Tale

I played through Beyond a Steel Sky over the weekend. Joey is fantastic. That's the only noteworthy part of the game, sadly. None of the other characters are worth remembering. And the story is exactly what you're used to from dystopia disguised as utopia fiction. But Joey is funny and a delight and I wish the game had been all about him instead of the world's most dull and emotionless man, Foster. I find myself wanting a really good party based RPG with quirky characters or super funny adventure game. Sadly I'm turning up empty for one I haven't already played yet. Recommendations, anyone?

And now I just binged through Blacksad. Shows 7 hours, but it felt a little longer. Anyway, it's up there with Telltale's best. Right behind Telltale's own Noir comic license, A Wolf Among Us.

Have you heard about our lord and savior Noita? It's getting hard for me to stick to anything else. I'm always wanting to jump in for a quick run that turns into a few hours and multiple runs. Will I get lightning bolt today? Will I accidentally electrocute myself in water when I do? Will I become electric and stand on a propane tank and explode? Here's to hoping I finally get unlimited bombs and explosion immunity! Finally a luminous drill that can go 4 length indefinitely, killing everything through walls. Except that one thing that... according to wiki only attacks me if I attack it. Too late.

The only competition is for your time. "Cheating" would be letting a game get away with having you spend time doing stuff you don't enjoy.

Cyberpunk 2077, or technically I just finished it. I don't think there's any sidquests left for me to do and there's one ending I can't get without a restart. Maybe I'll do that after they release expansions.

I've already scheduled Thursday off largely to play Cyberpunk. I'll be disappointed if it's still in miserable condition and all the NPCs are T-posing. But I think I'll survive.

I have no choice but to finally finish it now! Drakensang has been in my queue to play since before 2009. I always start and play a couple hours and put it down. Might have to tough through that intro.

Like I said, exhausting. Honestly, having their own tech tree sounds like it's an improvement. Is it?

Phoenix Point scares me in that it looks like it's leaning too heavily on emergent and randomized gameplay. As you progress, the enemies adapt! That doesn't sell me. That sounds absolutely exhausting.

How do I have 100 hours in Destiny 2 just since Beyond Light's launch? It's not that good a game... And I haven't even done the raid yet! I'm also playing The Last of Us 2. Initial impressions were that it's more of the same... but the game has flashes of brilliance where you're focusing on characters and it really connects with me again. Both are really just holding me over until this December's release of the true Game of the Year. Sam and Max Save The World remaster.

Got dragged back into Destiny 2. I'm not sure why, it always fail to live up to the promise it presents. Previously, it was nice coming in late to enjoy stuff after it had settled. But this time they deleted half the game.

Chaos;Head and 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim Both I can recommend if you're into stories and have a bit of a weeb side. Chaos;Head is pure VN, where 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim is 90% sidescrolling story game of high schoolers talking and 10% strategy game of giant robots fighting Kaiju. Though everyone pretty much looks like blue, yellow, or red dots. Don't expect to feel immersed in that part.

Was playing some Deadfire, but then kind of lost the reason why. The quests are all starting to blend into each other and none of the companions are giving me something interesting to work with. I hate saying it. I'm also tooling around in Amnesia: Rebirth. I'm tempted to go back to Pathfinder: Kingmaker for my party based RPG fix, but it ultimately has the same complaints as Deadfire. Maybe I find there to be more interesting companions, but the pacing of that game is utterly glacial. No interesting developments in the 60 hours I already committed to it.

I'm doing Deadfire. Some days I feel like I'm the only RPG fan who isn't a fan of pirate stuff. Mostly because I find shipbattles dull in the (admittedly few) games I've played with them. This is no exception. I just don't want to deal with all the extra resource management.

I found out there was more, the Underdark. No quest pointers pointed how to get there, no hints in the journal, it's just a locked door I overlooked in an area I'd been to a bunch of times. And now I'm finally done. This time the game told me so. The more I think, the more concerns I have. The companions are still "boring," but it feels like a quick fix. There's a common tip I hear in writing groups, cut your first few chapters. These characters need that. They all have hooks, but those hooks are all dragged out and locked away behind quests. So in EA all we get are the boring versions. We're getting Minsc playing coy about what's in his pocket. And that's being generous, because I doubt any will be Minsc once they break out of their shell. This is my biggest issue with the EA by far. And I will harp on it until it's clearly too late to fix, because it's fixable right up until they stop recording new dialogue. And even if these are set on it, maybe the companions not yet revealed aren't.

