Been severely addicted to Tabletop Tavern. Basically a FTL/Slay the Spire map that leads into Total War style army battles.
I played Resident Evil: Requiem and found it to be rather enjoyable. I haven’t played it on the highest difficulty yet, insanity, but I felt as though the other two difficulties were a little easy. My biggest complaint is that it only took me about 12 hours to beat it the first time. Gameplay was good, but for $70 I felt as though the game should have had more content.
Been addicted to this little indie game Everything is Crab. Its a fun rogue-like game about evolution and carcinization. As you progress you pick traits like - Predator (Eagle), Prey (Mouse), Gregarious (Bees), Imposing (Elephant), and Trickster (Fox). As well as a 6th Carcinisation. A special, rare tier of evolutions that embraces the game’s ultimate premise. These grant powerful food-rarity buffs but come with a penalty to the damage you take. Its wildly fun to watch your little blob evolve with different animal traits since it’s reflected visually with what you choose. I recommend it and its only $9 right now!
I’m playing through Kingdom Come Deliverance for the first time. It’s been mentioned here before. Some frustration at first, but I’m really enjoying it. It’s very much a grinding-from-hopeless-nobody-to-overpowered-hero type of story and it doesn’t gloss over the hopeless-nobody part. It makes you fight and do other quests while you are terrible, which feels bad. If you are very clever you might put up a respectable attempt vs an actual combatant. No one expects you to win, and you generally don’t. But that makes it sweeter when you finally do get decent gear and improve your skill.
Another gamer here who just picked up Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning. I’m really having fun with it, it’s almost the only game I’ve played for a couple weeks. Combat is a flowy beat-em-up, the game world is fairly magical. Reminds me a lot of Oblivion but quests and characters don’t feel as fleshed-out. I really like the different skill, weapons, and weapon modding. I don’t like the maze-like nature of the map and the fact there is no first-person or jumping. But it does a lot more right than wrong.
The maps aren’t great, but I appreciate that they usually have a shortcut back to the entrance so there isn’t too much backtracking.
Pentiment
Very highly recommended.
Pentiment is a story-heavy game. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure game, a really good one with a great story, characters, and gameplay. Gameplay? You actually navigate your way around and make decisions about what you will do, learn about, and do with the information you learn.
It’s amazing. Decisions have impact and there is ultimately a lot of ambiguity about what the right paths and decisions are. It took me 14 hours to complete Pentiment, so it isn’t a short game you can just go back and try differently. It’s a time commitment. I wouldn’t have chosen any differently than I did in my one playthrough.
I highly recommend this game. It’s from Obsidian, who made Fallout: New Vegas. The writing in this game is excellent.
To discuss it much more would ruin the story. In short, you investigate a murder in the 1500s. I wouldn’t want to know anything else.
Play it.
Currently Pentiment is 50% off for the steam summer sale (so only $9.99 US through July 9) . It looks beautiful, and my wife who before going into physics had her BA in art with an emphasis on medieval art styles was impressed by the visuals.
Yes, it was a beautiful game.
Another recommendation for Pentament from me. I played it a while ago and thoroughly enjoyed it.
Oh, now you have me wondering what decisions others made. This would have been a cool game to, at the very end, tell you percentages of what other players on Steam picked.
I got one 6% achievement in this game, meaning only 6% of players get it. End of Act 2 resolution in my game.
I apparently haven’t played since 3/23, so I don’t remember too much what my decisions were. But I see I have the achievements for finishing acts I, II and III. III says only 8% of people got it (on Xbox). Not sure if the achievements are the same on steam.
For the July 6 long weekend, it’s a great time to replay Bioshock: Infinite.
I’m 6 hours into playing Avowed.
I’m enjoying it a lot. I heard mixed reviews. It’s very much a Skyrim-like experience, only less open world and more like dense zones. It has a lot of quality of life additions Skyrim(and all the other Elder Scrolls games) don’t have.
Yeah, it’s a small Elder Scrolls game. Much smaller, less books to read, less of everything. Very beautiful, but my Steam Deck only runs it on low graphics.
I’ll comment after I get much further, but it scratches the itch Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim scratched. I keep saying, “Man, I miss this. I like this.”
I have a weapon in my right hand, a shield in my left, and a couple of spells loaded up. It’s great.
It was a pretty good game. I really enjoyed it. I went with a gun in my right hand and spells in my left; the spells were primarily for crowd control, healing, and area damage (particularly with ice/freezing magic), and my pistol was for single target damage and was my main damage-dealer in general. But I love how the game has 3 major combat styles; melee weapons, ranged weapons, and magic. And you can mix-and-match them, even more so than the Elder Scrolls series does.
My favorite bit about gunfighting in the game is that when you aim, the game can go into a “bullet time” where everything slows down and you can make precision shots with little difficulty.
I’m glad to hear the praise for Avowed. It’s… 3? 4? or so games down in my que to play next, and it was free-ish to me because I bought it with some of my stockpiled World of Warcraft Gold. I had heard plenty of the criticisms about it’s small scale and not particularly original story, but hearing the gameplay and combat are fun is nice.
Skyrim-light.
Yes, the freedom of spells and weapons is nice. And you don’t have to equip magic to left hand. I have a shield in my left hand and can cast spells still.
I’ll also point out that it’s a sequel of sorts to the Pillars of Eternity games, even though it’s a dramatically different kind of game. (Those were top-down, turn-based games similar to Baldur’s Gate III.)
Made by the same people (Obsidian Software, who also made such gems as Neverwinter Nights 2 and Fallout: New Vegas) and taking place in the same game world. It references events from the previous games, and some of the characters from the previous games even appear in Avowed; in particular Inquisitor Lodwyn, who (depending on how you play the game) might be a major or the major antagonist (again, based on your choices) was actually the major part of a side quest in Deadfire.
I very much liked the storyline, and the interactions with characters, and choices you make in the game having a massive influence on the course of the game. Except that I accidentally ruined my gameplay by doing a couple of things out-of-order (with no warning), and by the time I realized it, I had no real way to backtrack. So I had to live with it. This is probably the only game where I would advise people to go ahead and open themselves up to spoilers and “read ahead” if they don’t want unintended consequences.
Correct, you don’t. I just chose to. It doesn’t really make any difference whatsoever, except for which button you push to activate it. I really like the “left trigger for left hand, right trigger for right hand” gameplay choice. Really neat system. (Well, that’s how it works on the Xbox where I played, it’s might be different on PC.)
Also, sadly, there was an Avowed II in production, but since the original fell short of sales goals it was canceled.
I’m on PC using an Xbox controller. On the D-pad, up is drink a health potion. Down is drink a magic(“essence”) potion.
Uh, can I rebind those to other abilities/skills?