I’ve been working through my first playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077 - it’s fairly enjoyable, I’m glad I ignored it outright until well after big patches rolled out. There’s something very satisfying about blowing up enemies through a camera.

I’ve also picked up Dwarf Fortress (Steam) for the first time. It has a lot of depth but has been fun to learn and try and figure out. I just flooded a section of my fortress by digging into an underground river.

My chill-out puzzle game has been Can of Wormholes and it’s pretty fun! It’s weird for sure… but definitely fun.

A bit of Slay the Spire again and a tiny bit if Spiro Remastered with my daughter.

Diablo 3: Season 29 - Working on stocking up on Torment 16 bounty caches for the Avarice conquest (completing a 50,000,000 gold streak). It’s taking me longer than I anticipated, but then again, I keep getting distracted by the Visions of Enmity. I really need to start ignoring those portals.

Diablo 4: Season 2 - Snagged the Razorplate chest armor with around 15,000 Thorns and a level 925 bow, so I’ve been kicking ass and actually surviving Helltides. My current goal is reaching level 90.

No one lives under the lighthouse - This was the first time I played this game, and it was amazing. It’s been sitting in my Steam library since this past spring, and I didn’t really know a lot about it going in except that is was more or less atmospheric horror. It was not what I was expecting, and in a good way. It was way more horrifying and lightly Lovecraftian than I thought it would be, since I was expecting something more similar to Dear Esther or What Remains of Edith Finch where I just kind of walk around while learning the story, so I was pleasantly surprised when I actually had work to do lol. I thought I’d get sick of the pixel art graphics, but it held up pretty well, and I even got some nice screenshots out of it. The only parts that were relatively frustrating were two weird chase scenes, but luckily the game gave me the choice to skip them after dying so many times. I’ve read that there’s multiple endings, but I was satisfied with the one that I got (whichever one it is), since it was pretty much like a light bulb going off in my head and made sense with the story as I understood it. Parts of it felt very Amnesia-like as well, which is always a plus for me. I don’t plan on 100% it any time soon, because it’s definitely one of those games I like to finish in one go, but I think I’ll have fun whenever I do.

Just learned there was a new Grim Dawn expansion announced so replaying that again.

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Kind of in between games at the moment. Been digging through my backlog, looking for something to play, but nothing has really clicked yet. In the meantime I’ve been doing this little gaming advent calendar thing with Mission in Snowdriftland. It’s a platformer that used to be a flash game that was used to promote Nintendo products back in the 2000s. It’s set up like an advent calendar, with 24 levels. You could probably beat it in a few hours, but I’ve been enjoying taking it one level a day,

I played a fair bit more Backpack Hero, and made some more progress in the story mode. Still a bit too grindy for my tastes, but I’ll either finish it or just stick to the classic roguelike mode.

I’ve been playing more Starfield, and the recurring thought I have every step of the way is, “this should be better”. To go into much more detail than that would be to right a dissertation, but the short description is that the game has barely changed compared to Fallout 4 and Skyrim.

I got through another few missions of Wargroove 2. It continues to be a worthy successor to Wargroove.

Combined with Starfield, Pillars of Eternity is helping me resist starting a new run in Baldur’s Gate 3. I also have that feeling of, “this should be better” here, but it’s pretty much entirely down to production value. Number 1 with a bullet is that I wish it was fully voice acted, including narration. Still though, loving everything else so far despite real time with pause, which has been less of a problem than I thought.

Since getting a PS5, a good chunk of my time has been spent with my PS4 library I fell off of when loading was too obnoxious. I had a Last of Us Left Behind save on grounded difficulty that I had never beat because, while I enjoy the brutal difficulty of the last encounter, waiting to load every time I died was miserable. The much faster (but slower than PS5 games lol) load time got me over the hump.

I’m getting into the Last of Us 2 next.

Star Citizen. It’s a buggy mess as usual but it’s such a fun mess. Especially the Siege of Orison event going on right now, I’ve had some really amazing emergent gameplay moments come from it that have me very excited for the future of this game.

Hogwarts legacy: I think I already reached the last quarter of the game and it is fun so far. The main story feels more like a side quest, but the world has the right feel that the books and movies left behind. Only the side activities become a little too much. I still keep finding new stuff I could do, but always in so many iterations that I already know that I will not do all of them. Why can’t there be just 20 Merlin trials that are fun and diverse instead of 100(?) that quickly become repetitive?

I’m nearing the end of Crisis Core -Final Fantasy VII- Reunion. It’s still really mediocre, but I got into that mindless grind of those 300 side missions. The main story is pretty lame, the only interesting bits are those directly connected to FF7, basically when you’re in Nibelheim, although even that is a bit of a let-down.

