I picked up a game called “Little Kitty, Big City” on sale for like $10 that’s sort of the little sister to Stray. Cartoony graphics, more of a 3D puzzle-platformer than an action game. Leans hard into the “be a cat” part. You can do the missions and complete the goals, or you can go all Goat Simulator with it and just cause chaos. It was cute.
Can confirm it was a cute little game. Kept me entertained for an afternoon with no regrets. Though one afternoon was my limit on it. It was enough to finish the main story. I didn’t feel the need to 100% everything though.
I’m currently enjoying the hell of Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon, It has everything I liked about Skyrim and an interesting story, I’m not a complete fan of the game stylistic choices but I can live with that.
Currently on my third replay of OMORI. Combat is a bit tedious, but the story, art style, and charm of the game make up for it entirely.
The Alters just came out today, and so far it’s one of the most unique games I’ve played in many years… it’s a blend of genres, between survival/adventure/base-building/and more, with a strong sci-fi narrative focus. It’s from the studio that made Frostpunk and This War of Mine.
Very Positive on Steam, 90% on PCGamer, similarly high marks elsewhere. I don’t usually like story-based games, but this one’s got me hooked.
You’re a miner, sent by some corporation to an uncharted and highly irradiated planet to look for traces of an exotic mineral. Of course, things go wrong, you crash-land and the rest of your crew is dead, so you’re forced to scavenge for resources to survive. Without giving too much away (minor spoilers, just stuff that happens in the prologue and first hour or so of gameplay, and what you’ll learn from any trailer or review):
There is some looming stellar phenomenon that will soon endanger your life. You don’t have the skills to repair your base and will soon die without help. Turns out the mineral you were sent to discover allows you to clone animals, and you test it by 3D-printing a copy of Dolly the Sheep into Molly the space-sheep. Of course, the corporation then makes you clone yourself to get the help you need. You see your life as a timeline and choose a branching point, like what if you went to trade school and stayed home with Mom instead of going off to college. Then you make a clone from that branch. Your clone has your memories up that point, theirs after the branch, and naturally they think they’re the original, not you. So you both need their help to repair the base with the technical skills you don’t have, while also trying to calm their nerves and convince them to work together, reminiscing over the memories and loves you do share.
Gameplay-wise, it’s a mix of Subnautica, The Swapper, Fallout Shelter, the Telltale adventure games, and more. There’s the typical survival stuff where you harvest resources to craft supplies, base-building and management like in Fallout Shelter, and an overall narrative arc with dialogue choices that influence you and the others you eventually find.
The graphics are stunning (highly suggest playing it on GeForce Now on Ultra graphics and DLSS if you don’t have a good enough computer) — atmospheric, believable, threatening without being supernatural… like you’re watching a mix of The Martian and Interstellar, especially when the tidal effects start to threaten a tsunami. The writing is sharp and believable, the voice acting quite decent (the facial animations are OK), and overall it’s just a well-crafted labor of love. I’m only a couple hours in, but thoroughly impressed (in every way that games like Dune: Awakening failed to be… this one is an original indie creation, not just another me-too cash grab with generic systems). They actually dared to innovate across many fronts and somehow melded it all into a cohesive game.
It’s really, really rare to find a gem like this among’s today landscape of safe copycats and sequels. Cannot recommend it highly enough…
It’s included with Gamepass, $32 on Steam, and $25 on GreenManGaming (authorized reseller that gives you a Steam key).
You had me at Frostpunk.
*swoons*
Not for me it won’t be. It’s only a question of how long it will have to languish on my wishlist until it gets under $20.
Back in March during the Steam spring sale, I bought “We Happy Few” and “Satisfactory”. And I’ve been playing Satisfactory non-stop since then. So this week I decided to take a break and finally fired up We Happy Few.
The story seems interesting, and I’m enjoying the various quests and solving puzzles, but holy moley do I suck at the combat. For example there’s an early game quest where you have to go to the old train station. There is a gang of about half a dozen people guarding the way in that you have to get past. I’d manage to neutralize one then get jumped by the rest. Luckily when I respawned the ones that were down were still down, but it took me about seven or eight respawns to finally complete that quest. I’d play for about an hour, get frustrated, and wind up going back to Satisfactory for the rest of the evening.
I’ve been playing “The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion Remastered” recently. This has been updated using the Unreal 5 engine so the scenery and lighting all look great but many of the NPCs are pretty ugly now. It has a few bugs and glitches, some annoying, some funny. One funny one was in a dungeon full of vampires. I killed one and took all its stuff including clothes. After that every vampire I encountered in that dungeon had no clothes on. Being attacked by vampires in their underwear made me chuckle.
