What are ya playin' in 2025?

[Tomi]

I finished one successful run of Balatro and I think that's enough for me. It's a good game that I'd recommend to just about everyone, and I guess I've only seen a small amount of what it has to offer, but for now I'm happy that I can say that I've beat the game so that I can uninstall it.

I also played Lil Gator Game with my kid because it's leaving the Game Pass this week. It's a poor man's A Short Hike really, it feels like they've just ripped a lot of things straight from it. Well, "poor man" may be a bit too harsh, as Lil Gator Game isn't too bad for a harmless game that you can play with together with a 6-year-old. There's way too much dialogue for such a game though.

Also finished Psychonauts 2 at last. It's also great and definitely worth checking out if action platformers are your thing. I was silly enough to get every single achievement in the game, but at least they were somewhat sensible and fun, unlike in many other games. Psychonauts 2 isn't too challenging and it doesn't take too long to beat (unless you try to get all these silly achievements, of course) so it felt like the perfect game to play after my KCD marathon.

And speaking of KCD marathon, I finally started KCD 2 yesterday! I'll post more in the KCD thread later.

[Tomi]

I started a new game in Yoku's Island Express, this time on the XBox. I'm surprised that I never posted about it in here when I played it a couple of years ago, because I remember really liking it. The whole pinball metroidvania thing still feels like such a cool and unique idea. I wish there was even more pinball stuff in the game, but it's already pretty great as it is.

Another new game of the week is Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders. It's good and pretty much what I expected, but I kinda liked LM: Downhill (the biking game) more. Snow Riders looks really nice (the glittering snow especially looks awesome!) and the animations are more smooth than in Downhill, but there's something about it that feels a bit dull. It's a game that I'll be playing for ten minutes every now and then, but I doubt that it'll become a big hit in this household.

[Thirith]

While I'm enjoying Aliens: Dark Descent, there are some things I'm finding frustrating. One is its general tendency towards difficulty spikes, but it's tied to other aspects: I think the various gameplay systems don't always work in favour of the game.

For instance, you can specialise some of your space marines into becoming recon soldiers, and these can use silenced sniper rifles. This is great when it comes to taking out individual enemies from a distance before they can alert others. The problem is that a lot of the level design works against this: you need line of sight, and if you've got relatively short corridors that either curve or have doors that open and close automatically, or if the spaces have a lot of clutter (which they do), your recon guy becomes somewhat useless. The game could counteract that by taking into consideration what direction an enemy is looking in, but it doesn't: a xenomorph may have its back towards you but it still can 'see' you. It doesn't break the game, but it makes the system feel like it hasn't been properly thought through.

The other thing is that I generally like that the game *isn't* XCOM and doesn't let you position each unit individually. It changes the game, making it more into a present-day Syndicate, gameplay-wise. But there are situations where this very much works against how the game is designed overall. Take the recon guy: in order to get them into line of sight, you have to move the entire group, and it's never quite clear who's going to end up being spotted by whom. You can't just have Mr Recon peak out and tap a xeno in the head. Or ambushes: your entire team just sits there bunched up, which isn't exactly very tactical, as opposed to splitting up. I could imagine various ways the game could address this, e.g. formations or allowing for the group to be split but at the same time increasing the stress they take, but all in all it does feel a bit like some systems work less well in concert with each other than others, and that makes some of the game feel clunkier than it should. Some of that clunkiness works in the game's favour, making you feel that your dudes are more vulnerable, but others just feel like lack of polish on a systems level.

[Renault]

I played a few hours of Blue Prince over the weekend, I guess I'm a little surprised at all the hype this game is getting. There are some interesting ideas here, but IMO the game just relies far too much on luck and randomness, it just makes the whole experience frustrating. I'm finding it difficult to locate ways to nudge the chances for success in my favor, and in the end, point blank, just not having much fun when I have to restart time and time again. I'll probably give it another shot at some point, it's very likely there are some nuances I'm missing, but it doesn't seem like the landmark title some critics are making it out to be.

