I’ve just started playing ‘Beyond Words’ - a sort-of Balatro/Scrabble hybrid which I imagine many would like here. Awful music, but otherwise looks highly addictive.
Is anybody still playing Shapez 2, and did you just lose all your progress too because they went to 1.0?
I restarted a factory last week and I was pretty far into my main objectives, as that’s what I was focusing on this time around, and now … all gone. The only choice I have is New Game. Luckily, my blue prints are still there, but, fuck man. I gotta do that shit all over again?
Unfortunately, that’s correct 
Steam Community :: shapez 2 - Factory
Unfortunately, pre-1.0 savegames are not compatible. However, there is an
0.1.1-oldbranch available on Steam that you can switch to, if you for example want to check out some of your old creations, create blueprints, or simply are not ready to do the switch yet.Blueprints are compatible, but blueprints created pre-1.0 will show a warning in the blueprint library. We encourage you to recreate them (i.e. by placing them down, then saving them again), as we will drop support for pre-1.0 blueprints in future updates.
You can switch back to the old branch if you want to keep doing that.
Personally I’d just use cheats or a trainer (CheatEngine, etc.) to skip some of the early grind. Last time that happened, I made one of everything I needed to progress, paused the game, and then set the number produced to whatever the goal was.
One of my formative games in the early 90s was Populous. Apparently it’s available on steam, currently on sale for 99 cents.
The downside is that it’s Electronic Arts.
I absolutely loved Populous in the 90s. I played it on the SNES.
I’m pretty sure I have it today as a ROM.
There’s WorldBox - God Simulator on Steam too
And Peter Molyneux is supposed to come out with another god game soon, though his past few titles haven’t been very good.
RIP Bullfrog
Hisssss!
That practically requires the two-click rule!
The number of things I blame them for… -sigh-
In that era I was a major Civilization/Alpha Centauri player. In fact, I have a set of (mine or my wife’s) Civ on 5.25 Floppies in a box in the crawl space.
Oh, actually, Molyneux’s last game is already out: Save 10% on Masters of Albion on Steam
Mixed reviews, though.
From reading the reviews, it advertises itself as a “god game” but it’s really a mix of a cooking micromanager (seriously, half your time you are making pies and sandwiches) and tower defense. Seems like a real bait-and-switch.
Yep, personally I wasn’t that bothered, I was done a while ago with it when it got to the randomly generated stages, so not bothered about doing it again. Trying to spot the difference with the early access. Added C to anchor a belt to route it better. And an extra shape. Yellow colour too, I think, but that might just look different, more gold. I can’t work out how they’d add another colour…
But it does now have achievements and I can look at “acquired operator license” (basically finished the tutorial), and 0.1% of people have that achiement! 
Diablo IV’s latest expansion, Lord of Hatred, just launched earlier today. 90% on PCGamer, Mixed on Steam (few reviews; server issues in the first few hours, but fine now).
It adds two new classes, the Paladin and the Warlock, a skill tree revamp for all classes (granting much more flexibility now), a new zone story expansion, a seasonal mechanic, crafting changes, and quality-of-life upgrades like a loot filter (finally!), overlay map, guide path, etc.
Honestly, this is some of the most fun I’ve ever had in an ARPG, or maybe in any game. The Warlock is non-stop ADHD action, juggling two resource bars in cyclic builder/spender/spender combos and summoning demons, laser eyes, curse sigils, etc. all over the place. It couldn’t be a further cry from the methodical tedium of Path of Exile 2, where barely anything happens — Blizzard took the complete opposite philosophy here and doubled down on the chaos and madness and sheer guttural viscerality and endless dopamine that made the previous Diablos great. D4 finally got its pacing down.
D4 didn’t have a great launch, but it’s been slowly getting better every season, and this was a huge leap forward. I’m excited to get some friends to join me for the first time and play through the entire campaign together (which I formerly skipped).
If you don’t have the game yet, the full package (base + expansion 1 + this expansion) is $70. Otherwise the expansion is $40 by itself. Expensive, but it also has much higher production values than most games of this genre. It was quite a feast for the senses, especially in surround sound.
At this point we would be better off calling such games a Molyneux rather than a bait-and-switch.
Yeah, Lionhead made amazing games when I was a kid, but Molyneux’s last six games or so have been meh. Wish he’d just remake some of the older titles.
Hopefully the new Fable will be better.
The first expansion is bundled with the second one even at the $40 level, which is a decent way to remove that barrier for returning players.
Am currently enjoying Medieval Dynasty. The game is already several years old but I picked it up on sale quite recently. It lacks in terms of combat, but the medieval economic model is great.
I didn’t get super far in that game, but I remember really enjoying it for a while.
There is Titanium Court, the recent Independent Games Festival Grand Prize winner. The basic mechanic is match-3.
Thanks for this! I’ve been playing it off and on in between more “serious” games, and before I knew it, it’s become one of my relaxing go-tos.
It’s really satisfying when you get a “Scrabble” (rack clear) and then it gets multiplied by like 500x.
The mechanics/structure are extremely similar to Balatro, but I prefer Beyond Words just because I can affect my success using my vocabulary, whereas with Balatro I bring minimal poker experience to the table (and you can’t really ‘bluff’ in Balatro after all).
Just started playing a game called The Knightling. It’s one of my favourite genres, fetch-quest puzzle-action. It’s a bit buggy, with slow loading and tricksy camera angles, but that’s pretty common for these kinds of games.