull. You don't really aim, or brawl enemies, instead, when you are in range of an enemy, they glow red, at which point you can press X to shoot a homing barrage of light at them, with most enemies needing to be shot 5 or 6 times.

There are other methods of causing damage, like using the ground-pound, or firing a projectile back at an enemy, but these options are inconsistent at best, or dangerous at worst. To execute a ground pound, you need to jump in the air, then point the movement analogue stick down - unfortunately this doesn't happen very reliably, and if it doesn't work, and you touch an enemy, you take damage. To fire a projectile back, it launches you back in the opposite direction, but this can often launch you straight into a spiky wall.

Speaking of the controls, I don't think this works too well on a gamepad, which is odd, considering that this is an Xbox game. Jumping, attacking/charging your bomb attack, and jumping through enemies/projectiles are mapped to the A, X and Y buttons respectively. The issue here is that the game often expects you to use all of these things at the same time, like jumping up a tunnel, whilst also fighting an enemy, which is quite difficult when you only have one thumb actively hovering around those buttons. It often feels like I am also fighting the controls.

As for the combat, or the way the enemies attack you, I feel like this game is quite difficult, but not in a "damn, it was my fault that I didn't avoid that damage" kind of way, but in more of a "fuck you, take some damage" kind of way, which makes the game feel quite frustrating. Some enemies seemingly have very little windup, and shoot projectiles that move quite quickly, or are otherwise hard to avoid. There is also an issue where the game's art is layered with a foreground layer (which tries to add some additional depth) - the issue with this foreground layer is that it sometimes obscures enemies, and their attacks, so I feel like I am taking damage that I cannot have seen. And because the game doesn't have regenerating health, all of these issues are made just that more frustrating.

One other weird quirk is how the game uses energy, which is this resource that you can use for saving. Essentially, the game has very few checkpoints, but you can hold B to create a save point. What is odd, is that this resource is also used for charging your "bomb" attack, and also opening some doors. Its a very bizarre shared resource, which can only be collected from some resource nodes spread around the map.

So yeah, I am about half way through this game, and ultimately unsure if I want press on to tick it off my list, or just drop the game and never touch it again. I am really not having a good time with this one.

Interesting. I had the exact same experience with the game (I chose to quit when I had enough frustration). And I tried it twice- Switch, then XBox.
I chalked up my experience to me just being really bad at modern platformers though (I simply cannot complete these sorts of games any more) and felt it was a shame because I do like the art and story and character.

 

[XsjadoBlaydette]

Impressions of Atomic Heart from early hours;

Crashed before it could start the game, oopsies!

Looks and plays alright. Intro went very Bioshock at one point too, so they ain't trying to be subtle about their inspirations here.

Almost all hopes for insightful criticism of communism fall away as soon as the main protagonist speaks. The unmistakable cadence of low-effort localisation rings clear. And despite the dialogue being written like a confused first-time attempt at mixing grumpy bitter snark with 'Whedon-esque' quips and retorts (oh yes, this fucker got jokes, don't you worry!), the American VA delivers every line like a reject from 90s Buffy Vampire Slayer auditions...except that reject killed themselves after realising their entire existence was nowt but a dumb hypothetical, so the rushed replacement for the reject got us this guy instead. Would really love an option to have native spoken language, so far the only option just says "language" and it changes all the text too so haven't checked if audio change is included with that. Honestly this dialogue is way worse than any chatter in Forspoken, yet haven't seen any of the bad-dialogue parade take aim at this game for some reason.

Option tabs in menu seem a bit muddled. Language and subtitles in the gameplay tab?? Utter madness!

The last remaining vestiges of hope for insightful criticism ultimately died upon discovering the horny vending machine. It's going to tell you this single personality trait. It's going to make itself very clear very quick. And just when you say you got it, that you understand the intent of their stale clichéd innuendos, they're going to carry on talking. And joking. And talking. And joking. The one same looping joke. The 9th circle of hell. Like being trapped in a kids playground. Tho even idiot kids in playgrounds get bored of their own dumb jokes after a while.

UI and menu look naff.

