What video games did you play this year and what did you think of them? 2020/Quarantine edition

The Game Room
21

I am here more to read other people’s recommendations. I do not play a lot of games but once in a while I find one I like. I have Fallout 4 but haven’t spent that much time in it. I find it such a step up from Fallout 3 that it is becoming frustrating.

I enjoyed that one at first. It’s a puzzle game and the puzzles are all grid-based. There is some interesting variety and challenges, but in the end the uniformity of the puzzle types was fatiguing to me after a while and it was hard to stay interested until the end. I liked The Talos Principle better. Also a puzzle game but I found the puzzles to be more interesting, and they progress to where they are not only in 3D but also in time–you have to manipulate things in 3D in a certain order to get it to work.

Could you elaborate on the game and why you liked it?

22

Yes, Horizon Zero Dawn but it was on the PS4. I tend to wait for games to be out for awhile and go down in price before I play through them.

23

Confirming your experience: I played HZD on PS4 a while after launch and also had a smooth, nearly bug-free playthrough.

24

Yes, it was fine on PS4. I’ve been waiting to get it for PC and I do remember its August(or so) release being buggy, but they were working on fixing it. I was wondering if that is happening. I do see on other sites that patches have continued to go out and are improving it quite a bit.

25

I will start by saying that if I finish a game then I really like it. Typically I won’t finish games even if I enjoy playing them. With open world games I have an issue where I get sidetracked by exploration and side quests and then get bored and never get back to the main story. I will sometimes come back to an open world game a year or two later and play it through. Skyrim, Fallout 3 and 4, and Horizon Zero Dawn are all examples of games that I started, lost interest, then came back later for a fresh start and finished.

All games are on the PS4. I play a little on the iMac but not enough to be worth mentioning here.

Games I “finished” (completed the main story):

Horizon Zero Dawn

I started this one at least a year ago and lost interest at some point. The second time through I really enjoyed it. It looks great, controls well, and had an engaging story. For some reason I found the combat a lot easier the second time. I think I got a much better understanding of how to use weapons with high tear values and realised that using a machine’s own weapon is very powerful when used against it. I also got a better understanding of status effects and how to use them.

I enjoyed the questing with Nil and regret that I didn’t take a more peaceful path with him at the end of his story line.

I give the game points for having engaging side-quests but take points away for having very little happening outside of settlements aside from the odd machine fight.

Death Stranding

Probably my favourite game of the year. I’m not sure how I came to enjoy a slow paced logistics game that mostly involved walking from one place to another while trying to balance a heap of stuff on my back or towing a couple of trolleys, but I did. It’s a game that is difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t played it without making it sound like rubbish.

I found it disturbing, creepy, tedious, fun, atmospheric, and tense. The story was engaging but vague. The type of story that has you Googling as soon as it’s finished to try and work out what the heck was going on.

I found it a bit vague in terms of what I was supposed to be doing at times. In particular, there is a sequence very near the end of the main story that has you on a beach. I spent ages walking around the place and not getting anywhere. I’m still not sure if the game progressed because of something I did or if I just had to wait.

Red Dead Redemption 2

Another game I enjoyed immensely, though it was held back by an on-rails style of main-story gameplay. While exploring the land and doing side-quests, the game was very open and let you do what you want, as soon as you did a main story quest though, you were tightly restricted in how you did things.

I had a love/hate relationship with the slow pace of the game. Having to cook venison steaks one by one is tedious. The fact that you could moderately speed up the process by holding a button down only made it worse. Why not just let us skip the show and instantly cook our steaks or brew our coffees? When I only have an hour or less each night to play a game, it can be frustrating to have so much time taken up by tedious busy work.

On the other hand, there were time when I decided that I would spend my game time just camping, hunting dear, and cooking. Then that feature became much more enjoyable.

I also take points away from the game for its poor ability to interact with items. It was sometimes difficult to pick up an item. For instance, I might open a chest and see that there are some cigarettes and ammunition inside. I can’t get the game to let me pick up the ammunition because it only highlights the smokes for me to interact with, but I have as many smokes as I’m allowed to carry so I can’t pick those up without going into my inventory and dropping or smoking some. Annoying.

Observation

Quite a short game that has you playing as a space station AI. You have access to all of the station’s cameras, some of which are remote drones, and are tasked with helping what appears to be the station’s only surviving crew member after some kind of event that has shifted the station out of Earth’s orbit and into Saturn’s. It is probably closer to an interactive story than a game, as you don’t really have much freedom to do anything other than the task your crew member has set for you.

