Currently Playing

[Animalmother]

Sweet This sort of gives you an idea of what it's like.


On Game Pass as well.

[DjchunKfunK]

The Bookwalker

I played the demo for this last year and was really interested in the premise. You are an author who has been sentenced to 28 years working for publishers writing other people's books and are unable to write for yourself. In order to rid yourself of the magical cuffs that prevent you from writing, you take on some jobs for an organisation that require you to steal items from books. Each level is set within a different book which gives the developers the ability to really go for it in terms of creativity. Each world, whilst small in terms of size in-game, is very well realised and has a ton of character. They give you enough information and allow your imagination to fill in the rest, much like a book does.

Gameplay wise the puzzles are fairly straight forward and there is some basic combat. The script is quite brief and the translation could do with some work in places and the controls on a controller are a bit of a pain, it feels tuned to mouse and keyboard. However, none of that mattered to me as the game has this indefinable quality to it that meant I really enjoyed it, despite it's flaws.

It's well worth taking a look if you like strange games, it's also on Game Pass.

[Wrathbone]

The Outer Worlds

I didn't get far the first time I played this (I think another game I was more interested in had just come out), but having restarted it and left the first planet I'm having a great time with it. Its reputation as a distinctly average RPG is fair, though - there's a certain spark missing that makes it feel disposable rather than essential. Still, I'm glad I'm finally giving it a go.

The voice acting deserves some special praise. Its irreverant, lightly comedic tone can be hard to pull off, but it works quite well. Taunting the salesman forced to wear a huge moon hat and listening to his increasingly despair-ridden sales pitches had me in stitches.

[Sly Boots]

I enjoyed Outer Worlds for the duration of the time I played it, but I've barely thought about it since finishing and doubt I'd replay it or buy DLC.

A perfectly fine experience but not one that lingered long in the memory for me...

[Animalmother]

Put a few more hours into Arcade Paradise and now have about 8 arcade machines. The laundry is really busy so I'm run ragged loading the washing machines and dryers. There's a mountain of trash to be cleaned up each morning but luckily the shitters only been clogged a few times (the longer you leave that the worse it looks...). You need to concentrate on the laundry as its a money maker. I was ignoring the daily optional tasks until I realized this is the only way to earn money for upgrades. The arcade looks after itself pretty much so far, I can eventually hire a guy to empty the coin slots. Enjoying it so far.

[Sly Boots]

Finished Dave the Diver and just wanted to wax lyrical about it.

It took me about 30 hours to beat the main story, I wasn't rushing but when I had story objectives I tended to prioritise them. But you could easily spend two to three times that, because the game throws a simply insane number of gameplay elements at you and leave you free to do as much or as little of them as you choose.

Practically every single game-day you're given something new you can do, but the game is pretty chill about whether you chose to do it or not (there was a whole thing about a tamogotchi-type app on your phone you were encouraged to interact with that I didn't bother doing, and the game never chided me or made me think I needed to). As well as the diving, catching fish and working in the sushi restaurant there are: suit and weapons upgrades to farm for, collectible cards for all the fish you find, eco-targets that reward you with special items for completing, a fish farm where you can hatch the eggs you find while diving for another way to generate fish for the restaurant, staff recruitment and management, an actual farm to grow veggies, get eggs etc, photos to take and sell to the local journalist, cooking competitions (which later have their own minigames), casino games, seahorse racing that you do by catching the seahorses you want to race (which all have different stats), a subsidiary branch restaurant to manage, boss fights, secret base infiltration and full-blown actual games to play on your phone for a change of pace. There's probably a bunch more that has slipped my mind right now.

And it's all done with an easy charm and sense of humour that makes the above utterly compelling.

I suspect that even despite the coming release of BG3 this will end up being my game of the year. It's incredible.

[eny]

Far Cry 6

I have an ageing PC, but this plays very well all things considered. It feels a little console/blocky with graphics in places but is exceptionally playable. I think they took popular parts of Boiling Point, Just Cause, Dead Island, RDR2, Dying Light and made a game including them along with the old FC devices. Checkpoints and base takeovers have been diluted somewhat, but still good fun. The inventory system is something else, so much choice and ability to tinker. The map is massive but there is always something fun to do. I haven't had this much fun sniping aircraft with tanks since BattleField 4.

[Drarok]

I've not seen anyone mention Starship Troopers: Extermination anywhere yet. It's in early access, and is somewhere in the region of a wave defence/base building/FPS. Very unoptimised at present, but playable with a small squad of your mates (4 per squad IIRC, though the whole team is quite big) so long as you don't mind the performance tanking when the going gets tough.

Hopefully they'll get the performance improved and add some differing missions, maps, or modes lest it get boring fairly fast.

