@forcecommander: In case no one noted it in chat, Viva Pinata is now playable on PC via the xbox cloud streaming beta, which requires Ultimate. Thrilled to finally play it.
Great list! I definitely feel you on New Horizons; I spent a ton of time with it, but damn did it feel like there was hardly any villager dialogue. And the opening was pretty bad, even for an Animal Crossing. Good luck with Fall Guys!
Great list with great insight! I'm excited to give Ziggurat 2 a shot when I can, because I thought the first one would work out for me but it just didn't click. Good luck with Hades, and, yes, Xiangling is best chef!
I'm glad that Abby pointed out the weird pathing that NPCs will do in cutscenes as if they're all like "oh shit I didn't mean to walk into the shot I'm sorry", it's genuinely one of my favorite idiosyncrasies in these games.
Also: you can absolutely start with zero or 1, but after that it really isn't a big deal if you play them out of order. The series has callbacks and callforwards that, while flavorful, are not often of crucial significance.
Having mainlined Acts 1 - 4 over the past few days, I 100% agree with Alex's sentiment that you kind of miss something by not having played it over time -- I haven't given it a chance to digest or be replayed or discuss it with others, and I think that will add to the experience. That being said, it's still a damn fine game thus far! Very excited for the finale!
Spelunky 2 and UFO 50 are definitely up there for me as well. Given that one could make a case for Spelunky as the best game of the '10s (and honestly, a game that is damn near perfect as is), it's going to be very interesting to see how it gets expounded upon. Great list!
Hell yeah, idle games getting some love! Recently broke the 9k hour mark in Realm Grinder and it's neat to see that these games in which you "do nothing" actually have a fair bit of complexity to some of them.
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