Games I started but am either still playing or lost interest in:

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla

I like it so far. I’ve just got to England.

The Outer Worlds

An ok game. I’ve found the combat to be a bit easy and the story not particularly engaging so I’ve stopped playing it.

Subnautica

A great game but a little lacking in direction for me, so I get bogged down doing some things and lose interest.

Ace Combat 6 and 7

Good for a bit of low stress fun but not engaging enough for me to want to complete either of them.

STAR WARS Jedi: Fallen Order

I was mostly enjoying this game but I’ve ended up in some cave system that has a puzzle involving balls and wind and I haven’t got past it. There is also an enemy here that I’m struggling with. I think this game has some Dark Souls style features that I’m not really enjoying.

Bomber Crew

Quite a fun little game. You have your own WW2 bomber that you take on missions. You recruit crew members who have various stats and so on that make them more or less useful in different crew positions. The core game-play mechanic is flying bombing missions. During a mission you will get bounced by fighters and you can let the crew handle them on their own or you can inhabit different gun positions and do it yourself. This part is a bit like a tower defence game. You also have to navigate to the target area, do the bombing run and maybe do some secondary objectives such as photographing some of the enemy installations.

Completing mission earns you currency that can be used for upgrading your bomber and your crew.

Kerbal Space Program

A great game that I just can’t devote enough time to start enjoying properly.

26

I played this and forgot to list it in my OP. I would recommend turning the difficulty down and it becomes a lot less “Dark Souls” like.

I really enjoyed Jedi Fallen Order and played it all the way through to the end. It suffered from a bad map system, which I hope they improve upon in its sequel.

I had a great experience playing it, though. Best Star Wars game I’ve played in many years.

27

I had to work from home and had some physical issues with working long periods at my home desktop, so I had to Switch my gaming priorities. I looked up all the Switch games on Metacritic and added them to my wishlist if they got an 80 or more and I thought I’d like them. Most of the list was snapped up while on sale, usually 50% off. There’s still a lot I haven’t gotten to, and a lot that I played a significant amount of but put down for awhile. Note that pretty much every AAA I decided I wasn’t going to like, simply because it seemed like it put in way too much work in terms of graphics than I would appreciate. I like simple cartoony graphics much more than realistic stuff, so I basically ignore AAA games.

Games I finished, from what I liked the best to least:

Slay the Spire - the very concept of this game (rogue-like deck-building game) appealed to me as a former Magic and Dominion player. It did not disappoint at all. It’s by far the most played game on my Switch, and I come back to it every so often when I’m getting down on my more recent purchases.

Steamworld Dig 2 - The Metroidvania I have enjoyed the most out of modern ones. Hollow Knight (which is not on this list since I played it earlier than this year) is overall a better game, and Axiom Verge is pretty good (see later), but I really really enjoyed this. It wasn’t nearly as oppressively difficult as Hollow Knight was at times, and it had some very good core mechanics as well as upgrades that slowly opened up various parts of the map you had caught glimpses of before. The cartoonish graphics work much better in my mind than going with the pixel art of Axiom Verge.

Ori and the Blind Forest - Another great Metroidvania, but this one suffers comparatively from relatively unoriginal movement upgrades and a difficulty that’s on par with Hollow Knight. Fortunately, you can save on any piece of ground that’s safe, and there’s practically no combat, so it’s all about trying the same platforming challenge over and over again. The “bosses” are just very lengthy platforming challenges. It’s not fun to beat your head into the wall when you know what you need to do but can’t do it, and then you die immediately once you do pull it off because you didn’t know what the next section looked like until you got there, and now you have to work on figuring it out slowly whenever you can manage to make it back.

Axiom Verge - I really like the game mechanics, but the graphics are really ugly compared to Super Metroid, which is what I assumed it was going for. The sound on the title screen was extremely off-putting, and in-game it’s not much better. But it’s still one of the better Metroidvanias around.

Return of the Obra Dinn - Finally switching genres, this is a pretty good puzzle/detective game with some really neat and original mechanics. Unfortunately, while there is information available so you don’t need to guess at all, the system of locking in correct deductions when there are 3 fully correct lends itself to guessing as you whittle down the possibilities. Still, figuring out the very last one before going on to the epilogue was quite epic (if annoying because I didn’t know why I was wrong), and I was rather impressed with the designers when I finally figured it out.

