Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week?

Started playing Pikmin

I've reinstalled Disco Elysium, but on the Steam Deck this time.
I had started a playground a while back, but I took a break after barely scratching the surface.
I was too burnt out from work at the time to really enjoyed it, so I parked it and kept it for later.

Playing it on the deck also has the benefit of me not still sitting in my home office after working.

Me not remembering much of the beginning of that playthrough is actually pretty immersive in its own way too.

Dragon's Dogma. WTF? Why did nobody tell me it was good? Why do people describe it as "hack and slash"? It's a proper ARPG. Also, do I just suck or is it actually this hard?

I've beaten all the souls games multiple times but I got stuck in DD pretty early on and just quit out of frustration. I've been meaning to go back but I do think it actually is that hard.
- Figured it out! It's not hard. It's actually quite easy. It just gives zero fucks about letting you know the level of the enemies or the areas where they are. I got a quest to gather some flowers at level 5 and was told they could be found in the outskirts of the city so I went south out of chance. Turns out that's 20ish level area. Perhaps the same happened to you.

My work buddies and I started replaying Pokémon Black and White together. It's a lot of fun, and it has been long enough that it's like experiencing it for the first time. There are private servers now that enable the online content (since the official ones were taken down).
I did not realize the first time around just how much the plot was a takedown of fascism, but given recent political events, it is a little on the nose. But they did an impressive job of exploring the reasons people might be radicalized and truly believe that they're in the right just because they're following a charismatic leader (even one who very obviously doesn't have their best interests in mind), and in a way that kids could understand.

Huh, maybe I’ll play it again then. I tried to replay it a few months back but didn’t get far, decided to play something else instead.

Metal Gear Solid: Delta: Snake Eater (PC)

Never played an MGS game before (other than Portable Ops on the PSP), so I thought I'd install it tonight and give it a shot. There's no Denuvo BTW.

Path of exile 2 is free this weekend, and has a new season starting in a few hours, I'm trying to get my friends together to jump in.

It's not very in the spirit of this sub though, but it did take a lot of patience to get here.

I'm still kicking around the idea of getting no man's sky, but it hasn't dropped enough yet.

Persona 5 was in the humble bundle, I've yet to get into a persona game (tried 3 and 4) to the point of "gameplay" there's so much story than just doesn't connect with me before the gameplay starts. Makes me miss Pokemon Red/blue.

P5R may not be to your liking then either. I found it to be less front loaded on the narrative than P4G, but it's still a very narrative focused game. I can say however that I much preferred the story of P5R. I haven't played P3(any version) yet. That's just kind of the way Persona games are. They all start kind of slow. At least the two I've played. SMT may be more to your liking. I've only played SMT IV but SMT seems to be more gameplay focused. That one is at least from what I remember.
- I played the demo of smt5 (which is how I know you're referring to shin megami tensai (sp?) in case anyone else wants to experience it) and it was a really fun game, definitely faster to pick up the gameplay, and it reminded me, in many good ways, of dragon warrior monsters and Digimon, but at the end of the demo I was hesitant to pull the trigger because there are so many other games that deserve some play time.
  I'll definitely go back to it when it's on sale, and I'm going to give p5 a, maybe not fair, shake.

I've been really digging Death Stranding. It's kind of a silly concept of just delivering packages all over the map but it seems to be scratching some itch I didn't even know I had. I like that I can pick it up for a delivery or two as my real life schedule allows and then randomly sometimes I actually progress the story or unlock a new tool to make my courier job easier. I'm only vaguely aware of the story but it's enough to get me to actually watch the cutscenes even if I'm confused the whole time.

Overall I'd recommend at least trying it out for a few hours since it's one that I never thought I'd enjoy but I've been proven wrong.

I picked up that Humble Bundle with the Mega Man X collection in it. Man that game still totally holds up. It's just fucking awesome.

Hell is others

There was a bluesky thread on games that scared you as a child, and I was reminded one of mine was Duke Nukem 3D. Since I haven't played it in over 20 years, I decided to look up that remastered version and you know what, pretty fun game still. The levels feel much smaller to me nowadays - even though they're fairly dense - but the guns feel good, killing enemies is satisfying, staying on your toes all the time hits just right. I also find it deeply amusing that creating a character was as easy as putting as many one liners from your favorite movies in the script as you can.

Picked up Nioh 2 on the PC, a game that I already owned for the Ps4, but now I'm trying the complete edition. Turns out that the DLC added new weapon types - and weapons in Nioh are far more intricate and complex than other soul-styled games - including a Fist type. Not only that, but literally the first skill you can learn is the Dempsey Roll! I feel cheated from having played only the base version. Maybe this time I'll actually finish this game.

