What are you playing? (2023 Edition)

henke on 18/6/2023 at 13:59

Finished a couple indie games over the weekend.

Planet of Lana - platformer adventure where you're a girl with a robot kitten, trying to save your friends who got abducted by aliens. The story is pretty ho-hum, but it looks good. The gameplay is fairly simple but enjoyable, save for some QTE sequences towards the end. Yeah, it's alright!

Jelly Car Worlds - colorful and squishy 2D car physics game. Fantastic presentation and great gameplay. It doles out new mechanics and challenges at a good pace, never getting boring, and even saves some of its best tricks for late in the campaign. A good one!

Anarchic Fox on 18/6/2023 at 16:05

I'm still on Tears of the Kingdom. It'll be a while.

Quote Posted by Thirith

Having played some more Sable, I find myself oddly reminded of Ultima. Obviously it's a very different game than my favourite Ultima titles, but playing this brings back some memories: exploring a world, sometimes finding people or ruins or goodies, but often just getting more of a sense of what this world is; discovering settlements and talking to people and doing things for them. The game is designed to develop a connection between myself, the place I'm traversing and the people that inhabit it. What's missing is more of a sense that this world is alive: if there was weather, perhaps, or the settlements were a bit more than just a handful of buildings and some static NPCs. But exploring and inhabiting a world for the sake of doing so is wonderful.

Oh, now that makes my ears perk up. I enjoy most things that bear comparison to Ultima, particularly in the sense of feeling like a real place. That's the larger part of my obsession with Rain World. A game which does, by the way, have weather.

Quote Posted by demagogue

Overall ... if you want to play [Cultist Simulator], I personally think the way to do it is watch a spoiler-free tutorial about how to survive the basic mechanics for the long haul, and then you have the freedom to explore the lore and other mechanics. The game was made for you to figure out what's even going on. That's part of the charm and it is really fun when you make a connection. But it's important to get over that first level of understanding just to survive, and I think getting a little guidance is okay for that. It's fun to grope around in the dark for the big mysteries; not so much for the little ones.

I like the concept of opaque games whose mechanics must be discovered, but Cultist Simulator felt way too persnickety. Every time you unlock a new mechanic, some of the options will be disastrous, but since only random experimentation increase your knowledge of the mechanics, you have to take that bullet a couple times before you can move on. And every time you have to sit through the same early-game process of stabilizing your motivation and finances.

Jason Moyer on 18/6/2023 at 17:02

I'm supposed to be playing Pillars 2 and then when I'm done I want to get through System Shock so my plate is fairly clean for Starfield this fall. For some reason PoE2 isn't grabbing me like the first game or Tyranny did, I think at least partially because it just feels like you're messing around doing busywork while some imminent threat is going on that's much more interesting but that you don't actually need to pay attention to. Which happens with every RPG to some extent, but in this one it just feels like maybe it should be the central thing I'm working towards instead of faffing about helping squabbling douchebags fix their problems. In Pillars 1 it felt like everything you did was working towards identifying what the hell was going on, and in Tyranny you were constantly fixing shit because the Empire had problems and you were there to solve them.

In reality I'm just hooning around in Richard Burns Rally and working on trying to make the vanilla pacenotes a little better. It takes forever, but I'm significantly quicker and more consistent on the ones I've tweaked so that they match the descriptions of the notes that are in the manual.

Thirith on 19/6/2023 at 08:21

I'm slowly getting close to finishing Sable - or at least I think I am. I've just arrived in the final unexplored area, but there's plenty I can still do. Most of it is of the "Collect one of each X" sort, which isn't necessarily my cup of tea, but I'm not quite ready yet to end this. Once I've explored this last part of the map, perhaps.

I'm not sure it's quite as high on my list of games as it was for some people here, but I've definitely been enjoying it a lot. It's stylish and moody and a great 'vibes' game - and while there isn't all that much here for people who look for challenges in games, it's great for people who like exploration for its own sake, and who get enjoyment out of just being in a virtual place.

Malf on 19/6/2023 at 09:07

@dema:
You have more patience than me when it comes to Cultist Simulator.
I do love it and the way it drip-feeds its narrative to you; it all combines to really give you the feeling that you're really running a fledgling cult.
It's also got probably the best realisation of early 20th century mysticism and "Weird Tales" atmosphere that I've come across in a game.
But I got fed up with card stack management and having to start from scratch all over again after losing. The early game gets old, fast.

@Jason:
I hope you stick with PoE2. I bought it when they introduced turn-based combat, and had an absolute blast with it.
Yes, there is something of the old ludonarrative dissonance in the main thread, where you have this obviously world-threatening event happening that you would think requires all of your attention immediately. But no, you're free to wander off and take as much time as you like doing side-quests, which yes, does diminish the threat.
But I still had a fantastic time with the game, mainly thanks to the nuanced faction system and being able to blaze my own trail. I also seem to remember that like The Outer Worlds, they gave you a matchmaker option when it came to romance, where your main character didn't have to romance anyone, but could instead work on pairing off companions.
It turns out, this is something I really like.
The DLC also merges seamlessly with the main story, and in fact, I wasn't even aware it was DLC until I went looking for tips on a specific mission.
The Pathfinder series make excellent companion games to Pillars, as both feature fantastic companion character stories and comparably flexible main character stories, so I highly recommend playing Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous if you haven't already done so.
Fair warning: Kingmaker has a time-limited main quest, and doesn't sign-post to the player very well that it's going to end soon.

