I love the game. You’ll find yourself dying a lot, particularly in the beginning before you get all four Fighting Stances. You can get through the game without relying on your ninja-esque Ghost Weapons, but you’ll want to do sneak-attacks from time to time.
It’s a great game, but it’s dark and a lot of people die.
I played it on Normal difficulty.
My brother recently mentioned the phone game Slice and Dice. Goddammit, brother! It’s eight bucks, horribly spent, because I’ve already put dozens of hours into this stupid little deeply engrossing dungeon crawl of a game.
The scenario is that you’ve got five (usually) adventurers facing a series of twenty increasingly-difficult battles. On your turn, you roll a six-sided die for each adventurer, and each side has a result, ranging from the useless (an X) to the actively harmful (self-harm) to the much more common helpful (attack, mana gain, healing, shield, etc.).
Lots of modifiers come into play to keep things interesting: most dice sides have pips, and some of them cleave (hitting allies or enemies to either side of your target), and some of them are ranged damage, and some grow in power over time, and some do double-damage against an enemy attacking you, and so on.
You can roll dice up to three times, keeping any or all of the dice after each roll. Then you take your actions, finish your turn, and the baddies get their turn. Continue until one side is dead.
After odd-numbered battles, you gain magic items. After even-numbered battles, one of your heroes levels up into a new class in their general theme (so a rogue might level up into a ranger or an assassin), with entirely different and more powerful dice.
The final battles are really tricky, and very satisfying to win.
Eventually it’ll lose its hold on me, but goddammit, brother.
Glad to hear this! I found i drunkenly downloaded Orcs must Die through game pass the other day. I have yet to play it and may never have played it. But now I might.
Guardian’s of the Galaxy is fun. First time I’ve run an game I own on Epic(it was free) on my Steamdeck and honestly, it runs fine.
It’s not amazing, but the personalities of the Guardians makes it quite fun.
Try it in co-op and it’s quite a blast. The previous ones in the series are better for single player.
If co-op tower defense with randomization and physics traps is your jam, there’s a little up-and-comer I’d strongly recommend, from an indie studio out of North Carolina…
Fortnite.
Specifically, Fortnite: Save The World, the original PvE mode. Think looter shooter meets tower defense meets gacha RPG—or Warframe with jokes and building. You can pick it up for under $20 these days.
(I have, um, many thousands of hours logged in it.)
My switch died so I bought a new one and started a new Animal Crossing Island.
I am enjoying it so much more this time. I may actually be addicted to it. I had no idea how much more there is to it than I thought. I’m using pathways and custom designs and my Island is starting to look very nice.
I feel a little ridiculous playing this game so obsessively, but I need the distraction from the world and it sure does help the time pass.
I actually played a lot of that when it first came out, before it transitioned into a Battle Royale PVP game! I bought one of the Early Access packages for quite a lot of money and loved the game, but was devastated when it turned into a PVP game. I was afraid the PVP part would take resources away from Save the World (as indeed it has).
I wrote founder Tim Sweeney an email about the situation, explaining how I’ve been playing their games since ZZT and Jazz Jackrabbit and was really saddened by Fortnite’s sudden pivot into a completely different genre. It felt like a betrayal. To my surprise, he personally wrote back and explained that the financial potential of the PVP mode was just too great to overlook, and they had to balance fun with being able to make money as a business. Then Epic refunded all the money I’d ever spent on Save the World, while still letting me keep the founders’ packs and characters. That was a cool move.
I did briefly try the PVP mode too, but it just felt like another genetic battle royale shooter. Made Epic and Tencent very rich, but it wasn’t special like Save the World was.
Wow! That beats my story about the time Tim liked one of my tweets. 
Have you played it since then? STW is still (slowly) getting updates, and they’ve incorporated some of the good parts of Battle Royale: changes to movement and building, wildlife, cosmetics, and a few new maps.
Another Obsidian RPG came out a few days ago: Avowed (and it’s also on Gamepass). Obsidian was the fabled studio behind Neverwinter Nights, Fallout: New Vegas, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, The Outer Worlds, Grounded, and a few other games. In this case, Avowed is an action RPG adaptation of their own Pillars of Eternity universe.
Obsidian used to be one of my most beloved studios, but Avowed couldn’t really hold my attention. I tried it for an hour or two on Gamepass, and it just felt like a cheap, generic RPG from years past. It felt like “Starfield but with swords and sorcery” – i.e., just generic filler material.
I soon got bored before the main story even started and couldn’t make myself keep going. Anyone else tried it for longer to see if it gets any better?
Reviews have generally been mildly positive, but not in any special way. Could end up being one of those “damned by faint praise” situations… the game is serviceable but forgettable.