If you're digging Duke 3D, I can't recommend Ion Fury enough. It's incredible how far their team has pushed the Build engine.
- I'm not in any rush, so I'll keep that in mind, but currently my plans for after I'm satisfied with Duke 3D is trying Dark Forces and the original Doom, both that I also haven't played in a few decades
How hard exactly are the Nioh games? I'm playing through the Ninja Gaiden series at the moment so I guess I'm on a bit of a Team Ninja kick, which has made me look at them again. But from what I've heard they're perhaps even more prohibitively difficult than Ninja Gaiden.
- Having played very little Ninja Gaiden, I don't think they're similar at all save from being 3rd person games. Nioh is much closer to the Souls formula, which slower combat, stamina consumption on actions and a demanding care on facing enemies, with the added complexity (though not necessarily added difficulty) of weapon stances and combos, skill trees, colored loot, and a Devil Trigger-like skill.
  If you're going to try one, you should expect something more akin to Dark Souls + Diablo lootfest than the action romp that is Ninja Gaiden

PixelJunk Monsters 2. It was like $3 and a fantastic price for that. Not as good as the first game, but an amazing tower defence game nonetheless

I'm rocking on Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

Bioshock Infinite DLC. Recently purchased the remaster on sale. Never played through the DLC. Part 2 has a bit more sneaking around than I would like, but I still enjoy being in the world.

I could never get into Infinite. BioShock 1 is one of my favourite games ever, and 2 was also incredible. But after a few hours in Infinite I put it down and never picked it up again. That was years ago though, maybe I should give it another shot.

My time at Sandrock was on humble last month. Good deal.

Slice of life crafting game with a bit of combat and farming.

The PC version of Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. This game is super difficult for me but I'm having fun trying. It also tends to jump-scare me more than any horror game has before. Sadly, I can't get GRAW2 to run because of weird Physx problems and Wine/Proton, so I might go re-play Ghost Recon Future Soldier for the Xbox 360 again after this one. I'm too busy to get to that this week, though.

I also scooped up a Fire Emblem Awakening cartridge last week. I might try to finish the last two chapters of Fire Emblem Warriors and then dive into that one. I'd play both at the same time but the contrasting speeds of the two genres might be a bit too much.

My "I have 10 minutes to play" game this week is BlazBlue: Clone Phantasma. I really enjoy the BlazBlue series (especially the 3DS release) and this one is the cutesy/chibi arena fighter version. Very simple and shallow but great for quick games.

Those advanced warfighter games were so cool. Rarely see them mentioned but I fucking loved those squad based shooters.
- might as well be a solo game, though. my squad mates are as dumb as a bag of hammers 😆

Streets of Rogue. Dunno. It's fun. But it also gets repetitive.

Tails of Iron. Artistically nice, but it's a souls-like so it gets annoying to keep hacking at frogs.

Stranded: Alien Dawn. Played several hours in one go. Built a house. Don't understand everything, like what triggers the flamethrower, but it's a colony sim i guess.

Ooh, I have Tails of Iron wishlisted! Is it more fun than annoying or equal measure of both? I was on a 2D Soulslike kick earlier this summer and wishlisted a bunch that look decent and that was one of them.
- Depends. Are you skilled in this genre? Can't say that i am, so my experience has limitations.
  If you like this stuff, the game does make use of weight, poise, blocking, dodging and rolls. Does it make use of them well? I don't know if it's my lack of ability or the game's own issues, but it can feel clunky at times. Some dodges and rolls weren't working when i was expecting them to.
  Still, I have yet to rage quit and will keep playing, at least for a while longer.

Still Outward. I love this game, probably going to be playing it for a while to come. I want to try a flamethrower mage build next, or perhaps an archer/off-hand dagger build. There are still two entire regions I've not yet visited in 60+ hours of gameplay.

How is the story ?
- It's good, but not amazing. Each of the 5 main fractions has It's own main quest line with 5 quests, and any given character can only do one of the lines. There isn't much dialog, and don't expect a giant tree of options and alternate endings in each line, but the writing is solid and the themes are varied and interesting. After the main quest line there is a DLC quest about rebuilding a town with some lackluster town-building mechanics. I ended up not finishing this with my first character, it was too tedious. It wasn't horrible either though, I just don't have that much free time.
  There are lots of side quests spread over the land, but there is a lot of open space in this game, so you will end up referring to the fandom wiki in order to find some of them. The focus is more on exploration, survival, crafting, and optimization than a detailed and branching story.

Remnant 2 - as much as I suck at souls-likes, I am keep going back to this one. Loved the first one, beat it multiple times with friends and randos, but I think the sequel improved on every aspect. Just started a new character (of course the puppy class) and slowly progressing throught the firs world solo.

Just figured out how to play fallout 3 on my phone so that and I'm also playing Mo.Co I'm loving that game

You need to enlighten us
- On the fallout 3 thing? I'm using Winlator on a Samsung Galaxy s24 Ultra with my Backbone. Sound skips a bit but the animation of the game itself it's clean.

