Shadow Tactics and Shadow Gambit are two brilliant gems that come to mind by Mimimi Studios. I discovered them a few weeks ago and just learned they went defunct back in August because they were too niche a genre and couldn’t make enough sales. They’re Stealth Strategy games where you control a group of ninjas/pirates through a heavily guarded level to the objective, stealthily murdering everyone along the way. If you get seen you can easily jump back to a quick save and try again. You’re not overpowered and can easily be killed by enemies so save scumming is deliberately built in to the experience to experiment with your approach.
Shadow Tactics is set in feudal japan. This one has an expandalone.
Desperados III then takes the game to the wild west.
Shadow Gambit goes wild and gives us a magic ship and an undead pirate crew. It has two rather pricey expansions, one bringing in a character from the first game. It also has a hidden character to unlock after you beat the game, which is kinda cool.
You can notice how each game perfects the formula, but they’re overall extremely similar. I would very much recommend the last one if you have to pick one, as the focus on magic allowed them to go truly wild with the character abilities. Gaelle shooting corpses and partymembers around with her cannon is a particularly fun one.
Sidenote: Far as I can tell they didn’t go bankrupt or anything, they just … stopped. They’re done or so. Did the same concept three times, happy now, works for them.
rogue Lords: it is inspired by Slay the Spire (StS). Card game with roguelike element. Here, the cards are replaced by your minions skill. But the right set of skill is less frustating to build than in StS. Making it a more fun experience, and the graphics are way above StS(not hard). As in StS , with luck/skill you can manage to build some 'infinite deck" where you never let go of the control of the battle.
Crosscode is one of my favourite games of all time. It’s an immensely charming action RPG heavily inspired by the 2D Zelda games. It has some absolutely insane combat and surprisingly challenging puzzles. The story is also very good and really touching at times. The devs spent 7 years making this game and I feel like it never got anywhere near the attention it deserved.
It’s just $20 on steam AND it has a free demo, so there’s no reason not to check it out!
I bounced off Crosscode hard. Which sucks because I wanted to love it. The pacing and difficulty were all over the place. And making the puzzle dungeons a race between you and other characters just made me hate them. I want to stop and think! After dying to a particularly nasty boss I was trying to beat as fast as possible so I could maybe eke out a win in the dungeon, I ended up cranking the difficulty all the way down, and was the last out of the dungeon anyway. I put the game down and haven’t looked back. That was about 25 hours in, and nothing of consequence had occurred with the plot by then, anyway. I might go back sometime and see if it gets better, but it left me pretty sour.
I love the entire 16 bit era, and JRPGs, and action RPGs, and Crono Trigger, and difficult games, but Crosscode just took all those elements and somehow made them unpalatable to me.
I think if I have one criticism of the plot is that it takes a while to get going. If I may, I’d recommend you to play thorough it at your own pace, possible also at the lowest difficulty just to experience the story. It’s well worth it just for that.
I can’t even remember any plot. I know I got past some hourglass shaped pyramid and then a few more steps. But it all felt utterly disconnected. I might have actually finished it, but I can’t even recall.
If you play with M+KB, you can aim as good as the game clearly expects you to. But you will rapidly develop RSI from the spam-clicking, nevermind how the melee attack has the weirdest input I’ve seen in a long time.
If you use a controller, most controls work fine, but in return you cannot aim that well. Which is still preferrable, but the game clearly originally built for precise aiming.
Combined with how janky all the enemy attacks and hit boxes are, it just feels frustrating. Plus the difficulty is wild, 90%+ are boringly easy, and then the odd totally normal enemy wipes you in seconds.
It really sucks that you bounced so hard. Some tips in case you ever do want to go back to it:
Enemies are puzzles too. Nearly every single enemy in the game has a specific trick to them that, once you get it down you can beat them much more easily. This includes bosses. Usually this is indicated by breaking the enemy.
Don’t worry about the races. I think I only ever won a single race in the entire game, and it has literally zero consequence other than a couple lines of dialog. It’s purely a feel good thing, and to connect you more with Emily through a friendly competition.
The story can feel a bit confusing and disconnected because there’s 2 stories happening at once: the crossworlds story and the actual story. The actual story only really starts to get serious towards the end, so until then just focus on enjoying the fake-mmo world!
If it’s not for you, it’s not for you and there’s nothing I can do about that, but I really want others to enjoy this game as much as I did because I do believe it’s something special.