Kinda fun sucking all resources and shit in with the magnetic palm tendrils instead of having to use menus to confirm every intimate moment of kleptomania individually.

Quite like the creepy AI tech on corpses which sorta spouts various final thoughts the person had before their untimely deaths.

Annoying Destiny-like menu pointer moves too slow and has no option to toggle speed.

The image for your weapons in every menu shows what looks like the fully upgraded versions no matter what. This is a displeasing philosophy of method. If you have only time for one image, the basic version would at least allow the player's upgrade journey to have some surprise.

Plz no more English speaking voices!

 

[mirbrownbread]

Decided to give Bastion a whirl these few days - one of the titles I've been sidelining without a discernable reason for years...

What a great, great time it is though! I love almost all aspects of it so far (I'm like 5 hours in). Each of the weapons is worth considering, the challenges are actually tough to conquer, the art direction alternates between cute and disturbing when it needs to, the gameplay is so freaking fluid, etc., etc.
And let's not forget the narrator, which is perhaps even better utilized here as a concept than in Darkest Dungeon.

A real 2D gem, this one!

 

[meiam]

The last remaining vestiges of hope for insightful criticism ultimately died upon discovering the horny vending machine. It's going to tell you this single personality trait. It's going to make itself very clear very quick. And just when you say you got it, that you understand the intent of their stale clichéd innuendos, they're going to carry on talking. And joking. And talking. And joking. The one same looping joke. The 9th circle of hell. Like being trapped in a kids playground. Tho even idiot kids in playgrounds get bored of their own dumb jokes after a while.

I'll take horny vending machine over depressed cowboy that only know one song med bay

 

[Dalisclock]

Ive been playing Ori and the Blind Forest, and I do not like it at all.


So yeah, I am about half way through this game, and ultimately unsure if I want press on to tick it off my list, or just drop the game and never touch it again. I am really not having a good time with this one.

As someone who mostly enjoyed it(the escape sequences at the end of Dungeons got a bit long in the tooth), I'm gonna say if you finished at least one "dungeon" and don't like it, you might as well leave now because it doesn't get notably different or better after hat. There's 3 "dungeons" and while they're all different, they all generally work the same way and there's no real shift in gameplay.

 

[Dalisclock]

Decided to give Bastion a whirl these few days - one of the titles I've been sidelining without a discernable reason for years...

What a great, great time it is though! I love almost all aspects of it so far (I'm like 5 hours in). Each of the weapons is worth considering, the challenges are actually tough to conquer, the art direction alternates between cute and disturbing when it needs to, the gameplay is so freaking fluid, etc., etc.
And let's not forget the narrator, which is perhaps even better utilized here as a concept than in Darkest Dungeon.

A real 2D gem, this one!

Bastian is probably my favorite Supergiant game. I like all their games, but Hades it was despite being a roguelite and the Pyre I liked the parts that weren't playing fantasy basketball. Even then, i appreciate they try to do something different each time.

 

[Absent]

Mafia 3. It's quite a jump from Mafia 2 in terms of graphics, and a completely different game, a completely different atmosphere. Louisiana, bayous, voodoo, and even better songs on the radio.

It's, as often, a slow gta-like start. Introductory missions, most options and game loops aren't in place yet. The story neither. But it does feel different in setting from all others, this isn't the streets of Gta, Mafia, Saints Row, Watch Dogs. It's where you'd expect Hitman to take place for just one mission. This change is welcome already.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

Almost all hopes for insightful criticism of communism fall away

I really wasn't expecting the game to try anything of the sort. It seems to me that a lot of games that try to ape Bioshock either overapply or completely neglect its particular story beats.

...yet haven't seen any of the bad-dialogue parade take aim at this game for some reason.

They're too busy drawing porn of the lady robots.

And let's not forget the narrator, which is perhaps even better utilized here as a concept than in Darkest Dungeon.