Unfortunately, the combat never really gets better. It’s why the game got mixed reviews. The setting, plot, and writing are really good, but the gameplay outside of combat is not fun enough to really make up for the awfulness that is combat.
Less ugly than they used to be. I still have my old Prima Guide for Oblivion, and it’s noticeable how much uglier the pictured NPCs generally are than they are in the Remastered version.
The NPCs still look better than those in Morrowind. I tried to replay Morrowind a while back and I had to stop because I found it too ugly.
So I’ve played 9 hours so far. It’s basically “Frostpunk in 3D in space”. It has the same fundamental gameplay loop:
- Harvest resources
- Build base modules
- Research upgrades
- Build upgrades and more modules
- Things break and disasters happen
- People complain about stuff that you have to fix
- Moral conflicts and disagreements occur
- Repeat
What The Alters adds is:
- Outdoor, first-person 3D exploration. It’s just a walking simulator with some light aiming, but it’s how you discover resources and progress the story
- Specialists that are better at one task over another (like resources harvest or growing food)
- A character-focused narrative based on branching decision trees (very minor spoiler, as above: they’re all clones of yourself, and eventually you get a miner, doctor, technician, botanist, psychologist, etc. version of you, all living and working together but having many discussions and disagreements amongst themselves. The narrative changes depending on who you choose to have with you as the game progresses.
After 9 hours, I’m still enjoying the game — especially the resource management and 3D exploration parts — but it’s also starting to get a bit micro-manage-y, juggling all the different subtasks of the game and all the characters’ needs and wants. I think I’m going to use a trainer now to max out my resources and speed things up… (often do that for games just so I can skip the grind and get through the story quicker)
All in all, I’m very glad I gave it a chance. Even if it’s not perfect, it’s unique, enjoyable, and innovative. Well worth the $25, IMO (or $1 for a 2-week trial of Gamepass, if you haven’t tried it before).
A friend bought me the Oblivion Remaster for the birthday I had this month. I still have the 2009 GOTY, but haven’t played in 15 years (it didn’t hold up as well as Fallout 3/NV/4 or Skyrim for me) and I only played through once or twice Then, so this should be my addiction for the next 4 months.
Which puts all the other games I was trying to move forward on further back.
Especially because I just used a metric ton of my World of Warcraft gold to prepurchase Outer Worlds 2. I almost never prepurchase, and in fact wait a year or so until the first major sale, but I really like Outer Worlds, and it’s not like spent real out-of-pocket money on it.
Yakuza - Like a Dragon
I’m playing this game now, about 6-7 hours in. I like JRPG games and this is indeed one. Boy, talk about a lot of cutscenes, though. I’d estimate I’ve played 3.5 out of 7 hours and watched cutscenes the other 3.5 hours. Maybe not, but it feels like it.
Neat game, I like what I’m seeing, though it still feels like I am in the tutorial.
Speaking of which, I just started the Alters. A game touted as managing a bunch of clones. It takes like 10 or so hours worth of cut scenes to come to grips with the idea of having clones. I like the game so far. But holy shit did it take forever to get to the actual gameplay loop.
After S2 of the show I played through both The Last of Us games because I didn’t want to wait forever for the show. The first game felt pretty dated, but the second was phenomenal. Takes massive risks, but some small pacing issues aside I think they work. One of my better gaming experiences.
Very true. I commented on the cutscenes in Yakuza: Like A Dragon in a conversation we were having about video games a few years ago.
Ah, thanks. I’m in Chapter 4 and it has slightly opened up and I can complete some substories and so forth.
I’m playing more this chapter than the previous chapters combined.
Just played through it. Haven’t looked up which endings are possible, but I seem to have gotten a moderately good one.
Act 2 spoiler:
The whole Tabula Rasa thing annoyed me. Come on, there are zero ethical qualms to creating a completely unconscious being, with no memories or cognition or anything. It would be unethical not to have a few of these bodies around for spare parts! We’re on an alien planet. We’re gonna need some spare organs and stuff.
And yet I’m surrounded by whiners. The Technician I get, since he’s against me from the start. And the Botanist is a hippie-dippy idiot. But the Doctor is against it? Totally unethical for him to be against this. Like refusing to harvest organs from a brain-dead patient. Never should have been let on the project in the first place.
And even the people that supported my decision are being stupid about it, basically taking the attitude of “Well, it’s a little unethical, but the mission comes first”. No it isn’t, you idiots. It’s just a sack of lab-grown meat! You’re lucky I’m not feeding it to you for rations.
Of course, no one actually refused to take the treatment. Naked self-interest trumps all, I guess.
So does the open world actually open up at all? I got to the bit where you have to build the bridge and it’s more like a puzzle game than a survival game. Build a specific object, place it in a specific spot, etc.
Didn’t read your spoilered bits.