Did Sony announce a PS5 Pro? I think its just a rumor at this time. And even if so, we don’t know what the system can do, what restrictions or problems it could have and what it will cost. We don’t know if the console will be available without a problem. We don’t know when the thing comes out either, if ever. It’s incredible hard to know if its worth waiting, if we don’t know anything.
And second, if you really need a console right now, then buy one. My thumb of rule is, if you can wait, then wait. So this is ultimately your decision.
After Hades, I hope some folks went back and played Supergiant’s other titles. I love them all. But even amongst them, Pyre is the underdog, unknown, shunned. And I think it’s fantastic. The music and writing is top notch. You can really see the bones of Hades in all their games, but they polished their world building and story telling to perfection in this one.
I think it’s difficult to know where we really are in the release cycle for this console, as it’s been disrupted so much by initial unavailability and COVID. Normally, we’d be due a Pro version this year, but it could be this year, it could be next year, it could be never.
Last generation I was happy with a standard PS4 until I played Control, and could see that it was struggling. I’m not sure there’s any PS5 games that are known to stress the hardware, and would do anything with the extra resources.
I’d buy one now if I were you. Worse case scenario: you’ll want to trade it in for an upgrade in a year or two.
Citizen Sleeper - From the same publisher as The Pale Beyond, it’s another one of those story games that borders on visual novels. It’s a game about precarity and personhood set on an anarchic, decaying space station. Gorgeous art, fantastic soundtrack and it’s uniquely hopeful. Might be favourite game of the last few years.
Iconoclasts - really nicely made metroidvania with pixel graphics
Tametsi - a collection of handmade Minesweeper puzzles with additional twists and mechanics. Extremely cheap on Steam
Gunfire Reborn - roguelite FPS with Borderland-ish graphics, decently made 4 man co-op (unlike Risk of Rain 2, you can actually revive teammates that got knocked down immediately) and a lot of difficulty scaling. Notably, still gets new content, both free and paid DLCs (those add new classes and some new weapons)
Edited to add another: Opus Magnum - an automation/optimization puzzle game with alchemy theme. Supports user-created puzzles through Steam Workshop
Tametsi just barely eked out being my most played game of 2023 over, duh duh duh!! Elden Ring. Yes, it took me longer to finish a $1 Minesweeper clone than to finish a massive Fromsoft Soulslike. Haha!
Cloudpunk - A cyberpunk driving/walking simulator with a good story, great voice acting, LEGO-inspired graphics, and a Blade Runner inspired soundtrack. It’s dripping with atmosphere and I wish I could play it again for the first time.
IMHO, Xbox is a better console than PS this gen. I was a PS guy all the way but I got both XSX and PS5 when they came out and I barely touch my PS5 compared to the Xbox.
To be fair, most of the reasons I prefer the Xbox are just user experience things. The biggest one is that I think the PS5 controller is horrible. The ergonomics are all weird for me (yeah I realize that everyone’s hands are different) and the fancy trigger buttons are real cool in the one or two games that make use of them but they’re squishy and vague feeling in the other 99% of games. The Xbox controller has better ergonomics, and better feel in the hand with its materials and button feel. Yes, ergonomics and feel preference will vary from person to person but it’s worth mentioning since I never had an issue with PS controllers until the PS5.
The other reasons I prefer the Xbox are things like how much better it is for things on your TV that aren’t gaming (streaming shows, watching movies, etc.), I think Gamepass is WAY better than the Sony version, it has more exclusives I am interested in, etc.
Anyhow, you do you, but you might look into the Xbox a little before blindly just going with the PS5 on the strength of the older consoles. I was surprised by how much I didn’t want to use the PS5. And a little bummed if I’m honest. It was a lot of effort to get one at launch and a lot of money and it mostly just gathers dust.
And to answer your specific question, if you do decide to go with a PS5, just get whatever is available when you are ready to get one. When it comes to tech, there’s always something better coming so you can wait forever because they will never say “okay, all done!”.
I'm the opposite on every point. I have both and seriously considering trading both towards a Pro and hitting up Geforce Now every now and again to get some use out of my stacked UGP sub.
But as to waiting or not, if you aren't a dedicated console gamer I can't really see that you would value the extra's a Pro would bring. 80% of the experience will be offered by the base machine anyway.
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