[henke]

Yeah I also just did the first go-around in Blue Prince. The rooms come in random order and I suppose you gotta do everything perfectly eventually to get to the end, and I suppose that's where the Outer Wilds comparisons come in. Scouring every room for secrets made me think of Thief FMs and the way you build a mental map of locks and keys to look for feels survival horror-y. Anyway, it hasn't really grabbed me yet. I'll give it a few more whirls.

Oh, and I'd imagine it plays better with M+KB than gamepad, as a lot of the gameplay is just running your cursor over everything and hoping to find something interactable.

[Thirith]

Approaching the end of Aliens: Dark Descent, with two or three missions left. It's a good game that makes great use of the IP, but I also think that the level design becomes weaker towards the end, with too many narrow corridors that are challenging but not in a fun way. Definitely ready to finish this one before long, hopefully over Easter (what better time to complete a game that's all about egg hunts?).

[derfy]

The Long Dark. Survival in the Canadian wilderness as likely the last person alive... and stealing all the supplies from houses for myself. Hmmm... wonder why it interests me? :P

[WingedKagouti]

Purchased and completed Timespinner recently, very fun metroidvania. Fun enough that I did NG+ three times (including the Nightmare - Max Level 1 variant). Definitely give it a try if you like metroidvanias. Unless you're someone who can't handle non-hetero characters or female leads.

[henke]

I've played like 9 hours of Blue Prince now. I don't know if I'm enjoying it or not!

It certainly does keep ya hooked by dripfeeding you a steady stream of revelations and aha moments, but mostly I feel like the game just shows me these things rather than me having to figure stuff out. Running out of stuff to do in a day and having to reset progress for the next day is kinda a bummer and leads to me playing this at a rate of one day per playsession. Over time you learn exactly where loot is located in rooms and what to do to unlock certain things and it starts feeling like a bit of a chore doing these procedures over and over.

I think in general I like my puzzle games more focused on one puzzle at a time. Like Portal, Obra Dinn, or The Witness. Outer Wilds I thought was more "impressive" than "fun" and the way it split of into a million lil strands to follow eventually was too exhausting for me. I kinda worry if I let up on the gas with Blue Prince and take a break from it for a day or two I'll loose the thread, so for now I keep playing, hoping to eventually get to a point where I see what the big whoop is.

[Arch Fenster]

Shattered Pixel Dungeon on itch.io

[Yakoob]

So I finally got Balatro for my tablet and after 3 days I beat my first run. I thought "well that was nice" and thought I'd leave it at that, as I'm not usually a fan of roguelikes or replaying. And yet, something about it made me wanna go back, and I now beat the game with three decks. Gonna try to beat it with at least 5 to unlock all the challenges.

That being said, I find myself falling onto the same strategies each run. Perhaps I just haven't unloced the right jokers yet, or perhaps I'm not thinking in Portals enough, but I kind of feel there's only two viable strategies: either go ham on upgrading a mid-tier hand (like a straight or a flush) and just get it powered up to breeze thru most blinds in a single hand, OR get the pants joker that increases mults every time you play two pairs and strategically groom it over the course of the game where two pairs is your winning strategy.

A lot of the top tier hands (like royal flushes) are too rare/hard to pull off that it's almost a waste trying to upgrade them (I can easily upgrade a regular flush to be more powerfu). And the lower hands (like single pairs or three of a kind) just don't have enough cards and base multipliers to ever be powerful enough to survive later blinds. Only way I can see them working if you hit just the right combo of jokers (like counting all cards in deck + extra mults), PLUS upgrade them with celestial cards, PLUS have enough tarot card upgrades that the single pairs/threes will have insane multipliers on themselves.

Since everything relies on RNG, the odds of having that sweet combination of factors is incredibly rare, so just going with the above two strats feels a lot more reliable.