Salt and Sanctuary - I guess this is a Metroidvania (it fits most of the criteria) but it’s much more an RPG with Dark-Souls-inspired combat. The beginning of the game was extremely difficult as I hadn’t ever played anything like Dark Souls before, but as I went on it got easier and easier, and I probably was massively overleveled going in to the last few bosses because I crushed them without really trying. I played through it again without overleveling with a mage instead of a knight, and it was much more difficult. I guess one could say I liked the game more than the others above since I gave it a second playthrough which the others didn’t, but that’s only because most of the game is the combat mechanics, and mages play way differently. It also went a lot faster having explored the entire map already, so it’s not really an entire second playthrough.

Rogue Legacy - A decent game, reasonable mechanics with some stuff I hadn’t really seen before, but I think I’m not really a fan of action-platformer rogue-likes. Slay the Spire as a strategy rogue-like is fine, but I’m not coordinated enough to deal with permadeath in action games.

Steamworld Dig - I guess this might belong higher, but it’s not that great when compared to the sequel. No exploring and backtracking and just straight digging down further and further make it not really a Metroidvania even if it’s somewhat cut from that cloth in terms of upgrades allowing you to dig further. It’s mostly linear other than going back to town to resupply, and not very long.

Firewatch - Ugh. I forgot that “adventure” game means there’s not really any action and you just walk around and click on stuff. The story was somewhat interesting up until the point it was resolved, when it was just a complete let-down. I thought the final wrap-up was going to be much more involved than it actually was.

~

Games that I’m partway through that I gave up on at one point but I’ll probably come back to, from best to worst:

Reventure - The concept is really neat, and there’s a ton of subversion of various game tropes. I assume I’ll come back to this eventually, but I was sorta at an impasse and there were shinier things available so I set it aside. Graphics are intentionally bad, but sufficient for the purpose, and thus work really well within the concept of the game.

Guacamelee - I also bought the sequel, but since I didn’t manage to finish this one yet I haven’t started the sequel. I wasn’t grabbed enough by the game to stop from being distracted by something else, but it’s pretty good with a unique atmosphere. The movement and power upgrades aren’t all that interesting, and the story didn’t really push me to want to continue playing to find out what happened.

Celeste - I guess this game is good so far, but I’m not entirely impressed by it compared to the accolades it’s gotten. Maybe it gets better and better as you get closer to the finish? Sure, there are some platforming elements that I found interesting, but nothing mind-blowing yet.

Teslagrad - By the time I got to this I had no idea what to expect, it having been months since I read up on it. I guess it’s a puzzle-platformer. I guess it’s OK. Some interesting mechanics. I hadn’t heard anything about it before I read about it on Metacritic, so I don’t think it’s all that popular.

Gorogoa - A pure puzzle game with some neat mechanics. I set it aside after completing a certain chapter because it was getting really difficult and a bit hard to divine how to continue.

Yoku’s Island Express - I played probably 1/3 of this, and then was distracted by something else. The pinball mechanic in a metroidvania-esque game wasn’t really as interesting as I hoped it would be. Probably gets better later on, but didn’t pull me in.

Toki Tori 2+ - I’m not really sure what entirely is going on in this game. It’s some sort of puzzle game with a built-in adventure that makes it somewhat Metroidvania-esque only in that some sections of the game teach you more about how the game works, and that opens more paths for you. I got to some section where I was forced to go one direction and couldn’t immediately figure out how to do so and thus was stuck, and moved on to other games since I wasn’t too invested in figuring it out.

Steamworld Heist - I bought this mainly because of how much I liked Steamworld Dig 2. Unfortunately, this was a completely different genre, being a lot like X-Com but with one vertical and one horizontal dimension. I did not like X-Com. I got most of the way through it and lost interest. This is on the very bottom of my “will probably come back to” list.

~

Games I’m probably done with not having completed them:

Don’t Starve - I initially absolutely loved this game. Unfortunately, having to restart so many times due to dying from something new happening you weren’t expecting made it feel repetitive. When I finally got to the “campaign” and got through a couple stages, the prep work to be optimally prepared going into the next stage made it feel like work instead of a game, and I quit having never delved into the DLCs that came with the Switch edition. I get the feeling this controls way better on a PC.

