Monster Sanctuary. A superbly polished, extremely fun, and decently challenging metroidvania and monster collecting/battling game. If you played the first few Pokemon generations on gameboy and don’t find the newer games capture that same magic, check out Monster Sanctuary!
Pacific Drive. A station wagon building amd exploration game set in a STALKER-esque Pacific Northwest in the Olympic mountain range. Extremely original and unique game, and with an excellent soundtrack.
Hardspace Shipbreaker: spaceship salvage, with increasing hazards and challenges and complexity of ship systems to expertly disassemble. With a pretty cool workers’ solidarity and union struggle type of plot.
Rimworld. Hundreds of hours lost.
Stardew Valley. A literally perfect game.
Terraria. Also a literally perfect game.
Caves of Qud. Like if Dwarf Fortress adventure mode was actually polished, and also if distant future scifi with mutants and cybernetics and sentient plants and sapient gun turrets.
Dwarf Fortress. It’s Dwarf Fortress.
WolfQuest. Wolf simulator set in Yellowstone, with a focus on real world accuracy. So cool to raise a pack and manage territory and hunt and explore and howl a lot
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. A brilliantly executed spiritual successor to Jet Set Radio Future.
One game I love that hasn’t been mentioned yet is Subnautica. The only survival crafting game I ever finished. The story telling and athmosphere are unmatched.
I urge anyone who has not played CrossCode to give it a try. I randomly played it during the pandemic, and I’ve since not been able to enjoy gaming the way I did it before. For me, it was very close to being a 10/10.
True, but the problem (at least for me) is that I was simultaneously going nowhere and running out of places to go. I legit wasn’t sure how to progress literally any of the opened quests and felt like nothing was getting done.
The funny thing about Disco Elsyium is that there’s so much to do in the opening area and it builds such a rich picture of the city that you assume it’s a much bigger world than it really is.
It really isn’t that much bigger than the first part, but they did such a great job you don’t end up minding.
I’ve heard a lot of good things about VA-11 Hall-A. Haven’t played it myself, but it looks like you play as a bartender in a cyberpunk-esque world and talk to the partons in your bar to get to know what’s going on in both the world and their personal lives
I see a lot of people downplaying the remaster as a fresh coat of ue5 paint. I’m playing the game, having disliked the original, and I’m loving it. I’m kind of impressed with what they did with the game, basically remaking the world elements in ue5 and leaving the gameplay as it was with minor tweaks. Fresh coat of paint feels more like rip out the drywall and do it again. Just leave the structure alone. Like, the electrical and plumbing is still there and feels the same but it looks completely different.
Games like this dont come very often, so if anything, this remaster and BG3 should raise the bar on what we should expect from a new TES game.
It’s a remaster of a game from 2006 with a fresh coat of paint and some QOL changes and that’s basically all it ever could be. 70% of the game did not age well and they honestly did the best they could. If they did a complete remake and “modernized” the game all the old-school fans would be pissed. If they kept it as true to the original as possible besides a facelift they’d make it harder for new players to want to pick it up. I feel like a good 7/10 was the best they could shoot for under most circumstances.
And if you ask anyone where Bethesda fell off, depending on which game was their first, they will all give you a different answer. For me Morrowind and Oblivion are the best in the series and that’s with over 500 hours in Skyrim. They’ve been dumbing their games down with each new iteration since the 90s as they try to “modernize” the newest game each time and reach new audiences. Like, good luck playing Morrowind or Daggerfall these days without losing your patience in a matter of hours. And Morrowind especially is barely playable without mods these days.
I still hated Starfield, though. Gave it the old college try and left so underwhelmed I couldn’t tell you a damn thing about the story.
The story was the most interesting thing about Starfield, since like me, the writers of Starfield also really loved the movie Interstellar. Unfortunately, nearly every plot line sort of wrapped up in an unfulfilling way for one reason or another.
I think the gist of Bethesda games is that what they did was truly impressive 20 years ago, but each individual piece of them is kind of bad. The combat is bad, the story is bad, the RPG systems are way worse than their pen and paper roots, the NPC schedules tend to do little more than make quest givers just appear in slightly different locations, and what should be dynamic uses of physics and NPC line of sight never manifests in anything more interesting than putting a bucket on a shop keeper’s head to steal things.
There’s nothing quite like a Bethesda game, because I think when another developer sits down to make a new game, they try to make one or more of those pieces way better than a Bethesda game rather than implementing everything that Bethesda implements, because plenty of it is bad and will be bad without being able to focus on it.
there’s a subtle difference, but if i’m following your logic, then weapons manufacturers have no moral/ethical responsibility for enabling war to happen? if you made a knife—harmless on its own, and then gave the knife to a murderer who then killed someone with it, are you not enabling?
