Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week?

Played a bit more of the Lizardmen campaign in Total War: Warhammer 2 (easy campaign difficulty and normal battle difficulty). It feels really good when an in-depth-planned deployment and battle plan turns a predicted "valiant defeat" into a "close victory". The constant tension between expansion and territorial defense is surprisingly hard to balance, especially with the "main quest" events that spawn Chaos armies a few turns' march from your capital. The most frustrating so far is how the option to confederate with other Lizardmen factions only seems to be possible if you have no preexisting diplomatic ties - as soon as you sign even a pact of non-aggression the option simply disappears from the diplomacy menu despite good relations/standing.

I've also been playing a bit of Old School RuneScape. The quest line(s) involving the Humans Against Monsters association hit a bit deeper given current events IRL...

I'm thinking of giving Project Zomboid another try. I wish I had someone to play it with, zombie apocalypse games are much more fun when you can roleplay as a group of survivors (and diversify your skills).

Chugging along through NG+ in Elden Ring. Just beat the Fire Giant and am messing around in the sewers of Leyndell before I ::: spoiler spoiler burn this shit down. ::: I'm pretty sure I'm over leveled because things haven't really been that challenging until maybe around the Mountaintops of the Giants, but the novelty of laying a beat down on everything that caused me grief during my first playthrough has yet to wear off.

You’re making good progress! There’s nothing more fun than obliterating a boss in NG+ that gave you trouble in NG.

Citizen Sleeper

It's been a couple years since my first playthrough but enjoying it just as much this time. It's definitely a solid top 10 game for me so I really need to buy the sequel after I'm done.

Likewise

Finished Hades 2 recently. Amazing game, amazing story, art and acting are superb.

I just finished Syberia 1 and its remake in parallel. Still a great game.

I’m now moving on to Syberia 2, while also trying to find the time to continue Baldur’s Gate 2 and Icewind Dale.

I played a little Black Mesa definitive edition. Was fun. I'm not getting much/ any gaming time these days unfortunately.

I loved Black Mesa when I played it. I never played the original believe it or not, and it was a great first experience.
Yeah I’m with you on that, I don’t have hardly any time these days for games. I’ve got a baby at home, and I’m up for a promotion to a management position so I’m extra busy at work right now trying to impress the bosses, which unfortunately means later shifts most of the time. That probably won’t go away much if I get the manager job, which is the one aspect I’m not looking forward to. Oh well.
- That's a tough one. The ol' competing priorities. Congratulations on the new baby though! I love babies.

Dota 2 still. I still suck, but I hope I'm slowly learning.

I have friends that I play with that make it enjoyable, despite the smurfs and bad matchmaking.

The monster x Hunter event is pretty cool

Doing well in Animal Crossing New Horizons, what with the huge spike day on the stalks, made money before immediately spending it on a castle tower thing.

Also most of the island is just flowers now, which will be a problem for trying to fit in the castle tower and the fountain I also bought.

Just finished up the Alan Wake 1 DLC, and the American Nightmare spinoff game. I really loved Control and had decided to go back and play the Alan Wake games. The base Alan Wake game had some good ideas, but the controls and balancing were clunky and the combat was tedious. The DLC's got better, using the dark/light mechanics in much more interesting ways. American Nightmare had controls that felt much better and a neat structure of more open, less linear levels. Still nowhere near as great as Control was imo.

So now I'm playing Disco Elysium. I had tried to start it a few times and bounced off- it's great, but a TON of heavy text and political theory. I managed to make some headway a couple months ago when I was traveling with my Steam Deck. Figured now is as good for a time as any to try to beat it at least once. It is truly great, and I think needs to be in the conversations for best game of all time. But it also takes a lot of energy and a specific mood to play.

Another game I tried to go back to was Hellblade. I'm, idk, about a third of the way through I guess? First started over a year ago. I love the initial concept of the character's psychosis manifesting in-game, but it seems like 90% of the gimmick was done in the opening sequence and the game got incredibly repetitive after that. It's so slow it's hard to play. My hands hurt after a bit because I find myself pushing on the joysticks harder, pushing on the "jog" button harder, trying to make Senua move. It's really frustrating to have a puzzle mentally solved but needing to spend 5 minutes moving her slow ass around to execute the solution. It's a good thing exploration is pretty useless because it also takes forever. The combat is also boring and repetitive: the enemies take way too many hits and there are way too many of them. Even just starting the game, sitting through all the stupid splash screens and the same trigger warning is tedious and dumb. I feel like I've put dozens of hours banging my head against this game, but when I look at steam I've only put in a little over 5. I think I might retire the game and just watch a lore video of it instead.