Dead Cells - See Rogue Legacy. I can’t handle this game genre well, and it’s way harder. Interesting game, but not for me. I tried and tried and I just couldn’t do it. I don’t know how much there was left to do, but a certain level I was getting absolutely creamed in every time and I just gave up.

Snake Pass - I initially liked the mechanics, but in practice it was just too difficult for me to get much of anywhere. After being stuck on the same thing for a half hour having only played an hour before that, I figured this wasn’t going to be worth pursuing.

Moonlighter - Just way too generic and repetitive. After the second dungeon didn’t seem to have anything new to offer besides slightly different enemies, and seeing that I had already opened up all of the town and thus couldn’t expect to see much in the way of new mechanics, I got bored and quit. It’s not awful by any means, but most of what I’ve played is just way better.

Steamworld Quest - I thought I was really going to like this game. I liked the previous Steamworld games, and the basic mechanic of this game I thought was interesting to weave into an RPG. Unfortunately, the implementation of the basic mechanic was absolutely awful, IMO, and I found myself hating the game, as well as not caring about the story, a few hours in.

~

I’m currently playing Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. The Switch port is pretty bad compared to the screen captures I’ve seen on other systems. It randomly crashes in town, necessitating saving often when there. There seem to be an excessive number of component pieces in the game, many of which serve basically no function other than to say that there’s more mechanical content, because very few of them add much of anything useful to do. I mostly just bash guys with my club and eat food when I’m low on health. The no limit of food consumption makes it relatively easy to beat bosses, especially given how many times I’ve had to traverse the map looking for the way forward, which gets me a lot of ingredients and stuff to sell for money to buy food items I’ve already made before. It’s not worth full price IMO, though it certainly acts as like it should be. That said, given that there’s more to it than most of the games I’ve listed, and it’s more expensive, it’s hard to fairly compare it to others and I’m still in progress.

My list of games purchased to play still:

Shantae: Half-Genie Hero
Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse
Timespinner
Terraria
Bug Fables: Everlasting Sapling
Shovel Knight
Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 2
Dark Souls (got it for $20 on sale, I want to eventually try it out even if I’m not a fan of the graphical style)
What the Golf?
Transistor
Child of Light
Armello
Guacamelee 2
Okami HD
Bastion

28

Thanks to a Christmas gift card I have a new game on my list (though I haven’t played it yet): Ghost of Tsushima (I also bought Nier Automata as well). Unfortunately this probably puts Doom Eternal and No Man’s Sky on the back burner for a little bit.

29

I’m playing this now, and I decided that it would be more fun to look up how to get past this particular puzzle than to keep bashing my head against the wall. I’ve done most of this chapter, and would like to finish it tonight. :slight_smile:

(can I ask at what chapter you set it aside?)

Games I just bought today:
Gorogoa
Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Sid Meier’s Civilization VI
Okami

Games I’ve played this year:
Minecraft I’ve spent a ton of time in Minecraft. I’ve built several structures, a drowned farm, and I’m working on a zoo. But mostly it’s a virtual reality where I hang out with friends. (audio courtesy of Discord.)

Baba is You This is an awesome puzzle game. It’s very clever, lots of out-of-the-box thinking. Most of the solutions are rewarding. And you usually have a couple of puzzle open, so you rarely get stuck.

Ig and Ogg I probably don’t have the name quite right. This is a cute cartoon game I played with my daughter. I’m not very coordinated with games, and this let us (usually) give the hard part to her. It’s mostly about precise jumping, etc., but you have to solve how to get through each bit, and then execute it.

Witcher 3 This was too hard for me. Did I mention I’m not very coordinated with regards to video games. I bought it on Steam when it was on sale, but wasn’t able to get out of the training bit. I may try it again, now that I’ve spent more time playing video games.

Portal Yup. I know you all played it a million years ago. I bought it years ago, too, but I tried to play it with a touchpad, and gave up. when I bought Witcher, I found that I still had this in my Steam account, so I gave it a try. I used a mouse this time. :slight_smile: I got about 2/3 through it, I think. Fun game, but the graphics are sort of depressing.

30

All I remember is I had to use some tricks to get two clock hands of different colors aligned a certain way, and I had a hell of a time figuring out what sequence of actions allowed you to recombine them after getting them pointed the right directions. I don’t recall which chapter it was.

