Discussion What are you currently playing? (Week 27 of 2025)

[Cacher]

New week, new thread! What are you playing?

I beat Kirara Route in Yumina the Ethereal. Now I fully understand how the story composition works, so here's a quick rundown:

Story Premise Spoiler

Act 1 (Ch. 1 to 4) - Fighting to get Yumina elected as the student council president
Intermission (Ch. 5) - The school turns out to be a training ground for kids with special power. Since Yumina won the election, she was deemed to be the strongest so she got captured by the military. The protagonist Ayumu and friends set out to free her from capture and thus learning the truth.
Act 2 (Ch 6 to 8) - Fighting against space monsters to save the universe
In-between - Teleport into an isekai world called Ordacle to train special power through dungeon-diving. There is a story narrative in Ordacle separate from the main story, featuring several characters and main / side quests. After a certain point of progression the game asks you to turn up the difficulty in NG+ to further progress, meaning that the narrative in Ordacle takes all three playthroughs to complete.

Bonkers story development and composition but somehow the whole package works (inevitably with a lot of deus ex machina moments). The two opening movies show the difference in vibe between Act 1 and 2.

Opening Movies

Now, the progress:

• Act 1 Bad Ending
• Main Route: Kurokawa Kirara
• Main Route: Okitsu Ai - WIP. Chapter 2
• Main Route: Midorishita Yumina
• True Ending Epilogue

Dungeons:

• Marane's Maw - 30/120
• Mezelt Tomb - 30/120
• Key to Heaven Irukaruo - 30/120
• Path of Cracks- 30/120

Save shows 50 hours of playtime after beating Kirara Route. By the end of the story, I felt really attached to the 4 main characters, especially Kirara. A character with "sadistic queen" trope at the beginning of the story, but she was steadily revealed to be a complex character filled with trauma, vulnerability and compulsion for revenge. Originally I picked her route first because she was the least likable character in earlier chapters, but I ended up liking her a lot. Her romantic relationship with Ayumu was also lovely. Really great characterization.

Gameplay-wise, I managed to complete the required main and side quests in Ordacle, which made my party overleveled a fair bit. Thus, the final boss fight in the main story became piss-easy. Not a problem, of course. I enjoyed the power play.

I have already started NG+ at Hard difficulty for Ai route. Most of the story can be skipped so progression should be much quicker.

In addition to Yumina, I have a crave for older games lately, so I installed and started The Saboteur, Dark Sector and Killer is Dead. As mentioned in the steam thread, I am not enjoying The Saboteur so it is already uninstalled. On the other hand, Dark Sector is pretty dated, buggy and janky so I stopped playing it as well.

Meanwhile, Killer is Dead is way more enjoyable than I remembered. Yes, this is a replay because I beat the game on console 10 years ago. The PC port is notoriously bad because it only supports up to 1080p and has a 30fps lock. It also crashes in one place but I applied a fix on PCGW so no crash. Once again Lossless Scaling saves the day - I use it to upscale the game to 1440p and frame-gen it to 90fps. Looks crazy sharp as far as I can see and runs really smooth without noticeable input latency. I took a lot of screenshots (sadly they are in 1080p) so you can check out some of them in the screenshot thread. Suda 51 is such a talent. I will likely play through this one to the ending.

 

[curi0usBystander]

Slowly progressing through Romancing Saga 3, the series is as obtuse as ever and yet I'm enjoying it.
I don't really know why, but so far, I enjoyed the previous game more.

 

[Ascheroth]

Not that much. I'm mostly just twiddling my thumbs until my boy Phainon in Star Rail releases this week with the new update.
I did however gave the Persona 5: The Phantom X gacha a try yesterday.
Wasn't really planning on it, cause I never finished Persona 5 itself, but figured why the hell not.
I'm surprisingly liking it? The gacha-nature of it ironically avoids my biggest problems with the main game (pacing of combat/non-combat blocks and the calendar system stressing me out). Maybe I can also use it to motivate myself actually sitting down and finishing Persona 5 eventually.

 

[Parsnip]

Just Kingdom Two Crowns. Tried the harder modes a bit and the cursed difficulty is a bit too much for me.
Currently playing the Bloodstained themed free dlc, Dead Lands. It's mostly the same as the base game, just with some flavoring on the side.

Also been thinking about backlog blitz a bit since a new month is upon us and I'll probably start it with Dungeons of Hinterberg.

 

[Stevey]

More Dead Space Remake, want to get this finished before I get into anything else.

 

[STHX]

Too hot this week for playing games that require too much "action", so I moved up the next game I was planning to play since it's turn based: Wandering Sword
Another chinese rpgs not very well known in the west but with more than 20k reviews on Steam. This game reminds me a lot of Hero's Adventure which I played at the start of the year. And that's good because I liked that game

 

[QFNS]

Digging deeper in to Expedition 33. Really enjoying it. I believe I have all the party members now (based on achievements) and am doing some side activities.

It is interesting how this game lets you walk around in way too difficult areas if you are really good at dodging and parrying. Interesting choice for an RPG like this.

 

[einstellung]

I chose to induce Stockholm Syndrome in myself by committing to a console launch. I've never "done a console launch", so I guess my inner child wanted to be a part of one before I die. The primary thing I've been playing for a month is Mario Kart World. Watching competitive Mario Kart 8 Deluxe matches (facilitated by the MKCentral website) slowly raised my interest in jumping in with MKW over the past 6 months. The competitive matches showed me an interesting side to MK, strategizing around the randomness while keeping to good driving lines.

I really haven't played Mario Kart since the Nintendo 64. MKW has major flaws and an obnoxious dearth of options, but it can be very excellent too. I've most enjoyed doing Time Trials. It's basically because I love games like Neon White, Kick Bastards, Hell of an Office, and Rocket Boots Mania. Finding your own route, working on it, then watching the world record to learn new techniques is just as addictive as optimization was in Neon White for me.

I like taking photos too. The world provides a lot of cute moments of which to snap candids. The photo mode isn't great, but it's sufficient.

Race in online multiplayer is my favorite mode, but as you may have heard Nintendo wants to ruin it by making it mini-bad-Knockout-Tour-Jr. So, when I want to play I get on Twitch and find a streamer doing a private lobby. Those groups tend to pick almost exclusively 3-lap traditional tracks, so that's helped a lot circumventing Nintendo's creative director's hubris.

24 players is just too much. I mean it's great for Knockout Tour, but in Race I hate it. Private lobbies tend to be like 5-8 people and the rest filled out by CPUs which is acceptable. 24 humans is the problem. 18 CPUs is much less aggravating.

I'm a "sweat" in MKW and I've found it fun to try to be the best I can. I'm finally getting better at being judicious with my item usage. I'm predicting better what people will do and thus mitigating bad luck to some extent.

They made Moo Moo Meadows not totally boring by introducing one of the most satisfying and fun shortcuts of all-time: https://cdn.steamusercontent.com/ugc/11069825499626211284/C52FC288543723E85DEC72D08F10706252844A20/