Stranded Deep scratched an itch for me, the limited options available made it easier to focus on a podcast versus other games which have an overwhelming number of crafting items and quests.
Best game i played this year was Alan Wake 2, though I can imagine it’s probably not for everyone. The Marvelesque “homework” you’re recommended to do before playing to catch all the references and understand the interconnected lore might seem daunting, but the world and narrative Remedy has built continues to impress me. A lot has been said already about how Remedy has been pushing innovation and mixed media, but I’ll also add how impressed I am with the level of writing in general. Not only is the narrative mind bending, but all the characters are compelling and distinctive and all the different styles employed are nailed perfectly and mesh surprisingly well, from the Noir-caricature Alex Casey monologues to the goofy Koskela brothers TV ads.
The worst game I played this year was Ghost of Tsushima. Okay hear me out. The game is beautiful, well optimised and the combat is solid and satisfying. The game is just roughly twice as long as it should be considering what it is. The story is only okay at best, but suffers from a consistently dour and overly serious tone which really starts to drag as time goes on. The only bit of comic relief is Kenji, and he is barely around. On top of this the quest design is 90% “talk to person, move to area, kill the enemies there, go back and talk again”. Main story missions overly rely on walk-and-talk and/or ride-horse-and-talk. There are a handful of missions with more to it than that and those are good, but there just isn’t enough variation to sustain interest over the playtime (especially if you’re attempting to do everything and thus have to chase down the Ubisoft level open world stuff). After about 10h playtime I was loving the game, but by the third act I was thoroughly worn out and bored.
Unfortunately I had to drop Alan Wake after the prologue. The game is probably great, but I think my PC has finally hit a AAA game it just cannot handle. Perhaps I’ll give it another shot once I upgrade.
I absolutely get your criticisms with Ghost of Tsushima. While I personally loved the game when I played it, I do recall commenting that it had the same gameplay loop as I criticize Skyrim for i.e. go here, kill things, repeat, but for me the core combat mechanics were good enough that I didn’t mind. A shame that you weren’t able to enjoy them to the same extent, but very fair critique
Elden Ring and Stardew Valley ate a decent chunk of 2023 for me. And are both amazing games in their own right. Totally different, though.
I didn’t play anything really bad this past year, but I did bounce off Crosscode pretty hard after expecting to love it given I’m a sucker for early JRPGs and the 8 and 16 bit eras in general. It’s a well made game, just overlong and featuring some tedious and frustrating mechanics.
Street Fighter 6 - Really really good fighting game, definitely a recommend if you want to play one.
Baldurs Gate 3 - It is BG3, what more needs to be said?
Octopath Traveler 2 - It is more of the first, but more refined and better at tying the characters together.
Dead Space Remake - If you like the original, you should really play this, it is incredible.
Remnant 2 - Great game, a good refinement of the first remnant, and fantastic in co-op.
Last Epoch - I really like the leveling systems(Character and also Skills). Not perfect, but fun and chaotic.
Crab Champions - Crab goes BRRR. Not many games I go out of my way to 100% but this games feels incredible to play.
Spiderman & Miles Morales - Finally pick up on the cheap, if you enjoy the Batman Arkham formula, these two are fantastic. Miles Morales definitely feels like a large DLC though.
Driftwood - Longboarding Sloth, super chilled out and relaxing. Just enjoy carving down the hills on sticks of butter.
Lumines - The best game on the PSP, and still love it(picked up for cheap with Tetris, but prefer Lumines)
The not so good.
Ghost Runner 2 - I want to like this more, I loved the first game, but the wide open levels and bike traversal just don’t feel good or fun.
Diablo 4 - Play Last Epoch instead, D4 feels boring and bland and uninspired after finishing the story.
Blasphemous - Didnt click with me, the combat felt good and the movement was good, but never stuck with it, will probably try again at some point.
Hyper Light Drifter - I have tried a few times, and I keep bouncing off it.
Ori and the Blind Forest - I also want to like this game, but bounced off it again.
While Street Fighter 6 is my Favourite game of the the year, Baldurs Gate 3 is definitely the GOTY. I would strongly recommend any game from the favourites list. I haven’t played any really bad games this year, Diablo 4 is probably the worst I have played, do not recommend it. Unlike the other games which I would be tempted to suggest under certain circumstances.
On Ori and the Blind Forest - if you generally enjoy platformers, I would encourage you to give the sequel a shot, Ori and the Will of the Wisps. I played BF years ago and like you, I bounced off it. Then a couple of years back I tried WotW and loved it.
I subsequently went back and retried BF, and I realized that every issue I had with the gameplay had been fixed in the sequel.
The story of the first game only factors into the second game in minor ways, so you’ll be fine if you skip it.
