Just a heads up the game kinda made my head hurt physically. The characters move at like 24-30fps while the background moves at a full 60 (or something >30, was not sure). It’s a stylistic choice which I can respect but I couldn’t get into it due to the stark difference in fps between the two which made it feel laggy.
Mario & Luigi: Dream Team Bros, because the tutorials never stop. Even 20 hours into the game, it will explain which button to press in exhausting detail every single time. Gave up the game due to this.
On the opposite side, ΔV: Rings of Saturn. The tutorial does a really bad job of explaining the (very unusual) controls of the game. Worse, you can accidentally leave the area during the tutorial, which cancels the tutorial altogether so you have to restart the game. That happened to me twice. Third time was the charm though, and I did enjoy the game afterwards.
Valve only cares if you're setting your VPN to a different region to take advantage of differences in currency exchange rates. It used to be really popular to buy the version of a game released for random eastern European countries with poorer economies for a lot less than you'd spend in USD, until Valve started cracking down on that.
As long as any purchases you make from your account are done from the correct country for the content you're buying (and as long as the billing address on your credit card also matches the correct country), the VPN shouldn't set off any red flags or result in any bans.
Yup, as long as all your Steam Store and payment method settings match the country you're buying from, you should be good. My roommate games on Steam from a VPN all the time and has had no issues in the several years that he's done that (though I don't believe he's using the VPN to change his location, just to hide his IP).
So, I’m excited for this game, but after being burned one too many times on preorders, I’ve made it a personal policy to refuse to engage any sort of preorder.
GOG. DRM-free support needs all the help it can get. I have nothing but respect for Steam, so it's my secondary choice. The only exception is if it's a game that's been out for a while and there's been discrepancies between GOG and Steam support (or a dev/publisher with a history of said issues), in which case I'll go with the one that's better supported.
On top of some of the commentary here, I’d like to add that I think there’s a real chance that WoTC’s put some money behind getting it heavily reviewed/boosted, and so more articles about it and wider attention. That is not to undercut its quality, just that I think its layers of support. (I’ll admit there’s more than a little bit of my distrust of WoTC in that. Like after all their other scandals they need a win to try and suck newbies into the game after so much messing up. And I don’t even mean in the last year or something, their release quality for 5e has been abysmal for a long time.)
Additionally Larian played the early access thing very well. Not only did they listen to their ongoing players, and even netted some “tried it didn’t like it” people back, it gave time for everyone who was perhaps too into the older isometric BG1&2 titles (like me) to realize the game didn’t seem quite like it was for them and not pick it up. So you get clear, mostly good(if outdated) information out there for people to use in researching if they wanted to buy it, helping to avoid a lot of the knee-jerk hate that stuff like Fallout 4 and 76 got from misplaced expectations that could dull the release.
I didn’t hear about it when it released, only got it on sale earlier this year. Apparently all this time the perfect game for me had already been out there just existing slightly outside the range of my awareness.
It is a high quality pixel art narrative RPG with a single character class that can branch any way they like, in a pseudo-MMO(single player game where the game is lore-wise an MMO that you are one character in, rest of the characters in the game are “other players” but are of course just narrative to us the real world player, but to our in-game player they are their real life friends and you know them separate from their characters). The pseudo-MMO has 5 classes, but your character is the jack of all trades class. So your various party members will be better than you at their one specialty, but if you are extremely selective, you can nearly match them at the same level if you pick only stuff for that one path. The trade off is that this class is supposed to be much harder to play.
But anyway, enough about that, the actual story of the game is awesome and I don’t want to spoil anything specific. Your character starts out unable to talk due to a malfunction of the “game”, but slowly gains more words, it’s not a gameplay mechanic, just a narrative mechanic, but it’s crazy endearing. Kind of like a “little mermaid” type scenario. She still has full control of her facial expressions and body language, and speaking of, there must be thousands of facial expressions. They did not skip out on any work in the pixel art department.
