So, what're you playing?

[eldaec]

A week of the xcom2 long war of the chosen mod and I need to find some way to not go to bed at 2am every day.

Also, was surprised to discover there are still guys patching this mod. Mostly bug fixes and adding new maps.

[Rasix]

BG3 and Street Fighter 6.

SF6 has been a hoot. I hadn't really played a competitive game of Street Fighter (or any fighting game for more than a couple matches) since middle school. So, of course I'm a Modern controls Marisa main. I've got old man, dad reactions, so not having to manually attempt super moves is fantastic. You lose some normals/specials (some good ones at that) and damage, but I don't see myself going to Classic controls. For one, I don't think my left arm could take it unless I bought a stick. Modern works fine with a pad, but I'm getting some left thumb arm issues that I've never had before.

edit: Made someone rage quit last night. That was a sublime feeling.

[Samwise]

I finally checked out the new daily NYT puzzle "Connections" today after weeks of seeing colored squares drift through my feed.  It's fun, basically like solitaire Codenames.  Unlike Wordle you can't solve it by grinding through a dictionary with algebra.   

[Khaldun]

It makes me ragey because it only has the connections the puzzle designer has thought of, not the ones I think of

[Samwise]

Yeah, exactly like Codenames.     But I think the puzzle designer for Connections puts way more thought into it than your average Codenames spymaster does so I'm very okay with it.  Knowing that there are exactly four sets and they're disjoint also helps a lot.  I realized halfway through my first puzzle that if you're trying to find the groups one at a time you're doing it wrong.

[Samwise]

Dredge.

Nice relaxed fishing sim with exploration, inventory management, and a sanity meter.

 

[Setanta]

Robocop is surprisingly good. Between that, The Expanse and Darkest Dungeon 2, I've put Baldur's Gate 3 on the backburner for a bit. Roboquest has surprised me as well, it's a good, fun game.

[Hawkbit]

Dredge.

Nice relaxed fishing sim with exploration, inventory management, and a sanity meter.

 

Such a good game for this year. It pairs nicely with Dave the Diver; both have good game flow in small chunks.

[Velorath]

To the point where they just released some free Dredge DLC for Dave the Diver a couple weeks back.

[Falconeer]

Finally finished Baldur's Gate 3. It took me 180 hours of /played but I did all the side quests I could find. Incredible game, and this is from someone who hates the setting and was physically prepared to dislike it before launch.

With that out of the way, I was ready to restart Cyberpunk 2077 or Wasteland 3, but fell deep into a hole called Xanadu Next, a small dungeon crawling RPG from 2006. I'm surprised I didn't know it, but it turns out that it went mostly ignored, so I'd call it an underrated gem.

On the PS5/4, I'm still working my way through Labyrinth of Refrain.

EDIT: I also have a multiplayer bi-weekly game of Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader with three other friends. Coming from Baldur's Gate 3 it's hard to go back to an isometric CRPG with "normal" production value, but this truly is a fine RPG which I'd love to play by myself, except we promised each other to keep it for the group nights...

[Samwise]

Finished Dredge, would heartily recommend.  Started Against the Storm which seems promising so far.

[Riggswolfe]

Finished Dredge, would heartily recommend.  Started Against the Storm which seems promising so far.

I keep thinking about picking up Dredge but I'm afraid the gameplay loop might get old after awhile as it looks like it is primarily:

Daytime: Fish, go to town to sell, go out and fish some more.
Nighttime: Fish, catch elder things, try not to die. Go to town to sell, repeat.

This is based mostly on the trailers I must admit and is leaving out stuff like it appears you can buy stuff for your boat and better fishing gear and stuff like that.

[Samwise]

Yeah, what you described is the first game day, and after that it's more about upgrading your boat and exploring the world.  Think GTA or Arkham with all the collectibles and POIs and stuff scattered around the edges of a main storyline.  The main thrill for me was exploring new areas and figuring out what their deal is -- like, one area is an abandoned tropical resort at the edge of a coral reef that surrounds a giant sinkhole, and the thing you need for that part of the story quest is in the sinkhole, but you have to do some puzzling and side questing to figure out how to get it without getting eaten by the thing that lives there.  Each area has its own vibe and its own dangers, some of which only come out at night, but not all.  Learning your way around and picking up all the upgrades that make things incrementally easier really scratches that explorer/achiever itch.

(edit) I checked and I have 18 hours in it -- didn't 100% all the achievements but I had fun pootling around doing all the side quests and making sure I explored all the nooks and crannies before I finished the main quest.  You could probably blaze through and "beat" the game in about a third of that time.

[Riggswolfe]

See, I didn't even know it had a main quest. I thought it was more of a sort of slice of life game. I may have to grab it now the next time it's on sale. It does sound really neat the way you described it.

