Hey all!
Figured we’d try something like this. Let me know what you all think, and if you have any feedback on what you would like a weekly thread like this to look like. Thanks
What are you all playing? Anything you got from the steam sale you’re enjoying?
Star Wars Jedi Knight Academy! Enjoying an old game that my parents wouldn’t let me have because it was “too violent”
Also FTL! Snagged it for $2 on Steam.
Wow, both of those are among my all time favorite games. Good taste!
Been playing Heaven’s Vault, a game I kept seeing recommended for people who liked Outer Wilds and Return of the Obra Dinn. There’s this big overarching mystery to solve, and a core part of the game is translating a written language. There’s limited options you’re given for what each word means, but you still have to compare symbols and use context to make deductions, it’s very cool.
Outer wilds and obra dinn? Sold 🙏
Oh god yes, Heaven’s Vault is great. I love love love that the language rules are so consistent that once you learn what an individual symbol means and roughly how the order-of-operations work, you can make some very educated guesses. Especially on a second go-around, you feel like you’re making way more progress than your first playthrough.
Great explanation. I’m greatly intrigued. Thanks!
Path of Exile. I can’t even say it’s great. It’s OK. But they must have nailed that Diablo-esque addictive quality because I can’t stop.
It takes awhile for Path of Exile to truly click. I think it’s the best ARPG ever made, but the initial learning curve is pretty steep. Things really open up in the endgame. And we have Path of Exile 2 right around the corner which is awesome.
Interesting. What counts as the endgame? I’m in Act 9 now.
So once you complete the campaign you will begin maps. There are 3 tiers of maps, you have white, then yellow, then red. I consider mapping to be the endgame.
If this is your first build, the endgame will be rather punishing and you might not make it very far. It took me until my third character roughly before I was able to successfully push into red maps and beyond. There are special bosses to hunt down, and all the side content like Heist and Delve are very rewarding and fun.
Additionally you get another passive tree that allows you to customize your mapping experience however you want. Zizaran has a really nice video going over the endgame. It’s quite long, but very helpful. https://youtu.be/uf4wnvkS-mI
addictive quality
That’s exactly why I stopped playing that. I realized it was addictive rather than fun, and I could no longer stomach the business model based on annoying the player into paying (by deliberately making inventory management a living hell and then selling stash tabs to alleviate the problem).
Just started playing Hollow Knight again and I’m HOOKED. I love almost everything about the game so far from the music, the visuals, and the gameplay. Although it gets mighty frustrating when trying to platform through those fucking thorns or off the bouncy purple mushrooms but I take my break and then I’m back at it again :)
I picked it up again this week, too! The ambience is perfect, really on point for immersion.
Not sure if those mushrooms you mention have been in my way, but at the moment I cannot beat those damn explosive jellyfish in a reliable manner. Breaks definitely help; after a while I’m
filled with determination.I hear ya on the determination part, playing last night I was hit with the realization of truly how big the in game world is and I want to know all about the L O R E. But I’m trying so hard to restrain myself from watching a YouTube synopsis like I usually would for something like Dark Souls.
With those jellyfish, if you’re talking about the ones in Fog Canyon my tip is to kill the little ones and just avoid attacking the bigger ones altogether. The explosives the big guys have are so powerful and I don’t think I have been able to avoid said explosives except maybe a couple of times. But keep on chugging my fellow knight :)
It is a beautiful game, for sure.
I beat my head against Hollow Knight when it was released and set it aside after a while. I recently went back and somehow was able to get through it (I’m convinced they made it easier vs me getting better).
Make sure to explore and find all the story and world building tidbits. It’s definitely worth digging into, and I love some of the little side stories and character interactions as you go deeper into Hollownest.
You probably got better, but!
As I understand it, the initial release of Hollow Knight had some absolutely awful input lag and other performance issues. If you first played in the initial patches, you likely experienced this.
Hollow Knight is one of my all time favorite games. I replay it via randomizer quite frequently.
Definitely, I’m doing my best to try and do everything I can without a guide (unless I get stuck). Plus, if I miss anything I probably will do another play through or something because I find the game to be very comfy especially when you get into a groove.