Myself, having finished off Hogwarts Legacy (which was excellent, and surprisingly, doesn't give you enough skill points to fill all skill trees, contrary to my previous criticism!), while I couldn't quite yet face going back to the System Shock remake, it had piqued my curiosity regarding revisiting the Bioshock series, so I dove into Bioshock Remastered.
I had a lot of fun with it, but it's technically a really poor remaster when it comes to audio. Effectively, all audio has been normalised so the whole game is a wall of sound, with the audio-logs being almost completely inaudible. If anyone else chooses to replay it using the remaster, I strongly encourage lowering all volume types except Master and Voice to 2.
That said however, I think the story resonated more with me this time around. Yes, the final boss battle is still awful, and Atlas' / Fontaine's character change is still as jarring as ever, but the overarching narrative of the free market and Randian philosphy run riot may even hit harder now, more than ten years removed, than it did initially.

Having finished the first game, I polished off some challenges in Hitman 3's Mendosa map to get to mastery 20, then dove straight in to Bioshock 2 Remastered.
It's immediately noticeably a better remaster than the first one, having none of the audio issues, and just generally looking clearer, sharper and more vibrant. On a HDR monitor, it really pops. The game did start crashing reliably during the first Little Sister defense, but changing a couple of settings in a .ini file fixed that.
Gameplay-wise, much like the first time I played it, I still think Bioshock 2's the better game, but I'll have to experience the story completely again to see if I still think it's the better story. Of course, a lot of that is down to remapping left and right fire so they correspond with mouse buttons!
Also, I didn't get around to playing Minerva's Den first time around, and have heard nothing but good things about it, so am looking forward to that.

I think I will continue through to Bioshock Infinite, as much like 2, I never got around to playing Burial at Sea 1 & 2.

Maybe then I'll be interested enough to go back to the System Shock remaster, but I do really have a hankering to get properly stuck in to Shadows of Doubt, which I adored last time I played, but was still a bit too buggy to be smooth (NPCs changing fingerprints making solving something impossible, stuff like that).

Briareos H on 19/6/2023 at 10:17

Quote Posted by henke

Planet of Lana - platformer adventure where you're a girl with a robot kitten, trying to save your friends who got abducted by aliens. The story is pretty ho-hum, but it looks good. The gameplay is fairly simple but enjoyable, save for some QTE sequences towards the end. Yeah, it's alright!

I'm irrationally angry at Planet of Lana's insistence to focus on anything but puzzles when it is structured and presented like a puzzle platformer. It is very charming but constantly made me wish I was playing Oddworld, Flashback, Heart of Darkness or Bermuda Syndrome with those gorgeous visuals instead.

henke on 19/6/2023 at 10:38

You might wanna check out my other favourite platformer of 2023: Lunark! Dunno if it has more puzzles than Lana, but definitely plays more like Flashback and Oddworld. Lana is more in the vein of Inside or Never Alone.

Sulphur on 19/6/2023 at 11:07

Quote Posted by Briareos H

That is very odd, because it is very much all puzzles punctuated by bits where you run to the right of the screen. If your real criticism is that it doesn't build on its puzzle mechanics in interesting ways for most of the duration, I'll agree with that.

Sulphur on 19/6/2023 at 11:45

Quote Posted by Malf

I think I will continue through to Bioshock Infinite, as much like 2, I never got around to playing Burial at Sea 1 & 2.

You should, it's safely the best thing Bioshock did after Minerva's Den. I'd say it's better, even, in some respects - not in gameplay though, until you get to part 2 at least. It's all still a bit shallow (despite the setting, heh), but the return to the well-appointed Bioshock environments and the dark way it all ends was a savage yet poignant enough twist that I remember it well.

Quote:

Maybe then I'll be interested enough to go back to the System Shock remaster, but I do really have a hankering to get properly stuck in to Shadows of Doubt, which I adored last time I played, but was still a bit too buggy to be smooth (NPCs changing fingerprints making solving something impossible, stuff like that).

Did it get easier on the CPU, or more intense? Was quite intense already on my poor 7-year old CPU, but I loved the ambition of it. It's not going to be a great story generator because there's just no personality to anyone, but the level of detail to its simulation is seriously impressive to me.

Malf on 19/6/2023 at 11:58

You see, you say there's no character to anyone, but the homeless dude I was trailing 'cos he was my number one suspect got stroppy and stabby and would no longer put up with me being near him. He certainly developed his own menacing "charm" in my eyes!
Yes, for the most part, they're completely characterless, but much like Dwarf Fortress, there's enough in their routines and preferences to easily make you assign character where there isn't any.

As for performance, I can't really compare my experience to yours, as I'm running a brand new rig at this point (7900X3D CPU and 7900XTX GPU), so it brute-forces away a lot of performance problems.

Interestingly, and somewhat annoyingly, I have a hankering to get stuck back into Kingdom Come: Deliverance. But despite how beefy my system is, KCD consistently crashes less than 5 minutes after starting to play :(