What are you currently playing?

[hanselthecaretaker2]

Overall level: 108
Vigor: 45
Mind: 11
Endurance: 29
Strength: 40
Dexterity: 57
Intelligence: 9
Faith: 8
Arcane: 8

Using a +9 Bloodhound's Fang, a +7 Pulley Bow, rocking all of Hoslow's armor, and rolling with my +7 Mimic Tear homie. The Mimic somehow manages to survive longer than I do as I see him whacking away at the Fire Giant still long after I've been told "YOU DIED" for the millionth time.

For the giant you could use a talisman that helps with fire negation (Flamedrake +1 is by the lift of rold platform). Radagon’s Soreseal is also a nice perk adding 5 points to VIG, END, STR and DEX. It’s up in the rafters at Fort Faroth. There’s a 15% damage penalty but if you have a Crimson Amber Medallion talisman it’s basically a wash. Spend your runes before going there though because the giant rat might get you before you can climb back out.

This fight is kinda like Radahn in terms of rot being effective, but the giant punishes more for keeping distance. Worth trying to see if you can find a sweet spot to avoid triggering his fireball or other range punish. Melee is probably still best to do max damage though since you’re, well, a melee build. Not sure if you have any other weapons leveled that allow for changing ashes, like the Uchi. Double Slash plus a rot grease will do really well, plus if you have the Kindred of Rot talisman and Bloodflame Blade incant that will keep stacking damage.

Try to stay behind him and make a point of targeting his left leg. His left arm becomes weak spot in 2nd phase along with his eye but it’s risky moving to his front side if you don’t have much stamina to run back. Lock on might also be more of a hindrance since it can make the camera go crazy when he moves around.

 

[Xprimentyl]

For the giant you could use a talisman that helps with fire negation (Flamedrake +1 is by the lift of rold platform). Radagon’s Soreseal is also a nice perk adding 5 points to VIG, END, STR and DEX. It’s up in the rafters at Fort Faroth. There’s a 15% damage penalty but if you have a Crimson Amber Medallion talisman it’s basically a wash. Spend your runes before going there though because the giant rat might get you before you can climb back out.

This fight is kinda like Radahn in terms of rot being effective, but the giant punishes more for keeping distance. Worth trying to see if you can find a sweet spot to avoid triggering his fireball or other range punish. Melee is probably still best to do max damage though since you’re, well, a melee build. Not sure if you have any other weapons leveled that allow for changing ashes, like the Uchi. Double Slash plus a rot grease will do really well, plus if you have the Kindred of Rot talisman and Bloodflame Blade incant that will keep stacking damage.

Try to stay behind him and make a point of targeting his left leg. His left arm becomes weak spot in 2nd phase along with his eye but it’s risky moving to his front side if you don’t have much stamina to run back. Lock on might also be more of a hindrance since it can make the camera go crazy when he moves around.

That's I'll take your advise and see if it helps.

Quick question, though: I just respec'd for the Rivers of Blood, and when I went to respec back to the numbers I showed you, I don't have enough levels suddenly. Do you lose levels when you respec???

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

Finished the first act of The Talos Principle 2. Definitely enjoying it a lot, the new gimmicks are fun and the puzzles are all very well designed. Pro tip: If you ever get stuck, look for something that doesn't seem to serve a purpose, because ten times out of ten, it does.

The Talos Principle gave me headaches, which was weird because none of the Serious Sam games ever did and it's not like TTP had too much action to handle.

 

[hanselthecaretaker2]

That's I'll take your advise and see if it helps.

Quick question, though: I just respec'd for the Rivers of Blood, and when I went to respec back to the numbers I showed you, I don't have enough levels suddenly. Do you lose levels when you respec???

It will always be the same levels available, but if it isn’t adding up, you might want to double check if you have a talisman equipped that boosts something, as that will make your actual levels appear higher than they are. Easier to unequip anything like that before respec.

Did you not like RoB then? There’s a lot of flexibility with Dex/Arcane builds, especially if you’re leaning into status effect stuff.

 

[Xprimentyl]

It will always be the same levels available, but if it isn’t adding up, you might want to double check if you have a talisman equipped that boosts something, as that will make your actual levels appear higher than they are. Easier to unequip anything like that before respec.

Did you not like RoB then? There’s a lot of flexibility with Dex/Arcane builds, especially if you’re leaning into status effect stuff.

I think I had Godrick's rune activated when I respec'd, that might explain things. Makes sense. Thanks for clarifying.

