There’s never any sort of open world. Just a series of medium-sized maps (on par with the one you’re on now) and limited time to do the required things. I wouldn’t call it a puzzle game at all, aside from figuring out how to navigate the map. Definitely a survival game in that you have to gather resources, upgrade your stuff, survive various environmental events, and do it all in limited time.
I never found it to be particularly difficult, though. I’m playing on the default difficulty level.
What I mean is that the map is a static series of challenges with static solutions, at least so far. Walk until you see a particular shimmer. Do the “find the ore” minigame. Plant a mine that snaps to the terrain in one specific place. Walk to a pile of rocks. Plant the drill thingy that snaps to one specific place so that you can walk to the next thing.
That’s what I mean by a puzzle. Survival games, even ones with bespoke maps (Grounded, Subnautica) are a lot more interactive and freeform than that even if they do ultimately rely on gating your exploration behind doing very specific things. Alters seems to not really have the explore/exploit gameplay spoke that I’d expect to see.
Not a criticism, mind you; just an observation about what kind of game it is. Defying genre conventions is rarely a bad thing.
It’s not as strong in the survival elements as more “pure” survival games would be. Nevertheless, you do have to make choices about which research options to pursue, which resources to prioritize, how to prepare for disasters, and so on. I wouldn’t call these static challenges. I agree that the “main plot” elements are static, though.
Later you’ll have to deal with some… interpersonal challenges. To some extent these are also on rails. But there is some choice involved.
Yeah, I did specifically mean the ‘outside’ bits; I can definitely see all of those elements inside the base.
The outside threats get more intense in later maps, and also as time passes. So it’s not always quite as easy as strolling over to the nearest resource area and plopping down a miner. It never gets that difficult, but you do have to be a little careful and prepare for things.
Playing through Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and the combat system is very very much my thing. Beautiful story, fun reasonable difficulty, and an end-of-Act-1 plot twist that genuinely shocked me (and I’m much too old and jaded to be shocked by video game plot twists!).
The map design is truly awful, which makes it only a 9/10 game, but still a strong recommend.
I would agree about the map thing as well. I struggle spatially and had, well, not a ton of trouble, but I ended up just trying to advance through most areas.
It’s a great game; I was super surprised.
Oh, if I forgot to mention this earlier: Yes, I completed the Bard’s Tale trilogy, and I got a whole bunch of save states and screenshots, and it was an enormously satisfying experience, thank you. 
Cooling off just a tad on the YouTube Playables. It turns out that some of them are actually early or unfixed versions of mobile device games (Running Pet being a prominent example). Polysphere appears to have a glitch that prevents the last level from loading, and DOP 2 has recently refused to load at all. I tried the Tall Man Run clone Build a Queen for a while, but it eventually became obvious that it’d just repeat the same things over and over to no end. (Also, having a “rival”, with a completely random skill level on every stage, at that, made no sense at all to me. This would’ve been much better as a solo game where you had to get a certain percentage of the costume correct to proceed to the next level.)
I was VERY close to giving up on Thief Puzzle, as 211 appeared to be completely impossible (I tried everything, goddammit!). Luckily I was able to look up the solution on YouTube (How the hell did we get anything at all accomplished before the Internet?), but the fact that I had to resort to that frankly alarms me. I’ve decided to keep going, but the spirit of humor and whimsy I felt at the start is definitely long gone. There was another pretty tough level prior to 211, and I’m hoping to hell that this game doesn’t go into the same unfathomably dark place as too many others before it.
Oh, one other recent entry that looks nice:
Sandwich - Two slices of bread and a bunch of ingredient layers between them. Put the sandwich together one move at a time. A very breezy game (I’ve cleared 67 levels and they were all a piece of cake) that comes across more like a tech demo or graphics test. This is one of those astonishingly rare games where I’d actually welcome increasing difficulty, but it never left its just-for-fun state, like Tall Man Run, I wouldn’t mind at all.
I finally broke down and purchased Planet Coaster 2. Besides being on sale on Steam, I’d also heard that pretty much all of the bugs present when it initially debuted have been fixed, thanks to 6 free updates. One of the criticisms when the game was released was the lack of in-game content, but each update has included plenty of free content.
Having finally had a chance to dive in, I must say that the game is astounding, and far better than the original. I’m hooked. I’m probably also the only person around here who plays it. 
I bought a copy after watching Josh mis-play it: https://youtu.be/6ARjrl74nc4?si=i7_7Ig5BD8RB9rZl
I created a similarly evil theme park of torment and enjoyed it quite a lot!
Played the heck out of the Bullfrog Theme Park game back in the day, but these days, it’s more fun to just abuse the physics and pathing systems to torment the visitors 
Yakuza: Like a Dragon
I’m about 20 hours into this JRPG and it is pretty good, though I do see numerous quality of life improvements that could be made.
