Enjoy your time with it! Those moments of seeing something in game and going “wait wait wait I know what this is!” *rifles through notes furiously* were my favourite part.
Without spoiling anything I will say this: I recommend taking actual notes. I did it in a physical notebook but digital has the benefit of being searchable. It’s possible to get by with only screenshots, but I really recommend both and I thought the note taking itself was so enjoyable. I find physical note taking helps with memorization too, and every time you make progress because of something you’ve taken notes of is such a dopamine rush.
I absolutely love Blue Prince! Such an amazing experience and a unique and innovative game. I hope you’re enjoying the note taking and progressively losing your mind!
I mean, I love NV and think it’s by far the best 3D Fallout, but it’s also got a ton of performance and bug issues. Partly due to the engine they were working with and the insane development cycle, but still. The game isn’t without issues. It’s famously unstable and buggy if played without mods. I also think it needs mentioning that a lot of the assets look out of place, because they are. The game had such a short development cycle that a lot of them are just reused FO3 assets.
I love it, but there is a reason so many people recommend something like the Viva New Vegas modlist even for a first playthrough.
I have seen debates of both 3 and 4 over New Vegas. These arguments tend to come almost exclusively from newer fans. Anyone who played 1 and 2 first, especially back in the day, tends to have a much less favourable view of the Bethesda Fallouts. But there are tons of Bethesda-first fans who came into Fallout after first playing Skyrim, typically. The 4 fans either love the base building or tend to think the other games are “too old looking/feeling”. The 3 fans… I don’t even know, that game is pretty terrible I think. But they tend to argue the design of the world in 3 is better to explore than New Vegas.
I haven’t personally heard anyone argue 76 is the best Fallout, but I’m sure someone is out there.
I forgot about those because I never played them myself and honestly this year has been awash with so many good releases that they kind of slipped my mind. But you’re absolutely right!
Interesting that they didn’t include Ninja Gaiden 4 in an otherwise incredibly exhaustive list, but apart from that I think this is as close to “every notable 2025 release, summarised and collected” as you’re going to get.
Does the story actually get good? I tried it out around launch but when they introduced a knockoff Paimon I noped out. I was there for a dark post-apocalypse story, not Sunday morning cartoon. Not that there is anything wrong with it but just not for me. I felt a little mislead.
Recently it’s been Chaos Zero Nightmare on my phone. Yeah, it’s a gacha. Yeah it has some absolutely ridiculous gooneriffic character designs that makes me roll my eyes. Yeah it’s poorly translated and the story is garbage.
But you know what? The actual roguelike deckbuilder game mode is actually a ton of fun. The characters are well balanced enough that I’ve never felt like I was behind on power even with comparably “bad” pulls from the gacha. The game has been generous enough anyway that I have a lot of pulls saved up too. And the mutability and variety in the roguelike mode is just amazing. Tons of combos, tons of variations of every card and tons of opportunities to make niche builds work just because you happened to get one specific rare upgrade variation on one specific card while also stumbling upon one specific neutral card to add to your deck and stuff like that.
I haven’t really played anything the past week, beyond playtesting changes I’m making to the TALKER mod for STALKER: Anomaly (the mod using AI to let you talk to NPCs). This little project has grown considerably and I have a lot of writing left to do before it’s fully ready I think. But early signs are positive. I also have some more prompt engineering to do. I’m getting much better and more interesting responses from NPCs now than with the base mod - which had extremely basic and barebones instructions for the LLM.
It is… kind of. Hence the half-cheat. First off it’s 3D, but the game is completely centered around the Oldest House, which is the headquarters of the fictional FBC. Like a Metroidvania you explore and backtrack back and forth through it and unlock new areas opening up from previous places. There is also one (although only one) proper ability gate that lets you explore previously unreachable parts of earlier areas once unlocked.
Even if you don’t classify it as a true Metroidvania it’s definitely Metroidvania-inspired.
I don’t know, I played Blasphemous this summer and had a very mixed time with it. I really wanted to love it but it mostly pissed me off. Too much gameplay design specifically intended to waste your time and make you miserable. Which - I guess - is the point because the game is all about the virtue of suffering. I just didn’t find it particularly fun to play.