Bastion's narrator actually surprised me a couple of times by responding to random stuff I was doing. Sadly I think I only got about 60% of the way through the game and can't really find the impetus to go back.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Rimworld DONE! I completed the Royal Ascension quest and my colonists left the planet on the Fallen Empire's shuttle. Good lord, I've been playing this game for almost 2 months at this point. Over 170 hours. Comparing this colony to my last one that couldn't do the final quest I finished this one over 24 hours faster. I had the difficulty at the second highest for most of the the game, and I actually bumped it up to the highest for the final quest where you need to defend your base against raids for 12 days. I did bump it down around day 7 after a particularly brutal mechanoid breach raid that hit me on a weak side with like 18 centipedes, but the raid after that was really easy so I put it back. Man but that final quest was brutal. A raid at least every day, if not twice a day, for 12 days. Most of them mech raids and at least 5 breach raids and it started with a drop pod raid in my kitchen as soon as I started the quest. Just brutal. I'm not going to say I didn't save scum, because I did, I saved at the start of every raid and if things went too bad I reloaded. Overall, though I reloaded way less than my previous colony.

A couple things really helped this run out. First was I started with the Sanguophage (vampire) scenario. You start with 2 colonists, one is a Sanguophage with a masterwork longsword, and that was enough to carry me through probably the first year of raids almost, because you have an immortal strong melee fighter with an excellent weapon, and the only drawbacks are that they need to keep a couple prisoners with amputated limbs around to feed off of and they need to going into a 3 day coma once a year or so. Their ability to instantly tend all of a colonists bleeding wounds for a small amount of blood was immensely useful as well, it means you aren't losing anyone to blood loss. Ever. Have a potential prisoner with 20 separate gunshot wounds that would take your doctor 4 hours to save? Not a problem, they're stable in about 2 seconds. Honestly, they are a little OP, but I guess you do really need all the advantages you can get in this game because the game has no problem being unfair in other ways. Also I had the Sanguophage ideoligion as well and that made it so that I could butcher humans without my colonists complaining and all that meat and human leather really helped as well, instead of raids being entirely drawbacks that just make messes that you need to clean up.

The second thing that really helped was taking the Human Primacy meme for my ideoligion and making a production specialist. Holy cow, this is so good it's ridiculous. They get a bonus to work speed to start, but the main thing is that every item they make get's a +1 to item quality. My guy was constantly turning out masterwork and legendary gear. He was making so many masterwork and legendary formal shirts for trading it was actually kind of annoying getting the notification constantly. But this is actually a really huge deal, because masterwork and legendary equipment gives you a huge combat advantage that you absolutely need. A legendary shield belt has over double the energy capacity as a normal quality one. That means that your sanguophage melee fighter can long jump into a firefight and ignore damage for quite a while actually, and take out dangerous enemies or use beserk pulse psycast and then jump back out again. Everybody was using masterwork or better SMGs by midgame, and I threw in a couple charge rifles and lances by the time I was doing the final quest.

The last thing was just better base design. Instead of going in a hilly area that had a lot of natural barriers to build my base around I just went with a flat plain with a river for hydroelectric power and built a big square double thick wall around the whole base and then about 20 squares in from the wall I built alternating walls and barricades for cover against breach raids. This made them a lot more manageable. I wouldn't do hydroelectric again, though. Having that river running through my base just added too big of a weak spot, and restricted how I could build my defenses on that side.

Also, pretty much every colonist I recruited had a passion in shooting, that's pretty much necessary. Also I had a lot more romance in this game for some reason. My last didn't have anybody pair off as a couple in like 70 hours of gameplay, this one I ended up with 6 of my colonists married, which is a huge buff to mood. Especially since one of them was a husband that crashlanded for my sanguophage that had genes that let them psychically bond with eachother, giving an additional huge mood bonus. Eventually I installed psychic harmonizers on both of them so their constantly maxed mood bars would boost everybody around them as well.

I did play with about 10 quality of life mods this time as well because I just couldn't face playing the game again constantly getting food poisoning because my cook doesn't think it's necessary to clean the kitchen before cooking. Also being able to highlight items and say "prioritize hauling this" takes out the other main headache of the game. More planning was very useful as well, because the vanilla planning system sucks. Frankly, that stuff should be in vanilla and there's no reason for it not to be.