I think the main draw, for me, is that we have a JRPG that is set in a unique environment. Organized crime wars in Japan instead of your typical fantasy like world. I like that the protagonist of this game loves Dragon Quest and that all the JRPG stuff we are experiencing is his own interpretation of the battles and events we are playing.
I’ve heard the sequel, Infinite Wealth, fixes a lot of the annoying gameplay issues.
I notice there is something called Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii. What is this game? It appears not to be a full sequel or release, but something shorter? Has anyone played it? Is it a full game or just something small.
I’ve been into Space Haven and Homefront The Revolution lately.
I just finished Homefront The Revolution for the second time. It’s not some great work of art but it’s a first-person shooter a bit like the Far Cry that lets you gradually take back the city of Philadelphia from a North Korean invasion. If you like action movies like The Transporter or Boss Level you’d probably like this game.
Space Haven is a Rimworld-type game where you build the hull and walls of a spaceship, furnish the interior and build the systems from food and energy production to life support and entertainment. You try to keep your crew productive and happy as they mine asteroids, explore derelicts, trade with and do missions for various factions, and I assume fight other ships at some point. It has a steep learning curve but keeps my interest and it’s very rewarding figuring out what all you can do and find, and watching the crew go through their daily eat/work/relax/sleep routines.
That game didn’t exactly catch fire when it came out but I liked it. Like you said, it had a Far Cry 3+ vibe to it and I liked the urban environments and the weapon switching system. Premise was dumb as hell but I had fun with the game and played the co-op missions (solo) for a good while as a time killer even after completing the story and DLC.
I started playing Resident Evil: Village the other night but I’m not really feeling it. I should give it a chance since I’m still in the starting village area but something about it wasn’t hooking me when I played. I’ll give it another go over the weekend.
Any first person shooter fans?
Been playing Project Silverfish, which just went early access.
Indy open world extraction shooter. Low poly, solo dev, but it has style and a lot of content already. I tend towards indy games. I like the focus on gameplay they often have and the lack of scripted button mashing events and cut scenes.
You play as a post human lizard creature. Apparently there is a furry(?) subgenre of ‘Synths’ which are humanoid, possibly cyborg, lizard people. Who knew? (apparently millennials).
What do you think about Ostranauts? Not even a very new game, but the Steam page still has it under Early Access, so I am wondering what its future is.
Just finished the 3 DLC missions for Homefront The Revolution. The first wasn’t great but the second and third were good. A lot of Red Dawn inspiration in the general premise of this game.
Yeah I tried Resident Evil Village too and the atmosphere was off the charts but the gameplay didn’t hook me.
I haven’t paid a lot of attention to Ostranauts, but it looks like it could be my sort of game once I get over the learning curve. Stardeus is another similar game I have played, Rimworld in space with more complexity. I like that one but Space Haven grabbed me more.
I think I’m going to recommend GRIDROAD. It’s a rudimentary traffic puzzle game, both in the sense that you can’t use traffic signs (only lights and lane markings), but also in the sense that the graphics are mid-90s homebrew. You know how the term “programmer graphics” is not a compliment? This game is fully programmer graphics. I’m pretty sure I could write this game in VB6 right now.
But I’m finding it pretty darn fun. I keep beating the high score (the Dev score) before I finish laying out my design. Which leads me to the one tip I’ll offer: Test your design before (and after) implementing lights. It’s got a real Cities: Skylines “lights just slow things down” vibe going on. To the point that at least once, loading the Dev solution and just removing all the lights not only crushed the Dev score, but also mine. Removing lights doesn’t always help, but often enough that it’s always worth trying.
EDIT: Forgot to mention it’s 33% off ($7 down from $10) for the Steam summer sale, running through July 10th.
I’ve been playing the hell out of MLB: The Show '24, a baseball game on PS4. For the first time, you can play as a woman, so I decided to do that.
She’s a first baseman in the Washington Nationals organization named Tennibrook Fox. (The game announcer comes close: “Teddy” Fox, but you can’t really hear the D’s, and Tenni is her nickname.) She was drafted in the fourth round, and her childhood friend, also a woman, was drafted in the sixth round as a pitcher for the Cleveland Guardians.
I have it on an easy difficulty setting, perhaps too easy, as she delivered an absolutely unholy number of home runs and doubles in her rookie year. I still commit too many errors, though, and that’s probably why I’m still at the Triple-A Rochester Red Wings going into Year 2 despite a dominant first spring training.
Still, early in the season, the Red Wings are in first place while the parent team is last in their division, so I actually kinda hope she spends the entire year at Rochester and gets some Triple-A playoff experience. We finished second last year and only the top two teams in the International League make the playoffs.
Maybe play for the Nats in Year 3.
I miss The Show so much. I’ve logged more hours on that (the Road to the Show) than probably any other game. Alas, I no longer have a Playstation of any sort and it’s not available on PC. I’ve been thinking of picking up a used PS3 or something, just so I can make another 20 year run on the Red Sox.