And I like RoB just fine, but if anyone knows me, I'm the kind of guy who's loyal to a fault. I've been "my character" for over 150 hours now, and changing everything up this late in the game felt uncomfortable. Seeing stats I'd been fostering all this time have to drop so Arcane could raise the 12 points necessary just for ONE weapon just felt icky. I haven't respec'd back yet, so I'll give it some time, but the change better start feeling comfortable ASAP; I'm sitting on 10 Larval Tears that are burning a hole in my pocket now...

 

[CaitSeith]

I'm retrying Octopath Traveler. I tried it a couple years ago, but I quit after starting the Chapter 2s (I don't remember exactly why I stopped). This time I'm almost done with all the Chapter 3s, and, oh boy. The whiplash from the tone difference between one character's chapter to another almost broke my neck (specially when I went from "if the life you save today causes someone else's death tomorrow, the blood is on your hands" to "wow! A map! Let's find us some pirate treasure!"). It's funny how some have nuanced antagonists or former villains turning a new leaf; and others are moustache-twirling villains who might as well eat babies for breakfast.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

Since I got Outer Worlds for free on EGS, I decided to start it up. I'm only a few minutes into it, but I'm already finding the game world's tone kind of repulsive; there's "tongue in cheek", and then there's "tongue through cheek, down the side of the face and licking its owner's ass". It's making Fallout 3 look like a paragon of subtlety.

This is why I typically have no interest in "it's so zany; you'll love it!" games, because they too often veer off of zany and straight into farce.

 

[XsjadoBlaydette]

Testing waters of curiously unreviewed Indie metroidvania-ish darksouls-lite atmospheric cyberpunk 2D action platformer Darklight before Yakuza consumes rest of life.

There are salient infallible unavoidable truths weaved into the fabric of this world: death, taxes, endless injust suffering and 'having no democratic influence on foreign policy whatsoever' are familiar examples so far. Yet "Videogame titles will always be dumb" remains unspoken. Perhaps cause "videogame VR titles are even worse, wtf's going on there??" is still going through certification procedure.

Artstyle feels distinct from other cyberpunk worlds, can't quite pin it down, is more mystical, ominous, crumbly dreading...for some reason am more reminded of the top-down horror Darkwood than any sci-fi game's visual design. There's even dragons it tells me! DIsplay options got a pixel slider to make it look, well, pixelier. The menu screens just got out of bed, begrudgingly performing their job to a 'minimum viable product' level.of standard. With rpg stat upgrade screen eerily similar to the soulsborns. But combat and killing options feels satisfying, looks great. Jump and midair shenanigans still suffers from a vague sense of floatiness prominent in such genres, though not terrible, and the ground pound ability at least claws back a crumb of weightiness. It's doing something right anyhow cause am intrigued to explore further.

Am baffled as to why it's unreviewed on metacritic though, cause according to the PC version it's been out since 2020. Not one review aggregated popped up in search engine results.

However.

Our boys at the esc...uhh, now Second Wind community got a vid of their greasy mitts fiddling with the game, standing up where no-one else could!

 

[CaitSeith]

Since I got Outer Worlds for free on EGS, I decided to start it up. I'm only a few minutes into it, but I'm already finding the game world's tone kind of repulsive; there's "tongue in cheek", and then there's "tongue through cheek, down the side of the face and licking its owner's ass". It's making Fallout 3 look like a paragon of subtlety.

This is why I typically have no interest in "it's so zany; you'll love it!" games, because they too often veer off of zany and straight into farce.

Outer Worlds in a nutshell:

Ok, I'm missing the "corporations aren't your friends" image; but you get the point.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Ok, I'm seriously giving up on Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup now. I've had 2 characters in the extended game and it just isn't fun at all. There are just so many BS enemies that have too much health and stupid moves that instantly cut your HP in half or give you a semi-permanent debuff from across the screen. The damage ranges are insane too. Sometimes an attack will do 1/4 of the monsters HP and then you'll do no damage 5 times in a row, it just feels bad. I got to Hell with a ghoul(which have immunities against two of the BS moves) and was doing all right, but then a series of bad rolls left him dead pretty quickly. Then I thought maybe I'd do better with Gnolls because they learn all skills equally but they have a tough midgame because their skills are lower than they should be at that point and I ran into a torment enemy and died. And each time I want another chance at the end game it's another 5+ hours just for another attempt. And there's no grinding in the game so you can't do anything to prepare yourself a bit more for the end game. If RNG screws you, you're just screwed. So yeah, I think I'm going to have to just take my 3 rune win that I got a month ago and be satisfied with that.

