Goboard

I go by a fairly simple rubric when making such a determination and it goes as follows:

• Is the game Spelunky Y/N?

That's it.

I may need to amend this rubric when Spelunky 2 comes out.

The skeletons are the product of the actual enemy, but every time I see one of them I get the bad brain feels.

• Final Fantasy VII Remake started with CyberConnect 2 before shifting to in-house development at Square Enix 2 years prior to it's release.
• Duke Nukem Forever went to Gearbox after a legal dispute between 3DRealms and Take Two over development.
• Prey 2 was being developed by Bethesda before switching internally to Arkane and dropping the 2.

"...Compared to say FFVII remake where I feel reluctant to play as the time I invest doesn't 'lead anywhere'."

I played Arkane's Prey last year and found that I liked a lot of the immersive sim elements so this Steam sale I decided to pick up more like it including the Thief series and Dishonored to further explore other games in the space and refine my understanding of what about them is appealing to me now. This wasn't how I approached playing games when I was younger where I just played something because it looked and sounded cool and then moved from one game to the next. I've found as I grow older that using any form of media as means of personal reflection has been overwhelmingly helpful and opened up new understandings about myself and what interests me.

Having an experience is still a tangible thing, be it an endless one or finite, so even when a game is finite and you've reached the end you still have that experience to reflect and chew on afterwards. I've also found that it really does help to actually give myself that time to look back on a game after completion because more and more it's made the experience of having played something all the more valuable. Even when you find that you did not like that game, that experience still gives you the means to interrogate why and to use that to inform future games or media decisions.

@fourthline: Just out of curiosity but how much time, and how many people do you think it would take to include the reference to Covid-19 in TLOU2?

@fourthline: Sounds like you should play Dwarf Fortress. DF has everything your asking for and more. It gets large updates, dense with all kinds of details and only asks of the player to use a modicum of their imagination to visualize what it's systems produce. Go watch the interview NoClip did with Tarn Adams for a window into the narrative possibilities that emerge even when caused by the unconsidered interactions of those systems. On top of all that it's free.

I've played around 8 games from the bundle so far and the two that I'd recommend of those are Diaries of a Space Port Janitor and Boreal Tenebrae. The latter I actually bought it on Steam the weekend prior, but now that it's part of the bundle I very much recommend it. The game is buggy, but the few issues I ran into were fixed by restarting. If you played and liked Night in the woods or Kentucky Route Zero it plays in the same thematic space as those and has a strong aesthetic as well. Took around 2 hours to complete Boreal Tenebrae so it's not a huge time commitment. Diaries was around 6 hours if I had to guess.

I didn't create an itch playlist, but I do have the following games downloaded to play throughout the week

• Tonight We Riot
• Glittermitten Grove
• Signs of the Sojourner
• Stillness
• Luna (The Funomena one)
• Minit
• Extreme Meatpunks Forever

@pasta_pirate: Oh you don't have to do that and use up any of your work or break time on something like this.

@pasta_pirate: Ah ok, I misread your post and thought you'd be at your Nooks Cranny till closing. Thanks for the clarification!