Picked up Dave the Diver because everyone keeps saying it’s amazing. Sure enough, it’s addictive and definitely worth the $13. It hits the Stardew Valley type of gameplay loop and has been perfect on Steam Deck. I’ve got about 6 hours into it in 2 days.
I may still grab Marble It Up because I loved Marble Blast Ultra on the 360 back in the day.
The premise is that the planet starts about (with default settings) thirty days away from beibg destroyed by a meteor. You and the other couple dozen or hundred people on the server have the obvious goal of stopping that meteor. But nobody actually makes you do it and since you all start with stone tools and wheelbarrows, none of you even have the means to do it in the beginning.
The idea is that you band together with other like-minded players and form a settlement and each of you specializes into a different set of professions (for example, I am a shipwright and logger mainly but also have a small pottery workshop going). In time, you find new ressources or ways to utilise already discovered ressources to eventually build cars, boats, larger settlements and stuff. While that is happening, you can (and probably want to) set some rules for what is allowed and forbidden in your settlements radius (you widen that radius by increasing culture, mostly via decorative items). The rules you set (and players actually have to vote for and come to agreements with) almost always follow a simple “If x then y (else z)” programming logic and can be incredibly creative. Once voted for, those rules are law and can’t be broken by the subset of people affected by that rule. Seriously, one town on my current server basically gutted themselves accidentally by miswording a law. They intended a specific player to be forbidden of doing anything in their town but the wording was "If {name} is resident then prevent ". But since, yes, that player on the server was a resident of something (another town or their own homestead, doesn’t matter), so condition true, every citizen in town was banned from doing anything meaningful, since it wasn’t worded as “prevent {name} from doing xyz”.
You’re welcome! I’ve played 46 hours of it in the ten days since I bought it and I haven’t played more basically only because we’re on vacation now and I have to work to afford living lol.
Categorically disagree. I am a grown arse adult. Splatoon 3 tilts me like no other game, due to some very deliberate FOMO game design decisions and a very poor matchmaking algorithm. Whilst there’s no real money store in the game, it has a lot of other problems that make it just as bad as Roblox imo
Can you elaborate a bit? I played Splatoon 2 until Nintendo started charging for the online but, as far as I know, Splatoon 3 only has a free battlepass.
Honestly it’s a combination of the battlepass system and the stage design causing constant, very fast-paced combat. The stages are too small, so players are funnelled into the middle of the stage. This also causes spawncamping if the matchmaking is even slightly unbalanced (which it is most of the time), as one wipe will allow a team to push all the way into spawn.
Previous Splatoon games were very good about this - most stages were abstract shapes, with a lot of terrain, meaning combat was rare, and the game encouraged painting over fighting as painting would net the most points on a per-match basis. Splatoon 3’s new maps are all thin, straight lines, which forces players into that central killzone.
The battlepass, along with some very poor decision making around the results screen, which shows the winning team celebrating, means that losses feel bad. The matchmaking similarly punishes winstreaks by forcing losestreaks, usually matching you against people above your skill level, but on a team with players below your skill level. Whilst this is very addictive, it makes losing feel genuinely awful, and a losing streak causes tilting due to the FOMO of the battlepass.
Hope this writeup makes sense. I view Splatoon 3 as a genuinely bad game because of these factors, and greatly prefer Splatoon 2.
Seconding splatoon. Very kid and adult friendly, and basically no micro transactions (unless you count amiibo). No other game has kept my attention like it has for the last year
🤓 The Talos Principle 2 is taking up my tiny slices of gaming time. Tons of puzzles to solve, a really engaging story to unfold and the music is just beautiful. If you played the first edition (from 2009) it’s totally like that and more. I’m, only halg-way through it but yeah, it’s great and I can’t wait to see what comes next.
If I had been the one to decide what features this sequel should have, I never would have considered including a playable New Jerusalem or having NPC companions or any of the new stuff. And if you had asked me what I thought about those features before the game came out, I would have said it sounds like they don’t understand what people liked about the first game.
But this game surprised me in numerous ways and I honestly loved every hour of my playthrough.
The demonic cat-sith called Big Ears could be summoned (Gaelic taghairm Scottish Gaelic pronunciation: [tɤrʲɤm]) to appear and grant any wish to those who took part in the ceremony. The ceremony required practitioners to burn the bodies of cats over the course of four days and nights.
