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That sounds like a space version of Eco, with the roles stuff. In Eco, it’s impossible for one person to acquire all skills, so people on a server have to specialise.
I started out as a miner, to honour my late best friend who was a dwarf at heart and would definitely have been a miner if he’d been playing with us. Then I branched out into masonry to make use of the absurd amounts of stone I’d been mining. If I wanted something made of wood, I had to go flutter my eyelashes at my friend who had started out as a logger and branched into carpentry. I enjoyed having a domain that was my own, and a clear way to be useful to the server. Other players had some level of mining and masonry skill by the midgame, but for anything serious, they had to wait until I was online.
It sounds like Space Station 14 is far more hectic than this, but in an interesting way. I wonder if it will scratch the same itch that Eco did wrt being useful in a clear role
Space Station 14 sounds interesting. What kind of multiplayer is it? I.e. is it one where the typical experience is to play with randoms via matchmaking, or is it a game best enjoyed with friends?
I have discord server full of nerds who I played games with during COVID (and its aftermath), and this might be a good excuse to see if I can reawaken that server for games
You’ve reminded me that I still need to finish that. When I started it, I played it so much that I burnt myself out on it a tad (not in a bad way, just in a way that requires I take a break and play something else for a while). I’m looking forward to getting back to it.
I didn’t play the first game, but I remember seeing a lot of the promo/development stuff about it because my partner at the time was super interested in it. My impression of the first game was that it was ambitious and interesting, but rocky in its implementation, but the second one is a refinement in all the ways you would expect a sequel to be. Certainly I have enjoyed it thus far
Edit: Steam tells me that I have 133.5 hours in this game, bloody hell. In my original post, I mentioned that I expect that the actual data in the Steam year-in-review will differ from what I remember of 2025, and this appears to be a great example of it. It seems like this was one of the games that completely dominated the first half of 2025 for me, and I didn’t even remember it
If @[email protected] hadn’t already sold me on Cruelty Squad, you certainly have now. In terms of vibes, it sounds right up my alley.
And I do love a bonkers community. I find that when I get into a piece of media (whether that be a game, TV series or something else), I really enjoy participating in what I call “fandom tourism”. I enjoy dipping my toe into the community after I’ve engaged with the media itself, and it feels like bonus content. I don’t tend to stick around in any fandoms, so that means that even if a community is bonkers in a bad way (e.g. lots of drama), I even sort of enjoy being able to understand and spectate those dynamics, as a quasi-outsider
I’ve heard so many good things about Lies of P that I think I’ve been avoiding it in a similar way to how I was irrationally reluctant to play Hollow Knight. It’s a bit of a moot point at the moment, because I don’t currently have the brain space to get my teeth into a Soulslike, but when I do, I should resist that silly instinct of mine.
I’ve not heard much of Dispatch, I should check it out
Most of those games are ones I’ve never heard of before, but you’ve really sold me on them, especially Split Fiction and UFO 50
(Mini tangent, but I find it interesting how, in this age of algorithmically driven slip content, I cherish the opportunity to find little snippets of meaningful connection with my fellow humans. Like, I don’t know you, or anything really about your preferences or tastes in games, so what reason is there to put much weight in your recommendations? You’re just a random person on the internet, after all. But no, your recommendations feel meaningful because you’re a person who cared enough about these things to write about them, and matters to me (especially in our current climate))
If I was going to try out Split Fiction and UFO 50, which would you recommend I start with?
Nice! I haven’t attempted Sekiro yet, but it’s high up on my list. I am saving it for when I have the brain space to take a proper crack at the game. I remember that my first exposure to Fromsoft games was in 2017, when I attempted Dark Souls 3 during a Summer where I extremely burnt out due to doing a soul-sucking internship. I bounced off of it so hard, and that taught me that I need to be in the right headspace to play certain games.