I just want to make sure you notice it says “encrypted messaging” meaning matrix as a service, as opposed to “encrypted messages”, meaning selling your messages.
sure, it’s nuanced, but imho there’s a difference between actively helping and propping up vs providing free software. when you have active contracts with entities that discriminate, it becomes a different ethical stance than simply building FOSS.
yeah i can understand that viewpoint, and for all the matrix users i hope that remains true. maybe i’m just jaded, but i’ve been around long enough to know that just because a company isn’t a complete pile of shit now doesn’t mean they won’t be in the future—ESPECIALLY when you can see the company they keep (and defend).
Always gonna recommend Project Zomboid. Yeah it may look like the Sims (which oddly is where TIS got their art influence from), but it’s pretty darn unforgiving. Hell, I lost my last character without realizing how, chalking it up to some strange drug interaction (aka don’t drink and take sleeping pills, kids). Resource management, while not a direct focal point for PZ, is still important as you are watching every aspect of your character’s health and wellbeing.
The latest beta build 42 has incorporated some new mechanics and a nicer lighting system so things feel proper spooky when slinking around in the darkness. And don’t even get me started on the modding community. Infinite possibilities and a constant influx of new content, some which gets so popular it’s adding into the base gameplay. Look up Week One if you want more than just a zed simulator.
I also second Stardew if you are also looking to scratch that cozy gaming itch.
It does have a sandbox aspect, but much as I want to like the game, I always find myself dropping it and playing Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead instead, which is a similar “zombie survival” genre game, but has vastly more stuff and game mechanics. The big selling point for Project Zomboid, in my book, is the far gentler learning curve and lower barrier to entry; it’s got an adorable tutorial racoon, and doesn’t hit you with too much at once, but…
The combat in Project Zomboid frustrates me. It’s very simple, not a lot going on, but because a zombie infection is incurable, a single mistake in timing can have catastrophic effects, so it requires no errors.
The character builds. Project Zomboid has a lot of perks and such. Cataclysm’s got vastly more, plus mutations, bionics, all that stuff.
I prefer the Cataclysm turn-based play to the Project Zomboid real-time play. I don’t have to wait in the real world for actions to complete, and I can stop and think about what my next move is.
To try to illustrate the game complexity difference, take firearms as an example. Project Zomboid has six handguns, four shotguns, and four rifles. Each has one type of ammunition. There are ten weapon mods, each of which can be placed on some of those weapons. There is a firearms skill.
Cataclysm has, to look at just one firearm class and caliber category, 41 rifle-class weapons chambered in .223 (and that’s by default, as chambering can be modified). Each of these can take something like six different classes of weapon mods (replacing the stock, sticking things on the barrel, adding secondary weapons like underbarrel grenade launchers or flamethrowers, etc), multiple fire modes. There are 18 sight mods alone, and it’s possible to have multiple sights on a weapon. Recoil is modeled. Firearms can fit in various types of back/ankle/hip holsters, and draw time and encumbrance is a factor; these also have volume and longest-dimension characteristics, so that a large revolver can’t fit in a small holdout holster. For those .223-caliber rifles alone, there are 13 types of ammunition, including handloads, tracer rounds, armor-piercing rounds, etc. There are 63 different calibers of weapons. Energy weapons, flamethrower/incendiary weapons, chemical weapons, explosive projectile weapons, flechette weapons, illumination rounds, EMP weapons. There are multiple-barrel weapons, including some with barrels in different calibers. You can load specialized ammunition in a specified order. Different types of reloading mechanisms (revolver, tube magazine, detachable magazine, belt) are modeled. Some weapons use compatible magazines, and high-capacity and drum magazines exist. Speedloaders for revolvers exist. Weapons can be installed mounted on vehicles (fired manually from a mount position, or with an automated weapons targeting system installed, set up to fire automatically). NPCs (friendly, and hostile) can be armed with them. Bore fouling is modeled. When you fire a weapon without hearing protection, you’re temporarily deafened to some degree. There are multiple stances one can take when firing those weapons. Some of the game’s martial arts forms permit use of firearms. There are firearm melee modifications, like bayonets. There are skills for different types of weapons. The game has all sorts of exotic real-world firearms (e.g. to pick a random one, the American-180, a submachine gun firing .22 rounds with a 180-round pan magazine); the game probably has more real-world firearms than any other video game out there; my current source tree says that there are 555 in total.
