Video Games You've Played Recently

The Game Room
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Firmament: there is some kind of background story, but it does not make a lick of sense and best ignored. This is a Myst-style puzzle game where you manipulate machinery in a 3D environment; you need to visualize what is going on since you cannot necessarily see the entire scene at once. Good, atmospheric graphics; not very hard.

Alien: Isolation: Has its gameplay flaws but absolutely succeeds in evoking the creepy horror of hiding from a “Xenomorph” on a broken-down space station while avoiding killer androids.

Rain World: crazy hard platformer in a post-apocalyptic city hosting a weird simulated ecosystem.

Neon White: manic speedrunning first-person platformer/shooter

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I really enjoyed this game. Loved the throwback futuristic styling from the original movie. Got the achievement for dying over 100 times.

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I’ve seen comments that AC: Mirage (the upcoming one) is supposed to be less of a marathon, but we shall see.

I replayed AC: Odyssey recently. My previous attempt at a replay ended when it felt kind of like a slog, but I enjoyed replaying it after having forgotten most of the quest details.

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Diablo 3 didn’t even have an option to play offline. You could still play alone if you wanted to, but you had to log in to the server to do it.

Most recent new game I’ve tried is the demo for Girl Genius: Adventures in Castle Heterodyne. The story is good, though familiar to fans of the comic (it’s just a re-telling from the time she first entered the castle as a prisoner, presumably to the point where she proves her identity to the castle and establishes herself as The Heterodyne), but I’m still undecided about the gameplay. It seemed to be too slow-moving for my tastes, which I think was programmed in, not due to a slow computer (it was slow but smooth). It took me way too long to figure out that you can’t jump (the first step of the first quest, there’s a way to get there that looks like an easy jump, but you actually have to go to the next room and then back through a broken wall). And it’s difficult to judge the crafting mechanic, which seems like it’ll be a core part of the game, because there’s just not enough of it yet in the demo. What I saw of the lever-puzzles, meanwhile, seemed more on the “annoying” side than “puzzling” side: The actual puzzle-ness of it was fairly simple, but it took too long to walk between the needed levers.

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With the exception of consoles, where it was possible to play off-line.

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The Case of the Golden Idol

Highly recommended.

Man, did I need this game. I am just near the very end and I have been totally into it. Basically, you are dropped into a mostly static murder scene and have to examine all the clues to put together what exactly happened.

Nothing hugely original, but it is the best version of this type of game I’ve every played. The game finds ways of innovating the crime scene solving and better yet, each scene builds on what you have seen before, using some of the same characters. Ultimately, it creates an overall story.

Really, you should get this game. It’s great.

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I’ve been playing a lot of Elite Dangerous, aimed at achieving elite rank in Exobiology. I’ve also been playing Dreamlight Valley – an interesting Disney spin on village builders – and Delivery INC – a little delivery game based on real-world maps.

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Strongly agree on this recommendation. I especially liked (minor spoilers) figuring out the identity of a certain cult leader toward the end that tied the entire story together. Looking back, all the clues were there from early on, but it took me until Case 11 to figure it out.

The DLC Spider of Lanka is also very good, though it’s a bit short and not quite as strong as the main game.

For other games in a similar style, Return of the Obra Dinn is a classic. Strange Horticulture was also decent, but I felt it lacked something.

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I’ve got that one on my Wish List due to my absolute adoration of The Return of the Obra Dinn. I’ll check it out. (And if you haven’t played Obra Dinn, you’re in for a treat.)

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I preferred this to Obra Dinn, though they are very similar. They are very similar in the sense that you only see the aftermath of a crime scene and then solve it.

I have to say, the final two cases of Golden Idol required a guide for me. If I had played with my wife and she had extensively taken notes, I probably could have gotten through it.

It required knowing too many identities by the end of the game and I needed help remembering some things.

Anyway, you should get it immediately. The first two cases or so are easy-peasy, but it does go up a lot in difficulty and has a very satisfying feeling when you solve something. When the light goes green, I cheered and fist-pumped. It was really great.

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I just finished the main game and added this. Can’t wait.

274

I recently dusted off my account on Champions Online the free-to-play superhero MMO. Lo and behold, it was still there and I remembered the password! Judging by the ages of the characters there, I had played it in 2012, 2015 and (most recently) in 2018. I fired it up and it was basically as I remembered; you run around and zap villains in various different locations. It’s rife with pre-2009 pop culture references (e.g. Anchorman, Lost, They Live).