Despite the high skill level required, I actually found that it was quite forgiving for people who were learning. I barely did any parrying until I was well into Act 3, for example. I like the way that the feedback for dodges work — I started trying to parry more when I realised that I was consistently getting perfect dodges, which meant that if I had parried, it would have been successful.
I also like the way the difficulty works in the open world. It reminds me of games like Fallout: New Vegas, where the enemies aren’t scaled to player level, so you can be dumb/brave and wade into encounters that are way beyond your power level. Sometimes that works out surprisingly well, but often you try fighting a difficult enemy and get pwned so thoroughly that you accept that you’ll have to come back later. In Expedition 33 especially, it is super viable to just go and explore elsewhere and come back with more levels, better weapons and better pictos. The beautiful world also means that exploring is fun even without the mechanical perks.
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Ignorance isn’t bliss when you’re living in an objectively crazy world. At that point, you either internalise all the craziness and believe it’s in your head, or you look up and recognise that it’s the world that’s nuts. I’d prefer not to live in such a world, but given that I do, I might as well not be in denial about it.
Ooh, I like this
Edit: I think part of why I like it is that it’s evocative of both “construction” and “destruction”, and civil engineering necessarily involves aspects of both. Like, even when there isn’t existing infrastructure to demolish, there’ll still be tasks such as digging into the ground to anchor support structures, which I could consider to be a kind of destruction
"I made a mod that replaces cliffracers with Thomas the Tank Engine. […] I am incapable of learning lessons whenever it involves corporations, because I fundamentally do not view toy company CEOs or media CEOs as people.
In between working on my game and dying of various accidental injuries, I sometimes feel like I need to milk a particular joke until its inevitable demise. I will do this no matter how many legal threats, actual threats, black vans with the Mattel logo on them, or severed Barbie heads are mailed to me.
This is because I have issues with authority, particularly authority derived from intimidation. I kicked a lot of bullies in the nuts when I was a kid.”
Idgaf about silly mods like this, but this is iconic
To be fair, the first part of the game is by far the best. The unofficial patch adds back in a heckton of content in the late game, but even then, it feels sparse. I have very fond memories of exploring Santa Monica though. The game felt huge and exciting, even playing it for the first time in 2019.
Damn, I should try install it again. I’m running Linux now, and if I recall, I had some problems getting it working. I should take another crack at it.
Man, I feel so much nostalgia over Halo, especially Reach. It was the first campaign I completed on Legendary. My brother and I used to play the Swat game mode a lot, and we made one hell of a team. It was a nice contrast to arguing all the time. I enjoyed when I was in the zone and reacting so quickly that salty people would accuse me of using aimbot. That’s the highest compliment one can receive in an online shooter.
Exactly this. I don’t own any Steam hardware, nor do I expect to any time soon. However, I don’t know if I’d be running Linux as my main daily driver if not for how straightforward it is to game on Linux nowadays, thanks largely to Valve’s efforts in this area.
I did dual boot with Windows for a while, but I found that the inertia of rebooting made me more likely to just use Windows. When I discovered that basically all of my games were runnable through Proton, I got rid of Windows entirely.
I feel a lot of gratitude for the Steam Deck existing, because it makes things way easier. It’s not down to Valve’s efforts alone, but providing the solid starting point has lead to the coagulation of a lot of community efforts and resources. For instance, there have been a couple of times where I’ve had issues running games, but found the solution in adjusting the launch options, according to what helpful people on protondb suggest. I also remember struggling for a while to figure out how to mod Baldur’s Gate 3, until I found a super useful guide that was written by and for Steam Deck users. The informational infrastructure around gaming on Linux is so much better than it used to be.
Yeah, exactly, that’s what I was trying to convey. I’m not good under pressure, so I’ve spent most of the game opting to dodge, given it’s much safer. What I like is that the “perfect dodge” notice is a subtle, helpful prompt that’s basically saying “hey, if you’d tried to parry this attack rather than dodge, you’d have succeeded. Back yourself, bro.”
I’ve recently been playing it and I’ve been blown away.
