A positive thread about what you're currently playing

I bought, played and beat Strange Horticulture in one sitting. It got me hooked but good. It’s essentially a very similar gameplay loop to Papers, Please but with plants and mysticism instead of refugees and communism. The think that tickled me were some decent but not too challenging detection puzzles. Nothing that you would need a walkthrough for, but enough to make to scratch your head a few minutes before having a eureka moment. The ending was the only weak point, and not because it was bad, just because it was over fairly suddenly. It could have used a slower buildup and more puzzles and mysteries to lead into it. I highly recommend it, it’s cheap on steam and a calculator could run it.

Mario Odyssey, been having a blast with this game. Definitely a great Mario game though kinda easy.

Pokemon: Legends Arceus, I managed to get a copy a week or so early and just got done binging about 7 straight hours. Think Pokemon + Breath of the Wild.

I'm also on back on the Yu-Gi-Oh with Master Duel. Haven't played since Elemental Heros where the new hotness, so I've got a lot to caught up on. I'm sure this thing has to turn into a free-to-play scam at some point, but I've already made a Harpie Lady deck that seems decent enough for my skill level without spending any money.

I finally figured out something nice to say about Halo: Infinite. I like that your plasma weapons recharge by walking over the same type. It's such an improvement over picking up and comparing how much charge is left in the same weapon.

Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel has been a great surprise. I made my classic deck from my Legacy of the Duelist days and have been having a blast. There is no need to spend money on that game at all. It's very easy to break down unwanted cards and get whatever you want. I might have to buy some gems just to support the dev.

Now I'm on my break from playing Sim Racing, Rally Sim and Simcade, so I'll be playing Team Fortress 2 these days.

I finished Bayonetta 2 and I'm reminded that I love Bayonetta. I love the character, the games, and how they often are not-so-subtle love letters to Sega history.

Started playing Persona 5 Strikers and I'm digging it. I'm kind of salty that they couldn't get the JRPG running this well on base PS4 hardware. I get that P5 was held back technically to reach PS3 specs but still. It's the same way with the dancing spin-off games where it's clear that this art style looks extra gorgeous with a smooth frame rate.

Started playing Outriders on Game Pass. It's a decent action game, overall. The battles can become quite hectic and engaging, especially after you understand how the gameplay system works. It's still not as good as People Can Fly's Bulletstorm, which both looked and played better, but it holds its own. If you want to play a game that can hold your attention until the next big game comes your way, Outriders won't waste your time. And yes, do yourself a favor, pick the Tricksters class when the time to choose comes.

Ring Fit Adventure as an attempt to get from barely moving around to moving around more often.

I'm all wet from sweat.

One of my favorite games, Standoff 2 is a quality online shooter based on the gameplay of the most popular PC platform games. This project focuses on the interaction of all team members. Each individual game requires the player to make bold tactical decisions and skills related to killing enemies. standoff 2 apk almost computer graphics and sound design. All kinds of weapons, character models and locations are excellent and detailed. The game itself is bright and colorful. The sound is also very decent, because each weapon sounds different and at the same time realistic. In addition, the player needs to listen to the steps of the enemy to know his approximate location in advance and be the first to kill the enemy.

Played some of the demo for Neon White. It seems neat. It's kind of like Lovely Planet meets an early/mid 2010s Aksys published JRPG.

Forbidden West is totally dope! The slow start that so many sites were down on is all totally fair, but I already dug it’s combat and structure carried over from the first game. At a certain point, around the point of the quick look last week, you can beeline to the next story mission and the plot actually starts and it got its hooks in me.

Conversely, I am also tinkering around with the Norco demo on steam, and I really dig it. Surrealist dystopian sci-fi in the near future and with a focus of crippling poverty, at least to open. The demo has made me decide I’m gonna pick the full game up next month.

I played Sifu for like a week straight and got the Platinum. I wanted to mention it since it is my GOTY so far.