I also played more on my Steam Deck than expected, mainly because I got sick a few days ago and would just dabble a bit here and there while lying down. I did a some Vampire Survivors runs, but it’s basically always the same, so I need to look into those unlocks I’m missing. Then I tried Boneraiser Minions, but I’m not sure about this one. It’s a Vampire Survivors-like, but here you summon different skeletons to fight for you. The first few runs felt really slow and boring, but some of the unlocks improved it somewhat. I’m still not sure about the minions fighting for you thing though, since it feels a bit too RNG, but I’ll give it a bit more time.

Just finished Chants of Sennar. Decryption game with puzzles and light sneak bringing people of a babel like tower to speak to each other again :) I’m always in a weird indecision for what to play after I finish a game…

Thinking about subscribing to the pc gamepass to play Lies of P.

Unbelievably, I’m playing (and enjoying) Fallout 76 after avoiding it for so many years of following it’s travails from afar.

It’s buggy in all those Bethesda ways that are almost comfortable in their familiarity at this point, and it’s got a lot to explore. This can tide me over until Starfield is discounted and improved.

Also been playing Teardown a bit, which has a really cool look and feel. Hyper-real except a voxel universe, if that makes sense. Lots of fun to destroy the environment.

2 things

• Resident Evil HD Remaster

  • I followed a guide, and finally got my infinite rocket launcher around 2 hour 41 mins!
  • Skipped all the cutscenes, got the bad ending, I have no idea what’s happening in the game, and somewhat learned some speed running moves (e.g. stair skating and kiting).
  • I’m excited to finally playing the game properly (with rocket launcher) in the future, both Chris and Jill scenarios.
  • There’s quite a lot of work involved, I used the IGN video walkthrough, spliced the video into like 13 parts for 13 saves, then just redo those parts until I feel like I’ve finished the section without losing too much time

• Final Fantasy 7

  • I’m replaying it again, the last time I finished this game must be at least a decade ago.
  • It’s still my favorite mainline FF, I still love the Materia system and how you can chain them together. The combat is still very speedy, especially compared to FF9, the characters and story still hold up. You can definitely see Shinra Corp existing in our society right now.
  • I’m also surprised at the parts I’ve missed. After the temple morphed into the black materia, did Cloud shove Aeris to the ground and punch her repeatedly? I was shocked at that scene, didn’t realize what was happening when I was younger.
  • With knowledge about what’s happening with Crisis Core and FF7 Remake in hand, now I could definitely understand some of those scenes, the voices Cloud is hearing, etc.
  • I’m playing the PS4 remaster / re-release. Liking the QoL features (fast forward, battle assist), but there’s still an unfixed bug where the music would just stop playing.

Still playing the field since finishing my second BG3 playthrough a few weeks ago:

• Sniper Elite 5: I wish I’d known about this series 10 years ago. SE5 is a surprisingly fun stealth action game, with enormous sandbox levels that encourage varied approaches, styles, and paths. Lots of unlockables and customizations (and unlike the new Hitman games, those unlockables can be used across all levels once you get them). Unfortunately I’m just not super into this kind of experience anymore, but I still had a lot of fun for the time I did spend on it before getting worn out. I’m keeping it on my system because I’m sure it will scratch another itch soon.

• Bus Simulator 21: I wanted something I could zone out with, just kind of dive into mundanity and focus on little details. The game does meet that criteria conceptually, but the gameplay just doesn’t feel super well-tuned, and you get these little penalties for everything that goes wrong. I didn’t play it long enough to deal with the business management aspect, which I think is a significant part of the appeal, but it really just didn’t click like I wanted it to.

• Firewatch: Skipped this when it released and was a huge deal. I didn’t know anything going into it and really liked the format of the game, exploring the woods, pulling up the map and compass to navigate and all that. Characters and performances were exceptional. But ultimately I was kind of disappointed because …

• Concrete Genie: Really stellar artistic achievement. The quasi-stop-motion style of the in-engine game, the animations of the genies, and the sketchbook style cutscenes all looked phenomenal in their individual styles. The story was touching and I loved the idea of a hero whose value is his artistic drive, but I was a little bothered by what I felt was a fairly reductive approach to bullying. But the biggest problem was that the game feels really incomplete. Exploration is competent, but the drawing mechanics are not nearly robust enough to tap into the creativity it’s trying to celebrate, and the final act of the game introduces a whole new set of mechanics that, again, are really shallow. By the halfway point, the game felt more like a really, really sophisticated proof of concept than a completed game.

• Two Point Hospital: This game is doing a much better job with what I was hoping to get out of Bus Simulator 21. Love the art style and UI. No complaints, just something easy to dip into from time to time.

• Paradise Killer: I just started this and it is fucking nuts in a very sincere way. Opening lines: “The Syndicate created the first Paradise Island to worship their dead alien gods. Guided by Leader Monserrat, the Syndicate attempt to resurrect the gods by forcing Citizens into psychic worship rituals. However, the worship invites demonic corruption from beyond the stars. The islands always fail. The islands die and a new Paradise Island is born. The cycle repeats.” Really unique art style and game world. Time will tell if the investigative core lives up to the rest.