Discussion What are you currently playing? (Week 40 of 2025)

Cacher

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Jun 3, 2020
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New week, new thread! What are you playing?

Continuing Tears of the Kingdom. It is devouring my life. Already finished the third dungeon. This one was too easy compared with the first two. Now hoping for a ramp up in difficulty (although I still can't fight against a Gleeok at the moment).
 
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Played through the new Star Rail story and thankfully we're so back after the last one being mixed, this was great. Some huge lore/future story bombs and great character moments. Looking forward to the conclusion to this arc next update.

Otherwise lotsa Monster Hunter Stories. I have to take back some of the battle system complaining, it's less complete RNG than it appeared.
Just unlocked Rarity 4 mons and immediately put the Pink Rathian, Diablos and Shrouded Nerscylla that I'd hatched earlier into the party :evilblob:
The overall gameplay loop of this is just really good.
 
DOOM: A Dork Ages: Personally, I don't mind the switch from Eternal's verticality to flat, large battlefields. I think the speed makes up for it. And specially the shield charge. It never gets old mulching the fodder with a shield charge. It's a very fun, I need to consider my next move, move. I played at max game speed 150%. The game feels like it's in slow motion on the default speed. The Dark Ages pars back the complexity of Eternal, but sustains a good level of its own. In terms of cognitive load, it's a pleasant middle ground between the overwhelm of Eternal and, for my taste, too loosey-goosey design of 2016. I'd say it ties with Eternal for me, both of which I much prefer over 2016. I'm glad that they made all 3 games so different. And I'm glad they made Eternal and Dark Ages so unique. I don't understand people who want them to be standard boomer shooters. We already have like 3,000 of those. A major misstep I would say is Dark Ages' levels in terms of secret design were too oversimplified.

Tempopo: The game is 60 puzzles. Perhaps near the end a few of them start to strain your brain. Then the game looks at the ground and mentions offhandedly, "I guess there's another buncha puzzles you could play, if you like our game and want a bit more." So, after you "beat" the game. The real game begins. A second set of 60 puzzles is made available. In a coy, casual way, after the credit roll, as mentioned previously. But this second half... Wow, I may be physically incapable of finishing the game. I'm not smart enough. It feels like when I played Snakebird and you reach that point where you're pretty certain there's one, and only one, solution. And you will never be clairvoyant enough to see through the dense fog to the one, singular answer. I only did 14 of the back 60, not even one full island. And I was done. I'm too stupid for this; it was taking me 30 minutes per puzzle. The 14th puzzle took an embarrassing hour. The 15th puzzle broke me, and I limped away.
 
After last week having 2130982190381293 deadlines + TGS, I want to play "sleep" but I''m playing Shinobi Art of Vengeance on Switch (to try the patch), more Cronos (great game tbh), 1 game I will post about here soon, Hitman World of Ass and Maze Mice on iPhone.
 
Played through the new Star Rail story and thankfully we're so back after the last one being mixed, this was great. Some huge lore/future story bombs and great character moments. Looking forward to the conclusion to this arc next update.

Otherwise lotsa Monster Hunter Stories. I have to take back some of the battle system complaining, it's less complete RNG than it appeared.
Just unlocked Rarity 4 mons and immediately put the Pink Rathian, Diablos and Shrouded Nerscylla that I'd hatched earlier into the party :evilblob:
The overall gameplay loop of this is just really good.
Speaking of HSR, I'm (very, very) slowly going through the main story and got to Penacony. The scene where Firefly gets killed was great and the first time I got emotionally invested into the game. But then Silent Hill f came out and I've put it on the back burner. Hoping to catch up to the story before the next planet comes out in (what I assume will be) January.
 
Speaking of HSR, I'm (very, very) slowly going through the main story and got to Penacony. The scene where Firefly gets killed was great and the first time I got emotionally invested into the game. But then Silent Hill f came out and I've put it on the back burner. Hoping to catch up to the story before the next planet comes out in (what I assume will be) January.
Yeah, next planet should be end of January unless they throw a curve ball.
Good luck, Amphoreus is looooooooong. :sweaty-blob:
 
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I spent the entire long weekend (it was a public holiday last Friday) playing Cyberpunk 2077.

I can count the number of games I can truly get lost in on just one hand, and I can safely say CP2077 has joined that number. To be honest, I don't even know what the game is like on a vanilla playthrough. I did try it briefly back in 2023, but I then discovered one of my favourite mods for the game: Stealthrunner. For someone who prefers stealth gameplay, this mod feels like it was made specifically for me (and other fans of Deus Ex or other immersive sims). I didn't end up finishing that playthrough for one reason or another, but I'm glad the mod author still keeping it up to date with the current patch level.

Fast-forward to 2025, and I'm nearly at 500 mods deep into the game. Much like how my character in the game is more machine than flesh, the experience has been so far removed from the original game. From the smallest mod such as an interaction cue to open the stash door, to complex mods like Wannabe Edgerunner or Dark Future, all these things combined has made Night City to have a certain sense of place. This aspect is one of the things that I feel still very hard to convey in video games.

I think of the idea of having the ability to walk a crowded street and looking up, only to see the sky blotted by highways. Or watching the crowd peddling their wares (or bodies!) in a sickly neon-lit red-light district has somewhat captured that alienating feel that anyone who has lived in a metropolitan city has experienced at some point in their lives.

Of course, this being an open-world game, it is not perfect by any means, and glitches are par for the course, but I feel the world building has more to make up for it. An anecdote - when Phantom Liberty was just released, and I was looking through the reviews, I saw one review that one player has posted when they hit nearly 1,000 hours played. At the time, I couldn't quite comprehend playing a single-player game for that many hours, regardless of contents and life path variations. But after playing for nearly 100 hours myself for this playthrough, I think I finally understand where they are coming from.
 
I mostly played Silksong last week and have continued to do so this week (which is also why I didn't finish my last blitz game in time, grrr argh).

I can't say I absolutely love it. There's a bit too many mob wave rooms for my liking and it feels like the invincibility after getting hit is kind of too short so actually getting hit twice from one attack or from just touching a larger boss or something is quite common I find.
That's actually one of the things that somehow bother me the most, touching an enemy/boss and getting hurt. And yes of course this isn't a new thing, but for some reason it bothers me more here?
Maybe it's because they all have actual active targeting attacks so it feel off to also have this? I don't know.
Also how they handle lava and spikes suck.

Looks and sounds gorgeous and feels good to play though. But yeah some of the decision along the way I don't like.
 
Started playing Cronos, still in the first few hours of it and loving the Dead Space vibes it's giving off. Bloober has truly come a long way.

I gotta get back to Silksong. Still in Act 2 and currently exploring Bilewater, and doing more quests and exploration. Not in a big hurry to move on to Act 3, which I have a fairly good idea how to progress on.
 
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100 hours later, I'm at chapter 7 in SRWY, the final one, the last stretch. Next week I should be able to finish the game for the first time
 
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