I find the parry system not too bad actually. I’m more than half way through the game and I’ve only recently started properly learning how to parry, but I love how easy the game makes it to learn. Context for anyone who hasn’t played the game: when you successfully dodge, you see the words “dodge” rather than damage numbers. When you do a perfect dodge, you see the words “perfect dodge”. The window for parrying is smaller than for dodging, but this dodge system meant that when I started noticing I was somewhat consistently getting perfect dodges, I decided I should try parrying more often.
I find the overall difficulty tuning to be excellent. Even on normal difficulty, it’s definitely challenging at points, but it feels extremely fair. You won’t be able to defeat all enemies that you’re able to access at any given time — there’s so many times that I’ve tried my chances with a big guy just hanging out on the map, only to get my team wiped in one hit. However, the open world and much to explore means I can go away and come back later. Upgrade materials are scattered all over, so exploration is super powerful.
I agree with you that the highlight of the game is how beautiful it is. There have been a few times where I’ve had to stop for a moment and just take in the scenery when it was so soul achingly beautiful that I could scarcely think.
I feel like this kind of thing is sort of Steam making a political stance against the publisher. If Steam didn’t give refunds, then I imagine that they wouldn’t get much flack for that — it’d instead be directed at the publisher. However, if this became more commonplace, then it would end up eroding Steam’s reputation. It reminds me of how credit card chargebacks work: you get the refund quite quickly, and then the payment processor/bank chases it up with the merchant (especially if there are lots of chargebacks for that merchant).
That is all to say that from the players perspective, it is indeed nice of them to offer refunds. Also, I respect them drawing this line against this kind of bullshit. Corporations aren’t our friends, even when they seem to be working in our favour. However, if a corporation is acting in our favor, against a worse corporation, then I’m here for that, while it exists.
“Seriously people, if you’re a dev learn and get good at code reviewing”
It’s a useful skill, even outside of the context of cleaning up AI code. It seems to be universally the case that it’s easier to write code than it is to read it (which is why I sometimes find myself so baffled at my own code that I end up rewriting it again from scratch (good comments are a gift to future-You)).
I’ve been trying to get into contributing to open-source code recently, and it’s been a useful exercise in learning to understand other people’s code. It’s also been making me a more skilled programmer, because reading lots of code helps me to understand how things are typically done in a way that textbook learning can’t. It’s been especially useful to understand how large code projects are structured, given that most of my experience in writing code that’s used by other people has been in smaller, ad-hoc scientific contexts (e.g. writing a script that adds hydrogens onto the protein structures found in the protein database — by default, they’re not included, because it depends on the pH of the environment the protein exists in)
I bought this game on a whim after reading that the devs had said they’d rather people pirate it than have it spoiled for them. I don’t usually buy games full price, so this was a rare thing for me, but I have no regrets; it was one of my favourite games of that year.
I just love how ripe for thematic analysis it is. For example, I’m a woman who has read a bunch of feminist and queer theory, and some of my interpretations of the themes were drastically different to a friend’s. I found it really cool that I didn’t necessarily disagree with their takes, nor they mine, but we both resonated with the game is strong but different ways
It seems like the relevant section in the Ubisoft EULA says
“Upon termination for any reason, You must immediately uninstall the Product and destroy all copies of the Product in Your possession.”
I read this wording of this to be stricter than the BG3 example you shared, because the BG3 one seems to be saying “if you don’t agree to this EULA (or if you agree, but later terminate that agreement), then you must uninstall the game”. Whereas the Ubisoft one seems to include Ubisoft terminating the agreement, rather than just the user. That’s just my interpretation of these snippets though, as someone who is not a lawyer. It’s possible that the BG3 EULA also includes other parts that would mean similar to what people are unhappy about on the Ubisoft EULA
Ooh, Barnsley! That’s actually super close to where I hail from (we had a Barnsley phone number and post code, despite not technically being in Barnsley). That’s so cool, it’s not the kind of place you typically see depicted in media