[eldaec]

Got around to playing wasteland 3 and it's fine. Bit janky but fun.

But what I really like is the way the game handles moral choices and consequences. Shockingly the evil choice isn't just moustache twirling and being rude to people for no reason. Either it tempts you with meaningful rewards or the choices are actual dilemmas with a mix of both good and bad consequences whatever you do, and consequences that are visible in gameplay and not just cutscenes.

It is all undercut by being very silly, and it is in no way high art. But that's fine.

[Reg]

I just started another run through Skyrim.

Note: You may have heard the drama about the latest patch allowing for paid-for mods to be sold in the Creation Club. It hasn't affected me at all. All of my mods (and I have a lot at this point) still work just fine and there are few new ones in the Creative Club and none that I can envision ever wanting to pay for.
I'm sure that long term this is a bad thing and after Starfield I'm convinced their glory days are long gone. I sure as hell won't ever be doing another 100-dollar preorder just for early access.

[Zetor]

Played through a few games during the holidays, adventure games / superhero themed stuff from the steam sale.

Strangeland: Surreal psychological horror from the developers of Primordia, was pretty enjoyable and didn't overstay its welcome. I think it was a cool thematic choice to have one voice actor for almost all of the characters (just like the narrator / voice of the skills in Disco Elysium). It's decent as an adventure game too, the puzzles make sense even in the weird dream/nightmare logic of the game (though there was a particularly obnoxious puzzle that I spent too much time on). Easily worth the $4.50 (and like 5 hours of gameplay).

Superhero League of Hoboken: I remember playing this post-apoc superhero comedy adventure / RPG hybrid (how is that for genre specificity) back in the late 1990s, but I also remember not knowing wtf was going on for most of it. I figured it'd be more fun to replay it now that I'm a bit more familiar with the various US / pop culture stuff, and it was a pretty fun experience. I think the adventure part is stronger than the RPG part, since combats tended to feel like a repetitive slog (though still amusing to meet all kinds of weird monsters with pun-based names and special attacks). Definitely worth the $2.50 or whatever it was during the sale.
Also very prescient:

Midnight Suns: Another steam sale buy, it was... decent, not great. The design of the card battle system is solid, and I like the random card affix system in particular to add some tactical variance (without being easily min-maxable, that'd just be boring). The combat missions are ok to good, but they do get repetitive -- at around 40 hours in, I was just using the same tactics over and over to clean up missions, and there's only a few mission types (in fact, almost all of the story missions use the same enemy / goal templates as random missions, only with some custom art / cutscenes / conversations). It doesn't help that some characters' decks are WAY more powerful than others', and it takes a lot of grinding to upgrade cards so they become not-useless. The strategic layer was a bit 'neither here nor there': a few too many systems that felt redundant (did the game really need that many currencies / base activities?), but no real strategic choices to make, just pressing one button between combats to take care of research / hero ops / etc, felt like Chimera Squad (that's not good company to be in). But the combat was still good overall, and carried the 'game' part for me.
The noncombat parts though, ugh. It felt like playing a discount bin version of FE Three Houses without most of the actual depth. Lots of chores that were mostly running around, activities that felt like I was playing High School Drama Simulator 2023 (which would be ok if the cast was all teenagers, but only like 3-4 of them are) with some dating sim elements and a really simplistic paragon/renegade system (not that any of the choices seemed to matter, so I just went for 100% dark side, it has the better cards). The overarching story was ok, but the writing for most of the characters was really bad / cringeworthy, I just ended up skipping 90% of it. Maybe it's true to the characters in the comics, idk. Then again, srpg/trpg writing is mediocre in the best of days, so I'm probably being a bit too harsh. Anyway, not a bad game overall (I'd even say it's good in the deckbuilder subgenre, but there are many better tactical RPGs out there), but definitely sale fodder.

[Count Nerfedalot]

The Countess and I replayed The Planet Crafter.  They've made a lot of additions to the game but it's still not finished.  We jumped back in to try out the new multiplayer beta, but it's not a very good multiplayer game.  There's no option (yet?) to run a server, the host player has to stay logged in for any others to join their game.  And you can't afk without dying, over and over and over.  Which is not a real problem as long as you've stashed everything so your inventory is empty.  But the biggest problem is playing with someone else is more frustrating than fun.  The start is very hard as there's a limited amount of food so it's difficult enough solo and no extra food for additional players. The only real option is to immediately split up to cover more area in your scavenging for food until you get the ability to grow your own. And getting that requires you to focus on one particular track (of four or so) or risk starving to death.  Then once you get to base building and serious construction you end up interfering with each other if you try to build separate bases. It only really works well if everyone is clustered in one base and coordinating everything you do as once you get drones to start doing your fetching for you EVERYTHING is shared across the planet, energy, mining resources, etc.  And you end up missing out on a lot of the content if you split up the tasks between you to maximize your rate of advancement.

