Starrupture looks great, added to my wishlist.
Started playing Marvel Midnight Suns after getting it on a cheap sale. It felt cheap and clunky at first, but after a few hours it is winning me over with fun quippy dialog, lots of unlockables, and fun battle tactics using a card-deck for varied attacks and strategies. It’s delightfully comic-booky and makes me feel like I’m 12 years old again browsing the comic book stand at the grocery store.
Captain Marvel seems to be getting more flirty with me, but has said she has her eyes on Blade, so I’m not sure where that’s going…
Once you unlock enough characters, cards, and upgrades, the gameplay actually gets really tactical! There’s various combos and environmental dangers that you can combine in various ways to pull off some great clears. The level and gameplay design is pretty phenomenal.
The out-of-combat parts, on the other hand… you spend an absurd amount of time back at the base, looking for hidden crap in the woods or jumping into PG13 hot tub scenes with various characters 
That part felt like a mobile gacha game, almost, but I suppose it’s also fan service for the comic book fans.
It’s one of the most underrated superhero games, IMHO.
To me, that will unfortunately always be “the game they made instead of XCOM 3”.
I had the same feeling and like you it took a while for it to work for me. It felt awful at first until I got used to it.
Now I can spend a lot of time exploring, setting up builds for characters, and enjoying the wacky stuff. I also like that you get at least one really customizable character (Hunter). It really is a fun and sometimes deep game after you get used to it.
I’m currently 11 hours into Outer Worlds 2. The look and feel is a lot like the first one and the stats management has been streamlined.
I’ve also jumped back into Euro Truck Simulator 2 after getting to level 100 in American Truck Simulator. This will probably seem strange to most gamers but I’ve always played racing/driving games with a flight stick, currently a Thrustmaster TCA sidestick Airbus edition.
If it’s stupid and it works, it’s not stupid.
I’ve seen someone play Elden Ring with a punching dummy, so there’s worse abominations out there.
I did a full playthrough of both games back-to-back. When OW2 was about to be released, I made sure to complete the original one. Then after beating it I played OW2 and completed it as well.
I liked OW2 more. I preferred the story a bit more, and I thought there were a lot of quality of life improvements throughout the game. The biggest complaints I’ve seen of the sequel is that it’s too much like the first one, but I disagree; I think they kept most of the best parts of the first game and made it better overall.
One of the biggest disappointments of the first game is that the only real difference between the unique, hard-to-find gear, and the regular gear was that the unique gear had mods locked into them. The regular gear gave you more freedom and you could mod them freely, and the mods you could add often were better than the unique perks. In OW2 they made the unique gear so much better, to the extent that by the end of the game all of the gear I had was unique, which is what you’d expect to be the case. You still had the understandable drawback that they were less customizable, but the fixed bonuses in the guns were attractive enough to make it worth it.
My gear complaint about the first game was that upgrading your equipment’s level was far more expensive than simply buying a new piece of higher level equipment. Is it the same in OW2?
No, because equipment doesn’t have levels anymore. The way stats of guns are boosted are through building up your character, which then improves any gun you get. Or potentially mods added to them. (Same with armor and perks you can earn that make you tougher.) Thank you for reminding me of another massive QOL improvement in the sequel.
Thank you for the impressions of Outer Worlds 2; I’ve been on the fence but you’ve increased my interest. I might wait for a discount though.
I now have about 40 hours in Palia, the free-to-play MMO. It’s been fun, but I think I’m done, as at this point it’s more of the same. Palworld kept me going much, much longer, as obtaining and optimizing pals was much of the fun and challenge.
I tried No Rest For The Wicked again last night (currently 40% off, Very Positive Ratings). They’ve sold a million copies so far, and just added co-op. Also see PCGamer’s first impression: No Rest for the Wicked isn't a Diablo, but it might be one of the smartest soulslikes I've played in a long time | PC Gamer.
It’s a very different sort of top-down RPG. While it superficially looks like Diablo and Path of Exile, etc., it’s actually more of a soulslike. There is a heavy emphasis on tactical, animation-locked combat (parry timings, dodging, swinging, etc.).
It also has way more freedom of movement than most games of this perspective; there’s a lot of verticality and exploration, with a TON of secret areas with small treasure chests, in handcrafted levels. It “rewards” your exploration more than most games of this genre in terms of always giving you some sort of minor crafting ingredient or mining node in the secret areas, but after a while it gets kinda tedious. Movement is fluid and Tomb Raider-esque, with a lot of balancing across logs and tip-toeing around thin ledges. It feels viscerally different than most games like this… almost mis-genred, really.
The game world is beautiful too, with careful use of lighting and occlusion (i.e. many areas aren’t obvious until you walk behind something, but the fixed-perspective camera hides it at first, and some areas are entirely in the dark until you can find a torch).
I was hoping for another pew-pewing ARPG and this wasn’t it… I actually ended up refunding the game because it was too dark and slow-paced. It was the second time I’ve purchased and refunded the game, the first time being a few years back when it first entered Early Access. Just not my style, I guess. But others love it. If you like soulslikes and want to try one from a different perspective, with ARPG itemization and a heavy emphasis on exploration and movement, this might be worth chcecking out.
You aren’t kidding. This is absolutely gorgeous.
TR-49
Highly recommended.
A pure puzzle game with a good story. When I say pure puzzle, I mean like the Witness where you spend all your time solving puzzles. However, in this case, it is one very large puzzle that takes 4-5 hours to complete. However, it is very satisfying with a lot of payoff throughout.
You are a young woman who is working on a large computer that has, for reasons, ended up in the basement of a church.
You are told to locate a book called Endpeace. It’s apparently important that you do so…
Great game. I’m near the end.
Trailer makes it look kinda Myst-like, but maybe with an emphasis on solving riddles written puzzles rather than abstract physical puzzles?
It is a pretty game, isn’t it?
If you like that style of visuals, it’s from the same studio that made the Ori games.
The Trine games (5 of them now!), though unrelated, also have that sort of fantastical, luminous feel.
No, if you are talking to me. You only operate that machine with the letters and numbers. Sounds dull, but by making connections between passages and so forth, you gradually learn more and more about the game, the world, and so forth.
It’s one of those games that has to be played to understand. I’d be spoiling it to get into it much more.
Oh, brand new game and it is only $6.99 USD.
I see… thanks for explaining!
Sure. I finished it today and it was a perfect example of a very brief, gripping puzzle game. I was drawn into this fictional world for 5 hours total and really got taken away.
I got one ending on my own and looked up a couple hints to see other endings(there are 4 endings). It’s worth looking it up once you have completed the game on your own. The game itself contains no hint system at all and I kind of appreciate it.
I heard it described as “a wiki with all links unknown or broken” and you have to re-assemble it. Not quite, but close.
Speaking of puzzle games, I just recently replayed all four of The Room games. I hadn’t played them since they came out, so getting to do all of them in one long go was good fun.