Morning all. It’s Monday morning which can mean but one thing…What have you been playing this last week?
Replaying Subnautica. Still a superb innovation.
The first and only survival-crafting game I’ve enjoyed, and I enjoyed it immensely. Too many of them feel endless and aimless. Subnautica has a perfectly fine-tuned sense of progress that’s always dangling some new capability or area to explore just ahead.
Marvel Midnight Suns. Disregarded it on announcement and launch because I wasn’t interested in the core card-based system. Played a little bit of Slay the Spire, which didn’t catch with me but did suggest I might actually be able to enjoy a card-based system with enough narrative context to keep me interested.
So far, so good. I just completed Act 1 (which prompted me to exclaim “that was only act 1??”) and I’m a little worried that I’m going to tire of the side missions soon and lose steam overall, but it hasn’t happened yet. The characters are fine enough, although they definitely give off MCU fanfic vibes (it’s jarring to me having a Peter Parker voiced by Yuri Lowenthal who is such a little remora sidekick in his characterization). The loop is pretty satisfying, if not a little clunky, and I wish the balance between doing battles and running around the abbey grounds leaned a little less on the abbey stuff.
But it’s a lot of fun and very addictive. I’m saddened that it performed poorly but I bear my part of the responsibility willingly.
It’s 75% off on Steam right now so I’m strongly considering it. I love this studio and I haven’t seen/heard anything yet about the game that would turn me off.
Bowser’s Fury. Fun game, game mechanics have no logic whatsoever in-world, but it’s fun so who am I to argue.
I just wish the Fury part of Bowsers Fury was a little less all consuming. The little open world they constructed was great, but I found the constant interruption from Bowser to be a little grating after a while.
I was mostly fine with it until I got close to the story ending, when his episode doesn’t end unless I get a cat shine or die. Especially the last few cat shines seem to have been meant to be collected in a constant fury state.
Still playing Yakuza 0, but I haven’t touched the main story since Tuesday. First, the cabaret club opened up and that was interesting. Then while poking around looking for business partners, I stumbled on the mahjong club and tried it.
Boy, did I ever fall into a damn rabbit hole with mahjong. I’ve been hungrily studying basic strategy, and I even grabbed Mahjong Soul to play on my phone. I always liked canasta, and it’s a lot like that, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, but still. Prob playing more tonight!
Still playing Balatro
I wish I could get into this, but it’s just not for me. Seems super cool and everyone seems to be so enamored with it…but I just couldn’t get it to stick.
New patch out too!
Trying to get as many single player achievements as I can from Software Inc.
The 8 days for 10 years took ages.
On the other hand, my wife is having a blast playing the new Stardew Valley patch.
I’ve spent my time continuing through, and then finishing my first run on the new Suzerain DLC.
Had a good time with it but I think it’s maybe not as… fully thought out as the games OG campaign was. That said, I’m definitely going back to it at some point because I made some frankly awful decisions and it all went wrong very quickly.
I was a bit worried about how well the Steamdeck would handle it but I actually found playing with the Decks touchpads to be preferable to the games gamepad mode.
Mario Kart 7 online this morning, I assume it’ll just go dead at some point :'(
Dredge, GT7, and Armored Core has been most of this week!
Just started One Piece Worldseeker because it was on sale for $5. My expectations were very low but so far I’ve had a great time. Starting to see some worrying signs the game could become very repetitive though.
I’ve been entirely mostly off from OMORI these days, and still on vivid/statis, wherein I still seem to stagnate at my current ability to clear Classes 2 and/or 3 on Course Mode, as well as raising my personal skills and score on Middle charts past Level 6-9+, just for that last requirement on the final Final Landing song’s equivalent chart.
