Interesting to hear about Sawyer moving from a humanities / liberal arts degree into self-taught coding. I followed the same kind of path (although have been far less successful than he has!)
They nailed it with this game. It’s glorious. Every historical detail is spot-on and the “bestiary” style is a feast for the eyes.
Yeah I’ve had issues playing GOG games on linux using arch/gentoo because the libs that the game wants to dynamically link are often not where it expects. It’s possible to resolve it but the Steam approach where they distribute a static bundle of libs into ~/.local/share is much less of a headache.
Presumably Galaxy could solve this problem and make Linux more viable. The dynamic linking of the libraries has been more of an issue than the missing Proton integration for me. Often it is easier to install GOG games with wine and take the performance hit!
My partner used to be a teacher. There was a period of like a year when she would get home from work looking insanely stressed. Then she’d boot up Stardew Valley on her laptop from the couch and I could see her mood change immediately. She’d play for hours too.
At one point it was like Stardew Valley was her real life while the actual outside world was some horrible nightmare she had to wake up from.
This game was the most AA shit I’ve ever seen. In the PS2 days it would have got a 7.5 average from most reviewers then it would have had a not-insignificant number of people pick it up.
They are delusional for thinking a UE5 asset flip is a AAA game.
I am currently waiting for Alan Wake 2 to go on sale on Xbox. In the meantime I’ve been catching up with their older games - I’m in the post-game for Control and about 1/2 through the original AW.
Also, the new Prince of Persia is not out yet but will probably be leaving it until it goes on sale. To be honest there are only a few developers that I would buy new games from: first-party Nintendo, some Sega devs (Vanillaware, Atlus).
I did not enjoy the combat in the D:OS Larian games because I was so used to real-time with pause combat from the old Infinity Engine games. Will grab BG3 when it goes on sale in a year or so.