Discussion What are you currently playing? (Week 23 of 2023)

[Cacher]

New week, new thread! What are you playing?

Tears of the Kingdom: after 80 hours, I have finally finished my second main quest at Fire Temple. Story leading to the place is funny and the place feels like a traditional Zelda dungeon with good puzzles. I saw many people on some other forums say they cheesed through the puzzles through climbing because of impatience... Man what a waste. The puzzles are not even difficult to figure out.

Also downloaded the PC client of Alice Gear Aegis due to the anime. Played the game a few years ago but I am starting over. I just want to read the braindead but hilarious story. Have absolutely no interest in the gacha, so this game is going to be complete F2P to me.

Excited to see the upcoming shows from the big publishers and indies this week. Please be good.

 

[C-Dub]

A combo of SF6 (on and off when I fancy it over the next few months, I think) and Katamari Damacy REROLL. Realised the sequel remake was out this week so I thought I’d get around to the original.

Having a blast with both!

 

[Li Kao]

Having finished both Fire Emblem : Shadows of Valentia and Paranormasight, I started (and finished) Warhammer 40,000 : Boltgun, so there is that.

Now I'm juggling my daily chores in Honkai Star Rail (for how much longer ?) and dabbing in a little Street Fighter 6. Have to find the time for P5R, too !
Xenoblade 2 is in danger of dropping, as I didn't play it in some time and the story beat I'm in is uninteresting.
Strangers of Paradise in big danger, as I don't even remember how the combat system works.

And there is Diablo 4 in two days.

Overall, pretty happy, stressed by Xenoblade 2 but it's not like I wasn't playing good things, so hey, we will see.
I'm also itching to play most Kojima games in chronological order, and FF7 vanilla, too, but I don't have time slots for those.

 

[curi0usBystander]

Started playing SF6, but haven't been able to play much.

 

[Ascheroth]

Played through Hue, Muv-Luv Alternative, the current Genshin main event + new character story quests and did a bunch of Spritfaring. All very good stuff.
This week the new Star Rail update is coming, hopefully that's good. Primarily I wanna try out GhostWire Tokyo though, once the new bundle hits.
Until then I'm probably gonna do more Spiritfaring or read through one of the Muv-Luv extra stories.

 

[Durante]

I wrote about Astlibra Revision in the Steam thread.

It's absolutely awesome.
I never really heard much about this before, I must have put it on my wishlist a while ago. It popped up last week since it was on sale and I gave it a try since I was looking for a game to play on Deck and the reviews sounded great.

 

[C-Dub]

Having finished both Fire Emblem : Shadows of Valentia and Paranormasight,

How did you get on with Paranormasight? It's on my "Up Next" list but every time I decide to grab a game from that list (of about 15 games) I play something else.

 

[Li Kao]

How did you get on with Paranormasight? It's on my "Up Next" list but every time I decide to grab a game from that list (of about 15 games) I play something else.

My Steam review :

Not worth much.
The game was stealth released and had a sympathetic aura, it reviewed well and I'm sure many liked it, but alas, I can't go there.
Production value is very weak, with only an handful of backgrounds, there was no voice budget either, the pace is relatively glacial... and, far more problematic, the writing is not good enough, characters are linked together by connections that just feel there to help the plot stand up, and when all is said and done, the whole thing is convoluted.
Not to mention each endings feel very rushed, unsatisfying.
It's still a sympathetic game, it's a VN from a publisher that don't do them often, there are a handful of nice ideas and the art is solid, but it didn't have neither the budget nor the storytelling chops it deserved.

I really didn’t like it that much. But hey, plenty of people talk about it like it was the sleeper gem of the year, so YMMV.

 

[Parsnip]

I started Paradise Lost, played only a like 20 minutes before bed a few days ago, so nothing to say about it just yet.
Been also playing Baba Is You. It's great in that it opens up most of the different puzzle locations fairly early and usually each location also has multiple puzzles open at any given time, so even if you can't solve some puzzle you can probably try the next one, or go to the next location. I've definitely been skipping puzzles here and there, just don't have any clue on some of them. I imagine when I eventually look at a solution online it will basically just teach me some new trick I haven't even considered and I end up using it in other unsolved puzzles too.
Also some Solitaire as per usual. I can't quite recall the exact amount, but I don't think I have too too many levels left in the third Dreamland Solitaire game. Might grab the Zachtronics Solitaire collection at some point to fill that void.

I think I also decided that I'll play God of War fairly soon, but I'm probably going to watch some story videos before I start. I only played the first one back in the day, so I need a bit of a refresher for it and watching summaries of the other games will give me some much needed context for some stuff I expect.

 

[hersheyfan]

So last weekend was a blur. Just a metric shit ton of Diablo IV (XSX), I think at one point the game had been out for 48 hours and I had played like, 22, lol.

D4 is amazing! I leveled a Rogue to level 31, and a Sorcerer past that (level 37 iirc) - there's so much customizability in how you build out your characters, a happy medium between Diablo II and Diablo III. The open world also adds a lot - I was originally apprehensive about this, but the huge variety in different locations to run through helps prevent things getting monotonous.

Also managed to sneak in a little Street Fighter VI (Steam), which was also really great. The World Tour mode is a fun addition, it's janky as hell, but reminds me a lot of Yakuza's goofy side (edit: in terms of sense of humor/tone, not gameplay obviously). Lots of content to burn through for single player only types, if thats your thing. The new characters are generally great, and the improvements to the fighting system are much appreciated.

One caveat, the UI is incredibly bad. Just confusing and poorly made, which is shocking considering how much effort they put into onboarding new players - assist modes, tutorials upon tutorials, a general slant towards accessibility. If you pointed a gun at me and told me to switch from modern to classic style in two minutes to stay alive, I'd be dead twice over.

Both of them are still amazing games, all things considered. It's insane that they technically launched on the same day!

 

[Avern]

When Asuka dropped for Guilty Gear Strive a couple weeks back, my Hitbox broke after about 30 minutes of playing. I ordered a leverless Victrix controller from Amazon to replace it, but then they botched the shipping, delaying it by nearly a full week.

While waiting for the stick, I replayed Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (still a masterpiece), and now that the stick arrived, I've been playing tons of Guilty Gear Strive and Street Fighter 6.

Strive's been incredible. Asuka might just be my favorite character in a fighting game ever. He's hard to play, but having a bunch of constantly shifting tools to use is so fun (especially since most of the spells are absolutely cracked). I'm going to be playing tons of this in the coming weeks.

SF6 was a surprise for me. I've played a lot of different SF games over the years, but I've never really enjoyed them that much. But 6 is awesome. The mechanics and tools feel wackier and cooler, and the netcode is flawless. It's a great experience.

 

[crimsonheadGCN]

Street Fighter 6

 

[fearthedawn]

Street Fighter 6

 

[Acidote]

The time for Diablo IV has come. As soon as I get home from the office today I'll dive into Sanctuary.

 

[Stevey]

Been playing a load of Subnautica.
Will be picking Diablo VI up next week (payday is the 15th for me)