[Thirith]

After finishing Aliens: Dark Descent, I decided to do a quick playthrough of Mirror's Edge, with all the PhysX bells and whistles activated, as they're unlikely to work on future GPUs - unless savvy modders manage to find a way to fix the issue caused by Nvidia dropping PhysX 32-bit support on their new cards. As always, there are things about Mirror's Edge I find frustrating - mostly the horrible combat, but also the start-stop nature of some of the levels -, but the vibe of this game remains impeccable. I'm more okay with Mirror's Edge Catalyst than some people here, and I even like some of the open-world stuff (less the side activities than getting to know the place and getting better at navigating it through repetition), but its city is so much less believable, tactile and atmospheric than Mirror's Edge's city with its concrete, glass and metal. The original game's location feels like a place that could already exist now; Catalyst's city of Glass feels almost entirely like a video game location.

[Aja]

So I finally got Balatro for my tablet and after 3 days I beat my first run. I thought "well that was nice" and thought I'd leave it at that, as I'm not usually a fan of roguelikes or replaying. And yet, something about it made me wanna go back, and I now beat the game with three decks. Gonna try to beat it with at least 5 to unlock all the challenges.

That being said, I find myself falling onto the same strategies each run. Perhaps I just haven't unloced the right jokers yet, or perhaps I'm not thinking in Portals enough, but I kind of feel there's only two viable strategies: either go ham on upgrading a mid-tier hand (like a straight or a flush) and just get it powered up to breeze thru most blinds in a single hand, OR get the pants joker that increases mults every time you play two pairs and strategically groom it over the course of the game where two pairs is your winning strategy.

A lot of the top tier hands (like royal flushes) are too rare/hard to pull off that it's almost a waste trying to upgrade them (I can easily upgrade a regular flush to be more powerfu). And the lower hands (like single pairs or three of a kind) just don't have enough cards and base multipliers to ever be powerful enough to survive later blinds. Only way I can see them working if you hit just the right combo of jokers (like counting all cards in deck + extra mults), PLUS upgrade them with celestial cards, PLUS have enough tarot card upgrades that the single pairs/threes will have insane multipliers on themselves.

Since everything relies on RNG, the odds of having that sweet combination of factors is incredibly rare, so just going with the above two strats feels a lot more reliable.

The more I watched Balatro University, the more I realized that RNG shouldn't be much of an impediment if you're playing carefully and strategically. As he shows, basically all hands are viable in the right circumstances, but the trick is knowing how to maximize the odds of getting what you need, usually by amassing money early (he calls it "getting your economy online") and then manipulating the deck into being more likely to give you whatever hands best suit the particular combinations of jokers you receive. So in that sense, yeah, having all the jokers unlocked is important although some are only useful in very specific scenarios. And he's also great at knowing when to pivot, when to abandon an early game strategy to something more lucrative later on.

After winning a few rounds and feeling like Balatro was good but was maybe not grabbing me like it was supposed to, watching a few of his videos really opened my eyes to the depth and elegance of this game, and it kicked off a sort of second phase, where I started to play more deliberately. And that's the main reason I kind of bristle at the common claim that it's all about dopamine-fueled rushes of numbers going up. At higher levels in fact it plays more like a strategy game although I'm not math-minded enough to truly excel at it. I've won every deck on white stake and have even earned a few golds, but gold on every deck for me probably would end up being more RNG dependent because I'm not good enough at reading the cards and planning ahead. Still, that's not the game's fault.

[Jason Moyer]

mostly the horrible combat

The non hand-to-hand combat is bad on purpose, like it is in Thief, and like Thief you're not supposed to be engaging in it often if at all. Being able to use a gun is more of an "oh I fucked up" card than something you're supposed to be doing regularly, and if you're really good you can usually deal with guys without using the actual "disarm" function. In Thief your power comes from the shadows, in Mirror's Edge it comes from running and jumping. Like, one of the best bits that everyone seems to hate is the part where you have to destroy the servers, and you can deal with that objective and the guard at the top of the stairs purely by running and using the environment to vault onto that guard and hustling to the exit.

