Hey y’all, what have you been playing!
I’m still on my Isaac kick, and finally got my PC back to start playing Alan wake 2!
Just started a Valheim server and beat the first boss last night with my girlfriends. We’ve got room if any queer friendly folks want to join in.
Otherwise I’ve been playing FFVIII and Dave the Diver on Deck.
Replayed Uncharted 4 for the millionth time. Now on The Lost Legacy. Not enjoying it as much (it’s harder, for one thing). Interesting to see the developments that would go into The Last of Us 2 though (e.g. experiments with more open-world levels, and the attempt to redeem a character that’s previously been portrayed as a villain).
Diablo IV season 3
APE OUT
I just finished up Divinity Original Sin 2 this week! I enjoyed Baldur’s Gate 3 immensely, so I thought I would check out something else from Larian Studios, and it had been on my wishlist forever. Loved the combat system in this one, and how you could mix and match different skills and abilities to make interesting combinations. The battles were so much fun to play! I had a hard time keeping track of the story and all the different factions and their motivations, though, and went into the final act of the game not exactly sure what my character should choose. (Especially compared to BG3 I had a harder time keeping track of what was going on for some reason.) Still had a ton of fun playing this one and will probably replay it with a new character and all new party at some point!
I’m also working on my second playthrough of Disco Elysium and playing Cult of the Lamb. And then sometime soon I’m going to start Cyberpunk 2077.
Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth
Currently playibg Hogwarts Legacy. I don’t like the Harry Potter universe but I was curious what the hype was about. My lord is that game good. The visuals, the sounds, every little detail oozes magical whimsy. There’s a lot of standard open world collecting but the world is so cozy and fun I don’t even wanna use the quick travel.
BG3 still. Just started Act 3 for the first time. Astarion as my main.
Man, I put 80 hours into it in Act 1 last summer and haven’t picked it back up yet.
I’ll enjoy the rest when I feel like it, still GOTY for me even only playing a third of it.
Yeah. If you’re a conpletionist like me, you just run around picking up junk to sell to vendors so that you can buy one of every available named weapon (and store it in camp and never use it)…
Oh, there’s plot? Sorry, busy systematically looting an entire castle… I kid. A little.
I’m really enjoying how each character has a good arc, and that those arcs feel so substantially different from one another.
It’s an incredible game.
Act 1 just felt like a game unto itself and I was satisfied for the moment.
Spent most of my time this week, as per the ushe, playing Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition and doing setup for the Saturday campaign I run every week using the game’s DM client.
Great fun.
If anyone out there is into D&D and has free time on Saturdays, the game is cheap and you’d be welcome to join us. The server name is ALFA Sea of Swords 034: Daggerford.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/704450/Neverwinter_Nights_Enhanced_Edition/
Also picked up Sands of Aura, which is an indie soulslike and I’m just starting on that today. The reviews speak to excellent level design, and I love a game I can explore.
After playing through Mass Effect 1-3 (LE) I needed to go back home… To Skyrim.
My Breton Farmgirl visited her Boyfriend Lund only to find out he was killed by Forsworn robbers. They will pay for this.
Got my Deck back from RMA, so doing another run of Neurovoider. Then, I’ll probably finish Dragon Age Inquisition on Desktop.
I think I might play the Tomb Raider Legend/Anniversary/Underworld trilogy. Just to get ready for the I - III remasters.
As much as I enjoy the newer trilogy, I really miss old campy Lara. The fun adventures that don’t take themselves too seriously.
Edit: Man, I forgot how finicky the controls of these games can be.
Edit 2: No, seriously, fuck these controls. Anniversary feels like a nightmare to play. Legend had its control problems, but at least there wasn’t platforming in literally every room. I can appreciate that it’s got waaaaay more puzzles (I mean, it’s a remake of the original), but that doesn’t matter if the controls make the puzzles unnecessarily frustrating.
I thought after playing Star Trek: Resurgence, which I adored, that I’d follow up with The Expanse: A Telltale Series. I’m a fan of both series and The Expanse seems just as well suited to the format, I’ve enjoyed the other Telltale games I’ve played and I really like Camina Drummer. Recipe for a slam dunk.
Off the bat, The Expanse has a lot of advantages over Resurgence. It’s far better on a technical level - it never crashed, I didn’t have any visual bugs, I didn’t have any performance problems and there were no input issues. All things Resurgence was rife with.
But here’s where the problems start. The Expanse, in a technical sense, is better graphically. It doesn’t look better though. It’s just creatively kind of dull. This is going to be a running theme with the game - it suffers any time an artistic choice had to be made.
There’s only a brief moment in the first episode - of five - where we escape the uninspired industrial corridors. You might point out those industrial corridors are part of the show’s aesthetic, but they don’t convey the same details about how these machines work and how the people live in them. They miss details like how the decks are laid out in relation to the direction of thrust, and are weirdly wide rather than that utilitarian claustrophobia. The show also had no problem finding spectacular space vistas that are largely absent here.
But visuals are not why we are here. It’s the story, right? But for the first time in any Expanse media - from the books, novellas, show, etc - I was incredibly bored. None of these characters are remotely interesting. The Camina I know is intense, driven and decisive. This Camina is unsure, anxious and just all around unimpressive. The politics are gone - not that the faction don’t get a lot of lip service, but everything said is incredibly surface level and dull.
The game is blatantly obvious in how it forces outcomes regardless of choice. I was particularly frustrated when I shot a mutinous crew member multiple times, saw him floating limp in space, only for him to teleport mere moments later and have a gun pointed at another crew member again. I had these whiplash moments pretty often, where it felt like there needed to be an intermediary set up scene but instead we just awkwardly jump to something.
More important than decisions in story outcomes is stuff you find while exploring. People live or die based on these. Except you have no idea whether clicking something or walking somewhere is going to trigger a cutscene that’ll push you past a threshold where you can’t return to find something. Locations of items rely on moon logic - you don’t find meds in any of the med bays you go through, you them on a random crate floating in space. The result is an anxiety over whether you’ll miss something, and butchered pacing as you aimlessly walk around trying to find these things that could be anywhere.
The voice acting is sadly sub par. I really liked Camina’s actress in the show, but she sounds like she is phoning it in here. The others aren’t any better. The belter accents were particularly awkward.
It feels weird to talk about game play in this genre, but with dialogue choices this weak I couldn’t help but notice how much worse The Expanse’s were. There is a lot of tedious filler walking, jarring video game-y avoiding patrolling “drones” with comical red laser beam search lights and holding a button until a thing is collected. Resurgence had plenty of issues in this regard but, to it’s credit, it mostly just cut to the next scene (at least in the first half).
The one puzzle I remember was moon logic. You need to work out a password, which is connecting a series of shapes, and are encouraged to look around the environment for shapes that might have been important to the previous inhabitants. Is it any of the pseudo-religious iconography? Anything of sentimental importance? No, it’s the path of the silly connect the power lines chore you did earlier.
Ugh, I could go on. This is already way longer than anyone should read. The TL;DR is The Expanse gets a 3/10 for me, compared to Resurgence at a 9/10. It should have been an easy passing grade given my investment in the series and it’s suitability for this format but it’s just so creatively bankrupt.