[Disco Elysium] takes a lot of energy and a specific mood to play
Totally! In my experience you need to be depressed, in no small part because of People, and waiting on the final thing that will push you over the edge and make you give up on them entirely, for the game to best resonate with you. You need to love Humanity and yet be weary of her, to have hope and yet be terminally cynical about anything good ever happening.
It's almost like the game was designed as therapeutic deprogramming for bitter activists. Then again, I might just be projecting my own experience and perspective.
I think you're spot on about Alan Wake, it has a cool story and some good ideas but feels pretty clunky to play. The sameness of the levels doesn't help, either. American Nightmare plays well if you can overlook the low budget of being an Xbox Live Marketplace game. Plus it has some cool manuscript pages and lore elements and Ilka Villi absolutely slays as Mr Scratch in the FMV clips. Very interested to hear your thoughts on AW2. For me it's by far the best game Remedy ever made, and probably in my all-time top 3.
Shame you're not clocking with Hellblade, it's a game I really enjoyed but it does have its shortcomings. For me all the elements kind of worked, and even though the puzzle mechanics weren't amazing I allowed the game to be carried by the concept pretty far. The whole "seeing patterns where there are none in reality" being another manifestation of psychosis was neat. Also if you do want to finish it, the game is very short so there is probably less of it left than you think if you want to push through. I did personally like the ending, but maybe not worth it if it's not clicking.
What made you bounce off Disco Elysium before? I agree with you that it's probably the best game of all time, but I also do see people bounce off it frequently. Always interested in hearing people's thoughts on it.
- AW2 is going to be a while. Not only because I'm a patientgamer, but because it was published by Epic and I have no interest in setting up an account and dealing with their launcher, plus jumping through all the hoops to be able to play it on my Steam Deck. I've already switched a couple of my household's PCs to Linux, and I'll probably do the rest eventually. Maybe I'll pick up the PS5 version some day, but that severely limits the different ways I can play it. I might get FBC Firebreak if it ever goes on sale- I don't play a whole lot of multiplayer games generally but I'm interested to see if they put any lore in there.
  Disco Elysium is great, but at times the "gameplay" so basically just reading a polysci textbook. It's a very heavy game that deals with a lot of heavy topics. Often I'm tired of processing all of the terrible things happening in the world and look to videogames as an escape, and Disco Elysium is up there as one of the worst games for that lol. Even just seeing the ZA/UM logo starts to get me going from thinking about what happened to the studio and the main creators of the game.
  There's also a lot of friction that just comes from it being a text-heavy game. I had my retina surgically re-attached in one eye a few years ago- it was largely successful compared to going blind in that eye, but that eye is not as good at focusing at screens further away. Action games like Alan Wake and Hellblade are fine on my living room TV, but for Disco Elysium I mostly need to use my Deck or some other screen that can be closer to my face.
  Another factor is sobriety. I feel like this doesn't get talked about in gaming communities a lot- a lot of gamers are children, or adults who are sober for a variety of reasons. I'm adult who does not have any of those reasons, and even a medical marijuana card for my arthritis. I have a full-time job, a house to maintain, and several relationships to maintain. So on the rare occasion that I have an evening to myself to enjoy, I often want to get high (responsibly) and play some videogames. It's kind of a difficulty customization too: often the difficulty settings in-games are just boring number changes that make enemies bullet sponges. So I'm more entertained by playing on Easy and getting high than playing on Hard sober. Disco Elysium, for as much as it features drug-use in its world and gameplay, is nearly impossible for me to play while high. It's not a huge deal, but it often means that other games are just more appealing when I'm planning any given evening.

I also played Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded I think last year or the year before and have similar thoughts. I know it's a famous title/franchise and I wanted to check it out, and it was pretty much what I expected. I really hated the forced gambling-via-savescumming but it was otherwise an alright point and click puzzler with hit-or-miss humour.
I have half an idea of playing Love For Sail too at some point as that's supposedly the series high point, but it's not exactly a high priority.
- I don't mind the writing that much since not everything has to be up my alley and, more importantly, it's a remake of a game from 1987 - different time, different industry. I do however think they could update it a bit more in terms of gameplay at least. Maybe not completely reworking the moon logic behind some puzzles but getting rid of the option to hard lock your progress would be enough to improve the experience quite a bit, at least for me.

This week, other than the standby of OpenTTD, I'm doing some RetroAchievements on Game Boy and GBC.

I havent played anything in so long because i dont place time on it. I spend all my time modding or atleast having the code open and procrastinating

I'm back to Terraria for the umpteenth time. This time a thrower class with the Thorium mod. Currently building an alpine resort with a ski jump as my base before entering hardmode. Next up is starting the Metro FPS series.

It's been an early access for years but I've been having an insane amount of fun with Cosmoteer there has been a recent update adding thermal mechanics to the game

AC Origins and Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, which snuck up on me when I got out of prison somehow

Mafia Definitive Edition on Steam Deck it works well except you can’t see what button you’re supposed to press.

Once you know the controls you can just enjoy the superb atmosphere and surprizingly great gunfights!

I'm configuring a Samsung a55.for only gaming. I'll restart Vagrant Story a crazy action rpg from Squaresoft in PSX.