On the other hand, it's still a great solo game for builders, so we each started our own new solo games to play through from the beginning again. The only enemy is the environment, and everything you do works towards improving that environment.  There's a fair amount of exploration, and some factorio/satisfactory type elements, and some moderately flexible building components for just goofing around making interesting structures. But mostly it's about building first the machines to keep you alive, then the machines to do the terraforming, and then once you hit a couple milestones in the tech tree it becomes about building the machines to build the machines for you, plus having them building a steady supply of trade goods you use to acquire more stuff. 

The game is very well paced. Every time the game starts to get dull and feel like a grind you hit a new technology breakthrough and something changes dramatically leaving you a whole bunch of stuff to do to massively increase your rate of advancement in the terraforming.  There's always several things that need to be done, rarely are any of them critical but all of them are necessary to do eventually.  They've also added quite a bit of lore with some mysteries and hidden things to find and puzzle out. Plus a few more biomes and sites to scavenge. 

It's an admittedly niche game, and still in early access and incomplete - you can't actually win/finish the game yet.  But all in all I think there's enough there and it's a good enough game to be worth playing by it's intended audience. There are very few bugs, nothing significant any of us have found. If you're worried that playing it now will spoil it for when it gets a "final" official release, well, that may be a problem but honestly probably not.  It's a small team and moving slow enough that it's going to be a while yet.  I certainly enjoyed restarting from scratch after a year's absence and I'm not usually one for replaying games that will have so little variance from play to play.  It sounds worse than it is, but it is still a valid concern so take that into consideration before jumping in.  The current game is good for at least 50 hours of play till you reach the end of the content, and that would be if you're focused on maximizing your advancement at all times.  If you're happy to rest from that for a bit while you build a nice base to work in, or reorganize everything to make your production chain more efficient, or spend some time exploring every wreck and cave and biome, then you can easily double that.

[Samwise]

One of my high school D&D buddies gifted me BG3 out of the blue.  Have not played the previous BG games.  I'm excited to play it and also am a little scared to start because everything I've heard makes it sound like I'll be sinking a few hundred hours into it, so I'm trying to wring a little more fun out of Against the Storm before I put it aside and then probably never get back to it.   

[Fraeg]

One of my high school D&D buddies gifted me BG3 out of the blue.  Have not played the previous BG games.  I'm excited to play it and also am a little scared to start because everything I've heard makes it sound like I'll be sinking a few hundred hours into it, so I'm trying to wring a little more fun out of Against the Storm before I put it aside and then probably never get back to it.   

I took my time, and I think I had 209 or so hours for one playthrough.  I don't see myself playing it again, I mean sure there will be things I missed, but damn 200 hours is MMO territory for me. I had not played BG since BG1 back in the 90s.

Up next Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2.  BG3 got my RPG juices flowing again.

[Riggswolfe]

One of my high school D&D buddies gifted me BG3 out of the blue.  Have not played the previous BG games.  I'm excited to play it and also am a little scared to start because everything I've heard makes it sound like I'll be sinking a few hundred hours into it, so I'm trying to wring a little more fun out of Against the Storm before I put it aside and then probably never get back to it.   

The good news is you don't have to have played 1 and 2. There's 2 characters from those games that make cameos but they're barely in it really and all you're missing is the "oh cool, it's so and so!" moment when you meet them. There are a few references here and there to 1 and 2 but it's relatively easy to pick up from context. "Back in blahblah time X people did bad things in the city." type of stuff you might hear about or read in a book or something.

[Hawkbit]

I finally got a PS Portal. It's a slick device but it's getting refunded. I dislike the layout; the center map button gets replaced by touching the screen. It's a messy function.

More importantly, there's this slightly perceptible input lag that I just can't get past. Along with the constant slight upscale and downscale as the device renders the PS5, the input just doesn't feel natural.

Anyone running PS5 remote play on their steam deck? I keep hearing it's amazing, but this Portal experience has me now very put off.

[Rendakor]

I feel like there's always going to be input lag in any streaming device, but I haven't tried it on Deck specifically.

[Falconeer]

In a month where Final Fantasy VII Rebirth just released and Dragon's Dogma 2 is coming in a week, Unicorn Overlord is my early GOTY. Fantastic. Instant classic. Dreamy.

[Samwise]

Played Slay the Princess long enough (exactly one hour) to get the "finish the game" achievement, will probably play some more since based on all the locked achievements it looks like there are a lot of other branching paths I haven't seen.

It's got elements of Doki Doki Literature Club, Stanley Parable, and just a dash of Disco Elysium.  I don't think it's quite as good as any of those games, but it's pretty dang good, and if you liked all those you'll find something to enjoy here, I think.