Reverse: 1999 has this sort of roguelike deckbuilding mode and I played the hell out of that while I was very sick (still a bit sick). I played just about all of that mode that you can, and playing it made me feel like getting into another roguelike deckbuilder. I don’t think I’ve touched the genre since Slay The Spire gave it farming game status.
This all leading to: I got Balatro. And I’m sorry to say that I don’t think it has the magic for me. I could keep playing it, but I also feel like if I stopped playing it I could forget about it in two weeks. I get almost no emotion at all from playing it. When I lose, I see it coming ten miles away, so there’s no tension there. When I win, I don’t feel especially accomplished.
So yeah, Balatro was kind of a whiff for me. Problem is I still have this deckbuilder hankering. Any recommendations for those?
I mentioned it a few posts up, but Luck Be A Landlord has the juice!
When every element is representational, it’s very easy to build it out and be like… I’m feeling spicy so I’m going to lean into the spooky symbols or I’m feeling cute so I’m going to lean into the cats. Or fruits or aquatic life or minerals or card symbols or… Building it out and seeing how it interacts is such a joy.
I started playing Wizardry Variants: Daphne on New Years Day and am having a pretty good time with it. The dungeon crawling is simple enough that I can enjoy fiddling around with it for 20-30 minutes and feel like I did accomplish some progress towards reaching the next floor. There is some untranslated text scattered throughout the menus but there is a ton of menu navigating so thats not surprising that some may have been missed.
For a game with a Free to Play model it feels relatively flushed out and the microtransactions feel very secondary right now as I haven’t felt stuck or hindered which is what usually happens and turns me off these sort of setups. I do wish the menu navigation was a bit more streamlined as it doesnt always feel intuitive to accessing the information I’m looking for.
One thing I really do like about the daily quests is they offer some that instantly put you into combat and can be completed in roughly 5 minutes if you dont have time to delve into a full on exploration based quest. The rewards for those are usually experience tomes for leveling up party members so if you dont have time to take a party out you can still make a little leveling progress.
The blacksmithing seems really complicated and is super confusing to me and feels like it could be reworked into something simpler, but I just started messing around with it so maybe I just don’t have my head wrapped around it properly yet. There are like 4 or 5 different ways to go about enhancing equipment and that currently just feels like too much.
i’ve decided 2025 is the year i am tackling franchises so i can actually justify my spending on entire series yet never playing them.
first up: dragon quest!
currently: 3 remake, then 4-6 DS, 7 and 8 3DS, back to 9 for the DS and 11 to top it off on PC. will likely spread these out across the year, but i plan to make it my main focus of a series.
others i plan to chip at:
resident evil (6 [i know], 7 DLC, 8 DLC, 0, Code Veronica X, Revelations 2)
yakuza (at least 0, maybe kiwami 2)
mass effect (2 at a minimum)
final fantasy (5, 6, 9, 10, and a replay of 7 for funsies)
bioshock (2 and infinite)
dark souls (2 until i can’t stand it anymore, then 3)
hitman (the reboot, i own 3, so have all of them)
and i fully predict that to be my year and some change.
I started Cloudpunk today and made the first 2 deliveries. Here are my initial impressions:
Good: I like the voxel cars and world. The atmosphere is great. The music is pretty nice too.
Mixed: The driving is going to take some getting used to. I’m crashing into a lot of stuff. I’m good with twin sticks, but apparently twin sticks + trigger sends my brain into a panic. Going to have to wait for it to rewire before I pass judgment. However, I will say that the stressful driving is making the game a lot less chill than @Tom sold it as. I’m also not sure whether the deliveries should maybe have a crazy taxi style timer. So far it seems I’m very much encouraged to slow down, which lets me take in the city, but it’s not helping me enjoy the game on a mechanical level at this time.
Bad: I do not like the voxel people. I really do not like the portrait pics or voice acting. The atmosphere is being kind of ruined as goofy voices talk nonstop over my moody city experience. Hopefully that eases off soon.
I rolled credits on Dragon Quest 3 a couple weeks ago. For any math mavens reading, this is my second time playing dq3, the first time was on the Gameboy version, and this is the first Dragon Quest I’ve replayed after completing a full lap of the main games (minus dq10). I really like this game! I stand by my ranking where I would say 3 is my fourth favorite of the series behind 11, 5, and 8. And while this remake is a really great way to play this game, my definitive version is still the GBC remake, and I’d probably prefer the super famicom version if I were to play that. I won’t nitpick too hard on a game I ultimately love, but I will highlight its biggest flaw: They kinda broke the treasure economy, dude.
I’m a treasure maniac, so if I see a sparkly spot, you better believe I’m going to get those goods. But they shower you with so many of those that I would open a chest in a dungeon and already have 3 in the bag of whatever I find. They increased the number of treasures you can find without increasing the variety, decreasing the satisfaction of finding any given treasure.
The treasure inflation situation kinda works with the harder difficulty setting, though. I’m not normally into challenge runs or anything, but hard mode felt correct for this. I honestly love the Dragon Quest staple feature of getting to keep your levels and loot when you die and dropping half your gold so I’m cool with struggling a bit.
My party was cleric->monster master, thief->warrior, mage->sage. The timing was perfect, too; all my guys were learning their last couple moves right at the end. Just super well tuned (except for all the extra treasure) and beautifully presented.
Glad to hear you started it. I’ll admit that when I played it I didn’t get on with the driving to start with, then all of a sudden one day it just clicked and I could get around a lot better than when I started the game.