I will give it a try, pretty sure it is in the steam library, but probably be a couple months til I get round to it now (Granblue is being an absolute blast).
Only ever cared for the OG, Minecraft, because it was new and innovative. Mostly why I don’t really like the genre is that most of them are “me too” games that don’t do a lot more than the first game that spawned the genre to begin with. More of the same with different aesthetics or balance. But not really different enough that I can even decide which is better than another; they all get homogenized into a single bland blend where if you’ve played one, you’ve played them all situation.
Unless roguelikes such as Nethack could count as “survival” games. That would be a much bigger list.
I just started Frostpunk, and one of the first tutorial steps is to build a food place. So I built it, but it wasn’t on a road (apparently) so it’s unusable. I don’t know where the road is, and even if I did I don’t know how to build or extend it. And I can’t see a way to move or demolish it. Of course I can easily look all this up, but you know when a game immediately gets on your bad side? Yup, that.
Not a survival fan either but The Long Dark and Subnautica are both fantastic.
I know I’m late but I had that same issue with finding out how to demolish roads (I ended up looking it up). Ironically my most recent obsession with it, where I sunk 30 hours in a week, is also my 2nd time giving the game a chance.
I think my initial complaint was the controls for playing with a controller. Coming back to it with keyboard and mouse was great. If you have any questions let me know, sometimes you gotta set it down and come back to it.
Demolish roads is a small red button below the row of buildings. You should see the roads button that looks like a bunch of lines, and to the right of it should be the small red demolish roads button.
Frostpunk is made by my favorite game studio and I love the genre and all their other games, but I really did not enjoy it. Some reviews mention that the scenarios have such small margins that unless you do things in a specific way, it’s very unlikely you will beat them. I agree with that to a certain extent, but it feels like there’s something else to it too. It’s been years since I played, but the tech tree felt interesting but like it wasn’t properly enmeshed with the gameplay and struggles with an obvious winning strategy that limits your feasible options.
Not “bad” but disappointing: No Man’s Sky. There’s a lot to be liked here but as someone who has played Elite Dangerous everything is just so incredibly dumbed down.
Fighting is trivially easy, just hold S, shoot and grab a snack while doing it.
There’s absolutely no consequences for anything. It doesn’t matter how much fuel I have because I can just find new fuel anywhere or teleport somewhere completely different. Doesn’t matter where I log out because the game will just throw me to the same system as my coop partner anyway.
Doesn’t matter if the authorities want me, just fly into a station and all is forgotten. Got contraband? Just tell them to get lost and fly away casually. No bounty on my head, no nothing.
Don’t get me wrong, Elite is definitely way too hardcore for casual play but at the same time the only thing No Man’s Sky has done is make me want to play Elite again.
I wanted to like "No Man's Sky," when it was finally available on the Switch (my PS4 had just died when it came out) I was elated to play it. After a couple hours of playing, I wanted those two hours of my life back. An ugly game with very little color, and absolutely no direction as to what you're supposed to be doing, I wasted those two hours trying to figure out what the hell was going on. I absolutely hated it - the only game I ever asked for a refund on.
I’ve often described NMS as Minecraft in Space. The “story”, such as it is, is completely pointless and superfluous. You just fly around, mine minerals, build stuff, and that’s about it. And it wears thin really quickly.
Same here – I’ve been doing exploration exclusively in Elite, and it got kinda samey and boring. Yet, somehow playing Elite was so mentally taxing, it quite often felt like having a second job. So, I decided to try out NMS, after hearing about its redemption so much.
The story of NMS was kinda neat, even though it was presented in a very dry way. The visuals were also not bad. Looking at planetary landscapes sometimes felt like stepping into the world of The Sand Sea and the Plateaux of Mirrors, which is a very good thing imo.
The actual gameplay just wasn’t engaging enough, though, and super janky (making gas/mineral farms sucks). Like, it’s very hard to find meaning in whatever you’re doing in that game. In contrast, doing exploration in Outer Wilds was very fun, because it felt like you were exploring an actual living world. In NMS, you get the same prefab randomly generated building and a sliver of lore. No environmental storytelling, no anything. So, it’s very difficult to connect to NMS’s world.
If they count as survival then survival horror like Resident Evil and Signalis.
Most of the traditional survival games I’ve played end up being annoying to play because of the constant use of your resources outside of your control and I find gathering for crafting kinda boring. This kinda ruined Subnautica for me, since I was mostly interested in exploring but I had to constantly return to base to do chores.
Harvesting food, collecting water, random gathering for materials to craft. I guess it gets better later in the game, but I tried starting it twice and after ~10h I dropped it both times because I was annoyed with the resources.
You can play Subnautica, like I mentioned in my submission, without hunger and thirst. I highly recommend it. Normal resource gathering remains, of course.
