Buckshot Roulette is fun. Not a lot to it, really, but a fun loop that I got a decent number of hours out of.

I bought Arctic Eggs after seeing a little bit of a playthrough but haven’t actually played it yet. Seems weird, which I like.

Yeah, half-heartedly doing French in Duolingo for a few years meant that I knew a bunch of words and could read stuff okay, but communicating and thinking in French was incredibly difficult. I took a couple of classes IRL to fill in those other skills, so now I can actually get by as long as people are a bit patient with me. It was easier for me to learn that stuff than other people in my classes because I had Duolingo experience, but Duolingo definitely isn’t enough on its own.

Foddy is a game developer with a history of making games with frustrating control schemes. He originally got notoriety for QWOP, where you use the QWOP keys to control the runner’s left and right knees and feet and run as far as you can. Lately he’s better known for Getting Over It, a rage platformer where you play as a guy in a cauldron who moves by using a hammer to drag/throw himself around.

The description and comments on the video 100% confirm multiplayer. Honestly I’d be excited for the game either way, but I have a lot of fun playing crafting/survival games with friends so it’s appreciated.

I finished the main story last night and I basically agree with you. It’s got plenty of issues, but overall it’s fun. It is neither the 9/10 game of most reviews I saw nor the 4/10 game that people want it to be.

I think my main issue is that it wants to have a story about the underworld and how you can’t trust anyone and you’re a huge underdog just trying to survive but it doesn’t want to commit to it. It feels thematically janky in places and ways that feel design-by-committee. It fills the shoes of Shadows of the Empire decently enough, but it feels like it was trying to be 1313 and failed.

Yep, it sounds pretty much exactly like what people expected.

Honestly, I’m on a bit of a Star Wars kick lately and it’s been long enough since I’ve played an Ubisoft open world to find some enjoyment, so I might pick this up. But it certainly doesn’t sound like it’s going to blow me away.

Yeah, there was a whole kerfuffle about it because all the files were still on the disc, therefore some jurisdictions re-rated the game to some version of adults only. Rockstar definitely did all the development work to get that sex in the game, they just decided not to show it in normal gameplay.

I went from being glad this goofy-looking game is getting some attention to realizing I wasn’t one of those 5000 wishlists already. Oops.

Game looks like it’ll be a fun little experience, I’m looking forward to it!

It is genuinely ridiculous how much content there is in this game for the price. Like, a lot of it looks like an excuse to play the same levels a dozen times with minor variations, but then there are tons of levels, lots of events, ongoing updates with new content of all types, so many different towers and upgrades to play with, community maps to add even more variety… It looks like I’ve played over 200 games and I have so much of the game that I haven’t even touched yet.

Just to throw a few other options on the pile:

• Valheim is more combat oriented, but is probably my favourite survival crafting game after Subnautica. You’re playing vikings trying to earn their way into Valhalla. I die a lot. Very fun.
• Planet Crafter is more chill, more jank, and more linear, but it’s a survival crafting game that is clearly heavily inspired by Subnautica. You are sent to a mars-like planet to terraform it as part of your prison sentence. It’s a great podcast game, just build and explore and watch numbers go up.
• Less on the survival crafting side of things, the environmental storytelling is also really good in Outer Wilds and Return of the Obra Dinn. Very different games, but they were actually what I went to after Subnautica to scratch that itch and it worked weirdly well.

The art direction seems kind of off, but sometimes that can shake itself out in game.

The tone of the trailer is definitely not the Dragon Age vibe. Lighthearted Oceans-style crew selection to deal with what looks like some sort of world-ending calamity? Yeah, that’s not right.

Things could work out but I’m sure not feeling optimistic.

My prediction is that people will overhype it with lots of hopes for super complex systems, call it shit when it has fewer mechanics and civs than 3/4/5/6 with all their DLC, and then eventually decide it’s good after a couple years of DLC and patches.

You know, the usual Civ cycle. I’ll probably buy it day 1 assuming it isn’t actually broken, per usual, and dump a couple hundred hours in it, per usual.

Mount and Blade: Warband has multiple incredible total conversions. I’ve dumped a lot of time into Prophecy of Pendor and The Last Days, probably more than the base game.

For actually free games there are so many options that it really comes down to taste. Unciv is a fantastic reimplementation of Civ 5. Super Auto Pets is a fun casual auto battler. HoloCure is a really good Vampire Survivors-style game themed after Hololive vtubers. There are tons of MMOs and shooters that are F2P and good, but I know most of those from hearsay rather than experience.

I only played a few hours of Dome Keeper but it was quite a bit of fun. There’s already a fair amount of variety possible in the runs but not so much that this isn’t appreciated.

What is the current state of the Early Access version?

“Most planned core features of the game have been implemented. Single-player and multiplayer modes are fully functional and we have a separate dedicated server tool if you want a server running 24/7. There are currently six fully developed biomes out of a planned total of eight (plus the Ocean). There are hundreds of different items (weapons, materials, armor etc) in the game, to be found or crafted by the player. We have over 200 building pieces, and about 50 different types of creatures including monsters, animals and bosses.”