I'm trying to get into KoF15. I have some issues with how they present some of my favorite old characters (especially the ladies. Over the years more and more of the roster have recieved the DOA treatment and I'm pretty sure that in KoF16, ALL female characters will be Mai or Shermie-wannabees and they will be impossible to play because the camera will be zoomed into their boobs/ass/crotch at all times) but I have been having fun trying out characters I've never bothered with before, like Ralf and Clark. It's hard as nails but landing a combo is pretty satisfying. I will probably go back to Strive later since I'm honestly having more fun with that game. And apart from a certain samurai, that game has actually toned down the aggressive sexualization from Xrd. Well, at least until the next round of DLC characters - they know which ones to include from the start and which to sell piecemeal...

Also playing some Ace Attourney Chronicles. Like all the games in this franchise, it can be terribly slow at times, but the writing is pretty good, the presentation is the best of the 3D games, and all designs have been very charming so far.

Forbidden West is helping be see where the superfans of DOOM Eternal were/are coming from, oddly. There's too much of just about everything in this game, but almost all of it is designed with one core principle in mind: serve the people who loved the first game to death first, worry about the rest later. As a result, it seems almost needlessly complicated unless you had a real grasp on both Zero Dawn and Frozen Wilds. The game's also far less interested in realism, at least as much as a game in which bows and arrows take down giant robot dinosaurs can be less interested in realism. There's all kinds of esoteric tech magic in the skill tree and the pullcaster/glider/melee combo system turn Aloy into way more of a video game character than she was in the first game.

The game already felt like it was starting from a harder baseline than Zero Dawn, but once you start hitting the level 20 areas (where enemies that are often level 30+ are thrown at you) you realize that they really did develop this game as if everyone would have played the Frozen Wilds DLC just a week or two before launch. The more complex new robots in particular are totally devastating, and they've given some of the old dogs new tricks in some really...tricky ways.

In any case, posting these thoughts in this thread because I'm kind of impressed that this game has me constantly thinking back to all my loud, loud, loud complaints about the design of Eternal and how I can now see people perhaps feeling similarly about this game while I'm having a total ball.

I'm playing Dante's Inferno and... well.. it's a mood.

I finally started playing Cyberpunk 2077 when the latest patch hit.

After 15 hours I must say that I really like the story and characters. Haven‘t seen any major glitches either.

I like it!

Crusader Kings III, with the new expansion. As usual, no one does power fantasies like Paradox does power fantasies, and this is a rare game where roleplaying an asshole is fun as hell and doesn't leave me riddled with guilt. I'm currently rampaging across Siberia, mass-murdering my neighbor's spouses and children to deny them alliances so I can gobble them up. Delicious.

Finished The Forgotten City a few weeks back, what a fabulous little 9 hour video game this is. The Elder Scrolls influence feels somewhat uncanny at first so I appreciate that you can only interact with very few items in the world. There are some great characters who are gonna stick in my mind for a while.

Recently finished Persona 5 Strikers. It's been a joy to return to these characters this way, I'd say far more than it was to play Royal last year. One thing I want to call out are the character/Persona icons on the health bars. I'm amazed by whichever artists it was who made a stylized icon for every single demon that Joker can acquire in the game. The SMT bestiary is kind of set in stone at this point so it's cool to see them still make some unique art out of these iconic designs.

Going to start FF9, always heard good things and as I am about to finish FFX I thought it'd be a nice follow up

I just finished Jett: The Far Shore. I will say that the intro was amazing and really gave a sense of how incredibly vast space is and how much unknown is out there, and that's one of my favorite themes in all types of entertainment/media. That sort of feeling was still there throughout the game but the beginning was the highlight for me.

Mario Kart 8.

I'm too poor to buy the first wave of DLC track at the moment due to blowing my self-imposed gaming allowance on Pokemon Sword and its DLC, but playing the game online is one of the very few multiplayer situations that doesn't fill me with performance anxiety.

Elden Ring. 135 hours. nuff said.

I bought the Command and Conquer bundle on Origin because I missed playing Red Alert 2 but I decided to open up the other games in the pack as well just to see if they were as... problematic as I heard.

Short answer is yes, especially Generals, but the Red Alert 3 tutorial has a British, Russian, and Japanese tank all teaching you the game mechanics like they were straight out of a Thomas the Tank Engine game for children and it was the cutest damn thing.

