henke on 9/10/2025 at 16:01
Yeah so South of Midnight was good! Reminded me a lot of Psychonauts in the end, with its imaginative and bizarre levels reflecting the memories/trauma of various characters. Gameplaywise it's a tad middle-of-the-road, but the storytelling is strong, the visuals are great, and the soundtrack is this year's best.
Also finished Consume Me, which is a really neat slice-of-life management game where you play as a teenage girl trying to juggle dieting, love, and school. It's often laugh out loud funny, the visuals are great, and it is surprisingly captivating as a game. Where a lot of "cozy" games come off as feeling like they're pandering, Consume Me its way too weird and personal to come across as anything but completely sincere.
Game pass games I've poked at but didn't grab me:
Wheel World - the bike physics are so-so. The visuals look like Sable AND it kinda runs like Sable too with too much lag.
Lonely Mountains: the skiiing one whatever its called - it's neat, but I never really got into the mountainbiking one and this ain't grabbing me either.
Herdling - I liked this studio's first game, FAR: Lone Sails, but was less enthused about its sequel, and this 3rd game of theirs continues the downwards trend. Meh.
Also played the first couple levels of Doom: The Dark Ages today. It's fun!
Aja on 10/10/2025 at 01:21
I really liked the Lonely Mountains demo in that it reminded me more of actual skiing than most skiing games. But I couldn't run it smoothly enough on Steam Deck with the graphics at the level of sparkle I want.
Harvester on 10/10/2025 at 10:50
I'm playing the latest Life Is Strange game, Double Exposure, starring the main character of the original LiS, Max Caulfield. It's an Unreal Engine 5 game so I didn't even try to play it on my ageing system with a GeForce 3060, I'm playing it in 4K HDR on my TV with GeForce Now, with a Shield I recently purchased, my wired Xbox One controller works perfectly with it. I'm in chapter 2 (it probably has 5 chapters like the other games) and I'm having fun so far, I really like the LiS series.
It's getting mixed reviews on Steam but I haven't read those, after I've finished the game I will read up on what people don't like about it. So far I like it as much as the earlier games. From a gameplay perspective it's a super easy game, I've turned off the hint system because it's not needed. But hard puzzles aren't really the point of LiS, it's about experiencing a story and making choices and living with the consequences. If I had to say something negative, it's that sometimes it's not clear which action ends a scene. In multiple cases I still wanted to do some optional stuff but then triggered an action that ended the scene without being able to know that beforehand. That's a little annoying.
Tomi on 10/10/2025 at 13:57
Quote Posted by henke
Game pass games I've poked at but didn't grab me:
Wheel World
Lonely Mountains: the skiiing one whatever its called
Herdling
Also played the first couple levels of
Doom: The Dark Ages today. It's fun!
Looks like we've been playing all the same games lately! (I still gotta play South of Midnight though.)
The new Doom is pretty fun, but at mission 8/22 it's already starting to feel a bit tedious. It still feels very much like a Doom game - you collect keycards, health pickups and treasure like it's 1994 again - but they've also gone and added all sorts of silly stuff that doesn't really work imo. It's also quite a bit faster than the original Doom which occasionally makes the combat a bit too chaotic for my liking. I could do without the story too. The actual gunplay is solid though!
Wheel World is a strange little game. It's a cycling game, but it doesn't really feel like cycling, and it's not all that fun either. Perhaps some cycling enthusiasts can get something out of the numerous cycling related jokes and stereotypes in the game.
Lonely Mountains the skiing game was a bit of a disappointment to me, because I actually kinda liked their previous mountainbiking game, and this just isn't as good. The slopes are often a bit too extreme and the fixed camera angle can occasionally be annoying. I would have preferred a more relaxing experience instead of this suicidal extreme skiing. The snow looks gorgeous but while I do enjoy a challenge, I'd just like to chill and enjoy the ride sometimes.
Herdling is quite a weird game too. I appreciate the slow tempo of Herdling and the sense of a long journey, but in this case the actual gameplay is a bit too simple, and the story leaves
everything to the player's imagination.
Sulphur on 11/10/2025 at 15:06
Jesh and I finished a playthrough of LEGO Voyagers. It's beautiful, with easily some of the most realistically rendered LEGO bricks in video games. Its music is wonderfully warm and lovely to listen to.
It is a very easy game. It is also a very short game. You can finish it in 4 hours or less.
This does not matter.
LEGO's always had a place in my heart from a very early age, where my first memory of it was my brother putting together a bunch of innocuous blocks and a curved wedge of translucent plastic to create, miraculously, an impossibly cool spaceship primed to attack with dual, forward-mounted rectangular gun emplacements and a cool guy sitting in its cockpit.
Kid me, impressed, then proceeded to take it apart and try and recreate this wonder by disembowelling it ritualistically, then putting it back together with every single block in the wrong place. This made it look a DeLorean if you'd slammed it into a concrete wall, then backed it into a dumpster three times. I strongly believe that my brother's immediate and violent disapproval of this act (complete with flying LEGO bricks) is the origin point of why we dislike each other to this day, and is probably the first co-op experience I've ever had.
LEGO Voyagers is nothing at all like this, which is a point both to its detriment and its advantage: since you and your partner play as two of the tinier blocks in a LEGO set, you /must/ co-operate to move forward, and sometimes you must co-operate to build things together, because you and your partner are determined to be astronauts. The things you build can be utterly shite, and the game will not judge you as long as they work to ferry you onwards - and in doing so, it quietly says that everything will be fine as long as you're together.
This did not dissuade us from annoying the hell out of each other, as you can press a button to sing baby gibberish at each other at any point (or choo-choo if you're on a train), and discovering the attach button is a magical thing, because not only can you glue blocks together and roll around with them stuck to you like an impressively malformed katamari, but you can also snap to your partner's head at any moment. This is both cute and useful for some puzzles, but mostly it's perfect because it just *exists*, and makes for perfect comedy when you're both trying to snap the last piece on a bridge together and you jump on his head instead, which causes both of you to fall off the edge. Or sometimes you just snap together by accident, and then roll around blinking in confusion before you detach and sing angrily at each other. But then, you move on, and solve the next puzzle together, because that is what you do.
In other words: it is exactly what a co-op game should be. And as tiny as this game is, it manages to be beautiful, silly, wistful, and, in the end, a moving ode to friendship.
(But probably not brotherhood. We still kinda hate each other.)
henke on 11/10/2025 at 15:46
Hah, that's a great review, Sulphur. I looked at the trailer and it seems a bit Human Fall Flat esque as well, at least the "maneuvering big clunky vehicles" bits. I wanna play this.
Aja on 11/10/2025 at 15:47
Rock Paper Shotgun really ought to hire you already.
