Did it require co-op? I played it when I played all three and didn’t notice.
You can play single-player, but you won’t get the full experience. There are areas you can only go to with two players.
been playing civ 6 but ever since the last steam update or two been having a helluva time with it lately … with the game just spinning forever when its the ais turn or not loading up and just shutting off at random …as I said before I’m ready for civ 7
I’ve been playing mostly 7 Days To Die lately. And some Conan Exiles.
I started playing Hitman 3 on Sunday, it’s a fun diversion. Kind of annoying that going hot is never going to succeed, no matter how many bullets are hiding in my jacket 
I have trouble getting into the modern Hitman games. I didn’t spend much time on it; I got like halfway through the party in the first mission of the first game.
In the original games back in the day, which I loved to death, I used to replay each map to get both Silent Assassin (nobody detects you, only the target dies) and the other extreme (nobody detects you, all enemies die, no bodies discovered) but I forget what that one was called. Maybe something like psychopath or sociopath. I don’t know that I was successful on every map, but I gave it a good effort.
Anyway, the first map in the first remake starts with a huge party with bad guys working security at the door. How the heck am I supposed to kill those guys without being detected? So that kind of ruined some of my fun right out of the gate. I should give it another chance. I am looking for a game at the moment. (And maybe I could distract them one at a time by making a noise somewhere nearby…hmm…)
I think them dying isn’t the trigger of detection, it’s you being seen, so a chandelier onto them as they pass, or electrocute and snap neck, things like that.
But yeah, the Hitmans of recent years have far too many people in them (often the public) to kill them all undetected. There’s a Grand Prix going on it one of the games, think Hitman 2.
I think I might have found my new game last night. I started poking around in Kerbal Space Center again, running through the first tutorial and thinking “this looks fun.”
Then as I was packing it in for the night I went in one last time to Skyrim just to see what the deal was before I uninstalled it (temporarily) to clear disk space. My character had just finished the tutorial, which was practically non-stop dialogue and the volume issues with dialogue really turned me off the game.
There was no dialogue this time, just a dirt path I was supposed to walk down to the nearest town to talk to the NPC dude’s uncle. The game started notifying me that I was getting hungry and sleepy. So naturally I wandered off the path, where I ran across a group of three adventurers. I walked up to talk to them and they attacked me, so I murdered all three in cold blood, looted their bodies, ate their food, and even slept in their bed. That was extremely fun and satisfying.
I think I may have found my next game.
Bethesda games are infamous for long, kind of tedious intros before you get into the meat of what’s usually a really, really good game.
Doesn’t hold a candle to Civ 6’s bloated tutorial. I sat down three different times to try and play Civ 6, having never played any Civilization game before. First time I fired up the tutorial, within like 45 minutes I got interrupted. Closed down and came back to it later that night.
Second try demonstrated that you have to start it over from the beginning if you want to do it. Got about an hour in before I lost interest. Few days later I sat down again to run through it, but again an hour into the tutorial it seemed like I was nowhere near finishing it.
I would point out that the tutorial parts I repeated I zipped through much faster the second and third times. So it wasn’t the same hour, it was an infinitely stretching hour.
I have had zero interest in firing it back up ever since. Just brutal.
Nier Automata has a start/intro which takes maybe an hour. If you die in it, you go back to the start. You cannot save until you complete that intro. I eventually pushed through on the third time (gave it about a year between first try and second, but I’d upgraded the PC by then to stop the slowdown), and by the time I got to the real game I was just “meh”. Yet to go back to it, still don’t really know what the games about. Shooty. Chatty. Fucking long intro.
And I think I am done, was going to pick it up partially in mission 3 or 4, but I have to
a) Pick hitman 3 campaign in the main menu? Weird
b) Find the mission I am currently on? WTF?
c) watch the opening, unskippable, boring, premise video?
d) eventually restart the level, quit, then load my last fucking save???
It was a fun diversion, but I am 51 fucking years old, I ain’t got time for this shit. Who designed this interface? Why wouldn’t you default to the last game save for a single player game? Too far in to get my money back but never buying or playing another hitman game. Life is too short.