It sounds like the game’s getting Ashlands plus one more biome, but not much for new features. So depending on your definition of feature complete it’s at least pretty close anyways. From this point on it’s theoretically more of the same.

I’m pretty much on the same page as you, although I started playing a couple months ago with a couple friends. The game is obviously not abandoned, and it’s a pretty full game even with more to come. We finally built a hot tub on the weekend and I don’t know how I’m supposed to expect more from this game than chilling in a tub with your naked viking bros.

I spent a whole sick day blasting through a good chunk of the games a while back. It’s weirdly fun. I basically just bought it for the pin pull game that always infuriates me in ads but spent several hours getting all the stars in the parking lot game instead.

I’ve happily paid $70 CAD for games significantly shorter and smaller in scope than Shadow of the Erdtree looks. Plus I’m wanting to jump back into Elden Ring anyways and I more than felt like I got my money’s worth the first couple of times. So $56.16 CAD (what my receipt says it cost me) is pretty much fine for that.

This might be a weird take, but I don’t really care whether I’m paying for a new game, a DLC, a microtransaction, or even a gacha pull. If it seems like it’s somehow worthwhile, whether that’s by fun or hours played or novelty or whatever, I don’t really worry that much about what form it takes. This usually means I just buy new games (how often is a microtransaction at all reasonable to pay for?) but I don’t really worry about DLC pricing if it looks good.

Honestly? I just let the hype train roll me into the steam store. Not gonna pretend it was a smart decision, certainly not gonna advise anyone else do it.

What were the serious technical flaws at launch? I remember some performance issues but nothing super serious.

SMTV nailed the general gameplay for me better than any other SMT or Persona game, so I’m interested in better performance on PC and what looks like a semi-functional story. Despite all its flaws I’ve been wanting to play through again, this would make that feel less wasteful.

… But I do wish I didn’t need to rebuy the whole game.

I finished playing through with a friend a few weeks ago. Act 3 wasn’t notably more buggy than the rest of the game for us, and most bugs we came across were fixed by a quick restart anyways.

Great game, highly recommend even if it’s probably overhyped to some extent. We clocked over 100 hours in our playthrough and still want to keep playing.

Man, OSRS dodging most of the scummy monetization has been fantastic and has contributed greatly to it being relatively lively for so long. I can’t imagine a new owner won’t want to extract every possible drop of value from it, especially an investment firm.

Since release I’ve been playing BG3 every week with a friend and we finally beat the game on Saturday. Great game, but man we’ve been playing it for a long time.

Picked up Viewfinder yesterday. Fun little indie puzzler. Very cool concept, don’t know how much I care about the plot or anything but it’s got some of the same trippy fun as Superliminal.

Oh, and I played a couple hours of Against the Storm and have been hesitant to pick it up again because I’m pretty sure it’s going to be problematic for my already busy schedule.

I picked up Binding of Isaac: Rebirth and have been doing runs now and then. I played the original when it first came out and couldn’t get into it; the years of development seem to have done it a lot of good, feels much more playable than I remember.

Chants of Sennaar. Thought it would fun, turned out to be probably my favourite thing I played this year.

BG3, TOTK, and Vampire Survivors are all very up there as well. Really great year for games.

The fact that foreplay was a sword fight was much more of a turn on than anticipated.

Sounds like the client will keep working until something breaks compatibility, which could happen whenever. Backend updates, chrome functionality, lots of things could happen. Or nothing. They’re not supporting it, they can’t guarantee anything.

32 bit game support is a bit more unclear; I’d probably recommend downloading games you like to play a lot, I’m not sure they’ll be distributing 32 bit macos versions long-term.

Keep in mind that the main comparison point for it was Skyrim, which was pretty much the previous RPG people got sucked into.

The story was pretty good and it had a good number of meaningful side quests. Gwent was also a lot of fun, and the Blood and Wine DLC was another step above to keep the hype alive for longer. The combat can get fairly involved without feeling overly complex. Rather than the blank slate of many games of the era, you play as Geralt, who actually has relationships in the world to draw you in.

Basically, rather than the unfocused sandbox of random stuff in Skyrim, it was a more involved story-rich experience that a lot of people appreciated.

That said, the hype was ridiculous. It’s a very good RPG, not the second coming of Christ. It didn’t really do anything new, it was just a solid experience.

I’ve cried a few times in my life at games. This is the only one that had me outright sobbing.

I find installing via Lutris works most of the time for most games. Definitely not as clean or easy as going through Steam, but it’s typically not hard enough to avoid entirely.

This is one of those games where every time I see it, I want it, it looks so crazy, but it also looks like it will require so many hundreds of hours to understand that it’s hard to commit to buying it.

Still, congrats to them on the 1.0 announcement, the game has so many weird interactions that I wasn’t sure they’d ever be comfortable pulling the trigger on that.

To add: I thought Below Zero felt more “designed” than the original. The biomes feel less natural, the progression is a bit more obvious, the story guides you along quite a bit more. Even just the vehicle progression makes it a little less satisfying to explore around—finding a route to get the cyclops through small cave systems was just amazing.

I ended up treating it more like a game and less like a survival sandbox, if that makes sense. I was given goals rather than finding them.