I’m so thankful this trend has mostly reversed, at least outside of AAA games suffering from sequel-itis. Many indie games or smaller studio games use pixel graphics, 2D sprites, or barely serviceable 3D graphics from a decade or two ago — and are better off for it. Meanwhile, under-optimized UE5 games like Borderlands 4 overuse the latest & greatest and suffer terrible review scores because of it.
The bigger studios don’t know what to do except chase graphics because they’re too big to innovate anymore. Oh well. All the good gameplay and story come from indies and smaller studios anyway.
Then once in a while the Chinese come out of nowhere and hit it out of the park, like with Wukong. It’s mostly the big established Western conglomerates that produce soulless graphical tech demos…
This is a good list, and if I had infinite time and could only play 2 games for the rest of my life I would pick Baldur’s Gate 3 and Dwarf Fortress (DF), both are endless fun that players are still discovering new things about every day. Caves of Qud/RimWorld close second to DF.
Later tonight, I will be playing the newly released Jurassic World Evolution 3. It has finally brought Planet Zoo/Planet Coaster’s incredibly detailed building mechanics to the Jurassic World Evolution series, and I’ve been waiting for this moment since the announcement of the first game in 2017.
I hear the building hotkeys are very very different from the Planet series which is throwing some people off; but the tools are every but as powerful, and I’m invested enough in dinos and the Jurassic series to power through. And if you’re coming from JWE 1 or 2 rather than the Planet games, I think it’s just a straight upgrade. Even if you hate the piece by piece building and think it’s too complicated, the base game comes with more themes than JWE2 had with all DLC and you can download stuff from the workshop.
I didn’t realize there would be other JWE players! If there are enough of us, we could do some kind of community built park - sharing whole maps is supposed to be very easy with the new workshop.
Perfectly acceptable version of the classic American game show. Everything is there - the million-dollar space, the Mystery wedge, the Express wedge. Pat Sajak and Vanna White have generic replacements.
Character customization options are unfortunately very limited. The host’s dialogue is repetitive. When you guess a wrong letter, the host doesn’t say what letter it is, which is annoying.
Since it’s a video game that’s no longer being updated, naturally there are a finite number of puzzles. I once solved the same puzzle three times in one day. But that was an unusual situation.
If we were building one habitat or amenity building per turn, you’d download a park from the workshop, modify it with your build, then upload a new version of it to the workshop for the next person to download.
That’s hilarious! Now you make me want to change my avatar to a Pachycephalosaurus.
I was actually thinking of changing it to a JWE3 dino, but the Guanlong, not the Pachycephalosaurus.
I didn’t really pay attention to the subscores before but noticed them when looking at Caves of Qud’s entry. If anyone’s interested, here’s the top 3 for each category (and their overall rank in the list) as I didn’t feel like hunting down and organizing all ten games per metric:
This is what I have so far… Mostly just saved space for a parking lot and some facility buildings.
Really, I wanted to build a habitat today rather than something boring like an entrance. But I need to know where the habitat will be, and so I’m just laying out a bunch of stuff.
The good news is that I’m ALMOST done and then I can finally have some fun… like 20 minutes before bedtime
I played one of those rarest of gems tonight: A girlfriend-approved, couch co-op-able game that was a lot of fun for both of us: Sunderfolk
It’s a moderately simple turn-based tactics game where you and your friends control a party of animal heroes with D&D-like classes. But you don’t use a keyboard/mouse or a controller. Instead, each player connects via their phone (using the free controller app) and then drags their finger to trace out the path they want to move (or attack, or push). It’s a mix of deck builder and hex-based combat, where your skills are cards that have a combination of movement, attacks, buffs, debuffs, etc.. The levels are fun and full of environmental hazards like pits and lava that you can push enemies into (or, with the right class, charm them and lure them towards). There’s an RPG element too, as you get gold and equipment and levels and new skills/cards as you progress.
In spirit and atmosphere it’s like a simpler version of Baldur’s Gate 3, except much more approachable — she struggled with the controller and UI in BG3, but immediately understood this game and wanted to keep playing!
It’s like a tabletop game. One copy of the game lets everyone play for free on their phones. Good for casual co-op nights with people who wouldn’t otherwise play a video game.
