Patient Gamers

I finished Withering Rooms last week, and finally managed to tear myself away from it instead of doing a third straight playthrough. I'm still low-key obsessed with this game and am now waiting anxiously for the upcoming sequel. What a piece of art this game is. Beautiful art direction, beautiful music (all composed by the solo dev!), great gameplay despite the clunky combat and just such an interesting world and story, with some thematic throughlines of morality and responsibility running throughout. Possibly also a commentary on generative AI. It's a super well made, super interesting and captivating game and I can't recommend it enough.

Death Howl

I moved on to Death Howl as my next main game. It's a Soulslike grid-based strategy deckbuilder (yes, that's a mouthful) and so far it's been... Decent but mixed, I'd say. I love the art. Beautiful pixel art in a very minimalistic but expressive style and a distinctive muted color palette. The story is okay but very very obvious and predictable, so while it's a classic template and theme I am not really excited about getting to the next bit of story as I can already tell where it's going, what it's about and how it's going to end.

The gameplay is fine so far, although the game is quite grindy which I don't love. You need to do a lot of trash fights to grind out your deck for each area, and there is a mechanic that increases the mana cost of cards from outside your current area, which means you have to regrind a deck for every new area. It also means creativity in deckbuilding is restricted, as you really kind of are just limited to building one of the two deck archetypes provided by each area's cards.

There are also some QoL features I don't love, such as disabling fast travel while doing quests, which just means you waste enormous amounts of time walking. Overall it's interesting but I don't know whether I'd recommend it, outside of diehard deckbuilder fans who have already played everything else. It's also fairly difficult.

Ninja Gaiden 4

I got derailed in my playthrough weeks ago, but have picked it up again and am probably in the final third now. I'm playing it in parallel for whenever I need something faster paced. Not much to add about it that I haven't said previously. I have a ton of gripes with it, and it feels more like a half-brother to the older 3D Ninja Gaidens than a full blooded family member, but in isolation its combat systems are phenomenal, it's fast and it's fun and free-flowing and if you like action games you should absolutely play it.