Off to cold start the F/A-18 Hornet in DCS 
I’ve been through a lot of games on my Switch recently. I’ll only go over the ones I actually liked from most recent played back through some time in the past:
I’m currently playing Hades. My only complaint with the game is that it needed to be more up-front about what “God Mode” did. With a name like that, I assumed it was hard mode, when it’s actually easy mode, and it gets progressively easier as you fail more often with that mode on. I probably could have saved many hours if I had just turned it on sooner. A roguelike with a real story running through it is quite a feat. It isn’t perfect, and I wish that the process of getting the Olympians up to their maximum friendship level was a bit faster or at least more transparent, but I’m at least getting a lot of fun runs using all the weapons as I wait for them to unlock their last heart. I’m still working on the Achilles/Patroclus story, and saving up to do the Chaos/Nyx unlock as well as.
I finally got back around to actually getting through all of Celeste. While there were some annoyingly hard parts, it actually didn’t seem to get much more difficult at the game progressed, just new mechanics. There’s apparently another chapter you have to unlock somehow, but I had no clue where to start with that so I didn’t bother to try and moved on.
Ori and the Will of the Wisps is not all that much different from the original game. It’s the same basic engine and many of the abilities are the same. It was an interesting game to play through, but was rather shallow. There was a point where I had to bring up a guide, because I got locked into an event that I couldn’t get out of by reloading a previous save, and I was getting frustrated because I clearly had to do something specific to get past, but I thought I tried everything that made sense. It turned out one of the things I tried was the right answer, but I just didn’t do it fast enough.
Spiritfarer is the kind of game that people look to when they talk about video games as art. The story that it tells through various smaller stories from your varied passengers is quite interesting, and when you get to the end and there’s a reveal of what exactly is going on, it really hits home hard. The gameplay isn’t that much to get excited about - it’s mostly about figuring out where you need to go and doing the minigame chores on the boat, but this is a game for people who want a real meaty story with their chill relaxing gameplay.
Darkest Dungeon is one of the few somewhat lengthy games I actually put most of a second full playthrough in. I thought the game was very good at what it did, and there was a lot of real strategy and planning involved. I did get slaughtered my first time in the last set of dungeons, but I came back with a better plan in the first play through and sailed through the rest of it. In the second playthrough I thought I knew what I was doing, and ended up getting slaughtered again, but this time I had planned out exactly what parties I was taking on each of the last missions, and failing the mission meant I would have to redo a bunch of stuff, so I packed it in and moved on. (The first time I didn’t have any real plan and just threw together ad hoc parties, but it managed to work.)
Dungeons of Dreadlock is a short and cheap puzzle dungeon crawler with some clever twists on things, like having to backtrack a few times when at first the game looks like it’s divided into completely segregated levels. There’s only one puzzle that I needed to use all the hints for, because the solution was completely opaque. I also got softlocked in one puzzle set (involving multiple rooms) when I didn’t one part of it correctly, and because of the backtracking, it wasn’t letting me reset the room I needed to reset. I had to go back and reset the previous puzzle, which meant redoing a bit more content than I’d have liked, as the solution to it and the first part of the next set of puzzles was rather involved.
Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse and Shantae: Half Genie Hero were reasonably interesting games, but rather short and not very deep. In my 6 hours each I came very close to 100%ing them, with only one item in each I couldn’t figure out how to get, and I wasn’t about to use a guide. While I enjoy Metroidvanias, I generally would prefer them to have more depth. However, not everyone can make a Hollow Knight.
Subnautica I had a lot of fun with. The pop-in and frame rate issues are annoying, but not game-breakers, because the game looks stunning, and there’s a good story line and generally interesting (to me) game play structure it sits on. Some people said they get scared of the larger monsters, but they really didn’t bother me. It’s just a video game, geez. I did have to consult a guide on this one as well, but only to determine that I was looking in the right place for the next story bit - I figured it was in one particular area, but I spent a long time looking and never found it. Of course right after I confirmed I was looking in the right place, I found what I was looking for.