I can’t sell you on the people though, as that’s a very relative experience - one I enjoyed but if you are not enjoying it may be tough to play through. I will say it does get better though.
I started playing Silent Hill, as in that first one. I’ve only figured out in the last few years that I love survival horror, so I’ve been catching up. I played 2 because it’s a bonafide classic, but never the rest of the series.
I’m not so far in, I just got to the school, but I’m having a great time. Wandering the town itself, with the harsh fog/snow and the 50 yard wide roads, is constantly strange and interesting. The first time I ran into one of the giant fissures that are just around was pretty shocking.
Looking forward to seeing what this game has to show me.
I can tell I’ll need my brain to catch up to the driving controls before I feel comfortable.
Yeah, I really don’t like anything about the people so far though. I don’t like their models, I don’t like their animations, I don’t like their portraits or voice acting or dialogue. I don’t like having to get out of my car and BE one of those horrible voxel people. I am not vibing with the protagonist, who has already been unsympathetic to her AI dog.
Made the third delivery, where you have a choice. I opted to deliver the package, because I need this job, and I feel the protagonist is not a very good person, so I’m leaning into that as a bit of roleplay. No consequences have been shown (yet?) so I don’t know if the ticking package was a bomb or just a pocket watch or something.
Finished Unavowed. For a few years when I was mostly on a laptop, the Wadjet Eye stuff was my go to for comfort gaming. Happy to see they’re still going strong. This one spiritually fits into the Blackwell series I think. The toughest decision for me was with the restaurant. He made a strong argument, but I eventually told the kid he needed to figure it out some other way.
want to shout out a couple of games I finished near the end of last year and didn’t post about.
Paradise Killer
I thought this game was just so much fun. The setting is fascinating and I love the choice to make the outcome of the trial not just a linear story like it usually is in these types of games. Having the outcome depend on how much you explored, what evidence you gathered, but most importantly your own biases and desires based on who you want to be guilty. Your final decisions can be completely arbitrary or reflect an actual truth which I think is such a fun way to approach the ultimate ending of one of these kinds of games. Also thought it was great how by the end I feel like game wanted the player to ask questions about Lady Love Dies. There are a bunch of indications that she was and is just as shitty and weird as all of the other Syndicate members. Culminating in the end where she’s literally all powerful and executing whoever she wants. Great takedown of legal systems, how we judge, and punishment.
Also massive shoutout to the 3D artists on this game for making a consistently incredible world to look at. The game is this perfect stylized realistic style that the modeling and texturing sell soooo well. The game wouldn’t be as successful as it is without having a world that was fun to explore and look at so massive props to the team for delivering so well on that aspect. Seriously @Chopemon and co, what a brilliant game!
Slitterhead
6/10 action horror game, it owns super hard. Ambitious game that’s clearly constrained by real world issues like budget and production timeline. Makes the most of what it has though by having some interesting storytelling and smart reuse of environments and enemies. The action is fairly varied and stayed fun for me throughout. Looks great too! Dripping with atmosphere, highly recommend giving it a chance!
This game is just so damn impressive. It does narrative stuff that really only feels possible in a video game, what a great use of the medium. My mind kinda boggles at all the different routes players can take through the game and which order you can see all of the information in. It’s insane and beautiful. The strategy sections are decent palate cleansers but not really the highlight of the game.
House in Fata Morgana
I am knee deep in the real meat of this game now and it really has its’ hooks in me. It’s a brutal read with some real capital letter Content Warning stuff coming into play but I’ve found it actually treats this stuff decently well compared to how edgy it was skewing early on in the game. I’m bracing for a lot of tragedy to come still.
I was testing some things with Skies of Arcadia Legends (pondering a replay) when I left the title screen on long enough to watch this post-title trailer, which I didn’t remember existed. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it. That font is wild.
Fata Morgana is just so good. It deals with some intense subject matter but I think it’s generally played out really well and I think it makes for an enjoyable gothic horror read.
I just finished Misericorde Vol 2 and I am trying to pull some cogent thoughts together for a review, but it is definitely cemented as my GOTY 2024.
I was worried after the first hour or so that I was going to hate Cloudpunk and disappoint Tom, but It’s really growing on me. I’m enjoying driving around as I improve at the controls.
Learning to toggle between the camera modes frequently, especially on foot, has also really improved the experience.
There was an explosion at the exact spot where I dropped off that ticking box. Control assures me that it wasn’t related though, so I think I’m good. I almost never make the morally “bad” choices in games, but I think this one I’m going all bad. I really think it fits Rania’s character better.
The voice acting is still garbage though. I think I would greatly prefer mumble-beeps to this voice acting. Strongly considering turning the voice volume to zero, hut I’m afraid I’ll miss stuff while driving, since the text boxes progress automatically.
I used to think I wouldn’t be interested in survival horror games because what I’d seen of Resident Evil didn’t appeal to me and I assumed Silent Hill was more of the same. How wrong I was.
It was a review of Silent Hill 4 on Insert Credit combined with a friend giving me a Konami demo disc that included the first part of that game that got me into the series. And I’ve been a huge fan ever since.
Have you tried Monster Train? It’s my favorite video game deckbuilder. It doesn’t look like much at first glance but I found it hopelessly compelling. It combines deckbuilder mechanics with My Life as a Darklord. And I like the way it shows the levels your Steam friends have reached.
i finished Rollerdrome really quickly but had fun! it had the right amount of challenge and it looked really great. i didn’t like that the levels were gated behind challenge completions but you can disable that in the assists menu at least. it also ran buttery smooth on my laptop that’s got one foot in the grave
