Patient Gamers

I have been playing Tainted grail: Fall of Avalon and having a great time. They didn't get the difficulty scaling as good as Gothic, but it's fun to explore.

And bonking enemies with a two hander and watching them fly never gets old.

Final Fantasy VII

I was testing out something on my Miyo Flip handheld and started playing FFVII for the first time. Never played it before and so far there have been a few questionable moments but overall I'm enjoying it. Hardware wise it works great but I did have to ask my wife for some help with the story already and unsuprisingly she knew exactly what to do but wants me to play FFIX instead.

Noita.

I played all the way through Resident Evil 8 on my steam deck, while doing a train tour around Romania this week. The game aesthetics hit way harder when you can see so many of its influences right in front of you.

still bg3. oh man I made it a point to do everything I could before going to the shadowfell and then also went back and did auntie ethel too who I kept around for giant str potions. Its kinda great putting her off as the whole thing is kinda annoying with the multiple phases but oh boy I did not realize how much more there was to act 2 and actually you get sucked into the start of this act3 stuff where its like it just keeps going. between auntie ethel, shadowfell, the tower, the colony, the camp attack, on and on. Oh also I took shadow heart to the shadowfell as that was obvious but did not take wyll to the colony so lost an item. Trying to see all with eat the worm.

Been playing a lot of (emulated) Pokemon Violet this week. Just getting into the post-game now.

(lol, get rekd, Nintendo. I'll emulate whatever I want, and you can't stop me.)

God of War (2018)!

I often tire of open world exploration and gameplay, but so far this game has either:

• not opened up super wide
• or does not need to open up super wide

I’m not a huge fan of the Destiny level up system where you gain exp and get new gear to hit level requirements, but I’ve been able to keep up. Just annoying when I stumble upon an area with something 2-4 levels higher than me.

The story is great so far.

I never played the other GoW entries, but do recall watching my dad play them when I was younger. I did eventually play Dante’s Inferno, which was very similar in gameplay.

I much prefer the axe throwing/melee combo gameplay to the top down hack and slash, I think.

Got into Inside this week. What a fun little game, the atmosphere is top notch. I play this at night on my laptop with a controller and headphones on, great stuff.

Probably Very Little Nightmares and Sea of Stars.

Maybe not a "patient gamer" game since it was released a few months ago, but I'm playing Verho - Curse of Faces. I was in the mood for something like Kings Field or Lunacid, and this certainly scratches that itch.

Assetto Corsa

I'm playing Archolos, which is a free fan-made game on the Gothic 2 engine (you still need to own Gothic 2 tho). It's like 60 hours long and I'm only 12 hours in and just got into the city. The quality is pretty incredible for a fan-made game, I think I'll be playing through it for the next 2 months at the very least

Son's been playing Zelda BOTW and I thought that game is right up my alley, how could I've missed it?

Set up the Switch emulator on the Steam Deck and goddamn that game's a time sink!

Another week where I’ve actually had time to play, but not on pc at all this week unfortunately.

The last few days I’ve been playing Evolve. I recently found a used disc for PS4 and remember really enjoying it back in the day on Xbox (which I no longer have). I’m actually having a blast playing through it on single player again. The DLC is completely inaccessible nowadays unless you already have it unfortunately so I’m stuck with the base 12 hunters and 3 monsters but that’s okay, all my favourites were from the base game anyway. It’s too bad this game wasn’t better received, I used to play it a lot and was very confused when I saw all the negative reviews it had. Maybe it just didn’t click with most people and it did for me, not sure. Or maybe there was drama with it that I didn’t know about. Either way, I’m having a ton of fun with it again. I’ve unlocked all the hunters except Lazarus and Caira (I think that’s her name), and I still have to unlock the other two monsters.

Modded Minecraft. Specifically ftb evolution as it has the most diverse mods besides ATM 10 and wanted to learn and figure out the ones I haven't touched before. So far its going pretty well. Some magic mods are a bitch to automate of course. But I'm still figuring it out.

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.