What are you playing? (2022 Edition)

[Anarchic Fox]

Still Dragon Quest XI for me. It was my reward to myself for a successful move, and here I am a month and half later still playing it. I very much appreciate its midgame twist, though: It's basically Final Fantasy VI all over again. The bad guy wins.

[henke]

Spent this weekend being a lil' tiny guy.

Played through The Adventures Of Poppe. A metroidvania in classic NES-style, for good and bad.

The artstyle is very nice and movement feels good, and the world design is great. The whole premise of being a little guy reminded me of the Ghibli film "Arrietty". On the downside there are some grating design decisions and not much of a story. The first bit of actual dialogue (and anything resembling a plot) shows up 5 HOURS into the game, and the whole game was over an hour later. As a metroidvania, the flow of the world isn't as intuitive as some more modern examples of the genre, and a good amount of guesswork and backtracking is required.

Despite all that tho, this game pretty much had me hooked from start to finish.







This game has 3 Steam user reviews. The developer has 18 followers on twitter. This is likely the only time you'll hear anyone mentioning this game, so hey, put it on your wishlist eh? It's a good game, and it'd be a shame if the world completely passed it by.

[PigLick]

that actually does look pretty cool, wishlisted!

[Thirith]

I can already say that I will suck at Sekiro. It leans into the aspects of Dark Souls and similar games that I'm worst at, while reducing or even removing the aspects that helped me get through them after all. However, I realised that one of the things that didn't help was that my Xbox One controller was not exactly a spring chicken anymore, so that e.g. LB wouldn't work as reliably as it should - which is a problem if that what you need to block and deflect. So, after I spent over an hour trying and failing to defeat the first (?) mini-boss, General Naomori Kawarada, I switched to a new controller - and while I still struggled, I did kill him in ten minutes. Here's hoping 1) that the new controller'll help in general and 2) that the game will succeed at teaching me how to play it, because if it's already this stressful to play, I don't want to know what it'll be like once I get to the actual bosses.

[Aja]

Sekiro is probably the most difficult of all the Souls games, but I found it the most rewarding. Unfortunately you have to unlearn a lot of what the Souls games teach you: parrying, which was stupidly hard in DS, is now the best and many cases only way to win (so yeah, making sure LB works properly is important . Focus on filling the enemies' stamina bar, not draining their health. Learn the parry timings for each enemy. And be aggressive. The usual tactic for the non-monster bosses is to attack until they deflect, then focus on deflecting their attacks until you have an opening to attack again. Also, Chained Ogre is coming up, is probably the worst boss in the game, but he's not representative of what's to come, just a bad early design decision.

I could spend hours talking about Sekiro, but I guess there's a separate forum for that.

[Thirith]

I have to say that I didn't find Chained Ogre all that bad. Whether he's representative or not of other bosses, I can't say, but he was reasonably slow and the hint to use fire was very clear. I did die to him two or three times, but after that my timing was sufficiently okay.

What I'm still finding difficult is to deflect consistently; I press LB too early much of the time. However, whenever there's a sole enemy that I reasonably toy with, I use them to practice my timing.

[Anarchic Fox]

I have to say that I didn't find Chained Ogre all that bad. Whether he's representative or not of other bosses, I can't say, but he was reasonably slow and the hint to use fire was very clear. I did die to him two or three times, but after that my timing was sufficiently okay.

What I'm still finding difficult is to deflect consistently; I press LB too early much of the time. However, whenever there's a sole enemy that I reasonably toy with, I use them to practice my timing.

I think Chained Ogre and a certain fiery one that'll show up soon are the only ones that can fought like Dark Souls bosses.

Thankfully the deathblow mechanic makes successful combat more and more rapid the more skilled you become at parrying, so that skill remains a pleasure to practice.

[Angel Dust]

I can already say that I will suck at Sekiro. It leans into the aspects of Dark Souls and similar games that I'm worst at, while reducing or even removing the aspects that helped me get through them after all. However, I realised that one of the things that didn't help was that my Xbox One controller was not exactly a spring chicken anymore, so that e.g. LB wouldn't work as reliably as it should - which is a problem if that what you need to block and deflect. So, after I spent over an hour trying and failing to defeat the first (?) mini-boss, General Naomori Kawarada, I switched to a new controller - and while I still struggled, I did kill him in ten minutes. Here's hoping 1) that the new controller'll help in general and 2) that the game will succeed at teaching me how to play it, because if it's already this stressful to play, I don't want to know what it'll be like once I get to the actual bosses.

I had a similar experience to you at first but eventually it clicked. It felt like I was gonna have to do all the stuff that I basically avoid in Dark Souls & co (i.e. parrying) but once I clicked that the parrying is more like a little mini-rhythm game I really started liking it. I can't parry to save myself in Souls games but it's WAY more forgiving in Sekiro (since the parry/block in pretty much instantaneous you can block when the attack will hit you rather than that odd timing in Souls where you have to take into account the wind up animation of the parry and hit parry sometime BEFORE the attack would land) and works more like a block - once you learn the moves you parry the full attack and then get tour attacks in. Aja's advice about focus more on filling their stamina bar than lowering their health is good but for bosses you still need to focus on the health initially as the amount of health a boss has often affects how fast their stamina recovers.

Hopefully you persevere as Sekiro has the best bosses gaming has to offer in opinion - tough, full or spectacle but super clear to read. The final boss is by far the best 'final exam' boss I've every fought.

[Thirith]

Oh, I'm pretty sure I'll persevere. There's more than enough that I'm enjoying about this game, so it'd really have to get to the point where I keep failing and I don't feel I'm improving in any way and moving towards beating a boss. I know I somehow managed to beat the final boss of the Bloodborne DLC without any external help, so I should be fine. It'll just take a while.