 

[BrawlMan]

I finished all of the Character Episodes in Tekken 8.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

I've been playing Beat Saber, and I have to say that its "Campaign Mode" (basically Challenge Mode) is kind of crap. The difficulty ramps up exponentially; I'm not even at the halfway point and it's throwing shit like this at me:

​

I don't have the reflexes for that!

 

[Old_Hunter_77]

There is a demo out for one my most anticipated games of the year- Tales of Kinzara: Zau

I haven't played it yet, will probably tomorrow.

 

[Old_Hunter_77]

Pleased to report that the demo of Tales of Kinzara shows the promise of the game. The theme and style attracted me and based on what's in the demo, the gameplay has a lot of potential. I enjoyed the little bit we got.

For platforming you have to standard jump, double jump, but also hold the button to jump a little higher, and a dash, and jumping off walls, all of which is given to you right away (at least in the demo). For combat you have two move sets you can switch back and forth at will, which suggest a possible high skill ceiling as you string together combos. Being able to go between range attacks and melee, juggling attacks and jumping should be enough to avoid combat being rote.

What the demo did not make clear yet is how much of a "metroidvania" it will be. I think it will be significant though- I had to find a key to open some door and remember where to go, so if that's in a demo I'm guessing the full game will have some of that backtracking.

Also since I get bored of exposition scenes in indy games where I'm reading text that scrolls next to static images, this game does have full voice casting and studio co-creator and lead promoter Abu Bakr Salim does indeed voice the main character so hearing Bayek of Siwa in an indy game will be fun for me.

So, yeah, thumbs up from me!

 

[BrawlMan]

Pleased to report that the demo of Tales of Kinzara shows the promise of the game. The theme and style attracted me and based on what's in the demo, the gameplay has a lot of potential. I enjoyed the little bit we got.

For platforming you have to standard jump, double jump, but also hold the button to jump a little higher, and a dash, and jumping off walls, all of which is given to you right away (at least in the demo). For combat you have two move sets you can switch back and forth at will, which suggest a possible high skill ceiling as you string together combos. Being able to go between range attacks and melee, juggling attacks and jumping should be enough to avoid combat being rote.

What the demo did not make clear yet is how much of a "metroidvania" it will be. I think it will be significant though- I had to find a key to open some door and remember where to go, so if that's in a demo I'm guessing the full game will have some of that backtracking.

Also since I get bored of exposition scenes in indy games where I'm reading text that scrolls next to static images, this game does have full voice casting and studio co-creator and lead promoter Abu Bakr Salim does indeed voice the main character so hearing Bayek of Siwa in an indy game will be fun for me.

So, yeah, thumbs up from me!

I'll make sure to download the demo later. I am still invested in this game.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

Omensight




So I played Spearhead Games previous title Stories the Path of Destinies and quite liked it, the game was a not huge in scale really but a fun non AAA esc offering I enjoyed for it's ideas like the timeloop and idea of how the story played out.

Omensight takes a lot from that game but feels vastly expanded upon with a pretty huge amount of backstory. Don't let the anthropomorphic animals fool you this is a tale of war, of torture and of betrayal with a history that feels like it's bordering in Game of Thrones levels of backstory to the world.

You play The Harbinger, a being sent to avert the apocalypse and prevent the void serpent ever devouring the tree of life. Somehow the void serpent has been released and the godless priestess who could stop it has been murdered and worse her soul stolen so she cannot return to the tree of life and be re-incarnated.

You have to play through the day first to find leads to follow. Then just as the end of the world looms you return to the tree of life and can restart the day. Using your powers to restart the day following different people whose souls have formed bonds with yours. As you keep playing and uncovering more you get the power of Omensight where you can see events that happened and then make others also see them to influence their actions throughout a day. So a general who would normally help lead the charge of battle instead goes to find the nations leader secretly doing a strange ritual at a temple for example.

It's Arkham combat but not quite as refined as Arkham but still pretty good and a fair few hours in the game is still surprising me by introducing new more powerful enemies etc.

Really enjoying it so far especially how much of the story seems to twist with bitter enemies becoming surprising allies at times.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Still plinking away at Laika: Aged Through Blood.

This has one of the steepest learning curves I've played in a while and really doesn't give a shit about you unless you master every aspect of it.

