May 2023: This Month's Games
a public journal of everything i've played this month
any notes should be treated as "first impressions"
any notes should be treated as "first impressions"
25 Games
enjoyed this a hell of a lot more than I thought I would, because fixed camera angles and tank controls sounds like a combo designed in a lab to make me drop the game in a heartbeat. you already know what it is, it's RE1, it's good. if you're curious, just play it
still the best "esport" FPS despite having the worst possible battle pass format. unfortunately, even after all this time away i get too invested in this to avoid getting mad at the people i'm playing with. my bad!
a perfect village life sim for the steam deck, but it's surprisingly taxing on your hardware (even on a desktop PC!). in any case, a much more well-rounded experience than its predecessor.
Maybe I'm not picking the right factions but as someone who didn't follow pre-release media I'm not sure what this game is doing differently from TWW2. The map is bigger, but that alone doesn't make it feel like a new game
Generally quite solid but my issues with it lie in two areas. The first are targeting issues - when things are in close proximity to each other, it's hard to pick up/interact with the right things due to the top down perspective. The other is that it's just way too easy to play this game as a bog-standard shooter. It's fairly hard to intuit what elements of the environment can actually be used to plan a more creative approach
i like that the run-based nature makes the experience of playing the game less stressful over long periods of time, but my heart sank when i saw all the meta-progression elements, and i haven't seen anything to lift my spirits since.
i'm fine with a little bit of grind, but you have to at least offer me the hope that i could win early runs through skill alone, and DD2 doesn't do that.
i'm fine with a little bit of grind, but you have to at least offer me the hope that i could win early runs through skill alone, and DD2 doesn't do that.
the large pool of races and classes is this game's greatest strength, but it's undercut by same-y environments and by asking a player to pick 2-3 classes to hybridize together each run, meaning you'll feel like you've seen everything pretty quickly
will have to return to this one - i didn't really get a chance to seriously engage with the diplomacy mechanics during my time with this, meaning that i've only seen it as a fairly unremarkable city builder
coolest thing is the farming system, hands-down. don't know another city builder that requires crop rotation. beyond that? mostly standard fare as far as survival-oriented city builders go
the little bonuses you pick between rounds (and the fact that goals unlock a few seconds after round start) do a lot to mitigate the "i lost to some bullshit again" elements of the game, but the communication tools are still too barebones. as it stands there's no way for me to teach my teammates about strategies other than the one they already know, the same one that ratfucks us every single game: "always hit the ball when you can and always hit it straight at their goal"
Stardew with spells. I really enjoy any game that lets me level up skills by doing random bullshit - my brain no longer experiences joy unless I'm being told my "tree cutting" level has gone up - and this might be the first Stardew-style game where I've actually enjoyed the combat.
v cute! can't claim to know anything about touhou but i don't think you need to to enjoy this. the type of restaurant sim where you collect ingredients during the day so you can customize a menu and serve customers at night. i could nitpick this thing more if i wanted to, but i don't want to! it's a $3 fan game and i like it
I like the minutiae of arranging the tavern and actually running it, but I really do not care about the crafting. If it were a single crafting bench or something then I'd be fine with it, but having to arrange all this stuff outside so I can smelt ores and the like just feels like too much for me.
friends pitched a return to this game as "i've been playing it these past few days and it's changed a ton, it's so much better than it was" and i can only conclude that they accidentally launched a different game
doesn't have Polka
I like the ways in which this idle game encourages you to interact with it, but that's about it. Played it for one long session, and that's about all I need
40k diablo, decent class variety but i never felt like i was assembling my own build, which is an important part of any game built on this chassis
somehow manages to surgically remove the parts of any civ/4x game that might be interesting outside of picking a faction
aesthetically repulsive