Started Yakuza: Like a Dragon after playing through the other games in the series and the two Judgment games and I’m having a blast. The switch to turn-based RPG combat works really well and does feel like a breath of fresh air for the series. Not that I hated the combat in the other games, but after nine games that are variations and refinements on the same mechanics it feels so good to get something different.

I also really like Ichiban, who’s such a lovable goof and tremendously endearing. I’m still relatively early in proceedings (around five hours) but I’m so excited to see where the story ends up.

Staxel has been a delight despite intellectually knowing that the crafting/farming/building are lesser versions of Harvest Moon/Stardew Valley/Dragonquest Builders.

What's hooking me is the constant building quests without the overly long story (DQ Builders) and the balance of not having too much money, forcing me to work the farm and animals.

I constantly predict that after each quest, I'm gonna get sick of the Minecraft graphics, limited furniture options and horrible crafting UI. But no, I must tweak the houses I build so that it's "livable" and that's enough motivation!

I just finished Guardians of the Galaxy, as it came to Game Pass on March 10th.

While I think the combat was just "okay", I cannot believe how much I actually enjoyed the interactions between the characters. Part of that was due to character animation, but most of it had to do with the voice acting, which was on par, or better, than the movies.

I do not think this game did well enough to merit a sequel, but I would like to experience more of the Guardian's adventures.

Jumping between Factorio and Stellaris.

Pokemon Sword is one of those games where I can say "Fuck the haters" because I've been having a lot of fun with it. I did put too much stock into the whining, bitching and moaning about Game Freak not bring over all 900-someing Mons and the environments being lackluster. The shake-ups to the formula, mainly the Wild Areas, make me glad that I finally gave it a shot.

For Gran Turismo 7 on PS5, I have been playing this with the Thrustmaster T300 for a while, to me, it's a pretty good game for Simcade standards despite having so many microtransactions but I recently got back into rFactor 2 on PC, which is a game that I personally prefer because it's a proper Sim Racing game.

It's been amusing to be completely out of the loop on Elden Ring while I've been blasting through some fantastic bite-sized Souls-like and Souls-adjacent games.

Bowser's Fury - This is probably the biggest edge-case that I'll mention. If nothing else it feels like a realized version of what "world-tendency" is suppose to be. I only did the initial 50 Cat Shines but it's that typical Mario magic of fun platforming within the scope of a moderately-sized open world.

Death's Door - Such a charming good time with a really nice art style. It speaks to the accessibility of this game that I managed to beat it at the average completion time (like 9 hours) without ever upgrading health or magic. Even with that unintentional handicap these were some good boss fights.

Hyper Light Drifter - This game is just plain cool. I wasn't expecting the story to be quite as minimalistic as it is but it was a fun time to beat-feet through this crazy sci-fi world and defeat some cool looking bosses within the span of 9 hours. Playing this and Death's Door back to back is the perfect pairing of short Souls-likes currently on the indie scene.

Children of Morta - This is more squarely in the rouge-lite camp but this right here was the star of the show for recent games I've played. I tried like an hour of it a while back and felt kind of tepid on it but coming back to it in earnest it really captured my heart. I love this game. I found myself enraptured by the tale of this lovable family of badasses. It feels like Linda is the way to play but I often surprised myself by doing accidental clears with the others. The design of the Bergson house is fabulous and the family members' animations are rad as hell.

I just bought game pass which has done wonders for my backlog. Even though I heard every spoiler for Spiritfarer I felt like I needed to see the story for myself in order to truly understand its message of loss and even looking at all our relationships on a macro scale.

I started up and finished off the first episode of the new Life is Strange game since it's on Game Pass. So far it has reinforced the opinion I had when I played Life is Strange 2 and the Before the Storm prequel that the Deck Nine team that made the prequel and this new game understands better than DONTNOD what people liked about the first Life is Strange and know what to do when making these kinds of games. The main story so far seems a bit predictable but everything around it is exactly what I wanted from a new game in this series. I'll probably end up buying this one since I kinda want to see the DLC, which isn't included in the Game Pass version. Steph's a very good character.