[Alan]

I took a hankering for Dizzy and I was appalled to find there is no decent modern way to play Dizzy games. How can there be no Dizzy collection when so much pish gets rereleased? Theres a "Dizzy 2" on steam but it seems to be a bitcoin mining front. Theres yolkfolk.com where you can play them in browser but its not the same!

Anyway this lead me on a twisting road to end up dual booting Batocera on steamdeck and its awesome! Batocera is a linix distro that makes just about anything into a retro (and no so retro) console. On Steamdeck you can set an SD card up with it and if you turn the deck off then back on while holding volume down it opens the boot menu, select the SD card and boom, your deck is a full on retro beastie. Reboot without holding volume down and it boots back to vanilla deck. Have a Batocera sd and a steam deck sd and just swap them when required/desired. Its quite excellent! I did try emudeck before but I found it rather slapdash and footery, this is much better especially as its separate from SteamOS.

You can either download the core files from the batocera site and add your own roms or theres quite a few packs around of questionable legality (especially the 1tb one which features games from just about every console except PS4, 360, series and PS5). Theres even lightgun specific packs letting you hook it up to a telly with a Sinden gun for cool shooty action! Its all so impressive!




Ive an old Celeron Gigabyte Brix I'm going to try it on for the telly. Older stuff only, naturally.

[Sly Boots]

The Ascent

I'm exceedingly late to this I guess, but didn't play it when it came out in 2021. But I've played a lot of either narratively-focused games or tactical games recently and my brain was craving some time off... I was in the mood for either a top-down or isometric shooter, nothing too frantic or bullet-helly as I wanted a less frenetic time. I spent several hours searching Steam for something I liked the look of, playing demos of a couple, and in the end plumped for The Ascent.

Goodness, but it's a fun time. Pretty undemanding, just run around the joint shooting things with weapons, gunplay is involved without being overwhelming, loot to collect and gradually upgrade with, it's exactly what I wanted.

It's only Mostly Positive on Steam, with a recent review rating of Mixed, which is a bit of a headscratcher to me. But perhaps people were expecting something a bit deeper, whereas this is mindless dumb fun.

It's on Gamepass, but seeing as it's due to leave in a weeks' time I stumped up the wallet-purging amount of £2.50 to get it from CD Keys, and very much enjoying it.

[Mantis]

I had a blast playing that on co-op. The world was so well realised it was fun to stop in between all the frantic action just to soak in all the ambiance.

[Lenny Solidus]

Shadow Warrior 2

Hard to believe this has already been out for seven years, found it on a key site for as little as £3 and just had to give it a shot - and man am I so glad that I did. In essence, this game as I make my way through the early stages takes me right back to my first time playing the wonderful genre classic Bulletstorm, the writing the execution and constant main character quips all take me right back to that same kind of experience. I'm kind of surprised that this game wasn't talked about more tbh.

The level design though sometimes wildly sporadic (and still fun for hunting hidden loot chests) retains a very lovingly crafted touch throughout every level I have played so far, combat is a blast and much better than I was expecting clearly taking a leaf out of the DooM 2016/Eternal playbook. And it absolutely works. It does very much feel like a direct throwback to a genre bygone era, hints of older loved titles such as No One Lives Forever included but also falls very much in line with the boomer shooter revival of today.

Though I never completed the first game and always considered it a good but somewhat throwaway kind of game everything about this sequel is a considerable step up. Combat and weapons are just kind of nuts with a wild assortment of enemies to take down a ridiculous physics system and the game runs absolutely flawlessly for me at 60-70 frames. So far it's one of those games that I feel guilty about paying so little for the experience - being someone who predominantly tends to scour key sites for bargain price deals as I'm skint a lot of the time I should be feeling more happy than guilty - note: silly goose enjoy your hobby at whatever level you can, who gives a fuck right?

One of my absolute favourite game mechanics - a simple button press hold that instantly warps you both back to the games base hub or in conjunction back exactly to where you were situated in the world outside of it. No fiddly map traversal or entering certain sections of a map to travel in between - simple clean and instantaneous. Other games should take note.

It may not have the most modern graphics but there is still a great feeling of craftmanship at play in every level and in every weapon you pick up and I absolutely love the shotgun and all the reloading animations, there are just these extra nice touches put to everything you really do appreciate. The upgrade system is cool too and much more in-depth than I first realised.

Just one of those mindless have fun and soak up the experience kind of games and I'm so glad that I finally gave it the attention it deserves.

[Rusty]

I thought I'd give that one a go (Shadow warrior 2) and very nearly bought it. I then thought I'd check my GoG galaxy account that holds all my games... I already own it

Playing it now. Fun so far

[Sly Boots]

Well you guys have gone and made me buy it

[DjchunKfunK]

Shadow Warrior 2 is a lot of fun, people complained at the time about the loot system but I quite enjoyed it. I've had the third game sitting on my drive for a while as I've been meaning to play it.