What are you all playing? I’ve been trying out the slay the spire downfall mod a bit. Got some wins with the new characters. A lot of fun!
Been playing a lot of super punch out, started a stardee valley playthrough just now too.
I finally started Horizon: Forbidden West - gameplay changes compared to HZD keep trickling in and I couldn’t be happier. I love Aloy’s character so I’m really happy to be in her shoes again.
This past week was pretty disappointing before that:
- Hellblade II was good, but nowhere near as impactful as the first one for me. I’m left with a sour taste overall, although I’ll admit they did a tremendous job with cinematography and character rendering.
- Stellar Blade was insipid. Whatever could save it in my book - its gameplay - turns out stale pretty quickly, so I ended up abandoning the game midway. The story and characters were really uninteresting imo, couple that with how EVE is represented… I couldn’t really find any redeeming qualities.
Horizon Zero Dawn is amazing, gameplay and story.
I’m working my way through forbidden west as well. I’m really enjoying it. It’s always good to spend more time in an interesting game world. I really appreciate the more free form climbing system in this one, not quite breath of the wild climbing but way better than grab the yellow ledges only.
Absolutely! You could sort of “cheese” your way into climbing some parts of the world of Zero Dawn, but Forbidden West’s climbing is much improved - to the point that I’ve been getting sidetracked a number of times already just exploring and getting to great vistas.
I started it as well. Had weird sound issues that I had to fix by downgrading my system sample rate. It looks and feels amazing now that it works.
Selaco
Netflix has some good games I don’t expect. I love playing their Pinball and Slay the Spire.
Also on Netflix:
Play Wonderputt Forever if you like physics-based and/or golf games. I found it pretty fun and fairly challenging in the later levels.
Desta is also a really interesting narrative turn-based tactics game with some poignant emotional moments (it can actually be a bit heavy at times, especially if you’ve dealt with LGBTQ+ prejudice personally).
And I’m also really glad Netflix resurrected Cut The Rope from its grave. New puzzle daily and several months worth (i.e. hundreds) of puzzles to play if you’d like to catch up.
Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door quite a lot. Also getting back into Minecraft and Euro Truck SImulator 2. And of course, Cassette Beasts.
Picked up Rogue Trader in the WH40K “Skulls” sale, so been playing that.
Just started The Forest and Stardew Valley. Was looking for something like minecraft, but with flavor
Played a lot of Wuthering Waves since it launched. It’s a tricky one because it has a lot of flaws and weaknesses, but at the same time the core is actually really solid.
The combat feels amazing, and that really is the big selling point here. Parries and perfect dodges feel great, the bosses have fun movesets and the pace is fast and fluid with lots of tech like animation cancelling and character swapping. The character gameplay design is also excellent, with each character having a unique feel and playstyle, and a unique way of building and using the Forte gauge.
I wish the main story wasn’t complete garbage, but hey ho. At least there is a skip button. Even the good characters (like Aalto and Encore) feel out of place and too goofy in a supposedly post-apocalyptic setting. Funny enough some unvoiced side quests have been better than the main story by a long shot (I’m thinking of Eternal Concert, for example).
Also the localisation is insultingly bad and it definitely seems like Kuro actually disregards the importance of non-chinese regions to the point of not employing a single foreign language speaker even to their localisation team. Even their announcements are worse translations than Google translate, and it’s the same for all languages. You’d think they’d at least care about the JP translation. Puzzling and almost offensive.
Still, the game is mechanically satisfying enough to have me hooked for now. And it’s free (and very F2P friendly at the moment).
I finished Quantum Break, I loved it! I’ve never really played a game with superpowers, especially like these. I also love games that give unlimited ammo in the starting pistol since I have the worst aim ever, I constantly find myself having no choice but to melee enemies in other games. And the slow motion after doing the dash was so nice!
The final fight was so bad, I could not understand why I was dying even when I was doing exactly what someone on YouTube was doing but other than that it was so fun! And I actually liked the story, usually I’m not a big story person, I just like running around causing chaos, it also probably helped that I finished the game in 3 days, so I didn’t forget what was happening.
I had to give up on Alan Wake Remaster, the visual bugs were just too much so I moved onto Control. I was expecting a more linear style, similar to Quantum Break so I ended up running around in circles being so confused, especially the elevator at the start, I spent way too long looking for that lol but having the force like a Jedi is super fun
I also started GoW Chains of Olympus and I kinda regret playing the series in chronological order instead of release order because going from Ascension to this is not so great, since it was Originally designed for the PSP but hopefully the original series will look better when I get there
Quantum Break got me to put down BG3 for now since I’m looking for shorter games that I don’t accidentally spend 10 hours on a Saturday playing
Its also convinced me to get back into RE4 remaster. I started it in November and got to the part where I’m in the little boat on the lake but I got a bit bored of it. I think my expectations were too high, I loved 0,1,2 and 3 especially 2 and 3. And since everyone always says 4 is the best, I just expected more. I still want to finish it and continue the series because they are fun games tbf
I wanted to love Quantum Break so much but it was just a buggy mess on my pc, I spent hours messing with settings but it just wouldn’t run smoothly. I still managed to push through to mission 4 or so. Maybe I’ll give it another go.
Lol, it was buggy as fuck for me as well, so I “downloaded” another build and it worked perfectly.
The Game Pass version is especially bad in this regard.
I’ve been playing Hollow Knight the last couple of days. Sadly I’m now at a point where the bossfights are getting too hard. I’ll keep trying though.
Good luck my friend. Hollow Knight is a special one, but those bosses can be punishing. A few of them took me separate sessions over a few days, which is a frustrating way to play games for me, but it’s such a rewarding experience otherwise. I recently rewatched my recording of beating one of the bosses and I was fumbling so bad, I could see my own desperation in the way I was playing.
Apparently there’s a secret phase for the final boss that I was more than happy to experience via YouTube. I was perfectly satisfied with just rolling the credits.
Hollow Knight is the greatest game of all time for me. I replayed it recently and it was such a different experience for me to move through confidently and quickly when I had a grasp of combat from the beginning. It took me months to finish it the first time because of getting lost and not knowing where to go next.
Some generic (no spoiler) tips:
- go in another direction and come back to the boss later if that’s possible. If a boss is way too difficult then there may be an upgrade you haven’t gotten yet.
- take your time. It is more important to save your health rather than rushing to get a hit in. Sometimes it’s worth going to a boss and not hitting him at all and just focus on learning movement, patterns and figuring out where the openings are.
- play around with your charms and get the best setup you need to help with the boss fight.
- try to avoid attacks by running into the gap in projectiles rather than relying on dashes all the time.
- if you’re coming to thinking of quitting the game based on difficulty, then there’s no shame in watching a boss guide video on YouTube. Or space it out with a secondary game so you can play something else and come back later.
Thanks for the tips. I’m at such an early stage that I can’t even dash yet. It’s an ability that comes later right? Or am I missing something?
Possibly. The very early part of the game is linear. Very quickly in this game you’ll find it impossible to look up a guide because it is so non-linear, and it is really difficult to judge where you are in the game because you might have done things in a completely different order. Generally, early bosses just take a bit of practice and pattern recognition, and tend not to be reliant on upgrades.
