You are a monster.
Also, it’s not that difficult once you figure out how it works.
Loved the first (with caveats), have considered but haven’t played the second, never heard of the third. The reason I’ve hesitated on the second and had minor issues with the first, is just that they aren’t traditional RPGs ( I like some combat and strong progression systems) and I honestly do not like puzzles. To the point where if I encounter one in a traditional CRPG and I can’t figure it out quickly, I’ll resort to a guide to just bypass the whole thing.
An example that springs to mind is Nenio’s questline in Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. I just can’t with that shit - I find it incredibly tedious (and I genuinely like the character, but that quest is like pulling teeth). I love convoluted story lines, but I don’t want to have to think too hard 
.
But a well-dressed, well-fed monster! Turns out haggling works a lot better when they’re dead.
Couldn’t keep up with all the blocking and ripostes. Reflexes were too slow. But I did finally figure it out… now I just fight them while they’re asleep 
You might check out Owlcat’s Rogue Trader. The main questline is substantial and there t really any puzzles. It’s pretty much all combat.
I have played a bunch of these, some to completion but others I bailed on. Loved Stray. I have not heard of Gone Home, so I will check it out.
I’m not familiar with any of those, except The Witness which Mahaloth mentioned. That does not appear to be on the Switch, sadly, which is where I want to find something right now.
Thanks for all the suggestions!
Viewfinder started good, but got very dull.
Did you play Homebody? It’s on Switch.
On the recommendation of two friends (one of which is nonbinary and the other a trans man, FWIW) I’ve been playing Hogwarts Legacy.
I recieved a OLED Switch for Christmas to replace the old crappy Switch Lite I bought from one of the above-mentioned friends during the first wave of Covid lockdowns in 2020. It was well-used when I got it and after discovering Breath of the Wild and Animal Crossing while simultaneously having endless weeks to sit at home doing nothing but play video games all day, I’ve put thousands of hours on the old machine. It was time for an upgrade.
With the new console I wanted some new software. I absolutely love open-world games (BotW is by far my favorite game of all time) so gave HL a shot. The eShop had it on sale for ~70% off over Valentine’s Day. I prefer physical cartridges but this was too good a deal to pass up.
The main story line kinda sucks – or at least, it’s convoluted enough that I’m having some difficulty following it – but it’s a damn fun game. The battles are simple enough once you get some decent spells in your aresenal and the map, while not on the same level as BotW, is big enough and detailed enough to make it genuinely interesting. There’re some recognizable voice actors in it (Simon Pegg, Leslie Nichols) and it really adopts the whole Harry Potter wizarding world quite well. Hogwarts itself is rendered amazingly well and just exploring the castle is a ton of fun.
I also picked up A Space for the Unbound but haven’t really been able to get into it. I like the graphics and gameplay – very much a throwback to the 16-bit era of my youth – but the game is essentially and endless quest searching for puzzle pieces which is something that gets old very quickly.
Neat game. Best part was walking around Hogwarts, which they fully mapped out and made accessible. Every single part of the school is available, at least as far as I can tell. I can’t think of any room that isn’t a real room. It’s great.
The game? It’s adequate. Bug Hogwarts was amazing.
Edit: You might like to know a transgender character makes a brief appearance in the game, something the designers wanted.
I fired up Avowed yesterday. It took a minute to get into, but I’m well into it now. It’s definitely very pretty. But yeah, it’s not nearly as open worldly as Skyrim. But that’s not a bad thing. Levelling up takes a long time compared to other RPGs it seems. I have like 15hrs in it so far and I’m only lvl 8. And I didn’t start feeling like I was good at combat until lvl 7 and when I got my first fine tier gear. But I’m digging it so far for sure. Better than the new Indiana Jones game which I just keep forgetting to play. And a whole lot better than Stalker 2 which I just couldn’t get into.