The exploration parts of the game are kind of zelda style platforming puzzles with more of an agility focus. Combat is real-time but somewhat easy, with more of a focus on stringing fights together and trying to survive as many back to back in quick succession as possible. The longer you stay in combat and string fights together, the less overall monsters you have to kill to get all the loot from a zone. Though the max monsters you need to kill at the worst is pretty low. Like 50-100 per zone. And even then it’s optional, but better.
They also have dungeons, these are also pretty similar to old school zelda, but quicker and tighter. Speaking of, character movement/control is very agile for a pixel art game. I’m not generally great at it in other games, but I love it in this game.
Ok, well I should probably stop now. I could probably go on for hours, it’s an amazing game that I’m sad I didn’t hear about til recently, but at least I did eventually hear of it. Now I feel I have to make sure other people don’t miss out on it like I almost did.
Edit: bah one more thing, character development is pretty robust. I built my entire character around thorns damage and blocking. It’s entirely possible to go through the game this way, in fact it makes some fights kind of silly. But it’s also entirely possible to never have any thorns and even to never block a single hit. But the thorns mechanic alone is pretty deep. There are several components that affect how much damage you will reflect when blocking a hit, how much the hit would have been, how much you lowered it by blocking it, how much baseline “pin body”(thorns) you have and how much defense the monster has. So a boss hitting you for 100 that you reduce down to 50 is gonna hit them back pretty hard, but so is a monster hitting you for what would have been a string of 10 hits of 3 damage, but you reduced them all to 0. Since there is a baseline, those 10 hits trigger pretty close to your minimum amount, but it’s probably alot more than 3, and certainly more than the 0 they actually did to you. There is also perfect guarding, completely unnecessary, but since my character is all about blocking, I decided to practice perfect guarding, and I got pretty good at it. Also when I perfect block a melee hit, it stuns them for 2 seconds. And perfect blocks inherently double thorns damage, like as if it was a crit.
All the mechanics seem as deep and well planned out as that too. And there are alot of mechanics. The 4 main disciplines are tank, ranged damage, melee damage and caster. Though caster is mostly just using more skills instead of auto attacks while still being either melee or ranged. Just get way more mana regen. And of course the idea is to blend and not just specialize in one, but you can also specialize. Ranged damage is done by way of shooting “spheres”, it’s also a pretty important aspect of alot of puzzle solving, but you don’t need any points in ranged damage to solve puzzles with it. I have no points in any type of damage other than thorns. My character has more than double defense versus attack. Hehe.
There is a relatively limited selection of gear, but you will likely always find something you want. Kind of similar to a final fantasy game, no unnecessary gear, just a bunch of stuff that “isn’t for you this play through”, but your party members might like what you don’t. They of course have their own money and choose when and what new gear they buy. Though bringing them to a shop that has what they want will prompt it, otherwise they’ll go shopping on their own time when not in your party.
Outerwilds is a beautiful game and quite short, try to go in as blind as possible. It’s space archaeology.
Gris is an art game that’s about 3hrs long. Very pretty, very zen.
Into the breach, is a puzzle game (chess vibes) where you are time travellers saving the world from insect aliens. has a long time to beat, but play sessions are fairly short. I think it’s a great game for when you are taking short breaks between something else. it might be a tad too on the roguelike side for you, but it’s primarily about solving puzzles.
Carrion is a puzzle-horror game that took me about 5hrs to beat, it’s extremely satisfying
Nauticrawl is a very esoteric game, you pilot a sub at the bottom of the ocean and have to learn from scratch how to pilot it. If you like doing stuff with no instructions you’ll enjoy it.
Not for broadcast is a shortish (~20hrs) game where you control a live action broadcast and get points for how well you do cuts… or censor people
Superliminal is a 3hr puzzle game that plays with size and perspective.
Some games, like the Pathfinder games by Owlcat, use that initial input to determine if you are playing with mouse/keyboard or a gamepad. Depending on that, you get presented with a different UI in the main menu.
Another reason for such a screen could also be Xbox support. Nowadays it’s no longer necessary, because user-handling has been vastly improved with the GDK, but before the GDK was released a splash screen was the most user-friendly way to do user-handling in a single-player or online-multiplayer game on Xbox.
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