LOOOOVED darkwood! It took me a bit to get a feeling for the game, but after I got my daily rhythm I found the gameplay satisfying, tense, and occasionally scary.
Lots of Skyrim!
Also this game for Playdate called Spilled Mushrooms, I’d been waiting for it to come out a while. It’s a nice blend of simple card game and puzzle, each round only takes a few minutes. The goal is to pick animals to help collect your mushrooms from different areas, animals have different abilities and each biome can have modifiers. It’s pretty much endlessly replayable and very satisfying once you get into a groove! I’m glad it’s not on more platforms because I’d lose so much more time to it
I decided I wanted to replay Skyrim so I went and downloaded a few mod packs from Wabbajack and played through the intro to Bleakfalls Barrow on each.
Nordic Souls is a 200GB pack that makes the game feel modern and look great! My poor 1060 struggled in some places but the world is gorgeous and the interface is much better. It has the quick loot feature from Fallout 4 and overall feels like a great pack if you want to replay Skyrim but want something that feels new. Also it comes with like 1000 hair styles.
I did have a frustrating bug that made my crosshair disappear while trying to be a stealth archer, and the map was a 2D paper map which didn’t have enough detail for my liking. The list is like 1300 mods so didn’t where to look to fix those things.
Then I tried out Legends of the Frost, which is closer to 40GB total and is a more tame pack that mostly fixes bugs and enhances the vanilla world. I added the quick loot mod and this is what I’ll be playing on, the performance is much smoother on my graphics card and I don’t really feel the need for all the extra content. The world is still a lot prettier!
Nordic Souls is absolutely worth it if you’ve got the space though. There were more enemies wandering around Bleakfalls Barrow which made it a little harder, the refreshed map made it feel fresh to explore (I was surprised at some of the differences in world props!), and it has a ton of new content in the form of quests, companions, locations, spells, weapons, armor, etc. And I definitely recommend wabbajack, it makes these crazy mod lists a 1-click install (as long as you have the prerequisites)
Now those are fancy! I really like the joystick support.
Related, do you have any recs for an SP-style emulation handheld? I love the clamshell for tossing in my backpack
Edit: 👀 anbernic.com/products/rg35xxsp
I do recommend it! The season (delivered over 12 weeks) is sometimes hit or miss, but that’s mostly because there’s something for everyone. And being so dev friendly is a huge bonus if you’re into that
The specific mode yeah, you’d get some xp for kills but as far as anyone knew ending the round ASAP was the most xp/min you could earn. They wanted to get the platinum trophy before the servers shut down
I can see why, unfortunately it’s a little over $100 just to make the device so I can’t see it going down much. We can’t really get economies of scale for such a niche product
I immediately wanted a Playdate when I saw it. It’s a little yellow handheld with a crank designed by Teenage Engineering and made by Panic, who’s also published Firewatch, Untitled Goose Game, and a bunch more games recently.
I’ve had it for a year and still use it daily, the screen works great most places I’m waiting in line and I have a book light for the evenings.
One thing I really like about it is that it’s not an emulation device. It comes with 24 games +2 free on the Catalog and the community has made a ton (over 1000 on itch!). They’re mostly bespoke little titles that aren’t available anywhere else. The Lua and C SDKs are easy to use and encourage homebrew, I’ve got a pomodoro timer launching in the on-device storefront next week and am currently working on a little suika-like. Definitely recommend if you’ve got the spare cash!
I didn’t know about this game until today when an interview with the dev popped up on my podcast subscription feed, it looks good! I might have to go in blind