LavenderGooms

I cannot give a recommendation to Spiritfarer.

Its largest problem is there is just way too much video game within it and it dilutes all attempts at story and character building because between each beat is an hour of cutting logs and watering crops and fishing and trying to do an inconsistent double jump between platforms to find secret treasure chests.

But also there isn't really a story. They give you less information about what is going on than any Dark Souls game does. I don't know what this world is, I don't know who Stella is. I don't know why she was given this job. I don't know what any of the background npcs are. I don't know what this cutscene character is or what any of the imagery shown within it means. I barely know anything about the characters that join the boat and you spend hours minutes spread over hours interacting with.

I also didn't really care about the majority of the characters. The first couple you get are pretty good, and there's one or two later that are interesting, but the rest are either just kind of there or are aggressively assholeish in their behavior that I eventually stopped interacting with them entirely other than doing their story quests as fast as I could to get rid of them. The one character I really grew attached to i'm not sure if that's because of the quality of the writing or because she coincidentally shared a name and many many (weirdly many) character traits with my current ttrpg character. If that personal connection wasn't created by the game at all but is just a fluke coincidence.

So when I was surprisingly given the option to end the game despite having three spirits left I haven't completed the stories of I took it, because I just didn't care anymore.

Horizon Zero Dawn's main character is a silent protagonist dude.

Transistor is very pretty and has great music.

The appeal of Let's Game It Out isn't just the specific things he does, it's how much time and effort he puts into these things and therefore the ridiculous scale he achieves. He spends hundreds of hours doing dumb stuff for a 30 minute video and I admire the dedication.

Andromeda being the worst game of 2017 is the most I have ever disagreed with anything on this site.

Disco Elysium lets you go pretty far with the fascist decisions.

I like Andromeda a lot actually. I'm near the end of my third playthrough right now. Sara Ryder is a fun character who is deliberately completely different to Shepard and that helps things a lot. All of Mass Effect 1-3 you're playing as a super soldier badass and it creates a different feel to the story and character interactions. In Andromeda you're playing as an inexperienced goof who gets authority dropped in their lap and has to learn as they go, with a lot of people depending on them.

The party members are similarly written to be less serious than their OG Trilogy counterparts. This isn't a big important military operation, it's a civilian enterprise and these characters act more like a family than Shepard's team who are primarily just there for her. The big game-spanning main party mission is to gather a bunch of ingredients so the team can get together and watch a movie. They should have created a story for these characters to exist in that wasn't a generic save the galaxy cluster from a generic evil bad guy by finding ancient alien technology, but for what they are I like these people a lot.

The combat is a lot of fun, but what made me realize this was in my second playthrough when I decided to use the Vanguard abilities as my core loadout. Vanguard is a lot of fun in 2 and 3, but then Andromeda adds a jetpack and it just elevates it to be a complete blast. The open nature of the game's design makes it kind of pretty boring if you're just doing the hide behind cover and shoot thing, but add the biotic charge to the mix and every encounter becomes a hectic mess of explosions.

It makes me sad that there isn't ever going to be a continuation to see these characters again. There's still a lot of promise in the setting, they could tell a good story here if they wanted to. But they won't. If there's another Mass Effect it is not going to be a sequel to Andromeda, their offices would get burned down.

Alex should absolutely not play it for a Giant Bomb feature.

14 hours, 100%. It was a lot of fun. I was functionally immortal due to a few abilities interacting but that's fine with me I don't particularly enjoy overly hard challenges. The escape sequences have more than enough one hit kills to make up for it.

I crashed two or three times, had very occasional stuttering, and that weird audio static thing, but the majority of the time it performed well.

Easily easily easily worth $5 for gamepass to try it out.

Twelve Kingdoms, even though it'll never be finished.

It was fine. I had a lot of fun with it, despite the server issues and bugs. Using a two handed sword I was able to do ridiculous amounts of damage, and it was always fun tearing through groups in seconds.

There are a lot of bugs though. Mostly I didn't have problems with bosses, except for on the final one I got rid of all its HP and it just stood there doing nothing and not moving on to the next phase. I had to quit and try again from the start of it. With ability bugs there are passives not working at all or not doing what they say they do, ability modifiers that don't work, etc. I mostly was able to get a build that did what I wanted but i've read a lot of people with different stories.

Speaking of stories, this one doesn't have an ending yet. It just stops, implies further action is undertaken, and then skips you months forward to the post-game without saying what happened. So yeah this game isn't finished, there's a hypothetical Act 4 out there somewhere in who knows what written state or maybe just in their heads still. Also during the post-game cutscene my character was T-Posing the entire time.