Can anyone recommend a hunting or fishing game? I’ve been into watching outdoors videos and activities, but never been on any of those activities and pretty much can only do it virtually right now lol.
I haven’t seen anything new and exciting on sale. Some stuff I already have is on sale, though. BG3 is great. Pillars of Eternity is also great.
I’ve been playing Guild Wars 2 a lot. It’s on sale. New expansion came out recently. It’s the only MMO that doesn’t piss me off. Feels like an actual video game.
Anyone who’s waiting on BG3 to be cheaper or GOTY edition or whatever, try Divinity: Original Sin 2. It’s amazing, and the definitive edition is only $13.50 USD right now. No need to have played the first one - I never did and D:OS2 is probably one of my favourite games of all time now.
Seems very good. It’s wvw reset night right now. There’s a 16 person queue to get into the eternal battlegrounds map, and <10 on the other ones. Non reset nights the wvw maps are usually active with the occasional queue. I do a fair amount of wvw. The other night we had a wild 40 v40 v~40 fight in the garrison. Great stuff.
For PvE stuff, there’s almost always people doing the meta events. I never had trouble getting a group for fractals or strikes. Raids I see sometimes in the LFG tool, but I only do them with a training guild I joined.
Also, with PvE they added megaservers a while ago so it doesn’t matter what “server” you’re on. For WvW, they’re supposedly implementing guild-based matches instead, but that’s been in the works for a while.
That’s great to hear that everything is still going with a healthy population. WvW is definitely a ton of fun.
I remember one skirmish we had where we came upon an enemy “blob” by a small lumber mill (I think?) and they all jumped up and stacked on a tree stump. For what purpose, I’m not sure, but I like to think they thought they had the higher ground. We wiped them, of course.
Dyson Sphere Program just got a pretty substantial update adding combat mechanics. If you like other production/logistics games like factorio/mindustry/satisfactory I highly recommend it. The amount of control they give you over sorting/distribution/etc combined with the ability to create blueprints can make for some rapid scalability to your manufacturing operation, and the same mechanics can be leveraged to now wage a competent and scalable offence against the new enemy.
Definitely second Dyson Sphere Program! I'm not at all interested in the combat (it's optional), but now that they have that completed they'll be updating other features too. I'm hundreds of hours in and still come back to it.
Bought the game when it came to Steam a couple of years back and put 100 or so hours and uninstalled it feeling that it needs way more content.
Re-installed last week just because without reading the latest update news and boy oh boy was I genuinely surprised to see the combat and new QoS stuff been added. Highly recommend to anyone that has enjoyed Factories and/satisfactory. The build is somewhere in between both.
Lately I’ve been playing Spark the Electric Jester 3, Freedom Planet 2, Sonic Superstars, Vampire Survivors, and Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade. I think all of these are on sale!
I’m a platformer gal, especially fast-paced Sonicy ones, so Spark the Electric Jester, Freedom Planet, and of course Sonic Superstars are right up my alley. Sonic Superstars really isn’t a $60 game but I’d say it’s $36 sale price is all right. Freedom Planet 2 absolutely nails fluid 2D level design with insane levels of polish. And Spark 3 may be one of the finest 3D platformers ever made, with a tight control system and a incredibly high skill ceiling.
Vampire Survivors, however, is not a platformer. It’s a bite-sized RPG where your control of your character is exclusively directional and what upgrades to their skillset they get. It is incredibly addictive and while each session can last a maximum(ish) of 30 minutes I find myself wanting just one more try all the time. If you’re not sure about it, the mobile version is free with ads, but it’s really best played on PC.
And I don’t think I have words for FFVIIR. Say what you want about Square Enix (such as “fuck those guys”), they make a solid JRPG, and this enhanced remake of the first… like, quarter of the first disc of Final Fantasy VII? is excellently done and takes enough liberties with the storyline to feel fresh without feeling so different that it’s unrecognizable. (and the fact that they took liberties is actually a story point in and of itself but I’ll just leave it at that)
If you liked vampire survivors and retro graphics you might want to check out Halls of Torment. It looks like old school Diablo but it’s a vampire survivors like game.
I’ve been playing Bomb Rush Cyberfunk and Automation/Beam.ng mostly but I’ve been severely addicted to the free demo for Half Sword. It’s the most brutal, jankiest medieval combat simulator I’ve ever played and it’s as frustrating as it is fun. I can’t stop playing it.
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Aktywne