Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week?

L.A. Noire and Persona 5! Both games I started over a year ago, then stopped playing and finally finishing them now haha

I picked up Cyberpunk on the Steam sale so I'm just starting that. Aside from that, I'm kind of casually working my way through Coromon, which so far isn't great but it scratching the Pokemon-like itch well enough. That said, if other folks were looking for a Pokemon-like to try, I'd recommend Cassette Beast a hundred times over before recommending Coromon.

Going super old school - Chrono Trigger. Finally picked it up on Steam since $3.75 is cheap enough I'd pay for the convenience to not use an emulator. I figure buying it 3 times is enough for one life.

Factorio. I can’t recommend it enough. The space age expansion reinvigorated my addiction enjoyment in the game. You can never have enough green circuits

Gonna be starting Metro soon! It was reccomended to me by another fedi user.

Wrath of the Rightous. I'll be back in a couple of months, cya

Got burned out on Owlcat games. Really enjoyed Pathfinder: Kingmaker but thought it was almost there in some areas, and kept hearing people say Wrath of the Righteous was better. Got through maybe half of the latter and can't say I agree as of yet. But I'm having to put it down for now, thinking I jumped back in to a CRPG too soon. The encounter density is just too much for me, and I might have to put the crusade management on auto next time I pick it up.

Grabbed Final Fantasy XVI instead. It's a nice change of pace, really enjoying it so far.

Monster Hunter Rise, I have yet to see someone respond to my SOS signals lol

33 Immortals just dropped

I've been deep into Persona 5 Royal for weeks now. I'm now on the home stretch to the final big boss battle, and it has been awesome. I've put something like 75 hours into it. I'm going to miss it when I'm done, but I do also have Persona 4 Golden sitting and waiting for its turn. I played Persona 3 ReLoad last year and that was my first Persona experience, and totally got me hooked.

100percenting snowrunner

I've got another wall of text this week, it just do be like that sometimes.

I was unable to get either NHL99 or 2001 to run so far. I'll keep trying but it doesn't look promising unfortunately. I also tried to run NBA Live 2001 but that ended up either black court or a straight up freeze during loading so... I feel like early 2000's EA games don't like me very much.

I'm still dabbing with Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4. I'm making slow but steady progress, playing mostly when I'm in the mood rather than blizting through the whole thing in one go.
I still have a bit of a problem with trying to string tricks (especially grinds) a bit too eagerly but other than that I'm doing fine. It's going slightly better than my THPS2 playthrough from 2 or so years ago, if I remember correctly.

Championship Manager: Season 03/04 is also still on the menu. It's not really a game intended for long sessions in my case so I mostly treat it as an emergency activity, played for a match or two when nothing else strikes my fancy.

I mentioned Restaurant Empire last week and that I was having a decently fun time - that's still true. It's not the best management game ever but it's not bad. I have two issues with the game so far: default mouse sensitivity feels terribly (it feels like the cursor is magnetized to certain elements and moving on a tile system) and there's only one female player character to choose from (not that it means anything but there's 32 of them!).

My next choice for the week was Ace Combat Zero: Belkan War. I only played 4 before but I liked it quite a bit.
Unlike 4 however, I'm playing this one on a Steam Deck instead of a desktop PC. It plays great, as expected, but I do have so minor issues using the Deck for longer periods of time, especially during more challenging missions (mission structure thankfully helps with that).

Lastly, I came back to RimWorld for a bit. Similarily to The Division, it's a title I come back to every few months or so, play until I'm bored and go back to whatever else I was doing. It's pretty great, even in its non-DLC form.

On a slightly different note, does anyone know a site (preferably a fediverse one) that could serve as a gallery dump? I have some screenshots from various games I've been thinking about uploading but I'm not really sure which service would be good for that.

Voices of the Void! It's available on itch.io and I've been having a blast!

Never been a big fan of playing scary/horror games (I'm a big fan of horror films though), but this is also a signal simulator as well. Basically, the player character is tasked with looking after an array of satellite dishes, pinging and decoding signals from planets, asteroids, space stations, and other things, and then send them back to main base by drone.

Occasionally a satellite server will go down, so you'll have to drive the ATV out to fix it. The map and the base has so many cool secrets and locations, the story mode events are great fun, the random chance events are so interesting and sometimes freaky! I'm barely scratching the surface here, I mean, I can also use a mop and bucket to clean the base, and decorate, incinerate trash, craft things.

It's pre-alpha but I haven't even seen any where near to everything the game has to offer yet. I'm having so much fun with it!

I'm most likely gonna continue with Split Fiction, and try Aliens: Dark Descent and continue with Sea of Stars, now that I got a complimentary Game Pass subscription for a bit.

SF is still... mostly cinematic. The gameplay still feels generally basic, like a dash of Zelda-like puzzle.

I have reservations about SF's too-corny/tropey dialogue, but hopefully it'll improve as we dig into Mio's past.

Turtle WoW, a private WoW Vanilla plus server. I love this game. I've encountered kind people, made friends, and explored the world, lore, and stories.

Even when I have nothing else to do, just cozy fishing is great.

I'm playing a fork of Cataclysm DDA called Cataclysm TLG.

it's like the main project, but cooler and you are hungry. One of the coolest highlights include grabbing and throwing monsters around for a change. Usually it's the other way around.

anyway here's the trailer, take a peek.

• Castlevania: SOTN
• 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim

I didn't think I'd enjoy SOTN so much, as I tend to have mixed feelings towards metroidvanias, but it delivers in many areas - I'd say it's too easy, but then again it's a matter of adjusting your equipment to make it more difficult.

I'm attempting another playthrough of 13 Sentinels, I'm not sure why I bounced off of it a couple years ago but I've been getting into "gameplay-lite" games lately with great results.

Got into Old World. I have zero planning and just roll with it, which led me to start a war against Egypt with my 4 elephants and several axemen thinking i was hot stuff. Egypt had 3 onangers nested on hills, a dozen pikemen and a random ballista.

I was annihilated from the militaristic point of view.

Still won the match through ambitions though since they happened to be a match with what I still had going for me.

I was annoyed though. They were doing 8-10hp damage per hit at times and i was only doing 3. My small army went from hot to not in only a few turns and i couldn't figure out why. Turns out i just suck at it.

Anyway, if you've played Civilization, you'll easily see the influence. The card and character randomness can be fun or frustrating and you might find yourself wondering at times why your resources aren't growing as high as you were expecting them to. Better watch for that discontent!

I only have the base game so no comment on the DLCs.

I just finished Dark Souls III. Beat Gael in 5 attempts I think, which I was pretty proud of. Still haven’t killed Midir yet but I’m putting that on hold for a while. I just started a playthrough of Pokémon Emerald with my wife, who has never played a Pokémon game before but grew up with the trading cards and the show. I was the opposite, growing up with the games but never got much into the cards or show. We’ve got a little one on the way so we might introduce him/her to Pokémon when they’re old enough, so she wants to have an understanding of it first

lies of p and openttd

I'm trying to platinum Snowrunner. I'm currently in Amur, which is one of the hardest maps and it's the last map in the Y1 DLC pack

Not a lot, been sick off and on all week, but got in a little try of the Aviassembly demo, that was fun. Also some BG3 and Factorio with friends, and I've been loving the Icaria demo.

I recently picked up "Styx: Master of Darkness" in a Steam sale. It's really good! It's a stealth game where you can't fight your way out if you screw up. If you like the sneaking parts of Assassin's Creed, Thief or Dishonored then you'll love Styx.

Monster Hunter Wilds on desktop, and Blasphemous 2 on Steam deck.