Discussion What are you currently playing? (Week 30 of 2025)

[Cacher]

New week, new thread! What are you playing?

I am addicted to Reverse Collapse: Code Name Bakery. It is very polished with great balancing (which is a surprise considering that the two Girls' Frontline games from the same developer can be pretty janky at times...). I really enjoy that it has varied stages: a stage where you kill every enemy in broad daylight; another stage taking place in the dark, so your party can sneak to a location as close as possible to your enemies before pulling the trigger. And then there're also puzzle-like stages where it is a must to sneak past every enemy. With superb level designs, strategies change drastically between stages.. The game demands you to keep your mind sharp at anytime. This is not a relaxing game to play, but the satisfaction after going through each stage is immense.

Simply fascinating. I love it.

 

[curi0usBystander]

More Balatro (failed) runs.
Also in card games Kingdom Hearts: Re CoM (from the Remix collection). I still think that the game worked better in the 2D plane of the GBA and moving the game to a 3D plane was a mistake, since combat takes slightly longer, but it's a short(ish) game so i guess it's fine.

 

[Stevey]

Still playing Diablo 2 and the Oblivion Remaster

 

[Nebulys]

Started Donkey Kong Bananza on the Switch 2. I'm a couple of hours in and got to sublevel 300, and I'm loving it so far - feels like an extremely high quality platformer. Not quite a landmark title like Super Mario Odyssey, but it's as good as (if not better than) Astro Bot.

I'm also going to start The Legend of Zelda (NES) on my Analogue Pocket later today.

 

[Panda Pedinte]

I started playing Pokémon Violet and it has been a nice surprise as the last Pokémon game I played to completion was Pokémon Gold. I think the change to 3D is interesting as I like seeing the pokemons walking around everywhere. So far the story is a nice change from the other games of the series I've played as you are enrolled to a school and can take some classes and rise your bond with other characters.

Now the bad, the landscape is fucking ugly. Holy shit Gamefreak it looks so bare and I wasnt expecting anything incredible so my expectations were already low because I know the Switch limitations, even though I'm playing through emulation.

Another game that I'm playing is Ender Magnolia. I didn't play the previous game so it's all nee for me, the idea behinf the main character being just a kid that needs the homunculae to attack for them just makes sense in this universe. I'm not that far into the game yet, just beat the boss from the forest but I'm liking everything in this game.

 

[Durante]

About a week ago I discovered that in 2023, someone released a game that is absolutely made for me:
Touhou Artificial Dream in Arcadia


It's a blobber with some classic SMT elements, a JRPG overworld, and a bullet-hell-based capture mechanic.
And it's absolutely amazing.

Just looking at the store page and screenshots I was still a bit skeptical, but honestly, the first impression doesn't do the overall quality of this justice.

This type of game, in my opinion, lives and dies based on a large number of things coming together, and here, everything does:

• The old school dungeon crawling and mapping, with good variety, interesting (but not too prevalent) gimmicks, and with a nice little acknowledgment reward for fully mapping out floors
• The SMT aspect works, if anything, better than it ever did in SMT, at least for me. Because every single character is a Touhou character, and so has their own quirks, expected affinities, and so on, which makes them interesting to encounter/discover/use. The game really benefits from decades of franchise building in that sense.
• There are some really smart tradeoff decisions when it comes to resource management, which is always important in a good blobber. It has this lore justification for basically having a (soft) exploration timer, but you can decide the tradeoff between longer exploration and a more powerful party.
• The battle system, while rather basic overall, has some emphasis on buffing/debuffing in boss battles, with stackable buffs. It also has an additional party-wide resource (SP, in addition to each character's traditional HP/MP), which can be used for more and more interesting effects as the game progresses. Party composition and placement also becomes more important, as does the specialization of your own player character.
• Even the story is great, and the writing fits it to a T. Touhou stories have this special and rather somewhat unique quality, where the characters are just so matter-of-fact about even outlandish incidents, and the game captures that perfectly. Interacting with the various characters, although it's just a few sentences each, is fun.
• Finally, the game developer(s? is it a single person?) understand and implement pacing better than a lot of huge projects manage to do. I just reached a part when the game world opens up a lot more, and thought that this could get a bit annoying to traverse, and this is where the game unlocked a new mechanic (even with an intriguing in-universe event) exactly to cover that.

Oh, and you get something absurd like 9 hours of gameplay on a charge with this on Steam Deck.

In short: I like it a lot.

 

[Dinjoralo]

Persona 5X lead to me trying out Persona 3 Reload, and I think I can see this being "my" Persona game. The vibe just hits me in a way that it never did for Persona's 4 and 5, it has a quiet confidence whereas the others are much more bombastic and in-your-face.

 

[Parsnip]

Watch Dogs 2

Once they get past the kind of awful introduction for some of the characters, they are kind of growing on me. Also I need some open world slop every now and then.