I’m paying through Skyrim for the first time. I had tried it once before as a teen but didn’t really know what I was doing and gave up… Now I’ve got it loaded up with mods and am thoroughly enjoying myself!
You’re in for a treat!
I had been making steady progress in Expedition Rome from the sale, but then the siren song of RimWorld pulled me back again. My melee moleperson cult is going strong!
I’m playing a heavily modded Fallout 4. I got a mod where you can start more like a regular RPG and choose your backstory and where you start, and all of the dialogue relating to Sean has been taken out. It’s great, way more fun. My character is a drunk who washed up on Nordhagen beach and is living with the settlers and killing raiders for them and building them a nice house :)
Pokemon Violet. I’m trying to complete the Pokedex as much as I can, as I try to ignore the blatant perfomance problems of the game 😅 But I really like the game and its open world nature.
It’s so irritating that S/V could have been the definitive Pokemon experience but it ended up being what it was. I guess I can’t really blame them for not putting the effort. I mean why should they when everyone bought it anyway (I did too, I’m part of the problem)
I guess for me there was so much fun to be had grinding out an optimized team by breeding and training them up, and the new games sort of trivialized all of that. Totally understand why, but it took a lot out of it for me.
The open world in them is nice initially, but imo they failed to make exploration rewarding enough, so really it’s like… What’s the point.
I still like catching 'em all but it even seems like they’ve de-emphasized that.
Sorry to rant just an old Pokemon fan who can’t really move on.
Fire Emblem Three Houses again - So much changes between the 3 different stories in that game, it is so much bigger than I initially realized. When my partner was talking about what happened in their playthrough and it didn’t at all resemble my Golden Deer playthrough I realized I’d have to get back to it one day.
Diablo IV mostly right now. I’m level 45 and barely getting started on Act II. I need to catch up, but there are so many side quests.
I also picked up Dead Cells for the Switch yesterday. Seemed more appropriate on the Switch than on PC. So far, it’s a lot of fun.
Do yourself a favour and stop doing side quests. Focus on the main story, those side quests can be done later on or not at all. Otherwise you will end up over level 50 but the main quest caps at level 50; so you will be sort of wasting time fighting stuff lower than you.
That’s my focus right now.
You’ll also be able to get those side quests done much faster after you get your horse.
i’m running psychonauts 2, really loving the level design and story and characters. it has really really good gay representation too!
I liked it, it’s certainly an improvement on the first game, but I do kind of miss the snark the first game had that set it apart from other adventure platformers. The characters, especially Raz, seem a lot less, I don’t know, jaded, cynical? I get that they probably had to tone it down a little bit because there was certainly some crap they got past the radar in the first game that probably wouldn’t fly today and they wanted to appeal to a wider (and younger) audience, but it almost makes the returning characters feel less well-rounded than they were. It’s a weird juxtaposition, but I guess some tonal shift is to be expected over 14 years.
Pikmin 2, Subnautica, Dome Keeper on the Steam Deck, Zelda TOTK on the Switch and revisiting Civ V on my main pc.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a blast.
Early access is more fully-baked than many full releases. The story is intriguing, and seems to react in a very flexible way to dialogue as well as actions in the world. The D&D nostalgia is awesome, and it seems that Forgotten Realms is more familiar to me than I thought.
It’s gorgeous. It feels great. It’s fun.
Fun fact: if you get the early release, you get a free upgrade to digital deluxe when it releases Aug 3 I think. Not a shill, I just love gaming.
I actually started playing the Dishonored series in the remastered edition. Missed them, back when there were new and I am totally loving it so far 🙂
Stray!
And I did get it from the Steam sale.
It had been on my radar for quite some time. Partly because it’s gotten such great review and partly because it’s from Annapurna, they seem to release pretty sweet games.
And it’s great! Highly recommended. :)
Kinda found that the game falls away somewhat around the final third. Don’t want to spoil anything for you, but I’ll say that I found the games moment to moment a bit lacking. Real shame as the first hour or so is genuinely pretty good.
I’ll try to remember to report back when I’ve finished it and let you know what I think!