So it's a twin stick shooter on a dirtbike, with one analog for aiming and another not so much for moving (you just hold a trigger to go) as balancing the bike, which you can tilt forwards or backwards. The game expects you to be in mid-air half the time since spinning in mid-air is how you reload your weapons, and also how you shield yourself from bullets (you have to rotate the underbelly of the bike to use as a shield). The problem comes with sticking the landing. And if I've died 600 times so far, 95% of those have been due to landing a jump at a moderately inconvenient angle.

This is even more of a problem during boss fights. With several boss fights happening in an autoscroll level, and bosses being relatively humongous, the camera has to zoom out to accommodate everything on screen - so much it's hard to keep track of where the hell I am, let alone be able to tell the precise orientation of the bike as I'm making a jump. The boss fights bring out the absolute worst in the game and it makes me actively dread them. They become exercises in frustration.

Otherwise gameplay is fine. There's that die in one hit, kill in one hit Hotline Miami thing that makes things feel fair, and between the copious checkpoints and how quickly your respawn the game never gets frustrating at all. You can die a bunch of times due to a miscalculation and it's fine, feels like you're perfecting a run between two checkpoints. Besides you rarely lose anything for dying, and the acrobatics make the basic gameplay fun.

But at this point there have been too many annoying bosses that I've sworn off replaying this once I'm done. I'm happy to fuck around post game or whatever but I'm never fighting A Caterpillar Made of Sadness (great name) ever again.

 

[Worgen]

For whatever reasonable I just started playing Steamworld Quest this past weekend. Idk where it came from but it was installed on my switch and I was too miserable and sick this weekend to play anything that took effort or induced stress.

For such a simple RPG I'm a little shocked at how deep the combat "mechanic" is. So much so that maybe 5 bosses into the game I've found myself stuck, getting my ass kicked and having to go back and grind a little and rearrange my decks to try and power through.

For those that have somehow ignore this indie darling, it's ultra basic flash animation style fantasy RPG with people replaced with Robots. The big hook is that instead of combat abilities you have a deck of cards similar to Slay the Spire. However this deck is a combination of three characters decks mixed into one and its all customizable. The more interesting aspect is that base action cards add action points and higher level cards take action points so each turn you want to play basic actions and build towards big actions. Additionally if you play 3 actions one turn from one character you get a combo finisher action. For theres several levels to the combat, keeping things interesting.

Idk, I'm enjoying it, but it feels like the RNG can be a bit soul crushing at times.

I've got pretty much all the steamworld games, but there is always something about them that prevents me from really getting into them. I got the furthest in Quest, but ended up dropping it for reasons I don't really understand. I just reached a point where I stopped caring.

I grabbed Chasm and Beyond Sunset. Beat Chasm, it was pretty neat, its like a combination of quake 2 and wolfenstein. Mainly because all the levels are flat, but its 3d. Enemies (at least on hard) are pretty bullet spongy and you have to box them to avoid damage and for the most part its a good time, but there are some traps the game likes to do that are a huge pain in the ass, like teleporting enemies into your butt when you hit a switch, or trapping you in a small hallway with too many enemies. The bosses are all puzzles too, shooting them is generally a waste of ammo, you gotta figure out a trick to kill them, usually not too hard. Anyway, yeah, I liked it.

Beyond Sunset... Its... ok. The first episode is starts really interesting where you are wondering a cyberpunk slum where you can talk to npcs and figure out where your target is. But then you get a weapon. Combat is fast but... enemy spammy. It likes to put you in an area and just teleport a bunch of enemies in, which is fine, but the way it teleports them is kinda annoying. There is a quick portal animation then the enemies are there and it seems like they immediately start attacking , which is fine for ranged enemies but for melee ones that are suddenly in your butt, its annoying. Episode 2 looks cool, but I think I managed to break it and would need to start over to get out of the area I'm in and I'm not sure I care. Been thinking about doing another Hedon playthrough anyway.

 

[meiam]

I grabbed Chasm and Beyond Sunset. Beat Chasm, it was pretty neat, its like a combination of quake 2 and wolfenstein. Mainly because all the levels are flat, but its 3d. Enemies (at least on hard) are pretty bullet spongy and you have to box them to avoid damage and for the most part its a good time, but there are some traps the game likes to do that are a huge pain in the ass, like teleporting enemies into your butt when you hit a switch, or trapping you in a small hallway with too many enemies. The bosses are all puzzles too, shooting them is generally a waste of ammo, you gotta figure out a trick to kill them, usually not too hard. Anyway, yeah, I liked it.

This one?

 

[Worgen]

This one?

Nah, this one.