games

Quasimorph - You play a PMC group in the ancap nightmare future, AFTER they let parallel reality demons into ours. Of course, the an caps are on top of the situation by...trying to make money! It's basically a dungeon crawler with guns and a weird sort of meta-progression stemming from memory copies of people you can find and cloning them bodies. Quite fun, but has some mechanics one has to get used to.

Dungeons 4 - A good Dungeon Keeper clone with cringe humor

Generation Zero - Sweden turns into an isolationist prepper nation in this alternate history, where they are instantly taken over by the AI they made to control their cool robot army. Be a teenager nad shoot rocket at big robot

Noita - Be a wizard who dies by their own hubris. Recently did a 33 orb run. If you know you know.

Slay the Spire - I will never not play this one and you have for sure already seen it so.

Binding of Isaac coop beta is out. There are some issues with desyncs but when it works it's a lot of fun.

Games that I've recently played and completed are Armored Core 6, Like a Dragon Gaiden, and Pikmin 4. I'm currently doing a replay of Final Fantasy 7 Remake to prepare for FF7 Rebirth. I'm planning to play the Metal Gear Solid collection later this month.

Armored Core 6: 8.5/10 great game. I only beat it once and haven't tried the NG+/NG++ stuff yet, but might come back to it when/if DLC comes out. Had a lot of fun blowing stuff up with missiles and grenade launchers lmao

Like a Dragon Gaiden: 8.5/10 another great game. Playing as definitely not the yakuza known as Kiryu and the return to beat em up action was fun. Nice short and sweet game to prepare you for Yakuza 8 coming out early next year. 100% the game and got the plat for it. The ending made me tear up a little it was so great and bittersweet.

Pikmin 4: 9/10 just amazing! Probably a top 3 game I've played this year! The gameplay loop was very addicting and gave me the "Just one more day" feeling. The space dog Oatchi is very cute and useful if not a little bit overpowered and reduces the challenge of the game a bit, but it was still a fun time using him. I really enjoyed the Dandori challenges and battles - splitting up your pikmin and grabbing all the treasures and defeating all the enemies under a time limit that requires all your micromanaging and logistic skills. It was excellent.

Elder Scrolls Online on and off for around 2 years now, about 60% done with the solo quests there, BG3 for the last 2-3 months but I'm taking it nice and slow. They added a custom difficulty mode in the last major BG3 update but it can only be applied to new campaigns. I want to do another playthrough in BG3 eventually to try the other classes and companions but I'll squeeze in one or two smaller visual novel type games before that, like Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical and Coffee Talk 1/2.

In Stars and Time - Indie rpg about a time loop. The game starts with the party resting in town the day before they enter the final dungeon. They trigger a trap early in the dungeon and the main character finds themself sent back to the previous day. They're happy to have another chance to save the party, but their mental health starts to degrade as the number of times they're forced to repeat the time loop increases. The party is very wholesome, and the time loop story is the best I've seen in any game. Highly recommend.

Doom via GZDoom. It still slaps. Gonna play some newish WADs after I get through Doom 1&2

i have had a minecraft addiction for months and it aint stopping

Played a million different games over the year, always come back to Pokemon and Minecraft.

Mostly been playing Spider-Man 2 lately. Fantastic game. I’m so tired of superhero stuff with the sole exception of Spider-Man, fuckin’ love Spider-Man. Finished the main story a couple days ago, now just swinging around getting the last collectibles and achievements, want to get platinum in it like I did with 1 and Miles Morales.

Also been playing a modded Minecraft game with my partner when we just want to chill and listen to a podcast.

Once I finish Spider-Man I plan to go back and finish Tears of the Kingdom and Baldur’s Gate 3. Biggest problem with Baldur’s Gate is I need to like, actually pay attention to it lol.

Recently ive been busy so, I've only really been playing guilty gear strive. I intend to go back to outer wilds after exams tho.

2023 is absurdly stacked as a year it had:

• Pizza Tower
• Baldurs gate3
• Armored core 6
• Street fighter 6
• Tears if the kingdom

Any of which couldve made goty for me in a weaker year.

Lol, so I actually don't do much in the way of regular gaming on my own nowadays. I'm big into the potentials of VR, but I'm also poor, so when I do play it tends to be HalfLife:Alyx again or some campaign someone made for it.

I'm building my huge black marble illuminati upside-down pyramid in Valheim. I'm mostly done now, hopefully the new expansion will be out soon.

I'm playing the Talos Principle II. It started out really strong posing what I thought was an interesting & pertinent dilemma about degrowth/living in harmony with nature and expanding exponentially. Unfortunately past hour 5 or so the game really just starts fully leaning into the whole "anything other than exponential growth spreading the nuclear-powered light of consciousness to the universe is death, nature has no inherent value unless witnessed by a conscious entity" so whatever, I'm going along with the puzzles at this point because they're pretty good.

TLDR: Rogue Fable IV. Really impressed with its early version changes/upgrades from RFIII, which is my favorite roguelite by far. Just one person, passion project.

Highly reccomend.

https://justin-wang123.itch.io/rogue-fable-iv

Wrote this bottom part first and it started to ramble. Can't say enough good things. There's a roguelite called rogue fable 3 that ive hundreds of hours over the years before I finally was done with it. I thought it was just a great mix of challenge, variety, pace and enjoyment, while only taking 45-60 min to beat the game. There were days I binged but usually I just played the "daily challenge" and whether I won or lost it satisfied my "gaming itch".

Just a single developer doing all the work, with help from community feedback, he consistently updated the game to keep it feeling fresh, with no additional cost, for years.

Wasn't sure if I'd be interested in the new one, hard to recapture sparks, sequels often fell short, moved on with my life etc, but I started playing the prealpha version again and after lots of adjustments/testing/fiddling it just had its web release. I'm very impressed with the changes so far, new mechanics and solutions, more streamlined levels/encounters, more dynamic combat and skills.

It's free right now too so if you like games at all I'd give it a shot!

Currently playing Tevi. It's a cute anime metroidvania with bullethell elements. Not quite got the charm of its predecessor Rabi Ribi but still enjoying it.

The soundtrack is fantastic, reminding me of Ragnarok Online with some of its tracks.

https://youtu.be/W8nZ-bgrC6k

I started playing Naraka which is a Chinese free to play melee-focused BR game too. I'm very bad at it and the low western population seems to mean matchmaking puts me in with people who have thousands of hours regularly so I get bodied.