No, sadly… the pay-to-win aspect was a real turnoff (and plus the game was too easy once you upgraded your weapons). I started having fun trolling other players, putting jump boards below their spawn points so they’d fly off the map as soon as they respawned… until one of them started whining on voice chat and I realized I was bullying 12-year-olds. Whoops =/
I’m glad to hear it’s gotten better since then, but these days there are so many other good games (OMD is really holding my attention) it’s hard to go back to an older title.
I’m not on gamepass, and not willing to spend $70 on a “meh” game, even if I did it with my blizzbucks. My friends who are on gamepass gave various reviews similar to yours, with various flavors of “It’s fine, but I’d rather play Cyberpunk2077 / Baldur’s Gate 3 / Outer Worlds again”.
I almost never buy a game new though anyway, since modern gaming is a mess of bugs, day zero bug fixes, and months of retuning. But I do like action RPGs… at a guess, I’ll buy it on it’s first major sale when it’s 40-50% off or more a couple of years down the road.
Of course, I said the same thing for Starfield, and still haven’t bought it, because all of my friends who have played found it empty and boring as heck.
I’ve spent dozens and dozens of hours watching videos of people playing Slice and Dice. A fascinating game with tons of classes, items and play modes to unlock!
Yep. Maybe at $20-$30 this would’ve been worth it, but launching at an AAA price point just makes it seem like a money grab in the style of Starfield and Veilguard. They all just seem like me-too RPGs that some suit dreamt up… bland and soulless box-ticking exercises with dumbed-down gameplay systems and watered-down narratives devoid of any real writing =/
Yeah, exactly. Maybe I’m just jaded, but so many games these days have high production values masking empty innards.
I try not to refund games on Steam unless they’re really bad or not working. So Gamepass is a nice way to test the waters… I pay for it maybe 2-3x a year, at $12 a pop, and try a handful of titles. Very few of them end up being worth the time. I wish Steam offered a similar subscription service… most games I buy, I only play for an hour or two and then get bored =/
You’re not missing much, IMO. It’s also on Gamepass, but I don’t think it’s even worth playing there…
A friend of mine, in similar discussion, opined that it’s the ballooning costs of AAA games is part of the problem. Once you’re investing that much money in anything, the suits at the top don’t want to take much if anything in the way of chances. Which means trying for something new and blowing it is a risk they’re unwilling to take. The perfect game for a studio exec (who didn’t come up from the actual game-making side) is something like the Madden or other sporting games.
Just refresh the graphics and characters every few years and make a fortune. 
I can totally believe that.
I wonder if this is why the Chinese publishers are seemingly doing better recently – even the suits there probably grew up playing video games. Tencent and Netease buy up a lot of smaller studios too (including many Western ones) but tend to leave them alone and give them more room to breathe and innovate.
Tencent entirely owns GGG (Path of Exile 1 & 2) , for example, and partially owns Larian (Baldur’s Gate 3), Eleventh Hour Games (Last Epoch), and Epic (Unreal Engine and Fortnite), among others. Black Myth: Wukong (one of 2024’s better ARPGs) was also created by former Tencent employees. NetEase was traditionally mobile-focused, but even they’ve had their own share of recent hits like Marvel Rivals and Once Human.
Like the rest of the gaming industry, they’ve had their recent struggles and layoffs, but they seem to at least producing more quality titles than the Ubisofts and Microsoft-Activision-Blizzards and EAs of the world.
Wish I could wall-fly in the board rooms of these companies and see the discussions that lead to the greenlighting or cancelations of their respective titles. Presumably some are more willing to take big risks than others?
Humanity is a Lemmings-like puzzle game that I’m having a lot of fun with. You’re a spirit dog tasked with guiding hapless humans across various platforms filled with chasms, ledges, water, and more obstacles. The humans are dumb, really dumb, so you can only tell them to “turn left here!” or “jump REALLY high here!” and they’ll follow your commands unto salvation or doom.
Unlike the above tangent, this is one of those nice indie gems that prioritize gameplay over all else, and is better off for it 
I’m working on Avowed via GamePass. I don’t think it’s that bad, but it’s certainly the worst Pillars of Eternity game. I think the art direction is pretty good. I agree that its game systems are a bit uninspired. Apparently it’s pretty short; that’s going to work in its favour.
Avowed is suffering from the same “it’s not a once-in-a-generation masterpiece” expectations that a lot of very decent games are burdened by, especially when they invite comparisons to games.like Skyrim.
I’ve played the first hour or two on Game Pass and it’s pretty good! The reviews I’ve seen say that if you play a standard martial character it’s very by the numbers but that it has some of the best magic combat around, so I’m building that way.
Does it feel like a 70 dollar game? Absolutely not, but pricing is an industry problem rather than an Avowed problem.
Is it like Skyrim? First person perspective, free exploring, etc.?
My wife’s been playing it, and describes it as “Skyrim, but they fixed the combat.”
She’s got thousands of hours logged in Skyrim, so that’s pretty strong praise.