Champions has a special place in my heart because the tabletop RPG was my absolute favourite game circa 1983.

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Dave The Diver

Fun game, very cute vibe. You are a diver who also is managing a sushi restaurant. You dive deeper and deeper and several storylines develop.

I liked fishing and running the sushi restaurant. The main story was fun, but filled with a fair amount of frustrating sequences. Quick time events, puzzles that were dull and obvious. It didn’t ruin the game, but I did not look forward to the main story campaign.

I recommend the game, though. Getting more and more fish, breeding them to get more fish, developing the recipes and restaurant. It’s all really fun.

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Very similar to my take on it, including my dislike of the frustrating sequences. There are a lot of games that I don’t finish and I regret not finishing (Witcher 3, I’m staring at you). This one was just the opposite: I finished it, and wished I’d abandoned it earlier while I was still in love with it. The many minigames with new controls (which mostly consisted of rapidly pressing keys in a novel order) weren’t fun, and the story didn’t hold together even in an absurdist way; it just dragged out. By the time I opened a franchise, I was out of fucks to give and paid no attention to it.

But the first dozen hours of gameplay were glorious.

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I gave up on Champions Online; the gameplay gets repetitive after a while. Now I have dusted off my Dungeons & Dragons Online account and I’m playing it a bit.

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I was able to beat the final boss and in the epilogue, they let you fish and run your restaurants. It’s nice.

However, I upgraded the Harpoon all the way to max strength and down in the Glaical(500M) and further down regions, almost every fish takes 3-4 hits with it to get reeled in. And then they make you button mash to get them.

I wish I had a “one hit catch” cheat I could use. It’s that frustrating.

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that’s what people said about city of heroes/villans and DC online too I guess its all superheroes games online and off

280

Played some Book of Hours; it lives up to its name because hours do pass. Basically like Cultist Simulator in that you have to spend time grinding card combos and opening up new areas and items. Not sure how many hours a complete single playthrough takes [the home page says 20–40 hours]; my pace was slow until I worked out what I was supposed to be doing and how to make more efficient use of resources.

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I am replacing Ghost of Tsushima for the third or fourth time. It’s not a great game - combat is repetitive - but it’s a great experience. The cutscenes are mostly unskippable but for the first time I don’t care.

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Speaking of replaying games, I’m way into Defense Zone 3, a wonderful little tower defense game on steam. My impression is that it is the gold standard of tower defense games. (If anyone knows of other good ones to recommend, I’d love to check them out.)

Even on normal it’s pretty darn difficult, at least for the first 14 levels. Levels after 14 are, as far as I can tell, legitimately impossible without “pay to win” cheapness. But that’s okay by me since the original game only had the first 14 levels, so I just ignore the rest. (At least, that’s what I choose to believe.)

This was the first game I played with my new gaming computer back in 2021. I had originally played it on my phone, but the game heated up my poor phone to roughly the surface temperature of the sun, so I was happy when I found it on steam for PC. This is one of the titles I was able to play before I got a video card, just using integrated graphics.

Unfortunately, I seem to have lost the progress on eight of those first 14 maps, so I don’t actually know how I completed them. I have vague recollections but not enough to be able to recreate my preferred solutions. Which means it’s essentially a brand new game for me. So fun!

My favorite part of it is that there are no fixed placements for the towers. Just large areas where you can place as many towers as you like, in whatever configuration you please.

There are eight main tower types:

  • Machine gun (single target, weak)
  • Freeze tower (AOE slow, no damage)
  • Laser (single target, moderate)
  • Missiles (single target, good)
  • Tesla coil (chain AOE, moderate)
  • Flamethrower (AOE, DOT, good)
  • Howitzer (AOE, great)
  • Tornado (massive AOE rocket battery)

Each tower can be upgraded five times, with each upgrade doing double damage but also costing twice as much. Each upgrade increases the range as well, but each upgrade also takes time, and the higher the level the more time it takes. Towers cannot attack while upgrading.

I find it incredibly satisfying to come up with “perfect” designs using the fewest fully upgraded towers you can afford for each map. For example, one maxed missile tower is just as powerful as two missile towers both one step below max, and both configurations cost the same. But if you only have a single tower in a spot, you are very vulnerable while that tower upgrades. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle to me.

The biggest criticism of tower defense games is how passive they are. I will grant you that on many of these maps, my actions per minute is in the single digits. But I still find it really fun. Currently on map 7 of 14 and just loving life.