And that’s before getting into stuff like sandbox vehicle design and construction (land, water, air, amphibious), power generation and storage, nutrition (weight and its various effects on physical capabilities, body fat, vitamins, calcium intake), artifacts, magic (if you turn on some of the various magic or psionic mods), bionics, mutations, local weather systems, temperature (air and body; you can set up heaters and air conditioners in vehicles), vision in various spectra, monsters tracking scent/vision/noise, fires and building structural failures, brewing, the ability to recruit NPCs and create faction camps, quests, aliens, disease modeling, various types of parasites, fungal infections, various types of poisonings and envenomings, various types of lights, devices with removable batteries, internal-batteries, USB-style (UPS) charging and power that can run off static, vehicle, bionic, or power stations. Solar/wind/gasoline/diesel/jet fuel/nuclear power generation. Multi-fuel engines. Multiple-engine vehicles (or, with appropriate electronic systems, hybrid vehicles that can automatically toggle an ICE engine to charge a battery to run electric motors). Seatbelts and harnesses (and being ejected from vehicles in crashes). Folding, portable vehicles. Bike and motorcycle racks on cars. Stimulants, depressants, alcohol. Acetylene and electrical welding. Tons of types of food to cook (looks 547 recipes currently available). The thing is just huge.
I will say that CDDA has piqued my interest, but I’m not a huge fan of turn based anything, although weirdly I will get into some of them. May have to give this a shot myself… once I have time.
I think I’ve been spoiled by the massive modding community with PZ, as I feel there’s always something that’s added that feel right within the game world. Sure, there are plenty of non-lore friendly mods, but stuff like adding all the classic consoles into the loot pile, or real world foods keep the immersion up quite well.
Cdda is a pretty steep learning curve but I keep coming back to it. One of the nice things about the project is that anyone can work on it, I’ve submitted a couple of minor fixes in the past. It changes pretty drastically over the months if you’re playing the latest build. It’s also a huge timesink when you actually get into it.
Project zomboid was a lot of fun, but single-player it gets boring after a while. I don’t feel like playing on a public server and I don’t have friends willing to play it.
You aren’t wrong about the SP getting boring at times. I’ll usually find myself kitted out after a week in game and bored and then asking “what next?”, and then I’ll either create a new character in that same world but on the other side of the map, and see how far they can get. Still waiting for mods like RV Interiors to be released, as they are holding out until a proper stable beta of B42 is released… so that could be some time. Granted I’ve also been using Week One as a baseline mod for PZ, as it revitalizes the baseline start to be more in line with “how does this apocalypse truly go down?”. Is it perfect, far from it, but it adds just enough plausibility to make you feel immersed even further. As for MP, I’m not a fan at all. I tend to play most all games SP, as I’m a very patient gamer and usually jump onto the MP bandwagon too late to feel included.
Yeah I feel the same about MP. Although I do like to play with friends, but that’s different than random people online. I believe I had a mod for rv interiors. Like, half a year ago or something.
My primary concern, too. It’s fine for my man-hands but my wife and children still would rather use a switch (or literally have to, as I try to get my 3 year old to reach buttons). A deck lite would be lovely.
We just use a neck roll placed in the lap or on the stomach to rest it on while playing. It is a bit on the heavy side, but it is the first generation consumer handheld with that kind of power so I can excuse that.
I wish the steam controller wasn’t discontinued, IIRC it was some patent bullshit. But you could use one of you have it or get any other controller and use it with the steam deck
I have one, and plenty of controllers, but I’d trade a bit of battery life and horsepower for weight. I don’t play AAA games on mine, and I know I’m not alone, so they’d be smart to release a lite version.
And it’s not just the weight. My wife has small hands and can’t play it comfortably because it’s so large. I bought her a WIN400 and threw SteamOS on it and that works alright. Something that size would be amazing from Valve (but without the really fucking stupid control placement).
Small form factor handhelds with power under the hood are definitely a thing, but they’re like $1200. I bet Valve could drop the power by 40% and sell it at a reasonable price point.
Fair enough, I guess they probably wanted to target one set of hardware to begin with and this is what we got with a few minor variations. As popularity grows more choices will probably come further down the line.
With the KillSwitch case from dbrand, the Deck is both heavy AND sturdy feeling. The grips on the case are AMAZING though, and really help with the heaviness. I bought the entire kit for mine, because I thought it looked sick, but I can highly recommend the case to anyone who would like the protection and ergonomics that the case can give you.
I like the heaviness, personally. Gives it a “premium” feel to it, but that is my opinion of course!
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