Other than that I'm playing the Mass Effect trilogy for the first time (I'd only ever watched Alex's playthrough but never played these myself). Doing this while also watching Alex's ME:Andromeda playthrough is really driving home how good the writing in the original trilogy is. There are side missions in ME2 with more depth to their story than all of Andromeda. The Shadow Broker stuff is still really cool and has held up well.

Oh and I played a bunch of Vampire Survivors. That game is scary. it's a time vortex and does things to your brain. It feels like that thing leverages the same part of your brain as clicker/idle games and it's a bit unsettling. At least it's not full of gacha nonsense like all the modern idle games are though.

The Switch version of Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization.

Due to a lack of a demo version, I actually bought the Steam version for $6.50 on a grey market fist to see how it works with a controller because seeing the MMO quickbars led me to believe that mouse and keyboard might be optimal for this game, like Fatal Bullet is due to it being a shooter. But it plays well enough with a controller, and I still want to use my Switch, so I'm taking the frame rate and resolution hits just to use my Switch more often for an additional $8.

Worth it.

Little obscure indie game by the name of Elden Ring.

It's got arcane lore, a challenging but REALLY reward combat system that lends itself well to adaptability and experimentation, and a tremendous open-world where you actually find and discover things rather than having them barfed perfunctorily into your face.

Playing Cyberpunk 2077 on steam. After a lot of patch updates which were not easy to get around at first, I managed to run it successfully without any glitches. Explored 2 endings.

Elden Ring took over my life for a bit until I beat it. I've continued playing it too, picking up things I missed and testing new weapons and strategies, preparing for NG+ so I can get the ending I actually wanted.

Great game, what more can be said? It'll probably be in my top 3 GOTY with Sifu.

The Metal Gear Solid 5 games modded to run in 3440 x 1440.

UI quirks aside, 21:9 really does make playing old games feel new again.

Dragon Quest XI. My first JRPG in ages and it's wonderful so far. The switch version looks fantastic on my oled. I have nothing, but good things to say about it. I hope it's charming the rest of the way.

I just bought WRC 10 for PC and it's totally fun!

Battle Brothers. I'm suprised there is no single thread about this game on GB.

Its a dark souls of turn based tactical games. Started last week and cant stop playing.

Vampire: Swansong is way better than reviews would suggest, at least to me. Don’t get me wrong, it’s got a eurojank feel and there are some clear budgetary restrictions, but for what is essentially an interpretation of a point and click with dice rolls, I think it absolutely succeeds in what it’s trying to be. Its not full price worthy, but if you can get it for $20 and you like talky games, I’d recommend it. It’s also by the people that made that episodic game a few years ago called The Council that had George Washington hanging out with Napoleon. The “conversation battle” system that had is much better implemented in this and if this does well enough for them and they take the right lessons, I could see their next game being a real hit. They have good ideas.

I'm currently playing NBA2K 2021. I find the resemblance of the players in real life really entertaining. But what I like the most is the multiplayer platform where I can play with other players around the world. The animations and events are excellent and the FPS is neat.

The Crew 2.

This is the racing game that I need right now. Adding boats and planes really freshens up the open world racing formula for me; between having played Need for Speed 2015 and Heat for 80 hours each and not liking the Forza Horizon series as much as I want to.

Fortnite isn't so bad after all. Slinging around like Spider-Man then latching on to a zipline on the way down is pretty sweet.

@chamurai: high five 🙌

Returnal, got all the endings and extra DLC endings in 35 hours or so. I would still be playing it I didn't have so many other games in my backlog. It took me a while to get into its rhythm but at some point I couldn't stop playing.

Other than that, Guilty Gear Strive is still great and the 'new' character Bridget is great.

Multiversus is pretty fun as well (you get matches SO fast) but the insidious attempts to get you to spend more money than a new game would actually cost are a downer.

I've gotten back into Dead Cells after I had to send my GPU in for RMA and only had a Series S available for a few weeks. I had dropped it a couple years ago after struggling to finish a 1 boss cell run.

I'm thoroughly hooked again, finally up to 4 boss cells. The game just feels so fast the only problem I have is not just stringing runs together for 5 hours straight when I clearly need to stop and take a break.