What have you all been playing!
I have been playing a ton of Aeterna Noctis in an attempt to start clearing up my backlog. It’s really good so far! Tough platforming but I enjoy that a lot.
Making my way through Phantom Liberty slowly but surely. It’s quite a decent amount of content, and it’s enjoyable.
I’ve been playing Starfield, and I think I’m getting close to just wanting to wrap it up. I may or may not want to get a larger ship before that happens, because the starter ship has been a bottleneck in seeing through some of the other faction quest lines. At the same time though, better ships are expensive, and I’m not sure I want to grind missions with better money payouts to get there. This game should be better.
While traveling, I’ve been playing Pillars of Eternity on the Steam Deck. I’ve got 5 party members now, and I’m level 3. I think I’m about to get access to the stronghold that has its own button on the UI. Really enjoying this one so far. Thankfully, it exposes all of its dice rolls to help me learn the systems better.
How does Pillars of Eternity run on the Steam Deck? I just got one and Pillars of Eternity has been on my wishlist for a while!
Flawlessly. The default controller mappings aren’t bad either, though I did tweak them a bit. It doesn’t actually have controller support, so you’re either using the right stick as a mouse or relying heavily on the trackpad, but you’re going to want to use the buttons for a few things, like pause/unpause, for instance.
Still playing Octopath Traveler, it’s alright, although with some really rough spots. I should hopefully be done soon though.
It has some neat mechanics, like hitting enemies with their weakness to eventually stun them and cause them to take more damage, but it also leads to a lot of fights (mostly against trash mobs) that take far too long, because you might not be able to exploit that weakness well or at all.
Also, as the name suggests, there are eight playable characters, with a party size of four. You might think you could easily have an A and B squad, but for some reason, one character is fixed and can’t be changed. This leads to this one character being massively higher level than the other party members at times, and because there’s no exp for inactive party members, makes keeping everyone else roughly the same level a real pain. I just had a main party and would occasionally swap in one of the lower level guys to do their story.
Speaking of story, it’s pretty boring. Every character has four chapters (dunno if there’s more for the whole group afterward) and almost all of them play out the same. Start a story with some exposition, gather intel by speaking with a few NPCs, a bit more exposition, go to a short dungeon, fight a boss, exposition, done. By the way, your whole party never shows up in the “cutscenes,” it’s always just the single character, whose story you’re doing.
I played the entirety of “Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion”, which was short, fun, and cute. I’m increasingly finding that I lack the stamina and mental headspace for large games, and I’m appreciating the little indie games a lot more. Something about the combination of cute food characters and running around committing petty crimes and ripping up documents just really appealed to me.
Yesterday I started “Earthlock”, which I got a couple of months ago in a giveaway. I’m liking it so far. Has a lot of “Final Fantasy games in the 1990s” vibes which is working for me. There’s more frogs than I expected, which is always a pleasant surprise.
If you want more cute short games, Frog Detective is one of my favorites!
Oh I love Frog Detective! I played it together with my (then) 5 year old daughter, where I was required to read out loud all the dialogue in funny voices.
They are indeed very cute and short games.
edit: it’s a trilogy, not one game :)
Jumped into Chernobylite the other day, haven’t sunk much time into it, but I’m digging the atmosphere. So far it’s been a decent game to pop into after work and poke around a bit.