I found more to Baldur's Gate 3. And finally got a screen telling me I finished the EA. It's a promising game, but really comes across more as a Divinity: Original Sin 3 than a Baldur's Gate 3. So "is a lesser good so terrible?" I ask myself. I've also picked up Pillars of Eternity again and am marching through White March 2. Not an Icewind Dale fan and it's clearly inspired by that, but I want to complete everything before moving to PoE 2. And Phoenix Wright. About time I replayed it, the PC trilogy seems like a good excuse.

I think I finished what's available. It's hard to tell if bugs are stopping my progress in some quests or if they're still WIP. I'm not thrilled by it. It scratched the itch of party based RPGs, but that's pretty much it. There's some curiosity about where the plot is going. Like the hints of Bhaalspawn involvement. But the characters don't generate any interest. They feel like weaker OS2 companions, just an archetype attached to a quest you'll probably stumble upon completing as you do the main story. The encounters also bother me a bit, too. I like the interactivity with environs and how they handle stealth rules, but when your max level is 4 and they send a swarm of dudes you keep missing who are also level 4 (as a non-optional quest encounter), then all the shine wears off real quick. Only way I made it through what I'd call the final boss of EA was because I hung out in the rafters shooting people where half the enemies don't even know how to deal with it and the rest can be shoved off. I'm a fan of cheese as food, but not as gameplay. The hag encounter required its own cheese, too. Her minions were so hard, her environment was so painfully ridiculous with poison (or fire), that I got lucky and was able to repeatedly backstab her without being attacked back. As a minor quibble, I do hope they get rid of all the junk items as loot. No reason for forks, cups, and plates to be more than an item you can toss at baddies if they're only 1 weight, 1 gold.

I finished the Baldur's Gate 3 Early Access. I think. It's hard to tell. I've got quest markers up that don't seem to point to anything. And there's no big notice beyond the game saying I can't access other areas when I try. I might finally finish PoE since I'm still craving RPG.

I'm not sure it'll satisfy a desire to play evil. The "evil" option in quests so far has been to just turn down quests to help people. This may change as I come across meatier quests or it gets more development. But early impressions don't lead me to expect it.

The general impression I have for why most of the companions are jerks is that they're focusing on evil and evil-adjacent companions for EA period. This seems a strange choice. I like the Gith, though. She's the only one who I don't want to stab.

In the game I was part of before the pandemic I liked it. It felt like we were less reliant on ups. Part of that may just be how our DM ran the game.

I'm torn. Baldur's Gate 2 is such a treasure to me. But Divinity: Original Since 2 was just... okay. I've got to hear more on the writing, particularly the characters. I've forgotten every character from DOS2 already. It's not impossible for them to accomplish it. Baldur's Gate 1 characters weren't so memorable either. Not until 2 made them so.

Okay, hear me out. DOOM by Obsidian

I can find no mods that make it so the loot isn't just piles of crap that's managed by horribly slow menus. It's mostly cosmetic mods, a few rebalances. Ooh, I see one that drops even more loot. That would just make the problem worse.

Dragon Age Inquisition's loot system is annoying the crap out of me. It's one of those games I feel is trying too hard with loot. You have three tiers of loot, 4 rarities, customizable upgrades, and loot progression that goes alongside character level. Then, if you're a mage, you have to sort 3 damage types for your weapon because this will be on the test. Which means you're constantly finding utter crap. And you have to navigate the slow menus one item at a time just to make sure it's crap. And even when it's not crap, you're now going into another slow menu to take off the upgrades from your old equipment to put the upgrades on the new one. Your equipment basically has their own equipment submenu that requires accessing through a special location. And if you want to keep your entire roster's equipment up to date, you need to do this process like 10 times. Because you never know when you'll need to take someone off the bench. Customization is desirable because it's supposed to reduce the doing of all this. Find something you like the looks of and you can keep it by upgrading. Find something with stats you like and you can make it look cool. Here we're just adding more loot, more stats, more junk, more menus. I'm not even saying that games need to stop doing loot. They just need to loot to not be an obligation. It needs to be an interesting game system. It should have the value of a good skill tree, representing a play style. And only upgrading when it changes substantially or when you want a player to try something out different. Not just be ups. Soulsborne games are great at this. Even many games with too much loot show they know how... in their endgame. But games don't need the earlier filler. If the end game is where the interest is, the whole game needs to catch up.