The only mandatory combat in the first game (the sequel literally locks you into areas until you defeat guards, which is one of the many reasons it sucks) is with what's-her-face, which is your basic dodge and parry or if you're feeling fancy you can use the environment but even on hard you can just dodge and parry and it's over pretty quickly.

ME should have really had a difficulty level like Expert in T1/2 where you can't kill people, and it would make sense in the context of the story since you're dealing with your sister being accused of murder and probably shouldn't be building a body count of cops.

[Thirith]

That’s true, but some of the areas and encounters are designed pretty badly in that respect: the boat, the atrium stairs, or the rooftop bit where in order to continue you need to climb up a pipe, but there are a bunch of guys with guns that will shoot you while you’re climbing. Even if you can succeed without fighting, it’s less about playing well and more about being lucky with where AI end up going: as soon as you've got two or three bad guys in the same place, you're getting shot while you're pouncing on or disarming the first of them.

I’d be totally on board with the game doing what you describe well, but it doesn’t do so consistently enough for me, making these bits frustrating rather than challenging. I’d probably just need to git gud, but the levels aren’t designed in those instances to let me practice gitting gud.

[Pyrian]

Yeah, Mirror's Edge is clearly designed to have fights in it, even if you can avoid a bunch of them easily, and more as you get better. ...You can also turn around a few of the chase sequences and defeat enemies you're not supposed to, lol.

[demagogue]

I think it's really geared towards obsessive repetition for speed runs, and when you play it like that, then you optimize the take downs so they still flow smoothly and fast. But even still it's comparatively awkward and when you mess it up it really messes things up.

I was okay with it all things considered, since I tend to be democratic with games, liking when features or flows are mixed up, it did need some conflict element, and I got decently good at instinctively taking guys out. But for the life of me I don't understand why they double-downed on it for the sequel, playing up the worst part and denigrating the best part of the original.

[Jason Moyer]

Yeah, Mirror's Edge is clearly designed to have fights in it, even if you can avoid a bunch of them easily, and more as you get better. ...You can also turn around a few of the chase sequences and defeat enemies you're not supposed to, lol.

I can't argue with that, although I think I'd say the same thing about T1/T2. You're not ghosting those games on a first playthrough, and if you're good you can use the clunky combat to directly confront enemies. A skilled player can ghost them even though parts feel like the designers expected confrontation. I don't think you're meant to kill anything in any of those games though, and ME even gives you an achievement for not shooting anyone, which means they must have designed it with that in mind.

[Thirith]

Can't say I agree with that. In my experience with the Thief games, sure, you don't start off ghosting every level, but it's not a ghosting/fighting binary. Even while I was crap at Thief stealth, if I got seen I'd end up running, not fighting. (Killing spiders doesn't count.) And I don't think the games pushed you into fights either, which Mirror's Edge definitely does. And, differently from Thief, those times when I did end up using a weapon and killing the bad guys, it was due to those encounters being designed so frustratingly that grabbing a gun and shooting the goons felt like a "skip combat" button. It felt like a relief, for which I gladly missed out on an achievement.

As I said: I'd totally be on board with these encounters if they're designed better. There are bits in Mirror's Edge where you can avoid a fight altogether by taking a different route, and some where you can remain in the flow while taking out the bad guys, but there are others where that's just not very feasible (though I'm sure there are speedrunners that have figured out ways of doing it anyway). There are times when the encounters maintain the flow better, but the level design is too inconsistent in this regard, and the fighting mechanics are simply not well designed. IMO Catalyst was better at this (though not by much), but it squandered this by making its combat encounters too numerous and some of them mandatory. The perfect Mirror's Edge-style game that does a good job at integrating combat into its core mechanics but especially gives you enough wiggle room to avoid it altogether doesn't exist - and, sadly, is unlikely to ever exist.