I think the game is much more fun early game though. My last colony I was having a lot of fun early game and then it started to drag later on, then I restarted and was having a lot of fun again right away and the pattern repeated. Once you start getting more than 6-8 or so colonists and have a lot more items in your stockpile (being able to search for an item anywhere on the map was another invaluable mod) it just starts to get tedious making sure that everybody is doing what they are supposed to be doing and the game starts running more slowly too.

If your defenses work well, the game is fun, but if things go wrong and the AI does something you didn't expect them to do it can all break down instantly and it's hard to recover. Mech clusters are never fun and are just a pain to deal with. Thankfully you usually have a couple of days to get your ducks in a row before you need to do anything, but it's annoying how much of a disadvantage they put you at. Centipedes overall are just way overpowered, you can hit them with like 6 doomsday rockets and they won't die, it's ridiculous. If you get like 15 centipedes and they aren't going through your killbox, or at least coming through one opening in a wall, where you can keep them stunned with emp grenades and beserk pulses you are just screwed because they do so much damage, and take so long to kill, that everyone would be downed before you kill half of them. The game also throws way too many mech raids at you. And that also sucks because all your special items, like doomsday rockets and orbital laser targeters aren't effective against them, and the human raids generally aren't difficult enough to use them. I did use a couple doomday rockets against a mortar raid, and that was pretty fun, but generally it's hard to find a use for that stuff. Mechanoids also never retreat, which makes them so much more difficult to defeat.

Overall, I still maintain that the game is fun, but needs more work. Now I can finally play something else.

 

[Old_Hunter_77]

I hit my wall with Hi-Fi: Rush for now- one of these g-d mfing QTE has completely stumped me. Comparing to a full play-through on youtube, it seems I'm about half-way through. Perhaps I'll attempt this again but I threw my Steam Deck down in frustration last night. Well, not threw, that's shit's expensive.. gently placed it down on the couch then petulantly stomped around the living room like a child.

Upgraded my PS+ to the next tier for the 15 days remaining in my current subscription and downloaded Outriders and Oddword: Soul...something-or-other. I don't have high hopes for Outriders 'cause it's shooter but who knows might be fun for an hour or two. I dunno anything about Oddword *shrug*

 

[BrawlMan]

Oddword

Oddworld.

 

[Absent]

I think the game is much more fun early game though. My last colony I was having a lot of fun early game and then it started to drag later on, then I restarted and was having a lot of fun again right away and the pattern repeated.

Yes. I love Rimworld, for its base building and little society aspect. But I kinda drifted away when it became too towerdefensey, and building that spaceship would be too much of a hassle in that respect. So I never really tried to complete it. Switching instead to more relaxed and base-building (if I may say) stuff like Prison Architect, Oxygen Not Included or Space Haven.

 

[MrCalavera]

Having some long medical vacation this year, so i'm clearing the backlog

First on the board, NieR:Automata, route A

 

[laggyteabag]

I've dropped Ori and the Blind Forest.

I've dropped a few games in the past, but mostly those were just because I lost interest or got distracted by something else, but I can't really remember the last time that I dropped a game because I just deeply disliked it.

Im actually quite surprised that it ended up being this game, of all things. I've stuck through a lot of really shitty games in the past, but I never expected the game that is rated Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam to be the one that finally pushes me over the edge.

So yeah, onto literally anything else. 4 hours was still a good try, though.

 

[laggyteabag]

Decided to give Bastion a whirl these few days - one of the titles I've been sidelining without a discernable reason for years...

What a great, great time it is though! I love almost all aspects of it so far (I'm like 5 hours in). Each of the weapons is worth considering, the challenges are actually tough to conquer, the art direction alternates between cute and disturbing when it needs to, the gameplay is so freaking fluid, etc., etc.
And let's not forget the narrator, which is perhaps even better utilized here as a concept than in Darkest Dungeon.

A real 2D gem, this one!

Supergiant have yet to miss. All of their games are excellent in their own ways, and I really like how they are all have distinct gameplay styles, despite all being from the same perspective.

Pyre is definitely their most underrated game. That one really flew under the radar for a lot of people, but is well worth playing.