I have owned this game for ages, I think I bought it shortly after its release, but despite having a clear memory of playing it, it was so long ago that Steam doesn’t even tell me when I last launched it.
You should! The beginning may be a bit slow, but before long you’ll be building sweet bases or exploring the underground or doing whatever you like, really. It also has a ridiculous amount of content with even more to come next year, apparently. Also, no hunger/thirst mechanics! Like yourself, I don’t like 'em. Terraria has HP and MP, that’s it.
I bought Terraria a few months ago while I was buying some other games on sale and it’s legit all I’ve been playing. I absolutely love this game for the depth of he crafting system and the cosmic horror themed bosses and setting. Really just the whole thing is so well crafted.
I can second that. Valheim has a very neat balance between exploring, fighting and building. If you don’t progress to quick, even your base is relatively safe. Although I now have turned off raids completely. So my base is always safe and if I want action, I can venture out into the world. I like that.
Raids are fun but the need of moats is kinda annoying. I’d rather have more difficult raids but without raids destroying my BEAUTIFUL BUILDINGS GOD DAMMIT.
Hmm I wonder if there is a mod to make moat building easier. Or just nuke troll raids, that exists I’m sure.
And don’t forget you can play the whole thing in VR with the VHVR mod! I’ve played 330+ hours over 3 runs with my friends in VR, beating the Queen while panicking into repeated freefalls into pit (thank you feather cloak) was an insane experience (Yag too TBF; out of our 3 person group everybody died at least once, and several times the lone survivor was stuck doing laps with hordes of Fulings and a few berserkers and shamans in the parade until the others sprinted back from their beds.) Blessings to corpse run lmao
Valheim is the only survival crafting game that I play to relax. Just log in, listen to the music and the ambient sounds and just chill. Idk why, but the rain and weather effects really relax me
Większość sprzedaży na świecie należy obecnie do jednego koncernu piwnego z USA - AnnheiserBush Inbev (firma powstała z fuzji dwóch megakorp). To firma kontrolująca ponad ponad połowę rynku, mająca marki typu Bud, niemieckie Leffe, niektóre czeskie też (jest tego masa). Drugim takim podmiotem do 2016 był SABMiller, do którego należała masa znanych nam marek. Ale po tym, jak SABMiller też został wykupiony przez AB InBev, sprzedano jego europejskie marki właśnie Asahi.
Do Asahi należy cała Kompania Piwowarska (Tyskie, Lech, Pilsner Urquell itp), a także Grolsch, Peroni i takie tam. Więc tutaj mamy powiedzmy że rozdrobnienie. Ale ono wynikało tylko z tego, że SABMiller musiał się pozbyć tych marek, żeby zachować odpowiednią RENTOWNOŚĆ potrzebną dla fuzji z gigantem.
Drugim największym światowym koncernem jest teraz Heineken Group, do którego należy w Polsce cala Grupa Żywiec. Heineken kupił sporo starych europejskich browarów “z tradycjami” (chorwacka Karlovačka Pivovara, Royal Brewery z Manchesteru, Browar Ateński czy Browar Zamkowy w Cieszynie) którym pozwalała kiedyś warzyć pod swoimi markami i etykietami, często nawet z użyciem klasycznych receptur, albo przynajmniej w nawiązaniu do nich. Kiedyś, bo na przykładzie browaru w Cieszynie widać, że to był klasyczny heritage washing, jeśli można wymyślić takie określenie. Grupa Żywiec importuje również na krajowy rynek piwa czeskie i niemieckie. Jakiś czas temu kupili też browar w Namysłowie i Braniewie (też znane regionalne marki piwa niepasteryzowanego, obecnie praktycznie wycofane i zastąpione eurolagerem).
Większość segmentu taniego lagera w Polsce obsługuje (poza KP) Carlsberg Group Polska, spółka-córka duńskiego Carlsberga. Do nich należą Bosman, Harnaś, Kasztelan, Okocim, Piast, Karmi, Sommersby i nie tylko. Do duńskiego Carslberga należy też np. browar w Żatecu w Czechach i piwo Żateckie. Mają mocno rozwinięty segment piw smakowych, od nich pochodzi np. słynne Garage (warzone w browarze Baltika w Petersburgu od 2014 - no comment xD).
It has a good storyline. It’s not horror focused, and ennemies won’t suprise as much as in resident evil or doom. They’re mostly there to add difficulty or be part to the mission. Recycling makes the low amount of munitions/inventory tolerable.
Huh, I never saw the Prey reboot as a survival game. I thought it was more of an immersive sim, but then again, genre definitions can be quite fluid and a game can belong to multiple genres.
I can’t actually think of anything off the top of my head. After I stopped buying AAA titles from the obvious scummy companies, pretty much everything has been at least as good as expected.
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