Elwoodan

The thing I keep thinking about most as I playthrough this is Final Fantasy 15, in that both feel like they had a series of ideas/set pieces then, at some point years into development were like 'oh shit we have to make a game out of this'. The moments where an NPC has told me to sit down in Cyberpunk have all been neat, but those are surrounded by dozens of encounters in flat, ugly parking lots where I've killed 4-6 people for the cops.

The guns feel good, the skill tree seems like it give you a lot of room to specialize, but there are so many small UI/UX things that just feel like bizarre missteps, like the lack of touchpad swipes for menu options on the PS controller (A thing Witcher 3 had!) the impossibly massive lore shard list, I'm 20 hours in and the massive amount of meaningless text exchanges I've picked up has made the journal tab basically unnavigable; being totally unable to re-customize your character (even Geralt could get haircuts!) or the fact that outside of the eyes the create-a-character choice where extremely tame, the cyberware arms are the only thing you can do to really make yourself look less human.

Ended up with a lot more here than I thought I would, I guess I'm enjoying it as a piece of crime fiction, and the headshots are solid, but it hasn't been 'Cool' yet, and that feel like a major failure for something in this genre.

The Book Looks Dope

Path of Exile just started up a new league, and grim dawn also had a pretty big new expansion, so its all ARPGS for me.

Resonance of Fate was messy but had some really rad, unique combat (like if the Matrix was turned based) and I would love to see them expand on it.

The Last Remnant is similar in that while it was SUPER ROUGH it had some really cool ideas.

Also, while we may still get another Darksiders, I'm not super confident it'll be the kinda game we want.

God Eater Resurrection has been pretty great, and I 'll probably just roll right into 2 when that comes out in a week or so.

Firstlight was an amazingly lush garden planet that I spent way too much time on. After fixing my ship and hopping around a bit I decided to get out and walk in one direction until I hit one of those beacons that let you call your ship, 3 hours later I had holds full of weird stuff I found and a whole bunch of Gek words.

Dawn of Discovery is super great, easily the best of the 'Anno' games.

Went back through Call of Juarez Gunslinger today after they mentioned it on the GBE stream, I really love everything about that game. Also playing through God Eater Resurrection which is sorta an old game? God Eater is a solid MonHun-like but without a lot of the tedious stuff dragging it down, only complaint is that the combat is a bit simplified, as well.

Really, really liking this, beat it earlier then immediately jumped into speedrun mode, which is something I pretty much never do in games.

The health system is really cool, keeps a solid balance between the fights being challenging (and relatively long) while still allowing for some error, especially when your learning a new phase.

Easily one of my favorite games of the year, so far.