Disco Elysium is hard to recommend, simply because I’m not sure who would be most interested in it. It’s somewhat like Spiritfarer in that it’s very story-heavy, with no actual game play in the traditional sense - just choosing dialog options and wandering around. But the story it tells is really good up until near the end, where I think it really falls flat and makes it clear that the entire story was basically on rails and nothing that you did actually mattered. It’s also not for children at all. Children aren’t going to like it, and you’d best be keeping them away from many of the things they’d be exposed to.
**The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe Edition" is another entry (I guess Disco Elysium is too) in the “Video Games as art” line, but in this case the kind of art is parody. It makes fun of a ton of different tropes in video games in a way that makes you want to try all the possibilities just to see what’s going to happen. At first I was disappointed by the amount of content in the game, but I eventually realized I hadn’t actually discovered the Ultra Deluxe Edition content, and there was a whole extra game or more waiting on the other side of what I thought was just some lame bonus content. It really knows the tropes well and brutally deconstructs them.
I also played Crown Trick, Shovel Knight, Going Under, A Hat in Time, Owlboy, Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales, Arise: A Simple Story, and Okami HD recently, and I wasn’t a fan of any of those, so I didn’t finish them.
Next in the queue after Hades is Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights. If nothing else on my wishlist comes on sale at a good price before I finish that, I’ll probably buy Portal and finally play that. Valve losing the antitrust suit must have made them actually license it for non-Steam platforms.
I also bought Outer WIlds on the Epic Store after waiting forever for it to (not) come out on Switch. It’s quite a game. I don’t want to say anything more about it, as you’re best served to explore it all yourself. It’s quite interesting as a game that’s very easy to complete if you know what to do, but getting to that point takes a lot of exploring or reading what others say about the game. The more of the latter that you do, the less fun you’ll have doing the former.
That is not the same games as Outer Worlds. Came out around the same time, space themed, same first word, same first and last 3 letters of second word, very easily confused, and I think it already happened once in this thread.
I picked that up last month on deep discount due to the stellar user reviews plus its sterling reputation on various reddit forums, but good grief flying the rocket was the worst experience ever.
Has anyone played In Sound Mind? It looked terrific when I saw the full playthrough on YouTube last year. And I love the soundtrack.
I know there’s a thread on this somewhere on the board, and everyone seemed to love this. It was rated PC Gamers number 1 game out 100 this year and (at least) last year. I bought it off the strength of this.
But what you say here matches what I thought. I didn’t give it more than a couple of hours of my time, but it completely baffled me as to the appeal. It didn’t strike me as a “you have to get into it”, it was a story in video game form, not really a game at all. This on a list which featured neither Subnauticas, two of the greats of recent times for me.
The story is really good. That’s the appeal. It’s like watching a gripping movie, except you get to decide a lot of how it plays out exactly. You have to do some of the thinking, instead of being passive observer. I recognize that plenty of people prefer there to be more elements unique to video games in their video games, so that’s why I can’t wholeheartedly recommend it. But it is a really good story. Some people might like the art style as well. The inner voices bouncing things off each other is also a real treat, much more so in the fully voiced version.
I have had the honor of completing The Return of the Obra Dinn and it was such an immersive, cool, mentally stimulating experience it’s hard for me to get excited about anything else now.
I don’t want to reveal too much because it’s more fun if you don’t know. But basically you play an insurance adjuster investigating a number of mysterious deaths and disappearances on an old-timey ship. You have a list of the ship’s crew, some photos, a map, a schematic of the ship, and a magic timepiece that shows you the last moment of death for each of the crew members. And you have to figure out who each person is, how they died and who/what killed them. It’s like one of those nerdy logic puzzles wrapped up in a fantastic atmospheric story that just compels you to keep digging and digging until you have the whole story. Nothing else like it.
Not quite. There are some deaths where the cause has to be deduced or inferred.
And the game is hard. My partner and I solved it together. She had the advantage of having read the entire Master and Commander series back in the day, which meant she could deduce a lot of the information based on what people were wearing. Knowledge of British naval traditions is a huge help in this game.