31

Ah – that’s the chapter I just finished. I’m on the next one. And like you, I feel like I know what I need to do, but can’t figure out how to do it. There must be a picture somewhere that does this…

32

My current obsession is Hardspace Shipbreaker. You work in an orbital shipyard, decommissioning spaceships. You have three tools at your disposal - a gravity gun for moving stuff, a laser cutter, and some demolition charges. Use them to break up ships into its individual components, and either drop them in your scavenger barge (for stuff like computer terminals or reactor cores), processing (for recyclable materials) or the furnace (for stuff that doesn’t have any other use). Each ship is basically a puzzle, where you have to figure out how to quickly, economically, and safely break apart the ship - watch out for fuel lines and coolant tanks. Clip one of them with your laser cutter, and it’ll blow your valuable salvage to smithereens.

The game’s in early access, which in this case means the engine is pretty much solid - I’ve encountered very few bugs. The content is a bit light - there’s only three or four different kinds of ship, but each ship model has a really wide variety of configurations, based on what sort of job it used to do - heavy cargo, scientific research, transport shuttle, etc. They just added a whole new ship class last week (along with the demo charges) so I’m hoping for a wider variety of ships and tools will be forthcoming.

33

The difficulty level increases when there’s three or more layers of images on top of each other. Don’t be afraid to try and unfold the same picture multiple times over.

34

Nier automata: I’m still playing this now. A beautiful game visually and aurally.
I started playing though for the story, and, while it sets it up well initially (dropping many clues that there’s more going on than what you’re being told), it’s feeling a bit ham-fisted at this point. The characters you’re controlling are clearly slow learners and the answers are just being dumped on them late in the second time through.
But I have been told this is a game that makes some people cry, and so there must still be another revelation that I haven’t seen yet.

The Witness: loved this game; the visual style is excellent and I just like that it respects the player enough to set some really fiendish puzzles. And importantly these are not the fake difficulty you get in unfair click adventure style puzzles, they’re just smart.

The Witcher 3: I haven’t got into this yet. There was a point in the tavern where the dialog seemed fresh enough that I really got the feeling of this being a rich environment with real people inside. But then a couple of quests just felt like standard RPG fare, and it’s been sidelined now versus the other games in this list.

Trials fusion: great fun game, self aware of how absurd it is. Unfortunately on PC there are control issues. It maps the throttle to a button. With third-party tools I mapped it to the analog stick but the zero (no throttle) point is hold left, not release the stick. It’s possible to complete much of the game with this control system, but not all of it. Later levels require repeated bunny hops and stops, and are really impossible without the correct mapping.

7 billion humans: a game where you write programs to achieve tasks. A cute game, and it does get pretty hard even for an experienced programmer like me. There’s not much to do while you don’t have a solution in mind though. A couple of times I would fire up the game, start brainstorming solutions for the current puzzle in my head and realize they all wouldn’t work, and end up closing the game again having not even written a single program.

Glad to hear so many are enjoying Subnautica. I played it last year and it blew me away (though I agree the late game has some design issues). The only reason I haven’t bought Below Zero is I know it may be the end of my social life.

35

One of my greatest personal gaming achievements is that my wife and I beat every main puzzle and almost all the bonus ones without looking anything up. We kept a notebook and made physical models a few times, but we made it all the way through and continued on into the post-game to finish more puzzles.

It was a great experience.

36

I will give it another chance, perhaps. What tends to happen once I stop playing a game is that I start a new one, then another new one, and another new one, etc. I may have several false starts before getting to a game I stick with. At the moment, Fallen Order was a new game that I started and didn’t click with. I often don’t go back to those games because I have other newer games to play.

37

Yes. If I wanted to give a hint to a friend, without spoiling the puzzles, it would be, “object permanence isn’t”.

38

Fallout 4- I disagree with the OP mostly. I absolutely love FO4. I treat it as a big sandbox and dont think too much about the main quest. Its so much fun to explore, loot, kill and build settlements that the main quest seems blah. However, I do wish that our actions had consequences with fellow survivors, that the SS wasnt voiced and that the rival factions were further developed. But…its still one of the most fun games I have played.

Football Manager…its such a fun footy simulator. For baseball fans its the OOTP of soccer. Its very deep and detail oriented. One downside is that because of the depth it now takes far longer to play through seasons. I still love starting in the 7th level of the English pyramid however.

39

Main quest? I did not care much about the main quest, either. I didn’t find the sandbox to be as good as in other Fallout games.

40

I thought there was very little sandbox element to New Vegas; almost all locations are part of some main story quest (but not necessarily every faction’s version of the main story quest).