Citizen Sleeper has zero combat or puzzles. The primary game mechanic is, at the start of each game day, you roll up to five d6s, then choose which tasks on the game map you want to allocate those dice to. Higher results mean better chances of success and lower stakes for failures, with 6 being an automatic success. Your body (you’re a human consciousness downloaded into an android body) is slowly decaying, which limits how many dice you get at the beginning of the day. The mechanical aspect to the game is basically a worker placement game, where you have to decide how best to use your limited resources to buy food, access medicine to reverse your body’s decay, and improve your living situation (buying better housing, investing in local businesses, etc.)
Every other thing is decided through dialogue choices, which are fully un-gated. You don’t need to make a skill check or unlock a feat to access particular dialogue options, you just need to decide if that response is in character for the guy you’re trying to play. The writing is pretty sharp, and very political. You can get a Steam achievement for becoming a communist.
It’s very fun, pretty cheap, and fairly short. Worth checking out.
Definitely has been on my list - I’m a fan of Owlcat.
Hmm…not my usual thing, but it does sound intriguing.
I just finished a replay of Mafia 2. I actually started it after making a joke to a friend about the newest Nvidia cards. They don’t handle PhysX well so I said that the 4090 was now objectively the best way to play Mafia 2 since the 5000 series cards choke on the PhysX. Saying that made me think “You know, it HAS been a while…” and I fired it up. Just to humble me, getting it to run stable required capping the FPS to 99 and then finding a 3rd party patch to double to memory allocation for the game. Still a fun game though!
I never played the DLC much so I went to Joe’s Adventures once I completed the main game. It’s okay but I don’t really care for all the missions being timed and graded. Different vibe from the main game, to its detriment.
I finished it. Fun enough to keep playing, but I played it through Gamepass, and I think I’d have felt a little cheated for $70 or whatever.
The writing isn’t awful, but nor is it on par with the best out there. Probably the worst element is the companions. Just fairly bland overall. They all have some mental hangup that you have to work through as part of their mission. They’re all a little too friendly or something. Can’t quite put my finger on it, but when the supposedly gruff and antisocial dwarf says “good job everyone” or “let’s all take a breather” after a battle, it feels inconsistent.
The combat is reasonably good, although as usual I ended up as a sniper-like character. The parkour-ish elements were good. Felt way more natural than all those games where you can’t jump over a 2-foot fence. And it made the levels much more vertical, which meant there were some navigation puzzles. But at the same time, there weren’t any annoying jumping platformer elements.
Something about the game just lacked depth, though. Again, I can’t quite put my finger on it. It has plenty of lore, and good diversity in the different areas. I think maybe it was a lack of content off the beaten track. Skyrim had plenty of that–all sorts of isolated dungeons and other areas that made the whole place feel like it had more history to it.
That feels a good bit like The Outer Worlds. A much more polished game, but while there was some off the road content, it wasn’t Skyrim/Fallout level. I found that the Corpo-stupid setting was a ton of fun, as it combined a degree of wacky that offset the otherwise utterly dystopian Corpo state that we would get to enjoy in Cyberpunk 2077. And while the companions did have a bunch of issues, they were also more or less consistent in their interactions with the PC and each other.
Yeah, definitely a bit like The Outer Worlds in that respect. Some off-path content, but not enough. And what there was felt more like you were meant to find it rather than you just happening upon it after random exploration.
It was still enjoyable overall, just not a classic.
The companions here had some pretty wildly inconsistent views. The one whose home city was just burned to the ground is advocating flooding another city with lava. Or, the one from a city founded by pirates and other lawless types wants the new government to be a client state of the big empire. They just don’t have very distinct personalities.
Eh, that sucks. One other companion-based question, is there a romance option, or do they go TOW and avoid that entirely? I know romance is increasingly a tool to drive replays, so it could be good either way, but romance is again one of the harder things to do right, and if the writing is merely “fine” then it would probably been extremely underwhelming.
No romance, unless I somehow locked myself out of it. There were a handful of places where it seemed I could flirt, and I didn’t, but I’d be surprised if the game decided to stop offering the options based on those few encounters.
The rest areas are open-air camps with just one tent. So romance might be a bit awkward. Also, your options are The Fishguy, The Furry, The Dwarf, and The One Basically Normal Human Lady.
If the game has enough alcohol in it…
That furry is horny.