I am familiar.
Yeah, that happened with me, too. My characters were like 18th level or some such, ultra powerful, and I couldn’t figure out how to move the final chapter forward except sleeping all day long or wandering aimlessly about the map. It turned into a slog and a chore, and that’s the kiss of death for a game.
Lately I’ve been playing Grounded, and @EllisDee and other base-building fans, hoo doggy have I got a game for you. The premise is that you’re one of four teens that has been shrunk to the size of a grain of rice and set loose in a suburban backyard, and you have to figure out how to “embiggen” yourself again, all while pursuing clues left by a mad scientist, and dodging some bugs while hunting others, and building bases out of clover leafs and grass blades and dandelion stems.
It’s got some real similarities to Subnautica, inasmuch as it’s an open world with some very dangerous areas; but there’s more of a progression and storyline, and the humor is a little more cartoonish. And it’s beautiful, with some truly excellent light work: wandering beneath the tower grass forests while the light turns to the warm yellows of late afternoon is completely convincing and gorgeous.
Unlike Subnautica, though, combat is a really important element of the game, so if you don’t wanna face down against ladybugs and wolf spiders, maybe find something else to do with your time.
I also thought it was annoying that there were big chunks of time where you were basically running out the clock until the next phase of the adventure opened up. The whole kingdom management part of the game was kind of lost on me.
There’s a “skip day” button on the world map.
Thanks much for the heads up. It’s been in my wish list for a month or so, and it went on a pretty good sale just recently. (Over 60% off, I think.) Almost picked it up but decided to go with Stranded Deep instead, which was on a similar sale.
So right now I already own both The Forest and Stranded Deep and haven’t touched either yet while I focus on Raft. I feel like I like the water survival games more than the land ones, but I haven’t actually played a land one yet. All I know is that in Subnautica: Below Zero, when I got to the land part I abruptly lost interest and haven’t played it since.
Grounded seems perfectly tailored to me regardless of water or land. Let’s just say that I’m not a fan of spiders in real life. I’m actually more excited to play it than Stranded Deep, but the latter was a little cheaper during the winter sales and I’m not ready for a new game yet anyway.
I just started playing Return to Monkey Island. It is a very fun return to a game I loved playing as a kid. Although there have been several sequels since Monkey Island 2, this is the first game that was created by the original team.
Not the whole team - I don’t think Tim Schafer is involved.
You are correct. Only Dave Grossman and Ron Gilbert were involved.
I can’t even remember if I knew that. I might have, but not used it because the game has such weird time pressure, like if you don’t do missions then bad things happen and your kingdom can fall. It’s been a year or so since I last played it–I just know I reached a point where it became a chore.
The land is so much better than Below Zero, because it’s full of interesting landmarks, from explorable anthills to garden gnomes to discarded juice-boxes that drip enormous drops of juice.
But the spiders are terrifying. Fortunately, the game has an arachnophobia setting, where they’re replaced by (I think) blobs, so if semi-realistic enormous spiders are gonna ruin your fun, you can try that setting.
He’s busy making Psychonauts 3…in my dreams, anyway.
I found the arachnophobia settings to be even more creepy. YMMV, of course. Great game though.
I haven’t even played with them, because I kinda dig the spiders. I think it’s cool that designers are including this setting, though–I also saw a similar setting in Satisfactory.
I love spiders, but aren’t they in everything? Maybe I play too many RPGs. There’s always a giant spider level.
Nah, that’s part of the appeal. My favorite part of Subnautica was before I had explored the deeper areas and was too scared to try.
I’m a long-time fan of the village building game, Banished. and have searched for a graphically advanced version. After being disappointed by a few clones, I think I finally found what I was looking for in Farthest Frontier. Visually, it is Banished on steroids, as well as more complicated. Now, starving and sickness aren’t your only enemies. You now have real enemies, both human and animal. Or you can go into pacifist mode if you don’t want to deal with those things.
I’m not very far in yet, and there is a little bit of a learning curve. Overall though, I’m finding it very peaceful and enjoyable, and frustrating in a good way.
So it looks like steam revamped the Big Picture interface entirely last month to make it work like the steam deck. To quote a subreddit: Thanks, I hate it.
You know what you can’t do on the steam deck interface? Exit. There is no exit button or menu item that I can find. And as a fun bonus, Alt+F4 doesn’t close it either. If you Alt+F4 out and then open steam again it opens back into Big Picture mode.
With the new interface, I have only found two ways to exit Big Picture mode:
- From the steam tray icon in your taskbar, select “Exit Big Picture”
- From inside Big Picture, press Alt+Enter
What kind of unintuitive garbage hotkey for exit is Alt+Enter?! And the tray icon isn’t even part of the steam interface, that’s part of the operating system. Super weak.
The net result is that as far as I can tell, you cannot exit big picture mode using the controller or even the mouse. You have to either press Alt-Enter on your keyboard, or Alt+Tab (or Alt+F4) to get to the tray icon and then use the mouse to pick it from the menu. Either way you must use the keyboard to initiate the exit.
ive been playing a porny dating/vn clicker game called crush crush… its on steam but you have to buy the “adult” playboy type of pics … there’s a free site to play and get the whole game …
Nice, and welcome to the boards.
I’m about 60% of the way through Wytchwood, a crafting adventure game on Steam. Very basic gameplay mechanics, but the art style, irreverent tone, and stories in each chapter are a lot of fun. It has kind of a whimsical fairy tale feel. It’s interesting that there are creatures who can damage your health because you can’t attack them directly, but you can craft items to disable/kill them. If it bothers you to run around various cutesy settings gathering things and crafting things, this is not the game for you, because that is the game. But the stories in each chapter are so fun and funny I really don’t mind. Whether crafting puzzle boxes to steal gnomes’ hats, salting slugs, or pickpocketing thieves, it’s a lot of fun.
My only real complaint is the overarching story leaves a lot to be desired. “Collect these four souls for me. Okay, you’ve done that? Cool. Collect another four.” No level up, no plot twist, nothing.
In Windows, Alt+Enter is the traditional shortcut to switch between Windowed and Full Screen mode for applications that support the option of full screen. One of the most common applications to support this is the Command Prompt window; though these days it switches from Windowed into “Full Screen Windowed” mode, rather than true full screen. (If you’ve got the hardware for it, Full Screen Windowed is pretty much superior to Full Screen anyway because it supports quick switching between active apps.)