I keep speedrunning already-completed levels in Demon Turf, doing occasional dungeons runs in Atlyss and playing new Doom 2 mapsets.

I managed to finish Ninja Gaiden 2 (Xbox 360) on Normal. What a beautiful fucking mess of a game. If only they would have taken their time polishing it instead of pushing it out the door hoping for a bonus payout it really could have ended up the best action game of all time. Even though I spent more time screaming at it than any other game I've played so far I really can't wait for a Ninja Gaiden 2 Black sale to try it with FiendBusa's "White" mod.

Having come this far, and with NG4 on the horizon, I thought I might as well give Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor's Edge a try as well. Just to complete the trilogy. Man, I really don't like this game. I don't know whether I'll actually manage to make myself finish it. And it's weird because the combat had all the ingredients to be the very best of the entire series. Ryu is more fluid than ever, his moveset is larger than ever and the dynamic flexibility of combat is higher than ever. All the fundamentals are there. It just... doesn't feel that good to play. The game wants you to play for Steel On Bone counters, but that type of reactive gameplay is not that fun. It doesn't feel as measured and precise as NGB combat, and not as frantic and viscerally satisfying as NG2 combat.

Also, let's talk about the setting and the story. NGB did not have a good story, but it had a cool setting with the eclectic mix of ancient, steampunk and futuristic. Also the story was kind of comic book-y and didn't get in the way. NG2 dialled everything up to 11, and the story devolved into the absolutely insane campy nonsense that is so bad it's almost good. It's trash, but entertaining in a B-movie type way. Also NG2 had some incredible variation in locales, and while the globetrotting didn't make any sense you constantly saw new and exciting locations and the levels themselves were pretty cool.

NG3RE has an absolutely woeful story, so actively bad it's actually getting in the way of my enjoyment. It manages to be boring, derivative, cliche-ridden and lame without ever crossing over into so-bad-it's-good. It also completely ruins the vibe by reframing the game into some sort of Call of Duty or Ghost Recon-esque military special agent story, and the levels are poorly designed and extremely boring. NG2 had varied and interesting combat arenas, these are just mind numbing open squares with again a CoD type of military theme.

And on top of all this it's hard. Like, really fucking hard. And often not in a fun way, but in a "fuck you and your enjoyment"-way that makes the Itagaki games look strictly pleasant. Some of these boss fights make me wish I was fighting Gigadeath again, and that's a feat I thought was impossible.

I'm replaying Riftbreaker. They just dropped the extended endgame (plus a bunch of other new features) and it's a good reason to play through it again.

The combination of base building, tower defense, and action gameplay just works for me.

Please stop me from building over-defended walls at the far borders of the entire map and using a consistent 4x4 grid placement for flooring that aligns the entire gotdamn map...
Edit: said map
- Can't. I'm too busy building fusion reactors in bulk to power my wall of gatling laser towers.

Right now i play "A Game about digging a Hole". I feel very dwarfy rn.

1000xRESIST. I first heard about this game from Balatro of all places. It's very good. It's hard to talk about it without spoiling too much and I do think this game is best played with knowing as little as possible. You really need to pay attention to what's going on. I haven't played a VN style game in a long time but I'm really enjoying it! Some twists I definitely did not see coming.

Hollow knight. Trying to wrap it up before silksong. Probs won't happen but That's okay. I'll get to silksong whenever I finish!

I‘m gonna play Outpath when I have time solo and Peak with my gf. And I‘ll probably randomly boot up half a dozen other games if Outpath loses me.

Outpath was a good time 🙂

Shantae and The Pirate's Curse. This weeb game showed up in my GOG library for free somehow, so I thought I'd install it so I can decide that I hate it, uninstall and move on. The problem is I love it because it's a great fucking game. Casual platforming, metroidvania elements, bangin' ass soundtrack, every character has giant tits for no reason. I recommend it!

The Shantae series are some great metroidvanias with a lot of sass. Definite recommendation.
That said, Pirate's Curse is my favorite of the bunch; the gameplay is just so satisfyingly smooth.

Horizon Zero Dawn and Astro's Playroom

Traded in a bunch of stuff on Monday and picked up a PS5. So far really enjoying it and especially the controller, that thing is amazing. Next payday I'm definitely buying the newer Astro Bot game.

Astro bot is so damn good. I haven't found another PS game that maximizes the functions of the dualsense like they did, it's kind of a shame.
I burned probably a half hour just enjoying the vibration textures while walking on different surfaces lol.

Been enjoying playing Vampire Survivors on my SteamDeck, it's surprisingly fun for its simplicity and barely uses any battery.

Also just started Nova Lands because I heard it was a good gateway game to other automation games. It's pretty chill. Unsure how fun mid to late game progression is but I'm enjoying it so far.

I'm playing Morimens. It's a gacha, but I love the dark, supernatural theme and atmosphere. The music is great, too.