Last weekly thread of March!
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Still playing Regalia: Of Men and Monarchs. In chapter 5 now, I should be more than half done. Still enjoying it.
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Finished Jotun: Valhala Edition. I was playing it a few weeks ago, but took a break at last boss. Finally went back and finished the game.
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While I am enjoying Regalia, wanted something more action-oreinted, so looked at my backlog and started Neon Chrome. I am generally not a roguelike fan, but I like twin stick shooters, so started that. Not sure if I’ll actually finish this, but enjoying it for now.
What about all of you? What have you been playing?
Finished replaying 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim!
Goddamn, I love this game. If you like story-focused games I can’t recommend it enough.
Finished Touhou Luna Nights!
I know almost nothing about the Touhou universe, but even without knowing the characters I had a ton of fun with this game.
Combat is fantastic, and it’s challenging without being too frustrating. Exploration is a bit too linear, but overall I really appreciate seeing a recent metroidvania game that is not just following the formula set by Hollow Knight. The only bad I thing I can say is that the the game is really short, there’s no in-game timer but it definitely took me less than 10h to get 100% completion.
Finished Ori and the Blind Forest!
There’s a lot of good things and a lot of bad things going on on this one.
Production values are great, the world is very interesting, some stages are quite unique, and most puzzles are well designed. On the other hand, for a game with a lot of focus on platforming the controls don’t feel quite right - they’re kinda floaty and weird, it’s easy to miss platforms when jumping (or even more strange, when climbing them from the side), wall jump sometimes doesn’t grab and you’re not quite sure it didn’t work… Maybe I’ve been spoiled by games like Mario or Celeste, but I sometimes get an impression that I’m fighting against the controls in this one.
Combat is underwhelming, but that’s not really the focus on that game. Also, you’re going to die A LOT, and even with the mechanic that lets you save almost anywhere this can get annoying.
Playing Balatro!
So after hearing a billion people commenting about this game I picked it up, and I can confirm it’s as fun and addictive as advertised. Not that hard as far roguelikes go, I had my first win somewhere around 3h of playtime and managed a few more already.
Playing Crystar!
Early impressions on previous posts.
I’m bored with this game but I still want to finish it, so I’ll playing it slowly and sparsely. Not sure how long it’ll take, and probably won’t mention in future posts unless I hit some relevant landmark.
Added Touhou Luna Nights to my wishlist, I am leaning towards shorter games these days, so 10 hours to 100% sounds really good to me.
Didn’t expect to hear bad things about Ori, I haven’t played it yet, but the universal acclaim it gets, I was expecting it to be near the perfect / masterpiece level.
No! You started Balatro! We are going to lose you! Nooooo! Come back!!! … How is it if you aren’t into poker? Since everyone describing it mention poker, I didn’t even look into it.
Maybe take a break from Crystar for couple of weeks? Might reinvigorate some interest.
It’s a fantastic game, my second favorite in this genre in recent years after Axiom Verge. Worth mentioning that it can be quite hard at times, in particular at bosses, but I feel it gives you more than enough tools to learn their patterns and beat them.
The protagonist’s time-manipulation power is really neat, you have the ability to slow or even stop time for short periods which is handy when you’re stuck on “OK, so how the hell do I dodge this attack”. There’s also a “grazing” mechanic that lets you recover HP by getting close to the enemy or their bullets, which you can use to recover mid-battle if there’s a particular attack pattern you can’t dodge perfectly.
I’m now playing the sequel and having a much better time, though it does lose some of the uniqueness of the first game in favor including more common elements seen in games of this genre.
Balatro to me is a card/deckbuilding roguelike that just happens to use the poker rules because people are familiar with those and it helps shrink the learning curve.
The focus is not getting the best poker hand, but rather on finding a strategy that maximizes the chips you get with the tools you’re given each run. I just had a very successful run where I build a deck solely focused on getting “Two Pair” hands all the time.
Thanks for info.
Will give Balatro a try sometimes. I like card games in general. Not the card / deckbuilding rougelikes we are getting these days though, but this looks closer to a “pure” cards game.