My partner also enjoys Sunderfolk for the same reason, it’s an excellent balance of accessibility and tactics. A really great “gamer/nongamer” coop experience.
We did turn off the timers in the fights though. The phone controls are fiddly enough that it’s easy to biff a turn which stresses her out, and I strongly dislike turn timers in tactics games no matter the difficulty.
I’m really enjoying Shapez 2. I’m at the point now where I’ve got all my milestones churning out shapes and all my pinned tasks churning out shapes so the only thing I can do until the quotas are reached is try to figure out more efficient methods. I feel like a genius because I’ve hit stasis, but I know I’m fooling myself. I’m in the shallow end right now. I haven’t even got to painting shapes yet.
I really like the pace. I’m not usually one for sinking more than maybe an hour into a game before either ADHD kicks in and I get bored or I just have something else to do. This game is easy to dip in and out of. I’m curious to know at what point in the game I’ll hit my Dunning-Kruger moment.
Last night, my partner voluntarily asked to play another round. That has never happened before, with any game! I looked at her like “are you even the same person anymore”. It’s even managed to displace her favorite TV shows!
The game is actually pretty challenging too, at least at difficulty 2/4 with a shitty party of two support classes and no tank or DPS. Our Bard and Arcanist made buff tiles everywhere, only for the enemies to get to them before we do, sigh. It seems like they can steal our gold and chests too, at least if they inadvertently pass over one.
We died a few times every mission and just baaaarely met the victory conditions. I actually find it more tactical than BG3 or Gloomhaven, since you have to work with the limited options you have instead of being able to min-max an uber munchkin party.
I can imagine the game being even better with 4 players and a full party. Having a proper tank would really help. Gonna try to rope in the in-laws next
Yeah, I love that about the game! There’s no timers or limits or stress, and it only gets more efficient if you want it to. Or you can just keep it running overnight until you meet the next level’s quota.
Eventually (don’t remember exactly when) you get the ability to copy & paste constructions, like blueprints, and then you end up being able to make sub-assemblies inside assembles inside sub-factories inside factories inside meta-factories… but that happens entirely at your own pace, and only to the extent that you care to (if at all).
The programmer in me loves the optimization potentials; there’s just something incredibly satisfying about seeing a 100x speedup in my production of yellow half-circles
This, and RDR2, and probably the most-beloved games that left me cold. I played probably a dozen or two hours in Disco before giving up, and it’s one of my touchstones in my epiphany that I hate stories about sad sacks. The protagonist is the saddest of all possible sacks, and I was dreading stepping into his shoes over and over.
RDR2, I got a refund for. The first hour or two of play are like 10% “travel along this railroad, only very slowly” and 90% “watch this movie about your character that’s not good enough to be a real movie.” In reading review of it, even the ones that gushed about the game described stuff that I don’t like, so I’m glad I stepped away.
Both, I’m sure, are really great games; but just as some folks can’t understand how I can put hundreds of hours into the logistics-management systems of Factorio and Satisfactory and Dyson Sphere Program, I just don’t get these games.
I’m a huge fan of Rimworld, with over 1,300 hours in it. Last week I bought Necesse on sale due to how many times I see it recommended, and its glowing reviews on Steam.
Refunded after 15 minutes, and clearly I didn’t research it enough before buying.
My personal pain point: we’ve spent billions of dollars and thousands of lives trying to get past 8-bit graphics; just no. I want to leave my Commodore VIC-20 and Tandy 1000 where it belongs: in the past.
Obviously, my preference is in the minority, which is fine; different strokes etc. but as a design choice rather than technology limitation I just don’t get it.
(I admit that Borderlands has a non-realistic comic book style, and I love it; note that it is NOT low-res)
I’m the same way with the pixel-art style, I don’t have any nostalgia or fondness for clunky low-res graphics as a deliberate aesthetic. Cases in point: Octopath Traveler or Binding of Isaac.
Retro art is kind of charming for a short minute, but then it feels like a shortcut crutch to better artistic expression, or at worst being too cheap to deliver a complete product.
Yeah, no love for pxiel art here either. I can appreciate simple 2D graphics as a design choice (like in Don’t Starve or Oxygen Not Included), but faux retro pixel art is just annoying, especially when it affects the usability of the II
